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“The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ‘12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.”
Pardon me while I grossly weep over a stranger’s death. Sometimes clichés are such because we need to keep hearing it, that despite the endless repetition we still can’t always get these things into our heads. Sometimes it takes the horror of dramatic irony, the howling voice of Rilke’s youthful dead to make me hear a thing.
more unfinished thoughts.
-
Sometimes names are changed to spare the innocent
but we are as guilty as your sheets, Alexei
with your name like a poem and your eyes like wet lips.
I saw a razorblade fall from your pocket like an eyelash
your body shedding skin.
Everyone’s in love with you:
the girl whose cheek is wet with my spit,
the immigrant whose belt I split in two.
We cannot catch you. You are a ghost
and so we rub our tragic mouths together.
The night before you left, you took my picture.
I will never see the print.
“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via fitzgeraldquotes)
I really love this book. I also inextricably associate Fitzgerald with a super intense but very short-lived affair I had with a young man whose favorite author is Fitzgerald. He had beautiful eyes and good southern manners and too much to drink, and the way he looked at me out a window on the street made my whole body shake. In the dawn light of his bedroom I could see the regret on his face even before he stood and walked to the window. I could taste the damnation between us. We knew it wouldn’t last, our bodies were turning to dust around us, and in the darkness of a theater our hands touched in passing.
I wrote you a poem in my head and my nose started bleeding
Now open up your legs, because it’s time for a feeding
Inside my orchard the dirt’s going to shit
The birds are all silent but the rocks eloquent
I built you a house out of vomit and sticks
I paid all our bills with painkillers and tricks.
We wanted some solace from the noise of the world
But now I can’t remember if I’m that kind of girl
I’ll bring you a twinkie on a tray on my knees
While you whistle along to a theme on tv
I have no shampoo and my skull’s falling off
I begged you to choke me to the border of shock
But while you remind me what it’s like to die
Please spare time for a wink at the camera’s eye.
“Being fluent in a language is like being good at sex.”
- Malynne Sternstein
(can you tell I’m going through my notebooks again?)
some misc. notes I took during a panel on literary adaptation that I don’t want to lose:
“I think theatre is a medium that rewards a strong sense of place.” - Seth Bockley. “theatre is a language of action”- Leslie Danzig. it’s important to consider how the audience should read the relationship between the source material and the new piece. what, if any, is the prerequisite knowledge for both the adaptor and the audience? what is the place of the chorus in contemporary theatre?
I’m moving again soon. I haven’t even totally completed the last move, boxes stashed in former buildings, boxes taped up in corners. I have lost track of how many times I have moved in the last decade, but it is perhaps approaching twenty. I am hoping, I am crossing all my fingers that I give myself the time to make this new place a home. I’ve now committed to spending at least the next three years in this city–sort of a daunting thought, but also one that is both stabilizing and exciting–and so perhaps it is finally time to stop running around for a little while. Perhaps, however, I’ll hold on to the habit of periodically purging objects, even without the moves to motivate it. I’m a hoarder by nature, scraps and scraps and scraps piled together. I don’t have a bed frame that fits my bed, but I have sheets that fit mattresses of both a larger and a smaller size. I’m not very good at judging what to leave behind. I’ve abandoned beautiful pieces of furniture, odd musical instruments, things I would love to have now, because I simply had too much and whatever was last on the gangplank went out with the bilge. Instead I’ve kept a thousand little useless things.
Clothes that no longer fit, or never did, but that remind me of the man who took them off. A single bead from a bracelet long since broken, the elastic snapping on the wooden floor, the vending machine in Utah. Books I have never read but think one day I might. Cassette tapes of Apollinaire’s poetry being read, and no tape player to play them.
I don’t know how to throw away. I throw away so much. I feel trapped by all my objects, but I miss them when they’re gone, like an unhealthy lover. My memory is too faulty to go back digging through the trash of my heart, and so I need each box like a scalpel to open me up. I remember my dreams better than my days, and so I need this molding notebooks to remind me who I am. I reread my own words and rarely recognize them.
“a girl afraid of her own thighs. she whinnies blonde hair across her face, her rhythm jolting the redhead beside her. the shrouded, effeminate man who joins them, he shows no fear. I picture you dragging me on stage in a bloodied burlap sac, tossing me before the microphone, settling yourself behind the drum kit before I crawl out and break glass.”
Perhaps I should date my papers better. When I find these words floating in a box of a million myriad things, I do not know the woman who wrote them. I recognize my handwriting but not my intention.
“the slight change of time, adapting to your conditions–the tragedy, really, is that this work of mine, the years of slow shifts of the heart, this heard-earned suitability–this labor benefits me alone. If only my son, my son’s sons, could be born without hearts.”
sometimes it really disturbs me … #6. i didn’t know how effective it is. i just know that i wanted to do it.
I sort of don’t want to reblog this image, because I somehow feel… I don’t know, irresponsible disseminating this information, I guess. But it brought so strongly to mind something that happened a few days ago that’s been kind of haunting me that I felt the need to post it.
On the phone with my mother the other night, she mentioned the sudden death of a friend of hers. This was not a very close friend, but a woman she had worked with periodically for quite some time, who worked in another office in the physical sciences at the university where my mother works. They got along well, had things in common, went to jazz bars together after work meetings. This woman had struggled with bipolar disorder (I feel strange writing that phrase–how can we not struggle with it?) for a long time, and then very recently had gone through a very rough breakup. She was a chemist. My mother said that when she learned this woman had died, before anyone told her how she just knew. She made her own cyanide.
On the phone with my crying mother, I shivered.
Have I ever had “ANY unwanted/undesired physical or sexual contact”?
http://www.firsttheegg.com/have-i-ever-had-any-unwantedundesired-physical-or-sexual-contact/
That short but upsetting article by Molly over at First the Egg is worth a read.
Rape trigger warning. (I initially misspelled that “rage trigger warning”– probably also appropriate?)
Some day, some therapist will maybe start to understand me a little better when they learn that a big part of my self-loathing and my complicated relationship with femininity is due to the fact that, despite my being a small, femme woman, in most of the sexual traumas of my life I have been in at least some way the aggressor. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write about all of that properly, maturely, some day when it’s finally behind me.