9.28.11

"Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me" (Yorke 1993)

I am often melancholy; tragically longing in the mid-morning. Do you get irritated easily?

I remember standing with my bicycle on an unkempt lawn. My friend was there also; we were talking to a man. We had stood on this same spot with our bicycles about a week before and spoken to him and his mother. We had tried to convince them to let us teach them something religious. Come back, they had said. Now we were back.

The man was going blind, they had also informed us. He was taking it very hard, everyday receding more into an unknown world, walking down a fading road alone. His mother was pleasant, but concerned in the stubborn, business way that some mother's are. She knew all the facts and figures; a resourceful woman, but not a scrounger. Her's was a hard-met hope, built and sustained on passion fused with logic, on the defending of her son. There was at least the hope that his condition was treatable.

Their house was close to a main road that headed out to a large bus station and then out to the highway. There was a gourmet sweets shop on that road; we stopped there several times. The road out to the bus station was long and beautiful, but we rarely noticed the beauty - we were most often rushing to the station in a long since futile effort to catch the right bus. My bike seemed to be perpetually stuck in the highest gear, although our bikes didn't even have gears. That must sound like some awful metaphor, but its not - for some reason my bike was simply adamant about missing the bus. Perhaps its previous owner had not been so care-taking as I, though I can hardly claim that I took better care of the vehicle, mostly because of my frustration with its stubborn spite of cooperation. I felt like my legs were going to implode every time we got to that bus station.

I often have the audacity to call this kind of mood "pensive." I guess it is somewhat pensive, but more like a plea for the weight of heavy thoughts.

This time the man was alone - his mother had gone out to run some errands. In the interim since our last visit, he and his mother had visited the hospital and found out that his blindness was not reversible. As he spoke about it, he began to weep. Had God taken even this from him; his sight? What hope could he have in God? He seemed to plead with us for the answer. I don't remember what we told him, but I don't think it was the answer.

So long have I waited, Lord
so long I have tried
so long whipped and hated, Lord
that my hope has burned and died

In ashes let me see thee, Lord
so tired, let me rest
not as I would see me, Lord
but as I need be blessed

I picture my brother playing with his band in a dark room. There is no stage, only a space between the many tables and the wall. There is a moose's head hanging on the wall, or maybe it was more like some type of caribou or elk; I don't really know (it took me a good minute to figure out how to spell "caribou"; spell-check suggestions were "carbonate", "caboose", and "scarab"). There are only two small lamps on either side of the wall, and a neon Coor's Light sign. The band begins amidst a subtle hubbub.

My brother starts to sing and is gradually transformed. Each word that he transmits to the microphone pulls him deeper into some mysterious plane of painful meditation. There is all range of voice; all range of feeling. Within this world he alone transcends the bounds of mortal limitations - social, cultural, ethical, intellectual. Alone he drifts in some immortal current, beyond even the notes of his own music. At times the sound is a gentle haunting of ghostly contemplations, at others the mournful scream of some overpowering memory, once experienced and now laid before the audience, our souls surrounding it and collectively weeping as it is slowly, triumphantly lowered into its grave. Such is the emotional power of his travels that by the end of the performance he is on his knees. Breathing heavily, he resurfaces amidst rapt applause.

"I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. I didn't write that song" (Yorke).

9.26.11

"Tho' I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" (Kipling 1892).

Religion sometimes confuses and worries me, mostly because I enjoy it when people think I know things. And it's not that you can't know things in religion, but it seems that so often the lines between belief, assumption, logic, knowledge, and truth become incredibly blurred. That being said, I naturally grew up as a spiritual prodigy.

I went one summer to a week-long church camp called EFY (Especially for Youth). I remember one night we were gathered as a small group sitting outside and listening to our councilor give a short lesson. At the end of the lesson, he invited us to separate (there were only about ten of us) and each find a secluded location where we could (ideally) truly and honestly pray. I found my spot and laid down on the grass, looking up at the moon. Suddenly, I began to weep. Powerful, emotional sobs - waves of some kind of fire, some kind of eruption of deep anticipation that washed over me again and again. Was it God? Was it only me? I stared up at the moon as if it were the hand of God. After a time my tears stopped and the intensity was replaced by a feeling of rest: a sort-of aching peace. As I think about it now, I think about Elijah, who witnessed wind and earthquake and fire - what emotions of terror must have accompanied him, I can only imagine. Or maybe it wasn't terror, maybe it was astonishment and awe, an outburst, a crescendo of incomprehensible beauty that may sometimes attend us as we witness the unequivocal power of the natural; perhaps even of the divine. Perhaps he felt the wind and the earthquake and saw the fire as if they too were the hand of God; waves of passion washing over him as they did me.

But I feel empty now as I remember Elijah's story; I feel somewhat confused, like my emotions should have proved something, like remembering them - and even experiencing them again in the slightest degree as I do so - should have produced something more than the quiet, tired uncertainty that now pervades. But perhaps that is why the author of 1 Kings was so careful to note that the Lord was not in the wind, or in the earthquake, or in the fire. But why? What is this voice that comes after?

A few years after EFY, I went with a large group of local church youth to a weekend campout activity. During one of the last nights we were put in a surprisingly similar situation (though this time by our local church leaders) and thus I again found myself in a secluded spot with the intent of communing with the Divine. But this time I was ready, I knew what I wanted and I was fully prepared to ask for it. This time I did not weep; I was not washed; I was not fooled by wind or earthquake or fire. I was only refused.

One day in my high-school English class our teacher began to criticize the US government. The things he said here controversial - something about Osama Bin Laden (whoever that is) and the Taliban (whatever that is) being freedom fighters when they were fighting Russia , but now being branded as terrorists. I didn't really know what he was talking about, but I definitely observed how his controversy gave him some sort of rapt attentive power. I immediately adopted his beliefs and, the next day, was thrown out of my Math class for refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. My Math teacher spoke to me afterwards as did my mother when she picked me up from school. They each reprimanded me, but then masterfully used the situation to respectfully present their opinions. They even encouraged me to discover my own.

Did I listen? Of course not; the damage had already been done. When I had been waiting outside my Math class after being kicked out, I had been approached by two girls, one of which I knew. They asked me why I wasn’t in class and I explained. They looked at me like a god.

You know, the boy who cried wolf eventually got eaten by the wolf. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it is rather frightening to me that, in my mind, this brutal end seems so incredibly justified.

9.23.11

The womb
The average temperature of the female womb is 98 degrees Fahrenheit, which degree scale was named after the Dutch and German and Polish physicist (and engineer) Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit who in 1686 apparently caused his mother to go into labor somewhere in Danzig, Poland before communicating his express opinion that he possess tri-nationality, thus causing his mother to quickly traverse the German countryside - including both the Elbe and Rhine rivers - so that he could actually be born somewhere (I would imagine) in Kerkrade, Germany/ Netherlands which city existed at the time as a part of, of all things, the Spanish Empire from which he apparently emigrated to begin experimenting with alcohol, glass blowing, and mercury which led him to eventually propose the philosophy of a temperature scale in 1724, just 12 years before his death in 1736 for which a certain Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, was desperately waiting perhaps due in part to some slight insecurities and jealousy caused by what must have been for him a very lonely, mono-national state of being and also in order that, perhaps as a strictly secondary reason, he might - only 2 years before his own death in 1744 - propose a completely new scale at which water boils at 0 degrees and which he must have thought to be vastly superior to Fahrenheit's, but with which an Irishman - one William Thomson - would disagree (though perhaps not because of reasons of nationality) and so propose yet another scale in 1848 which was an attempt to reconcile his qualms with absolute zero (which I'm sure he's settled by now with his absolute death in 1907) and, in a startling turn of events, was actually named after him by other scientists instead of being so named in front of a mirror, though I'm sure he had plenty of mirrors as he was said to be a Baron in which case I probably should have addressed him as "Lord William" at first, this being the proper title at the time in Ireland for people with a lot of potatoes, such as engineers, and for people named William as was the case (though I think without the potatoes) with William John Macquorn Rankine of Scotland who didn't even wait for his Irish counterpart to kick off before proposing the Rankine scale in 1859 which no one really uses, which I think a just consequence for William's obvious attempt to overshadow another William and fellow engineer for the reason of potatoes, but I also think poor William got little attention because there were many other important things going on in 1859 of which one was the birth of William Fredrick Rigby, Jr., who left Mrs. Mary Clark's 98-degree (Fahrenheit; 36.67-degree Celsius; 309.82-degree Kelvin; and 557.67-degree Rankine) womb to be aptly named after his father, William Fredrick Rigby, Sr. who had renounced his own mother's womb 26 years before as the first child of his father, William (this fifth William adding substantial evidence to the Rankine's apparent William complex for which I'm sure he received frequent, albeit posthumous, criticisms from William "Lord" Kelvin who actually outlived him by 35 years, probably because of his potatoes) Atkin Howarth who abandoned his respective womb (the word "womb" actually being of unknown origins) in 1816, a mere 46 years before the birth of little Jr. William's brother, George, whose son's daughter's son (not named William) married a lovely woman (whose paternal grandfather, believe it or not, is named William) whose womb I vacated on the 25th of April in 1986, exactly 300 years after the birth of Mr. Fahrenheit, with whom I share a name and by whose scale I experienced a temperature drop of about 30 degrees on the night in question, which has justifiably caused me to remain screaming for the last 25 years.

9.21.11

Loss
In my junior year of high school, I was enrolled in an art class at the south end of campus. I sat across from two girls, one of which I was attracted to, one of which I was not; but I had to make jokes for both so as not to lose face. The result was that the girl I was not attracted to became attracted to me. The other girl I couldn't say. She (the girl I was not attracted to) wanted us to take a picture together near the end of the semester - I was sitting down at the art table and she was bent down from behind me, her arms wrapped around my neck and her head to the left of mine (to the right in the picture). She gave me a copy of the picture which I still have somewhere. The other girl must have taken the picture, but I don't remember; I don't even remember what she (the girl I was attracted to) looked like. I remember the picture though, vividly - the lighting of the room such that it turned out terribly blurred. I remember the feeling of her arms around my neck, her face close to mine; why do I remember her?

For a few days in art class we were assigned to attempt a self-portrait. It was to be my next masterpiece as all high school art projects are when you are sitting across from a girl you are attracted to. We began simply enough: the basic shape of the head, the symmetry of the face, adding the ears at the same level as the eyes (which I had no idea was the case even though I had been looking at faces for upwards of sixteen years, including the face of the girl I was attracted to. The girl I was not attracted to had smooth, brown skin and long, dark, strong Latin hair; she was just a tad shorter than I was).

Next we added the nose, mouth, and hairline. I took great care to add my characteristic Widow's Peak and scraggly sideburns. A Widow's Peak is said to be an omen of early widowhood.

"And ye Jentyl wymen whome this lewde vice doth blynde Lased on the backe: your peakes set a loft" (Barclay 1509).

After the basic hairline, we went back to the eyes. Here great care was taken, mirrors getting closer and closer to faces across the room, silence in the contemplative poetry of self and self. The brushing and nervous scratching of pencils, the condemning judgement of the No. 2 eraser.

After many minutes of work, I put pencil and mirror down to view the portrait in its entirety. I looked at the proportions and hairline (which, again, pleased me immensely) and then meandered down the face to the eyes of my creation. I was suddenly transfixed. Deep within those sullen, two-dimensional orbs I saw something strange and terrible; something that looked back at me in the sudden realization of life. It was the mirror that looked back, it was me; beyond the windows of lead and tree I had crossed the bloody, arcane river braved by Frankenstein. I was startled and entranced, and then it was gone; the monster fled before me and I was left alone, never to see his living visage again upon the page.

"I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" (Shelley 1831).

The girl I was not attracted to had produced a pitifully disproportionate portrait - her head was much too sphere-like and much too small. I said I liked it though; her's is the only other portrait I remember.

9.19.11

 
I guess the main purpose of this blog is to be honest; an attempt to be authentic and admit a range of both light and dark thought and emotion.

What is it about honesty that we perceive to be so liberating? Honesty can be terrifying, it can be incredibly unwelcome, it can be socially unacceptable; such a strange concept, even purely irrational in some cases.

What if you don't know whether you will be understood? Perhaps this is what constitutes authenticity - the ability to be honest despite your audience. Talk about terrifying: if honesty itself is challenging, authenticity seems like a naked stage-fright nightmare. Even as memories now arise and beg to be recorded, my mind fights back, "why would you ever reveal that?" I'm not entirely sure. Curious the phrase "in spite of yourself."

A friend of my mother's once caught me looking at a nude picture of Britney Spears.

Do I even dare tell you about this? My mind screams the contrary, it tells me that you will change the way you think about me and that that is a bad thing, the worst thing. It tells me that you will not understand, it begs me to avoid it. Or, if I can't avoid it, to at least explain it in such a way so as to show that I am not the same person as that twelve-year-old boy. "See!" it wants to say, "that was something bad, but now I've changed and am going to heaven. Judge me the way that I want you to!" Please don't, actually.

At the time, my room had a large window facing the patio and front yard of our house. My computer screen directly faced this window such that anyone approaching the front door could clearly see what I didn't want them to, unless the window was covered. This was the job of a large quilt my mother had fitted to the window to act as my pubescent stage curtain; different shades of diamond and trapezoidal pink that always seemed to me strongly Native American.

It was in the evening and I had grown bolder and bolder in my curiosity for the last couple of days. I remember thinking Britney Spears had the face of a goddess - some type of beauty that I couldn't really understand, and one that had some mysterious effect on me. As I think about it now, I am reminded of Marilyn Monroe: "goodbye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all."

Why am I telling you this? You may be asking that question. I kind of hope you're asking that question and that the answer gives me an excuse to rethink what I'm doing. "Rethink" in this case meaning complete abandonment.

My face was close to the screen, close to Britney; close, I wanted to be close. I wanted; longed; she seemed so real, but frustratingly far away. There was a wall, some kind of wall; I willed myself to believe that it wasn't there, that all I had to do was get closer...break through the wall. The perfect curves of her body screamed to me in a language I did not understand, but wanted to; oh, how I wanted to speak that language, for her to know that I spoke it; for her to speak to me; to...

The doorbell rang.

"Delete that paragraph"

"What?"

"Delete the paragraph now."

"Shut up; you don't think this is hard enough?"

"Those emotions are inappropriate; admitting that you have ever felt that way is unforgivable. What are you, an animal? Some sick pervert? You are disgusting; why would you ever want to remember being so sub-human? If you don't delete that paragraph, you're no better than a sick dirty novelist."

"What's it to you? Maybe I am just a dirty novelist."

"People won't like you; they will judge you; it will hurt."

"What will hurt?"

"Being flawed. Being rejected."

"Maybe I am flawed."

"Well why the hell admit it to other people?"

I'm not entirely sure.

My hand shook almost uncontrollably as I clicked to close the browser window. I turned around to find that I had not drawn the quilt. I sprinted over to see who was at the door, my mother and Denise looked back at me, Denise was smiling in a giggling sort of way, my mom looked confused.

I had until after school the next day to think up what I thought to be a convincing lie. "It was in an email," I frantically told my mother, "my friend sent me an email and I didn't know what was in it; I didn't know that there would be a naked woman when I opened it!" I wept, terrified. I was scrambling to be believable, wanting with my entire soul for her to believe the lie, for me to believe it myself. Maybe it was just an email, right? Anything to avoid embarrassment. Sexual attraction was just something that happened to other people, right? That makes sense, I mean, it was those "other people" that had sent me the email.

"Other people" in this case meaning me.

What are we supposed to do with the emails we send ourselves? Trash? "Mark as spam"? Reply? Archive? "Mark as read"? "Add label"?

"Well, that depends on the nature of the email."

"Why?"

"Because some emails contain bad things."

"So, how about I just create a label called 'Bad things: Never feel again'?"

"Yes! Then you could set up your account so that bad emails were automatically archived! Then you'd never have to even see them in your inbox!"

"Sounds fantastic; a perfectly rational solution."

"Precisely! Wow! So, why haven't you tried this yet?"

I have.

I don't remember anything my mother said; I wish I did. Sometimes I kind of wish she had just cuffed me in the back of the head and told me to stop being a liar; to just be honest. Maybe she did. Would I have listened?

"They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name"

9.16.11

Sight
The train from Spegazzini is cold in the morning air. We are headed towards Tristán Suárez and then on to Ezeiza; the blue metal seats unforgiving and unsympathetic to desperate pleas of warmth - my body heat just seems to bounce off them. Its like trying to warm up an ice rink with a hockey puck. The seats are relatively empty so far; we'll fill up as we get close to the city though.

El tren bumps and lurches along, always content, the old horse; harmless, but still powerful. Oblivious to its passengers, whether few or many; they have painted her and sold her, but still she canters on, her placid eyes are dull, but luminescent in the early mist.

Around me there are routines, automatic gazes wait for 11am at least, some for noon, some forever. I am reminded now of the Hotel California: some dance to remember and some dance to forget. But I realize now as I am reminded now that these two settings and their inhabitants have absolutely nothing in common: "forever" doesn't even rhyme with "remember". Maybe the people at the hotel are waiting for something, maybe they're trying to escape. Either way, the people on the train are trying to sleep. Nada que ver.

Maybe a couple dances the tango at the hotel?

Many are holding bags or boxes to take beyond Ezeiza, into the city, into shops and ques and homes (hopefully). The hope has since faded though; meshed into the confidence of time. A man walks through the compartments selling sweets and shouting an instantly familiar phrase: "quatro por un peso!" I wonder now if he is still there, walking back and forth along those distant corridors, shouting in his tired way.

What I wouldn't give now for quatro de sus alfajores. And por only un peso? He's probably raised his prices a bit since then though, un peso no te llevás como antes. At least, that's what I imagine he would say; I also imagine him rubbing his right index finger under his nose, across his mustache as he says it, in a forlorn look of business. But maybe then he would make a dirty joke, at least something with some character - something to show that he's still alive, that some element of humanity still simmers inside him, breaking occasionally through the cement mask of peso; through a lifetime on the train.

I look to my left and see one last line of houses along a dirt road. And past that, something beautiful - a place of solitude. It is, to me, a symbol of culture, of casual brotherhood, of pureness, of passion. It is like a dream, a memory, a piece of poetry that bridges generations. It is the essence of struggle, of enjoyment and of life; it is la cancha.

Here I sit and gaze upon it, wishing I could somehow take it with me. I watch until the trees obscure it, holding it in my mind for just a few more moments. Then I turn back to the train, my head against the window, and try to settle a little deeper into my jacket. I close my eyes and wait for Tristán Suárez.

9.15.11

Crossroads
A combination of tales swirls in my mind; a current of dark observations and considerations.

"They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened. I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere" (Barthelme 1981).

"To what extent do we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by docilely accepting the roles others assign us or, indeed, choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions? The prison of fear constructed in the delusion of the paranoid is no less confining or less real than the cell that shy persons erect to limit their own freedom in anxious anticipation of being ridiculed and rejected by their guards - often guards of their own creation" (Zimbardo 1973).

"'Listen lady,' he said in a high voice, 'if I had of been there [to see Jesus' miracles] I would of known [they were true] and I wouldn't be like I am now.' His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them" (O'Connor 1953).

History sometimes seems to pull at secret parts of your mind, revealing those hidden synapses that connect you to generations uncounted. Possibility can seem like such a heavy burden.

Children, are we not all children? Scared, sad, hopeful, unsure - cycles of feeling seem to both bind our hearts or bind our hearts together. Are we doomed to repeat history or are we supposed to?

It seems at certain crossroads that life can so easily seem real and surreal simultaneously; its incredibility can haunt, its terror can give hope. Crossroads remind me of Mr. Robert Johnson; crossroads remind of me the blues. Seems strangely ironic: do you know the tale of Robert Johnson?

Last night I was washed over by a strange feeling; I felt like my soul could somehow clearly observe the reality of the moment because it had been ripped out of the moment. It was a sad sweetness, like a man in the midst of the sea, grateful for its bounty and terrified by its depth. The feeling somewhat permeates today, considering unknowns like the possibility of affection - the flutter of the heart both excited and anxious, afraid to lose control, afraid to have it.

"Standin at the crossroad
tried to flag a ride
Standin at the crossroad
I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me babe
everybody pass me by"