Mother told me to be something so I’m afraid.
(Just another one of those days)
Failing the Rorshach Test
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Kalopsia
lt’s not a lot of fun to remember that there are a lot of parts of you that you don’t like, but don’t know how to change…
Just have to remember that I’m okay, and that the broken stuff will pass.
A loose end i don’t want to forget
‘I need miracles and improbabilities, maps that haven’t been drawn and instruction manuals that haven’t been outlined. I’ve got a charred and tattered soul to trade for a better world for everyone.’
another day in paradise by the dashboard confessional
“The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…”
-David Brin
My brain is all over the place today (for an oddity, I can’t quite explain the why of that — maybe the storm front blowing through, some sort of sleep disturbance… maybe it only matters to me because usually I can pinpoint the reason). And so, too, is going to be whatever I end up putting down here.
Been thinking a fair amount about time, in a general, conceptual way. As a dimension — just like height, and width and depth, observable, measurable and experiential. (I sometimes wish some of my writing came with a way to observe me in the process of writing — to wit, just now, watching myself debate and erase and readd and erase again a couple of Oxford commas. I wonder what look crosses my face at times like those?) Like the fact that if you take a single instance of the smallest unit of time — suddenly, you have nothing more than a photograph or a hologram, but one limited to a single point of perspective, a unique and non-redefinable vantage point.
The differences in perception of time from culture to culture. On one hand, that sort of thing is to be expected, but it’s still fascinating to me. Further evidence of evolution on a community scale.
All of this is leading to a near-future reread of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. I can’t recall how I ended up getting a copy or what prompted my initial read, but I do distinctly remember my brain opening wide at the idea of the limitations of what we can perceive, and how especially our human egos have a tendency to think that we are the top of the food pyramid — but because of our perceptual limitations, odds are pretty decent that we’re closer to the middle (or perhaps even lower). I don’t understand nearly enough about physics to pretend to talk more than conceptually about dimensions beyond our (my) perceived four, but I have seen mentions of up to ten. (That’s a fun article if you need nightmare fuel — save it for the last thing you read after a particularly grueling day.)
Look, I warned you that my brain is firing on all cylinders, all at once, today.
If the Butterfly Effect is a real thing — and why wouldn’t it be? — then you have a fairly strong basis for rationalizing astrology, as well. Maybe not from the standpoint of telling the future (I don’t really go in for the pre-determinism that implies), but at least toward some level of explaining why people are who they are. Or why people under similar signs are likely (?) to have similar relationships.
On the flip side, this is using star groupings that were conceived and named by sailors and explorers to be able to travel at night in times before all kinds of science, which does seem like a random way to try to explain anything, much less predict shit.
(And I just spent twenty minutes reading about my sign on the internet, where all things are true, all the time. Which tells me it’s time to step away from this little black box and probably start drinking until I manage to forget I do shit like this too often.)
hearts murmur under halogen lights
driving at night
blacktop stretching in front and behind as far as perception carries
trees and farmland and asphalt
headed somewhere
nowhere in particular
maybe just anywhere new
your sleeping hand in mind
speaking sotto voce to a dream
your thumb twitches against mine
electric
i turn up the volume a bit
smiling
humming along
when we arrive wherever
what will we find?
what will we do?
what experiences await?
the highway hums beneath
the streetlamps fly past
you continue to converse in hushed alien tongues
as we draw closer and closer
you and i
to my next favorite adventure
happy birthday, Natalie!
file under: things that should be remembered (pt ii)
HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY
by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the muderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God’s eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne on throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.
| “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty” is reprinted from The Wind Among the Reeds. W.B. Yeats. London: Elkin Mathews, 1899. |
(re)awakening
Vacation. Mid-winter February, another city somewhere in America. The world is dull, muted. Colors are dirty faded versions of themselves. Sounds are distant and staticky. Touch is like being separated from the world by a thin wool body suit, taste is bland no matter how much spice is added.
Nothing feels like it should. Maybe memory lies, or romanticizes the past. The only thing that feels real, the only spark of life is brought by negative — anger, sadness, nostalgia. All of which quickly spiral out of control too often to a sense of hopelessness, nihilism, some sort of Nietzschean cage.
On a whim, a text is sent. Questionable purpose, maybe none at all, outside of seeking connection. And another is received, and poetry is shared, and suddenly things start to make some sense — a vague, shapeless, probably imagined sense, but enough so that it feels like a lifeline, or maybe a voice calling out from safety.
A memory:
A crossword puzzle, appropriate for ages 8-14 probably. A picture of galaxies and star clusters and other astronomical bodies set against starry black, probably meant to inspire said pre-teens to learn more about the heavens. The end picture was likely cartoonish, or clearly hand-painted. But it stuck, and eventually became a dream dreamt twice through a life: once the night after completing the puzzle, and once more. The dream was set at night, though you had to just know in your bones that it was night, because it was bright out, the entire globe of the sky filled from one horizon to the other with the puzzle image — galaxies, supernovae, moons, planets, comets — so close that they seem palable if it were actually advisable to touch, say, a red giant or the heart of Andromeda.
That dream was broken by a new day, begun with the strangest mix of raw elation and crushing sorrow, of having been touched by something uniquely beautiful that will never come one’s way again. But the memory, as they say, remains.
Home, current day. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, only it’s not. Because the dream recurred, as vivid and hyperreal and tactile as memory served. Only on waking, the sense of once-in-a-lifetime enjoyment is lessened. Because the dream returned, for a second and maybe not the last time. Because the waking world is more like remembered from long ago.
Where only weeks before was the cinema of the ’40s, the album quality of the ’50s, the food quality of those horrible ads for Jello and ham and black olive casseroles of the 1970s magazines aimed at lonely housewives chained to their husbands’ bidding — now, here, rich and glorious color in high-definition 8K at 60 frames per second on an IMAX screen, full bullet-time surround sound with a sub-woofer that rattles one’s very soul. The air has that quality of the immediately-post-rain wonder: clean, clear, as though the gods had just finished their weekly washing chores, colors brighter than anyone can remember, that springtime petrichor freeing the mind of everything but the here, the now.
It doesn’t matter so much where we are, as much as: we’re not in Kansas anymore.
For the ladies…
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
– Mark Twain, of course.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
– Albert Einstein
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting…but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive….it’s that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly. – Kurt Vonnegut
I hope the best for the Ukrainian people, and the Russians as well. Putin and those who are behind this mess — meh, not so much. And I imagine and hope one day, karma will boomerang back on them for all the misery and suffering they are creating.
Lots of good quotes about war scattered about . But maybe most relevant, if hyperbolic at this early stage of the game (to remind myself that the glass can be half-full just as easily as half-empty):
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers. – Kurt Vonnegut
A Return to Hope (Captured)
How long has it been?, he asks himself silently. And he honestly doesn’t know — time has stretched and compressed and warped so much that the ten years his math tells him could be a day or a century. How long since I didn’t feel like a machine, like an emotionless computer processing 0s and 1s and not much more?
The rain blows against the window at his head, soft chit repeating at irregular intervals as the wind shifts. A cat paces back and forth at the foot of the mattress, whining quietly that his usual spot is not easily accessible. There’s the familiar whir and occasional puff of cool from the tower fan to his left. There’s a smell of clean shampoo, fruit-scented? and WONDERFUL, and the weight of her right arm across his chest, firm but light as an autumn ocean breeze. Cool, soft, alien but so familiar from his wandering daydreams. Her hand on his shoulder, touching the tattoo, her fingernails occasionally digging as she dreams of whatever beautiful aliens dream of.
The past years, he had suspected he was slipping away from himself. There were moments of his old and familiar self, but fewer and further between as the decade had progressed. Hobbies had fallen to the side, passion projects had run out of steam, and inspiration had been muted, barely a whisper in the fog of his nights. The one constant had remained working with computers — solving problems with a tool that did what and only exactly what you told it to do. Little wonder, then. Easier to think in 0s and 1s than admit you’ve gotten too lazy and tired to keep up with the people around you. It’s admonishment that echoes in his head routinely, motivation mistaken consistently for self-deprecation. Easier to bury your feelings than admit people don’t seem to understand or care.
Her forehead is pressed gently against his cheek, her bare abdomen and hips solidly against his. He listens to her breathing softly, and is convinced for a moment that this is all a dream, nothing more than a dream, a passing jumble of neural signals he’ll forget with the dawn. I need a camera, he thinks. A full range view of this room, this moment, this beautiful human beside me. And the talent to use it, to capture this, that it’s not forgotten and lost in the shadows of my brain. He feels her leg crooked over his, soft and cool and so comforting, feels her gentle breath on his neck, smells the slight undertones of bourbon and cigarette.
He takes in the details, every one, from her head to her toes and back, again and again. Repeats what he sees, hears, smells, feels, more granularly with each pass. Draws an image, carves a tableau, ingrains the essence of a three-dimensional holograms, over and over and over until the moment is as real inside as out.
And smiles. Not in binary, not with the purpose of solving a problem, not with concern for tomorrow or yesterday, but at peace and in the moment, words and sensations his own camera.