Just back from running--it seems I am always writing you
when I'm just back from running, but that's what happens:
My mind in motion works better in motion, or maybe it only works
more furiously. Or happily, clearly, seriously. My plan is to make a few notes
when I'm just back from running, but that's what happens:
My mind in motion works better in motion, or maybe it only works
more furiously. Or happily, clearly, seriously. My plan is to make a few notes
on who we are/what we might be. What it's like
to pay a particular kind of attention, have faith, get reckless. To unravel
in our pockets and in sadness, fall or drift or tear apart. Last night
I cut my finger on an artichoke. I reached into the refrigerator,
and it was thorny and sharp. Today it hurts. That's not a diversion,
but a reminder to stay focused. Now looking up at the clouds
from my porch, I am thinking how nice it is to be entangled in all the ways
we are: what we think, who we love, and the grand scheme of things.
There's always a grand scheme of things even if we can't articulate it.
I think one can see it in the fact that anything exists at all. Cities
and locusts. Speed metal and snow. But if one doesn't,
that's okay, too. I'm not really invested in providing some fleeting thesis.
My assumption is only that we all have assumptions
and these have a great deal to do with our perceptions. The world
as I find it is similar to and different from the world as you find it,
so it becomes necessary for both of us to find the common ground,
the plateaus and sore-spots where our hearts and our language
and our dreams overlap in a bridge that we can walk together.
As Lyn Hejinian notes, language, unlike other artistic materials,
doesn't only exist "in multitudes of contexts, it is multitudes of contexts,"
and given that there are multitudes of languages, you can see
how reality doth spiral out of control. Depending on your perspective
I suppose this could be thrilling or terrifying or both. One can't be
out-of-control-in-control--that is, both reckless and careful all at once--
and yet, in a significant way with words we always are. We employ
and deploy language simultaneously--it is, by its very nature, both
a thing that we use to mean other things and a thing that means out beyond us
in spite of our best efforts to keep the portrait in focus, e.g. "I cut my finger
on an artichoke. I reached into the refrigerator and it was
thorny and sharp." The artichoke or the refrigerator? Both.
And I love that. I don't want to fix the ambiguity. I want meaning
to radiate. I want to make sense, but I also want sense to be made of me
(both by myself and other people) and regardless. As Matthew Rohrer put it,
"I must learn to say the things I never intended to say," and then
I want to add: I also want to learn to say all the things I intended to say--
intended and unintended in the very same breath. This seems to me a power,
inherent in language itself, to make and re-make, to vision and re-vision,
to act and re-act to the world as it throbs, or culture as thesis-antithesis-
synthesis, fear and some trembling necessary and full. Barbaric yawps!
Walking home drunk the other night, I said a bunch of weird, good things
and you did, too and while it's hard to remember exactly what,
the shadows of what and the feelings still linger--even now,
even sober--we were so fired up, because
the night was so ridiculously in flower, so and so and me and you
electrified and shocking, terrific and true, and we were laughing together,
leaving our strung-out presences like presents around the city,
me an amplifier and you a defender. One thing I definitely remember
is talking earlier--earlier when?--earlier ever
about how you convince everyone that you're talking directly to them,
and I convince everyone I'm dangerous with speed--it's true
I like being worn out, even when I read, and sometimes, too, overwhelmed
and even panicked (though mostly after the fact). When experience kicks me
and everything turns black, or polka-dot, or mechanical bull, or post-avant,
my teeth in the trees my blood on the windshield, it's just an indication
that I need to act decisively--to do something for myself with myself
and keep living. It's the best I can do for the people who'd miss me,
but more importantly for the ones who I would miss terribly. Life is overwhelming
for good and for ill. But what isn't overwhelming? Beauty is overwhelming.
Data is overwhelming. Text and the devil and the heavens overwhelming...
How to live and what to do? To make sense all the time (or maybe ever)
in this life/of this life is a sham. Nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall.
I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is. Better worn out
and wary, than a mannequin pretending. "The slightest loss of attention
leads to death," said Frank O'Hara. I say: Be prepared for the darkness
when it takes you, but stay alive and stay light
for as long as you can.
- Matt Hart
