the habit of being

To be alive and trembling under the gravity of all times near and far is to be spinning in so many directions at once it seems that we are sitting quite still. I can see my heartbeat looking at my skin and it is so thin to hold in frantic force beating down the invisible walls crashing through door by door, yet I do not feel that I am spinning, but I am. The universe is a circus and I’m not even dizzy, just tired, physically relieved tonight, satisfied for the second. I’d state a formula but that may be to blunt, and I am slight of hand, slight of hint.

A hand? Give me yours. I miss a hand to claim, my own are not enough and I’d so like to be rid of them. But yes, give me yours and I will treasure it, press it to my cheek, kiss your fingertips one by one for hours, hours, and never ever let go. I won’t fall down from the endless twirl if you steady me one of these long centuries, while I explode and die out and invert all the darkness to weight. I was not meant for lightness, I give my light to you.

These is no day on the sun, I say, though others may disagree.

My eyes hurt.

[ I heard a most exquisite story yesterday about a man's friendship with a groundskeeper at Chartres. It was told in such a deep and knowing voice, accented and erudite. The whole world seems to echo in a voice like that. I wish the world would vibrate in my voice. Where is the world in such stale conversations as I have day by day? Where is the heart in tick-tocking awkward silences?

Could I somehow modify one of my genetic attributes, I would choose to make my brain function in the same manner when I am speaking that it does when I write. A cautionary fence is placed between what I think and what I communicate when the page and pen are snatched away from me, the letters merged into sound. The flow is halted, uneasy, inevitably inferior. I quite literally think differently when I am recording myself in print. It is as if a thought cannot truly mature until it has been written down, and until that moment it many times hides so well I do not know it is there. Upon my investigating it through writing it becomes so much more real and tangible. I can metaphorically touch it, fold it, mold it into a thesis, flesh it out into a story. It can be examined from all angles, studied from any number of perspectives other than that of a seventeen year old girl. If the same were true in speech, if I could process topics in such an in depth manner just by conversing about them, I think I'd find myself much happier in my relationships with my peers. In whole, my ability to quickly comprehend and digest material given to me would be quite increased. ]

As the hypothetical leaf slowly falls, cells divide and divide again under fingertips and before eyes, “a person” blinks x number of times a day, a hundred metaphors are created and broken, my doll (Esme) sits still upon my art table, eyes fixed in a wide stare, lips falsely moist, floppy hat flopped in precisely the same manner for weeks, porcelain hands gracefully (limply) touch the table, palms-up, pale, and breakable. My own more liquid palms, while more pink and less prone to crack, are more questionable - the fate line outreaches the life line considerably and the head line appears to be either nonexistent or too faint to be easily spotted. (Yes, the heart line is deeply and noticeably branched, but no one ever led me to believe it would be easy. I’m not even allowed to fall in love until I’ve completed graduate school, says my mother. The Indian professor finds undergrads unready to think, I suppose not even the thinkers are ready to love.) I see one vein, slightly blue, even in the dim light, and slight chipping of the nail polish, dark red, on my thumbnail. I quite adore my hands, I find them lovely and capable and poetic. I would have them talk for me. I would have them play scales on the skin of a lover.

Love? I know two strains of love, love in a minor chord and love in a major chord. One, painfully electric; the other, unbearably comfortable. Both are addictive, unrealistic, consuming. They refuse to be superimposed; it frightens me. Is love desire? Is love everything but? What does it mean? Question love, attempt to classify, dissect : feeling, art, vibration, chemical reaction, myth, blessing, enigma, curse. The more effort one puts into figuring it out the more tempted one will be to disbelieve it all. The more skeptical one is about love, the more affected one will be by it, the more hurt. Our philosophers, our scientists, our great lovers of logic are also our great romantics. It is the most lovely irony.

People play games as if they were part of life. The world may as well be a giant chess board.

A plain white sheet of paper with words typed across it (filling the page, plain black letters, small) is truly the loveliest, most inspiring thing. Before the first sentences are read and comprehended, the page contains all the most insightful, logically poetic, time shattering thought imaginable. The potential for all manner of beauty is packed into those black letters, spaces between, words yet unread, so neatly blocked off between one-inch margins on all sides. A page full of grammatical errors and trite redundancies, with no intellectual or emotional merit whatsoever even, is still indescribably engaging -before- it is read, sitting on a marble coffee table somewhere or tucked safely into a labeled manilla folder. Is it that a body of writing not yet titled is at once Anna Karenina, the Bible, and The Cat in the Hat? A body of text has life, it speaks to those around, calling them to read it, like magnetic poetry, words shout to be touched. Judgment comes about not until they are massaged, digested. Prior to that, the text may as well be sacred script. I must wonder if all people might simply assume that a hefty stack of typed pages must contain ideas, thought, truisms.

If anything in these years I’ve made things online I’ve learned that the web is entirely unlike print, and that one is silly who makes websites based on magazine spreads or such things. Still there is so much technical knowledge involved in actually using the web as the medium it was meant to be, I wonder if it is not better to simply put my black bits of text on a white page and hope that somewhere there is someone who might want to print it out. Online, plain black (#000000) text on a white (#ffffff) background is boring and plain. People want TV.

. . .

“You missed a nail.”

“Nah, the paint chipped off.”

“Now all the other girls will talk about you behind your back.”

. . .

Red-silver are my fingernails and pink are my hands tonight. It is now, this microscopic instant on my private sphere, as if my heart itself (my very center, more likely my brain than my heart, but I am sentimental and feel the beat strongly) were letting out a much-needed sigh and singing an aria all at once. I don’t often take notice of my sides, they are only products of engineering, precisely holding the rest of my body together, relatively straight, yet now I see my sides are quite exhausted. A slight tremor is still about, a trill on low F# (sharp), and it is in my sides that the echo seems to remain, bouncing back and forth like a neon vending machine rubber ball. In this after-feeling are all words and none, this is the paradigm of calm, much like what I once called floating. A breath means infinitely more (it truly does reach the entire body), a touch could send a crack down my spine, expanding somehow along all my capillaries until my body were as crazed as a dismantled clock.

To be truly aware, so far on the edge, one must be still, so still. (The slightest twitch might alter the trajectory of millions of tiny waves jumping about in my space. How many tangent lines does a human body create and break every second, with each pulse? Could one conceivably calculate the mean derivative of an orgasm?)

It strikes me that this flavor of reality is so close to that which follows and dreadful argument, or an eruption of tears, all is in turmoil, out of balance, and suddenly it is over, and for once one can really, clearly, think. It is this identical calm, only more dull, slower in coming, legato. I could never write even the simplest essay for school unless I got horribly upset about it first. Not until I’d had my mental entropy explosion time could I get myself composed enough to write, because afterward this detachment would step in and organize my thoughts in front of me, where I could see them for what they were, logically and in light.

Yes, this was true for years, until this term when I had to let it go due to the insane number of essays I’m expected to write (my body, my sanity, just couldn’t take it, the buildup to the calm).

Perhaps there is only a very limited number of ways a person can feel. In my case, there may be only two

Tonight I lay fully clothed under my dirty green comforter, turned upside down so it is really off-off-white, and read Virginia Woolf (With all her pretty, long sentences describing things in such a shockingly complete way, how she can use commas so well, as if they were actually part of the music and not simply breath marks or barlines. It just occured to me that my endless dots, in earlier years of online communication, were intended as the grammatical equivalent of fermatas, so maybe the reader would not forget my words too soon). Only fifty pages or so, but I should be reading about gel electrophoresis or the Sanger method instead, in much shorter and more pointed segments. All this after spending four hours on eight calculus problems, and whining about it, though I didn’t really mind, because math is afterall pretty, and someone like me can’t really tell with certainty that I’ve done anything wrong. It feels like time sacrificed to something horribly clean, I come out of it feeling refreshed, as if maybe some peasant girl sat about scrubbing my mind with a loofa for a few hours. Still one can see the necessity of To the Lighthouse after staring at numbers and things for so long.

“And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something - wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things - she never could… A heartless woman he called her; she never told him she loved him. But it was not so - it was not so. It was only that she could never say what she felt… Then, knowing he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him” (184-185).

Never for lack of elongated yearning, these hands, fingers extended toward the end, quiver, whorish red nails (number 147) and all. I stare at them myself, with a wondering look, Anne Frank eyes. And the end, my metaphorical piano, is a body. Affirmed, they are good piano hands. They do the ballet positions beautifully, gracefully, when the rest of me remains awkward and fat. Tapered white fingers, or quill pens, to draw those exquisite Zen landscapes down the back, using shadows as clouds. Yes, there are slight curves on that body, and yes, shadows are made, though at lesser angles, and I see, I see, I paint, I touch. - The picture in my mind.

I remember green lights and vertigo. All like the dream this morning where the phone rings just as my appeal is begun. I’ll never know my fate. That confusion is much like it, like the cat curled up in my stomach, a shiny black stray all bones and skin and light light sleep - the floating obbligato, a thin sheet of rest. A requiem of bird songs, a mosaic of voices make only an oddly close chord and I am so on edge and electric I can nearly see sparks. - The scene.

- - -

The Artist stands, amidst the clutter of discarded clothing, unfinished texts of questionable profundity, dirt and blur and fluorescent lighting at an angle from the solitary corner lamp, an unorganized table littered with guides to this and that, an old doll with sad eyes, the bed and its blood-stained sheet, holding a canvas that is not stretched quite tight enough, observing the figure she shall draw, darken, and paint. It seems this nude thing, fawning shame and modesty (hiding the unfathomable force of pride which catches her, keeping her here, before a friend who became at once a stranger as the robe slipped from her hands onto the dusty floor) is indeed lovely, exquisite. This overgrown nymph struggles to find a comfortable position in which to begin her journey toward stillness. The Artist watches (still), a hint of a smile forming, eyes turned at a slant view, forehead up for dignity, proud, in control. Lying back on the bed, touching the old brown spot with the back of her thigh, resting her head on a balled up forest green quilt, the Model asks silently for the Artist’s nod and approval, is granted that, and freezes, still as icebergs and all alive from the obvious scrutiny. She imagines her body breaking up into shapes, geometric, organic, and otherwise, curves, shadows, each shadow waltzing one-two-three one-two-three across her eyelids with the white ceiling as a spotlight and backdrop. I am a Thing, thinks she, motionless, and she, not the Artist, is content.

- - -

Art is messy, splattered with not only paint and oil but heterogeneous emotion disorganized and dangerous and tiring and dreadful. I dread being unable to begin, unable to continue, too blackened with the smut of it to see at all anymore. Art is seeing they say again and again and I feel I have seen many things and wish to see many more but these things will be ruined by the charcoaled smudges of my urgent fingertips as I reach and purloin and whore it all down to my level. Thankful for the filters, the shades, I will put down like the rest of the world to save my soul when no god will waste his time. Art is clouds of smoke, clouds of color, of line, of pixels, of words, of flesh. I will have my art on a table and drink it with fervor, yes, but I will not be so impure as to make it my body, my life. I will go instead where it is clean and white and understandable, logical and chic, bury myself in the light by day and take my fugues in dream form.

In the mean time, I will learn the secrets of the universe. I will study, be good. Instead of these muddled phrases I will write essays with clear theses, take endless notes, do my math.

- - -

Streams of consciousness tend to lead me to believe I shall never be a successful surrealist, as incongruous and oddly erotic my inner world may be at times. When faced with the tender task of uniting art and science, creativity and logistics, as I find myself most desperately seeking a path toward doing, I am most stunned, remembering at once a digital image I worked on using a certain set of floating numbers and mathematical symbols. I was easily stumped when presented with such a cerebral journey in the form of a visual art project, not that I am against mental gymnastics, quite the opposite, but somehow art seems to want to cradle itself ( in the fetal position, you guessed it) close to the side of my brain which embraces calm, meditativeness, stillness - the quiet path to knowing, as opposed to the active one that encompasses fierce study.

Often I find myself staring at the blank canvas perplexed. I separate quite distinctly the art of ideas and that of images. These worlds stay contained in separate jars of different shades of glass, resting on far away shelves in antipodic kitchens. I’m afraid of the single black dot in the center of the painting. I’m afraid of the part of me that will see the beauty in it, without reason, whether it is the dot of final truth, enlightenment, contentness, silence or the black dot of arrogance and vanity and sloth. I know I will not be able to accept it for what it is.

- - -

I take my science in tiny packages, minuscule and sharply organized. Orchestrated like a little meiotic symphony, everything is perfectly right. If it is not perfectly right it is perfectly wrong and even abnormalities are glowing white and amazing. Do not tell me I cannot save the world with my little moving specks. To save the world is not my goal, rather to save my brain from abstraction and anarchy and confusion. Art synectics is a science, to be sure, but it is far too obvious these days. I could be more subtle and calm looking through a microscope for hours, reading tiny print in an expansive library, counting drugged Drosophila.

I can’t spend my life trying to make things pretty. I am too far convinced that pretty things coming from me are artificial. Give me a medium that is already sound, preferably something I cannot maul, and let me simply arrange, uncover, report. I can have faith if I close my eyes.