what you resist persists

…

nave of the apparition looks like…

Hello, it is morning & I’m going to talk to you about spirituality– maybe. Devin& I were supposed to go to a Zen thing this morning but he was having trouble breathing while I dreamt about Christ Church & K. for likely the fifth night in a row. Still not sure what I should be getting from these dreams. Mostly they’re pissing me off.

I have a reminder on my wall that tells me to listen.

Parts I understand: a lack of closure, certainly. The abruptness. & perhaps, as I look back, I see that I, personally, as a sixteen year old, acted in a way that should make me feel embarrassed. Immodesty, the glow of a “strict father” worldview glossing my words at church. Okay to a degree because Episcopalians believe in faith, not works, though many have the heart to work… shouldn’t get stuck on details.

What do I have to admit to make these go away? Will confessing all the little details make me learn what I need to any better? Yes, I wanted to be like you, so graceful, giving, discriminate, tough… some of these qualities continue to inform “the person I want to be,” which is no longer based on the people I admired or thought of as less of failures than I thought of myself.

Social interaction remains a mystery to me. I flutter with years of programmed anxiety (is that what it is?)- I say nothing, & I’m not sure whether it’s because I believe I have nothing of value to say, or if I’d rather listen, or… mystery. I know I’m interesting& somewhat intelligent& capable, but I’m unconvinced that others want to hear what I want to here on first meeting…

I don’t know how this came around to this topic, I was talking about church. & K., & how I only think of her in waking life when I have these invasive dreams in which she is either staying or running away on a silver bicycle, initially surprised & happy to see me & as I linger, pressing for something real, she turns around, nonchalant,  the complication hidden in her face. I stay in the building, hoping it will feel the same without her, but I’m always looking for her… her & the opportunity to sing.

Maybe I’ve fooled myself into thinking these two discrete elements are what I pulled from Christ Church, but it was more than that…

It has only recently occurred to me (in the more cat fur-covered corners of my self worth) that maybe I was the one who hurt her& that’s what was never dealt with. I’m the one who just one day stopped going to church. Still, this possibility never seemed real because I’m the one who attaches to people– K. was always transcendent in that way, at least as I remember her. Good enough to move on from people, from situations that called for her to leave.

&this is key: as I remember her. Whoever is in my dream is an apparition, ghost of a part of a person who has gone on through so many selves I haven’t seen…

So why these dreams? What am I to get out of them? That I’m obsessive & should get my head checked? Last night’s was admittedly more complicated (they usually are), & waking I discriminate, pull out the parts that disturb me (i.e. obsessive dreaming about a woman I’m in contact with less than once a year, if that).

Christ Church, in a way, makes sense as a location. Father Kell is always there, even if he isn’t now. I wanted to be a priest while I attended there, through much of it. When I started to think about my life as a spiritual person, all its tails & associations, I had to leave the church, that idea for my own… safety. Now I’m safe & listening again & it has become apparent that I will be unavoidably spiritual & attracted to spiritual vocations. Even after having an experience that lead me to personally reaffirm this attraction I’ve been reluctant to give it full attention. The way I gave it my full attention in the past was unhealthy… not what I want right now, but it’s the model I have?

I don’t know how to make sense of this. Perhaps its too early. Certainly scary to admit, but doing something is much better than stewing in these dreams& the thoughts they produce.

So I’ve been in the midst of a “spiritual” action plan, trying to figure out who to listen to (I guess, it just occurred to me that I may be evading the listening by trying to control it…). Trying to meditate everyday with Devin. Attending the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship when I can (because I can sing there)(& because U-U values resonate with me). Trying to attend some Zen events, Quaker meeting, maybe. Getting involved in things I believe in (Planned Parenthood Activist Council, for one). Increased awareness of how I treat other people, what I do through withholding & (then) fearless bombing with personal information once I’ve made sure the ground is clear (need to strive for balance, less fear).

Is this the next step? Why am I not writing? HOW CAN I BE OPEN TO WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO LEARN?

Must meditate today.  & sing, & breathe. Be open to temporary answers.

navel-g00, reignited.

One month later & done with my accidental hiatus. Guess I needed it. Now I need to write & it feels like I forget how, which is scary because writing seems to be how I discover so many things. Here I arrive as a beginner again, only some lines about a guy staring at my tits on the Bx34 bus. Still looking for balance since Devin arrived. Have learned that I like having something to long for& I don’t know what to long for now that his desk is across from mine. Balance. Yes, I want some kind of balance& need to make a little money & write & share my writing & celebrate the summer with people rather than ignore them, afraid of fitting in time with Devin & me-time& work time & writing time & singing time. My life is so full & delicious & this is going to be pure  full  gushing  navel-goo– being out of practice will only work as an excuse for one entry.

The past 24 hours I’ve been interested in cleaning my own apartment. I’ve never been clean, mind you, but I feel like having my own place may be the catalyst I need to become clean& healthy. I need a new vacuum cleaner because my dad’s old one won’t pick up the hair from my carpet.

I’ve forgotten how to be interesting to you, or even myself. Maybe a list? Maybe organize the things in my head…

• I have my own basement apartment in Woodlawn& I’m looking forward to my IKEA trip like a good capitalist. Part of me still wants to saw a couch in half. I can do whatever the fuck I want. It just needs to be a space where I can write.
• Devin is, indeed, here. & things are wonderful, real, living. Conversations about the future happen in the context of the dozen people I love getting married, but it feels nice to relate to him in the present-tense.
• Trying to do journal submissions & entirely too slow at it to be successful. At least I have a spreadsheet!
• Activist training @ Planned Parenthood has made me think a lot about the link between sex ed & abortion & how its not as simple as I have liked to make it in my head, but just as (if not even more) subjective– it IS easy to have an unplanned pregnancy, but in repeated cases, there’s usually a deeper reason the woman isn’t using contraception. That’s what is best addressed: council, not repeatedly teach about how to use contraception. Makes me think of Sarah Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking. Every individual is different (should be simple? not politically…)
• PRIDE this weekend. Zen lecture on Saturday, also trans march? might go to? Not sure.
• Singing at my mom’s church. Probably “Pie Jesu” from Faure’s Requiem. A challenge in my voice, but a worthwhile one.
• WHY AM I NOT WRITING? WHAT AM I AFRAID OF? GO TOWARDS THE DREAD!!

What is it that I dread right now? What am I afraid to say/ that I have nothing to say?

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my dad’s death& my moods & feelings fluctuated with the hours & I ate ice cream cookie sandwiches with Devin& Hunter. Thinking about “affirming life”– to me, this is most worthwhile when it’s an everyday practice, to live in an affirming way without waiting for real life to happen. This anniversary can be a date of remembrance, but cannot be the only day of the year on which I remind myself that I am breathing now, but that could change any minute.

Change any minute. I need fuller days, less time on facebook, more time actually answering my phone, responding to messages, writing poetry.

At least Devin & I ran today & it felt good. & we’ve been making healthy dinners& helping my mum with her house. This is positive.

So much of it is. & writing is a discipline, a practice, & I must do it. I must hold office hours. I must freewrite every day, or I suspect I will explode. This starts now.

thinks of lake superior

The feeling that stagnates between “detached” & “invicible.”

Get stuck there. Self-destruction– palpable. Don’t want to watch my thoughts, just want to eat this bag of m&ms, drink this handle of tequila.

Don’t know why I land there, but can’t just step out of it. Slow climb to awareness.

Easier, still see my shoeprints from last time. Two summers ago. Oh what a mess was made. Dust-stormed. Gathered on tops of bookshelves, treadmills. Ghosts my sentences.

Started feeling on the phone cuz  I don’t know what to feel besides numbing frustration, conflict– need to reset, sit on my charger for a few days & not care who my hibernation hurts. But I will/will I do it anyway?

On Kristen’s couch in Boston, about to fall asleep with borrowed mascara in my eyes& almond butter under my head. I want energy, or a drink, or a sign, or something genuine to launch me back into myself. (whatever that’s supposed to mean.)

attention (poet)

So many things I want to tell someone yet know no one really cares about. This is what blogs are good for. 

& I’m binge eating rather than running & blogging rather than screening journaling & for the first time ever my nails are long enough to break. I’ve been biting them since the womb (I gather). Got a manicure three weeks ago (a month ago, maybe?) & haven’t bitten since. 

Midday drunk on Friday. Can’t wait. So much excitement this months– camping & weddings& readings–

Had a dream this fall that Cathy Park Hong was my thesis advisor. Emailed her today & told her this. This might be a way to trust the divine feminine. 

Reading Siddhartha & desperately want a novel of awakening in which the woman does not die or is the spiritual aspirant rather than a stepping stone to a man’s. I want to write Kamala’s story, free her from role & history  (though she’s pretty badass in her own ways, don’t get me wrong). 

Chose meditating over running these next two days, don’t have time for both. 

Hanging out with Rena& her daughter today made me want to move to Portland & reproduce. This article in the New York Times did not help…

present-centered, Megan, present-centered. (Life is fulfilling here. Build community, the life you like, keep out the capitalist/soulless rush…)

No, I don’t expect you to care, but…

Thinking about the essay I wrote my freshman year of college: “I find it necessary to write…” 

& I do. I do it in poems, in here (on here?). & my compulsion to blog feels like my compulsion to write poems. 

Narcissistic, self-absorbed blogs? Kind of love them. Love to see how people are made, or make themselves, or however you want to look at it… 

Thinking about how poets seems to reject the blog. Does this make me a bad person, ugly, to navel-gaze so unabashed& publicly? Is this who I want to be? (This feels beyond me, an impulse… but maybe one I should examine… I guess I do… as everything…)

I don’t want my blog to hurt. Not anyone. & you don’t have to read this. I don’t advertise. 

Oh to be awkward, contradictory. 

So much excitement, & poetry, & my nails feel weird after removing the manicure

& the man in the picture at the top of my blog is dead. Told over Facebook. 

(really, want to be the perfect

self.)

What is the definition of apology, really?

Having trouble focusing. Keep trying to center my mind, bring myself back to the breath

but this morning’s emotions feel impossible. Disobeyed, slept in, feel envious 

of those who can deliberately form relationships rather than simply incidentally 

let them form, or let them form out of the other’s interest in my interests, introversion, navel-gazing. 

I can pretend this room will be the grounds for my interior castle all I like. I keep listening

but I don’t know the next step. I feel self-conscious when I say “my mind is winning” 

& a week of devout meditation brings me to these challenges, new things to overcome. 

I cycle. There is a precedent for this. Some call it “natural femininity,” the essential feminine part of women (some women, if so identified) that groove with the moon, that enclose, reconfigure, reemerge over & over & I am rarely certain of the enclosure– I crave it until I’m there, in the evenings, just longing for someone with whom I can share the fruits of my aloneness. 

Had an important insight on Easter, now reconfiguring. In the mean time, those other concerns– how to be better to others, a more caring friend, a better student who engages rather than just thanks because I am excited about what I’m writing, how it interacts with the world, but how do I express this to another, adequately? How do I form a relationship? How are people friendly, or why is it that I’m not? I’m nice, but cautious. Cautious of letting people in? Not so much. I make myself vulnerable in my art all the time, in the relationships that do form. Not afraid of confessing… 

Maybe that is what this Keats poem is trying to teach me & Carol Lee Flinders & Easter– & I know, it’s so much coming into my own cycles, accepting them, making the most of them….

Where is the intersection between self-consciousness & self-awareness & the self, that silly put-on, that consequence of speech& action& relentless construction…

Crawl out. Forgive, forgive, forgive. Give. How can I / What can I?  

For now: I CAN finish this paper. I CAN focus on my screening journal entries. I CAN be friendly in class today. I CAN be willing to put myself out there, whatever that may mean. It’s all somehow related to emerging, maybe…

This compulsion, to write, it interests me. I’ve been writing for myself but feel compelled to write here today. Again, is this an apology? Is this a whack way of saying “whoever is listening, I’m sorry, I don’t understand why my version of reaching out isn’t successful, see, I’m complicated,” which is bullshit, because we’re all fucking complicated, we all have fucking reasons, we can all call that series of actions “father” or “society…”

but in the end, what? I write this& discover things. Sometimes having a “you” that isn’t a “You” but at the same time they are one in the same helps me to have an experience, a curiosity, is a catalyst for this figuring out. Yes, I wish I could wear a disclaimer sometimes& I wish people would care about this disclaimer, make them care about me even as I’m weighed down in my head, but the world doesn’t work that way. 

Just go on discovering. Que sera, sera. (Now finish the damned paper).

acceptance before change, maybe?

Wonder if writing a letter to my eleven-year-old-self would help. Or talking to her in meditation. Her fears come out in crowds of people I half-know, the fear of being friendly for feeling I am automatically a burden on people or something, like I’m still a Bible-thumping spelling-bee winner who wants to tell them about Jesus– no one ever wants to be told about Jesus against her will. 

In moments of paralyzing self-doubt, I forget how to form sentences, make associations, be funny– it all gels in my poems but scatters in my vocal cords. 

I wish I were endlessly cool, instead I’m endlessly hesitant. 

Is this entry an apology? To who?

Daffodils are common& I still love them.

Told myself I’d freewrite for 45 minutes today because after being so generous the visitation has been incredibly elusive& I’m feeling a lot right now, have been all day, mostly& I need a haircut, horribly, I don’t know if my hair has looked this bad since high school& dreadlocks are cultural appropriation, maybe– I don’t want to do that I have privilege enough. & I miss my best friend (the Molly one) terribly, & I think there’s a poem about her stuck in me somewhere (God& my mom totally handed it to me, actually, but I don’t have anything except the coincidence that halfway between Ann Arbor & the Bronx stands the hotel that I’m sure was the last place we had sex before the LBD or whatever set in). 

I’ve actually been relatively focused lately, but it’s weird because it turns off between 6:30 & 9 completely& I feel incapable of doing anything but sitting around & feeling slightly nostalgic with a tinge of sadness. This time last year birthed so much beauty– Devin& I started to deepen our relationship but it still had that irretrievable freshness, Molly had forgiven me, mostly, I took lots of walks in Boise& Caldwell, lots of swing sets… this year could have beauty, too, but I miss these people who I’ve let dig past my word-self, into the whatever is there that can’t represent itself in poetry or even staring contests. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately– the inadequacy of verbal communication, in general. This does not have to do with my relationship with Devin, per se– we are both verbally adept& I have faith that we present ourselves to the other in ways that are as honest as words can signify. It has to do with a moment of existential aloneness I had a few weeks ago that I refuse to recount on here for reasons I am choosing not to present. It also has to do with some of the art that has inspired me lately– Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses, Brakhage, poetry of Larry Levis& D.H. Lawrence– it’s Lawrence’s “The Snake” that gave me the idea of existential aloneness, or the class we had today on it, where I became quietly obsessed with doing a queer reading of the poem. Suzanne insists that the parts where he thinks “if I were a man, I’d kill it” are simply a red herring– the poem, at its core, is about desiring one-ness with nature& the inability to do so… she thinks Lawrence wrote it but simply didn’t get it, but I think the two readings can be combined– no, he didn’t get it, but maybe he couldn’t? I mean, I spent the whole class thinking about how the snake is a terrific phallus& the “bowels of the earth,” jeez, buttsex allegory. I feel incapable of digging into this more deeply right now, but I intend to in the future. Anyway, I need to read more D.H. Lawrence– Camille Paglia talks about him a lot in terms of sexuality, & from what I’ve read so far, I feel like I agree about his ideas about sex/the bodily bringing humans closer to nature– what is not verbal, tied up in signs. 

In the wake of this, I’ve become curious about how Devin sees me. Literally. I was watching Fuses last night & I found it compelling how Schneemann filmed herself vs. how James Tenney filmed her. & the film makes the penis look beautiful, sexy, compelling, in a way that it never, ever is in porn or other films I’ve seen with penises. I want to play with cameras on my own, photograph Devin, have him photograph me. 

& it’s not just seeing as another way of knowing, it’s about touch, & maybe about dissociating language, the signs we associate with ourselves. I keep being drawn back to the following section of the Larry Levis poem “Our Sister of Perfect Solitude”:

One of my pastimes then was savoring the casual emptiness of names, any name, 

Even the name of that stranger I said over & over in bed until her name

Slipped itself from all moorings, & her body became like wind stirring itself,

Until, free finally of its name, it would do anything.

And the next time I called her by another name, deliberately, just to see…

And repeated the name over& over until her body belonged to no one, to neither

One of us. It came to the same thing: without a name, the body could be anyone’s,

Open to any suggestion. 

This fascinates me. This time last year, Devin called me by one of my best friend’s names while we were drunk at a party (not having sex, thankfully)& I flipped shit. Now I don’t know if I’d react in the same way, or maybe I would. It would be an interesting experiment, though, if I could be made just my body, a body, though it would still be me (could it really be anybody’s?) Could I be known in a different way if momentarily I were divorced from my name, its tail of associations? 

I feel like I can’t hear myself right now. I have the entire new Neko Case album playing in my head rather than my inner monologue& this makes writing messy& near impossible. I might put off doing revisions until this weekend& be sure to make time to meditate tonight because that’s what makes me hear the clearest. 

Yes. I feel emptied but still ringing& unsatisfied. Sometimes this is hard. Maybe it will be easier after moving on to other things. 

Hollis Frampton’s navel

“I” is the English familiar name by which an unspeakably intricate network of colloidal circuits– or, as some reason, the garrulous temporary inhabitant of that nexus– addresses itself; occasionally, etiquette permitting, it even calls itself that in public. It lies, comfortable but immobile, in a hemiellipsoidal chamber of tensile bone. How it came to be there (together with some odd bits of phantasmal rubbish) is a subject for virtually endless speculation: it is certainly alone; and in time it convinces itself, somewhat reluctantly, that it is waiting to die. –Hollis Frampton, from “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative”

Here I am, frantically trying to conjure up something intelligent to say in film class, which seems to remain difficult for me no matter how much preparation. Maybe I am held back by my memory of an inability to speak, a paralysis that presents itself like narrative, my own personal mythology. Nevertheless, I relate to and enjoy Frampton’s theories, though I’m having trouble directly articulating how they work in his film. (nostalgia) presents photographs out of sync with the narration, so that, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, “words anticipate the pictures, the pictures recall the words.” Makes us hunt memory for context, which will be imperfect… also makes us maybe project what we are hearing onto the images? No. The point is the one he is making about the image… what we see will “triangulate” between what we retained of his description and what is actually projected on the screen. How does autobiography come into this– there’s a certain irony to it, considering Michael Snow is reading Frampton’s recollection of events (not strictly Frampton recalling them)….wait, the discontinuity of the narrative of becoming a filmmaker– we CANNOT see what he sees– filmmaker’s vision exists at a distance from the film-product. 

(Sidenote: still seduced by idea of art as a way of living, a way of catapulting revisions or destructions of narrative into life…)

“I” represents a different…set of coordinates each time it is uttered. Kind of covered in the Michaelson article, which I found impenetrable. The destruction of the images in (nostalgia), the reverence for the cells of the body replacing themselves, represents the tenuous relationship between the “I” who took the photographs and the “I” who is writing the narrative. 

(Question of “how factual the vision”– fruitless. Expressed much more clearly through the film than anything Lionel Trilling ever said about authenticity or sincerity). 

Poetic Justice– more about the language issue– language as a clarifier of seeing– represents the film script, the written plan that employs language, as a link in the whole filmmaking process. The idea is not that Brakhage is wrong, but that he limits himself to something he can never fully access because he HAS language and this effects his vision. I don’t fully understand the link to autobiography/ the glove at the end, but this might be because I didn’t see it– I fell asleep. The pronoun trouble is compelling, though– the shifting signifiers. In this way, it can become a film “about you…” 

Riddle of Lumen- VISUAL riddle as opposed to verbal riddle in which we are supposed to discover that light is the protagonist. I was more compelled by the patterns– even duration of shots (well, movements, in the case of Brakhage), the repetition of certain colors, the moment with the child’s primer (genius!) Did not get the point at all until I read about it, and I’m still unsure what exactly Sitney means in his reading. 

What does this blog do in terms of continuity? It has a continuity of subjects. Do I want to represent myself as continuous even though I am aware that I am not? A recent theme in my poems of late has been the problem of nostalgia that cannot be relived, the problem of defining oneself through past desires. I did not consciously set out to write poems “about” this. 

(I = at this moment, as far as I can conceive of myself in language.)

Shouldn’t  ever-shifting conceptions of self facilitate a conscious change to a way of life that accomodates this temporality, to the best of our ability, while somehow still acknowledging that some don’t/can’t/won’t think of the individual in these terms? How to exist in this tension? (This has to be enacted, real, or else it’s just rubbish)

How can this be empowering? Is it, innately? Rather than achieving a dominant narrative, achieving a mythology, existing in conscious (& possibly unconscious? though everyone must exist in unconscious…) tension with it…