In her poem, "The Poem as Mask," Muriel Rukeyser writes,

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, 

 on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.

 
[...] Now for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

* * * 

Why does every big new iteration not disappear the previous ones but
make it so that this one feels the most pertinent, feel like this time we're really beginning? 

But what is the reality of now? 

(apologies, Muriel, and thank you for your patience)

Sometime masks! Different mythologies!

Here are two real photos shot on film of two real people in the middle of a far too real argument,

and in it, you can clearly see our defense mechanisms, our battles, our means of both trophy and entropy.

Me, unwilling to perform past set-up, resistant to looking away but pulled back from physical intimacy, face-front, overblown or overexposed, aggressive confrontation while melting, logic bullying but thin-skinned.

 

And you, vulnerable but shadowed, figuring out where the light is as quickly as possible, reaching toward both me and sun, performing the feeling of okay, part pretzel part fence, active and strong when feeling weak.

 

 

I couldn't be more proud of doing this. Not just the photos though definitely that too. But of this, this life with this person and this willingness to grow, this forceful reaching toward it. And especially this pulling up each other by the hands and hair and heartstrings. 

 * * *

I promise to make photos of us in all manner of love and discontent and exploration and sensual pleasure and awkward silence and dank hotel beds and shoreline kisses and costume changes and coffeeshop bathrooms and blue toenails and new water bottles and 90s songs where we forget all the same lyrics and watching strangers' family dynamics from the window and forgetting where we parked and ruining watermelons and posing by mannequins and spitting in each other's mouths and falling asleep with one foot and one hand touching and petting all the dogs and making fun of babies and losing our hair and buying 42L suits and dancing against phone booths missing their phones and so much tango and no more white vehicles and the little hairs I can't unsee and the oatmilk and counting birds in the trees and panic that makes me hypercritical and abandonment that makes you avoidant and the silver linings that turn out to be not silver but grey and the rain that overtakes the rainbow and still the rain but also the sun and also the little crabs that make holes in the wet sand and me in a leopard bikini and you clawing at your matted hair and the poems the poems the poems and the yesterday and the today and the fearlessness to not just consider tomorrow but to want it, to not be scared of it, to know its loss is inevitable but to run headhandheart first toward it anyway. 

 Not just anyway but because.

In the preface to his book The Art of Daring, Carl Phillips writes,

"As if distortion were preferable to reality. Isn't it sometimes?" 

Do I still think that?

I believe reality can become distorted past recognition,
and it's in these moments that only something like daring, 

a willingness to risk going forward when we hardly know where we are,

can provide us the chance both for self-knowledge and for the making of art. 

Restlessness carries us to penetration -- 

we pierce the world as we knew it,

the world as we've never known it pierces us, in turn,

 
daring pushes us past this... 

and then what? 

 

(linebreaks and film photos, mine)

Re-ordered (and still ordered) words from all the open tabs on my computer:

recent film of something I understand, shot of something I've forgotten

 * * *

Why do birds collide with windows?

Dopamine, magazines, and a perfectly timed arrow.

But how might art usurp the canvas?

Moments of epiphany, scrupulous meanness, and the everyday activities of a houseplant.

And why to admit light or air? So that people can see out?

 All those hours saddled to gentleness. 

Experimentation should be multi-phonic, befuddled.

But I guess some birds are just looking for a fight.

Ripe with Chains and Berries -- a short story in 2 parts

Part One:

one roll of film's relationship to the color Red 

 

Part Two:
an exquisite corpse poem composed with You today:

"And because of this, I have a huge blind spot,"

says the man across the room from me, being far more honest than he means to be, instead believing that he is actually speaking about his optic nerve.

"You have to move around your blind spot. It's like looking through a fishbowl. < ha ha ha > The pressure makes me wide-eyed. It makes me have a different sense of compassion for other people."

The person listening to him (whom he intends to hear him, not me surreptitious) responds equally, though I can only hear phrases: "after an hour of that," "she had exactly," "a friend of mine," "but I joke about it," "it's only a couple of us," "it's better than."

They vibrantly talk about standing desks next, and I can't be bothered to work that hard for a metaphor.

Outside the window one furry human leg replaces a furry canine leg in the exact same seat. A person in bike shorts paces around a French pastry and orders two bottles of something glassy that looks sharp and thick.

There are less birds now, less buses and sunshine and poems and taco trucks as well. Instead, with the rain coming, the seats are empty, the couples hold hands less anxiously, the milk isn't cold. 

I read everything to keep from feeling like I'm reading.
Once you feel like you're reading, the reading is over. You can only stop or push past.
Like this, moments before this post:

It's getting time to stop. [listening to other's conversations, waiting to pet dogs, dodging the heat, smiling at kissing strangers, stealing mismatched words from books about hypnosis and recklessness, not knowing how to spell bus in the plural, sending dirty messages to the handsome Tigre sitting across from me] It's getting time to go home.

We live five blocks from here, and neither of us know how to get there flawlessly yet. But we like it that way, and though I know it's impossible, I hope it never changes. When it's fully changed our only choice is to move. After all, we have to keep things whole.

Mr. Blindspot suddenly says, "I'm a sentimentalist, so I get moved easily by stuff like that."

Well, Mr. BS, I get moved easily by stuff like this,
film of red in the absence of:

 *

On Heartfelt Impermanence

I'm sitting outside at a coffee shop that is empty of people save for me and the person at the counter who fell over a broom they placed directly behind their own feet. The sun is gray, and the rain is shining. All the tables are glossy with the ash of trees and the velvet of graffiti. I like it here. I keep the library of cement blocks company as they grow columunious weeds out of their bodies like smokestacks. Clear bottles of tears sit atop all the tables, each falsely, obviously, marked Hand Sanitizer. Someone left a ballroom shoe near a hula-hoop and a gleaming trophy the exact shape and size of a trash can. There are little rocks everywhere, and when I press my toes in the earth my wet body sinks into the wetter sand. I really like it here. There's music in my head. It sounds like astronaut dreams and an electric surge. It makes my fingers make letters that make words like Astronaut and Surge. The music has titles, and I really like those too. Here are some titles from two albums, no words added, few words left out, most words rearranged (though aren't most words rearranged? No matter matter.):

Le Souvenir des Temps Soudaine 

Every ending is heartfelt
impermanence. Skin was only shelter
when words like throw were still. 

The valley glitches in afternoon
strobes. L'invisible unravels into
a static coast. Our obedient stutter

shall flourish and fade like pyramid
heat at twilight. Intention is bright
meadow beauty, shrouded

soft bells that toll objectively
yellow. Your amber
shape swirls me clock-

wise into a river of trombones.
A sea of xeroxed candy.
But I am no miracle

Other. I carry you by broken
traveler hands. This place
is only wind. Is only particles.

Take my sky, my name, my verses
like film credits. Tomorrow
(too) the stars heal their disguise. 

* * *

film photo shot this year with broken traveler hands

 

 

On murdering, trampling, and melancholy

One time it was very late at night, and I was parked outside a dark cafe, sweaty in the backseat of a vehicle that included 3 of us but should have included only 2. The 2 people in front were in that early phase of intimacy where they imagine it's safer to have a third party, a buffer really, with them to both ease awkwardness and to heighten the awareness of their own growing chemistry. 

They were bonding over the fact that they had their deep melancholy in common. Others, like me they pointed out, had the gift of cheerfulness, of being happy. 

It offended me greatly. Wasn't I melancholy? Wasn't my sadness as real and as palpable as theirs? I forget the details, but I know I huffed and puffed and said I was sad frequently, to which they balked and laughed and felt ever closer to one another. 

It left me with something to prove, and I chewed a lot of melancholy fat over the next few years. 

But I think what they saw was my easy access to joy. And who imagines that joy has to be experienced over and over again like melancholy? Who imagines that it's not a constant flavor, that it has to be consumed again to be tasted again? Who imagines that joy is as fleeting as it is pervasive?

Well, it's always been there, this joy. And proving my melancholy got lost along the way, not that long ago maybe. 

It's still there too, thank gracious -- how disappointing to lose an entire emotion otherwise! 

But the thing I'm holding close to today, the thing I'm tasting, the thing I'm scribbling right so here so I don't forget it is that 

I Feel Good.

* * *

I bought a mirror for our new apartment. 

A full, singular mirror for looking at my full, singular self.

The package also made me feel good:

 

See?

* * *

And here I want to show y'all where I am right now. 

Because I'm a little bit in love with a lot of things, and I'm a lot in love with something far greater than me.

(I initially wrote, here I want to give away where I am right now.

See how the language of hiding and of pleasing is so easily accessible on the tongue in this place? 

But also see how I caught it and I shared it because you have it too?)

Attempting delicious murder with my favorite shimmering black bird. 

Together we are attempting a delicious meta-murder.

"It was either stay in bed or get up and meet the impassible barrier."

Well, I've been reading a lot the last few months. 

It began for some reason I can hardly remember to forget now, something about a lockdown and the same four walls and a little bit of imaginative relief instead of an airplane or an intimacy or another physical escapade. 

I missed it here. I missed collecting my thoughts and other people's words, others' ideas. 

So today, reading my second Rebecca Solnit of 2021, I thought I'd come back to see what seeing myself looks like again. 

To see if I feel safe here, to see if I can let go of the idea that it was ever unsafe, that I was ever unsafe. 

Or at least live with it. 

 [Of course I remember I started with Joan of Arc, but that's a different story to chase.]

*

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she wrtites,

"Maybe if I really paid attention to my life, 

I'd notice that I don't know what's going to happen this afternoon. 

And I can't be fully confident that I'd be competent to deal with it. 

How do I engage this process so that I don't become 

too frightened by what it may unfold or too complacent by avoiding it?

This is the delicate work of awareness. 

 It all happens in half a second.

We see someone and make up a story about who they are. 

And so we get ourselves into a lot of trouble about the stories we make up as we weave our world.

And the practice of awareness doesn't say, don't weave your world 

-- that's what we're hard-wired to do.

The practice of awareness says, don't grasp it too tightly, don't be too convinced."

*

Here's to a life practice of not being too convinced & not being too convincing.

There is this motion about which I can't stop thinking. (Are you in a state of grace?)

In the late 1920's film The Passion of Joan of Arc, there's this moment where a fly lands on the eyebrow of the Falconetti in the role of Joan. The fly lands on Falconetti and on Joan. The two of them, as one, move to shoo it away; their two hands, one laid atop the other, obvious and imperceptible. The fly lands on them separately, separated by spectators. (The world loves to separate us by our spectators). But the two of them, in a conscious or not reaction, act simultaneously -- one not overtaking the other, one not even conscious of the other, perhaps. 

So the fly lands. Joan lifts her hand, and her fingernails are so dirty, her cuticles are chipped and dry from the salvation she is scraping from the men around her. 

 "Whose hands are these?" asks Joan who has been stuffed underground, pulled up like a marionette from the baseboard, thrust into the spotlight and the grey-toned faces and the movie camera. She doesn't know why her hands are dirty; they just are. And it doesn't matter anyway because her hands are attached to strings and are outside her general control. Someone else says Act, and they act. Dance, and they dance. But it is comforting, in a way. In a way it has always been like this. 

The fly lands. Falconetti lifts her hand, and her fingernails are chipped because she arrived on the movie set four hours early for hair and makeup. 

"Whose hands are these?" asks Falconetti who wants the fly off her goddamn eyebrow but knows the two dimensional memory of film out-values her impulse of disgust or beauty or whatever side of that coin she flips. So something acts for her instead, something that doesn't rely on instinct but creates it. She has always wanted to be someone else -- at least temporarily -- and when it shoves into her, it's as if watching her thousand selves from the panopticon. The panopticon with playback.

 

 

The fly lands. Their single hand touches their face, gently, like how you touch a door handle in the dark. Their single finger with the single dirty nail draws an almost circle around their single eye. The two of them are now indistinguishable, and it is that moment. And it is that motion. 

And it is that motion.

Deleuze writes, "An island doesn't stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited. [...]

 [S]ome people can occupy the island -- it is still deserted, 

all the more so, provided they are sufficiently, that is, absolutely separate, and provided they are sufficient, absolute creators. [...] 

Far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point. 

[H]umans do not put an end to desertedness; they make it sacred.

[T]hrough them the island would in the end become conscious of itself as deserted and unpeopled. [...]

There is but one condition: 

humans would have to reduce themselves to the movement that brings them to the island. 

The geography and the imagination would be one. 

But [because humans] are unable to join with the elan that produces the island; 

they always encounter it from the outside. 

"The holes of oblivion do not exist.

There are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. 

One man will always be left alive to tell the story,"

writes Hanna Arendt.

* * * 

Here's to being the last one alive in a long series of catastrophes of my own making.

Making no more, at least not for now.

Presence, greater than oblivion.

At least for now. 

When I'm in a panic I, what I would like to be forgiven for.

Two people. One starts speaking in poetry; the other starts speaking in poetry. They're getting along.

What do I get from this?

This translation of the face. This translation of touch. This translation and mistranslation of identity.

Yours and mine.

Bend the mask, make a fold in it. What's below it -- if anything -- is suggested.

And isn't frightening!

What if what is below this level of me 

(the one in which I act and walk around and desire and try harder than I knew I could try to be upfront)

isn't disgusting? isn't wrong? isn't a monster?

Isn't a Monster.

Yesterday I heard a discussion at the Contemporary Arts Museum, a short talk led by a psychotherapist.

It was billed as a response to the art on view now, but mostly the therapist explained how memory and lies worked on a physiological level. He was enthusiastic but quiet. He talked about his own shame, kickstarted as a child, and I felt kinship with him. Not because of the shame, not because of the childhood. Frankly, those sorts of mystical, tingly, psychoanalytic resonances skip over me these days. But I recognized something in him that I see in myself -- we both think we might be monsters. And the rest of life is hiding it, exposing it somewhat to see if we are right, being told we are right by others, being told we are ridiculous for such lofty and egotistical ideas of ourselves, being unseen entirely when we feel the monster -- in glittering regalia -- is in full view. 

Of course, being a monster would forgive any barrier I trespass. Any personal territory I colonialize.

That would be easy, taking away the need for all the hard work.

Being a monster is the ultimate victimhood! 

And not even the active victimhood -- the lazy, boring one that doesn't even have to ask for forgiveness. 

Pah. 

It's more correct to say I thought I was a monster. Now I know where my responsibilities lie... 

or at least I'm working on knowing. 

Earlier in the talk he asked for a volunteer to share their earliest memory.

A woman on the far right side of the room shared a dream (her earliest memory).

It included a portal in her closet that led her to Disney World. But the first person from Disney was wearing a utility belt full of machetes and axes. She woke up in her parents' bed. She remembers the smell of the bed.

The second volunteer, to the far left, I cannot remember her story, but I can see her body language clearly.

[WAIT! I am adding this ten minutes later as it came to me. She was a child, less than two. It was dark outside. She was alone in the backseat of a parked car. She was strapped in a car seat. She was peaceful. Outside, her mother was frantic. She'd locked her child in the car with the keys. A fire truck arrived. She remembers being confused (a condition she said she experiences a lot as an adult). The people she loves subsumed with guilt and fear while she calmly sits in the humid dark and watches from an internal remove.]

Next he asked for a volunteer to share their first remembered lie.

Again, on the right side of the room, another woman spoke. She described answering the phone as a child. A man asked her name and then said that he could have been her daddy. He wanted to speak to her mom. The child said she did not know where her mom was (a true story -- she'd vanished long ago and left her child with the grandmother). The man asked the child if she knew how to get ahold of the mom. The child said no. This was only a partial lie. The child knew she could ask her grandmother for more information or put the man on the phone with someone else. 

Across the room someone else wanted to share. It was a man standing very close the woman who'd been locked in the car as a kid. He described playing with a toy in a store before accidentally putting it in his pocket. Finding the toy in his pant pocket in the car later, he was horrified that he'd stolen it. Afraid of his mom, afraid of the store, afraid of himself. 

We want to explain ourselves, our why. I often confuse the who and the why and the how.
Instead I often look below. Not just the psychological below. The physical below.

What's below the bed on which we sleep? What's buried below the lowest tree trunk in my back yard?
Often I attempt to get to below by going through. By toggling at the surface. To see what shifts.

More and more, it's nothing. More and more, if I shift myself or if I shift you, everything looks the same.
Just clearer. More distinguished. More accurate.

It's always been easy for me to recognize beauty, especially where other people ignored it or couldn't see it.
This is different. This is a merging. This is the opposite of disappearance.

I don't fear it. I crave it. It's not out to get me. I am not the monster. But only because there isn't one.

In 1961, Louis Aragon supplied the answers to a Proust questionanaire:

"If I’m indulgent towards something that passes for a fault 

that’s only because I don’t consider it one." 

When he came to the question, "how would you like to die?" 

Aragon answered, "differently."

* * * 

Means You Prefer from Traci Matlock on Vimeo.

Favorite glossaries 1) associations 2) a dwindling

Left much exception behind

Liberties appear for taking
Imitations of asterisks describe chronologically,
therefore deleting all but carefully considered

Frequently, backwardly, each.
By seldom and patterns my own hesitation
Think of ellipsis as disorganization
I need only difficult conclusion
After interval of several hundred passages
Her own hand rough reluctance
Deep suspicions of imaginative exception
He was unable to perhaps because

He was introduction. I inside impulse.

Set me the example of seldom composing
I can't poem anymore

"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening we drink and we drink." & "What propels this strangeness, this “too-muchness” of a lyric voice? Why such urgency?"

Carl Phillips writes,

Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is partable,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation -- how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth 
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which 
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),

I should perhaps regret more. But it's grown
so late: see how dark, outside?

The swallowing parts of the body are restricted to foreplay.

My feet are the most swallowing parts of my body,

tearing out roots each night 

(is that not foreplay?).