Memory Gardens

Sometimes you come across something so appropriate to your current circumstance that it strikes you in such a way as to imprint itself on your mind. Something you must return to over and over again, in reference to all points of your life. Seconds ago I opened up my copy of the second issue of the St. Petersburg Review for some good reading while waiting for my friend, and decided to re-read the essay by Arkadii Dragomoschenko, entitled 'Memory Gardens'. I love Dragomoschenko's work, and have had a wonderful conversation with him this past summer, and so always enjoy reading whatever I can of his, for the first, second, or even third time. Though I had read it before, the opening of this essay had a particular effect on me now because of the events in my life in the past two weeks.

Sometimes a few encounters, no matter how long or intensive, in the end form something like a ghostly constellation that owes its linguistic content, the valence of its anticipations, its mutually substituting intentions - in a word, the laws of its existence - not so much to chronologically distributed facts or neuroleptic recollections of certain attendant, contextual circumstances as to the logic of an unforeseeable ("future") exchange of that which can be rightfully called "generative possibilities": they open to the imagination - but not all to the permanence of memory - in forms that are ungraspable yet anticipate unimaginable perfection.
In certain other regions of discourse, these possibilities are sometimes called "desire," which lends some vague value to the clarity of forestalling. The influence of such interactions is unpredictable. Sometimes such encounters happen in life.

Is it too much for me to hope that the confusing and absurd encounters I have had with one specific person in the past two weeks can come anywhere near this idea of an influential, generative, ghostly constellation of interactions?

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out - by Richard Siken

Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.

Today there was

a fire, and a question still unanswered. I have been talking about it for a week. More.

At the market, I bought two sweet peppers, one red and one yellow, and a cucumber, green. I couldn't remember what else I wanted. I ate an orange for lunch, and drank afternoon tea. H. asked me about last night, and I told her it didn't happen. Therefore I don't know what I'm doing.

I have a greeting card I bought for myself years ago put up on the wall above my desk. It's a fantastical drawing of a tiny naked woman standing on shoulders, reaching into the ear of a head, holding an axe in her left hand and placing a chopped up log onto a pile.

It's all about fantasies and deadwood - chopping up useless thoughts...clearing room to dream.

I know that I have been dreaming recently, I just cannot remember about what.

Playgirl

Returned from an amazing concert by Ladytron, who's music you can listen to here. I reveled in the beating of the bass speakers that pounded notes into my body. One of the best concert's I've been to, and needless to say their recordings do not do these songs justice. Three years since their last album, the newest one entitled "Velocifero" is definitely their most accessible. With more streamlined lyrics and more flowing sounds rather than straight electronica, this album has been their most successful release yet. I must say, however, that I do love the incessant beats and words of their second album, "Light & Magic."

Maybe this is because I like thinking about light so much.














My persistent companion on all thoughts pertaining to light, I find myself again flipping through Elizabeth Block's "A Gesture Through Time." She writes:

Light races, especially in a digital era of fiber optics. You race at the speed of light. Though it moves through time, we only know its absence/distance/deferral from its object, the source of light. Light is not pure object. It is mere representation. Not the thing itself. The virtual memory of the memory, as OS X operating system becomes OS 9's parasite. Light becomes God of mediation. Light moves, light presents as if. Not is. But, no. Light is (in the twenty-first century): Artificial projection.

Lights behind the musicians, blue, red, white: light and magic. I sent this quote to E. yesterday because I couldn't think of anything else to email her. I also spent all of today sitting in front of a warm fire, tea in hand. I love the fire; I do not love this desire and ensuing confusion.

Photos: Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie, by Guus Krol on Flickr.com

A Tease

Dark red of screams and daylight sucked out of / Trying to escape
Surrounded by noise, screaming mouth sounds. A wine glass / lacking
A base. Calling my name and then / and then bodies pressed against windowpane
Something sharp that breaks / open mouth, closed face. She said it again.

I couldn't know your thoughts, I only wanted to close the space.
A terrible tease. Tormenting me.

Wine, champagne, people sitting in chairs. A fire, there was. Bad music, conversation somewhere between interesting and not, and interesting if I cared. Thinking about footsteps in snow, crossing the yard. New snow and crystals. And now, nothing more to say.

From Wednesday, on the Thames

I love cities. I love the noise of cities. I love the lull when traffic is stopped at a light and then the rush of sound when it all starts up again. I do not like sitting in a room for two hours waiting for my number to be called. But I do like the sound of the word 'clock'.

Today, I like fog. I don't always. I like the sometimes kiss of light mist as I walk along the river.

I like poetry. I like walking.
I like thinking about poetry as I walk in London.