'The House'

"It grows larger
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the centre
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe,
but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labour at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I'm clearing new ground,
I'm lugging boards,
I'm measuring,
I'm hanging sheets of glass,
I'm nailing down the hardwoods,
The thresholds —
I'm hinging the doors —
Once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings."

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

A different angle of entry, if you will."

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

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.

Bachelard's Introduction to The Poetics of Space. I can't figure out why these lines always felt so familiar.

"In any case, harmony in reading is inseperable from admiration. We can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical consideration arrests this impulse by putting the mind in second position, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost."

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.

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.

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.

Ichor Left on a Forest Rock

I caught a glimpse
Of a nymph
And her boyfriend.

Spent a while
Damming bile
While I envied.

For her touch
Not so much
Do I crave her -

But her space,
Pagan grace
To be bloodless.

To inhale above the reaches
Of a single tethered coda
Coiled about a gnarled
Finger
Of dead bark,
That one day will be
Again.

He's just so done.
Like a glass full of sand waiting for the parched man
to thicken his bile into a paste,
dry his arteries and blacken his veins
until withered roots sprawl across his face and
he exhales dust and
grows still on his chair,
petrified stiller than anything living yet still somehow alive.

I'm genuinely scared of this book. The way it sits there, emitting so many unspoken volumes of thought that I can never grasp, let alone even see as they shimmer past my perception. An unending stream.