tothesound

We’ve filled up the room with dead horses, though we’re poor small things. I don’t have an answer. I stand, run my fingers between the tiles, her feet swinging from the counters while we’re drawing the same line back and forth until we’ve both become inaudible.

The day before we were accidental witnesses to a man on the platform who lurched and met the ground with blood that pooled to a thick shadow. Today I feel like I’ve been stepped on. We phoned help, told the woman at the gate but any more we were useless; the train came. Walking home she told me about unrolling her mother’s clothes from the drawers and pulling at the threads for three days after the funeral. She was the nicest she knew how. We made it to our house where there had to be something to do– build something or stir something– like to prove we were still in this world while the air stayed smelling of iron.

I want to sit down and talk. I feel horrible.

I could make her clothes, sew her up in a thick cloth. I could wrap it around her for days, leave her breathing but remote. It keeps spilling out of her that we’re at a loss, things are uneven– if it could only drip from her tongue to the soft web I could build around her, taking what was edgeless and spongy between us, it disappearing in the threads. This was one small ominous disaster, not a series.

Her feet swinging I tell her I don’t know, slip my hand in the hollow cave behind her knee and move away.

Maslow, found in de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work*:

It isn’t normal to know what we want. 

***

Last week I built a yurt, start to finish– one of those novelty-type things that actually realized into wood slats and labor. All this talk of not being able to hammer a nail over the internet or something and it was a kind of joke turned oddly pertinent: four days in the middle of nowhere with duck eggs for breakfast and things that grew from the ground ten feet away and power tools and failed-math-cum-trial-and-error, all the while serving a numero uno purpose of total distraction from unemployment round two (twice as bad). All a special kind of first-world respite from alienation, self-pity, and job postings that emphasize the word “twitter” and act like bright neon callings for exodus. I don’t want any of this.

No hesitation, though, (or guilt, etc.) to say that it was nice to feel deserving of things like dinner or sleep. I built a thing.  

*Some (seconded) dislike of Pleasures: I am angry with the voice of most of this book– occasionally mean and quick to deem things surprising or apt (this town “surprisingly devoid of charm,” a (hey!) surprisingly apt summary of the book), all of it existing in a place too far removed to make any effective stabs at saying anything new or real about removedness. But, at least: my library uses old library catalogue cards for the scraps you can write out call numbers on, the one I inadvertently grab to write down the number for Pleasures tagged with the category “self-actualization,” in all caps: SELF-ACTUALIZATION, Maslow’s final step in the hierarchy of needs, “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything one is capable of becoming.” In a steady stage of not-becoming I at least have a yurt, and a satisfied basic need in case I face eviction.

It is unlikely we are taking care of ourselves. So (first) I will have to stop ending emails that way;

Sophie Calle: Agreed. D’accord. Ouais. 

(Sophie Calle– “the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry”; men-to-projects maker. Oof.)

(second) I am tired, often. 

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: “In no love story I have read is a character ever tired.” 

(Roland Barthes– died, February 25, 1980, injuries sustained from being struck by a laundry van; everything-to-projects maker.)

I think maybe that is true, but it is stupid. Unless he is only meaning the love story, and not the endings of the stories, where we are always tired. Somewhere: the gentlest collapse–an image from a movie or story I think may not exist but is the coalition they’ve made — a seat, a sigh, because, [name], I am tired. Bleak battles from the trenches tire anyone, even if you are on the same side. 

So slowly we tire, and our concerns are only ours; take care of yourself, because I no longer want to (we hear). But we aren’t lying: I imagine, robustly– calisthenics, the last smoke, hearty meals. Care for yourself, because once I loved something there, and if I am tired it is only my fault. 

(Larkin, Philip:

Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitious and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it.)

April? Still? 

Not much to be done, though. I have a thing that is being worked on between increasingly equally* *ish matched office v. non-office hours, equally* dark  (it’s a heat wave! we turn the lights off! then, this weekend, it rains, and yea, power grids move upon the face of the waters). Not cruel, really, this has all gone very well, I think, minus those few mishaps (1) illness (2) lapse in judgment (3) repressive measures [200 dead on both sides, unsparingly slaughtered].

(”A thing is being”? Getting as far away from this as we can, we are. Ten-foot pole. OR longer? Oh hush. Sea change=death wish: look, it’s right here: 

“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange…” 

Those pearly eyes we dream of. Hey: image search versus: Pearly King v. Pearly Gates. We have a clear consensus on the winner, and I don’t even know you. What’s ultimately weirdest about this is that the pearly gates were each made of one single pearl, so sayeth the verse. Tiny gates or giant pearls? From that giant-ass clam Venus came from, maybe. Relocate your swine, please.)

Anyway, a thing becoming. Soon it’s a-maying, and April won’t be any longer. We’re wringing our hearts out over here, sun-dried and ready for something slightly more open to swiftly churning tides. That, friends, is the sound of a coming victory. You and I vs. this silly stagnant pond. 

A million years later I’m off the couch, stealing spotty internet at a new place with two floors and an impossible parking space. I have a view from this deck now of an old hotel which is mainly why I’m here, and in my head moving means playing music too loud and drinking beer and standing in empty spaces: enough empty space, I guess, for all this romanticism to echo wildly off the walls. It’s like inhabiting an expectation.

This view, though. The moon hangs right above the ancient sign for the hotel, named less an actual name and more just a string of nouns– a geographic term and three different words for buildings. Too there’s a mosque and a mostly empty parking lot and my neighbors have a garden. It’s space.

On my lunch break today at the Galleria a pigeon flew from one side out the other which isn’t weird because it is a kind of open-air version of a strip mall/food court and so completely plausible, but it is weird because that’s straight out of Bede. A bird through the mead-hall. Life as the brief period of light between the two windows. It’s a perfectly fine metaphor except for how airy it sounds: a bird through the mead-hall leaves out the massive pile of stuff being accumulated, stuff I’m currently moving up three flights of narrow stairs.

“You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again.”