just another story
It has been increasingly harder for me to update. Updating should be called downdating when you sink back into the events and minutes to recap. To retell anything is a retrograde act, after the clock has stopped and everything been retraced in the slipstreams of memories. Writing gives time its closure but the butterfly can only be freshly mounted on dark velvet when it's already dead, no matter how recently. When no closure is possible, there remains the breach, the infesting wound that no words can cauterize. A photo speaks a thousand words, because a photo isn't the thing being photographed but the epitaph of the thing alive in the compact elegance of its perishing.
Seeing is gratuitous, hearing is consumption and writing is hard because it requires effort. There are writers in this world because people believe if you put in the necessary effort something good shall come out of it. Even if the opposite is true, if writing produces nothing good, if thinking or optimism or the mythical belief in the act of writing as a contact with something transcendental is to be forever discredited, people would still be writing, writing what I cannot say, because to write is to clean house, to vacate space for later use. It's a dietary function still needed for the mind and body to tell another person what would otherwise be forever lost.
I saw a little boy on a wheelchair outside the hospital my mother has been staying. Chemo left him with no hair and I could see the tender blue veins under his temples and onion-skin skull. His pale but sweet face had no smile or curiosity for the world. His growing left leg was amputated from the knee down. I could not give him a read of the future. I could not point to him at the incoming summer when the days are long and kids will soak themselves through riotously and barefoot in the arched streams of a liberated water hydrant cooling down the pavement. I could not place him among the other kids and adults at St. Catherine's Park a block away sweating the sun off like snapping sails in the wind, the playground slides and swings and monkey bars, the rush of blood in the oak wine barrel of life, the discovery of thrill and lung-whistled scream and minor bruise. I could not say to the boy it's ok to be different and singled out by fate, to speed up and crash early without ever making it to hatching out of the shell of adolescence and first love and the brittle uprising music of heartbreak. I could not give him what he hadn't already reached the end of his full innocence to know.
I saw David Blaine in his nighttime stasis of aqua, outside Lincoln Center, through the water sphere's acrylic wall, him getting whatever sleep he could, placid as an embryonic installation, bright as a sea goddess's sea spray, almost an afterglow in a lilac display. Lines of behaving crowds glad at the duration of the party waiting to reach the platform of David's liquid rapture of entrapment. Earphones and a stadium's flow of flashing cameras. Words of levitation and card tricks. A black air tube reached inside the sphere and down David's mouth to keep the ongoing saga oxygenated. The cosmic merman lay motionlessly, belly up, his arms suspended above his chest, his hands gloved, his stomach caved in under his naked upper body like a torpedoed impact on the hull of a treasure ship. David! Those waited long enough to approach him called out his name and touched his turquoise, impossible grave of resurrection, David who once in a training held his breath underwater among more than 20 sharks to secure the center of his stillness. I walked across the street to stand in another line for a ticket to see the screening of a movie in the Tribeca Film Festival. A stranger came out the theater and offered me a free ticket. French movies give generous breathing room, and in between the plot-thickening scenes I saw David floating on the screen, the black light of a yogi's battered exterior body coming in and out of its nirvana. There were blazing chandeliers, in the evening lobby of the New Yorker Hotel, where when I was waiting for someone I saw the chaperoned mass on their way to a prom. The conspiring drift of carefully fitted dresses and conspicuous youth streaked through the girls' flicker-nestling earrings and necklaces in a verbal haze of competing ownerships, the legs and shoulders bared for a hushed air raid of inarticulate gazes. The inpatient sleeping in the same room as my mother's made her nocturnal moans of agony, unmitigated by morphine, at the locust cloud of cancer spreading in her still conscious organs, drowning out the family caretaker's scarecrow defense of prayers for miracle and Isabelle Huppert's words for overdue justice spoken by her character of the investigating judge in the movie.
Humid, the air outside the theater was tight as a starvation-shrunk body, heavy as salt-drunk skin after a swim. In my mind's eye, Sartre said imagination is the mind's magical transformation of the world to relegate everything to intentions, I saw a power pole catching the forked brilliance of a lightning, sparks flying off the wires to usher in an electric-winged tomorrow. I thought I heard thunders, deep in the bones loud as breaking metal in the undated darkness. I got on the subway, the door closed to let the last of the voice and guitar from the two black bluesmen playing at the station run its course inside the train. Behind a woman and her handful of tireless flyers I saw a girl who looked like Marie when I first met her outside the bus station, her hazel eyes the midnight Rhine after the boats had docked, a wave of bashful awareness of her unchallenged beauty across her face, all 17 years in a water-dynamic poise ready for news of the future years to turn on the kitchen light. The girl on the subway had blue eyes, but the same ripple and quiet ache for the days of heat-oiled fields and blizzard. I wanted to tell her I am not sure where I am, where all of this is going, and words will never be enough. I wanted to hear her story: she may also be a writer, or just have a story to tell, and I wanted, through her eyes, to see the stirred sequins of motion (while mine were to close), the seething kindling of the pictures still locked on a roll of film, the zodiac phantoms of the constellations accompanying us from cradle to gravestone, when we unravel the distance from the backseat of a car, behind the plexiglas, one mile at a time, driver unseen, with just enough for a one-way fare, not remembering the way back to where it all started, the home of light's lone, unwritten origin.
Seeing is gratuitous, hearing is consumption and writing is hard because it requires effort. There are writers in this world because people believe if you put in the necessary effort something good shall come out of it. Even if the opposite is true, if writing produces nothing good, if thinking or optimism or the mythical belief in the act of writing as a contact with something transcendental is to be forever discredited, people would still be writing, writing what I cannot say, because to write is to clean house, to vacate space for later use. It's a dietary function still needed for the mind and body to tell another person what would otherwise be forever lost.
I saw a little boy on a wheelchair outside the hospital my mother has been staying. Chemo left him with no hair and I could see the tender blue veins under his temples and onion-skin skull. His pale but sweet face had no smile or curiosity for the world. His growing left leg was amputated from the knee down. I could not give him a read of the future. I could not point to him at the incoming summer when the days are long and kids will soak themselves through riotously and barefoot in the arched streams of a liberated water hydrant cooling down the pavement. I could not place him among the other kids and adults at St. Catherine's Park a block away sweating the sun off like snapping sails in the wind, the playground slides and swings and monkey bars, the rush of blood in the oak wine barrel of life, the discovery of thrill and lung-whistled scream and minor bruise. I could not say to the boy it's ok to be different and singled out by fate, to speed up and crash early without ever making it to hatching out of the shell of adolescence and first love and the brittle uprising music of heartbreak. I could not give him what he hadn't already reached the end of his full innocence to know.
I saw David Blaine in his nighttime stasis of aqua, outside Lincoln Center, through the water sphere's acrylic wall, him getting whatever sleep he could, placid as an embryonic installation, bright as a sea goddess's sea spray, almost an afterglow in a lilac display. Lines of behaving crowds glad at the duration of the party waiting to reach the platform of David's liquid rapture of entrapment. Earphones and a stadium's flow of flashing cameras. Words of levitation and card tricks. A black air tube reached inside the sphere and down David's mouth to keep the ongoing saga oxygenated. The cosmic merman lay motionlessly, belly up, his arms suspended above his chest, his hands gloved, his stomach caved in under his naked upper body like a torpedoed impact on the hull of a treasure ship. David! Those waited long enough to approach him called out his name and touched his turquoise, impossible grave of resurrection, David who once in a training held his breath underwater among more than 20 sharks to secure the center of his stillness. I walked across the street to stand in another line for a ticket to see the screening of a movie in the Tribeca Film Festival. A stranger came out the theater and offered me a free ticket. French movies give generous breathing room, and in between the plot-thickening scenes I saw David floating on the screen, the black light of a yogi's battered exterior body coming in and out of its nirvana. There were blazing chandeliers, in the evening lobby of the New Yorker Hotel, where when I was waiting for someone I saw the chaperoned mass on their way to a prom. The conspiring drift of carefully fitted dresses and conspicuous youth streaked through the girls' flicker-nestling earrings and necklaces in a verbal haze of competing ownerships, the legs and shoulders bared for a hushed air raid of inarticulate gazes. The inpatient sleeping in the same room as my mother's made her nocturnal moans of agony, unmitigated by morphine, at the locust cloud of cancer spreading in her still conscious organs, drowning out the family caretaker's scarecrow defense of prayers for miracle and Isabelle Huppert's words for overdue justice spoken by her character of the investigating judge in the movie.
Humid, the air outside the theater was tight as a starvation-shrunk body, heavy as salt-drunk skin after a swim. In my mind's eye, Sartre said imagination is the mind's magical transformation of the world to relegate everything to intentions, I saw a power pole catching the forked brilliance of a lightning, sparks flying off the wires to usher in an electric-winged tomorrow. I thought I heard thunders, deep in the bones loud as breaking metal in the undated darkness. I got on the subway, the door closed to let the last of the voice and guitar from the two black bluesmen playing at the station run its course inside the train. Behind a woman and her handful of tireless flyers I saw a girl who looked like Marie when I first met her outside the bus station, her hazel eyes the midnight Rhine after the boats had docked, a wave of bashful awareness of her unchallenged beauty across her face, all 17 years in a water-dynamic poise ready for news of the future years to turn on the kitchen light. The girl on the subway had blue eyes, but the same ripple and quiet ache for the days of heat-oiled fields and blizzard. I wanted to tell her I am not sure where I am, where all of this is going, and words will never be enough. I wanted to hear her story: she may also be a writer, or just have a story to tell, and I wanted, through her eyes, to see the stirred sequins of motion (while mine were to close), the seething kindling of the pictures still locked on a roll of film, the zodiac phantoms of the constellations accompanying us from cradle to gravestone, when we unravel the distance from the backseat of a car, behind the plexiglas, one mile at a time, driver unseen, with just enough for a one-way fare, not remembering the way back to where it all started, the home of light's lone, unwritten origin.