romantic after drinking also (makes) alone and artful

My head hurts. Today I went out to lunch with people known as "co-workers" and we plied ourselves w/ free beer and whiled away an easy couple hours, til W. Got paranoid and began whining about what his boss might do to him when he got back but by then the second pitcher was empty, so...

...Once we were outside I was immediately far drunker than in the restaraunt, a phenomena that continued as we entered the office, where I found even the hum of my trusty hard drive sounded uneven and malevolent.

The above story is copyrighted and intended for educational use only.

Trungpa (Chogyam) wrote about alcohol as a unique drug, one that simultaneously elevates and depresses - from the easy cameradie of one Tom Waits song to the head-in-toilet moan of the next. In the brewpub, I tended toward elevation - now - by a simple transition of physical space/a few minutes of digestive time, if there is anything "simple" about that - I find myself far more towards the depressed side. Slow and low. Sunglasses would be the order of the day, if I had a pair.

The best part of the lunch was watching these two moods nip each other's heels, giving birth to and cannibalizing their "opposite". How exuberant became sullen, how thoughtful turned giddy, its a carnival - and a carnival is its own cycle of dependent co-origination, its own web of constant shift. Like these philosophic turns...

But, friends, how much of what we write do we share: and how do we select those bits? The ones we can easily share, or the parts we are desperate not to share, the parts we have built extensive closets and sub-basements for, neatly boxed and presumably forgotten... but my work is totally honest - all this makes me sad. Sad-in-the-writing of it.

And I also know each one of us is writing towards and into a freedom (although some call it "power") we desire and are terrified of. Its the terrified of part that I am coming to experience more of right now - how it manifests in a censoring, a clipping away of that which doesn't fit with what I want to show (and has such good reasons for doing so, devious fucker) ... and how what I want to show becomes lesser, limited, more polite (in the sense of 'mannered' - that is, politically tailored), in so doing. I suspect its not just me waking up into consciousness of this, but I really don't know. Surely every writer has desires they acknowledge and bask in, and others they try to hide - desires both textual and more broadly lived. Studying at Naropa it was fascinating and often disturbing to see how writers - often quite celebrated ones - were inevitably "dirty snowballs" of consistency and contradiction - and how many of them seemed to be holding (tightly to various degrees) this very perverse (in a non-glamorous sense, perverse as in torturous) admixture together, goading it on, at all costs. As if there response to Plato's cave and the Buddha's journey was I have come so far and no farther. Ego-centric in the most basic, geometric sense: as if we needed to hold the planets in orbit about the sun like a steering wheel on the road.

And yet, writing this, I think back too on - when they were in their court (i.e. workshops) esp. - how much openness and flexibility and consideration they gave both to their own role and to us. The generalities are here - because a) I'm still feeling the beer and b) why name names? Impressions vary. For many years I was a completely idealistic sop, and it in many ways saved my life (it ruined it in the remainder). (Ego-centric)

I'm reading Julianna Spahr's thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs which has this decided ability to engage these sticky places, these contradictions. Pico Iyer quotes Leonard Cohen as saying that life is rooted in perplexity, that we bend around these perplexities like trees into the light. Juliana certainly is doing just that as, once again, she caps off an utterly distinctive "voice" with an utterly compelling subject. Turning over the relentless interconnection we rationally know binds all objects and subjects in the world is nothing new yet in doing so with such ruthless attention Spahr can never escape the rough limits of this logic: the unfinished business of alienation, private property, our equally relentless closures and turning-aways from all the "yous" before us. And that she does so simply, lyrically, both fully enmeshed in particulars and able to write richly on "love" and "war". This book is a dialectical rollercoaster, an omnivorous beastie that will break into your pantry and clean you right out. For which you will be very thankful. Having worked and re-worked my own responses to the war, having been horrified and dismayed and out-gunned by the political establishments of this country, the economic establishments, and the military establishments ("the three-legged stool") I still came to this book unconscious of how deeply and persistently scaring this war, this administration, this environmental policy, this habit of not looking each other in the eye on the bus, has been for me. It never stops. A poem, a book, a night of fucking, these can be acts of resistance - as tender and impotent as they may seem: and, in a world of hegemonically assigned meanings, they do seem so (unless say, portrayed in a film, where they seem heroic). This book dives into that turning, each line a new shade - a new particular, the situation evolving at the very edge of our ability to articulate it, always threatening to be beyond us, out of our control. I don't know another writer who so plumbs the perceived limits of our autonomy, or how the damned world of media reference incessantly bumps into, pours upon the intimate world of parrots outside the window, a lover next to you in bed. And how that second, piped-in world claims dominance, claims objective hegemony, claims to be the (not a) real (deal), and my world, your world, our worlds, slip into the unsaid corners, leftovers, detritus, nada. But isn't the media distant, manufactured, bogus and endlessly distractive/murderous/exploitative? Don't we have a voice in it except to gobble it willingly down? Spahr writes, with tense and eloquent dignity, from here, this ripped open seam out of which I bleed daily.

I read this book for half an hour in the bathtub last night and it was easily the highpoint of my day, even though the bluelights we've strung up in there are barely enough to distinguish soap from toothpaste, let alone letters of type. But the calm, even lines - which I am reading as a lyric prose, essentially hybird (and endlessly fluid in possibility - hence "omnivorous"), her praising, decrying - and even naming - of unlikely things (anaphoras and litanies of attesting, of witness), her investigation of distance as a sort of spiritual balm, all strikes me as something marvelous. Wrought, but not a fraud.

Which makes me feel all the funnier for my inability to go up an talk to Juliana when I see her about the city - she teaches a town away, across the bridge at Mills, and I've ran into her three times now. Baseball aside, 4 will be the number that I step up to the plate.

Trailing slimy seaweed word-strands, and having just been handed 401k info, I bid yous goodnight.