17/12/10
I mean by this that I am now feeling that I've exhausted my own potential in attempting to create unique parts that nonetheless individually both create and amend an homogeneous whole. That "whole" is still compelling, but it is an illusion. I'd thought it necessary.
Maybe it is. All systems require dialogue, and I am alone here. I am expressing myself poorly because I'm talking to myself.
I'm having a hard time explaining myself because my brain is creating a syllogism here between my lives creative and "romantic."
I want to make groove-oriented music, or art, or love. Or whatever. I'm running with this. Each part is simple, boring, even, but the whole is heterogeneous in the sense that it all works together, a celebration of synchronized, teleoglogical cacophony. This is not a new idea, but it is one that's never taken hold. The systems of love may seem irrational; they are nothing but; too often in the modern argument is reason confused with empiricism; too often in the postmodern argument are these things excused as phantasmagoria, simulacra, or simply fashion.
How to, how to. If we can't create a chord in passing, then I have failed. My dick has shriveled to a thumbnail. I bet Baudrillard never had a satisfying love experience either. If this is truly impossible, then I want to make parts that create a unified whole expressing this. What bothers me is that I must do it alone; I don't know if I have the wherewithal or the means to manufacture the incredibly simple music ? I hear in my head. It still requires the participation of others, but not in this same "band" way. I need to have clearer vision, a means of capturing it, and a legion of people willing to play individually mindless parts. Or I could just retreat into mindless visual art.
|
Maybe it is. All systems require dialogue, and I am alone here. I am expressing myself poorly because I'm talking to myself.
I'm having a hard time explaining myself because my brain is creating a syllogism here between my lives creative and "romantic."
I want to make groove-oriented music, or art, or love. Or whatever. I'm running with this. Each part is simple, boring, even, but the whole is heterogeneous in the sense that it all works together, a celebration of synchronized, teleoglogical cacophony. This is not a new idea, but it is one that's never taken hold. The systems of love may seem irrational; they are nothing but; too often in the modern argument is reason confused with empiricism; too often in the postmodern argument are these things excused as phantasmagoria, simulacra, or simply fashion.
How to, how to. If we can't create a chord in passing, then I have failed. My dick has shriveled to a thumbnail. I bet Baudrillard never had a satisfying love experience either. If this is truly impossible, then I want to make parts that create a unified whole expressing this. What bothers me is that I must do it alone; I don't know if I have the wherewithal or the means to manufacture the incredibly simple music ? I hear in my head. It still requires the participation of others, but not in this same "band" way. I need to have clearer vision, a means of capturing it, and a legion of people willing to play individually mindless parts. Or I could just retreat into mindless visual art.
|
08/12/10
25/11/10
There is a certain stage of crystalline cynical frustration at which I function best. When I'm happy I get lazy; when I'm anxious and depressed, I am, in a consequentialistic sense, also lazy. Beauty lies in the eye, it might have once been said. Beauty lies to the eye.
It's actually not so hard for me to fathom that you've done this to me. Our friendship was always a high-stakes game and I guess I took some pride in having won that bet for so long. I've never been an adventure seeker in the white-knuckle sense, but I have always quested to tame the lion, swim with whales, hunt with wolves. Ingratiate myself to the most hostile species, because then I've infiltrated your stupid rules and won. We'd been friends long enough that I forgot that even the most hard-won, coddled, well-fed snake is still just a snake. I should have expected this, but it came at an odd time: I'd just spent months trying to nurse you back to some semblance of mental health. How many hours did you spend on my couch, going on and on and on about the same shit over and over and over and all I wanted was for you to SHUT UP AND STOP TALKING FOR A FRACTION OF A SECOND ABOUT THE SAME SHIT, but said only supportive, constructive things.
You take a two-month vacation, and then come back criticizing our band for inactivity. You rant about us not being ambitious, with the main criticism being that I am ambitious. What even the fuck. Then you dump me, via email, out of this thing I've in large part created, and then proceed to berate the hell out of me for feeling betrayed. Man, you were never my friend, and the joke's on me for ever thinking you had been. You are an actually bad person.
And that whole "dark cloud following me around" thing might have been apt if I hadn't just spent the last month being blind-lucky and happier than I've ever been in my entire adult life. What a goddamn awful, hurtful thing to say. The only dark cloud following me around right now is YOU.
|
It's actually not so hard for me to fathom that you've done this to me. Our friendship was always a high-stakes game and I guess I took some pride in having won that bet for so long. I've never been an adventure seeker in the white-knuckle sense, but I have always quested to tame the lion, swim with whales, hunt with wolves. Ingratiate myself to the most hostile species, because then I've infiltrated your stupid rules and won. We'd been friends long enough that I forgot that even the most hard-won, coddled, well-fed snake is still just a snake. I should have expected this, but it came at an odd time: I'd just spent months trying to nurse you back to some semblance of mental health. How many hours did you spend on my couch, going on and on and on about the same shit over and over and over and all I wanted was for you to SHUT UP AND STOP TALKING FOR A FRACTION OF A SECOND ABOUT THE SAME SHIT, but said only supportive, constructive things.
You take a two-month vacation, and then come back criticizing our band for inactivity. You rant about us not being ambitious, with the main criticism being that I am ambitious. What even the fuck. Then you dump me, via email, out of this thing I've in large part created, and then proceed to berate the hell out of me for feeling betrayed. Man, you were never my friend, and the joke's on me for ever thinking you had been. You are an actually bad person.
And that whole "dark cloud following me around" thing might have been apt if I hadn't just spent the last month being blind-lucky and happier than I've ever been in my entire adult life. What a goddamn awful, hurtful thing to say. The only dark cloud following me around right now is YOU.
|
15/10/10
Arches
This is for the record
Since household name
Did not know
Monet to shame
Tried to tip the cup in my eyes (with my hands)
A cynic or a liar or me to blame
Not to recount a bad blessing
Stupidest thing I've ever said
Worked for me
You checkered my head
Did not know
And since you came undead
Now I can arm myself against crisis
And bed
|
This is for the record
Since household name
Did not know
Monet to shame
Tried to tip the cup in my eyes (with my hands)
A cynic or a liar or me to blame
Not to recount a bad blessing
Stupidest thing I've ever said
Worked for me
You checkered my head
Did not know
And since you came undead
Now I can arm myself against crisis
And bed
|
04/09/10
I wonder if my love, my desire, my infatuations, predilections, sexual appetites, napkins, abstentions, words I use and don't use, Lifestyle Choices, pining, keening, caterwauling seeming necessities have taken on the aspect of the victim who begins to desire victimization; rape, alonenesssssssss, hiss, shh, goodbye, hello, let me fuck and never know you, let me never begin to know or seed within you or mutual exchange, only on the surface of your face alone, we two, we everyone, every single person alive is dead, dying or trying hard to get there at a discounted rate to face salvation only on its surface, alone alone alone, baloney, it's all in your head so what else? - they say; we all scream for ice cream anyway, to melt down our fists in molten orgies of absolution, never able but always wanting to look it in the eye as it melts and morphs and every single thing outside conforms unstoppably to a lack of understanding, slimes itself like cold gravy, like Cold Turkey, like the unimetric Stuff that always exists but changes so quickly like the Ice Ages we cannot grasp but have a lingering scent upon our fingers, a unified sense of individuality, a wisp of hair clutched, a fingernail clipping, a little pearl of shit hilariously perched upon the tip of nose; man, what the fuck is this stink? - what did I do last night? - who ARE you? - and so on until absolution is never reached--an autonomy of nothing, the future of everything. A lie that is and has always been the truth.
|
|
30/08/10
I think I now understand the desire to fuck a dead saint.
I saw you exactly three weeks after you'd died. I didn't tell a soul. I see fragments of you often now: a portion of a smile; one tweaked eyebrow on a face otherwise apportioned to another character. The crease of an elbow. But this was you, in every way I'd foreseen. You came and said with only a glance that for me you must remain a mystery. A level glance, but quick, containing more information than I could receive but for the crystalline kernel that there was more, that the full interpretation lay still, perhaps forever beyond me. This, I believe, was the truth of your lone appearance to me not in dream or the fantasy of another's features: that meaning is only the search for itself; truth is a question, not an answer. I say all this now. Our gaze broke and you stepped around the corner, all in black, perhaps my mourning, slightly overlarge. I did not follow. I have some disposition to resent this line of reasoning.
The next summer day I became feverish, bedridden for nearly a week. I have not thought of you since, as I felt was your wish. Is healing selfish? Have I absorbed some truth (which is the scar of healing, which is a question) from your passing? Did you bestow it upon me? Did I murder you in this exchange? There seems to be no transaction in obliteration, but maybe this is a semantic problem. My own crafted image of you scoffs at this, tells me to fuck off, lighten up, stop asking ridiculous questions, live life, enjoy paradox, absurdity, whimsy, situational conflict as a moral apparatus. I'm putting words where your mouth never kissed. Still, your loving dismissal of my petty agony pointed warm lamplight down every darkened path your words told not to travel. Again, maybe the dissonance is only between isomers, because your song, your question, your healing, your raised eyebrow (I imagine) spoke in deeper tongues that overwrite this language, and beckon deeper.
I can't escape the idea that you planned it this way, that you designed to enthrall me and then die. This is the farcical degree of my narcissism. July 10th of this Gregorian year, as I hummed and hawed to myself about suicide, you sent a simple message. "Things really aren't that bad."
I don't want to replace you with a symbol, reform a strange memory into idolatry. You were not a saint, but no Saint ever was. So you were a saint. Saving my life. Certainly you preserved some part of yourself in me. What part? Just the mystery? Fuck you.
It was bizarre how you found me. Mutual friends had expressed worry for and before you, in your somehow precedence. You said we'd met and I still cannot recall. The blank polaroid silhouette is infuriating against the backdrop of every teenage colour, all black tears on the beach, all flushed cheeks between the trees, all me me me. Can I promise to notice everyone from now until I die? Is there a way to know when it will mean this much?
I said that things really were bad, and you told me a secret. Maybe a lie. Four days I lived that truth, that revelation, and four days you spoke to me as though we were, for lack of better words, lovers. Four days. Like a bird I nested jewels and sang. My secret for you was wanting to sing together. "Notice how you speak to yourself," you said. "And I'm a real live person who lives in this world."
Then you died. How fucked is that? What did you look like? When did we meet? Why do I have no memory of it?
I think you sought me out to be your priest. A life ritual in death (which is life in question, which is bondage in fire and intimacy, which is the healing scar that prompts renewal, which is the lie that you began and I continue), or a death ritual in life?
The systemic part of me wants to think that maybe there is something mundane like Bipolar disorder behind this crazy thing. OCD. DUI. ILU. Why did you find me? What were you trying to teach me? You meant to die, didn't you? What does that mean for me? I loved you with every ounce of my being. Every molecule of feeling.
Now I slough this off. Now words can create. I love you. I love you so much, Natacha Roussel. You are the dead saint here.
|
I saw you exactly three weeks after you'd died. I didn't tell a soul. I see fragments of you often now: a portion of a smile; one tweaked eyebrow on a face otherwise apportioned to another character. The crease of an elbow. But this was you, in every way I'd foreseen. You came and said with only a glance that for me you must remain a mystery. A level glance, but quick, containing more information than I could receive but for the crystalline kernel that there was more, that the full interpretation lay still, perhaps forever beyond me. This, I believe, was the truth of your lone appearance to me not in dream or the fantasy of another's features: that meaning is only the search for itself; truth is a question, not an answer. I say all this now. Our gaze broke and you stepped around the corner, all in black, perhaps my mourning, slightly overlarge. I did not follow. I have some disposition to resent this line of reasoning.
The next summer day I became feverish, bedridden for nearly a week. I have not thought of you since, as I felt was your wish. Is healing selfish? Have I absorbed some truth (which is the scar of healing, which is a question) from your passing? Did you bestow it upon me? Did I murder you in this exchange? There seems to be no transaction in obliteration, but maybe this is a semantic problem. My own crafted image of you scoffs at this, tells me to fuck off, lighten up, stop asking ridiculous questions, live life, enjoy paradox, absurdity, whimsy, situational conflict as a moral apparatus. I'm putting words where your mouth never kissed. Still, your loving dismissal of my petty agony pointed warm lamplight down every darkened path your words told not to travel. Again, maybe the dissonance is only between isomers, because your song, your question, your healing, your raised eyebrow (I imagine) spoke in deeper tongues that overwrite this language, and beckon deeper.
I can't escape the idea that you planned it this way, that you designed to enthrall me and then die. This is the farcical degree of my narcissism. July 10th of this Gregorian year, as I hummed and hawed to myself about suicide, you sent a simple message. "Things really aren't that bad."
I don't want to replace you with a symbol, reform a strange memory into idolatry. You were not a saint, but no Saint ever was. So you were a saint. Saving my life. Certainly you preserved some part of yourself in me. What part? Just the mystery? Fuck you.
It was bizarre how you found me. Mutual friends had expressed worry for and before you, in your somehow precedence. You said we'd met and I still cannot recall. The blank polaroid silhouette is infuriating against the backdrop of every teenage colour, all black tears on the beach, all flushed cheeks between the trees, all me me me. Can I promise to notice everyone from now until I die? Is there a way to know when it will mean this much?
I said that things really were bad, and you told me a secret. Maybe a lie. Four days I lived that truth, that revelation, and four days you spoke to me as though we were, for lack of better words, lovers. Four days. Like a bird I nested jewels and sang. My secret for you was wanting to sing together. "Notice how you speak to yourself," you said. "And I'm a real live person who lives in this world."
Then you died. How fucked is that? What did you look like? When did we meet? Why do I have no memory of it?
I think you sought me out to be your priest. A life ritual in death (which is life in question, which is bondage in fire and intimacy, which is the healing scar that prompts renewal, which is the lie that you began and I continue), or a death ritual in life?
The systemic part of me wants to think that maybe there is something mundane like Bipolar disorder behind this crazy thing. OCD. DUI. ILU. Why did you find me? What were you trying to teach me? You meant to die, didn't you? What does that mean for me? I loved you with every ounce of my being. Every molecule of feeling.
Now I slough this off. Now words can create. I love you. I love you so much, Natacha Roussel. You are the dead saint here.
|
17/07/10
I feel like my body is melting away, sitting next to the fan in this heat, waxen drips pouring off sideways, until I become nothing.
|
|
15/07/10
26/03/10
So I call you to create a stopgap, and am surprised to find that you're crying. You start doing dishes noisily on the other end to mask the sound of your hurt. I'd forgotten that you cry, or that you can cry, even though you once did on my shoulder when you learned how I let you break my heart.
I will always turn "you" into "me." And then I will destroy the mutant synthesis. This is the romantic ideal.
I'm sitting in a parc around the corner from the buanderie, and I feel like a drug dealer because I keep checking my phone and I'm drinking a beer and it's like -10 and this seems like potentially the most paranoiac familial whitey part of this otherwise brown-scale neighbourhood. I wish I could paint, or even had a camera, because there are poplars defying bilateralism with much more stark, defiant symmetries and strange right angles, and, towering over the light that lights us all, a fir tree with needles of such crystalline grace as could only be the horked up and frozen-arrow phlegm of cherubim.
I sent you the wrong letter. Or, rather, I set you the right letter with the words in the wrong order. Maybe the environmental circumstances of time will sort the alluvium from the glacial till. Or maybe language is already the indecipherable artifact, lost to all those but historians of the quaint and heretofore impossible.
|
I will always turn "you" into "me." And then I will destroy the mutant synthesis. This is the romantic ideal.
I'm sitting in a parc around the corner from the buanderie, and I feel like a drug dealer because I keep checking my phone and I'm drinking a beer and it's like -10 and this seems like potentially the most paranoiac familial whitey part of this otherwise brown-scale neighbourhood. I wish I could paint, or even had a camera, because there are poplars defying bilateralism with much more stark, defiant symmetries and strange right angles, and, towering over the light that lights us all, a fir tree with needles of such crystalline grace as could only be the horked up and frozen-arrow phlegm of cherubim.
I sent you the wrong letter. Or, rather, I set you the right letter with the words in the wrong order. Maybe the environmental circumstances of time will sort the alluvium from the glacial till. Or maybe language is already the indecipherable artifact, lost to all those but historians of the quaint and heretofore impossible.
|
