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Monday, December 30, 2013

Here at the End of the World

"Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a curious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music... [...] It mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earths crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations, the void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers. Gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistable feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceieve the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tones that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch it...to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is, thats triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephermeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent."*


                I wonder what else I´ve inherited from my parents other than my dad´s large nose and my mom´s slender wrists. My father´s restlessness and constant agitation? My mom´s tendency when talking to strangers to touch them, lightly, on the elbow? Their great affection for a cold beer at the end of a hot day, all of us, when we were still all of us, sitting on the deck of the sailboat listening to some echoing country song, drifting over a muddy river somewhere, enjoying the fading heat of afternoon and welcoming evening together, quietly. 
                I don´t think my mom believes in god because we never went to church, but we spent a lot of time out in the woods, by the beach or in the mountains of her north carolina home, and she always seemed to be really happy there, saying out in the middle of nowhere is where she felt at peace, and in tune with something else, something larger than herself. I learned that from her, the ability to sit still somewhere and to let myself feel insignifgant, and now I finally understand the word ascetic from a book I read on the plane to Argentina. I knew the word, but now it makes sense, why mom sailed around the world and spent so much time away from people, in the middle of nowhere. A ascetic finds peace in sacred places, not just empty marble churches but deserts, open oceans, small places on tops of mountains. I understand now that I know many people like this, and certaintly have dated a few of them. It ties in my answer for people when they ask me what I´m doing in Buenos Aires, alone, wandering around this melancholy city. 
               Nature is a place I´ve never felt lonely, but there is a loneliness in large cities that is unattainable for me anywhere else. I realized at nineteen walking around Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona...I felt contained in my own body, alone but quiet calm, and enjoying that loneliness when compared to the world there, around me. Buenos Aires feels the same. In any country where I don´t speak the language fluently I´m forced to think what I want to say through, all the way down to each syllable. I have to clear my head and focus on what I really want or need to say. I have to listen with an intensity I am not capable of at home. The parks and giant, impossible bright green trees are beautiful. I enjoyed the sunset in Uruguay, but its the buildings and the rush of traffic and people that are truly what I´m here to see:
               Women on the subway, passing by me on the street. Each with her own perfume, a whole world of perfumes here at the end of the world. Flowers falling out of balconies, windows open leaking songs and shouts, fights and whistles and declarations about the weather. Open doorways spilling air conditioning, the smells of cleaning products, fresh and soft and welcoming. People buying grocieries to cook dinners I won´t eat, kissing people on the street corners, hurrying onto buses. Antique books I can´t read, the smell of dust and leather and fur in every store, in the market, like the smell of my grandmother´s closet in a house I´ll never see again. The ummistakable smells of summer, of diesel fuel and rotting paper and meat, raw and cooking and overcooked. I could never be an ascetic, it´s places like here where I feel alive, where I unpack my thoughts fully and place them, tightly rolled, back inside for the trip home. 

"That was Buenos Aires...a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid style avenues and Catalan cafes next to Neapolitan avaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droit mansions, beyond all of which, however, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way."**

                


*J.M.G Le Clezio, The Flood
**Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer

Monday, October 14, 2013

A Truer New Year

"Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life- sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans- tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke, and sometimes fate. Right now now there is a chain of circumstances of guilty mistakes or lucky decisions, whose consequences await me around the corner; and even though I know it, although I have the uncomfortable certainty that those things are happening and will affect me, there is no way I can anticipate them. Struggling against their effects is all I can do: repair the damages  take best advantage of the benefits  We know it, we know it very well; nevertheless, it's always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are, it's always disconcerting to discover, when it's another person who brings us the revelation, the slight or complete lack of control we have our own experience."

               Growing up, I realized not too long ago, involves doing a lot of the things you'd swore you'd never do when you were younger. I'm far more like likely to say, "I'll never do that again," than swear off something initially. Some of these things are fun, wild, irresponsible parts of being alive, like traveling to another country where you don't speak the language, swimming at night in the ocean, going on a blind date, etc...but more often than not they're more harrowing experiences, the kind where you actually learn the depth and dimension of consequences that stick with you for a long time. Like the decision you make early on in the evening when you realize you're about to have sex with someone other than the person you're dating, and it just sort of washes over and you and you think, this is going to be fine, this might still work out, and then later in every subsequent relationship knowing it's not other people you have to be watchful of, but yourself. Or losing touch with a best friend, and knowing there's been too much time to ever repair the distance between you, in years of miles, and remembering in all your other friendships after the importance of a letter, a late night phone call, a simple text touching base. 
             Sometimes there's also the reversal of things I've sworn off of, you know when you say you'll never talk to so-and-so again but then you slowly forget why you were so mad and you become close again and the cycle repeats itself weeks or months or years later. I'm bad at holding grudges. Which I think is mostly a good thing. It feels good to forgive someone. It's easier to forget slights and perceived insults than to let them simmer in the back of your head somewhere. And yet...
              Around this time about two years ago my dad wrote me a letter, outlining not only the ways I've fucked up as an individual but also with the weighty end note saying that he would rather not have a daughter than have me as his. We were very close when I was younger, but after my parents divorce and then my very hard-headed adolescence we went through years of spotty communication, to put it lightly. Every time we got in an argument I'd say, ok, that's it, I'm done, and then a year later I'd end up talking to him until we would have another, eventual blow out. The letter he sent me sent me on sort of an emotional tailspin, as you might imagine, and all our communication ceased. I was on tour maybe 8 or 9 months later with my band Rose Cross, and my step-mom called to tell me my dad was in the hospital, and had just had a heart attack. I didn't tell any of my band mates, until we were in Pensacola. 
              We were partying after the show, in a steep two story apartment that two really nice kids invited us home to. I can't remember their names for the life of me, but I remember being so cold that I kept waking up in the middle of the night to try and get their dogs to lie on the bed with me, and ended up sleeping under orphaned jackets and backpacks. Lying awake, so troubled by the cold (I remember it was a very cold winter because our Atlanta show was canceled because of an ice storm and all the roads in and out were shut down), I turned to my drummer and just said, "there's something I sort of need to do in the morning." We had been up doing drugs or drinking, or both, it does't matter, but Jon and I woke up and drove our dodge conversion van to the hospital there. I have no idea what he did while I was in the hospital, but it meant a lot to me that he woke up early and took me there, and then didn't tell anyone else in the band later when they asked where we went ("oh, just out for coffee"). No one in the hospital said anything to me, I remember thinking how wild it was that no one stopped me, and I wandered through blindingly white corridors until I found where he was suppose to be, connected to tubes and bandaged and gowned (he had ended up having some sort of open heart surgery, but it was only vaguely explained to me, in passing, months later). And my dad, Parker, who I really did like so much for so many years of my life, just laughed and said, "fancy seeing you here!" So that was that. We never talked about the letter. We exchanged some weird hugs, and then we resumed our normal, strained communication. 
              Recently we got into another fight, and we aren't speaking again. He insisted that I was a loser, and wasting my life, or ruining it, something to that effect. Coincided so perfectly with fall, when I'm already filled with a sort of shadowy, intangible nostalgia, like the creeping deep shadows that get colder and fuller, when there's something about the chill in the air and the smell of fires that makes me sad. I start thinking of all the ways I have fucked up. All those letters unsent. Rejection letters from the few graduate schools I actually wanted to go to. People younger than me moving on with their lives and having different adventures and experiences when sometimes I feel like I'm stuck on the same page, living the same story as four years ago. I think I know enough now not to say I'll never talk to him again, but I think I at least know better than to mail him the letter I wrote in response. I'll just tuck it away for now. I wrote him a letter explaining all the ways I'm not, in fact, taking anything for granted in my life and how even though I might not be any sort of a professional anything, there's at least a lot of things I enjoy doing and am lucky enough to have a good group of people around me who care about me...but why bother explaining anything to him? My biggest fear as a kid, and the one thing I can safely say I have sworn to never do, is that I'll never be like him. Still, the dialogue in my head, where I'm telling him everything I've done so far in my life and everything I still have a chance to do, and how lucky I am and who-the-fuck-wants-to-be-a-lawyer-anyway, all that? It's pretty good motivation. 

"They're all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken."*
             
             Maybe this is just a season for regret. My mom sent me an envelope full of essays I wrote as a kid about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Always an artist. Always a published writer, from a very young age. Reading those sloppily written essays, on faded, grey elementary school paper, touched a nerve in me for sure. I imagined schools I never went to, places I never moved to, opportunities put off or missed completely. Then, the weather gets beautiful all of a sudden. I read a few good books, went out walking, took a bubble bath, cooked dinner with my boyfriend, and everything once again seems alright. Fall once again presents itself, like a truer new year, full of possibilities and things to be learned. 




*The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Visit from the Goon Squad

I. Books 

"His desire was so small in the end that [he] could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. [She] was baffled at first, then distraught [...] but eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken [her]; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, [he] supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He's presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that [she] had forgotten how things were between them before [he] began to fold up his desire; she'd forgotten and was happy- had never not been happy- and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him."* 

        Sometimes in passing people like to drop these tiny bombs on me where they say things like, "oh but you get along with everybody." I know when it's said it's meant well, I'm never really offended, but I always think excitedly, internally, "holy shit they're right!" Then I spiral a little bit, worry about who I'm too nice to, who deserves it, if I'm not critical enough in my personal relationships. I'm not ever too nice, it's just that I might try too hard to like everyone. I mean to say that I tend to gloss over certain things in order to attain a balance- left over from a real shitty divorce (my parents) most likely- where everyone gets along and no one is trying to kill each other. I like playing this part; the middle man, camp counselor, whatever you want to call it. I like plans. I like difficult people. I like to organize, mediate, and all that stuff that probably drives my best friends crazy (but they like me because of their own fucked up problems too). With that being said, I am wild about this book by Jennifer Egan.
        I am fully aware of the criticism surrounding this book, but I can gloss over some of the criticism and focus on what's really amazing. Do I need to explain? Have I become one of those people that asks rhetorical questions? Fuck no. I bet if you didn't like the book it's because of some of the last chapters (I sort of skimmed them, not really my style but I think it took some guts, you'd have to read the book to know what I'm referring to). Cool, write about it for your professors while you get your MFA but I'm working 40 hours a week at a bar. I just want to say that the book freaked me out more than anything I've read in awhile and that's saying a lot (the next two books freaked me out too actually). To me, the best parts of the book were about how people loose touch with one another, destroy each other, forget about themselves, and betray their own instincts, all because of time passing and their own very small, innocent decisions that amount to tragedy- their own or someone else's. The redeeming quality of the book was that most of the characters go on. They just keep fucking up or eking out whatever shitty life they're trying to live, a few are redeemed (debatable) but it seems very realistic that no matter how you fuck up your life, it's just going to keep happening.That might not be a saving grace, but it's true. Characters in the book that you felt sure were going to "make it" just totally fell apart, by I guess my own standards. The book made me question my own ideas about growing up, about marriage, about a career, about what was important. I'm not even sure I had appropriate responses to parts of the book. Still, I'm glad I read the book when I did. 

"Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home on the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel."**

        I think it's important for everyone to be intolerant of men whining about women, in every medium- music, books, poetry, tumblr, you name it. I don't mean whining in the sense of showing emotion, everyone deserves their own allotment of feelings, even self-centered miserable ones (goodness knows I've hammed it up a little on my own) but there's a fine line between "I have these feelings I want or need to share" and "this girl broke my heart and I didn't deserve it and she's a bad person" blah blah blah bullshit. Too often men get to use art as a cover up for their own bullshit, their own mistakes, and a mysterious girl gets the blame. I would say oh, about 90% of pop punk. However, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz doesn't fall into that trap.
       The collection of short stories, mostly centered around the same character (a sort of shadowy reflection of the author) completely fucking up relationships for his whole life. He really takes the blame, and not in a passive aggressive way, but with really tangible self-loathing that I found myself relating to (there was an old Gomek lyric, "four years of youth wasted/fucking up relationships/and several houses"). Dead pan depression, sometimes witty, mostly just sad, and I kept waiting for the characters to stop, to just...stop being so fucked up to one another, but they don't. That's real life I guess. The quote above is from one of the singular chapters with a female perspective, but that doesn't mean the other women in the book aren't given incredible dimension. The mother in most of the stories is the strongest character (the one really deserving of respect and never getting it) but the woman in this chapter, who is sort of patiently waiting for things to work out or fall apart, that really resonated with me most. I used to think that, like anything else, when you fall in love you could control it, wrestle with it, rail against it...I think I know now that when you fall in love you just have to allow it to happen, take a deep breath and see how thing's turn out. Sadly, for almost every character in this book, nothing works out, things fall apart, and the main character ends up alone. Refreshingly though, he knows it's his fault. These are the accounts of all the ways he betrayed his partners, and also himself. He says at the end, "that's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start  is all we ever get."

"'A writer needs four things to achieve greatness Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.' 'That's only three.' Alvis finished the wine. 'You have to do disappointment twice.'"***

        Another book about betrayal, complicated human interaction, and the degrading and redemptive qualities of time. Not quite as depressing as the first two. Inspired me to actually stay up last night and write these book reviews though. Don't judge it by the cover (literally awful, didn't pick it up several times from three different book stores) it's actually captivating and quite funny. 
       I read it in the van on my way up to Richmond with Mauser. I don't mind being cramped with seven people for ten hours if I have a good book to read, so if you find yourself on any long trips this summer it would be a good book to have. I don't have beach reads. I have van reads. 


*A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
**This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz 
***Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter 

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Deny All Shores

“Human beings, I thought, change so little, and are so much what they are, that there has been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing its terrible simplicity or its irremediable sorrow.”*

I did some things pretty poorly last year, and some sad shit was done to me in turn. I’m lucky though that I have some real stand-up women in my life. My mom, the doctor at the abortion clinic where I worked, and a handful of friends I can talk to about anything about from Marquez to masturbation. Either Nikki or Amanda came up with this idea of “making it nice around the tree” which we say a lot now but haven’t really explained so I’m going to do it now because it has a lot to do with the only resolution I really made. You know how when you sleep with someone (or mess around with someone or make out with them in the bathroom and then forget about it) and instead of falling madly in love you’re just met with a deadpan sort of silence? Then there’s that windfall of awkwardness and you and your sort of maybe partner avoid each other at the bar or make weird eye contact at a show and you sort of tap you’re foot impatiently and you say, alright, enough of this and you go up and say hello and some jokes are made and then you’re laughing and you’re friends again or maybe for the first time? THAT’s making it nice around the tree, and after that you can either keep being friends again or for the first time or maybe you end up sleeping together again. Either way it doesn’t fucking matter if you’re CONSENTING ADULTS (we are exclusively interested in OUR OWN TREES unlike the guy who cornered me at the Atlantic and asked me, specifically, which of his friends I wasn't sleeping with). And that’s nice, when you get to smooth out the awkwardness and keep being friends with people and even though it’s messy and sometimes complicated it’s mostly good. However sometimes, the tree is REAL fucked up. Like you really hurt the trees feelings and wrote them some letters and then you blew them off again and the tree is pretty much far away forever. When a small awkward moment (or just shitty, terrible moment) stretched on indefinetly and suddenly someone you used to talk to all the time not only doesn’t feel like your friend but maybe even someone who really, really despises you (or more than likely doesn’t think about you at all, ever). Well one of those other really smart women in my life told me around my birthday (late November) that making new years resolutions is really silly. Adding on more baggage and more stuff to feel bad about later doesn’t make any sense. Instead it’s better to spend the end of the year forgiving other people for the things you might still be holding against them, and also it’s a good time to forgive yourself for the things you weren’t able to get done (or in my case even started really). It might sound VERY trite to some people but it made me feel a lot better, especially about some real sad feelings I had about myself. I realized that the holidays, in this whole other sense, are about “making it nice around the tree.” I used some time to connect with old friends and let some other shit go, and also with the intention (this year) of not letting little awkward moments stretch out to the point where anyone I care about gets out of reach of communication. I know other people are often terrible. It’s all just like all the other stories sometimes, always so trite and easy to predict. But then after that, when the next chapter starts, it’s so wonderfully, tremendously good.

“The useless days will amount to something.”**

I always wanted to be on the Real World. I remember turning 24 and being deeply disappointed in myself for not ever trying to do it. What an easy way to just be showered in love and attention forever and ever? What an awful, awful idea; I realize now. I think I know now the cut off point in age is because people in their early 20s are so sure of everything. Myself included, of course, anyone who’s ever been 19 or 20 just knows that they’re the best writer or artist or football player or whatever it is that they like about themselves, and then that gets sort of hammered and chipped away at everyday until they eventually get to this point where they realize they’ve been totally wrong, for a long time. Even now the things I think I’m good at, that I really like myself, are the same things that embarrass me about myself when I meet people or think of people who are really, really good at them. Can you imagine a Real World set up with a bunch of creative, smart people in their late 20s? I only use that because it’s how I feel but maybe it stretched out a lot later than this (oh boy!). I can just imagine my testimonials, “well I really thought I was right about this intangible theory of feminism but now...I’m just not so sure...so-and-so really knows a lot more than me and they brought up this really important point about....” and cut the scene where I’m just staring at empty pages for hours, and then drinking, lots of drinking still. It would be a great show. Terribly, wonderfully funny and very depressing and often pathetic. The show might actually exist, and I may have been living it.

I’m finally not so terribly afraid at failing. I’ve done it. I’ve been failing. It just doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It's still ok if I take some mediocre photography, at least I'm doing stuff. I can even write some only "alright" poetry, but at least I'll be writing. I'm even going to apply to graduate schools again, because I've stopped memorizing that other rejection letter. MRR liked our 7"? Great, we're going to make another one! I feel much less distracted by all the terrible possible outcomes and much more excited about doing everything, more, and more fully. If you’ve been feeling really awful about yourself I really recommend reading Beautiful Tiny Things by Cheryl Strayed. I read the book right after the new year clocked in and it really reminded me to stop feeling sorry for myself and, I quote, “write like a motherfucker” among other things. It’s the perfect book for anyone who’s been wallowing, or just stuck, or anyone really. Thanks to all the wonderful women in my book club for recommending it to me.


*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis
**Beautiful Tiny Things, Cheryl Strayed