I'm going to try this again?

 This will probably be seen only by me...but i like the idea of having a repository for memory again. a record.

i'm not good a consistency and a lot has happened since getting my phd in 2012.

i've landed in tennesee and i'm teaching

and life has continued to add it's weight

mom died in 2017

janis died in 2023

it's a waiting game....i'm the youngest and if i live long enough

everything around me will erode until it's just me standing on the shore

oh god this is getting depressing but i can't help

but think about how unanchored i'm becoming...just waiting

maybe to float above the vastness of the this ocean i can't

stop looking at

anyway i might as well find something to do 

to occupy my time

nothing's lost forever

for rhonda...i miss you

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.” 

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika

for rhonda part one

i teach writing, but i am not a writer. can i compare that to a tattoo artist who doesn't have a single tattoo on her/his body? there is an artist like that you know...somewhere in europe...maybe paris, yeah i think he lives in paris. anyway, is that an apt comparison? i love my art (or perhaps my profession) but not enough to commit my body to it. i don't think that i love anything that much.

i want to write something about my friend rhonda who has gone on. away. softly. but in this same instance...in the same paragraph even i change my mind. i don't want to or i find that i can't write about this loss, this absence now...or maybe i am narrating it anyway by not writing about it. with me, this sorrow seems to swim beneath the words. perhaps or because with me, grief can find no satisfying branch to perch on//no grammar to anchor it into place onto the page.

chela 4 july 2002-- 21 may 2015

maybe i will write something that will adequately express the grief that i am going through but then again probably not ...it has hardly been a year since maxwell left me and now...you.


and it was so very fast...

 i come home to an empty apartment...this is the first time i have ever truly lived alone and

 i miss you terribly

i pick up your ashes tonight and i wish the person who called me would have pronounced your name

correctly, and it's funny how deep that wound reveals itself...what emptiness it reveals: the scope, the depth



the world is wider and vaster...and starker now
but i guess that is what grief is all about...negotiating the growing space of loss

Gewiteđ þonne on sealman, sorhleođ gæleđ
an æfter anum; þuhte him eall to rum,
wongas ond wicstede. (Beowulf 2460-2)

grief and insistence

"All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable." Judith Butler, interview in Guernica (2010)

grief insists that it  be recognized...the on-and on-ness of its insistence is vast and untraceable and yet still it persists in its continuous quest for validation

chicago

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” ― Judith Butler

"The moment of change is the only poem.” ― Adrienne Rich

sorrow and the prospect of a resurrection

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.” 
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

untitled sorrow

"Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison/Mother I lost it all of the fear of the Lord I was given/Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to/Mother forgive me I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you"

--Samuel Ervin Beam

"Let be be finale of seem."

"how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster" from Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts"

here is grief

maxwell april 1, 1996-march 10, 2014

this is an ongoing narrative because it is based in grief and grief like writing is never finished
i know that it hasn't been a month yet but the silence is overwhelming
i almost called to him the other day and i can sometimes still see him in the corner of my eye, i hate the fact that he is now in my periphery...i think that that is the most painful part because i can no longer trust my senses. they fool me and my heart hasn't really caught up with the reality of his gone-ness
grief is just so empty and vast, trackless
i certainly can yell and scream into the void but i know that i won't hear any echo because there is nothing there for the voice to bounce off of...just swirling words that now can only be spoken...brought into a sorry excuse for an existence, in the past tense, in a passive voice tinged with memory
holding him as he took his last breath
i tried to kiss him back to life and i tried to cry him back to me but i can't fight chemistry, the poison injected into his leg, his precious leg with his precious paws that i have kissed 1,000s of times...his eyes open and his cataracts still present, this is more than missing this is trying to figure out the rest of my journey without him. the points between a to b to c to d i hate the geometry of grief, the on-and-on-ness of it all (this learning curve is steep, alone and a capella, silently and horribly plaintive)
i am also learning that grief is selfish, it is big and it is selfish, calling the past back knowing that that is impossible but still doing it anyway through empty gestures by looking at pictures, writing narratives, calling for him in a very quiet apartment, in tri-tones, a recursive dissonance without any resolution

sweetness, sweetness i was only joking

it has been awhile...
feeling nostalgic lately
especially the first time i fell in love. well that's a bit of a hyperbole. but i can locate that moment...early 1990s, an undergraduate, i was in a really smokey club called "club park avenue" in tallahassee, florida. dressed in black, before i started smoking but loving the smell of the clove cigarettes my friends were enjoying, there was a veil of smoke hanging over the dance floor, i was just watching. it was "gothic" night at club park avenue. cocteau twins were playing and liz fraser's voice was flying around the place so lightly opaque and yet so present that if you wanted to you could touch her voice with your fingers....but you didn't dare do it because, like butterfly wings, to touch something so delicate only invites a certain type of ruin.




i spent a lot of time in my head back then...more so than i do now but there, in my surroundings with my friends, the music, and the dark hazy air I seemed to relish my aloneness…suspended in the darkness as if hanging by threads that were thin and gauzy...moving slowly, deliberately in the presence of so much company. "big mouth strikes again" was the next song. i usually danced to this one...dancing to me was, more or less, carving out a space on the floor where there was nothing but myself, the music, and contemplation...narratives that spin...it's easy to forget in moments like these...i miss them, deeply.





but i didn't dance this time...i just sat on the floor off to the side..legs crossed in a sort of lotus position...back against the wall...looking past the immediacy of knee caps...looking back on this moment...i see myself...black clothes....deep, long black hair that is streaked with purple...i can't remember if i wore a barrette or not that night...but for sure, heavy eyeliner...maybe some lip liner too depending...foundation and powder...i was some kind of fucked up yogi sitting there engaged in shadowed poses. i saw this one guy dancing. basic white t-shirt, black jeans rolled up to expose the white socks between the bottom of those pants and the tops of his doc martins. thin with his shoulders arched slightly back, arms bent at the elbows circling his cigarette as if he were writing a poem (to me) and he danced so elegantly against the velvet heaviness of morrissey's voice framed by johnny marr's riffs. i fell in love not only with "him" but with the idea of "him." the idea that at that moment my life was opening up, undulating amidst smoking air and the smell of cloves and, for what may have been a moment or a lifetime, this phantom slowly faded...then liz fraser's voice came flying by again...only this time it was accompanied by massive attack...





it was a crying song that still follows me “Love, love is a verb/Love is a doing word/Fearless on my breath/Gentle impulsion/Shakes me, makes me lighter/Fearless on my breath/Teardrop on the fire/Fearless on my breath…” i will always be haunted by the ghostly shapes of my past and the not too distant future...dancing in a darkened void leading me where the air smells sweet, is hot and cold, and you see the glowing tips of cigarettes being held between invisible fingers that continue to write poems not unlike the temporary language of fireflies whose flickering grammar never quite catches up with the words..."you're (i'm) stumbling down"

a new website and excellent resource

tania bruguera is an unbelievably talented and important artist. she has started up a new website that i am sure will turn out to be an extremely valuable resource.

http://immigrant-movement.us/

being present

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this series. I thought that the very end plus the epilogue were a disappointment (but that is because I had certain expectations that weren’t fulfilled). However, this ending didn’t diminish (for me) the brilliance of this story and the very important work that Collins has done with this trilogy.



View all my reviews

why i will never listen to or read joe.my.god or dan savage

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/10/predictable-navel-gazing-over.html

the above is a link to one of the most repulsive, essentializing posts i have ever read. dear joe and dan...you (and your listeners/readers) are advocating for the same kind of violence that you claim to be "fighting" against. it is your way or nothing....there is no critical inquiry or conversation regarding your white male "ideas" or about how to "fix" something...and when, goddess forbid, someone does actually want to put your ideas into relief with others you simply go on attack mode...again...how white, male of you. does it really get better? or is this a rehashing of the myth of "the american dream"? if you work hard enough you can get whatever you want....because if you don't get what you want then you didn't work hard enough and therefore you are a failure? turn it around, the "it gets better" videos, as femmephane points out in this post:

http://tempcontretemps.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/why-i-dont-like-dan-savages-it-gets-better-project-as-a-response-to-bullying/

are created mostly by white, privileged gay men...and when you get to the bottom of this issue it doesn't address gay teen suicide at all it addresses a personal experience of "overcoming" that is universalized and repurposed as a truth. what happens then is the self-serving motivation that constructs these videos, as objects of truth claims, create an unchallenged and anitintellectual (much like the tea party is doing) violent and reactionary atmosphere wherein a teen who does commit suicide is going to be seen as a failure instead of the tragedy that it most certainly is. dan and joe...gay teen suicide is NOT about you or your lives...it is about hopelessness and oppression...it is about trauma and the loss of voice. if you really want to "make a difference" why don't you listen instead of throwing your lives up on a video and telling people to just stick it out or rather "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps kids" because "if you don't get through this difficult time then you have missed the point and you are a failure because you did this to yourself"...joe and dan....in your attempt to embrace this problem, to bring it closer to yourselves you (and i think inadvertently) are abjecting the very bodies that you want to speak to. we need dialogue not two guys (among many) who have tricked themselves into pretending to be self-absorbed mother teresas, and, btw, calling queer theorists "navel gazers" doesn't help your cause...at all...you're just name calling...something i'm sure that gay teens are all too familiar with. if you can't listen to other types of narratives, critiques, and standpoints then how in HELL are you going to be able to listen to bodies that feel hopeless, oppressed, and violently abjected into the periphery? ultimately this is about power...who has it...who doesn't...how it is moving through language. i don't see empowerment in these videos...i see a reinscription of a hegemonic struggle enunciating itself through privileged bodies who, in turn, are firming up their always and already privileged standpoints.

early morning poem...because i can't sleep

i can't sleep...even when i read poems....poems aren't comforting to me, they cut deep, they resonate on a level where sleep is impossible and impossibility is where i expect it to be...sitting next to me on my bed, whispering to me all of the secrets that i thought could never be mine...in a song without meter, melody, or key signature.

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

BJORK live HYPERBALLAD

i go through all this before you wake...

Nouvelle Vague - killing moon - Piotr Kamler Coeur de Secours