supposed to be writing (#35)

...this one is for october

Some things I want to remember slip past me because I’m driving, like the way the yellowing soy plants seem suspended in a permanent ripple before they give way to the silty dust. We talk about tilling and the nitrogen cycle. There's this old cinderblock building that catches my eye, and it’s because of how the windows gleam. The sky is luminous and dark at the same time. There’s crumbling walls, there’s a footprint on the side of the barn, there are hawks circling. I can hear the woodpecker long before I see him, as if the binoculars I borrow can’t be adjusted.

What is a practice of writing if you don’t have time to write? What am I practicing for, why warm up if you are going nowhere, if the only reason to write is to do more work?  I think at times that

there’s writing so that I remember and then there’s writing so that someone might ask me to tell them the story. Like clambering up the hill, my shoes are wrong but I forget to worry, and we make it to the grove before the rain starts. The trees are protective of the damp yellow quiet, and the depth of their pine needle bed dissipates beneath the lens of my camera.

Or perhaps I want to remember the skeletons, climbing out of wells, dragging themselves up from the roots of trees. They stand 12 feet tall in the entryway of the hardware store; in the side mirrors of the car and at the entrance of the bar, they loom even taller, they crawl up the sides of buildings. They’re on top of BigLots, in line with the highway. They jut their hips and they commune with the others, and they appear improbably latched to the man on the back of his motorcycle.

Maybe I want to feel with this writing the roughness of a chestnut tree, which reaches out beyond the imaginary square, through that imagined window, into the woman’s silent scream, and arrives again at my car door on the name of a street that I don’t take but pass by. I’m not sure 

but I think I would understand what it means to be hollow if I crawled to the very center of a tree. There’s one I climb over whose insides have turned to dust, a deep chestnut warmth under the soft carpeting moss. Its insides turn to dust before me and I wonder if my insides have congealed or pulverized, if the numbness of the character is mirroring or inventing my own unreactivity. Am I standing tall with two legs of tree trunks or is it that I have fallen over? That I am climbing over myself in the attempt to reach the lunar landscape on the other side of the thicket.

The colors are what’s odd. The grey and yellow merge until they are the antlers of a tree, a deer, a mailbox (an 8 point buck you’ll tell me, laughing, remembering different lowlands than these). The reeds that have deadened since the first frost stand on alert, as if charged with electricity, as if beaming tera quads of data to an unseen vessel above us. Its weight inverts the pull of gravity, challenges the very center of the earth, but the tomato plant keeps blooming. The yellow buds look like they’re floating, and by extension so am I – in between the day and the evening, the beginning and the end, I sit here suspended

hovering and dazed, because I can’t resist the final touches, the last minute edit. The trick is to let go, to let the skeletons fossilize (bfs) until they’re no longer frightening.

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read/saw/heard/did

🎬   the bow, kim ki-duk (2005)

👯‍♀️  dancing and dive bars w/ drc; dive bars in general; neighborhood spots and neighbor hangs

📚 lettres philosophiques, voltaire (1733). see esp. lettres 9-11.

🍽️    dinner plans ft. squash from the future / past

🖼️ cleveland museum of art

📚 loganberry books

🎬 moonstruck (1987)

🍺    oktoberfest forever; miller high life + meletti (ty cl & ml)

📚 ladivine, marie ndiaye (2013)

✍️ writer friends, writing near friends, friends who write, friends who remind you to keep writing (i really like the pasta metaphor mw)

🎬 what we do in the shadows (2014)

🏕️   camping

📚 strange weather in tokyo, hiromi kawakami (2013)

🍰    louisa’s cake with pear and ricotta i can eat

📚 the living days, ananda devi (2013)

📚 les liaisons dangereuses, pierre choderlos de laclos (1782)

🎬 les liaisons dangereuses, roger vadin (1959)

📄 eating the other, bell hooks

🎬 bram stoker’s dracula, francis ford coppola (1992)

🥩 steak

this is

still hard. hard to carve out time to do things for yourself, like practicing stuff that’s hard— sharing your work or how you do things, being open to criticism (suggestions), judgment (selection), working hard to get somewhere and then arriving. i want to call this a vanity project, but it’s more like working directly against my ego so i can externalize the bits of language floating around in my head and seem like i’m still glued together. see you next month (ish).