More Kate Zambreno

 Wish I could write like Kate Zambreno. Who adores Rilke, Wittgenstein, and the artist Durer. She lives through them, it seems. Scatters bits of ruminations on their lives and their artwork throughout. She just wanders carefully collecting wisps of observations, connections that barely connect, perhaps only through the air, because she hardly seems to have a body. Her body seems to be this arcane world both distant and trashy, incomprehensible, without theory or classic beauty, or classic meaning. And also beyond this world. She mentions her teacher and writing frustrations as if they are happening to someone else. Is all this a heroin flashback, existential pain as bliss, the most meaningless is inside out. Her dog is more reportable then her husband, but in a good way. 

Because if I'm addicted to writing like I am, then I know that I don't really have an identity 'per se'. But then something must be happening. What is it, to just want to kiss everything with my mind, no matter what it is? What journey is this? I certainly would not want to say too much about anyone I actually do kiss, or hug or talk to all day. I'd only want to do that if I could say everything about them. Or just turn the camera on my life like in Sherman's March and then narrate my side of the story. A real show and tell. 

Because the one who really lives in words, like a religious person or a philosopher - but not a lawyer or a politician or goddess knows - and I'm going out on a limb here - goddess knows not a social worker or an educator of social change, OMGoddess that would be the worst: the educator of progressive social change. I'd rather do anarchist self-help than parent all of society all at once. So many people with the maturity of 5 year olds... Probably myself as well. No, what I want is how to use ideas of non-hierarchy to assist in one's own well being. As well as others, but me first. Because if I experience myself as no one, at least I can take care of myself and try not to judge others. Just be in the world. Just talk to people, and listen.

 

Too sensitive as a youth probably. That might be the category. Too sensitive and lost in books. My best reading experiences were in 3rd grade when I found a series of books on the Greek, Roman and Norse myths. I ate them up. Perhaps I haven't advanced past the complexity of elementary school level English, which would explain why I also can soak right through Bukowski and Hemingway. Short stubby sentences. Kind of phallic sort of writing if I were to sexualize it. In the Lacanian sense. Show offy, slightly funny, the heat radiating right off the end of each short sentence, bouncing out of the period into the eyes, over and over and over again. Until at last the ending just appears and the reader is dropped off like a tagline, or a...

or a ...

I don't know what.

 

Yes, I don't know what. I get to the sexualizing within the writing and then I start the numerous asides and that's the end of it for me. I can't do Hemingway or Bukowski (or Zambreno for that matter), I'm too nervous, too hyped up. "Hypernormalization" is a terrific documentary I watched recently. I read that the director, Adam Curtis, considers his work "emotional documentary". I feel like I write until the heat is just too much for me to handle, I can't quite stretch it out like Zambreno does to a trascendant, tolerable level. Not yet. 

 

But maybe my personal style will fit more with movie making. Music videos perhaps, those are enormously ethereal. Who needs to actually be someone when playing music? And painting the moving images over the music? The lyrics are as close to reality as it gets. Or if I could just be like Godard and the french new wave, become like Belmondo and Karina at the stony beach in Peirrot fou something something, espousing arcane lines while looking gorgeous in the sun on a beat up old dock. Then they go skipping back to the stone fisherman's cottage with a tiny floppy eared fox hovering around. And there's a parrot, for god's sake. Then Belmondo skips up over the roof of the cottage and down the other side, always jumping down to earth like only a youth can do, from too high, so that my poor back hurts watching him. I'm getting old, goddamit. But then she says lets go back to the gangster life, which they do, as if its some kind of rite of passage.

 

Did someone say that it

might be ok, for the first time?

Divorced almost in secret, the weeping

rained through the rock n roll,

the warm cave of people was

always further away, a hut,

a homeless shelter, some branches.

American tin foil everywhere but

digging around, past the hero's

and heroine's bones, deeper, higher,

more color, more layers and

then simplify: you. Amazing!

A holding again.

Holding, gentle propulsion,

swimming, detritus - well, a leaving.

A leaning, the shore, a force,

I realize I was almost swept away,

out to sea and no one could say

much. But no matter, yet the chorus

sings there must be

a reason.

Does light move or is it

merely here? By evening we'll

know more. Did you say you'll

hold my hand? We don't care

about cars or politics or simple

pleasures like onions, but rather

the drips and drabs that

find verbal swing

or wings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

People who come and go are like a haunting. That's all we know of all those strangers. Why make it so of family and friends? Crazy, is the only answer. The only connective tissue, because we all know by now what smiles are made of.

But frowns, is that always new? To hear the weeping over the wall and then shut it out with the large ear flaps until we're in a singular echo chamber. Somebody must have tried yelling at you at a young age or bombing you with silence, either one. If we only knew which one. The things not said, is my guess. Endless things not said, until the words themselves form like bulldozers in the sky, 3D and trenchant.

Crazy, this psychic connection to the cosmic subconscious. The Ancestors, the myths, the hauntings of jigs and reels. Could we find categories, is that worth while? Archetypes Jung said, I beleive. In moving away from the dreaded Oedipal moment.

But back to the haunting and the strangers. All it takes is words, the right words. And then the opening can open. Out of the echo chamber, into the world of people. Just people and friends and family. Who talks to whom? and how?

Eric Rohmer, Je ne sais quoi Amerku?

    Ah, to make a movie just like Rohmer except about the Philly shit. Except I see that he's not making the movies about love, like it appears, but so much more. Just to be there now, talking, breathing, beeing in a Rohmer movie seeming to be about love... Or the Agnes Vardes one about the 3 love children in Cali. Same thing. The becoming, the beeing, the singing. Movies as singing of the eyes.Within that space - and time. Time X space. Or perhaps its Space X emiT and somehow emiT seems endlessly endless. Sendless. On the edge of boring, mundane. The knife's edge. The cliff's edge. I mean, you just don't even know what is going to happen next. I mean, love is claustophobic and liberating at the same time. Bursting forth into small miniturizing differences moment by momento.

    A singing machine, movie making as. Of a particular reality, dense as love. Multifarious as the socio-political itself. As above so below. Slowly but surely unraveling the socio-politico (SP), the special, one knotty naughty word at a time, these words are meant for thine ears only, all secrets are true, a philosophical quest if there ever was one. The drama is a springboard, wound up.

    

    But Amerka, the SP w/o the cosmic consciousness at all, is seemingly a harder nut to crack. At least for me, having not tried yet. Should not all art be a cheerleading section for any and every creature to bee? And if not, is not that the definition of 'dead art'? The singing machine (SM) attacks Amerka, sinks within, is submerged there in, was actually previously captured and held therein against SM's will. And yet will vibrate still -if not vote! A tell tale heart, put on your dancing shoes. Please don't leave me...

Amerko,

the giganto question

mark!

Is

the radical gentleness

possible?

 

A walking talking advertisement for the French New Wave to return again.   A way to get into the psycho-socio-politico.

Personal is Political means Childhood's End

 

When there is no sci-fi:

  But once the personal is political is it too late to go back to the Garden of Eden? Ask Jean Luc Godard or Agnes Vardas. Once no one cares it might be ok. The revolution will not be televised? The 70's on time loop. From 1959 to the 70's, WOW! So much change, how could that not be a revolution, an evolution, future shock in real time. Like being in a boxing ring with the Kabalah and Madonna, both, teamed up. Lao Tzu and the Devil are referees. Who would disagree?

  And so, we're waiting for a normalcy that will never return. Un-freneticize is not a word in auto-correct. Best I can hope for is a room with a view down by the river under the rainbow. Nuggets of meaning are muppets in stereo. We never made it to quad. I'd like to become a 'marrying judge' though like my great-great grandfather who survived the civil war (North) and went to North Dakota. Or was it South Dakota. Red Cloud stayed on his land often enough and had a dance with his wife.

  And thus we see the rhythms of friendship re-established, from out of this mess. Anarchism (or the politics of non-hierarchy) once again has continual reference. The only answer someday. I'm just channeling everything my mother was thinking but she couldn't find the words. My father is dumbfounded but still alive. Watching tv alot in his new recliner.

 

When the personal is political ALL of the time:

you'll always get lost.

the kids will cry.

tomorrow never comes.

dryness is fun.

the sun, the sun.

the sky the sky the sky.

the oil is pumping.

and burning.

the fire next time.