lexicon

I hope I am never accused of brevity.  I believe one can be both verbose and poignant, and when faced with an act or work of egregious, unapologetic poetry or intelligence, I feel almost shame for the author if I see malevolent brevity has set in, like atrophy, euthanizing an epic at it’s seeds, culling the volume down to a readily graspable and thus-designed-to-be-trivial ideal.

Nietzsche, an author I celebrate a great deal in my own writings, elaborated, too, with abandon – and thus, exhaustively would extrapolate; and when he couldn’t be burdened to expound on aphorism, he at least had the good decency to fill his pages with them, copiously, one after another, a body count of past ideas and writ index of the dead ‘sense’ that may never really have been all that common but now made ready to the commonest of folk, in words.

I think if you have the gift of any memorable wordwork, you owe it to any and all of your listeners to sift it through and mill it out to a gaseous form and disseminate it across all planes of it’s possible experience.

In my own case, I expand on an idea because I have no faith in myself to make my point in short.

But even if I could, I would have it such that I’d never be accused of boiling it down and evaporating the extraneous.  Explication is not art, and I hate and hate the word ‘wordsmith’.  I am not banging together and burning these thoughts, face to the fire, cackling mad through a heatshield, tongs and hammer in hand, a clear and endgame for the ore’s design inhabiting the mind.

Expression, at all, artistic or otherwise, is a sort of tragic restraint, like a dog pulling at his collar and leash so hard that he chokes himself to death.  What wild, unchecked, foolish assumption we make when we feel understood at all in speech and in word, what amazing leaps we take with our faith, dancing it around the room and having our way with it – it’s a very specific sort of debauchery, and one we seemingly cannot live without on a word to word basis.  The facade is entirely complete and wholly pervasive.  It is everyday, perhaps, for the idiot, but I promise you in honesty, I don’t understand anything but the most facile and shallow scrapings of your meaning.  All I get of you is the little erosion of your yesterday that I scrape off my whetstone, having caught you in passing with the slightest of slights and chipped off a sliver to take with me as I continue on.

We bang and bump into one another, spend days and nights and even, sometimes when we’re truly fortunate, mere seconds together, and a real human moment of a real human sense of comprehension of another’s caterwauling remains a painfully rare occurrence.

Brevity ‘cannot possibly’ be our answer to this problem.

I will never assume that I am heard, and never assume that I am understood, and thus I will write and write and sing and talk, be a friend and befriend more still, love until I ache and condemn until I ache, until my bones are bleached by the sun and like most my ideas as well, my body has taken to rot. I want to die, some day, having stood for something, having spoken for someone.

The creation of a thing, even so much as a word, a pressure of breath past teeth and tongue, to speak, utter and congeal together from the sludge of mongrel mastery of one’s language – this act, it is the very avatar of Wonder and Awe, and we take it for granted, first in our use of it, and second in the preposterous belief that we ‘use’ language at all.

The concept of a wordsmith, and I said I hate and hate it, is something I’ve been called when calling was to be done, and it is a truly absurd notion.  We are nothing of the sort – instead, I suggest, we are ALIVE, and to endure such a state is necessarily to struggle to be heard and to convince ourselves that anyone else we bump and bang into as we suffer our souls is anything more than a strange paralles of our own understanding of the viciously undependable state of affairs we host our affair with.

Language is one such passage into this fantasy, if we’ll permit for a moment it to be called by it’s other name.  Love is another, pain another still.

We are alive; thus, we mewl like animals, and assign what meaning we can to the animal babbling next to us.

Consider, especially in those moments when you read one, read a word and, just for a second, it sounds a little odd to your ear, or looks a little odd to your eye, or you learn something about it, another meaning, another way to pronounce it, what it really means and how you misjudged it, how they make you laugh and cry and doubt yourself at the worst of moments, when we recognize where it came from and see how it fits in with our own circle of trust and library of options… when faced with all that, consider this: the words live as we do, each one bright souls of their own, and we, quite rightly, owe them our lives.

They are not the ore – we are.  Through their lense we shape our understanding of every second of every day, storybooking every moment of our experience.

The words smith ‘us.’

translation

My wife and I have always respectfully disagreed in our respective interpretations of the meaning of ‘travel’.  To her mind, travel is a physical displacement of one’s person to another patch of land somewhere else, with it’s own set of sensation, it’s smells and tastes and temperatures, it’s trees and water and sand and dirt and unnatural, alien clothes and banners and bus schedules set at an angle, different time zones to different streets whose arrangement and layout thereof make little sense to the freshly initiated, uninitiated to this particular culture, with it’s own songs and colours and..  well, I already mentioned the smells.

I, in contrast, travel only from idea to idea, regardless of on whose side of whose line on whose map I happen to, on a moment to moment basis, reside.

I can’t quite understand just quite where we differ – when she writes on her own blog of the various travel experiences she had before we met, it’s very much an exposition and exploration and excitement of her mind just the same.

But when she returns, she speaks and writes of that which exists, and she returns with evidence of the fact, photos and memories of comparable experience, a communicable soul of the place inhabited, even for a while, and she promises sweetly that you, too, might tread where her adorable little feet had once tread.

Her dirt is your dirt, if you so fancy it, and you could go walk those paths too – ask her, and she’d happily draw you a map in green crayon and place in your hand a good compass, and push you just so to get you moving to where you definitely ought to visit.

It’s terribly inviting, seducing, and inspiring.  With her, I’m often moved to action, having been whisked off with her to Honduras, across the country on a long, long drive, down to see family, over to see others still.

Just this weekend last, I felt the unsettling consequences of choice creep up my spine, and on a lark, we drove out to another city four hours away, swinging down the highway at great speeds, staying overnight, all because we could, right on the tip of a whim.

Adulthood is a bit of a strange beast that way, especially at it’s onset – which, hmm, seems to take years to set in, but curiously only appears to have firmed up and taken purchase overnight.  And yet we can never quite point our finger to which night, exactly, that it appeared.

But overnight, you have all the freedom in the world, and nobody to stop you from exercising it.

Perhaps you’re now an adult when you no longer think to call anyone when you decide to skip town.  Or a fugitive, I suppose, might satisfy that criteria.

One in the same?  Irrelevant.

Every time I travel her way though, in her fashion, with bags and plans and tickets and vehicles and a watch, those damned, blasted tools, everytime I take to my heels, my heels to the wind,  the wind taking the plane, the road under the wheels, transporting, translating, processing my transfer from here to there, I can only stand it for so long before I need to escape back to the world I designed, with things around me that have actual meaning, and people around me who speak in tongues that don’t sound like babbling and about whose facticities I’m vaguely aware.

I think most of all, I find the moment itself as we decide to ‘go’, the most exciting.  And it all becomes downhill from there.  I think this is the case for me because that moment, the decision-time of the undertaking, that resignation to a plan and the first steps to carry it out – that’s the moment we share in our respective travelling, and I do love to share it with her.

But a drive is a drive, and a flight is a flight.  Breathe this air or that air, sit in this chair or that chair.  Eat this food or that food, see this form or that form.

I find the senses rather tedious without a great personal meaning attached to the thing being sensed, and because of it, I’m deficient, I’m colourblind to the collective experience.

I eat out almost daily, a luxury and a freedom of consideration, but food means nothing to me at all, it’s a chore and carries with it punishment should I rebel against it’s chains, pains and madness, a fury and truculence that spoils all of my moods should I fail to spoil my appetite.  But sitting down to a fresh loaf of bread and tearing out the soft, white innards reminds me of sitting on hard cloths seats in the back of my grandfather’s Jeep Wagoneer, listening to my father and my Nono talk about work.

And now I’m travelling, back to when I was that size and the seatbelt fit me like a blanket, when my feet were so small that my shoes were weightless, where everyone was taller than I, but by virtue of noise and personality alone I fancied them equals nonetheless.

When my grandmother sat at the breakfast table on Sunday morning and the smell of bacon and cigarettes flooded that large kitchen of the house that has since been totally remodelled down to the brick with an unnatural gate out front and a now-distinct absence of life about it, notably only in contrast to the beautiful, vibrant souls that used to inhabit it.

And I’m moved, the same way that cancer, spite, jealousy, miscommunication, betrayal, economics, mistrust, and worst of all, WORST of all – TIME, moved out from that place where the Jeep used to park, moved out from that place all the love that used to inhabit it’s four walls and every nook and cranny, with the odd-feeling wooden doors and brass handles, and the large bearskin rug and hand-made bar in the basement, with the locked door of mystery that my cousin and I curiously tried to pick, where I lived for two summers, where I challenged my aberrant uncle with veiled threats and watched my drunk aunt drive her fist in the wall and SCREAM in my face, not looking at me, but through me, as she re-told and re-lived an old, painful memory.

And here’s where I’ve travelled to, and I’m moved to tears, and I haven’t left the spot I sit.  I don’t have pictures or proof, I have only a very precise, unflinchingly honest recall of my time there, but it could have been time spent anywhere, because every place is special when it’s special to a boy.

Ten years from now I’ll write of this moment now, sitting in bed with my wife, click-clacking away at the keyboard, wondering where I’ll next travel to in life, wondering where I’ll go with her next, be it her trip to our honeymoon and great adventures and photographs, or my trip into tomorrow and the day after next, stealing away nuggets of incalculable meaning and value to my soul and recalling them in the highest of definitions, defined perhaps only to me in my own babbling tongue of the thousand voices of my mind, my own chorus and army of librarians, cataloguing my life so that in those pages of my history I might learn anything at all, endavouring to continue to endeavour to become something worthwhile, something worthy of the beautiful moments I travel to on an everyday basis.

Translation is no sort of alchemy or magic, it’s a passage, always a movement, from here, to there.  She translates herself and I translate myself; her from home X to place Y, and me from thought to words, words to wheels, wheels to paved tarmac, always firmly on the gas, lifting off, landing abruptly, always taking in everything, no camera needed when I paint the memories by hand.

She mentioned she wants to go to Iceland for our honeymoon.  Every day is my honeymoon, because I know someday, someone may ask me about these days, how it feels to be newly married, to be a new adult, what changes, what stays the same.  My travels are all, are all in my mind, and my souvenirs are the oft-shed scales and skin I shake off as I go, remaking and reforming all that I’ve been to see about who I’ll try to be when I next set off.

My best travel story is the one where I found someone amazing to travel everywhere with – specifically, everywhere that “I” actually travel to, maps be damned, fuck the compass.

Specifically, in happy translation from now to every tomorrow ahead.

cruelty

No questions about this one; it is written, that I cannot change and I will never forget it, but nevertheless: no questions at all.  It is, it speaks, and it’s voice is enough:  or will have to be, all the same.  

My best writing was never read – I expect this piece to dutifully adhere to that tradition, and should it become insubordinate and garner some audience, I’d ask that we respect it and leave well enough alone.

-~-

Typically in the nowaday should I write anything but fluff, I get calls asking if I’ve got mad or if I’m suffering some sort of crisis.  Life is a crisis.  Sometimes I’m just feeling honest about that fact.

This is kenosis, and questions are not necessary here.

There is no just reciprocation of the acts of the heart and memory by the ghosts who haunt us and carry away in hand as they go whole sections of souvenir, parts and pieces and strips of the wall’s paper, great axe-gashes in the foundation of our personality cleaved clear from it’s block; our ‘us’, our best estimation of all that we love about ourselves and the worst of our hate; that sad ichor with which we, in broad, equally brazen strokes, slather on and thus affix together, resolutely, the very bonds of our resolve – these stands we take (even when we stand sidelong with a buckling spine and one shaky leg), all those battle lines and lines drawn in the sands of whispers and promises and lies, it’s those determinations, made, determinedly, to never again allow such hurt and rape and love.

In a word(s) – when we should think of anything, the thing of thought apparently owes us little due for the consideration.  Gifts inspire gifts, love begets love, whispers – even – can elicit some very soft tears, and thoughts…  the most deafening of our myriad favours to bestow – our thoughts remain ours alone, and they run through us like a second set of arteries, just as pervasive, crawling through our skin, inextricably tied to the function and commonplace activities of our heart, running us through with our our own recall, drawing themselves, quartering us, without so much as a sound, wracking us, changing us, bending us to their will, moving our hands and feet and eyes like puppets with invisible strings, puppets in a one-man, one-act play, with no lines and very little movement all the same, with no one to view it but a drama all the same, all the same, same thoughts again and again, rushing, twisting, churning us around and wrapping us in their firm embrace, holding us and our eyes wide open, open to the possibility of forgetfulness, teasing us with a sense of choice, and slamming the cage door shut all the same, all the same, one mind and one life and one trillion ways to live with these infinite memories and I’m to choose just one at any moment, rushing and twisting our arms to choose, to select of the impossible that which to make possible, swearing each choice will be the last one, the only one, the final choice to make, after which all else will be branching therefrom, and the ‘right’ path will always veer left, and all the same I’d veer left even if it were the wrong one.

In dreams and in thoughts, my breath still catches, cold, and I collapse, and this memory’s blood pooling over my hands, same hands quick clutching my chest, and that beating, quick-clutching (double-clutching even) thrum of the heart pounding and choosing of it’s plethora of choice to right to life, making the choice to remain alive as a thing itself worthy of choosing indeed, but reminding me, all the same, that the bloodline of a memory is hydra with many, many heads – with every one being an insurmountable opponent on it’s own, and each insurmountable head looking for it’s own, individual opportunity to spear itself through my jaw, haymakers shattering my cheekbone and crumpling me like an old canvas and earlier work, tossed away as foundational experiment, and remind us that we are slaves, uncommunioned, inarticulate in our minds and fumbling over and through our words as they build out from these thoughts, and we’re strictly unable to think past and remember anything but the same memories that chase us around the room as they please, howling and bellowing like a pack of wolves with five heads a piece, five parts of the same memory, five ways it could have played out, and five seconds of the way it actually did.

In a minute, in a moment, they exercise their option, these monstrous memories, and we are stricken again, without warning or celebration, lashed out at again and reminded, vividly, of a time that is not ‘now’, and reminded, painfully, that that time will never again ‘be’, and all the same convinced that we can NOW never change any of the all that we’ve already painted over and buried alive.

All I’ve ever learned of cruelty, I’ve learned from Memory; one shovelful at a time, burying myself alive, alone with my thoughts, convinced, completely, that I’m alone in my thinking.

We never heal from any of it.  We never hate what we loved, never love what we hated.  That which harmed, harms.  That which inspired, inspires.  I will never forget, never heal, never forgive.  I will never stop running, chasing, loving, trying, wondering, blaming, hating, or fail to cover and covet the precious as I find it.

And so in the world in which I live, where my mind is Warden, not tool, when I wander off that path, and I act against my heart, even in thought, with a thought or a dream, in the pliable space between the quick-ticks of time; spined teeth taste of my shoulder as the monster’s one-of-many-heads tears painfully my flesh with it’s bite, and in these vivid hallucinations, hurls me through the air, my skin stinging as the fresh air whips across the too-open wound, and I come to rest, injured, at the feet of a memory that’s now cruel, so cruel, so cruel, so cruel to watch.

And as I dream, I watch the insane, dancing scene of my past flavours of happiness, many-coloured and spaced out at great distance but all the same forbidden to my heart.  And as I watch, I ache, strained against the nonsense of this idea, all the same unyielding in it’s punishment, cat with nine tails, ten tails, fifty, all the same swinging it with horrid force and no restraint, all the same I see it as my restraint, my pulling of pulleys to wield me around in directions I would not naturally choose to go.

And the ache follows me like a weight, insisting with such heaviness that I suffer it until I admit that I love it, damning me until I admit that it’s holy.

But I can’t, and I won’t, so tear out my liver, so cruel but go on and do it, I’m screaming, do it for my doing that which I must, tear it out again, all the same, day by day.

You’ll hear me scream, and oh, how I’ll scream, right until the chords of my vocals crack from my neck and snap out like snakebites, the voice itself terrified of it’s howl and desperate to escape it’s brutal chore.

And in that screaming, hear these words, remember as I do when I cannot forget, how I used to write with such violence, writing promised to be unread, but written as if the words themselves would take to the wind if ignored, my slashing with adjective left and right, whirling about; HEAR these screams, make room, feel and remember this strength that I used to command at will.  Yes Warden, too, remind me of that, remind me of my weapons and their double-edge, remind me how “I” love and what that meant.

Make room for me and my damned ideas and twisted sense of reason, feel that FIRE that I used to throw around, that consuming, debilitating fire that both simultaneously birthed, bathed and brutalized my image, impression and impact on and for everyone I used to know.

An exorcism then?  Is that what this is or what’s needed?  Or just a rebirth of perspective?  All the same, haunted all the same, blind in the sandstorm, whipping about, never likely to be found – but never lost, all the same, ears to the wind as it flies, listening for an echo, never forgetting what it was to see my madness in a mirror.

not an inch, not a whisper

For most of my life, I’ve employed a strict policy of wasteland left behind, a scarred landscape of tilled and addled soil wherever I’ve gone.  I’ve been afraid to set any roots down at all, to allow any hook or anchor to tie me to any one case or place.

A vagabond of soul, petty and poor and content, determined to be content with his thoughts alone.

I firmly believed that this is the way one must ‘be’ to keep principle first and at the front – if one’s ideas and one’s dreams of how life might soon become are to be of any value in the slightest, they seemed to me to be required to stand guard at the precipice of one’s priorities, and must not be ousted by whatever inclination toward laziness does try to creep in.

They must be moved from the forefront not an inch.

I saw the material existence of soup and sandwich and some of one’s own ‘things’ as something of an untenable but unimpeachable distraction, and so I moved for a firm policy of having little and none, save for only that which connotes ‘quality’, something good and of high status in it’s class.  A mongrel philosophy on the subject, no doubt, but the issue deserved no better.

And if I could not have it well, I’d decide I did not need it.  I felt I’d keep the shades of grey for my moralizing – consumer affairs, accordingly, can be allocated to black and white.  I owned very little, but that I bothered to own I ensured was of good quality – undiverse, yes, but discerning in taste and educated as to it’s value.

At the core, I felt that with a good woman and good word(s), that was enough, more than enough for me, as long as I kept to great quality on both fronts.

And how things DO change – and how sharp and biting it tastes when one tastes of one’s own evolution of perspective.  Unsettling, in a word.  So where HAVE I found myself now, with what gathered into my grasp?

I’m married now, I have my own little wife, and she’s quite splendid.  I did not settle in the least in this regard – I expected only the best of wives, and with time and some trouble, I secured her.  She’s magnificent, and every evening I spend with her curled in the crook of my arm, I feel rich and overburdened with great fortune.  I’ve written of her many times before – my feelings on the subject are no secret, and it’s no deviation from my ideal to love her greatly and value her above all else.

I actually just bought my first car too, it’s very luxurious with all the little fancy toys and blinking lights and screaming engine growls that make every other little car out on the road seem like it’s moving in slow motion.  It feels, when you sit in it, like your favourite sofa chair.  The radio always seems to play my favourite song.  It’s black and sleek and beautiful and it’s the only car I see when I walk through a parking lot, and it’s true, it’s just like your wife that you can’t stand to live without, it’s the only fish you you see in the sea.

Feburary 18th will be my one-year anniversary at my job, which I love as well.  I have autonomy, some decision making power, and for the most part, I have a great freedom to do anything I feel will improve our company’s chances of success, and significant latitude to employ my own strategies.  If you took that statement there, and posted it to your facebook, one wonders if it wouldn’t seem to be the most intense form of boastfulness, given the normal deplorable whimperings one tends to see amongst one’s friends, the little jabs and complaints and eagerness to lament one’s work.  I love my job, and I’m challenged by it, and most of that challenge exists because I’m given the freedom to challenge myself, every day, every week.

I’m now, in a word, rich – rich as before, just as before: but different, somehow more content, someway more satisfied and well still in keeping with my original vector, great pleasures in few things, few eggs in fewer baskets.

And it’s all so terribly scary as well.  The potential loss with so much more invested.  My gamble is not with money and chips but with a greater investment of self into my life, into my people and into my things.  I’m, now more than ever before, connected to the pulse that trickles through the telephone line veins of the world in which I celebrate and condemn, and the risk is invigorating.  For a guy who really never cared what he had, and only really cared who he was, I now find myself blessed with tremendous, invaluable gifts which cannot be quantified, calculated, amended for in case of loss or truly insured against.  Money didn’t buy me this facet of happiness; it was choice.  In abstract, perhaps a choice to generate some money, but still choice – what some and most take for granted, most would wonder why I chose to choose.

I selected, carefully, with great research, deliberation and an inviting touch of inspiration the path I wanted to take, and in desiring to have her and to be had by her, I learned of these other, excellent things that I collected as we went.

The tao te ching suggests that one can guard against assault and thievery all day, only to lose all that one guarded in sleep.  But there is no replacing my beautiful wife whatever, and I cannot accept a simple sort of vigilance.  I feel as though vigilance would do well to be reinvented, for cases just such as mine – and should I ever patent true defense, this often-offender would make a choice of it as well.

I’ve battled a lot of issues and heartache and morality in my writing, but at the core, I wonder if I haven’t become a little blunt.  I’m fat and happy and blessed with success of a sort, and I’m trying not to become complacent here.  What else could one become but complacent, when what evolution took place was from content ‘to’ content, self to older self, no wiser but perhaps still better for realizing better the possibilities of betterment ahead?  I know that children are next on the docket, and I have said before that my wit and my wonder and my wild-eyed fascination are fast dwindling, an all-too-satiated man becoming quite complacent with his absolute, solemn happiness.

What line does one walk when you speak to a child, how can one honestly caution against 20+ years of largely disappointment when one can only seem to focus on the last two?  Do I ignorantly tell them that time heals all?  For it doesn’t…  one just notices less the damage done as one focuses more on the building of tomorrow.

If I have any wonder left, I wonder…  what’s next, now that I have it all?  I ask with no boasting, I promise – but with genuine curiosity.  I was content before, always content, determinedly content.  But I’m content without determination to be so now, and I do wonder, what’s still to come?  What else will this fascinating life offer me, challenge me with, now that I spend my days left to challenge myself alone?  What will I now gain, and how might I now endure and suffer through a loss, despite my promised best efforts to maintain?

Just…  simply…  amazing, this life we live.  Every day, another fortune, a plundered present, strip mined of it’s excellence:  and yet another powerful reason to fear it’s quiet end.

I guess what I’m saying here is:  Don’t ever let anyone take even an inch, as best you can prevent it – it’s all very precious beyond any recompense.  As of this day I’ve lived longer than I have ever before, have accomplished more than I had ever dreamed, and have surrounded myself with the best people I’ve ever known.  I didn’t always realize that each day is, actually, a realized opportunity to live, to exist and explore, to enjoy and to introduce and to discover.

Don’t trade any of it, the world is not a bazaar for pleasant exchange.  Part of the pleasure is in the fight, the struggle to gain and gain and keep, to find the edge and screamingly leap off in mindless search for more.  Excess is the word here, to be MORE content, the riddle is simple in posing and commonsense in response – just refuse the one-step-back proposition, charge ahead with abandon when you hear those trumpets shriek; and charge ahead, just the same in silence, once you’ve found yourself leading the pack.

Not an inch, not a whisper; I love it all, I’ll give none of it back, and I make no apology for enjoying the most enjoyable of lives.