"Under the iron bridge we kissed"

The sky was iron too when you showed me that bridge Morrissey mentioned. "I hope you don't take this as a 'signal'..." you said, before you told me about The Smiths song, explained the history of that place. It was difficult. And yet such an ugly place, concrete twisted through with rattling chain links. They couldn't stop the wind.

It was the next day and everyone else had left when I was vomiting eleven times (I counted) in the toilet of your apartment. You were there in bed, facing the wall as I came and went, came and went. I'd fall back beside you for thirty seconds, before I had to climb up again. You said you were impressed by how close I was cutting it. I always just reached the bathroom before I vomited.

The next morning we had orange juice (not all had been mixed into the vodka) and croissants. Even jam. The sky was more or less clear by then, though it was still cold.

These nights I'm sat on my carpet by the light switch, hitting it whenever the next wave of nausea comes, so I can stare at the book shelves and imagine the world isn't spinning quite so much. So tired that I have to learn to sleep by increments in those small intervals. The ones when I've just switched the light back off, where I've managed to forget that there's walls all about me.

False Poltergeist

Something happened over the past few days. Earlier last week, I went to the shower and it froze me. I played the whole self-deceit act of hanging the arm under the stream, waiting for it to heat, though it never did. The next day it still froze me, though I could make it through without masking hisses beneath the sound of the cascade. By degrees, stadially, it worked up a kind of warmth, not as my arm hung, but over a course of days, until frigid went to cold to tepid to something like warm.

Helen Mort said that poems start with a "haunting": "I’m visited by an idea that won’t go away and I often carry it around for months. The shapes of poems seem to bother me. And like the glimpses you describe, they always stay somewhere just out of reach. The best poem is always the one you’re nearly-but-not-quite writing."

I suppose this is relevant because whenever I stood at the edge of the shower, pretending it would resolve into heat, I would keep getting ideas for poems, in the way you do with ideas when you have no means of keeping them. The first few times I was too slow, and they threaded out of existence. I had no pen in the bathroom, no paper, and the thought would have left me by the time I retrieved any. So instead I had the idea of writing in the deliquescence of vapour that formed on the mirror while the shower steamed up (by this point it was verging on warm). But the problem was, over the course of the shower, I completely forgot about it. Left the room scrubbing my head with a towel, not glimpsing the lines I'd fingerpainted on the glass.

But of course the marks stayed, stains, coming into sight again only when the shower misted the room up. You can imagine that it was a start, seeing them again, as though for the first time, as though they had written themselves, as though a ghost had left them (for me? for them? for anyone?), formed out of air and water into a strange space of un-air and un-water, un-lines nothing like ink that the mist clung around. And the fact is I still don't remember having drawn those notes, that's just the assumption I formed, spending soaked minutes ennunciated by drips, staring past my reflection into those lines I (must have) left there. Because even if I think I recall that writing, I can't sever it from my imagining that recollection. Like a broken shower waking you up - except these only put you to sleep - false memories are a pain, and yet such a constitutive pain.

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.

"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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

That last poem was another scheduled post. Well, I say 'poem', but I recognise the italics as a complete piece that I wrote during a lecture way back in October. I think I added the rest at the time I wrote the post around February.


There was a certain night a while ago where I got really really drunk, deliberately, or that sort of half-deliberateness that constitutes almost everything if you let it, until all becomes a habit. But there was a habit I wanted to give up that night. I think. Patchy memories. Which is actually a really good phrase, because it suggests that there's been holes in memory filled in or covered by foreign fabrics, whether repressions or invented memories. And we all know how quickly recollection of recollection takes the place of real memory. As if 'real memory' were a thing.

What I remember a very enveloping darkness, just a crack of light leaking onto the wall, or was it the floor, it wall all blurred, and the words, repeated, hoarse, over and over, my voice, "Just stop. Just stop. just please stop. stop. just stop. just stop


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

Several Posts and an Etymology

Have you ever mistaken a dream for reality? Because maybe that question's a tired trope but maybe out of dissociation, whether depersonalisation or derealisation or anxiety my memories so often have a completely detached quality indistinguishable at times from the conchoidally fragmented shards of my dreams, but then at times my present also has that detached quality, in fact it all does, my sight seems to recede far behind my retinas, everything is distant and muted, dull echoes of the world spiralling about my skull. And then I get a grip. As if a grip were to be held (haldan), as if there was anything solid to hold onto in the first place - as if that first place existed.
Although I still catch myself heading towards the door for a meeting with a friend I had scheduled until I realised that it was never scheduled, that that friend no longer is around.

But that's not what I came on to write about. More scheduled posts, quite a few. So I didn't recognise those words at first, but a quick google told me that they come from the novel As I Lay Dying. Pretty apt name. Pretty good book as well. The picture was a recent post, I just forgot to tag it, so it blends in with the other old ones. I uploaded it from a scan of of Leaves for someone looking for it in a forum.

I don't know that there's much more to say on the posts. All in all pretty disturbing. I definitely had something about myself in mind when I wrote them - the 'Irrealis' and 'trees' posts that is - and it's not hard to tell what it was. Makes me think of ripples. I think George Eliot remarked on the way every motion of every life will have wider influences; which of course wasn't only her idea (Chaos Theory etc. etc.). But I'm not so sure how much lingers. Did you know that the word 'linger' comes from the Sanskrit dīrghá; to the same root apparently as the Greek ἐν-δελεχής, meaning 'perpetual'? Some people also think it comes via the Gothic tulgus ('firm, persistent'), Old Saxon tulgo ('very'); all of which might connect to the Latin indulgēre ('to indulge'(originally to be 'long-suffering towards'(maybe))). All's very prolix, I'm sorry.


Words linger. I think that much is clear. And I knew that then as I know that now. And even with all that, I know that there is nothing perpetual in lingering.

Another day, another scheduled post. At least I didn't throw in any Greek.

So, I recognised this - another passage from of leaves, although it's actually quoting Robert Jean Campbell, M.D., Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 9^th edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 951. That's not the citation given in the text, but I went off and actually found a copy that didn't have brackets slicing through it. They're meant to represent ash littering (marring) the pages. Notice how "patient" is severed into "pati", reminding us of the word's root to the Latin. As Danielewski later writes in the book:

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.” 

I'll drink to that. Or not, seeing as I don't drink any more. Not a good idea with the new combination of meds. Probably just not a good idea for me in general.

Guess it sure seemed like it at the time.

Hm.

“The knight was wrath to see his stroke beguyld,
  And smote againe with more outrageous might;
  But backe againe the sparckling steele recoyld,
  And left not any marke, where it did light;
  As if in Adamant rocke it had bene pight.
  The beast impatient of his smarting wound,
  And of so fierce and forcible despight,
  Thought with his wings to stye aboue the ground;
But his late wounded wing vnseruiceable found.”

That's from Spenser's Faerie Queene, I was reading it last winter. Irony is that I didn't have the patience to read up to the actual end of it (though it was incompletely written, funny that). I suppose I didn't have the patience to get to the end of a lot of things.

In fact, I probably wanted to be asleep most when it was day.

Insomnia & The Familiar

That's another Shakespeare quote, I recognised it immediately. It's from his poem 'The Rape of Lucrece', I read it a while ago and those lines always struck me particularly.

Insomnia's a bitch. When you feel like dying every day, you begin to look forward to those hours each night you get to spend in complete oblivion (provided there's no nightmares. Although, at least with nightmares, the fear you have is never really localised. That might be the same with the panic attacks awake, actually, but in the dream you're only so lucid, and if you suffer the suffering rolls over you like a wave. It throws you to your feet, but at least you're too dazed to get properly scared. And maybe fear is the most painful part of pain.).

So when you're up at five and the terribly thin curtains are breached, and things start to move, that's the worst part. Or maybe it's when you realise you won't fall asleep. I don't know. The whole thing is awful. And then in the day you're practically delerious. I guess that might feel like a reprieve, but it's not. It's like an ache all through your skull, and how I was back then, I didn't want to be in too much of a stupor to read, to continue my work.

Not a great poem I wrote, I admit; but then, I must have been half-asleep at the time. Danielewski's new book, The Familiar came out two days ago. I picked it up at a store on the day it came out, but I haven't had a chance to read it since then. I'm excited. It's the first volume of a twenty-seven volume series, and this book alone is 880 pages. It's sat on my desk now. I think I'll start reading, maybe put up a few posts on it.

The book has an awesome trailer which you can see here.

Two more posts

Fucking fuck, I thought I'd have ran out of scheduled posts by now. I suppose there must be some that I've readied for months or even years in the future, that seems like something I'd do, and I think I even remember doing it.

What really freaks me out is how I talk of myself in the past tense. I can't believe how I really believed that I was going to do this. And that it was right. That by now I wouldn't be here. Well I guess the person I was already is dead, because we change utterly in the blink of a moment and Hume knew that, and I'm thinking of a quote of his involving darkness and something about a pool and memory, but the closest thing I can find is this:

"I desire those philosophers, who pretend that we have an idea of the substance of our minds, to point out the impression that produces it, and tell distinctly after what manner that impression operates, and from what object it is derived."

which I know is close but that isn't it at all. It reminds me of how I felt back then, actually. So many ideas and memories rushing, tearing through my head in a maelstrom and I couldn't hold on to any of it, yet it all was so significant, every scintilla blasting through and out and beyond my reach.

Okay a new one. I recognised the quote immediately, although it didn't much matter since I actually remember when I scheduled this post to begin with. It's the opening of Danielewski's novella The Fifty Year Sword.

The word 'ghost' comes from the Old Norse geisa to rage, Gothic usgaisjan to terrify (hence we get 'ghast'); outside Germanic the derivatives seem to point to a primary sense ‘to wound, tear, pull to pieces’. It's thought to have pre-Germanic origins but the sources are hazy; the word's haunted by the phantom of some other past, but we don't know the origin. We never do.

It's interesting that the sense 'pull to pieces' comes up. I think of the German der absoluten Zerrissenheit, a phrase Danielewski/Johnny left untranslated in House of Leaves. I also remember the torn up text of the Esau and Jacob chapter, and that old Hebrew word vayitrozzu which comes from the amazing root rzz meaning "to tear apart, to shatter". Finally I remember Sappho, all her destroyed papyrus manuscripts, left littered in rubbish heaps with IOUs and store records, waiting in the dark to be read again, reread in its ghastly half-rotten visage and its fragments, all of which becomes some kind of uncanny beauty that I still can't place my finger on.

Oh, I remember one more thing. A poem I read once, about a ghost in a house , by the sea if I remember. Lingering for days with a friend. More than a friend. More than days. It was a long long time ago. I don't remember any of the words. But I remember having read it, I remember remembering it, and something of that ghost and her house remains or lies dormant or reappears before me now, and I know she never really left me, and she was with me, in every moment, every glance and inhalation, every season, she was always there behind my eyes, on the tip of my tongue, always alone yet never gone.

Traduttore Tradittore

Odd that I scheduled two posts on the same day. Also, I've noticed that the times I was scheduling them at tend to be at midnight, which I guess is the default, but then the recent ones have fluctuated a lot. 20:08, that's 8 minutes past 8. No idea what that's about.

Again, I don't know the source of that quote. Usually I keep them in speech marks like this " not 'inverted commas' like I did there. The 'every breath a death' thing reminds me of something I said in an earlier post, but I can't find it right now. I do remember thinking with a sudden clarity about inkblot patterns - or at least what I thought was a clarity. Something about the pattern of an open book looking like a Rorschach page. It's weird that some of these got so romantic, really, because I know I didn't have anyone in mind when I wrote them. And a 'Rorschached face' is what, make up and tears? My own sight being clouded by my own tears? Something else? I don't know what I'm looking at.

Sorry about the lack of response, I was caught up with a surprise bit of coursework that had slipped my mind. I don't remember the actual writing of this last post, but I do recognise a lot of it. The words in the title come from Philip Larkin's poem 'Mr Bleaney'. Despite its sort of nursery rhyme sounding name, like all of Larkin's work it has a lot of depth to it.

As for the rest of the post, I'm pretty sure that's my writing. The phrase "vast abrupt" sounds familiar though, but I couldn't find anything by googling it. Maybe it's just familiar because I half-remember writing it.

My room was a mess back during my episode. I'd broke the latch on my window and rainwater kept falling in, seeping into the nearby wallpaper until it got distended and colourless. I'd stopped showering and I couldn't tell if the stink was from myself or the room and all the shitty food I'd left festering in the bin. I didn't really have much of an appetite, even less the desire to go out and get food or order it by phone, so what little I did had mostly ended up there.

Eventually I got tired of shivering and taped the window shut, but the heater's over-active in my room, and it gets really stuffy once the sun starts beating down on the room through the glass. I spent hazy patches of time asleep, day and night. It didn't really matter when. It's amazing how much you can sleep if you get into the habit of it. I was happier not to be conscious anyways.

"From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow"

Don't worry, I have a source for that one; it's one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.