[AUGUST 2024.]
After a period of sitting, a wooden sensation, rigid but yielding. There was give in the grain. Clean and dry, sap smell. It was like a desert gully, a channel where water ran once and might run again.
Dig under that tree, is the challenge, and find the bones of an interesting person. I do my best. But once the first layer of dirt is scraped away there’s nothing between the roots but trash, a dead crab, vegetable slime. I pull out something like a long fibrous husk. It doesn’t count.
On TV there’s a show about a small surviving population of Homo habilis, who have been living in the open all this time adjacent to urban civilization. A young female, eyes bright under her brow ridge, listens as her new friend from the city explains science. “I understand you,” she tells him, “but how did Einstein and Schwarzschild feel when they made these discoveries? Where was the emotion?”
Bad Trip
Heart, unhitch
from future time, dire honey
of the not yet opened. Idle
in the garden, the light won’t eat you.
Faust chasing his pleasures
was always in hell.
The shark afraid to drown in stillness
carries time in its gills, ceaseless.
Yourself is the shear of what swam. Swim.
I said, I was drawn to Kannon at the start because I felt in need of her comfort and protection, very much the relationship one has with the Virgin if one happens to grow up with the Virgin. But as time went on, and especially after becoming a mother, I began to feel a reproach in her, an ideal that I was always falling short of.
My teacher thought a moment and said, it’s true, there are two Kannons. But in my experience, she only pulls out that sword when there is real need of it.
We sometimes said the problem was “quantum entanglement,” but it would have been easier just to call it a three-way light switch, where you never knew if up or down was on or off because you had no insight, that day or any other, into what anyone else was doing at the other end of the goddamn hall.
Silence as gift. That Peter Stamm novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, had a good title even if as a novel it was mood and not much else.
The “vulnerable narcissist” is a new type to watch out for. From a distance we do no harm.
Climbing, ladders and skylights.
Once upon a time the shtick was to have no secrets. Then I got better at “interpersonal connection,” as in, I learned how to make my problems other people’s problems; so here we are.
R. went to the first day of eighth grade in big Zoomer jeans and the little butterfly crop-top we bought together in Hongdae. Coming home, she said no one at her new suburban school dresses like that. No inspo. This might be a difficult fall.
I had a surgical thing done to me that has thrown my hormones out of whack, again. All the crying and texting gets old, but the real problem is forgetting how to concentrate, and how to be lonely; which are, I said, the basic things when it comes to writing. That makes sense, said my companion, but do you think when it’s going well it isn’t lonely? I said I thought so. But maybe the better answer would be that it shines a light through the loneliness. The loneliness rings out like a metal bowl.
