Her green pedicure
When I am busy “Appearing-As,” my life feels wrong. It feels wrong because I am still craving the stillness.
But she wondered: could it be that I'll have to pay a high price for my happiness? She didn't worry. She would pay all that she had to pay. She had always paid and always been unhappy.
Soulstorm, Clarice Lispector
✶
We want to say wonderful things. I don’t always have the vocabulary or the patience. I wanted to be a wonderful thing. I found that I could not be sufficiently flattened. I allowed myself a silver inch of two-dimensionality. It was divine. I was full just thinking only of what I would dress in, or how I would let my voice spill out. I loved red peonies, I felt that passing thought was enough, I loved that heady evocative fragrance. I made a perfume list for purchase—espresso, jasmine, vanilla in a green bottle—but I couldn’t bring myself to spend the money. I wanted to love deeply and well, but I was the epitome of inner unrest. The silence at my core was a catastrophe. It still is. I’m beginning to love it.
Spinoza wrote that by the word “JOY” he could understand that what follows is a passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection, and that sadness can be understood as passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection. He is describing the pleasure of thriving. I might say I agree, but I have another personal note.
The little death is also a joy.
There is a distinct and discernable place between the land of Being and the land of Appearing-As, and sometimes the gap is easy enough to spot. The gap is death; it feels like this. Suddenly shaken from the structure of your most familiar thoughts and egoistic ideas. To traverse between the two or, more compellingly, to force yourself out of Appearing-As and decide to just Be. When I am busy “Appearing-As,” my life is wrong. It is wrong because I am still craving the stillness. I won’t commit to life. More than exploring life, playing with consciousness, more than creating heaven on earth, I want to go back. I want to go all the way back. My drive is to burrow myself into that deep stillness.
The difference can jump out at you while you’re walking through a total paradise of mind, a secret happiness warming the thread of all moments. Torta di limone, white wine, pink yoga mat and full body Pilates. Flirting, endless ballooning evenings, inspired movement. Other times you come across it on the other end of a very long and tough time, months or years you spent believing that there was something Out There that would, at last, grant you access to yourself: to Loving Yourself, Being Yourself, Expressing Yourself, Exploring Yourself, Choosing Yourself. Day in, day out. Getting comfortable in that gnawing solitude. Laying back in your most grotesque corners.
I wanted rooms of velvet; I wanted fountains and music like crystals bouncing off of flower-petals. The realization that I shake off shame by knowing that I will survive it even if I do let myself feel, to the end, this ancient hatred of myself. I still carry this idea that it was failure on my part which caused me to not ever experience the right love. I still have to understand that sometimes that people are busy and that doesn’t mean I’m dead. This moment now contains all others. There is no line, no hallway. Some personality types have left behind a note of clues: Everything now!
It feels disrespectful to reality to soften anybody in retrospect, but I close my eyes and remember that I have always been loved, whole, sufficient. I have always been treated with care, that’s what I tell myself.
If I find my way regardless, I feel like I’m letting you off of the hook.
So again, when you find the doorway between Being and Appearing-As, I hope you can enter and enjoy the ride. There is no point in drinking or sleeping or scrolling that disgust away to multiply itself in corners as it does because it eats your fear. The point of life is not Image-Making. The point of life is not to gain recognition, love, admiration, and divine sentiments through Appearing-As; I speak for myself, I do not advocate for this method. Although I’d like to control the shape of their perception, all that does is block me from more beautiful life. Beautiful activities in life. Controlling is a time-eating activity and fear of life is more than an emotion. It requires time and effort from you. You heed to its direction. All of the time. You take its shape. You barely know it. You give it your posture. It builds its worldly forms.
With writing there is always the fear that my words do not mean anything, that my being will never truly learn to talk. The same sensation is present in loving. Anything that needs me at the surface of myself. I also don’t know if it’s a solvable problem. On some level, there are always two of us in the room. This morning, I read Borges and I, which is a literary sketch in Jorge Luis Borges’ Dreamtigers. This was mind-altering and reminded me that yes, to create at all is to die. Because to create is to release control. Don’t clench, don’t cling to life. Die and spit up what you have to. Trust life to come back.
Controlling is only superficially effective: You are so fearful that you do not know them, you know only what they represent. All of these glittering or opaque figures depart one by one from your basement party, never touched. Fear makes you monitor whether or not they’re leaving—is their hand on the door—is the body dreaming of far away—is the exit outlined? You are like this, rather than living and growing familiar with the tones and details of the Other’s stay. Fear craves those arbitrary checkmarks. You need to focus on your craft. The futility of forcing oneself to appear as anything; the emptiness of seeming-to-be.
You need to practice. Living is a craft, so is love.
But you are on the verge of dangerously veiling everything. The problem is not the magic, it’s that you chose the dark kind. Veil this room in light, veil this room in wonder. Understand that life is rising and falling consistently. You desire creative ownership. But do the right thing. There are days in which I want to sleep through the day. I want to sleep through the day because I want to close, to close myself to the excruciating crushing of life. I want the drug of the dream, I want to float headless. I want to not be affected by blood, pain, bones, or gravity. A rainbowed mass of vision and no form. I want to be full of the beams of fantasy. Sometimes I am like that. I want to be so full of life. I want it so much I don’t focus. I die among other things. White wine, joints, cigarettes, too many naps, reality television, the mixing of substance. I want to feed without having to feed on anything. I want to be full without having to move. My craving for that pure dark stillness. That stillness which is life in its most basic essence. It is like nothing on Earth. So far here I have only found glimpses.
The witch took her sharp green finger to the fabric of life.
She could not be sure of life.
I have been possessive of my time for nothing. That’s why I sit with you tonight, when I cannot afford to give you anything but this sentence itself. I cannot afford meaning I do not feel abundant. I have lost all inclination for decoration. I become smaller and I try to preserve something. The stillness.
I felt myself decide that I was beautiful. It did not stick but I’ll recount the time. A shift of light fell over me while I was writing in the garden. I remember it because it turned my vision pink at the corners and made my whole back warm as a jacuzzi bath in winter. My manicure began to wink, artificial moon rock, and while I watched my hand move back and forth over the journal pages, I watched the wet black ink, my glass of espresso, words like swan, premature, reject, endless all fell in fell into the hole of my vision. I thought it was quite beautiful to be sitting there in the backyard garden dedicating myself to something as strange and futile as writing. Writing which demands you to be.
I watched shocks of purple flowers sway beyond the brambles and vines. My pink nicotine pen shimmered, a strange machine. All there was was alien towers of green plants. Chocolate river and beaver dam. Dark, rich mulch. I no longer felt hungry or tired. I was alright with the way my hair fell. I felt that perhaps there was something more interesting in me than the Image I’d been so long concerned with. That project had not been enjoyed for a long time. In that new silence I had not been abandoned. In the garden my posture shifted as elegant as a swan’s.
A drunk bumblebee sat on my wrist of charms. I opened myself to the idea that I’d not hear his voice for a long time. I felt that I was full, and that the night would be for writing. I’d write to absolutely no one and I’d sing to absolutely no one in my mind. From time to time I saw you, reader, I saw you and I worried and I winced, but then I remembered the impossibility of us ever meeting. Impossible because you don’t exist. I calmed again. The sunlight warmed itself up and up. The pink light was still there at the edges but was imperceptible in certain moments, moments I spent lost in other thoughts. An explosion of thoughts. I thought of him, mostly. I was always arriving back at him; I was pulled, I was conjured up. I often had to talk myself down from the brink of some threatening idea. The whole maturity aspect, the never acting on impulse out of fear of perception, it made life feel false and bad to me.
And she does not know where she is the most real.
If I spoke to you in my own tongue, would you find me extravagant?
The garden at times was bright and more green. Organic lights flashed on and off through the night. Condos of leaves made music nonstop. I did not reject its presence out of habit. I did not need anyone else to drink themselves stupid on that silky air. I felt that I was full. I claimed the moment for myself in a way that I’d not claimed a moment in a long time. I let out my scent. I was the fountain pouring crystals in the driveway. I was the sea my man was somewhere laughing jumping into. I was every inch of this. I adored you and as was your right, you were wild and bold and significant. Sun hid behind a cloud again. I tried to respond to your demands. I did. I gifted you with time and reason. I just thought that I should have felt like I could speak.
The grooves created by inaction are so deep, deliciously deep. The brain adjusts itself to that routine stillness. Change is excruciating, rightly so. It unleashes the true dragon of fatigue. I am taken over by wanting to say everything in one clear moment. I want to open and close. I want to flash.
When I read something that I love, I know that the author has given their blood up. All recording of a thought, a sensation, an intuition; it demands payment. It can be such a mutual exchange. Passionately mutual. Blood, memory, money, time, vision. The only thing that I can do now is transcribe the corners of this story as I live it; even as I suffer the sensation that I am losing something, that life is loss all of the time. I cannot relay it precisely as I see it—the coffee mugs on the counter, the laundry waiting behind the shut door, my bed, made but just freshly. I wrote in my iPhone notes: Ignoring physical life for an active mental or intellectual life is a big mistake–or even just ugly.
But the truth we see and live by is only a manifestation of a decision that we’ve already made. Nothing I do can satisfy me until I make a new decision. This decision I’ve made, that says I am unimportant, is a big hole that eats and eats. It eats my blood and my satisfaction. It eats my beauty, my buoyancy, my libido. It eats my moderation and my temperance. It eats my patience, my empathy. It eats the musicality of my own soul. It moves me in a straight, dispassionate line. I browse statues of Saint Theresa on Etsy as if I could purchase an amulet with enough heavenly power to protect me from myself—converting mom’s spare room into an imitation of a Catholic monastery, nothing but a bed, a wooden cross, a cluster of eternal red roses. I know I’ve been quiet, but I don’t write imperatively when I’m feeling too confused or too hopeless, only when I latch onto the tail-end of a star and can ride it over dark rivers, I like the fresh-white sparks at my feet, the wings and the thrilled, exhilarated screaming…
And who would have known that I could find you here?
LOVELIST
Old Italian songs remixed on Soundcloud.
I started reading a PDF of Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges; I have tried to read this book before but couldn’t wrap my mind around it at the time. I didn’t have the patience to get into the text. It’s mind blowing how beautiful it is: "As I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger […] Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird. ” — Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
Little gifts that my sister brought me back from her travels. A new pink I <3 NY espresso cup, a copy of The Paris Review, and Japan blend coffee beans.
Carl Jung: “There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself.”
Etsy shopping/Etsy favoriting.
Her Etsy wishlisting Until we meet again,
It is so good to see you back. Magnificent writing as always. We are all probing around in the dark with our eyes closed... when the light comes, I think we'll find we've had jewels adorning us all along.