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

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 

Nights At Home

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner...I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic."*
                   I did read the new Roberto Bolano book** like I said I would. I never got around to writing about it...maybe I couldn't make the time but also the story didn't leave me with much except the image of the German tourist walking down the beach during a cloudy day, lost within his own vacation. This summer has felt like that, a little at least, to me. Rain for weeks on end, waking up to darkness and going back to sleep until the afternoon, going to work with wet shoes, coming home with damp hair. I didn't leave town enough maybe. I visited my mom in NC and we kayaked around a lake, a mountain storm has just passed and the water split dark and glassy under us, and I felt happy, to be thinking about nothing in the middle of all those mountain colors. I came home and finished my summer class and kept working. I should have stayed up there longer.
                   A few of us went to the beach the other day and that might be the last time in the ocean until spring. The water will stay warm a little longer but I doubt I'll have the time. On our way home the rain was so bad Adrien couldn't see the road. Everything in front of us just looked white, and I worried that if we died on our way home, somewhere in between Gainesville and Palatka, that I had totally wasted not just my summer but the last four or so years of my life. I keep hearing all these internet-worthy catch phrases about "doing what you love before it's too late" but I think there's something to be said for doing what you need to do too. Also, even at 26, I'm still unsure of what I really love. I like that I'm unsure. As far as I'm concerned, I've got fucking options. I'm just going to keep walking the fence until then, a little bit of staring out into the ocean and a lot of working my ass off until four in the morning. I'm not sure I have or even deserve the luxury of doing exactly what I want, and I know for a fact that most people never even get a chance. 
                   Of a few things I am at least certain. Not the future, not my next step, but at least the little things that make me happy. Don DeLillo is right, staring out the windows of trains at passing landscapes is absolutely one of them. Punk music still makes me inexplicably happy; I can still walk into a room of people I don't know, in a terrible mood, drunk or getting there, hungover or totally sober, and suddenly there is music and I feel better. Sometimes better than better! Sometimes even excited, or I start thinking, "hey, the world isn't so bad, I should fall in love! I should write a book! I should write more songs, I could write NEW songs!" And along down that line of thinking until the spell wears off. I also like sitting in my room tonight, with the windows open, finally signaling that the long, terribly humid summer might finally be over, and I can put on a record and go through my books, and think about my life and it's not so bad.

*Don DeLillo, Point Omega
** the new Roberto Bolano book is Third Reich

                   

dolce vita

"All those gentleman and ladies and boys and girls sitting at tables in that cafe- they were right, unquestionably right. As they talked, they become more and more certain of how right they were. And their certainty about being right was built on ridicule, devastation, and scorn for other people. they more they talked, the more they were right, the more their rightness demanded its tribute of words, threats, and gestures. As that tribute piled up, all the others,those who were in the wrong, became increasingly alone and unhappy. I looked out the window, across the street, and I saw other people sitting in other cafes: they were right too. This immense, single-minded rightness had split the world into two camps: those who has right on their sides (which is to say, everyone), and the others (which is to say, again, everyone)."*

I got into an argument with Daniel about literature, or rather an argument about Truth, since he reads mostly nonfiction, and mostly philosophy, which he thinks is a part of the Quest, and I think literature, specifically fiction and also poetry, makes for the surer road. He threw a biblical reference to me, about Babylon, and all the poor fuckers scratching in the dark, and I got wildly upset at the idea of all of this being some sort of misadventure, even though most of the time I'm convinced it is. Most books make our problems greater, but there has to be some truth in that. He meant, I think, that most people who write just don't have their hearts in the right place, which maybe makes "accredited theories" a better shot at figuring out the ways of the world and ourselves, but I think the same can be said for everyone. A lot of people don't have their hearts in the right place, they're on some other road entirely.

I think some reading ends up being in the "entertainment" category for me. A lot of the comics I read aren't going to teach me anything new about the world, but then again, X Men has a very special place in my socio-political arguments. Bolano is good, Marquez is also good (even though I know he would had to think so, Bolano had a hefty distaste for Marquez but as I explained to a friend the other day, it's like listening to both Morrissey AND Discharge), Mark Twain and Melville are good, Borges is good, and we all know there's mountains and mountains of trash in the literary world. Doesn't mean I'm going to give up reading. Anyway it seems like that's what most writers spend time thinking about anyway, in any interview you've got at least a few pages of the author talking about which writers he or she admires, and which books still matter, and that's all critics are trying to figure out anyway besides. I don't want to take sides in the fiction vs. nonfiction debate, despite the fact that I've been quietly thinking about it ever since the other morning over breakfast, which I was drinking my coffee reading a fantasy novel and Daniel was reading Gurdjieff.

*Stefano Benni, Margherita Dolce Vita

Unknown Pleasures

"Memory is not what the heart desires."*

I drove into Melbourne going South on A1A, listening to Joy Division on accident. I wanted to play the Mind Spiders record but it was somewhere behind my seat, just out of reach, and I was too stubborn to pull over on the way down from Gainesville. Just needed to finish this one last thing, I kept telling myself, and then it's all over. I'll probably never come back here again. Suddenly the song seemed just right.

I lived in Melbourne for four years with my mom after we moved down from St. Augustine. I'm still friends with my three best friends from high school, but I don't come into town if I don't have to. I had to come down to help my mom pack up the house, which she sold last week, and now she's moving to Asheville. Lucky her. Last night I packed up my room. I threw out everything I could. Boxes and boxes of pictures of people I don't know anymore. Fliers for shows I barely remember. Notes from girls in high school, and notes from boys I wanted to kiss. The term overwhelmingly depressing doesn't begin to scratch the surface. The most unsettling things uncovered though were my own writings, which for some reason my mom kept. Folders and folders of short stories, poems, essays, and then the journals, at least a dozen of them. All so totally pathetic and foolish. I thought I understood solitude and depression at seventeen, what a joke. I should have been out on the beach kissing boys and hanging out, I should have been huffing glue and fucking up way more than I did. Didn't I know what was in store for me? Once all the promise ran out? DIDN'T I? All the stories are sort of banal and all the private thoughts from the journals are so pathetic, and I felt a shudder of foreshadowing as I read through them; will these thoughts I'm writing now look the same in twenty years? I'll admit to being hopelessly self-centered and a little too romantic at times, but I'd like to think I've gotten wildly smarter in the past seven years (seven years since high school, holy shit it burns) but I began to feel vibrations of doubt...do I remain the foolish kid I know I was? Terrifying. I won't think about it anymore this morning.

So now my mom has me packing up her books. Boxes and boxes of books. It's going to take me all 24 hours of today, since every few books I stop and start reading. I can't pick up the Mark Twain, Melville, Marquez, Salinger, Zadie Smith books without sneaking in a few pages. Every book marks a memory just like the pictures I threw out upstairs. Every chapter a chapter, if it's not too easy a metaphor. I told my mom over coffee this morning, "friends and punk shows make up half of my best memories, but these books make up the other half." So my mom may be moving out of this place that's suppose to be my hometown, but I know where to visit ghosts if I need to.

*Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring