the habit of being

Once, art was only words written in boxes outlined in black and pasted on mirrors, so the viewer would be sure to realize the work reflected himself. (Which words would I chose? Most commonly searched here - beauty and cock.) I believe it may just be headed that in that direction once again, and all the better, though it makes me nauseated, my hands aflutter.

Step down from the podium, and, a brief update: I’ve stopped reading Tolstoy, begun playing Parcheesi. Last night I got teary thinking about how beautifully perfect a cell is (and I said “I’d just like to listen to your heart beat for hours, and I’d like to tell you about cells”). That is what I respect most about myself, as funny as it sounds. According to online tests I am a Theravada Buddhist and a stoic, but we shall see. I am moving to New York City in August, and I see myself standing still and going all at once, because that is the impression NYC made on me the one and only time I visited, and that is what I need. I try to love lightly and with fervor. I feel good carrying my box of paints, and playing the piccolo part in “The Marriage of Figaro.” Lightness does not come easily. (And I forgive you all, even your pretending not to know vanity as I do.)

Once, art was only contrast, line versus color, space versus subject, light versus darkness (light versus heaviness, lightness versus weight).

Sitting on the yellow air-mattress, flipping through that art history text, fetched from the closet, I knew the relationship between brilliance and humility before Capitalized Concepts. There were hand dances, a language in gesture; I cannot remember the word for it. The bones in his hands are most exquisite, yet it slipped my mind completely that on the way back toward home, I wrote the word “intense” on his palm. How these things are odd.

Latest revelation: as humans, beings, we are overprone to confuse beauty with sadness. I see they are not always the same, and are very unlikely to be, really.

Sameness, complexity, is something I’d like to explore. Ellen tells me history is a fractal and it is not a hard concept to understand. Take a cross section of any part and you’ll find a microcosm of the whole. Those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat it, practically a formula, it is, to become folk-knowledge, yet a thing studied by immaculate academics in air-tight think-chambers.

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Ways of seeing. I’d aspire to create detail so profoundly. James photographs a hanger that could be fragile hips to hold, a light switch all too genuine. I feel my the centers of my hands running, falling down leaving invisible loops and arches on the plain white walls, and tiny bumps, flaws, tickle me, and my nerves. Axon, synapse. I am the anti-sterility. To move weakly. I’d like to be inspired, I’d like to see the atoms when I look at an object. The small will draw me in, as always.

I think you see the small in everything, and that is what makes the difference. My body wants so to be small. The rain may very well not have hands so tiny as I make mine out to be. Yes, I’d like to think Cummings would write a poem about me. Someone once wrote a sonnet about me; I think I might have it saved on my hard drive, but probably not.

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I have a list of environmental things to write about, later. Godiva chocolate will not pacify this craving of mine. I long for the beach and the sun baking me alive. Even for the burn I want the pressure of heat. Hansel and Gretel should have, perhaps, pushed me into the oven. Sylvia and I would then at least have something in common, thought she has been so long stolen and remote from me.

The blue lines keeping my black words in place are fading fast, for I splashed water on my notepad. I’m writing in the tub and I look down for a minute to see my body stretched out under the water, my legs so long with my feet under the tap (so far away), and minuscule bubbles clinging to my pubic hair, and my navel a shallow pool. It is all very calm, and I will not drop my pen, and I will not worry about the spitefulness of others. I will stretch and breathe again, all sympathetic and alone.