le train pour paris (part 0)

Seven years, and your eyes are beneath every lovely braid of brown. I find myself sneaking peaks inside every passing blue accord, hoping you'll be there. Do you still own one, this far down the road? Sometimes, when I sit at coffee shops or on park benches, I glance at the shoes of passersby, looking for yours - is it odd, even now, I remember the grace of feet - how tiny, how petite - but your face is lost to me; that memory, I couldn't bear.
The thin stratum of cirrus clouds burned like phosphorus this evening at sunset in a gorgeous display of fireworks, as though someone ignited taffy as it stretched across the heavens, and the sunset was the pulling wheel. Nostalgic, somehow, though of what I do not know. Maybe there is in my soul the dream of platonic, eternal sunsets; of a world where all the colors don't make sense, but just are, and the formless mystery is enough.
When I envision you, imagine you living, it's with someone you love for true. You are sitting at a park bench, laughing and delighting in the magic of it all, and he's holding your hand as treasure. Neither of you see me, stretched against a willow tree a hundred feet away, and neither of you would care. Then this sunset would be yours, and the romance of it all would suffuse your faces with an ember-glow, like lanterns of gold making icons of each sanctified moment, and cherubim hovering at your sides are singing such wonderful hymns - immaculate dreams.
The sky transforms into the dingy and smoky crumble of the train station ceiling, held up by cylindrical cement columns and sheer persistence. The earth quakes and the air vibrates with cigarette fumes, summer heat, and the dust. Everyone shuffles by with vapid resolution, in suits and jackets despite the arid weather.
If tomorrow, a friend knew and told me I'd lose my heart again, oh, I'd probably fall all-in. The ante is worth the pain, just for a glimpse into the prisms of another's soul. And when, once more, I stumble into the same pitfalls I made on that first train, and again on that mountain ridge before sunset with words I cannot rescind, I'll be reminded why you, and they all, traded this for another, for the better. I wish I could trade one broken-heart for another - seven is too long a forever.
And I did.
Two weeks past, on another incidental train, this one again for breaking chains, it was different. I saw someone else's eyes and hair and shoes, and didn't mind. Once, years ago, someone asked me if I missed love, having never known, like a boy-child misses his father who left before he was born. No, I don't, I said, for I believe I've always loved, and always known. But this was the first I've done so, not alone. When you love, is it always for the first time?
Are you with me, mon ami? I see your ripples in the lake of my soul, can feel the broad brush strokes of aquamarine and the swans, singing their song and leaping into the sky from the reeds. These pictures ever limn my reality.
The locomotive burst free of the tunnel with a sinister speed. From the first car to the last, as it passed neatly into the station, I imagined it as a giant, puffing caterpillar, an Alice in Wonderland vehicle of dreams. Together, soon, we would cocoon in a recursive metamorphosis, and with a fragile, dawn-wet flutter, we'd stretch and fling ourselves at the stars, as monarch machines brandishing nascent wings.
I am surprised, as always when the train huffs to a halt, that such inertia can screech into spot like a mechanized lock. It's a devastating potential energy, like a predator, coiled and eager to spring into destructive motion. My heart surged into my throat at the rawness of it all, the sanctitude of this spectacular sepulcher - because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
The doors opened and a few meandering souls boarded, waiting for the klaxon warning and whistle of our leaving. Every moment was the held-breath of goodbye, a severing from this country once part of me. I could feel the whistling blade that guillotined the past from beneath me, and with a whistle and a pop, the groaning metal beneath began rolling into the darkness of the future.


-------------------------------

This was originally not one piece, but three separate empty thoughts, just thrown out there as per usual. One was a story moment (not beginning) and the other two were just day reminisces. Now, they are all so jumbled little remains of the origin of any of the three.

Sharks! (not really)

I think I'm a shark. (not a card shark, though maybe that too)

I think we all need movement. There is a reason people locked in the prisons of their minds are jokingly (or not) referred to as vegetables. Mammals, animals in general, move, and require motion I believe to thrive. Not necessarily to survive, but if survival was our only motivating factor then we are sorry beasts, indeed. And I don't mean that we need to pack up our bags and hit the road every couple weeks or months, but that "motionlessness" does not suit us. Sitting in one place and staring at the computer screen; gluttony and sloth.

I may be speaking for myself a bit, but sometimes it's like I'm a shark. The moments I cease moving are those moments I feel least alive. And this isn't always so; immediately someone is going to suggest the verse: "cease striving and know that I am God" and forge an argument for "stopping". But stopping has never been a problem for me (and I know some people who do struggle with rest and sabbath). But even in our moments of stillness, we are hoping to move closer to God. 

This Lenten season, I chose a passive "waiting" approach of sacrifice. I gave up a few things, but not to create of stagnancy, like an 8-year-old boy who is punished with no computer games and claims he has nothing to do. The object of Lent isn't punishment by sacrifice and fasting. It's a preparation of self, a movement if you will, and I'm racing.

So I'm a shark, I think. Did my layers of teeth unmask me?

spindle-pricked thumb on a pencil stub

and dizzydizzy down this rabbit hole -

it's a mad hatter even 

with the twisting twilight sky, 

and I'm escaping 

into well-worn pages, scrawled lines -

and nights like these have the silence

of the sirens, sight of the cyclops,

discretion of the gods 

and Titanic complacence,

stuffed into a tiny mason jar and rattled

Mummy

(I may or may not have written this while driving down scholls in the rain, in the dark, in the silence of the night when the fog hung heavy around my car and I skidded around corners in the collected puddles that huddled there, and I stopped like a culprit at each car that rounded the sides of the hill, caught in the beams of accusatory light - I may have written it on a dime, one that still spins, and I can make neither heads nor tails of it - I may be still writing, because some stories are never finished until they stop beginning, and this may or may not be such a one. I may completely re-write it when I wake in the morning, cold without a fire and only the dust at my side, and contemplate my foolishness at trying. Shikata ga nai. Do svidaniya)

A stranger, wrapped in white, woke

beside me on the road, hoping 

for warmth by the once-fire, 

now reduced to coals.

How he shudders and groans, 

his bandaged-body and tired, old bones.

in the brisk morning breeze, I ask,

what does the mummy desire?

stirring to speak, he glances at me,

and tells me of wars long ago:

battles and fighters in warrior attires

engaged in the hatred of yore

but whose? mine or yours? no,

the avarice of kings paid with the blood

of just beings who craved only the hearth

or the home.

Then on he goes about the gods below

and above in whose sight we marred

the earth we love, and the child whose name

we don't know.

Of sickness to death, of hope and love cleft

in the eyes of the lover and loved.

So what do you need, I ask, if you please?

and he hushes me with a hand, let me speak.

He saddens me with tales of ships with wide sails

white, rife with slavery beneath.

Of pirates and lies, and what lies down,
deep in the oceans of hearts.

and what now, can I offer, I ask, 

my soul suddenly cold.

A little tea and warmth by the fire,

and tales of what, for love, you have sold.

Beneath the white folds of cloth

beneath every one, there's a soul

and one worth dying for,

I reply as the fire sparks its rebirth.

Hamburger Writing (yuck)

"Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land."
~ Helprin

I have not read Winter's Tale yet. Matthew quoted this at me, and I was pleased at the mimicry of my own sentiments, despite not knowing the context.

Always, on long drives I have significant time for thinking. Add into that the fact that I couldn't find my media player, I had some opportunity for *quiet* thought. I was contemplating mostly on the topic of intellectual humility. I think one of my greatest irritations are those who view their own works as intrinsically better than anyone else's, and beyond comparison or improvement. Maybe it is; maybe they've reached the pinnacle of human achievement in writing or artistic endeavor, but I tend to doubt it.
There is always room for improvement.
But even more than that is this internalization that once you immediately assume a new task, you will automatically be a maestro. I mean, c'mon! I've put a week into it! Maybe you are a prodigy, or a savant, but still (yes, still) there is room for improvement, for change, for adaption. One of my favorite quotes by Donald Hall: (it's a long'un)

The United States invented mass quick-consumption and we are very good at it. We are not famous for making Ferraris and Rolls Royces; we are famous for the people's car, the Model T, the Model A—"transportation," as we call it: the particular abstracted into the utilitarian generality—and two in every garage. Quality is all very well but it is not democratic; if we insist on hand-building Rolls Royces most of us will walk to work. Democracy demands the interchangeable part and the worker on the production line; Thomas Jefferson may have had other notions but de Tocqueville was our prophet. Or take American cuisine: it has never added a sauce to the world's palate, but our fast-food industry overruns the planet.

We get into a groove of production and never leave it, all too often. One of the reasons that I started this blog was to try out different forms of writing, and mimic different artists in their creativity. Sometimes, imitation can be incredibly helpful in learning to understand what makes something artistically relevant, or good.
But really, more than anything, I don't want to get caught into the McPoem, McStory groove. I don't want to be the Thomas Kinkade of writing, where I simply discover a beautiful scenery and mass produce it in workshops. I want novelty, innovation, and thoughtfulness. I really appreciate Elizabeth Bishop's argument that if it takes 40 years to write a good poem, then that is how long she'll work on it.
Unfortunately, with capitalistic motivation as the driving force behind art, it becomes more difficult to wait so long for a muse to strike us on the head with the creative mallet. For me, this isn't a problem, because money isn't a driving point at all for me (since I'm earning no money from my pieces at this juncture - nor are they worth any). But the problem for me, at my level, is still that tendency to get rutted into a line of faults.
Some of the statements Donald Hall makes in that essay are frightening, in light of entering the sphere of artistry to any degree. I understand what Keats was saying when he wrote the words: I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
This is the same driving force that sips at the edge of my sanity. Because I know where my tipping point is, the place where I withdraw from society and make a competitive run for greatest "something" in the world. And honestly at this point I don't even know what that something is. I know it could be almost anything that I put my mind to, within the constraints of my mechanical prowess (it's too late for me to become the greatest futbol player of all time).
One thing I know, at the end of the day, is that in order to improve I have to first understand that improvement is possible, and that I need it. If I don't believe that I can improve, I won't; if I don't believe I need improvement, I'll continue creating hamburgers of stories and poems.
Which sounds gross.

Or I can try outrageous, silly, obscure, unusual, messy, ugly attempts at artistic creation and pray something rises from the dust eventually.


You're the worm for the early bird
dressed in asps and newspaper wraps.
your hands read: violent murder/politician/
hundreds wounded in/going under
in smudges of running ink.
but through this window peering back into me
I see Alexander the Great playing violin,
lacrimoso, sharing his odyssey;
and Cleopatra feeding pigeons,
cooing at all the appropriate points
and her hair reads: hostility in/
concealed disaster/media sexist rem-/
how does she not weep with the music,
covered in such head-lines?
pulling back from the vantage, gradually, asking
who's the bleary-eyed captive in the mirror scene?
another snoozing worm, losing
to the carpe-vermis bird

Charon

in dante's insomnia, it's divine comedy

all night long, and stepping outside

into a bleached-bone dawn, you see 

venice and your taxi is Charon, 

holding an incense lantern which swings 

wildly in the windless air.

He asks if you want pennies for your eyes

but you'll be fine, fine, you want your sight.

pennies, says he, is what most people see,

but all right, and he rows backwards

through time, until dusk limns the horizon -

and you're still in bed at 1am

feeling like a seasick dog with three heads

and no one who will ever know.

Perception Persephone

Later, she wonders
if she merely dreamed of such
transcendent passion.
~ new york times haikus

whether ash or snow falling from the sky,
well, it's your dream, shouldn't you know
what drifts past your window?
Persephone paints in holographics
a scene that shifts with the seasons,
while staring at a plaster wall that poses
blankly, in sterile-scrub white.
some see wedding trees, garbed in gossamer
others icy rivers and evergreens,
or the great, pink thumbs of mountains at sunset,
and some see cities like fires, windows flitting
off and on like sparks and fireflies.
but it's a wall,
and she hasn't started painting, yet,
or even opened her eyes.

Late night thoughts: Hasty Generalizations #2

** Disclaimer: I shouldn't be writing at this hour, and I make a lot of half thought-out statements. If any of them offend you, throw something at me. Nicely.

A number of things are on my mind, at the moment: "bossy", turtles, dystopia, friends, books, writing, drawing, poetry, love, prayer, worry, impatience, sleep.

I usually go to bed at 10 and try to get to sleep by a little after eleven. I'm not a night person. I'm actually not sure why I'm still awake, the night brushing up against 1am and I'm still not ready for sleep as yet. I wanted to write, but I couldn't get my fingers to move. I wanted to read, but after eighty pages, I couldn't seem to focus on the story enough to continue. 

http://i.imgur.com/UQtTn.jpg

I feel like this turtle. I'm on my back, helpless and stuck, but I believe that I'm flying.  Or maybe like someone has taken the kaleidoscope of my thoughts, and is twisting them around faster and faster, until the colors mesh into a mesmerizing soup of jumbled thoughts instead of an elegant fractal of glittering images. 

Also, I really like turtles.

I started The Giver by Lois Lowry tonight, just because it was convenient and I knew it would be a short read. Hence the contemplation of dystopia. I really enjoy it so far, even as simplistic as it is. I think I liked farenheit 451 better, but that is an unfair comparison, I suppose. 

The whole anti-"bossy" campaign is something I've been digesting today, and contemplating the positives and negatives of. The argument itself is a bit fallacious, as something of a hasty generalization and a bit of a red herring, but there is importance in what is being said, nonetheless. 

Sometimes, I wonder why there aren't more women leaders and women competitors. Why aren't there more women CEO's? Part of this is media, cultural, and sexist subjection, and it is these which I disagree with wholeheartedly. I would abolish gender inequality on the spot if I could. (can I?)  But there is a part of it that is, in my experience, relational. I'm about to make some foolish, possibly hasty generalizations of my own. Forgive me of I offend, but I'm not thinking at my brightest: it is late. 

Men tend to incline towards the mold of alpha, gruff, competitive roles more frequently, because it's a means of proving oneself, and the male hormone testosterone acts as a natural competition enhancer. And it isn't that women aren't competitive, or don't vie for leadership roles, but men produce 20x as much testosterone daily as women, and during spikes of the hormone, men are more selfish, competitive, and willing to take risks. 

I say this, even though it is a bit sexist: I have never in my life met a woman who is as over-archingly competitive as I was during my teen years. This sounds like a challenge, doesn't it? But whenever I was challenged, I had to win (if I cared. If I was challenged to a bacon-cooking contest, I think I would have ignored it). Grades at school; sports; computer games; card games; board games; proficiency at some skill. I didn't always have to be the best at everything, I just had to know that I could easily surpass anyone I wanted given enough effort. I was willing to do anything to win regarding things I cared about, if that's what it took. Usually, I didn't have to go very far. 

(And I by no means am suggesting this is a good thing)

What I'm saying is, I've met countless men who are within similar levels of competitive angst as I often was (or even am, still occasionally). But women generally have smaller, more directed instances of such competitive drive. They are often more focused in their competitive natures, and definitely as skilled when it comes to it, if not more so. 

Anyway, the "bossy" campaign is interesting, because it is saying that this male subjugation of women is what prevents women from being capable leaders. I think this is partially true, and partially I just think more men crave leadership for leadership's sake, whereas this is less common for women. Women tend (hasty generalization #150) towards desiring leadership for relational reasons, though this is not always true. Men just want dominance (not always true, either. When it comes down to it, humanity has just as many exceptions as rules. Maybe there are no rules, only exceptions. Kinda like English)
Men are willing to take selfish risks, because they deem the reward of dominance worthy enough a pay-off. Women who tend more to the relational path of competition and self-improvement won't take the selfish sacrifices, because that overrides the relational component of their drive. It's partially a competition thing. If I want to win, how many heads to I have to step on?
I remember in high school actually having this run through my head: how many people do I have to crush before I exhibit my complete dominance? Because it wasn't about winning, only, it was about proving a superiority complex - like an alpha wolf complex. Ok, I'll stop digging my ditch now.

I think it is time to sleep before I make a fool of myself with all these hasty generalizations. These are just thoughts, and I may very well regret these come morning. I think there are differences between males and females, differences in our sex that does distinguish us. Gender is a cultural construct, sex is biological. However, I do not believe this differences necessitate a hierarchical factor: men and women should be equal, not subject to subjugation. I don't think my existence as a man necessarily dictates that I'm better at competing or anything - in fact, I can't tell you how many times I've been beaten by women superior at activities.(though I used to go into the zone and practice for days and days straight without rest until I was the best) Countless times. 

Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't be focusing on a "don't do this" approach, but a "do this" approach. Instead of a "ban bossy", maybe a "nurture leadership and important qualities" approach, or a "value differences and ensure equality" approach, but perhaps that is a bit too vague for a campaign, and certainly less flashy.