1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.
2.
Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.
3.
Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.
4.
In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.
5.
Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.
6.
Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.
Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.
7.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
8.
Memory is brutal because precise.
9.
She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?
I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.
10.
I have only one purpose: to live intensely.
11.
I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.
You taste like a river in June.
12.
I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.
The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:
“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.”
13.
In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.
14.
Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.
They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.
Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.
Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.
15.
Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.
16.
How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?
17.
My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu.
Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.
He said: “I am dying.”
I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.”
18.
And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybody’s leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.
19.
A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?
20.
In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.
21.
I believe in love only when it rains.
22.
To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.
In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.
23.
Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.
~
You came to suffer/survive.
24.
How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?
25.
Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.
Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.
26.
Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.
27.
Memory is incomplete–lost.
The world is incomplete–vanishing.
Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.
Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.
28.
In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.
29.
When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.
Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.
30.
In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.
31.
Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.
32.
She said: give me more space.
- Arkaye Kierulf
the compartmentalization of
thoughts
and feelings
is a sensation that has stood the test of time:
since the age of the dinosaurs
(when triceratops fed on felt heart matter
and stegosaurus called
the land its own)
we have held on to the concept of
solitude // solitas
and how there is
a body and half a mind
to represent the person i was
way back when.
you exist as a part of my
left side of teenage wasteland subconscious
where you
sway, intimate
persist, delicately
holding court amongst
the brethren roses –
i sink my soul
deep within the soft side of your
always embrace
because this love is temporary,
transient.
the spirit as we know it
is unforgiving:
she is always ready to run.
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
- Richard Jackson
In 2012, I will finally allow myself to pursue happiness, regardless of who or what I have to leave behind as I begin to make this life my own. I will build myself a home, multiple homes, in the most beautiful pockets and hideaway holes of this volatile breathing delicate sleeping planet. I will laugh on a shoulder of gold, sink into the silence and remember to forever remain in a state of quiet wonderment. Love rewards the brave, it is time to be courageous don’t blink don’t run there is a reason for this madness. Shoulder to shoulder, heads beneath a ruddy patchwork blanket and always beating hearts thrust into the center of the storm: I will keep your spirit safe and warm so chase, daughter, chase.
Here’s to the journey.
-
“Happy Shab-e Yalda everyone. Have watermelon. Pomegranate. Build a bonfire. There is loneliness. May the fire light your way out of it. May the darkness grow shorter as the light of the hours grow taller with each day that follows. Climb over the darkness, over the mountain. Bring the picnic baskets. Watermelons. Carry your prettiest plate. Follow the peacock. Listen to it sing. Let its song climb into your deepest silence. Carry your prettiest plate with you. The blue flowers change colors for you.”
- Anis Mojgani
Kodak Gold 200 film pilfered from my grandfather over the summer. Expiration date: Sometime in the eighties or nineties, most probably. A mere eight shots out of 36 were spat out of the developer’s as visually legible prints, but they encompass the freak October snowstorm/Thanksgiving 2011 in Schenectady/balcony evenings, and for that I find them beautiful.
“It does not matter how long you’ve kept us in cages. It does not matter how strong your gravity is; we were always meant to fly.” - Sarah Kay
