moths

When you’re thinking you’re not having a thought unless you can write it down. If you have a thought but then you cannot write it down you are not having a thought. The thing that seems to be happening in your brain is like what happens when you check a potato for electricity – the potato will have electricity but the potato is not thinking, nor is it thinking about whether or not it is thinking. This line of reasoning will get us nowhere. Check your head for electricity and there will be electricity. Will there be enough electricity to kill a man? No, but perhaps enough to kill a moth that decides to alight within. The head can have moths. Maybe what you feel when you wonder if you’re thinking but you’re not thinking because you can’t write it down, is moths. The powder falling off with the flap of their wings. Their eyes on those flimsy stalks flickering left and flickering right. Write it down, and then you will be thinking, you will have a thought. The shape that remains when you lift their bodies from the dust is the character of the first letter.

the D-minor mood

"Impetuous as if conquering territory ...gravitas with moments of reverie..."

There are a few lies every singer tells at an audition. Most common is the imagined illness: a throat over-lined with phlegm, a nasal passage conquered by the prickles of oncoming sinusitis, an accidentally ingested grape leaf stuck in the esophagus (not an illness, but still, an unfortunate sort of vocal ailment). They get onto the stage and put their hand to their chest and cough, expelling dry air into the space, looking at the accompanist (tempo? key?) shuffle their feet to the left, to the right, put their hands into the folds of their long skirts, their trouser pants, their mossy sweaters, and breathe. They are not like dancers, who pull their legs up and their arms out, rippling the muscles they plan to show. Their talent does not sit as a golden mantle on their bodies. Some beautiful, some with faces like depressed Chihuahuas, some slouching, some twitching their noses as if they can smell the comments you will think before you make them. Whatever lives in their throat is invisible, even if it speaks to them. The high F is there today, sitting on its shelf, simply reach up and throw it over.

Do they dream of this? If they do, there’s no romance there. No maestro in violet cloaks rushing to his feet to wave a wand and command the performance. No chirping birdsound to score the moment. 

the sky fell

And there were two inches of mussed gray ice on the ground as you heard the sound of rocks thrown down the gutter. The roof of the house across the street flew into the air and seemed to hover before it drifted down and you realized it was actually falling when it came to rest on your own front stoop. Crash, bang.

It's not that anything ever changed around you. The same paper bag that came across your face whose crinkled brown surface you condemned for the flecks of dirt you thought you tasted as it passed and seemed only to indicate disintegration went softly to the floor and the next day you walked by it and thought of the family of ants that must be living in its corners. You slipped in the ice and when the salt pressed into your cheek you wondered if you'd seasoned the soup. The leaves finally dipped red.

and now here to sing this lovely ballad -

 

Like a lot of people, I get into song funks.

I wake up every morning, turn on my computer, and play one song for weeks. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to this irritating regularity. 


My earworm is no snob. I went through a particularly troubling period where I played the 90s clunker 'Faded' by Soul Decision for a month, propelling it to the top of my Most Played (this a song most notable for its astonishing rap interlude, which includes the phrase 'the way we conversated' and ends, 'How's it goin'? Ha! - I'm faded'). 


It's basically unknowable how my brain decides what it will have, but what it wants, it craves. 


For some months now, though its frequency's decreased, the song of the moment is the Mamas and the Papas' 'Dream a Little Dream of Me.' It should probably disturb me that nothing's come to take its place, as this seems some arcane psychological judgment my taste is making on my mental state, but nothing rights my nerves like Mama Cass singing her lovely ballad. 


The lyrics are this side of saccharine, the title refrain smacking of the doo-wop ditty it could have been, its penny melody origins. It has the crucial three minute length, chemically proven to be the only amount of time a pop song should occupy. But despite its pleasantly familiar structure and catchy chorus, its requisite oo-ah backup and da-dum da-dum rhythm, it reads more like elegy than harmonic snack. 


It's not just Mama Cass that makes this happen, though her voice, richly mournful, thrummingly sweeping, imbues each word with pointed feeling. She pulls out vowels like warm taffy, the voice diminishing finally into pure da rum dum hum singalong that itself fades out into whistle and silence. 


The song is very baldly about the famous kind of romantic nostalgia - the lover missing the beloved - that informs some huge percentage of all art, but this rendition frames this old tragedy in the terms of sweet 60s pop. It seems to say: maybe there's something nice about feeling sad, when you have something nice to feel sad about. 

you are falling down a blue hill into a violet pond

The dream is a lot like a foreign movie, with a definite and separate narrative offered by the subtitles and the actual action. In a foreign movie, the subtitles are the unavoidable, unmistakable laid down created track of the film. But at the same time, you see what is really happening, and sometimes the subtitles seem right and sometimes they don't but while you're watching one seems to describe the other.


That's garbled, but what I mean is that dreams possess at the very least two simultaneous streams of meaning (not meanings within meanings, a la Inception, but the dream of Inception had all the dreams of Inception been compressed into one totally incomprehensible and inseparable mess of significant surrealism), which at the time of the dream seem not to be at cross purposes, but in waking shudder apart to make themselves singular. Then you no longer can tell what you felt while you were selling pencils from an ice cream stand in a crumbling facsimile of Bombay while air balloons perforated the sky. You try to hold onto the solid items you knew you saw but as they coalesce into anything known, they rapidly stop resembling the items you remembered.

advice we thought we learned from fairy tales

There were small and large forms of despair and the large forms looked as much like the small ones as the small ones did like the large.


The castles that had once loomed over the grottos were turning grey with the soot of the nearby glass factories and had to be rinsed down with hoses on Mondays. 


Everyone who lived in the village with the books had to learn to read only from the three books and were allowed no other words to them.


Once you turn your face from the mirror the mask that is left looking back will begin to smile. 


Shaking dust out from the carpets will improve your upper back strength as well as make you handsomer to young women with yellow hair. 


When the large forms of despair begin to look like the small forms of despair this means things will only continue to get worse. 


When the small forms of despair begin to look like the large forms of despair, you should wash your face with very cold water. This will also improve the appearance of youth and decrease wrinkles around the eyes. 


Killing chickens is sacrilegious and will make the town smell like bad wine. 


The woman in the supermarket line, the woman wearing the baggy green pants and pink windbreaker, the woman with the hair of yellow and white fuzz, the woman with the shaking and jagged left arm who is dropping milk in the aisle, the woman who cannot pronounce the word eggs, this woman used to sell jeweled fruits at the marketplace for more money than could fit in as many shopping carts as would circle this entire store, twice. 


It is important to sleep facing left. 


It is important to work the calves for appropriate legs.


It is very important that you speak in your small voice when you are talking to a king. 


Kings without teeth know the most painful ways to betray their mistresses.


The small forms of despair and the large forms of despair were the same form of despair, which was simply, despair without shape or end, without height or heaviness, simply invisible, spreading both over and through anyone who even believed they could smell it. 

mistaken siren

There is no sound of ice cream trucks, or ice cream trucks, or even the mild feeling of having once been excited by the idea of the ice cream truck on your corner. No cold slab of sweet milk fat will make your mouth feel better now that you have quite accidentally spent hours spitting out fetid corporate nonsense to doltish and disembodied voices at the window.


On the cot spread over the vent that is even now blowing up its stale wet breath into your hair, you will lie back and think about the little scarab corpses of the cockroaches that bred and lived and ate and died in your room only ever having known the furrows of the dusty woodgrain floor. You will, one day, deem it fit to brush back the litter and the hair off the ground into a corner, into a pan, and let the insects clatter into the bin. Walking barefoot, at last, barefoot, in your own room, you will feel beneath you the empty space of all the unoccupied 7 floors of filthy cellular living that other people abandoned long before it occurred to you that you might even consider the idea of leaving.

the protestant poem

The first 'cup' poem is Catholic. 

The Cup (2)

The sweat cup of the collarbone

Slackened jut of the shoulder from the torso

And the splayed feet, rough soled and brown.

The mouth is just another kind of cup.

We pour it full of noise

And drink it empty again.

Yes, these are events that would disgust

A lesser man than you, that would drive

A saner god to murderous injustice

But you were born, not made, and so

You must remember what it was like

To be only the appendage to someone else’s life.

It was dark, and then light – unless

It was light, and then dark – I don’t know.

I don’t remember. Not even how to start.

Yes, you said, yes the skin is just the start

Of the sac that compresses the body to being

Merely tangible by any probing gesture

Of the senses. When we cut our hands off

To spite our arms. When we cut our arms off

To spite our embraces.

Yes, he said, what if the skin

Is just another kind of wrapper

Keeping out the light?

movies with sex on tiger skin rugs

Or just one: a vintage review in honor of its appearance on Netflix instant, Catherine Breillat's Une Vielle Maitresse - 

Catherine Breillat, a director with whom I have no prior experience, is apparently noted for her disturbing, probingly intense visions of female sexuality and the thorny navigations of sexual politics. 

Marigny, a man about to marry the love of his life, relates the story of his tempestuous relationship with the woman known as Vellini, his former mistress, to his fiancee’s grandmother; but the telling, meant to prove his removal from the subject, is more indicative of his attachment. 

The movie is actually rather straightforward in a lot of ways: it’s a sumptuous period piece, rich with intelligent color design, a marvelously faithful set, and the kind of romanticized passion narrative we usually expect from any movie involving bodices or the ripping thereof. 

It says something about the intelligence of the narrative that moments that should be truly outrageous (as when Vellini, the mistress in question, leaps onto the body of her lover and begins to lap at his fresh bullet wound) engage us more deeply rather than pull us completely away from the action. 

It helps that the leads of the story are stunningly attractive, though Asia Argento, as Vellini, is less perfectly wrought than her male counterpart Marigny ( the “luscious“ Fu’ad Ait Aattou). 

As in another favorite, “Lust, Caution,” sex in “The Last Mistress” is not the means to an end, or any kind of clarifying force. Vellini and Marigny do not have sex for the usual cinematic reasons. The compulsiveness of the act is what the movie tries both to relay and explain. Just because, as in the first picture, frantic coupling ensues upon tiger’s head rugs, doesn’t mean the movie belongs in the category of romance. Marigny is obsessed with Vellini; and she with him. But whether or not they love each other is unimportant. It’s a question that’s never quite raised, because it’s a question that Breillat has no interest in. Marigny claims, again and again, to love his virginal bride, far more than he ever loved Vellini - but the movie moves to destroy the hazy idealism associated with the word “love.” Marigny’s true love for another does not diminish the strength of the violent connection he has with Vellini. 

This is not a movie about two halves of one soul finally finding each other, or about the satisfaction of honorable self-abnegation, or even about the justifications of passion. There are no justifications; but no need for them. Rather, we find that certain outcomes are unavoidable, certain downfalls inevitable and acceptable. Momentum ought not to be opposed, or maligned.

Or as Bidart says:

Our not-love is like a man running down
a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop,

falls over—

apple

Walking to Jordana's house, I realize that Roslyn was not built for the casual pedestrian. All wind is generated by the speeding metal sides of SUVs and detached trailer wagons. The sidewalk, tapering into moss, is muddy, gritty, unkempt. On this path, I see an apple, discarded that morning. Half the apple's skin is intact, still shiny, distinct ridges of tooth around the edges of yellow flesh. Maybe 80 or 90 ants swarm the apple, moving quickly enough that the flesh seems illusion, the apple taken over. Imagine this: a conveyor belt of ants moving along the immense carcass of fruit to an underground lair. Or this: touching the apple, you must become a part of the unceasing motion, ants seeping into your body, until you too are an immeasurable carcass bound forth by these splinters of self, these plundering specks.

because we like to laugh when other people suffer

Apparently a man my aunt knows once ate too much corn and drank too much beer. The corn began to ferment in the beer in his stomach and the gas produced gave him hallucinations. He had to have his stomach pumped.


This was about 20 years ago, and she still can’t look at the guy without having it pop immediately to mind.