re-ravagement of the beast part 3: correctens majistatis
sonja was looking at me quite kindly when i finished my recital, which made me nervous. I reflected once again on that strange quality of her eyes--it was either emptiness, or just a profound animal slickness--and then, again, i thought of the fact that it's impossible to know what doesn't lurk within oneself. A profound animal slickness, i thought, finding the idea somewhat appealing with the quixotic perspectival fluidity of the inebriate.
"You told the story," she said, "but you told it wrong."
"Oh i did," i said, as if stung.
She smiled slightly--a feral twitch of her mouth, as if her upper lip raised in a slight play-growl. I didn't remember the lighting of a fire in the fireplace, but i saw now that her teeth sparked slightly in the firelight, that her whole face took on a rosy elemental glow, and the healthy liquidity of her eyes.
It is difficult to slay a Beast, she said quite directly. Requiring a profound mastery in the arts of death. You killed him by attrition.
Which can be done, but not simply: a Beast, with senses sharp as thorns and acute as knives, can live on glances and tastes, on scents and essences, for longer than most any other thing. But not forever.
But not forever. Body, furred like a hearthrug,
stretched comma-like out on the white tile.
The thing is done, you thought, and suddenly it was like the skin of your mouth tore, or as if you had a membrane over your mouth, intact, and seeing the Beast's slight-furled body tore it--
the words pouring from that slit across your mouth were new,
almost flesh, they were so new--almost no more than sounds.
you dragged across the cold tile to him and because there was nothing stopping you now, you wanted the Beast, you begged for him. you took the cold body between your knees and
when he came back to life
you were in too deep
to let him go.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
re-ravagement of the beast part 2: energate cronkrun
It was a dream or wasn't--wasn't a dream--it's drunker, it's later, and Sophia is on the couch and according to her pictographic memory i am on the floor with my head in the carpet.
This is what i said:
I go to the bed. For it is late. It has been hours.
And where was i when he lay dying? where was i?
Away. i was away from his side.
i pulse with guilt. guilt thick in the mouth like a varnish, and pooled and shimmering in the variegated crevices of my skin.
as though i were an urn, cracked in the kiln.
skin stained with red.
The Beast lay in the bed, dark golden shape against moth-eaten sheets, the spray of rose petals across his chest--his chest still, massive, like a monolith, and the mouth open, and the eyes open and dull. It was terribler than I can express, because i was too late. And because it was my fault. He was innocent, you know, though his looked like the face of some primordial terror, because there's nothing intrinsically wrong in being a beast. Yes, the face of his desire was sometimes terrible, and yes he wished to devour me with animal fervor...but...
Could he help that? Could he help hurting for me? His desire had done no more to me than--than regard me, and his eyes had done nothing to condone that activity. If there were a million terrible beasts in the world, I had still killed the one good one, by straying away from his side.
I did not know how i ended up knelt by the bed, with my face pressed against his stone-still chest. When he said my name, I was suffocated with the enormity of his death, and for a moment i did not hear him, but then i scrambled backwards, a realization of the re-issue of his pulse run through me as if an electric shock. as if a string in me had suddenly sprung taut for plucking. His eyes were looking at me. after a moment he sat up. Petals drifted from his torso.
You were dead, I said.
I was dead, he agreed.
You died for me, I said, on half a sob. He smiled slightly and held out his hand. I took it, and came closer, and his eye sharpened on me.
Arc of the nostril flaring--he smelled it on me. No sense keen enough to hide from a beast.
his hand dropped as if in an arc. "Beauty" he said.
"I love you," I said and died in his eyes. After a moment i heard a strange sound as if fabric were tearing and i looked down--he had one claw with which he was engaged in ripping my shift open, slowly, carefully, so that it fell.
It hurt me to be the woman he wanted. but then that did not lessen my enjoyment of it. shining animal eyes reflecting a vision of myself, myself for once habitable. for one shabby half-hour, i endured it, loved to endure it, because i loved him, and when he turned back into a man in the middle i did not notice. abandoned to his arms, i enjoyed it, more--i enjoyed it, more, when he lost control, when his thorns made me suffer. joy in pain. like a lip bit to its splitting: bed dropped with gold.
because he was mine. because he loved me. because he was good, not bad. because i loved him.
because something was wrong, the whole damn time--it was something in me, not in him. and so i loved him. and so outflung.
It was a dream or wasn't--wasn't a dream--it's drunker, it's later, and Sophia is on the couch and according to her pictographic memory i am on the floor with my head in the carpet.
This is what i said:
I go to the bed. For it is late. It has been hours.
And where was i when he lay dying? where was i?
Away. i was away from his side.
i pulse with guilt. guilt thick in the mouth like a varnish, and pooled and shimmering in the variegated crevices of my skin.
as though i were an urn, cracked in the kiln.
skin stained with red.
The Beast lay in the bed, dark golden shape against moth-eaten sheets, the spray of rose petals across his chest--his chest still, massive, like a monolith, and the mouth open, and the eyes open and dull. It was terribler than I can express, because i was too late. And because it was my fault. He was innocent, you know, though his looked like the face of some primordial terror, because there's nothing intrinsically wrong in being a beast. Yes, the face of his desire was sometimes terrible, and yes he wished to devour me with animal fervor...but...
Could he help that? Could he help hurting for me? His desire had done no more to me than--than regard me, and his eyes had done nothing to condone that activity. If there were a million terrible beasts in the world, I had still killed the one good one, by straying away from his side.
I did not know how i ended up knelt by the bed, with my face pressed against his stone-still chest. When he said my name, I was suffocated with the enormity of his death, and for a moment i did not hear him, but then i scrambled backwards, a realization of the re-issue of his pulse run through me as if an electric shock. as if a string in me had suddenly sprung taut for plucking. His eyes were looking at me. after a moment he sat up. Petals drifted from his torso.
You were dead, I said.
I was dead, he agreed.
You died for me, I said, on half a sob. He smiled slightly and held out his hand. I took it, and came closer, and his eye sharpened on me.
Arc of the nostril flaring--he smelled it on me. No sense keen enough to hide from a beast.
his hand dropped as if in an arc. "Beauty" he said.
"I love you," I said and died in his eyes. After a moment i heard a strange sound as if fabric were tearing and i looked down--he had one claw with which he was engaged in ripping my shift open, slowly, carefully, so that it fell.
It hurt me to be the woman he wanted. but then that did not lessen my enjoyment of it. shining animal eyes reflecting a vision of myself, myself for once habitable. for one shabby half-hour, i endured it, loved to endure it, because i loved him, and when he turned back into a man in the middle i did not notice. abandoned to his arms, i enjoyed it, more--i enjoyed it, more, when he lost control, when his thorns made me suffer. joy in pain. like a lip bit to its splitting: bed dropped with gold.
because he was mine. because he loved me. because he was good, not bad. because i loved him.
because something was wrong, the whole damn time--it was something in me, not in him. and so i loved him. and so outflung.
Monday, September 14, 2009
long to have some chat with her
i always thought proetry (prose-poetry, that is) was kind of a load. i mean, not the proems themselves necessarily, but the idea that the proem exists in some new and wildly experimental space (wildly experimental i say), the space where theory crosses theory and everything can finally be crystallized into an explanation--exciting newnesses to caress with minds, except of course that proems that enter that crossey-crossey space without taking the time to be poems (or prose) first make me crazy.
the reason that i was so into proprieception when it crossed my landscape was that, a., try as i might, i could form no clear mental idea of what olson was talking about, and therefore the theory had to bypass thought and enter to some extent into my body, and b., it so obviously came after the fact. That kind of writing about aesthetics is actual aesthetic writing, for me. Sometimes theorizers manage to be much clearer than Olson ever seems to be; that's okay, as long as what they're going for isn't an end, but rather something like a trampoline, or a window... To apply the idea of the mutable foot to Williams' poetry, for example, is possibly a good exercise, as long as you understand that Williams came up with the mutable foot after writing in it for a while. Either that (I don't know the history, as always), or he came up with the phrase and thought "that sounds KICK-ASS; i should try that. mutable foot. yeeah."
cuz that's how we do it in america. i think there may be nations out there where you can think everything through to the last degree--where you can cushion yourself in theory, you can upholster an entire room in theory--and still be able to come up with something that isn't a crock, but america isn't one of those nations. for the most part. i feel like i can talk this way because theorizing about what it means to be an american poet is one of the time-honored traditions of american poetry...most of the people who've done it before me knew what the hell they were talking about, but i think i can imitate cheaply because it's late and i'm wired and this all has been festering ever since we went to the hess winery and saw the bacons.
francis bacon was a theorist i can get behind. he insisted, as far as i remember, that he wasn't painting representatively. everything he painted was so horrible that representation seems impossible to get away from. but the closer you look at his stuff--and due to the shifting styles of the painting, you have to look closer and closer; his pictures are constantly in motion--the more you see that his own theoretical framework was the only acceptable one. his paintings can be interpreted as nothing but themselves. the screaming pope isn't a picture that condemns popes to screaming; it's instead an image of a thing. it is itself. it doesn't depict; it can't. all words slip from it, because it's beautiful but it can't be beautiful, terrible but it can't be terrible...in a sense, bacon successfully painted that thing beyond language that derrida--and lovecraft--and st. augustine--talk about.
what does the above discussion have to do with ANYTHING? i guess what it is is i'm feeling the allure of the proem recently, and am wondering how far i ought to indulge my curiosity. pretty far, i think. but i don't want people looking at my proetry and saying, "man, see how it straddles the line between prose and poem! MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE??? (and the days flow by, and the water flowing...once in a lifetime, water flowing underground)". because once you've gone there, you've cut yourself off from man and beast. because what the hell can you say about a proem aside from the fact that it's both prose and poetry? i guess you can go into the ways in which it's both prose and poetry, but these ways, as anyone who has taken a modern poetry class can tell you, are woefully thin on the ground. "it rhymes yet is in paragraph form? what is this strange beast of a work? MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE???" hopefully you see what i'm getting at.
i shouldn't browbeat my father about the fact that i like doing homework now.
the reason that i was so into proprieception when it crossed my landscape was that, a., try as i might, i could form no clear mental idea of what olson was talking about, and therefore the theory had to bypass thought and enter to some extent into my body, and b., it so obviously came after the fact. That kind of writing about aesthetics is actual aesthetic writing, for me. Sometimes theorizers manage to be much clearer than Olson ever seems to be; that's okay, as long as what they're going for isn't an end, but rather something like a trampoline, or a window... To apply the idea of the mutable foot to Williams' poetry, for example, is possibly a good exercise, as long as you understand that Williams came up with the mutable foot after writing in it for a while. Either that (I don't know the history, as always), or he came up with the phrase and thought "that sounds KICK-ASS; i should try that. mutable foot. yeeah."
cuz that's how we do it in america. i think there may be nations out there where you can think everything through to the last degree--where you can cushion yourself in theory, you can upholster an entire room in theory--and still be able to come up with something that isn't a crock, but america isn't one of those nations. for the most part. i feel like i can talk this way because theorizing about what it means to be an american poet is one of the time-honored traditions of american poetry...most of the people who've done it before me knew what the hell they were talking about, but i think i can imitate cheaply because it's late and i'm wired and this all has been festering ever since we went to the hess winery and saw the bacons.
francis bacon was a theorist i can get behind. he insisted, as far as i remember, that he wasn't painting representatively. everything he painted was so horrible that representation seems impossible to get away from. but the closer you look at his stuff--and due to the shifting styles of the painting, you have to look closer and closer; his pictures are constantly in motion--the more you see that his own theoretical framework was the only acceptable one. his paintings can be interpreted as nothing but themselves. the screaming pope isn't a picture that condemns popes to screaming; it's instead an image of a thing. it is itself. it doesn't depict; it can't. all words slip from it, because it's beautiful but it can't be beautiful, terrible but it can't be terrible...in a sense, bacon successfully painted that thing beyond language that derrida--and lovecraft--and st. augustine--talk about.
what does the above discussion have to do with ANYTHING? i guess what it is is i'm feeling the allure of the proem recently, and am wondering how far i ought to indulge my curiosity. pretty far, i think. but i don't want people looking at my proetry and saying, "man, see how it straddles the line between prose and poem! MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE??? (and the days flow by, and the water flowing...once in a lifetime, water flowing underground)". because once you've gone there, you've cut yourself off from man and beast. because what the hell can you say about a proem aside from the fact that it's both prose and poetry? i guess you can go into the ways in which it's both prose and poetry, but these ways, as anyone who has taken a modern poetry class can tell you, are woefully thin on the ground. "it rhymes yet is in paragraph form? what is this strange beast of a work? MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE???" hopefully you see what i'm getting at.
i shouldn't browbeat my father about the fact that i like doing homework now.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
i'm pretty sure my name's no longer anywhere on this amalgam of blogs. pretty sure.
re-ravagement of the beast
(4 acts; at some point i'll stop writing scraps, but that point is not today)
1. epilogue
It hadn't been a dream. But here I was, forced back to the incongruous reality of corporeality, of being straightened back into a life. I desired a life. I was wanting in this life. That was to the good.
It had been a sideways twist, right, of a temporal-spatial mirror of some description? A dream, is I suppose the technical term. I watched Sophia drop a twist of lemon rind into a clear-filled glass, watched the lemon rind slip to the bottom of the glass and settle.
She smiled at me. I suppose I was looking more wide-eyed than usual. After serving the girl at the end of the bar she came over.
"Seen a ghost?" she asked. At which I wanted to laugh, but only made a grin. "What's up, Sleeping Beauty?" she asked, and that made me want to cry.
"Wrong fairy tale," I said.
"Well which one was it?" she asked. "This time," she added.
In answer I pointed to the scratch marks on the back of my wrist. She leaned over and I held out my arm for inspection. Unless I'm mistaken she smelled them, and smiled slightly. "The Beast," she said. "Yes?"
"Give the lady a prize," I intoned ironically, and scooped the bowl of peanuts over toward her. She grinned and popped one nut between off-white teeth, then spat out fragments of shell into her hand.
"Ever wonder why I made friends with you?" she asked. "When I had my pick," she added.
"No," I replied. "But this is because I am not a wonderer."
"Well what's the story."
It was a game, I realized, suddenly. The realization flashed, as if against the backs of my eyes, in a manner that somewhat took my breath away. The thing was that I'd never had someone to play it with before...these experiences, twisting like a ferris wheel in wind, had never seen the hand of day or the body of breath. They stayed, turning restlessly on the bed of my mind in the breathless heat of the night in my skull. I was choking a little, thinking suddenly about how her eyes looked like blanks and then thinking about how you can never know what's not within you and that therefore to see her eyes as blank would mean that I was really seeing my own eyes as blanks, but then she smiled at me, and I returned the smile, and felt like smelling my own wrist.
"You haven't known me forever," I said.
"Haven't I?" she interjected. "Cuz it's kind of felt that way."
"Ha ha. Back in the day, I was...kind of delicate. This is before I decided I was the All-Heroine."
"Right," Sophia said.
I smiled at her. "I'd been had by a beast."
"Oh, it's that story," she said.
"That one was a secret," I admonished. "Until now."
"Right. Sorry. So you'd been had by a beast."
"But I couldn't remember it."
"Mmh. The possible having."
"Precisely. I might have been had by a beast. Which had turned me delicate. Like one of those children in the stories who gets turned into a bird by a witch."
"God damn it, Heretica, which story are you telling?" Sophia asked without any rancor. She leaned on the bar so that I could see down her shirt a little and started wiping glasses like a bartender in a movie.
"The other one--it was a metaphor. For the turning that I did. From normal to abnormal. Due to the beast that had me."
"The possible beast."
"Right. Where was I?"
"You were delicate."
"Right."
"You know," she said, leaning further forward, "you should tell me this one later. At my place. My shift's over in 10 minutes."
"Can you give me a ride?" I asked, indicating the fact that I was drunk with a wave of a hand toward my corpus.
She nodded.
"Can you get me another Pabst?" I asked, and she grinned and nodded again.
re-ravagement of the beast
(4 acts; at some point i'll stop writing scraps, but that point is not today)
1. epilogue
It hadn't been a dream. But here I was, forced back to the incongruous reality of corporeality, of being straightened back into a life. I desired a life. I was wanting in this life. That was to the good.
It had been a sideways twist, right, of a temporal-spatial mirror of some description? A dream, is I suppose the technical term. I watched Sophia drop a twist of lemon rind into a clear-filled glass, watched the lemon rind slip to the bottom of the glass and settle.
She smiled at me. I suppose I was looking more wide-eyed than usual. After serving the girl at the end of the bar she came over.
"Seen a ghost?" she asked. At which I wanted to laugh, but only made a grin. "What's up, Sleeping Beauty?" she asked, and that made me want to cry.
"Wrong fairy tale," I said.
"Well which one was it?" she asked. "This time," she added.
In answer I pointed to the scratch marks on the back of my wrist. She leaned over and I held out my arm for inspection. Unless I'm mistaken she smelled them, and smiled slightly. "The Beast," she said. "Yes?"
"Give the lady a prize," I intoned ironically, and scooped the bowl of peanuts over toward her. She grinned and popped one nut between off-white teeth, then spat out fragments of shell into her hand.
"Ever wonder why I made friends with you?" she asked. "When I had my pick," she added.
"No," I replied. "But this is because I am not a wonderer."
"Well what's the story."
It was a game, I realized, suddenly. The realization flashed, as if against the backs of my eyes, in a manner that somewhat took my breath away. The thing was that I'd never had someone to play it with before...these experiences, twisting like a ferris wheel in wind, had never seen the hand of day or the body of breath. They stayed, turning restlessly on the bed of my mind in the breathless heat of the night in my skull. I was choking a little, thinking suddenly about how her eyes looked like blanks and then thinking about how you can never know what's not within you and that therefore to see her eyes as blank would mean that I was really seeing my own eyes as blanks, but then she smiled at me, and I returned the smile, and felt like smelling my own wrist.
"You haven't known me forever," I said.
"Haven't I?" she interjected. "Cuz it's kind of felt that way."
"Ha ha. Back in the day, I was...kind of delicate. This is before I decided I was the All-Heroine."
"Right," Sophia said.
I smiled at her. "I'd been had by a beast."
"Oh, it's that story," she said.
"That one was a secret," I admonished. "Until now."
"Right. Sorry. So you'd been had by a beast."
"But I couldn't remember it."
"Mmh. The possible having."
"Precisely. I might have been had by a beast. Which had turned me delicate. Like one of those children in the stories who gets turned into a bird by a witch."
"God damn it, Heretica, which story are you telling?" Sophia asked without any rancor. She leaned on the bar so that I could see down her shirt a little and started wiping glasses like a bartender in a movie.
"The other one--it was a metaphor. For the turning that I did. From normal to abnormal. Due to the beast that had me."
"The possible beast."
"Right. Where was I?"
"You were delicate."
"Right."
"You know," she said, leaning further forward, "you should tell me this one later. At my place. My shift's over in 10 minutes."
"Can you give me a ride?" I asked, indicating the fact that I was drunk with a wave of a hand toward my corpus.
She nodded.
"Can you get me another Pabst?" I asked, and she grinned and nodded again.
stuff
rejection isn't just a part of life; it's also a bodily sensation, more than an emotion or a thought, and therefore is within the province of that which can be endured as a bodily sensation can be endured.
it's, as always, an arcane distinction. and as always i'm speaking personally. for me, thoughts are things that don't go away, and at the same time don't really build. they're somewhere in between static and peach fuzz, corporeally. static has the power to torture your ears, but it doesn't do much else aside from signify the absence of the desired sound; peach fuzz, if collected over a long period of time from many peaches, does have the capability of turning into an object of solidity, though not such a capability as, say, play-doh or tapioca pudding. so on the one hand, thoughts constantly bombard, and on the other, they don't stay--the bombardment is frustratingly within time, and as such, slips and slides into a semi-cohesive object all the more cohesive for being un-entangle-able. (this doesn't sound like original thought. i wish i could credit my sources.)
but rejection isn't like that. somehow, despite being just mental, it's got physical clout--and as such, it's just the thing itself. having a thought like "maybe i'm too intelligent to be understood" is a slow twist of pain--it's not itself; it's rather about a zillion things: it calls down upon itself, well, a., the feeling that it's nothing more than a reaction to being misunderstood, as well as an excitingly specific echo chamber of associations such as, b., the shame at having such a capability for hubris, and c., the despair (somewhat theatrical) at the idea that one's intelligence is immutable as a fixed star and therefore one will never understood, which then brings in d., the fact that one is being pretty irrational about the whole thing. knowing that you weren't selected for something that you tried for, on the other hand, is a short sharp shock. and it's acceptable as such.
if i were to say that the process of accepting rejection as physical were immediate, i'd be lying. but i got myself there. it's a really simple story, actually. i was sitting and thinking through the thing, attempting to ameliorate the shock with the mix of self-flattery and faux-practicality that i usually both make use of and despise, when suddenly i remembered a thing that i sometimes have trouble remembering--it's just pain.
and as such it became a thing to be enjoyed.
i wish i could say that freaked me out.
it's, as always, an arcane distinction. and as always i'm speaking personally. for me, thoughts are things that don't go away, and at the same time don't really build. they're somewhere in between static and peach fuzz, corporeally. static has the power to torture your ears, but it doesn't do much else aside from signify the absence of the desired sound; peach fuzz, if collected over a long period of time from many peaches, does have the capability of turning into an object of solidity, though not such a capability as, say, play-doh or tapioca pudding. so on the one hand, thoughts constantly bombard, and on the other, they don't stay--the bombardment is frustratingly within time, and as such, slips and slides into a semi-cohesive object all the more cohesive for being un-entangle-able. (this doesn't sound like original thought. i wish i could credit my sources.)
but rejection isn't like that. somehow, despite being just mental, it's got physical clout--and as such, it's just the thing itself. having a thought like "maybe i'm too intelligent to be understood" is a slow twist of pain--it's not itself; it's rather about a zillion things: it calls down upon itself, well, a., the feeling that it's nothing more than a reaction to being misunderstood, as well as an excitingly specific echo chamber of associations such as, b., the shame at having such a capability for hubris, and c., the despair (somewhat theatrical) at the idea that one's intelligence is immutable as a fixed star and therefore one will never understood, which then brings in d., the fact that one is being pretty irrational about the whole thing. knowing that you weren't selected for something that you tried for, on the other hand, is a short sharp shock. and it's acceptable as such.
if i were to say that the process of accepting rejection as physical were immediate, i'd be lying. but i got myself there. it's a really simple story, actually. i was sitting and thinking through the thing, attempting to ameliorate the shock with the mix of self-flattery and faux-practicality that i usually both make use of and despise, when suddenly i remembered a thing that i sometimes have trouble remembering--it's just pain.
and as such it became a thing to be enjoyed.
i wish i could say that freaked me out.
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