...

And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

...

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

...

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”





You know this one.
Or not. But you should.

For years and years I've had a kind of nervousness without a specific source,
material anxiety without location...

Something I think I best describe as incontrollable shaking.
My hands always shake... but sometimes there's something inside my chest, sometimes inside my skull, and sometimes everywhere. Like something that wants very badly to explode into pieces.

Like the tide, it subsides back into somewhere until it almost seems like it's disappeared.
Then it rises... and rises until it nearly drowns me.

And like the tide, it brushes the memory of it from the shore and sucks it back along with it, because I rather forget this happens.
I'd like to pretend that I am not a person with a permanent shaking something in her ribcage.
A tick-ticking timebomb that sometimes forgets itself.

It's that strange something that makes me want to fly out of my body and into the sky... out into space...

Or be buried in the sea where the weight of the water pushes down upon me with enough force to keep me from doing just that.

I need the weight of an ocean on me.

Or I'm going to float up and up into the atmosphere... until I freeze and disintegrate... falling back to Earth, unrecognizable, as glittering pieces of dusty ice.

You may not believe me,
(though some who know [me] better might believe me)
but as I'm reading through some texts for my American Transcendentalists final
(Emmerson, particularly),
at this moment (as I was typing it onto my lj client, because for me, I always feel something more when I write it... hence my compulsion to take notes rather than listen, my need to quote)
I was moved (again) in such a way that feelings seep out of my body and I need to cry.

I know it may just be my vision of things... of the world and the present.
But I'm reading Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass and some of Emmerson's essays... most, though universal about mankind, more specifically about the American "race."
A very idealistic planning out of what it is to be, in my opinion, a perfect human being.
In touch with everyone and everything around them... the poet, according to Emmerson (and Whitman and lots of other poets before them) obviously being more in touch with the Universe and hence, the seer, and the one who professes or expresses the beauty and truth of what he sees that most are unable to see.
Because he cannot be the latter without being the first, yet he can be the first without being the last.

And what these poets saw was mostly projections (real or possible) of beauty and perfection... and hope.
Such hope, without a doubt, that humankind (Americans mostly) would become as what they projected in their poetry... just, courageous, free and trusting of themselves and others.
So not what I perceive humankind to be...
More like the fictional, ideal humankind... and the people I love and admire, but not people in general.

I first read The Oversoul when I was 16 (and those of you in my friends list here on lj back then surely witnessed what sprang forth from that - not that you'd remember, anyway...) for one of the first lit courses I took and couldn't remember what it was about, but what I felt.
For some moments, I felt loved.
I felt secure in the world.
The Oversoul is a warm, fuzzy blanket to sink into on a cold night that makes everything be well.

I'm reading it again, and I feel it again...
It's still a warm fuzzy blanket that makes everything seem better... but I feel there's a hailstorm outside it.

I think we, as the human race... as one... are so non-continual... so disjointed... so selfish and wrapped up in our individual selves.

Maybe it's just my mood right now.

And maybe it's just my lack of contemporary reading, but how is the poet regarded today, in a collective sense?

Thinking about my "specialty" again... I think one of the topics that I keep coming across over and over again throughout my studies (as a topic of personal interest) is the figure of the poet.
Spanning from bits of classical to early 20th century. Western (blame the UPR).
Perhaps because I relate to it... not in mastery, but sensibility.


I've read Song of Myself a few times before... maybe it was because I read Emmerson as a starter, but tonight (and not before) it seems absolutely effervescent to me.
I literally felt it bubbling on my skin because it's that uplifting.


But I think of it in terms of history... and nationality... and see this Americanism twisted out of context and made into something else.
It is liberating to feel invincible, limitless... even if just spiritually. And ideally.
But reading into the past, this projected Utopian dream... makes me be a little disappointed in the present.
Because I do not trust my "brothers and sisters" and have reasons not to.

Whitman writes, "Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted and shall be done with perfect candor. Upon this basis philosophy speculates ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness never inconsistent with what is clear to the senses and to the soul."

So if we speculate looking towards the poet... and regard the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness never inconsistent with what is clear to the senses and to the soul... it makes me wonder.

What comes after?
A Wasteland (to use one example).



To summarize how I feel, I'll contrast this:

"Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of divine energy. Words are also actions, actions are a kind of words. "
- Emmerson

"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

(...)

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

- T.S. Eliot.

(Quite the premature buzzkill, I know. Sorry.)



My paper is about none of this, I just wasted like 40 minutes thinking and writing about it, and it's 3 am, so I better get back to work.
Or take a nap.



Here's some quotes.

"The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression."

"...poetry was all written before time was."

"... though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. (...) Language is fossil poetry."

"Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl."

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence."

"We live succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every particle is equally related; the eternal ONE."

"The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold."

Ralph Waldo Emmerson



"There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist… "

"The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer... he is complete in himself... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and the do not. He is not one of the chorus he does not stop for any regulation... he is the president of regulation."

"The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay.
His love above all love has leisure and expanse... he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover... he is sure... he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills are not or nothing.
Nothing can jar him... suffering and darkness cannot - death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth... he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore surer of the shore of the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty."

"A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning."

"I help myself to material and immaterial,
No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me."

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."

"See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that."

Walt Whitman

My mom decided to drive around today after during some errands, so we stopped by the beach to do nothing.
She sat to read...

I spend about an hour writing random things in the sand and watching them melt away.



( This is a photo post. )

"... Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."

Ishmael




"...you were kicked by a great man, and with an ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour, I consider it an honour.
In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, a made garter-knights of; but, be it YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of."

Flask




"Perhaps they were (whales as scarce as hen's teeth);
or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship;
by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.
Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists"

Ishmael


( + )

I try to keep it secret when I'm reading something not related to what I should be reading (even from myself),
as if I were cheating on my subject(s) still.
But I've found that this guilt complex is inevitable.

I'm slowly getting the books I requested at paperbackswap in the mail, among which is Sartre's Nausea.

The introduction is also a brief introduction to existentialism.
viktor_exhumed gave a report for his thesis workshop a few weeks ago on a poem (that I absolutely don't remember, and didn't read through the whole thing) where I kind of recall that he reached some conclusions about the poet that were from a somewhat existentialist point of view.

I was telling him about it yesterday.
I'm posting some quotes here.
You know. To share.

Jaspers has written: "The non-rational is found in the opacity of the here and now... in the actual empirical existence which is just as it is and not otherwise." Why is it not otherwise? Why is it at all? What is this is-ness? Isn't it simply nothing, or rather Nothingness, the unknowable, indispensable Void? What could be more absurd, "non-rational," meaningless? The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning - this is its self-defining cause - and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.

Man, beginning in the loathsome emptiness of his existence, creates his essense - his self, his being - through choices that he freely makes. Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end. Nor would philosophy.

From the introduction by Hayden Carruth.


And some nauseous quotes:

"This is what I have to avoid, I must not put strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something."

"Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it anymore. My odd feelings of the other week seem ridiculous today. I can no longer enter into them."

I think this also speaks for the blogger generation.
More later. (Or not really.)

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

W. B. Yeats

There's a thought that's been circling my head for a few days, so I want to write about it because there's always relief (of a purgative kind) in placing thoughts outside...
Articulation therapy... when something is verbalized, it takes shape and the thought, immaterial and free, becomes tame.
One becomes master of the thought and is not bothered by it... unless it haunts again in another form, and needs to be re-worded (imprisoned) once more.

This observation is one that has often come up in conversation with certain friends when either really drunk or really high.

It came up again about 2 weeks ago when I was burning time sitting at the theater balcony at the UPR with some people, and we were talking about random subjects (not random subjects, but subjects that were RANDOM), among which one was absurd fetishes.
xanctus came along and seemed to kind of misinterpret what the fetish was, and I gave him the freudian definition (of it being a transference of emotion to an object) and he said something to the effects of
"well, I don't keep set definitions in mind when I talk, I make up my own."
And it woke me up a little, and I agreed with him. "Good for you, why should we be trapped in constructs?"
But of course, we all are because it's inevitable.
If we weren't, we would all understand each other even less.

What he said stayed with me... and this is the thought that has been circling my head for a few days.
It often comes up as I'm talking or explaining something... or thinking about anything.

Last night I was having a conversation with losemeontheway on identities.
She explained to me that, as she was in high school, she built an image for herself (as we all do) where she tried to reflect the opposite of the things she disliked in the kids around her.
She told me (in other words) that this identity served its purpose, but was not entirely representative of herself.

I kept thinking about this... and about how that is another example of being trapped in discourse.
She was the anti-airhead, the anti-jock, the anti-"cool" kid.
But to what extent is that genuine?
Would this identity even have been constructed by her if not for its antitheses?

I thought of myself and my own "identity"...
I told her I hadn't been looking for myself in a long time.
But the truth is, I don't think I've ever looked for myself.
I've been looking for alternate selves... to escape my own.
Something she said also made me aware of how, in many of my situations throughout my life, I've turned the eyes others inward...
but not many have done that for me.

I told her I was not looking for myself, that I was looking for another (and not an Other).
But the truth is I was looking for myself in another, and I think that's probably what we all do when we bond.

Some people are more trapped in constructs than others... the demands of society, culture, even language determines how perceive...
how we see, how we feel, our expectations, our opinions...
And some of these people need these invisible structures of being that I find absolutely imprisoning, because they probably would not know how to even be.

Inevitably, mist3rg came to mind (although he often does anyway)...
Although perhaps this is just my vision, I think he is the person closest to being free from the impositions that I'm talking about.
His perception, feelings and expectations always seem as if not contaminated by anything external at all.
As I told losemeontheway, he is the person most like himself that I know.

And this is pushing things further (and I don't have the excuse of being high right now),
but one metaphor of this can be the way he writes.
Not often, but sometimes, he misspells certain words, or just dutchifies them as well as his grammar.
Instead of submitting his thoughts to a set language, he seems more like he is appropriating it...
And that seems to be his position on absolutely everything.


I think this is enough for now... and it's not an isolated rant on a new subject, it's probably what tons of my past entries have been about and it will come up again for sure.

When it gets a certain kind of late, I just can't find sleep.
I was looking through old notebooks just because
(I've been trying to organize the past lately).

I think, as we get older, the spheres of our universe becomes wider, heavier... spanning galaxies across.

Last night I went outside and wished for a shooting star because, I may have told you before, my wishes often come true and I've seen many, many shooting stars in my life.
I didn't see one, though...
but in turn, the sky was full of sea serpents.

Although constellations are basically the same, I always read new shapes in the stars.
Last night they were all glittering serpents, gliding across the ether, and I felt like I did when I was very young, the sky was always alive, night or day.
I always felt that stars and clouds spoke to me, and I thought I understood.
Then I forgot that I knew because I grew up.
(Or I pretend to have.)


Nov 11 01

i was asked by the ocean if i knew the sound
of the sky as i lay at its edge, at the beach
and i know, as i've known all my life, so profound
is the sound of the sky - it's a weary heart beat.

low like the thunder, damp when it rains,
sad when it's clear blue with pallid day-moons
and at night, with such sorrw, i've felt the earth shake
beneath the black canvas of a god dead too soon




I used to perceive our souls as isolated phenomena.
Now I very much believe that there are bridges...
and that eventually, we start to connect.
Or perhaps not, perhaps I'm just lucky, because I see lots of shooting stars and my wishes often come true.

I'm cleaning up my myspace blog because...
because.
I don't know why I used to write in it the first place, probably reaching out for... anything.

Anyway, I transcribed this poem from Niel Gaiman's Fragile Things long ago and posted it.
I googled it, it's not online.
So if you don't own the book, here's a freebie.

The Faerie Reel

If I were young as I once was, and dreams
and death more distant then,
I wouldn't split my soul in two, and keep
half in the world of men,
So half of me would stay at home, and
strive for Faerie in vain,
While all the while my soul would stroll up
narrow path, down crooked lane,
And there would meet a fairy lass and
smile and bow with kisses three,
She'd pluck wild eagles from the air and
nail me to a lightning tree
And if my heart would run from her or
flee from her, be gone from her,
She'd wrap it in a nest of stars and then
she'd take it on with her
Until one day she'd tire of it, all bored
with it and done with it
She''d leave it by a burning brook, and off
brown boys would run with it and
stretch it long and cruel and thin,
They'd slice it into four and then they'd
string with it a violin.
And every day and every night they'd
play upon my heart a song
So plaintative and so wild and strange that
all who heard it danced along
And sang and whirled and sank and trod and
skipped and slipped and reeled and rolled
Until, with eyes as bright as coals, they'd
crumble into wheels of gold....

But I am young no longer now; for
sixty years my heart's been gone
To play this dreadful music there, beyond
the valley of the sun.
I watch with envious eyes and mind, the
single-souled, who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon,
who do not hear the Fairy Reel.
If you don't hear the Fairy Reel, they will
not pause to steal your breath.
When I was young I was a fool. So wrap
me up in dreams and death.

"In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself."

Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured
from Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience

ƿis līf is lǣne, and ƿēos woruld drēoseƿ and fealleƿ.

This life is temporary, and this world declines and falls.






This is a practice reading sentence from my Old English grammar book, I thought it was beautiful.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be give to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. (...)
The true critic is servant to the poet; today he is acting as master, or being taken as such. He omits Zarathustra's last, most vital lesson: "now, do without me."


In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. Where it is more than reverie or an indifferent appetite sprung of boredom, reading is a mode of action. We engage in the presence, the voice of the book. We allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. The exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most covert dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. The artist is the uncontrollable force: no Western eye, since Van Gogh, looks on a cypress without observing in it the start of flame.

George Steiner, "Humane Literacy."
From Language and Silence.

Bauhaus, among the post-Punk bands associated with the inception of 'Goth' musical and sartorial styles in the late 1970s in Britain did not celebrate Dracula in their first single, but the actor: 'Bela Lugosi is Dead' and, of course, undead as well.

From Gothic by Fred Botting.

WTF?

The book is about the history, development and some analyses of Gothic Literature.
So... that mention was unexpected, unnecessary, and awesome.

Haha, check this out:
"Fun I love, but too much fun is, of all things, the most loathesome."
- William Blake

"A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not."
- my dead boyfriend

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
-Keats

I've come to realize that perhaps it's a very personal superstition of mine to consider my birthday my real new year's day...
It's around this time of year, at the start of autumn, when I start reflecting on everything a little more than I usually do... what I used to think as psycho-spiritual narcissism is actually a necessity for me, because so much overwhelms me inside my head (and outside as well).

I find it extremely difficult to move forward in time without rereading pages to feel that I still exist, that something preceded the present, that I am not floating in some kind of timeless limbo.
I often feel guilty, even embarassed about this. It's easy to write about and letting all of you know, because it's easier to interpret (versus talking about it).
I don't expect anyone to understand.


My mother says that I'm hypersensitive about certain things that don't matter to most people, or that other people can deal with just fine, and that I'm stronger in times of crisis that most people... I guess I have one great strength and one great weakness.
It's easy for me to stand up for other people but not for myself, even when I'm right.

I'm proud of who I am when I analyze my virtues according to my moral code.
I try to always be fair, to always be courteous, gracious, humble, respectful and sincere.
These are things that I value in other people, and qualities that I project on others until proven the contrary.
But this can also be a weakness.
I've been told time and again, by many people that are important to me, that not everyone is nice and not everyone has the best intentions.
I always try to see the best in people - until they show me the opposite throught their actions. Then my judgment will change.

People change... I tend not to, not essentially... and in some ways I still feel like a child.
For a number of reasons.
But what I mean to say is that sometimes I put too much trust in "adults."
In some, anyway.
Even though I know better.

It doesn't matter, this doesn't concern any of you.
I just need to remember to not forget.
It makes me sad to think about it, and this is regarding something very specific.


Today I had to see a professor about something, feeling terrible (as I have been for a couple of months now, for existential and school reasons, which at this point, are tied very closely together), and left her office thinking about all this, but felt better because there's people like her.
Sincere, modest and just beautiful.

I also saw another prof from last semester (of whom I was absolutely terrified and still am, a bit) that I adore and look up to so much... she has no idea, I'm sure.

And that made a big difference.

For every let down, at least, there's thrice as many people to make up for it.




I'm tired.
Emotionally.
I've been holding back tears for most of the day.






Anyway.
Happy birthday n3cr0phelia.
( Lookit my presents. )

In one of his books, Auster quotes the psychiatrist Oliver Sachs's belief that it is a sign of sanity to make an internal narrative of your life. Indeed, as Auster knows, although he has never been in therapy himself, the construction or reconstruction of such a narrative is the premise of psychoanalytic healing. When a writer makes up fictional narratives, is that also a sign of psychic health, I ask.

"I doubt it. I think writers are probably a little damaged. For artists of any kind I suppose, but particularly for people who make up stories, reality isn’t enough. You need to interpret reality; you need to make your own reality. I really admire people who are content to be in the world as it is and find that enough. But it’s not enough for writers. Something is wrong with us I believe."

More later. Maybe.

It's that time of year again.
Brushing up pages before I turn 22.



May 2002

Names - obligated to respond when you hear those syllables, those sounds that mean nothing... every word loses meaning if played out monotonously, just enough, between your lips...

Images call me, feelings, more than a sound ever could, unless it's the synthetic beating of a machine heart that says more than words ever could.

I ran into Lazerus today... I was in no condition to talk.
He said my name and it sounded so far away... sometimes I'm half dreaming and wish I could be quiet.

( + )

My favorite Proverbs of Hell
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Dip him in the river who loves water.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Exuberance is Beauty.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

Enough! or too much.

Hoy estaba releyendo Las Babas de Diablo de Julio Cortázar, porque me encontré por un momento mirando a las torres y torres de libros frente a mi cama... como si no tuviera nada pendiente.

Inevitablemente me recordé de dead_eifersucht por varias razones.

i. Por la entrada de "meta-thingies: self reference"

"Nunca se sabrá cómo hay que contar esto, si en primera persona o en segunda, usando la tercera del plural o inventando continuamente formas que no servirán de nada. Si se pudiera decir: yo vieron subir la luna, o: nos me duele el fondo de los ojos, y sobre todo asi: tú la mujer rubia eran nubes que siguen corriendo delante de mi tus nuestros vuestros sus rostros. Qué diablos."

ii. Y el "self-reference" en combinación con nuestro viaje perpetuo de Voyeur / Flaneur.

"Creo que sé mirar, si es algo que sé, y que todo mirar rezuma falsedad, porque es o que nos arroja más afuera de nosotros mismos, sin la menor garantía, en tanto que oler, o (pero Michel* se bifurca fácilmente, no hay que dejarlo que declame a gusto). De todas maneras, si de antemano se prevé la probable falsedad, mirar se vuelve posible; basta quizá elegir bien entre el mirar y lo mirado, desnudar a las cosas de tanta ropa ajena. Y, claro, todo esto es más bien difícil."

*Michel es el narrador, que a veces se refriere a sí en tercera persona.


"Curioso que la escena (...) tuviera como un aura inquietante. Pensé que eso lo ponía yo, y que mi foto, si la sacaba, restituiría las cosas a su tinta verdad."



Y ésta, que no tiene que ver con lo anterior:

"...qué palabra, ahora, que estúpida mentira..."

"Life holds the mirror up to Art, and wither produces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction."

"Nature is no great nither who has borne us. She is our creation. it is in our brain that she quickens to life. This are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on how the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty."

"What is interesting about people in good society (...) is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask."

"The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear."

""They are vulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unnatainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its hero a a man, who, according to his own confession, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

From The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde.

Raymond Chandler


(...)
Personally, I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don't all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.


From The Simple Art of Murder, an essay on hard-boiled detective fiction.

Scattered thoughts.

Jul 15 2006

Cuando no tengamos de que más escribir, ¿qué queda?

Las estrellas se desvanecen en lágrimas celestiales,
trozos de hielo, escarcha, derritiéndode en las mejillas de una niña enajenada.

Éste es mi relato,
palabreado retrato, entretanto,
estrellados párpados, pétalos satinados
y palabras heladas, cielos de cavernas,
laberintos de estrellas.

Mi amor me ha dado su mano.
Confies que una vez fui poetisa, y, ahora,
regreso al papel
con la vergüenza y la culpa que siente un infiel.

Humo de vainilla, pecaminoso carcinógeno, alucinógeno, analgésico
analógico
catastrófico.

He perdido la fé en las palabras... más bien, me pierdo en laberintos semánticos que no dirigen a ningún lado,
mis círculos infantiles, pueriles,
¿el propósito?
Deleitarse con el vértigo.





Jul 20 2006

Perhaps it's true that we choose who we are, but what is it that makes us happy in one way and miserable in another, when we try so hard instead of letting things be?
Perhaps that is the core of a certain nature, what we can call nature.





Jul 21 2006

But it is not an inescapable fate... because none is...
But it is, however, inevitable.




Aug 27 2006

once upon a time I used to have more faith in true love than anyone.
Perhaps experience and naivety are qualities to treasure.





I feel that I have too much to learn... and not enough time.
I miss expectation.
Expectation that was once certainty.

"I love you," Rachel said. "If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test."

"Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought."
(Rick Deckard)



I've been reading Blade Runner over and over lately (because I'm using it for a test)
and the more I read it, the more it seems to me like an absolute perfect representation of everything Baudrillard explains
(but not quite, mostly through examples) in The Precession of Simulacra.


I was going to elaborate on this, but I spent most of the night talking to a certain little group on IMVU.

So maybe later
(maybe never).

Marcos posteó estas imágenes en mi myspace y las quiero re-postear aquí a ver que dice dead_eifersucht... y también porque me encantaron demasiado.


Es Walter Benjamin!

( + )

My fave quotes from Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451,
both by the character Granger.

" 'See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there was never such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day, every day, sleeping its life away. To Hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass."

"There was a silly damn bird called the phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. but every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the silly things we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around wehere we can see it, someday we'll stop making the funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation."

"...poetry is the product either of a man of great natural ability or of a madman"

- Aristotle, from Poetics







"Who trembles with vain fear, true fear deserves."
- Creon, from Seneca's Oedipus

"He who fears hatred overmuch, knows not to rule; fear is the guard of kingdoms."
- Oedipus


And the bonus:

"What monstrosity is this? A foetus in an unmated heifer!"
- Manto

None of these are recent.

i. nov 07 05
Last night my ears were rotting off.
I was cleaning my earrings with a solution that smelled like roses, deliciously, but made the metal react with my skin in a way that my ears withered as if they were burnt plastic.
I desperately tried to pull them from my skin in front of my bathroom mirror, but the spikes would not unscrew from the hoops, so I yanked them out with pliers.

ii.
I was a drowning little boy.
My death was a beautiful song.

iii.
Two huge, white, tall buses came to my house, one of them carrying drdoctorevil and the girls from RazorSun .
In the other, there were mostly girls, some that I knew and some new ones, all half-naked because of the intense heat, and, apparently, acid trips.
They asked me to come with them to a huge party, but that they had to leave right away.
I replied that I wasn't dressed up, and that I couldn't go unless I did. They said they'd wait for me.
The truth was I didn't want to go to the party... when I said so, I think I disappointed them.

iv.
Mayra Santos Febres was giving a writing workshop.
I sat on my desk and, instead of writing, I kept sharpening a pencil with a lead that kept breaking off or falling out.
My hands were dirty with lead.

v.
I took out my eye with a fork in the kitchen
and screamed and screamed and screamed.


vi.
I was a fab femme dandy on a cheaply luxurious ferryboat.
I wore heavy, fake and sparkling jewels, white lace gloves, red lipstick and felt prettier than everyone.

Somehow, there was a cathedral on the sea, or perhaps it was a vast river...
It was nouveau-gothic, minimalist and smooth, beautiful in my opinion, like a pretty scifi novel.
I don't remember getting off the boat, but I was off the boat and at the cathedral.
Night fell before I realized.
There was someone else there, but it was too dark to see.
Then came a pirate ship.
I waved from the nautical house of God to them.


vii. Bleak House
A rich family was moving out of their mansion. Their time was up.
They had used up the family's fortune and were forced to sell.
But the truth is, they were fading like ghosts right before our eyes.

I didn't want to be there, my mother made me go.
Little girls were very pretentious and obnoxiously full of themselves.
I was chubby with brown hair, like I was when I was 10.
They had angry dogs locked up in pens... I wanted to pet them, but they weren't friendly.
I flew away.


viii. vision

My bare feet ached under the jagged pieced of stone, twigs and dry branches along the rough ground
as I ran, not knowing towards where... I was not running from, but to.
My skin was scratched and cut by the branches that whipped my face, arms and legs.
I stopped running when I came to a clearing where, to my surprise,
all was covered in snow.
I began to shudder and shiver,
the sharp, biting chill sweeping over my skin.
Then I heard the thundering sound of galloping horses...
Dozens of gigantic, white horses breaking through the icy ground, underneath which, I discovered, was water.
Their legs splashed through the ice, making the ground shake...
Their legs broke like shattering glass, and they fell, freezing and screaming in angry neighs to their deaths.
I was no one.

ix. helpless

I walked away from the sorrowed sight, that was swept away by a chilling silence, cold as the air.
Winter faded and was forgotten as I kept onward, through thick, dry, brown vines.
Later I learned that the vines were roots.
I feel through a weak spot of what I thought was solid ground, the dirt dusting my bare legs and arms.
I found myself in a sad attempt of a little girl's room.
Wallpaper was yellowed and full of green moss and mold, the small bed full of brown, rotting leaves and crawling with insects.
Hidden reptiles crunched through dead heaps of vegetation.
I found a music box... it was a small, pink jewelry that played music as a delicate little plastic doll, green with mold, twirled pathetically.
The song brought tears to me eyes and suddenly, I was in love with it as I only can be in dreams.
I hadn't noticed the girl still lived there. She was unseeliefiend, I think.
She grabbed my wrist with a mossy hand, dirty as the walls, and I smiled.
There was a small window on the wall opposite to the tree roots that I fell through.
Outside the window was a frozen river and white, white land and sky.
"Let's get out of here," I said, but she shook her head in fear. The song was haunting me.
The tree roots became angry, wooden faces and I understood she could not leave, and maybe, neither could I.
Then I realized the song was a song I knew all along.
I was terrified, for me and the girl, a fear colder than the cold outside,
so I sang, loudly as I could.
I shut my eyes, and I thought I felt little vines growing out of my ears.

...puedes apreciar letreros como este.
(This sign says "Do not tie horses here. Thank you.")


Las gallinas de palo saben que tienen que mirar hacia ambos lados antes de cruzar la carretera.
(Iguanas know they must look both ways before crossing the road)


Ves payasos pidiendo dinero en la luces.
(You'll see panhandling clowns at traffic lights.)

I didn't want to admit that I'm actually enjoying George Eliot's Middlemarch... it's the little truths woven into the plot that make me look forward to reading.
Perhaps this post will make your image of me crumble.
So be it.



"Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge."


"Life isn't cast in a mould - not cut out by rule and line, and that sort of thing. I never married myself (...).
The fact is, I never loved anyone well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know. Temper, now. There is temper. And a husband likes to be master."


"You don't understand women. They don't admire you half as much as you admire yourselves."


"...All choice of words is slang. It marks a class."
"There is correct English: that is not slang."
"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."


"If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit."



"(...) he certainly liked him the better (...) for being a stranger in Middlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man."


"I suppose a woman is never in love with anyone she has always known - ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl."


"Like many a plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a plain girl, who had no money!"

This is for zarathrusta, whom I just got off my new piece-of-crap cell phone with...
I found the whole text to Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky online.


Part I


I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor
for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.
Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine,
anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am
superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you
probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I
can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my
spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not
consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only
injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is
from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

( Read more... )

Acabo de recoger un pedazo de papel del piso de mi cuarto... no sé quién escribió esto, ni porqué está en mi cuarto...

He aquí el misterioso texto anónimo:

Un pájaro, un niño, una cabra
El azul del cielo, una bella sonrisa sin ganas
Un cocodrilo, una vaca al sol
Y esta noche me quedo dormido en el país de las maravillas

Esta mañana me imagino un dibujo sin nubes
Con algunos colores como vienen en mi pincel
Del azul, del rojo, me siento tranquilo como una imagen
Con algunas casas y algunos animales

Esta mañana me imagino un país sin nubes
Donde ningún loro vive en jaula
Amarillos, verdes, blancos
Hago lo que me gusta
Porque es así que me imagino el mundo perfecto.

These 2 pictures are from early summer of last year, two semesters ago...
We'll be using that book for out City, Modernity and Lit class,
(which I bought to use for my BA thesis back then)
and, remembering the book, I remembered the pictures.

One day I'm going to miss the UP's hallways.

I woke up (not very long ago) to such an ugly day...
It's sunny, and rain falls and ceases and starts again and,
outside, it's foggy and bright,
and the sun is reflecting off everything that's wet...

It makes you wish the weather would make up its mind...
Because a clear, crisp cerulean winter sky would be nice today
or a steady grey and cold one that made it seem like the day never exactly woke up...

I didn't exactly wake up today.

The only novel I can say I seriously read during Christmas break I started around four days ago... I'm sure a number of you must have picked it up, and it's really popular now that they've made the film (which I'm anxious to see).

I highlighted a very few quotes from Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha:

"...dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely."

"Greif is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it."

"Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things, Sayuri. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."

( + )

You are the little prince.


Saint Exupery's 'The Little Prince' Quiz.
brought to you by Quizilla

This is the most beautiful test ever ever, and I love my result.
Stolen from kreestal love.

from Conversations with Toni Morrison

Some bits from Tracking the White Rabbit: Essays in Subversive Psychology
by Lyn Cowan

( + )

Aug 15 05

"This is the stuff that dreams are made of," she whispered with a smile, and turned her back
to the eyes that implored something she did not understand,
(all the better, for if she had known, her heart would have ached a little
as it often does when she must refuse that which the other wants and
she simply cannot give).


Aug 05 04

I'm deciding wether looking for answers in a perfect past or renewal
in a perfect future is one better that the other.

( notebook narcissism )

"Dear dreams,

You are the only thing that matters. You are my hope and live for and in you. You are rawness and wilderness, the colours, the scents, passion, events appearing. You are the things I live for. Please take me over.

Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness.

Dreams by themselves aren't enough to destroy the blanket of dullness.

The dreams we allow to destroy us cause us to be visions/see the vision world.

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, labotomy, bussing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing we are human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

Once we've gotten a glimpse of the vision world (notice here how the conventional language obscures: WE as if somebodies are the centre of activity SEE what is the centre of activity: pure VISION. Actually, the VISION creates US. Is anything true?) Once we have gotten a glimpse of the vision world, we must be careful not to think the vision world is us. We must go farther and become crazier."



"Bear was an elephant. Elephant rose up, mighty mighty gray, and two legs and roared. Roar of the universe. (...)

Who am I? he asked. I'm an elephant."




"You, the thing called 'you', was a ball turning and turning in the blackness only the blackness wasn't something - like 'black' - and it wasn't nothingness 'cause nothingness was so somethingness. The whole thing turns into a ball, the ball's ephemeral, and where are you? Your self is a ball turning and turning as it's being thrown from one hand to the other and every time the ball turns over you feel your characteristics, your identities, slip around you so you go crazy. When the ball doesn't turn, you feel stable.

You exist in this darkness. Rebels. Creeps. Outcasts. Loners. People who hate everybody. People who feel uneasy around everybody. People who know everyone hates them. People who hate being tied down, restricted, constricted, and huge whirling snakes. The snakes climb around your neck and arms. The woman who's the mother of snakes takes you in.

You feel very uneasy. You take a step. You don't know what to do 'cause there's nothing, 'cause there's not even nothing."


"I think most writers are crazy 'cause they sit in their rooms all the time and scribble down stuff no one wants to read and they don't fuck. Anyway this guy can fuck me when he beats me up and then he can only fuck me once for five minutes."



"A book report
(...)
All of them even the hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she couldn't be anything else and because she wouldn't be quiet and hide her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and insane as they come.

(...)
...every now and then there's a kind of territory and you might get stuck; if you get stuck, that's OK too if you really don't give a shit, but who doesn't give a shit! Loving everything and rolling in it like it's all gooky shit goddammit make a living grow up no you don't want to do that."



"OBLIVION IS THE ONLY CURE FOR AGONY"



"As I'm walking towards genet I hear: 'You can't throw yourself on a famous writer like Genet, on a man who'll reject you. You have to learn how to control yourself.' "


"Cancer is the outward condition of the condition of being screwed-up."



"Actually, President Carter wants Janey, but Janey wants to believe President Carter doesn't want Janey because it's more difficult for Janey to deal with a situation (Janey can't deal with any situation) which isn't a mirror of her desire. Janey isn't me. Which of the two do I think is real?"



Kathy Acker, from Blood and Guts in High School



Too bad we we born in different times and places. We could should have been best friends.
Or rivals.

Some quotes from my new favorite book Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner.

"I had once intended to write am entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I'm writing about a character who's in a PH.D. program and I don't have to urinate badly, I'll have him do a regular three-or-four-year program. But if I'm writing a novel and I have to go urinate very badly, then I'll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year."

"My advice to the young people of today? I'm tempted to say: Surround yourself with flunkies and yes-men and have naked slaves, perfumed with musk, fan you with plastic fronds as you write. Because that's what's worked for me."

"Be petulant, narcissistic and charismatic. That's what President Valgus would have exhorted today's young men and women, had not a hit-squad of gnat-sized robots filed stealthily into his ear and mined in his brain with plastic explosive. And love. Love with extreme lucidity and barbaric ferocity."

"Winning your place in the hierarchy is a basic part of primate life and each day is a savage, pitiless battle for dominance- so don't expect everyone to like you. Today, I am the most significant young prose writer in America. And I have the body of a grotesquely swollen steroid freak."


" 'I was asking how you got started as a writer...'

When I was six, I came home from school one day and I went down into the basement to look for a bicycle pump and I found the dead bodies of my parents. They were each hanging from a noose, naked. All their fingers had been cut and arranged into a pentagram under their dangling feet and in the center of this pentagram of bloody fingers there was a note and the note said: 'Dear Mark, you did this to us.'"


"'Ashley, what I don't think you understand quite yet is that in their hearts of hearts women don't lust after men who are merely sensitive and artistic. Men like that are ultimately quite boring. On the other hand, women can't truly be loved and nurtured by men who are brutes and nothing more. And often on a course of a woman's life, she vacillates back and forth from one extreme to the other in an effort to satisfy her spectrum of needs. How rare it is that a man can embody both of these seemingly tipodal profiles. Your grandfather, Ashley, was such a man.'

'Grandpa Mark?'

'Yes, Grandpa Mark - may his soul rest in peace.'

'Mama, what sort of man was grandpa Mark?' Ashley asked (...)

'Your Grandpa Mark was a violent maverick loner with a fatal weakness for Hispanic women... and he was the finest, most audacious, most illuminating, most influential and imitated writer of his time. He was all these things.'

'Will there ever be anyone like him again, Mama?'

'Never.'"

In my household we're conscious of what a hypocritical holiday Thanksgiving is, and historically and politically speaking, we hate it.
But we have a turkey dinner nonetheless (because it's kind of tradition now) where I say grace. So you can imagine. It's satyrical, but not, I give thanks to people who deserve it.

Anyway, happy day to all of you because there's no reason not to wish you one, today or any day.

I was tempted to write something negative,
but I'm tired and a little alchoholized and don't feel like searching for backup info... luckily for me, miss rattengift posted an interesting essay that I'm stealing without her approval.



Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance...

( read more... )

New acquisitions:

The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
Marcus Boon

Simulacra and Simulacrum
Jean Baudrillard

Decontsruction and Criticism
Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jaques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller