"Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream."
Monday, April 29, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
2013 Tunnels
People say these things cheaply.
'Til the wheels come off...'
'Til the bitter end.'
'Failure is not an option.'
But do you know how far you have to actually go until the wheels are rocking on their spindles, wobbling??
Until things have gone from irksome to challenging to frustrating to enraging and then passed into listless bored waiting and then been jerked back and forth with hope and doom and then gone back into 'irons' and passed beyond bleak resignation into some gray no-space of nothing...
Some place, without gravity...
when the tank has run empty and you're coasting,
just coasting through the fog and you really don't know if it's going to work
or if somewhere up ahead,
somewhere soon,
it's going to roll to a stop.
The end is not bitter.
Not for the pioneer.
The end is just a mathematical arrival
when the resources have been exhausted before the destination is reached.
The end is an option.
The end is a quiet silence and a sigh.
And if you have pushed hard enough and far enough,
it is a sweetness,
Not bitter, but longed for.
Failure is the ever-present, easy-way-out.
Failure is also something you can find at the top of the climb,
at the end of the journey, when you're almost there,
Failure is as arbitrary as success.
Failure is the vulture wheeling over the herd
that will get his meal either way.
This is not to complain.
This is simply to say I woke up while running along the naviglio
and realized I was long past the end of my rope.
That I had felt my limits reached and pushed through
repeatedly
and I couldn't see myself doing it for much longer.
I reached down inside me for the clamp,
the switch that would compartmentalize it all
buy me a few more months... weeks, even...
but there was nothing left to grab.
Just a hollow empty place, quiet and dusty
and utterly used up.
I could see both the light at the end of the tunnel,
and feel the fuel gauge of spirit bouncing on empty.
Just rolling for as long as the momentum kept up.
Either way it would be over soon, and that was a relief
to soothe the anxiousness that is the handmaiden of hope.
And all that was three months gone
and still we crawl
towards the Light
'Til the wheels come off...'
'Til the bitter end.'
'Failure is not an option.'
But do you know how far you have to actually go until the wheels are rocking on their spindles, wobbling??
Until things have gone from irksome to challenging to frustrating to enraging and then passed into listless bored waiting and then been jerked back and forth with hope and doom and then gone back into 'irons' and passed beyond bleak resignation into some gray no-space of nothing...
Some place, without gravity...
when the tank has run empty and you're coasting,
just coasting through the fog and you really don't know if it's going to work
or if somewhere up ahead,
somewhere soon,
it's going to roll to a stop.
The end is not bitter.
Not for the pioneer.
The end is just a mathematical arrival
when the resources have been exhausted before the destination is reached.
The end is an option.
The end is a quiet silence and a sigh.
And if you have pushed hard enough and far enough,
it is a sweetness,
Not bitter, but longed for.
Failure is the ever-present, easy-way-out.
Failure is also something you can find at the top of the climb,
at the end of the journey, when you're almost there,
Failure is as arbitrary as success.
Failure is the vulture wheeling over the herd
that will get his meal either way.
This is not to complain.
This is simply to say I woke up while running along the naviglio
and realized I was long past the end of my rope.
That I had felt my limits reached and pushed through
repeatedly
and I couldn't see myself doing it for much longer.
I reached down inside me for the clamp,
the switch that would compartmentalize it all
buy me a few more months... weeks, even...
but there was nothing left to grab.
Just a hollow empty place, quiet and dusty
and utterly used up.
I could see both the light at the end of the tunnel,
and feel the fuel gauge of spirit bouncing on empty.
Just rolling for as long as the momentum kept up.
Either way it would be over soon, and that was a relief
to soothe the anxiousness that is the handmaiden of hope.
And all that was three months gone
and still we crawl
towards the Light
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Feb 2010
Feb 2010
Spring broke winters back at long last. Air smelled like spring water, fresh from the ground, as though you could drink it. So you did, through your nostrils. Fog. Trees. Birds, en masse, hundreds of them, return circling, cawing, a tornado cloud of flapping wings. It would freeze again mid-week, but it had begun, the long thaw. Fieldwork was going increasingly well. Winter was dying, slow bleeding across the gray fields lost in haze.
The puddles at the bus stop bear testament.
Spring broke winters back at long last. Air smelled like spring water, fresh from the ground, as though you could drink it. So you did, through your nostrils. Fog. Trees. Birds, en masse, hundreds of them, return circling, cawing, a tornado cloud of flapping wings. It would freeze again mid-week, but it had begun, the long thaw. Fieldwork was going increasingly well. Winter was dying, slow bleeding across the gray fields lost in haze.
The puddles at the bus stop bear testament.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Ezra Pound #5
"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Brought and Left
Winter 2010
What I brought was passion,
What I brought was passion,
more than could be contained or controlled.
Honest beyond the good intentions of 'honesty'
Honest to the point of Truth
which not even the self
especially the Self
can ever bear for long.
And what I left was nothing
Less than can be easily maintained or directed.
Empty beyond the desire for simplicity.
Empty to the point of unbeing.
which not even the self
especially the Self
can ever bear for long
A fistfull of sand
that bled through the fingers the harder it was squeezed.
But this is the cycle, the turning wheel.
What was brought?
What was left?
What was?
It does not matter.
There is
Night enough to hold pounding hearts and the rhythms of passion
Night enough to drench
And the scrapings of hope
like claws at the door
Are ignored
as one might ignore a cur
or the whines of a feral cat
There is only Life here.
Pinocchio
Winter 2010
What hot boiling rage is this?
From where birthed?
As the dropped puppet,
crumpled on the mock-stage,
first seeing his strings,
must burn with anger
at his helplessness
And curse black Geppetto
in unspeakable tongues,
plotting vengeance in wooden silence
behind a painted smile.
Let the Blue Fairy come...
in due slow passing time...
Let her wave that magic wand...
Let the strings dissolve
Flesh and muscle replace his bastard bolts and joints
and then lie still
so very still...
until He returns, to tinker again in passing
presuming all to be well
that self-satisfied smile upon his fat cheeks,
knowing all his playthings are where he left them,
abandoned, but loyal by their helplessness.
Beware, old man,
You will not find a loving son, here,
o father Geppetto
No warm boy brought to life
But a fury fueled prisoner
on his own two feet
unforgiving, uncompromising, unfettered
with a memory of stone
etched by your insulting self-gratifying dances,
and a beating heart too gristled
to be merciful
and too cunning and patient
to be rashly impetuous in toppling your self-maintained delusions of deity.
Beware, o smiling Geppetto
for the toy shop grows treacherously restless in your absence.
What hot boiling rage is this?
From where birthed?
As the dropped puppet,
crumpled on the mock-stage,
first seeing his strings,
must burn with anger
at his helplessness
And curse black Geppetto
in unspeakable tongues,
plotting vengeance in wooden silence
behind a painted smile.
Let the Blue Fairy come...
in due slow passing time...
Let her wave that magic wand...
Let the strings dissolve
Flesh and muscle replace his bastard bolts and joints
and then lie still
so very still...
until He returns, to tinker again in passing
presuming all to be well
that self-satisfied smile upon his fat cheeks,
knowing all his playthings are where he left them,
abandoned, but loyal by their helplessness.
Beware, old man,
You will not find a loving son, here,
o father Geppetto
No warm boy brought to life
But a fury fueled prisoner
on his own two feet
unforgiving, uncompromising, unfettered
with a memory of stone
etched by your insulting self-gratifying dances,
and a beating heart too gristled
to be merciful
and too cunning and patient
to be rashly impetuous in toppling your self-maintained delusions of deity.
Beware, o smiling Geppetto
for the toy shop grows treacherously restless in your absence.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Paulo Coelho #2
"I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don't hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am."
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Friday, April 12, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
The Horses
8Feb2010
I felt the horses before I saw them,
nightvision clipped as it was
by the headlights of an oncoming car as I crossed the highway
Left me blind in the snow
Just felt the presence of something big and dark
and there it was.
rough day. left Uppsala at 3...
didn't get in to the hostel until 1930...
a one hour trip max dragged out into 4 and a half hours.
When I left it was warm. Warm on my face. Didn't wear gloves, or a hat. Boot sole broke again halfway across town and had to clomp to the train station. Arrived sweating.
The train was supposed to leave at 1509... so i killed the twenty minute wait sitting on a bench... 10 minutes later they called it delayed.... 10 minutes after that they cancelled it... 20 minutes after that I caught the next train, but the connector to Sodertalje got messed up... ended up in Sodertalje Syd... 4 km from the center... only 1 mile from the hostel... thought about walking... but there's no road.
Choices were to head into the center or try to wing it overland, hugging the train tracks around Scania or trespassing... or taking a blind azimuth and trying to slug it out uphill through the forest. Warmer dressed and in a better mood, without three bags weighing in around 30 kilos, I might have chanced it... instead I managed to miss the local train by about 20 seconds, got to watch it pull away from the deck... and had to wait another 20 for a bus... which dropped me off 2 minutes too late to catch the ride to the hostel... ate at a kebab shop and then sat another 40 minutes waiting in the cold. I'd sweated through my clothes repeatedly in the strange heat wave and with all the walking under weight, so the freeze was quick. Fingers first, then my cheeks and nose, then my foot started to go where the snow had gotten in through the break. Fucking perfect application of Murphy's law.
so it was with shivering frustration I tried a new route from the bus stop to the hostel, seeing if could cut the last km overland by aiming down a lightly walked path I'd seen the week before.
How the horses do it, I do not know. Standing there, dark and silent, in the freezing night air. If the day had teased of spring, night reminded me that I was still in Sweden and it was still deadly cold. I imagined what might have happened if I'd chanced the overland route and turned my ankle or lost the boot. I probably would have survived, crawled downhill through the trees to the road... but the frostbite would have been a bitch. And if I hadn't, it would have taken a long time to find the body, frozen in the forest behind the test yard at Scania, lost somewhere in a forest no one ever goes in, where no one ever would have cause to go...
There's several missing people on Mt. Marcy... in the caul on the backside, a low flat area beneath the summit. At least they are presumed to be in there, beating retreats off the top in bad weather, heading for low ground, bailing out as we say. But the pines are so thick and unnavigable, the terrain so harsh, that a body could lie a meter from you, with a bright red pack, and you would never see it.
There's more like a 100 disappeared bodies somewhere on Mt. Washington. Random too. Some poor bastard left the weather station to go take a piss in a snow storm and never came back. It's weird up there, above treeline. You'd think you could spot a body. But the tumbled rocks are treacherous. Likely everyone missing up there scrambled down hill, hoping to find a drainage and follow it out to a road... likely, otherwise they would have been found... but in the night, in the winter, they succumbed, either just inside the treeline, or somewhere in the snowfields... where they were promptly buried. In the woods, I'm sure they lie there, rotted skeletons in mountaineering gear, long picked over. The others, in the snowfield, were carried down and under and out by the spring thaw and who knows in what sharp bend of the river their waterlogged corpses have found final rest.
But at least they died on a mountain. To perish in the woods behind Scania, in the flat forest of Sodertalje would be a stupid fate. So as pissed and angry as I was, the bus rides were better than huddled under some tree in an army blanket, cursing my own stupidity while the cold burrowed into my bones.
The horse... he bothered me.
He was beautiful. I did not try to touch him, just stopped a moment to look. And then there were more horses, as my eyes adjusted. Dark deep blackness that materialized against the snowy forest. what patience and reserves of fat they must possess, to weather the night like that. Short, stocky swedish horses were also there, seemingly too small for riding, just... for whatever people keep short stocky horses for. Silent. Unmoving. Uninterested. Weathering the night. I would pass them everyday now on my new shortcut to the bus. and they would remind me.
I felt the horses before I saw them,
nightvision clipped as it was
by the headlights of an oncoming car as I crossed the highway
Left me blind in the snow
Just felt the presence of something big and dark
and there it was.
rough day. left Uppsala at 3...
didn't get in to the hostel until 1930...
a one hour trip max dragged out into 4 and a half hours.
When I left it was warm. Warm on my face. Didn't wear gloves, or a hat. Boot sole broke again halfway across town and had to clomp to the train station. Arrived sweating.
The train was supposed to leave at 1509... so i killed the twenty minute wait sitting on a bench... 10 minutes later they called it delayed.... 10 minutes after that they cancelled it... 20 minutes after that I caught the next train, but the connector to Sodertalje got messed up... ended up in Sodertalje Syd... 4 km from the center... only 1 mile from the hostel... thought about walking... but there's no road.
Choices were to head into the center or try to wing it overland, hugging the train tracks around Scania or trespassing... or taking a blind azimuth and trying to slug it out uphill through the forest. Warmer dressed and in a better mood, without three bags weighing in around 30 kilos, I might have chanced it... instead I managed to miss the local train by about 20 seconds, got to watch it pull away from the deck... and had to wait another 20 for a bus... which dropped me off 2 minutes too late to catch the ride to the hostel... ate at a kebab shop and then sat another 40 minutes waiting in the cold. I'd sweated through my clothes repeatedly in the strange heat wave and with all the walking under weight, so the freeze was quick. Fingers first, then my cheeks and nose, then my foot started to go where the snow had gotten in through the break. Fucking perfect application of Murphy's law.
so it was with shivering frustration I tried a new route from the bus stop to the hostel, seeing if could cut the last km overland by aiming down a lightly walked path I'd seen the week before.
How the horses do it, I do not know. Standing there, dark and silent, in the freezing night air. If the day had teased of spring, night reminded me that I was still in Sweden and it was still deadly cold. I imagined what might have happened if I'd chanced the overland route and turned my ankle or lost the boot. I probably would have survived, crawled downhill through the trees to the road... but the frostbite would have been a bitch. And if I hadn't, it would have taken a long time to find the body, frozen in the forest behind the test yard at Scania, lost somewhere in a forest no one ever goes in, where no one ever would have cause to go...
There's several missing people on Mt. Marcy... in the caul on the backside, a low flat area beneath the summit. At least they are presumed to be in there, beating retreats off the top in bad weather, heading for low ground, bailing out as we say. But the pines are so thick and unnavigable, the terrain so harsh, that a body could lie a meter from you, with a bright red pack, and you would never see it.
There's more like a 100 disappeared bodies somewhere on Mt. Washington. Random too. Some poor bastard left the weather station to go take a piss in a snow storm and never came back. It's weird up there, above treeline. You'd think you could spot a body. But the tumbled rocks are treacherous. Likely everyone missing up there scrambled down hill, hoping to find a drainage and follow it out to a road... likely, otherwise they would have been found... but in the night, in the winter, they succumbed, either just inside the treeline, or somewhere in the snowfields... where they were promptly buried. In the woods, I'm sure they lie there, rotted skeletons in mountaineering gear, long picked over. The others, in the snowfield, were carried down and under and out by the spring thaw and who knows in what sharp bend of the river their waterlogged corpses have found final rest.
But at least they died on a mountain. To perish in the woods behind Scania, in the flat forest of Sodertalje would be a stupid fate. So as pissed and angry as I was, the bus rides were better than huddled under some tree in an army blanket, cursing my own stupidity while the cold burrowed into my bones.
The horse... he bothered me.
He was beautiful. I did not try to touch him, just stopped a moment to look. And then there were more horses, as my eyes adjusted. Dark deep blackness that materialized against the snowy forest. what patience and reserves of fat they must possess, to weather the night like that. Short, stocky swedish horses were also there, seemingly too small for riding, just... for whatever people keep short stocky horses for. Silent. Unmoving. Uninterested. Weathering the night. I would pass them everyday now on my new shortcut to the bus. and they would remind me.
Ezra Pound #4
"The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people."
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Conversations #1
Autumn 2009
He cut himself shaving, in the shower, washing off the night. The sudden smell of salt and iron. Deep. through the lip. with a new blade, of all the luck. And it ran into his mouth and reminded him of boxing. He wiped his face and the hand came away red.
"Your room is very red." he said
"Yes. I like red. Do you mind it?"
"No. I was just saying."
"Salmon! I like salmon." he said
"Oh really? I didn't know."
"No. I didn't tell you. It's one of my favorites."
He didn't say it reminded him of his father. and his grandfather. and family dinners.
"Can you close the window?"
"I can try."
"You shouldn't stand there naked. You will catch cold."
"No. I won't."
"Or you will get arrested"
"True. It is a civilized country, afterall."
"Is it raining?"
"A bit."
"Do you want sugar?"
"Where?"
"In your tea?"
"Maybe."
"If you want it, it is there."
"Okay."
"Well! Do you want it or not."
"I don't know. Sometimes."
"You're writing is odd."
"May I have some more wine?"
"Sure. But it is. You know. If I write something, then it is me. The same. But when you write, it is like a third... median?"
"Medium?"
"Yes. A third medium. Between you and the world. Like those songs you put up. They were shit."
"I know."
"But you said that some were with your roommates around... so you were nervous... so you see, when there are people around you are different. But yet you will put it online for the whole world to see. I don't know. It is strange. You are strange."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"I don't know yet. I like to read. But it is a different voice. The... the tone is different. The words you use. The way you put them together. You are not like that in real life."
"Not at all. I would never talk to anyone like that. Or discuss those things."
"But you don't care, the content, to be online?"
"I put those songs up."
"yea. you should stick to writing."
"ha. It doesn't matter if I suck at singing. Maybe I do. Probably. for sure. or the content of the writing. Could be shit. Could be good. If the whole world can see it... well... then it doesn't matter anymore does it? Then it is shit. Garbage. And I am free of the things. Otherwise I would be... I don't know. pent up? or... I don't know. It is good, for me to write. And I don't give a damn if people read it or what they think about it."
"You are shameless."
"perhaps. I think. I think it is a kind of honesty, in a way."
"Yes."
"I am good now. I wrote about today. there is Peace."
"Good!"
"I think I will probably delete the whole thing."
"Why? I think you shouldn't"
"Because it has served its purpose."
"But some are nice... nice to have... nice to read... and anyway, is something of you. Once is done, leave it there....no?"
"meh."
Blood in the shower. And the numbness. And the gratefulness. And the sweet grating truth of the irony. Blood. Salt. Iron. Irony. Clean. Washed clean. We clean the body. The mind is harder to scrub. Not of filth or bad things. But of marks. Of things that stick. Permanent. Nothing on the body is permanent unless it is etched or scarred. The same with the mind. Words are dirt, thoughts are sweat. but really good things... and really painful things.... these are etched and sore and ache. So we numb them. And maybe, in proper circles, this should be kept private or it should take a long time. a 'decent' amount of time. it is indecent and cruel otherwise. But there is shamelessness. Honesty. If a man has no secrets to bear, he cannot be found out, cannot be judged save by his honesty. Judge that, if you must wonder or make sense of things. What I wished and what is are opposites and separated by a mere hundred meters.
Blood. Iron. Irony.
"Did you have a good night?"
"Yes."
"Would you like me to shave it with the machine or use scissors?"
"Whatever you prefer."
"Scissors. It will take longer. But we will not be too late to Fika."
"Did you take all these pictures?"
"Yes."
"I like them. I am not surprised that they are here. I am just saying that I like them."
"You hair is very dark."
"Is it?"
"Yes. Look at it. It is almost black!"
"Hmm. It is hair."
"You are such a boy. 'it is just hair' ha."
"Life is simpler that way. What is that? The entire Sex and the City series?"
"Yep."
"RICARDO, how could you!"
"At the movie. Everyone was crying and she just said, 'Oh Lina. You are going there and you will be killed. ah ha ha ha. like thanks. serious stuff."
"Du kan se galenskapen i hennes ögon."
"HA! bra svenska."
"jag ska lära mig."
"I think you will be fine by the time you do your fieldwork."
"I hope. Or they can speak English. Martin thinks it will be fine."
"Vackert väder"
"In Sweden they complain. they always complain. Where I work in the summer with old people... they complain if it is too hot. They complain when it rains. They complain that if it is too dry the leaves will fall in the streets. and then it rains and they complain that they had only two weeks of summer."
"God forbid the leaves fall in the street."
"I know, right?"
"I like all kinds of weather."
"There is nothing you can do about the weather anyway."
"Right. So you might as well like it."
"Have you been to Las Vegas? Out West?"
"Yes."
"Karl and I went there."
"Did you see the Grand Canyon?"
"Yes, but we had to pay to see it."
"Of course. It's America. The first person to find a giant hole in the ground gets to charge you."
"Ha."
"I like that heat. the dry heat. I cannot stand humidity. Heat and humidity. I cannot think. Today is not so bad."
"No. Today is good. It is a cozy day."
"Yes. The rain is good."
The cut healed in a black slice through his lip. Stiff. He reflected on the humor. A stiff upper lip. Ha.
More irony. More subtlety. More nothingness in an endless sea of nothings. Events without significance. He grew tired of significance. Tired of caring. Until he couldn't bring himself to do it anymore. As the water pounded on his neck and the memories layered upon memories to banish the Furies from their wing-ed antics. Rain suited him. The weather suited him. It did not reflect his mood. Nor change it. It just fit. And that was good. No studying this day. Movies. And powering down. For the next two week would be stressful. Paper writing. Reading. And nothing else. Until he could get to Ireland. And hug his little brother. That would be a wonderful thing.
"You do not have to run, we can bike slowly."
"I don't mind running."
"You have lost weight since you came here."
"Where? To Sweden?"
"Yes."
"It is the training. And everything else."
"And you do not eat."
"Ha. I spent my food money on the ink. That was my choice. And what are you saying? that I was fat?"
"No. Just... your cheeks were rounder. Now your face is thin."
"Meh. I will eat more then, I guess."
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