Me: I think I'm gonna get an undercut. Then I'm gonna dye my hair a mixture of icy blonde and pastel pink.
Mom: Couldn't you do something normal people do? Like get a tattoo?
Me: Tattoos are permanent. Experience says I don't like anything* passionately for longer than six months at a time.
Mom: True. But you also don't even like pink.
Me: Maybe I'll do rainbows.
Mom: ...are you having a... y'know... crisis?
Me: .....
.....
.....
...
Yes. Yes, I am.
The lazyhawk: a far more likely outcome, given my notoriously sky-high ambitions.
On the other hand, I do have compelling strategy-based reasons for not making my hair into a spectacle at the moment. Maybe next year. EARLY next year.
See... this is why we INTJs so rarely actually do anything observably insane. Our interior simulation schemata always return with manifold reasons why not. There are tons and tons of reasons why one ought to remain an accountant, not run away with the circus, and refrain from sticking one's one-and-only pickle in that plausibly herpetic hole over there. But what a dull reality, eh?
---
* Note: I said "anything" not "anybody". There is a difference.
Empty battlefields keep their phantoms.
Grass crawls over old gun wheels
And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple
Into the summer’s southwest wind,
Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet,
Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel.
II.
Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
Smoke of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.
. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.
There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.
Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.
(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)
I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.
. . .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.
Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.
III.
Horses and Men in Rain
Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter’s day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,
And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.
Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.
Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail and men called “knights” riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.
A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping the hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.
Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the rain.
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
---
the golden leash in this story bothers me a lot
---
The following is only an obliquely related tidbit, as I really don't consider the above poem to be specifically about men, but about us all.
I read Bly's book Iron John: A Book About Men about four years ago when I was pregnant with my second son. What I remember most about it was the author's conviction that a boy must steal the key that lets loose the Wild Man inside him, he cannot merely ask for permission from his parents. Bly recalled a situation in which a young man tried to persuade him that the boy need only request to have the Wild Man freed from his cage (which had been my own initial inclination as well), but Bly came down hard against that option. I have to say I don't yet feel I fully understand this metaphor, even though it has stayed with me for years and I've poked at it quite a lot, hoping to unravel it completely. Perhaps Bly is wrong, or perhaps I am just too inculcated with the culture of polite consent and working-togetherness to embrace the concept of a necessary theft... even if I've already lived it out as a thief in my own way. (Evidently the latter then, hmm?)
A quote that jumped out at me from the book, interestingly along the lines of my previous post:
A university, like a father, looks upright and decent on the outside, but underneath, somewhere, you have the feeling that it and he are doing something demonic. That feeling becomes intolerable because the son's inner intuitions become incongruous with outer appearances. The unconscious intuitions come in, not because the father is wicked, but because the father is remote.
Young people go to the trouble of invading the president's office to bridge this incongruity. The country being what it is, occasionally they do find letters from the CIA, but this doesn't satisfy the deeper longing...
---
"Brother and Sister" is not a Grimm tale I knew in childhood. Instead I grew up with "The Six Swans"... specifically the sad version of the tale in which the princess isn't able to finish all the shirts in time and her last brother is left with an arm permanently deformed because of her failure. The illustration of the final prince and his poor bird arm was assigned to my birth date in an anthology of fairy tales broken into 366 readings. I remember asking my parents to read that story to me over and over, each time disappointed with the ending, wondering how it was that they all "lived happily together," as the story claimed, in the face of irreversible loss. I was equally captivated by the tale of the girl who chopped off her own finger to open the lock on the glass mountain in order to free her brothers, the seven ravens.
Cruel stories for children, maybe. That's life, though. We give away things (and have things taken from us forcibly) that we cannot ever regain... and we are supposed to gimp our way toward happiness regardless.
Etymology: from Latin praestigium (“a delusion, an illusion”)
, from praestinguere (“to obscure, extinguish”)
... from praestringere (“to blind; to blindfold; to dazzle or confuse someone”)
, from prae (“before”) + stringere (“to press, tighten, compress”).
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "prestigious institution", doesn't it?
I also get the skin-crawlies when people use the word "antisocial" to indicate that someone is shy or asocial.
As in, "I haven't left the house in 3 days, lol, I am so antisocial."
I realize that most dictionaries do support that definition, but that's not what I was (unfortunately) taught in grade school, so I always think of this:
Here's Johnny! ...just staying home and playing WoW today, with his phone turned off.
lioness you said
or phoenix, you amended
vermillion ornis fierce and burning
stalking beasts among reeds
you knew
witch that you were, or warlock, full-handed gleaner of seemingly
barren fields
with your crystals, candles, pentagram-kept-in-jest,
empty room
but for pagan books, a sleeping place, and hash pipe, hemp
necklace with the yin-yang
you never studied and never needed to, it came so easy, like hunger
or did it? 'cause there was also
your ragged pack where you said you hid the tabs you'd do what-with like any nameless street-roach insulating self from nameless dangers
god only knows what was under your tidy bedskirt, boy, I did not
look
but the floors shone where your mother scrubbed them clinical
and forgot
that the world is a story writ by Flannery O'Connor:
in this one a professional mama forsakes her own bundle-uh
that she may carry instead the whole city
on her alcoholic back,
functional-like,
'til for lack of tending you hung
stabbed imbibed shot up breathed in
--what have you?
"I knew you'd be a Leo,
from the moment I first saw you"
you said that, city lamplight streaming down on me and you
(shameless for once)
through the window of the guest room in A. Wonderland's house
(her real name!)
your hands on my bare waist.
earlier you'd watched Thelma & Louise as if preparing for exegesis.
I remind you of a lion? Because I'm cowardly?
"Because you're brave, a huntress."
You only see yourself reflected back at you, not me.
"I see both of us. You and you beholding me. Each a lion, each a bird to be born again."
Nemean lioness, then--fine, hippie star-gazer. I will believe because you trembled with fear and want, guileless in your virginity and we did not fuck at any point because your ancient soul, four months younger than mine, knew better. That's why I
trust
you did not lie when you named me
Lion.
But you were no Archer like your own sign,
Nor any Hercules fated to win and wear my vacant hide, yet
You skinny Buddha, font of calmness, dark and gentle
eyes as placid pools of mu
beatific, terrible as a saint to look upon
thoroughly impressed the fear of the void
into me.
my hair was golden then
and long but i have changed it
it has changed me for i
gave all my crowns to the face-sculptors
who hollowed out my eyes and plumped my cheeks
gave me a stare
you would not recognize
me if we passed in the street,
goshawk,
they have sparrowfied my plumage
and deportment
both
i let them
and i always wondered but never found out
if it was her,
your mother,
the white-frocked one
who paddled my errant father in
his own temples
with a jovian bolt,
to slay or to awaken
(thy will be done, lord, either way)
the dragon-snake that ate us up as babes,
you and i,
while she--again--stood by, unmoved
or was she the one who wrote secret notes to herself
over crossed legs, asking without interest
beneath that painting we laughed about together--remember?--the one of a bridge
with no reflection in the water below it, so completely ridiculous
a thing to hang in a place for the already-disturbed
as if they needed prodding along in getting gone enough to be worth helping back to shore: What animal, little girl? What animal?
A peregrine falcon, doctor x. Like in the Jean Craighead George book.
A wild-bound boy will steal me from my nest, name me Frightful, feed me
watch me fly free,
keep close 'til the day I'm killed.
But, no. No, no. Not so. Not really. Not true. Not for me.
A bug.
Yes, my final answer.
A tiny, crawly glitch. That I might hide where no one will see me.
A bug. If you so much as move your shoe I fear I will be
crushed
my broken feelers still probing the breeze, vainly,
as my guts and shards of exoskeleton wetly glint,
laid open for viewing and consumption.
For I am twelve and I do not believe in anything so fantastical as human flight, doctor x.
lies. i do believe in flight, but not of the airborne variety
instead a mad descent
scuttling wide-eyed away from your near-limitless love, Garuda,
like a rat from a broom
or as a beetle eschews the sunlight for her dank but lithic sanctuary
down below,
phoenix? yes, dear heart, we are all continually ash-rising from bleak Earth
but I did not let you attempt (maybe, maybe...) to burn me up
so--
my purpose in legend, in your own short book
aborted.
what then?
in the age of tubes in tubes
criss-crossed circuitry connecting
masses mashed up, frigid closeness,
frenzied swarming orgasmic apathy, bottomless and omni-present,
you and I
the both of us, lovers, for the nonce
walked out at separate times, for separate reasons,
from our parents' snow-packed cabin,
trecked through the wood with Gemini gait and
leapt off the edge of the map
into the memory hole--
falling faceless, songless
leaving behind no trails, no cybernetic breadcrumbs
for any circling birds
There's something about deadlines and a damn full schedule that always simultaneously makes my brain:
1) Kick into high gear and start thinking up all sorts of writing ideas that I won't be able to get out of me before I lose them...
and
2) COMPLETELY MELT DOWN!
SHAMPOO FIRST OR SHAVE MY LEGS O GOD I DON'T KNOOOOWW
II.
Mainly I want to commit to writing about Hideous Man #6, widely regarded as the most troublesome HM of all. The only real hideous man in the entire book, if you ask John Krasinski. Do I agree? I don't know yet. Last year I did. Now? Not so sure.
In a lit forum I frequent (well, sometimes), somebody posted a link to that part of the story recently. I knew I shouldn't read it again, but I did, very closely. I suppose it's probably obvious to anybody who knows me well the reason why that particular interview grips me in a bad way. I don't mind saying it ruined my day, really. Again. Apparently the day-ruining is worthwhile, though, or I wouldn't come back for more.
Don't know what I want to do with it. I'm not much for deconstruction. But we'll fiddle with its piggilies and prod its armpits, to see how it reacts. And maybe make it puts the lotion on its... oh, never mind.
That'll be in a couple weeks. For now: verily, verily ....another shall carry me whither I wouldest not.
III.
This song feels like the story of my life right now. Not my love life, just my life. Usually when people say, "Anything could happen," they mean it in a good way. I don't think Ellie does, though. Neither do I.
And it could. Anybody, anytime, anywhere. To you.
Is there a version of Zen Buddhism where you learn to accept reality as it is, to smile and remain unruffled... but also to give that fucker the nine-yard stare for being a goddamn Earth-vexing pignut?
Don't approach your history as something to be shaken for it's cautionary fruit... Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed... Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.
In my view, there is no perfect love song. It's a moving target, always changing, always different. You are a moving subject, with a moving object of your affections. (Or objects, depending on how slutty you are feeling.)
It's not even experienced the same way at the same time by each party involved. For instance, you might tell a guy he's your Aya - Over Night ("chivalry show me the way to go...") and he might laugh throatily and tell you that's all fine and well and very sweet but you're his A Perfect Circle - Magdalena ("one chance, one kiss, one taste of you, my black Madonna..."). True story.
This is a hard one to answer. I knew my ONE almost perfect love song instantly. Then I knew I was wrong, and I knew why. But I don't want to hop right to sharing my conclusion d'heure. Love itself isn't like that. And this space is my field in which to frolic and do as I please, not some rigid survey form with a 55-character answer box.
So let's take a winding journey. Rather... I'm taking one, whether you come along or not.
This'll be a long one. And not appropriate for relatives, probably, especially those who'd still prefer to see me as a cute, li'l inoffensive baby. :-) You've been warned. As my big sis says, "Anyone who reads my diary gets what they deserve."
(Also, very image and video heavy. If you didn't notice.)
This installment is not about my greatest love song in the world.
No. This is just a tribute.
---
First up, my favorite harshly realistic love song:
Tim Minchin - If I Didn't Have You (I'd Have Somebody Else)
Your love is one in a million You couldn't buy it at any price But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves Statistically, some of them would be equally nice Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you Or dumber but better at sport... or tracing... I'm just saying (I really think that I would) Probably (Have somebody else) Yeah...
That's actually tied in this category with Placebo - Every You, Every Me. Though I don't take either one cynically at all. More just... with a knowing, little smile. A spoonful of humility to go with your ecstatic sense of cosmic uniqueness. A little down to temper your up, and keep you grounded. "A little sully in your sweet," as Sugar says.
That Placebo song was my #1 favorite when first dating my partner. Always on repeat. Sucker love forever. I (knowingly) choose.
The real question: how does she fare against Voltorb's SonicBoom attack?
---
And then there is the song that first really made me pretty sure I wanted to fuck a boy. In 1995 or so. Not any particular boy, mind you. Just a boy. A really awesome one. Someday. In the not too distant future. Maybe.
Cracker - Low
It's not every song that can make you think, "Why, yes, I DO want to go down like some disgraced cosmonaut." :-D
I tend to like songs with space imagery in general. Stars, moons, nebulae, space ships, infinite horizons--all very sexy. For instance I think Incubus' "Stellar" is mostly a really boring song and it's not in the running for this at all, but the opening line ("meet... me.... in... outer. spaaaaace") always got me. Many, many nights I spent outdoors under the stars listening to that song playing on the local alt. rock station. They overplayed it. Probably part of why I don't care so much for it now.
Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground and Toadies - Possum Kingdom (dark secret? behind the boathouse??? yessssss) were second and third place for this category. And, no, let's not explore why all three of those songs are sort of about degrading situations and/or possibly murdering people, hmm? At least not right now. "Fast As You Can" by Fiona Apple is also on my love song A-list, if you really want some rich material for troubling analysis.
Runners up:
Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence
INXS - Need You Tonight (though the Husky cover kinda knocked it out of the park)
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole (I feel bad even mentioning this 'cause there are so many other, better Muse songs... but none sexier, imo. YET.)
---
Moving on...
Next up is my "we're broken up and still in love and I know you'd drop everything and come for me if only I asked but I can't afford to go through that again so I'm gonna cut you off now, bye" song.
Does everybody have one of those? Love is a many-faceted thing, isn't it?
Jimmy Eat World - Your House
And my best vaguely resentful-yet-smoldering wistful-yet-firmly-resigned sexytime breakup song, while we're in the neighborhood:
Joydrop - The Line
More forbearance, less finality:
Chris Cornell - Pillow of Your Bones
The embers of the saint inside of you Are growing as I'm bathing in your glow I'm swallowing the poison of your flower And hanging on the rising of my low Colorful and falling from your mouth Like a painted fever in recoil Like a lie without the pain On a pillow of your bones I will lay across the stones Of your shore until the tide comes crawling back Throw my pillow on the fire Make my bed under the eye Of your moon until the tide comes crawling back
My tragically lost love song:
The Seatbelts & Mai Yamane - The Real Folk Blues
The real folk blues I only want to know what true sadness is Sitting in muddy water Isn't such a bad life If it ends after the first time Hopeless hope And the chance with traps What is right, or wrong It's like both sides of a coin
Bang... It's all... a dream...
Yeah, those sad ones were all for the same person. That's life, fuckers. :-) Not everybody's worth a sad song.
His breakup songs for me were "Fatal Tragedy" from Dream Theater's Scenes From a Memory and almost the entirety of Stabbing Westward's Darkest Days album.
I know this because we listened to each other's music, even when we could not bear to speak to one another. That's how it was. My step-brother had that album, too--Darkest Days. I practically stole it from him, in those (darkest, ha) days. So many times I filled the tub with warm water and played the album front to back on the stereo in the bathroom, naked and immersed, eyes closed, imagining his head space, exploring what it might feel like to be the man who listened to that album over and over on the other side of the country, missing me. And all other emotion would slip away, the more I understood, until there was only love, joy and sorrow remaining.
It would be nice if we could put away and throw out everything except what really mattered, but reality is just cruel. In such times, I see you laughing whenever I close my eyes. Until the day I reach eternal sleep, that smiling face will have to stay with me without fail. People are all sad, so they go and forget, but-- For that which I should love, For that which gives me love, I will do what I can. Back then, when we met, it was all awkward. We went the long way, didn't we? We got hurt, didn't we? Until the day I reach eternal sleep, that smiling face will have to stay with me without fail. Back then, when we met, it was all awkward. We went the long way, didn't we? We got there in the end.
'cept we didn't!
But I do think we kept our promise: "I will do what I can." That's enough for me to be at peace with what is. That song is also Kikyo's death theme, in Inuyasha... and that's what she says. "Kikyo, I... I couldn't save you!" "You came for me. That's enough."
It's not a bad candidate for a perfect love song, actually... but it can't help being a song of failure to me, or at least an ending of sorts, so it can't be my perfect love song.
That song is called "Dearest". In a peculiar sort of way, I suppose he always will be dearest to me. Not because I love him best (I don't), nor because of his own unique set of gifts and foibles are the set I could most admire of any in the world (bluntly, they are not), but simply because of the precise, haunting quality of the time and space in which all of that occurred. The beauty is in the collision. There is an indelible mark because of it, an invisible silver chain, connecting. Unchosen, but nearly ineluctable.
Eventually you see that you were not made prisoner by the chain, nor broken by the collision, only become that much more powerful than before. If you keep on climbing.
---
Husky's album Forever So is about that kind of love. To me, anyhow. Every word is golden. The Josephine winding throughout is not just a person, but an idea, an ideal, a broken dream and a new, more sober hope fashioned from the shards of it.
The Woods
I went walking in the woods today found a path that led me astray I couldn't leave it On the bank of a river beneath the trees I stripped down naked and fell to my knees I washed my sins away Morning came and gave the truth away I wondered if I'd ever return But as you say, time will pave the way I just sit and watch our kingdom burn I went walking in the woods tonight trees looked wicked by candlelight I heard them whispering your name Far away I saw the city lights the dreams of mankind burning bright It was so beautiful Morning came and took my fear away I wondered if I'd ever learn But how will we explain the mistakes we made when my fear will surely return I went walking on my own Bright eyed spirits guided me home
But all is not lost when dreams are broken. Reminds me of this quote by Wendell Berry:
There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
---
When my partner and I were moving in together, we were listening a lot to The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead.
I won't keep my eyes ahead anymore. I don't need to, for I am no longer fleeing. I do not fear surveying the ashes of any kingdom in the world, nor the signs of life that came to bloom amongst the gray.
At least, not for the moment. Fear returns cyclically, like everything else. Perhaps the next go will not be so poignant.
---
Now it is time to see how you died.
Remember that death is not the end, but only a transition...
---
Then there are the "love as defense against existential angst" songs. Too many to list.
Second place would probably be The Velvet Teen - Naked Girl ("smile, you will be my shield, you'll be the only thing anyone ever sees... kill, crush me, break my will, cease the endless rats inside the walls that squeak and scratch away, and keep me awake..."). Breaks my heart when the singer refers to his relationship as his "Christ in arms"... for the Christ-in-Arms is a traditional term for an image or statue of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus, but it also conjures up the Pieta, doesn't it?
This isn't a song that I really associate with romantic or sexual love, myself. I was given it by a very dear but completely platonic friend a long time ago, and almost feel as if I'm taking care of it for him, on his behalf. Because I grokked it, right away, and he was happy. Which made me happy. So, his song, my heart, always on my iPod ten years later. Weird, I know.
I think the song can be applied to a lot of crutches, though--the "naked girl" is just a symbol of what you cling to, albeit unhealthily, to get you through... for better or for worse. That's the way I hear it. Sort of like "Bottom of a Bottle" by Smile Empty Soul.
First place is IAMX - I Like Pretending.
Are we machines Obsolete, alone With symbiotic self-indulgence? And if we dig deep The circuitry burnt out, bends Into neurotic repetition. But your silver skin soothes my aching curses and reminds me That you're worth it. The whole world's insanities The bleeding hearts and tragedies Won't distract me from the deathwish Are we pretending? Are we pretending? Are we pretending? I like pretending.
---
My old cheatin' song:
Liz Phair - Why Can't I?
There are better cheating songs out there ("Bizarre Love Triangle", for one, if you interpret it that way, and the previously mentioned "6 Underground" probably counts as a cheating song, too, if you listen carefully), but this is the only song about cheating that I ever actually cheated to.
Well, depending on what you consider cheating. Maybe it was just a rather rude and abrupt breakup followed by pure fun, as suggested by the lyrics. And no sex was involved. Is that even considered cheating in these daisy-chaining modern times?
(yeah... it was totally cheating...)
(and it was with the aforementioned, not on, if you were astute enough of a reader to wonder)
---
Best love song with slightly mystical leanings:
Wilson Phillips - Eyes Like Twins
Describes an impossibly perfect connection, most likely... but very attractive, nonetheless. Loved this one as a kid... though back then I thought Wilson Phillips was a very high-pitched man, haha. So at age eight, I had a crush on an imaginary person. Maybe that's the only kind of crush there is.
Love is all of that, and none. It exists and it does not. Pathetic and transcendent. Holy of holies, the most mundane collection of observable phenomena.
---
GOD, he will not save you IS NOT, he will not save you HERE! he will not save you from this
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.
-Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim"
---
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
---
I'm sure the reality, my El Dorado, lies somewhere between those points. I don't know how to get there, but I'm not giving up.
Not really. But his work is packed so very densely with meaning, it really does feel like consulting a sage sometimes.
I've only mentioned him around the house two or three times in the past year because whenever I say his name, my partner gets visibly jealous. ^_~
(He shouldn't be.)
That, up there. That, from a man who hung himself. Makes me wonder if true love for humanity is incompatible with enjoyment of dwelling in its midst ("it" being that mindless, helmless, ever-crashing sea of people). Everywhere I look, love and fear comingle and intertwine, feeding on each other like AURYN in the hands of the Childlike Empress.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).
