Running through the streets of this city is never a task to take lightly, especially when you're chasing someone. Your eyes have to move fast, back and forth between the person running from you and the street full of potholes so large you could curl up and sleep in them.
You know the big bang never happened here? It was a bang everywhere else, but here it was more like a loud, wet thwap that started everything – like the sound a soggy pancake makes when you throw it against a bowling ball that's been dipped in grease.
Let me fall into the broken waves of your absence, twisted in the soft wings of your malignant ships.. as they sail in the frozen crystals that cover my eyelashes.. gently crashing. your memory, rusting the endless tunnels of my mouth.. shaping slow breaths into my dead lungs. i’ve been waiting for a taste; the death of your neglect. a wreckage of sunken ships swallows my dreams, in my desperation i embrace the planet of this silence. when i wake…. i can still taste the fruitless attempt of forgetting. it is our language, familiar, muted, splintered. -eileen garcia
My life is measured by this glasse, this glasse By all those little Sands that through passe And see how they press, see how they strive, which shall With greatest speed and greatest quickness fall And see how they raise a little Mount, and then With their own weight do level it again But when they have all got thorough, they give over Their nimble sliding downe, and move no more Just such is man whose houres still forward run Being almost finished ‘ere they are begun; So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we That ere we are, ought at all, we cease to be Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly And while we sleep, what do we else but die? How transient are our Joys, and how short their day! They creep on towards us, but fly away How stinging are our sorrows! Where they gain But the least footing, there they will remain And how groundless are our hopes, how they deceive Our childish thoughts, and only sorrow leave! and how real are our fears! They blast us still Still rend us, still with gnawing passions fill; How senseless are our wishes, yet how great! [...]
“…and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” – Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Thinking of the Caribbean this week, for obvious reasons. One of the happy aspects of surrealism most people don’t think of was that it opened the door to a number of poets and artists from the Third World. And not just because surrealism was about the “exotic.” Breton’s slanted idea of beauty confirmed what people of African descent suspected: that Western aesthetic ideals were incomplete and exclusive. Years in Louisiana, Florida, and NYC have given me a sense of identity with the Caribbean. But in the inevitable global paroxysm of sympathy after a disaster like this, and what will inevitably be its rapid fading from the awareness of the 24-hour news cycle, I get conflicted. Is there anything beyond a few friends and the coincidences of place (“spots of time”?) that have drawn my allegiance to Haiti and its neighbors? Artists of Negritude saw that “convulsive beauty” is appropriate to the Caribbean, with its precarious islands, diasporic cultural confusions, and political unrest. Likewise it is to postmodern America– [...]
“Because I’m a perfectionist, baby. And you can write that down. In fact, I’ll wait a minute while you do so.” -Bret Easton Ellis
we live on a half-lit stage, a concrete platform.. waiting it’s grand appearance, it’s ultimate performance.. dark & light, kissed infinitely by the sun. day becomes night, night into day- the anticipation of change, of an end, or a beginning. the cracks in the walls take their last breath, a soft exhale of tired days… we live in a dream of exploding hearts and hot streets. -eileen garcia
What’s the matter? we question a problem or situation at hand… Matter of factly… meaning actually in fact… Mind before matter. When researched, “The term matter traditionally refers to the substance that all objects are made of…” I can go further, yet substance is where we can stop. There is printed matter, abstract matter, atoms and electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are a the basic building blocks of a much more intangible thing, word, person, place, feeling, icon…. Linguistically, matter is “a situation, state, affair, or business: a trivial matter………. ….importance or significance… ..reason … things sent by mail …a substance discharged by a living body…” What then, matters? Seemingly everything and nothing, as all things are calculated in dealing with the presence or absence of matter. If matter didnt matter, would we exist? Would anything exist? With existentialism approaching, the multiplicity of what matter is, does, does not, and has, creates a sovereign world within six simple letters. Matter composes all things. Is matter therefore, an inadvertent creator or has society created a hell of a loaded bag of meanings for this word. Roland Barthes, an early 20th century thinker/talker/writer/reactionary and man of abundant critiques for the bourgeois, should be called [...]
Books make great holiday gifts. They’re not usually very big or expensive, though they can be both. And they can signal a regard for the receiver’s interests, intelligence, and aesthetic sense. This sort of multi-level communication is very much in vogue these days. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again (1975) is maybe the easiest book to give, at least in my library. Everyone loves it. So many people that it almost cuts down on the specialness of the book as a gift. Except for that it is an incredibly intimate piece of writing. Not exactly in the sense offered by the latest Kitty Kelley biography, which imagines the uncovering of salacious gossip as some kind of final or conclusive knowledge about its protagonist. And Warhol loved every porny detail, don’t get me wrong. The thing is this is a “philosophy”: a warm, funny, charismatic, and full view of the world, its workings and its workers. The chapters alternate between a transcript of a telephone dialogue between “A” and “B,” and loose collections of anecdotes and aphorisms. Both genres are longtime staples of philosophical writing: Plato and Rousseau wrote dialogues, Pascal and Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. In [...]
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