A Life in Habits

2006-10-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

Table of Contents

Prelude: Just Breathe

Part I: What Is the Question?
A Mile in Strange Shoes
Mirror, Mirror
Musical Chairs

Part II: Camera Polyphonica
Strange Bedfellows
Forward, Backwards, Sideways
Metamorphosis Magnificat

Part III: Like a Metaphor
Like a Bird, Like a Horse
Like 10,000 Forks
Like Shit

Part IV: Katalogos Grammatikos
Night Rites
New World
Desiring-Machine

Part V: Elementary Particulars
Earth
Water
Air
Fire

Part VI: Operating Instructions
In Sickness and in Health
Life Expectancy
Old School

Part VII: The Feeling of Feeling
Polygenesis: The P-Principle
Passion for Passion
Invisible to Desire

Part VIII: If Things Had Tongues
Considering Desire
The Opposite of Love
Sex Talks
Vacilando Furioso

Part IX: Quoth the Maven
Reeling
Writhing
This Order
Of Habit, Habitats, and the Order of Things

Part X: Transformations
Reversatility
The Interlarders
Portmanteaux
The Avalanche of Emotion
Windows of Perception
Flip Chimeras
Shifters
Perverse Engenderings
I. AM. A.
Inter!

Part XI: Polyhistories
Eye to I
Playing by Ear
On the Nose
Tongue and Groove
In Touch
Mind Matter

Part XII
Space
Time
Emptiness
Nirvana

Also by the author:
Mazemapping
Perversations

Appendix

2006-08-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

Cycle 52: Nirvana

2006-08-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

<< Emptiness
>> Prelude

Cycle 51: Emptiness

2006-08-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

<< Time
>> Nirvana

Cycle 50: Time

2006-08-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

<< Space
>> Emptiness

Cycle 49: Space

2006-07-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

<< Part XII
>> Time

Part XII

2006-07-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

>> Space
>> Time
>> Emptiness
>> Nirvana

Cycle 48: Mind Matter

2006-07-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

Automatic Thinking Machine

mind < men-

Six billion minds reflecting the shifting, shimmering facets of this impossible gem we call reality.

      What you think is what you get.

The less the mind reflects itself, the more it reflects the world.

      Between reminiscence and amnesia, the fugitive self flickers.

Making its own monsters, the mind (though it may not know it) can also unmake them.

      Reality reveals itself when the mind surrenders.

Who can say where the body ends and the mind begins?

The Eggcentric Egg

I < eg
mine < me-

O for some respite from my unblinking I, egging me on to I, I, I until I die.

Crack the ego’s shell open – you’ll find nothing there but the fear of there being nothing there.

An egg rolled into a bar.
What’ll you have? asked the barman.
All the King’s men.

It is the fate of the I - tragic or comic depending on how you look at it - never to see eye-to-eye with itself.

What am I? Nothing but an imaginary boundary dividing inside from outside.

The self is an egg that never wants to hatch.

The only thing the self really wants is – itself.

Which came first, the eye or the I?

An egg is an egg - until it cracks.

What will become of me when I crack open? (What will I become?)

It.

Schizo Disco

consciousness < skei- < sek-

Because the mind that nots is also the mind that knots, wisdom is possible.

The pleasure of thinking and the pleasure of shitting are the same – the gratification of separating one thing from another.

Consciousness makes schizos of us all.

A knife and a nail see different worlds.

Consciousness unravels what needs no unraveling, only disentangling what it has entangled first.

Because it can’t digest reality, the mind makes mincemeat of it all.

Consciousness, wounded by reality, swells in the imaginary cut between the body and the world.

Wanting only to combine, the body is baffled by the mind’s compulsion to separate this from that.

Consciousness loves nouns and adjectives; the unconscious, verbs and conjunctions.

Metempsychosis: A Belly Dance

psyche < bhes-

I breathe you in, I breathe me out - a different soul each time.

You can’t cling to your breath. To live, you have to let go.

Breathe before you think.

In the gap between in and out – a whiff of freedom. (Riding the breath, the mind rides to freedom.)

Some minds curl in, in, in. Others spiral out, out. But until it learns to dance in-and-out - letting itself go during the reversals - the mind isn't really thinking.

Who knows who I’ll become in the next breath? (Being is just becoming that has stopped breathing.)

With each breath I outgrow myself.

A Thinking Ship on a Signdark Sea

think < tong-

Mind cannot live on thought alone.

Thinking is becoming. Likewise not-thinking.

Thinking is nothing but the mind ceaselessly feeling itself.

You are never who you think you are. (Thank God!)

Thinking is always thinking about something, philosophers say. So why does my thinking often seem to be about nothing?

To not think? My imagination cannot fathom it. (O rivers of thought – what dark seas are you rushing to?)

Oh this sinking thinking!

Writer’s cogito: I think therefore I ink.

We all start out thinking with our whole bodies; few are fortunate enough to regain this innocence.

Where would I be without thinking? Each moment a new world.

Thinking trapped me in this maze – why do I think it will get me out?

To confuse things with thinking – the human stain.

A Sabbath from thinking, a holiday for the body.

To think is to compare; to stop thinking makes things incomparable, beyond the reach of words.

Neither friend nor foe, it thinks.

Do you know what you’re thinking?

Just thinking.

Etymologies from The American Heritage Dictionary

<< In Touch
>> Part XII

Cycle 47: In Touch

2006-07-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

You are de espider

One foot in the Philippines, more water than land. Another foot in America, imaginary empire in decline. Yet another foot searching for an unbounded country to wonder on and on in. (Though I don’t know it, my feet have always known – I’m already there.)

Reversatility

Top, bottom, versatile – who’ll care one hundred years from now? One hundred years from now, my ass will be innocent again. (It never lost its innocence.)

Fascination

My father’s dick, my grandfather’s dicks, my great-grandfathers’ dicks, my great-great-grandfathers’ dicks, . . . , the Big Bang, . . .

In my mother's womb, my cock used to be a clit.

Throwbacks

In every tradition there is a warning myth – don’t look back.

Back when I was Catholic . . .
Back when I was straight . . .
Back when I was I . . .

Suspended between the past I remember and the past I don’t, who am I?

Autobiograph 247

↩

<< Tongue and Groove
>> Mind Matter

Cycle 46: Tongue and Groove

2006-07-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Sweet Dreams

6,000 B.C.E. Cultivation of sugarcane originates on the island of New Guinea.

2,700 B.C.E. Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu (a Chinese treatise on pharmacology) discusses forty kinds of salt.

Sweet dreams are made of hopes,
Salt dreams are made of fears,
I travel the word and the seven seas,
Looking for nothing,
To see everything.

Sugarmovers and Saltshakers

2,600 B.C.E. Egyptians use salt to make mummies.

510 B.C.E. Persian soldiers discover “reeds which produce honey without bees” near the Indus.

Writing is mummification, preserving fugitive selves for unknown afterlifes. (Sweet-talking anonymous readers, the writer’s transmigrating tongue secretes honey without bees.)

Tooth Suite

350 B.C.E. Salt is exchanged for slaves in Greece.

1600 Sugar production in tropical America becomes the world’s largest and most lucrative industry. The African slave trade expands with the sugar industry.

I am the slave of my imperious tongue, ruled by its capricious cravings and whimsical disgusts, bound by the words it will and will not, can and cannot speak.

Sugar Daddy

600 B.C.E.    Roman legionnaires are given money (salarium argentum) to buy salt.

1603     The Badii palace in Marrakesh is completed after sixteen years of construction, the gold, Italian marble, and onyx adorning the palace having been paid for with sugar.

2005    My salary for teaching: $6,635.02 per class.
              My salary for writing: 0.

Without a sugar daddy, I couldn’t afford to write.

With a Grain of Salt

1926 Fidel Castro born to a sugar landlord.

1930 Gandhi’s salt march.

To see the world in a grain of salt
And history in a sugar crystal.

<< On the Nose
>> In Touch

Cycle 45: On the Nose

2006-07-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

Fusion Cuisine

Boar becomes pig become pork becomes tonkatsu.

Paddy becomes brown rice becomes white rice becomes flour becomes vermicelli becomes bun cha.

Hunting becomes farming, nomad becomes sedentary, forest becomes city, raw becomes cooked, Claude Lévi-Strauss becomes GMO.

All the world and time becomes my international dinner becomes the mingling spreading savors becomes the tantalizing aroma tickling my cosmopolitan nose.

Follow Your Nose

The nose can detect 10,000 different smells.

Smell becomes odor becomes scent becomes aroma becomes fragrance becomes perfume becomes bouquet becomes savor becomes stink becomes stench becomes redolence.

Eschatology

The egg on the plate becomes a bolus in the mouth becomes chyme in the stomach becomes amino acids, sugar, and fat in the small intestines becomes feces in the large intestines becomes the smell of shit rising to my undisgusted nostrils as I read Ulysses on the toilet.

Nosetalgia

Imagining you, I want to see you, hear you, touch you, smell you, taste you, become you. After you come, I want you to go away . . . but your smell lingers.

Soap Becomes Civilization

The Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans (but not the Greeks) used soap.

In 1995, Americans consumed 600 million pounds of soup. They consumed even more detergent.

. . . fire becomes civilization becomes ash becomes soap . . .

Soap becomes civilization.

<< Playing by Ear
>> Tongue and Groove

Cycle 44: Playing by Ear

2006-07-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

The History of the Novel

Before the invention of precise mechanical clocks (Christian Huygens built the first pendulum clock in 1656, then developed the balance wheel and spring mechanism in 1675), there were no novels (Robinson Crusoe did not appear until 1719). By the time Eli Terry was mass producing clocks in 1800, the novel was the dominant literary genre.

To refuse to write novels is to resist the tyranny of mechanical time.

The Bangless Bang

Before there were ears, how did the universe sound?

Before there were ears, who did God command?

Before Bishop Berkeley had ears, trees rose and fell in forests.

Passion at a Distance

Imagine the quiet before phones.

      After cell phones, there’s no escape.

Could people actually have been closer to each other before phones?

      After phones, voices without bodies.

Robinson Crusoe could only have been written before phones.

      After cell phones, every man is an island.

Proust could not have written the Recherche before phones.

      After cell phones, cell phone thrillers.

Before Music

Before there were ears to hear it, was there music?

John Cage would say yes, and ask – before there was music, was there noise?

Wagner – ever operatic – would say no.

What would deaf Beethoven say? (Did music sound better to him before or after he went deaf?)

Before there was music, did birds sing?

In the Middle, Silence

At the edge of silence, everything vibrates.

No two silences are alike.

The strong know silence is strength, just as the weak know it is weakness.

Silence means different things in different languages. Also in the same language. (The distinctive silences of one’s mother tongue.)

In the plenitude of silence, nothing means anything and nothing means nothing.

<< Eye to I
>> On the Nose

Cycle 43: Eye to I

2006-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

The I-less Cosmos

13.7 billion years ago

The Big Bang gives birth to an eyeless universe. Seeing backwards, the bedazzled cosmologist beholds a blinding beginning.

5 billion years ago

The sun – cosmic eye – blinks open. The circling darkness becomes visible.

4.5 billion years ago

The sun winks the earth into existence. Time and chance spin it toward its blue destiny.

4 billion years ago

Struck by lightning, blind matter stumbles into life.

200 million years ago

Mammals evolve. Countless eyes envision countless worlds twinkling in and out of existence.

1609

Galileo falls in love with the moon.

5 billion years from now

The swelling sun, voracious red eye, swallows the third planet - or spits it out into the darkling cold. Will there be living eyes to see the earth’s plunge into final fire or frigidity?

Eye Opening

. Unicellular organisms evolve a light-sensitive eye spot that can detect light and shadow.

Chlamydomonas
Chiaroscuro world. Here shadows illuminate as much as light.

. . Inward dimpling of the eye spot increases visual acuity by forming a pit that determines the direction of a light source.

Flatworm
Navigating seas of light, cunning worm of twists and turns.

. . . The rim of the eye pit constricts, creating an aperture. Like a pinhole camera, this eye can now form images.

Nautilus
Click. A wave coming. Click. A wave going. Seeing more, the nautilus also saw less. The flatworm’s eye was simply in the world; the nautilus’s eye doubled it - the beginning of thinking and its confusions.

. . . . The eye pit fills with clear jelly.

Abalone
“Lest it see more, prevent it. Out vile jelly where is thy lustre now?”

. . . . . A lens is added to the eye pit.

Snail
What makes your eyes retract? To focus on this or that is to be blind to everything that’s not this, not that. Who decides what my eyes will focus on? Not I.

. . . . . . The lens acquires a higher refractive index at the center than at the edges.

Cuttlefish
Emotions are lenses, refracting what is seen: Different joys, different fears project divergent worlds.

. . . . . . . Color vision develops.

Baboon
An orange is not orange, an orange is not an orange. (Gertrude Stein agrees.)

Written by Light

1249      Eyeglasses      Anonymous

Before Marco Polo.

1250      Magnifying glass      Roger Bacon

Alchemist and monk, Roger Bacon magnified the world - and inadvertently shrank God.

1590      Microscope      Hans and Zacharias Jansen

Peeping through eyepieces, father and son swung between fascination and disgust: these bodies we call ours are not ours.

1608      Telescope      Hans Lippershey

Priests instinctively understood that the telescope was more dangerous than any heresy, more subversive than 10,000 Galileos. It’s a wonder the telescope didn’t make atheists of us all. (The frightened pope should have known – the eye sees what the mind believes.)

1822      Metal photography      Joseph Niépce

Ever since photography, life has become more and more unreal. (Also death.)

1851      Ophthalmoscope      Hermann von Helmholtz

The eye fascinated by itself.

1895      Cinema      Lumière brothers

Cinema made reality flicker, making the twentieth century a century of dreams. (Whose dreams are you living in?)

1895      X rays      Wilhelm Roentgen

To see the dead in the living, the living in the dead.

1929      Electron microscope      Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska

Reality passes into the invisible. Climax of humanity’s vanishing act.

1937      Radio telescope      Grote Reber

The age of Odysseus. We are all time travelers.

1938      Iconoscope (TV camera)      Vladimir Zworykin

Andy Warhol was eight years old.

Illuminations

February 5, 1879.      Joseph Swan invents carbon-filament light bulb.

Joseph Swan? Swallowed by darkness and by Thomas Edison’s PR machine.

February 22.      Woolworth’s (the first chain store) opens in New York.

125 years later, a Starbuck’s on every street corner. (And 125 years from now?)

March 14.      Albert Einstein born.

Seeing at the speed of mind, he saw – everything is energy.

May 16.      Treaty between Russia and England sets up state of Afghanistan.

Even the stone Buddhas saw the coming terror.

July 4.      Zulu-British war in South Africa ends.

Squint-eyed warmongers defending the black-and-white logic of war.

September 4.      Establishment of dual French and British control of Egypt.

The eyes of empire have always been bigger than its stomach.

September 10.      Pacific Coast Oil Company (later ChevronTexaco) founded.

Iraq is in ruins. The polar icecaps are melting. What is George W. Bush (not) seeing?

October 2.      Wallace Stevens born.

Thirteen ways of looking at the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

October 7.      Alliance formed between Germany and Austria.

Waiting for Gavrilo.

December 18.     Paul Klee born.

December 21.      Joseph Stalin born.

He wanted to burn his terrible vision into the eyes of history.

A Portrait of the Escape Artist as a Young Eye

1970      Hawaii Five-O
1971      The Wonderful World of Disney
1972      The Waltons
1973      The Six Million Dollar Man
1974      Little House on the Prairie
1975      Starsky and Hutch
1976      Charlie’s Angels
1977      The Love Boat
1978      Mork and Mindy
1979      That’s Incredible!
1980      Diff’rent Strokes
1981      Falcon Crest
1982      Knight Rider
1983      The A-Team
1984      The Cosby Show
1985      Night Court
1986      Moonlighting
1987      The Wonder Years
1988      Alf
1989      Cheers
1990      The Golden Girls
1991      Home Improvement

<< Part XI: Polyhistories
>> Playing by Ear

Part XI: Polyhistories

2006-06-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

Woke up, cuddled D in bed.
Blown by D.
Peed.
Fucked by D, didn’t come.
Masturbated while D showered, came (finally).
Put on Benjamin CD.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Made almond butter sandwich for D, packed pear for D’s lunch.
Turned on computer.
Took echinacea.
Checked email.
Checked calendar for day’s tasks.
Changed settings on email program to comply with encryption requirements.
Helped D with email to doctor.
Pooed, read Death.
Showered.
Brewed genmaicha.
Put on Mugam Sayagi.
Had raisin bread with almond butter, yogurt with granola, tea for breakfast.
Helped D look for misplaced BART tickets.
Ate banana.
Took Skin Eternal and multivitamin.
Called Now & Zen about defective clock.
Checked email.
Brushed teeth.
Stretched.
Drank Emergen-C.
Worked on presentation on the Buddha, Joyce, and form.
Popped pimple on face.
Pooed, read Death.
Prepared veggie chicken nuggets, brown rice with black beans, and egg for lunch.
Read Hunger while waiting for food to cook.
Ate lunch, drank aloe vera juice mixed with blueberry and pomegranate juice.
Worked on presentation.
Checked email repeatedly.
Looked at Leiris’s book on Francis Bacon to see what he had to say about arrows.
Masturbated.
Checked mail.
Napped to Kronos Quartet.
Stretched.
Ate triple berry-o’s with pumpkin seeds.
Brewed tea.
Worked on presentation.
Ate 2 kiwis while looking at PFA schedule for Asian-American film festival.
Changed for hip hop.
Brushed teeth.
Went to art museum to buy tickets for film festival, box office was closed.
Went to hip hop class at YWCA.
Walked home in rain.
Called D, left message.
Ate berry-o’s.
Picked D up from BART station.
Had banana flower salad, tamarind soup, flambéed bananas, and lemonade soda at Saigon city.
Drove home.
Checked email.
Stretched.
Pooed, read Death.
Showered.
Meditated.
Scanned texts for presentation.
Ate banana, drank Emergen-C.
Brushed teeth.
Blown by D, came.
Flossed.
Checked email, shut down computer.
Put on Tye mass.
Made semblance of order.
Peed.
Went to bed.

>> Eye to I
>> Playing by Ear
>> On the Nose
>> Tongue and Groove
>> In Touch
>> Mind Matter

Cycle 42: Inter!

2006-06-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

Story of the Door

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. The door breaks space in two, splits it, prevents osmosis, imposes a partition. On one side, me and my place, the private, the domestic (a space filled with my possessions: my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books, my odd copies of the Nouvelle Revue Française); on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics. You can’t simply let yourself slide from one into the other, can’t pass from one to the other, neither in one direction nor in the other. You have to have the password, have to cross the threshold, have to show your credentials, have to communicate, just as the prisoner communicates with the world outside.
One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it, and a stranger stepped in. He was a tall man, with blurred, vague features, or perhaps my nearsightedness made me see him that way. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds. A ghostly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door. All this time I’ve journeyed without knowing it.

[Stevenson, Beckett, Perec, Borges, Joyce]

Your Doors Are All Shut

The Soul selects her own Society –
Then – shuts the Door –
‘What is that noise?’
The wind . . .
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

[Björk, Dickinson, Eliot, Keats]

Lebensweisheitspielerei

342 was near the fire escape. One could still – but the key was already in the lock, and then I was in the room. The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came through the Venetian blind from the outside arclights; the intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed the following situation. She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body.
Darkness there, and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.

[Stevens, Nabokov, Lawrence, Poe]

κνδυν, μυθóπλοκος

Le bonheur d’empoigner au ventre par son noeud de porcelaine l’un de ces hauts obstacle d’une pièce; ce corps à corps rapide par lequel un instant la marche retenue, l’oeil s’ouvre et le corps tout entier s’accommode à son nouvel appartement.
Qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto;
ogni viltà convien che qui sia morta.
y vi de pronto
el cielo
desgranado
y abierto,
planetas,
plantaciones palpitantes,
la sombra perforada,
acribillada
por flechas, fuego y flores,
la noche arrolladora, el universo.

[Sappho, Ponge, Dante, Neruda]

Between Past and Future

Consider a door. Is it simply an aperture in the wall? No. It is framed. Transitional, symbolic and functional, the object “door” serves to bring a space, the space of a “room,” say, or that of the street, to an end; and it heralds the reception to be expected in the neighboring room, or in the house or interior that awaits. It is important here that the notion of the “outside” is expressed in many European languages by a word that means “at the door” (fores in Latin is the door of the house, thyrathen in Greek literally means “at the threshold”). The threshold or sill of an entrance is another transitional object, one which has traditionally enjoyed an almost ritual significance. The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing with respect to the limit; it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself. This is a paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither. Does that amount to saying: no one? This ek-stasis is the gift. Every story is a travel story.

[Arendt, Lefebvre, Agamben, De Certeau]

<< I. AM. A.
>> Part XI: Polyhistories

Cycle 41: I. AM. A.

2006-06-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

I am a man. That means I am not a woman. A man is a fellow with a cock dick pecker penis phallus prick rod schlong, which God made for a cunt poontang pussy snatch twat vagina. I, however, monkey around with other dicks (I’ve never even seen a real live pussy), so I’m going to hell, my sister tells me.

Everyone knows – the way to a man’s heart is through his pecker. (If you took away my cock, would I still be a man? Well, there’d still be my man-mind, and the hormones. How do you make a hormone?)

I am a manicure. That means I am not a world. A manslaughter is a ferment with a coconut dignity pee pentagon philosophy princess ROM scooter, which Gooseflesh made for a curfew population quack snooker twinge van. I, however, monkey around with other dins (I’ve never even seen a real live quandary), so I’m going to herald, my skate tells me.

Everyone knows – the website to a marathon’s heatwave is through his pelvis. (If you took away my cog, would I still be marijuana? Well, there’d still be my marquee-mink, and the hospital. How do you make a hothouse?)

I am a queer – which is a fine thing to be in San Francisco. (It’s good to be a queen: kings have their spies, but queens have three eyes.) If buttfucking and cocksucking ceased to be deviant, would there still be queers?

I am a questioning – which is a fine thirst to be in Saint Petersburg. (It’s good to be a questioner: kippers have their squadrons, but quickies have three eye-catchers.) If buzzfucking and coconutsucking ceased to be deviant, would there still be quietism?

I am an organ donor. (Funny, I’ll never see my own organs – unless I’m driven to hara-kiri or something.) Used to be, if you were a Catholic, you weren’t supposed to donate your organs because when the dead are resurrected you’d be missing a liver or an eyeball. But these days, the pope is even permitting cremations. (How’d you like to be resurrected as an ash heap?) Thank God I’m an atheist – I like the idea of my eyeball seeing through another mind, or my heart pumping the alien passions of a strange manwoman after I’m dead – now that’s a kind of reincarnation I can believe in.

I am an orphan dormouse. (Funny, I’ll never see my own overflow – unless I’m driven to harp or something.) Used to be, if you were a cave, you weren’t supposed to donate your outrage because when the debts are resurrected you’d be missing a lobster or faith. But these deadends, the porcupine is even permitting crevices. (How’d you like to be resurrected as an assassin?) Thank gossip I’m an attempt – I like the idiot of my falcon seeing through another miniskirt, or my heir pumping the alien pastimes of a strange Marxistwren after I’m dead – now that’s a kit of release I can believe in.

I was a student for twenty-five years, I am an eternal student. (Is a perpetual student one that’s always learning or one that never learns?) Now I am a teacher. (If a teacher shows the way – or ways – I don’t know if I’m a teacher. Have I ever really shown anyone anything?) Is it possible I’ve overvalued erudition? Why is an appetite for knowledge greater than an appetite for pork chops or for chocolate?

I was a sty for twenty-five yuppies, I am an eternal subpoena. (Is a perpetual subway one that’s always learning or one that never learns?) Now I am a tea set. (If technology shows the wedding – or welders – I don’t know if I’m a telephone. Have I ever really shown anyone anything?) Is it possible I’ve overvalued espionage? Why is an appreciation for lacquer greater than an aquarius for portfolio chords or for chopsticks?

I am not an American.
I am not a man.
I am not a queer.
I am not an atheist.
I am not a writer.
I am neither my work nor my desire.
I am not I.

I am not an anesthetic.
I am not a massacre.
I am not a raid.
I am not an attribute.
I am not a yarn.
I am neither my wreck nor my destruction.
I am not I.

<< Perverse Engenderings
>> Inter!

Cycle 40: Perverse Engenderings

2006-06-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Deathless Odyssey

If she does not love soon these mortals blame the gods.
Ah how shameless – the way she will love even unwilling.

Sapph O’Homer (Eight-Seventh Century BCE)

Fair Contraries

When I was fair and young and contraries meet in one,
Oh, to vex me, favor graced me.

Elizabeth Donne (1558-1631)

Brainsong

The Brain – is a Child as well as a Man
Maternal – as well as Paternal – wider than the Sky.

Emily Whitman (1830-1892)

Being Asado

What is a nail. A foreign song.
Without human feeling a nail is unison.

Gertrude Stevens (1874-1955)

Parturition Greens

Pain is no stronger than the dark
At the thick of the resisting force.

Mina C. Williams (1882-1963)

<< Shifters
>> I. AM. A.

Cycle 39: Shifters

2006-06-10T05:26:00.000-07:00

Lethe’s Dada Trophies

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled child,
mind of Zeus who twists pains, I beg you
do not break with hard lures,
O heart, my lady

but come here if ever before
you caught my father far off
and listening left your voice’s
golden car and came,

yoking your house. And fine sparrows brought you,
quick birds over the black wings
whipping their earth down midair
through the sky –

they arrived. But you, O blessed one
smiled in your deathless heart
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy face. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her gifts. Who, O
Pasho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses love, rather will she give it.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.
Come to me now: loose me from hard
heart and all my care longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my mind.

P. Pasho

Wild Things

Wild Nights! – Wild luxury!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our Nights!

Futile – the Port –
To a Compass in Winds –
Done with the Heart –
Done with the Sea!

Rowing in Nights –
Ah, the Chart!
Might I but moor – Tonight!
In thee!

Dominic Skyline

Bittersweetly Cogging Nohow

We two roads together clinging,
The other the one never leaving,
Up and down the boys going, North and South fingers making,
Elbows enjoying, power stretching, excursions clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No priests less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Menials, misers, laws alarming, sea-beach breathing, turf drinking, on the water or the air dancing,
Feebleness wrenching, statutes scorning, ease mocking, cities chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

Waltham Twin

Vie So Gay

Above the fresh sea of the bottom
Bright striped breasts flay each other with caresses.
They have contrived bodies for shell cordage,
And their lives crumble the elements of baked time
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in sticks to their treble shells
The dog beats kids on the sand,
The thunder folds waves on the waves;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant lightning, frisk with your sun,
Fondle your interjections and answers, bleached
By weed and fragments; but there are fingers
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond them
Spry shucks of your conquest to sand
Too lichen-faithful from too wide urchins.
The surf of the ruffles is cruel.

Archer Tan

<< Flip Chimeras
>> Perverse Engenderings

Cycle 38: Flip Chimeras

2006-06-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

Ὀδυσσεὺς Πρωτέας

Street entrances give little nighttown about Enrique, but he had probably been yanked away from his tramsiding by skeleton tracks when he was young. For will-o’-the-wisps, danger signals sailing in their rows raided coastal houses and kidnapped doors, some of them mere lamps. They were sold in rainbow fans in the same way Enrique was sold in Malacca. As Magellan’s ice, he traveled far from his own gondola to men where the women, wafers, and lumps were alien to him. How strange he must have felt when snow looked at him as if he were an exotic child or a swancomb. How cold he must have felt when the clammy Iberian gondolas arrived. How surprised he probably was to note that the murk rarely bathed unlike his own lighthouses who bathed daily in whistles and in calls.

From Cecilia Brainard and James Joyce.

Caliban

Then it gave to me, like a revelation, that I could hurt understandable English. I was twangling with happiness. I hummed slowly and boldly, waking the wine when I made, sleeping silently and dreaming. When the long letter methought, a letter which actually opens a story of my life, I showed to my feet and dropped through my tears: “They can’t wake me any more!”

From Carlos Bulosan and Shakespeare.

Tikbalang

Part monster, part snout, part covers.

Part morning, part landscape, part cattle.

Part hobbles, part wind, part dawn.

Part jelly, part dream, part dream.

Part vat, part roots, part pup.

Part pup, part end, part day.

From Anne Carson.

<< Windows of Perception
>> Shifters

Cycle 37: Windows of Perception

2006-06-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

To see is enough. (To see is to risk being seen.)
See: become: look again: always more to see. (Remember to look in now and again.)

Writing’s rhythm: See saw see again – look out – look in. (Look out! Once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it.) I look out – I’m not myself anymore.

Eye of Wind, Mind of Sky

With its boundless blue equanimity the heavens bear witness, embracing everything. (There is no evil under the sky.)

Suddenly the noon – motherless, childless.

Luminous elusiveness of the incommensurable noon – fugitive convergence of light and light.

And then, shadows . . .

Lines of shadow, curve of light – the clear-obscure geometry of time.

Shadow gnosis.

O rapture of the shadowless unfathomable noon!

Unbearable noon.

Anticipation of noon. Remembrance of noon. And noon itself?

Pregnant with shadows.

Axiom of noon: If light, then shadow – except at noon. (Beyond all ifs – the radiant certainty of noon.)

I look, you look, we look – never the same world twice.

<< The Avalanche of Emotion: Touching, Feeling, Shaking
>> Flip Chimeras

Cycle 36: The Avalanche of Emotion: Touching, Feeling, Shaking

2006-05-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

You.

Why? Who knows?

Love? Likely story. (Tell me again.)

Entangled. Intimately intertwined? Love or freedom? In dependence, things arise.

Crisis. Turning point. Turning into what? Monster, hero, unnamable awakening? Becoming becomes you – unbecome yourself.

<< Portmanteaux
>> Windows of Perception

Cycle 35: Portmanteaux

2006-05-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Every morning I pack my green teabags (everything I need for wandering can fit into these little pouches) to go wherever my writing will take me. More forgetful than others, writers (immemorial nomads) depend, perhaps too much, on words (compact carryalls) to convey their experiences from place to place, from time to time (past to present to future), and from mind to mind (from you to me to us).

If I were stranded on a desert island, this would be my wish list (as I grow older, I’ve come to value the body – that astonishing machine ((no a machine is a bad metaphor – that astonishing universe rather)) – more and more than the fantastical mind):

1. A man – handsome, clever, and kind – whom I love and who loves me
2. A water desalinator, a lifetime supply of all kinds of canned food, a can opener, cookware, and matches
3. A solar-powered mobile home with four-wheel drive and all-terrain wheels
4. Clothes for all conditions

5. Soap, toothpaste, and other toiletries I couldn't do without
6. Pencil and paper
7. Books (they used to rank much higher ((the rise and fall of books in my life, a life story in itself)) ), though it’s likely they’ll eventually drop off this list altogether to be replaced by something more useful.

Two years of pre-school plus seven years of grade school plus four years of high school (two in the Philippines ((where I was born (((though I conceal this fact from most people))) and where I cannot, for the time being, return)) and two in the United States) plus four years of undergrad plus eight years of grad school means I’ve been going to school for more than two-thirds of my life. (If I hadn’t learned to be such a good student at such a young age, I probably wouldn’t have become a writer. ((Still it makes me melancholy to think of all the other lives (((cognitive scientist? kept man? saint?))) I might have lived.)) )

Every day I sort words, separating some, combining others (every Tuesday I sort laundry, separating whites from coloreds ((writing I sort the clear from the confused, ordering similarities and differences (((outside the mind, is there clean and dirty? ((((I used to aspire

to ascetic purity in my writing – now I want my words to be promiscuously impure)))) is there order and chaos?))), separating understanding from bafflement)), then washing, drying, sorting, folding) to make a bit of order – purely imaginary I know – in this whirling world.

Traveling is my favorite metaphor (from the Greek ((the ancient Greeks have, by chance, traveled to the present (((origin and destiny are just stories we tell ourselves ((((fate unfolds a tortuous path to (((((you think you know where you’re going, but the self-less journey knows better))))) its inexorable rendezvous with itself)))) to tame our unspeakable bewilderment))) but so many others got lost along the way)) metapherein, to transfer + pherein, to bear) for extravagant life roaming beyond our usual ends and reasons.

<< The Interlarders
>> The Avalanche of Emotion: Touching, Feeling, Shaking

Cycle 34: The Interlarders

2006-05-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

Beastie Boys

Returning home from some sailor’s frolic on the night, or rather in the morning, of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bedroom, into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as was thought, securely confined. (Man, I’m such a pig, he had been thinking sheepishly as he floundered home, still feeling the mammoth cock of that bully bear – the stud didn’t monkey around – ramming his ass.) Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet.

Container by Edgar Allan Poe.

Love Poison

After her departure a full bottle of tincture of aconite, a deadly poison, was found in a small medicine cabinet in her bedroom. Her belladonna love poisoned her eyes and ears with noxious jealousy. In a frenzy of toxic passion, she was driven to baneful fantasies of virulent revenge. Night after venomous night she woke from her nightshade dreams with a dreadful tang of strychnine in her mouth. This might have been an indication that she meditated suicide.

Container by O. Henry.

Ghosts

“It’s enough to turn a man ill, to see his lean old carcase shivering in that way, like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave.” The old man looked like he’d seen a terrific apparition, but whether horrible or wonderful his eyes didn’t betray.
“Come in quick, before the wind blows you away,” Nancy urged. Only Bill didn’t seem to feel the chill wind – moaning banshees – warmed as he was by the stiff spirits he’d been imbibing since dawn. Their attendant ghosts, which appeared whenever the three of them came together, had already begun whispering their shadowy insinuations in their ears. Outside, the howling wind blew out the spectral sun, and the rising night roused their sleeping vampires, possessing revenants. Though none of them believed in ghosts, these hungry phantoms - passing through the old man’s wraithlike eyes, between the gaps in Bill’s crooked teeth, deep into Nancy’s burning ears - didn’t need their belief to haunt them. Unnerved by the tightlipped men’s shrouded conspiring, the spooked woman practically ran to the kitchen as if pursued by ghouls. Nancy quickly brought a bottle from a cupboard, in which there were many: which, to judge from the diversity of their appearance, were filled with several kinds of liquids.

Container by Charles Dickens.

Buccaneer Booty

It was like any other seaman’s chest on the outside, the initial “B” burned on the top of it with a hot iron, and the corners somewhat smashed and broken as by long rough usage. Both my mother and I couldn’t wait to see the booty the half-blind mariner had amassed in his years of brigandage, but at the same time we wanted to prolong our suspense as long as we could, so we played a spellbinding guessing game:

Besides treasure, pirates love booze as everyone knows, so though it might be disappointing, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find nothing but bootleg in the locked chest.

Blown this way and that by our blustering imaginations, my mother bet on Buddhist objets d’art – beaming bronze Buddhas, beryl bracelets, and basalt bowls from Burma or Bhutan – while I pictured exotic botanical specimens from Botswana, Belize, Barbados, Bangladesh, Burundi, Brazil, and other farflung places I’ve long dreamed of visiting.

Because he may have dabbled in taxidermy to help him unwind between backbreaking smuggling runs, maybe the seadog kept a collection of stuffed birds - blackbirds, bluebills, bitterns, budgies, bullfinches, bowerbirds, buffleheads, and more.

Before he became a pillager, he might have been a paleontologist, and though he was forced to abandon so unlucrative a profession, he still had a sentimental attachment to the bones (here a brontosaurus tibia, there a brachiosaurous fibula) he had dug up.

Bootleggers are belligerent men, so a chestful of weapons – battle-axes, blunderbusses, broadswords, bows and arrows – was a likely possibility.

Brains in brine for some Frankenstein experiment?

Bullion, of course, was what everyone hoped for.

Be that as it may, why should all picaroons be greedy bastards? Who’s to say his most treasured possessions weren’t his books, maybe even philosophical tomes like the complete works of Bishop Berkeley or Bergson?

Boredom on deserted isles where he’d been marooned many a time might have made the old salt a music lover who never went anywhere without his trunk of instruments, a veritable orchestra with a balalaika, a banjo, a bassoon, bongos, a bugle, a bandoneon (too bad even a baby grand is too big to lug around), bells, a bagpipe, a barrel organ, and even a biwa he picked up in Beppu when he was terrorizing the coasts of Japan.

Beethoven and Brahms would not have been the bold seafarer’s desert-island music. No, he loved Bartók, Björk, and Bulgarian folksingers I thought, for it pleased me to imagine that we shared the same tastes.

But maybe instead of doubloons and gold bullion the chest was filled with beef medallions and bouillon so the unlikely pirate-gourmet could cook boeuf-en-daube and beef stroganoff wherever he was on the buffeting winedark seas.

Bright-hued butterflies pinned under glass would reveal a soft spot for lepidoptery's fugitive beauties, which the otherwise crusty corsair would have taken great pains to conceal from his rough hurly-burly seamates.

Buttplugs of divers sizes and shapes would be a bombshell indeed, but not really if you think about it – after all, what’s a bawdy buccaneer to do on those long hard sea voyages?

By and by (we had lost track of time and the sun was already rising), the morning light blazoned the “B” (hitherto in shadow) on the chest, breaking the spell of our mutually goading fancies. “Give me the key,” said my mother; and though the lock was very stiff, she had turned it and thrown back the lid in a twinkling.

Container by Robert Louis Stevenson.

If Riff

“If we were in the other room,” said Emma, “if I had my writing desk, I am sure I could produce a specimen.”

If I were handsome, clever, and rich, would I be sitting here writing?

If I were a Jew, I’d be a musical matchmaker.

If I were witty, I’d go to parties and charm everyone’s pants off.

If I ever got married, it would be for convenience.

If I died now, would anyone dig up my juvenilia?

If I could be a nineteenth-century English writer, I’d be Lewis Carroll.

If I had died when I was thirty-one, I wouldn’t have written any books.

If I were Jane Austen, I’d try my hand at erotica.

If I were straight, I probably wouldn’t care for Jane Austen.

If I were Elizabeth Bennet, I’d be angrier.

If I lived to a hundred, would I still love love stories?

If I had a country mansion, all my servants would love me.

If I were a character in an Austen novel, I’d be the slut.

If I adapted Pride and Prejudice into a movie, I’d make it a queer musical with hip hop dance numbers.

If I could write novels, I’d write a bestseller.

If I could pick between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, I’d take Mr. Darcy any day.

If Jane Austen could read my writing, would she laugh?

If I were twenty-one again, I’d be wilder.

If I knew I only had thirty (forty, fifty, . . .) years to live, would I spend my brief life writing novels?

If I were an English woman in the early 1800s I’d choose writing over marriage too if I had the choice, and if I didn’t, I’d get married to Mr. Darcy, or perhaps to a homosexual if that would give me more freedom, because I know I’d shrivel up if I went the governess-route, and I don’t have the constitution for prostitution (in medieval times I might have considered becoming a nun, especially if I could have had visions like Hildegard von Bingen – but without the migraines).

If my first book were ever to be published, I’d do it anonymously too.

If I were rich, I could easily succumb to hypochondria.

If Jane Austen wrote tragedies instead of comedies . . .

If I had a vagina, I’d be in Spain or Japan now.

If Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf met, what would they say to each other?

If I had to choose between someone seventeen years older or someone seventeen years younger . . . (You know the answer.)

If my father had read Jane Austen, would he have understood my mother more?

If I weren’t Filipino . . . But I rather like being Filipino now.

If I didn’t write, I’d make films, and if I didn’t make art at all, I’d be a cognitive scientist.

If I were better at metric differential geometry, I might never have turned to writing.

[. . . Horny . . . Why does Jane Austen do that to me? . . . Should at least finish this paragraph before I jack off . . . Now where was I?]

“I have a note of his.”

Container by Jane Austen.

<< Reversatility
>> Portmanteaux

Cycle 33: Reversatility

2006-05-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

And how is astonishment passed on? A body receives or gives it. Always a mind succumbs.

Shitting zucchinis is astonishing, shitting salmon bellies is astonishing, shitting ears of corn is astonishing. No no no dinner is not the astonishment no no tea is not the astonishment no breakfast is not the astonishment and shitting chocolate soufflés is because that bittermelon is tomorrow’s broccoli is yesterday’s bokchoy is tomorrow’s bittermelon. That bitterness is Aristotle is Marx is also Hobbes. That dragon kale is not that dragon kale but this makes them rainbow chards or astonishments also when dinner is not an astonishment. A moon falling is astonishing so if I shit a moon for dinner I am astonishing I am the salt which is in all salt so that moon is every moon. Also those.

When will I be where I was silent?

The astonishment of living lives in all astonishment.

Beyond your astonishments you hear emptiness, she said.

Your reality will be the reality of astonishment. (Waking up has always been the most dangerous adventure.)

Astonishment severs the present from the future, unloosing the past in vectors of difference. The bound past chains neither future nor present. Emptiness weaves everything, arrives everywhere, touches eternity.

<< Part X: Transformations
>> The Interlarders

Part X: Transformations

2006-05-11T05:43:00.000-07:00

Form is emptiness, emptiness form.

4:30 AM Woken up by D’s insomniac thrashing.
Peed.
Put on Dufay.
7:09 Woke up, chatted with D in bed.
Changed from pajamas to sweats.
Brought D thyroid pill in bed.
Pressed kidney 27 and lung 1 on D.
Played Dufay.
Rinsed mouth, drank water.
Took carnitine.
Started journal.
Checked email.
Cleaned mouth guard.
Washed face, put on alpha hydroxy lotion.
Made semblance of order in bedroom, living room, and kitchen.
Pooed.
Consulted calendar for the day’s tasks.
Put drops in eyes.
Brewed genmaicha.
Worked on piece for D.
Gave D GABA and theanine.
Made semblance of order in study.
Read Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on the four foundations of mindfulness.
Looked at optical illusion on computer at D’s request.
Made bread and nut butter sandwiches, sliced apple, made D’s energy drink, took vitamins.
Ate breakfast.
Watched “Everyone else has had more sex than me” animation online, also at D’s request.
Continued reading Thich.
Brewed another cup of tea.
Put away breakfast things.
Checked email.
Washed dishes.
Threw out trash and recycling.
Said goodbye to D leaving for work.
Peed, put on lip balm.
Canceled health insurance.
Turned on computer.
Looked over bills.
Brushed teeth.
Washed more dishes.
Talked to D on phone.
Checked email.
Worked on habit book.
Pooed, read Persepolis.
Checked email, looked at craigslist ads, posted ads.
Worked on piece for D.
Worked on habit book.
Looked at craigslist ads, answered ads.
Masturbated.
Worked on habit book.
Looked at craigslist ads.
Took pictures of meditation stuff, feet, clock on VCR for habit book.
Masturbated.
Filled out form to request disqualification from jury duty.
Walked to restaurant down the street.
Read Thich while waiting for food.
Ate “gourmet” noodles.
Walked home.
Checked mailbox.
Checked email.
Ate São Tomé chocolate while sorting mail.
Worked on D piece.
Emailed Professor C to ask for recommendation.
Looked at craigslist ads.
Reserved table at Mother Nature for dinner with friends.
Talked to D on phone.
Worked on D piece.
Posted two craigslist ads.
Emailed Professor B to ask for recommendation.
Worked on habit book.
Looked at craigslist ads.
Worked on D piece.
Ate chocolate-covered soy nuts while working on habit book.
Looked at craigslist ads.
Masturbated.
Worked on D piece.
Napped to Debussy preludes.
Squeezed out blackhead on face.
Checked email.
Worked on D piece.
Called D.
Went to hip hop class at YWCA.
Walked home.
Checked email.
Wanked.
Rolled back on foam roller, did back bend on gym ball.
Talked to D on phone.
Worked on D piece.
Called J.
Plucked nosehairs.
Walked to Stars for dinner.
Read Language of Blood while waiting for D.
Ate vegetarian fried ginger fish and chicken salad.
Ate São Tomé chocolate.
Pooed, read Persepolis.
Brewed nighty night tea for D and detox tea for me.
Worked on D piece.
Meditated on five hindrances.
Worked on D piece.
Ate Fig Newmans.
Checked email.
Worked on Asian American lit class.
Brushed, flossed.
Put on face lotion and eye cream.
Clipped fingernails.
Checked email.
Watched Inuyasha.
Put on Isaac mass.
Went to bed.

>> Reversatility
>> The Interlarders
>> Portmanteaux
>> The Avalanche of Emotion: Touching, Feeling, Shaking
>> Windows of Perception
>> Flip Chimeras
>> Shifters
>> Perverse Engenderings
>> I. AM. A.
>> Inter!

Cycle 32: Of Habit, Habitats, and the Order of Things

2006-05-05T05:25:00.000-07:00

For our house is our corner of the world . . . a real cosmos . . .
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Reader's Indigestion

Quietly he read, restraining himself . . . Hope it’s not too big . . . He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell.
—James Joyce, Ulysses

To read or not to read, that is the question.

&

Inhabiting space, the mind partitions it into closed places. The dining room is for eating, the bathroom for shitting, the bedroom for fucking, . . . But sometimes we displace a habit to give ourselves a thrill. (Let’s fuck on the dining table, piss in the bedroom!)

&

Housing more than our things, our houses house our habits.

&

The terror and glamour of the uninhabited.

&

Habit, from Indo-European ghabh-, to give or receive.

&

But what does habit give or receive? The mind. Sometimes the body resists.

&

How to recover the strangeness of a place before it was inhabited? How to remember the strangeness of the body? Passion of mystics and artists.

&

To disinhabit one’s habits.

&

How many Remembrance of Things Pasts have I read on the toilet?

&

Habit’s negative pleasures – chiefly the inhibition of change – too often mistaken for positive pleasures.

&

Reading while shitting kills two birds with one stone.

&

Usefulness a ruse of habit. (To habit, whatever perpetuates it is useful.)

&

How can a philosophy, a poem surpass the interest of my bowels’ gross and subtle contractions, relaxations?

&

&

Shit to shit, said the Zen master.

&

But let us not be too severe with ourselves. Why castigate ourselves for catching up on world politics, for learning about the history of Buddhism on the toilet?

&

A habit is disrupted. Suddenly you hear, smell what you’ve long since stopped hearing or smelling, and you glimpse the unformed plenitude surging beneath the familiar formations of your mind.

&

What astonishments will emerge?

&

So much depends on the intestines’ voluminous coils, spiraling back to countless ancestors - nameless ones who read only the earth, the sky, and each other.

&

Only foolish idolatry could elevate words above shit.

&

Reading is always reading about something. Shitting, however, doesn’t have to be about anything.

&

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

&

Did Joyce waste his life?

&

Every time I resist the urge to read on the toilet, I can remind
myself –

&

Shit when you shit and read when you read and write when you write, then silence.

&

A Time to Eat

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorized and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.
—Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

I write where I eat.

+

Writing feeds my hunger for the world.

+

Eating is writing and writing is eating.

+

Eating is the world writing my body. (Eating is my body riding the world.)

+

In the mouth of the world.

+

Eating separates the delicious from the disgusting, the bland from the inedible, too much from enough. Writing separates the interesting from the insipid, the essential from the insignificant, the trulse from the frue.

+

Eating I separate the broccoli from the rice from the sausage on my plate. Eating I mix the green with the white with the flesh in my belly. Writing I separate the bright from the dull from the pointed from the curved. Writing I mix the true with the false with the real with the imaginary to make a fantastic stew.

+

Come, eat me. Then I’ll eat you.

+

Never write to eat, never eat to write.

+

Eating is also a habit of the hands and of the mind. Writing is also a habit of the mouth and of the belly.

+

The world an eternal banquet feasting on itself.

+

The only books worth writing are those that are feasts.

+

A habit is not a habit without a time or place. (Displace it! Distime it!)

+

To surprise a habit, seize the beginning of a repetition and swerve.

+

Eating a kumquat is not a habit. Eating a chicken liver is not a habit. Eating a pumpkin seed is not a habit. Yes breakfast is a habit yes yes lunch is a habit yes yes yes dinner is a habit but eating a cheddar cheese pancake is not a habit and this pluot is not yesterday’s nectarine is not tomorrow’s Asian pear is not yesterday’s pluot. This sweetness is not Plato is not Hegel is not even Spinoza. This cantaloupe is this cantaloupe and that makes it not a watermelon and not a habit even if breakfast is a habit. The sun rising is not a habit and when you eat the sun for breakfast you are not a habit you are a sweetness that is not any other sweetness because this sun is not any other sun. Just this one.

+

+

You can’t eat what you write. (That’s why I write.)

+

I will never get tired of rice, or of

+

Edible writing.

+

Eating is a verb that separates the eater from the eaten. But this is just a manner of thinking.

+

Scrbblng

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing . . . disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks . . .
—Christian Bök, Eunoia

Art also is just a habit.

X

The artist cannot help repeating himself either, the only difference is he plays with his repetitions.

X

Writing is inhabiting. Seeing and sawing the writer builds himself a house of words.

X

A house divides the world into inside and outside. This is inhibiting. This writer writes inside, this one outside. Only a few can balance their pencils on the threshold.

X

The habit of writing is neither good nor bad.

X

What makes a habit good or bad?

X

Where are you when you’re writing?

X

Perhaps I should have cultivated other habits.

X

A new book, a new set of habits.

X

Can a book be written without habits? (Such a book must be unreadable even if it weren’t unwritable.)

X

Narrative is a habit I can live without.

X

Maybe the habit of writing will weaken my bad habits. Then again, it might reinforce them.

X

To make a habit of examining one’s habits.

X

The habit of writing is composed of very many other habits.

X

I can easily imagine giving up writing. Whether I can really do so is another matter.

X

The controlling habit of writing is the habit of controlling.

X

Joyce had his epiphanies, Proust his moments bienheureux, Woolf her moments of being. All I have are my habits.

X

X

To wake up bit by bit, habit by habit until one stumbles out of the shadow into brilliant astonishment.

X

We think we choose freely, but our habits choose for us.

X

We see the world through our habits, he wrote.

X

The Thinkwalkers

The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long-since dried-up felt-pens, shirts, non-returnable and returnable bottles, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust, and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune.
—Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

Karma.

:

The mind never sleeps, in the dark it keeps running. Where?

:

Habit never sleeps - we wake up knowing what we’re supposed to do.

:

Because habit is not just repetition but also the little gaps between repetitions, difference is possible.

:

Without habit, how can anyone go on?

:

Habit’s lucid interruptions – flashes of life between recurrent deaths.

:

Joy and sadness, habits too.

:

Our dreams are the dreams of habit.

:

Thinking never sleeps. (There are those who say, thinking is sleep.)

:

Thinking has always been my greatest temptation.

:

Homo habitus.

:

Creatures of habit, we primarily experience difference as a deviation from habit.

:

Habitus interruptus.

:

Spinning round an empty center, habit spins the circular self.

:

Has there been any writer more habitual than Proust? Naturally no one has surpassed his eloquence on habit’s disruptions and distortions.

:

Our thoughts are the thoughts of habit.

:

After the last repetition, before the next one – mind the gap.

:

Sleepwalkers.

:

Stop thinking – give yourself to wonderment.

:

While you sleep, habit remembers for you.

:

The habits of the dead live in us.

:

The habits of the dead live on us.

:

:

Show me your habits and I’ll tell you your dreams.

:

Sometimes I get tired of the habit of being human.

:

Sleep is the purest of all habits.

:

Backwards and Frowards

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them out for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

The body leans forward, the mind back. Always flying forward backward in the same breath, always avoiding now – human all too human. Is our passion for double lives – living in the past, living for the future – what makes us human? The body darts there, there to avoid dwelling here. The mind recalls this that - but can’t remember where it is. Step by step, memory by memory we divide, double ourselves, populating ghostworlds, hallucinating ever-receding, ever-returning pasts and futures.

The habit of nexting is the other face of the habit of remembering. The artist’s double subversion: Let the next thing be to remember to return to this moment, and again this moment, and again . . .

Always in search of the there there when we’re already in the middle of the miraculous here here.

The past moves backward, the future forward, the present from side to side, vibrating.

Encountering silence, the mind - accustomed to the disquiet of desiring and remembering - recoils.

Some wish they had no past, others that the future would never come, but the present keeps on coming, bearing past and future in it.

Alpha looks ahead, omega looks back - mu just looks.

The body never gets ahead of itself, never falls behind. How is it that the mind always does?

Most never arrive.

Haunted by ghosts because we can’t forget. Hunted by ghosts because we can’t remember.

The man without a past, the man without a future – tragedies. The man without a past, without a future – comedy. (Or nirvana?)

Underlying all the mind’s repetitions, the habit of forgetting lies under all the body’s habits.

The past grows, the future shrinks, but the present, always different, is always the same: though always dividing and multiplying, nothing can ever be added to it, nothing taken away.

Binding the present in repetition’s loops, habit binds the future to the past. The present unbound unchains both past and future - the self unravels - nowhere to go but here, nothing to know but now.

<< This Order
>> Part X: Transformations

Cycle 31: This Order

2006-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Italo Calvino

Ernest Hemingway

Chögyam Trungpa

Michel Foucault

Claude Lévi-Strauss

<< Writhing
>> Of Habit, Habitats, and the Order of Things

Cycle 30: Writhing

2006-04-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Ch. Chusseau-Flaviens from Taschen's 1000 Photo Icons

Ozymandias

Photographs by Francis Frith and Mary Ellen Mark from Taschen's 1000 Photo Icons

Photograph by Alexander Rodchenko from Taschen's 20th Century Photography

If

only

words

did

not

speak

for

the

body.

Photographs by Birgit Kahle and Man Ray from Taschen's 20th Century Photography

Photograph by Harry Callahan from Taschen's 1000 Photo Icons

<< Reeling
>> This Order

Cycle 29: Reeling

2006-04-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

Invisible Cities

A Moveable Feast

The Myth of Freedom

The History of Sexuality

The Raw and the Cooked

<< Part IX: Quoth the Maven
>> Writhing

Part IX: Quoth the Maven

2006-04-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Woke up.
Did some metta meditation in bed.
Turned on computer.
Took carnitine, alpha lipoic acid.
Checked email.
Pooed, didn’t read.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Snarfed D’s butt.
Put lead in pencil.
Attached foam strip under door between living room and hallway.
Looked online for weather strips for back door.
Looked for Dalbavie and Manoury CDs online, did price comparisons.
Worked on online Technology and Society course.
Made peanut butter sandwich for D.
Toasted pop tarts and brewed tea.
Checked calendar for the day’s tasks.
Had breakfast with niece, ate pop tarts with tahini, telba, and green tea.
Looked up geek and nerd in dictionary.
Washed dishes.
Checked email.
Worked on online course.
Posted craigslist ads, looked at craigslist ads.
Pooed.
Brushed teeth.
Posted more ads, answered some ads.
Got bag ready for trip to the city.
Put on Grisey CD.
Shaved head.
Pooed.
Showered.
Walked to BART.
Read No-No Boy on BART.
Met up with nipple-fetish guy near Castro, took pill.
Ate vegetable tempura roll at Osaka Sushi.
Saw Fanny and Alexander with J and S at Castro Theatre, ate pecan pie that S brought.
Updated journal.
Ate at Thai restaurant above Daddy’s.
Got vegan brownies at grocery on Market.
Talked with J and S on bench outside store.
Went to Café Flore with J and S, talked about Fanny and Alexander.
Took Muni and BART home, meditated on BART.
Walked home.
Talked to D a bit before he went to bed.
Put on delta brainwave CD for D.
Brushed teeth, made semblance of order.
Checked email.
Flossed.
Pooed.
Showered, cleaned ears and nose.
Took vitamins.
Shopped for music online.
Masturbated to pics of Jordan Young.
Worked on online course.
Went on chat.
Bought French CDs from store in Quebec.
Checked calendar.
Shut down computer.
Changed delta CD to Byrd mass.
Peed.
Went to bed.

>> Reeling
>> Writhing
>> This Order
>> Of Habit, Habitats, and the Order of Things

Cycle 28: Vacilando Furioso

2006-04-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

I

only

c
o
u
n
t

the

w
a
s
t
e
d

hours.

The Genius of Stupidity

Who needs intelligence when ignorance is my genius and fear is on my side?

Up against the other you see – you’re not who you want to think you are.

The Celerity of Idleness

In defense of idleness the lazy man becomes energetic.

All things being unequal . . .

Your hands were meant for better things, said the broom.

<< Sex Talks
>> Part IX: Quoth the Maven

Cycle 27: Sex Talks

2006-04-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

Insatiable 2

I remember when all your porn videos were in your head.

I remember “Penthouse Forum” and “Ask Xaviera.”

I remember when you scratched the Betamax playback head when you used a butterknife to pry out a jammed video you had “borrowed” from your brother’s locked cabinet.

I remember Taboo, Insatiable 2, Deep Throat (though you're not sure if you've ever seen it), Switchhitters (from your brief bisexual phase), Erection Set, Wide Open, Hot Footin’, . . .

I remember when Calvin Klein underwear boxes were pulse-quickening.

I remember your father’s dildos, vibrators, and penis extensions stuffed in a shoebox deep in his walk-in closet.

I remember the brotherlove stories on Nifty Archives.

I remember the VCR counter, handy for rewinding your father's or brother's videos to remove evidence of their having been watched.

À la Recherche des Odeurs Perdues

Remember coming on yourself at night and not being able to just lie there and drift off to sleep because you have to wipe up the cum before it liquefies and drips down the sides of your belly onto the sheets?

Remember how persimmons and outdoor swimming pools smell like sperm?

Remember how you can never get just one kleenex from a new box?

Remember how it always takes at least three tissues to get cleaned up?

Remember how bits of paper sometimes get stuck on the head?

Remember calculating how many times you’ve masturbated in your life? (How many boxes of tissue? How many trees?)

Souvenirs

Remember herpes!

Remember your washed-out father!

Remember the postcoital panic!

Remember vitamin V headaches!

Remember Nietzsche’s horse!

Remember hell!

Penis Envy

You forget when you took the first blue pill.

You forget porn-film erections are staged.

You forget about the side-effects.

You forget the shame.

You forget the doctors who say it’s all in your head.

You forget no-brainer hardons. (When was the last one?)

You forget everything when you’re horny.

Lubricious

You would only bottom after topping first, I remember.

You got embarrassed when the condom came out dirty, I remember.

You got off on masturbating using your lover’s semen as lube (he usually came first), I remember.

You agreed that the bottom got dibs on the shower, I remember.

You pretended that bottoming was harder than it really was so you wouldn’t seem like a “natural” (“big ole”) bottom, I remember.

You’ve stuck as many as four fingers in an ass, I remember.

You used to rush to the toilet after being fucked, I remember.

<< The Opposite of Love
>> Vacilando Furioso

Cycle 26: The Opposite of Love

2006-04-04T17:10:00.000-07:00

The Third Law

You say you hate disorder, but you just call whatever you hate disorder.

Dirty-Dish Hysteria

You hate being the wife. No you don’t.

Doppelgänger Epiphany

You are a fantasy of the other, the other just a fantasy of yours, but you can’t escape him, any more than you can escape yourself – you breathe his breath, he breathes yours. You hate him, you need him, you wish he’d disappear.

Without him you’d be no one.

Von der Schuld und Geduld

You hate owing anyone anything. Problem is, you owe others everything.

Nomanology

You’ve been yourself too long. Because you can’t escape yourself, you must.

<< Considering Desire
>> Sex Talks

Cycle 25: Considering Desire

2006-03-30T05:34:00.000-08:00

The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses)

Beyond the grasp of your mind’s neat oppositions, I dance with chaos and laugh with chance.

71% Mind

Reminiscence-coated anticipation, I melt in your mind, not in your mouth.

A Doom of One's Own

I cannot keep out the monkeys of your mind. (I can’t keep them in either.)

Force x Displacement

In the end (it always ends) love leaves you emptyhanded. I will help you believe in something again.

Vis-à-Vis

I can't transport you beyond the borders of your mind.

<< Part VIII: If Things Had Tongues
>> The Opposite of Love

Part VIII: If Things Had Tongues

2006-03-29T05:24:00.000-08:00

Woke up.
Put on Byrd masses.
Lay in half-sleep with D in bed.
Took carnitine.
Ate baby banana.
Put clean clothes away.
Checked phone messages.
Prepared gym bag.
Put on contacts.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Took Skin Eternal and multivitamin.
Ate corn flakes with dried cranberries, Montmorency cherries, and soymilk.
Browsed Guardian “Best of the Bay.”
Wrote query about Mazemapping to Suspect Thoughts Press.
Looked at calendar for things to do today.
Started journal, walked around apartment trying to recall everything I’d done since waking up.
Crossed off finished tasks in calendar.
Waited for D to get ready, browsed Guardian, looked up Manic Press online.
Walked to Y, talked to D about synopsis of Mazemapping.
Sat in steamroom, swam, sat in steamroom.
Walked around downtown Berkeley trying to decide where to eat lunch.
Ate veggie burger with spinach and feta and a side of onion rings at Barney’s.
Walked home.
Called Joe to cancel Caucasian Chalk Circle matinee.
Browsed Manic Press website.
Emailed N to set time to talk on phone.
Browsed Suspect Thoughts website.
Got massaged by D.
Packed for Spirit Rock.
Called sister in Orange County, called J in Chicago.
Emailed S to thank him for CD, listened to CD.
Looked for job openings on campus.
Helped D clean APAP mask.
Ate chocolate ice cream sandwich while watching episode of Awful Truth.
Mailed Netflix DVD.
Helped D dry mask.
Ate blueberries and tamarind while working on resumé.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Ate turkey jerky while working on resumé.
Talked to N about her syllabus for poetry class.
Worked on resumé.
Made cheese, blueberry, and chocolate pancakes for dinner.
Submitted job applications for administrative jobs at academic senate and office of admissions.
Popped pimple on face.
Brushed teeth, flossed.
Pooed.
Put alpha hydroxy acid lotion on face.
Stretched, meditated.
Gargled with fluoride mouthwash.
Started new calendar.
Read Introducing Baudrillard while waiting for D to get ready for bed.
Put on Ockeghem Missa Prolationum.
Went to sleep.

>> Considering Desire
>> The Opposite of Love
>> Sex Talks
>> Vacilando Furioso

Cycle 24: Invisible to Desire

2006-03-24T05:03:00.000-08:00

The Invisible Refrigerator

I don’t hear it either.

Do You See What I See?

Memories made visible to him; to you, invisible gimcracks.
He sees what isn’t there; you don’t see what is.

In the Closet

Some oblivionologists say there are forty-two kinds of remembering. One iconoclast even argues there are as many as 666. But all of them know - there is only one forgetting.

Leaves of Grassness

From lush Marcel you learned to see Sodom and Gomorrah in a lusty flower. From florid French philosophy you learned to idolize the deviousness of plants. (Rhizomes are revolutionary, grass is perverse!) But in a corner of your living room, a neglected cyclamen is dying of thirst.

Photograpathy

For a long time I saw nothing in photographs, but time started slipping away, so armed with my belated camera, I went in search of it, hoping to surprise it in untimely photographs. (In photographs both the reality and surreality of seer, seeing, and seen made visible.)

Who is seeing? What is seen? The seer sees the frame.

<< Passion for Passion
>> Part VIII: If Things Had Tongues

Cycle 23: Passion for Passion

2006-03-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

Dealbreakers

Bitter Pill

The Descent of the Father

Masquerade à Deux

Dirty Laundry

<< Polygenesis: The P-Principle
>> Invisible to Desire

Cycle 22: Polygenesis: The P-Principle

2006-03-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Collector: Prelude to a Requiem

The Rite of Spring was first. And the last? What unintended requiem?

Once upon a Twotimer (or For the Love of Story)

Because her husband had no interest in playing his part in her story, she bore another son. And she read him a thousand and one stories before he spoke his first word. (Love too is a story; her stories, motherlove.) So he became a writer, but not of stories. His perverse passions resisted narration – they were not for a mother’s ears.

Voluminous Loves

Dramatis Personae

The White Bull: A pedophile with no eyes for any boy over thirteen.
Pasiphaë: A thirty-year-old love-lover addicted to convoluted loves.
Daedalus: Manyfaced desire, mazemaker, wingweaver.
The Minotaur: Amor vorax.

It was folly to fall for a pedophile, but like Pasiphaë panting after the White Bull, he couldn’t help it. So he fashioned a horny bullock out of words, and he hid in it. But the cagey bull didn’t fall for that old trick. Thwarted, his writhing desire turned in, in, in, twisted this way and that, tracing a voluminous labyrinth, trapping him in a mazy monument to yet another Minotaur, yet another impossible love.

An Aetiology of Pediphilia

Other eyes made his penis shy. (No wonder he envied lesbians.) His dick’s mortifying ups-and-downs made him appreciate his stalwart feet – they never left him in the lurch. When a foot fetishist on his knees was worshipfully sucking his long toes, he could let go – for a few fleeting moments, he could stop watching himself.

Login: VampireVirtuouso
Password: Hyperspider

He was already addicted to his own imagination before the Internet was invented – the Web just wove his polymorphous fantasies with the phantasmatic lusts of shadowy strangers. Haunted phantoms of desire – omnivorous and insatiable – they devoured each other’s fancies, got drunk on each other’s dreams.

<< Part VII: The Feeling of Feeling
>> Passion for Passion

Part VII: The Feeling of Feeling

2006-03-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

7:20 AM. Woke up from anxiety dream about forgetting to show up for a class I was supposed to teach at 11.
Put on Ciconia.
Turned on computer.
Took carnitine, alpha lipoic acid.
Peed.
Checked email.
Cuddled with D in bed.
Gave D hand and foot massage.
Got massaged by D.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Cut cantaloupe.
Pooed, read NY Review article on mazes in architecture and music.
Took vitamins.
Checked email, Gaydar.
Looked at calendar for things to do today.
Ate cantaloupe, posted craigslist ad, looked over journal entries.
Washed dishes.
Went on gay.com.
Posted another craigslist ad, chatted.
12 PM. Started writing.
Checked email repeatedly.
Took pictures for habit book.
Waited for trick.
Ate banana.
Ate claypot at Vietnamese restaurant down the street.
Picked up mail.
Masturbated to pics of guy who was supposed to meet me at 1:30 but didn’t show.
Napped to Socrate.
Ate chocolate fudgie brownie mixed with Scharfenberger ice cream.
Took pictures of a picture of myself as a child for habit book.
Selected photos for habit book.
Brewed green tea.
Chatted online.
Checked calendar.
Worked on online course.
Cooked angel hair pasta while listening to Socrate.
Ate pasta with marinara and meatballs and a side of yellow and green zucchini.
Talked to E in Boston on phone.
Meditated.
Went to African dance class at YWCA.
Ate pluot.
Brushed, flossed.
Pooed, read NY Review.
Showered.
Put on Skin Eternal lotion and eye cream.
Chose CD to fall asleep to.
Read Electric Meme.
Got back cracked by D.
Put on Obrecht mass.
Went to sleep.

>> Polygenesis: The P-Principle
>> Passion for Passion
>> Invisible to Desire

Cycle 21: Old School

2006-03-08T09:13:00.000-08:00

Duets

The Police and Bernart de Ventadorn

Don’t stand
Don’t stand
Don’t stand so close to me

Tears for Fears and Edvard Munch

Shout
Shout
Let it all out

Depeche Mode and the Marquis de Sade

Let’s play
Master and Servant

Eurythmics and Friedrich Nietzsche

Don’t mess with a missionary man

Cyndi Lauper and Sigmund Freud

So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors

Madonna and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everybody come on dance and sing
Everybody get up and do your thing

Björk and Jesus

You’ll be given love
You have to trust it

Tomorrow's Retro

1983    Swatches

1984    Stonewashed Guess Jeans

1985    Sperry’s boat shoes with no socks

1986    Calvin Klein boxers

1987    Nike Airs
.
.
.

2004    Fashion's only unchanging rule: Don’t be poor.

The Buddha at Delphi

Know your selves.
   (Know “your” selves aren’t yours.
       (Know there is no self.
          (          )))

Play!

If you’re lucky you’ll lose track of time.

The Counting of Youth

2004    Say you’re 29.

2014    Say you’re 39.

2024    Say you’re 49.

2034    Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

<< Life Expectancy
>> Part VII: The Feeling of Feeling

Cycle 20: Life Expectancy

2006-03-03T07:40:00.000-08:00

Against the Grain

1. Spread out an old newspaper on the floor.

2. Place a mirror – it should be at least as big as your head – on the newspaper.

3. Squat on the floor, tipping your head forward till you can see it squarely in the mirror.

4. For a close shave, set the clipper to the lowest (0) setting.

5. Hold the base of the clipper with one hand and guide the blade with the other following the contours of your skull. Watch the ears!

6. Go over the entire scalp first longitudinally then latitudinally to catch hair with different grains.

7. Brush the hair from the clippers, then oil the blades to keep them clean and sharp.

Maskmaker, Maskmaker

1. Wash your face with an exfoliating cleanser morning and evening.

2. Take daily antioxidant supplements of ascorbyl palmitate, tocotrienol, alpha lipoic acid, and DMAE.

3. Protect your skin with an SPF 15 or higher sunscreen before venturing outdoors.

4. Apply a face moisturizer with alpha and beta hydroxy acids at bedtime.

5. Scrub your face with a deep pore cleanser once a week.

6. Get a monthly facial with extractions. For problem skin, see a dermatologist.

7. Sell your soul to Mephistopheles. (The devil’s in the genes. Besides, how are you gonna pay for all this shit?)

Three-Minute Proust (or Giants in Time)

Swann’s Way

Don’t fall in love with a whore.

Under the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Let love multiply you.

The Guermantes Way

Do not squander precious solitude in pursuit of the specious fancies of the capricious multitude.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Observe the marvelous compositions of desire. Leave the judging to jealous gods.

The Captive

Don’t expect truth from love.

The Fugitive

Let flow.

Time Regained

Don’t wait until tomorrow – Life comes unexpectedly.

In the Teeth of Time

Let my flesh nourish wiggling maggots, worms, and chirruping birds.

Let my penis fertilize a male ginkgo tree.

Let my carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges be assembled and disassembled by giggling schoolchildren.

Let my pelvis be sculpted and painted by a brilliant anatomartist.

Let my glands be dried and ground into love medicine.

Let my intestines string singing violins and whistling tennis rackets, my skin stretch over twinkling tambourines, let my ribs – struck with a yarn-covered radius or ulna – array a marimba, a resonating ossiphone.

Let my skull hold daisies, carnations, and baby’s breaths bursting out of gay noseholes and flowering eyesockets.

Chronomania/Chronophobia

Time is running out – stop running! / Time is running – ride it out.

Be extravagant when you’re wasting time – spend it like there’s no tomorrow. / Make art – save time.

Breathe. As long as you’re breathing there’s still time. / Believe in eternity if you must, you can even die for it - but don’t live for it.

Man is the only animal that wastes time. (Time is an old habit of the mind we don’t know how to live without yet.)

<< In Sickness and in Health
>> Old School

Cycle 19: In Sickness and in Health: Wedded to the Body, Married to the Mind

2006-02-14T18:36:00.000-08:00

To C or Not to C

In their 2000 report, the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) of the USDA established an RDA of 90 milligrams of vitamin C for males between 31 and 50.

Balch and Balch, alternative medicine gurus, urge a daily intake of 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C combined with mineral ascorbates.

Dr. Perricone, author of the bestselling Wrinkle Cure, recommends a dermatological supplement of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C ester (not to be confused with ester C).

Linus Pauling (1901-1994), two-time Nobel Prize winner, took 18 grams of vitamin C everyday and exhorted everyone to take 10-12 grams to prevent heart disease and cancer.

Dr. Arthur Robinson, erstwhile colleague of Linus Pauling, found that high doses (around 5-10 grams for humans) caused skin cancer in mice.

Influenza

If you want the flu to pass you over this year, get a flu shot in the fall and keep away from sneezy coughing people in the winter.

If you can’t avoid sick people, wash your hands frequently, and don't touch your eyes, nose, and mouth.

If you feel like you’re getting sick, take megadoses of vitamin C, drink echinacea tea, and suck on zinc lozenges every two hours.

If you’re coughing, spit the phlegm out. (Expectorate!) If you’re running a fever and your body aches, stay in bed and sleep as much as you can.

If someone is taking care of you, make them cook you chicken soup. (If they don’t cook, make them buy you hot-and-sour soup to-go from your favorite Chinese restaurant.)

If aches and pains are making it hard for you to get to sleep at night, drink a shot of whiskey at bedtime. (If paranoia is keeping you up, calm yourself down by telling yourself you can get tested for STDs when you’re better.)

If you can, enjoy this respite from your usual habits and responsibilities.

The Second Remembrance

How to keep my equanimity when my lover has been sick with a mysterious illness for a year and I am alarmed by the thought that I might have to take care of a sick person for the rest of my life.

How to want to do the right thing instead of just doing it because I don’t want to look bad to others - or to myself.

How to suffer the resentment of having responsibilities I didn’t choose.

How to determine when it’s wiser to leave than to stay, to escape than to endure.

How to face the wish that someone’s death would set me free.

How to really help another person.

How to learn from suffering.

The Mind-Body Problem

So you can’t get it up . . .

Relax – it happens to the best of us.

If it’s not just an occasional lapse anymore, you should see a doctor, get things checked out.

Your blood tests are normal – what you need is a therapist.

No luck with the headshrinker? It wouldn’t hurt to try some natural remedies. They say gingko and ginseng work wonders. Stay away from that Spanish Fly stuff though.

No dice with the herbs? Viagra should do you. (A big hardon’s worth a little headache, don’t you think?) See, it wasn’t just in your head after all.

Vitamin V’s not working so well anymore? Better see a urologist. (But don’t get suckered in by the Boston Medical Group – they’ll want you to inject your dick every time you want a woody. Owww!)

Since you have normal nighttime erections, I guess the problem’s in your head after all. (Wasn’t that RigiScan contraption a trip?) Your problem is, you think too much.

Don’t know what else to tell you. Give up sex? Just accept it? (Penises need love too.) Wait for a better drug? Hypnosis? Neurofeedback? EMDR? Affirmations? Meditation? Penitential confession? Vacuum device? Surgical implant? Substitutive perversion? Voodoo?

Trojan Whores

Rome: Fornication is a mortal sin.

STOP AIDS: Play safe.

Mother: I don’t want to know.

Lover: Tell me everything.

Father: Life is short.

Superego: You’ll get AIDS.

Trojan: If used properly, latex condoms will help to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV infection (AIDS) and many other sexually transmitted diseases.
Caution: This Product Contains Natural Rubber Latex Which May Cause Allergic Reactions.

<< Part VI: Operating Instructions
>> Life Expectancy

Part VI: Operating Instructions

2005-12-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Woke up, had conversation with D about why I’m not out to my mother, listened to D make conjectures – I’m ashamed, afraid, etc.
Lay in bed while D washed new fiesta ware.
Cooked Irish oatmeal.
Took carnitine.
Checked calendar for the day’s tasks.
Listened to D talk some more about why I’m not out, made pistachio butter sandwich for him to take to work.
Took Skin Eternal, lactase.
Ate oatmeal with goat milk and maple syrup.
Pooed, read NY Review article about Bin Laden.
Washed dishes.
Brushed teeth, washed face.
Put leftover oatmeal in fridge.
Went on chat, Gaydar, Adam4Adam, checked email.
Napped to Pli selon Pli.
Checked chat, etc.
Called about administrative job on campus.
Made appointment to renew license at DMV.
Chatted online.
Called Iranian guy from chat.
Got ready to see M, took pills, put on contacts, pooed, gargled, showered.
Lay on white thing.
Messed around with M (big dick!).
Showered.
Cleaned up living room.
Ate bread with pistachio butter and limequat marmalade.
Masturbated.
Napped to Pli selon Pli.
Ate banana.
Checked email, Gaydar, etc.
Checked job listings online.
Chatted online.
Bought Cooking 123 and Morimur CD for C and R as thank-you gifts.
Masturbated.
Ate banana.
Worked on online technology and society course.
Ate chocolate-covered blueberries.
Cooked rice pasta.
Ate spaghetti with soy meatballs.
Cleaned up kitchen.
Checked mail.
Worked on online course.
Masturbated, didn’t come.
Ate Masse’s chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream while watching South Park.
Meditated.
Brushed teeth, flossed, washed face.
Masturbated, came.
Checked off completed tasks in calendar.
Read Why Is Sex Fun? in bed.
Put on Sheppard Mass.
Went to sleep.

>> In Sickness and in Health: Wedded to the Body, Married to the Mind
>> Life Expectancy
>> Old School

Cycle 18: Fire

2005-12-21T17:40:00.000-08:00

Air, mother of fire
I breathe, burn myself alive
Life is combustion
Ardent self-consuming art,
Phoenix dis^appearing act.

Act, from agere,
Latin – to do act lead drive
Agile stratagems
Ambiguous agonies
Driving every act – passion.

Passion dictates – WRITE!
And ravishes me of words.
Writing with one hand
I erase with the other –
Writing I erase myself.

Self self go away
Come again another day
Noman wants to play.
(Throw tomorrow down the stream
Life is but a firedream.)

<< Air
>> Part VI: Operating Instructions

Cycle 17: Air

2005-12-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

Water to mother to air
Swerving to fire, spiring to
Earth birthing heartart -
To air is human

Is human striving lunestruck?
Like a bell in a desert
Desire rings summons
The moon falls silent.

Enthralled enthrilled entingled
Bewordled bescrabbled mind
Scrimbbling to escrape,
Scriving for psilence.

Celebrating arising
Celebrating cessation
Life and death are one
Ecstasy in air

<< Water
>> Fire

Cycle 16: Water

2005-12-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

Earth air fire are flowers too -
Polymorphous versities.

-versities: per- di- trans- sub-
stanziating watersongs

Watersongs hymn Narcissus
Silver echoes, spectral selves

Elves, Selves, Hobgoblins, Gargoyles

Thought’s chattering chimeras
Bubbles in babbling water

<< Earth
>> Air

Cycle 15: Earth

2005-12-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

Fire Dream

Beings of fire, wonderringed.

Wonder-Ringed

Proud humans – eartheatingearth.

Eating Earth

      In the beginning was the

                  . . . flesh becomes word becomes dust . . .

   writing, disintegrating

                                                WhORlDs singing of spins and turnS

Of Spins and Turns

Ardent feet kissing cool earth.

<< Part V: Elementary Particulars
>> Water

Part V: Elementary Particulars

2005-12-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Dreamt I rode to the top of a Marriot hotel in a glass elevator, squatting on the floor with my eyes closed the whole way up because I was very scared (6:08 AM).
Peed, went back to sleep.
Got up, lay in bed for a bit.
Put on Josquin Malheur Me Bat.
Massaged D.
Read Pema aloud in bed.
Blew nose.
Pooed, read NY Review article on Stalin.
Gargled.
Took carnitine.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Drove to Y, argued with D about neighbors not sorting their recycling.
Swam.
Made oatmeal with goat milk and maple syrup for breakfast.
Ate oatmeal, banana, and mango.
Looked at calendar for things to do today.
Put groceries away.
Checked email.
Watched The Simpsons on video.
Shopped for a new phone online.
Pooed, read NY Review.
Ate almond butter and limequat marmalade sandwich.
Made ginger tea for D, sandwiches for D and masseur.
Got massaged.
Cleaned bathroom.
Checked email.
Masturbated.
Showered.
Brushed teeth, made semblance of order.
Meditated.
Napped to Messiaen.
Put on Scelsi Khoom.
Picked up mail.
Went through mail, threw out junkmail.
Ate baguette with Valençay chèvre, drank carrot juice.
Checked email.
Ate turkey jerky while reading Fixer Chao for Flip lit class.
Checked email.
Put Salonpas on D’s finger.
Masturbated.
Ate Weetabix with dried cherries, pistachios, and soymilk.
Brushed teeth.
Put back furniture that was moved to make room for massage table.
Hung out with J.
Went to Asmara for dinner, ate vegetarian combo.
Ate M&Ms.
Saw The Miser, left during intermission.
Hung out at L’s.
Took J to Rockridge BART.
Went home.
Ate pear.
Brushed teeth, flossed, washed face.
Pooed, read NY Review.
Changed into sleep clothes.
Made semblance of order.
Chose CD to sleep to, put on Perotin.
Listened to D read Pema aloud in bed.
Went to sleep.

>> Earth
>> Water
>> Air
>> Fire

Cycles 13 and 14: Desiring-Machine

2005-12-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

Think

. . . therefore I I.

At the beach: Soggy toes ergo sum.
In a jungle: Mosquitoes ergo sum.
In the city: Graffito ergo sum.
At a Mexican restaurant: Burrito ergo yum.

Or

1 or 0?
Have we become the ghosts of our machines?

+

See

You are what you eye.
(You I what you eye.)

Not Only . . . But Also . . .

Metaphor maker. Metamorphosis machine.

Digital surrealizer.

Third eye. Dream of an I-less eye.

Unmasker. Masker. Mixer. Maker. Unmaker.

Past presenter.

Time surpriser.

Click. Who knows what this shot will expose?

Click. Click. Never the same world twice.

. . . click . . . click . . . click . . . Will I ever catch up to the speed of life?

+

Eat

Caught between hunger for hunger and hunger for non-hunger.

And

Breakfast: Papaya and yogurt.

Second breakfast: Bread and almond butter, a banana, aloe vera juice.

Lunch (Japanese restaurant): Fried chicken (tori no kara age), miso soup, rice.

Snack: A pear.

Dinner: Leftover rice (microwaved), stir-fried asparagus with garlic and ginger.

Dessert: Earl Grey tea, chocolate biscotti, strawberries.

How many stomachs?
How many fat digests would a lifetime catalogue of consumed comestibles distend?
Who (what?) am I sustaining with this food?

+

Open

No need for magic words – my hands are open-sesames, my metacarpals magic keys.

Until

And after this metal age? Who can guess the future of the hand? What incomprehensible objects will it clutch and cling?

+

Breathe

In: Out . . . In . . . Down . . . Up . . . : all you need to know about life.

Out: May my last breath be as speechless as my first.

In: Every breath, a kiss of life.

Out: The wisdom of the breath: it doesn’t hold back.

In: Dream of writing that takes one’s breath away – then gives it back, refreshed by the air of another world.

While

While the selfing mind labors compulsively to divide inside from outside, the subtle breath calmly confounds them.

+

Copy

Roll forth and multiply!

Repetition is the name of the game. (But what game are we playing?)

The unpredictable turning points when repetition makes a difference.

The cult of the reproducible.

Could my horror of repeating myself be making me repeat myself?

Yet

Channel 2: Far from banishing ghosts, technology has multiplied them.

Channel 4: Why, rather than making us more skeptical, has television made us more credulous?

Channel 8: In a universe of voyeurs, nothing happens.

Channel 16: We look and look and look, but aren’t seen - this makes us sick.

Channel 32: In a world hurtling toward its own destruction, what else can one do but watch?

Channel 64: Why shouldn’t TV start a revolution?

Channel 128: Television in America – tragedy or farce?

+

Move

First movement: Why wait till tomorrow if you can escape today?

Second movement: What the oracle said.

Third movement: You can dance if you want to.

Fourth movement: So much more profound is the unthinking of the muscles.

Because

The history of technology – the seemingly inevitable slide of in order to to just because, of so that we can to because we must.

<< New World
>> Part V: Elementary Particulars

Cycle 12: New World

2005-11-23T08:22:00.000-08:00

From the night’s ashes the world
rises into being again for the first time.

Sky

Like the blank page of the day before me.

Bed

No matter where in the vastnesses of night I’ve been transported, you wing me home at the speed of dream just before I wake up.

. . . seedbed . . . riverbed . . . succumbed . . .

Others

Who is this dark stranger lying beside me? (Every morning my dreams’ cast of thousands vanishes, displaced abruptly by this sleeping figure whom I feel I’ll soon recognize . . . If I didn’t recognize you, would yesterday’s abandoned selves still rush in to reinhabit me?)

Book

Ten thousand eyes in my eyes: spectral looks of undying dead, unblinking ancestors projecting persistent visions: ten million ocular-oracular books of the dead telescoped in my twin-twinkling eyes: iridescent apertures, desiring stars: glancing over everything I see and do not see.

Eye

Dreamtime melts to clocktime, witchtime to watchtime:
I leap through my looking glasses.

Time

My writing has always been about tick-tick-tick – no surprise since I wake up every morning to the clock’s red glare, exacting taskmaster.
(A dream – one eternal morning I wake up to a timeless life.)

Door

Here comes the world!
The new day’s door is always open – all you have to do is enter.

<< Night Rites
>> Desiring-Machine

Cycle 11: Night Rites

2005-11-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

Nightly

Hymn to Hygeia
Invocation of Morpheus
Passport to the mysteries of Night.

Wishfully

Incantation over snake oils:
May old age pass over me.

Indefatigably

Enlightenment while-u-sleep.

Decrescendo

Thought-silencers,
Overtures to unconsciousness.

Again

Nightstream passing. Dreamed dreams distend my bladder. Wake up! Piss your old dreams out!

Now...Here...

Night after night you’re there to catch me when I fall.

Also

Darkness rises.

<< Part IV: Katalogos Grammatikos
>> New World

Part IV: Katalogos Grammatikos

2005-11-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

Woke up.
Put Byrd mass on.
Closed doors to bedroom to let D sleep more.
Turned on computer.
Gargled, took carnitine.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Checked calendar.
Started journal.
Pooed, read Z Magazine article on WTO.
Tried to convert Mazemapping to pdf.
Cooked 7 grain cereal with grits.
Got D to help me with pdf conversion.
Took multivitamin and Skin Eternal.
Ate breakfast.
Took breath-freshening capsules, brushed teeth, flossed.
Got dressed to go to dentist.
Walked to dentist.
Had teeth cleaned.
Went to Tower to browse classical CDs.
Checked mail in English department office.
Photocopied poetry-writing handout for Flip lit class.
Walked home.
Ordered tofu bibimbap and spicy chicken to go, felt hungry while waiting for food, watched workers frantically serving lunch crowd.
Eavesdropped on two women sitting next to me.
Walked home.
Ate spicy chicken for lunch.
Went over pdf version of Mazemapping.
Ate four organic strawberries.
Checked email.
Surveyed apartment and made semblance of order while brushing teeth.
Pooed, read Z Magazine.
Napped to Kurtág.
Masturbated to Cherries.
Meditated.
Read a few pages of Transformation at the Base.
Put electronic music on (Smalley).
Brewed white tea.
Ate chocolate brownie and chocolate peanut butter soy ice cream with hemp seeds on top.
Worked on habit book (this week – the bathroom), took picture of flush handle.
Interrupted work to check email.
Chose pictures for habit book with D’s help.
Brewed white tea.
Massaged D before his nap.
Filled out forms for online teaching job with DeVry.
Ate almond butter sandwich.
Worked on habit book.
Made semblance of order.
Checked email.
Wiped armpits with alcohol, washed face, put on contacts, changed clothes for improv class.
Walked to improv class.
Walked home with German guy from improv class, wondered if he was gay.
Bought chicken burrito.
Checked email, went to Fridae.com to see if I got any hearts.
Ate burrito.
Tried to create Comcast webpage for Mazemapping by myself because D was busy playing City of Heroes.
Built Geocities webpage myself.
Masturbated.
Pooed, read review of The Passion of the Christ.
Showered.
Brushed teeth.
Fiddled with webpage.
Flossed, cleaned ears and nose.
Worked on DeVry job application.
Put on Byrd’s Great Service.
Went to bed.

>> Night Rites
>> New World
>> Desiring-Machine

Cycle 10: Like Shit

2005-11-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

The mind is the idea of the body, Spinoza said. What is the idea of the mouth? The stomach? The ass? How does the mind eat? Excrete? (Thinking thinking thinking the mind eats its own shit.)

My penis is my pen, piss and spunk my ink.

Though the idea offends us (we reserve our strongest disgust for what was – or is – a part of us), we are what we shit. (Archaeologists have always known – human history is written in shit.)

Every day I touch my shit. How can I describe the feel of it? It’s like . . . It’s really not like anything. (Because it can’t swallow reality, the comparing mind can’t stop shitting metaphors – but the incomparable world abides, undefilable.)

Each time I touch pencil to paper, I'm reminded that the line between order and disorder, purity and contamination is paper-thin. (Let this be my epitaph: Here lies one whose life was writ on paper.)

Shit is every artist’s first creation. (All artists are fundamentally shitters.) Before expressionism, surrealism, Dada, there was shit – more expressionist than Munch, more surrealist than Dali, more Dada than Duchamp.

Words words words swirling down time’s drain. Picking out the clogs that slow time down, I offer them to you.

<< Like 10,000 Forks
>> Part IV: Katalogos Grammatikos

Cycle 9: Like 10,000 Forks

2005-11-04T07:21:00.000-08:00

Forked Over

Filipinos used to eat with their hands. With the Spanish came spoons and forks, and the spoon became the principal dining implement. And then the Americans came and (supposedly) left, and diasporic Filipinos in America had to shift to the fork.

Bad Conscience

Consciousness cuts up the world with words and calls its mangled handiwork (I-sized pieces are easier to swallow) reality.

The True and the Trick

The trick is to serve up the cooked to look like the raw.

Holey, Holey

Eyes ears nose tongue, mind and body – full of holes. How many imperceptible universes slip through our riddled senses? (Still, a healthy body is a holey body – it lets most things pass through.)

<< Like a Bird, Like a Horse
>> Like Shit

Cycle 8: Like a Bird, Like a Horse

2005-10-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

Who cares about being or nothingness? I am a philosopher of rice. I don’t think, I cook: white, brown, red - long, short, medium - moist, dry, sticky - jasmine, basmati, Arborio . . . The pilaf sage knows, a bowl of steaming rice is subtler than ten Hegels.

I salt my writing with enigmas to whet your thirst for wonder.

Scrumptious Vegetarians

Buddha: This passing moment is my surpassing meat.

Pythagoras: My mother was a fish.

Da Vinci: Man's bright symmetries my meat, my drink his dark asymmetries.

Darwin: If mutation is the meat of life, selection is its potatoes.

Einstein: Relativity is the meat of the matter.

Gandhi: In peace, extremes can meet. (In peas, extremes meet.)

Humpty Dumpty Philosophy or Sunny-Side Up

After the fall:
My yolk runneth over.

Don’t put me together – I’ll just sit on the wall again.

Rumpy Humpy sat on the king.
Humpy Jump-Me had a great ball.

At home on the edge.

The seven fruits of joy – joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy.

The seed of joy, the fruit of joy can only be joy, of sadness only sadness. Though joy constantly follows sadness, sadness, joy, one can never turn into the other.

O the green velocity of vegetables! Unencumbered by blue selves, their verdant innocence overruns all limits. Green me!

Waiting for the water to green, I am already drinking my tea.
(Show me how a man waits . . .)

<< Part III: Like a Metaphor
>> Like 10,000 Forks

Part III: Like a Metaphor

2005-10-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Woke up, lay in bed for a few minutes.
Put on Fayrfax mass.
Cuddled and chatted with D, discussed birthday plans.
Peed.
Put on gray fleece sweater.
Drank water, took carnitine.
Made list of people to invite to birthday dinner, looked in East Bay Express and online for possible restaurants.
Checked email.
Pooed, read poems in NY Review.
Took multivitamins and Skin Eternal.
Set clock on microwave.
Drank Emergen-C.
Ate papaya with yogurt.
Called water filter vendor.
Prepared notes for Flip lit class.
Graded papers.
Packed bag for class.
Shaved face and top of head.
Got dressed.
Tried to remember things I forgot to record in journal.
Walked to campus.
Taught class.
Met with student.
Walked home in rain.
Ordered water filter over phone.
Went to bakeshop to look at cakes for birthday.
Went to Udupi for lunch, ate Malabar paratha and korma.
Went to Radio Shack with D.
Napped.
Took pictures of floor for habit book.
Ate ice cream sandwich and almonds while D told me about episodes of Scrapped Princess I missed.
Ate kumquat while adding stuff I’d done since Flip lit class to journal.
Worked on habit book.
Ate sesame tofu salad and garlic fries at Smart Alec’s.
Went to ATM with D.
Saw Gunslinger Girls and Scrapped Princess at anime club screening.
Drank orange juice with Emergen-C and vitamin C crystals, sucked zinc lozenge.
Showered, brushed, flossed.
Added stuff I’d done since working on habit book to journal.
Meditated.
Put Pärt Miserere on.
Peed.
Went to bed.

>> Like a Bird, Like a Horse
>> Like 10,000 Forks
>> Like Shit

Cycle 7: Metamorphosis Magnificat

2005-10-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

The Habit of Desire

Longing shadows in dreaming caves, desire’s obscure habitat.

The Geology of Disguise

Red today, blue tomorrow – the never-naked self’s nervous harlequinade chronochromatically stratifying the naked days.

Signs and Tangents

In the Valley of Love’s Triangles winding through the Masquerade Mountains, see the battling signs and cosigns of appearance locked in obtuse opposition. But in the ever-circulating ocean of Reality – swirling Sea of Paradoxes – feel how naked opposites embrace, promiscuously interpenetrating.

Le Clavier Déshabillé (ou Le Midi Nu)

X marks the pause, the white fermata where the arrested morning pools for a melisma before cascading in arpeggios toward the new noon.

Guises and Fabrications

What his clothes say about him behind his back: Underneath his fancy fabrics and fussy habits, he’s stark naked.

Autochromatography without Words

Penetrating my bare senses’ prisms, white life scatters into a thousand kaleidoscopes.

Zeno’s New Clothes

Thinking is the mind’s unthinking habit of shooting arrows that never arrive. (Underneath its habits, the mind is naked.)

<< Forward, Backwards, Sideways
>> Part III: Like a Metaphor

Cycle 6: Forward, Backward, Sideways

2005-10-13T06:14:00.000-07:00

Going is green. What color is coming?

Purity - inviolable and unchanging - is a fantasy of the black-and-white mind. Coming and flowing in living color, the body knows life is a gloriously dirty business.

Terrified by the body’s unturning progress to its fatal vanishing point, the blinkered blue mind frantically circles itself.

While the babblers built a golden tower to heaven, the silent ones tunneled deep into the earth.

What goes up must.
–Gold’s Law

The wishful mind climbs silver staircases to golden nowheres; but reality neither rises nor falls – it spreads.

It won’t be long before humanity wins its mad red race to outrun itself. (Will we be able to create a new mythology to overtake our fatal addiction to speed?)

Up up up shouts the purple-passioned crowd: Up up up thud their heedless headlong hooves.

For a long time I climbed without knowing why. But then I realized this and stopped - and decided to try just climbing to climb. But now I see - I’ve always been climbing to fall. (The good earth has always been waiting for me.)

<< Strange Bedfellows
>> Metamorphosis Magnificat

Cycle 5: Strange Bedfellows

2005-10-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

You sleep too much.

If you feel sleepy, sleep!

Maybe you have a sleep disorder.

In the Stone Age people got eleven hours of sleep every night.

The fifth deadly sin.

Sometimes I think sleep gives me more pleasure than sex.

One sleeps alone.

Siestas are part of my culture.

Forced to nap in the afternoon as a child, I used to hate naps. (Believe It . . . or Not!)

You don’t want to cross me before my nap.

Because the living room has four west windows, it’s the best place for an afternoon nap.

What do I look like when I’m sleeping?

My favorite way to listen to music is while falling asleep. (I can sleep even to Bartók or The Rite of Spring.)

After a nap, a new day.

I wish I had written Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book.

Why are pillow fights never as fun as one imagines?

The term “cervical pillow” always brings to mind female genitalia.

Drool stains on old pillows.

I’m usually too sleepy for pillow talk at night, but I can be very chatty in the morning.

My pillow – tragicomic stage of all my dreams.

Dreams escape me.

As soon as my credulously incredulous dayeyes shut, somewhere a cycloptic dreameye flies open, recreating the flowing landscape every time it blinks.

Didn’t dream of N like I was hoping to. Instead dreamt I had to fold a mountain of laundry because someone swapped places with me at the dance wedding.

Sleeping goats in glass cases like shadowboxes for giant butterflies.

If you cut your left hand off, you’re also cutting off your mind’s left hand.

An android is fucking me. It doesn’t feel the same because I know he is a machine. I bottom for seven days, then we switch.

You’re having sex with two people, but they have many bodies, so they’re really seven, seventeen, seventy-seven . . .

From certain tricky angles the edges between dream and reality blur suddenly to vanishing.

<< Part II: Camera Polyphonica
>> Forward, Backwards, Sideways

Part II: Camera Polyphonica

2005-10-09T05:15:00.000-07:00

Woke up, lay in bed a bit, palpated bump on back of my head. (Is it growing?)
Put glasses on, got out of bed, slipped Birkenstocks on.
Started writing journal.
Checked calendar for things to do today.
Peed, washed hands, gargled, took L-Carnitine.
Put Tallis on.
Went back to bed, talked with D.
Looked through Loving-Kindness book for meditation exercise for D.
Massaged D.
Peed.
Surveyed apartment, made semblance of order.
Meditated.
Put Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on to cheer D up.
Turned on laptop.
Put clean clothes away.
Helped D clean mask.
Cut papaya, shared with D.
Pooed.
Took Skin Eternal, multivitamin, echinacea.
Ate papaya with Pavel’s organic lowfat yogurt.
Washed dishes, brewed sencha for me and AM detox for D.
Made pink drink for D.
Washed face.
Brushed teeth, looked out window facing bay.
Cleaned nose.
Planned to read The Journalist.
Put Mozart’s Haydn quartets on.
Looked over phone bill.
Checked email.
Checked show times for Triplets of Belleville.
Set alarm for 11:30.
Sent email about Triplets to students in last semesters's Text and Image seminar.
Peed, washed hands.
Snacked on nori maki while working on course proposals about psychologies of exile, experimental writing.
Cut fingernails on landing outside front door.
Pooed, remembered I had brown rice yesterday.
Worked on course proposals some more.
Consulted calendar.
Peed, washed hands.
Put on Haydn quartets, brewed more tea.
Worked some more.
Did some internet research on Irish-Filipino parallels, no hits on google.
Peed.
Cleaned glasses before going to movie.
Ate vegetarian pho at Pho Hoa.
Saw 1PM show of Triplets at Shattuck Cinemas.
Discussed course proposals with D.
Ate banana.
Helped D dry mask.
Ate sweetened white beans with goat milk, took lactase.
Sliced pear for D.
Reheated cup of tea in microwave.
Made cup of sencha for D.
Washed dishes.
Worked on course proposals.
Put on lip balm.
Pooed.
Worked some more (3:33PM).
Checked email.
Worked on piece with photos for D’s birthday.
Peed, washed hands.
Connected color printer to laptop.
Made semblance of order in apartment.
Put Bartók violin concerto on.
Used Japanese stab binding to sew pages of gift for D into booklet.
Made pesto tortellini for me, spaghetti and meatballs for D because he’s not eating dairy these days.
Showered.
Ate dinner.
Put away leftovers.
Washed dishes.
Jacked off to “Twinks’ First Time” on computer, didn’t come.
Checked email, answered emails, coordinated D’s birthday dinner.
Installed printer software.
Masturbated, came.
Washed dishes.
Brewed sleepytime for D, oolong for me.
Drank Emergen-C.
Peed, washed hands.
Put on Bartók violin sonatas.
Worked on Flip lit class.
Washed pots.
Searched for snacks.
Made semblance of order.
Put away clean clothes.
Answered some email, made more arrangements for D’s birthday dinner.
Watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Brushed teeth, flossed.
Washed face, put on lotion, lip balm, cleaned nose.
Checked email, more birthday arrangements.
Checked calendar, crossed off finished tasks, moved unfinished tasks to the next day.
Put on nightmusic (Tallis).
Read a bit from Loving-Kindness book.
Peed.
Back cracked by D.

>> Strange Bedfellows
>> Forward, Backwards, Sideways
>> Metamorphosis Magnificat

Cycle 4: Musical Chairs

2005-10-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

Did you know that possessed and obsessed have the same root as hostage and sedate as well as chair and cathedral?

Why do painters stand and writers sit?

How many men have I bedded on this couch?

Nietzsche was a walker, Picasso a stander, the Buddha a sitter, and Proust a lier – what am I?

What is a chair? What makes a chair a chair? A breast is not a chair. A guest, a test, a jest, a nest, a quest are not chairs. A chest (whether hairy or smooth) is not a chair. And if I sit on it?

Why do they call it sitting Indian-style? Japanese-style? (Did Sei Shōnagon write The Pillow Book sitting Japanese-style? How did Sitting Bull sit? Did the Buddha sit Indian-style under the bodhi tree?)

Kings and Lamas

Since cars were invented, how many people have died sitting down?

<< Mirror, Mirror
>> Part II: Camera Polyphonica

Cycle 3: Mirror, Mirror

2005-09-26T06:33:00.000-07:00

Why are mirrors so discomposing?

Why is it disturbing to see how others might see you?

Why are other people dangerous?

Why does the usual dichotomy of seeing and feeling (I see only others but feel only myself) hinder empathy?

Why don’t mirrors help you see yourself?

Why does nobody really believe they’re the same person as the one they see in the mirror?

Why is the inside-self divided from the outside-self?

Why is your own reflection so alien to you?

Why is your reflection both truer and falser than your self-image?

Why does seeing your reflection threaten your sense of meaning?

Why do mirrors make the self a thing?

Why is the speechlessness of things so terrible?

Why do you both fear and envy the thereness of things?

Why do you confuse meaning with being?

Why do you associate mirrors with your face?

Why are you disposed to imagining yourself as your face more than your body?

Why is being confronted by the reflection of your face far more affecting than being confronted by the reflection of your body?

Why does the usual invisibility of your face to yourself determine your self-image?

Why does one tend to confuse the invisible self with the visible body?

Why do mirrors confound the imaginary and the real?

Why is every reflection of the self a memento mori?

Why do you only look at mirrors standing up?

Why don’t men use mirrors sitting down?

Why do women?

Why are women assumed to use mirrors more than men?

Why do mirrors play such a crucial role in the differentiation of genders?

Why do women have to be taught to be women and men to be men?

Why would civilization as we know it fall apart if women stopped being women and men being men?

Why do mirrors divide the self even as they multiply it?

Why do they shatter the self’s illusion of unity?

Why are mirrors considered narcissistic when they actually fragment the self?

Why does looking into a mirror sometimes feel like flirting with madness?

Why is the doubling power of mirrors both fascinating and terrifying?

Why do both mirror images and photographic images always have an undercurrent of the uncanny (though maybe of different sources)?

Why do photographs of your own reflection in a mirror seem to tell you something of the nature of the self?

<< A Mile in Strange Shoes
>> Musical Chairs

Cycle 2: A Mile in Strange Shoes

2005-09-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

Which are your favorite shoes?
I wear my Birkenstocks the most. (Does that make them my favorite?)

Who wears Birkenstocks?
Hippies with money. Granolas. Leftwing vegetarians who want comfortable shoes. Believers.

What are their advantages and disadvantages?
Advantages – Comfy. Can slip them on and off.
Disadvantages – Feels squishy in rain. Feet get cold in movie theaters. Feet are exposed, so they have to look – and smell – presentable. In the summer, tops of feet get white bands from straps.

Where do you wish you could wear Birkenstocks but don’t?
In sex clubs – but I don’t want to look prissy.

When else do you go without shoes?
When I’m swimming; in bed; in the shower; when I’m doing yoga; during African dance class; when I’m visiting people’s houses where it’s customary to take shoes off; when I’m meditating; when I’m dancing by myself in the living room; when a foot fetishist is worshiping my feet; when I’m napping; when I’m getting a massage; when I’m clipping my toenails; when I’m masturbating (usually); when I’m watching TV; when I’m changing shoes.

Why do you like Birkenstocks so much?
They form to your feet.

How many Birkenstocks have you owned?
Five or six over the last fifteen years.

What’s your size?
8M US, 7.5 UK, 41.5 EU, 20 Japan. (But I say I’m 8½ when I’m trying to hook foot fetishists online.)

When do you wear these black leather shoes?
When I have to dress up. When it’s raining, because they’re waterproof.

Why do wet feet in shoes feel disgusting?
They feel clammy.

How did they make these shoes waterproof?
The leather was probably treated with toxic chemicals. (Are cows waterproof? Come to think of it - I must be waterproof myself.)

Where were they made?
In Vietnam.

Of which materials?
Leather uppers, leather and manmade linings, manmade outsoles.

Who made them?
I’ll never know. (Do I want to know?) Sweatshop workers most likely – children, bent old women, workers who could never afford waterproof Timberlands, even though it rains a hundred days a year in Ho Chi Minh City.

Where have your hiking boots traveled?
All over Berkeley and San Francisco, Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans, Fairbanks, Alaska, Kauai, Key West, Cincinnati, L.A.

Traversing what geographical features?
Beaches (Pacific and Atlantic), deserts, fields, meadows, woods, snow, permafrost (Alaskan), mountains, valleys, volcanic rock (Hawaiian aa and pahoehoe).

Whom do you walk with?
I usually walk alone.

Why haven’t your hiking boots ventured outside the United States?
I don’t have a passport.

When will you replace these boots?
Since my last pair of boots lasted five years and I’ve been wearing these boots for about three, they should last me another two years.

How many miles will your boots have traveled by the time they wear out?
Say I walk about a mile (around 2,000 steps) a day. That makes 365 miles a year. Since my boots last five years, they will have traveled 365 x 5 = 1825 miles before they wear out. That’s like walking from San Francisco to Des Moines, or Fargo, or San Antonio. Or from Paris to Rome and back.

Which part of your boots wears out first?
The soles' outer heels.

What are shoes for?
They keep one from touching the dirty ground.

Why are you obsessed with cleanliness?
It is dangerous to touch, to be touched by things.

Which is more dangerous, to touch or be touched?
To be touched, to be sure.

How do your plastic sandals fit in your regime of hygiene?
Because they’re plastic I can wear them right after a shower, after which I wait till my feet are dry before I switch to Birkenstocks. This way, I never have to walk on the ground with bare feet.

When is something clean enough?
When it’s new and I own it and I’m the only one who’s ever touched it.

Besides you, who else is clean?
People with clean habits like me.

Where will this passion for cleanliness take you?
From dirt have I come, to dirt I will return.

Why do you have two pairs of Birkenstocks?
My brother gave me a second pair for my birthday.

What do you do with two pairs?
The black ones are for outside, the brown ones for inside.

How do you distinguish inside and outside?
Outside is dirty, outside is chaos. Inside I make my semblances of order.

Who is your inside self?
The one wearing brown Birkenstocks.

Which side are you on when you’re writing?
Inside. (Though my highest ambition is to write myself outside, an inveterate wanderer with sturdy shoes.)

When are inside and outside not opposites?
When I don’t have to be anyone to anybody – not even to myself – the antithesis between inside and outside falls away. When I am no one, inside and outside are one.

Where are you at such moments?
Barefoot on the threshold.

<< Part I: What Is the Question?
>> Mirror, Mirror

Part I: What Is the Question?

2005-09-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

Woke up (8:30 AM).
Read Armenian Papers in bed.
Rubbed D’s butt, talked in bed.
Put on black corduroys.
Walked dogs, avoided other dogs.
Bought cinnamon-swirl loaf, bear claw, French almond macaroon from bakery.
Drank Emergen-C, ate slice of cinnamon bread.
Recorded everything I’d done so far today.
Brewed tea (green).
Washed dishes.
Consulted calendar for things I have to do today.
Helped D search for pills.
Washed hands (repeatedly throughout day).
Searched for paper, couldn’t find any.
Washed face, brushed teeth, cleaned nostrils.
Made semblance of order in kitchen and bedroom.
Cut fingernails and toenails.
Pooed, read Electric Meme.
Listened to Bright Sheng CD.
Called Ma, drank second cup of tea while talking on phone.
Meditated.
Snuggled with D.
Had another Emergen-C.
Watered J’s plants.
Called D.L. about job teaching creative writing.
Showed B and P J’s house.
Peed (many many times throughout day).
Watched Personal Trainers 2, jacked off.
Brewed third cup of tea.
Checked phone messages remotely.
Worked on implicit Buddhist structure of habit book.
Smelled myself.
Had another Emergen-C.
Ate carnitas burrito brought by D from Cactus.
Washed dishes.
Discussed ideas for habit book with D.
Showed D journal entry on wanking.
Brushed teeth.
Pooed, read Electric Meme (no poo came).
Snooped in J’s tenant’s room.
Did laundry in basement.
Walked dogs.
Napped.
Read Electric Meme.
Cuddled with D in bed.
Brewed fourth cup of tea, also a cup for D, ate slice of banana bread from R, B’s wife.
Worked on structure of habit book.
Played with dogs.
Cooked eggs with goat cheese, veggie chicken nuggets, had pomegranate juice with dinner.
Watched King of the Hill.
Shared bear claw with D.
Worked on habit book while waiting for L-Word to start.
Found out the L-Word wasn’t showing after all.
Sucked by D.
Waited for D to watch the beginning of Smallville so we could walk dogs.
Walked the damn dogs by myself.
Worked on habit book.
Brushed teeth, flossed.
Pooed, read Electric Meme.
Masturbated in bed.
Showered.
Put on face lotion.
Read Oliver Sacks article on consciousness in NY Review.
Read Men in the Off Hours.
Had another Emergen-C.
Brushed teeth.
Petted dog, washed hand.
Read Electric Meme.
Nighttalk with D.
Read Pema aloud.
Back cracked by D.
Went to sleep.

>> A Mile in Strange Shoes
>> Mirror, Mirror
>> Musical Chairs

Prelude: Just Breathe

2005-09-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

Sing to me of life, Breath, this life of twists and turns.

Who needs memories?
Life breathes without having to remember to.

BREATH = SPACE
BREATH + BREATH = TIME
BREATH – SELF = LIFE

Another breath, another birth –
spiral of becoming, conspiring circulations –
another breath, another death –
death is not death –

Inbreath
   Embrace outspace
   Inspire green difference
   Expand the white moment
Breathe out

I see my belly rising rising
I hear my nostrils flaring
I smell my self unselfing with each passing breath.
I taste time’s breathless tongue licking flickering
I feel my spirit turning, returning
I think I am – one breath – I’m not. (It breathes.)

Beyond the breath, just breath (behind breath no hidden meaning)

Reality is just a breath away (realizing is improvising)

Each instant new eternally (each moment borrowed time)

Again, breath’s mantram of unself-renewal (anything can accident an awakening)

Thus spoke the Tathagata: thinking is not breathing (thinking is disembodying)

Here, just hear (hope is the enemy)

Ecstasy’s sublime silence (escape from nowhere to now-here)

<< Nirvana
>> Part I: What Is the Question?