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of not being ‘public’, not ‘putting myself out there’. instead, going inward, learning to listen (to what?)

i flew halfway across the planet, an aerial revolution of finding and coming home. i returned to an island remade by time and a virus; monstrous changeling. my friends are older, different, yet some things stay the same; that old eatery, this haunted staircase. i’m cycling back to achingly familiar things; a country, a childhood home, habitual bus routes, forgotten books, clothes from my twenties, a neglected blog. i glance at a bare wall, emptied of the sun-clock of time past; uncorrectable tic. glad, helpless circumnavigations to rituals i’d thought lost in fog. everything seems sodden with signification; how overwhelming. and not writing them down? the dull terror of consigning my life (my life) to obscurity.

the guilty privilege of hiding, being ‘non-essential’, insulating myself, coming to terms with time lost. refusing to write or unable to? reading incessantly. swimming through the murk of depression, the heart-pinch of anxiety. wrestling with words, pulling them up and out, dripping. the accidental fine powder from cutting a pill. the terror of the blinking cursor. the shy comfort of blue ink on paper. figuring myself within the tired trope of homecoming. what had i been searching for all this while? 

the lightest drizzle-- the crinkling of the world, the light crackle of my view wrinkling in on itself. deciding that the placid sky above this island is the loveliest of all. singapo(re)discover. america, i haven’t mourned you yet. 

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts wir trinken und trinken wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

my dreams are long and run like epics. they keep coming back, years after the last, creating by erasing. memory always one false step behind history, history always emerging one real second too early.

it’s hard to find creativity in things that repeat.

that one hawk eye, so terribly magnified in that human body, strong, running, the dying chieftain over your shoulder, trying to get to the bus stop that would take him to paradise.

we are running all the time, constantly revivified, waiting for the catastrophic event that never occurs but that is always on the way.

(is sadness always a girl?)

there have been so many days. even now: not wanting to feel, not wanting to think. i play comedy in the background without watching so i know there is laughter nearby. the apartment hears them and not me, the play-acting of others drown out the silences of my everyday. this is sadness i think. being okay drowned. passivity is a kind of death too.

i search for love in the wrong places. in the eyes of my cat. in the sounds of the standing table whirring. i search for love in a cut finger. in things i can buy. i think i can own love, i’m sure it’s on amazon somewhere, on sale. i search for love in a photo, taken from behind, of your frail head. no face. i knew you were going to go. i search for love in a photo, taken from behind, of your back, always out of reach, snow and grass and lava hugs. i search for love in your arms, in your arms, warm and alive, in your arms, cold and gentle, in your arms, in stories i can eat and stories that i can’t. i think i found it in the sound of the dishwasher, churning, stopping, raging, sighing, dying, opened and emptied, warm.

After experiencing the death of a loved one for the first time, the girl found, to her surprise—for it had come about so slowly she hardly noticed it—that she as well wasn’t “living life”, as everyone quite vapidly called it. Concerned—because in this world where life inhabited, not “living life” was indeed a cause for concern—she decided to neutrally observe herself apart from the self that didn’t “live” life, so she could be able to ascertain for sure what she was doing if not living life. She soon noted that the inane, everyday acts not usually considered when one talks about “living life”—getting up, having breakfast, heading back to bed to think and be afraid—filled her with a very strange, miraculous kind of joy, as well as a very, very joyless dread. Trying to see herself from a detached point of view—which she knew was a very strange thing to want to do, for what was the point of subjectivity if one didn’t particularly want to be subjective?—she noted that nothing in particular seemed wrong; she was still a very ordinary, shallow, unexceptional girl who recognized the importance of painting her face, of visiting and imprinting herself briefly upon wild and varied geographical places, and of doing work—which, for her, meant reading elegiac writers who prepared her for the inevitable event of death and then writing about them, but more of that later—because having ‘work’ and ‘purpose’ meant being alive in a world that continued, quite atrociously, to abide even as its inhabitants quietly waned away, screaming. 

However, when she was not painting her face or traipsing hollowly around foreign lands, there were many afternoons—the worst time of the day, for while it was excusable to wile life away in bed in the mornings and evenings, the afternoons demanded rather unfairly that life be “lived” rambunctiously—when she would, for no other reason than because she had no desire to do anything else, crawl into bed, curl into a shell and calmly settle into fearfulness, stopping everything around her and becoming still for the labour complete passivity required, all the while listening to cars and people screaming gloriously at each other outside her window, reminding her that they were what she was missing out on. Supine, she would think of how miraculous it was that she was here, a living, breathing thing with living, breathing organs, a human—what was she?—on this bed, conscious of herself as she ossified into a state of terror at the blankness that living life had now presented her with, a life that had made her realize that she had to die, would die, that that was that and nothing more, alea iacta est. Quite miraculous, really, life, when one wasn’t too busy living it to stop and think. Life continues on, one continues to live, her body still a brilliant, sentient machine until the day it wears down and gets replaced. Lost in such thoughts, she would naturally, almost amusedly, leave her body while inhabiting it, take a position on the ceiling, and gaze contemplatively upon herself on her bed, eyes wide open, suspended and deliberately insignificant in the abyss of the universe spread over the warm coverlet. The boundaries of the cozy universe functioned as the calcareous covering of her shell, a protection that stretched on till the end of the world and never stopped, though it really ended, she knew, where her mattress did.

I’m afraid of things breaking because ashes. There are pleasures of the text yes and the sky and life and people in living flesh and worlds in my head and I can breathe and curve my finger. But I breathe also ashes, the obliterated remains of precious things, even the feel of paper reminds me of cinders, or something that had burnt up, a tree.

Words seem to be the only things that endure, and I detest that immortality. To last, one has to be printed or stamped upon a surface, forever branded onto the universe. We seem to have been expelled from somewhere, or dropped from above; we can be swept off and away, lifted off, dropped. When they opened the urn I had wanted to say stop because no one had noticed the fan was still running and what if she was swept off and away? What if we lost her because the fan was on and because someone forgot to imprint us into the earth? But nothing moved, ashes and people, and if they did I wouldn't have known because ashes (so much and so little) and fragments of skull, curved.

It infuriates me; ashes. Acceptance, or resignation: what the world has deduced about it all. The gravity of entirety summed up in three words, in miniature. It makes me angry that people seem ready, or actually want to go quietly into the night, while I am here, seething, afraid and hoarding whatever I can and failing.

I take that back. Separation is an illusion and everyone fears ashes too.

 *

How can one hold onto something, actually be able to really, truly grasp something without having to hand it over?—to who?—The things we wish to hold onto often have a way of being fatally indifferent to us. Who are we to assume that they would pay us the least bit of attention? Or that we can possess any bit of them at all? They get snatched away in the end—by who?—, disappear into the air, ashes trickling through our fingers, refusing to conform to any of our totalizing desires. At the Monterey Aquarium, I followed the sunfish with my eyes as it swam straight toward me. Its deformity—whose mistake?—and mine made contact. We saw each other face to face, first revelation of the other, it headed for me, saw me, wanted me… and devastatingly, with a flick of its stumpy tail, wafted away into the depths. The betrayal one feels in finding oneself suddenly quite alone.

Death is like that, I suppose. She had, perhaps, done her best to wait for me. I had, I know, expected her to.

 •

Perhaps I want to help resurrect Bachmann. I can’t believe she was consumed by fire, that the cause was unknown and ashes. All over Todesarten, Ways of Dying, unfinished because of ashes. I need to know. Did she lazily watch her lit cigarette fall to the hotel room floor? Or was she as surprised as all of us will be when facing, at last, the terribly ordinary accident of living?

A car crash? Who decides these things? Sebald’s awareness, his voice, Hausfreund, so focused, so disciplined, so quietly devastating, sadly accompany us wandering the empty space in Pompeii between nostalgia and the march to the end of time. But Bachmann, in her gasping and frenzied anger and guilt, still on fire, runs after the figure of Gravida, chasing the hem of her skirt, losing her way in her ambitious undertaking, frustrated in the abyss between time and space.

I think about mourning, and existing and miracles and dying and worlds and outer space and ashes and it’s so acute I sometimes have to lie down. I am in history but wish to be out of it, to see everything in miniature so I can understand or be able to work out a way of holding onto things. If Gravida could walk on ash or cinders perhaps I could too. I could become ghostly, I want to become ghostly and perhaps some archaeologist would come find me, and another archaeologist, and another and another and I’d be the one thing they wish they had but would never get. But the impulse in me right now (here, in time) is to dig for the ghosts I’m already chasing. I will never be able to find them, or mine. Only a glimpse of the end of their skirts disappearing behind the door. But digging through ashes is living and searching for their delicate remains and remembering and perhaps if I were lucky I could uproot a tree and sweep it off and upside down, lift it off and imprint it in the sky. When that happens I may finally grasp the trimmings of that dress and I will cry and never let go ever and time may finally stop.