my, oh my...

i haven't updated in a while. i haven't had much to stew about.

however, i'm hoping to get some poetry or the beginnings of poetry in my hj class tomorrow (3 hours... grarr).

i've come to be confident that good things can and do happen.

frustration

This was supposed to be a concept elaboration, but I ended up going off on a tangent. I've been feeling very frustrated lately, and I guess I was needing to get it out in some way or another (and trying to learn guitar is additional frustration rather than expression--unless you count a high action twanging fourth string as a channel). Anyway, this is more of a rant than a work, but I need to put something up here. (Eek... I just realized every sentence has the same syntax. Can I blame it on being tired for now?)

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1/26/09

Every thing left undone is an image trace. The shadow that never quite makes it to completion. The stark peripheral ghosts are the ones that pull the most. The beauty of a pale hand gliding in the light of night cannot imitate the light motion that preceded it, but it is all that can be seen.

What happens to the light that fails to reach us—due not to distance but to our narrow vision? Will we turn and face it later? The right shade of night, a repeated posture leading to a moment reincarnated.

It’s the soft focus motion preceding hard reality that I am looking for. The thing is: soft focus can never be the focus. Soft focus is for yearbook pictures of acne-marked high schoolers made glamorous. Soft focus is for Hallmark commercials—red poppies, green grass, golden puppies. Soft focus is when I take my glasses off in the almost dark. Soft focus is unseeing and unseen.

Soft focus is captured by thick-skinned 35-mm film and matted with black paper. The image has no context and is allowed to make real impact by forsaking reality. The blur of a dancer’s leg betrays beauty, but it is also a still life by its own right. A span of seconds is crushed into the moment it takes for the photograph to reach the brain. Soft focus is the three dimensional, or even the four dimensional, squeezed down to two.

So what happens to those dimensions shed? What if they were to stay behind to form the negative space of a moment of memory? Could it continue on according to its own will?

The air above the dancer’s leg pushes back, and a knee bends. What happens to the angles that are never arrived at? The tasks? The healing?

Is there a world where people dance backwards and all the negative space that builds up maintains the separation of individuals? Lovers back down hesitantly. Dismount. Dress with experienced yet unnaturally shy eyes turned away. Mechanical, angular contact—no collapsing into a body lest a body be given meaning, life, soft focus. Back up onto the stage to make perfectly isolated angles. Intersecting lines are too traditional, too comfortable.

What happens when a soft focus instant of a person joins this world? Where does a person defined by the soft motion of a jaw nestling into a neck fit into a modern dance formed of points A, B, C, D, etc. with no AB, no BC, no CD, no Detc.? Can she make the image traces of a gliding fingertip connect the dots and ruin the fractured dance? What happens when the points move and lack the motion to guide her to their momentary destinations?

Perhaps I have gone too far. I am a soft focus, near-sighted girl, and, ironically, the glasses that bring points into focus also work to cancel out the periphery. I cannot balance on a point; I’m far too traditional, a creature of comfort. I form a triangle with my love and my mind. Regardless, I have found myself in this strangely pointed angle-dance. My love has collapsed, and I am acutely pained by my awareness that I am a painfully acute angle—without a line to bring me from one place to another, just a sense of falling into a violent mind-ocean without a life vest.

Can I go home now?

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Once again, comments rock my world. (Thank you, Michael Jackson.)

Rehab?!

I'm popping Reese's peanut butter cups like a raver pops X.
read: I really don't want to write this paper.

(Arghhhh...)

Say Uncle.

I decided to go to sleep about 45 minutes ago, which (of course) meant anything but that would happen. Instead I ended up writing this poem.
______________________________
"Say Uncle."

I am not a part of you, and you are not a part of me.
I say that it’s sad, but, to live, that’s the way it must be.

I had fallen for years yet could never find the ground.
And then a shoulder shared happily, a shelter sound.

You saw the gravity in me, and you were pulled.
You saw the force beyond me, and quick grew cold.

I don’t float on air; I descend through: mile forty and one.
Strata of air, milestones of fear, block light from the sun.

You find the ground on which you stand erodes, and to me you wave.
But to one fallen from the sun, sight lies near: this far gesture won’t save.

A touch will not reach; kind eyes cannot this gap breach.
The only tool to save us now is painful speech.

Say Uncle.
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As you might have guessed, poems aren't exactly my forte. (Not that I really have one, but it's nice to imagine that I'm good at something.) Anyway, when I do write poems they never rhyme. Another rule broken--although maybe the last line can be my safeguard. I tried to keep the consonants within the couplets fairly even. Does it seem that this led to awkward phrasing/description? I can't see any particular place that this happened, but I knew my intended meaning, so it would be rather unnatural for me to say, "Oh, that's weird. What the hell is meant by this?" (All things considered.) It started out coming from an awareness of a battle of prides, but I didn't want to discount the origin, and so it became a sort of love poem. Comments and criticism would be awesome, especially since this is relatively new ground for me.

x a.h.

A Sight Seen

I was walking to work this morning in the frigid cold when I noticed something. It's about that time of year when the grass isn't looking so good and the soil looks bland and dead. I noticed a patch of said soil in the shape of a heart, and it made me think.
Is the heart a place where nothing can grow? The first part of the body to shut down when the cold front hits? It seems about right. I took it personally. Here's the barren ground of my heart, and here is all the life outside of it.
I know it's silly to go off on such a tangent upon seeing a mere patch of dirt and dust, but, in the end, isn't that what a heart is?

x a.h.
(On the bright side, I guess this means my mind is working again.)

here's a fun one...

So the happiness has subsided--the productivity, too, as my lack of posts in the past month might indicate. My mind has been on a more degenerative path. I don't know that I would call this prose, but it's not necessarily indicative of how strongly I'm thinking. (I'm not so much an anarchist as I am a person who mocks the intent of anarchy.)

________________________

Don’t be disappointed. Or do—it doesn’t really matter anyway. What I’m about to say is nothing new. It’s been said before, and it will be said again. It’s a funeral toll shouting over the sidewalks on which we walk, the streets we get stuck on. Still, not everybody will listen to it. There are those who take the message to heart and some who merely dance to each note that sounds.

What are we doing? What have we been doing? We’ve been making progress. Damn the archaic structures! To hell with tradition! We’re living in a world where the rules don’t work. We can marry an appropriate member of the opposite sex at 27 years of age and have 1.5 children, and we won’t be happy. So what do we do? We get rid of marriage. It’s a rule, and it’s not working. We modernize. We start revolutions. We throw out our morals, our values, our ethics. They’re old, obsolete. But we don’t replace them with anything. We leave the space open. Rules don’t work, but when we abolish them, we only succeed in making worse ones. We break what we have made, and we relish the destruction. Damn! This institution has Fucked me over, so destroy it. So what’s worse? Giving up or continuing to try—imprisoning ourselves in the process? Damn good survival instinct there. Live another day; be cut another way. Now we embrace the moment; dance to the note. Don’t look down. You’ll step into your grave soon enough.
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So I showed this to a friend, and we had a long talk about modernism, postmodernism, and different reactions. I've always felt that meaning in life if fabricated and that much of this depends on how able people around you (and circumstances) are to fit into this scheme. (Basically: the fantasy not being refuted, or being embraced) I think the turn to nostalgia is the realization that the new rules aren't working either. People knew the old ones weren't working but weren't necessarily able to completely trash the old value system behind those rules. Unfortunately, old values don't fit in with "living in the moment," and we end up lost in our search for meaning in actions that we won't even let ourselves attach meaning to. The longing for meaning and the acceptance of meaningless don't mesh, and the result is a world fraying at the edges.
I think it's important to recognize that this is not a new phenomenon. I'm fairly certain every generation experiences this: idealism and disillusionment. I'm still not quite sure what comes out of it. I can't say that the meaning we place in things gets us anywhere, but I'm afraid to say that it gets us nowhere.

So, yeah, there's a terribly disorganized, emo-type post for you.

x a.h.

headphone baby

Happy again. Also: trying to write a paper again. So, I wrote a poem instead.

headphone baby

headphone wire
an umbilical string
birthing and being born to
music
words in, thoughts out
thoughts in, words out
free at the edges
mixing
music, my mother
my daughter, music

(Psst... I love comments. They make me feel validated. Not really... but... a little bit?)

x a.h.

P.S. I feel like I should try to draw this. I kind of see a buddha-esque abstract baby. Kind of psychedelic. This actually came from me accidentally sitting on my wire (because I'm a mess like that) and being like "hey..." So yeah, now I've destroyed any sense of sophistication that a random person reading this blog might have been tempted to attribute to me.

Yup, definitely flattering myself there...