In my freedom I become the enemy.
Category Archives: on my mind
Ham for Rhye
Essays In Love quotes
Reading Alain de Botton’s book(his first!), Essays In Love. It’s a delightful read with fun story and some decent thoughts on love that feel like he’s discovering them as he’s writing them down, which allows me to take them in easier even if I don’t fully agree. However I sounded in my last post, I haven’t given up on love and its forms. Here are a some from the first half of the book:
“We fall in love in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another persona perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved, hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring.”
“It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those whom we are least attracted. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness.”
“On his first date with Chloe: Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. a silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe’s body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgement, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgement to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirmsL I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think – such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.”
“It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams.”
“Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other. In the mature account of love, it is only when we truly know our partners that love deserves the chance to grow. And yet in the perverse reality of love (love that is born precisely before we know) increased knowledge may be as much a hurdle as an inducement – for it may bring Utopia into dangerous conflict with reality.”
“It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility.”
Dark days.
The thing I am coming to accept, now in my mid-thirties, is that I will never be known. Not in the full way that I believed ten years ago was possible. That way where I can present my puss-ugly holes and necklace of dead babies and know that I am still wanted, loved more even. That way where the knower looks at me and sees the complexity, puzzle, pessimism, and life ‘n shit and says, “Yes, I know you,” and I believe it. Someone hungry for me! The one I imagine at the fire in the loneliest nights and riding thermals beside me on the brightest days. Please, please, PLEASE!!! Don’t fucking mention anything about a “God-shaped hole!” Or Jesus as my BFF that will never let me down. I haven’t given up on spirituality and all that, but I’ve outgrown imaginary friends.
My ex-wife couldn’t handle my dark WAY before I fell in love with someone else. Then it was impossible. The closest thing I’ve had to a soul mate (whom I love in many ways, but never with eros) left my life without a word of explanation. However, the throbbing hurt it caused and thoughtlessness of it fucked the shit out of any comfort I had from believing at least one person knew me. This hope and the hope I had for Heather and I to someday get to a place of deep knowing? Fuck it. I often find a place of santosha, but it is a dark existence and the light of recognition flits in and out like a shooting star fizzling into the atmosphere.
I am fucking getting tired of looking up. And if and where I find the god that loves me like my heart needs he/she/they/it will be living in the shit piles.
ps – Don’t worry about me. I’m fine and I don’t want to talk about it.
All You Need Is Loves
I am reading Roman Krznaric’s book, WONDERBOX, and this is basically what he says in his chapter on love. He goes on about how the Greeks were so much better at loving than we are today, but I think they were just better at labelling. I am a lover. And this is what I mean by it. These loves are alive and we know them. And just as if you’d only eat one thing you’d be deprived of other essential nutrients it’s good to not be too heavily in love with just one type of loving. Broaden your palette. See where you’re deficient. And, for the love of God, please don’t burden any one person by expecting them to fulfill all your love needs!!!
unfinished: thought on direction
I just tried to put my mind back into my nine year old self. I was just looking at an old photo of me where I had to be around that age, wearing a Transformers shirt with a bubbled-out plastic picture of Optimus Prime. I am holding an indistinguishable piece of paper and I’ve look full of mischief. The silver Honda Civic I would learn to drive in is waiting in the background to deliver me many powerful memories that would lead to adulthood. This person in the photo is ME about twenty six years ago! I can see how I saw the world then, my concerns, thoughts. But the view is a bit of the tunnel view as if I’d try putting on that Transformers shirt now, only getting it around my head. The loudest thing I see, though, is hope. I was always hopeful.
The Dust off a Dionysian Album
The dirty water in the dirty dishes,
the smelly banana in the smelly trash,
the messy blankets on the unmade bed,
the rolled clothes in the open suitcase, I
lay on the new carpet, I
take off my cap (put it on the cap-shelf), I
create a “Genius playlist,” I
file my 15,000 KRW’s for next time.
The novels are years I wrote in those parallels,
The years are novels I write in these poems in songs.
We middle-agers surprise ourselves in our 8-bit menus,
The levels we have beaten or have beaten us
become tribute to our red, wind-beaten faces.
Our tears dry as they come, the years, novels
that we flip through to find the underlines but never reread
while writing new ones. We edit as we go.
The wildfire is contagious! It eats all and leaves none.
Our beds are barely slept in and our landlords love us.
The air is fresh when we move, but when we stop,
we get slammed by the bus carrying the losers from pageants past,
banners become nooses swinging the wreckage we kicked dirt over.
But the stories come. Oh, there is not enough ink for them!
There is no shelf so strong for the binders of source material
that collect like cars in highway traffic, backing, beeping, busting for attention.
Only we are a space shuttle and have no time for earth-thing(ling)s,
we are artists and we don’t read our own history.
The life we bring is the life we take and the balance is a high wire act that
helps the people forget how miserable they are, or reminds them how miserable they are.
“The shape of the smoke we inhale
fills the fucked ships we sail
that no one else will captain
and no one will again.”
But you’ll not understand if you’ve nothing in your gut.
Eat! Eat our food. Drink our drink.
Mind not the dirt, the germs. We share our dishes!
Let Narcissus bury Narcissus and free your hands;
let those who shelve shelve themselves!
Love lives
Love lives far longer than the death of the girl.
The memory in the cells you took, you gave, stay
stained, but moving in your body,
a homeless part of yourself that wanders in your veins,
like an epileptic cat that spins and recovers on your floor
full of piss and drool, a vulnerable,
deadly seraph that’s forgotten its god.
Yes, she lives but she doesn’t remember you.
You can only watch as she floats by, lips unconsciously
mouthing your name and caressing the flower petals
you’ve thrown her that pass through her fingers.
Follow her and you find the nettle too thick,
turn into thorns and take your blood.
But this blood dripping from your legs,
your arms is where she lives.
Eggs that hatch and feed from the inside,
grow, mate, and release more eggs
until you are so bloated with love
you can’t keep yourself from birthing
a song, poem, dance, blog post.
Maybe you shave your head or find a lover in a bar,
maybe you throw stones,
to distract yourself from the killing-contractions.
But she lives in you, love, still,
then out. Then out love.
Moving, not ‘moving on.’
BLM opened last night. Not their first performance without me, but their first seasonal Cowles performance without me. First new work made without me. I have these weird, contradictory emotions about it. On one hand, I would think it awesome that anyone who came to the show didn’t even notice I wasn’t there because it was so flipping good. On the other, I WANT people to feel like something’s missing! I feel the former stronger than the latter, but that tug to be missed is not just a tiny, subtle thing. When I read this preview of the show it definitely stirred something in me to read my name in it. Made me feel like maybe I did make an impact on that community. But the writer needs to read the website closer…
I am excited for BLM and cheering for them overseas. BLM lives and thrives without me moving with them and that makes me very happy! I danced for BLM for 8 years! Carl’s vision pulled me back into dance after leaving it to pursue a post-bac degree in English Education. I have invested much into this company and have helped form it’s esthetic. I am still listed as artistic associate! I haven’t moved on. I just have a long tether. And I’ll be back.