Little paragraph: Theory can exhaust the life out of the very revolution in gender thinking it helped foster; similarly does theory threaten to impoverish art, if it loses itself in the abstraction of a continual denial of all grounds of self, identification, materiality, embodiment.
Susan McCabe
“with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in
the soul and with the fear of death”
double the snow leopard so it shall not be blown down (out of history)
(the double turns on me with a black look, with a knife)
discernable to the interior eye is my self talking with someone else One of me sees
me there
orbiting the eyes
food of light
flood
the soul with the body’s first double
Eleni Sikelianos
There was
the space between [her/his] face and how I felt about it
where sunlight condensed from what once was sun
a perspiration of minutes sweating between us
the door love practiced in me swung open
to look at you and lodge it in my heart
an attitude of love, called Ritual Disaster
Eleni Sikelianos
Back in the Deepest South after my week-long wedding-fueled blissout in Santa Fe. And I just…I am just in complete awe at having found friendships that run so deep they are family–and a place that runs so deep it’s home. It’s more than enough for anyone.
Anyone anywhere.
Home in Santa Fe! Already coming out of my shell. Already singing to the cats in the morning and making jokes. Something in the change of light as we dipped through the clouds and over the Sangre de Cristos yesterday afternoon. Something about the browns and reds and deep greens. Already clearer, happier, steadier, in deeper contact with Self.
More karate chopping. WHACK! Gone.
The more I think about that terrible call yesterday, the more I think it is a serious stroke of luck for the Americans. HFS, this story is the lead story in sports all over the world right now. As long as the team can keep the story alive, they garner attention and sympathy. They continue to need to learn an important lesson about being more alert during the first minutes of the game so as not to concede TWO GOALS. England’s poor performance against Algeria yesterday means USA are very much still candidates for progression–and the hardship unites the team! USA’s got everything to gain from that bad call, and if it hadn’t been made all we would have had was a win. This scenario makes for much more exciting soccer.
Also–I just want to say this–soccer players are so HUNKY.
Um, ahem, excuse me. Back to pining and poetries.
Dear Readers,
Turns out, after many days of terse, punctuation-less texts returned several hours after initial inquiry, days of long phone fights followed by days of short, curt, distracted 20-minute phone conversations, I’ll have to abort Operation Win-Him-Back. I am writing this to you because writing to him to try to convey my sentiments regarding the “end” of our “relationship” would be such an extraordinary waste. Yet I do feel the need to explain myself, and renew my values and integrity.
The composite picture Soccer Captain has of our relationship is one in which I was, for the first half, a haughty, bratty, emotionally-distant bitch–then decided randomly to flip the script and play house and expected him to commit too. This narrative is unfair and untrue–though I am, having gotten up at 6 am to buy football tickets for next season (which I will sell for a month’s rent) and to watch the World Cup, and having endured months of this silent terrible resentment, too exhausted to refute it point by point–I will only say that I think trust and commitment are gradual achievements that come after time and work of both people in a relationship — but Soccer Captain will not be disabused.
I half-think that this is a story he’s cooked up to give himself an out (much like the professor’s initial “we’re just not kin, Farren”, when he ought to have just said “I’m a raging narcissist and I fucked some of the students at the newspaper we’re running together”) and I half-think that I am sticking it out (beyond I LOVE HIM and WE ARE COMPATIBLE) because I think I deserve it. Insert here the memory of the final YEAR of my last relationship, in which I worked two jobs while my partner, fired a few months after I’d moved to a crappy city I did not like to be together, ignored me, criticized me, drank to such excess that waking up to a bathroom splattered with vomit was a twice-or-thrice monthly kind of arrangement, and slept on the couch and watched Sports Center all day long. I really believed that I should stay in that too.
Plus, I mean, GOD, it makes for great drama doesn’t it? It’s a good story. It’s a great way to think of myself. I am “broken-hearted”. I am “mid-break up”. It’s whatever.
Anyway the point is the Farren who hangs around for all that is BULLSHIT and I need to do better by myself. I am very very sickened by the turn Dude’s brain has taken, but he took that turn because he wants OUT, not because it was true, and there is absolutely NO WAY to convince dude that his story is wack and we love each other because dude needs this out! Dude needs out and he’s going to stick to his guns. Bye Dude. Bye. Bye.
It’s time to start thinking of this break up as a relief from the demoralizing emotional abuse I have been sticking out in the name of getting to the bottom of whatever Soccer Captain’s six-month-long Shitty Attitude was About. Turns out? Who cares. Maybe we were compatible but in many, many important ways we were not (ohai, dude who lives two miles from the house he grew up in! Dude who makes unbelievably sexist and racist jokes as a matter of course! Dude who found me too “intimidating” to do anything but the obligatory in the sack! Dude who has–that’s right I SAID IT–really terrible taste in music!) and I have to STAY STAY STAY the fuck off of the “I got so close to having a family, I’ll never get that close again” headtrip I get on when I think about the fact that the man who told me in FEBRUARY that he wanted to marry me now won’t return my calls for days and days. I don’t want to have a family with that guy. That guy is a remote, neglecting, selfish, resentful husband and father. And OKAY–I live in the deepest south, where interests listed on dating site profiles are hunting, fishing, jesus, football, and “my kids are the most important thing to me” even though they are like the SEVENTH item on the list–but that’s just tough. I also happen to be at a very good institution of higher learning, reaping the fruits of the biggest effort of my life–and to extend this metaphor REALLY REALLY far, sowing my fucking future, so you know what? That shit can wait.
XOFS
PS – What the fuck was up with the ref’s call during the US-Slovenia game this afternoon?
“Leland, the time has come for you to seek the path. Your soul has set you face to face with the clear light and you are now about to experience it in all its reality, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center. Leland, in this moment, know yourself, and abide in that state. . . Look to the light, Leland. Enter the light.”
Special Agent Dale Cooper
The Gulf is dying, more heartbreak. It’s all I can think about. I read about it on and off all day. I read about marshes and the ecology of the Mississippi Delta. I read about the hurricanes in New Orleans and the fishing in the Gulf. I read about the life cycle and farming methods of Gulf Oysters. I read news coverage of the spill incessantly. I don’t know what to do. NO ONE knows what to do, so we all just bear silent terrible witness.
Also. Alabama is fucking HOT HOT SWELTERING HOT. I eat a lot of cottage cheese. The butter gets rancid and the bananas go bad in the space of a day. The mythology of central air. I have been doing a lot less laying around and staring at walls, but also and still a fair amount.
Carole Maso today. Thinking about Infinite Jest.
