the habit of being

I walk down the hall with my secret two hundred dollar shoes, high-water jeans from 8th grade, little white ankle socks. The walls are big cement blocks painted a blurry grey. Day after day I walk along the cold plastic-esque floor, and chatty rude people bump into me, happy careless people don’t notice me, silly caring people smile at me. Sometimes I am dressed outrageously and people give me funny looks. I’ve worn feather boas, kitten ears, flower wreaths, fishnet stockings, neckties, slips, all manner of thrift-store dresses, designer silks, glitter, charcoal, acrylic paint, clay, scarves of every color, cashmere, calm, curls, and all the rest down these blank corridors. Then sometimes I wear the same pair of old jeans for two weeks and don’t wear make-up for a month. It is all the same, and maybe a part of my artifice, my old catchword. I always wanted this, my website, to be called “Art and Artifice.” Always the most fitting thing. Still, for a girl who can neither sing nor dance, I hold my own surprisingly well among the birds of the world. And yet.
“Is she angry at you?” he asked.
“She’s always angry at me,” I replied. And she might as well be anyone, might as well even be myself. My self.

- - -

Upon my entrance into real life, I shall wear yellow, suck up my shame, and breathe freely the lighter air. I say these things with stars in my eyes and water (salty as sushi, alliteration, simile ) dripping along where my cheekbones could be. I cannot decide how it is that I should feel, again, yes, again. I wonder still if I have lost my faith in thought, yet my emotions blur around, and I am left wondering down empty streets at three AM, a mail-order bride in disquise, an adult in sheep’s clothing, always a cherry. It is a curse that my life should always be about me, I am inclined to call auditions for a new protagonist. I would chose a pretty sex-worker, they are most easily glorified. We’ll not postulate about selling flowers on street corners, we’ll not magnify my metaphors tonight, and yet I imagine
1 “kitty”. sixteen, 5′ 11″, white, prostitute.

2 ducking always the touch of must and shall,
3 whose slippery body is Death’s littlest pal,

4 skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.

5 the signal perfume of whose unrepute
6 focusses in the sweet slow animal
7 bottomless eyes importantly banal,

8 Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
9 amused from time to time by clever drolls
10 fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
11 The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight

12 –beer nothing, the lady’ll have a whiskey-sour–

13 whose least amazing smile is the most great
14 common divisor of unequal souls. (e. e. cummings)

Skilled in quick softness. I want to say such things. I am, afterall, all wanting and hardly flesh. I was 5′11″ once, but then I became 5′10″, and some said I didn’t look tall in my photographs, and I say curse my photographs. They called me Kitty when I was thirteen. I will live only in Oriental mindsets, and my rooms will all be empty. Resolution #5.

- - -

When the music murged from Christian contemporary to elevator classical, the juvenile giggles from the back seats of the van faded away to murmurism, fragmentated run-on flutter misplaced in notes. The sounds must be connected before they are decipherably meaningless, I sat writing words in a scrambled script, jolted serifs concocted of friction, the wheels against cement, blue-grey interstate, with those green signs by and by. I wanted always a large book of my text, my script, smooth and long, just so I could admire the letters I had written over days and days, paying little attention to the words. I am all parts, smallness, interested only in cells, neither the kidney nor the heart can hold my attention. In the van, I had cramps, but they were not so severe, and almost comforting, a tight hug, honest, sincere.

- - -

Notes:

- a story without words
- include more bone / breasts
- also - the sex-based fitness plans
- wait to be acknowledged
- parenchyma, the judge, plegma, varenka
- Roth IRA
- Melville! dammit.
- 221
- LSAT
- dividend
- goodness….
- cherry, lemon, lime, grape, strawberry, raspberry, apple, orange, pineapple
- concept mapping: proton, energy, gene

- - -

A complaint: The deer outside the door to my room here at “the lodge” (Red Top Mountain) do not make up for the fact that the bathroom is overwhite, the water pressure a joke attempted red-faced by that mockery of a shower massager. And I must say, I really must say, that gift-wrapping one’s soap is really quite too much. Having to deal with soggy white paper on top of everything else, in the tiny hope-to-be-hygenic shower I can barely sit down in. And I must sit down, this body, not electric, not electronic, longs to sit and to be rained on.

In my favorite, stands a nude woman with a Parisian look about her, defined cheekbones, and a slight feather-lace draped around her neck. One could say it were a boa, one of the most delicate variety - and yet, boas are harsh and remind one of cheap prostitutes, Las Vegas showgirls, drag queens, but no, not whores like Kitty, Kitty wouldn’t wear a boa. The woman in the photo is so far from all that, but her eyes say “I know.” A shadow mimics the outline of her torso, soft curves, thin skin. Her name, too, is mine, spelled more simply. She is not Kitty but Catherine, more classical, more elegant. I feel almost a mockery of what she is, Catherine, in black and white, beautiful beside and open window, nude and calm. Perfectly captured. Completely had.

- - -

answered correctly:

2 questions - name the opera from brief description
3 questions - common organisms used in genetic research
fractals!
Sappho
Plato
Scott O’Dell
Lindberg
Pascal’s wager
House of Seven Gables, House of Mirth, House on Mango Street
Ang Lee
Starry Night
Andrew Wyeth
Darius I
King Lear
Narnia
et cetera

And as I lay there, my heart beat frantically, three dimensionally, under my skin, as if a thousand little boys with feathers in their hair and scowls across their faces beat drums within me, in my sinuses, along my arms, in the inners of every fold and crease. With each beat the temperature seemed to rise a degree, and I could feel the pink in my feet and the pink in my neck surrounding my body in ribbons. I could not have gotten up or I’d have fallen down from the sudden lack of pressure. Yes, and the walls of my face seemed to cave in on me, but it was a tiny place, such a tiny protective space, my shell had become, and this is what I saw, and this is what I dreamed behind my eyelids, hot, red, thin, illuminated.. much like a hand in the dark with a flashlight shining through.

My lover swims, quite literally, swims, into me. Freestyle, indeed, one hand in front of the other, as if it were the obvious thing to do, as if my body cavity were the safest place to hide. Centimeter by centimeter, the slow advance, membranes penetrated through one by one, whether by diffusion or osmosis you slip between the cracks. My organs are brushed aside as if made of clouds or tulle, and vessels cling like seaweed, strangling those fingers that slink down my sides from the inside, outlining those same figure eights I might have fashioned along someone else’s skin. I imagine the pulsing arteries are fun to poke at, make a yawn in my pounding pulse, still raising the mercury as my temples become moist. I start to fade out into some tropical bliss, as a sun worshipper in California might, with her tiny purple bikini and brown brown stomach. The heat soaks through me from the outside air as I am filled completely from the inside, until the entire body of another stretches out inside my own, and another heart beats there, overlapping systole and diastole and systole and diastole until all is too blurred to differentiate, nothing remains but a constant hum, and the very capillaries become tangled, and our skins make a double grocery bag, and our eyes see in the same direction, in the same shades and tints, the same hues.

And I find I am shaking terribly, involuntarily, as if this were all real, and not just an illusion sleeping between thin sheets.

. . .

Another day: “When are the wings of eggs visible?” and random absurdities.

On a mission to repair a broken VCR (Disillusioned with presenting the same lies day by day? Oh the drama! The drama! Where is Lady Macbeth when we need her? Where is Sylvia Plath with her icy voice?). They say there is a problem, that the pictures, the frames, they repeat endlessly, like songs on the radio, fashion advertisements. Back to my Prada collage, being not really finished after all, and still Uncle Leo (Tolstoy..) would not be proud, as I envy the intelligentsia he so despised, and have to wonder whether color and line (words and sentences, comma splices even) as tools, puzzle pieces, count in the scheme of things. Yes, I say, art is a mess for years and years, but this, but this is organized, somehow, right from the start. “You are very good at this,” they tell me, because it has no meaning beyond the form. Yes, I could make a meaning. It is my treatise on some oxymoron, organized chaos, contained entropy. Am I, could I possibly be saying, implying, hinting, that everything is meaningless? (But not to worry! It will all come right in the end! We’ll all DIE!! Seems less like Buddhism than bad existentialism, though I’m sure there’s something to be quoted, and the exclamation points didn’t help. It does reek of Camus…).

So help me, in all my idealism, I will always been able to see it another way, even the darkest most depressing of ways, and I will constantly doubt my instincts; this is my flaw, why I cannot make an argument, not even for the existence and value of beauty itself.

Let me just tell it how it is, for once, I am tired of the artificial blur. First of all, I know nothing. I do not think (Descartes would have me killed) and I feel through turned-down blinds, light streaming through in only in segments, never illuminating the whole of the emotion. To save myself, preserve my sanity? I don’t know.

I’d like to write honestly of some people I know, some people I once knew. I’d like to revisit some snapshots. I suppose that would just be too real, so instead I will paint my nails that dark dark red, because before there was Tolstoy or Varenka or the cold, there was a nail polish color called “Russia” that I just had to have.

To explore medium-sized navy polka dots on a transparently thin silk skirt, mid-calf-length:

First ponder: the way a masculine hand can rest on a feminine thigh, even lower, near the knee, even through clothes. They can be transparently thin as mentioned, or rough as old art-jeans with splatters for dots. These are the kind that aren’t flattering at all, too loose in the rear due to gauntass disease and the legs just can’t be narrow enough. The thickness of the waist is accentuated, when you’ve always wanted a waist like a sheet of paper or a drinking straw or something, anything, insignificant. Even so, yes, you’re wearing them dirty for days. Still he touches her leg with such a glaringly possessive expression just shining from every blue vein, tiny hair, conspicuous bone. It is obvious in the way the thumb will rub back and forth, tiny motion, maybe in a slightly circular pattern, saying something of I own you, something of I am you, something of I cherish you, something of I’ll protect you, something of I want you, now.

Then: the texture of the skin beneath, and how it adds to things, and the warmth, and the yearning. The way legs are for wrapping around things. And how they can be so long.

The art-jeans are mine, folded up in an old drawer somewhere, with my favorite art-t-shirt, with just the right combination of smeared fingerprints along the hem. The silk polka dots are children of a stranger, it is the silhouette of some skinnyprettygirl’s thigh in my visage, not my own, and that hand belongs to no lover of mine, and oh how I would like to break his wrist, to smash them both into atoms, and scream to all in the theatre that my hands are like that too, only more fragile, and I have owned hands like that, worshipped hands like that, prayed both with and for hands like that.

. . .

Make us a little house with a plant and a good rug, or an apartment in New York City. Make it the tiniest place in the world, with room only for two hearts, four hands, and the beginning of light. A corner to hide in, but so close it’s not truly hidden, and a shower, where I can sit with my eyes pressed hard against my knees, watching darkness and capillary lightning, as the water streams down over me, a waterfall in a cherry I always said, and some things never change. I’ll lean back and let the hot water massage my sinuses, let it fill my mouth, and then spit it out against the tile, and you’ll be somewhere close, somewhere I’ll always be able to reach you. Everything will be colors, red for Mondays, teal for Tuesdays, and I’ll no longer be the only one to see them. (Maybe we’ll list the Good Words of the Day on the walls: lachrymose, parenchyma… )

No one else has ever seen as much as you, I know, I just know, because you look at me like you understand, and no one else ever has. Something about the way you take pictures of ordinary things, it makes it seem like nothing could ever be ordinary to you, least of all me, because you see every tiny thing no else notices, and no, I am not the same when we’re apart. So make us a cardboard box in the middle of the street to get rained on, or a hole in the ground where we can sit and read poems to one another, because neither of us knows how to say it, and both of us are still afraid.

. . .

In a past life I may have been a mock Spanish dancer, with some fake red flowers in my dyed-black hair (not in a gothic way, oh no, not like a raven’s feathers, but like something more permanent, black automobile touch-up paint). I might have moved in a way that wasn’t stilted, I might have had love affairs with strangers and enjoyed it. I might not have been so sensitive, and maybe I never worried about the reasons for making art. Maybe I kept a journal I let no one read, maybe I was content. I bet when I was a mock Spanish dancer I never took pictures of myself naked, and if I did, it never occurred to me to show them to anyone else. Maybe my waist was small and my breasts were perfect, maybe I had very white teeth. If my eyes were the sort that look all the more lovely in black and gold frocks, I probably dressed them every morning and never checked to see that the lines weren’t smeared, because I didn’t need an excuse to look at myself, and I didn’t need to tie cherry stems in knots with my tongue. No one needed to tell me I was a good lover, or that I had the capacity to become one over time, or that no, I really wasn’t just making a fool of myself all those years, all those dances. Just a thought.

( In reality I have Tereza’s view of polygamy, it would tear me apart. But for hours I stab myself (metaphorically) for needing this website and for needing other people in general when I make things (I call my art “things” because I don’t always presume so much). I know it to be infinitely more pure, more right, more real to make things solely for the sake of making them. To write only because I must. And it is true that I must, but why must I put those words, these words, here, out in the light, when I could keep them safe and free of misunderstanding, keep myself from prostitution, just by letting them lay unread by anyone? Why can’t I do that, when it seems so easy, so simple? I have tried, oh have I tried. This upsets me more than any other flaw, and here I sit whining about it, knowing somewhere someone will read my silly pleas and maybe, just maybe, relate to them. This, my beloved audience, is why I can’t dance. )

. . .

From circles to squares

My new project, vapid and clean. Like I said, design is much cleaner than art (sorry the image is blurry and glare-ish):

(img lost to time)

96 2.5″x2.5″ squares. 22 are blank. The images are from 2000 Prada advertisements (the year 2000, not literally). Still working on the “theme.” Uncle Leo would not be proud. Oh, Uncle Leo would not be proud. Composition, juxtaposition, still I hide my face in shame. Uncle Leo would not be proud.

Still, simplicity. Yet I think it is wrong to say simplicity is nothing but the acknowledgment of complexity. There is a certain amount of breaking down that must be done, actively, say the putting of things in squares. Not a fight against entropy, I don’t mean that, but rather a quest for contentment. Even meditation must be practiced. I’m already contradictory (When E, lover of chaos theory, said she was all about complexity, I said I was all about simplicity, adding later the addendum that they were the same thing, really.), but I know it is not so easy, even given the Eastern obsession, pearls and scrolls, and how things like Crouching Tiger… (I could think of nothing but the past) seem so real to me, oddly. Duality is a force as thick as shells, each infinitely small.

Real art is more like integrals, only the opposite. Revolve the image about the abscissa and find the volume of the solid using the washer method. I still have this crazy calculus fetish, though my math instruction has always been horribly inferior.

real science (about the closest I get to humor)
ERROR: MT and TM were rather prone to knocking their little plant baby out of its potometer, sending it screaming to the cold hard labroom floor. We probably all screwed up reading the little numbers correctly from time to time; I know my eyes begin to fail me. D moved (”slightly tilted”) the fan in the middle of the wind experiment, throwing the readings off at the beginning. There might have been some air-bubblage in the potometer tubes. M and I probably breathed in the presence of some important lab apparatus, throwing the readings off at least 20%, the mark of the lab-retard. Red stars flash before my eyes.

. . .

I’m in the den watching a pretty movie with a lot of sex scenes, and the rest of my family is in the kitchen making sandwiches and soup. My little brother walks in periodically. Shots of a woman in orgasm, she is nude, moaning. (I took my own orgasm-photos, you know. Thought I looked rather typical. Maybe we have these expressions melted into us at an early age.) Someone calls from the other room, asking if he wants to play a game. I feel silly, like I should explain myself to them, and yet I’m in that floaty movie-watching state, wanting to be something art-like. They aren’t really talking to me today anyway. It is still odd. Worth mentioning, though I did a poor job of it. There are no moors here, not a castle falling down, or any hopes of winter cold. The rain falls in such a way that it seems to know sadness without symbol is twice as bad. No one is yelling at me, yet the echoes still remain. Contrary to what some may think, I do not keep secrets. The secret-keeper is a dominatrix all in black, when it is all I can do to find a hand to slap me.