writing about writing

When I write for this project, Ex Movere, it is always with presto, always with an eye to the moment and the language of the feeling, always in single sitting, always an idea given birth, and then I sit with it, I hold it in my hands and I read it over, and I never change it.

I don’t write unless I’m inspired, and I don’t write unless I feel what I have to say might be, in some form, inspiring.

I once told someone that I borrow my words like I borrow my thoughts; I design nothing, I write from outside myself, I let ideas come and go and I try to play host and entertainer to them as best I can.  I try to anticipate what they desire, and provide it without their asking of me.  In this way I see my travellers safe passage and a chance at respite, and in this way I am rewarded with their company and conversation.

Unfortunately, all the writing I’ve done in this last week will never see itself found on Ex Movere.  I’ve come to a point where *I* finally have something that needs saying, something to express, something personal and from within, and sadly, something indescribable – and so this artist has finally been forced to take up his brush and paint.

The process of letterwriting is one foreign to me; as I say, my relationship with words is one of symbiosis and friendship – they are there when I need them, and I’m there for them too, as such I’m a no loss whenever for words, and I’m never left without something to say.

But to write *this* letter, to *this* woman…  words are not enough.  The process has exhausted me, I write to her not with exhuberance but with solemnity.  Truth rarely wears a smile, for truth feels neither good nor bad about it’s facts or outcomes.

I am trying to be better than my words, for her.  For someone who no longer has to try much at all at anything, I am so grateful for my failures here, and yet, so wretched to have failed at a task so necessary to succeed at.

And so I write, and I write, and I have found where my ‘Delete’ key is, and I craft, and whittle, and add and subtract, and I paraphrase and then elaborate, and in the end, I think I’ve painted..  me.

I hope she can bear the reflection.  Dum spiro, spero – again.

~ Driz

play

Serenity is not a still, peaceful meditation amidst the storm and chaos; it is the grace and humility one learns as a leaf in the wind, carried up and around, content with it’s fate left to fate.  We feel ‘right’ with our feet on the ground, our fingers curled around the hanging straps of the subway car, our waists bound by the roll bar on the rollercoaster.  We feel ‘wrong’ when weightless, when dreaming, when out of control.

I say damn the anchors.  I say let’s try to become beautifully wrong.  Say the wrong thing, eat the wrong thing, walk the wrong way, sing an awful song.  Sing the very first song you ever sang, off key, messy, half-forgotten lyrics.  Something honest.  Let’s get it out, let’s help our exterior facade try to compromise with our disgustingly compressed inner selves.  Let’s look, and act, and dance about with the depravity, false confidence, strong, indefensible convictions, impatience, undiscipline as our child’s soul would have us dance.  Let’s take our demons for a walk once in a while so they don’t soil the carpet.

I won’t give up my demons, because I’d lose my angels too.  My only gift I value is my gift of thought, my parallel, rational, absurd, comical thought.  Life as tragedy is perceived through our role in the act, and transcribed and translated to our senses by life as satyr play, a comic, a farse.  Our fantasy, our perception.  There is structure to a comedy of errors; and indeed, we are errors of god if little else.  The right line, the right movement or mannerism; it’s all in the script.  I say eat the fucking script, and spit out whichever line you want.

Make a little chaos, make a little beauty.  Fumble around with the clasp of a bra for the first time again.  Nobody is watching you, nobody cares how fast you slide it off.  She’s not impressed that you can go through the motions with precision; if you are precisely anything, you are precisely and deplorably proud.  Be in the moment, bathed in the darkness, awkward as fuck.  Get back to yourself, live and learn a little.

Suppose truth be a woman.  Well, she’s not judging you.  She doesn’t criticize your off-key song.  She doesn’t reject your awful poetry.  She eats the terrible meal you cooked for her with a smile.  Truth is our one love worth the courtship, and in it’s service, we cannot fail.  The truth of the matter is, even when you’re ever so fucking wrong, in how you act, in how you acted; in that purity of wrongdoing, I can find you ‘right’.

We are insects on a speck of dust.  Ants scurrying over the hill, moving at random, no discernable purpose, but acting in tandem and dance with one another.  I say embrace that chaos.  I say lose yourself in the crowd once in a while.  Leaf to the wind.  Join the chaos, breed a little silliness.  We exist in context of role in the play.  So play!

Play!

~ Driz

twenty-five degrees

I’m coming to realise that, these days, I enjoy what I speak about, but I hate how I speak, the language I’ve come to use in speech.  And while I enjoy how I write, I hate what I sit and write about, words in a vaccuum, talking to myself.

I work (that is to say, ‘the function of me is’) so much better when engaged.  I need someone there to laugh, or question me, or react.  It’s a humbling realization and an infuriating relationship.  I can only be me, when I’m me-in-context.  I’m sure I’ve written about that idea before, the self-in-context, the countenance-as-reflection.

The disappointed man speaks; ‘I listened for an echo and I heard only praise.’

Nietzsche.

When I read that idea, I initally thought the man was trying to teach, and just failed to get through to his students.  Now I’ve come to believe that he simply came to be disappointed with his reflection.  He got his echo, but hated how he appeared in their mirror.  He didn’t fail so much as his failure defined him; in what tinny, hollow echo he did receive he learned how he was received, and thus who he had become to those he loved enough to speak to.  The epitome of disappointment; the very depths.

I think people like me live and die by the echo.  When so much of the world is askew and a-slanted away from us, our necks become sore while living life at an angle.

I would trade my eyes for a conversation that matters, for a curious person who keeps me curious.  But when you have it all, all or any offering would seem miserly.

‘… I have gone about as a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune…’

Dante.

Us blessed are cursed to be blessed alone.  I could not stand to be ordinary, but for all my bluster and word, I’m simply lonely and handling it in a rather poor way.

And a silly idea that is, no?  Handling loneliness?  As if it’s a pain to be managed, a sickness to treat.  It’s worse; it is a fact.  If, I am; then, I am lonely.

What a choice!  To submit that I exist as I am is to suffer that I am no better off for it whatsoever.   Damned if I do, and damn the other half of the saying; for me to be me, is to do, and (it would so dreadfully seem) do alone.

It is terrible to live in such a world, where one designed to live is one designed to lonesomeness.

Sadly,

~ Driz

stalemate

I’m studying the pieces at the chessboard.  I’m the aggressor, working my pair of knights into a queenside castle.  I’m watching my step, moving forward slowly, but going for the win.

Now I’m thinking about my old kung-fu class.  We’re doing chi-sao, rotating hands, moving around momentum.  I’m ignoring my opponent, he is terrible, predictable.  I’ve already decided how to attack him, and I’m generating the opening in his rotation, gently, subtley.  

Then I stop, ask him to start again.  I should have hit him when I could.  But I chastise myself, for being so static, for deciding how I will act without asking for input.  I was going to act; not react.  I teach him instead.  I think that’s when it changed for me.  I teach him to give me nothing to react to.

For when no action is taken, harmony should remain.

I’m back in meditation, breathing deeply, imagining the fight, feeling my forearms tense, feeling my fingers claw up into the skin-and-bones-hammer of a tightly balled fist.  I fidget and flex my digits as I crunch them up, squeezing the air out of my clench, finding pockets of skin for my fingertips to nestle into.

The stack of tiles shatter into bits.  I recoil my fist quickly, feeling nothing at first, then the cold vibration of pain that comes after.

I take another breath, feel my tense posture, ask myself to release.  There is no fight.  There is nothing to hit.  I relax, open my eyes.

I’m standing still in the empty park.  I ran there, and my legs feel like they’ll give out at any minute.  I wheel around, my shin crashes into a tree trunk, it feels like my leg is going to break.  I kick again, bark chips off the tree.  I kick again.  I kick again, and my leg is going numb.

I can feel the warm phone on my clammy palm.  A tear or three stream down my cheek.  I drop it on the sofa, grab my jacket, walk into the night.

I move my bishop into a fianchetto.  Her face glows in the soft yellow light.  She’s dressed in her pajamas, and has a hot cup of tea in front of her.  The air conditioner roars in the background.

I’m sleeping on the balcony again.  It’s two in the morning and the cat is meowing at the window’s screen for me to come back in.

I drive my fists into the padded gloves.  I’m not even thinking anymore.  I’m fifteen degrees to the left of tired.  The strikes land in furious succession.  My knuckles are bleeding.

I’m hobbling home from the park, my leg is injured.  I’m thinking about why I pushed so hard.  I didn’t really know how I felt about that, or what it meant.

I move a pawn further up the board.  I didn’t think about why, I just felt that I should.

I’m blading down an empty street.  The wind is fierce.  I had just removed the brakes from the right skate, and the decline is intense.  This is the fastest I will ever be skating, and I move into a dangerous crossover as I take the turn onto an offstreet as fast as my ankles can handle it.  My friend thinks I’m crazy, and looks at me with a mixture of unchecked admiration and rational disapproval.  I don’t forget that look, I’ll see it again and again.

My buddy has tripped with the chest of drawers.  He was headed up the stairs.  I’m right behind him.  I grab him by his weight belt and lift him clear off the ground before I realized he slipped.  He gives me that same look.  I don’t know if I see a thought in his eyes, or if I put that thought there, but I feel like a brute.

I’m in my high school weight room.  I’m pushing 290 on the shoulder press.  A crowd has gathered, and the ricketly old machine creaks and squawks as I push up and out.  My breathing is slow, measured.  I’m thinking half of these people can’t spell the word ‘pancreas’.  I’m wondering what I’m doing here.

My breathing is slow, measured.  I’m back where I started, tense, frustrated, on the offensive again.  I command myself to relax, and resume my meditation.

I hear the clack of the keys as I type.  I never look at the keyboard, but I type with two fingers.  Somehow the keys are always where I ask them to be.  Thank god for small considerations, I suppose.

I hear the bass rumbling in the nightclub.  I feel my feet move as I dance.  I’m still wondering what I’m doing here.

This is the seventh lap around the track.  I don’t remember when it changed, but I swear I used to have trouble running a single lap.  I’m not even breathing heavy at this point.

I wrote my father a letter.  I told him, what a man actually *is* tends to betray itself when he’s no longer able to show what he’s able to *do*.  I wonder briefly if I envy that sentiment.  I don’t really feel like showing what I can do anymore.  I don’t know if I’m bored, or just tired.

I move into checkmate.  I’ve won seven games straight.

I sit down tonight at the chessboard and I can’t figure out my third move.

Did I really just outright forget how to do this, or was I really just *done* with chess?  I never forget anything.  Stuff just crawls into the shadows of my mind, ready for psychotic recall when I command it to the forefront.

Was I a different person back then?  Was I better?  Was I worse?  I was different.  Or maybe I am different now.  Fucking christ.

I feel like I’m no longer me.  I feel like a scholar of who I once was, and a teacher of the lessons that I taught myself.  I think those half-tamed demons of the mind finally demonized me.

Maybe I was really just done with it.  All the rest of my explorations have always ceased once I’m scratched out their map.  Maybe I’ve really done it, maybe I’ve put down the pen, and the parchment, and the compass and square, and the needle and the fucking haystack, and now I just chase the horizon.

Should enlightenment have so much doubt?

But then, should I ever learn so much pride I demand certainty?

~ Driz

death of time

This horrid, churning feeling I’ve been raped by for the last week, this death of an idea, death of a moment, has resulted in what I’m calling a death of time.  I just realized tonight we feel this soggy madness in many ways.

The pointless arguments between lover and lover, yelling past one another, complaining of different points.

The miserable inability to construct the fucking Ikea desk, with tab A supposed to fit in slot Y, but you can’t find the piece with slot Y on it.

The stupid, petulant nitpicking of one idiot to another, splitting the hairs of bald, meaningless words, again verbal victory taking precedance over any sort of communication.

The dead-time is the isolation, our sounds unheard, our loneliness made plain by the incurably miserable face in the mirror.  Our slow, inarticulate minds mumble out.. what?

I’m sorry I’m angry, I’m angry you’re sorry, I’m inspired to sit quietly, I’m encouraged to do nothing.  The running in circles around a square fucking track, cutting corners that wouldn’t matter to take, because you’re going to end up in the center of nowhere anyways.

These moments where we sit down to talk with our life, and then talk right past it, missing the mark, missing the point, missing…  the life, essentially…  We miss our lover, so we MISS our lover, and instead talk to ourself, right past them, straight to our impression of them, the impression we longed for and pined for; not the squawking and squabbling, internecine racketmonger in front of us, but the better version of itself, the parallel lover, the parallel idea.

Fixation on indifference amplifies our frustration to dramatic and intolerable stasis.  That is the death of time, the death of our thought, and the death of my idea.  I simply failed to communicate, and I’m sorry.  For every visit to these words, or any other on this site, I apologise again and again but without feeling.  My screeching wench; I blame you for your insipid noise, clatter and rape.

Like I said, I’m sorry I’m angry.

Perfect.

~ Driz

i cannot fucking remember

A few days back, I fell asleep with a sense of deep accomplishment.  I was lying on my couch, I was perfectly comfortable, listening to music…  I had a few candles glowing on the other side of the room.  I had a glass of cold water on the table beside me.  I was staring at the ceiling, and I had this idea.

It was like an entire post at once, it felt very poignant and charged, and I fell right asleep, thinking to myself, ‘Tomorrow I’m finally going to write something of worth.’  I was so certain that an idea this perfect, this connected and sharply formed, would last till at least the next day.

I realized the next evening, as I was having my dinner, that I had forgotten it completely.

I’ve been going out of my mind looking for it since Monday.  I’ve been short with people, ill-tempered and ornery.  I remember none of the details; I am only left with the ghost of it’s presence.  I feel haunted by my failure to preserve it.

Fuck.  How proud and bold one acts when he finds the answers he had looked for – in his haste to enjoy rest from the walk, he wanders off the path.

~ Driz

eight and four

It was after six, and the sun was setting across the ocean, painting all the clouds in reds and yellows.  The air was light, crisp, and tasted of the salt water.  We exited the car, I hopped over the guardrail and fence, and knelt at the edge of the rock face.

Twenty feet below, in this heaven-cut alcove in the cliff face, was a sight I could never un-see.  The waves would roll in, bottleneck, and swarm against the back wall, lashing up the rock face and kicking mist and spray into a hazy fog that seemed to hang in the air.  The last wave rolled back against the next one coming in, braiding their streams together.  Parts of the braid met transition so smooth that the chop and froth of the water was peeled back to reveal crystal cylinders of current, rolling one glistening sunbeam off the next, the abdominals of the melee crunched tight and appearing beautiful to my eyes.  The motion of it all ebbed and flowed, huge waves crashing up ten, fifteen feet higher than the top edge of the rocks, with impossibly quick currents blending in and out.

I stood up and stole my gaze away when I heard the kids call.  I returned to the roughly shaped wooden fence, and lifted them over, the older one, then the younger.  Eight and four years old at the time.

With a shaky voice I told them to hold the fencepost as I arranged myself at the cliff’s edge again, and motioned them over to me, one at a time.  They sat beside me as I wrapped my big arms around them, terrified out of my mind for their safety.  If you asked me in that moment to trade my life for peace of mind about what we were doing, I’d be scrambling for the pen to sign at the dotted line.

I watched them as they watched this painted canvas of the gods; I listened to the wind for a change in breeze and tempo.  I remember how wide my eyes had opened as they let in the light of the sunset and caught water’s reflections.  I remember feeling their young hearts beat in their chests as the watched the orchestral chaos below.

Belive this as fact:  There is nothing more beautiful than the innocent awe of a child.

When I could bear the fear no longer, I sat back on the flat rock and dragged the protesting kids back to safety on the other side of that rickety guard rail.

I meant to take another look for myself, but, for some reason which I cannot for the life of me remember, I didn’t.  I’m a fool.

What makes this memory so special to me is not in it’s uniqueness, or it’s stirring of my passion to be a father someday, or the intese beauty of the moment, or the subject matter itself, or the timing…  but that its one memory of many I have of it’s like.  There were many good times, full of trust, and enjoyment, and wonder.  There’s a history, and a story: one worth telling, recalling and revisiting.

My life has come and gone, and that which I loved and learned to live alongside has swept away with the brilliance and natural movements of those braided streams.  That life died slow, and in agony, and in gruesome enough fashion to well-balance the sublime and vital peaks at the high points of it’s pathway.

There’s so much argument about fighting the good fight, and getting back on the saddle, and how there’s more fish in the sea, and on and on this culture of survival goes.  I am content in my death.  I promise.  My days are spent in the meantime, the conversations with the boatman on the raft-ride across the styx.

What if our life really is just the dreamstate of, and free time during, our passage from options to oblivion?

Love,

~ Driz

coral and kiss

I’ve been reading poetry for the last two hours, and I’m doing so in a state far different than I normally would.

I usually bring such ceremony and form to my reading, to find a lighting, and a spot in time, and a spot in my chair where everything just fits, and I read and take it in, and I sort of float around. I think tonight is different, it feels grittier, heavier. I’m exhausted, I’ve been working out all day, stretching, exhausting myself, trying to get to a different place, to break through the cocoon wall and force it just a little further; six steps past sick paths, seventeen degrees south of midnight.

I read this line just now, and fuck, it clicked with me, and now I have something to write about. I’ve been kicking and punching all afternoon and evening, the mad child’s tantrum, and it hurts to walk and take deep breaths, and this line clicks in with my grisly visage, the worn out, punch drunk boxer, swinging at shadows with intent sans dignity.

from It Is Not The Beauty I Demand

13 These are but gauds; nay, what are lips?
14 Coral beneath the ocean-stream.

~ George Darley

Beautiful, no?  Consider the imagery?  The lips, the kiss, the oft-loved symptom seen for itself to be what it be: the side effect of the message – the pretty decorum and archway through and into love and soul.  Love the medium instead, this poem claims; the lie, the bittersweet and damned-to-die declarations instead.  The I love you that you sold your soul for.

I cannot, I sigh, but I would if I were to be.  I sink into the ocean-stream for the coral alone, I watch as it shapes and moulds the cool waters through it’s fingertips.  I watch as the water stirs it’s last, rushed past those painfully red lips, and settles into banality and formlessness.

My eyes aren’t grey enough and ready for such grey.

I think I’m finally realizing that there’s still colour left for me, red blood in my veins, in the wine-drenched kiss of the world.

And tears are coming to my eyes again, as I leave flowers at Hope’s emptying grave.

~ Driz

cemetery

I think I’m trying to force it tonight, force the words out, force out this feeling I’ve been wrestling with for the last month. I’m antsy, excitable. I’m squirming and squeamish. I try to relax, and my thoughts are clouded, and my vision is muddled, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, or if I do, in those brief moments I become aware of it, I forget again and return to my swamp.

I was six feet away from a bull snake tonight. Snakes terrify me, and I stared it in the face, as if a different person sat where I sat, and I explained to him that the fear was real. I think he looked at me, looked callously through me, as if I was a child he’s grown up from.

I’m going to try sushi for the first time tomorrow. I’m scared; I don’t think I’m going to like the taste, I have no idea what I’ll order. I’ll be ten minutes early to the reservation, watching myself walk in, fidgeting, uncomfortable.

I’m spending time talking, saying nothing. I sit in quiet and I don’t know where it ends. I feel so scattered, split apart, the light of my feelings and ideas rending me and ripping me in all directions. I have so much time, I’m drowning in time, my freedom enters my mouth and nostrils, suffocating me with possibility.

I stand in front of the mirror. I smile, it’s a fake smile. I adopt a miserable scowl. Another lie. I’m neither; I’m me. I flex my muscles, and I see strength. I rub my palms together and my hands have become soft; too many nights my grip eroded by my errant caresses of the faces in my dreams.

I remember the feel of her arms, impossibly smooth and cool to the touch.

I don’t feel strong, and I don’t feel weak. I don’t feel happy, and that thought makes me smile.

Am I getting there? This whirlwind of motionlessness? This incredible, painfully centering feeling? People are coming in and out of my life, I feel like I’m the only one standing still. But I know, I feel in my heart, that when my eyes shut and I take a step, they’ll all slow down around me, to a terrible crawl, and I’ll be wandering for the rest of my days.

I will walk forth into fear, I suppose, but it’s not a choice *I* made. My me-to-come is here already, and he’s running the show until I learn how to. Opportunity will no longer see me sit idle, apparently. I’ve been evicted and ejected from my high horse, and I’m back in the trenches. But the war ended. I lost it, long before. I get ready to charge again, to fight for what I wanted… but I empty my rifle and I roar at the dead friends and dreams all around me that I want it no longer.

They rise, and leave me to my silent field, and silent screams. So I wander, and I take that first step, and it leads me in tears to the only tombstone in this nightmarish place.

Hope, that ever-so-delicate gypsy magician; I stare in silent horror at her motionless, porcelain figure.

I shut my eyes, I shut out the light. I promise with a clenched fist: There is no madness in hoping for hope, in praying for a life after death for the only beauty that makes me feel alive.

~ Driz

trust issues

I sacrificed some hours and some misery in the name of a smile tonight, talking about and talking through life with someone I’ve come to consider my best friend.

What an insane title: ‘best friend.’ It’s one *hell* of a thing to say about someone else, and so pregnant with respect and value, but the only people who thought to come up with and use that label are people who have to forcefully divide a kelp from the chaff and detritus that is their social circle, and give them a title because their splendor isn’t visible enough without it.

Things that are, are what they are. But either way, there it is, I talked with my best friend tonight. He’s the one that got me reading this Watchmen book, a story I’m still enraptured by and struggling with. I tried to describe to him what I’m trying to do with my life, and with my writing, and my living, and my teaching, and I think I did a poor job with it.

When exploring the psychological profile of one of the characters of the book, the book reprints a fictional article that this character published, talking about ornithology, the study of birds, and his fixation with owls. He describes the process of the owl’s hunt, the isolation of the bird, the mad, insane screams into the night, the wide-open eyes reading the darkness like a menu, dropping silently into the lives of the other animals and then making his mark with an unholy noise and a talon to the throat. This is what I am, this is my hunting call, my impact, and my splash, and my crazed, unreasonable choice I make.

But I no longer land my talons upon any sort of prey. I simply soar, and I hunt, and I catch… and release. I paralyze with my hoarse death-call, just to remind the field mice that death follows them; so live while you can, little mice.

My talons only tense when you doubt. When you struggle and dare. And grip harder as you fight. But my secret is plain to see, from anyone who reads my words, and from my best friend who understands me and remains unflappable in the face of my plumage and my battle-cries… I will not kill.

I just need you to understand that if it wasn’t me, practicing my hunt on you and reminding you to defend yourself, it would be someone else, who isn’t so generous with his strength, who isn’t so fair, and doesn’t consider the other side of the deal, the prey’s perspective. If it wasn’t me, that hunts you, it would be someone who doesn’t believe in you, who doesn’t respect your potential, and who will take you, thrashing about, into the night, never to wonder again what you might have become.

Nasty, brutish, and short. Even if all I accomplish is to numb you lot to the war-cry and fear, you’ve at least come to understand that you cannot live in fear, and delusion, and decadence, and comfort… and by default, must simply learn to live.

And they’ll hate me for it, my friend. They always do, in one way or another; I breed resentment, always, in the end. But nothing ever ends, this is what I understand where they don’t. They hate me in the end, and I count that as their beginning.

~ D