Writing in Vodka

Currently wandering in international waters: reading "A Child Is Not a Knife" by Goran Sonnevi, Swedish poet. Am under the influence. And drinking Russian Standard. Am enamored.

What makes you think it is possible to understand other people? Contemplation of nuances against words. Verbs cannot describe your actions, but adjectives describe your countenance; it's blue with a hint of deceit. I want to stop talking about it, but there was never anything to talk about to begin with.

There is something to be said about your brilliance. I will not say it anymore.

Repeat. Repeat.

What is it about recurring themes, recurring dreams? The unconscious shift from obsession to preoccupation persists in this liminal space, temporally cataloging my thoughts. This happened then, and that happened there; returning. Electricity and blackberries, road music and initial theories, to name a few.

Conversations repeating themselves until they are reduce to one word and one breath. Choose one: Blackberry. Russia. Poets.

J. is moving on Wednesday but today we met up for coffee. I don't remember everything we talked about, but I know it involved something existential, New York, Keats, Blake, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, K., and sex. Not necessarily in that order.

the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

--Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas"

Poetry/Play

Light returns again; as the cycle of days, the cycle of subjects. Stein's "Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights" impeding on my consciousness and too stubborn to go away. Read before seen, read as writing, not theater (not my medium). Now returned to, a production. The Wooster Group production; video monitors and recordings. Writing again, this time about the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century. White electric light pervading my sight. Rhyming. Refusing structure as Post-Modernist experimentation.
Attempting to return to the source (without knowledge thereof):

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,

Die früh sich einst dem trüben Buck gezeigt.

Versuch ich wolh, euch diesmal festzuhalten?

Fühl ich mein Herz noch jenem Wahn geneigt?

Ihr drängt euch zu! Nun gut so mögt ihr walten,

Wie ihr aus Dunst and Nebel um mien steight;

Mein Busen fühlt sich jugendlich erschüttert

Vom Zauberhauch, der euren Zug umwittert.

-Goethe, "Faust"

[Once again, you draw near, wavering shapes,/ from the past in which you first appeared to clouded eyes./ Shall I try this time to hold you fast?/ Do I feel my heart still inclined toward that illusion?/ You push yourselves forward! All right, have it your way./ As you climb out of vapours and fog, / My breast feels itself trembling in a youthful manner/ from the breath of magic that hovers round your train.]

Sunday

Musicians
and Wine.

Russian Standard.

Poets in the
minority.

An unimportant
fact.

Postcard

On a postcard I picked up at the NY Art Book Fair last weekend, tacked to the wall above my desk:

"Playful talent wanted. Must write well."

It is something about the writing. Of the writing. First-drafts looming over me; the revisions usually more quickly executed than initially thought, but the time first. Finding the time, as if it could be locked up and stored for later. But if that were the case no one would be afraid of running out of it.

Or running out of thoughts. Not quite penetrating deep enough for a new one to emerge: this is such a difficult point to judge for oneself. I try, I think I try. Is this exhausting?

I cannot move enough. When I am sitting, I want to be cycling. When I am running, I want to be reading at the same time. I don't know where the time goes, really. The digital numbers move up or down depending on what machine I am on, but always moving towards the conclusion. Lifting, sets are monitored by seconds, minutes, rest-periods and exertion. My heart-rate monitor my constant companion.

I have not had a good work-out in days.

In case you had forgotten

These are
my words.

I am
not you.

I wish I did, but I don't

create art.

Art that consists in looking that is, as opposed to
envisioning.

This afternoon I wandered in my jeans
and Adidas shirt amidst vintage clad beings;
I could not melt into the walls because the
warehouse was glowing: white: sterile:

a showroom for the books but illuminating
so much more.

::

Reading In Praise of Shadows (1933) by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - among other things, explaining the reasons why modern appliances, white, white, white, do not fit harmoniously in Japanese rooms; the Western preoccupation with light, white, bright, sight.

The banishment of mystery.