I learned that scar tissue is thrown together in a multitude of directions over the injured muscle. Up, down, right, left, diagonal at all degrees. Our muscles, in their original, immaculate form, stretch long in one direction as is needed by our body for motion. Our body rushes to action to fix us when we are hurt and haphazardly throws down scar tissue. Mobility is lessened.
I believe this must be the way with the heart, with love. Our body, our souls rush to fix us when we are heartbroken, and though the intention is great, and it perhaps leaves us in a functioning state, it is a mess. Motion is lost. It is hard to make right again.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Sand and Dust (or poems about being a mess, parts 1 & 2)
Part 1 (Sand)
And away that went, on a breeze it seems, as it came. And all the better it be gone, really... though it is hard to be easily dismissed and forgotten. And as time does with all things, this thing will become more like a dream, or nightmare, and my utter dismay at having been nothing there, at... at.. at being unnecessary and in the end just some... girl. Just a thing. A mistake. As it was. Well, it will bother me less. This is life, after all. What a beautiful, horrible, wonderfully fucked up messy ordeal.
Answers are like sand - you grab at them and for a moment you think you have them, but they slip through your fingers. They don't belong to you.
Part 2 (Dust)
And she blew away as dust on the wind, so alike they are. From something more whole, solid, but made up of small, tiny parts and so easy to crumble. So easily carried off. So pretty to watch fly away and so simply and utterly forgotten once gone.
The best she can hope to be now is an annoyance, as dust into someone's eye. Better than being forgot, isn't it?
And away that went, on a breeze it seems, as it came. And all the better it be gone, really... though it is hard to be easily dismissed and forgotten. And as time does with all things, this thing will become more like a dream, or nightmare, and my utter dismay at having been nothing there, at... at.. at being unnecessary and in the end just some... girl. Just a thing. A mistake. As it was. Well, it will bother me less. This is life, after all. What a beautiful, horrible, wonderfully fucked up messy ordeal.
Answers are like sand - you grab at them and for a moment you think you have them, but they slip through your fingers. They don't belong to you.
Part 2 (Dust)
And she blew away as dust on the wind, so alike they are. From something more whole, solid, but made up of small, tiny parts and so easy to crumble. So easily carried off. So pretty to watch fly away and so simply and utterly forgotten once gone.
The best she can hope to be now is an annoyance, as dust into someone's eye. Better than being forgot, isn't it?
2 for 1 poetry jam
These are 2 shorter poems I wrote... they seem good in a pair, so I have them sharing this space.
9/18/2012:
What untold small heartbreak, tiny personal tragedy, disappointment and duress await me tomorrow?
Such that barely a ripple will be seen by anyone while inside I drown...
Small hole:
There is a small hole, directly in the center of my chest, where all the cold wind blows. Where sadness and wretchedness and the unfixable torment of mistakes, indignities and dank-filthy-letdowns live and thrive. A place that takes up little space and is usually covered up and overcome by warmth, hope, love. Hope. Forgetfulness of failure, and hope. But every so often this small hole is opened up and into your bloodstream runs this horrible sadness, and into your throat grows a lump.
9/18/2012:
What untold small heartbreak, tiny personal tragedy, disappointment and duress await me tomorrow?
Such that barely a ripple will be seen by anyone while inside I drown...
Small hole:
There is a small hole, directly in the center of my chest, where all the cold wind blows. Where sadness and wretchedness and the unfixable torment of mistakes, indignities and dank-filthy-letdowns live and thrive. A place that takes up little space and is usually covered up and overcome by warmth, hope, love. Hope. Forgetfulness of failure, and hope. But every so often this small hole is opened up and into your bloodstream runs this horrible sadness, and into your throat grows a lump.
Disorientation
Life changing! You tell me like I don't know. As if I am NOT unable to recognize myself and my surroundings anymore. As though I were not desperately searching everyday for some conclusive answer one way or another to just put me back on the track of knowing which way is up.
So that I can see the sky... dark or light, to just be able to orient myself.
Being unable to choose a direction because you are so strange even to yourself is the most hopeless feeling there is.
So that I can see the sky... dark or light, to just be able to orient myself.
Being unable to choose a direction because you are so strange even to yourself is the most hopeless feeling there is.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Thoughts on Bill T. Jones and other random musings
So I recently read Bill T. Jones book, Last Night On Earth. Actually, full disclosure, I've almost read it - the end is proving really tedious for me. This happened to me one other time, when I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice - holy crap was the first 2/3s amazing... and then, it was like blah blah blah.... anyway. Neither here nor there.
A professor of mine, and someone I'd like to say I collaborated with (but maybe more accurately, was directed by... maybe) asked me to create a video that could be used to help guide your average person (aka not very liberal, open-minded, perhaps homophobic) through the book. Bill does speak with a great deal of candor about his sexuality, discovering it and living it, as well as other things. Before I go much further, let me just say, I am having some strange thoughts lately. Perhaps I'm in some kind of artistic adolescence, as I've just recently started to regard myself as one, and this could be a result. In any case, moving forward - after pondering how I would approach this task for quite some time, I felt I simply could not do it. First of all, if people weren't so concerned with lying to themselves about their own observations, thoughts, and feelings in order to fit societal expectations, very little explanation would be needed for dear Bill's writing!
But here's the other thing - I don't think it is possible to explain a person. I go through my thoughts and come across ideas and conclusions and musings and daydreams and think, brilliant! and No way is anyone else going to really grasp what that was about. So this is where art comes in, right? You get to take these wild thoughts that are so intangible and make something with them - probably still intangible on some level, but wholly and incredibly tangible as well, even just on a baseline sensory (sight, sound, touch, smell, etc...) level. And send people off into the night creating their own magic, weird, indescribable ideas.
In any case, I didn't at all know how to go about explaining Bill T. and his book. I found it pretty simple, extremely candid. There is no way to help people through the fact that one of the first times he realized he was gay was when he saw his own brother's hard penis when he was sleeping. Oopsies! But such is life, right? And it just sounds so dirty, so outside what is okay socially - but I'm thinking, he didn't say he wanted to fuck his brother, just that the sight of a penis made him aroused and that caused him to realize something. That sounds like puberty to me! Meh. People don't like to be honest about how they function, where things are discovered and all the strange curiosities there are out there. It's not easy, not the way we're all conditioned, but still. I don't think I need to break this down for anyone.
Now here's my problem currently with Bill T. Jones. I read his book (mostly), as I said, and I loved it in the beginning. The storytelling, the subtle way he describes moving/learning through life, his love with/for Arnie... and then all of a sudden it becomes a book which is all about describing, in great detail, the pieces he's created. It went from being about who he was, where he came from, to what he's done or is doing. Now, his work seems amazing, and he's certainly created really cool, deep, politically and socially relevant pieces, but I do not need a Laban notation of each one (exaggerating). It's like Arnie died and all he had left to talk about was the work, there was no more person/life/soul to share. I found it extremely boring and extremely depressing. I read quite a bit of this too, and it did make me want to see the pieces, but it did not make me want to keep reading about them.
Further, I went to check out his company's website, which is actually new york live arts, as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company has merged somehow with Dance Theater Workshop - in any case, I checked out the dancers in his company. Wow. I mean these are some impressive backgrounds... serious pedigrees. We're talking BFA's from Julliard, danced with Martha Graham's company, featured in Dance Magazine, on and on. I found this so disappointing! Here is this man, who didn't really even start technical dance training until he got to college, was in many ways self-taught, who's boyfriend/love/partner in art and dance really never trained as a dancer, who went on many wild hippy journeys through space and time and contact improvisation, and made amazing art. Just did it out of passion and with like-minded, experimental people. And here he is perpetuating the same old dance status quo. It's depressing! Is that what happens? You gain success, get old, and hire dancers who have crazy technical/classical training to dance your art? Stop collaborating? Stop the journey? I feel like I want to meet him and say, Bill, what in the hell is going on here? Talk to me buddy. When did you get so hoighty-toighty?
Maybe I don't have the full picture - I'm certain I don't. But I feel pretty sure that something changed there, just as the course of the book changed. Maybe it happened when Arnie died. Maybe it did. I don't know. But I think I always rather focus on who I am rather than what I'm doing. The who creates the what, you know? And there's so much more there to hold on to, to care about. I hope I can always make it about my who, not my what.
A professor of mine, and someone I'd like to say I collaborated with (but maybe more accurately, was directed by... maybe) asked me to create a video that could be used to help guide your average person (aka not very liberal, open-minded, perhaps homophobic) through the book. Bill does speak with a great deal of candor about his sexuality, discovering it and living it, as well as other things. Before I go much further, let me just say, I am having some strange thoughts lately. Perhaps I'm in some kind of artistic adolescence, as I've just recently started to regard myself as one, and this could be a result. In any case, moving forward - after pondering how I would approach this task for quite some time, I felt I simply could not do it. First of all, if people weren't so concerned with lying to themselves about their own observations, thoughts, and feelings in order to fit societal expectations, very little explanation would be needed for dear Bill's writing!
But here's the other thing - I don't think it is possible to explain a person. I go through my thoughts and come across ideas and conclusions and musings and daydreams and think, brilliant! and No way is anyone else going to really grasp what that was about. So this is where art comes in, right? You get to take these wild thoughts that are so intangible and make something with them - probably still intangible on some level, but wholly and incredibly tangible as well, even just on a baseline sensory (sight, sound, touch, smell, etc...) level. And send people off into the night creating their own magic, weird, indescribable ideas.
In any case, I didn't at all know how to go about explaining Bill T. and his book. I found it pretty simple, extremely candid. There is no way to help people through the fact that one of the first times he realized he was gay was when he saw his own brother's hard penis when he was sleeping. Oopsies! But such is life, right? And it just sounds so dirty, so outside what is okay socially - but I'm thinking, he didn't say he wanted to fuck his brother, just that the sight of a penis made him aroused and that caused him to realize something. That sounds like puberty to me! Meh. People don't like to be honest about how they function, where things are discovered and all the strange curiosities there are out there. It's not easy, not the way we're all conditioned, but still. I don't think I need to break this down for anyone.
Now here's my problem currently with Bill T. Jones. I read his book (mostly), as I said, and I loved it in the beginning. The storytelling, the subtle way he describes moving/learning through life, his love with/for Arnie... and then all of a sudden it becomes a book which is all about describing, in great detail, the pieces he's created. It went from being about who he was, where he came from, to what he's done or is doing. Now, his work seems amazing, and he's certainly created really cool, deep, politically and socially relevant pieces, but I do not need a Laban notation of each one (exaggerating). It's like Arnie died and all he had left to talk about was the work, there was no more person/life/soul to share. I found it extremely boring and extremely depressing. I read quite a bit of this too, and it did make me want to see the pieces, but it did not make me want to keep reading about them.
Further, I went to check out his company's website, which is actually new york live arts, as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company has merged somehow with Dance Theater Workshop - in any case, I checked out the dancers in his company. Wow. I mean these are some impressive backgrounds... serious pedigrees. We're talking BFA's from Julliard, danced with Martha Graham's company, featured in Dance Magazine, on and on. I found this so disappointing! Here is this man, who didn't really even start technical dance training until he got to college, was in many ways self-taught, who's boyfriend/love/partner in art and dance really never trained as a dancer, who went on many wild hippy journeys through space and time and contact improvisation, and made amazing art. Just did it out of passion and with like-minded, experimental people. And here he is perpetuating the same old dance status quo. It's depressing! Is that what happens? You gain success, get old, and hire dancers who have crazy technical/classical training to dance your art? Stop collaborating? Stop the journey? I feel like I want to meet him and say, Bill, what in the hell is going on here? Talk to me buddy. When did you get so hoighty-toighty?
Maybe I don't have the full picture - I'm certain I don't. But I feel pretty sure that something changed there, just as the course of the book changed. Maybe it happened when Arnie died. Maybe it did. I don't know. But I think I always rather focus on who I am rather than what I'm doing. The who creates the what, you know? And there's so much more there to hold on to, to care about. I hope I can always make it about my who, not my what.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Loss and Losing - the difference
I had a friend I lost, his name was Eriq. Eriqua. Qua. He was murdered. Actually he was murdered on this very day, one year ago. I had just seen him a couple of weeks prior, and a couple of weeks prior to that, both for friends birthday celebrations. And then he was gone. One moment here, one moment gone.
This is so incredibly difficult to process, obviously on an emotional level, but for a person's brain as well. It can't keep up. It keeps making you think your friend is still out there, but you're just not seeing them right now. And then you remind yourself, or it strikes you out of the blue - NO FOOL, this person, this tangible, living, breathing, loving, nellying (in Eriq's case) hilarious being is no longer here. It takes the wind right out of you.
We had gotten some details surrounding Eriq's death, nothing I'll share here, but for me, I couldn't stop thinking about that. Creating a vague scene in my mind. I felt he must have been scared, and picturing that, my sweet friend scared thinking, this is it? this is the end? what? why? ...broke my heart more than anything. It made me angry. It MAKES me angry. He went out to have a fun night, maybe meet a guy... and just met a really bad one. So many of us have made similar choices and not ended up dead. Of all the people, of all the ways to go... so again, processing this information. Questions. Disbelief. Even all this time later, I don't think my brain has caught up, I still have to remind myself that it's real, really think about it. It usually makes me cry. That is loss. It is permanent, and it is irreversible.
Losing is different. You live with losing for awhile. You may not see it coming initially, but once you realize it's there, you fully grasp it. You think about what to do about it - often referred to as "this situation" - you discuss it with your friends, if you can.
I have another friend, and I am losing her. Losing her to bad choices, a bad guy, to romanticizing a seriously fucked up, unhealthy, co-dependent situation. And I am pissed about it.
It's an interesting thing, losing. Like loss, often there is really nothing you can do about it, however, unlike loss, losing is in motion, still happening. You are watching future loss as it's being created, and you are totally helpless to stop it.
My friend, I am sure, is pissed at me. She and I may never really have a friendship again - this is yet to be seen - because of my strong reaction to realizing I'm losing her. I've had experience with this type of "situation" and I know how it pans out 90% of the time. I know she's fooling herself and everyone else by thinking and acting like it's going to work out. I am angry at her for being disloyal. I am angry at her for fucking up and feeling entitled. I am angry at her for taking my friend away from me.
I AM ANGRY AT HER FOR TAKING MY FRIEND AWAY FROM ME. and making me watch. It's the kind of shit that makes you wish you never met someone, because living through losing them hurts so much.
Loss and Losing folks. Different things, though related. Both can kiss my ass.
This is so incredibly difficult to process, obviously on an emotional level, but for a person's brain as well. It can't keep up. It keeps making you think your friend is still out there, but you're just not seeing them right now. And then you remind yourself, or it strikes you out of the blue - NO FOOL, this person, this tangible, living, breathing, loving, nellying (in Eriq's case) hilarious being is no longer here. It takes the wind right out of you.
We had gotten some details surrounding Eriq's death, nothing I'll share here, but for me, I couldn't stop thinking about that. Creating a vague scene in my mind. I felt he must have been scared, and picturing that, my sweet friend scared thinking, this is it? this is the end? what? why? ...broke my heart more than anything. It made me angry. It MAKES me angry. He went out to have a fun night, maybe meet a guy... and just met a really bad one. So many of us have made similar choices and not ended up dead. Of all the people, of all the ways to go... so again, processing this information. Questions. Disbelief. Even all this time later, I don't think my brain has caught up, I still have to remind myself that it's real, really think about it. It usually makes me cry. That is loss. It is permanent, and it is irreversible.
Losing is different. You live with losing for awhile. You may not see it coming initially, but once you realize it's there, you fully grasp it. You think about what to do about it - often referred to as "this situation" - you discuss it with your friends, if you can.
I have another friend, and I am losing her. Losing her to bad choices, a bad guy, to romanticizing a seriously fucked up, unhealthy, co-dependent situation. And I am pissed about it.
It's an interesting thing, losing. Like loss, often there is really nothing you can do about it, however, unlike loss, losing is in motion, still happening. You are watching future loss as it's being created, and you are totally helpless to stop it.
My friend, I am sure, is pissed at me. She and I may never really have a friendship again - this is yet to be seen - because of my strong reaction to realizing I'm losing her. I've had experience with this type of "situation" and I know how it pans out 90% of the time. I know she's fooling herself and everyone else by thinking and acting like it's going to work out. I am angry at her for being disloyal. I am angry at her for fucking up and feeling entitled. I am angry at her for taking my friend away from me.
I AM ANGRY AT HER FOR TAKING MY FRIEND AWAY FROM ME. and making me watch. It's the kind of shit that makes you wish you never met someone, because living through losing them hurts so much.
Loss and Losing folks. Different things, though related. Both can kiss my ass.
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