Unholy Acts at Unholy Hours
My chameleon shadow.
"It's just past eight, and I'm feeling young and reckless. The ribbon on my wrist says, 'Do not open before Christmas.'"
Take this line of hope, the nebulous idea of future, and hang it around your neck like a string of pearls.
Like a gold necklace.
Like a noose.
Necklace.
Noose.
All paths lead to the gallows.
Letdowns and Pick-me-ups.
I'll capitulate. I'll surrender. Let me down.
But you must promise.
You will pick me up.
Strewn about like old rag dolls and chew toys, all displaying varying degrees of wear. Use. Defeat.
A tragic rigadoon, all in dance attire and in elegant mid-step.
They never got picked up. They're waiting.
And their shadows bled colors into the earth.
They're there, but where?
A summer, a few months, and then a new home.
I'm leaving.
And when I get there, maybe a vast collection of experience will trickle down the thin flights of stairs, washing around my feet. I'll wade in the roiling sea of endless possibilities. But more likely, the safer bet--I'll have to go out and find a future before a future finds me.
1/24/05 Lilacs Along the Alleyway
A meditation upon beauty: Primal, Ideal, Static, Transitory, Apparent, Inapparent.
A person's life is an entanglement. A business appointment, if you will. One that must be met, but no strictures are set, no guidelines in place. As such, no wise sage declares anethema on joy, fun, beauty. Yet, at the same time, this wise sage who passively allows the flowering of beauty also allows the flowering of uglier things, gross caricatures of beauty groomed in the long shadow of love. Beauty gives birth to many feelings, sows seeds that manifest themselves in many ways. The ugly jade of jealousy, the roiling red of animal lust, the royal purple of conceit. A whole spectrum on a wide, morbid, and ugly rainbow.
I am a man. As such, there are certain biological repercussions. As a heterosexual male, I cannot help but revel in the beauty of long, slender legs, or full, rounded breasts. Yet, at the same time, I hold myself above beasts. Where is the line drawn between admiration of the beauty ideal and the concealment of pure lust? Pure envy? For every lovely female who walks on by, wheresoever her thoughts may lie, whatsoever she believes herself to be, she must feel the eyes of the male horde studying her steps. She must feel the fervor of their thoughts, and abhor the impersonal utterly indiffernt desire directed her way. Not the fervent desire of the truly enthralled, but rather the mindless, casual curiosity carried by the detached words, "I wonder what it'd be like to fuck her." What coarseness. Such inhumanity. Does any physically attractive female know how many times they conjure those thoughts within the murky minds of men? Do they really? They may smile about it, they may joke with their friends about it, "How men are beasts," but are they truly aware of how absolutely irrepressible and completely common these thoughts are? When they use this weakness to their advantage, do they know the heartlessness and thoughtlessness which with those hot, hormonal thoughts are executed? Like clockwork? If women knew, truly, from the unique viewpoint of a man, would she shudder, aghast?
At the same time, there's a certain ideal of beauty within the female form. A certain...esteem given the sculpted body and the perfect face. Not the impersonal lust between a man, his genitals, and a woman, but rather the esteem given a bed of tulips spotted by beading rain. A line of lilacs along the alleyway, long crimson blossoms waving in the brisk late-April breeze. That kind of beauty. There is nothing beautiful about, "I wonder what it'd be like to fuck her." There is something intrinsically, ineffably, and utterly breathtakingly beautiful about holding a woman from dusk to dawn, never once truly considering anything more. Paint that on your old easels, masters of art, and consider that your masterpiece. There's something gorgeous about a long slender neck, or lightly-freckled cheeks, or a delicate jaw or a bare back. That's just the truth. And not just the promise that their sight entails, mind you, not the knowledge of how that slender neck would feel beneath your lips or how that back must bend, muscles tensing, in the throes of lovemaking...but rather the beauty lies in the sight of something irreplaceable and completely unattainable. Like a failed Prometheus, watching a flickering flame from afar, wondering what truly such a distant marvel must be like to know. Not to know...just to understand.
Such beauty, as the trite line goes, is fleeting. Any one can tell you that. But my mother's beauty is not transitory, it did not die with the years. It did not diminish with her fluctuating weight or her slowly slating hair. It shone brighter and brighter as my biological knowledge grew into personal knowledge. And though her mistakes are tangible, and sometimes truly reprehensible, I know the beauty her form entails is of an entirely different kind of majesty.
And I know the love of my father as an intransitory thing. Rather, it was a flower planted with the fall, and weathered the impersonal, unrelating years of my young winter. Never dead, the bulb, just waiting for a warm time for which to sprout. Yet, as I grow towards being the man he's become, the uncrossable breadth between our understanding shrinks to just a short fault, zig-zagging the ground between us. We are close enough, now, for us to yell back and forth across the breach, and to not just hear each other's point of view, but to see and understand it. And the silly jesting and petals we hide ourselves in fall away with the new winter, to be replaced anew for a new year.
And as the years pass, sometimes slowly, sometimes frighteningly quick, I watch the floudering parts and people of my world and wonder: do these men wish for what I do? Or am I the same beast in thought and action? All they truly care for, is it, "I wonder what it's like to fuck her?" Is it what all I truly care for, and do I sit here, trying my very ardent best to convince myself otherwise, because I know its wrong? I think, I hope, that I long for a beauty to love like I love my mother and my father. The inapparent in form and the apparent in action, the transitory in form and the static in emotion, the ideal in everything. For once you find someone to love, all other ideals must pale in comparison. That's the hope I cling to like a fistful of dirt on the side of a cliff. It's the ideal I suscribe to, the altar I worship at. Not the lines drawn in the sand between the mosque and the cathedral or the battleground between the temple and the mosque, or the ugly traditions between the temple and cathedral. I worship zealously at the altar of To Love and to Be Loved, and if need be, like a young sacrificial goat with its throat slit, I'll bleed my life out upon it. I'll die on those slippery stone steps, and count myself lucky to have died for such a beautiful, fulfilling god.
I know the cynical response. That this is all a bunch of naive rambling, an overly dramatized belief about what love really is. And I have a response. Not a witty one, mind you, but wit should be saved for when wit is needed. The cynics don't know what love is. They lost it, somewhere dank and dark, somewhere unattractive and frightening. Someplace awful and unreachable, so they can't go back, not easily, and grab it. They forgot what it is, they bastardized its definition in the angry aftermath of some failed relationship, some belief that love MUST be permament, love MUST be something owed everyone everywhere. They became convinced of their entitlement, didn't relish it, didn't bathe in it, didn't become it, and when it wilted away like the lilacs in May, they had no choice but to refute its existence or seriously start doubting their own behavior, motives, beliefs. I believe in what I typed, I truly do, that love is ideal outside of beauty, and that while beauty enables lust, love unfailingly enables beauty. The very nature of love does that. It does. I sound like a petulant poet proclaiming cliches, I know I do, but I believe it, and with no remonstration will I recant.
The tulips in my room are blooming. They're lovely. And there really are lilacs along the alleyway where I live...lived. Thoughts hard to reconcile, those are. Oh well. My home has moved, I suppose, if only in part. It is sad, when home is equally divided between two places so evenly that you really can't consider either of them home. Home is where the heart is, home is where you make it, yet my old home is worn, tattered, hackneyed; although a wonderful place to relax, it no longer feels right to sleep in a house as a child with his parents. My new home is small, smothering, with not enough room to hold me or my thoughts. I tried to spruce it up, too! I swear. I tried to make it a little more Mitchy. Alas, although the aquarium makes the room a little more uniquely mine, and the flowers are a bit of a personal touch...it still feels like a sterile, processed room for inmates, patients, or both. The books that line the wall, although pretty decor and brought with every intention of being read, rest, for the most part, unopened. And not by choice, I am not the sort to bring my books and line my shelves with the sole purpose of impressing passerby and visitors. I love to read. But the endless work of this semester almost makes my room an office, an office where I sleep, and I have trouble transforming the idea of an office in my brain into a home in my heart. I don't even know if I want to.
"It's just past eight, and I'm feeling young and reckless. The ribbon on my wrist says, 'Do not open before Christmas.'"
Take this line of hope, the nebulous idea of future, and hang it around your neck like a string of pearls.
Like a gold necklace.
Like a noose.
Necklace.
Noose.
All paths lead to the gallows.
Letdowns and Pick-me-ups.
I'll capitulate. I'll surrender. Let me down.
But you must promise.
You will pick me up.
Strewn about like old rag dolls and chew toys, all displaying varying degrees of wear. Use. Defeat.
A tragic rigadoon, all in dance attire and in elegant mid-step.
They never got picked up. They're waiting.
And their shadows bled colors into the earth.
They're there, but where?
A summer, a few months, and then a new home.
I'm leaving.
And when I get there, maybe a vast collection of experience will trickle down the thin flights of stairs, washing around my feet. I'll wade in the roiling sea of endless possibilities. But more likely, the safer bet--I'll have to go out and find a future before a future finds me.
1/24/05 Lilacs Along the Alleyway
A meditation upon beauty: Primal, Ideal, Static, Transitory, Apparent, Inapparent.
A person's life is an entanglement. A business appointment, if you will. One that must be met, but no strictures are set, no guidelines in place. As such, no wise sage declares anethema on joy, fun, beauty. Yet, at the same time, this wise sage who passively allows the flowering of beauty also allows the flowering of uglier things, gross caricatures of beauty groomed in the long shadow of love. Beauty gives birth to many feelings, sows seeds that manifest themselves in many ways. The ugly jade of jealousy, the roiling red of animal lust, the royal purple of conceit. A whole spectrum on a wide, morbid, and ugly rainbow.
I am a man. As such, there are certain biological repercussions. As a heterosexual male, I cannot help but revel in the beauty of long, slender legs, or full, rounded breasts. Yet, at the same time, I hold myself above beasts. Where is the line drawn between admiration of the beauty ideal and the concealment of pure lust? Pure envy? For every lovely female who walks on by, wheresoever her thoughts may lie, whatsoever she believes herself to be, she must feel the eyes of the male horde studying her steps. She must feel the fervor of their thoughts, and abhor the impersonal utterly indiffernt desire directed her way. Not the fervent desire of the truly enthralled, but rather the mindless, casual curiosity carried by the detached words, "I wonder what it'd be like to fuck her." What coarseness. Such inhumanity. Does any physically attractive female know how many times they conjure those thoughts within the murky minds of men? Do they really? They may smile about it, they may joke with their friends about it, "How men are beasts," but are they truly aware of how absolutely irrepressible and completely common these thoughts are? When they use this weakness to their advantage, do they know the heartlessness and thoughtlessness which with those hot, hormonal thoughts are executed? Like clockwork? If women knew, truly, from the unique viewpoint of a man, would she shudder, aghast?
At the same time, there's a certain ideal of beauty within the female form. A certain...esteem given the sculpted body and the perfect face. Not the impersonal lust between a man, his genitals, and a woman, but rather the esteem given a bed of tulips spotted by beading rain. A line of lilacs along the alleyway, long crimson blossoms waving in the brisk late-April breeze. That kind of beauty. There is nothing beautiful about, "I wonder what it'd be like to fuck her." There is something intrinsically, ineffably, and utterly breathtakingly beautiful about holding a woman from dusk to dawn, never once truly considering anything more. Paint that on your old easels, masters of art, and consider that your masterpiece. There's something gorgeous about a long slender neck, or lightly-freckled cheeks, or a delicate jaw or a bare back. That's just the truth. And not just the promise that their sight entails, mind you, not the knowledge of how that slender neck would feel beneath your lips or how that back must bend, muscles tensing, in the throes of lovemaking...but rather the beauty lies in the sight of something irreplaceable and completely unattainable. Like a failed Prometheus, watching a flickering flame from afar, wondering what truly such a distant marvel must be like to know. Not to know...just to understand.
Such beauty, as the trite line goes, is fleeting. Any one can tell you that. But my mother's beauty is not transitory, it did not die with the years. It did not diminish with her fluctuating weight or her slowly slating hair. It shone brighter and brighter as my biological knowledge grew into personal knowledge. And though her mistakes are tangible, and sometimes truly reprehensible, I know the beauty her form entails is of an entirely different kind of majesty.
And I know the love of my father as an intransitory thing. Rather, it was a flower planted with the fall, and weathered the impersonal, unrelating years of my young winter. Never dead, the bulb, just waiting for a warm time for which to sprout. Yet, as I grow towards being the man he's become, the uncrossable breadth between our understanding shrinks to just a short fault, zig-zagging the ground between us. We are close enough, now, for us to yell back and forth across the breach, and to not just hear each other's point of view, but to see and understand it. And the silly jesting and petals we hide ourselves in fall away with the new winter, to be replaced anew for a new year.
And as the years pass, sometimes slowly, sometimes frighteningly quick, I watch the floudering parts and people of my world and wonder: do these men wish for what I do? Or am I the same beast in thought and action? All they truly care for, is it, "I wonder what it's like to fuck her?" Is it what all I truly care for, and do I sit here, trying my very ardent best to convince myself otherwise, because I know its wrong? I think, I hope, that I long for a beauty to love like I love my mother and my father. The inapparent in form and the apparent in action, the transitory in form and the static in emotion, the ideal in everything. For once you find someone to love, all other ideals must pale in comparison. That's the hope I cling to like a fistful of dirt on the side of a cliff. It's the ideal I suscribe to, the altar I worship at. Not the lines drawn in the sand between the mosque and the cathedral or the battleground between the temple and the mosque, or the ugly traditions between the temple and cathedral. I worship zealously at the altar of To Love and to Be Loved, and if need be, like a young sacrificial goat with its throat slit, I'll bleed my life out upon it. I'll die on those slippery stone steps, and count myself lucky to have died for such a beautiful, fulfilling god.
I know the cynical response. That this is all a bunch of naive rambling, an overly dramatized belief about what love really is. And I have a response. Not a witty one, mind you, but wit should be saved for when wit is needed. The cynics don't know what love is. They lost it, somewhere dank and dark, somewhere unattractive and frightening. Someplace awful and unreachable, so they can't go back, not easily, and grab it. They forgot what it is, they bastardized its definition in the angry aftermath of some failed relationship, some belief that love MUST be permament, love MUST be something owed everyone everywhere. They became convinced of their entitlement, didn't relish it, didn't bathe in it, didn't become it, and when it wilted away like the lilacs in May, they had no choice but to refute its existence or seriously start doubting their own behavior, motives, beliefs. I believe in what I typed, I truly do, that love is ideal outside of beauty, and that while beauty enables lust, love unfailingly enables beauty. The very nature of love does that. It does. I sound like a petulant poet proclaiming cliches, I know I do, but I believe it, and with no remonstration will I recant.
The tulips in my room are blooming. They're lovely. And there really are lilacs along the alleyway where I live...lived. Thoughts hard to reconcile, those are. Oh well. My home has moved, I suppose, if only in part. It is sad, when home is equally divided between two places so evenly that you really can't consider either of them home. Home is where the heart is, home is where you make it, yet my old home is worn, tattered, hackneyed; although a wonderful place to relax, it no longer feels right to sleep in a house as a child with his parents. My new home is small, smothering, with not enough room to hold me or my thoughts. I tried to spruce it up, too! I swear. I tried to make it a little more Mitchy. Alas, although the aquarium makes the room a little more uniquely mine, and the flowers are a bit of a personal touch...it still feels like a sterile, processed room for inmates, patients, or both. The books that line the wall, although pretty decor and brought with every intention of being read, rest, for the most part, unopened. And not by choice, I am not the sort to bring my books and line my shelves with the sole purpose of impressing passerby and visitors. I love to read. But the endless work of this semester almost makes my room an office, an office where I sleep, and I have trouble transforming the idea of an office in my brain into a home in my heart. I don't even know if I want to.