I fear only fear. The whistling, wolfish winds of night; monsters steeped in shadows beneath beds; the many unknowns, shrouded beyond the veil and betwixt destiny's many folds; judgment and pain; breaking; distance and love; apathy and angst; failure and loss - the many catalysts of fear, pumping at the bellows of fright for a spark of fearful fire, with a malicious grin, do I fear these or what these bring?
Sometimes what appears inevitable branched from a stem of choice. You may choose boredom or adventure, though perhaps not always the adventures that arrive. You may choose good or evil, though not always the consequences of your actions. You may choose truth or deceit, love or hate, kindness or cruelty, hope or doubt. But sometimes, sometimes these are chosen for you, without you, over you, and your will gets trampled when you simply arrived at the wrong place during a stampede.
There are many doors, and the world isn't as dualistic as we'd like to believe. Pick one, pick some, and see where they lead.
I finished my last of four original Agatha Christie mysteries today (original meaning the first four I found). I bought another four, but first I think I'll be reading some novels that I've been meaning to read for a long while: "The Da Vinci Code" and "History of Love" and the rest of "The Story of Art" which I have not read since influenza ate my life. I think this is the year of Agatha Christie. There are roughly 80 novels that she has written, and my mother has notified me that she owns everything Agatha Christie has written. Easy game, easy life. They take roughly two or three hours to read each, so about 240 hours of reading. I also was told to read a couple of other books, so I probably won't get to Agatha Christie binge.
I also bought a Sue Grafton and am looking everywhere for a Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time) and if you find it, I want to borrow it.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Clouds and Mysteries
How low and flimsy the clouds tonight
resting scarce above the grasping hillsides,
having been granted the treasure of flight
they squander it, curious at these ants who scurry
the endless seas of grass and streets below
how carefree they seem, when to us
they live so slow - we rush east, ever east
to our doom, crying and thundering as we go
with the stars in reach, why must we linger so
low and heavy above the vineyards and prairies -
what did we want? was it just more time?
I had something I wanted to write about tonight that excited me. And on the way home, I thought of something clever I could include, but somehow I managed to forget it completely by the time I had prepared for sleep. I think I'll read some Agatha Cristie instead.
resting scarce above the grasping hillsides,
having been granted the treasure of flight
they squander it, curious at these ants who scurry
the endless seas of grass and streets below
how carefree they seem, when to us
they live so slow - we rush east, ever east
to our doom, crying and thundering as we go
with the stars in reach, why must we linger so
low and heavy above the vineyards and prairies -
what did we want? was it just more time?
I had something I wanted to write about tonight that excited me. And on the way home, I thought of something clever I could include, but somehow I managed to forget it completely by the time I had prepared for sleep. I think I'll read some Agatha Cristie instead.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Shhh
flickering candle, will you be my light
in the dark and distant places I hide?
night ever drags me through doors
of broken bone into lost, tragic rooms
made magically alive by a dying star
bleeding through the dusty window,
and my trailing fingers: dot, dot, drag,
draw two button holes and the button-bottom rim
smiling, the ashen glass; beaming, the candle
if you must be lost, might as well find yourself
lost at home,
asking questions of the loquacious faces in the walls:
do you understand how I forgot the world?
it was all there: hands, face, smiles
so you know, then, also
how the world flew away - do you?
it's difficult seeing another's world,
when your own grows too large before you
In a fantasy novel, were I a character, I think I may be the tragic villain. Not out of spite or anger at humanity, but a childishly competitive craving for knowledge. After countless hours in the library, I'd stumble upon some devilish volume no one had found for centuries, and I'd eagerly devour its pages. Already, my burgeoning magicks would have revealed themselves to me, and my cravings for continued prowess in conjuration and illusory tricks would entice me into a dangerous dive through terrible secrets.
It wouldn't be malevolent, believe me. But eventually, I'd conjure something that would consume me, or that I'd fallen too far to escape. Of course, it would have been prophesied long ago, and I'd be a perfect host for some evil djinn, having already mastered the many magicks of whatever world. In a strangely different universe, perhaps the hero finds me and drags me into the painful light of day, or a master discovers me and trains me in boring uses of the art without competitive aims. But I'm no Ged, and I'm no Kvothe, and I'm certainly no Harry Potter - I know where I stand. Maybe if I was fortunate, I'd be a Rincewind - at least then I'd be (Douglas Adams) mostly harmless.
I realized recently I wanted to write a novel that wasn't fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, or any of these, but actually non-fiction/essay. I started the other day, and I'm enjoying the process immensely. It will take me a while, perhaps, because I'll want to write it all down on paper before I transfer everything over to digital, but for once I'm actually really enjoying that process of conception and research.
I almost wish that I had chosen a more researchy major. Maybe I just wish I could be in school forever. I had a really great monday, all things considered. I think it will be a full week, but a pretty enjoyable one.
in the dark and distant places I hide?
night ever drags me through doors
of broken bone into lost, tragic rooms
made magically alive by a dying star
bleeding through the dusty window,
and my trailing fingers: dot, dot, drag,
draw two button holes and the button-bottom rim
smiling, the ashen glass; beaming, the candle
if you must be lost, might as well find yourself
lost at home,
asking questions of the loquacious faces in the walls:
do you understand how I forgot the world?
it was all there: hands, face, smiles
so you know, then, also
how the world flew away - do you?
it's difficult seeing another's world,
when your own grows too large before you
In a fantasy novel, were I a character, I think I may be the tragic villain. Not out of spite or anger at humanity, but a childishly competitive craving for knowledge. After countless hours in the library, I'd stumble upon some devilish volume no one had found for centuries, and I'd eagerly devour its pages. Already, my burgeoning magicks would have revealed themselves to me, and my cravings for continued prowess in conjuration and illusory tricks would entice me into a dangerous dive through terrible secrets.
It wouldn't be malevolent, believe me. But eventually, I'd conjure something that would consume me, or that I'd fallen too far to escape. Of course, it would have been prophesied long ago, and I'd be a perfect host for some evil djinn, having already mastered the many magicks of whatever world. In a strangely different universe, perhaps the hero finds me and drags me into the painful light of day, or a master discovers me and trains me in boring uses of the art without competitive aims. But I'm no Ged, and I'm no Kvothe, and I'm certainly no Harry Potter - I know where I stand. Maybe if I was fortunate, I'd be a Rincewind - at least then I'd be (Douglas Adams) mostly harmless.
I realized recently I wanted to write a novel that wasn't fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, or any of these, but actually non-fiction/essay. I started the other day, and I'm enjoying the process immensely. It will take me a while, perhaps, because I'll want to write it all down on paper before I transfer everything over to digital, but for once I'm actually really enjoying that process of conception and research.
I almost wish that I had chosen a more researchy major. Maybe I just wish I could be in school forever. I had a really great monday, all things considered. I think it will be a full week, but a pretty enjoyable one.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
internal dishabille
It's easy for me, a perfectionist who has fallen fall short of such a standard, to lament my shortcomings. Perhaps it is easy for any motivated individual craving more ample opportunity, aptitude with this or that device, or more time. Would that I possessed a vaster intellect, like a Da Vinci, an Einstein, an Edison, or Tesla.
I glance at those phenomenal individuals surrounding me, those with a magnificent capacity for memory, comprehension, learning, teaching, writing, analysis, abstraction, discernment, sight, patience, pathos, faith, love, intelligence and all those attributes of creativity and social propensity that sometimes appear in my life like the moon, but disappear too readily when the sun brightly shines.
I was merely middling in high school, where discipline lacked and apathy reigned. I liked school, but I wasn't sharing my experience with anyone. I recognized my peers as intellectuals in my preppy high school, but didn't believe them truly worth competing against, and so I wasted a great deal of potential learning because my pride was too great.
Stories have always appealed to me, but something is lacking in mine. I think, perhaps, I cannot bear writing less magical stories than Carroll, or tales without the wit of Twain or Swift. Everything was always a comparison, and that's yet another of my greatest foibles. I've never been capable of writing my own stories, because those wouldn't be as magnificent as the stories of those titans of literature whose pieces have changed my life.
Settling is so difficult when magnificence is within grasp.
One of my favorite quotes is one by Neil Gaiman (obviously):
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.
...
There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
(Neil Gaiman)
It's an easy slippery slope to fall down. I get an eerie image of a funnel spider, and I'm at the lip of it's web, teetering. I can almost imagine the hungry monster waiting within this trap, 8-eyes of cunning waiting for the twitching strands of web. But Gaiman is wise. I'm none so intelligent as my father, many of my friends; I cannot read so fast as Matthew, nor comprehend as much as perhaps J, or gather in the details of creation as imaginatively as A, or bear up so strongly under pressure with such a pleasant smile as many of my friends.
I'm not, and (at the rate I'm going) may never be, an artist, poet, or musician, and I will never be able to produce a poem like Mary Oliver, Charles Simic or ee cummings, and my stories will not cradle the beating hearts of myth that Gaiman crafts, or the unbelievable intellect of a Dostoevsky, or the tragic, soul-wrenching cleverness of a Steinbeck story, but I still have stories - I do, I do. Some weeks it just doesn't seem like I can tell them.
I'm reading a bunch of Agatha Christie (I think I finished three this week and I'm started on my fourth). I love the way she develops character, and creates suspicion on every single person. It's true purity of person in the books is exceedingly rare, and those people you sometimes suspect even more, simply because the rest of the cast is hiding something, what haven't you discovered about them? She manipulates the reader so deftly that I'm consistently dazzled, just trying to arrange all of the characters and their relationships in my head. It's fantastic.
I glance at those phenomenal individuals surrounding me, those with a magnificent capacity for memory, comprehension, learning, teaching, writing, analysis, abstraction, discernment, sight, patience, pathos, faith, love, intelligence and all those attributes of creativity and social propensity that sometimes appear in my life like the moon, but disappear too readily when the sun brightly shines.
I was merely middling in high school, where discipline lacked and apathy reigned. I liked school, but I wasn't sharing my experience with anyone. I recognized my peers as intellectuals in my preppy high school, but didn't believe them truly worth competing against, and so I wasted a great deal of potential learning because my pride was too great.
Stories have always appealed to me, but something is lacking in mine. I think, perhaps, I cannot bear writing less magical stories than Carroll, or tales without the wit of Twain or Swift. Everything was always a comparison, and that's yet another of my greatest foibles. I've never been capable of writing my own stories, because those wouldn't be as magnificent as the stories of those titans of literature whose pieces have changed my life.
Settling is so difficult when magnificence is within grasp.
One of my favorite quotes is one by Neil Gaiman (obviously):
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.
...
There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
(Neil Gaiman)
It's an easy slippery slope to fall down. I get an eerie image of a funnel spider, and I'm at the lip of it's web, teetering. I can almost imagine the hungry monster waiting within this trap, 8-eyes of cunning waiting for the twitching strands of web. But Gaiman is wise. I'm none so intelligent as my father, many of my friends; I cannot read so fast as Matthew, nor comprehend as much as perhaps J, or gather in the details of creation as imaginatively as A, or bear up so strongly under pressure with such a pleasant smile as many of my friends.
I'm not, and (at the rate I'm going) may never be, an artist, poet, or musician, and I will never be able to produce a poem like Mary Oliver, Charles Simic or ee cummings, and my stories will not cradle the beating hearts of myth that Gaiman crafts, or the unbelievable intellect of a Dostoevsky, or the tragic, soul-wrenching cleverness of a Steinbeck story, but I still have stories - I do, I do. Some weeks it just doesn't seem like I can tell them.
I'm reading a bunch of Agatha Christie (I think I finished three this week and I'm started on my fourth). I love the way she develops character, and creates suspicion on every single person. It's true purity of person in the books is exceedingly rare, and those people you sometimes suspect even more, simply because the rest of the cast is hiding something, what haven't you discovered about them? She manipulates the reader so deftly that I'm consistently dazzled, just trying to arrange all of the characters and their relationships in my head. It's fantastic.
Genesis
With just two words, I dreamed. Stopless wind – Jorie Graham, how clever you are, and how artful your musings. How are my own words so impotent, tiny in comparison?
Every now and again, an internal fever clutches at this gut, turning it once and again upon itself. I don’t know what it is, wanderlust? It’s a drifting: buoyed up without an ocean, like a helium balloon that’s reached the zenith of flight, where the air is lighter, emptier, and cold crawls the spine.
Am I a star, staring down distantly at tiny humanity – ah, until the moon sidles in front of me and blinds my sight. Even so far, this exhausts me, the more for the daunting mess of my immobility. The greater the cloud of witnesses, the more silent this soul.
the first trees before seeds, grasses, and leaves
(was it green, the virgin earth?)
I gaze upon the lounging, white-beard god
reaching the sharp-nailed finger down to trace shapes in the sand
some noumenon exist in only dreams, I think
until Eve wrestles free from a dusty, drowsy man
(was there loneliness afore the sin, in paradiso?)
lost, frightfully lost amidst
Autumn, Eden’s final season, and a golden road
paved in a burning scimitar of leaves
how petty Cain, you are,
would that you’d seen eden
instead he killed for he was able
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Eyes
Can you teach me to open my eyes?
In high school, someone affixed a horrific media image to their locker: a teenage girl's face with her eyes stitched shut with thick, barbed binds, and a tiny scalpel hovering on the right, ready to slice through the ties. The locker was near the front of the hall, so each passing into and out of the main hallway resulted in a brief glimpse of that image. I don't even remember the message, but on the scalpel were the words, "the truth". The truth about what? Smoking? Prostitution? Pornography? Abortion? Cultural propaganda?
Whatever the aim, the image has been seared into my memory, branded there so I mightn't forget.
Eyes are so vulnerable, so unprotected before this dangerous world. If I fall and bloody my knee, I'll be fine. If I scratch my eye...
And it's bad for me, worse. I can't stand watching people put contacts in, or using eye droplets, without my eyes watering in sympathetic misery. Eyes are magnificent and fragile things, and they make me nervous.
But I still want them open, even when the truth - the scalpel - terrifies me immensely.
Tell me how a fly sees, that I may understand - a blurry world of pieces, unfocused. And the bee, you ask? In ultraviolets transforming white clover into royalty. And what of the puppy, with her missing colors, or the hawk with sight piercing many miles. But I want to see inwardly, and the colors and motions of people as the live and love and breathe. I want to watch when your heart beats for what you believe and the turnings of your soul.
Can you help me to open my eyes?
Am I all cogs and wheels, gears and grinds?
This machine which every even unwinds, and winds
again through the night, is all of me, isn't it -
but I want to, long to believe in something beyond
grief and joy and disbelief, the mystery thereof
enticing me with nectar and honeyed wine
slipping into these toothed wheels -
sticky old clocks are a broken design -
so the bees buzz and pendulum keeps ticktock time
all cogs and wheels, when it's flowers I desired
it's only clocks I got,
and time is forever blind
In high school, someone affixed a horrific media image to their locker: a teenage girl's face with her eyes stitched shut with thick, barbed binds, and a tiny scalpel hovering on the right, ready to slice through the ties. The locker was near the front of the hall, so each passing into and out of the main hallway resulted in a brief glimpse of that image. I don't even remember the message, but on the scalpel were the words, "the truth". The truth about what? Smoking? Prostitution? Pornography? Abortion? Cultural propaganda?
Whatever the aim, the image has been seared into my memory, branded there so I mightn't forget.
Eyes are so vulnerable, so unprotected before this dangerous world. If I fall and bloody my knee, I'll be fine. If I scratch my eye...
And it's bad for me, worse. I can't stand watching people put contacts in, or using eye droplets, without my eyes watering in sympathetic misery. Eyes are magnificent and fragile things, and they make me nervous.
But I still want them open, even when the truth - the scalpel - terrifies me immensely.
Tell me how a fly sees, that I may understand - a blurry world of pieces, unfocused. And the bee, you ask? In ultraviolets transforming white clover into royalty. And what of the puppy, with her missing colors, or the hawk with sight piercing many miles. But I want to see inwardly, and the colors and motions of people as the live and love and breathe. I want to watch when your heart beats for what you believe and the turnings of your soul.
Can you help me to open my eyes?
Am I all cogs and wheels, gears and grinds?
This machine which every even unwinds, and winds
again through the night, is all of me, isn't it -
but I want to, long to believe in something beyond
grief and joy and disbelief, the mystery thereof
enticing me with nectar and honeyed wine
slipping into these toothed wheels -
sticky old clocks are a broken design -
so the bees buzz and pendulum keeps ticktock time
all cogs and wheels, when it's flowers I desired
it's only clocks I got,
and time is forever blind
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Fingerprint Trails
There are a lot of questions and so few answers going around. Like a freezing night with a tiny blanket - do my toes freeze, or my face? My left side or my right? Or perhaps all of me can be covered, but poorly, with a ratty blanket, gnawed and thin with age. And it's so cold.
In my last several trips to visit my family, I noticed something interesting. Sitting outside the rooms where each family member sits, when they were alone, I heard nothing. But the instant I moved and made sounds in the hallway, down the stairs, past the rooms, they would start talking. Not necessarily to me, though sometimes, but more frequently just tiny snippets out loud. Why? Why would Phil suddenly find it necessary to say to himself, "This next scene is my favorite" when watching a movie by himself? Or Sam suddenly remark, "this guy isn't doing any of the right things, so we're going to lose soon if I don't play this next portion right" when no one else is in the room as he plays his game? Why would my dad suddenly comment on how fantastic a portion of mythbusters is - who is he talking to? - or mom laugh and exclaim how much she loves this show?
No one is around - who are these questions for?
Me. Me?
You see, when I wasn't making any noise, there was silence. But when I moved, suddenly someone is listening, someone is there. They don't know who, but each one of those people wants whoever it is to be interested, to be intrigued enough with the question to saunter in and be enchanted with his or her life. Not even to answer the questions, or statements, whatever they may be, but to invest their being in a response. I have no answers, but sometimes I can be, and be in the right place, and that is sufficient. And I hope that when the time comes and I'm spouting off cries for help or calls for assurance, that someone is there, someone does respond, and drops in to offer a little human contact.
Fingers leave oil prints on freezing glass, like foot tracks of a beast who went not far. Is it better, then, this glass, which brittle breaks into countless shards, than steely metals which when bent do bend, and so ceaselessly endure the pain? It's not me who asks - no, not me - but the fire-breasted robin in the trees and the japanese sparrowhawk as he wheels above the leaves, in air vaster than mountains and even seas. Questions without greener pasture or silky answers, warm as summer eve; questions at whose gravity the beast falters and falls, after but ten steps of dreams. When the weight of the world rests heavily, so heavily you cannot breathe, it's love or flee, struggle or believe, and under certain lights, shattered glass coruscates, bright as those endless stars.
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