Alas my darling pig!
Bob and I recently began netflixxing (I heart making up verbs) seasons of the television series Lost. I was somewhat proud of the fact that I have managed to duck pretty much every tv trend of the last ten years by extremely limited exposure to the great evil box, but dammit, a few series have sunk my battleship and rendered me slavering for the next installment. Previous offenders include Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under.
Bob, that dastardly boy, was tipped off by some toolbox coworker at Church (otherwise known as guitar center, where he works, but we call it church, and you pronounce it like pimp lucius: CH-UH-TCH) to the addictive qualities of the stupid show, and here we are, balls deep in season two.
Now, along with a desperate desire to know just how does miss evangeline lilly keep her armpits baby bottom smooth on this nairless, razorless paradise, comes the ever constant idea of what I would do if I were in a similar situation, stranded, marooned, lost, completely cut off from everybody I'd ever known.
Before I could really think about this, I decided to do a little research, and I sat down and read Lord of the Flies, another one of those supposed "classics" that I just never got around to, and lo and behold if there isn't one hell of a sow killing that goes on.
What do I make of this?
The Lord of the Flies is decapitated head of a sow the boys slaughter in an overtly sexual display of violence (lots of mounting, stabbing downward, butterflies flap nearby, and the boys anally rape the creature with a spear before slitting her throat).
Post-gutting, the leader of the hunters, apropriately named jack, offers the head of the sow on a spike as a sacrifice to the much feared "beast" of the jungle. Later, a boy named Simon, lost in that neck of the woods, awakes from a stupor face to face with the leering skull, and conducts the theme-solidifying conversation with it. "I am part of you" says the lord of the flies, as the buzzing (symbol of hell) grows louder, and slowly unconsciousness approaches the boy in the form of the head's black hole of a mouth.
The desecration of the loveliness of sow is perhaps a delicate subject for me, being that I'd so recently named it the masthead to my Jess-gets-back-to-fucking-writing-and-making-her-life-mean-something project, but just the same I feel like the two must do battle inside everybody's head at some point.
The desire for perfection in oneself versus the unavoidable evil imbedded in humankind.
I know I've sought the unattainable before, and I thought settling on being the best damn sow i could be was pretty transcendental, but what if my evil is inherent?
What if seeking the perfect contentment of self is what makes one the perfect victim, and only after we are violated, murdered and desecrated, offered to the fucking invisible fiends of the jungle, do we reach the point of true enlightenment?
All the artists who die...their lives so lamented, their work so much more valuable due to the brief time of its creation. Yeats, Plath, Lennon...were they pigs who reached their artistic apexes and had to be cut down in order to become the ethereal gods of art they are today?
From the time I was ten until I was seventeen, I was certain that in order for any of my writing to be worth a damn, I had to die before my eighteenth birthday. All the greatness, all the poetic justice in the world wasn't worth the deification of a torrid fling at creation and then an abrupt tragic end, and I know now it was of course a foolish and ridiculous desire/notion, but perhaps a kernel of truth was there.
In order for a person, say a writer, to truthfully encapsulate the human experience mustn't he experience both sides of the extreme; the sublime perfection and the death and slander of oneself?
Should it be at the hands of his greatest fans that he be destroyed? Is that what makes it all the more poignant? In showing the writer the end of his humanity are his executioners actually revealing the path to his finest art?
Leave me alone on a train too long, and this is where we end up.
Weigh in people.
I'd love to imagine somebody, somewhere actually read this.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
All that glitters is sometimes snail slime
I've been trundling about my daily business under the mantle of some serious misery for the last five months. It's amazing to write that number and realize it really has been so long since I last felt unencumbered.
I keep trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me so desperate, and all the usual suspects line up next to the height chart, and some are defiant (money), some are ashamed (eating), some are virtuous (writing), and some refuse to turn around and be identified.
So I make another cup of coffee, crack the spine on another book and log in another train ride.
I am adding another instrument with which I can notch the wall.
A writer without writing is like a snail without a shell. Sure, it's heavy as fuck, and you curse the damn thing as you slime a trail up the garden walk, but damn it, it's yours, it found you, you made it, and it loves you as you love it, and you'd die if someone tore it from your back.
So I've been starting journal entries and abandoning them, beginning stories and deleting them, writing blog entries for an hour and then when the internet craps out and deletes them, just walking away from the computer and making another cup of coffee, sitting down and watching Lost.
Bob practically yelled at me last night to finish the story I started almost four years ago. I kept fighting him because I haven't written on it in so long, I didn't think I had it left. I made a thousand excuses, and then I opened the document and stared at it for an hour.
Tonight I started writing again, and maybe it's garbage, but it's my garbage, and I'm lugging it around until it's done.
I keep trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me so desperate, and all the usual suspects line up next to the height chart, and some are defiant (money), some are ashamed (eating), some are virtuous (writing), and some refuse to turn around and be identified.
So I make another cup of coffee, crack the spine on another book and log in another train ride.
I am adding another instrument with which I can notch the wall.
A writer without writing is like a snail without a shell. Sure, it's heavy as fuck, and you curse the damn thing as you slime a trail up the garden walk, but damn it, it's yours, it found you, you made it, and it loves you as you love it, and you'd die if someone tore it from your back.
So I've been starting journal entries and abandoning them, beginning stories and deleting them, writing blog entries for an hour and then when the internet craps out and deletes them, just walking away from the computer and making another cup of coffee, sitting down and watching Lost.
Bob practically yelled at me last night to finish the story I started almost four years ago. I kept fighting him because I haven't written on it in so long, I didn't think I had it left. I made a thousand excuses, and then I opened the document and stared at it for an hour.
Tonight I started writing again, and maybe it's garbage, but it's my garbage, and I'm lugging it around until it's done.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Tres Angeles
On tuesday nights I close the cafe.
Usually I am accomplice to the amazingly youthful, impressively moustachioed Weston, whom 4 out of 5 randomly polled folks agree looks like he sprung from the frame of a 1920's silent film. Tonight was no different.
Usually, I get the job done just in time to miss the 9:30 train from north station and spend an hour and ten minutes hanging around with all the other vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes waiting for the next one.
Tonight there was a guy who sat on the bench across from me and wept for a while.
Three little girls, dressed like different flavors of bubblegum and speaking spanish really really fast crowded onto the bench beside me and tittered and squealed for a minute or so before one leaned forward and asked the man why he was crying.
He told this long story about how a year ago today his girlfriend overdosed on drugs and died, taking with her his unborn twins. He talked about how he was trying to get home to vermont and he had thirty two of the fifty one dollars needed for a greyhound ticket. He talked about his mom and how he used to be a boxer and how he never cries and he has too many bags and he talked and talked and talked.
One of the girls began crying too.
Another lent him her cell phone to call his mother.
The third brought him a soda from dunkin donuts and handed it and twenty dollars to him.
The girls blessed him and told him god had a plan, and then went right back to teasing each other and giggling.
He hugged them.
I am still not sure if he was telling the truth. Sometimes, there's a lilt in the voice of a liar...a willingness to elaborate too easily...a gushiness to the story or the repetition of a few facts over and over. All these, and a nasty feeling in my stomach told me that the three sweet girls were being had.
But what can I do?
They deserve to keep the kindness within them which allowed for such generosity.
It's more than anybody else in that train station would have done.
I came home, and walking through the silent streets of salem, the snow thickly muffled the air, the trees, the buildings, and lay white and unspoiled in the streets.
It let me have a moment of calm in my wretched brain, and it made me glad, that, even though overnight it will be shoveled and plowed and sullied and salted and soiled and irreversibly filthied, for now, in this moment, it is pure, and it made me better.
Like those girls.
Usually I am accomplice to the amazingly youthful, impressively moustachioed Weston, whom 4 out of 5 randomly polled folks agree looks like he sprung from the frame of a 1920's silent film. Tonight was no different.
Usually, I get the job done just in time to miss the 9:30 train from north station and spend an hour and ten minutes hanging around with all the other vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes waiting for the next one.
Tonight there was a guy who sat on the bench across from me and wept for a while.
Three little girls, dressed like different flavors of bubblegum and speaking spanish really really fast crowded onto the bench beside me and tittered and squealed for a minute or so before one leaned forward and asked the man why he was crying.
He told this long story about how a year ago today his girlfriend overdosed on drugs and died, taking with her his unborn twins. He talked about how he was trying to get home to vermont and he had thirty two of the fifty one dollars needed for a greyhound ticket. He talked about his mom and how he used to be a boxer and how he never cries and he has too many bags and he talked and talked and talked.
One of the girls began crying too.
Another lent him her cell phone to call his mother.
The third brought him a soda from dunkin donuts and handed it and twenty dollars to him.
The girls blessed him and told him god had a plan, and then went right back to teasing each other and giggling.
He hugged them.
I am still not sure if he was telling the truth. Sometimes, there's a lilt in the voice of a liar...a willingness to elaborate too easily...a gushiness to the story or the repetition of a few facts over and over. All these, and a nasty feeling in my stomach told me that the three sweet girls were being had.
But what can I do?
They deserve to keep the kindness within them which allowed for such generosity.
It's more than anybody else in that train station would have done.
I came home, and walking through the silent streets of salem, the snow thickly muffled the air, the trees, the buildings, and lay white and unspoiled in the streets.
It let me have a moment of calm in my wretched brain, and it made me glad, that, even though overnight it will be shoveled and plowed and sullied and salted and soiled and irreversibly filthied, for now, in this moment, it is pure, and it made me better.
Like those girls.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
St.Francis and Sow
When I was in one of the "famous" poet Wes McNair's poetry workshops, he demanded each of his students commit a number of poems to memory. A long, self gratifying diatribe punctuated by references to feuds, publications and personal accomplishments he attributed solely to his prowess of mastering other master's masterworks was his explanation.
So I leafed through a few books and was struck, for various reasons, by Galway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow.
I wrote it down a dozen times, each time covering up more of the text so I had to retain the lines. I scrawled it in blue marker on a few giant sheets of paper and pasted them on the door of my closet in my tiny single on the first floor of Stone Hall. At night before I went to sleep, I aligned my body with the last line of the poem:
"the long, perfect loveliness of sow." and read it over and over.
At night, my broken blind allowed the tender glow of the street lamp to lull me into sleep, and in the morning it tore open my dreams with the gyrating, blinding, crackling rays of the rising sun.
Winking furiously after the painfully brief amount of sleep I survived on back then, the first line of text I read every day was Kinnell's praise of the pig.
I never managed to get the whole thing memorized, and muddled through the oration in front of McNair and my classmates without much trouble, knowing, the professor really didn't give a shit about our regurgitation skills. I think he was more concerned with how many, if any, of the students would pick one of his works.
After my cauterized graduation, and skipping the country to find my fortune, however, the last line of Kinnell's poem continued to pop into my head at odd moments of mental quiet.
Especially first thing in the morning.
The other day, while in the shower, pondering nothing in particular, I glanced down at my side, to check if my tattoo had fallen off. This is routine. When I was little my sisters and I compared notes in the bathtub as to whether certain birthmarks, scars or other abrasions were like scabs, and if, after prolonged wear, they just shriveled up and dropped off. After I got my tattoo, I simply totted it into the roster of things to check on, while rinsing soap off.
Anyway, after verifying that yes, my waist does in fact still read disappear here the line from that long ago forgotten poem popped into my head, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I am beginning this blog in an attempt to regain my previous literary productivity.
Once upon a time, I wrote all day every day, and itched when I wasn't putting pen to page.
It's been almost a year since I got anything down other than a scritched out journal entry on the fly.
I am aligning myself again with the last line of this poem, putting my faith into its resurfacing in my consciousness as an omen that there is something asleep inside me which needs awakening. A hand needs to touch the forehead of my muse and remind what it is that makes her beautiful.
Here's the inspiration. I hope it helps you as well, solitary reader.
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of
self blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers from within, of self blessing;
as St Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering, all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl
of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
So I leafed through a few books and was struck, for various reasons, by Galway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow.
I wrote it down a dozen times, each time covering up more of the text so I had to retain the lines. I scrawled it in blue marker on a few giant sheets of paper and pasted them on the door of my closet in my tiny single on the first floor of Stone Hall. At night before I went to sleep, I aligned my body with the last line of the poem:
"the long, perfect loveliness of sow." and read it over and over.
At night, my broken blind allowed the tender glow of the street lamp to lull me into sleep, and in the morning it tore open my dreams with the gyrating, blinding, crackling rays of the rising sun.
Winking furiously after the painfully brief amount of sleep I survived on back then, the first line of text I read every day was Kinnell's praise of the pig.
I never managed to get the whole thing memorized, and muddled through the oration in front of McNair and my classmates without much trouble, knowing, the professor really didn't give a shit about our regurgitation skills. I think he was more concerned with how many, if any, of the students would pick one of his works.
After my cauterized graduation, and skipping the country to find my fortune, however, the last line of Kinnell's poem continued to pop into my head at odd moments of mental quiet.
Especially first thing in the morning.
The other day, while in the shower, pondering nothing in particular, I glanced down at my side, to check if my tattoo had fallen off. This is routine. When I was little my sisters and I compared notes in the bathtub as to whether certain birthmarks, scars or other abrasions were like scabs, and if, after prolonged wear, they just shriveled up and dropped off. After I got my tattoo, I simply totted it into the roster of things to check on, while rinsing soap off.
Anyway, after verifying that yes, my waist does in fact still read disappear here the line from that long ago forgotten poem popped into my head, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.
I am beginning this blog in an attempt to regain my previous literary productivity.
Once upon a time, I wrote all day every day, and itched when I wasn't putting pen to page.
It's been almost a year since I got anything down other than a scritched out journal entry on the fly.
I am aligning myself again with the last line of this poem, putting my faith into its resurfacing in my consciousness as an omen that there is something asleep inside me which needs awakening. A hand needs to touch the forehead of my muse and remind what it is that makes her beautiful.
Here's the inspiration. I hope it helps you as well, solitary reader.
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of
self blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers from within, of self blessing;
as St Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering, all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl
of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
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