Mere Anarchy

Critical evidence.
andre breton
james dickey
kafka
theodore roethke
wb yeats
sylvia
ts eliot
irvine welsh
chuck palahniuk
dostoevsky

Forensic reports.
edward gorey
man ray
simon boses

Admissions of guilt.
deadcandance
cohen
nick cave
natalie merchant
rammstein
iggy pop

Crime scenes
aurora picture show
diverseworks
theater LaB houston
voices breaking boundaries

Damning testimony.
surrealism
roller derby
exploding dog
levity
girlsarepretty

Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet, "search out the reason that bids you write... lie awake on silent night and ask yourself must I write?"

I was driving through flooded farmland. The rain stopped yesterday, but the roads still lifted wet music to each passing car. I was close enough to Houston to pick up Rice radio. I caught a song off of the Donnie Darko soundtrack. The refrain is: "I find it kinda funny I find it kind of sad the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I ever had."

Neglected or molested children will develop strong attachments to their abusive parents. Psychologists propose that this maladaptive behavior is because the child is looking for a close and stable bond and when the caregiver neglects to provide this bond for the child, the child then works that much harder to create that bond, even if it is only within themselves.

Have you seen the picture where the abusive father hangs his head? The cop looks straight ahead; you can tell by his blank eyes and clenched jaw he just wants to get this over with. The seven-year-old girl who still wears the cast clings to her father's leg. She has shaped her mouth into the familiar vase of 'daddy' despite the fact that he has beat and burned her every day of her life. The thought bubble above the cop shows himself, only younger, and crying. The thought bubble above the little girl is a short film, its only a few frames long. It shows her father smiling; from the angle of the shot you are unsure if he is smiling at the TV or his daughter. The thought bubble above the man has red drippy letters that spell out 'fucking bitches'.

I began with a certain set of dreams, with an ideal world. As I have grown I have seen the real world. I have seen a gulf grow between the real and ideal. It has become harder and harder to reconcile the two. I am sure most people feel this to some degree. I am not able to reconcile the two, nor can I stop trying with every breath.

Imagine: a birthday spent in a soup kitchen.

Ideal - Real

Will you accept the real? Or do you begin to fantasize that this is an elaborate ruse before the best birthday party of the century?

The Jesuits talk about the twelve-inch drop. What they mean by this is that it is completely possible for a person to know something in their head without knowing it in their heart.

To a certain degree I have known that the real world of my outer senses, my head, is in conflict with the ideal world of my inner sense, my heart, for some time. The more I see that the real world is true the more ardently I need for it to not be so.

Death is unknown, so it can retain its ideal beauty and mystery all the while being hauntingly real. Death=healing? Life=dying?

Blake writes in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell "when the doors of perception have been cleansed, mankind will see things as they truly are- infinite."

posted by James @ 11:24 AM

Donnerstag, November 07, 2002

This weekend I saw. I saw a man standing in front of an open violin case. I saw a few wet bills and coins that on the dark velvet interior looked like puddles in a tilled winter field. This weekend I saw a man lean into a violin as if he were dancing with a small child, or perhaps protecting it from a storm. I saw a man in front of the case, before the violin, turn his face into the rain and sway his long coat, heave his feet and drop them. A hop, a jump, a stumble, terribly out of rhythm. I stopped to watch the idiot show. When I realized that the dancer was blind who could console me?

posted by James @ 3:05 AM

Dienstag, November 05, 2002