flexions

“Tecum habita et noris, quam sit tibi curta supellex”

Dwell in your own home, and you will see how simply it is furnished.

- Persius, Satires

At first the blood curdles at the thought: another night spent in its own company, listening to its own despised rhythms, its ordered cacophony of branches twining about the vessel, the fistclench at its center throbbing throbbing throbbing towards its own music. But here the vaults are empty, immediate, a few wooden pews brushed into clean corners, cut stone staring with the intensity of slit stems, Lilly or Carnation or Anthurium. There is only the smell of bone, the dust inside a heavy skull or an arched rib. No stained glass. Echoes. A dwelling. For you and not for you, but you are nevertheless here, and you must make the best of it. You don’t know who said that. I am here.

Strip strip strip. Do away with lace and window blinds and blind cockroaches – no extraneous material here, no hunched forms and quiet needlework, no invisible brush strokes and meticulous Thursday afternoons. We will roll these things into a ball, lint-ball huddled in the eye of a belly-button, scooped out with unwashed nails, ingested outside, amongst all the things that are weaker than you. Inside. Out. Pick up the draw-strings, they are being pulled as you speak, five-hundred bald stenographers palpitating and sweating, pushing out excremental passions as you speak the last things that are holy for you. Give this up also. Cut and scoop. Roll. Inside.

The last room. The last last room. I am here. There is nothing here. Cut. Do not paste.

neruda spoke to me when i was feeling down

Repertoire

I will find someone for you to love
before you stop being a child -
then it will be your turn to open the box
and swallow your own sufferings.

I have at my command
queen bees in boxes
and you’ll see how, one by one,
they smooth out the honey,
dressing up as apples,
climbing the cherry trees,
quivering in the smoke.

For you I’m keeping these wild loves
who will weave the spring,
who are strangers to weeping.

Hide yourself in the clock
in the belfry while the pass,
girls as bright as amaranth,
the last girls of the snow,
the lost ones, the lucky ones,
the ones crowned in yellow,
the infinitely mysterious;
and some, gentle and loving,
will perform their limpid dance,
while others pass on fire,
swift as meteors.

Tell me which ones you want for now;
later is too late.

Today you believe what I’m telling you.

Tomorrow you’ll be contradicting the light.

I am one who keeps turning out dreams,
and in my house of feather and stone,
with a knife and a watch,
I cut up clouds and waves,
and with all these elements
I shape my own handwriting;
and I make these beings grow quietly
who could not have been born till now.

What I want is for them to love you
and for you to know nothing of death.

(translated by Alistair Reid)

i am so very glad the air show is over

what an absolute mess that was. even the aviation enthusiasts had to agree that there is very little romance and beauty in a modified P-51 Mustang flying over a downtown playground while the children screamed, sobbed and ran for cover. here’s a cartoon that says pretty much what I think:

(pictures for sad children)

week

It has been more than a week since I moved into my new apartment, and already my life has changed so much. The first four days were hectic and fun – we had a German couple staying with us for a little while, crashing on our couch during their brief visit to Toronto. People filed in and out, the kitchen was filled with the wonderful aromas of cooking, and I was almost never alone. But now the excitement has faded, and I am once more confronted with empty rooms. I know I will not feel this for long – university starts again tomorrow, and soon I will have a job as well to occupy my hours. I will not have time to confront myself. Does everyone live like this? Is this why people want to appear so busy all the time, to fill up their lives with as much activity as possible to avoid that ultimate, naked confrontation? Žižek with his customary excess says that “anxiety is the only true emotion – everything else is a fake.” Of course he is operating from a Lacanian viewpoint, and if you accept this then the only authentic function is a confrontation with your own symbolically constructed ego. The moment you realize that core of primordial lack around which you have necessarily constructed your (various) identities. Heidegger says the same thing when he comments that to fully experience your being – ie: to experience reality for an instant – is to also experience that being’s decay toward death. Death here meaning again that lack, that core of absolute nothing. But I’m not sure that to exist within this reality means to exist in anxiety. But I also do not mean to say that anxiety is a necessarily bad thing. I hate the fact that today so many people talk about anxiety in moral terms, as if to feel it means that there is something wrong with you. Everyone goes about now doing their Yoga and their meditation, talking about how calming of an effect it seems to have on their hectic lives, about how they no longer feel anxious or uncomfortable. There is something deeply disturbing in this view. In all my experience I have found that meditation (formal and otherwise) has always been a confrontation with anxiety, not an avoidance or circumvention of it. You become aware of your anxiousness, and this awareness doesn’t magically make the anxiety dissipate, on the contrary – it merely makes you accept it on its own terms. So much of what we do is in avoidance of this fact. I know the many listless hours I have spent trying to forget my own waiting, my own nervous nothing. But is this all there is? I do not think so. In the best of times I make something of my anxiousness – for it is, after all, a raw kind of energy, something that can be shaped and used. I put in service of my writing, or some other kind of art. Or I use it like a tool in dialogue, chipping away at the defenses and boundaries we create to make survival that much easier. This is not a sado-masochistic endeavor, but something I know can be used to create a lasting beauty and truth. To produce out of this state of anxiousness means that your product will have an authenticity that is sorely lacking in things that are created out of a purely aesthetic mean. It is the difference between statistical judgment and individual judgment – advertisement and art. What you create is not an alleviation of anxiety but a confrontation with it, an eye to an eye. In this space I can be a little more free.

harsh queen

I awake to necessity,
scrambling to shut the window
against a slit-eyed sun,
the broil of neighborhood
lives under its command,
and a cold lip of august wind.

I have recuperated from the night,
when of my own accord I lapped at your
heels, that raving flesh strapped in a black
dress, eyes the color of damp sand
beneath a rock glossed by lichen
at the neck of a pine lot,
eyes shielded by glasses, thank god,
so I can pretend the love in them
and jig accordingly.

Your grit I wash my tongue of,
thinking,
I must water the plant today,
I must finish that book today,
I must find a job today,
I must write that poem today,
and I push you to the edge of the
mirrors I must encounter,
so you do not strike me old.

evidence of illegal wartime atrocities in Sri Lanka

As some of you know, the war in Sri Lanka is officially over. What ‘officially’ means is that the open military conflict is finished, but the covert psychological and physical torture, malnourishment and general inhumanity still continues. Acts of illegal wartime violence by the army have been documented for several years now, but there has never been any hard evidence to be able to indict and sentence the perpetrators. Every single media outlet in Sri Lanka is either overtly state-sponsored propaganda or carefully monitored and censored. But just a few days ago a video captured on a cellphone was smuggled out of the country and given to Channel 4 news in the UK. It depicts Sri Lankan soldiers executing Tamils (civilians or combatants is unknown) on the field. They are stripped naked, blindfolded and shot casually in the head. The Army personnel joke and trade barbs while all this is going on. This is the news report:

This is the actual uncensored video. A warning, it is extremely graphic.

This is an incontestably illegal act. If those people were armed combatants fighting for the LTTE, then the rules of war according to the Geneva Conventions (which Sri Lanka has ratified) state that all captured personnel must be held as POWs in a reasonable and humane manner. These extra-judicial executions are the antithesis of ‘reasonable’ and ‘humane’. If those people were civilians (which is a concrete possibility since most LTTE fighters, upon capture, bite down on a cyanide pill) then this video is sure to cause some serious investigations and, hopefully, prosecutions within the Sri Lankan political-military complex. President Rajapaksa, who is revered as a kind of god by the majority of Sri Lankans, will have his carefully manufactured image shown up for what it is – a manipulative, self-serving lie.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

Sorry I haven’t updated in awhile – sometimes life begins to gain a little momentum and I just don’t want to spend what little free time I have in front of a computer, summoning up some last reserve of energy for a coherent post. In any case, I’m preparing for a move into my new apartment next week, stressing over my almost-certain library job, my almost-certain petition at York, and the almost-moronic bureaucratic hell-spawn that is OSAP. I know I’m not alone with that last complaint – navigating the red tape required to file an OSAP loan request is, at times, like being in Kafka’s The Trial, running like a caged mouse through corridor after corridor, speaking to people so sunk into their roles that they wouldn’t notice if you’ve just got your hand chopped off and were dripping blood on their wall-to-wall gray carpeting. Sometimes I feel like stapling my finger just to get a human reaction out of them, although I imagine he/she would just take the stapler back, put it carefully in its place beside the pencil-holder shaped like a cat, clear his/her throat and say something like, “I’m sorry, that stapler is not for public use. There are several others available at the reference desk downstairs, just to your right…” Yeah, I’m a little bitter.

On the up-side of things I’ve been performing some of my poetry on the streets with S. playing on his Hang. We’ve just started on this little venture, but already I can feel that it is something special. I love the radical difference of poetry when it is taken outside the confines of a bar or cafe. Within an enclosed space, in the structure of a poetry reading or show, the poet can be sure of his/her audience. The people listening to you have no choice but to listen – it is what they are there for, it is the role they must play as members of a polite audience. They are, in a way, bound to you and your voice, and it is very rare that someone gets up and leaves in the middle of a poem. This is not the case on the street. When you are performing on the sidewalk, the only influence you have on people is with your art. There is nothing else to keep them listening to you, no social strictures or assigned roles. If you suck, then people will naturally begin to drift away; if there is some gravity in what you are doing, then people will begin to congregate, listen, dance, laugh, or simply hold your gaze with a bare acknowledgment and understanding. There is something liberating in this.

Sitting at Future’s after a refreshing rainfall, I wrote:

The Return

The whole scent of an evening
distilled at the bottom
of a coffee cup,
the particular heat and light
of a day’s work
coiled and waiting
in the midst of small things:
a hand resting with one
finger over the abyss
of a table,
the fine yellow hair
above the upper lip
of a woman in pastel blue
shivering like antennae
poised above the moist
surface of cheese-cake;
and there,
lurking at the edges of things,
that sine of cloistered distress
in the eyes of strangers.

He wipes the café table
clear of rain
collected in anticipation
of his arrival,
the fine crumbs of bread,
flax seeds        poppy grains
he holds in the bowl
of a swiped hand,
all that residue of
others’ satisfaction –

Has it always been like this,
the world’s crowd
suspended like puppets
during the intermission,
waiting for his return
to a comfortable seat?

Or has there been a
reckoning
in his absence,
and now there are
no things
but their collisions
to wait for.

——————————————————————

Sometimes I feel like I am returning from exile. Not a physical exile, but some kind of mental displacement, a withdrawal of my being from its fullest engagement with the world. This withdrawal changes the quality of my movement, the momentum I like to call spirit. In these long stretches in the arid deserts of my mind, my spirit becomes stunted and unable to see more than a few feet ahead of itself. Sometimes I am caught by a mirage and blunder halfheartedly towards it, my mouth dry and parched, practically smelling the cool water I think lies just a few more miles ahead. But invariably I am deceived; the sustenance I thought was waiting for me was a delusion. After a few of these solitary failures I return to the world, feeling out my newold surroundings and relearning my existence. This is the Return I mean: the divestment of fantasy and the return to the real. Many years ago this return was a painful process, and, in some instances, it still is. But now I am beginning to enjoy the warring calm and anxiety that attends this ordeal. It seems that every time I relearn the ability to see, to hear, to smell, to experience, I feel that it is an emancipatory process, something that makes me stronger, surer of myself and the ground I walk on. The things I had left behind me are waiting. I do not know what has happened in my absence. Whether or not I have been judged. All I know is that waiting.

something like a home

Growing up as an only male in a Sri Lankan family is a very privileged position. I didn’t quite realize what it must have been like for my sister to grow up beside me, to be subject to all that subtle inequality of affection. I am trying to confront that privilege, to acknowledge that it exists and to deal with it. So…

Daughters and Sons in South-Asian Families

As is custom the daughter stares discretely
out of old photographs,
         customary the meek smile caught in
at the corners of the mouth,
milk teeth barely glowing as they should,

as she should but the custom does not allow,
stamps the forehead with a future downcast
a future brow to be cast aside in the
         corner of the photograph,
the daughter squared away at bottom-left,
shoulder sheared
off by the dismissive bulb
of the camera,

the arm that holds the camera
the cheese-face father who holds the camera
steady in the shadow of the eaves,

the son in the middle of the photograph,
shining in the center of the old photograph
he holds now;
older;
creased with age and heavier to the ground.

His fingers tremble at the edges of the frame
as if the glow of the son in the center is blinding,
as if the hot white core of all that accumulated
potential          potential          potential
would slip
like a spring
unawares
through the old photograph
he has found in the family album,

         (but the sister there in the corner,
cornered by a vine and the yellow seep of
frangipani, an aunt who ignores her kindly
like a tree, a grandmother who pats her
head only after she has patted the son,
a mother behind the glowing son –
a genius! – he will do great things! – a brilliant
burning boy! – a brilliance, we say, a basket of
fruit in the eye! – let us ladle that luminance
over our heads and anoint our bodies with the
holy oils of his potential          potential          potential,
of that future in the prints
of his hands)

                     trembling at the corners
of the photograph,
drunk on a Monday afternoon,
flipping through the family album at his sister’s
house,
the money he has stolen from beneath her bed
crushed in the back of his jeans,
the sister-daughter
in the corner
sheared off by the bulb,
the cold stillness of potential,
that frozen waste perfected and
engraved in all those dead eyes,

the sister with the small smile, the
brow tilted forward and that ghost
of an arm that has disappeared forever
beyond the edge of the frame,
tangled in the freedom
of invisibility,

far and far from the lipless weight of the cheese-face,
the arm that holds the camera.

some hypnotic video-art

turn your lights down, your sound up and watch as Surabhi Saraf manipulates space and time with two simple movement-images of a woman cooking.

more about “some hypnotic video-art“, posted with vodpod

What is happening here? Saraf’s words: “PEEL presents a visual and sonic echo of the present instance: it takes an unexamined moment and gives it life. The transitional motion of going to the fridge to get an ingredient is stretched into the echo of an unforgettable instant, and what emerges is an examination of the subtlety and hidden beauty of that moment.”

With each repetition, the mundane act of cooking a meal takes on a resonance previously hidden, hidden perhaps because of its solitary nature, but now we are confronted with not one but 96 of these movement-images. That they are the same image does not matter. In fact, it is in playing with our expectation of rote repetition that Suraf achieves something that borders on the transcendent. The simple, unselfconscious gesture of replacing a wayward lock of hair behind the ear spirals outside the frame like some kind of ink-spill, slowly spreading its influence to all those other women, women who have become unstuck from the rigid requirements of time. There is something organic in the way these gestures move across the screen, like waves or long grass in the wind. Each of the 96 women we see is an unique instance of the same moment, and each acheives her own grace and beauty. Perhaps this is a comment on how the traditional gender roles in South-Asian communities tend to play out – women relegated to the kitchen, the unseen providers behind all the ‘unique’ moments of a man’s life. Most of my memories of my grandmother are of her toiling in the kitchen, sifting rice in a large tin pan on the doorstep or gathering curry leaves from the tree outside. Hers was a life of invisibility, of the constant work required to feed and fuel the rest of us. Saraf has opened up those unseen moments and shown us their beauty and importance. She has also shown us that each instance of that woman is unique, as each of those countless wives and mothers and maids is unique, bound only by the action of cooking, of ‘peeling’: of revelation.

what has happened to me?

I have been building a nest. Carefully bringing back the twigs and berried branches that are necessary for permanence. Or at least the illusion of permanence. I am here, surrounded by the need for comfort, for security, for a future that is always given, never found. How have I come to this place? How is it that my desires are now for roots, for deep thick veins shooting through the soil and reaching for the warmth of some core that I cannot see, cannot feel, have only heard about from others? I am becoming attracted to women who are settled in their lives, who have found jobs, who wear their pencil skirts and black pointed shoes with modesty, with the grace that comes from hungerless eyes. This is strange. This is overwhelmingly strange. I feel like an impostor these ordered lives.

Everyone says, Jerome, you have so much potential. Potential for what? Where is it that you want me to go? What is it that you think I am able to accomplish. The word ‘accomplish’; to accomplish one’s self, to accomplish one’s work, to be an accomplished man. What does that mean? It makes me sick. It makes me sick because I know that I am the only one, or at least one of very few, who can be uncomfortable with that word, with the thoughts that accompany it. Why is it that we feel that we must leave something behind us, like the slime trail of a snail crossing a sidewalk after rainfall? We mark our temporal territories with deeds, with good works and the good sculptures of our working hands, with the weight and heft that we value so much. “A life well lived,” we say, “that is all that matters.” And a life well lived is a life that was weighty, that had heft and influence, that was like a white sun that steadied the orbits of others, that was filled with the laughter of the spheres: the friends, the family, the lovers. Somewhere along the way, I got lost, I thought there was only one way to this goal. I thought there was only one goal…

What is this permanence that we value so much? Why is it that we look at the drifter, the transient, with so much pity, so much contempt? We say, a man who lives for nothing but his own experience is a selfish man, a solipsistic man, an immoral man. We label him a misanthrope and cast him aside, we say, “you had so much potential, why did you throw it all away?” Why are you without a home, without a lover, without a family? Why are your friends like so many rooms you pass through, ephemeral and fantastic? You are a chimera and we cannot grasp you. Your skin is oiled and slick, you shift through all the colors and are a prism to no one. How dare you say we cannot feed the hunger we see in your eyes, how dare you say we cannot fulfill your desires? You do not need us, and we want to be needed. We function on need. We exist because we are needed. You are not needed here.

My nest, it is unraveling. The last safety net is gone. She is gone. That cube of friendship, that glass cube she bought at some trinket shop, slipped into a three-sided metal sleeve and gave to me as part of a conversation we had many years ago. She gave me back a word that we had fought over, a word that even now I cannot say, I have not said since she gift-wrapped it and slipped it into my hand. “Here,” she said, “this word is yours, keep it, I do not want it any longer.” The church we parted in was gone. Some kind of symbol. We were almost lovers there, once. We almost talked to each other with our bodies. But she could not feed the hunger in my eyes. I was a fool, I projected my fulfillment into a future that could not cannot did not does not exist. Now she is gone and I have given her the word, now the church that was abandoned and left in the freedom of its abandonment has been demolished. They are putting up condos there. People who have espresso machines and light fixtures from IKEA are going to live in them. People who tell me I have so much potential, so much potential to have a home as well, to have a cottage and a boat and an espresso machine, potential to buy my parents out of bankruptcy, to have a partner whose financial statements are mixed with mine, a joint high-interest account, some blue-chip stocks for the future, some money saved for traveling in the future, some food in the freezer for the future, something for the future, for that future, for our future.

My nest is unravelling. I am sick of being ashamed of being a bum. I am futureless, and I am proud of it. You can call me selfish, you can call me narcisistic, but you cannot call me lazy. Because I have my work. Because my life is always a work. There are no vacations, no brief repreives from the grind. There is only life and life and life. I do not want to accomplish, I do not want to fulfil, I do not want to potentiate. Because those words are no longer mine, because if I do those things they will never be done on my own terms. My potential is my own buisness. If I choose to teeter over the edge, if I choose to hover forever uncertain, if I choose to merely survive and not ‘accomplish’, then do not be so arrogant as to presume I am lost. To be lost is also to lose, and not all losing is faliure. It is I who have lost you, it is I who have become abandoned, not because you have abandoned me, but because this is the result of my agency. The room is empty, the room is free.