EDIT: Since apparently some have misinterpreted this as some kind of depressive para-suicidal cry for help (I still don't see it), I just wanted to reassure my readers that this is purely an abstract and mostly fictionalized letter.

Dear Friend,

            Straightaway you should notice that there is no date on this letter—I don’t want to think of the day, the hour, the month of the year. I wish I could be subsumed—transubstantiated—into pure timeless Mind, slip into a knife-thin, universe-deep dimension between molecules, shift slightly into an alternate space from which I may survey, and think. Of course this is nothing more than a sick Cartesian fantasy—where I dream of escaping there is room for infinite worlds to converge, eternal contingencies splitting forever in all directions, but none for me. There all the ties that bind me are revealed to be who I am—elsewhere there would be no me—it is context which forges identity from nothingness. There is no absolute point in curved space, and the Self is not an immovable place from which the world may be moved. Inside-outside, outside-inside: there is no difference. I am deceived by “appearance” into thinking there is something beyond the phenomenon. It is a lie; I may lift the mask, but I will find nothing underneath.

            Perhaps this makes no sense to you. Especially if I told you this, all this, is the reason making a choice is excruciating. In searching for something, the only thing I find is the fact of my own searching. There is nothing behind the veil. All I have to guide me is the tangled jungle of thoughts and sentiment which has sprung up around this seminal choice.

            Friends don’t let friends think too much. It’s too late for me, but others may be spared. Although my corrupting influence may be seen in you already: side affects may include ennui, paranoia, existential paralysis, angst, anxiety, fear and trembling, sickness unto death, dread, Sartrean nausea or drowsiness. Not recommended if you are nursing, pregnant, or about to embark upon a major life decision.

            But enough of this. By the time this letter reaches you I will have already made my choice and all this anxiety will be a phantom twinge from an injury already forgotten.—Hem, that’s the odd thing about letters. I am addressing these words to a you-of-the-future. Future You: Me-of-the-past wants you to know, whatever she has decided, the thought of you tortured her every moment, and never doubt the weight of her love for you or how keenly she felt it as she eyed the scales moving up and down like the last movements of a pendulum before the clock stops. God, how she loves you, and (Universe forbid) should she ever be so remiss as to need reminding, give her these words from me and she will remember, she will remember.

             It is so fragile, or seems so, the strand that ties the past self to the future. Of course if the past and future are illusions bred by a constant present (in what sense may the past be said to exist? It is a causal mirage since the mind insists upon perceiving everything in a sequence…) perhaps every moment is a misperceived transformation immediately bound and disguised out of fear. Fear—is there anything stronger than that? And how, in this vision of temporality which collapses past and future into the darkness of fictions, is authenticity to be understood? True to myself? Myself now? What I imagine as myself earlier in the casual chain? Who I am imagining I will become? Luckily I (whoever or whatever that may be) don’t believe a word I just wrote. And if I did, there are fictions which are a matter of life or death. “Merely constructed”—a bridge is “merely constructed” but we use it to cross a river nevertheless. Does any of this make any sense? Perhaps not. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

            I have consulted the cards, and they have done nothing but show me my own face (the oldest trick, as if I wouldn’t recognize it…?). Friends, councilors, tell me, “Look inside” (as if I could do anything but that…). The fortune cookie I ate the other day told me I should look to the logical solution and I will find happiness. The teabag rotting in the mug on my desk tells me, “Don’t live at each other/Don’t live with each other/But live for each other.” Sounds good, though I don’t see how that helps me or what “living at each other” means. The cap off one of the six-packs I bought last Friday says “Don’t Fear, Great Beer, is Quite Near.” Not really quite true anymore. So much for oracles.

            Ironic, since I am writing to someone who knows the future.

                        I remain,

                                    Ever Yours.

Two Fragments While Waiting for the Night Train

I.

            It is where I find myself wondering about my place in the world most. Waiting in some god-forsaken suburb, listening to the distant wail of perpetual sirens, watching thick drips seep down the roof into gray banks of filthy snow, sitting alone on a dank, damp bench strewn with pigeon shit. Waiting for a train and wondering.

 

            I am not a drop of rain falling into a stream heading to a rolling river, finally to tumble into the infinite sea. I am not an atom of blood shooting through a winding capillary, bound for an artery, destined to be cycled through one of the four rushing chambers of a great pounding heart.

 

            I am a fleshly parasite if anything at all. I cling to a machine spread over miles of gears and iron, wire and steel, a huge un-living grid whose scope and electric vitality I cannot even guess. 

II.

            The sunlight disappears, leaving uncanny shadows in a ghostly pantomime of buildings and trees. It rises silently to grotesque heights on the gravelly earth. No vista from here, however I crane my neck to see, approaches the picturesque. Everything is scattered, out of joint. The only order to be had seethes in the edge of vision, in the ghastly facsimile of the beautiful. And what is that but the grotesque? I recognize the horror not by virtue of what is before me but what it fails to be.

 

            A wind, bitter and sere, whirls up the rusty tracks before the train, invisible forerunner to the dread machine. High in the twilight air, a train whistle or a crow’s cry rends the rigid sky. Words start out of the mouth and are arrested, dead in the air. Thoughts are leaden, and a yammering bubble of fear erupts in the gut—signifying nothing naturally—for what can be more frightful than that, a nattering, matterless terror.

Currently Listening Queen - Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 &2 By Queen I'm In Love with my Car see related

An Exhaustive Rambling

Psychosomatic is a peculiar word. If an illness is psychosomatic, it is not a real sickness, although the symptoms may be the same. This makes sense, I suppose. After all, non-material ailments cannot be treated with material cures. This is why the placebo was invented. Psyche rules soma, mind over matter (as if mind-body-spirit were a metaphysical game of rock-paper-scissors).

My car is my greatest placebo. It was love at first sight, the best 600 dollars I have ever spent. I christened it the Death Star because its interior was designed by an engineer who spent too much time at science fiction conventions. While it would be too much to say that I am in love with my car, I do like my car more than I should.

And without it, I am discovering how powerful psychosomatic distress can be.

I say my distress is psychosomatic because without the use of a car, I am still in roughly the same material position as before the Death Star began to surrender to rusty decay. I could not, given my financial, social and scholastic responsibilities, simply leave to start a life elsewhere. Nevertheless, now that the car is actually to all intents and purposes done for, I am irrationally panicked, oddly aimless and adrift.

I am not sure why I should feel this way. It was just a car, or, as others not blinded by pride and love have called it, a tuna fish can with an engine.  A rusty tuna fish can.

Oh, it still allows me to drive five minutes to work, but not without certain humiliations and dangers. My motor sounds like a passing F-16, so when I can’t coast past pedestrians in neutral, I find myself leaning out of my window shouting, “I’M TERRIBLY SORRY.” Of course, they can’t hear me over the predatory roar of the Death Star. My car looks like hell and sounds like Armageddon.

I have known the death of the Death Star has been immanent for some time now. Ever since I had my oil changed a few years ago and the mechanic took me aside to tell me that there was no scientifically sound reason my bumper should still be clinging to the rest of my car, I have known my days in the Death Star are numbered. I assured the mechanic that I drive by faith and not by sight, but I had a premonition that my love for my car would end tragically. I shrugged and ran my hand over its gritty hood and promised that when its time came, there was a good chance the two of us would go out together, gloriously. 

Of course, like most promises, mine was hollow and meaningless. I knew this a week and a half ago when my tailpipe, long suspended by a coat hanger and willpower alone, fell with a clang. I couldn’t stop and I wasn’t really sure what was dragging, so I doggedly finished the road trip feeling like a cat with a tin can tied to its tail. When I got home and slid underneath my car, grasping a coat hanger in one hand and a flashlight in my teeth, I realized another pipe had witnessed the fall of the tailpipe and decided to follow it into the land of the dead.

Determined that this was not the end, I murmured soft comforting nothings into the bowels of the Death Star as I carefully wired the pipes to the underside of the car. I had just paused to admire my handiwork when the whole thing fell again—the hooks and loopholes I had used to hang the exhaust pipes were themselves too rusty to support the pipes. Finally, looking at the gaping holes which riddled the pipes, I gave up all pretense and ripped out the offending three or four feet of pipe with my bare hands. This was worryingly easy, and afterwards, hands raw and covered with rusty flakes, I threw the pipe into the back seat of my car and went inside. I tried not to think of all the carbon monoxide which I have probably inhaled over the past weeks and months, and I tried not to foresee how bloody cold it will be driving to work at 4:30 AM with all the windows down to avoid permanent brain damage.

I realized I needed to avoid driving as much as possible. The Death Star is now loud enough to not only attract the attention of any bored police officer but also to merit a ticket for disturbance of the peace. If I were to be pulled over, though my tailpipe is to all appearances sound, the telltale length of rusty exhaust pipe in the back seat would be incriminating. I could imagine myself, stammering, “Oh that? Oh officer, that’s not mine. My friend and his brother were borrowing this car, and they must have left it there, heh heh, you know, those guys.”

Thus, I am effectively trapped at home until I resume my studies at college. This was true before the Death Star began the last stretch of its long meander towards automotive death, but now I am trapped without even the illusion of escape. This illusion of escape is essential, and I miss the tranquilizing placebo effect of imagined freedoms. This is a lesson I have been learning in various forms over and over again this summer. I enjoy solitude when I have an alternative; I don’t mind spending weeks at home when I could, in theory, go out and do something.

Instead, I find myself here, foiled worshipper of the false idol of my will, trying to understand exactly why I feel restive when I know that this is what I would be doing by choice—writing on a rainy day, reading and generally spending time in uninterrupted solitude. Of course, it is not really about the loss of a long-loved car or the unscripted summer hours, is it? One glance at the calendar tells me why this is crossing my mind, now of all times. After all, it is not about the car, it is about the memories made in it. Only thought of summers spent differently makes this one oppressive.

Or perhaps I am distressed because I don’t understand why something I have relegated to my long list of unfortunate experiences which I no longer consider consciously painful can still affect me, make me question my motivations and strength, make me dream the Death Star is anything other than a 600 dollar junk car without an exhaust system or passenger side rear view mirror.

Yours wistfully, with a head full of misplaced illusions and carbon monoxide,

Antigone

P.S. I have also posted a short piece which is a bit different from my ordinary Xanga fare. I have made it a protected post, but if you would like to read it and I forgot to include you, just let me know and I will

Currently Reading Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise By Paul Monette see related

Half a woven thought, half a life story . . .

“This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man from the beginning of time.”
–“The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Why do I read? Why do I write? 

This entry has been rewoven from other thoughts. I have taken little care in doing this; I choose only the brightest threads as they catch my eye. Gleaming, they unravel; glistening, they dart from side to side as entire cloths of dreams half spoken and half unremembered tumble about my feet, undone in the retelling.

I pull thread after thread and sit down at my loom to spin my web anew. 

Reading and writing, I am partly trying to disentangle me, a fleshly matrix of human need. If I cannot even understand my own comings and goings, my own longings and lusts, what can I know? One need has fascinated as much as it has bound and confounded me: the human desire for belonging. This desire is cumbersome, and as I finger the smooth edges of dice in my pocket I wonder if it can be ignored.

This urge to belong, I think, is why I read and write—why reading and writing happen in the first place, if I may saunter presumptuously into universals.

 This need insinuated itself into a conversation while I was attending a science fiction and fantasy convention last week, appropriately enough. As soon as I pulled into the parking lot of the hotel I could tell which of the hotel’s guests milling about outside of the lobby were the writers and readers, scholars and fans there for the convention. Perhaps I will try to do writerly justice to the menagerie of eccentric literati that milled about in excited gaggles and how I felt like a salmon returning to the place of its birth (only with far less copulation involved, I’m afraid) another time. For now, the thread which hangs suspended between my fumbling fingertips is a fragment of a conversation I had with the girl who brought me to the convention.

The conversation was of the kind had between one and three AM, the kind which is half muted in overstuffed pillows and interrupted by dozing and the babbling streams of consciousness. The conversation fell to reading. 

“Why do we read?” She or I mumbled into the coverlet.

“To escape,” answered she. “To connect,” said I. 

(Or something like it—but there are many threads and I can only grasp one, which may or may not be the truth. Whatever the truth may be and if it is worth anything in the end is yet to be seen, if I shall ever see it at all.)

I was an intellectual paraplegic after two hours of driving and ten hours of working and not as many hours of sleeping, and so I lost the argument. But I still maintain that I was right—we are not fleeing, we are searching when we read, when we write. Perhaps I will be lambasted for stereotyping fans of science fiction and fantasy (among whom I am the chiefest of sinners), but speaking in general terms, they tend to be people who had difficulty connecting to other human beings for some reason or another. So yes, strange as it may seem, I suspect that my interest in other worlds had to do with my the isolation my personality and homosexuality created in early childhood. Those who fit the places preassigned to them (or think they do) never realize they need to escape this world through imagination. They never think they need to read books that unbolt the horizon and reveal fissures in the sky. Contented with a nutshell, what need have they of infinite space?

But escape is only half of the story—these lonely freaks, queers, misfits, losers, weirdos, castoffs, stowaways from reality,  runaways from the tyranny of the ordinary (and some of the best human beings I have the fortune to know) hope not to escape but to go somewhere. This somewhere is not just anywhere but here; they seek others like themselves. In a sublimated way, the characters of these books which were my only companions were vestiges of my desire to share the mind of the author, the flesh and blood creator of these ideas. A point, had I but been able to make my sleep-scrambled mind think of it, proven perfectly by the convention itself, designed to bring readers and writers together.

And so, where does this all converge, my homosexuality and why I write and why I read? Does any of this count for anything? Of course, being a good little existentialist and gender constructivist, I think not. After all, if gender and sexuality are cultural constructs, what does it really matter? Some theorists cherish a fantasy that homosexuals are natural genetic variants beneficial to the human race, a secret superior society which has always existed, however invisibly. I happen to think this is fantastical nonsense. While there may be a genetic component to it, I believe sexuality and gender are largely social constructs. And so my sense of not being at home, like anything else, is a melancholy contrived from my own desire to look into someone else’s eyes and see a reflection of my own experience, to read a book and see that hand reaching from the pages to touch mine. 

A book added heat to my crucible. Becoming a Man: Half a Life by Paul Monette has left me shaken by the author’s power and passion—and his anger. He is a gay man who grew up in the McCarthy era, suffered through high school in the late 50s, attended ultra-conservative Yale in the 60s before finally coming out. His husband died of AIDS, and he became an activist and writer, publishing memoirs about his experience and struggle as a homosexual as well as several novels.

I mentioned this writer to a wiser and more jaded friend, and she laughed. “Oh, is it one of those coming-out stories where he struggles through a repressed childhood, comes out, finds the man of his dreams, settles down with a few cats and lives happily ever after until he dies of AIDS?” 

“Well, no. His husband died first and,” I searched my brain for something which would set Monette apart. “And he had dogs.”

I was flustered and felt vaguely insulted. Of course, she was absolutely right. It was that kind of old, predictable story. Why should I be so upset? Because I had identified with Monette. There was something in those pages which seemed to speak for a part of myself which had long remained silent, and somehow that book has become part of who I am. I felt that hand reaching out from the pages, and I flatter myself that Paul Monette would be pleased that he had reached me so profoundly. Writers long to touch, and readers long to be touched. 

The problem is language—language blurs the boundaries of our isolation, and it is sometimes unclear what falls in or out of its strange borders from what is conveyed in a mystic, space-and-mind-defying resonance. Even beyond the limitations of language itself, I wrangle with my limitations as a writer, and ideas which are difficult to communicate become infinitely more confusing when I am the interlocutor. Forgive my failures; they are failures in art rather than in feeling. I am trying to touch you in the only way I can.

At the end of the day, when I stand in front of my mirror in my closet, reeking of my workplace, dressed like a ten year old boy with oversized black t-shirt and shapeless jeans, evidence of my femininity hidden as carefully as possible, and look at the tired expression on my thinning features, I realize something. I do not read to escape, I read because I am searching. I have a tender sensuality and a quiet disposition which makes me better suited to the solitude and harrowing sublime of isolated living. Yet this singular urge to be a part of something, to belong to something or someone, to hold a human hand tells me that a city would bring me to others like myself. A strange paradox, to need to leave a part of myself behind to become more myself, in some way. 

In the mean time, I frantically tie my thoughts together to write so you might hear me, that I might somehow touch you.

I read every book with the uncanny whisper of the invisible man in my mind, as though each author were saying, “Who knows, but on some lower note, I speak for you?”

(These are the things that keep me staring through my skylight in the dark watching the spiraling stars until the last watch of the night.) 

Yours,

Antigone

*Dedicated to the memory of Paul Monette, whom I missed in space and time but not in spirit*.

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou Shalt Not writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black growns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

-William Blake, Songs of Experience