Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory. —Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Oakland, September 2022
You want to know the details so you can tell the story.
There was a feeling of a passage of time, then a return
almost sacred in its magnitude. This fluctuating affect
bound to ghost objects is still holding their shapes after all these years.
There was an act of becoming visible, inventing new ghosts; unclenching.
Why this instinct? From who, and where, is its intransitive source?
But those answers are not the reason we are gathered here today.
This is about our roots growing deep underground, unbothered.
Those are the details I want you tell the others when they recognize
themselves in a familiar situation. Your intimacy—and mine—
now consequence of bright flares inviting creative echoes.
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
excerpt from ‘Messenger’ by Mary Oliver
The Gleaners and I (2000) dir. Agnès Varda
It was like a dream—and a paroxysm.
Downtown was covered in fresh tags.
As the city bus sped through red lights,
I read the scrawl as “cosmos” but
up close I could not determine its message.
What intent was behind this expression?
The next day, on the exact same bus, I saw
a lone pamphlet asking “Can the dead really live again?”.
That answer, and its implications, was also unknown.
Yet clouds scroll by already knowing having lived
a thousand lives before I even woke up that fateful day.
When the light hits blue, I knew an answer.
The astonishing present cannot be ignored.
When living in the unease of ongoing questions,
I must rupture the false integrity. I must seek what calls me.
I don’t have an answer prepared. My geology is unwritten.
“I am attracted to the ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence.” —Louise Glück
Western winter light, January 2015
At their deepest hibernation, groundhogs slow their heartbeats
to three to five beats per minute. Dangerously efficient.
Orange blossoms take almost a year to resemble fruit.
Did you notice when the undulations became ritual?
When time, found in the sound of light, was earnest and seductive?
“Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.” —Ansel Adams
Screenshot from 1974: La posesión de Altair, Victor Dryere (2016)
Yesterday, not an ounce of sunshine so I read old love letters.
I hoard my integrity and stash joy wherever I can find it.
There is muscle memory and active imagination.
There is something called living in between these extremes.
I kept the love letters. I liked that they still held their refrains
from a recent past. I remember to cast its spell.
There is ceremony and letting go.
There is something I call living in between those extremes.
“I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf.” —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
GET IT OR REGRET IT, Jan 2022
Recent times is a reference, well-worn and specific enough to create a shared understanding. I read an article that used the phrase “deaths pulled from the future” after reading another article that claimed the word “robot” wasn’t publicly used until the early 1920s. The framing for both pieces was replaceability. What comes next becomes a question of narration. Can I claim to know the moon without having been there?
I listened to a recording of an exploding volcano thousands of miles away. It initially sounded like gunfire, then I heard a blast from a force unimaginable, a process of release and eventual settling that is so unknowable it has been ascribed to the gods. This is a story to find a way, a hook to hold onto while the world spins.
I wanted what the future would bring. When and how was what I was most interested in. I thought about how the best poets break the conventions of language. How passive writing is aggressive and how darkness holds its own light. As trees absorb sound, bodies shelter. I write deliberately. I’m acutely aware of how time can get one-dimensional when influenced by the dollar.
It was only February.
I imagined a time where hope has no currency because there is no fear to weight its over-inflated value. Neglect should have been the word of the year; acting as both a verb (a failure to care for properly) and a noun (a state of being uncared for—deprivation). In between cracks of clouds, blue. I dredged, flayed, and autopsied the past into quantum bytes. I tried to stay inside my bones.
The palm trees hissed and swayed. A Home Depot burned so hot we saw the fire’s heat signature from space. I found quiet inside a frequency where the sacred is buried. Wars drag on, more brutal and unnecessary than last yesterday’s justifications.
What can be palmed is what I want. A random ray of sunlight; the trill of unseen song birds; a break, nearly inaudible, in the freeway traffic. I gather the most extraordinary mundane moments—the astonishing present—as proof of my witness.
August arrived and asked an ancient question: will any god save us?
What reclamation can be shown from the exchange of a year lived? Inside this daydream marathon, I toast to multivalent miracles. Nobody survives by accident.
Maybe all of this has a simple explanation. I don’t remember
how I got home. I was feral due to generational circumstances.
I started this life from a deficit. I am a self-described opt-out.
What might be lies and what might be inaccessible misunderstandings?
The tail of history wags in all our faces, stubborn as possession.
It is an earned intimacy. The subject is abandoned, an allusion of comfort,
if that’s an orientation. It is a pattern recognition.
I want to try and describe an image of a hole but it’s more extravagant
than that. Hole is more of a preferential reference and also a moment recognizable only because this thread is a fractal.
Statutory evidence gathered like exhale and escape.
Capitalism fracks the sensorium.
—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
4th of July TV fireworks, 2022
At some point, your conception of the universe eclipsed mine.
It’s none of your business how we sorted out the important details
like why are all the planets round and who took winter?
I whispered the projected significance of seeing 333 predictably
patterned to arrive when yesterday’s headlines became a dirge. Bright,
overexposed, and not unlike prophesy I read between the images
and placed my gaze elsewhere. At this point, it’s an omission
if I didn’t disclose your mania kept us alive. We were shrines buoyed.
To say that trees are immobile results from an anthropomorphism that impedes our seeing beyond our own time scale. It is as stupid as the history of aphids: In my memory, says the aphid, no one has ever seen a gardener die. Everyone knows that gardeners are immortal.
—Francis Hallé
666, May 2022, Oakland, CA
A day-to-night sky fades shades of purple.
Impermanent referents. A bruised ending.
I tried to tell you otherwise, before I knew.
We’re not quite trapped, but not free either.
Poetics are drawn from our dreams: escape
and waiting. Similar to the way cat’s paws
mean rip currents. That specific kind
of dissociation. What do I want to be?
What a terrible question to get stuck inside.
“It is a time for tons of verbiage, activity, consumption.” —Mark Rothko
The end of the year is coming, again.
Will you claim you are satisfied,
so far? How will you commit
to these remaining days? In this interlude,
what to cherish, what to improvise,
what to root, and what to let go?
I am still learning to pretend
the difference between memories
of a past gone and memories of a past unknown.
A loop on its return becomes a harbinger
of sentient evidence, now personal phenomenology.
It’s best to surrender to messianic joy
at this horizon point in a vanishing year.
Update your maps of what remains of your calls
to provisional responses. Name your beloveds.
There’s still time for passionate cadence and
appreciation of light’s lengthened silhouettes.
That space, that pause, is an insider’s point of view.
These longings pull from long-shadow days and nights.
Return, again, repeat. That kind of essential
permanence, palpable. Cross reference your embodied index,
then become a territory beyond meaning.
Enable new, interpretive beginnings. I flicker—an epic
verse. Your alterity is my resonance. Ride with me.
I THINK IM DUMB / MAYBE IM JUST HAPPY (creator: unknown)
Based on rumors of math, scientists believe if they move Jupiter’s orbit the Earth will be “more habitable”. I have the same foolish desire when capturing moving light by using future perfect verbs and modified nouns.
What might be translated from the way light sounds after saturating iridescent city pigeon feathers? I think light and time become sacred geometry. Ordinary as questions ruptured clever and bright.
Your majesty is now gender neutral. Please comply. Receptivity remains bearded as you wait for affirmation. That you found lack of detail a form of stillness means I can trust you to keep secrets. Plumb that male gaze.
“Absence is harder to accept than death.” —Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog
TECH DESTROYS, Portland, OR, June 2022
August is a month of dedication.
Be like the cloud-burning light,
and ask yourself, was it on purpose
or an accident, and then try to decide
which wrong answer is easiest to forgive.
Is your faith in the disembodied voice of unlearning
or the recollections of a still life, untouched?
That’s the kind of sensory deprivation I echo.
You must assume there is truth in this translation.
summer avoidant
sadder than green oranges
—not yet
March 2012, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC
Diminishing returns on man-made misery:
take drinking water to put out wildfires
then create full-color murals of mercurial martyrs
underneath burnt contrails that suggest messages
of conscriptive curtailment. There is some hope
as we begin the slow pilgrimage towards autumn.
But, last year was a mast year. Abundant loss.
What should we barter for an underdog future?
We seem to be trending, again.
That familiar sense of ascension,
of a ride. Time given, if we may be honest.
Relentless associations: abortion and rape,
vengeful anger and ketchup-stained walls,
parasocial relationships; unaware and informed.
Is my morning bus late or did it simply not show up?
July arrives. Come, unknowing.
The poppies were still asleep.
Cats, the ones who never let me pet them,
stare past me as the sun migrates west.
It is summer. I am feral, again.
Or maybe this rumor wants to be about withdrawal,
an urge for a substance being withheld. Within,
there can be acceptance, resistance,
and something possessed delicately in between—
unknown, suggestive and loose like spontaneous prayer.
The atmosphere, thick with notes of jasmine and rose,
wanders around my morning shadow. It traces vintage memories
swarming unsolicited and holy: 4th of July rodeos,
tomato sandwiches, shedding cottonwoods, and parental neglect
so pervasive it remains material witness to all those lost summers.
Of course gravity is physical, but who will study its somatics?
Blue fading pink light transitions the sun’s nightly disappearance as a star.
Earlier the concentrated sunlight, setting late, hit a distant window—
just right. The bright reflection took shape of an ordinary reminder.
A reminder that temporal sequence as closure is felt, a sense.
What if we are actually expanding instead of contracting?
Hours as measured by:
clouds slipping by
exhaust pipes
glaciers melting
street pigeon’s stuttered coos
gossip economy news cycles
a flock of geese in V formation
rivers carving out gorges
indigent centers
exhale
Can we claim survival as the measured depth of a body of water?
An ending does not always need to follow a chain of events.
Duality alters thresholds, choices, interpretation.
These ongoing attempts become accumulations, layers,
a structure of ongoing being. There’s worship and fetish.
A complete world.
In a Christian context, responsibility of discernment
makes meaning a gambler’s holdout. I mean that literally.
It is the same mechanics when a moment can be a monument,
dramatic affect to overactive nervous systems—tense:
a knowing. Which indicators of such deception are most valid?
The idea is: what you saw isn’t always accurate.
Are we simply machines preprogrammed to make complexity
out of the simplest of ideas, like wanting to be loved
unconditionally and without remorse?
In war, mourning the loss of art, be it actual or anticipated, is not separate from mourning for the senseless disruption and destruction of human life. To live is to build, to repair, to illuminate, to leave traces in the fabric of time and space. Until an empire’s fist hits it all and smashes it to smithereens. In the face of its onslaught, human life is as fragile as the glass that bears humanity’s loving traces. —Yuliya Komska, A Stained Glass in Lviv (emphasis mine)
A Fragment, San Francisco, CA, April 2018
Officially, it is spring. Wars are an endless reality behind opaque glass screens. We are learning to feel non-solid things in the hype. The sound of analog reflected in a digital world hits different. Open your mouth away me. Climb out from underneath those emotional thumbs. There’s overtime to be made fabricating virtual systems. Memory tracers betray our line of sight. Some rooftops grow trees and some of us are proficient in the logistics of nostalgia. Do your fantasies prepare you or scare you? Tongues are cut to remove coherent confessions; supplemental augmentations will cost extra. Always cultivate a feeling of waiting for the next disruption. Faith’s orientation requires an artifice, requite deprivation. It’s really like that. Geography as corral, gathered. A rotunda of light. The curtains hung themselves outside the cracked window. This dramatic neglect obscures strategic purpose and tides are never mentioned in the Bible. Its promises another proxy of obscene revenge.
I’m begging you. Please don’t use this time wisely.
I want you to waste every swollen second
as your breath catches inside your abandoned throat.
Untitled, Louise Bourgeois, 1999
I’m sure you’ve felt this ineffable pleasure before?
Being unwanted, unseen, silenced: useless reputations.
What these words leave inside you matter to me.
“When it’s your turn to live through a war, you’ll see, you don’t have time to feel anything.” —Colette Marin Catherine
Zenon Zubyrtowicz
It’s all random chaotic vigilance these days.
Day number: “unknown”. Secret selves will be revealed
in the times to come. They know desperation
influences choices. Which illusions may end up real?
II.
This “new normal” hangs like a loose shirt,
an odor, a swallow. We are promised a brighter future.
III.
Philosophers and preachers’ predictions,
unproven claims, betray their nostalgia.
Doubts to the contrary raise suspicions,
an emotion of imagination and subjectivity.
IIII.
Uncertain and curious how permanent this now
will be is one way to recognize the game.
Loss, grief, time are the same measurement,
which requires comparison in some form.
IIIII.
The rich, and their need for luxuries, buy ready made.
Some beauty is unimaginable, a pang. Sharp vanishing
click bait. Possession was an emanation: source.
It is necessary to permit error because information is not simply making the correct responses. —Silvan Tomkins, from Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader; “What Are Affects?”
put some respek on my names, February 2019, San Francisco, CA
What wildness still remains to be explored
and why haven’t I moved in that direction?
The horizon to the south cracks light.
It rained fish in Texarkana, Texas—
during the last days of December
and no one is afraid.
Imagine being actively denied
of embodied experiences.
That sense of knowing.
2014, Oakland, CA
A clause (particular and separate).
“Peach blossom has a beautiful sensual pink, far from vulgar, most rare and private.” —D.H. Lawrence, from Sketches of Etruscan Places; “Flowery Tuscany”
June 2020, Oakland, CA
What is positive about fragmentation?
||
The rest of the trees stand naked, unashamed, claiming a brighter future.
March 2012, Portland, OR
|||
When is it ok to stop remembering?
IIII
Crisis as a series, predictable, and, if you believe, a trick.
Traveling at the speed of days per hour.
Is it okay to celebrate survival?
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
Arranging for false openings—second endings.
What marrow should we salvage?
Oblivion becomes subjugation
when aesthetics have agendas.
Only at the very beginning
did the freeway quiet.
Now, faint signals of endearment are muted
as claw marks or socialized hope.
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
At this point in time, there might be enough
to carry the rest of us curiously forward
full from holding unanswerable questions
in all this cropped light.
If we do not forget, what is there to remember? —Mary Ruefle from “On Secrets”
found reality on a construction site sign, July 2011, San Francisco, CA
Suspension is a type of prayer
in the same way hard luck is still luck
or how clicking clocks make meaning.
Ending another year with reconstituted rituals:
unwrap an orange, warm the house with lights,
leave no trace and lament the echoes.
Interiors become accomplices
in a cascading culture of closures.
Reminding me the moon makes no light
of its own, and I don’t know
is the most honest answer I have to give.
This response to an unknown call,
how deeply personal an endeavor.
Radiator hisses fill the space left between
a bright sun in an empty blue sky.
Expressive clouds reclaim their territory.
Rain and miso ramen for lunch.
Downtown buses trail each other like snails
as layers of buildings are held together by math.
The remaining oak leaves hang like ornaments.
This week, scientists proved birds sing in their sleep
but most of us already know how the body tries to protect.
Are you the audience? Have you been disciplined?
If not, pay attention to how the slow accommodation
of western light adds to the rapidly sharpening darkness.
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
—May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”
screenshot from As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Jonas Mekas
I’ve traveled far enough to remain the narrator.
The beautiful distortion of reflection,
time arrested. Star gravity.
Symbiotic or parasite? It’s both
and there’s only one answer. Details,
I need to add details. Salt air stains.
I am not doing anything wrong,
which is where we disagree. What does it mean
when the middle ground is now the high ground?
Sometimes the only place to start is right here.
It’s the same kind of living that believes
challenges are opportunities. Experts predict
the rapture will happen in the early morning
during the hours of softening darkness.
Show a smile; brave a tooth.
Imagine this as it is—a holy exposure.
Stimulate me, please.
is to know where the bones are buried.
Synonym: institutional allegiance.
Why is risk so often in your mouth?
Your answer, “That’s where the desire swells.”
It’s true the end of a river is also a mouth.
Waves form unnoticed. We tell each other stories—
unanswered questions worth more conceptually.
Wanting words that hold their form
both as concrete nouns and confluent verbs.
No subject is stable you often tell me.
Following the principle of least astonishment
is probably how we got here.
The living room pictures hang crooked
from the last noticeable earthquake.
“What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?”
—W. Eugene Smith
Barbara Kruger, The Globe Shrinks (video still), 2010
The park’s grass is ankle deep,
again. Promises of everlasting life
continue to hold their sway.
It’s 2021, and I just learned
gold seeks gold.
Bounty hunters still scheming.
When will the rich suffer equally?
Is that even the right question?
Forests burn to their crowns
while babies drown in basement apartments.
What frequency will you hear
the trees screaming? Repeat yourself.
The neighborhood birds continue to sing
their morning songs. We must still be ok,
for now? Surrender—then acceptance—or
is it the other away around?
Certainty needs urgency
to keep it potent.
Embody your devotion.
Watch the ocean replicate.
All those Sunday sermons
soaked deep within.
Knowing, that convinced feeling.
Accuracy a worthy reliquary.
Be an animal, again.
I lean into the throat of summer.
—Jenny Xie, “Chinatown Diptych” from Eye Level
if she had it or NOT
You assume you’ve seen this before,
this familiar demarcation of transition.
What promises or expectations did you bring to this?
You know you can never step in the same river twice.
Are you listening to remember?
“No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness.” —Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
OWING TO LACK OF INTEREST, TOMORROW HAS BEEN CANCELLED, artist unknown
A local politician sells
subtext. Mixing patterns
of outbreaks, denial, aggressive
neglect, profit, waste. Time
monetized into relativity of spectacle.
Subterranean realities. July descends into August.
Clouds sail by dry as bones. Crowns above spread
shade. Our vernacular noisy wagons, isolated
oak savannas, quarantined in translation.
Wanting to do what we see; evidence.
Let’s take these metastasized days
and ride them into darkness. Be silhouettes,
featureless. Are you aware of all the consequences
when accepting the advertised risks?
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
—last two lines of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s “July”
“Whose Values?”, Barbara Kruger exhibit, Getty Museum, July 2015
Trust your gut. I don’t want you to get lost in the details. This is a map,
a blueprint, a ledger of interactions, process or form or whatever
you’ve been taught to see.
Guests of former selves clamor. There are fires and no water. Heat domes and variants. Return-to-work and shelter-in-place. Critical race theory and Big Lies™. Long division and 4th of July car sales. Blueberries are rotting
on the bush and border theatre sells out. The routine of keeping it together. Line by line, word by word, click by click. 21st century prefabrications.
How can I hurl myself deeper
into this life
—Ellen Bass, “The Long Recovery”
I’m a maximalist by virtue. I want more than an average understanding.
I’m the oldest daughter of an amateur bull rider. Surface-level commonality is temporary as an ocean wave. I want to be like the tides, consistently influential to the point of unforgettable. Inverting the fates,
nothing unimportant.
Les Krims, 1970, spitting out the word p-h-o-t-o-g-r-a-p-h-y
Hope was my greatest sin.
—Clarice Lispector, from “The Disasters of Sofia”
Your and my immunity are fated these dragged, hot days.
In a burning world, my dreams saturate. Mostly trees,
thick, green, with moss thick as absence. Caution—
only longing and sunny winters ahead. Toward is a feeling.
Away a noun. What luck has found us both still breathing?
Our futures have become increasingly jealous of the past.
Portents of death a spammed life—forgettable.
Self as a frequency. Do you know how to want less?
Having the equilibrium of a poet, I kept falling in love. — Frank Stanford,
“With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes”
Felicia Simion, Self Portrait, 1999
And everyone’s competing
For a love they won’t receive
‘Cause what this palace needs is release
— Lorde, “Team”
The neighbor’s laundry hung drying in the wind generated from our conversations below. It listened like well-placed ears as your observations unraveled my patterns: cold penetrates while the sun strokes. You said in order for this to work, we must agree to be happy but your gaze was hard, questionable. My tone grew suspicious. Wandering fragmented and feral as virtual imagination, I drifted. Our poetics of pleasure and devotion now kindred mysteries. Illusions of prophesy, or was it property, told us we could own each other with infinite monthly payments—no money down—an absolute steal! A flashing sign said Don’t Eat, Touch Only. Absorption may reduce your wing span and there’s not an airport within hundreds of miles from here. Yes, of course this is a competition and you’ve been eliminated before knowing all the rules. Love, now a cathedral built from simulation, was defined for us. The laundry, dried hard as bones, was pulled back inside.
Chieko Shiomi, EVENT FOR THE MIDDAY IN THE SUNLIGHT, 1963
Monday:
Beneath a gray sky, backlit bright,
the persimmon tree is full of leaves
as if it hadn’t just been naked for months.
Tuesday:
If you find an orange
on the sidewalk,
one solitary orange,
what kind of luck is that?
In Olivia Laing’s opening essay in Funny Weather, “You Look at the Sun”, she references Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of a paranoid reader. “A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.”
Distilled: “to prove what we already feared we knew”.
Wednesday:
I fingered the begging-for-it jade trees.
Thursday:
As the flowers slept,
still curled tight,
the sun floated above me
already round and bright.
Abstract as repentance or glory—a transitory representation—is the distinct learning from unknowing, an experience of active living. A day of rituals, smooth from habit, bloom into conscious discipline. Nothing less than a lived response will do in these warped times.
Another week soft as cat paws sneaks past me. The sounds of the radiator and freeway now so familiar, I consider the silence around the noise. Maybe this form, an oblivious infinite loop, finds function waiting like the persimmons? Or maybe this release continues to demand merging threads fleeting as sunlight passing through morning clouds. It’s just as possible all that happens is that I learn to love myself a little more.
Friday:
What if
this whole time
I’ve been writing my future?
“I set the limitations. The limitations of course are the color, the size, the wind in the room, and how I put the paint on.” —Pat Steir, Pat Steir: Artist
I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.
— Anne Boyer, “Not Writing“
Hubert Hilscher, cover of Projekt No.1, 1969.
You asked me if I had responded to the response.
I thought about those high school boys from Tennessee
bragging about their football conquests in the Mariott hot tub.
They were beautiful, hard like toy guns
full of manufactured bravado.
Again, you asked me if I had responded.
I remember witnessing a new moon’s illumination.
A simple and ordinary texture of perceptual darkness
worn resilient and smooth as a natural pearl.
You asked me when I will respond.
I answered with a question wound around reactive
need, a homegrown suspicion. Where, in my body,
won’t I respond based on all this surveillance?
Are your feelings loud enough to be heard?
Will they last long enough to remember
these stretched thin and cheated days?
How should I trust the slant of this sound —
as a temporary glance, as weather, or as
a debatable response? Is this everyday
violence dystopia or social change?
As if the media makers and media takers
are building the same empire. As if they
fantasize to the same thrills.
Explain where god can be found in this.
Rectify the impossibility of knowing.
Show me the value of undivided attention.
Where faith’s enforcement tends to
get stuck is wanting results. Shame on me.
: you use a multiplier factor, the language. — William Stafford, 11 January 1976 (source)
Wet Hands (2015), Sanya Kantarovsky, Oil, Pastel, Watercolor, and Oil Stick on Canvas
It’s always the details.
You know the cliché.
The public is personal.
It’s just business
or fun
or boys being boys.
Years ago, now,
I asked about the narrator
in a room full of narratives.
I was told “story not facts”
is how we would “win.”
All the narratives nodded
into well-trained echoes.
… read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul…
— Walt Whitman
Maurizio Nannucci, THE MISSING POEM IS THE POEM, 1969
This just-past year was a hard and impatient year to live through. All the ways that living had been previously measured—flesh on flesh, breathing in blue sky, talking with your eyes in crowded noisy rooms, curating analog conversations—were inverted. In my sheltered place, I watched as the pace and geographic scale of global suffering became buried in disembodied aggregates. Paradox ruptured.
“Everyone remains aware of the arbitrariness, the artificial character of time and history.”
—Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End
pleasure | obsession | distraction | instinct
This list contains references from a calendar year that borrowed time to push its own way through. It began as it ended, incomplete.
40 hours online is not affectively equivalent to an embodied 40 hours
consciously inviting imagination and reducing perceived need of others’ assumed expectations cultivates fascination, which is an antidote to manufactured boredom
making assumptions wastes time, and more importantly, energy
change is unquantifiable malleable entropy
morning walks adjust the perceived stillness
step into the slant
It has been enough to record the honest and the irreverent interruptions. There are whole days, months, ideas, and precious witnesses missing. An almost unbearable time-lag of consciousness is now felt experience. To survive what? An optics of promise, a future?
distance + force = gravity
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
—William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
What I continually draw from this poem’s well is not hope but alert perspective and prophetic predictability. I anchor on should — indicating both obligation and possibility — as the holding ground. “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” is a solicitation, or a prayer, to listen to your clearest signals — yes or no, or maybe — and bravely claim them.
Some branches still have fruit, hanging heavy and waiting.
Other branches broadcast their superior ability to let go.
What is found in this imagined center is a hymn.
Do I leave the gaps alone and pick apart what remains?
Flickering waves of mutilation swell tight and solicitous
as an echo at the horizon. Curves turn into cliffs.
When asked how I survived this year, a question loaded with context,
I answer: I’ve taken to stroking tree trunks to experience exotic touch,
to feel materiality of time.
By the time attempts to describe loss become offerings of intimacy,
the muted shine of flashbacks turn into conviction. I was always here—
in this impermanent place.
I too remain untrustworthy like a cloud. What comes next
is future’s damage. Replication, pattern, or suggestion: between “be well” and “goodbye” is tomorrow’s hopeful exhale.
Han Jin (South Korean, b. 1979), Inner Side of the Wind #1, 2017. Oil on linen, 130.3 x 130.3 cm
Large-scale logistics require brutality to properly function. It’s a consistent low-grade hum, not quite elevated to cadence, buried between the lines of the system’s dramatic rhetoric. Have not. Listen to the outgoing empire’s heroes—the obedient civil servants, the priests, and the keepers of fluctuating interest rates—as they transition their esoteric power. In this tenuous state, it feels risky to outright deny dehumanization is holding together our mutual cultural identities. Shut your mouth, withdraw. Are your dreams an onslaught of forbidden touch too? Historically, politics of a republic abandon specific kinds of astonishment. Buried seeds of exaltation. This year’s plans were just that, plans. Revision requires experience, which can only be earned through the passage of kairological time. Our collective scripts of possibility are now hardwired into the evaporating streams of multiple realities. We are conducted citizens. The death of illusions can be a gift with the right slant. I think philosophers of imagination make the best poets. Please love me as much as a skeptic’s devotion. Help me feel for the traces of memory around our capacity to forget. That’s grace. The last time it snowed in Los Angeles? 2007. If you want, you can call that feeling of recognition emotional regulation. Are you a canary? Am I? Were they?
“But I wanted never to adjust my explorations to the anticipated expectations of others. Writing was enjoyable for the reverberation I got out of it, and the reverberation had to be discovered, not planned. — William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life
Store-Bought Rolls, Thanksgiving 2015
Were you raised in redemption?
You’ll likely recognize its siren
as a concept—a never-ending story—
a seductive and subjectively
generous way to live one’s life.
Were you born with a shy body?
There’s love there,
you just have to be patient.
Have you learned
constant calibration
fucks with stasis? See also:
acceptance, risk, glory, grief,
and madness. Winter light
breaks through in layers,
kernels of stimulation.
Atonement becomes a paradigm;
it is a grind to keep believing.
Maybe it’s time to examine
your one dramatic life
when inertia is salvation
in an authoritarian state.
Are you ready to receive?
The stimulus of showing up, here, is a fevered habit. Prompt: insert your abject wandering into a space consumed by right-leaning ideas of lack fortified by institutional memory. You may be thinking insufficient curiosities flourish in dank places or perceived stimuli explodes into slow release, but if you’re not thinking about death, or its cousin grief, are you even alive right now? Pull from intermittent signals so faint they remind you of the softness of privilege, an edge of feeling safe. Remember that feeling, you’ll need it today and every day that follows you into the future. I agree, this practice has earned the boredom of recognition. Say transformative like you really mean it. I want to glimpse that specificity, again. It may be entirely possible the change we seek is not propaganda, or won’t be recognizable in the way we’ve been told. Repeat until fully integrated, until expansion is assumed. What if we understood our respective divergence like the quest of a glacier crawling unnoticed across outwash plains? In other words, your finish line will not be the same as mine. It’s the lived experience between habit and ritual—an autobiography of coercive fragments—that reminds me, it’s time to re-read You Must Revise Your Life by William Stafford. “But I make the lines be the way they are by welcoming opportunities that come to me, not by having a pattern in mind.” Miracles demand that kind of attention. Come, gather with me.
The future is a con. A dream remembered in excerpts: enjoying cigarettes, frayed rope ladders, cubicles. My cat’s heavy metal heart beat when she lays pressed against my head is aggressive. I like my information distilled, fermented, and expansive in perspective. Accumulation drags. Fragments fascinate. What was before and what can I imagine after? Learning language and understanding her partner, grammar, I realized early that words strung properly don’t always hold their power—not nearly as long as when you have to stumble, pause, or outright stop to notice the tender edges of the fragment’s extraction. Disclosure. Do you want me to continue? Broken, then mended. There isn’t a stable subject or am I paranoid? Out of context trends. Passive tense is monetized. You are welcome to take all of this, make what you want, and build from these haunted tensions.
During the war, we felt the silence in the policy of the governments of English-speaking countries. That policy was to win the war first, and work out the meanings afterward. The result was, of course, that the meanings were lost. —Muriel Rukeyser
artist unknown
I consumed so much “information” throughout this very long weekmonth that this post is what it is. I know that too much intake isn’t good for me and yet I binge as if satisfaction could be found in declaration. Refreshing will tell me something new, smooth these edges of unknowing, and fill all the holes. At saturation, it physically hurts. Early symptoms are a tight chest and shortness of breath. Today the sky is a perfect California blue absent clouds and smoke. Fact: you can believe it but that doesn’t make it true. The barrel of the camera can cause dramatic harm. This is a threat. Surely witness reifies reality. I know some will say angles and their slants are beholden to the power that frames and seduction laps those edges but there’s more. There’s always more. Urgent thinking and wanting immediacy always take us away from the subject who doesn’t want to, ironically, be seen. The next spectacle must definitely be worth it? Any similarity to a person living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Cache Culture 