the question of distraction, or is it defining fulfillment/changes in that definition?
we're always wondering how we're going to survive. it excites me that there is at least one person (note: not necessarily the correspondant, the receiver of this letter. another person. and a boy to boot) who wants to understand as i do. how to SURVIVE REACTION, and if there is a way to make it so the answer is NOT A COP OUT, not a relinquishing of meaning, not a putting to sleep. something that does not involve anesthesia.
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 05:38:41 -0500
To: p
From: m <beestung@myself.com>
Subject: i've got a headache. but i feel all rushing; don't have the dictionary.
...
it's some sort of ... always hesitant place, move, the string that quivers, keeps you in flux between being swallowed up into an abyss and returning home quietly, neatly.
it's cliche, but i think of how a bunch of my friends handled red house painters the first time they were exposed to it, to songs like those off down colorful hill and whatnot. julia put it something like, "o god. music, no...murder." yes. i realize how teenage and impressionable we can be, but that reaction still counts. for so much. falls ago, things were always breaking off. and just when i would think there was nothing left to crush, there was and it did. loud snaps slicing through black air.
i want to say to myself, there must be a way to come out of it alive. whatever it may be. but i read all those who will confirm otherwise--roth and dramatists. nothing safe, nothing safe, there is no one what will take care of you. ...the quivering never stops, i don't think, unless something snaps and you DON'T survive, to the fullest extent of that notion. so what is there to do? always this issue of being open to the most beautiful and horrifying things being alive offers, but thus allowing yourself to basically...to basically live with little armor. vulnerable to all kinds of injuries whether with blunt objects/thuds to the head or sparks given off or even shots to the back or to the face. is there some other way to be.
and then there's the fate that seems somehow to a romantic mind worse by comparison, or at least not better--you know. this ... putting to sleep that seems to become more and more apparent everywhere lately. anesthesia. leisure. there was a period when it seemed to be everywhere, like an affront to my face. carl steadman (http://freedonia.com) said somewhere a bit about how there are times when he wished he wanted the four kids the dog and the SUV, because then he wouldn't worry that the drugs make him stupid. and when i was maybe 17 i would stumble upon articles about intense heroes who'd all but torn their skin off as offering, i'd read about how they'd found self preservation and a slick sort of easing of the pain. greg dulli told spin that zoloft saved his life. pj harvey mentioned how she could hear how, on to bring you my love, she was "at the very bottom of the barrel." and how since moving to new york she was going out, to parties, and meeting warm people to care about, and how the notion she had once employed that demanded bruises and sacrifice to create...how the idea of self destruction as connected to art...how now she knew that was, of course, ridiculous and completely unnecessary. melodrama questions again.
and this is not a little upstart who's never known anything sneering at people really out there. nono. i JUST WONDER. is it a matter of getting old? wounds easing up a bit, letting things go, possible things coming by and passing them up, finally, getting tired enough to pass them up, to know better. i think about that all the time. because for a while i had to be focused only on regeneration, on meager re...re proliferation. filling in gaps, feeding a growing body. not letting in harm. and it was such an experience, and i wasn't used to that sort of mindset--it was so new. and maybe i never quite made it mine; the past fall, the itching and the question and the mystery comes up, again. like it was on hiatus, waiting for me to get better so it could come back and spar again. and if it is all about mettle (a great words, the one you've used), i keep telling myself to tell myself i simply don't have it. okay. because if i don't have it, no question, then i can go back to studying for quizzes and scheming for a "career" and forming businesslike associations. (that sounds so pathetically...snooty, but maybe you know where i'm coming from, it's not elitism so much as difference and ongoing feeling of being so foreign.)
but this is a problem--i may indeed not be strong enough to let art consume me, but i can't return to something else either. or at least, not yet. it doesn't work--been trying...there are jobs involving smiling, involving "people skills," involving skirts and stockings. and distribution lists and office mail boxes. and there is school itself--will this be 4 years of discussion and growth of the inner, or is it going to be training/"vocational" in a sense? i'm flimsily trying for the latter, which has meant avoiding temptations like the writers series and the evening lectures and workshops. or even meeting people who love writing, who are working towards being that...it's silly i know. but i avoid it because it is not, at this point, set on "all" in the binaries of "all of none" proposition. and if it can't be about throwing oneself into it, all-fashion, it creaks, it makes rusty hinge noises, it itches and stings. they don't want half-in-it hopeful-despites anyway. it is a club of its own, yes. for just the reasons you mention, the art as needing that. needing that commitment.
so, what to do. i don't know yet how to live my day to day without things like music that breaks inside, and nearly anonymous chapbooks in the mail, and evenings with table talk hot food and drink and soothing convergance over art, and letters to split your chest open. and books that leave you stumbling, unable to breathe w/that-was-perfectly-fine-before air. shoes too tightly laced, a heart with one river which beats noticeably against the insole. these are the things i still need, i still scrounge up. a nasty addiction but more a tender and decked love affair, the kind one has with a raggedy, mouthy, penniless woman on the street. it's ugly but so endearing. and you'll always go back, you'll always remember. and others will click their tongues at you, say "huh" and "why" in more civilized flourescent ways.
when i am lonely or restless or unable to understand why, i go back, sometimes indirectly, to all of those things i consider to be art. the thing you think about, think months later when you should be complacent, think "maybe, maybe..."
i can't think of any other reason why i go looking for something different at 4 in the morning sometimes, randomly. it feels like something's missing. nothing glossy or glamorous or fit for tv. just...something maybe remembered, sensed in the air years ago, when every moment held promise enough to rattle you, really put your life in danger by changing what could be and who is. in a life. just a tiny life.
bryce said once, it sounded like what i mean is. "it sounds like you're saying you miss being delusional. so do i."
and of course i maybe confuse "being young" with "art." funny and troubling, that.
but art can be so old, creaking in the inner. i don't see it as all about life nor all about death, one or the other. mary daly says the problem with western, with european/american art is it's obsessed with death; it is necrophilic (form?). there does tend to be a sort of...haughtiness, or unspoken dismissal of the teeming and celebratory. i wonder what that's all about, still, but i also don't think it's so cut and dry, critiquing it...it doesn't have to necessarily be about newness and excitement, nor jadedness and decay. exclusively i mean.
/
anyway.
i don't know how to relinquish everything "normal" healthy and warm for this wild myth that doesn't even promise rebirth in phoenix fashion, this "life around art." (i sound melodramatic. eh.) but i can't be without some desperation, or that urgency, the bright blinking eyes and the gnawing issue of starvation or lack, and swells too. the tumultuousness, the chiding/reminding of cycles or at least of inconsistency. that nothing is static or certain. how do i have both? is that a cop out, to want to know, to try to find a way to touch art on the face but live to tell about it? it seems like some manage it--there are individuals who seem to have accomplished this, and that contributes to the hope down in me--but it may be a matter of inner or innate strength in some, too.
there is a desire to be in love with everything but not go insane. to survive heady reaction but not grow bored or listless. it sounds like the problem of marriage, abstractly. (laugh)
roxanne quoted some poem, with its final swift statement, "but i won't, i won't die for poetry, sylvia." there is a need to defy art, so defiant itself. to say, no, you can't take __ from me, only i possess my judgment; i give it away as i choose to, you cannot demand it of me, exactly...the self struggles, protests, resists against being consumed and dissolved.
of course, there's also this: to believe that art was never about that, that some particularly pathetic drama queens and teens in particular have, from their culture and their own need to fuck shit up because of their surburbs, because of their easy lives, constructed this ultimatum that never existed, only to squawk and wring their hands over it, so preoccupied little gets done...i wonder though. where does the tension felt come from, then? some of it, at least, feels valid. somehow...
if art is something that cannot be put away for a time, i mean, can't be tidily ... a utility for now and maybe not then, like other aspects of life...what is there to do? jump wholeheartedly? ...
i can't just stick it in a drawer and forget, not really. so far. and if i find a way too--that terrifies and dismays me as much as jumping itself. because it will mean i have forgotten the way to it, to meaning, that maybe part of my heart has dried up and the amnesia has set in permanently. i won't remember all those nights meant, those parking lots, this record. who will mourn the loss? i won't remember. i won't remember.
but so far, i do remember, even when i go periods "not doing it," "not getting involved." it comes back for me still. which hurts, but is also secret relief in that it assures me i'm still wide eyed.
...
questions i have.
...
i'm way off from where i started. and it's going to be five in the morning, and i have morning classes, so it's time to wring out last night's sadness and find something resembling breakfast. a little early, but it'll give me time to relax a bit.
mb
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 05:38:41 -0500
To: p
From: m <beestung@myself.com>
Subject: i've got a headache. but i feel all rushing; don't have the dictionary.
...
it's some sort of ... always hesitant place, move, the string that quivers, keeps you in flux between being swallowed up into an abyss and returning home quietly, neatly.
it's cliche, but i think of how a bunch of my friends handled red house painters the first time they were exposed to it, to songs like those off down colorful hill and whatnot. julia put it something like, "o god. music, no...murder." yes. i realize how teenage and impressionable we can be, but that reaction still counts. for so much. falls ago, things were always breaking off. and just when i would think there was nothing left to crush, there was and it did. loud snaps slicing through black air.
i want to say to myself, there must be a way to come out of it alive. whatever it may be. but i read all those who will confirm otherwise--roth and dramatists. nothing safe, nothing safe, there is no one what will take care of you. ...the quivering never stops, i don't think, unless something snaps and you DON'T survive, to the fullest extent of that notion. so what is there to do? always this issue of being open to the most beautiful and horrifying things being alive offers, but thus allowing yourself to basically...to basically live with little armor. vulnerable to all kinds of injuries whether with blunt objects/thuds to the head or sparks given off or even shots to the back or to the face. is there some other way to be.
and then there's the fate that seems somehow to a romantic mind worse by comparison, or at least not better--you know. this ... putting to sleep that seems to become more and more apparent everywhere lately. anesthesia. leisure. there was a period when it seemed to be everywhere, like an affront to my face. carl steadman (http://freedonia.com) said somewhere a bit about how there are times when he wished he wanted the four kids the dog and the SUV, because then he wouldn't worry that the drugs make him stupid. and when i was maybe 17 i would stumble upon articles about intense heroes who'd all but torn their skin off as offering, i'd read about how they'd found self preservation and a slick sort of easing of the pain. greg dulli told spin that zoloft saved his life. pj harvey mentioned how she could hear how, on to bring you my love, she was "at the very bottom of the barrel." and how since moving to new york she was going out, to parties, and meeting warm people to care about, and how the notion she had once employed that demanded bruises and sacrifice to create...how the idea of self destruction as connected to art...how now she knew that was, of course, ridiculous and completely unnecessary. melodrama questions again.
and this is not a little upstart who's never known anything sneering at people really out there. nono. i JUST WONDER. is it a matter of getting old? wounds easing up a bit, letting things go, possible things coming by and passing them up, finally, getting tired enough to pass them up, to know better. i think about that all the time. because for a while i had to be focused only on regeneration, on meager re...re proliferation. filling in gaps, feeding a growing body. not letting in harm. and it was such an experience, and i wasn't used to that sort of mindset--it was so new. and maybe i never quite made it mine; the past fall, the itching and the question and the mystery comes up, again. like it was on hiatus, waiting for me to get better so it could come back and spar again. and if it is all about mettle (a great words, the one you've used), i keep telling myself to tell myself i simply don't have it. okay. because if i don't have it, no question, then i can go back to studying for quizzes and scheming for a "career" and forming businesslike associations. (that sounds so pathetically...snooty, but maybe you know where i'm coming from, it's not elitism so much as difference and ongoing feeling of being so foreign.)
but this is a problem--i may indeed not be strong enough to let art consume me, but i can't return to something else either. or at least, not yet. it doesn't work--been trying...there are jobs involving smiling, involving "people skills," involving skirts and stockings. and distribution lists and office mail boxes. and there is school itself--will this be 4 years of discussion and growth of the inner, or is it going to be training/"vocational" in a sense? i'm flimsily trying for the latter, which has meant avoiding temptations like the writers series and the evening lectures and workshops. or even meeting people who love writing, who are working towards being that...it's silly i know. but i avoid it because it is not, at this point, set on "all" in the binaries of "all of none" proposition. and if it can't be about throwing oneself into it, all-fashion, it creaks, it makes rusty hinge noises, it itches and stings. they don't want half-in-it hopeful-despites anyway. it is a club of its own, yes. for just the reasons you mention, the art as needing that. needing that commitment.
so, what to do. i don't know yet how to live my day to day without things like music that breaks inside, and nearly anonymous chapbooks in the mail, and evenings with table talk hot food and drink and soothing convergance over art, and letters to split your chest open. and books that leave you stumbling, unable to breathe w/that-was-perfectly-fine-before air. shoes too tightly laced, a heart with one river which beats noticeably against the insole. these are the things i still need, i still scrounge up. a nasty addiction but more a tender and decked love affair, the kind one has with a raggedy, mouthy, penniless woman on the street. it's ugly but so endearing. and you'll always go back, you'll always remember. and others will click their tongues at you, say "huh" and "why" in more civilized flourescent ways.
when i am lonely or restless or unable to understand why, i go back, sometimes indirectly, to all of those things i consider to be art. the thing you think about, think months later when you should be complacent, think "maybe, maybe..."
i can't think of any other reason why i go looking for something different at 4 in the morning sometimes, randomly. it feels like something's missing. nothing glossy or glamorous or fit for tv. just...something maybe remembered, sensed in the air years ago, when every moment held promise enough to rattle you, really put your life in danger by changing what could be and who is. in a life. just a tiny life.
bryce said once, it sounded like what i mean is. "it sounds like you're saying you miss being delusional. so do i."
and of course i maybe confuse "being young" with "art." funny and troubling, that.
but art can be so old, creaking in the inner. i don't see it as all about life nor all about death, one or the other. mary daly says the problem with western, with european/american art is it's obsessed with death; it is necrophilic (form?). there does tend to be a sort of...haughtiness, or unspoken dismissal of the teeming and celebratory. i wonder what that's all about, still, but i also don't think it's so cut and dry, critiquing it...it doesn't have to necessarily be about newness and excitement, nor jadedness and decay. exclusively i mean.
/
anyway.
i don't know how to relinquish everything "normal" healthy and warm for this wild myth that doesn't even promise rebirth in phoenix fashion, this "life around art." (i sound melodramatic. eh.) but i can't be without some desperation, or that urgency, the bright blinking eyes and the gnawing issue of starvation or lack, and swells too. the tumultuousness, the chiding/reminding of cycles or at least of inconsistency. that nothing is static or certain. how do i have both? is that a cop out, to want to know, to try to find a way to touch art on the face but live to tell about it? it seems like some manage it--there are individuals who seem to have accomplished this, and that contributes to the hope down in me--but it may be a matter of inner or innate strength in some, too.
there is a desire to be in love with everything but not go insane. to survive heady reaction but not grow bored or listless. it sounds like the problem of marriage, abstractly. (laugh)
roxanne quoted some poem, with its final swift statement, "but i won't, i won't die for poetry, sylvia." there is a need to defy art, so defiant itself. to say, no, you can't take __ from me, only i possess my judgment; i give it away as i choose to, you cannot demand it of me, exactly...the self struggles, protests, resists against being consumed and dissolved.
of course, there's also this: to believe that art was never about that, that some particularly pathetic drama queens and teens in particular have, from their culture and their own need to fuck shit up because of their surburbs, because of their easy lives, constructed this ultimatum that never existed, only to squawk and wring their hands over it, so preoccupied little gets done...i wonder though. where does the tension felt come from, then? some of it, at least, feels valid. somehow...
if art is something that cannot be put away for a time, i mean, can't be tidily ... a utility for now and maybe not then, like other aspects of life...what is there to do? jump wholeheartedly? ...
i can't just stick it in a drawer and forget, not really. so far. and if i find a way too--that terrifies and dismays me as much as jumping itself. because it will mean i have forgotten the way to it, to meaning, that maybe part of my heart has dried up and the amnesia has set in permanently. i won't remember all those nights meant, those parking lots, this record. who will mourn the loss? i won't remember. i won't remember.
but so far, i do remember, even when i go periods "not doing it," "not getting involved." it comes back for me still. which hurts, but is also secret relief in that it assures me i'm still wide eyed.
...
questions i have.
...
i'm way off from where i started. and it's going to be five in the morning, and i have morning classes, so it's time to wring out last night's sadness and find something resembling breakfast. a little early, but it'll give me time to relax a bit.
mb