that would be the dream - the mosaic, the hand-painted, ancient historic, added-on, made-new, art deco vintage-hippie-revival haven, an orchard, a slanted roofline, dormers and wood and tile.  Sure, it calls to me.  Obviously.  Could it ever not?  Are there people, real human people, to whom it would not  beckon?  I cannot decide where to hang the great dragonfly.  Darling, i have been saving the great dragonfly for twenty years for this, with all his blue and green, with the marks and leftover folds of each interval.

I have not been dreaming of this house - there's no piano, there's too much light, the garden is so narrow and the trees so high.  And anyway, happiness is not tied to location.  My home is not a place.  As we speed through the edge of the galaxy, I remain an insignificant speck forever at the center of the universe.

Labels: house

Remember when we were in St Jean and there were raspberries and i stood there and picked them and ate them with my straw hat in the sun - remember all those little orange plums he saw in the park that grow everywhere now - remember, Emily when you died and i found blackberries and i put a little heap of them on your tree and my fingers were stained purple - remember when i used to pluck the oniongrass in the green hollow under the forest, sharp and clear and alone with someone mowing the lawn in the distance, past the trees.

All those golden summers, so far and so dizzyingly immediate, a collection of particular, unconfiscatable jewels to make me hold my breath.  Look, honey, look: i don't have to go in the light, i don't have to hold the Light (as if i could contain it), because we are there.

Labels: writing

caffeine wraps around my spine like an abusive relationship.  Maybe i should drink less.  Maybe i should never have married him.  I don't even fucking know any more.  I used to have an aunt who didn't like to hear me swear - oh, honey, it doesn't matter.  Your god loves you.  Language changes.

Labels: writing

that was all real, once: what i see, what i touch.  what i felt.  But our memories lie, stretch, embellish, filter, and destroy.  Memory is not real in the sense that it was then.  It is a leftover perception, an echo, distorted.  And, finally, then, untrustworthy.  Isn't that a conclusion?

I can love a thing which is not real.  This does not make the love not real.  The love does not make the thing real; it is neither sufficient nor necessary.  (that would be magical thinking.)  I can love a story or an illusion or a facade, and my emotion remains fact.

The world is not going to wake up one day and be fair and perfect.

All of this has no right to be anything less than self-evident.

Labels: reflection

Write my own fairytales.  Act like i know my own fairytales.  Remember how cold it always was upstairs? - remember how everything was always on the porch? - remember how i believed every word and every promise.  I think at the time it was even the truth.  Forgive them for that, liz.  Everybody's doing their best.  You believe that, on the good days.

And it'll never be so simple or so easy, but then, it never was, and will always be.  Illusion of reality, the impermanence of all things, what what.  If i am only one point towards a story of an illusion of reality ... one shouldn't be surprised, to get lost in a hall of mirrors.  Love is real - the love which resides (which begins) in my heart is real.  Start there.

Labels: writing

Look, it was one lapse in judgement.  One thing.  And, seeing as how everyone makes mistakes, liz, maybe be a little less harsh: it could be a mistake.  I could call it a mistake, own up to that, acknowledge the oceans of shame and humiliation on my own map, and quit going all here-be-monsters.

But i've crossed the dark space already.  I know which icky things are hiding in the depths; they're as familiar as sunshine, as thoroughly practiced as boiling water.  In retrospect, what i need to do is figure out where i am, and quit forgetting i know how to swim.  I know how to swim; i've been doing this for ages.

Labels: writing

It's Machiavellian, nuanced, poses and feints and traps and honestly what the fuck.  That's just fucking creepy.

Not to mention unfair.

Labels: writing

Sometimes it all seems so far away.  It is all so far away.  But other times i don't notice - or it doesn't matter - or everything is far away, and all times are soon.  Those jewel-toned moments, the imprisoned lightning, will always exist.  (we have always been at war with eastasia.  we have always lived in the castle.  we will always end up here.  the man in black fled across the desert.)  What happens after we die, she asks? but what is after?

tolle talks about the now.  So did Annie.  It is always now.  And now has only the residues of before and only the tiny seeds of next, and we all wade through it, panning for gold ... It has always been so far away, so foreign.  And it is always right there.

I carry it in my heart - your freedoms, your wide-open limitlessness, your dreams.  your Dream.  your closed-up, deep-running shame and prudery.  your ambition.  your confidence.  your stated acceptance, your fear, your optimism and unshakeable belief, your paranoia and conspiracy theories - your total mixed-up-ed-ness and canyony divisions.  Your willingness to work for things, and hard, and angrily; to willfully ignore things, your refusal of help or criticism, your entitlement and privilege.  But you were never a monolith - you were cracked from the very beginning, fault lines and statelines running up and down and crossing, supervolcanoes in waiting.  There were always people to say that everything was going to shit, and that your welcome was hollow, your inherited colonialism arrogant and presumptious: they'd been saying it already for hundreds of years before i was born.

They're right, always.

But they say it everywhere else, too, and in every language.

The way you evolve further, now - where are you going?  The more you change, do you stay the same?  Am i fixed in amber, a relic?  My voice changes, my language changes, people say my words are not the same as your words, and you seem so terrified and angry.  Is it already too late?

Labels: expat, reflection

breathe, and let the light fill my lungs, my chest, clean, cold water.  i write in circles and talk about the weather.  You can't see your hand, six inches in front of your face: i remember those days.  bad days, i tell you wut.  They were all in paris, all together, all the expat-Modernists.  have u sen paris?  The other stack of younger ones in new york in the eighties, in the nineties, bits of talent getting tangled and angry in each other.  Vultures, vultures everywhere, and what looks like huge bats.  They must be everywhere now.  echo echo echo

Labels: writing

who knew?  the mist rising off the river between the hills - the sunrise, the sunrise!, the little fishing boats and people swimming in the eddies and a great loaded ship going upstream - they must have come through the eiserne Tor in the night. imagine those pale cliffs, at night, and a boat like this.  A tree, a whole tree, in the middle of the well-grown Danube, floating serenely down between the little wavelets.  The mountains in a row, the spine going along into blue ... the old Soviet hotel at the top and i swear on anything i have been here, i have seen all this in a dream, i know this room and its clouds and its windows and i can see Romania ...  Ice cream by the riverbank, obviously.

Labels: travel

i pull back, quick like i've burned myself.  kali, paul, legend, carina.  no, this is part of it: finding patterns and so.  the whirling, this is just not done.  this is not real.

next day: name it.  claim it.  understand it.  find the fuzzy edges, the borderlands, and stay away from the precipice - what does that translate to in the map of my head?  it is like a mountain, steep and tempting and treacherous, (but then what isn't full of treachery and the threat of betrayal, these days?) and you see the peak shining burning a star a sun just out of reach and it's breathless and the air is so fine, so bright, and i am scared of heights after all when there's no guardrail, nothing to hold on to, and it can all crumble and collapse into the abyss.  know it, chart it.  the base camp can still be safety, and as much as anyone needs.

breathe, and keep my balance.  if i could keep in my mind that i will never know everything, never be everything, never protect everything, never predict everything.  god is everywhere.  i am not.  this is a hedgehog-big thing which i do not know.

In high school we read Russian poetry and i didn't appreciate it at the time - though the professor did her best, be fair; we were children, reading childish things, and it did stick.  did Akhmatova ever meet Hemingway?  they couldn't have: he wasn't in Paris yet, he was just a boy ... i am reading Chekhov now.

Labels: writing

Safety in numbers, clots of commuters jaywalking across the big street.  We are like birds together, sparrows fleeing.  I am a cipher, a placeholder, carving the space around me with the points of my umbrella ...  I can trace my path back - i can follow it, i can follow it the whole way.  This is invaluable.  look there!  look there.  this is what i have been talking about, the entire time.  the colors, the shades, the

This is what i have been doing.  My footprints stay for a moment on the wet roadway.

Labels: writing

Reason #806 i love my neighborhood: nobody has to shave their legs to take the kid to a drag show in the park (especially in the rain).

I know, i'm showing off.

Labels: vienna

things i noticed while rereading the waste land, this time around:
i always go back to the waste land.

i could get a lilac tattoo. I fucking hate April.
Sissi is in it? Sissi is in it?
16: bored to death. (i don't mean it, she does.)
europe in 1848 was nuts
30: i never know how much i never know
under the rock, he is afraid of what i am afraid of (obviously)
41 asshole.
I have zero fucking sympathy for Tristram and Isolde. Sorry. I just can't.
Y's French Tarot cards are all different ...
46: i do not believe in arbitrary
the Wheel is in hebrew!
93: this doesn't end well. Ever. Rape, love, suicide, .ever. Revenge.
You keep telling the same story
ophelia, dido, cleo, the hyacinth girl.
118: fuck you. also, god, that's morbid, i love it.
120: i have had this conversation. Those are pearls that were his eyes means it was never supposed to be like this.
137 people have been here since the beginning of people.
168: fuck you i said it's mine
fuck you i said it's mine
III it's all damp corpses innit
but since when does it rhyme?  must be red with wot.
he's so young - it's his, it must be.
242: see what i mean? ooooooh, humans never change.
253: again with the dead girls?
the whole thing is full with being afraid.
memento mori.  (but death is not what i am afraid of)
352 dry hopes.  if there was a martini on the rock
if there was a martini and no rock
if there was only a little gin and no vermouth
an olive, a twig
365 it's the lilac gentleman, off his train.
actually there's no movement, is there, here - the train is gone
390 and only stillness will remain.
425 it's too late. but he knows.
428 soon, my love, soon.  very soon.
431 huckleberry ;)
yes i said yes i will yes.  are you nice?

Labels: writing

Sometimes i could barely see for the red and the black. If I had stomped my foot it would have raised a mushroom cloud, rings expanding. I saw 28 Days Later, ages ago, all those new-generation bloodbaths, and was afraid of those zombies (i call them zombies), that move too fast, that are so feral. I think now if one of them had touched me, come near me, it would have disintegrated of covetous want - i outranked them, i surpassed them, they were nothing next to me. I was a tower and a mountain and a vast, sheer cliff, and the cliff was my anger and i was the cliff and i stood on the cliff and the entire rest of the world was tiny, minuscule, ants in a hole compared to the old-world-glacier bulk of my rage. (The effect i am going for is that of being hit in the face with a steel beam, but that you keep consciousness.)

Other times i was sad - and i can't say i don't know why i was sad, i knew why i was sad, it is mind-numbingly obvious why i was sad - but there was no proximate cause, no immediately identifiable trigger, just this sudden tsunami of endless grief.

Labels: emptor

It all comes of following the Dalai Lama on Twitter - or, rather, it doesn't, but the other way round - and now, i see Precious, i see Incendies, i do not know if they are supposed to be full of hope, if i should come out lighter than i went in. I cannot help but question this response. Any version of the old Leonard Cohen Hallelujah is about water long, long gone under the bridge, and diluted to only the vaguest ghost of bitterness, only a memory. That one about Captain Kangaroo and wallpaper, that one is doubly ironic. The first layer of irony, that's a freebie we can all agree on, but the second? Is that normal?

Dalai Lama says we are all the same, but i already knew that. Nice to hear, again, for real; the force is strong with this one, etc.

Labels: reflection

i see them in my mind's eye, playing over the strings, just like all those years ago, and everything has changed, but nothing has changed, and i remember. please, please god, my head swims ... to put one foot in front of the other, to continue, with this redyelloworange flame, i can't even imagine it, ludicrous. that kind of mask is bullshit, i know, by now, at least i know, but all the same, the 1993 version runs past. It's not what i want, but it is, but it isn't.

Labels: drama

I like knowing the provenance of things. I feel better when i know it. Where did this come from, and why is it still here, and how long did it stay at points between? What contributed to its creation? Was there one ultimate seed, or many?

Labels: reflection

It is having a crisis. I don't know what to say here, how to reclaim it.

I had hoped that when it was finalized, it would also be done, but of course that has turned out to definitely not be the case. Very far from the case. I had hoped i could wrap it all up in a big black box and let it slowly turn to dust in a distant attic corner, but it's not working. I knew this would happen. I said this would happen. I told you. I fucking told you.  And i know what you say about backpacks, but that doesn't make it - that doesn't make it okay, that doesn't make it acceptable for me to continue to behave this way.  For me.

(Please note: there is one of me, and seven billion seperate yous, plus the whole world. Chances are, you're not it.  Chances are, we will never meet.  Chances are, i will never see you again.)

You disappeared, and you have not kept your promise. I don't know if you're happy this way - again, i hope so. The world has seemed bigger since then, and emptier, and more friendly, when i remember.  Full of connection and possibility. I trust people.  Dear god thank you for that.  Anyone could be you.

It has been so long ... i am so much older.  This hasn't been turning to dust at all, i swear it (though anyway i hold it too precious) -

It's okay. You were none of you anything i could keep.

Layer upon layer and how do we find meaning in the world. If i have always known you, if i have always been with you, i have always lost you. It has forever been this way...

You exist. This is the connection. The universe is in chaos, is in change, and as it would be completely egotistical to contain it i have to let it go.  i have to let it go.  i have to let it go.

Labels: people

I had a dream that my ex-husband introduced me to his new girlfriend, and his new girlfriend was a sculpted Croatian surfer dude with bleached tips. I did not know which pronoun set to use, which was awkward and embarrassing.

Labels: random

*not very factual on motorcycles either

:anmut: :annika: :chin: :dooce: :ewok mama: :food: :little frog school: :lj: :longform: :low odysseys: :natalya: :rich: :salon: :slate: :this is how: :unique yn:



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