|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
BTWN YOU + ME
Windy & Carl
Songs for the Broken Hearted
Kranky : 2008
[Buy It]
THE THING WITH FEATHERS
James Lavino
The Woodpecker OST
Brookhaven/TuneCore : 2008
[Buy It]
TRACK3A (2WAYNICE)
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Playthroughs
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]
Today appears to lack characteristics. Gray, blank sky. Leafless trees - it's winter. Houses washed clean by last night's rain. I can't see them anyway - windows fogged with condensation from heater, behind closed Venetian blinds. (It's cold - cold enough to numb, but not to bite.) No cars on the street, just wetness and a dull shine. The power went over night and my clock flashes 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. My books look like, just, objects. Every story the same: The tower is visible but inaccessible. The flaming horses run into the waves. The hero returns from the mountaintop only to sink into iniquity. Amado Vazquez will fall in orchids and bloom again in Malibu. My instruments struck deaf and dumb. I tried to send a Facebook message and the "Send" key didn't respond, as if my cursor were just a decoration. I'm monochromatic in black shirt and black pants. My neighbors sold their house and it's emptier than empty. My paintings look like accidents. I can see the white wall behind them. I don't have any lights on and the room is washed in dim white light. The heater's hum is voracious and empty. The phone book in the drawer is a cemetery, except portable and helpfully indexed. The world is around me but not within me. My mind a coastline vanishing into a bank of fog. No opinions, only aphorisms. This state is eternal and it will pass. I will shift again and click back into the pattern. Or so the pattern has showed me in the past. But for now I walk the road without characteristics. That road is short and never ends. My mind is voracious and empty. Things pass through it and leave no trace. I pass through things and leave no trace. My messages are not being delivered. No mail today either. If I touch the window will I leave a fingerprint? I thought and thought about what to write and found only a void. Write the void.
Sometimes I wonder where I go. Always up or down. My mind radiant with good or filled with dark birds whom I love, and do not know. I know it's me that's moving because the world is still there - but remote, as if at a distance of years. Or abstract like math - infinite half-spans between wall and wall, always one more to close. Impossible to cross the room. If you're reading this post, either we're both dreaming or we're both awake. Today I am not sure that's true. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that I might be blogging from someone's dream. If the world is still here and I am not in it but not beyond it, where am I? Quite literally lost in thought. As if under glass today. Noticing odd details that amount to nothing. The dust remover I use to clean my computer contains an agent called "Bittergent," to deter me from inhaling it. A small mound of rubber bands on my desk reminds me of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty." One of my walls is covered with what appear to be footprints. The grain of my desk alternates light and dark and resembles a plowed field viewed from high above. The letters "P L E" are vanishingly carved into the railing of my porch. My keyboard's cord is tangled around it in a way that depresses a couple keys - a partial D minor - a silent dirge latent in the air. Each of these details containing a thought, a post, a poem, a story, a novel, an encyclopedia. But, lacking characteristics, I can't interpret these messages. They notice me and move on. Each an aleph. But not today. I hear the drone of an absent chord. I should inhale dangerous chemicals. Calamity would be good for me. But I'm too quiet for calamity right now. I feel so disconnected from my actions that I wonder if I carved "P L E" into the porch myself. No evidence today that my actions connect - to each other, to the world, to my memory. I wonder if I was going to write "PLEASE." I wonder what I was asking for, and from whom. I could write poems if I would let myself. Idleness is the leading cause of poetry in white males. But the world seems coiled like a serpent, slumbering. Best not to prod it.
Today I crave music of pristine blankness. Music without characteristics. Windy & Carl are a married couple who've been making ambient and shoegaze music together for a long time. They recorded Songs for the Broken Hearted during a period of unspecified sadness. But I'm not interested in sadness today. It's the disconnection that, weirdly, I connect to. Carl made the music in one room, and it sounds like the world slipping free from its moorings, the dark field beyond it gusting in. Windy recorded the vocals in another room, mining her journals for grist. Like a small figure with a lantern, searching for Carl through an impenetrable murk. You can leave a room but the wall remains. Today I feel as if I could move to the perimeter of the world and find a barrier of sheetrock at each end - can't get out of the wall. And there's James Lavino's soundtrack for The Woodpecker, in which he hollows out every genre he can think of, rendering each as a profoundly formal exercise. Music with sense but no meaning. Then things get really endgamey with Keith Fullerton Whitman, into whose music everything else funnels down. It's the hum at the root of consciousness. My mood condensed into barely audible form, not so much filling the blankness in the air as giving it contour, color, shape.
And suddenly through this shape an opening resolves. The day's soupy mass fragments into vectors of possibility. Because boredom is always a failure of imagination, and the blankness of this music, giving form to my own, stirs my imagination in a way that seemed impossible moments ago. What if I were to turn on the radio, and sit amid a gray tide of music and voices. What if a few notes of jazz pierced my sternum, opening a dark blossom inside my chest. And what if I opened the blinds, and saw dark blossoms blowing slowly over the horizon. Now we are getting somewhere. Time returns - the faucet drips the minutes, the heater hums the hours. The dark blossoms becoming entangled in the piano wire woven through the trees. My mind stirring. A red phone in a dish of milk rings. I find a brightly wrapped package inside my piano. When I shake it, I can hear the skitter of little talons inside. My cheeks puff out and I draw a long black stocking out of my mouth. A voice wells up from the radio, proclaiming, Get your heart down out that tree, Reverend, and sing! The world returns if you can part enough veils. Important to remember that a void is not a thing but the absence of things. And this world contains no shortage of things, we can touch them and move them. This is a reminder. Writing happens against all odds. It just did. I am thinking again. I can move. I am opening the blinds.Labels: brian, nothing
posted by Brian
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
