Lacquered Brain

"What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapor rises from within forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapor brings a delicious anticipation." Tanizaki 15.

This quote is in reference to a dark, lacquered bowl of miso soup eaten in an old room with old lights. And other things, probably; everything, by virtue of existing in this world, is touched and tampered with by everything else--even in the smallest of ways, this quote is connected to many things besides soup and shadows. Some more than others. Some less than others. But everything's got a claw in it somewhere.
But those last four sentences were throwaway; I am trying to obscure and making a mess of it. I am trying to keep from saying that I am holding on to this quote like my last coin, my last weapon against (for?) syntheticism, against an unresolvable story. But my brain has found the weak point in the armor, and I can't forget it's there. And if you have to forget something to make it work...then it doesn't work, does it? I wish it did. I'm working on it; I'm working on it. I just need the right numbers.

decanters look cool.

antonym

1870, created to serve as opposite of synonym, from Gk. anti- "equal to, instead of, opposite" (see anti-) + -onym "name" (see name).

anastrophe

"inversion of usual word order," 1570s, from Gk. anastrophe "a turning back, a turning upside down," from anastrephein "to turn up or back," from ana "back" + strephein "to turn" (see strophe).

strophe

c.1600, from Gk. strophe "stanza," originally "a turning," in reference to the section of an ode sung by the chorus while turning in one direction, from strephein "to turn," from PIE *strebh-strophaligs "whirl, whirlwind," streblos "twisted"). "to wind, turn" (cf. Gk.

A turning of a turning of a turning of a turning--spinning spindled wait, look, listen, catch up your legs, you're dragging threads and I know this song I know this face I bit its eye I twisted its lips I tied the thread so many colors so many frays and ways around this weird house my house? no not my house just my points and my eye and my string and my running and--is this-is this what--?

I am so tired. I do not have nearly enough of a reason to be tired--just a history of animals and loud noises, mostly. I can sleep with the TV on, with my laptop fan on, with the dreadful light in my room on. I have I do I probably will. But when you get one good night of warm, dark, quiet sleep...sand is forgotten much more quickly than it is recalled. Sand is heavy. Collecting takes time.

If I could just--If I had-I don't care ab-I don't want t-I-I just--

"I run the numbers through the floor."

5.8 PetPetPet

On fleas, mostly.

Do fleas know they're fleas? Do parasites know they're parasites? Does something change if they do, or if they do not?

I know the animals are laughing at us; they don't even know what a joke is.

What is a pet?
Cleverness.
Ingenuity.
Patience.
Sneak.

To be a pet is to be part man.

What does the flea do when discovered?
Pray to shit that, somehow, it reflects back human to its would-be killer.
Time must love me; time, at least, must forgive me, the flea says. But look--seeing eyes, right at you. Do they mistake you for a mole? Do they see you as you are? Curl your legs in and look cute, or else pray they find you cute.

Fuck. You've fucked up, flea. Can you hide? Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve? Or is your only option escape? You've sucked too much, you've sucked too long--can this moment of weakness cost you that much? Everything, really?

Declaration

I have terrible habits; I am a very cruel person, in reality. Not malicious--just a little cruel. Always have been. I caught frogs and garden snakes when I was young. I held a baby bird once (it was on the ground and the mother was gone). I catch moths when nobody's looking. I always let them go; but sometimes, I cannot resist catching them. Even though I have grown into a prim and proper adult--I try to play with things that don't exactly share that inclination.

I am that awful, ridiculous kind of person that can live on secrets and secrets alone, I think. Here I must bring in Derrida, though I'd rather not, because I understand so little of what that man says. There is Abraham, there is God, there is Isaac; there is me, there is other, there is my irl self (that is not an exact parallel, but I will use it until it gives me trouble). I am sacrificing some part of myself, some real part, some continual part, some future part, when I content myself with Other. Content? I do not want this to be the right word. But I'm not sure it's not.

Abraham's silent, secret decision is unforgivably cruel; but the result is not. Far from it. Somehow, I feel I operate in reflection of this; my decisions, my secrets, my stories are not cruel. They are pleasing and beautiful, even when they are terrible. But the result? There is some cruel, copper taste to it left on my tongue, between the grinding of my teeth.

It is not right to catch snakes.
It's not right to lift rocks [to find crayfish].
It is not right to play with toys as if you are one.

I cannot tell what is even going on here. Have I killed Isaac? Do I worship him? Do I abandon him for the Other? The happier I am, the more I drift into dangerous territory. God, what have I done? Nothing--and that is the cruel bit of it. I have not killed him; but he now knows I would have. And that kinda shit don't sit well with no one.

[There is a sweet nuance to the sort of cruel I'm referring to. Like umami.]

I put the Other before Isaac; I put myself before myself. I am all greed. I am all hedonism. But I have nothing to show for it. What is this, then? This hording of nothing--no, I will not say hording. I am more discerning in my tastes. This collecting. This piecing together. But what is this flavor that has nothing to show for itself? I have nothing to be ashamed of--and so I am. Nothing.

Isaac, you are involved. You are part of this secret. But you are the object: you are the secret. If God and Abraham share a laugh at the end of this, it is not extended to you. They are they relationship; you matter, the medium through which it is expressed. You are rendered by their relationship. Come to dinner, Isaac. You are invited. Take a seat--yes, right there. On the plate. You are the meal.

I will say a terrible thing: nothing consumes me, sometimes. It excites me. Not as things do, but as only nothing can. It terrifies me. I see myself in all the wrong characters; too often, Kawabata's. I cleaved Kreisler from Ettlinger in my thought experiment because it was good. But they are not really so different. I am not really so different. I sympathize with Daisy, Emma, Edna, and the narrator. The narrator, perhaps, most, because of that awful penchant for creeping that we share.

That is another bad childhood habit I haven't quite rid myself of yet--creeping. Sneaking. I was very good at sneaking out of the house to play. Outside was the free zone, where you couldn't be found, not behind trees, not behind hills, not crouching between the car and the blackberry bushes. The more I think about it, the more I remember how carefully I used to turn door handles (go to the backdoor--it turns like a mouse), then close the door. Step slowly over the porch step, because it rattles. Don't take the gravel--it crunches. Duck down or you'll be seen through the window.

I loved taking me with you those times, because your doggish footsteps hid mine. And somehow, you knew I was creeping. And it made you antsy. And it made me antsy. So as soon as we made it past all the windows, we ran like convicts.

But I can't run too much here--and never again with you.
So I've internalized it. I've turned my dogs to robots; I've made silicon cats. Hedwiga turned inward--why can't I? I play in mechanical ways. Does this mean that Isaac is dead, through some fault, through some slip? But the Other is still Other.
How horrified they were by the Princess's illness. How disturbed.
But what Ettlinger did was far worse.
And thus it was unspeakable; unforgivable; cruel. A secret. Internalized. How ugly, to watch that foolish man-boy put a bullet through that bird. Put it back. Put it back. God, nobody remembers to put it back. Nobody plays by the rules. She is alone in her game, and that deviates it--dements it.

I did not want to kill him; he was my son, for fuck's sake. Nobody wants to kill their fucking son. And I wouldn't have had to. But something went awry--something interrupted. Or maybe the thing I was waiting for just never came and everything else did. I closed my eyes and felt the angel stay my hand; I felt God. I felt the unforgivable wretchedness of our relationship. It made me weak; it made me strong. The knife was gone--slipped away, or taken, made a secret article by the angel that seized me. I trembled. I wanted to see my son, before I trembled to the earth in this strange ecstasy. But look--
The alter is gone. Isaac is gone. The knife is gone. There is a gun at my feet. I don't know where my son is. I don't know where my son is. I don't know where my Other is. Fuck--what the fuck happened here? I don't know what happened. But I have been divided. Someone has cut me while I slept [because that is what you do to dragons].

I am awry. I do not know where my son is. Will I recognize him when he returns? Will I love him, then? Will I kill him, then? I had not let go--I was interrupted. He was stolen. And now I am weak. I have not been given the chance to learn. To incorporate. To gather. My object has walked away. My medium has unrendered itself. I shudder to think what you will be when you return. A monster. Me.

And what, in the meantime? I am alone with my Other. Halved, it will pity me. It will fill in my gaps. I will be whole again. That is, I will appear whole again.
There is suspension.
There is awe.
There is Aura.
We are waiting, aren't we? Each on opposite ends of the world.

I didn't cut you from me, boy--God, I swear I didn't cut you from me. What? No, I don't know where my knife is. That gun isn't mine--it hasn't even been invented yet. The blood on my feet? Oh God. Blood on my feet. I don't know. I don't know whose it is. Is it yours? If you're going to come back without it, better not come back at all. I'll kill you. I'll kill you then. And I'll weep like a man before the grave. Whatever happened today won't matter then--if you come back to me, without the blood on my feet (if it is indeed yours), I'll have to cut you then. And I'll do it right that time.

But God I hope I didn't kill you. That would be so goddamn fucked up.

4.5 Coda

In connection to the last blog, it must be clarified that one can certainly go too far into these things; there is a point at which you can become a hollowed out skin watching your blood fill a flea. An obsession. Da capo. Da capo. Da capo. If the flea has more [of your] blood than you, who's to say who's who? Like all things, there is a falling point. And there should be; it wouldn't be any fun without one.


Furthermore, on deathy-ness:

"That is what existence is: facing death, being in perpetual difference from equilibrium....The fall kills us and creates us" (Serres 72).

"Ev: (shoots a dark look at him before speaking softly) Have you ever held something broken before?
Le: (toying with the fabric of the couch) Hm? Like a watch or something?
Ev: no. Something alive.
Le: I--(hesitates) no.
Ev: The body is warmest then, in that moment after it's broken, when it's trying to heal. When it's trying to keep from dying--that's when it's most alive. (turns to face him) You were alive when I found you. I don't know what you were before that, but when you hit the ground, you were alive" (onmyroommate'sbookshelf 60-61).

4: Bollenia

This title means nothing. But it pleases me.

I had a moment today. I do not have many of them anymore, these days, at least; I did last year. I was an incredibly nervous person (still am) and it was more difficult to hide there, I think--I was poked and prodded and preened by every sound, every smell then; but I do not feel as many things now. It is a strange thing.

But I did have a moment today. In my Eng 350 class. So I stopped everything and wrote, before I forgot. I do these things without thinking. What? Play. Meshing. Thinking. Editing. This is how I entertain myself in class; this is how I find honey. And this, here, is as close as I can get to describing that process, which is not instinctual, but has come to be close to it:


Turn, turn. I am twisting my pen cap; micron .005. like it is the top of a pill bottle. With just enough pressure, it'll pop up a bit. But a little too much, and it almost slips out of my fingers. I jolt a bit, instinctively moving forward to catch it or collect it, wherever it falls. But it does not fall. I have felt a moment's anxiety for nothing. And as this moment happens, I am thinking of you; artfully, deftly, I smudge that feeling, that anxiety, into that thought. And it is beautiful and pleasing and you are whole. This is what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas.

This is a very difficult thing for me to describe, and even writing in the moment, it has come out garbled. The last line is the truest of them, I think: this is, indeed, what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas. When you play with...yourself, really. No lewdness intended in that statement.

In my Psychology class last year, we learned about the several theories about how reactions and emotions and input work--whether one sets off the other, they happen at the same time, or something of sorts. I forgot a good deal of it. But I remember one of them said that what we feel and what we think we feel are not always the same; responses are not exclusive. I heard that part at a lecture, akshully. It went kinda liek this:

Nora is reading an engrossing romance novel. The male character, Lonshawn, is a dashing cad, except his suddenly head over heals for Deli, the female protagonist. In chapter suchandsuch, Lonshawn becomes very disturbed after Deli does something maybe a tad dangerous. Goes out to get a fruit pie while her attacker is loose or something. Anxious for her sake, Lonshawn grabs her arm and pretty much drags her back to his apartment (all dashing cads have apartments), despite her protest (like any woman, Deli loves a good fruit pie). He says it's because he loves her--dragdragdrag. The violence of this gesture creates an anxiety in Nora; but the follow-up profession of love turns what might have been anxiety-fear-anger-getyourmisogynisticmitsoffmepal into anxiety-nervousness-love'spalpitations. The symptoms are misattributed to something else, something decidedly fluffier. Nora begins to dream of sonofabetch cads who would drag her around by the arm, too.

It is this sort of skewing action; I am aligning parts just left of what they should be to create a desired effect. In the same way that one creates a picture, I work to create a moment. The result is not the same as Nora's, but the action is--that's all I was trying to get across. The verb. The shift. There are very little opportunities for it, and very little time in which to work. It takes practice. It takes editing. It takes thoughtlessness.

The end result is this: I might have simply thought "Oh--that pen cap didn't come off as I expected it too. I suppose I look silly for having jumped a bit." But I covered this thought before it could breath. Instead, I saw a face; both horns and no horns, curled hair and shorn. I saw you, as I remember you; and you, as you are now--as I edit you.
It's become like a game of Where's Waldo now--in almost all of my poems and short stories since then, there will be a character that bears traces of you. I have become so terribly fond of breaking you into pieces: one with horns, one with clay, one a god, one a shade. There is something cruel in all this; but it is not enough to stay my hand.
I could say more here on you and on moments, but I will not; it would be ugly and denatured, and hurt more than just this blog.

It is a pleasant thing, for the artist, to sense the color that sits in the flea's belly through other means. When I paint, I feel it clinging to the corners of my fingers, drying quickly into a stubborn new smudge of skin. When I write, it stretches and shapes out before me, and I see all the things it colors; I see the form, the body of the color.

But artists are just men as well; Ettlinger went mad. He shows there is still a touch of play, a lean toward ruin in the artist. I am not mad; but I am not at all opposed to play. I enjoy what impressions I get of puce through all the world's art; but, at the same time, I take a certain delicious pleasure in squeezing the little bug, just a bit, maybe a bit more, until I can see that good, heavy color through the tight stretch of the flea's skin. It is enticing; it is incensing. It is all a very fine game to me.

And this is as best I can describe something that sits in a large green chair, beyond the reach of my brain.