2009-11-09

jan-ken-pon

Four years
For years
Fore years
4 years

now it seems and you’re still singing under the rainbow, licking the envelope and searching for a pur(ity) that won’t close or converge and crush you with its corrosion and decay, false starts and fading, weakness and wasting. Whole mislaid misplaced melding months now since beginning the pages, days and months of abstraction and intricacy inside one unobstructed moment, the room again an increasingly deepening hue, partial, vivid, raw and darker. Months ago, uncountable years, last night, next weekend, hypothetical two girls with red big balloons across secret seventeen pictures, an arresting display, curious and capturing, a dispirited dog and something. Some place, some one, some idea, some time. The music breaks into bright beautiful pieces, sharp and shifting, uncertain and unclear, the impression of joy, perplexities. Beauty and its slow destruction, possibility. Inconsequence.

(what are these imaginary examinations About,
Who are these obliterating pieces for)

January jangles, February flashes, March moderates, April abates the provocative pull of May. June and July, August and September [Hayden’s September] and slowly soon the clamorous cold and clashing into Axl’s November rain. Last year’s careen and conclusion occurs with such seeming suddenness it’s almost like it hardly happened. There’s one memorable version of a magical snowstorm, of wandering willfully into a wide wild winter world of whirling white: a sealed and pale yellow room, three closed doors, a watchful waxen woman and you. Everything is by her account ‘picture perfect,’ which invalidates the potential problems of last November. It’s four months before that unfamiliar Now, the four months pass into the persisting promise of June and your anamnestic heart recalls that today’s magnificent storm. And then the cataclysmic conflict, a hate-tinged exchange, a volume of two voices, familiar and furious, the discomforted dog demurs, a devastation defined by a stiffening into silence, a questioning disquiet inside her joyless eyes. Her front right troubled paw rakes you as it every time does and everyone’s affected, in particular her and so in particular you until it ends. The details separate, sever and sink, a slow unraveling of memory by the desultory persuasiveness of time.


The immediacy of colour returns, reflects and remains, one long movement arrested into slow-motion, adversity and advantage, struggle and success, the falling out of love and into more love again, strangers meet as friends withdraw, doors swing shut and always the wrong song stays with you the most in some unprotected place in your mind. There’s a jellyfish loose in large waters that’s evolved itself to such a degree that it’s become immortal and is swarming itself across the world, the dog seems especially discouraged and depressed this late afternoon. You look at her and embrace her too intently, you often assign to her such seeming states, you worry over her periods of unstoppable melancholy. You attempt some motions and words to inspire delight, she looks askance and holds herself still and then vomits. Three times actually while you look lingeringly on, adoring and appalled. The apartment has floors that at least are uncomplicatedly cleaned so you make things become as they were in mere minutes and then afterward attempt again to with him eat your dinners with counterfactual complacency and apocryphal appetites. The dismal dog looks dolefully on. You spend the next consequential space of time encircling her black-furred warm and living form, she looks at you too gravely and twice as you speak in gentle secret tones to her of fantastic pleasant all-inclusive things. Sleep approaches her, she relaxes but then tenses and stares at you transfixed and tormented again, every time you try tenderly eventually to leave. Embracing and holding her too tightly against you takes the shape of the rest of the hour, that afternoon’s today, your shared everything, your shared life and heart and moment, you, this time, this light, this slow sickness, this silent killing into afternoon, this beautiful animal, this longtime living,

this Dog
this Place
this Him
&You.

An adult male approximately unconscious behind you on the bed, a lying down sitting position unique to him, so far. He’s very silent and nearly still but for the involuntary tap-tap-tapping of his shoes against the floor, the rhythmic twitching both soothing and disturbing of both his legs. You do not remonstrate and you slide through because it’s undeniably you that has progressed him into this by now expected eventual enduring condition, so disturbingly peaceful, so peacefully disturbed. Behind the tatami-coloured wall electronic music lessons shine across a telephone line. You’re eating a comparatively Romanesque dinner, the dog appeals, sustaining stock-still her habitual height of determined and deadpan drama. The new clock you bring to the house is consummate, intricately simple, all silence and metal, glass and gears and you’re late. You’ve put everything down, closed it up, sealed it in and shut it off, you just can’t seem to care again or enough, rightly or exactly, naturally or completely, you cannot seem with any pure clarity and direction or true purpose and mind to set it all down.

You’re wearing cream-coloured winter nylons, sweetly sage socks, great green Eskimo slippers with prodigious puffs of achromic adornments, a child’s undershirt, a double-lined dark and well-worn hoodie, an archaic loose-fitting sweater that belongs to no one and two tremendous toques, it’s inconceivably cold. Consequently: the clothes. The place has no heat, darkness distends, falls and fills and after five discouraging days of death-like silence, stillness and illness, the dog improves and even turns thirteen, you’re pleased, appeased, relieved. She’s in many daily ways {your life} and your longest most love-drowned relationship with any one living thing. This dog, this eternal dog, imploring and beseeching forever for food and freedom, feasting and friendship. She’s a perfection of unpredictability, unforeseen frustrations and canine charisma, she’s your sweetest heart, your dreamy darling and your darling dream: a wiggling waggling wonder of wobbling warmth and inextinguishable innocence. She settles now into eventual tranquility, a consolatory silence downward and always nearby. December descends and jounces into January, a new homosexual neighbour appears, he’s congenial and considerate, genuine and generous, spirited and sweet. It seems also he is a periodic Leather Man by contention, is rather probably a Rent Boy by the suggestive sounds through the walls and is a recovering Porn Star by conceit. His mannerisms all are affectedly sincere, there’s an elaborate turmoil to his movements almost to the point of insurgency. His eventual ruinous reality forms finally the sad silhouette of nullified needles and rubber bands strewn across a severed space, a rueful rotation of controversial consorts and a near overdose that costs him much more than he might deserve and yet still less than he is able to bear. The culmination and crescendo of your joined experience involves some slashing staggering scuffle with the alcoholic and unfortunate Native Americans ‘down the way’... There’s more of course but no longer current currency and no longer now [such a tumultuous time, such a displacing place] (you’re glad you’re gone (and but still. you miss it)) and now all not now. Not this now, now your mind is consigned, maligned, resigned, your bones begin to break themselves, remake themselves and days pass away, pass by, proceed, progress, push on. Days pass and pass. Days pass.


Vanish your space and clear your place abandon who you are
shut your eyes hold still and listen carefully. Because this is what
her (heart) can sound like.

In a bedroom the colour of spilled wine, an anxiously visiting beautiful girl waits too passionately [with too exclusive a focus and for too long] for a single phone call. Through the speakers a large gentle-voiced beautiful man begins to die but before his death sings a beautiful song that makes ten thousand people cry. You’re wearing knee-high chocolate brown nylon trouser socks, those passionately prodigious great green Eskimo slippers, another ancient long-favoured thick and hooded top and again a pair of underwear that belongs to a boy. Your thighs have rarely seen such a degree of exposure and light and it’s not today as cold in here as it was when you last described what you wore. You feel a bit ‘on the verge,’ increasingly weakened and waned,  you should go lie down and you will. You did. You do. And then he returns with spicy kimchi soup and hot sake in a sweet special effort to take conjectural care of you. Together you watch an episode of some latent ly engaging British show and it’s interesting and even touching as it ends, despite seeming perfidious and provoking when it begins. You feel better enough now to write and you’ve since learned there’s another group of jellyfish thriving within the waters of this time Japan that have developed into monstrous renditions of themselves because they’ve no known predators and they eat and grow and grow and eat and multiply by this point endlessly. Apparently about half a billion of these monster jellies wash up upon Japanese shores annually, some of them have grown larger than four versions of you weighing as much as 400lbs and the Japanese-Korean fishing industries are struggling and straining, straining and suffering. The dog meanwhile grows old, her bones decline, she’s so brittle and equivocal now, especially in her ailing joints and her failing hips. She has difficulty negotiating the jumps up to the couch or onto the bed and every miscalculation strikes your heart hard. Sometimes she slides helplessly down with a thump onto the floor and just remains there, destitute and deficient, a heartbreaking heap of her own downcasting failure. Still she eventually and again wriggles and wags, exudes and survives and you spoil her with increased elaborations and intensities. You love her to an outrageous degree but everyone knows that: the coming of her dying isn’t something that will at all be easy but (death in its place) when it arrives, whether suddenly or slowly, in time.

The light is starting to dim and die, the music is just as loudly fascinating as before and you just did some searching to find out what you could about the worst people that have ever lived. The results while in parts are inaccurate and incomplete are all the same and of course intriguing. The next room contains such a massacre of music-making, such a demented and beautiful fury. The dog approaches sleeping and/or the constant [re]quest for possible food with the most penetratingly acute intensity. There are pangs of pain in certain areas of your body and you’re thinking about someone all of the time, looking for something always, avoiding all the while and all the same in effect everything. You’re sure again that you need to go lie down, feeling the usual undefined strangeness, words flash on and off, up or down, in and out, the difficulty relentlessly remains. The difficulty is deciding which ones. Which ones you need to want or want to mean or mean to need. The definite and detailed difficulty is in defining the destination, ascertaining the audience, proving the point, sharing the show and showing the sharing: erasing toward a place, elevating toward a heart, establishing toward a permanently fluid place in time. It’s hours later, hours or days or months, you attempt abstractly to carefully capture, to hold it still and you delusively do but you never completely can.

You watch afterward a somber documentary about a somber event and it gets all of you talking together and separately speculating. You try your best then to remain lively and bright despite how actually absolutely awful the world and its people invariably are, continue to be, will likely always be. You try, you succeed slightly, you fail finally and so, bereaved, you cleave, deceive and leave.


You’re wearing this time an entirely pink and cotton outfit, approaching at least four layers, all of it extremely mismatched and a new counterpoint for you, an unplanned plunging towards a depth of the dramatic and deranged. Your socks are striped brown and tan and on your feet are what could be mistaken for some type of very outdated, unquestionably unfashionable, grandmotherly bowling shoes. You are at present unattractive and inelegant to an unknowable degree but you aren’t concerned and also you’re not actually wearing any of ‘all that’ anymore anyway. You won’t describe what you are actually wearing now as you never intended to sit down for days and write a Daedalean dissertation describing all the different dementia- declaring outfits you happened to wear. A girl behind you reads a book on sex and/or love, she asks if you are familiar with any of the diversely staggering and stimulating ways to deliver a job with either your hands or your blows. You do not offer an explicitly forthright retort but gesture ambiguously in a generally legitimate way and say: ‘Whenever I leave that room, all his world grows dark.’ Or something excessive and sensational to that effect. The girl slightly smiles, ponders and pauses philosophically. She continues then just to read, you continue then just to write and the world continues unstoppably, to spin and spin. The weekday late afternoon sun shines with a radiance that drowns and glows through clouded glass, the rays touch upon every colour and corner, angle and space, life resists, consists, persists and the beauty is felt while words are written and read, while pages slowly turn. The room looks beautiful and the girls in the room look (not at each other but a connection is clear) the light while bright becomes too dark, the sound increases and the temperature drops.

You’ve sharpened, altered and intensified a hundred images, ideas, thoughts and things, you’ve strained yourself in wayward ways, you fixate on the same unclarified and complicating concerns, you eat excessively and still you’re starving. Cold and starving: this state seems to be the way you live your life {according at least to these seven years seven pages} and it’s all ‘decent’ (it’s a decent life) [precarious and unstable according to some, afflicted and impossible by the standards of others, uncommonly special and uniquely strange from another perspective and possibly nearly ‘just right’ (or mostly) for her,

for me. For
all these continually shaping shifting and
changing ideas of]

You.

Except you don’t create enough art to quiet your heart and you don’t read enough books to quiet your mind and you don’t write enough, do enough, mean enough—enough of the time. Time curves and crushes just the same, it’s the same everywhere and all these people too, so peculiar and perplexing, disengaging and disengaged, wonderful, beautiful, horrible, estranged, rearranged and strange. You’re enchanted for a moment, you lose yourself again to the same familiarly transcending song. You come across another story now about a Belgian man that shows up somewhere on his bicycle with ‘white paint on his face and black around his eyes,’ he stops at a daycare center and stabs fifteen people, twelve of them just infants, tiny completely helpless babies. You acutely admire the unfaltering nurse who dies in her attempts to protect the children, the story sinks into you and seethes and the postliminary pictures plainly portray the perpetrator’s downreaching profound and pronounced remorse. These pictures speak some volumes, volumes frozen eerily and uneasily into all this curving, crushing time. Next then the woman who strangles with just her hands her twelve year old daughter to death in a desperate bid to keep her dictatorial lover from leaving. The daughter begs her mother to stop, the mother doesn’t, the daughter dies and the boyfriend stays. Morbid murders and headline news, turbulence and trauma, repulsion and regrets and everywhere awful affairs and eristic events keep reeling and revealing the wheel. Yet somewhere and somehow else, something special and singularly sweet happens also, is about to happen as well [why shouldn’t it and how could it not] somewhere intimately different and differently familiar, disparate and destroyed, two people meet again after the longest saddest moment that took a whole lifetime to pass, two people meet and remember, recognize and realize that they’re still and unmistakably in love. Living, lying, loving and leaving, the words and ideas drench you, wrench and entrench, they weaken you, wane you, you write just the same. You keep writing straight into it all, despite this converging, despite these obliterating unmeasurable walls.


The world seems always on the threshold of disaster, the immutable division between minimal true wealth and maximal true poverty persists, air planes crash, wars are fought, conflicts occur in monumental and miniature ways, hundreds of indignant white people rush to criticise in openly racist terms a famous black musician who is publicly rude to a young and beautiful white girl with brilliantly blonde hair and brightly blue eyes. Hundreds more indignant white people also rush to criticize a famous black tennis player for threateningly and seethingly ‘losing her cool’ as captured and displayed internationally across the world. These criticisms are as threatening and seething as the tennis player’s lost cool and somewhere in some important House, an angry aging white man shouts ‘You lie!’ He points his finger accusingly at the beautifully abstracted black man supposedly in charge. Social shards and race cards, opinions and assertions, contention and discussion, the merciless twittering of millions.

You hide but you can’t outrun the headlines.

Somewhere to someone (always. Again) something impossibly cruel is happening. Something impossibly beautiful and beautifully rare too but it’s the horror that seems to critically shape and affect, to change things for the worse, to weaken you by unrelenting impact. A plane disappears, an immeasurably special dog saves a hit and hurt and dying one, wars and wars with their deaths upon deaths, moments of frail and flimsy beauty amidst all this waste and hate. You withdraw and you wonder, you take sides and you hide, generalities blot out all the details. Clarity and complication, skepticism and desire, the tension of the choices made starts to fade against the equivocal oppression of contamination and conflict, history and heartbreak, terror and time. Knowing less and less and wanting more and more toward some purer, sweeter thing, wondering how it is at all that so solemnly and secretly, secretly and simply you can still be here. All these mistakes, these discontinued promises, these suspended plans. And all this all this all this love. Strained and strong and searing, destructive and creative, knowing and denying, wishing and wanting, you move inside a kind of carefully delicate disaster, a slow advancing, willing still and still waiting. Small-scale sagas singe and scald you, emerge and dissolve, the circle circles, obsolete almost before the stories even break. A turning then toward these ashes, flowing slowly and without certainty without confidence or conviction through the ruins and nothing very much truly beautiful beautifully changes. Reservation at every point now in judgment and opinion, there’s too much of a perpetual sense of secrets and show.



Distress, disquiet, disruption and doubt
Anticipation, affection and assurance again

This love of hope, this hope of love,
Gingerly, uncertainly, permanently.


4 comments:

illiam b. gates said...

lovely! i am proud of you. more of everything please!

Unknown said...

<3 And yes so much more coming, coming. I just wish I had one whole long day that required no breaks, rest or eating, a beautiful single day to just 'go' that would never end. The house meanwhile too is coming as well.

n said...

me too -- also very proud and looking forward to many more beautiful musings

xo

Unknown said...

<3! &too
i feel more writing come on.
{happy smile}