SOUBRETTE

 

December 19th, 2022

 

Ithaca (Cavafy, trans. Mendelsohn)

As you set out on the way to Ithaca 
hope that the road is a long one, 
filled with adventures, filled with understanding. 
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes, 
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them, 
you’ll never come across them on your way 
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice 
emotion touches your spirit and your body. 
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes, 
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them 
unless you carry them within your soul, 
unless your soul sets them up before you. 

Hope that the road is a long one. 
Many may the summer mornings be 
when—with what pleasure, with what joy— 
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes; 
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts 
and there acquire fine goods: 
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony, 
and heady perfumes of every kind: 
as many heady perfumes as you can. 
To many Egyptian cities may you go 
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages. 

Always keep Ithaca in your mind; 
to reach her is your destiny. 
But do not rush your journey in the least. 
Better that it last for many years; 
that you drop anchor at the island an old man, 
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way, 
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. 

Ithaca gave to you the beautiful journey; 
without her you’d not have set upon the road. 
But she has nothing left to give you any more. 

And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you. 
As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience, 
you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

 

You can make a your case for Ithaca all you want, but I know something else true now. 

When you move to a new place and immediately make a new postural habit, the habit becomes also embedded in that place, subconsciously reminding you of it as you move through the associated land.

I'm back in Minneapolis and my neck is a fucking rock again. My tongue is a fucking rock. My jaw and my chest are back to clenched position, which they grew into as I grew up.

This place does not glow when I do. It does not speak the way I speak. Rather, it's become a sign that I'm winning when Minneapolis bristles against my touch. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 2nd, 2022

 

 

What the fuck whas I going to write about?

 

How embarrassing to be me and have a typo. What a waster of grandmother's inheritance and the elite attribution to my grandfather in Chicago; it's all underground now. I can hear my idiot

landlords say (really, just now): "It's all night-night now. Time to go night-night now," with night-night now having the same inflection every time. Who the fuck talk like that? Honestly. Being here is weird, freaky even. I'm not sure if 

I'm the problem or they are. It's 10:08pm and I'm worried that I'm typing too loud. It's the desk they provided me, however. It's got a resonance in the wood.

Fuck it.

 

 

 

October 12th, 2022 

 

As long as I stay ahead of him, it's good. 

Ahead of him: cool, violent. Before him and moving

forward into the bigger and better. The dream of monument. The dream Be it 

Indianapolis, or was it Indianapolis. it involved Minneapolis, too, like when Rachel took me to the capital, 

A disappointment in literature is a weakness. 

Strong language is strong language. And 

avoidance fragranced on trend is nothing but goes everywhere,

honorable enough, or even valid.

 

 

July 18, 2022  

  

What the hell is going on here?

I'm tired. My voice is tired from misuse, that telltale smoke comprising the area in which my mandible used to be, and the area immediately below my jawline on both sides, that land of lymph and violin-string tendons. It feels like a damp, hot pair of earmuffs keeps sliding down, torn bear fur sticky with dust.

I have a real problem that I know now can't be fixed from within. 

I've practiced what they wanted for long enough. I didn't know then that leaving private lessons was only the preamble, a way to create freshly indifferent time slots to replace a way of "making art" that, according to what I believed but let myself relabel impetuousness, wasn't making art at all. But time is neutral and one can easily get lost in it, forgetting where the hyena is sleeping who was chomping at the bit for this time today which wasn't yours yesterday.

Because it was never enough to stop taking lessons; every hour, one must enter the Saturnian boardroom.

Do not leave the truth to languish by the side of the road in the old fishing net of your tiredness. You're very much the only one. You shall bushwhack, log, flatten, and pave (or leave it gravel to your liking.) You must compartmentalize, you must build each facet out, so that the world inside of you becomes larger than the world around you, triggering change simply by its largess, pressing, popping, spitting out your mouth. Become habituated to its needs and eccentricities, and catch yourself with the hook when you're worrying. That is one of many things that are unreal to you now, nothing more or less than a waste of your time. 

 

 

July 15, 2022 

 

I’m starting to suspect that my best work is that which I do spontaneously. Limiting belief triggered: toil is value.

 

Reality: I’ve toiled for 20 years. Anything I create spontaneously contains that work.

 

 

May 20, 2022 

 

on OperaWorks advice:

when you are stressed, go to a beach somewhere while you let the body move for you, talk for you, do your day without you doing it

you'll be surprised how present you

what kind of art could best represent this phenomenon, the experiential difference between turning this on and the stress of otherwise? 

I feel the difference massively, the mass that I forgot was there

shifts from between the world and me (allusion intended, though I appreciate drastic differences) 

But the effect is antipodal to the cause again (and with increasing regularity. We're definitely beyond synchronicity.).

Cause: You imagine yourself gone.

Effect: You are more present.

"You" have moved from between you and the world.

It reveals the ego as prepositional.

Of course it is. We know the ego exists only in the real or imagined presence of an other.

So why don't we ever talk about the ego spatially?

It's implicit in that definition. If something only exists in the presence of another thing, it is prepositional

because a preposition asserts the position of a noun in relation to a previous noun.

 

At root, all prepositions assert relationships either

along a time spectrum: before, after, next [Thursday], last [March]

or

within a spatial field: under, above, inside

 

In some cases, a preposition

may appear to be

in a separate category of conceptual relationships within the mental space exclusively: as per, according to, thanks to

 

But are conceptual relationships actually separate from time spectrum and 3D spatial field?

 

Take as per.

1. "as"

it is a shortened version of "also"

(Old English: eallswa)

which is a contraction of eal (altogether) and saw (so)            (etymonline.com) 

eal (altogether, all, every, the whole QUANTITY of)

from Latin quantus (of what size? how much? how many? what amount?)

early 14c. French quantite, "amount, magnitude, the being so much in measure or extent"

late 14c. as "that which has quantity, a concrete quantity;"

by 1560s in prosody and metrics, "the relative time occupied in uttering a vowel or syllable" (distinguishing it as long or short)

from 1610s in the concrete sense of "an object regarded as more or less."

 

ALL: a term arising from measuring or amassing physical objects, which later 

 

 

 

The difference between measuring and amassing objects is striking me as congruent perhaps to

The difference between mechanical and longitudinal waves

(The difference between sound and light)

 

 

Sound, Light = Ask for permission, ask for forgiveness

Explain why or why not.

 

Poem: girlstuff

 

I. 

you don't consider your action. you offend so you ask for forgiveness.

you consider your action. but you offend so you ask for forgiveness.

you don't consider your action. you don't offend so you don't ask for forgiveness.

you don't consider your action. you don't offend but you ask for forgiveness anyway.

you consider your action. you offend because you didn't ask for permission.

you consider your action. you offend but you asked for permission.

you don't consider your action but you ask for permission. you offend.

you say, "I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission." you offend. you ask for forgiveness.

you say, "I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission." you don't offend. you ask yourself why you considered your action, when you should have known that you wouldn't offend. 

you say, "They say it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." you don't offend. you recognize that they were right in this case.

you say, "They say it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." you don't act. you offend because you said that.

you say, "I believe it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." they say, "Do you believe that or have you just heard it said?"

you say, "I've heard it said that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." they say, "Well do you believe that or not?"

they say, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." you act. you offend them. you ask for forgiveness. 

they say, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." you act. you offend them. you ask for forgiveness. 

they say, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." you act. you don't offend. you ask for forgiveness for needing the idiom.

 

II.

you forget to consider your action. you offend. you forget to ask for forgiveness. 

 

 

You don't

They don't

You forget

They forget

You don't forget because there was nothing stored to forget

You don't forget because you remember

You forget because there was nothing stored to forget

You forget because you remember

They forget because you remember

You forget because they remember

You forget so they remember

You forget so that they don't remember

They forget so that they don't remember

 

 

or, regarding the topical issue of women saying sorry too often:

 

 

 

This brings me to my favorite idea, that time is the 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May second, 2022

 

My lips fondled fuzz but my jaw bit the rock.

 

 

April 29, 2022

 

I sit cross-legged on the white bed, slip on the eye mask, and enter the mute clamp of black headphones. I begin a meditation called “Soul." I’m easily hypnotized. Then, she instructs me to recall the womb world. Each possible need was met and every impossible, encased in the warm, dark pink perfection of the full. Obvious.
 

In junior high, we were asked what made humans different from animals. I can’t remember if we determined it was empathy or imagination. I don’t think either are right. What it should have been was projection, but we were too young to come up with that. 
 

But in this womb, this impossible but delicious experience, I come upon a calcified fact of my life, of my “being me.” 
That I could not be safe in that womb, nor could I have all of my needs met. I was already suspended there from somewhere else. Already assigned to the job. Perfect safety was not a feeling by which my particular human self could ever return to, even to that warm earthly as-close-to-perfect-as-we-can-get place. I was already not exactly supposed to be there. This is not to say I won’t or didn’t enjoy the warm, wet, dark pink. I will always be an animal. So many things can be true at once.

 

How do we string words together, one by one, and not feel like we have left something out?

 

How do we read words one by one and trust?

 

I don’t want to respond to what I write in spoken conversation. Ever. It will only cast us further from the truth. I will lie, intentionally and unintentionally, as I try to simultaneously protect my holy solitude and be with you in that moment. I will become split and no one will win. We will move and speak apparently loosely but tied to our independent and connected network of sticks, our customs, our thin capacity to be entirely honest for the duration, let alone spontaneously, unencumbered by the thinking about it behind our eyes, that serial killer of immediate response. I will lead you to misunderstand me, and I will regret having ever allowed the topic to enter our conversation.

 

I’m confident that if I don’t say this here, someone will read this entry and ask if I’m depressed again. I am not depressed, and I am not interested in fielding this question. In case this is not clear yet, it is a sensitive topic for me, and a mirror in front of which I grin and flex all day long, and likely for eternity. My Sun is in Aries in the Eighth House: for me to be myself is to be at war with death.

 

If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that the more open I become the more people will think I am depressed or unhinged. The unacceptability of this possibility, I am sure now, is why as a child I felt I needed to depress myself— to push myself flat like a tongue depressor—in the first place.

 

I wonder why I expect this reaction from you. Well, rather: I’m watching the text wonder why as I watch it do so, already disinterested as the words perform for the millionth time an artificially-slow awakening. I have always thought too fast. I have always moved on. I want us to move on to greater things. When will we stop telling the same stories and feigning the same realizations?

 

There is something new just over there. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. I’m impatient. I don’t know how to get over the wall.

 

I don’t wonder why I expect this reaction (that I am depressed again or otherwise unhinged) because I have watched the prophecy fulfill itself over and over again. To be candid, I find it boring. Immensely, existentially boring, and depressing not because it depresses me, but because I am disappointed that the world is still turning so slowly, tilling the same dead soil season after season, instead of letting it rest until it feels better. This is how living things actually grow—with space and a cocktail of nutrients. “One must always be drunk” to get bigger, to be colorful, to teem with tiny, fenceless farms despite the massive unknown that makes up the majority of the world.

I have no delusions about why this prophecy continues to repeat. There is a lesson I haven’t learned. A part of me wants to be seen as depressive and unhinged, though the conscious part disdains it. To be categorized that way is warm, wet, familiar. It’s so familiar I feel those words tickling the cockles of my past life’s heart.

 

When I recall a time when I was actually myself, I see deep space and stars.

 

The truth is wilder than fiction.

 

 

March 31, 2022

Stop Breathing Into Me

 

                                     Stop mistaking me for a conch shell while
                                     I'm answering. Why are you speaking?

                                     At night, when I'm finally alone, I make the turn

                                     I pray to God that he will keep me violent

                                     Their eyes well up
                              They wet their pants 

                                     but I will never stop feeling around for
                                     the teeth amidst these ready graves for the corps d'épreuve

 
                                  

 

 

March 6, 2022

I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing here. Is it music? Is it “performing/composing”? I have a hard time believing it’s that simple. Proceeding in that simplicity for a time has yielded the most results so far, so perhaps the “hard time” I’m having believing it’s that simple ought to be eased thinking about something else. Nonetheless, she persisted: I think I’m meant to act out the furthest-reaching possibilities of those “performing/composing” behaviors, circling around ultimately to refine myself as the slanted punctuation itself, in the 18th century simply referred to as the “oblique.” I’m certainly that. In mathematics, a line has a measurable length but the width of a point, which is zero, which is only a pointing gesture towards a location. A line, therefore, is a series of points, an invisible, massless omniscient with infinite arms pointing infinite times and simultaneously along a continuum. I am not the omniscient; I am a continuum of points so pointy, so niggling, that I pass straight through the  soil like a pin leaving no trace, decomposition and bits of inconsequential bone tumbling back in behind me in the blink of a steady eye.

I hate Montaigne because I’m just like him. “I can do that.”

Lingua Ignota, the contemporary musician and the concept of “unknown language” 

Brian Eno+Peter Schmidt “Oblique Strategies”

Is it possible to be disinterested in sound if you have a natural aptitude for it? Do I have a natural aptitude for it or do I just have a pretty voice? Do I just have a pretty voice or is that some kind of inborn directive?

 

 

March 3, 2022

BREATHE LOUDER THAN YOUR THOUGHTS.

Make pieces that are so immediate, the draft is the final. How can I construct the short and direct chute, when it’s often apparent that the draft could become something much more elaborate? A chute to channel faster than the thought habit of having and idea that must be returned to for improvement. Remember what that painter said on the Louisiana YouTube Channel, specific enough to know where you are, but with enough open ends to be nonprescriptive.

February 28, 2022

Normalize saying you don’t like someone. As someone who used to dread not being liked by everyone, I believe that normalizing this is important for the disliker and the disliked. One should never have to feel shame because of their preferences or the boundaries they must erect to honor themselves. Likewise, the disliked person will be given the opportunity to better understand their fear of rejection and individuate more authentically. We’re okay with people not liking certain foods, colors, etc. and we should all become mature enough to dislike certain people. 
Some people, no matter how hard or creatively you try, will never understand you. It’s okay because it’s the truth.
This comes with a critical caveat: in order to prevent burdening yourself and the other with unnecessary pressure, you must find a level on which to respect and love them. Another caveat: to dislike is not to hate. To dislike is to prefer something else, to hate is to project a fear onto another. 

But by all means, and this is the hardest part, do not allow yourself to cower or make yourself unnaturally bubbly before them, which only can appeal to an immature and unripe sense of security within both of you.

Do not be surprised or disappointed if admitting your dislike   diminishes internal pressure, creating a vacuum in which the other is more likable than before. 

February 25, 2022

To control the day, to be master of the day. To remember to ask yourself if this particular struggle matters where you’re going, or if it’s feeding on the historical wound, translucent blindfold pressed against your eyes. 
The day closes and opens its eyes. 

 

February 24, 2022

You must grab your idea by the ponytail and drag her to the platform.
 

February 23, 2022

Of potential benefit to community spiritual health (anytime initiation by an individual): full body stretching in public places when the urge arises. Others’ physical space is to be respected, but the urge is honored and acted upon equally. Feelings of awkwardness arise and are questioned like a patient, confident woman chatting with her child, the primary investigation being this: “In public, why is another’s possible (and usually unknowable) judgement directing my body with more force than my desire (respectfully expressed)?” This initiation has two benefits to the individual: strengthened inner/outer continuity and behavioral therapy for self-consciousness by exorcising most of the other from one’s inner space. This initiation has one, infinitely-armed benefit for others.