T.S. Eliot Is Better (Than This Blog)

Hysteria

BY T. S. ELIOT


As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.

Don't Panic

I'll return to you soon. The good news is I finished my MA in Philosophy at Boston College and now I'm embarking on a carefree summer!!

And that means I'll return to you soon.

Sidelined

So, I'm coming up on having to write a couple of papers, prepare for my MA comprehensives and make some tough decisions about how I'm going to spend the next year or two. I'm sure (and if history is any indication) as I get overwhelmed with all of this, I'll feel impelled to play a little and write for this. Still, for the moment, I'm going to make no promises and say that you'll likely not get too much out of me for about a month.

But when the summer rolls around, I have a feeling this will be a blooming, buzzing concatenation of images and words and word-images.

Hope everyone is feeling Spring.

Nothing To Remember: Epilogue

She locked the door behind him and looked at the raw circles set about the extremities of her slender feet, hugging her bare arms against the wrinkled and delicate fabric of the sweater she wore with nothing underneath. Setting a kettle to boil, she gathered sheets and duvet and pillows up, arranging them back about her mattress. Shaking out the quilt, which she’d found at the bottom of a pile of aged linens in a box at the flea market in the west coast city where she’d loved a boy for the first time, the floral print underwear she’d set aside all week tumbled onto the hardwood in a wad. Her mind wandered back so many hours as she sat cross-legged on the floor before them.

In those heels for the third night, she’d been thankful for the acrid apple flavored vodka swirling in the bottom of the sweating glass. So long as she didn’t get carried away in the tingling carbonation of feminine laughter, she’d stood lean and craning. For a moment, she had allowed herself to close her eyes and tilted her head to the side to enjoy the draft from the single pane windows on her neck and the thin flesh stretched across the bone behind her ear. This young man before her kept resting his fingers against the descending slope at the bottom corner of her abdomen and she kept pretending not to notice. Instead, she looked at his boots and nodded as though listening to whatever it was he was just saying about writing. But mostly, she thought about how her pillow would smell of cigarettes in the sunny afternoon after he had left and she lay wondering when next he would call.

Nothing To Remember Pt. III

The flat was palatial in that “old world” sense. The ceilings seemed to be lifting away from the floor all the time, the way the espresso from the café down the rue made the top of your head feel as you reached its bottom. Everything ornate and rosette’d and engraved, so much so that surfaces seemed more pockmarked than decorated. Alyson could hardly imagine this place on a winter evening, the single pane windows like cellophane stretched between shriveled fingers of wood. Those summer months, they just stayed swung open at every hour. Moths made pilgrimages to the few, flickering lamps every night. They had nearly no furniture. Mattresses on floors. Treacherous, wreaking chairs parked beside milk crates and wood boxes pilfered from behind the tavern. The problem with “summer in Paris” was that you were trapped in every other summer in Paris. Even huddled, teeth-chattering, in that damp, frigid alley in March, Alyson didn’t really miss it.

The light, above her in the kitchen window, dumped a yellow wash across the alley. A tittering laughter clattered against the cement around her. His voice, muted and indecipherable, murmured beneath it all. Alyson peaked, though she didn’t need to.

That summer, they would smoke cigarettes and talk too loudly out on the balcony of the sprawling flat. All those American girls, it’s a wonder more of France’s young men didn’t gather beneath that balcony like dogs outside a butcher’s dumpster. They were all but hollering about the tragedy of this or that when they failed to notice the intermingling of a foreign trail of smoke amongst their own. Andrew, in his outrageous boots, had leaned against the column beneath their sheltering parapet, to smoke and listen.

Inside the kitchen, where Alyson didn’t need to see, his hands were on the redhead’s waist and her chin was tucked against her shoulder. Alyson knew that they were leaning against the sink. In Paris, it had been one of those awful cast iron basins with no counter beside it to set your coffee press to dry or to lay out ingredients. Here it was some dull aluminum thing, no doubt, with miles of counter space. Every spurned American housewife, baking away her loneliness, had demanded it. He’d place his thumb along that nigh-translucent waif’s perfect little jaw-line and turn her head up to his. Then he’d press his lips and musky breath with hers.

Andrew threw his hat to them and made them promise to return it that evening. They laughed and made no promises. Inside, Alyson wrote her initials on it’s fraying tag.

When she woke up the following morning, she was still mostly dressed.

His attention had been very much like Paris after the rain. At night, everything sparkles and you feel yourself as the first-born of creation and culture. And yet, in the mornings, the sun casts mottled shadows on every embellishment. Every quaint little flaw of the antiqued is just the marring of too many trespassers.

When the elite of a moment are many, Alyson began to think in a way she’d never say aloud, you realize it may be better to be forgotten.

Nothing To Remember Pt. II

He used to say it sometimes at parties. He’d stare at his scuffy boots and scratch at the greasy hair behind his ear and say it. Or, he’d tug at that stupid thrift store t-shirt and look over your shoulder as he said it. Alyson had watched him do this once a week, every week, for 8 months and now she watched him do it again in that fucking basement. He snapped the folded-down beer can tab with the nail of his forefinger and looked up at the ceiling and said it.


“I don’t know… you know? It’s like, when you make art – when I write – and you do it in public like that, you’re just free. And anonymous. In front of everyone. “

The skinny red-headed girl, that girl that everyone thought was overdressed in her asymmetrical dress and asymmetrical haircut and teetering, perilous heels, nodded solemnly with her eyes closed and her head down, like an acolyte at prayer. He went on. Alyson, on the mildewed basement sofa, stopped smiling.

“It’s like, because everyone is there and sees you, it's like you matter. But you don’t have to explain to anyone why and no one could say for sure why, but everyone knows that this guy, with his typewriter…”

He touched the little, freckled thing on the hip with the tips of his fingers of his non-beer hand.

“or this girl with her sketch pad, or whatever. They know that you matter.”

He shrugged and pressed the sweaty beer can against his forehead and the little red-headed girl bit her lip, blushing behind all her adorable goddamn freckles.

Allyson stood and smoothed her sweater, swaying a little. Leaving that half-full beer can on the coffee table she’d carved their names into in the Spring, she climbed the stairs out of the heat and the sweat and the noise of the basement. The rest of the house was cool and all you could hear was traffic outside and the muted thump of the music downstairs. She tried a few cupboards and finally found the glasses and selected the biggest, cleanest one. At the sink she let the water run and and stared at her reflection in the window out on the alley between disheveled bungalows.

She knew she was pretty. Delicate featured, with fair skin and a great mass of healthy dark hair. It wasn't just her looks he didn't talk to anymore. It was her, in all the invisible ways.

Alyson dipped a finger into the water coming from the faucet and it was that shocking mid-winter cold. She filled her glass and lit a cigarette at the stove. Ducking outside, she sat in the late-march cold with her water and chain-smoked, shivering. And not crying.


She'd left her coat down there on the couch and couldn't decide if it was worth retrieving.

Nothing To Remember Pt. I

“Everyone knows that girl,” this other girl exclaimed, “is a liar.”

That girl sat at the end of a basement sofa balancing a can of beer on her knees pulled to her chest, heels of her flats on the ratty cushions. Her fingers tapped rhythms on her cantilevered soles. Her jacket was folded beside her and in it were three loose cigarettes. She smiled while the room performed for her benign spectatorship and, eavesdropping, she sometimes laughed. Before the end of the night, her cigarettes would be ash and filter in the street.


There, across the grey institutional carpet was the only thing that undid the smile in her eyes, if not her mouth. His boots were just too big and never tied, as though he’d been in some kind of hurry to get to this chair in this room and not talk to her.

Alive. Alone. Alight.

The boy sat all bold angles and subtle curves in the belly of the cast iron tub. Soap bubbles had collected at the edge of the water ringed in filthy grey and the ripples of that way little boys are never still. His head was lathered in a great frothy white wig of shampoo so that he looked cast in a pageant. The man’s hands moved deftly and quickly through the froth, so that when the time came, he cupped an inverted hand over the boy’s brow and ladled bathwater with the other. When he was finished, the man swept the boy’s bangs out of his eyes and kissed his slippery forehead. The boy wiped at his eyes with fingers that seemed longer every day to the man.

“Do moms sometimes give sons baths?” the little boy asked while the man ruffled him briskly about the shoulders with a towel.

“They do, mostly when they’re little boys.” Said the man. The boy stepped into the underpants the man held sprawled between his hands.

“And then do they brush their teeth together and floss and shave together?”

“Well, Mom’s don’t shave their faces the way dads do, but yeah, then they brush their teeth.”

“And read together before bed?”

“The best moms do, yes.”

“My mom was one of the best, right?”

The man put his hand on the little boy’s chest, flat and broad like he was giving compressions to keep the child alive until help arrived. He looked at the wallpaper and all its little swoops and textures. He felt his heartbeat 7 times round and then spun the boy to face the sink. They brushed their teeth. They flossed their teeth. They spread shaving cream about their faces and wiped it away from their chins and cheeks and upper lips, the boy with a plastic razor, the man with the real deal.

“You want batman or superman tonight?”

“I want to be spiderman.”

“Spiderman’s dirty, pal. Tomorrow night.”

“Okay. Okay, batman.”


The man started to help the boy into his pajamas, but he didn’t need it. The man leaned against the doorframe to the room she had painted with care. It was only barely just dark out on account of the summer and he could see the boundaries of their world together, him and the boy. That afternoon, he’d sat with his thoughts and his iced tea on the steps to the kitchen door and watched a pale warrior make-believe a victory at the edge of the lawn. The sun had made the man tired and the boy wanted him to come and fight at his side. He could have and maybe should have. With the cinematic memory that rested in sepia tones through his thoughts now, he was glad he didn’t.


The boy was dressed for bed and they read a story of turtle’s stacked to the sky that one might reach the moon, like some inversion of the Hindu foundations of the world.

The man awoke on the floor of his bedroom, all those photos spread around him and the glass on its side having been earlier drained. The boy was crying, frantic. When the man stepped to the door of the child’s room, still bright from the moon and being painted white save for the clouds stenciled about the ceiling, he heard the boy but didn’t see him. And then there he was, folded into a pile just inside the door by the wall, his eyes wide with terror and drenched in grief.

“What is it, pal?”

“It was a bad dream… a bad dream.”

“Oh, no… You know you’re okay now, okay?”

“I just – yeah, I know, I just – it was so scary and-- so scary.”

“Do you want to tell me about it, pal?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”



The boy trembled with sobs and his breath rippled the room like frothy bath water.

“It was all of us on the bridge, but it wasn’t the bridge,” the boy let tumble out.

“All of us?”

“You and me and mr. mittens and mommy and we were on the bridge but it wasn’t the bridge.”

“How did you know it wasn’t the bridge?”

“Because it was real high. It was so real high up and mommy was out front while we crossed it and and then…” The boy’s voice broke. “ but and then she fell and you couldn’t catch her.”

“You knew it was your mom?”

“Yeah and she fell and you reached and couldn’t catch her and you were holding mr. mittens and we all began to slip. We slipped and we fell too.”

“And then you woke up?”

“I woke up and I was crying and then I tried to find you but I was scared. I was scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared and I’m always going to come find you.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“And that’s okay too. Just look for me, okay?”

“I wish you played with me today. I wanted you to.”

“Sometimes dads have to let their little boys play by themselves. It’s good for us. For both of us.”

“Okay.”

The man held his boy in that empty house and well within the boundaries of their world. The boy was asleep soon and the man soon after. In the morning, they made pancakes and they laughed in the sunlight that found its way onto their faces through trees and windows.

Just The Briefest...

I'm home in California for the weekend and running around with my sister and some friends. I've got some really awesome photos cued up, as always and I'll try to post some stuff later this week.

Side note: if you run into the girl above while you're galavanting about Paris, tell her that there's a young man in America who will keep her in coffee and baked goods for all of eternity.

Noble Lies & The Things Implied

Cigarettes were, for him, always the triumph of context over reason. He never smoked them in America, but on the Continent, the air smelled wrong without the hint of acrid tobacco smoke about his clothes. Except now, he’d been in Europe so long he was always cold. He spent most of his mornings rubbing his hands together and trying to get the fluid slowly gripping his lungs to settle for the day's work. European editors were used to phlegmatic writers. American editors couldn’t be bothered to get up early enough to call in the morning. If his daughter called, she would have worried.

Still, she never called.


He wrote the same six pages every day. In those pages, she walked from the kitchen and collected a basket with blankets and pads of paper and brushes and paints. He would describe, everyday, that same dress, that same gold ribbon in her hair. And she would walk through the back woods to the clearing and his words would describe what her brushes would portray. Then, in his description and even in the room a bit, the air would take a chill and the light would go gray. Day after day, twilight would be creeping around her enclave, her clearing.

Then he would stop, light a cigarette and get to work.


Today, when he pulled his kerchief away from his mouth, it was streaked with red. Today, the phone would not ring, nor the day after. Today, in the six pages, she was grown and in a white dress and he didn’t follow her to the clearing. Today, he narrated as though wrapped in gauze and only half awake. And, in the distance, she sat on the swing he’d always meant to build in the woods and smiled.

Mildew & Rust. Moths & Blowing Dust

She preferred her dresses barely there and this one was no exception. It wasn’t so much that a dress should show vast expanses of pearly skin, though this one certainly did. After dashing across her front, just beneath her collarbones, the neck line traversed a scapular curve at a dire, hurtling angle, and swept back up over the other shoulder blade just as abruptly. This dress was barely there in that perfect way; it hung across her frame delicately and yet moved with her like an aura. Like a razor thin cloud of silvery ephemera. In candle-light, she glowed. In passing headlights, she shimmered.


And the best thing about this cad on her arm was that he never noticed. She could set her emerald irises in a field of smoky grays such that they suggested men would fight wars in her honor, and he would spend the whole evening behind a scotch and a cigar, content to kiss her cheek on every entrance and exit. She was, for him, much like his cuff links; dashing accoutrement that, if left at home, would be unfortunate but, after all, the night would go on. Tonight, she’d feign a yawn and tuck her fingers beneath the lapel of his coat.

“I’m tired,” she exhaled, brushing his ear with just the hint of her bottom lip. He produced some bills and she received them along with a last kiss for her cheek in all those masculine aromas.


And wherever the taxi took her, she had hours before the illusion required she was home. There were, of course, men who loved her. Probably one each in every surrounding postal code. Men who would have stolen her away to any number of warm, Catholic places for the rest of history. And she told them how she loved the sound of escape. And, in the mean time, she let them buy her things she had no place to wear. Every single one wondered why she never spent the night.

And every morning she woke up before him in that sprawling bed and thought with fear that she would always love the man who never called her by her name.

Beware Woeful Wisdom

I'll be back to write more in this soon. I'm sure I'll need a break from the paper I'm working on right now. It's about desire and capitalism and advertising and it's proving to have many unruly angles and I'm viewing it through a lens that is stuck at just-out-of-focus.

I haven't really done any school work in days. But if you've read this for very long or happen to actually know me, you'll realize that isn't really news.

In the mean time, here's a poem a Cafe-friend shared with me:

Unwise Purchases
by George Bilgere
They sit around the house
Not doing much of anything: the boxed set
Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:
The French-cut silk shirts
Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
And make me look exactly
Like the kind of middle-aged man
Who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:
The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
The mysteries of the heavens
But which I only used once or twice
To try to find something heavenly
In the window of the high-rise down the road,
And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
When it could be examining the Crab Nebula:
The 30-day course in Spanish
Whose text I never opened,
Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
Save for Tape One, where I never learned
Whether the suave American
Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
At a Madrid hotel about the possibility
Of obtaining a room,
Actually managed to check in.
I like to think
That one thing led to another between them
And that by Tape Six or so
They’re happily married
And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.
But I’ll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
For a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
There lives a woman with, say,
A fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
Near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
Drying in their tubes
On the table where the violin
She bought on a whim
Lies entombed in the permanent darkness
Of its locked case
Next to the abandoned chess set,
A woman who has always dreamed of becoming
The kind of woman the man I’ve always dreamed of becoming
Has always dreamed of meeting,
And while the two of them discuss star clusters
And Cézanne, while they fence delicately
In Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,
She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
Fixing up a little risotto,
Enjoying a modest cabernet,
While talking over a day so ordinary
As to seem miraculous.

Side note: I'm also working on a terribly long essay about empire and church and life and practice and... well, you know, "stuff." I'm worried it might inspire me to do something abundant. I mean, I have always wondered what it would be like...
Don't worry, I won't post it here.

A Voice Cries Out

Tonight I’m wrapped in this strange soulful-ness. I think it must be partly because of the snow.

I’ll slow down any day for snow.

These crystalline motes that hold the secret of life captive in sparkling beauty are collecting on my almost-balcony tonight. And I’m warm and folded in a blanket, resting against cushions and pillows, just inches from it all. I’ve just read and read and read.

Even the cold pizza straight out of the box was romantic.

Like, tonight, I’m a real student. Like Pinocchio, I’m now a real boy.

I know a story about America in which a Father, coughing and pale from days in the coal mines, drinks himself half to death over a still-born baby. The still-born child is out of the ordinary. The near-death drinking isn’t.


The father collects that little body in some spare blanket, soiled in blood and afterbirth, and carries it through town on a muggy Midwest night in August. Or maybe a crisp November night on the plains. It doesn’t matter. He’s alone and the child’s body is cold and blue in one arm. He’s dragging in his free hand a shovel.

He finds some corner of the town cemetery no one will be jealous of and he sets to digging, swigging at the bottle in his back pocket when it occurs to him to swig. When the hole seems deep enough or when he can’t keep his balance over its lip anymore, he places that little stiffening body at its bottom.


And for an hour he anoints the soil quickly filling this little grave with his tears and his sputum and his retchings. He does his best to hide any sign of a burial. So no one asks. So no one knows.

When he awakes somewhere unlikely the next morning, his wife wants to know where her baby is buried. Where’s her little child. Her beloved passenger of all those months.

And he doesn’t know. He can’t remember. He'd drank so much. It had been so dark. She walks the rows of the town cemetery, but every over-turned stone or patch of grass looks like every other.

She never mentions it to him again. But often times, as he’d endure a scolding through a hang over, she’d pause and look east and he’d nearly stop breathing.



Being in my twenties often feels like being that little infant child on the day of the resurrection of the body. So confused and sad and lost, having passed through the suffocating crush of earthen darkness that our forbearers have baptized in mourning and dying and self-pity, only to realize we’ve no idea which way is home.

But what if the last few layers of our eschatological ascent are through crisp, fresh-fallen snow that our own lively body heat melts into a new baptism. And so we come to stand, people anew, warmed by the Son and ready to disturb the still and quiet of a world in waiting.

The Luminous Look of Lovers

It was my sincere intention to let Valentine's Day go by well and truly ignored 'round these parts, but this picture... Well, you get the idea.

"It's a beautiful thing when you love somebody... and if you love somebody, you better let them know."

Also, A Poem

I want every poem
To be read like
I read them aloud
To myself
On the toilet, with the door open
When my apartment is empty and
I wonder if anyone
In the hall can hear
My impromptu rendition
Of a stranger's beloved
words, published for
promotional purposes.

And my enjoyment
too, I suppose.

Aptly Alternating Alttitudes

There wasn’t a square corner in the place. Every angle pinched acutely or yawned obtusely. Every line bowed this way or that. If you rested your temple against the wall and looked towards a corner, it was as if you perceived the curvature of space itself. The building was skewed with the drunkenness of its architects those generations ago. It lay at the edge of the clearing in a murky wood. At this elevation, nearby peaks caught hulking afternoon thunderheads as they trundled past, but the golden hour was often left clear and placid. God Himself tied finishing touches on the day in rainbow’d ribbon. The soil beside the deck was spongy and cold beneath her feet as she waved goodbye to the guests who’d ventured here only to speak in generalities and leave behind the odd article of clothing.

The parties were nearly as unbearable as the stretches of aloneness. Anyone she invited out here never came alone. It was always handfuls of people and usually one or two more than there were seats for. They staggered and sprawled across worn out rugs and worn-smooth floorboards alike. They would parade through, like a band of mendicant friars, in a clinking of glass, a shuffle of feet and a dull, spiraling murmur of vacant illocutions.

“This place must be a hundred years old.”

“Don’t you get lonely out here?”

“The view is just beautiful.”

Usually, on the second or third day, everyone would come to a hush, the better to hear the muffled sublimity of the afternoon tempests beyond the meandering walls. That was always the day they’d leave and the only one she wished they wouldn’t.

I was going to write this in the relative privacy of a real paper-and-pen journal, but I can't find a fucking pen within reach of my bed (which I feel is really an embarrassing oversight on my part). Anyways, here it is:

Dear -----,

For a minute tonight, I stumbled upon a sincere desire that you will learn how to be happy in that all-the-way-through kind of way. In that way that makes you steady and regal, and not at all skittish. And, ironically I guess, that desire gives me hope for me and my okay-ness.

Though, whoever knows how it's going to turn out for any of us.

Jon

Black Little Rain Cloud

I've got some solid pictures collected and I'll start writing about them soon, I think. I've not been feeling very well lately and it's been hard to get the creative juices flowing.

Hm, here's an idea:
If you follow this thing with any regularity, post a comment about what you do to get momentum after a long (hopefully restful!) downtime.

*sigh*

Winter Songs from Crush Design on Vimeo.