Q: So how do we let go of the need?
A: Today is a good day! Don’t stay inside, don’t buy a thing. It’s a rare one though; each day something seems to be calling to me, the shiniest gift on the shiniest raft in the shiniest ocean, every sudden shortcoming new and novel. We all have these ordinary insides. “Oh Charlie,” she says, “Oh Charlie, what if I just need a little bit of sparkle?” How can you possibly keep up? You’ve got your finger on the pulse, you think, then someone’s carrying a tiny bomb in the crook of his heart. Ka-boom. You think you’re gonna need to fill what’s left with the things you’ve bought.
Q: What’s a man to do?
A: A long time ago in France a man carried the messages of his fathers and grew to teach swallows to carry what he wanted to say. Unraveled thousands of years of migration, patterns built into their blood. But Europe had pigeons and couldn’t go to war on swallow-time; thirty years to fill an imaginary need. We can go on inventing ways to carry all we want to say or we can just say it. Swallow, or just spit it out, I’d say.
October 20, 2012 – 8:54 pm
Posted in q&a |
Q: Are you bored with the question and answer form?
A: I am bored with it but realize that it permits many valuable omissions: what kind of day it is, what I’m wearing, what I’m thinking. That’s a very considerable advantage, I would say.
Q: I believe in it.
March 12, 2009 – 1:29 pm
Posted in q&a |
Q: What do–
A: Idiot.
Q: What?
A: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and on. There’s no cure for it. The question’s stupid.
Q: Then–
A: Listen. At thirteen my old man tells me he’s dreamt I’ve started three wars and killed so many men. This is your question. The same. Take all I’ve done wrong somewhere else in their dreams and then know there’ve been no wars, I’ve killed no men, and nothing is changed. It isn’t a consequence.
Q: So–
A: So we’ll take your answers and wrap them in swaddling cloth, carry them down to the river to hope they make it to another’s shore. But in all this time you’ve forgotten they’re stone. You drop them from your mouth, to the river, and they sink to make the smallest ripple. The world is shaped no differently.
Q: So instead?
A: Instead: there are things alive in this river. Find those.
March 11, 2009 – 11:39 pm
Posted in q&a |
Q: What do you worry about?
A: Lately I am not-things: not staid or needy or acutely bored or solitarily dealing with a cloudy swollen ego, not tired or overworked– something like stepping away from an outline of yourself still feeling the pressure of the chalk around your limbs. M calls, early early morning, and I’m not old enough to panic yet, and he wants to talk about what he wants or that he’s been sick lately or both and I will. The decisions to make now are what to be full of, what kinds of liquids and when, and that it isn’t sponge-like or drain-like but instead just another kind of bowl or a jar. Early morning is a hard time to walk quietly to such a loud thing, and I try not to touch the objects we own, disturb them, because nothing else asked to be a part of it. I’ll keep my voice as close to nothing as possible, practicing delicacy. In the mornings when I wake up that’s chalk dust on the sheets.
Q: But what is it, the worry.
A: The same. I’m trying not to hurt anything.
March 8, 2009 – 12:19 pm
Posted in q&a |
Q: What do you worry about?
A: Today on the train an older man had made it barely through the doors of my second stop. I don’t know what they call the people that drive the trains. Drove? Conducted? The conductor. The conductor was friendly and reminded us cheerfully to let the elderly and disabled have the seats. I didn’t know if our cheerful conductor would have considered this man old enough to be elderly. What the conductor really said was that if we are young and vigorous we should let the elderly and disabled have our seats. The day had been long. At the end of the day someone had asked if I was tired which means I had conveyed that I was tired. I think I had rubbed my eyes, wearily. If I had let the man have my seat he could have looked at me and thought young, perhaps, but not vigorous. He had barely made it through the doors and when he crept through he had become much younger. Vigorous, even. What slight danger does to a body.
Q: And the seat?
A: It is rare to get a seat on this train.
March 5, 2009 – 8:06 pm
Posted in q&a |