Epic Loss

Funeral Blues - W. H. Auden

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

"Blackout" - Chris Garneau
"I, I was kidding about the mean things
While we were sleeping
He rushed in, he rushed in
The fan stopped, the fan stopped
Oh oh oh oh

Flashlights and tele's
Drinking on the street
All the lights are out in New York City
And it never ever will be too damn late
To run inside the market place

I, I'll be quiet, then
And you do all of the talking
Then we're walking
Thoughts rush in, those thoughts rush in

The heart stops, the heart stops
Oh oh oh oh

Flashlights and tele's
Drinking on the street
All the lights are out in New York City
And it never ever will be too damn late
To runside the market place
And it never ever will be too damn late
To run inside the market place

I sit by the window and I watch all of the little
Rain drops, rain drops"

i didn’t know your love was a commodity

I feel sad for people who anxiously wait for their lives to start mirroring romantic comedies. Always worried about having what others seem to have: the perfect boyfriend with movie-star good lucks, the perfect career bringing in the money, the closet of clothes, the glamour, the renown. I wish they could see things are never as they first appear. Nothing ends with just a "happily ever after," but that's not necessarily a bad thing-it just means things are more complex. We should live in harmony with that, instead of creating myths about what life should be. We can't live up to the myths.

Sometimes when I see really, really, staggeringly good looking boys around here, I just want to cry because I know that there are a trillion girls staring at the same boy. Each girl wants him because then she'd feel validated. All the other girls would look at the girl, holding that boy's hand, and think, wow, she's lucky. It is all so silly, so childish--the kind of crap you see in a playground. Relationships are so mercantile. A lot of people are just in relationships so they can see what they can get from them...but eventually the resources run out and they're off to the new person.

A 23 nothing, out of tune

At 23, I still think that I am going to be suddenly and brilliantly found. Passively I wait for my salvation, my super-stardom, my sweet success. But I know - deep down - that I am not special. As much as I want to claw through a sentence and demand that the reader FEEL my importance, there is nothing there behind these words. I am here, and then I am not, and it does not matter, I am just matter. I am just little miss Mary - a little girl megalomaniac.

I feel lost. I feel just like a little child. I have not grown. I am like those Tenenbaum characters. Unable to move. I am just another symptom. I am a million cliches. I am awkward sentences and a paragraph that does not flow. I am stupid and silly and selfish and sad. I fear that I am not a human; I am byproduct of this society.

I want someone to hold me... to really-truly-sincerely hold me. And tell me God-damn-God-Damn, you fucking matter. I want to feel safe from human contact- not just from songs such as Coldplay's "Careful Where You Stand" or Andrew Bird's "Don't Be Scared." I want to know that I belong in this place, with these people, at this time. 

Sci-Fi Self

I feel archaic. The English language can no longer reflect my moods. Old songs, passages from sci-fi literature or Salinger novels, funeral epitaphs, love letters by Dylan Thomas--these texts can only comprehend me. I do not feel like talking or writing much anymore. Because I do not know how to say me--how to speak mynewself into being. We're often taught to think of the self as stable, essential, biologically-rooted (or God-given). I think of my identity as a malleable thing that may transmogrify in a plethora of interesting ways. It's kind'a creepy...

cacophony.
my father learnt STANDARD ENGLISH by studying the DICTIONARY and watching AMERICAN FILMS that glorified the rugged individual, the male protagonist with a five o'clock shadow. he now constructs beautiful sentences, with a perfectly neutral accent, but if you look at the language of his body, you will see AGONY. he writes covertly on the autonomous facebook profile, "i am an enigma to myself." he writes, writes, writes long letters about nationality and his father's death. he articulates, but does not join up.
god damn, he's such a brilliant man, or so the paycheck says, but i don't know anymore. success or suckcess? Bob Dylan's the only man I want to be. he transcends, always, with a mischevious smile. i am interested in this transcendence. i am interested in all words that start with the prefix "trans-" because i want to get outside of this power paradigm.
instead of being a success, let me get wrapped up in text, to lose the self, to become two, mingle mingle mingle mmmmmmmmhmmmm. transport narrative, all intoxicated. to travel with someone, eyes closed,  destination undecided, landscape a'blur. the author takes me there. i am him, he is me, there is no difference, because text is sex. it is the realization that we are one, in one skin, immobilized in our momets of simultaneity. death, we defy you because WE continue: not I (in the conventional sense of the "I"), but WE and the realization that "I" is an inextricable part of the "we."
 I wish I could tell this to my father so that he would no longer write long letters about how his father died. I wish that we could stop this glorification of the enigma, of the rugged individual with the five o'clock shadow. alas, i, too, fall for this ruse, as i'm all infatuated by dylan's cult of personality. so i will not impose these ideas onto my grieving father. i will not write this to my father because this is just a wish, it'll never come true. "as time goes by" explains it all. the persistent desire for DIFFERENCE, never DIALOGISM
feb 4, 2011

when you are in love with someone.... your own mortality is not so frightening (to paraphrase j. buckley)

woke up roaring, reverberating, revolted by the last moment

that we each spent sailing in a flunctuating, flickering time

couldn't you have swam the sea to meet me, 

why didn't you erase time quicksand time?
give me immortality in a moment

of intimate mingling!

your eyes have the lens cap on 'em, though,

god damn, you're such an invulnerable ocean

you just expound on dead philosophers

then pound on my body

while i drown

"if i had wings like noah's dove,

i'd fly a river to the one i love"

The Right Interpretation of Mary Sharma

I wonderwander. Amidst the great achitecture of language, I construct fragments and hope for pellucidity. I ask questions, I ramble on, I reiterate, I fumblemumble.

The desire for Communication: the reason I claw my skin at night. But throughout the daylight hours, I am curiously silent. So fucking detached, I cannot find an interpretive community. I felt real wistful when I read that Herman Melville was so giddyglad to know that Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated Moby Dick. Melville felt that Emerson understood everything that Melville was trying to convey when writing that long book.

Never underestimate the soulorgasm that occurs when you realize that someone else shares the same interpretive lens as you. I want a pen-pal who understands my poorly-constructed words. Don't we ALL? We sigh romantically when songs and movies supply us with the hope that TRUE LOVE WILL FIND US IN THE END! We are bombarded with images of an everlasting love, an everlasting love that denies the borders separating human souls. We fall for the popular discourses on love. How can we not? It sounds so pretty to belong, to have a space within the crushoftime. To forget our meaninglessness within the broader universal landscape, we must construct our little Babel of love, we clamor for pure communication. But maybe everything is lost in translation, lost in the troubling space of hermeneutics. Maybe love is a naive idea. Nonetheless, I am enchanted by the idea. Just like everyone else, I want someone to fall in love with me and know me as I am. 

9/20/2010