These are my memories not just in words, but of them. Maybe all are strictly transmitted as such. Best I can recollect beyond the syntactic is notions of memories I should have, episodes repeated enough to form an eventual series, their details as vague as the notion that I should know them. What comes to the fore are phrases coined, caught for repetition, often enough a companion in a loop interrupting my thinking until... still.
One definition of insanity is picking these phrases from the loop and placing their impatient non-sequitur into every gap in the conversation, only ever offering an inside joke that nobody is in on.
Moreover on another hand on the left-right spectrum, there's that title song, sung off the page into the Sensual World, always in words. Channeled prominently from the sensations of Molly Bloom, if felt by any reader of Joyce, from words.
Semantic memory repeats in sequence and so do the words. I could show you, and you might remember, but what I say is what we'll laugh about later.
And maybe more yet than I've realized, it is sense that I try to make with these words. And lest I admonish that that word doesn't mean quite what its face tells us, for every thought is a more perfect word that's bound with the searched sense.
At least that's what I always catch myself striving for.
To spread these thoughts out into clarity, some one-word strikes the perfect pose without making one into a poser, I would hope — for the sense of the word.
The only time I'm at one with myself & the world is by the responsive arrangement of verbal expression, constant creation of my own metaphor, clearing the clutter of thought to be sure there is something to be said of these symptoms. And momentarily to allay them.
Unlike with meditation, I can shirk the discipline of practice and wait for the soothing arrival of inspiration. Probably I'm afraid routine will bring nothing but frustration. More probably I'm afraid of something else. Most probably I'm just lazy.
Maybe lazy is the wrong word.
It feels more like apprehension.
How do I know when a sentence is one too many? Revision is murder.
Sitting w/ a friend & my empty open suitcase
Of course there's a balance I fear and ignore when I can. As much as I'd like to believe my ideal is of solitude, there's the fuel of human contact at work and at play. Yes, that's a pun. Always a pun.
I'm terrified of the sum of time I've spent at nothing. Like the coins as a kid I dropped into the fountain that is Pac-Man at Del Farm, except the world has closed in since the age of thirteen. I have no reason to believe I'd find anything more sensible now to spend those quarters on.
But I can't help it, I'm uneasy around them, in the company of a visit. One'd like to think that we're all the same, in our core or what-have-you. But the suspicion is sneaking that my attitude about life, this existence is so different from those all around me who embrace it so sensibly. I know it's my ethical duty to assist them with given glimpses of purpose, but I can't find it in those times when I sit in discomfort.
And, let's be honest, the last lone desire at such a visit is to attend the unpacking of all one's shit upon arrival. Baggage can't be taken for friendship, even & especially when it's discovered how empty it is.
It's not the loneliness that hurts, but the guilt that I don't feel it. It's not the embarrassment that I don't have it, but the shame that I don't want it.
Slippery Whenever - Frankfurter Allee/Möllendorffstraße, Berlin-Lichtenberg - 2015
One definition of insanity is picking these phrases from the loop and placing their impatient non-sequitur into every gap in the conversation, only ever offering an inside joke that nobody is in on.
Moreover on another hand on the left-right spectrum, there's that title song, sung off the page into the Sensual World, always in words. Channeled prominently from the sensations of Molly Bloom, if felt by any reader of Joyce, from words.
Semantic memory repeats in sequence and so do the words. I could show you, and you might remember, but what I say is what we'll laugh about later.
And maybe more yet than I've realized, it is sense that I try to make with these words. And lest I admonish that that word doesn't mean quite what its face tells us, for every thought is a more perfect word that's bound with the searched sense.
At least that's what I always catch myself striving for.
To spread these thoughts out into clarity, some one-word strikes the perfect pose without making one into a poser, I would hope — for the sense of the word.
The only time I'm at one with myself & the world is by the responsive arrangement of verbal expression, constant creation of my own metaphor, clearing the clutter of thought to be sure there is something to be said of these symptoms. And momentarily to allay them.
Unlike with meditation, I can shirk the discipline of practice and wait for the soothing arrival of inspiration. Probably I'm afraid routine will bring nothing but frustration. More probably I'm afraid of something else. Most probably I'm just lazy.
Maybe lazy is the wrong word.
It feels more like apprehension.
How do I know when a sentence is one too many? Revision is murder.
__
Sitting w/ a friend & my empty open suitcase
Of course there's a balance I fear and ignore when I can. As much as I'd like to believe my ideal is of solitude, there's the fuel of human contact at work and at play. Yes, that's a pun. Always a pun.
I'm terrified of the sum of time I've spent at nothing. Like the coins as a kid I dropped into the fountain that is Pac-Man at Del Farm, except the world has closed in since the age of thirteen. I have no reason to believe I'd find anything more sensible now to spend those quarters on.
But I can't help it, I'm uneasy around them, in the company of a visit. One'd like to think that we're all the same, in our core or what-have-you. But the suspicion is sneaking that my attitude about life, this existence is so different from those all around me who embrace it so sensibly. I know it's my ethical duty to assist them with given glimpses of purpose, but I can't find it in those times when I sit in discomfort.
And, let's be honest, the last lone desire at such a visit is to attend the unpacking of all one's shit upon arrival. Baggage can't be taken for friendship, even & especially when it's discovered how empty it is.
It's not the loneliness that hurts, but the guilt that I don't feel it. It's not the embarrassment that I don't have it, but the shame that I don't want it.
Slippery Whenever - Frankfurter Allee/Möllendorffstraße, Berlin-Lichtenberg - 2015
