gaps.

the

even

gone,

This hurts too much but I can't stop

There are so many images and I feel them all leak from me with each second something remaining like a track in the fall?

A ferry trip. The violets in her lap. The cold in the air. A coach's murky window. Statues. Sunlight.

Storm still

Wer jetzt kein hat, baut sich keines mehr.

Redwood

[be]li[e]ve ["Only the interviews inform these events. They alone show us how the moments bruise and bleed."]

"Oh, we live comfortably because we create these sacred domains in our head where we believe we have a specific history,  a certain set of experiences. We believe that our memories keep us in direct touch with what has happened. But memory never puts us in touch with anything directly; it's always interpretive, reductive, a complicated compression of information."

float

Sometimes the tide pulls me away for days.
Far, far out to the horizon

opposite the sun. The sea always spits me out
eventually. In the space of a month,

a week, a few nights, by the span of a
lifetime,

I resurface, hurl water from my lungs
my gut, my bones.

The taste of salt
and the most silent ocean bed

lingers for days.

“There is not space in the universe
to tell the universe to the universe.
Therein lies the peculiar beauty
and the sadness of stories:
to tell it all without all at all.”

"By now I am far beyond copying only what comes after the patient’s saying: ‘I have this dream, doctor.’ I am at the point of recreating dreams that are not even written down at all. Dreams that shadow themselves forth in the vaguest way, but are themselves hid, like a statue under red velvet before the grand unveiling."

any question directed at another becomes something directed at the self and I'm starting to shake here, too much of me in the air of this room

Strange how happy I was just then. I hadn't left the apartment for days. Or something like that.

I need to go out today. And here I am writing this. The light's etched a permanent grimace on me, bleeding through the curtains. I have a prescription to pick up.

There's a little irony. Going out to get a pill so that you can go out in the first place. I want to throw up. I want to cry. I haven't done either for years.

Time to kick out this seat from beneath me and force myself to leave.

I hope this lasts

only images

"A swimming pool. A rocky bay. An empty lot. A tower. A lighthouse. These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different. Sometimes they are camoflage or disguises. Sometimes they are something more truthful."

-Jeff VanderMeer

"The center is not the center."

A new hypertext: I now have a tumblr blog. I think it'll mostly be what I'm writing here - the reason I got it was because it seemed like a good pathway into a lot of the things I have an interest in. Anyways, I think I might also start working back and writing up my old posts from here onto the blog - pretty sure you can backdate posts. I'll have to actually make an effort at tagging things too. Who knows, maybe I'll run dry and the thing will be a dead end. But it'll be interesting to cross paths with myself.

sike[r]

"Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."

"Where I've been. | Where I am,"

"Then ... now ... what difficulties here, for the mind. (Pause.) To have been
always what I am - and so changed from what I was. (Pause.) I am the one, I say the one,
then the other. (Pause.) Now the one, then the other. (Pause.) There is so little one can say,
one says it all. (Pause.) All one can. (Pause.) And no truth in it anywhere. (Pause.)"

Tinnitus

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because even a person of poverty-

Someone I would have risked all for, once,
and allways,
gone now. Leaving hollows in streets
and crowds
and at the steps of buildings
in the final weeks of a month,
where someone once sat,
waiting for someone else.

Sheep in Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells ----
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

 - Sylvia Plath

Neighbour

When you get to a certain stage of suicidal, every ''see you'' becomes a promise that you can't tell if you'll keep.

This time last year I was all pieces and splinters. Ugly. Hideous, really. I spent a bit of time visiting my neighbour down the hall. I don't really know how we ended up sharing those empty hours (or was it minutes?) together in his white-walled room, the window always open just a crack, enough to hear the bus going by. He was a 50-something French guy with hair like rust and stubble like steel wire. The guy was living in Manchester for work, but he'd had a wife back in Paris. They'd recently split up. Not quite divorced, but they were definitely apart. He wasn't that interested in the books I'd always end up talking to him about, and he'd always speak in turn about Beethoven. I knew nothing about him.

Once, he mentioned an essay.

"Lydia Goehr. 'The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works'. Have you read that?"

"No."

"Mm. She's fantastic." A long pause. He took a bite out of his toast. "Do you play Scrabble?"

"I have." I started thinking about Aarseth, about cybertexts and multicursal pathways.

"Think about when all the tiles are placed in their little rows. And you have all your words, right at the end of the game." I always won. It infuriated my brother. He broke the board. "And then the game's over, and you fold the board and let all the tiles slide back into the box. Where are the words then?"

He leant towards the window, placing his lips together and whistling a tune I'd heard through the walls sometimes. He held out some crumbs from his toast, and about three birds came fluttering down, out of the blue, landing on his hand for just moments before flying off again.

He looked back to me with a smile. I was at the door then. I could already hear in that unsounded language how it was time to leave.

"Au revoir."

"Yeah. See you."

-mysisterandI-

"Don't be scared."

Maybe it was the vacancy I had begun to taste, brought on by November—Novum ovum nine and all mine.

[re]curs[iv]e

New Blog Name

I've changed my blog title. I'd felt for a long time that the old one was ... eugh.

Frankly, I just liked the alliteration, the phonics, but the meaning of that string of words together was bland.

For now, before I can think of anything better, I'll just call it

Someone else

Mute clay smiles

'Shut up.'

  'Make me.'

Is it possible to suffer from the absence of something you don't desire?

too little too late

"Sometimes I think the best plan is to plan on a little coincidence."

Singed carte de visite

"the filmic phenomenon of the
                                                  afterimage, where what is seen

is something extra-orthographic, something

imagined"

Boom. Boom. Boom.
Boom blast and ruin.
Trying to outsound the panic
in our hollow guts.

"We have all been injured, profoundly."

Minos Trevet [Ascenius ----|

"A labyrinth without exit is a labyrinth without entrance; in other words, not a labyrinth at all."

"She led hym to þe eldryn hill,
Vndurneth þe grenewode lee,
Where hit was derk as any hell,
And euer  water tille þe knee.
Þer þe space of dayes thre,
He herd but þe noyse of þe flode;"

the bard's tongue flickers as he traces his steps

Theseus had no choices,
he could not but reach the centre.
And from the centre
he could not but
rediscover the entrance.

The labyrinth was unicursal,
there was only a single path,
through which he dragged
his impotent thread.

"How koude ye withouten bond me bynde?"

"It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping."

Dewey Dell

"I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood."

I'm so sorry to have to forget you

I keep having the strangest dreams. Last night, I was atop some overhang on the Golden Gate Bridge, my legs dangling from the cutting metal precipice. I was too scared to jump. Cars moved past without seeing me. Then some began to slow. A person with a face I have known but did not recognise walked up to me, slowly, from the road.

Alaska, she said.

I was too petrified to ask her what she meant, but she smiled and her smile was like the laugh of Medusa and it froze me and it warmed me. And others came, those she knew, a collection of them. And they took my arm, even while I leaned away, out, out, they guided me into a car.

And I was ushered calmly into a home, and I very nearly resisted and ran, a home for others who hadn't done what I hadn't done. I knew many of them, though I had never known that they were like me. Some I embraced, some I smiled with. But before I entered I looked back to those who had caught me, I looked to the first one.

I hope this won't be the last time I...

No. They give us visiting hours, she replied, telling me something I had not known until then, something warm and homely, something comforting. I think now I recognise her face.

How can it be that I am so grateful yet so empty?

Le nid tiède et calme
Où chante l'oiseau
Rappelle les chansons, les charmes
Le seuil pur de la vieille .

"Forests have boundaries too, in our imaginings of them."

Jagged Brink

No,
you're nothing soft
at all, and if I kissed you,
your bones would cut into me.
Every breath would be
a struggle.
The fury of your teeth would bind
me to you,

the blades of your shoulders
might sever me.
The fangs of your ribs
would eat me whole,
because your heart always has space
to devour.

Our mouths taste of metal when we meet.

Your pupils are a kind of oblivion,
in each pit
a deeper pit.
In you, I could never stop falling
if I fell.

I mean, it's all so self-indulgent, isn't it?

"You can't go home again"

-Thomas Wolfe

Pelafina

I don't think I'll be commenting on these scheduled posts anymore.

I just don't need constant reminders of the state I was in a year ago. I have enough reminders of the state I'm in currently. I suppose by now you must have realised that not all these posts were ones I scheduled.

An unrelated poem. It reminds me of someone's mother.

"Before you'd given death a name
Like bear or crocodile, death came
To take your mother out one night.
But when she'd said her last good night
You cried, "I don't want you to go",
So in her arms she took you too."

Necropolis | Life is the cenotaph [and empty chambers are the embers of a laugh [you gave up [

When I am buried you can just as well imagine yourself in the coffin with me, but you cannot feel the edges of the wood. It all spreads out and you feel nothing but darkness around you, and who knows how many others lie sprawled out beside you, around you, just out of reach, and that is what my death is, and what life is.

the hollᴏwness

So the main question is, What is 'you'? Or if it helps, what is 'me', here? Or if I'm on a printed page, with other characters (real or fictional (I resist the whim to use inverted commas on those two values)) and I coinhabit the space, the same plane, the same matter, ink, how far are the distinctions of black dye or pixels circumscribed? What if I am being read? If I blaze out and scatter and resonate and vanish in a cloud of what always has and always will come before me, and after me?

Jack

So this place where 'you' ends, or begins - there's really no distinction in this case, the unity of opposites and all such ambivalence. Your fingernails might be a clue - protruding from your hands, connected? embedded? affixed or inhabiting? Part of you like a tooth, though less permanent (more whims resisted). And when you cut your nail, or gnaw it off, what then? Is it still you, severed? Or is it, bereft, an Other? Not even bereft but isolated now and always. And are you less of you without it?

But I cannot have been the first to ask any of this empty questioning, all in all which winds back to the necessity of accepting the dissolution of the self- no, not that but the abstraction of the "you". I'm getting lost. Or not lost either, but too grounded. These words wither as I speak them.

There is no you here. Nor an I. Maybe not even a him. Or her.

What about a lock of hair?

Once, I saw Emily and Anne Brontë's hair entwined within a locket, an embrace meant to destroy borders, physical, emotional, temporal, personal. An embrace to forgo the caprice of things. It was in their old , empty now, save for how full it is of memory and thought. They turned it into a museum. I visited it myself. Took a coach from Manchester to a valley-slouched town over a hill from their own residence. I walked up to their home, stopping once, to drink some lemonade in a pub. I remember it now, full of bloated bubbles. It was the artificial, stale tasting kind. But I was thirsty, and I drank all of it, and I carried on.

Afterwards, I turned off and headed upwards, and eventually found my way to the graveyard near that place. It took a while of pacing up and down the yards, line by line of tombs. But I found it. Or her?

"ɪɴ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ

sʏʟᴠɪᴀ ᴘʟᴀᴛʜ ʜᴜɢʜᴇs

1932 - 1963

 ᴇᴠᴇɴ ᴀᴍɪᴅsᴛ ғɪᴇʀᴄᴇ ғʟᴀᴍᴇs

ᴛʜᴇ ɢᴏʟᴅᴇɴ ʟᴏᴛᴜs ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ,"

And flowers marked it, but they were weeks old, or longer. Almost gone. She was almost gone too, even there. But only almost. The rock was cold and rough to the touch, like the skull of a sheep I found in a field. Out there, just before. In the moores.

There was dirt on the grave, and with a tissue I wiped at it. Some came off. The stone was no less grey. The flowers were still brown and brittle.

How much of fire blazes within us?

"In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light
             and the fever of the world



                 Thou wanderer through the woods,"

μαντεία

I carve
a new line on my palm,

hope with blood
and sting I might

gouge a new destiny

"And a whisper will be heard

in the place

where the ruined

once stood"

blue-black

Of course, this can never be quite the whole story.

Je rêve d'un logis, basse à fenêtres

Hautes, aux trois degrés usés, plats et verdis

..............................................................................

Logis pauvre et secret à l'air d'antique estampe

Qui ne vit qu'en moi-même, où je rentre parfois

M'asseoir pour oublier le jour gris et la pluie

a pregnant fear to fester

The fatal Engine looms,
draws itself near,
a warning in itself, though none listen.

It shudders at the gate,
creaking with its own weight,
the doom it carries.

Three times they tug
before it enters.
The gates close behind it.

All Edges and Weight

His name is Ares
the battle and the carnage
his shield is blistered and dented
his lips are cracked

fault line scars darken his skin
his wounds open with each roar.

None know if the chains
bound
length after length
biting into his wrists
are his fetters or his flails.

What one evening had to say to another

It's fortunate
     you spoke
because I would have lost
     my way.

I need to fucking sleep

Lord Byron, Don Juan; Charles Corbet, View of pond tree;  of Leaves; The Haunted in Contemporary Filmic and Literary Gothic Narratives of Trauma; of Leaves again-

That's all of them. The rest of this latest kipple is mine.

Years and years of sedimentary refuse, half-formed ruminations, scraps of charred paper slumped like carcasses in sickly towers

‘Whom the gods love die young’ was said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by this:
The death of friends, and that which slays even more—
The death of friendship, love, youth, all that is,
Except mere breath; and since the silent shore
Awaits at last even those who longest miss
The old archer’s shafts, perhaps the early grave
Which men weep over may be meant to save.

Oh god this is out of control

like ink spilling across a page

Ankles crossing ankles
under tables, anxiously
temporal -
diminished too soon.

Because if you lay hope to rest you can at least linger.

there

Irradiated skies.

O my stained Earth;
a thousand fingerprints,
landmarks,
lone histories roaming moores and brooks.
So much lost, never rediscovered.

Resting as easy as an outward breath.




My bones finally finding their soil, deep and profound, where they know they may take root.

"Alas to leave. For this has all been a great leaving. Of sorts. Hasn’t it?"

In the domain of teleology, 'to leave' is not to go to a place but to depart from one.

La hantée demeure une figure centrale du cinéma et de la littérature américaine d’aujourd’hui. Ces récits gothiques contemporains sont conscients que la hantée est le psychisme lui-même : ce motif hante tant les romans que les films mettant en scène le « moi hanté » de personnages ayant survécu au traumatisme. Ces œuvres se structurent souvent autour de l’image du labyrinthe, qui traduit le sentiment d’aliénation et de terreur ressenti par les personnages, mais permet aussi, dans un jeu réflexif, au film ou au texte de jouer sur sa propre construction comme hantée faite d’images et/ou de mots, dans une mise en abyme de la hantise et de la spectralité.

"Walls black like black waters when they are heavy and seem to belong to other seas."

About to sleep

Couldn't sleep and I checked the blog to find all these new scheduled posts.

They're kind of creeping me out. The Everlasting Whims & Everlasting Loss is of course a quote from Only Revolutions. Page 180, Sam's side. I actually prefer, having read and reread the book several times, Sam's writing. I feel like Danielewski wrote him first, but who knows. I'll have to try reading it in reverse order, see if it makes a difference. I just love some of his phrases moments.
"

Because I am too soon.
Because without You, I am only revolutions
Of ruin.

I'm the prophecy prophecies pass.
Why need dies at last.
How oceans dry. Islands drown.
And skies of salt crash to the ground.
I turn the powerful. Defy the weak.
Only Grass grows down abandoned streets.

 "
The August 14th post is [an]other quote(s) from The Fifty Year Sword, also by Mark Z Danielewski. I didn't read the rest. I'm sorry. My eyes just float over the words.


I think I'm getting worse again.

It was a sunny day, but it doesn't feel like summer. It hasn't ever felt like summer. A spring, followed by a premature fall into something morose and grey. Old cobbled streets, coated in dust. Never seen. I stayed in my room all day. Remember that dissertation I started way too early, or at least tried to? Well I actually need to work on it this year. Reasons burn need sometimes. I just feel hollow. Like an empty jug, with no handle, no clay, nothing, unsculpted.

Lost sensations still have my fingertips tingling. My throat aches. I don't know if I can continue. I don't know why I want to. Or if I want to.

I don't know where I am.
I don't know why I am.
I don't know I am.

A terribly thin line

-Everlasting Whims & Everlasting Loss.
      Against Horrors passing with Love’s passing.
            Between them you must choose.

-Choice then is allways Them?
-Love & Horror’s impermanence forever against
    Loss & the Caprice of Endurance.

Will I outlast anything?

When does an experience end? Because every butterfly-wing hurricane sensation, memory, contemplation, intake of breath, doesn't it drip into that great turbulent pool of consciousness? Each experience climbing onto each other, increments of sediment, or ripples upon ripples, until the pool is like a stream, a river, entirely ripples, and maybe that's all a river is.

And you can't lose it. Can't escape it. Each history upon history built into your bones. The boy and the girl by the cave, so long ago, one waving a stick tipped with embers. Never passed.

Sometimes though, it feels less like a pool or a river, more like a cascade. Just slipping out of reach. Pouring off in splatters and sprays and trickles and intangible mists. How can I hold onto that? Do I want to? What am I without my own particular poison? My dim, smouldering lights?

But I lose track of that thought too. Just gone. Slipped off, away, away. Maybe that's why I write. I can't hold everything together in this patched and leaking skull. Not alone, with my bare, cupped hands. Freeze some of it here, hope that by the time it melts someone else has understood at least something of it. Which would be more than I understood.

But I still lose I.
By and by.
 

So I end it, before it ends.

You built my House

There is beauty,
Says the sinner,
And she knows more of it than I ever have.

                                                                          He's every turn,
                                                                          And spits bilious laughter,
                                                                          Knows more of joy than I ever could.

                                                    Grey specks of eyes,
                                                    Earth and gravel,
                                                    A monument in decay.

You built my bones

It’s strange, that I’m alive as you read. Of course, I am alive in some other, ‘real’ world, myself, but here I am alive in you. With every word you read or moment you dedicate to a thought inhabited by me, I animate, my muscles twist, contract and thicken, my blood shifts, begins to pulse. But there isn’t really an I. Because the I you think of really is just you, and what you make of me is entirely what ‘I’ am. And what are you, beyond all the countless other I’s that have touched your life, not even just humans, but the unarticulated I’s of the trees and rocks and stars of your childhood? When you look at someone, anyone, anything, when you make me alive, really you are looking at an extension of you.

                  “mere shadows on the grey,
                  “he too like a passing day
                  “was already gone.

"-How iz forever?

       -Taking everyone."

A thousand dusks reflected over the film of your eyes.

I suppose it's clear that I write. I like to write. I write a lot, sometimes. Maybe that's part of the story I tell myself, the story of myself.
Am I close to something here?
There was always one thing I could never find the words for. One thing I could never write. Allways a series of drafts, scrapped when I saw they were redundant.

Was it like an Echo?

Hong Kong, weeks ago

[There isn't even a choice]

What fragments shall I leave behind?

They would no longer be mine.

"The comets | Have such a space to cross": ["Wan[dering] stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness"] [-

There are times I think, that yes, okay, maybe I'm glad. If not relieved. That I lingered long enough to see that lastest spark. Even if before, after, I wish I wasn't. What strange turns blur the shadows hunched around corners. So soon forgotten. So soon assaulted.

Traversing along a great black from point to point, never seeing what constellation you trace.
If any. That word again. Apophenia, how you haunt me (or don't(what signs I have misread))
And of course you cannot stand on the surface of a star for long. Nothing holds you up. There is no up. And just like that, you're back in the black again.

Breathe out.

I do not forget the words you spoke to Patroklus

I remember that Nestor lives in Pylos by its epithet 'sandy'. Sandy Pylos, home of godly Nestor by the ocean. How brilliant that I find some echo of the same mnemonics that were originally found in the oral poetry to hypnotise the listeners, to help the bard recall the tale he or she murmured, a tale that warped in each telling - which is not to say was deformed, but rather mutated, like some rogue cell, the very point, essence of infinity that is to unravel from it in lush, diaphanous  fractals. As when "the universe was unfolded from its state of infinite destiny.*


*Typo: 'destiny' should read 'density.'"

"A new novel by Danielewski requires a new way of reading.

A different angle of entry, if you will."

You are not here.

Her name was Cas. Same primary school. That time of life when so many trees arch over a sun-filled sky, and warmth hangs in the air, amniotic, filled with murmuring laughter, hums and faint calls, now somehow imbued also with sighs, or maybe just a sigh, one long sigh, extending far far back like an umbilical cord to history. Your history. Did someone call it sepia?

And we were the closest of friends. She lived a few streets away. I would visit her . Her parents weren't strict at all, but they weren't not-strict in that bad way. They let us out to play in the park. She smiled so much. I'm sure I did too. And when I see sunlight, sometimes, it's her I see. She was like a sister, a sibling. Her parents even loved having me, maybe felt pity, thinking of the I left so readily to visit them. I had no one else but her. During high school she left the country with her family. Gone, and for a time it truly broke me.

A long time. And one thing I tried, eventually, after realising that I had no way of contacting her, one thing I tried wasn't to think she was gone. Or rather, to think she was truly gone, absolutely gone. She had already been missing for such a time. From me. So I saw these fading memories, and fading smiles, and I imagined instead that she was dead, that she had died, because she had died, the girl I knew then, and I knew at the time as I do now that if I were to see her once more, she would not be the companion who had soothed the most jagged edges of my copper childhood, with whom I had shared so many stoney meadow paths overtaken by moss. She had died the moment I had stopped seeing her. So, that girl, gone, dead, was at least frozen, still, one thing not to be stolen from me, residing in some white-walled, cozy recess in the rooms of my mind. Still with me, purely by her absolute inexistence, her complete vanishment.

She died long ago, and even as I say that - as you have already guessed - I know I tell only half the story.

Apple Tree

I'm stood, hands in my pockets, in the garden of my family , watching my father pluck the underdeveloped apples from one of our thin trees. The earth is still dark in patches where the other trees burned.

He talks to me - amicable today - "You have to remove these smaller ones under the other apples. Otherwise they stop there being room for the fruit to properly grow."

And all I can think of is how very, very late it is. How much more you could have taught me, long ago, what you should have taught me instead of leaving me to learn. I should never have learnt some things so late on. And some things you should have stopped me learning all together. But today you're happy to ignore our past, and you smile like nothing ever happened between us. And for some terrible reason, I'm still here, stood in this garden, when I, too, should have left a long, long time ago.

But that was not how love was supposed to grow. Amidst the shards of another shattered love, handed bit by bit to an other, a shared story, collective fragments. Not to meet while such pain still rakes their throat each night, a pain they whisper of to this new one. At least not a healthy love, yet perhaps in the margins of that union, where one still carries the damage of another gone, they could have at least spawned something powerful, primal, if not lasting.

'Though here's a song they might of sung'

"Mad woman on another tour;
Everything she is she spits on the floor,
An old man tells me she's sicker than the rest,
God I've never been afraid like this."

Only Smiles Come And Go

There's this cat that hangs around outside the apartments. All white, except for a dark paw. I'm not sure if there's even an owner, people who live here just feed him whenever. He's pretty thin though.

I was on my way to a lecture, closing the heavy gate that leads into the carpark and the back entrance to the rooms, when I saw him loitering just beyond it. The gate's just bars, so it's not like he couldn't slip through, but there he was, sat forlorn, as if he couldn't get in. As I turned from the gate to smile at him, he lifted his tail up and brushed against my ankle. I've known him a while, so he's used to me.

When I bent to scratch behind his ears I saw the feet of a girl about my age stop by the cat. At first I thought she wanted to get past and into the apartments, but then I looked up and didn't recognise her.

"What's his name?"

I stood up.

"I don't actually know, but he lives around here."

"Like you?"

"Yeah."

She leant down, reaching out to him. Her hand froze. "He doesn't bite, does he?"

"Hah, he does actually, but his teeth just kind of hold your hand in them. He doesn't press in his teeth. And if he swipes at you he keeps his claws in."

She flashed a grin. "If he scratches me I'll do the same to you." She reached out, and the cat let her run her fingers down his spine. When she smiled, her lips drew back and showed gums. Her teeth were white. Her skin dark with the warmth of another day's sun. Perhaps another life's sun, an ancestor's sun. Her eyes, I'm sure, illuminated the most profound caverns.

She rose, and I saw for the first time the silent friend with her. She smiled again, leaning on his shoulder, entwining her arm about him. They walked off, and she turned briefly to wave goodbye to me.

When I finally looked back down, the cat was gone, and the gate had shut.

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"


-Sylvia Plath

How many of us have fallen for ghosts?

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been having the worst dreams. Really tired right now, but let's look at the last few scheduled posts...

The 12th of June entry, like any mention of 'words caught in mouth' probably has the phantom of Sappho in it:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
     to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
     is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
     fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
     I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . .

(Fragment 31, trans. Anne Carson).

Though that doesn't mean I had it in mind. Maybe the world and the clouds held in in mind. Funnily enough, looking at the post now, "my gut grows sore" reminds me of another poem, also to do with that old Lyric:

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

Before a face suddenly numinous,

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate   

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?   

It’s documented torrents are unloosed

by such events as recently produced

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,   

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,   

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.   

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,   

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest

of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

(Marilyn Hacker, '[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]' in Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons)

Brilliantly visceral.

Come to think of it, there's a lot of Greek floating around in these few posts. And in my blog in general. It makes me think of a friend I knew a long time ago. Castillia, I think she was called. Back in primary school. I think around when we were eleven she moved to some island on the Mediterranean, near Athens. I don't know her anymore, and even if I managed to get back in touch, would I know her any more?

Oh right, Greek literature. So "The long unmeasured pulse of time moves ever[y] thing" is from Sophocles I think. He's mentioned a few lines later. Or maybe it was Aeschylus. An ancient tragedy writer, at any rate.

As for the image of the stairs, I tried searching by image for it on Google, but couldn't find a direct match. Just a hall of other dark grey and black images.

Tithonus] Chronos] " These things I sigh for and lament, but nothing can be done."

"The long unmeasured pulse of time moves ever[y thing]."

Half a year looms past, revolves, an ending turn. There is a terror and eventually a fatigued comfort in the days causelessly passing faster and faster.

Like a jagged stone worn smooth by sand and wave.

["Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."]

Many by way of horror come to crumble in this sand.

A few black rocks still jut half-drowned above the writhing ocean surface,

But for how long I can discern that they are there
I do not know,
in the dying light the ocean grows - the sound of it, the unformed shape

A kind of everything.

Sometimes there's a great ache. It goes from the back of my throat to a sting in the eyes like smoke from a small fire, and then down behind the ribs, misty now, like dewy fog in a rainforest. But I've outlived many deliquescent achings and even if my bones creak and my gut grows sore I find another tomorrow beating me back into silence, though not tranquillity.

How awful must it be to be mute. But even with a mouth not sewn shut I find my words receding to a haggard limp before they ever fall from the precipice of my tongue.

I don't know about any of those. Okay well the second one down is from Only Revolutions, page 58. I found an awesome website that lets you search the text, like an online index. Pretty helpful for pinning down half-recalled words.

I read an interview with Danielewski the other day:

"Yeah, and I think that’s where it moves beyond just writing into a more vocational way of living. It encourages a practice of being open, of listening, and most of all finding a way of being comfortable about being uncertain, because it’s impossible to tell at a certain moment. Now and then you get these little gems, but often things that suddenly are important aren’t recognized as being important until maybe even a couple of years later. Say you had a moment, and you were open to the vitality of the story that was being told, the word that was being conveyed, but you didn’t necessarily place it somewhere, and nonetheless, two rewrites later, suddenly this moment comes to life, and that’s how it happens."

I have no idea when I must've wrote 'Chaos Magic'. It seems too calm for it to have been done that late on. It seems too calm in general. In fact none of these are using brackets, so I guess they were done a bit earlier or later than the initial bulk of scheduled posts I had made.

Chaos magic

“It won’t work unless you can behold the stars as individual points.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s just it; you don’t need to. You aren’t supposed to. Forget the constellations. Stop looking at it like it’s a pattern. Like it’s a painting.”

“Then what is it?”

“What’s left. What’s more than what you took from it.”

...

“Okay now take the knife.”

“Why am I doing all the work?”

“Because it’s your spell.”

“What next?”

“Pick it up first.”

“Okay.”

“Hold it.”

“I am.”

“Hold it.”

...

“Point up. Straight up. Now let it tug you.”

“What?”

“Point it up again. Okay. Now imagine a thread is attached to the tip. It’s made of something white and blue and cold but glowing. Picture that. It goes straight to the sky. Can you feel it?”

“I think so...”

“There’s a wind, but not the kind we have. Do you feel that? Can you feel the thread swaying in it? Pulling at the blade? Follow the thread with the knife. Every inch. Don’t let the cord break.”

“Chord? Like music?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“If my mum sees us...”

“Stay concentrated. The wind.”

...

“It’s all around us but it doesn’t make a sound. It moves slowly.”

“Yeah.”

“It won’t always change direction.”

“I’m not sure I feel it.”

“Imagine your feet are in a bucket of ice. Like all the water’s frozen over around them.”

“How’s that supposed to help?”

“It won’t, aside from stopping you thinking so much. Or at least it was meant to.”

“You said you’d done this before.”

“Kind of.”

“What?”

...

“Where’s it guided you?”

“Lower.”

“Than the stars?”

“Yeah. Towards the tops of the trees.”

“They’re part of it too.”

“Part of what?”

“Part of the pattern that isn’t a pattern.”

“The constellations?”

“Yes. Or what the constellations aren’t. The trees are part of that. Do you see how they lean into it?”

“Into the wind?”

“Yes. And into the stars.”