erroneously self-reminded of proust

i hope to god this is a rough draft.

summer teaches how to forgo

summer teaches

how to forgo

what one loves

best:

turn the salt-touched

skin,

the crusted

lip

to benediction--

one sends up

the high gloss

of summer evening

as a paean to rain.

it is

sweet

to beg

in memory

for the scent

of wet asphalt

to linger,

for the water-soft

bark-of-trees scent

to stay

on the still wind

of impermeable

summer night,

the manifested scent of rain

a memory

of what rolling time

took--

until not the scent

but the plea

becomes rain's

representative.

my darling,

press your memory

hot

like living wire

to mine.

i have lived

once

in you

and

my life

is now complete,

recomplete,

resown,

rereaped,

the hovering shapes

of the earth

and sky

remade

as

your face

and earth

and sky

nowhere

to be

seen.

ahem.

the heart is a spiral

the heart is a spiral, against which its just

beat presses, face first, beat's breath a clothing

fog upon the heart made window glass, less

flesh than constant display, heart's red show cleaved

to shaking rounds, spiralling suck, a rose

whose petals run into a pit, the grade

at which they plunge steep as the plunging grave.

to become the heart's beat--to will the cleave

of face to rose, the surge of breath that rises

against the tilting petal, the sigh's jut

through lungs and mouth a press no less, no less

than that of glass against the heart enclosed.

to breathe against the rose, to clothe

heartbeat in the half-death of breath, unbraid

the strand of rose and glass and heart, unclean

the blood veining up the words, leave unblessed

the point of this unseaming, adjust

the glass around the rose;

exhort the breath that out of the mouth rose

to touch nothing, not even glass, to watch the heart just

spiral, and if within there beats a dream unclothed,

to hold back even death before the unsplit heart, the great

spiralling red, to hold back even breath. cleave

away, cleave away those delirious things, worth less

than the spiral value of the glass,

by which the panting breath upon the rose

imagined itself. this distance just,

clothed

in the gradation

of cloven

sanctity, split, cleaved,

the beat from the heart, the beatless

heart, the heartless grade

of the slip of the rose

toward the clothing

grave, the infinite jut.

the just

grave, the retrograde

spiral, the cloth

of breath on the rose

fleeting, the raw glassless

heart stopped, cleaved

from its spiraling.

methinks i do protest a reasonable amount considering

my heart is too crammed with ash to write about meistersinger. it all sounds like disney film music after the prince has just left the princess for the first time and she's staring after him wistfully (or the other way around, if it's aladdin). the whole time i was listening to the quintet, i was envisioning ariel gazing dreamily at the point at which prince eric had just disappeared. figuratively speaking. actually i was more thinking, "this music is making me ill. what the hell is the point, even, of non-sturm-'n'-drang-y wagner?" things that are badass: the liebestod. things that are not: the prize song.

maybe i could just use that as the title of my paper.

it was kind of like when i went to see die fliegender hollander (sp?--it's just so much more fun of a title than the flying dutchman, but i guess i'll go with that), and was underwhelmed. not by the singing, much of which was very good (though the baritone, a., wasn't, and b., had developed his own version of the park and bark, which was the stalk and talk [he didn't need no stinking sustained line, OR to use his knees when he walked! he did what he wanted!]), but by the piece itself. the whole time i was like, "this is supposed to be wagner? this is to real wagner what strauss's operas are to strauss's songs. seriously. this is the musical theater version of wagner." not that i don't like musical theater. but for the most part i don't like strauss operas (rosenkavelier? come on. it's so self-conscious it's ridiculous, and you can't even call it ridiculous because it knows it's ridiculous so you just have to call it freaking ridiculously self-conscious. and salome, which i do kind of like, still seems to have been written in an apologetic attempt to live up to beardsley's illustrations), and i really don't like dutchman.

and while i can see that meistersinger is better, or at least less rough, than dutchman, it's still got that dutchman-y, musical theater-y, song and dance-y feel to it. it's the emma to dutchman's northanger abbey, except that i like both northanger abbey and emma. oh, don't pretend you don't know what i'm talking about. it's got a certain degree of self-forgiveness that i just can't get into. even if i wanted to, which i don't. in meistersinger, wagner knows what he's doing. in tristan, he either doesn't know or doesn't care what he's doing. and that uncertainty, the uncertainty expressed in tristan, for me, right now, makes art art--uncertainty, or lack of control, makes for art that i respond to. because i'm someone who's living in uncertainty, i'm therefore living as uncertainty, for uncertainty, and nothing so completely self-credulous as meistersinger can touch me.

i'm even tempted to do the full marxist, and take an adorno-ish stance by condemning meistersinger as a really IRRITATING example of bourgeois what-have-you-ness. blah blah national art blah blah c major blah blah fairy godfather and shoe cobbler hans sachs, go ahead and reject the blonde kid! GOD KNOWS you wouldn't want to be anything like king marke! king marke had something to die for; you don't appear even to have that.

of course, if i could do this assignment thoroughly, i might feel better about it...or i might just get really really frustrated with how much i don't like meistersinger, as opposed to the merely very large amount of frustration toward it that i currently carry.

ah, how sweet it is to whine about something vaguely amusing. i like this adorno, though not as much as his thing on mahler. adorno is determined to tear wagner up from the floor up, at least in the first half of this in search of wagner thing. what i like best about adorno is that he's not frightened of getting personal; though i think that his attack falters somewhat by being placed on shifting ground in this particular book (in the mahler one, it was different, as far as i remember), i feel like he also makes it clear that he's talking about his particular viewpoint--it's a need-based argument; he needs to be very stringent with wagner, especially because this work was published first in '52. and within that parameter, that of his need to condemn, he functions brilliantly. the brilliance of personal need is never an issue with me. i like things more when their authors' preoccupations show up in them. at the sfmoma, they have a few matisses, and though i like the green lady in the hat, my real favorites are the color sketches he did of indeterminate, bright-rendered landscape. i like them because they share the personal; they aren't guarded. this preference probably shows up in my own stuff; you could never accuse anything i write of being, you know, polished. if i were to have a sense of something like an aesthetic, it would certainly include unfinished-ness in its parameters.

maybe at some point this will change--maybe at some point i'll understand how a person can stand to listen to meistersinger with any degree of complacency, for example. any degree of complacency that he or she can still occupy, considering the fullness of wagner's own complacency in the work. maybe if i hadn't been reading the adorno, i wouldn't be seeing so much to object to in the opera. but i don't know. i watched the ring on t.v. when i was five or three or something. it's pretty much my earliest memory. my mom was falling asleep on the outside of the tv, and siegfried was dressed vaguely as mary martin in peter pan on the inside of the tv, and erda came out the trap door, and it was all verrry exciting. meistersinger is not like the ring. it is nauseatingly self-assured, and does not push itself in any direction that touches me. i really can't handle sachs musing on sacral german art. and i can't handle this nonsense about spontaneous crowning of master-poets and jokey riots. BAH.

i mean, if wagner wanted, like the harvest moon shines, to muse on, in utter fatuity, about aesthetics, he should have come to the future, followed my example, and gotten himself a blog.

in which i remind myself, erroneously, of laura riding

i have turned my back for the time being

i have turned my back

for the time being

on longing.

i wish to take a stab

at wanting, because

wanting is so much

feasibler

for one

alone.

take the depicted

st. sebastian

in several much-vaunted paintings:

to be tied up and stabbed

all over with arrows,

some would see this

as longing, but

longing has no

true metaphoric

bearing

on his

situation--

it is wanting

that st. sebastian achieves

against his sharp-barked tree.

he has succeeded

in truly experiencing

the stab of desire.

for a figure of longing

with tree and arrow,

the inviolate son of william tell

will do well.

dude.

if i had an attic

if i had an attic

i would find things i'd stored there

years later--

mementos of trips taken,

dresses i'd grown too full for,

ornaments for holidays

and spotted diaries

full of a life

i remembered living

but never lived, pages

crammed

with the testimony

of someone

i remembered being

but wasn't me,

the recalled feel

of cloth that never touched

my skin. the garments' emptiness

within their trunks

would be nothing new

to me, who never

had filled them,

but i would recall

myself, clearly enfolded

in their swirling patterns--and

the trips, cross-country, face

pressed close

to the hot window

of a car i never was in.

and suddenly to realize

that the dust-crammed objects

surrounding me were

never

a part of my life...

and that

the attic

did not exist.

and to cup

my palms

and color them

the color

of fine wine.

unfolding, unravelling

specific creation song

there was a god without a name

who created

several things, such as

cinnamon,

amber

with its light-trapping flaws,

death,

the wheel,

delicate antennae

that stood out against the air

and touched the wind

as if it were a solid thing,

the metaphor.

in the cupping of his hands,

from the touch

of the edges of his palms

against each other,

he took sensation

and created a flower

whose many petals

lay smooth and long

against each other.

while he waited

for her to open,

a god that lived in fire

touched her

with blazing fingers, and

each of her long petals

became a ridge of fire.

consume yourself,

the fire god breathed,

as i have consumed myself,

and the hot wind

of his words

fanned the flame

he had set on her.

her creator set her down

on a lake like glass

and she floated, burning,

even when the fire went out

and left her petals ragged stubs--

she burned in memory

and floated far away

from the touch of anything.

she turned away

from the touch of her reflection.

she turned away

from the touch of her own name.

the flesh healed itself

while she turned away--

years and years she turned,

and unnoticed her edges sealed over.

she came to the edge of the lake

where other things grew...

they liked her--

her color, her shape,

the smell of ash that

cored the sweetness of her scent--

they asked her name.

she did not answer

until she looked into the water

like glass

and stared back at herself,

and then said

her name was peony.

and they gave her ground

and she found

herself laying

roots.

this story

does not end.

really really

today someone told me that there was a point, in their depression, when they sat on the edge of a fountain in the snow for two hours looking at a hot dog they'd bought but hadn't eaten. which is the saddest--and the funniest--thing i've ever heard, and it makes me feel so much better. i don't know why it's good to hear that someone else has gone through this--it's not just the sitting in one place, unable to move; it's the hot dog. because i've totally done that. not in the snow and not with a hot dog, but i've stared at food for lengthy periods of time before.

there are people around me for whom hearing my problems would not be a burden. i have no judgment, so i don't know who they are...but there are people around me who i don't have to worry about hurting by being myself.

this is what i mean: it's extremely painful, but i'm so grateful. i'm being rescued by some part of me that realized it was time to stop being so shut out from myself, so locked in. i can't leave the pain part unacknowledged, because the pain is important. when it hurts, it hurts like a bitch. nobody is more tired than myself of having panic attacks in theory class, though probably its teacher runs a close second. but when i'm not afraid or anxious, i'm happier than i've ever been. literally. i'm finally capable of feeling at peace--not deadening myself to the point of numbness with food or books or alcohol or movies. and though that means that i'm also capable of feeling really really scared...i mean, at least i can finally feel scared.

the point is, thank you, person who told me about staring at the hot dog. i really really appreciate it.