I continue to astound myself with my own contradictions.


When will the heart ever learn?
The years have failed to teach.

From Marjorie Evasco's "For Maria Kodama's Other Borges"

II. Orpheus Falls Who has not heard the Poet's lament/ for one descended into dream's dark stairs?/ Who has not heard the gods'/ admonition, given with knowing smile--/ Do not look back--/ last trick to play/ on the body's lighted book of memory?/ Every single instance, the lover fails,/ falls,/ quick to where the sought-after/ back to the surface of time. He sings/ to her, "Ascend with me!"--/ yet in a/ moment's breathlessness, hers,/ he/ looks back and she's undone,/ charred bones/ and ash./

"Finally,

the things we love demand more love,/ as if we have always been capable of it. Yet/ I can only offer belief, mirages that mean water,/ long travels leading somewhere./" -Joel Toledo, "Attachments"

Coming to terms: a journal in parts

I was taught Art--fed books for breakfast, given songs to wipe my tears with, pushed to poetry for solace--and it is through Art's glasses that I look at the world. The search for meaning, and the beauty in it, are innate. I find that I have the need to turn things over and under and look for smoothness, or dents; I question things that don't make sense. I question, to the point of breaking, when I do not find the answers, or when the answers I am pointed toward do not collide with my faiths. I search until I find what I had hoped to find, when I began. The failure to sate my anxieties breaks me. I insist on reading between the lines, even when there are no spaces, no gaps to poke through. My downfall is often my stubborn insistence at the soul in things. Or, is it my salvation?

This morning's companions

I promised myself I'd catch up on all the sleep I keep losing during my work week, but here I am, with my cup of coffee, reading and scribbling, musing and smiling in between, sighing, every now and then. I missed this, hopping from one blog to another, becoming privy to other people's thoughts, finding affirmation in their hopes and solace in their griefs, knowing that I am not alone in my mind's episodes of darkness. That these people are strangers makes the balm even sweeter, as the knowledge that other people go through brokenness, too, and that they, too, write candidly about life and love, make for delicious companions on a Tuesday morning, that could very well find itself buried under a pile of other days as the weeks and months and years progress. One could not escape what one is, and this could just be who I am. Cheers to the beautiful creatures that words are. Life seems less lonely, with them in all these (seemingly) blank spaces.

Coming to terms: a journal in parts

"I choose a color and it connotes sadness./ But how long must the symbols remain true? Blue/ is blue, not lonely. After a time, one gives up/ reading the sky for shadows, even rain./ There is no promise, only a possibility./ A moment moves to another, and still it feels/ the same./ -Joel Toledo, "Attachments" ************************************************** *The awareness--or belief, if you will--that everything is transitory: is it a blessing or a curse? This lack of faith in the faithfulness of things lends a cynicism that, yes, gets shaken from time to time, yet stays, always rooted, a habit of years that veers the heart away from believing that there is value in the things that one does, in the people one has known and knows. The mind trembles under the very sun of hope. Despair is a constant. It is one yardstick with which existence is measured. Happiness becomes a stranger whom one welcomes but does not allow too close, because parting is always imminent, parting must be inevitable.

Signs of the/my times

After my recent bout with the flu, here comes the itching in my hands. The unbearable urge to scratch is once more a constant companion, with the actual scratching coming in at a close second. I uncurl my palms and see the beginnings of countless rashes, small and red and annoyingly there. My lips are starting to chap. Rashes flower on me at the merest of scratches. Whenever the temperature goes down to a particular level, and the wind blows this way, like this, I turn into a walking rash. I'm thinking it'll be a while before the scratching ends. March should be a good month (I hope).

Going through this blog reminded me that David Foster Wallace's been dead for four years. I didn't realize so much time has passed since stuff and people and places. But, yes, apparently.

From the weekend(s) couch:

So this morning I find out that Ebert gave "Shame" and "Cloud Atlas" 4 stars, "Melancholia", 3 and a half, and didn't care much for either "Detachment" or "The Tall Man" (the latter did leave a bad taste in my mouth and the former is second to next of my movies to watch, after "360".)

Coming to terms: a journal in parts

This preoccupation with loss. This fear of what the next moment will have in its hands, or already does. Ah, my mind. What are we to do? That I could restrain you within this small space: these quotidian-smeared walls, this dusty floor, these narrow stairs, this endless day-to-day. That I could pull you back from your stubborn forays into the great unknowns, bigger than you could comprehend, deeper than you could fathom. Why do you stray so? You venture out with the very things that taunt you, the very spaces that house your fears. Why do you insist? What is the sense in this persistence? Stay, stay, stay. Stay and be safe. Be safe.

From Proust

"But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; whenever it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day."" --Marcel, Swann's Way

Coming to terms: a journal in parts

Propitious that I should find my way back to this book at a time like this, when the losses seem at their most, scattered at my feet like fallen leaves, demanding gathering. I am reading Swann's Way. In Search of Lost Time. Remembrance of Things Past. The former seems ever more apt. Lost time. Lost things. Losses. I have to pause, every now and then, as reading the book sometimes becomes painful. Sadness for lost things, for the ecstasy and the agony in the act--voluntary and involuntary--of remembering. We lose something everyday, I remember thinking, when Proust was recounting the episode of the tea and the petites madeleines. Man himself is a canvass of loss, an abyss whose depths hold so much light and darkness, impalpable, unfathomable.