"And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? ... You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there King was to wake you'd go out -- bang! -- just like a candle!"
"Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise."
"Well it's no use your talking about waking him when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."
In the dream we all stayed in the fathers' house and planned the wedding on the arrival of the groom. We wanted to swim in the river which was bath warm and technicolor green and spangled, but too much was in the way. The boys played a game of baseball on the stoop below the house, and though they had no bat, no gloves, just stuff from the lot to kick around and throw, and though the house above us on the hill let its machinery fall down on us, they stayed around and tossed things in the air. The man and the woman living in the house above us left their windows open and the the gauze curtains fluttered in the breeze. They were out looking for his father's ghost. When the groom arrived I saw it was you, and I wasn't surprised though I'd fled from you in those years when no pause was given for caring. "Okay then," I said, "let's be happy."
***
Recognizable? Almost, then, able.
***
Depression-for-no-reason raising its question: what do you have to do with this? Oh yes there is winter and more work to do than the ocean and a call for more sleep than the ocean and dryness now--worst of all that--but there is also: what about you, what you did and didn't do? That's the question that keeps some of us in bed. What I did to bring you around again. I hadn't noticed before, all those accusations. It takes enormous self-reliance--sign and no signifier, or sign and any signifier you choose--to keep responding to it.
***
Like tossing Kleenex into the Grand Canyon, a friend said.
***
But Kierkegaard's John is too silent, I think, in the imaginary trial. That even the consolation of fatherhood is meaningless without knowing what fatherhood, what filial relationship, is. And how can that be given or witnessed? Terrible as it is? No sacrifice is for the absolute. It is always for the finite reaching-after for another self. For-Me and not For-You. Terror cannot be received. It unfolds in time (as self-referential) as it is sought and lived. ***
"It is better to use the term 'vulnerable' [which] directly qualifies love. Love is receiving and it is giving. It tears us away from ourselves (it is 'ex-static'), but it is also receptive of the other, of the loved one. And from the moment one is receptive, one is vulnerable; one is hurt by the person one welcomes, who might not be as considerate as he who welcomes him."
--M.D. Philippe
***
My mother's mother; her mother's mother. A glass.
***
Lethargy: probably not a good enough reason to be reading so much Kierkegaard online.
***
The middle day the longest. Expect me home by ten tonight; I'll need to leave here within an hour. If I weren't content with so much solitude in the outpouring, this gig would still be astonishingly lone-some, and after all these years too, in which (it turns out) it is still possible, given work does not call, to go unsummoned indefinitely. Remember Mitch? Whose neighbor found him several days after his heart imploded? It was summer. When the work falls off and the people go away.
***
Would be: but isn't anymore, thankfully. I know a few others forced to turn there for company, and their sadness and panic at discovering a work community is a not an ethical animal but a political one, despite its best efforts. You get a thicker skin, you get irritated and a little despairing, and you forge your greater independence from the same experience you find available to you in a traffic jam. From where you're sitting, the bridge might arch right up into the sky and end there, and you find (in the greater scheme of things), given the relentless trail of taillights glowing (ineptly) in broad day: that would be okay.
***
Fitting, anyway. Though I'm always surprised we're all willing to settle for getting along as the measure. Me too. The word indifference makes me nervous for this reason. And disinterested, as well. They require so much qualifying, so much clarification of feeling and effort, where my interest in you is likely in my own best interest and according to my interests, where my disinterest is more likely a form of uninterest. Where my attachment to you is most recognizable in my attachment to myself.
***
My friend's imaginary halo: a nostalgia.
***
And everywhere mistaking art for people. I'm surprised, too, to discover I prefer art. That I prefer beauty, its orderedness, even when terrible. That I've defended my preference by asserting art has some kind of necessary relationship to teaching love, somewhere. But no. Not a substantial relationship, no. An accidental one. Why is it so difficult to remember?--That where there is love, there must also be a who. Not a generalized who--the political animal again--but a specific, touchable who. Not "people." You. Or again, we are only back to our work. Our making.
***
That's what I meant! Not arbitrary. Accidental.
***
Houses on the mind. Because the Arizona house is in danger? Because I don't have a house? So I dream my cousin moves into a luxury department store--a new rage in extravagant living space I hadn't heard of--after the new marriage and new baby, and it's a VIP cocktail party the size of an airport as soon as we arrive on the scene. Chandelier lighting, crystal and mirrors, velvet displays of imported cheese and cognac. Everyone's wearing a bikini and nibbling from serving platters and hanging around the enormous black marble fountain at store central where servers in white gloves and jackets look suggestive: anything I can get you. I'm pushing a shopping cart around the meat department, embarrassing my cousin as I tend to do. You don't shop here, for meats or fragrance or fly swatters. You never go shopping again. ***
The world wants to be deceived. If they won't pick you up at the airport, they won't visit you in the hospital either.
***
"Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions." At the bottom, oblivion. Forget everything. At the top, forget only what is unpleasant.***
Scruples.
***
"The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by."
--Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
***
& a year now.***
Merton said the most helpful advice he got in the beginning was: Daily. As often as you can. And I thought yeah, make a note of that for someday, and then I put it away, and then JM pulled it out again, "daily, as you can," putting his hands behind his head, sinking in his chair, "and so that's the main thing, whatever you do"-- leaning into his hands, stretching his legs and sandaled feet in front of him--"now what are you giving up that's most charitable?"--asking (in that way he has) the impossible with a levity that says he is asking the impossible. I think I do amuse him. With my little book of St. Ignatius breathing sulfur down my neck. "Are those the scriptures? No." He thumbs through my bent pages, my question marks, notes the press. I explain I'm reading it in sympathy with Michael, the Jesuit, while he's on 30 day retreat. "But it's dark," I say. "Maybe it gets better but the first week plunges you into death and hell." He nods. "We have to be careful what we read: a classic, of course, but perhaps a bit ... extreme. I mean not for everyone at every time." I say something about despair, about needing less of it. "Well, that's how medieval literature often reads. Actually, I know the publisher," he says, smiling, "and he prefers books of darker meditations. Did I send you to Faustina already, yes? Yes. Good." He marks his points on his fingers. "Alms. Some time with the ways. A little adoration. Nothing too regimented. Remember Lent is about charity." I laugh a little through my confession, I can't help it. It is impossible to ask a man who loves love to pursue more hellish considerations. It is hell enough to fail at love.
***
S(he)***
(Y?)
***
One wonders if I'll ever understand what I'm looking at. ***
~Sent off application to University of Arizona Poetry Center Summer Residency
~Got the car registered in the state of Illinois
~Met with a few students
~bought roses, rotisserie chicken, soap, vacuum cleaner
~Met R back at the house: she assembled the vacuum, did all the floors, polished, dusted
~Cleaned the bathroom, mostly
~Ate chicken
~Talked to N
~Wrote to S
~Took tripod photos of the candlelit altar with roses (for H)
~Put clean sheets on the bed
~switched to Perrier and coffee
~Remembered garbage day
***
The saint was in my head all night saying "creatures will always present themselves as your end." I dreamed of moving to a house with a back porch facing a grassy field. The house was cheap. The field soon filled with a carnival of rides, kids telling me it's either this or the water hole. They were hanging all over my porch. It was summer. I was waiting for my mother to get home. I like this town, I thought.
***
First dream in what? A year? My body kept me in bed with cramps. I'm afraid to eat.***
"I will empty out my jacket pockets": pockets and more pockets within more and more pockets, a pair of lungs no sooner exhaling their fill of clouds than breathing every bit of cloud all in again. Thus I help myself to myself again--heaps of myself--for I can end the fast when I choose and do--though the fast is a fastening onto what holds fast, you inspiring, me expiring, a kind of symmetry I walk around in all day, breathing in and out, seeing in and out. My eyes convince me of myself and I forget. All day long I forget and have to be reminded. For before me are the clouds and I am taking them in saying look what I made, look. ***
Yup. Forgot it's garbage day. ***
"and what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?"
[contact me: ghostwordeffigy@yahoo.com]
