Where is on down the line / How far away


8.25.21


From the driving position, once again I’m adjusting the shade. Recyclical, which is watchful, to say prideful, of my hurtling-towards. My gift of my death. What that is my giving. Towards loving. Towards loving my life.





~





After visiting home, or perhaps a little prior, a steady off-ness had built in me a fortress until I awoke one morning to N.’s startled face in my own. An $850 trip to the emergency room and I’m reminded that panic only recedes by great effortlessness, where the story begins, where the will automates the rush of action inconclusively, though operative.


Every day a new tremble/ing.





~





I’m seeing seeing. I’m writing writing. I’m reading reading. I’m hearing hearing.


Like the old fashioned telephone.


“A doubling where there is too much feedback.” A doubling that isn't circle, but an unbreaking dynastic Line.


The sensory. What feedbacks the senses senses a route backwards toward a second, personalogical recognition where everything is a cathedral built by wisps of past effort. Like the old fashioned telephone, we can’t surmise its mechanical properties other than the prosthetic use once crossed with the human-divinity plane, where the human is immortal.


For example


In Charlestown, I held her hand through the streets I was seeing. I was seeing seeing the streets as if the streets were a castle built by refractions in the door frame. Even the Monument seemed like something I’d placed there, poking my own eye (not the atmosphere).


I was hearing hearing the people streaming aboard Old Ironsides. I held my face in the mist near the old courts. I felt hers. My legs promptly gave in to a pain I didn’t register as my own.


Was I breathing this beating?


“Certainty is nothing other than the objective essence itself, that is to say, the way in which we become aware of the formal essence is certainty itself.” Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. So simple, and yet, so difficult to internalize, to remember to deploy—conceptually—when I’m digging digging. Instead of, in the place of. I’m in the place of wherein the place-of desists. Certain works of philosophy would take the mind’s inability to focus on the objective essence as evidence of it being a symptom of some other unity, thus abandoning it. Spinoza, on the other hand, is the one who knows that it is precisely the infiltrative presence of these other “unities” that keeps us from focusing on this ever-unwanting task at hand, human freedom.


Oscillation inaugurates—sets going—not the recognition of oneself, but the howl. “If you want to drive a person crazy…” Alan Watts wants a bowl of.


The howl. We listen to the music of a certain part of our youth we desire to never leave. This is what is meant by a ‘black hole.’ As Keith Reniere used to ask his followers, “What do you lose if you were to stop living the way you live now?”


What have you got to lose in forgetting? What has one //


got to lose in forgetting?


“I first of all realized that if I abandoned the old ways and embarked on a new way of life, I should be abandoning a good that was by its very nature uncertain—as we can clearly gather from what has been said—in favor of one that was uncertain not of its own nature (for I was seeking a permanent good) but only in respect of attainment.” Spinoza again, with a clarity of spirit one like me could only achieve under the wracked bodily strain of nasal steroids—all else sullying, a wet napkin placed over the iron.


I worry worrying. I see myself seeing worrying. Fearish and trembling, sun through the white blinds, from the white wall a reflection of tan on the bedsheets I kept kicking. My bloating, the keep. The most important thing to consider now now under consideration, unable to ‘let go.’ Become-Kleist. The puppet coming over the master like shadows of an air raid. We must, first of all, recover belief in this world.


“[I]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.” Deleuze and Guattari—or, here, speaking from the double-voice, Deleuze—speaks of an empiricist conversion of the work of philosophy, from Hume to James/Peirce, which would require the belief in belief, or calling belief what has customarily been described as the process by which something is folded into the body, prehension, demiurge of the platelets. Can you hear them howling?


There isn’t anything to be recovered by believing in “this world.” This is of no reactionary order. Rather, what is believed is believed in the utility of leading to other belief: of what can be believed. Can we adjust the goal posts of what may comprise the new so as to crack open belief (always once again), is the question asked by those in whom I place my intellectual trust, and those to whom my writing—in the spiritual sense—is dedicated.





~





I love you more every day.


The bad trip came at a time at which I thought I was becoming one with this person, N., who I loved. A ficus tree turned into a dark mobile of rain-inhered dying. To be breathing or seeing was death-defying, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to do either anymore. It was as if there were fishing lines attached to each muscle in my face, reacting to what I felt were the exultations of my own actions recited back to me in hers. Black hole. Bad hole. That was that.


With certain drugs, there are no second chances. Or easy ones. I suppose we could have induced ourselves to expel the moulded shrooms. She did vomit, later, after nearly choking on a piece of bread.


I was introduced to Lord of the Dance. The day had been planned to be a day of working on the internet. We’d driven to Southie to pick up a printer/scanner that didn’t print. Later, its sleek modern design features would to us look like the idiosyncratic mouth of Evil, and we treated it so.


The rain had stuck us inside like two pairs of sandals. I had no inclination to have sex. This was the first time I’d felt attacked by routine. We just sat on the couch, occasionally becoming looped. In each other’s orbits was a profligate wasting-away of one’s presentness, and not even the music winding through the apartment could bring us any closer to the bliss we’d encountered down the Cape on some beach of which we no longer even remember the name: eating a whole bag of chips, nearly pissing to keep warm, but rolling through the atmosphere with a serpent’s muscle, hearts real. A woman came up to the shack in which we were holed only to put a letter in the empty mailbox. A few hours later, the same woman arrived to retrieve it.





~


7.16.21


Aim sight. From Berryville on down, one sees into a past that’s stuck around. These mid-Cambrian hills referred to as mountains, valleys so far below sea-level your ears pop just ascending a stair. N. begs to take a picture in front of the vintage Coca Cola mural. Rolled deep into tourist country. Just before crossing the Line, N. gets out to piss behind an empty church. I snap a picture unsure of whether CVS will develop graven images such as this, her ass popping out from beneath her blouse in the familiar but always shocking bone-shade bone-shape. We’re headed to Eureka, land of so many ancestors, aesthetic and real. Touted as “my favorite place on planet Earth,” and I stand by that.


AKA: Little Switzerland. Two Dutch Dames Chocolate Shoppe. History of Klan activities, history of Wiccan activities, history of Osage displacement, history of World War I. In Carroll County, the old places like this. A movie set sans camera crew. Few know of it, though those who do, assured of its dark, dank mystery, acclaim it.


I’d put “Eureka Springs” on the agenda as an open-ended prompting, for exploration. I’d already filled N. in on most of the lore—historical, that which precedes me, and my own—such as the haunted Crescent Hotel, the Bourbon St. Inn, where Stanford stayed initially when he blew into town white-suited. Any mention of the poet brings to mind lines from C.D. and the image of how I suspect .22 holes in a chest would look. As if nothing entered the body at all. Negative pimples erupting inward. They say, it’s the force of its trajectory, as well as the swiftness with which lead keel-hauls a biological system, that kills the idiot who uses such a small caliber weapon.


We sweat into our shorts, the dinky shop-lined streets where both my parents and my mentors (C.D. and Forrest) undoubtedly strolled, post-coitus in new marriage bliss. A honeymoon destination. The first city in Arkansas to issue marriage licenses to “queers.” An LGBTQ destination solely based on its being the center around which migration falls, a town no one really wants to visit for more than a day, unless you’re in love with each other or God. In the magic shop, the kid asks us if either of us know how to skateboard. In the gallery, the man asks us if we know the work of Thomas Kinkade. Of-fucking-course we do, we think.


N. and I stay for 6 hours, though in more love than ever. Leaving not before visiting E. Fay Jones’ Thorncrown Chapel, a hidden gem, literally among the pines. Where the sun never shines, and you shiver when the cold wind blows.


Incidentally, this is the location of C.D. and Forrest’s vows. Poets as speech-actors. Reading the pamphlet in pew I recognize the fact that the two must have been one of the first couples wedded here, perhaps just a year after its opening.


E. Fay Jones cites the inspiration of his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as Anglo-Saxon architecture. And it’s true, one isn’t sure whether they’ve entered the set of Beowulf or Deep Space Nine. A “thin place.” Eric Weiner of the NYT: “locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.” A proper deterritorialization. One alights as the site of what had previously been an arbitrary caesura. Is this not the history of the world? Acclamation of glory at the slightest indication of the subject’s waning. Architecture: a frozen multitude.


Being in or among a thin place remembers me to the importance thinkers like Deleuze and Foucault (as Nietzsche and Spinoza before them) on comportment, the way one carries one’s meat around. Especially in this century this strikes me as immediately vital, this century which no longer believes the body other than discursively drawn. Thought to have eliminated the mind-body dualism it (our chatter) has made everything mind. Deleuze and Foucault are in some sense blameworthy, though through misreadings of their work, undoubtedly. No doubt still to blame. Though comportment (as in, repetition is a comportment, from the first page of Difference and Repetition). A position: that’s how it’s felt with N. I’m held by a love that has nothing of a beginning or end. Truly as if I came in at the middle, clambering through the orchestra pit and onto the stage, the audience full in its emptiness.


On the long drive home (as always, I mistakenly turn onto 13 instead of continuing through Branson West to 160, resulting in a much longer trek through the old country, where the old people lived their deaths) mom calls to tell us dinner won’t be ready. “I have no energy,” she says, “I’ve been in the ER with Granny all day.” Last night, apparently, Granny downed an entire bottle of Lovenox, an anticoagulant. At her age, I assume, there’s not much blood to thin beneath such brittle skin. A thin place. Frantic, I grip the wheel. “She’s alright. The doctor says she can leave tomorrow. Nothing happened.” Nothing happened. One more thing: “When I told her this is why she needs someone to watch over her—because she took all of her pills by mistake—she tells me ‘Maybe I did it on purpose, did you ever think of that?’”


“Maybe I don’t want to live anymore.” Not ‘maybe I want to die,’ an exhaustion of what’s possible. Maybe I don’t want to live anymore, maybe life doesn’t want me. This proliferation of dead cells. I carry around this unconscious, this sack of real globlets.


Love nox. Bring on the night-love.

8.26.21





Jean Luc Nancy, I find out on twitter days after the fact, has passed away. I feel a similar chest-tightening when learning of Sophie’s tragic fall from moon-watching. These individuals whose very courage, as it was expressed through media not known for courage, offered a glimpse at an action removed from itself as the deadening strike. “Poetry itself might be found better,” Nancy wrote, “where there isn’t any poetry at all...Poetry does not coincide with itself.” Eternal return of the same difficulty, that of appearing together. Not of appearing as if together but together-appearing, compearance. I’ve been telling myself how the Other stands there for me, against the wall of all-else, and I should take note of its budding circle-producing. How poetry can be a brick and a garden.


To draw a territory. MP on love: “to make my outside your inside, and vice versa.” To, as GL would write, affirm that bodily reaction does not arise from excitation, but that the outside world lends evidence for a movement occurring in the deep, we weave a fiction for every pre-game. “To be exposed is to be ‘posed’ in exteriority,” wrote Nancy. An intimate outside, not like one’s childhood backyard, but like one’s head of hair.


We have the desire to be together, either at an origin or, orgiastically, at the end of all trouble.


Wordsworthian sublime as element of oneself taken place outside of one’s motive, an unreachable tide, staggered by the vision of the giant swan. On a beach in Niantic, N. and I sip seltzer down and read to each other, the hottest people around, naked in our summer outfits. I’m leaning on my fist and elbow, dreaming of making her quiver, on the lookout for loose nipples, sine waves lapping a child. “A child is being lapped.” A lapsus is being birthed, and for what? Other than making it difficult.


I haven’t been able to do anything anything, but seeing myself loving, fucking, as if I were watching myself showering, wondering how powerful such a body would be over me. In combat. I had to stop smoking weed in my Somerville apartment. Too hot to walk around in, I would vegetate, waking up in a spiral. Where do we find ourselves… (Emerson). Though now, there’s cicada-whir, budging me.


Waking up so cloudy I slap blood out of my mouth in the car, punch my jaw so hard I let go of the steering wheel. Yelling into the dash. This is the danger I’m printed on. A trip to regulated life at a desk. A deck of emotion on which is laid the granular innate, innately intimate body. Throating the drunk liquid, shoveling shit into my gullet, finally sure of some breakdown of bodily softening that could be said to be mine. A few mornings of not being able to speak, of holding my ribs, N.’s had enough of it, and drives me to the ER in a hurry. I toke before getting into the car, the light at the end of the cartridge flashed, hatred of the image intensified, entwined in a chrysalis of fear that in stretching out my arms, the muscles will fall from the bone. We drive behind a truck with an advertisement: Ur | bane, N. pronounces it “ur-bane.” The master of bone. I have fishbowl vision, and this won’t end, even after the medication I’m prescribed kicks in, although already I’m remembering believing. Remembering believing in remembering-at-hand. A pin emerging, red hot, out of the birthday balloon.


Message body :

Hi Cary,

How are you doing ? How medication works for you ?

Please let me know,

xxxxx


A wing engulfed in a freefall of the lips.





~


8.28.21


I follow her lead. Wore Haiwaiian shirts all summer because I followed her lead. After complaining about making coffee, N. reminds me: “You can be a real pussy sometimes.” That’s undeniable. I can be a real pussy.


I'm going to start practicing kegels to improve my pelvic control, ball motion. I want to be able to make my testicles dance.





~





Where do we find ourselves


with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down (Fitzgerald)


the game already played, moves already huddled in the shell of decision


this hell of decision, implodes in the Barrel


a voice in the word





~





Like a press.


Like the old fashioned


Only man in town who knows a little bit about everything in knowing a little bit about anything.


These models of non-oscillation.


Act of mirroring fudged.


Straight shots of the common.


The supplement resides, homely, at the beginning. A plane of consistency.


“You might as well say the Grand Canyon cracked with you. Why not? …No, listen to me.”


Left nut of the crowd.


“Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden.”


Right nut of solipsism.


“I am the color of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.”


Prick of the multiple.





9.2.21





Becoming-one with this person, that is, becoming familiar, which sometimes has the opposite effect, as it does now. Malfunction, or the overworn repetitive groove.


N. and I take a trip to the Wenham Museum of Child Artifacts. Though when we arrive, a sign informs us that it’s closed for repair, for cleaning. Presumably of the toy trains. We look in the windows and see nothing other than the specters of what is desired. My mask around my chin in the reflection like a blue helmet strap.


This part of New England is beginning to feel most authentic. Unlike the big port simulacra of the city. A building built in 1668 stands (still stands!) mere feet from the space I am said to inhabit, aged 29 years.


We drive to Manchester-By-The-Sea in the spirit of the same spontaneous urging that led us this far north today. I’m hopeful a full somatic return to a place of memory-comfort will revive my body into its rhythm, but at one I take 10 mg of buspirone and take each step off a cliff onto the sidewalk. Side effects: dizziness, fatigue. Barely different from the effects of anxiety, though “safer,” unable to climb.


I’m drinking an Arnold Palmer in such a quaint little place, I feel the movement of the infinitely small particle itching for a mirror. Through shaky hands I peer through the book to the wisdom of lines such as “Everything happens for a reason” (Leibniz), that nearly carries me over the edge, head into the glass. And if I were to act on such a motive, would I be more in pain or relieved to be breathing fresh air again. I don’t have an answer for it. I feel like I’m inhabiting the life of a different human copy, even my shits appear “off.” Come out at a non-Euclidean angle.


“[A] feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set—simply silence with only the sound of my own breathing” (Fitzgerald).


How fast would I have to run and how low would I have to lunge to escape through the opening to the other side of the tracks.





~


“Well said...”


I should try yoga.





9.4.21





The moment of dream reflection, of reflecting upon what is thought to be recognized as images incorporated into the dream, is really dream-dreaming. It’s the inward folding of the force of the dream back into form, which it, in fact, didn’t have prior to this formation. Form is supplementary to the dream, the dangerous supplement, although it can be said that in the virtual form exists, as links between coils of RNA. The cult is a formal dream of community that only “works” under conditions of great secrecy and grace. Such that one can only enter into prayer fully with eyes closed, the moment contemplation reaches the status of representation, it suffers a pre-slotted caval of judgment that (typically) leads to its dissolution. Or at least its dissolution into the everything else.


Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, a plot of land. Bought and sold by individuals in honor of individual-less honor.


I dreamed a Tik Tok of an anime woman getting eaten out in POV. I kept flicking the video into recession, viewing it as one views the footage of some once in a lifetime feat.





~





9.8.21





Indefatigable human presence, I am thankful for mercy, thankful for existing for others, thankful for pain. However difficult it is to sustain, this thankfulness, or how cheap of an utterance, I am thankful for pain, for the evidence of forgiveness, brotherly love. I am thankful for paintings and presence. Indefatigable human presence.


Turkey Hill Lane, or Turkey Hill Place. I sift through the remains of a weekend's Maps queries for the actual name. Technological curtain of territorialization. Turkey Hill Lane in Hingham, near the Weir River Farm where a woman, commemorated there by an art studio, painted a regionally famous landscape, red barn included. In her quotation, she mentions the tree covering, as well as the faint scab of the city visible behind (now much more visible, no less a scab). N. and I walk awhile through mud to what we thought was more trail, but was only the head we'd misinterpreted, having to backtrack. To trek back. Chiggers or something loving me alive. Trying hard to wake myself up to this light. Photo-receptors lagging behind the faciality burnish, calibration taking on more than it can to chew daytime.


I'm scolded whenever I let my head fall, wishing I had no head to let fall, or arms to let hang, or legs to be eaten alive. We eat sandwiches in the now unseasonable, though expected, dry heat. I am thankful for mercy, I am...


However much of a hill it is, or ridge, Turkey Hill Trail gives one the impression, by its proximity to the air, that they’re mountainous. Perhaps any closer to the Sun, I’m not even a feeling-being, just floes.





~





Polly Thayer Starr, the painter’s name. One farm, presumed, for one family. Hers. Weir River Farm, just down the hill from Turkey Hill. The artist’s father, lawyer and at least intellectual acquaintance of the Transcendentalists, committed himself to the swift Charles—as many had done and would do—just after she’d turned 11, a death which would mark the family with that familiar stain of Why. Digressively, the discourse surrounding what would now be termed ‘acute depression’ had not burgeoned, as it later would, in this very region of America, and so blame had to be left to personal spirit. And as societal-academic perspective would come around to rid depression of its teleology (theology), the river dried, sank, overran, and eventually collapsed in its modern state to the level of picturesque event, rather than callously insatiable serpent.


“There are suicides and suicides,” the elder James brother would write, one who was not a stranger to melancholy of his own, and who dedicated even his philosophical career to the scientificity of studying the humors. “We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must ‘ponder these things,’ also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share.” Is life, as it is lived by some, lived? To be lived? Where is the will.


In James, as with Emerson, we’re always “finding ourselves” someplace. Where do we find ourselves? // We find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. As if life exceeds our apprehension of it, or rather, as if Life shapes this apprehension as the angle of touch affects both the leg and the lathe.





9.16.21





I disclosed my predicament in the form of an admission of guilt in the audience of two men I love: M. and B. Two men I love dearly, friends who—up to that point—I’d considered adjacent to the type of bond of friendship that says anything anytime, though that correction had been misplaced. I misapprehended, on the ride down, how uncallously loving their reactions would be, swift and declarative, tumbling in my chest as they spoke. I needed time away, they advised, I needed to see myself as I appeared to myself fully naked for a time. Sinking into the couch.


B.’s apartment overlooks downtown New Bedford, a city of streets leading to water, sluices down which terribly loud flocks of seagulls come squawking. His windows, large and imposing from the inside, eternally covered in unwashed fog, are as big as backyard movie screens. Upon one visit, I even suggested he begin screening his crowd-favorites for the weekend drunkards below: Brother from Another Planet, Walkabout, Days of Heaven. Imagine a red biplane banking left from Shore St. onto Broadway, film reflection patterning distortedly its frame as it passes. His guitar and television feature prominently in the “space,” as if of a gallery exhibition of a turn of the century (this century) apartment. To be among the people I’ve gathered here feels to be among something so undeniably Massachusetts, whether we’re driving down the South Shore or fishing along a river in North Hampton. There thrives a familiarity with every part of the state and its history within each bred individual. Today we’re headed toward water, a beach on the other side of Dartmouth. Discussions range from when will the one of us who is single feel comfortable dating again to Ivy League ratings.





~





Outside my window at work they’ve replaced the rotted Yellowwood with a sapling Yellowwood.


I learned diaphragmatic breathing. Which makes me feel pregnant more than it eases me.





~





Control is the center’s supposed background. I had come to realize realizing, feeling as if I could no longer disengage. What a duddy comportment! So rarely do my nerves rest, rather attached to reaching and kept doing. Last Tuesday, I zoomed in with M., a therapist, to unearth—not the poison—but its pathological track. Family. Not family, but the words with which I ascribe to it a substantive barrier. Unacceptable deaths, I jot down. These unacceptable deaths.


Papa (pronounced paw, paw), April, my cousin, dead in April. It’s only the deads’ names I authorize, write-out. Cancer-line. Granny’s soon to be authorized, my mother even. All of these whom I’ve killed by my neglecting them a moment of peace, captured-in-presence up in my cranium. Their cancer full of heart, my own laying waiting.


“You weren’t treated right,” N. said to me early on, confirming something I resisted.


Coming on in the middle. Not static, but blue-screened.


In dying, they retreated. I became treated to it. My own laid waiting. Sex with the sentence.





~





When the three Roche sisters sing in unison “If you go down to Hammond, forget about us,” Hammond refers to Hammond, Florida, and us refers to the music industry, or the managers and producers as the intimidatory arms of that institution. Instead of leaving for Florida, the sisters, it’s written, stuck around and finished the album, although its best song—Hammond Song—with its ahead-of-its-time untimeliness (the way the King Crimson guitar line floods and recedes, presaging Nigel Godrich), wasn’t written until the end. In a time of reflection. (To reflect upon a period in which one couldn't hold the line, is there any other rationale for literature?) One wonders (me) whether or not they should have scrapped all before it. Instead, the sisters tacked the song onto the beginning of the record, as if it had been there all along. Dangerous, beloved supplement. Creation’s children always end up shadowy in the mirror.


I will continue writing this and that, which I wield like ceremonial blades, until I’m directly told that it’s within my best interest to cease and regather. That the tip of my nose bleeds, or my eye drips, plucked at the sharpest point, its non-conscious light on the All.


Does your heart have an answer for this heart of mine, I always misremember. Do your eyes have an answer / to this song of mine. The song is a query. In the land of State power, combination of song and deliverance.


I'm waking waking. I wake to sleep. I go by learning. I’m already awake.