it sometimes seems like life-- as this tremendous picture-- appears so hectic, so frantic, so perpetually shifting, that there is no room truly for some absolute error. but then there are the small parts, the waiting rooms, staring at the walls thinking this is a tomb, this must be what a tomb is like. decidedly, i always look up. more often than not (pretty much always) i trust what i cannot see moreso than what i can. i trust numbers birthdays weather patterns ghosts. i trust prayer poetry gravity and grace i trust the dead. i trust how things find me. i trust why i read certain books at certain points in my life, why i watch certain films. certain music. bad horoscopes put me in a bad mood. but at some point, after so many years of touch and go, its all response. i used to fear losing so much to death. everything ive relied on is only a construction. only comforted by the walls the space the ambivalence of such a tremendous picture. i have avoided any true attachments. i like to imagine myself being healthy and entirely put together. but i dont have an idealized version of myself. i couldnt even draw my own face. i mean, i have all of these ideal parts but it is all as blurry as the tremendous picture. its like in vertigo when the dead love reappears completely in her idealized form but in that moment everything is green light and her face is shrouded in a gauzy blur. she reappears within the shadow of her own morbidity, the morbidity of the situation she perpetuated. and though he is so distilled by her beauty, the camera knows that she is not to be trusted. imaginary camera or not.
whenever i read poetry i always feel too distracted, and if it is a poem that i am absolutely obsessed over, my attraction becomes even more distracting. i dont think i will ever be capable of reading/understanding/knowing a poem in the complete way that i would like. even poems i know by heart are distracted by language and cadence and tone and history and space and and and my blinking eyes and heart beat the sounds in the room. when Plath reads "Lady Lazarus" it is not how anyone else reads it. girls in their bedrooms emphasizing all the words they are so certain maintain the weight and brevity every tone heavy and foreboding. and Plath's reads it like a single, steady, cumbersome sound. but even the writer cannot communicate wholly with her own work because she can never be a response. only a catalyst. this is a dull topic, but its extensions to humanity create an even greater distraction. like Eliot's Prufrock--
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
everything, even face value, is an extension of the hyperreal. everyone has multiple truths. multiple faces prepared to meet. often this appears as a lie, as often as it can be, especially with sexual politics and what not, but other times, more often than that, it is just a shifting of the self within the same dimension.
The tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening.
:Anais Nin
a few years ago i was remarkably obsessed with modernity. post modernity. anything nouveau. it was something about a distilled movement that i craved. some act of isolationism but in some distinct way-- some super theory for being. but it was all bullshit avoidance. all fear. this theory of modern times being something perpetual, something never entirely experienced, is a scapegoat for living. its an observance of the current movements. it stifles everything by perpetuating some sense of eternal youth. mostly these days we watch one another between little boxes. faces pixalated, everything some modern, formed, separatist representation of the real. but youth is not eternal. death is sincere.
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