Thursday, December 16, 2010

I Admire You, Beloved, for the Trap You've Set. It's Like a Final Chapter No One Reads Because the Plot Is Over

I'm caught between two friends who diametrically disagree with how to live in the clusterfuck both of whom I agree with wholeheartedly. These are the oddest, freakiest, angriest days of my life. People play grocery-cart chicken in Safeway and play to fucking win. Thoughtless acts at work are elevated to slights, slights to affronts, affronts to confrontations. Disagreeing who changed the cat litter last escalates into fuckyou fuckyou war that lasts two days. Political discussions over pints escalates to screaming about complicity and growing the fuck up....


I don't know how to channel my anger and its energy (because anger is an energy) because who can I lash out at with any efficacy that deserves my anger? I'm opting out in my small pampered MOCO progressive fashion: Chris Van Hollen survived my not-vot, I'm greening whenever and wherever possible, I'm giving to pantries, to Metro Ferals, I'm shopping at MOM's, I yodel on a fucking blog and so on pathetic etc.


It's grimly fascinating watching anger at Corporate's clusterfuckery being redirected and dispersed by those being fucked towards those being fucked. I'm not talking about cracker hate for liberals or liberal hate for crackers, though that's certainly part of Corporate's design, I'm talking about the kind and angry like-minded in their various stages of apostasy and despair, the angry competition to be the angriest, the angry competition to be the kindest.







MEDIATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Frank O'Hara


Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.


10 comments:

  1. Prisoners don't make good friends or allies if they try to fix the world outside of the prison walls.

    ReplyDelete
  2. But there are prisons within prisons within....

    Yes, masters' tools can't dismantle the masters' house, but part of masters' tools is counting on the mastered acting like masters against each other.

    I meant no disrespect - as I say, I agree with you wholeheartedly even if I'm differently tempered. I'm working on it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A world of simple, or similar temperaments? Shoot me in the face with ten pound shot.

    The internet is part of the problem for all that it lets we who would otherwise never meet communicate and keep each other in the anti-game.

    Face to face, reading expressions, processing postures, sharing meals, casting askancey glances at the farter, watching eyes - all lost.

    No risk, the typing. No shared burden. It's corny, but we're unforged, untempered, untested. My grandfather, on the other hand, never missed the Bread and Roses parade (yeah, a minor gesture) in Lawrence, because his forebears had been there. Did that. We were from those people. My mother, the Beckian Christer, still attends. Deep roots, deep forging.

    Which doesn't, of course, explain the pretubez factionalism...

    ReplyDelete
  4. The sole reason I hope Planet is accepted to and chooses Bowdoin is I will have multiple chances to meet and share beverages with you (and Montag and Ethan and whomever else I befriend from Ningland on this blog) over the next four years.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I would welcome that, without hesitation. As shy as I am, I'd take that opportunity with gladness.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "the angry competition to be the kindest"

    Heh.

    ReplyDelete
  7. What, I'm not supposed to Saturday scowl at the night schooling bastard who bitches about late books 'cause he knows his schooling is for naught but a burger flippin' job but trudges on anyway because even illusory hope is still hope? Bah and humbug.

    Sadly, it's easier to rail against fellow shulbs because, unlike those above, they actually notice the railer's presence.

    Speaking of whining, the bag inspection will only take minutes AND it'll save lives *and* Christmas.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'd be more than more than happy to meet for drinks or whatever whenever, should you ever be in my area or I in yours.

    You often express what I've been feeling without even realizing I've been feeling it; this is one of those times.

    I am really enjoying all the Glenn Gould recently. I mostly just know his Bach stuff and the Solitude Trilogy, but I'm finding I don't even have to like a composer (I don't have much patience for Beethoven these days) to like his interpretation of them.

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  9. Whenever I'm looking for piano pieces I try to find either Gould or Pollini. As for Beethoven, I only come back for the sonatas now (and today's his birthday). And Bach - after a long hiatus he's coming back around.

    Yes, anyone who's in the DC area for a visit please let me know! If the stars align, you could be standing in 232 of LOUD SIDE! for a United game, beers and ticket on me (he says in an act of angry kindness!).

    ReplyDelete