x-ray of an addled mind
a personal maelstrom of abstractions and tangents
1 Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst by Remedios Varo (1961).
Tangents and spirals and interconnected loopholes
of the personal and the surreal,
freely associated and
written on a phone whilst moving,
then edited on a laptop whilst sitting,
then churned and burned and redacted
over the course of a few weeks.
Conventions have been tossed.
Loquacity is relative to the immensity
of thought that transpired from minute to minute,
hour to hour
and day to night to week.
These are prose.
Both dainty and dirty
and imperfect
like me.
AN AUTUMN WALK
[The water called and asked a series of rhetorical questions, one streaming into another as it does when I've spent one too many days away from its depths, no stone unturned in the river that runs through me.] I read, I wrote, I exercised: I fed the twins a large heaping of food— two eggs today instead of one— sustenance they digest in wholly mysterious and disparate ways, each swallow invoking a call and response between the gut and the brain, anima and its less animated foil, the white and the yolk. It only took about ten minutes to feel more alive and notice the blue of the flame still burning on an empty belly made of iron. I often cook to the beat of my own drum, improvising out of necessity versus real skill or inspiration gleaned from the worn and weathered pages of timeless recipes handed down from generation to generation, etched by a hand that no longer exists, a wink of this, a dram of that, don’t forget the... but no, my grandmothers and great grandmothers bore too many burdens in their lifetime— children and war and vices I'll never quite understand— for cooking to be anything more than evaporated milk and canned goods. When it comes to food, I oftentimes eat at home, or not at all, and standing up, about two inches from where the food was made, avoiding the ritual of the table as if it was anything but kind. For me, eating is not always the joyous act of sensorial delight, nor the prolonged moment of aesthetic decadence that personifies food into rich personalities that keep me company; instead, it's droll and dull, a hurried scene of piteous self-preservation nobody, not even I, ought to witness; a comical charade of body and mind out of sync that looks bad and feels bad and yet, I do it anyways, but not always. If the body is a repository, what, then, is the soul if not, too, a void to be filled— or not to be? I don't like the mechanics of how I often cook, nor the neuroses that often comes with it. I wish recipes weren't something I resisted to follow, that my perverse apathies towards posterity or my proclivity for unintentional innovation wasn't confused as skill— I say I love to cook but nobody knows that cooking (for me), like cleaning, is usually a ruse for curing an obtuse anxiety perhaps ancestral in nature and certainly not one I can fully describe to a therapist. I should be on my way now, walking.
… To have clearer answers to “basic” questions that, in fact, are not very basic at all: what I love to do, what I love to eat, what I love to cook, ought to be as simple as boiling an egg, which I know how to do very well, soft or hard or just about any texture in between; but to answer these questions, sincerely, not basically, takes an algebraic formula of self-awareness and perhaps self-love that I’ve, admittedly, not yet figured out. I was never good at math. I love to learn, to eat ceviche in the summertime, to cook coq au vin when I'm sad— you see, I'm not totally worthless or clueless or apathetic— I have some basic answers for some not-so basic things. Sometimes, I'll even err from the norm, host a gathering and put my apron on, remember the joy of the ritual where presence is paramount and candles recall what love is all about. Sometimes it's just that simple. And these small moments, in the pages I do keep, weathered and stained and mostly full of nonsense, are indeed rare and precious memories, immortalizations of Time's evanescence; vital nutrition for the ineffable thing that animates this mortal body, and yours. But mostly, I feed myself as an act of self-preservation, to keep my muscles from deteriorating, the fat from stretching, though it stretches still, and the brain from dimming, or attacking the body, or ceasing to function altogether. It isn't about my weight or the weight of all the uncertainty I face, it's about feeling ever connected to that thing of unknowable proportions, enmeshed within the body armour that is implacable and amorphous, a thing we can sense but that cannot be sensed beyond pure feeling, the thing that, as it were, differentiates the living from the dead. Is nourishing the sentience of a being not a pure and simple act? As tides do the moon, that wax and wane without thought, our whole being cradled by a Womb largely unknown? “This is presence: To embrace the foil of human toil, to be— to allow," says the thing that embodies the winds I call to when I am lost and out of tune. The thorn of resistance that pricks with each step, yesterday’s sullen perfume that sticks still to each open pore, to the agency and artistry and ancestry I’m supposed to exhibit day in and day out, is as crippling as the pills women so often take or the copper coils they so often bear to allay the very pain that became something much greater than what it was before. Being unemployed isn’t so terrible; I’ve managed to live a rather “rich” life as a socioeconomically “poor” person who relies on Medicaid and credit cards I wish I didn’t have. It’s the reality of everything else that suddenly feels more terrible than before: Because the act of making money, doing, is now replaced by the act of not losing my mind, being, and all the things I cannot control, having, haunt me like the things I wished I had started three years ago. Or more. Even turning off the internet, or deleting my social media won’t save me from this goth-like optimism. A walk in the park, however, just might. Move a muscle, move a thought. It is now an acute anxiety of the soul running through me like a river gone mad. I must leave! Each minute crawling into a hole I can no longer see. Every feigned hour of productivity in the serfdom of paranoia washing away Time itself; another hour then another month goes by; another lost opportunity to be, then do, then have— not the other way around. Not the other way around! I promise you, I’m trying! I wondered as I walked how many others, how many miserable minds echo these very thoughts more invasive than the eyes with no name, two letters long. Can you guess what? With my eyes I waved hello to the hissing trees and autumn air as a bird replied in lullabies and a siren passed, slow and cacophonous. Who else will die today? A thought as pervasive as the pollution we create, kneeling at the altar of wokeness begging for mercy, but from what? Sometimes I laugh when I'm nervous and I really shouldn’t be laughing and I feel like dying for a little while because nothing could be funnier than dying and nothing could stop one from laughing like death. Back to the present. Immersion overcomes me, I am no longer my mind, but my body, a pale skinned, feminine body, a soul in a glove nonchalantly walking along, eavesdropping to what wants to be heard, to the big body also made of water and soul and half forgotten truths. I've edited this poem thrice or more murdering whole passages and words on this corrosive device that can never get them back; I do kill time and I do kill words, but I'm not really a murderer. It's a shame the things we choose to erase, to ignore, to abstract in our second belly known as the brain. Editing our words, our lives, this is what we do to our thoughts: redact, redact! And rewrite and reform and cross out and scribble and wait until someone sees us, likes us, hates us, before we do it all over again until we’ve lost ourselves so majestically so completely in the red and blue and black ink of a body that is no longer ours, but somehow, everyone else’s. Who is the I of now you ask? Good question. Where does the mind go when the head's been cut off from its supply? When reality becomes mired with myth? Purgatory? This feeling it's like listening while talking, and standing in the middle of a door that's revolving, or telling a partial truth to someone you love: Everything overcast, channel zero on the television, static noise, static silence. When the mind leads each act— the listening, the talking, the shoegazing— we become a fraction of our potential, each act less potent than the one that preceded it, splintering each sound into two parts less powerful than their whole. When the body leads, intuition prevails. How does one manage the one that got away, and ended up as the invisible fraternal flame? ... The middle is my safe space. I was born in the middle, the third child of four. It knows no bounds, the middle, and the bounds know no limits. Apparently, it's all made up. Apparently, everything (but not everyone) is not so simply, tolerated, dictated, or plagiarized, ad infinitum— until an organ breaks, and a planet explodes and the system goes down and nothing makes sense anymore. But did it ever? But even the trees, with their roots and trunks that soar, have their cycles and wars, and do not resist middle age, or the inconvenient truth of their demise more inevitable than world peace. (A pipe dream so long as we exist...) But what of the trees that lie? And what of the rocks that stand? Or the Tonle Sap river that flows in both directions? Sometimes, I convince myself of a truth not whole, but partial: Close a blind eye as a card slips through my opponent's fingers, and disappears; the joker winks, as gravity winks back; it is we who define our wins and losses. I've completely lost my train of thought on this walk, on purpose I suppose— Standing here, walking there, in conversation with the chorus of my environment and a voice somewhere deep within. Another bird, another couple hand in hand, a fox in abeyance, taking note of its surroundings. What is a leg without a body? Swoosh An eye without a skull? Squish Two hands with no fingers to clasp? Splash But a memory, a signal, a bag of bones without a home? To spot a single leg without a body, bleeding, or an eyeball hanging from the arm of a tree, blinking: this is the carnage of a bomb this is your surrealistic pillow that sings as your mind orchestrates your mares and your heart orchestrates your dreams. Innocent children and families, dispersed and disconnected, their bodies and homes decimated, limbs and memories missing, every stolen hour of every unimaginable day. How horrid we are to our own species. It's easy to forget how much death surrounds us, and how little life we have to live. Sometimes, I don't listen because listening means suspension of the mind, and I was taught to question everything, and I was taught things I can no longer remember, but somehow they've stuck with me like roots do a tree— because I, too, am dying. What does it mean to have all senses truly activated, engaged, cultivated, at once? Like cells and stars and hearts ablaze in syzygy?
As I continued my stroll, I noticed my negligence in the reflection of the clouds, and my left ear in the hollow of the tree, and my attention towards the gaze of a swan too far away to give bread to. Bread I didn't have. I paused, in reverence of the magic of chlorophyll, and exhaled— admiring the leaves, their rustic reds and vibrant oranges and calming swathes of sun-dappled yellows. Kids laughing and crying, swans squawking, the flapping of wings and rustling of leaves, the jangle of a lone dog's collar, the humming of a hurried city in the throes of partial truths and rising costs of living. How the fuck does anyone feel anything anymore? Bombs and genocides and the tireless oppression of people with whom we share tissues and souls and air and sun and night and day. A plane glides over the sky. The clouds continue their dance. I swing my legs back and forth and close my eyes, to listen to feel to try, for a minute, just to “be” and allow the water and I to become a majestic lake— until I inevitably get bored and remember all the things I inevitably ought to do and the meal I ought to eat and the people I ought to call when I get home, again. Even if here, in a way, is also home.