bugwords

the light from the sun cuts a line across the horizon, oozing forth as if from a narrow wound. a gashing of the night to let heaven spill forth. i watch from the crooked shadows of some dark hollow as the wound expands and the world alights in flames of yellow, as sunlight streams across the treetops and the mountaintops and upon everything and everyone in between those treetops and mountaintops.

i watch and, as the light approaches me, i tuck myself deeper into the night that i call home. the sun burns. when looking in its direction i am forced to squint. but even so, i refuse to avert my gaze. i hate it and i envy it. i look upon all the children of the sun, awakening for their lives now that their god has risen again: i look upon them with a jealous spite. were i able to cast flames of my own perhaps i would destroy them all in baptismal fire. i would burn the world with such ferocity that the smoke would blot out the sky. then, once all is reduced to ash and the last embers fade, it would be night forevermore.

but i am no serpent, i am no dragon, i am no leviathan. i am an insect--a parasite. unable to muster the strength to fell a single man, let alone the armies of god.

this is a poem i wrote back in 2019. for a long while (like three years!) i considered never releasing it out into the world, but have since moved on from that initial mindset obviously. while stylistically it's a bit dated, i still think it's pretty quality.

heres a link to the post !

i really loved this book! i'll be slowly updating this post with my notes and highlights. page numbers included (for the oxford world's classics edition).

"I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs." (page 6)

"She has kissed me. All is shattered." (page 6)

"What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs?" (page 6)

"She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted." (page 7)

"'But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.'" (page 8)

"‘Each tense,’ said Neville, ‘means differently. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.’" (page 11)

"This is only here; this is only now." (page 12)

"'Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful.'" (page 17)

"He sways slightly, mouthing out his tremendous and sonorous words. I love tremendous and sonorous words. But his words are too hearty to be true. Yet he is by this time convinced of their truth." (page 18)

"'I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,' said Jinny. 'It shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much when I laugh.'" (page 23)

"we cannot deny that his departure leaves us not only with a sense of relief, but also with a sense of something removed, like a tooth." (page 28)

"'But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.'" (page 30)

"'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly.'" (page 30)

"'I hate darkness and sleep and night,' said Jinny, 'and lie longing for the day to come. I long that the week should be all one day without divisions.'" (page 31)

"'This is the final ceremony,' said Bernard. This is the last of all our ceremonies. We are overcome by strange feelings. The guard holding his flag is about to blow his whistle; the train breathing steam in another moment is about to start. One wants to say something, to feel something, absolutely appropriate to the occasion. One's mind is primed; one's lips are pursed.'" (page 33)

"Now I hang suspended without attachments." (page 37)

"Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs, and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The gold-eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness, quizzically. Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture." (page 43)

"What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel--then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many." (page 44)

"There is some flaw in me--some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity." (page 48)

"'But I am too nervous to end my sentence properly. I speak quickly, as I pace up and down, to conceal my agitation.'" (page 51)

"The old woman pauses against the lit window. A contrast. That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and Neville does not feel. Hence he will reach perfection and I shall fail and shall leave nothing behind me but imperfect phrases littered with sand." (page 53)

"I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is all, this is worthless." (54)

"I am for ever sleeping and waking. Now I sleep; now I wake. I see the gleaming tea-urn; the glass cases full of pale-yellow sandwiches; the men in round coats perched on stools at the counter; and also behind them, eternity." (page 55)

"'But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.'" (page 56)

"'I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.'" (page 62)

"The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice." (page 64)

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. (page 66)

"this knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a thing to cut with. The normal is abolished." (page 69)

"'We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for all our cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.'" (page 70)

"My life has a rapidity that yours lack. I am like a hound on the scent. I hunt from dawn to dusk. Nothing, not the pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning for me. I shall have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have what I want, for I lack bodily grace and the courage that comes with it. The swiftness of my mind is too strong for my body. I fail before I reach the end and fall in a heap, damp, perhaps disgusting. I excite pity in the crises of life, not love. Therefore I suffer horribly." (page 75)

"The only sayings I understand are cries of love, rage, and pain." (page 77)

"I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape." (page 77)

"I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness--I am nothing. When I am alone I fall into lethargy, and say to myself dismally as I poke the cinders through the bars of the grate, Mrs Moffat will come. She will come and sweep it all up. When Louis is alone he sees with astonishing intensity, and will write some words that may outlast us all." (page 77)

"Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it." (page 78)

"But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love." (page 80)

"'Everything is now set; everything is fixed. Bernard is engaged. Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.'" (page 83)

"Who and what are these unknown people? I ask. I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said--I can see a dozen pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda's? What is Neville's?" (page 84)

"We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road." (page 85)

"'Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.'" (page 89)

"I am upheld by pillars, shored up on either side by stark emotions; but which is sorrow, which is joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world." (page 89)

"I am now at the zenith of an experience. It will decline. Already I no longer cry with conviction, "What luck!" Exaltation, the flight of doves descending, is over. Chaos, detail return. I am no longer amazed by names written over shop-windows. I do not feel Why hurry? Why catch trains? The sequence returns; one thing leads to another--the usual order." (page 90)

"This is my funeral service. We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate." (page 91)

this is a short essay i wrote on the seasons for a literary journal. it never got published, so i wanted to post it to my wordpress before autumn ended and the words began to lose their relevance. i wrote it like two months ago, but i still think it has flair.

here's an excerpt:

It’s so hot here that rather than brown leaves in the autumn we contend with brown grass in the summer. All through August, there was a burn ban in my zip code. Shriveled and desperate my plants clung to the notion of living with what little life was left in them. I silently cheered them on, gave them food and water and shade and told them we’d get through this, even as heat curled the last leaves of all I cultivated into dust.

Unable to bear witness to growth, I became fascinated with decay. Watching the process from beginning to end and as I watched I internalized the notion that it was only natural things would come to this. Brute fact and all that.

here's the link to the post:

so tomorrow there's a lunar eclipse. i've never seen a lunar eclipse and seriously considered waking up early to peep this one. but i probably won't just because the thought of having to go to work later in the morning really puts a damper on the whole idea.

its kinda weird. just like a few centuries ago or whatever stargazing and moongazing and planetgazing must have been common. less light pollution for one, and no 40-hour workweek. imagine taking someone from thousands of years ago and placing them into todays world. imagine their reaction as they look at the night sky in the midst of a lit city and see nothing but emptiness bearing down on them. all their gods dead

people used to live by the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets and the seasons and now they barely register to us

on the bright side, when i was walking tonight and looking at the moon and thinking about how i won't be looking at the eclipse cause ill be asleep in bed, i looked up and saw a shooting star zip across the sky. i tried to get a picture but shooting stars are pretty ephemeral so it was already gone by the time i'd gotten ahold of my phone.