if it's written to the song "theft, and wandering around lost," it's BOUND to be good

i piece various aspects of myself together within a dream

parts

that dredge themselves

up

from within

that black water.

thanks, i said

dryly,

receiving into

ridiculously pale arms

the sodden torso of my desire.

on a different current

floated by

the calves of

my helplessness.

dessicated are

the eyelids of

my dependency, churned up

from some dark recess

within the general

undertow.

parts

pile up

waist-high

on the riverbank

and i wander

in the shallows,

elbow-deep

in rank

and turgid

liquid,

grasping at

scraps of flesh,

physical detrius,

the casualties

of

fracture.

depressing as shit

i always come back to rain

1. icarus

as if all mankind

needed only one symbol:

rain, falling,

shudders

against a roof,

that shudder

located somewhere

within the stuff

of sound

and touch--

which, in their

stretched

blind twist,

work,

like

a root

v'd

into wetted earth.

thirst,

like the stroke

of a hand

down a back,

shuddering

along the root.

2. math

the sound of every raindrop

echoes the beat of some

heart,

somewhere.

statistically

this makes sense--

each heart beats

its own rhythm,

and some part

of all rhythms

can be seen as

encompassed

in rain's percussion.

this may be

an idea

of beauty

but it is lonely.

or perhaps

just shattered.

they call the fern's equation

a fractal.

3. the lady in the tower

i already have so little,

i think,

and in some small way

it's true.

clouds the color

of oxidized copper--

rain, rain,

never stop falling on me.

how much will

the breaking

of one girl

matter?

how much will

the breaking

of one girl

matter?

clouds the color

of chased silver--

rain, rain,

never stop falling on me.

i am shattered

in sadness--

it matters

so little.

clouds the color

of water

clouds the color

of water

rain, rain,

never stop falling on me.

other poem

premise

beauty being the press,
as if of two palms,
of pain onto pleasure,

the nature of the pressure
being such
that they turn into
each other

by turning in
toward themselves:
a strained
homecoming.


this is how pain
looked at herself
as if into a mirror,

seeing all she had discarded
become all she ever
would love--

she would have cracked
from side to side

if beauty,
like a bitter taste,
had not held her
bound together--
if beauty,
in a blind
home-coming,
to herself
had not bound herself
ever-closer.

early music metaphor

string player

subtle
as an instrument
with ten strings, i
move
for you,
idea of
a lover.

as the church
awaits her bridegroom
so i
await you,

like the center
of the earth,
in a state of
banked yet constant fire--

like a shape in Hell,
self-enflagrate,
even when nothing's left
to burn
but the fire itself--

formless
but for its flame,
or frozen,
repeating
like the echoing vein
of the wood,
polished
into liquidity,
that makes up
the broken back
of the low-singing gamba.

sound of science

i'm NOT depressed. i'm just using this blog as an outlet for when things get too weird.

as, for example, now--i'm wondering if every sizeable part in every opera will be as difficult to handle emotionally as cornelia's being (that totally maybe makes grammatical sense). i mean, granted, she has about thirteen arias, ALL of which deal with the subject of wanting to kill herself (a slight exaggeration). but, although i like comic characters, it's the tragic ones that kind of do it for me. and being cornelia's kind of killing me a little.

in a way it's probably just that it's too damn much to do. between the rehearsals for giulio cesare, the rehearsals for rake's progress chorus, and the rehearsals for suor angelica, even though i haven't put in ANY time on either rake's progress OR suor angelica (nothing like being a super-impressive student, here)--and class, even though i skipped class a bunch last week--and this...whatever it is, paint-by-number project of piecing myself together out of colors, voices, answered questions, and random-ass symbolism--

it's not working out. there's not enough of me to go around.

which is what everyone says. and they always survive. and i'm going to survive. but at what cost? i refuse to give on the cornelia thing. i'm going to keep trying to put more than as much of myself as is possible into her. i hope it's working; i don't actually know.

i mean, i hope that it's not just being her that's making me this...shattered; i want to be shattered, at the end of my rope, etc., because that's where she is; i just don't want to be there all the time. in a professional production, would the rehearsal time be this long? maybe, right? but i wouldn't be trying to do as much? except i might?


there's a rumor floating around within the various entities that are trying to help me piece together a self-identifiable self--you know, the ones that might mean i'm crazy? it's that pain is my gift. like buffy, with death. oh god. i mean, that the way pain is within me is a gift of mine (nice rephrase, sra. way to really explain the heck out of the concept). i don't understand what this means--i don't see what it entails, aside from the berserker streak that might just be a product of over-strong amygdalic reaction. pain is a method by which i define myself, but i use it in the old sense--the unconnected, over-intellectual, overly brutal sense of self, self in the vacuum, that i'm being reformulated from. i don't know how to break the hard plastic shell and get at the truth behind pain... it's too separate, too distinct. maybe that's the issue.

right now my shoulders hurt real bad. i'm not loving the sensation.

bitch and moan. bitch and moan.

mammoth blog for your enjoyment

the bliss of being reunited with stories from the city, stories from the sea is only equalled by the quasi-terror and extreme weirdness of basically having what appears to be my chakras opened for me by some life force that is responding to sheer necessity...

did anyone else know that, yeah, the masculine manifestation of myself within the earth mother is named albert, the masculine manifestation of the earth mother within myself is named herteubise (after the dude in cocteau's orphee, natch), and they both live in a sort of natural-lit box made out of some sort of sandalwood within my throat? today i was tired and attempting to explain myself and my throat got all jammed up like it does sometimes with the blankness, and then suddenly i envisioned a lotus flower and i was able to express myself in language again. or it was more like the lotus vision just sort of popped up in my mind in the vicinity of the front of my neck. also since albert and herteubise have been introduced by said earth mother (who resides in my heart, unfurls in blue fire, and answers questions at the juncture of my spine and my brain), my tmj has lessened. and i see desire as two serpents twining together. while on bart. mmh, but the serpents are the manifestation of hecate, who lives within my head seed (chakra[?] in the middle-top of my skull), and isn't allowed to unfurl yet because i'm not ready for her...not to mention the dark twin, who's the one that lives in the seed in my uterus and unfurled as black and red fire about a week ago, and who i went down on in a vision about three weeks ago.

i'm grateful. but right now i HATE THIS. i'm not a visionary. i have no desire to be psychic.

if i'm anything, i'm just a desperate woman. i've always been desperate. i've always been looking, i guess, for a way to stop--or start--devouring myself. and i'll accept what's happening. because i know it'll save me eventually, both from what's in me and from what i am. and even if it were not to stop this self-devouring propensity, i'd still give in to it, because it's making my singing better...or because i desire self-immolation, it's imperative that i survive for as long as possible, and this option--of chakra-vision-whatnottery--is both self-immolating and life-sustaining. apparently.

i'm willing to pay in pain, but i guess what i'm getting at, solely, is that somehow this whole thing manages to hurt like a bitch. i don't want it to stop. though hopefully my desires to some extent cleave to the circumstances...if it were to stop, i hope i'd be able to want that. but it seems to be going strong, and i want this. and it hurts. and i hate it.

ha ha, i guess i am hecate. which is what they've been telling me from the beginning. hecate, by the way, is the principle of the rope. the dark twin is the root, and the earth mother is something like the tree as that which the root is the shadow of...and hecate is the rope, the twist of light and dark, pressed together in red. the press of which impels energy through the root and the tree.

yeah, it sounds okay, if a little airy-fairy, for the beginning of a poem, but this is my HEAD. how do i know this crap all of a sudden? why albert and herteubise? these beings agree that i can tattoo my wrists as a gesture of protection and invitation, and say on the left wrist should be a lion, and on the right a gardenia. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN??? in order to finish a conversation with the earth mother, i draw my wrist to my chest and say her name three times. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN???

i know why i know. if i know anything. if these aren't all more simply the warning signs of imminent psychosis. i know these things because i need saving, i need help, and the only place i find it is inside myself...the only place anyone can find self-shattering, self-reformulating help is inside themselves, and this is the kind of help i need if i want to sing as i want to sing--if someone like me, with the problems and issues i have, wants to sing as i want to sing. in the final analysis, this...stuff does represent a practical if improbable solution to the problem of making my voice better, more whole, more mine and thereby not mine, a more perfect manifestation of the juncture that classical song really is: composer, performer, words, music, audience, self, body, soul...the moment that, because defined by so many oppositions, exists in something we think of as impossible: the moment in song, as i wish to deliver it, is the paradox, rather than being either one or the other of the possible things that define it. to make this moment i have to know more...i have to be stronger. so, again, i'm grateful.

i just can't freaking believe it's happening to me. i mean, both in the positive and negative senses, what did i ever do to deserve this? except need it, i guess. except my need.

just...rgh. WHATEVER.

oh god the blah blah.

the extent to which i'm actually not that normal of a person has been preying on me recently. i always kind of figured that just because we didn't talk about these things, it didn't mean that others weren't going through pretty much what i was going through...apparently, this isn't true, though. to some extent.

i've always thought, and i still do, that this stuff is a system of exchanges. there are a series of ways in which i can't take care of myself: financially, sure, but also just these other things, like going into grocery stores and food places--there's something about having to interact with clerks that makes me feel wildly uncomfortable. also i don't like cleaning, and i mean, really really don't like it. i don't particularly like it when it is clean--that is, i like looking at it, but living with it makes me uncomfortable. it looks like someone else's reality when you can see too much of the floor. and then there's these mood things, the anxiety stuff, the worrying. i've started doing this thing where i'll twitch violently when it seems like my brain's about to suck me into the vortex of...whatever that weird vortex is, the blank space that just gets fuller and fuller. i don't feel safe with people looking at me...well, sort of. that's not true all the time, really, and often not feeling safe isn't a terrible thing: there's a certain enjoyment in balancing on that knife's edge. "unsafe" doesn't connote "bad." not always, anyway, right? i mean, when i think about it, i'm scared a lot. but being scared isn't irrational. shit is going down. i don't mean that in the totally paranoid way--i highly doubt i've got enemies--but accidents happen, people get hurt and killed for no reason that one can understand...there's global warming, there are attacks, all the exciting accoutrement of modern living and living in general--and fear, as i've said, sort of, anyway, makes enjoyment stronger.

the balance is that with the freak-outs and depression comes talents like singing, acting, and writing (if this dreck could be said to spring from some sort of talent--and if i could be called a good actress, which my dad does, but come on he's my dad). my brain does patterns well, which means that i can do anything that requires analysis well, which is most stuff (except grammar and basic math facts). and i'm smart--i guess i'm pretty smart. i guess i'm smart. it sounds weird to say it, but i guess it's true. it doesn't matter much, except that for the things i want to do, it's good to be smart--it's fine to be smart without being very practical when it comes to singing and writing. just like for classical singing, it's good to be somewhat attractive, though it doesn't matter too much, plus it's okay if you're gigantic and somewhat overweight. it's good to be smart for other professions too, but not in the same way.

why am i attempting to think this stuff through? the answer is, basically, because, as i've probably said in here already, being in singing school is making me weak. i'm becoming an emotionally functional person, but this means that i have emotions as opposed to that i'm a pleasanter person to be around. i've been being a douchebag for the past months. i don't go into stores when there's someone around to go in for me; i don't cook unless i really want to...i don't pay enough attention to my mom...i don't provide support for anyone else.

is it because i can't? because i'm figuring stuff out and blah blah?

or am i just being lazy?