When did I become a person who wakes up at 6am to film a scene for a mini-series, smoke sidewalk cigarettes and go to work in a car bumping casual rap, go to a lecture on media and ontological horror, and then work on the staff of a sex magazine, and then get home to rehearse a clown piece about guidos and fairy tales and childhood and piano-playing?

Oh right, this is business as usual.

what i think about when i look at a telephone

(Or, sometimes I have some intense, melodramatic feelings.)

It happens often: either I read it, or I hear it, or I see your childlike mouth make those shapes, on a glowing screen a second in the past– but every single time, the heat under my collarbone blows outward, bursting every artery, every streetlight bulb for miles. I hold my breath forever, I swim across the Atlantic. I am the Atlantic. I am every shipwreck between this city and you. I get quietly drunk, alone in my apartment.

I dream about high-speed trains. I overcome my fear of flying. My telephone commits suicide. The ice melts in my whiskey ginger.

I get minor chemical burns. I have a cleaner kitchen. My bed fills up with tepid water, floating with dead leaves. I am a person in love, and a person in love knows no physics.

Sometimes I think I could fuck you up, bad, with a knife or a broken bottle and all the indignant rage that I can muster. But even still, I hope that every time I wake up in the middle of the night in terror, I hope that I see your eyelashes on your cheek, that it is your hand on my arm. That the small and overwhelming sun under my blankets is always you. 

I want you to be here. I want you to be quiet. I want to hear your voice. I want you to love me until whatever is left of my body scatters in the breeze.

synchronicity: memory

Sometimes I am reading two different things for two different reasons (research for a play, sampling the reading list for a friend’s course), and they speak to each other so clearly that I can’t help but feel that the topic is something I should be paying attention to. 

As someone whose mind loses large tracts of time but clings to arbitrary moments with obsessive detail, the idiosyncrasies of memory have always interested me. And so I wanted to hang on to this paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” (from Moments of Being). Discussing childhood memories from the a nursery in St Ives:

At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories–what one has forgotten–come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible–I often wonder–that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it–the past– as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. 

So basically, Virginia Woolf invented the Matrix. This is similar to how I’ve always thought about life after death–the intense moments of our lives occupying some frequency, humming, waiting to be tapped into through memory. Even after all of a moment’s participants are dead, stopped and rotting, the moment continues, waiting for someone to tune in. But it is always there. I find this comforting, although this thought becomes stranger as I consider the vast, teeming number of moments of my life–even those that, at the time, were overwhelming, were infinitely important–that I have forgotten, that seem irretrievable. Mundane and unique, the life slipping away from my memory is mine alone to lose. Much of it has been shared, sure, but a sense of continuity can only come from me. And what do I have to work with? Whatever I can remember, which isn’t much. An airplane, a pile of dirt, a body of water, a naked body, the smell of something burning. The sounds of people talking. Mostly I remember the sound of their voices, the way the light hit the side of their head, the way they looked so fragile, more than any of the words said. I lose words a lot.

What I am trying to say: sometimes it makes me uncomfortable to realize that my sense of self is based on a fairly small percentage of the data that could in theory be available to me. 

For years, I thought my earliest memory was of a nosebleed on an airplane. On the way back to New York from Los Angeles at two or three years old, the sudden awareness of my body’s spontaneous fragility. Wiping my nose on the back of my small hand, the shock of red, that color screaming at me that my body could be a traitor. That feeling of surprise still strikes me often. I am still utterly convinced that I am going to live forever.

I realized, however, about a year ago, that my earliest memory is from a few days earlier. Universal Studios, Hollywood. The King Kong ride. Sitting in a bus with my mother, staring out the window as that giant face emerged, primitive and furious, and we were lifted into the air. My earliest memory is the scowling face of a huge robotic gorilla, if that means anything.

On the same train ride as “A Sketch of the Past,” I was reading The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome, one of several books I am reading for research for a play I’m supposedly working on. It’s a fascinating read. She was very much a part of Freud’s circle in Vienna in 1912-1913, and addresses both the progression of various theories and the fluctuating personal relationships among the intellectuals of that time. The journal entries are interspersed with letters, mainly between Lou and Freud. Right after reading “A Sketch of the Past”, I came across this:

If we are inclined to doubt the truthfulness of journals and memoirs, it is not just on account of their conscious or half-conscious omissions. Above all it is because the construction of memoirs, like narrated dreams, amounts to a rationalization of experience, eo ipso a falsification of its latent essence. If a person thinks back over the entire course of his life, he is struck by the discontinuity and poor selectivity of the points that stand out clearly in his memory. Transitions and bridges of logical reflection must do their best to provide the connections. Many “unforgettable” events are strikingly banal, indifferent, or meaningless, while incidents which have claimed our deepest interest have to our sorrow become unintelligible in their precious details. Here too, by means of the associative process, significant latent content may very likely evolve out of the fragments, exactly as with the dream; the picture which emerges in all these lines, broken at the surface but pressing vertically into the depths, is a picture quite different from the horizontal structure of our waking memory.

So, too, a literary technique could be imagined (that old dream of mine!) which would be true to that very unity of formation. 

[…] Freud remarked once that to bring about the construction of the completed analysis from the end to the beginning would require an artist.

And here I think, at least I’m not the only one. These ladies seem to know what I’m talking about.

uncomfy times all around

a friend’s post about processed chicken, which was super gross but interesting, lead me down an unexpected path of horror– anorexia tumblrs. there are so many of them. i guess i should have known– did livejournal not prepare me? or better yet, opendiary? all those creepy self-injury blogs I read at 15? but i guess i just hadn’t thought about it. tumblr is good format for it, thousands of girls circulating the same photos of women who don’t get their periods and faint a lot and have no sex drives. 

i don’t really want to link to any of them, for one because girls with such fragile egos would probably not take it well, and i’d feel weirdly implicated by further distributing the content, but they’re there. so many of them. 

it’s been a long, shitty day and I feel defeated. an adorable hedgehog is dying today. i’m sorry, buddy.

long story short: ladies, it is okay to eat, because one day you won’t be able to eat ever again. or maybe you will just be irresponsible like me, and not always have money to buy food.

null

The Rolling Stones - Sweet Virginia

My boyfriend keeps harmonicas in his car, and sometimes while we drove around the cold streets of Chicago in circles, smoking cigarettes and singing along to rock n roll, he’d play along to the intro to this song.

I played it on the radio recently, passing out alone in the station at 4am. It’s a good song. 

I’d like England to give him back, now, thanks.

Because between last night and tonight I’ve gotten a cold, because ever so suddenly fall is here, because my telephone won’t work–

Because I’m in love with someone on the other side of the ocean I grew up with.

Because my friends are breaking each other’s hearts, or moving away, or getting old, or staying the same, or getting into bicycle accidents, or standing in the middle of a room after a shower and looking at a reflection in a window and thinking, jesus, what am I doing with my life?

Sometimes you are standing, 22 years old, at a bus stop that is not even a bus stop, eating Lunchables out of a black plastic bag, on the verge of tears, or maybe just a yawn.

Sometimes you imagine a woman lying naked on a huge block of ice, and a patient man with a razor, shaving the ice into snow. 

Sometimes even though you hate hate hate airplanes, your golden birthday is coming up, and all you want is that ticket, and those eyes.

the only piece of furniture in my bedroom is a tall, queen-sized bed, a gift from a man who taps his long fingers across linoleum and black fabric, thinking about death and how to stop it.

the only clock in this house doesn’t run, and I see the cemetery through my windows.

walking past the stones each morning, a chord rushes itself into my thoughts, one syllable:

O Fortuna O Fortune

velut luna as the moon

statu variabilis, stays changing,

semper crescis ever waxing

aut decrescis ever waning

among the images on the wall alongside my bed, a self-portrait– a girl who died in a bathroom in venice. i remember: the bruises on her arms.

you would think, with all this, you would think i was a sad girl.

on the verge of fainting on the train ride home, an hour of sleep in a chair after a night of strange airwaves, I feel and look like hell.

but honestly? honestly, these days i am feeling full to bursting with the fact that i’m alive. yes. yes.

yes.

Right, right, so I keep saying I’m going to write things here.

Instead, I fall out of my windowsill backwards, trying to install a curtain rod without a drill.

Instead, I drink campari out of a vintage creamer and spill it down my bra.

Instead, I wake up in the middle of the night hungover, and I look out my window at the graveyard, and I think about being alive.

I swear to myself, yet another time, that I will never again sleep with a boy with a rickity loft bed, because I’m an adult now. I drink absinthe and get lost in the woods. I catch the bouquet at a wedding. I feel bad about my family. I take the first bath I’ve taken since 2006. I make to do lists on legal pads, and lose them. I think about writing letters overseas, or passing out in a Brooklyn subway station.

I need to stop being intimidated by the action of putting words places. I need to start getting more sleep. I want to yell, at everyone, all the time, just how much I love them, and I know they’re having a rough time but of course they are, we’re in our early 20s and everything is a mess. But it’s gonna be fine, I love you, it’s gonna be fine.

null

the amount of response to this in under an hour brings me a lot of joy.

(you can’t see it if you’re not my friend, but I said “anyone have book suggestions on these subjects: Wagner; Russian émigrés in Western Europe; a broad overview of the history of feminist theory; the early development of psycho-analysis” and everyone I know is a huge nerd)

Haven’t been writing, things have been hectic, I have been homeless. I move into an apartment this week, and then I go to New York for my high school best friend’s wedding (congratulations, Ally and Gavin), and then I get back on Monday and will still have a thousand things to do. But by the end of this week at least I will be moved into an apartment that is actually mine for the first time in months and months, plus it will have a view of Graceland Cemetery and will contain the companionship of one Griffin Sharps, Renaissance Man.

I am trying to write a play, but I’m very much caught up in the intense amount of research it may or may not require. Here are some books I am thinking about:

Lou Andreas-Salome - Freud Journal; Fenitschka; Hymn to Life a bunch of other stuff

Rainer Maria Rilke - The Duino Elegies; Sonnets to Orpheus; okay actually everything he wrote

Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy; the Case of Wagner; Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Benjamin - the Work of Art In the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

Adorno - On Lyric Poetry and Society

Agamben - The End of the Poem

Kant - Critique of Judgment (on Aesthetic Judgement)

Freud - the Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures

W. H. Auden - In Memory of Sigmund Freud

a book or two about Wagner, a history book or two about Russian emigres in Western Europe, some feminist theory, some Lacan, a bunch of other crap and various biographies, oh my goodness