Wednesday, January 30, 2013

In which I stakeout again the I

No I have shackled me through censoring the senses and senseless stumbling through smithereens as synthesis I wonder of etymologies and subject myself and grope a myself subjectively a molesting unhindered by deprivation of experience of excitability. A stoicism I cut my hair some he guesses at a masculinity a declaration semblance of identity is a loss a surrender of anonymity. One fears nothing except being named  too truly a hiding of nomenclature though a necessity must be admitted but is there necessarily a consent. You are wrong identity as product is neither polish nor vomit. From whence a redundancy how neccessary then a discovery a conquering. When does the egosection begin a someone I would like to buy please a ticket.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Body & Space, Co-Conspirators

Am sick today. Again. Another day off tinted by cold meds and mucus. My "big project" for this much anticipated two days off in a row was supposed to be rearranging my house because I just can't stand it anymore, the shape and the memories and the neglect of the space. But my arms are so heavy, and there is this gaping viscous disconnect between my face and my head that is temptingly insurmountable. I have enough in me, I think, to take all of the books down from the bookshelves and make a lot of precarious stacks teetering all over the house, but not go much further than that. So today it is not just my body or my space conspiring against me, but both. Both of these big, abstract/concrete concept-things, Body & Space, somehow separate from Me but inseparable from my identity, whatever that is. Subjects of many aborted blog posts and poemprojects and anguish, targets of change. Today is the day they team up to make everything seems just so damn daunting. Do I fight against that? Does that make Body&Space my enemy? Do I give in, and does that make Body&Space my master(s)? Neither of these options are much different from how I view these concept-things everyday, I suppose. I just feel so helpless against the grog of the sick and the weight of the bookshelves looming over me. This may just be a catch up on reading day. Does that mean I win or lose?

Friday, January 25, 2013

Wasting Words

I think I may need to start Writing some Really Bad Prose. Just vomiting it out, watching it slosh everywhere, letting it dribble down the drains. Pour enough out of me until it starts to filter into Mediocre Prose. Because while I think I will never be a Prose Writer, I feel like there is some kind of vague connection between the relative quality (as I perceive it) of prose I do produce (i.e. almost exclusively this blog at this time) and how I relate to / project / reflect on myself. Not completely clear on how this relation is laid out, and not saying I produce my best in times of self-contentment and worst in times of self-loathing,  but there's something, hiding between correlation and cause and effect. I have the creeping fear that my ability to express myself is degrading, and degrading quite quickly.
I used to keep a traditional journal/diary, writing about my day thoughts experiences etc, but that has dissolved into scribbled diaryesque "poems"--not because the medium of poesy is better for expressing my life (though it is) but because that is the only shape my grasping, fragmented and sprawling, inarticulate attempts to describe can mimic. The amount of question marks in these poems has been growing. I flip back through the pages and their numbers make me anxious, an assault force of doubt assembling.
I flail about with words trying to recreate whatever is echoing in my head, and generally it's a pretty frustrating process. When I do this for sentences and paragraphs and at the end there is nothing insightful or revealing or even charming and witty to show for it, it just makes me... sad. And very impotent. Talk may be cheap, but I believe there is absolutely such thing as a waste of words. I also believe I do it all the time. And if I am going to claim words as the tools of my trade, it seems disrespectful, wrong, to go on wasting them without acknowledgment. So here's to slaughtering words relentlessly and hoping their corpses pile up enough to support something more beautiful.

..

I get headaches (or perhaps singular, a headache) every evening now. Internal pressure expanding with no definite point of origin or concentration, just an amorphous distraction of pain. I figure it's  a) a godlet making ready to emerge from my head   b) my body telling me I need to give some serious consideration to my life w/r/t waiting tables  or   c) I need to get my sinuses Roto-Rootered . Today, the buildup has started early. Guess that means I'm getting a headstart on the day. Ha. Guess I'll see where it takes me.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Today I wrote a problem. I mean a poem.

Ok and this minute I fell again
in love with Frank O'Hara
and his gabbling of the gables of the day.
I don't care how hairy his face is
or what gritty sidewalk he strode
the year in.
Today again I remembered to fall again
in love with oil in my throat
and rain in my hair
I hated
when the eaves drip cold wet into my roots
I keep trying the lock anyway.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Untranslatable

Finally have circled around to another day off. Still haven't decided how to use it, but the rain is (again) sending out "nap!" signals I'm going to have to continually resist. There goes my intention for a run, I suppose. I believe I'm experiencing what is in Estonian "viistima: the feeling of slightly laziness, can't be bother by anything. Don't want to work nor going anywhere. (sic)"

Identified this useful emotional descriptor after reading a Salon article on a cross-lingual map of human emotions put together by Pei-Ying Lin that includes labels for some of those titchy, unidentifiable or in-between feelings for which we don't always have words in English. It's part of his Unspeakableness project, "An intervention of language evolution and human communication." It's a delightful find really-- a kind of moulding/picking throuhg of launguages to more accurately depict human...ness. Particularly like Part 4 of the project, "Personalised Language." He's filmed multilinguals doing monologues in kind of an extreme cross-lingual idiolect, where they translate a piece (dealing with a particular emotion) using all of their available languages, jumping around word by word. I'm kind of in love with/identify strongly with the Icelandic girl (Robyn Peters, though her real name sounds unspellable for me) who does the first monologue, on love...the sound of it all is unspeakably (ha) gorgeous, and her explanation for why she translated the way she did resonates with my own translation organ and makes me want to give her a big ol' hug.

Maybe then I'll do some translation work as my next project. Huh, it's very strange though. After having no ideas for anything to do, I suddenly just had a lot--to the point of a mental log jam. Words are hard to sort and select right now, and I have the beginnings of a headache. Unfortunate.

Maybe I'll go snack on some of the fancy cheese on which I spent an obscene amount of money yesterday. What's the emotional offshoot of decadence? Something related to gluttony, evelry, and pleasure I'm sure. With a twinge of incompleteness to make sure the spires keep climbing.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

2013: Well, we're still here I guess

There is no such thing as a fresh start.

I've mused before on the myth of the tabla rasa at the New Year, but it is always true. Nothing is clean or easy to end or then to begin.There are always jacket edges holdovers, sticky bits. I would say I wouldn't have it any other way but that would be so false. I've been holding out so long for just such a new beginning, a clean starting line. Letting the old life decay around me, living on scraps and rust while I try to convince myself  that I'm just revving up for the Next Thing, where it all will be Shiny and New and Me.

But I'm not strong enough to scorch the earth behind me and just restart, so  I have to act like a citizen of the real world. I'm young enough, but realizing I'm reaching the point where there will always be baggage. Forever and ever amen. Deal with it. I already used my "fresh start", 17 and wide eyed and no idea what I was building. I wouldn't say I wasted it. I think of things I might have done differently, but I don't have regret or bitterness weighing down my tongue. It's nice to realize that. I'll start from there, instead of the kind of emptiness/novelty is bliss attitude I feel like I was building up to attempting.Our past defines us, et cetera et cetera. Weighs us down and/or teaches us. But we all know (maybe?) that it's really the now-us really doing that. We choose how to strap on our baggage, whether it's going to supply us or be an unendurable burden.

Such a philosophy is easier to know than to apply, of course. Time is muddled, and I get incredibly messy as I try to slog through it. Then the world opens up, and I realize I have to deal not only with my incredibly unorganized issues, but also everyone else's. Friends, lovers, enemies. All regurgitating pastpresentfuture all over me. Just the thought of it is exhausting. And also amazing.

All of this is unfortunately insipid and vague. A necessary hashing out of issues surrounding personal realities of mine. A text rehearsal of mental application.  Whatever. I'm going to start buying new things for an old house, literally and figuratively. Confront some intersection of control and aesthetics and the feeling of home.
Confront some issue. Confront anything.

2013, prepare to be refurbished.