notes

[sioltach]

YOU DID NOT COME INTO THIS WORLD. YOU CAME OUT OF IT, LIKE A WAVE FROM THE OCEAN. YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE

[kitchen-light]

“There’s a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn’t do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and vanished, saving himself. I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it.”

— Ocean Vuong, from an interview with Zoë Hitzig in Prac Crit

[shimmery]

the angels of love

the angels of love were ones who began to fall and got stuck somewhere on the way down hung by the collars of their shirts on the spires of churches  and the tops of trees or up above a drinking fountain — anywhere a forgotten plastic bag might get caught on a windy day that sweeps the rubbish from the streets. 

those angels not fully fallen belonged to no element and spread their own suspense in thoughts of imaginary lives that seemed more real than anything that had been lived

the same impulse that would make you save the wrapper from a complimentary mint you received after dinner a token of the night — that’s what love is

clinging to things, or having something that lives on in the imagination something you can never look at full on in the moment but which gathers beauty in a rear view mirror, diminishing in size on a horizon fished out from the bottom of a shoebox you keep under the bed beneath the letters that haven’t been read in years which it would take a death to make you read again

desire is only made possible with empty spaces it needs nothingness around it, it needs absence. imagine a ballroom with just the one thing you want at the other end of it the ballroom is filled with water and you can walk through it only slowly and only far beneath the water.

are you listening to what i’m saying?  to get to what you desire you must fill your lungs with the air up by the chandelier, sink down to the bottom and walk across the room while holding your breath you always only get so far. and it always seems like on the next go you can make it.

and why do you want to go there in the first place? just for a couple of days in which the sun happened to be shining, which made a new way of living seem possible? a day you were far from your ordinary responsibilities, and ate new foods for breakfast? is that all it takes? would you stop breathing for this?

why don’t you just feel the depth beneath you as you float on the surface? someone painted beautiful frescoes on the ceiling centuries ago

why can’t that be enough for you? why must you always want to go under?

there are other rooms here; you haven’t even seen them yet. the angels of love are the devils you know — 

why don’t you just let out the breath you have been holding and scream for the devils you haven’t met yet, who you might discover are nothing  to be feared after all:

come all ye unknown devils — show me that i do not know anything at all — i am not afraid to learn that my own life is something so completely beyond me. i imagine and yearn to do one thing while doing something entirely opposite. it seems i am on the way; that in just a short time i will be living the life i imagined the life those angels of love sang to me before i knew the same song had been sung to everyone: only the fools like me thought themselves to be the sole hearer. what is beyond my comprehension is that i have been living all along!  this waiting has been my life. its beauty has been the candelight on the surface of the water far above my head, which has called me up again each time

yes i am ready now to go on. to see what i haven’t seen before or else to continue to see the same thing over and over again  but this time without delusion. this time breathing in and out and knowing that one day it must come to an end and that there isn’t a stone angel in this city that can save me

[shimmery]

[shimmery]

lol (lots of love)

hi, my name is Nev, I’m from the MTV show catfish, this is to tell you we know you’re not real but someone loves you very much or else craves closure filmed from 7 angles experts in watching dreams dissolve quickly on an untold amount of porches        we wait for the light to be right before bringing your victim a producer and 5 camera guys what you 2 had was special     a collaboration in imagining how a person might be loved in spite of vulnerability

what the lover might look like, the reasons she’d have for a western union transfer, for not showing up in 3 years sometimes people just like to know they exist outside of the room they are in; if not physically they could anyway be present in the mind of the person they rely on being in love with If I didn’t make this show, would anyone think of me? Do I exist when I am alone?

[shimmery]

[theparisreview]

No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 (via theparisreview)

[shimmery]

St. Paul’s Studios “They were designed as artists’ studios by Frederick Wheeler (1853-1931) and built in 1891. Wheeler designed the studios in the Arts and Crafts style for James Fairless, a publisher of prints of classical works of art. The houses were meant for bachelor artists and had three rooms on the ground floor and in the basement a kitchen and a room for the housekeeper...  The studios themselves were situated on the first floor and were 30 feet long and 22 feet wide (9.1 × 6.7 m). The large barrel-vaulted windows, facing north, were specifically designed to let in as much light as possible.” -- Baldwin Hamey 

(Picture credit: 1, 2 & 3)

[shimmery]

Space Walk

FAR ABOVE AN AFTERNOON my years of learning to walk in Texan swimming pools came untethered waiting for my oxygen to run out I looked at the fingerprint of clouds against the memory of ocean, wondering what colours their undersides appeared to anybody looking up a last breath and a final push: one more swim in to the dark with an ending fear of not knowing if it was cold beyond my plexiglass not feeling any breeze or lack of on my skin exhaling I dreamed questions like

           if I pick up speed will I become            a comet?  

[shimmery]

He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: 'These horrors were really non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present day life as something far more than horrible and cruel, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, between two modes of life and thus loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innocent. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.'

Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse. 

[theparisreview]

Writing is a very silly business at best.

John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 (via theparisreview)

[shimmery]

[shimmery]

Our Lady

HAIL MARY grace would be the earth imploding. Daffodils begin to open. It is spring in contrast to my being.   You are with me. With-child is a preview of being a corpse with some root planted and soon to flower in your dirt. And so motherhood feels the first little death; I believe you know the fear at the hour of our death. 

[soycake]

g r o w t h

[shimmery]

I will eat oranges. My fingers will smell of oranges, my tongue will be sour. I want my gums to be strong, to keep a mouth full of teeth. My hair is moving back off my face. I’m getting bald and my gums are pulling back from my teeth. When I drive with my hand on the top of the wheel I see it freckled with sun spots, patterned like my grandmother’s. I’m 22. God, I feel old. Then again I felt old when I was 19,  then better -- really young again -- and now old. Both ages I called myself ‘in love’. It’s dreadfully final. I’ll put sunscreen on the backs of my hands. I’ll massage it in to my knuckles every day after I’ve eaten my oranges, so as not to taste that sunscreen smell.

In my job now I can read stories online. I stop whenever they get romantic. Love is only loneliness, and I can’t stand anything other than all out desperation: two oranges minimum per day. My job is to not be ill. When the children’s teachers get sick I cover for them. I set work and sit quietly at the front of the class, reading the stories, writing a little, too. The hours pass quickly, I look up to see the children standing behind their chairs, their faces turned towards me, expectant, almost concerned. ‘Miss,’ they say, ‘Can we go?’ I tell them yes; leave, feel free. 

We all stay in the same house, the children and I. When a storm came the house murmured with sleep talk and with a breeze that found its way in to the corridors and struggled to get out again, to be wet with rain, to lift the dead leaves off the ground. My door creaked opened by itself, I whispered: there are no dead things here, yet. 

I got out of bed, I peeled an orange. I have an east facing room and so much sky allocated me to look at. It was pink with the dawn. I took the skin of the orange off in one piece, I got pith beneath my fingernails. I spat out the seeds on the ground, spat them through the window. When I got back to sleep I dreamt orange trees growing between the cracks of paving slabs, out the moss on the roof. I will eat the fruit of those trees, too.

[shimmery]

Birthday

I was seven when I first knew a sadness my angel calls proof there exists a spectrum of emotion wide as the sea for those who sail without sight of land. It was deep.  Some animals see more colours than others. I try to see this as a colour. Once a year we arrive back where we began. And in this beginning I see my colour in the sunset. How neat it would be to step off here, at the exact point in space the earth first conceived of me. 

[shimmery]

I Could Not Carry a Child

You like cities. I do not. Like cities I have come up too far from the ground.  Even at night I see myself reflected on the sides of collapsible glass buildings.  I know gravity and I know fire. And I know my arms too weak to carry a child out of smoking ruins and therefore unprepared to carry one in.