Candlelight From Within Red Glass (The Time Capsule of Memory)

8:04 pm; In my favorite cavernous bar. Elton John's Your Song just came on over the speakers playing here, and with it, the most vivid imagery of the last two minutes of a few hour long drive from long ago.

Pulling up after an endlessly curled and narrow path supposedly for cars, to reveal a driveway.

Moss. Forest. Deep green black parted to reveal a strange and crooked beautiful castle disguised with white paint, doilies, VHS tapes and antiquated cookbooks.

The beginning of a weekend that is engraved in my mind for beautiful and horrid reasons, both equal in their weight.

I bled so much those months. Every time you would do something awful, I would start to bleed.

Somehow it makes sense that the entire weekend the pulse of a hounded rabbit haunted my throat, relieved in syrup, intermittently, with the deepest slow of meditation. 

Do you know that when you left that night, and came back thinking I had stayed because I wanted you it was, in truth, because upon your slamming of the door, it began again. I ran to the bathroom because I could feel the blood coming. And it kept me there. It filled the white porcelain of your bowl. So thick of crimson against it's ivory hands.  

It's all so sad, now. The carpet of that castle looked like dried blood, and it would be roughly a month until you decide to slit the throat-down-to-the-gut of that memory.  Looking back, I can see all of the soaked walls. How could I not see it then?

Light within red glass: A light glowing from inside this body of blood.  As if my entire body wanted you away from me. I never told you that the bleeding started the day that I met you.

Oh, it has nothing to do with hindsight. It has everything to do with the truth hidden in plain view.  The jewels hidden in the closet as false as anything I held in my hands those few nights.

How strange it is that our bodies know more than anything we can think or feel. The bleeding stopped the night that I left you. 

But that weekend the pizza was warm and somehow, within that, there was still a love that existed- malnourished and acidic as it may have been.

All feral animals begin to trust by virtue of food.

I am no exception.



(link, here, to Elton John's Your Song)

I hope you don't mind
that I put down in words
How wonderful life is
while you're in the world.



**

Title: Catholicism
Image: Closer
Non-Fiction Source of Inspiration: Steve Stern's The Memory Box of Pinochet, historical trilogy
It is my father's birthday tonight.  This, too, comes as no surprise or lack of inspiration. 

Hymn of Disappearance

Libraries are churches.  They are tornado shelters.  They are not-quite fallout bunkers.

When I am scared, panicked, or lacking in the faith required to continue, it is where I find myself.  In any country, in any city, in any language.  The feeling is distinct from that of bookstores: There is no selling happening, here.   It is sharing, loaning, borrowing.  Questions are created with three times the speed as they are answered.  My pulse quickens at how much information and beauty exits under one roof. There are posters encouraging people to read, and to learn.  The phrase "life long learner", "the people's university",  and "right to privacy" are common place.

As a child, I would dive into my curiosities with nothing more than a slight blush as I nabbed a title from its place in the Dewey System.

Ghosts, the occult, dreams in the 100s. Religion in the 200s. The arts in the 700s. Literature, poetry and theater live in the 800s. Nothing else mattered to me, although I was vaguely aware that technology was in the 600s.

100, 200, 700, 800.

Over the years, these numbers have served as my emergency contact information.  They have replaced the memorized phone number of parents and neighbors. They have stood in for crisis lines, prayer circles, and the emergency pull chains one finds dangling from the ceiling of hospital-room bathrooms.

In times of distress, I look for the icon for LIBRARY (block person reading a book), walk directly into their doors, and stand in front of these very ranges of numbers.  In doing so, I know that something will salve me.

Change my mind.

Distract me.

Engage me.

Intrigue me enough to shake what is haunting me, or to give me lesson enough simply to understand it's beauty.



-k.

Heaven Rolling Off the Top of an Eyelash

4 AM in a warehouse very far from home. It's cold and my eyes have that insanely-late-or-insanely-early feeling of strain and sandpaper. Yet I am excited. Cold, my fingers burn a bit, but excited.

One of the things I love about my job are moments like these. Being forced out of bed at ungodly hours to travel to an yet unseen destination and end up flirting with the shop steward dyke with bleached tips. Swoon. I will always have a thing for Teamsters.

Lately, I've been shedding a particular type of inhibition that has always vexed me. While I have always been a sucker for adventure and for taking chances, there are areas in my life I tend to play it OSHA level safe. Regulating and over thinking. Padding and keeping away from open flames. It has to do with brains and intellectual vampire-ism. At times I get shy persuing someone's brains and insight because people tend to read it as sexual interest when it is not. (Certainly, both elements may be present, but here I'm referring to intellectual or life skill interest only). Over time, I've become much more conservative with my leaps towards learning from people who specialize in something I'm interested in- although it is my preferred way of learning- because of their misreading of what my passion is about.

Nothing feels sadder to me than someone going from telling me about their knowledge and insight to trying to make a pass at me. I feel betrayed, somehow. Like when someone tells you they love literature, and then you find out that they don't even read much- they only said it because they thought it would make you like them.



--k.


(title: you know, like when a raindrop hits your top eyelashes and they keep it from going into your eye.)

Cut the Conversation, Just Open Your Mouth

"If she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me-- even then I would have jumped!"

 -F. Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

It's opening time. The scent of dry cedar is mixed with just-below-frozen air. I've been obsessive as of late, and it has been as enjoyable as warm wax upon a wrist.  Fyodor and his dirty knees: How can I help myself? Ever since I came across that tiny book that was part of a mini library of classics, I can't stop reading him.

Am I the only one that reads Dostoyevsky like the big, glorious bottom that he was?

About a year and four months ago, I listened to Dostoyevsky's tale, The Gambler, as an unabridged audio book.  I ended up recording a change purse of excerpts from the narration. They were such deep displays of submissive desire.  It was incredible, really.  Yet not entirely surprising.   

It's Polina, it's all Polina! Maybe there would be no schoolboy pranks if it weren't for her. Who knows? Maybe I'm doing it all out of despair (however stupid it is to reason this way). And I don't understand, I don't understand what's so good about her! Good looking she is, though. Yes, it seems she's good looking. Others lose their minds over her, too. She's tall and trim, only very thin.  Seems to me you could tie her in a knot or bend her double.  The print of her foot is narrow and long.  Tormenting. Precisely tormenting. Her hair has a reddish tint. Her eyes, a real cat's. But how proud and arrogant she can look with them.  

Four months ago, when I'd just entered their service, she had a long and heated conversation with De Griers one evening in the drawing room. And she looked at him in such a way that later, when I went to my room to go to bed, I imagined that she had given him a slap- given it a moment before- then stood in front of him and looked at him.

That evening, I fell in love with her.

(pause)


I mean, come on.

And how gorgeous to describe someone by the quality of their footprint: That a footprint could be, and is, tormenting.

Incredible.

I close my eyes and tilt my head back.

(longer pause)

Sometimes, when people ask what, exactly, a bottom is, it seems so hard to explain.  And yet, this inexplicable leaning that a person may have has the instant ability to quicken a pulse and smudge want so deeply across a face.

Bottoms amaze me all the time. No matter what it looks like from an outside or constructed eye, it will always be the bottom that has the actual power in the relationship.  Tops would be nothing without their bottoms, and bottoms will forever blow my mind with what they want to, and will, do. 

"Well, yes, yes, to be enslaved to you is a pleasure.  There is, there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance!" I went on raving.  "Devil knows,  maybe there is in the knout*, too, when the knout comes down on your back and tears the flesh to pieces..."

(longer pause)

I let my chin drop back to center space, and open my eyes slowly, and take in the room.

Oh, surely this says nothing of me or of Fyodor.

Only that I would like, very much, to be lost in a forest with him.  Simply to see what would transpire.

 

Beauty and pleasure to you on this first night of December,

-k.

***********

*=A knout is a multi-tailed whip that was, as I've read, used in Russia to flog criminals.

All images: Calyx tumblr
Title: Lyric from Fascination Street/The Cure
 All italicized text:  The Gambler.  This is a particular translation of the text. The exact passages, shown here, have quite different translations in other versions.  So strange to think that in the other translations, I would have barely anything to connect to.  I will cover my eyes and pretend that this is the most exact one.

(We Live Half at Night)

6:27pm on the evening before Thanksgiving- I'm listening to The XX and the sound of the dishwasher running in the kitchen of a house that is not mine.  I've lit three candles, placed them strategically around the room, and shut off all of the lights.

(November is the month after that in which I tend to think of him, but it is this month that he will be coming to visit.  This week, actually.)

I've been feeling protective of myself as of late. My life. My doings. My constructions of accomplishments.  Is this strange? It is toward no one in particular.

I've been thinking in mathematical terms, lately.  Summing things up.  Dividing things. Subtracting. (Not multiplying. Never multiplying. Some do. Carrie just had her baby today.)

Unrelated, I am thinking of what I had wanted, in a moment, for Thanksgiving this year.  Then, I simply stopped wanting it.  And here I am, in this warm house that is not mine, in candlelight and the reassurance of the dishwasher.

Upstairs, a conversation of smiles is being woven between a long distance sister and her brother.

-k.

title credit: part of a lyric from The XX
photo credit: Logan White

*****
Upon the suggestion of a film genius friend of mine, I recently watched the film Night of the Hunter (1955).  I read a bit about it first- German expressionist in style and, according to a number of famous film types, the film introduces Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), as one of the most memorable villains of all time. The use of light and shadows (and hilarious use of animals) is absolutely gorgeous.

If you get a chance, watch it.  If anything for the underwater scene of a dead body that is breathtakingly beautiful and unforgettably creepy.   Although I won't spoil that scene for you, I will give you a taste of some of the shadows here.

So That's the Kind of Little Devil That Crouches in Your Heart, My Lad

Last night I dreamt I was caught in a flood that was pushing through the streets on an unnamed city.  The water was filled with blood, shards of glass, and photographs of bad memories.

Light would catch upon the glass and refract through the water as I was tossed beyond my strength.  The sopping photographs and their freeze-frame atrocities rushed past me, as if pulled by an underwater vacuum.

Slamming movement and arms askew as I wondered whose blood- and of how many people- it was that I was struggling through.

*****
Title credit:  A partial line from Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov

I'll Suck My Tongue As a Remembrance of You

My nails are the color of wine-almost-black.  It makes me think of the last bit of wine left in fancy wine glasses sitting on tables and by kitchen sinks after a party.

I've been using a soap that smells like almond croissants and butter. I stay in the shower too long because of it and, when I get out, I crave the type of pastries that melt in your mouth like a silk, edible ribbon.

Tonight has been one of candles, polished wood, ink, and paint.  Violins and pianos have been filling a room with too strong of heat- the type of heat that places dust in your lungs and the deepest thirst in your throat. The door to this room has been a revolving carousel of both unexpected and experienced visitors.

The applause that bursts in between the songs on the live album I'm listening to somehow accentuates each person's entrance.

It also cheers the silence that blooms after each exit.



-k.


**********************


Title credit: Lyric from Possibly Maybe/Bjork
Photo credit: Javi Dardoof of Anatol

Red Curtained Windows Lead to Suspicions of Witchcraft: The Doldrums of Cliche

I have never been particularly fond of actual roses.  Their scent reminds me of funerals, weddings and particularly bad dates.  That said, there is a deep red ink that I use from time to time when hand writing letters to people that is, indeed, rose-scented.  I have become accustomed to, and have even come to enjoy, ink-stained fingertips that smell faintly of petals.

This may simply be a part of the season of reconsideration has been enveloping me as of late.  I've been reconsidering aspects and entities in my life during the past few months- an experience quite different than regret or even changing one's mind:  Taking a few steps in one direction or another can alter the light cast on that which you are observing, and it is this illumination that I find myself enjoying.

-k.


 ****************

In other news, there will be a revival of Cabaret that will include Alan Cumming as the Emcee in 2014. Needless to say, if you place tickets in my eager little palm, I will go anywhere with you.

Dear Emcee I have always been in love with

(photo: Alan Cumming as the Emcee in Cabaret)

The Savored Blurs of Fascination

" "To tell what happened" is inconceivable and futile, or possible only as invention.  The idea of testimony is also futile and there has never been a witness who could truly fulfill his duty.  Anyway, you always forget far too many moments and hours and days and months and years, and the scar on a thigh that I saw and kissed every day for years during its known and lost time.  You forget whole years, and not necessarily the least important ones."

--J. Marías Dark Back of Time

The scent of pine and dirt has been rubbed deep into my clothing as of late.  I've been holing up; reading; writing. The images that are conjured around me leave their scents in my clothing and hair like campfire.

It has been enjoyable, to say the least.

With the time change comes the more dramatic descend of the dark. One can be watching the sky, feeling the slight sting reflection of the clouds in their eyes, only to blink, and open to a sheet of black.

(Did you hear it tonight? The moment you opened your eyes; the quick sound of a sheet pulled taut.)

(pause)

There is a paragraph from a book I am reading that I can't stop thinking about.

The sentence of it threading through my mind in this moment is this:

All anyone has to do is introduce an "as if" into the story, or not even that, all you need to do is use a simile, comparison or figure of speech ("he was acting like a jerk", "she flew into a rage"-- the kind of colloquial expression that belongs to the language more than to the speaker who chooses it, that's all it takes) and fiction creeps into the narration of what happened, altering or falsifying it.

The kind of colloquial expression that belongs to the language more than to the speaker who chooses it, that's all it takes. ("Crossed a line", "it is what I must do", "paint oneself into a corner")

This is what I keep thinking of.  These drops of dye into the water that unravel and spread.  These slight stand ins for communication.

These expressions that belong more to the language, than to the speaker who chooses them.  



-k.

(photo credit: billy kidd)

(scent: Norne, by Slumberhouse)