It humbles you and hurts you, to stand there at the side of the sea. For Normandy made me realize that I would never love a person, or conceive another, as beautiful and austere as this place. For I felt all four corners of the universe. I was, once again, all four facets of myself.
For I was honored.
I was happy.
I was home.
I am weak. I am wise. I am born, over and over, to die.
Forward
Why did Tennessee Williams write? Because, he said, he “found life unsatisfactory.” And thus many a book about this man has found its way upon my bookshelf. And I suppose it would be impolite of me to not dedicate some, if not most, of my rewrites to him. Always an inspiration to my writing, Williams cinched my affinity for reworking old pieces and manuscripts by simply…being. He didn’t entirely integrate incidents and exhume experiences in his work solely for the audience, though he loved their reactions a great deal. He used the pain of his past, the panic of his present and the fear of his future to create a complete catharsis…though complete, as we all know, is oftentimes unattainable. Even after his work was either published or performed, he believed in the constant combating of old ghosts and their resurfacing regrets. Perhaps it was this continuous catharsis, through constant editing, that kept him alive as long as it did…for I wonder how many times my own atonement kept me going.
Williams not only danced upon the floorboards of his failures, but he also opened himself to the enjoyment of his existence. Whether dormant or dynamic, Williams shared his journey through the most authentic and devastating layers of his life. He turned pain into praise. He cured loneliness with laughter. And he came face to face with the most fearsome parts of himself. I feel that I owe a great deal of my relentless reworking to him. And I feel, in the face of famine for something more…something better…something deeper…that I’ve found a catalyst in his work.
And so I am choosing to share a very vulnerable reworking of The Anniversary.
I first wrote this piece on January 20th of 2013, during the most guilt-ridden and despondent digression I had ever dealt with. I had felt something similar, but nothing as vicious and cruel as this inner pain and panic. And now, looking back on that valley, I can see why it was meant to be one of the most meaningful moments of my entire life. For Williams had said:
“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”
And I looked so far into that mirror that I was fearful it would fragment. But finally I saw every awful, ugly, flawless, unforgiving and fascinating facet of myself…and I had an epiphany of that fucked-up, perfect, exciting existence.
And so here is a reworking of the most painful part of that valley. And I need my readers to know that, though the original version was once written FOR someone, it is now rewritten for NO ONE. There is not one shade of a character in this piece that even remotely resembles someone in my past or present. Because I actually began rewriting this piece in the hopes that I would divide gender and separate self, and I think I’ve somewhat accomplished that. Its production felt very powerful; frightening, even. For I pulled apart the perforated line that dotted my middle. And I looked at each aspect of me; first in my left hand and then in my right. But instead of meditating upon these halves, I merged them back together. Unorganized and unprompted.
So, here is that mania in me. Here is the divide of Diana. And here are the reasons why that basin is behind me…and why my sights will never stop the search for something far beyond that always-venerable version of myself.
The Anniversary (au courant)
Today hurts. Today rips and burns and rapes. Today eviscerates and asphyxiates and eradicates. Today destroys. For this day was one of the hardest days I have ever had to do. Yet, in its simplicity, it was but only a day. Just a heap of twenty-four hours. A mass of one thousand, four hundred forty minutes. A span of eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds. But suddenly an unforgiving and apathetic anvil pushes into my chest and snaps my spine; my ribs into my heart into my back. I am nothing. I was nothing. I will always be nothing. My bed is an open, hungry mouth and I am delicious with all my sweet sadness and mouthwatering grief and appetizing anguish. And, all at the same time, I am flat and stale and bitter with my fantastical dream of one day becoming a passionate poet, or perhaps an amorous actress.Yet he could not read. Could not see. Could not know. He was crudely thrust from the cramping crevice of two tectonic plates. He slept in shallow graves of soft silt and bathed in the warm waters of a tumultuous tide. For he was simple. He was spontaneous. He so loved the earth that he knew of nothing beyond damp dirt and salty surf. And so the earth, in turn, knew of no man more righteous than him.
But I was born in the severed synapse of a young man’s mind. Him and I; we snorted sulfurous smoke and chewed on synthetic seeds. We coiled choroid veins around carotid arteries. And, after the most painful of superfluous stillbirths, I was impelled. I was implanted. I was inherited and instilled and integrated into a world of cracked needles and swelling sores and dead-end dendrites. A finger into my forehead; an accusation beyond bone and brain and splitting skull. A boulder upon a billet. A wire between a winch. For I was not reared from a rib. I was not created from the clay…
I was designed and duplicated and manufactured. Dyed and packaged and dispensed. And it wasn’t for many years, from a cradle of sweaty palms to a bed of swollen tongues and into an always acrid ocean, that I began to blur the line between benefit and burden. Only then did I stop puncturing even the tightest of hymens with my heel. Only now were veins preparing to shift from syringes. Only here did blood begin to boil. Leaking lobe and clawed cortex strewn about my feet; I began to suspect I would never satisfy that intrinsic itch inside of me. And so I repressed my daily release into the bloodstream. I clung to nimble nostril hairs. I fought the most frequent of floating upon a very backwards breeze.
And thus cravings culminated. Fixation failed and dependence died. Organs recoiled and ruptured. Capillaries began to burst. Skin started to separate. And so very much I feared the hour I would be forcibly expelled from this inlet. This partial opening. This mouth of poisonous prescriptions and bloody bile. But this fright was not fruitless; this trepidation was not futile. Because, after all, fear was fated to me. And this fear knew nothing of formalities; it knew of no one with a more fickle future. For fear was my only follower through this failure of existence. Fear was my flight. Fear was my freedom. Fear was my friend.
Indeed my friend freed me from that factory and pushed me over protruding lip; I was promptly plunged into an ocean of amniotic sacs and coagulated cum. But there was this sort of split-second séance. A somewhat slow-motion moment when fear faded and I realized I had escaped epidemic. I had forfeited failure. I had eluded extinction. Yet I was not ashamed and I was not, for the first time, afraid; sinking into an abysmal aquarium of eroding embryos and unraveling umbilical cords. Rather I was delighting in it; this death I so deserved. This punishment I proudly preferred.
And so commenced this catharsis of conscience and carcass. I floated face down in a cemetery of miscarriage; a cesspool of constant carnage. An eddy like an ovarian elixir. A pockmarked minefield of mucosa. I belonged beneath the springs of this maritime mattress. I metastasized the cold cancer that spread from my empty epitaph. I devoted every side and slant and switch to this now deteriorating disposition. I was dystrophy drowning. I was entropy ebbing.
And yet so suddenly…so assuredly…this man washed over me and held tightly to me; gaping wounds and red-rimmed eyes saturated with saliferous water. I knew nothing of my savior. I knew nothing of his callow clemency. And never would I know the reason of our lactiferous liaison; my breasts shrinking and my ovaries tightening. White amongst white amongst red. Three fluids fusing. Two tubes tying. For in the absence of awareness, I knew nothing of myself.
I traced his inept outline above such a splendiferous sun. I shuttered in the shadows of his slowly-sliding solar eclipse. But, behind the most accurate and sincere and palpable parts of me, I could not yet see this sodomy. For the air announced no attack and the water reflected no rape. Even my father, riddled and ruined as he floated by, did not lift his face to the familiar cries of his daughter. Out of one mouth and into many, many more. I was crawling with corpuscle. I was bathing in bacteria. I was, and always would be, plunging over and over and over again into pathogen.
I wanted nothing more than for that thin, silver string to snap…to separate…to sink into this lonely and strange sea. But what was there to regret? Who was there to blame? For I, too, had beckoned many a weary wayfarer and lonesome leper to land. I bounced between bodies and tip-toed over torn treaties. I salivated at the plunging of their pulse. I dug my heels into stirrups of sand and craned my crooked neck and split my spurious spine; I came while watching each of their severed wrists disappear into a frothy wash of saliva and sperm. For my creation had condemned mothers and fathers. My birth had blighted sons and daughters. But I was not destined to die in that noxious Nile, nor was I doomed to drown in such a pocket-sized pool of pestilent pills and forgotten fetuses. No, my punishment would pulverize my past. My chastening would atomize my atrocities. My hell would be bottomless. Immeasurable. Unfathomable.
And infinite, it was. Vast, it might very well be. For this man who swam me to shore and inflated my lungs and licked the salt from my lips would soon die. The muddled mind of the man who thought he could cheat death by duplication…he would also die. Every woman and man who ventured into the most commodious crevices of my being…they, too, would die. And they would always expire at the hands of this curse; this cerebral contagion. My very mental miasma.
And yet I was immune to my own infection. I absorbed their antibodies and annihilated their antidote. I crushed their cures. I inebriated their surgeons. Because only I would love loneliness and marry madness. Only I would be the book brought to the bench; the bible brought to the bethel. I would abnegate abortion; widening the way for this unwilling world. I would padlock purgatory and pull space down through the sky and out over the ocean. And because, above all, I would be the one to understand this ubiquitous universe. He who denied denomination; I who postulated purpose.
Thus that my stamp was saturated. My imprint had imploded. My capsule was cracking and crumbling; small silver beads wrapped in polyandrous polymer. For I saw his temples tinge. I felt his ears explode. And suddenly I denied the death of this disease. I relinquished regression and relapse and release; my vertebrae dividing and sliding around my torso. His knuckles latched onto my kneecaps. My lips liquefied upon his salt-stained eyelids. We were melting. We were merging. We were making a mistake.
So did you know? Did you hear me crying? Did you feel me flinching? Jagged nails fingering the softest parts of me, swollen scratches and bloated blemishes. Claws into clitoris. Failures forced into warm, wet flesh. You were snaking around inside long before my legs were open to you…long before my enzymatic existence and your mere mortality. And amidst the loss of logic, you continued nailing neon crosses to my sides. You punctured peritoneum and erased endometrium. Rusty nails were pounded behind pallid paintings. Decrepit doors were drilled over windows. Initials carved into cavities and emblems etched into empty embryos. I was soon to be sterile. I was damned to be desolate.
And so there was not one facet of fighting down within that fissure. There was no white flag to be waved. For the walls and the linens were stained with a collective culmination. They were tinged with a chaotic caesarean. You who so proudly inherited the earth and I…I who corrupted civilizations and contaminated communities. We were bred for the broken. We were raised for the repulsive. We were survivors of sin. We were prophets of plague. The day he died, I could no longer recall exactly what regret reminded me of.
Yet not one worry was worthy.
Not one apprehension was there to acknowledge.
And not even one flare did I fire into the night sky.
For how laudable was he that he wished to expire among the legion of his land? Not beside the stitched-up side of his sluts. Not upon the sickle-scarred slopes or between the bayonet-bisected beaches of the earth. But no matter the location; still I promised. Still I preserved. Still I pledged.
Because just how righteous would I be to to recant…?
Filed under Uncategorized
How suddenly I have seen…
That through the most devastating of failure comes the most righteous of success.
To those I’ve wronged. Abused. Abandoned. Moments spent succumbing to confusion and conniption and contradiction. I am a scar, a scab, a stain. Never will I forget those names carved within an infected cage upon my chest. For, from the crevices of creation, I am contaminated with the most bovine of boils.
Yes, I have seen the stratum of my scourged skin; once disfigured with the most depraved of dismemberment. Still I hide beneath madly multiplying malignancy. Tumors tugging at the handmade handle of a too-soon termination. Pimples stretching my pores, filling with fluid and erupting upon the blank pages of a once-promised paradise. Warts widening the most foolish of fingers; am I all that is methodically-mundane and infallibly-familiar?
And still I bathe in bacteria. I plummet into pathogen. I consummate cancer….because I know that I am malignant. I am malicious. I am uninviting and unpropitious and uncompromising. I am all that is absolutely, undoubtedly, unconditionally, fucking evil. My body has thus rotted past the point of pardon. My face forever frowning upon an illusive and frivolous faith. Sanity has slammed her fists against a marble statue of Seraph…of spirit…of substance. For inside of this, I am stagnant. Outside of her, I am volatile.
And though I am…yet I might…never shall I know.
Though I am ruined.
Yet I might be broken.
Never shall I know immobility or ineffectual; neither routine, nor remiss.
Because it is in this acceptance, this disparity and this denial, that I am reborn. My forehead inside forceps and my head between hips. My temples touch tunnel walls; etched with my eternal eulogy. I have happened upon a new nose. I have tightened myself around a new nerve. I have been given a new name. Finally I see that I am both. I am bilateral. I am bested and yet I am blessed.
For though I am inclined toward someone such as you, I am everything without you.
And so you see?
Do you finally see that which I have seen?
This forfeiture of failure for the most scrupulous slants of success…always down. Definitively down.
And never again, on my journey unto basic and bare and benign, will I dare to question the universe’s plan for such an unfairly forsaken and feverishly fleeting future.
Filed under Uncategorized
I will start this forward by saying there has been much hesitation on my part to share my recent work. I’ve stumbled upon a very true and intrinsic place in my life these past few months, and I’ve been reluctant to showcase this dark awakening for many reasons. The first reason is that many people probably won’t understand it, nor will they ever experience it in their own lifetime. The second reason is that, despite my constant efforts to explain that which is unexplainable, I feel some resentment in admitting vulnerability to a world that truly thinks it is invulnerable. The third and final reason, and most important to me, is that it frightens me in ways that I never thought possible. And if I can find freedom in this fear, with all my volatility and flightiness, what’s to say that it won’t forfeit the last connection I have with society? We were all born in a sort of fluidity, a chasm of chance if you will, and it took every strengthened synapse and molded molecule in me to deny this birthright. What will be left, after my declaration of disengagement, to preserve the deep love that others have for me?
In a lackadaisical (but momentary) mindset one morning, after constant contact with an interested literary agent in Chicago, I accepted an assignment that at first irked me. She would give me two weighty topics, both distinct and yet dissimilar, and I would connect them in a literary fashion. If I accepted her challenge, I would have two hours time to write about them. If I denied her insistent inquiries, refusing the assignment, then I would indirectly arouse suspicion of my past work’s validity. She needed to know, based on the uniqueness of a random writing assignment, if I could recreate that which I had previously submitted. Luckily, as I had earlier stated, I was nonchalant that morning and I had no qualms with this project. How heavy could the two topics be, anyway?
I spoke briefly on the phone with her, encouraged by my previous publishing mentor and also by my current companion, and immediately accepted her surprisingly towering topics of: Art and religion…
Art and religion?! I asked for clarification and she elaborated: sell a painting. Create a new religion. Explain my recent enlightenment. She said I was a surrealist writer, so why not share a story of personal religion and Le Manifeste du Surréalisme? And finally she negated my obvious aversion with incentive: Do this, show me, and prove to my superiors that you’ve found a new way in the world.
And so I suppose I owe my newfound triumph to this two-hour cluster-F of writing. It was unedited, unscripted, and unprecedented. And it illuminated only the smallest but most truthful sliver of my unending darkness: my ability to sacrifice compliance, deflect a life of stability and listen intently to the vilest voices of the universe. And I owe SO MUCH to those who tried to cure me, save me, marry me, change me, manipulate me, domesticate me, saturate me, suppress me, hold me, cut me, screw me and, above all, understand me. For I now know why I rejected engagement rings and the promises of a new life and the chances to be like everybody else on this planet. I needed to know, to have, and to feel…so that I might one day define all that is ugly and ruined and forsaken when it is gone. And I am long, long gone. And where I’ve gone to, I’ve never been happier.
So I hope you enjoy. And know that I also hope you don’t, if you so feel that way. Because, no matter the way this makes you feel, know that you felt something evil and beautiful and real. And that is all I wish upon the world; the ability to feel something outside of familiarity, commonality, safety and maybe, just maybe, sanity.
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There aren’t many things I expect to remember at the end of my life; this I’ve accepted. My family’s history of weak minds and heavy conscience; thick blood running rampant between soft silt and polluted valleys. This has plagued me at every juncture but birth. Yet I swear on all that is true and blatant and heartbreaking to me in this life, I will never forget that one moment melted into Robert Vickrey’s artwork. It was an after-hours show at the GRAM downtown this winter and I was moved so tremendously that I briefly forgot how to do the most simple of things. My legs separated; two loud clicks of angry heels. My lungs collapsed; dead and stagnant air hovering over the smallest recesses in my pockmarked throat. It felt as if there was an exploding of stars, a vacuum almost, that suctioned the space behind my ears to large chunks of overlapping egg tempera. How proudly, how insignificantly, I stood there as I watched the brutal splitting of my two hands into four shreds of severed membrane and mismatched fingerprints. How sweetly I smiled as metacarpus merged and ligaments loosened. There was but only a quick and painful “pop” as bone tore away from trapezoid, disseminating to a four-sided frame of his painting “The Labyrinth.” Oh, how beautiful I felt as I witnessed the most glorified and sanctified unions of hammer to nail. Fragile knuckles exploded, fingers bent backward, white skin gave way to cherry muscle; rusty iron spokes through the weakest Hooks of Hamate and into blemished skin. I leaned back upon an inverted crucifix, jagged splinters deep into my sagging shoulder blades, and drank the melted gold of false idols. For every artist’s dream was finally forming within the most despondent parts of Vickrey’s unending Labyrinth, over the hollow space between peeling wallpaper and knobby knees, and into the gaping appendages hanging loosely at my sides.
I tasted the erratic splashes of Pollock’s paint across my lips. I held loosely Van Gogh’s blue and unrequited gift of one-sided silence. I basked in the warm windows of Rothko’s always setting sun. And all at once, as was written, I was two hands into four corners within eighteen-thousand misunderstandings. Small scribbles upon the sacred printed pages of proverbial lies; we had long ago sunk into mass graves of putrid, forgotten genius. I sold my soul to aesthetic and archetypal and bellicose and infallible. I worshipped a neon god of heightened awareness and hysterical perception. I chewed up wooden parish pews with a growing fascination for futility and frivolity. I opened leather-bound books and spit deep into their spines. I danced upon cold slabs of marble, rolling my hips and parting my knees, while I mocked the most meaningless hymns; sharp and sinful screams reverberating against stained glass and Baroque ceilings. For a long life of mistaken meaning and empty expectations had led me to this moment. This cataclysm. This apocalypse. Walls crumbled and floors buckled beneath the grand finale of manifestations; the culmination of civilization’s once-abandoned thirst for knowledge. Medicine was disproved. Faith was forgotten. Science was negated. Embryos dissolved in acidic placenta. Loosened follicles floated down into green piles of sloughed skin. Optic nerves caught fire, burning from end to end; we saw sentience but we would never see significance. For we were gestated in noxious neurotransmitters; tangled lattices of polypeptides and norepinephrine. Black pupils, smooth bullets into shriveled raisins, spiraled down their rainbow drains and drowned in an equally-blinding sea of white waves and knotted blood vessels. And through this pain, this awakening, this punishment…I finally foretold a better way to live. A better way to know. To be. To die. A rational reasoning to refuse love and light. A deepening canyon of intent and purpose and prospect. I craned so far my neck to see that familiar, small spot behind the sun. And I never expected, with my first glance inside those stained walls of dripping graffiti and rotting stucco, that the carefully placed footprints of lives long gone would lead me through this maze of blue basins and manic mountains.
And finally I was released from that burning chasm of concrete; long streaks of sepia stains and melting tar upon fragmented grey rock. There once sat a sagging sedan between two decaying docks; I can still hear the grinding of its expired engine. Melting mortar had hardened long before I was pulled from that gigantic mess of broken glass, crushed headlights, snapped sternums and punctured air bags. And for two decades…two excruciating and horrific and gruesome decades…I watched over and over and over again the beginning of my end. I saw my mother’s brain burst from her forehead and out through her nose . I relived my father’s chest opening up and swallowing the spears of David Dunbar’s tri-shield. And I watched a little girl, compressed between cracking plastic and collapsing cartilage, being sprayed in the face by familial blood.
And so I pulverized permanence and cracked the foundation of ambiguous living. I tore at my face. I bruised my breast. I unfastened my father’s seatbelt. I wanted…no…I needed to feel all that was absolute, unforgiving, fucking ugliness. I needed to know destruction. I needed to understand destitution. I needed to be blasphemous. Fingernails like claws. Tips like talons. Small flakes of me embedded deeply into frying flesh and smashed buckles. My vise was crippled. The Jaws of Life were separated. My mandible locked tightly around the scratched slabs of stone that once supported the weight of multiplying melancholia. One Buick LeSabre, two bodies, three corpses, and four million shattered dreams. I gnashed, I chewed, I spit and, every now and then, I swallowed. I ingested cracked clavicles and lacerated lobes. I sucked in razor-sharp shards and lapped up small puddles of blood. My esophagus ripped and ruptured. A tidal wave of acrid blood filled my mouth to the brim and spilled from the corners of my mouth. Dozens of deepening rivers mixed with black bile and scarlet saliva burst from my lips like the expulsion of many malicious lies. And still we will lie, we will choke, we will swallow.
We accept the caustic cancer growing in our bones. We do not tourniquet the arm that fills with lymphatic fluid. And we do not stifle the stranger’s mucus that drips down our chins and burns holes in our clothing. We know nothing of a peaceful and consistent existence. We are priests of pain. Prophets of passion. We live in a wasted world of reason and rationality. We open our hips in anticipation of the slowest suffocation; a sweet screwing that bites at our lips and thrusts wire hangers into our bowels. We coagulate with the same fluids that tangle our sheets and stain our mattresses. We lock ourselves in dark rooms and dance longingly with the most despairing of ghosts. And we jump headfirst into an always stagnant surf; anchors for ankles and bricks for brains. Our wounds widen within salty waters. Our fingers fray against habitual hooks. We feed flesh to briny behemoths. We staple skin to the bellies of boats. And we look up into a crowded cove of bloated bodies with disintegrating disguises.
But know that we will never pity the lost ones. The ones that were born to die in this lonely ocean. The ones who missed a million chances to press syringes into sugar cubes. To taste the coveted contradiction of saccharine sealant and chemical conspiracy. To experience the mind-expanding journey that simply starts upon trembling tongue and tame tastebud. They march upon cramped cobblestone and they cower inside neat squares of whitewashed fence. And sometimes they call out to us, breaking from their bubbles of constant cold shoulders, and point to our broken backs and laden luggage. But there is no point in recruiting for an abandoned army. There is no purpose in telling a cochlea what it cannot hear or showing a retina what it cannot see. And, I suppose, this is what it’s like to fear and taste and feel and be all that was revealed to me in Vickrey’s labyrinth, in that car, in her uterus, and in this life.
And so I allow the sinking of civilization as the left side of the world slides slowly into the sea. And I suppose I feel something deeper than human emotion. I know something older, something truer, that withstands the beginning of time and space and myself. I was once branded with the defeat of successfully separating my morality and my immortality, but I am finally starting to decipher the damnation of unwelcomed mania. I see this as my only cure for permanent descent. And never again will I beg and plead and threaten the person I once was and hope to one day be. I’ve eaten my grievances and burned my bucket list. For this moment signified final appreciation and irrevocable love for the instability of my life. And still I will welcome the lost and hopeless ones, as I once was, with my stitched and bandaged hands open wide. I will never refuse their inane questions of what it’s like to feel something, anything, everything all at once…though I’ve accepted they will never truly know. For how easy it is to push people to the brink of death. How simple an effort to invite them to question the importance of their life on this planet; and then bend down to whisper the most inhuman of insults in their ear: “You were made to be meaningless.”
As painful and frightening as it was to learn of this power, I have never felt so connected and coherent in my entire life. And I wish, with the most hateful yet humbling of emotions, that everyone in this world could experience something even remotely as viscous as this. The way I felt in that single, impenetrable moment; my palms splaying and my shoulders broadening as unforeseen fingers wrapped around my waist and slid down my wrists. I welcomed, without warning, the sudden judgment of my fucked-up existence in a world full of concrete mazes. Yet my forehead continued splintering and bleeding and oozing small bits of pink flesh and thick fluid; the starkness of loss and injury slowly sliding down my swollen face and filling up the blackest voids of my eyes. Even then, through a cranial cloud of torpidity, I could still see the smallest of spider webs spanning out from an ever-deepening hole; a familiar fissure that had once felt my fist and my heel and my forehead. It was then that I finally wiped the gore and plasma from my mouth and turned away from the plastered wall that had matched my gaze for almost two decades now. And, in the absence of intimacy, I finally felt a part of myself that I assumed would forever lie dormant within miles and miles of my small intestine.
Because there’s nothing quite like seeing the calmest parts of yourself in the hasty brush strokes of another; the humiliation of your past, the confusion of your present, the fear of your future leaking down into the shallow cracks of aging varnish. Know that there is no feeling more shameful and righteous, in the entire goddamn history of the universe, than looking upon the face of the faceless and finding an entire canvas sporadically stapled with your hair and nails and skin. Face proudly, in black pools of bacteria and mold, the reflection of loose teeth and thinning hair that successfully suppressed the image of the woman you once were. Accept the rape of your weakest parts. Break your bones and eat your hair. Spend many a sleepless night under an array of always-closed doors. But, above all, know that once you are chosen for change, edification, enlightenment…there is no chance in hell you can turn back.
Robert Vickrey’s The Labyrinth (1951)
Filed under Uncategorized
There’s nothing quite as beautiful and humbling and victorious as finding that sweet spot between instability and insanity. That comfortable little niche in the middle of security and sustainability; a calm in the center of a tumultuous being. Spread-eagle legs and middle fingers and snowflake nostrils. I cannot put into words the feeling of once-hopelessness that is now euphoric-permanence. I cannot even begin to epitomize what warmth welcomes you on your way back from death. And still stepping over strewn bodies; the guilt of senseless casualty rages inside that shrinking sanctuary. These bloody battles fought in the wake of my inner war. I’ve mourned, I’ve missed, I’ve marched on. Brown blood coagulating into murky membranes; pallid pores filling up with foreign fluids. I fly flags full of fallen names. I fly the flag of my father, held high above this intersection of hellish highways; past perennial pathway and boundless abyss.
But indeed I’ve found it. I’ve finally found it. God-fucking-damnit, I’ve finally found my way home.
Filed under Uncategorized
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware; joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. -Henry Miller
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time; those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything. -Lawrence Durrell
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Just the other day a kind, young man told me that my erratic, stream-of-consciousness writing style reminded him of Lawrence Durrell. Upon copious amounts of research and my sincere dismay at discovering the absence of Durrell’s (and his own inspiration, Henry Miller’s) vehemence in this lifeless world we all seem to now live in, I have finally set sail. How motivating it is to find another unsettling soul in the universe, especially when that spirit leaves behind such a frightening yet impressive wake. I have spent combined years of my life reading literature. Not trashy, worthless vampire smut; but true, visionary, surrealist works of art. My appreciation started with the first book I read aloud, without prior lessons or instructions: Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” I then pushed my way through Richard Adams’ grotesque destruction of anthropomorphic innocence in “Watership Down” when I was ten years old. I survived a trip down to the principal’s office when my fifth grade teacher caught me, for the second time with an offensive book, reading William S. Burrough’s 1959 novel “Naked Lunch.” I mourned for Astrid at the end of Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander” in seventh grade. I won an essay contest to meet the visionary David Almond, author of “Skellig,” when I was in sixth grade. I tackled my mother’s bookshelves as soon as I could reach the top shelf: Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind.” I fell in love with Alex Garland’s “The Beach” long before Leonardo Dicaprio starred in its watered-down travesty of a film. I met and mourned the death of each Lisbon daughter in Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides.” I pondered the defectiveness of my morals after reading Cathy Ames’ story in my favorite book, John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” A small part of me felt again what it was like to watch a parent depart as I read Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” later in life attending one of his speeches on forgiveness at Rochester College; and it was then that I understood my incapablity of sharing his altruistic outlook upon life. I felt the ripping pain of childbirth while laboring through Chris Bohjalian’s “Midwives.” And I continued to fall in love and fall apart, time after time, with literary geniuses like Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Bret Easton Ellis, Hubert Selby Jr., George Orwell, and Gabriel García Márquez. My life is usually a mess; I’ve gotten used to this. But my stomach will not stop growling and my brain just cannot cease gorging. Words into sentences into paragraphs into novels…these things have, for many years now, proven their loyalty to me. Such sweet stability between the yellowing pages of the rare books I’ve accumulated thus far in my very arbitrary life. And so, capriciously, I am fascinated. I am motivated. I am anchored.
Still, from the front to the back of every stack of bound papers I’ve held in my soon-to-be arthritic hands, I waited patiently to find another writer that I could identify with. It wasn’t until I read Stuart Dybek’s short story, “We Didn’t” in class last year that I was given hope. Immediately I contacted him with earnest deliveries of profuse appreciation. There was finally a transcendental link between the hypnagogic style of my writing and the trauma that knocked around in my brain. What a relief it was to feel enough confidence to capture surrealism; transmogrifying Dali’s empty eye sockets and twisted clocks and turning them into convoluted syntax and revolting prose. This was what I was born to do…an omnipotent calling that only someone so frequently touched by death and repeatedly shunned by those in the light could heed. I started shedding layers of baby fat years before I was ready. I endured the agonizing rape of unwanted metamorphosis at the exact moment sixty small shards of our windshield came cutting through the air toward my face. Or the second I lost every single thing I owned…leaving behind every shirt, every book, every phone number, every presupposition of starting a new life with NOTHING in upstate New York.
And yet I lived in the vacancy of true cognizance…until today, that is. Today I realized that my aching back meant very little compared to the broken spine of Lawrence Durrell; a truly prolific and adept maestro composing such pleasing paragraphs from an obscure orchestra of unsettling sentences. And, more importantly, I had my first experience of tolerating the terrible places I had been so they would one day burn to the ground in my always decaying but forever immortal memory. Henry Miller has reserved for me the last life preserver on the last seat on the last lifeboat. What an inexplicable but marvelous buoyancy; so high above these exiled waters that I can’t even reach my wrinkled fingertips to touch the surface of a tempestuous and swelling surf. I’ve been ready for some time now to leave behind the irrational fears of precipitated prolicide and indefinite mania that have plagued me since infancy. And now I have commenced upon a fully absorbed and exceptionally unyielding version of the woman I was once destined to be…and have since then gathered the staunchest of crews to help me set sail upon those once dark, polluted waters.
And so the apocalypse of my instability is upon my life and those living in it. Raging fires across the dead foliage of last fall are now thinned out to smoldering ash. Furious and frothy tidal waves have finally begun to recede from the muddy walls of the Rhine Valley; a gushing current plunging back down into an ocean filled with grey ash and granulated bone. I walk slowly over soaked soil and rising vapor, my lifeboat docked safely behind me. It is then that I notice the misplaced ashes of Henry Miller as they slowly ooze up between my toes and down into the darkest of earth’s clay. The pungency of burning hair and charred skin wiggles between my lips and slides through the gap in my front teeth. I have begun to absorb a death that is, and will always remain, unbeknownst to me. Once scattered over the coast of Big Sur, the ashes of ingenuity and prodigy and wisdom beyond the ages have triumphantly traveled and amicably arrived to affectionately cushion my aching feet. The world has folded into itself, for I watched the top of the Santa Lucia Mountains in California grind down into the grooves of the Vosges Mountains in Eastern France; a cavernous, hungry mouth clamping down and locking its fangs upon a world that Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell and my father and Kris and Frank and Loretta no longer know.
But I’ll stay here just a little bit longer. I like it here. It’s dark and frightening and I can yell for hours upon hours without expecting more than the always comforting reply of frantic loneliness as it echoes between the ground above and the puddles below. Such a consoling reverberation of self-alienation that bounces off boulders and catches soft gusts of air that gently rise up from the belly of a very familiar beast. I will keep standing here. I will keep sinking past remains and loam and fossils until I have sheathed myself in a grave of somber stories and painfully pulsating poetry. And so my skin will peel and my muscles will melt. My bones will splinter and my blood will evaporate. My words will outlive me…and that’s all I could ever ask for in this whole, wide, fucked up world. I belong here. I am maintaining. I am a writer. I am home.
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An excerpt from Henry Miller’s 1938 novel from Paris, “Tropic of Capricorn”:
“So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimeter of lust running to dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in their impeccable lunar consistency. This is the icy white maidenhead of love’s logic, the web of the ebbed tide, the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the center of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the nostalgic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.”
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