Bad luck negates bad luck. That is what I learned in Manitoba, three summers ago, in the marbled building. And that is what I saw today, one black cat crossing the street west, and later, one black cat waiting briefly as I unlocked my bike. It occurs to me now that they might have been the same cat. But I saw it twice. And the twice sight is what I can know determinedly, therefore anything […]
All my life, I have emulated my life through art, but never saw art as life. I delighted in books because they brought me escape, elucidation, and comfort, but I believed in the distance, I said, not me, not really. What I mean by art in this instance is narrative. I thought life had a distance to narrative, to all those artful and aesthetic objects I consumed. It was a relief. It was relief to […]
To put it quite frankly I think I am depressed again, depressive, blue, gray, however you would like to call it. I am not even sure how—sometimes I would like to question it intently, sometimes I understand the futility. So heavy with the most searing and trivial symbolism did this new vision come to me; missed farmer’s market, a re-visiting of the old path, the weather so clearly and densely changed. And silence. An absolute […]
New lamp. Autumnal leaves, cyclonic. It will be a year. It will have been a year. I remember how I had been slightly under the weather. I had biked to Shopper’s to buy Ricolas. I played it cool. The clouds played it cool. Coffee, tea, soup. I took down half of my desk and turned it into a shelf for my plants. My plants aren’t doing so well. My asparagus fern has crisped and yellowed. […]
… Sylvia Plath, Munich Mannequins. To enter a new realm is to enter a new void, so faultless and so limitless. Today I am thinking about narratives and what exactly we/I mean about romanticized this romanticized that, is romanticization simply not just a coherent narrative, a dramatization of suffering until it is no longer truly suffering, until it is the ‘image’ of suffering. ‘Dramatization’? I think to myself, what can I write in four days? […]
Something peculiar happened to me Thursday morning, or perhaps Wednesday morning. I had just finished filling up my three water bottles at the fountain by the Welcome Desk, a routine habit at this point. As I walked back down the hallway, inching closer to the doors of the chapel, I happened upon an old man waiting by the elevator. I automatically greeted him with a “good morning,” but then my mind stopped with a message […]
Would be wonderful, essential, bewildering, right about now.
November, it’s November, November, oh November. I am waiting on a letter. I am not sure if the letter will come true. I am leaving things I have yet to leave. I can still sense the wishes by the dark water. I can still touch the sleeplessness from hundreds of days ago. Has it only been several thousand hours? Oh heart. Foolish unto ever. It’s going to be a hard winter.Look through the almanac, lookat […]
Weird, cool, winter-sick, warm behind the knees, silent furnace, cotton face masks, sweet candy sweet wrappers. Bike ride at midnight. Stomach pit. Familiar foreboding. The light of art behind doubled windows. Yacht blocking eastern view. Pumpkin pie, cranberry oatmeal, sesame ball. Plastic compostable but not really fork. Polite woman running her laps. Older man playing guitar tunes and his wife/girlfriend/partner/friend listening on, beside me. Last two days. You can do this. Last two days. Stay […]
Sontag is the heart of the brains’ knowledge, or the brain of the heart’s knowledge. Having finished (with some skipped pages), Under the Sign of Saturn, I feel, with a form of genuineness, invigorated. Sontag begins with despair (Artaud) but leaves us with a point of gratitude (Canetti). We are taught madness and the self-perpetuating mind’s circle, but also that life is rich and tragedy can be refused. I am interested by her use of […]
