Ryoshu

Sometimes I’m startled to find myself where I am. Happy, sitting on the grass with ____’s head in my lap, I suddenly thought, How did this happen? I thought of how disoriented the past-I would be if I pulled the her from two months ago and set her in my place. She couldn't exist here. You don’t notice the little changes, the way decisions link with each other, replace the old and build until you are a structure unlike what you were before. We shed ghosts like exoskeletons everywhere.

The little changes don't fall into place perfectly. They can't, as the idea of a perfectly formed person is ridiculous. We are too fluid for something like that. But those defining moments, when you are suddenly aware of what you are now thanks to those accumulated little changes, feel like this:

As if everything has fallen in some sort of form, even though you couldn't connect it as it was happening. At that moment of beauty, it seems a shame to break that form. You want to cling to that clarity, that feeling that everything is as it should be right now. You delude yourself into thinking that this form is best; there is no other way you can be arranged. Why should things have to change?

But all around, the trees are shedding their leaves. Part of Japanese aesthetic beauty lies in the impermanence of things, which is why autumn is the loveliest season. The changing leaves and their flash of brief color before winter is a reminder of the perishable nature of everything. The beauty of autumn wouldn’t be the same if leaves were that color all the time; that beauty is inextricably connected to its brevity. I am overwhelmed with this idea as I play with ____’s hair.

Later, while researching for a paper, I read about the Japanese concept of ryoshu. It’s one of those moments when a piece of writing illuminates an idea you're trying to come to terms with, and I can think of no better way to articulate the shadowed stirrings at the back of my mind.

“Ryoshu…is  an  intense  emotional realization  that you  have  found  a  home  of  your soul.  The  purity  and  intensity  at  the  moment  of this  discovery colors  the  whole  experience  with a  sense  of  sorrow.  Yet  this  sorrow  differs  from  a  sheer feeling  of depression  or  loss.  Rather  it  is  warmness  rising in  your  heart  when  you feel  you  have  discovered  a  genuine  sign  of  life  in  nature and  human  beings.”



--Tsukimura, Reiko and Kawabata Yasunari. “A Thematic Study of the Works of Kawabata Yasunari.” The Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 5.2 (1968): 22-31. Print.

Bravery

I'm all about the abstracts lately. About a week ago, _______ and I talked about bravery. What does it mean to be brave? Is it something you should even be proud of? To _______, bravery is doing what is right even if it is the more difficult choice. I am more selfish. To me, a brave person is someone who commits to a decision enough that she never looks back with regret. Bravery is more than deliberating between thought-out choices, though; sometimes it is the courage to go limp and let the current take you where it will. Admitting that you can't control or know everything; you can only live with what you have now. My bravery belongs to me, not others.

peace

I'm thinking about peace.

Peace as a sound we have decided to designate for a silence, for an absence of war in countries and bodies. That quiet homonym for piece. And then I think about all the peace we piece ourselves together with, all those spaces of quiet we stitch together to try to create something out of nothing. It's more of an absence than a state of being, really.

Peace isn't active. You can't search for peace anymore than you can create silence. It's not like water, something transparent sloshing in your body and on your taste buds, something that's supposed to be tasteless but always has a tangible flavor nonetheless. Something like peace isn't part of a solid, restless body like mine, with all its cells fighting and dying every second. My body is painted in red tones. Close my eyes in the quiet, in the dark, and I'll still see red on the backs of my eyelids.

Dali painted burning giraffes as a symbol for war. I find reality in him. I don't think you can ever really find peace; you can only outrun war. And you can run in empty spaces until that fire creeps up the back of your legs, thundering up the length of your spine, distorting everything in its heat.

I think Lao Tsu understood:

"Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there."




Peace is shaping ourselves to hold an emptiness. 

transcription (blackout poem)

the steps of music are different 
from our own well-tempered octaves.


transcriptions into strictly set-off 
lines and spaces
distort the character of music 
and matter, both.


all our efforts to script existence
cannot convey what we want
and need to know;
we are not interested in intervals, but rather in distances.


the problem: transforming into a system of cents,
our clanking ankles weighed down,
drowning out that tonic hum,
those wholetones whistling through our bones
in quiet moments.


somewhere there is a distance found 
without walking--
a red closing of eyelid skies,
a harbor laced with vessels,
shipping cells like notes to the heart. 

Work

_______ believes in the knives he sells, which makes it easier to work for him. But easier does not imply ease, and this job relies on the poisonous scripts I've been working to run away from for months. 

Sacred

My father and I drove down to Lexington to see my sister graduate. We were on the road by 5 a.m. The two-and-a-half drive didn't affect me until we turned onto New Circle, and I directed him to my sister's house, reciting those turns, that liturgy I'd learned by heart last summer. His unfamiliar tires rolled past the path on which I used to run every morning. It was new to him, but I could remember my skin burning with the sweat I shed like poison, the sun-bright air I took into my lungs, swallowing fire with every step like the xiezhi as I listened to Florence and the Machine ('I must become a lion-hearted girl'). Now, shyly stepping back into this place as if I'd never left, it seemed that I was traveling through time like the xiezhi, as well. But the simile ends there. I cannot prevent violent change, not when I run to it with an instinctive need like hunger.

We stepped into my sister's house. It had never been mine, but now that they were selling it, it was even less so. I was a stranger. I didn't belong to the ghost of the girl who lived here. That I and I were parallel.

We drove past the bookstore where I used to work, with its seafoam-green, pointed dome rising out of Lexington Green like a basilica. I have now traveled to St. Peter's in Vatican City and San Marco's in Venice; the sight of that seafoam-green dome filled me with more spirituality than either of those breathtakingly beautiful places; it reminded me of all the places that had filled the space between me and last summer. I could never explain how important that time was, just as I could never tell you how I exited my mother's womb; I can only ever know and feel it afterward, can only then explain to you how I exist.

My holy ground is not the same as yours. Sacredness is more than humble, bloodless faces carved from marble, dappled with red, yellow, and violet light from stained glass. Birth is quieter than white, more fluid than water.


Xiezhi

wake/burn

wake to your tongue having turned tectonic, drily scraping itself against your rumbling, violent throat like a velvet-antlered hart rubbing his horns on a tree; it's cold here. things are too still at the edges, too active in the center. if only your legs could run like your pulse; if only you could scatter your body and live in a thousand scenarios at once, like your mind. but there are only your fingers curled around blankets, only a sleep-warm throat pregnant with a sickness that bears you deeper into stasis. 


not even london rained this much. it hangs down over indiana when you fall asleep; half-conscious, you imagine this is what the slow sprinkling of dirt on a coffin would sound like from the inside, or this is the sound of ____'s movement in the bedsheets slowed down a thousand times. it is a drowning rain, only. no thunder, no lightning, no chance of fire. where did the thunderstorms go? what happened to the nights when you ran in the rain with _____ until three in the morning, dancing next to the cracking snarl of a storm until your clothes steamed and skin and clothes melted into one with the water, became one burning light in pooled streetlamp halos. 


there is comfort in burning. healing. there is comfort knowing that there is paper yet to be burned, that people still write letters that end as the smell of smoke in someone's hair. 

I am in love with Barcelona

(I don't know how to explain just how beautiful Barcelona is, and I am also procrastinating on homework. Behold, poetry.)

...

“Aut virum aut murum oportet mulierem habere” (a woman ought to have either a husband or a wall)

so pull the pink and yellow tones from my blushing skin,

and with a brush, wed them to warm Barcelona walls;

I will be her bright bride

until the Spanish sun peels our paint, swallows our brick back

into the mountain,

and migrating swallows cool us with their passing blue shadows

as they remind us how everything grows

in shifts of breaking eggs and bleaching bones.

turning, and turning, and turning

the seasons will slice us into sand

and sigh us down to that Mediterranean coast,

where we will glow white and wet with the same moonlit waves

that shiver with laughter from splashing children;

we will wait a million patient mornings

until their hot hands smooth and glaze us into glass

so light can crack us into color that will freckle and flutter on their shoulders

like the glittering of Gaudi’s mosaic greens and golds on plaster

like a clouded yellow butterfly

thirsty for the salt of a sea

that sings, and sings, and sings, and sings

...

(written to Alpha Shallows looped over and over)

I tried to explain to her why marriage doesn't make sense to me

she asks me when I’m going to settle down.

I ask her:

how many times do you have to be born before it finally takes? 

how many skins do you have to shed before you stop needing to scratch your layers away?

she says I’m just going through a phase, like I wax and wane in cold, celestial cycles, like I’m pitted and dead yet falsely glowing enough to inspire madness and religion--all you need for love--and I say:

if I am, I’m not a crescent, not the sharp sickle bodies of those young tough girls with a newness and blooming confidence that cuts; almost all of them in shadow. nor am I full, those complete glowing girls, rich and round and shining so much you want to act out that old cliché: take them with your mouth like silver coins just to taste the sting of metal on your tongue, bite them between your teeth to make sure they’re real; nothing that luminous can be real. 

no, I’m gibbous, I say. assymetrial, unassociated with wonder, curving outward right now with my neck tilted backward, spine pressing into my stomach as if to fill me from the inside with the cold newmoon air plucking at my raised hairs and nerve endings like pulling legs off spiders, spreading the feeling through my digestive system; swallow, send it vibrating down my bloodstream web until I’m inked with pulsing shadows on both sides. 

and I close my eyes and say: they say the moon has a dark side, but how can you say that when the moon never really has a bright side in the first place? it’s only a beggar-god, only pitted gray dust that steals whatever shine it can.

and she says I’m just too young and I say: 

you say I’m just going through a phase, but what do you mean because we are all going through phases. no one is everything they are all at once; they’d explode. we have to take it in pieces. a full moon every night doesn’t make sense; it swells the tide, it floods the beaches until everything drowns

and she says: you just don’t get the point. you take everything too literally, and I say:

you know how they used to think pictures stole your soul? well, what if it was sort of like that. look back at every picture of you. every one is a different person. with every picture you gained or lost thoughts, gained or lost age, depending on what order you view them in. with every new thought, you are a new person. 

you know that phrase people use when they make a decision, “I changed my mind?” 

well, every decision, ergo, changes the composition of who you are. so maybe they had something right. taking a picture captures who you were in exactly that moment. it’s like we have as many souls as seconds, all ripe for documentation and capture.

maybe it’s like ovulation, like eggs, I say. each soul you have stays ripe in you; either you meet the right circumstances, and that soul is nourished and develops, or you don’t and cast it off with only a little ordinary, cyclical pain--every time you lose a friend, an opportunity. we’ve killed ourselves so many times. then there comes a point when you just stop. you stop changing, you stop being born, you stop losing souls and being reborn every month, and you slow down until you lose the last one you have. 

that’s why marriage is bullshit, I say. at the moment of “I do” the two are joined, but that’s just for the moment. don’t tell me anyone’s naïve enough to believe people stay the same for decades; how many millions of souls pass through those two bodies in between those years, and how times do they have to pray to get lucky, how many pulls on the slot machine arm before the sevens line up again and they feel that connection like full moon silver sharp metal life on their tongues again? it’s tragedy; it’s the gambler’s problem: every small win pushes them to bet more until it’s too late and their pockets are empty. 

and they used to say your last breath was your soul leaving the body, and maybe they had it half right; it’s the very last you you have to give giving up because you don’t need to be born anymore. 

Flaneur

Last weekend, ______ and I walked the streets of London until I was walking on the sides of my chapped feet. From nine in the morning to six at night: Baker Street, Regent Park, steal a break at Starbucks, Soho, dodge buses, Covent Garden, breathe in all sorts of places outlying and in between. We ticked away the day with our pendulum legs the entire time (like all those beautiful clocks I studied at the British Museum). By the time we flopped on our beds at the Royal National Hotel, our screaming heels were drowned out by the silly peals of laughter born only from satisfied exhaustion.

I miss things when I don’t walk. I miss making up walking games down the sidewalk; step three times in between each segment without touching the cracks (step on a crack, break your mother’s back). Our mothers teach us to look both ways when we cross the street. London tells you to Look Left or Look Right, depending on which street you’re crossing. (I looked both ways anyway.)

Riding a bus or driving a car is often necessary—belive me, the next day, ______ and I rode plenty of buses, and our feet were less spiteful—but it’s also window shopping. You can see the shape of something through glass, but you can’t run your fingers over it or smell and taste it in the back of your throat. You can’t keep it.

I can only think of this:

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)

I want to be a flaneur of the world. But, still, even that isn’t enough sometimes. We pass through people like cities, stopping in doorways when someone opens up and glancing through windows when they don’t. You can know a building—you can sketch its corners blindfolded, know the exact shade of every patch of wallpaper, anticipate the echo of every room you walk in—but you can’t feel it; you can know people, but you can’t. I have to remind myself this is okay, that I am allowed to simply enjoy something in passing with no need for absolute understanding, that complete knowledge is impossible. (Why are there so many why’s? You nail one down and end up splitting it in two.) No matter how deep you go, you are always walking somewhere on the outside.

(But that’s all right. It’s good for your health.)

Flaneur

Jar

______ wants me to bring her back a jar of dirt from the United Kingdom. I’ve heard people ask for this before; what’s the appeal of soil? Another friend joked that if I forgot, I could always scoop up some dirt from my own backyard and claim it was pure England turf. (I won’t, ______). But I could, really. No one sees the cartographers’ puzzle-line cracks cutting through the ground when moving from one state to another. And there is no piece left out. Every place has a name. The only way to find something new is to reinvent the old, just as it is with everything. Who knows if the spot where I scoop up soil for ______ will even be part of the United Kingdom at some point in the future?

(If you’re the kind who dies, like a name or a firefly, I could catch you in my mason-jar mouth—you’ll glow and then dim a little when I keep you, but that’s the nature of all things that stay in one place for too long. Breathe in, breathe out. You don’t even notice you do until you can’t, and then it’s throat burning, black heart-star vision beautiful.

If you’re something that breaks down out alone in the world, something ever-changing as soil—give me your erosion. Let me still you, lock you up from the weather for awhile. Show me the rocks you came from; let me sink into you and sift your horizons through my fingers. We will be more and less than names.)