Friday, December 28, 2012

we are cards

I haven't written here in a while because there hasn't been much to write about, or that there has been so much to write about that everything amounts to a thin veil of strictly diaphanous consistency, the albumin surrounding the yolk of an egg. The cumulative effect of experience has been thus so poorly conceived of by myself. I am also a lazier person, preferring to torrent a movie I already own on DVD than sift through piles of ephemera to get to the disc. I have also taken to boredly imbibing temperance beverages and pretending to be really interested in Downton Abbey if only to please myself, as if I can now only curate myself after having made fun of people who curate external objects in their lives. Days have become strange and artificial, dome-like, with the phrase "nothing suggesting architecture" floating now and then again in my mind, a tomb of dreams and syntax.

While time and space have become dimensions of reality that I can no longer accept as objective and true, I have been enjoying the thought of being able to gripe about college applications and the deluge of essays that I will treat as manifestations of my own tepid personality, words written on a page in a mysterious order known fully only to myself, and then again, concealing everything from myself. I will hide behind these apparitions of meaning in the hope that they become masks, and turn them into the physicality and particularity of my face. Humanity is begrudgingly knit together by our experience with materiality.

I am afraid of confronting the idea of internality, because there is nothing else in the body besides viscera and effluvia. I don't know how we contain multitudes or the sky. I don't know why we say "we don't know" so knowingly and charmingly. I am reading text without knowing why or how. You are reading this thinking you know why, but really you don't, and this matters to me. It is weird that we have holes in our faces and think them necessary and even beautiful. 

I want to believe that words belong to me, but it's us who belong to language, who come into being because of speech, who are made subjects because of the ability to translate an innateness of being into words that are hopefully coherent. Pronouns are that much insidious and invisible in ordering social reality. I can say "I aspire to become a person who lives with cats" while thinking nothing of grammar, accepting syntax as truth much like mathematics and numbers, social conventions notwithstanding. I have been buried in these thoughts and I want to be buried with them.


Saturday, December 08, 2012

bad


"If I can't leave this God-forsaken town and go to college, no-one will!"

Monday, December 03, 2012

Emergency


Arm-in-arm, I forgot
               what the city looks like from a helicopter,
what the city looks like in the middle of winter during the middle of the night,
               do you remember
in the middle of the street and what I am saying,
               what shape is this, and you hold it up, prism—
what does the city look like
when the middle of the sky opens,
what is beyond that, tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now
               this view is worth every single
               and it is snowing and I forgot what the Earth’s axis says: Yes (at all times),
               Yes, whatever the circumstance, Yes, I forgot to tell you, Yes.
— Katie Jean Shinkle