randomness

Reflective deceit – interchangeably on repeat

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“We are who we’re not, and life is quick and sad.” – Fernando Pessoa, The Age of Disquiet

I had given a lot of thought to mirrors – both literal and figurative – in the days leading up to his sharing a random thought about mirrors and their uses. I twirled that around in my mind – how is it that each thought he expresses is like a mirror of my own thoughts? Not just general “thinking similarly” but near-verbatim captures, as though he were me and shared my consciousness, overlapping in time and meaning. I would think something, be overcome by something, silently, and he would voice the next logical thought or feeling for me. It should have been frightening to realize this interchangeability, but instead it was comforting to feel that a shared mind could express what I could not, or could extend my expressions, without my exerting any effort at all. An intellectual and mental mirror image.

My considerations, informed by a complete overload of reading, centered on how mirrors and reflections (both the visual and the intellectual varieties) intertwine effortlessly with memory, desire, identity and our whole concept of time, i.e. what the past and future mean to us as we creep through the minutes and hours of the present.

We know there is no objective truth when it comes to human reflection, but does that make it all reflective deceit? Our reflections have value, but at what cost?

“At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Los espejos son gratis pero qué caro mirarse de verdad…” – Julio Cortázar, “Inflación qué mentira” (Mirrors are free but how dear to really see yourself”)

Particularly given how memory is tricky, slippery and totally enmeshed in personal consciousness.

“La memoria es un espejo que miente escandalosamente.” -Cortázar (Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies)

The fallibility and subjectivity of memory means it cannot be trusted.

“Stuck On Repeat” – Little Boots – because repeating shit is what I do: “Every time I try to break free/then something comes along to intervene”

But we’re alive,
full of memory and thought,
love, sometimes regret,
and at moments we take a special pride
because the future cries in us
and its tumult makes us human.

from “Describing Paintings,” Eternal Enemies – Adam Zagajewski

Photo (c) 2013 Dermot McElduff used under Creative Commons license.

Creating reality

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In the middle-of-night hours of Saturday/morning Sunday, I didn’t realize I had lost a whole hour – I had somehow misled myself into thinking the time change was coming the next week. No. It was that Sunday. But I was up all night anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I just remember looking at the clock sometime in the night (around 3) thinking that that last hour sure passed quickly. Yeah, because we skipped it entirely.

In many ways we can create our own reality – but in terms of time, and the ridiculousness of daylight saving/standard time switches, we will be and are slaves, despite what the semi-New Agey psychic phenomena book I read the other day says:

“That we shape our perception is not just a statement about attitude, it also means just what it says: we construct our experience! … We create reality by the imagery we use to organize our experience. The three-dimensional world that we see is fabricated in our brain based upon an inner pattern of three-dimensional space.”

Yes, someone concocted time zones, spring-forward, fall-back and linear time itself. And somehow we all (or almost all) agreed to follow this organization of things. (Or perhaps we fell for it! We organized life itself into oblivion!)

Indeed someone has to see or organize or conceptualize things in a new way to bring about a new understanding and eventually a new reality. And be capable of imagining what has hitherto been a given (e.g. the real is flat) as something other. The book used another interesting example – the guy who finally envisioned the heart as a pump rather than as some cyclical thing, flowing like the tides. He would have to imagine things differently first to apply the new meaning or descriptor.

How shall I imagine things differently to create reality?

Blissful torture

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He told me I would not be able to breathe for three days; I would not be able to move for three days thereafter. He was right. Blissful torture for every muscle and tendon and bodily hinge I never knew existed.

It sounds, after the fact, like he took me hostage and tortured me, but it was more an “I get to do this” kind of thing – I have this ability. Not an “I have to” kind of thing. Oddly these kinds of things become easier when you understand and feel the interconnectedness of everything on a subatomic level. If everything is just energy, the barriers, boundaries and physical limitations slip away. Feeling at one with everything (I know how that sounds) makes me ready for everything – and anything. I feel that my mind has been in that space for a long time but locked itself away for some more appropriate time. Is this that time?

A ‘crackpot psychic book’ has been like a gateway drug to physics books. After all, these subjects I avoided when young become clear now only because of the way they are presented. Because it feels there is real-life application and not just abstract ideas. My ex used to bring home physics books from the library to read for fun, and as much as I admired and loved that about him, I was not ready for such books at the time.

Beyond that, I live and work in the happiest places in the world, right? 🙂 At least not unhappy enough that I cannot overuse the word “everything” in this post.

subatomic particles (-david keig)
i dreamed i was a neutron
inside an atom’s heart
surrounded by electrons
their force pulling me apart
i met a pair of bosons
got assaulted by some quarks
found my quantum levels jumping
when something made me start
could i be sure of all this?
in my subatomic world
or would statistical mechanics
introduce a kind of blur
of uncertainty to all things
and so it wasn’t clear to me
if i really was a neutron
or just a probability.

Epiglottis

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Banter, repartee and conversation with a linguist distinguishes itself from almost all other exchanges because of its speed – both in terms of the flow and the pace of topic change. Nothing said has a single meaning. Everything has multiple meanings, which makes the exchanges all the richer – things to mull over long after the brisk conversation ends.

Beyond the aphrodisiac of constant metaphor, your wordplay will be enlivened with terms like “velaric fricative” and words like “epiglottis”.

I love this, as someone who dreamt of but abandoned the dream of being a linguist many years ago. I also love how one single word – like epiglottis – sets me off on some entirely different tangent. In this case, right back to my favorite thing: poetry.

So… Romanian poet Nina Cassian. She died in 2014. Did I even know she died? (As a complete digression: When I originally jotted down this question of doubt and walked away, I came back and thought it read, “Did she know she died?” Are we aware when we die that we have died? I start to wonder sometimes about what we see or experience. So many stories I hear about near-death or about being with someone as they shed this mortal coil lead me to think we meet already-passed loved ones in those last moments, in the in-between world between here and hereafter – whatever that hereafter is, even if it is infinite nothingness.)

Nina Cassian – a discovery I made in high school. Poetry that now feels overwrought and overdone, indelicate and “blocky” (I don’t even have a word that adequately conveys what I mean by “blocky” as the dictionary definition of “blocky” isn’t right). I don’t care for Cassian’s style now, but it provided a kind of shock value at the time, which was enough credibility for me. Hers was a voice, despite not being popular or apparently well-liked by most Romanians I have known, from a mysterious but newly open place. Every Cassian reference I made to Romanians was met with a “You should be reading Eminescu”. I did, but it did not fill the need I had at that moment.

Me, I am partial to Marin Sorescu but at the time of finding Cassian, I wanted to find women poets exclusively – not men, and not pre-20th century – from eastern, southern and central Europe. Cassian qualified. She satisfied my need at the time to explore the limited perspectives of life in specific countries through a female’s eyes.

Incidentally, it also contributed to my efforts to supply my brother and his friends with poems that would shock or offend teachers who never wanted to hear words like ‘orgasm’, ‘clitoris’ or, worst of all – ‘cunt’ (see also: Heather McHugh, Marge Piercy). They could not deny the legitimacy of a word like ‘cunt’ when it was wielded by these women writers and often by champions of feminism.

But yes, Cassian. Epiglottis –> Glottis.

Cassian’s work deals frequently with language and the self/identity divided by language or the identity language confers, and it is within these poems that I sensed her greatest strengths. Other works on other themes seemed weaker:

Language
My tongue — forked like snake’s
but without deadly intentions:
just a bilingual hissing.

Or

Vowel
A clean vowel
in my morning,
Latin pronunciation
in the murmur of confused time.
With rational syllables
I’m trying to clear the occult mind
and promiscuous violence.
My linguistic protest
has no power:
The enemy is illiterate.

And finally, the pièce de résistance, the poem that actually came to mind as “epiglottis” flapped its way casually into discussion, “Licentiousness”, which naturally was on the penultimate page I searched (after looking through hundreds of pages of disorganized collected poetry)…

Licentiousness
Letters fall from my words
as teeth might fall from my mouth.
Lisping? Stammering? Mumbling?
Or the last silence?
Please God take pity
On the roof of my mouth,
On my tongue,
On my glottis,
On the clitoris in my throat
vibrating, sensitive, pulsating,
exploding in the orgasm of Romanian.

Fractions

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As soon as you learn about fractions as a kid you (should) realize that life is short.

At what point does the perception shift? I had written in a blog post two years ago about how, when I was 4, I thought 30 seemed like a reasonable, elderly age to die. By the time I was 8 or 9, or as soon as we started studying fractions in school, I realized clearly that if I were to die at 30, my life was already almost one-third finished. The shortness of it all hit me suddenly, and early, meaning that I was never like the kids and even young adults who looked at slightly older adults and thought of them as “old”. It was one of my first steps toward looking at people and seeing much more depth and a bigger story than I could guess or perceive on the surface.

This ‘seeing a bigger story’ thing has two sides. Of course it makes me more compassionate – I don’t join into making fun of people, their appearances, foibles or misfortunes. I try to see the whole person, his/her history and issues, what got him/her to where s/he is. On the other hand, this also means that I know that what I see and receive on the surface is just the surface – maybe even an act (intentional or otherwise). And no one is immune from this because, again, there are two sides: there is the person one tries to present and the person the other party perceives.

Still I could save myself a lot of trouble if I could just apply the caution of this wisdom: In the beginning it is all an act. I was thinking about MDL, ex-boyfriend, who was all sweetness and light and listening and generosity and compliments. Intentionally he misled because he took great delight in intentionally tearing a person down brick by brick (I later saw that he repeated this pattern in every single relationship he subsequently had). In the sum total of the thing, he was the ‘perfect guy’ for less than one-third of an already brief, blip-on-the-radar relationship that felt like it dragged on for an eternity – or at least a huge chunk of my youth. It was not at all a huge chunk, but it seemed like “prime time” during which I missed so many other opportunities because I was so busy trying to reclaim the false perfection of the beginning.

What I took away from it, and need to Always Remember: It is all an act in the beginning. Maybe not everything, and maybe not as overtly as it was for him, but in most cases, people (all of us; again – no one is immune) are either donning their Sunday best or wheeling out best behavior or best-case-scenario versions of themselves. Or they are in the middle of some kind of an episode, and you get caught up in their madness until you inevitably realize, as it all winds down, that oh, none of that was real. Ooops. Or you know right from minute one they are not at all who they claim but for various reasons you let it all happen, perhaps repeatedly, because it feels good, whether on its own or because it’s the opposite of whatever you’ve just been through or because of the strength of their conviction and decisiveness in knowing who they are and taking what they want – that stuff is magnetic, if fleeting. Or it’s all a complete accident without intent – somehow it’s still all an act.

Because of the rule of fractions and life-is-short admonishments, you kind of hope that this rule about everything being an act will prove false one of these days.

Crying wolf
I keep thinking I will stop writing blog posts, but then ideas pop into my head, and I feel I must cast them out and put them somewhere. Often my threats are true, but it happens that the random things must come out one way or another. As someone said to me the other day, describing his semi-imaginary personification of me upon first acquaintance, trying to skip over all the ‘in the beginning it was all an act’ machinations and guessing games, “I made you inconsistent, difficult to please, playful, fearsomely intelligent and very autonomous.” Thus, if I am so inconsistent, it will come as no surprise that one day, I claim I will quit writing blog posts and the next, I’m writing them.

Other nonsense
Films: Somers Town (on MUBI)
Books: The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Soundtrack du jour: “Less Young but as Dumb” – Dougie Poole

A palate-cleansing sorbet of trivialities

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Having contemplated a blogging hiatus recently, I briefly put the idea of a hiatus on hiatus. Now I am back to considering a break from it. I suppose it’s not like a store or job where you have to formally shut things down or go on sabbatical – I just follow the ‘inspiration’ for pouring out the contents of my sometimes addled mind as it (inspiration, not the mind) comes (or goes).

I am channeling this energy into an offline project that is moving forward very quickly, and it’s eating every bit of creative marrow I’ve got in my bones. Thus I will potentially write blog posts when I need to unload or unwind. It seems that my most prolific blog writing periods happen when I am thinking too much, overanalyzing and in periods of intense emotional confusion or anguish or something. (Anguish may be too strong a word, but I like it, so I will leave it.) Once free of these things, the feverish urge to blog floats away. Blogging is, in some ways, a kind of existential palate cleanser.

I finished Infinite Jest – finally. As I wrote before, I marveled at its massive depth and breadth but cannot say I liked it. It was laborious to read at times, and I could not wait for it to be finished. I am still reading six other books, though – some great and some for fun (all my ‘hone your psychic abilities’ books are in fun; I have, after all,  to fulfill the psychic destiny one of my exes claimed I had when, while hiking along for many silent hours near Háifoss in Iceland, I randomly blurted out, “Sorbet is a vegan dessert!”. He looked at me as though he’d seen a ghost, and said, “I was just right then thinking about how my grandmother used to make sorbet.”)

I watched the second season of Love on Netflix – it’s easy enough viewing but only remarkable in that “I’ll Be Your Mirror” plays at the end of one episode and made me think back to a moment in time – so very long ago – when I was briefly involved with a Polish guy who made me possibly the most eclectic music tapes ever, and I think he was the first to introduce me to the Velvet Underground (starting with this song). I also recall that he had nothing but critical disdain for the United States – but many years after we had lost contact, I discovered that, after returning to Poland for a number of years, he eventually made a permanent home in, of all places, the American South (that’s a familiar trope, though – the “America Haters” who end up living there quite comfortably in the end).

I’ve cut back immensely on the TV viewing, but there are still things I watch – such as the aforementioned Love, binged in an afternoon; Girls – I’ve hate-watched the whole series, so why would I not complete the circle by watching its final season?; The Americans – it’s one of the best shows ever, and somehow more relevant than ever… and other stuff as well, but it is true that once I broke the cycle (ha!) it seemed quite dull to return to the majority of shows I’d mindlessly been sucking in.

Otherwise, life is work, creative projects, a series of last-minute travel or guests and always hoping for sunlight over the dismally, stormy greyness that pervades today. Nice weather, too, is a palate cleanser.

Letters of the Unliving (Mina Loy)
The present implies presence
thus
unauthorized by the present
these letters are left authorless–
have lost all origin
since the inscribing hand
lost life.

The hoarseness of the past
croaks
from creased leaves
covered with unwritten writing
since death’s erasure
of the writer–
erased the lover

Well-chosen and so ill-relinquished
the husband heartsease–
acme of communion–

made euphonious
our esoteric universe.

Ego’s oasis now’s
the sole companion.

My body and my reason
you left to the drought of your dying:
the longing and the lack
of a racked creature
shouting
to an unanswering hiatus
“reunite us!”

till slyly
patience creeps up on passion
and the elation of youth
dwindles out of season.

Agony
ends in an equal grave
with ecstasy.

An uneasy mist
rises from this calligraphy of recollection
documenting a terror of dementia.

This package of ago
creaks with the horror of echo.

The bloom of love
decoyed
to decay by the finger
of Hazard the swindler–
deathly handler who leaves
no post-mortem mask
but a callous earth.

Posing the extreme enigma
in my Bewilderness
can your face excelling Adonis
have ceased to be
or ever have had existence?

With you no longer the addresser
there is no addressee
to dally with defunct reality.

Can one who still has being
be inexistent?

I am become
dumb
in answer
to your dead language of amor.

Diminuendo
of life’s imposture
implies no possible retrial
by my present self–
my cloud-corpse
beshadowing your shroud.

The one I was with you:
inhumed in chasms.
No creator
reconstrues scar-tissue
to shine as birth-star.

But to my sub-cerebral surprise
at last on blase sorrow
dawns an iota of disgust
for life’s intemperance:

“As once you were”

Withhold your ghostly reference
to the sweet once were we.

Leave me
my final illiteracy
of memory’s languor–

my preference
to drift in lenient coma
an older Ophelia
on Lethe.

Photo (c) 2008 Angela Schmeidel Randall used under Creative Commons license.

Eight weeks

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How different eight little weeks, and the speed with which they pass, can feel depending on the place you find yourself in life.

For a man struggling every day, every minute, with sobriety, eight weeks is an eternity – but almost an unbelievable one (to the degree that he has been fearful to even count or keep track consciously). And each little milestone (being able to claim two months!) feels like a major triumph, but also comes with a possible downside. Like all lifelong ‘afflictions’, it’s forever. It’s something he lives with that must be maintained and nurtured with great care and consideration. He may be sober but never free of the label, the disease, the temptation.

Eight weeks feels like a very long time: each of the days passing not hour by hour but minute by minute. Each day packed with AA meetings, work and gym-going (or whatever fills those minutes) and the slowing evening more difficult, staring at the clock while the minutes pass until the stores that sell alcohol finally close. (All these themes appear at length in David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest, which I’ve been slogging my way through for days; the addiction parts are by far the most interesting.) It’s a safety net, knowing he can’t get anything if he suddenly fell into despair. Eight weeks, eight days, eight hours, eight minutes. Everything broken down to the smallest parts, anything to make the time go faster.

Meanwhile, for a newly pregnant woman, if she is even 100% sure she is pregnant at eight weeks, time is almost accelerated. At eight weeks, she has barely accepted the reality but is in a race with time if she, for example, intends to terminate the pregnancy. Many places have a 12-week cutoff point (at which point she could still terminate but needs special permission from her doctor or a panel of doctors), and while one would imagine that the four weeks in between eight and twelve weeks is a whole month, it’s never quite that simple.

She has a massive, life-changing decision to make. She may be in denial. She may even attempt to schedule an appointment to terminate, but even that can take time. Again it depends on where in the world she is. (It could be that depending on the stage of the pregnancy, the abortion will cost more; in the US many states don’t have abortion facilities at all, making the whole ordeal that much more challenging.) Eight weeks into a pregnancy, it’s already so well underway – like two months have already slipped away sneakily, almost without her conscious knowledge. And she wishes for anything that could make the time go slower.

Blue skies & laughing cries

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“Knew’st thou one month would take thy life away,
Thou’dst weep; but laugh, should it not last a day.”
-Robert Herrick

Laughter is an elixir, and once I have some, I crave more – I would not go so far as to say I am out on the prowl looking for it. It’s like love – if you’re looking, you’re going to come up empty. But those moments when something strikes you as so funny that you are unable to breathe because you’re laughing so hard… well, those moments are rare. And coveted.

Three days in a row I got completely unexpected, five-minute, cannot-catch-my-breath, cannot-stop-laughing, projectile-tears-flying-from-my-eyes crack-ups. I neared actual hyperventilation. Laughing this hard comes with considerable discomfort, really, but discomfort that is well worth it.

Your Laughter
-Pablo Neruda
Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

shot in the back-shot in the arm

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Not quite an Alpine vista, the world of rural western Sweden in mid-March was this time mostly sun-filled, a shot in the arm for getting things done. Pleasurable things. Okay, maybe hauling recyclables to the recycle station doesn’t count. Must be done, and there is some pleasure to be found in accomplishing the must-do stuff, too.

Conversation (so much laughing). Walking. Writing. Films, thanks to MUBI (Fogo – what a weird accent these islanders have, such breathtaking scenery; I’m All Yours – an unusual French film that had the makings of a really good story but was not sure what it wanted to be and suffered from trying to clumsily weave too many narrative threads into it; Catch Me Daddy – quite a grim and disturbing picture, mostly filmed in West Yorkshire with a bunch of foul-mouthed Scots in the mix). Music (mostly Elena Frolova – various things from her, inspired by digging out my CD of Frolova setting Marina Tsvetaeva poetry to music, but also Nippon Girls volumes 1 and 2).

Reading (First, I quickly devoured a basic and silly book on developing ‘psychic abilities’. Not because I think it will work or because I want to develop clairvoyance. I thought it might give more insight into developing deeper intuition.

The rest of my reading time was devoured – and I mean devoured; time is devoured by the book, not the other way around – by David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. I’m still only halfway through. For a month I sat at about 2% completion, according to my Kindle, but in the last two days, I managed to chip away at it to reach the halfway mark. (It is, after all, well over 1,000 pages.) I don’t necessarily like it, but I marvel at it. I really like select parts of it, and others I can take or leave. I suppose this is symptomatic of the ‘bigger is better’ credo that seems to have propelled the book forward, which  Michiko Kakutani referred to in her original review:

“Perfect, however, “Infinite Jest” is not: this 1,079-page novel is a “loose baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind.”

“The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.”

Sometimes that “encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind” is fascinating; sometimes it’s pages of mind-numbing, sleep-inducing quicksand. As a whole, the concept is fascinating but digging into the details isn’t always.

The language – both its volume and particular use – can be overwhelming – the breadth, depth, randomness – lack of narrative or plot-driven clarity while still somehow offering some other kind of clarity – is not something I can really explain or describe or review. It is exactly what it is unapologetically, with its sudden, pages-long description of the terror of suddenly moving from aural telephone to videophony or little statements like, “Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak.” Haha. You never know whether to laugh, cry, be puzzled. Less story or narrative than a radical transformation of language and form that feels that it inadvertently (though this is quite deliberate) ends up telling many stories anyway.

It’s just so much, so complex, so full of digressions, but the kind you can get engrossed in, not distracted by. Random but not.

Long passages about addiction and AA “sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can’t pay the loan back but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works…” “The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you’ve got the Disease like he’s got the Disease…”.

Relatable, but at the same time so far out there, it’s not. You have to sit and wonder about the writer with the kind of mind who produced this tome much more than the content of the final product itself in some ways (and he was clearly tortured enough to take his own life).)

Signals

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“A signal is what you use in your car, dude. Not a way of communicating with someone who clearly needs direct answers.”

I only get through things and process them by writing and thinking. It does not work to talk about things, not only because I don’t know how to say or explain things without introspection and processing first but also because I am so bloody concerned about how things will affect other people. Like… if I say things that are not fully formed, I’m putting burdens onto someone else – and of course, in a two-way exchange, you can intuit and know when that the other person can’t handle or deal with whatever you might say, or will take it all on board and cloud things up for them, or make them feel worse or guilty. And why do that when you could suffer with the uncertainty or hurt on your own without making two (or more) people feel bad? It sounds like I am being some kind of martyr (I’m not), but I just can’t do it. It is not my nature to expose a larger group of people to harm or damage if I can take the hit myself (even when that means internalizing something). I have to work on this. Anyone who knows me knows this.

By the time anyone gets the full lowdown on something I experienced or felt, it’s because it is in the past – over, done, processed and packaged neatly into a box and tied with a bow. Then after the fact and all the acts, curtain closed, I can reveal all the feelings I went through – but it is like I have to finish going through it before I can show it… which is not the healthiest way to go about it. I write, think, feel my way through things, and then revise, think and finally come to a peace with even the most painful of things. Then perhaps I put the ‘incident report’ in some form or another into blog posts, but by the time I do this, the deep-seated and immediate emotion is long gone. There was a time when I would not even have made this much public, so I like to think I am making the most imperceptible steps forward. Sometimes the disconnect between the brain and the fingers is enough to make these moves for you. For example, deleting something that you wanted to save, hitting send before you were ready. Are these really mistakes or is the immediacy of the fingers taking action where our brain fears to go?

This is perhaps also where my own blind spots/insensitivities are. I process and publish, and because it’s all over for me, and I am just ‘clearing out cobwebs’ and more or less just telling a story after the fact, I don’t think about how the retelling and my own rendering (which is a compendium of my feelings and interpretations throughout my processing – not an objective recollection of fact) of ‘how things went’ might be hurtful to anyone else. Another thing to work on.

But at least all of these ‘operations’ provide an indication of where close partnerships, friendships, relationships and the like are actually impossible. Where you find you really censor yourself, close up and hold back – not because you can’t share but because you don’t want to unduly influence or trouble the other person – where’s the parity – or clarity – there?

It’s a little bit fucked up – when you’re adults, intelligent and seemingly capable of communication – and even talk ad nauseam about the importance of communication (thus ending up being all form and no content, which is a good way to fool yourselves into thinking you are actually communicating…) – you should be able to say what is on your mind. But it becomes one of the hardest things to do. You then detach to get to solid ground again, and that journey takes you through the full range of feeling – or elements*, as DH Lawrence would have it. But you eventually make it back to the start, to rediscover the things that made your mind race with joy and thought.

It’s a shame, too, as you end up at such a distance from, in a protracted silence with, someone who is without doubt beautiful, amazing, hilarious, messy, quirky, witty, and smart – exactly as you always believed, someone you genuinely care about and truly miss. But having communicated – or not – in staccato fits and starts, never quite saying what was going on, never quite being truly open – you may never get back to a place where you see anything but yellow caution lights in a sea of faceless stop-and-go traffic.

Most importantly, and this is my signal: I am still, and always, here, and I still love. Unconditionally. If I didn’t, it would not have been such a trial in the first place. Of course.

Elemental*
-D.H. Lawrence
Why don’t people leave off being lovable
Or thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be lovable,
And be a bit elemental instead?

Since man is made up of the elements
Fire, and rain, and air, and live loam
And none of these is lovable
But elemental,
Man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements
And be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies
As fire is.
I wish they’d be true to their own variation, as water is,
Which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice
Without losing its head.

I am sick of lovable people,
Somehow they are a lie.

Photo (c) 2006 Rachel Knickmeyer used under Creative Commons license without modification.