Practice

I decided at the Christmas party.

I'd been considering it for a while. Today I knew. I took the couch and you sat on the floor in front me, leaning against my leg, and I couldn't speak. I wasn't ready. But I will be.

I will build a man who is good enough to be with you. I will build a man who deserves you. There is much to do. The rest of this doesn't matter. The rest of this is just practice.

Living Social

It will Hopefully darken the space
between me and the steady stream of community

It is the one nod to base people

The Crucible

reading his poetry
you wouldn't guess what happened to his relationship

grief and longing seem obvious
But there is something more.

I see compassionate fidelity
which was the crucible of this story

LXV

by Pablo Neruda

Matilde, where are you? Down there I noticed,
under my necktie and just above the heart,
a certain pang of grief between the ribs,
you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,
I looked around, devouring hope.
I watched the void without you that is like a house,
nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned:

so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.

No Special Hurry

by Ernest Hemingway

“That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke so no one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Albert

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Link

Bits

I’m tired of doing bits.

It’s a comedy term that functions by extending a premise; interjecting quippy shit and constant veering away from seriousness or gravity. In this way, sincere communication is sidestepped and your trembling core made inaccessible. We’re protected. We’re validated as intellectually dexterous. We’re safely apart.

I’ve been listening to podcasts like all the time for a while now. It’s not just entertainment. Recently, I have come to realize that this is a form of self-medication. I am attempting to fill a nutritional need through desperate means. Stop what you’re doing and spend some time with the following examples. I present for your consideration:

WTF, Episode 300

You Made It Weird, Episode 84

These are good examples, but by no means the best examples. I have not stacked the deck. Do you have conversations like this? I do not have conversations like this. I used to try and we would really start to get somewhere and then someone would say, “Hey, The Simpsons are coming on” and I would be like, “what the fuck is wrong with you guys?”  

Don’t say it’s because I’m alone. Don’t reduce it that way. It’s not about that; this is a chronic, systemic issue and has been for years and years. Being in a relationship solves nothing in and of itself. Yes, I’m really late to the party on that one. It is the most potentially damaging example – we don’t reach out because there is no guarantee that someone will reach back.   

But when something happens in your life you want to tell someone. Maybe your mom. Your best friend. There are specific people you need to share crucial information with and without that “epilogue” the experience itself seems somehow unreal. You need to complete the circuit. I can’t seem to tell enough people anymore to make anything real. 

Sometimes I fear that the tires are coming off.

The real issue here is not with the group but with the individual. I realize this. Not everyone feels this same compulsion or maybe just not to this degree. It has to be fairly wide, though, right? At least wider? There are things you aren’t talking about. There are things you are not talking about enough. Don’t tell me you’re fine with it. No one can be fine with it. There is something more and you know that instinctively. Maybe your needs are being met but I’m skeptical.

I’m just yelling out the window.

When Someone Great Is Gone

Robert Frost

by George Bilgere


Over there on the dining room table

are just twenty-five of the thousands of essays

on the poetry of Robert Frost

produced this week alone in the USA,

the world leader in essays on Robert Frost.

The essays are about ambiguity

in The Road Not Taken, and also ambiguity

in Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Every year the English majors of America

must read these poems and analyze their ambiguity

or compare and contrast their ambiguity

in five double-spaced pages.

And the English teachers of America must read these pages

and determine whether they are incisive or not incisive.

I am one of those teachers. I try to do my share.

Because if we don’t do this – if Frost’s ambiguity

is not discussed, and if those discussions are not assessed,

and then finally graded – well, what’s the point of all this?

What are we doing here?

Therefore,

I must walk over to the dining room table

and determine whether the essays are incisive or not incisive.

And yet two days have passed, an entire weekend,

and it’s Sunday evening and I am having a glass of wine

and the essays on ambiguity in the poetry of Robert Frost

remain unassessed by me, and this is getting very serious.

Tooth

by Leo Tolstoy

He felt like a man who had had a tooth out that had been hurting him for a long time. After terrible pain and a sensation of something enormous, larger than his whole head, being pulled out of his jaw, he suddenly, scarcely able to believe his good fortune, feels that the thing that had so long been poisoning his existence and absorbing all his attention is no longer there, and he can again live, think, and be interested in other things beside his tooth. It was this sort of feeling that Karenin experienced. The pain had been strange and terrible, but now it was gone; he felt he could live again and think not only of his wife alone.

from Anna Karenina

From Virginibus Puerisque

by Robert Louis Stevenson

III. — ON FALLING IN LOVE

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense; they form together no more than a sort of background, or running accompaniment to the man’s own reflections; and he falls naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects tomorrow to be after the pattern of today and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friends and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But it is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience. I remember an anecdote of a well-known French theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in his Cenacle. It was objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon he arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it until he considered that he had supplied the defect. “Now,” he remarked, on entering, “now I am in a position to continue the discussion.” Perhaps he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an apologue to readers of this essay.

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy dislikes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-an-one in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you.

...

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent these advantages. He joined himself to the following of what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called nonchaloir; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash of that fear with which honest people regard serious interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course of life among certain selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregularly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the preoccupied attention of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But it is not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has been done already, and that to admiration. In Adelaide, in Tennyson’s Maud, and in some of Heine’s songs, you get the absolute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love; although they tell me some German critics are of a different opinion, probably the same who would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, in Les Miserables, is also a genuine case in his own way, and worth observation.

...

To do good and communicate is the lover’s grand intention. It is the happiness of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. To make one’s self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one’s self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

...

Attack on Memory

Secret

"Tell me a secret."

"I can't think of a good one."

"So tell me one that isn't good."

"I've been having a hard time writing poetry recently."

"Why? Because you're happy?"

"Yeah."

Irrational Freight

First picked you up outside Lexington I don’t know it was like two a.m.

We talked for a while through the passenger window.

Later I was telling you about my family you nodded along with the music.

We were making real progress as the sky got born.

That’s when I realized that I had forgotten to unlock the door.

I was alone in the car and had been.

So much time wasted.

The Extreme Claim

“But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant.”

- Tennessee Williams


He never would have accepted that. It is precisely the sort of statement that enraged him. It privileges the physical. It supports a worldview in which the primitive is not only tolerated but venerated. It defends those choices made of desire and which too often came down against him.

I see it differently. I have learned humility in the face of such compulsion; have seen the insignificance of plan and protocol and protestation. Ethics wilt and reason falters when presented with the grand, biological imperative.

He is gone and gone. Robert Pirsig, when writing about his own former self, used the third person. He spoke of a ghost, named Phaedrus, with whom he was once acquainted. It seems appropriate in that the gulf is adequately wide to consider these separate persons but disturbingly melodramatic. It’s reminiscent of the Extreme Claim.

The Extreme Claim, a tool of metaphysics, states that we have no reason, or no special reason, to care more about our future selves than any other numerically distinct self; that the currently cognizant ‘You’ has no connection to potential, future ‘Yous’ aside from occupying the same space. There is no logically defensible reason to exhibit greater concern for those separate entities than for the billions of other separate entities.

A similar argument could be made concerning ancestral selves; that the many identities you have held in the past have no true connection to your current identity; that the developmental thread that seems to link these selves is convenient construction. There is no schema of identity capable of encompassing all these divergent personalities, experiences, and behaviors.

I was a very different person once, sure. Or persons, I suppose. There’s shame, regret, sorrow, and bitterness. What there is also is a strange sort of pride felt for the mad intensity of those periods. Though I am pleased with the direction things have gone, and would choose this self over other, prior selves, I want very much to be perceived by means of that impossible schema. It is for this reason that I feel the need to reveal portions of my past. I want to receive credit based on my current value and also my previous values. That isn’t how it works, though. You just end up being a guy who can’t let go.

Part of me yearns for the vitality and certainty of those prodigal years, especially the boy who would have spit on Stella. He would only have seen the weakness. He would only have thought of himself. Representative of feminine scorn and abasement, brain between her legs and legs about the Cretan bull.

I see it differently.

All Around Me

Slip

I want to slip in beside you
- in bed in step in photographs -
fixated on each arm freckle again.
Sweater shrug,
cover and reveal and cover and reveal.

I hunger for involuntary spasm,
your body and I trading in whisper.
The rush of air propelling laughter,
the rush of blood blush quaking hips,
your own hand cupping back a cry to herald warm contortion.

“How much?”
And how can I explain how
your face forbids such thinking?
You coax out an early thing that cannot speak
- that needn’t speak -
and afterward the still warm chamber.

Part your hair with my breath,
the starts beside me, a body in dreams,
with a peck against the surface tension
like a fish, cooing recognition,
realigning against my torpor.

Slipping through some crowded wood - a party now -
should let you lead in such things you know better.
Waking in your bed, the gray,
holding hands while we slept
wound like coiled rope.

It’s better this way.
With you as one of many.
With me as one of many.
What other choice do we have we’re running out of time.
I press my face against your chest and draw you in.
It should be enough it is it is enough.

Posted reminders, diligent notary,
A transparent frame which surrounds the vision
on which to print
reminders in lipstick and marker.
Doubt in several fonts and sizes, “this is a person like you imagine,”
“it is you,” that will be easier
- it isn’t wisdom -
a tepid screed, another barrier,
my heart is in the right place. Write that last bit large.

Moments of anger that hint at something private and real.
A force that comes of distance not velocity -
when you slip up and slap temper -
I’m just going through the motions,
I’m just standing out back staring into the retaining basin.

You were right
I am a thing of the sea.
You always knew and I was scared to say.
A man part which you love but something further -
it’s adaptive and for survival you of all people
should understand that august finality,
the need to dive down deeply; the need to come back slow.

Exposed to certain imaginings
in youth, these were seared into my vision.
They do not merely influence they are
fellow participants
and too numerous, too congested in grime and file,
cluttering our vision and confounding explanation.
It’s simply difficult,
I understand that. I should have been patient
and wasn’t.

You already bear such weight.
There’s a steel framework comprised of train trestles,
a certain stance with feet set and the arms wide to receive.
The awful thing is they expect it.
Leaning in and on and suppose suffuse you suffer buffeting
waves and broken yolk misplaced faith placed faithfully.
When it’s you afloat they’re gone
and you slip under.

I don’t want to love you, I want just to see
lights that peek out underneath
like tiny silver eggs.
Frail on some park bench or, better, fretting brunch,
and to then remember so sincerely something so sincere.
I nodded and I knew and now I’m saying:
you wonder what’s before,
I wonder after.

Records

Do you remember this? It was very near the end.

It's funny the things we choose to remember. I wonder where you are sometimes. I wonder what you've become. Base or chaste. Married or marred. Suffering or insufferable. It's a piece of history I've long since tucked into a basket and sent downriver.

There are days, though, when things are especially quiet and the rain falls. On those days I want to lie in bed and listen to records. Stare at the ceiling and move only to relieve the tensions of the body. It's not for everyone. A private moment of thoughtful counsel requiring little dialogue and no explanation.

I know that you would want that, too.

Supportive

The core issue is about data processing.

I am, as I have said, very good at identifying social patterns. Using observation and mimicry for so many years has allowed me to develop a fairly sophisticated type of cataloguing. I can predict probable outcomes based on these observed trends. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this aside from the fact that it is, I believe, unusually cognitive. It would rightly be considered a coping strategy. When there are deviations from these patterns I notice immediately.

The issue arises when it’s time to actually analyze those deviations. I’m terrible at it. I’ll know that there's something happening, something potentially important, but determining what that is exactly is mostly guesswork. This is where a lack of instinct becomes crippling. Sometimes it’s a pretty simple puzzle to solve. At other times I will proceed on a completely incorrect assumption and find myself wildly far afield before I realize my error. There has been a lot of damage done from such mistakes.

I have no idea how one becomes better at such things. The options seem to be either:

A. improve
B. react less

By reacting less I mean disconnecting my behavior from the behavior of those around me; internalizing the motives of speech and action to a high degree. This has proven to be successful but only in those situations where I am not particularly invested in outcomes. We’ll call this the “I don’t give a shit” approach. When you really don’t give a shit there’s no need to calibrate based on feedback – you do or say whatever you choose to do or say and call it a day.

Clearly, this is less useful when you are invested. Pretending not to give a shit offers all the downsides of not caring and none of the advantages. It’s also an awful, disingenuous way to treat someone you care about. We’ll throw that one on the woodpile.

In the interest of possible improvement, I spend time studying those who handle this process well. Of particular value are those who, like me, take the long division approach of watching and calculating but somehow achieve better results. The friend I’m thinking of specifically seems to follow my format but does so with more accuracy. At some point in the processing stage she is able to take the same information I’ve gathered and know better what that information indicates. I don’t know how. I’ve asked her and she doesn’t seem to know how, either. She suggested that I am over thinking things. That’s definitely true, but not tremendously helpful. Watching her to see how she behaves in such situations brings us back to the beginning so no solution there.

In the short term maybe the best practice is to trust such people. I’m hesitant to do that. It’s not a matter of pride so much as it seems to be a weakness; a dependency of the sort that is so deeply unattractive. Sounds like a pretty weak objection. Perhaps trust really is the operative term here. She’s good at such things, I am not, and so when in such matters we disagree I should consider her position quite seriously. There’s something else in there, what’s it called? Oh, yes, being supportive.

Kendrick

You need to get with this shit.

Burial + Four Tet - Nova

Notes II

If I could wear you like warpaint
I would
a slick rouge up the cheeks
to identify my patronage
remind me of purpose
to caution strangers
______________________________

Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg; The Alhambra; Ko Samui; Florence; The Vatican
______________________________

Andrea Doria

I don't care if you're a boat or a hole in a dirt road
Remains of a rotted cake, can hardly remember then
kissed her on both cheeks taught her to hate men
______________________________

I'm standing at the window
waiting to see a walking figure or headlights
some sign that you've arrived
some sign that you've stayed
______________________________

When I see you smile so genuinely, an old smile I feel like a boy so open it's a pleasure and a fear I never feel
like a boy
______________________________

If I were a prince I would like to imagine
that I was not the product of a dowager
that I was not imperious and vain
that I could hold no distance between stations
and that such gravity as I could provide
would be made manifest in smiles and hale greetings

Notes

Once I served The Nothing
My car is full of spiders
______________________________

I am going to cover one eye
I am depleting the quantity of incoming stimuli to the betterment of greater exclusivity
______________________________

Unable or unwilling to differentiate between varying collections of sensory experience and this location is indented and experience [illegible] all of colors and sounds the pressing immediacy of form and object
______________________________

Microfiche

Describe the circumstances in which one would level a flare gun at the horizon instead of vertically: entity one wishes to contact is both known and distant
______________________________

There's this false expectation that a relationship should last forever. And that's ridiculous. Every relationship eventually ends and that's okay. The expectation creates a hostage scenario. And it makes for awkward situations in which you can't be friends with that person or even be around them.
______________________________

Everything is moving but me most of all. I cannot be still I cannot find stillness nor certitude.
______________________________

trying to invent rules mutually exclusive goals worry about spectrum and brain growth rates

1. communicate/provide an authentic representation
2. successfully engage

grapple with the postmodern division that has become too common

do you see what I see? do you hear what I hear?
______________________________

Confessional
Deep leviathan crown prince of the new sincerity I am interested in the development of my personal brand I cannot function independently I am motivated by shame I need a girl who is better than me I am terrified of girls who are better than me I just want to get drunk and talk about dark matter I have a thing for ponytails
______________________________

as mistakes accrue
the extent of work that the muscles do
to hinder and hold what they might of you
truthfully, I don't know what you're going through
______________________________

Haunted House next door
wet rock and curtained windows
slate shingles flecked with oxblood and bleak view obstructed by bare trunks
and telephone wire
scaled siding, cake, spoiled sugar/confection
slime, serpentine
white chimney, cracked ivory darkened fire damage
especially today it's raining
______________________________

a peck, tip of my nose
the few strands that work their way across a headband
the hollow of my arms filled neatly
a soothing of the chest completely
the note I produce is a
vibration/a resonance
I think in D
I think in D
______________________________

this is so simple
a smaller pattern of fewer threads, one band of color,
don't spoil the arrangement
through touch
or at least insensate grabbing
a harsh and directionless need
______________________________

The benefit of breath
is largely
the altitude of momentum
and not
the power to comment on same
as once I suspected
______________________________

Geryon, Moloch
shall we mythologize
______________________________

FAVORITE
CRAVE
______________________________

Brunettes are great because the follicles are filled up so it feels like you're getting your money's worth.
______________________________

Identifying something as awkward says more about your lack of social facility than it does about the situation.
______________________________

"More weight"

The difference is temperance born of fatigue. A blunting of sensation (that allows for a cleaner, more efficient interaction of cogs) I don't feel so much better as *heavier* which mimics the motion of deliberate choice

a chronic but sustainable malaise

Henry Miller's Writing Commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it -- but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.