Which hearts shall I break?

I lent him weapons, and a second face...

Hallucinations come, are without number...

No one is here, and yet someone is...Shall I disappear?

His kisses and embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind. I got used to it. I saw us as two good children, free to stroll through Heavenly sadness...

Love must be reinvented. That much is clear...

How simple it is, to become caught in the web of illusions others project onto us. Like getting lost in a house of mirrors, bumping into a million reflections stretching back to infinity, turned around and around until you can't be sure if you're the image or the real thing; we can vanish entirely. We can become so fragmented and compartmentalized that we wear a different face for every occasion, all of them ill-fitting, locking away the parts of ourselves that others might find displeasing until we cannot be sure we exist at all without the gaze of another to tell us who we should be.

We wish to be loved and praised, we want to feel that we are part of some all-consuming and shattering romance, or failing that we'd at least like to feel as if we belong in the world. If we want this badly enough it's no great matter to assist in our own confinement, the little amputation required to fit an ungainly foot into the glass slipper, the emptying of the will it takes to become one of many cells in a hive. We're adept at erasing and re-drawing ourselves over and over again, sketching in a personality so tenuous it's nothing but a mass of crosshatching and ghostly afterimages.

As mutable and ill-defined as our own personalities can be, we would prefer that other people remain who we think they are; when they change too much, too quickly, it calls everything into question--the bonds we build so carefully, the contours of a loved one's life we fit into so well, a routine we thought stable as bedrock until the foundation shifts and slides away. Suddenly the picture is canted, and we're reminded that no matter how close we come to each other, there is always a door whose key we don't hold between.

In the absence of religion, people cling to their belief in the redemptive power of relationships with a passion; I can save her. Through love and understanding, I will save myself. When there is failure we feel as if we've been cast out, fallen from grace and drowned in our own separate hell.

And so we're cautious, sending signals out from the tower in the hope they'll be received as we intended. We don't rock the boat, for fear of capsizing it. Compromise is necessary in any kind of relationship, but when it reaches the level of pathology and an identity is constructed entirely from self-sacrifice, when we're nothing more than a shadow on the lookout for a praiseworthy shape to take, we become as insubstantial as Sylvia Plath's "living doll", a frame for others to hang their wishes on: "You have a hole, it's a poultice. / You have an eye, it's an image.".

The eye is always voracious; the heart desires to beat for another despite the wounds it's so likely to encounter. It's easy to break apart, by ourselves and in our connection to others, and easy to forget that at the center is a place of power and self-reliance we can arm ourselves with, if we rid ourselves of the fears that nag like a thorn in the side.

Climbing up a bloody great hill.

The President appeared on my tv the other night to deliver an address to the nation regarding the current financial crisis, and what action his administration and Congress plan to take to remedy it. In short, he wants us to do this.



Seems just a touch ironic when almost the whole of his two terms has been dedicated to persuasion through terror.

This poster was comissioned by the British government's Ministry of Information on the eve of their involvement in the war with Germany, and was meant to convey to the public an "attitude of mind" appropriate to the unknown and very dangerous situation they'd confront in the days and years ahead. Mr Bush is well-versed in the rallying cry of a well-timed piece of propaganda, and this country has, up to a point, been agreeable in the face of his decision to use its people as cannon-fodder. Our George, however, is not George VI; there is no Churchill on the horizon. And this is no longer a matter of stoicism and the acceptance of hardships with an eye to the greater good, and the surety that comes from suffering for the common cause. This is a matter of people's money, and I'm thinking it's not going to be a simple matter of telling everyone to buck up this time.

As I listened to the President I was aware of the fact that he wasn't talking to me. He was talking about mutual funds, mortgages, retirement accounts, and credit flow. I have none of those things, am in no danger of losing what I don't have, and so don't really figure into the equation. And it seems that more and more people might be joining me here among the ranks of those who really aren't a part of the fabric of American society. Clearly, to be of matter within it is to be tied to those slips of paper; when you take away a person's money, you take away their reality. Words are cheap to begin with, but even more so now. I'm wondering what words people will be speaking to themselves if they lose even a part of what they always assumed was so solid, if the institutions they believe in fail them. I'm wondering how much they can lose and still function, and what will happen once a little too much is taken away.

In Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes about his experiences as a calvary officer in World War One. Early in the story his regiment is shelled by the Germans, his colonel is killed, and he is seriously wounded; somehow he escapes and makes his way to the rear, where he's put to work at a ration distribution point. He's just seen most of his fellow soldiers slaughtered, but remains full of his usual apocalyptic joie de vivre, until he's confronted with the sight of the regiment's butchers at work: "The squadrons were fighting tooth and nail over the innards, especially the kidneys, and all around them swarms of flies such as one sees only on such occasions, as self-important and musical as little birds.
Blood and more blood, everywhere, all over the grass, in sluggish confluent puddles, looking for a congenial slope."
And it's this moment, finally, that proves too much for him; he faints dead away.

It's interesting how we can become accustomed to almost anything, how we can ignore what horrifies us for so long, function despite the untenable situation staring us in the face, right up to the moment when it changes context and we see it as if anew, through defenseless eyes. It's interesting what happens to people, and what they'll do to survive, when that last, small piece of belief is taken from them.

The pure products of America / go crazy.

And let's suppose for a moment we, I, do try to get free and fly off from that common morass the heart is so prone to settling in. Let's say this is more than just an exercise in literature, tarting up the corpse so it won't look quite as dead and we may admire it before closing the casket. Let's say I'm serious, let's say I'm working in the only ungoverned zone left to us; ideas as tangible agents of change. The age of philosophical and artistic manifestos is long over, and no matter how you slice it they were just another set of boundaries in novel costumes; we, the undersigned artists, exclude any vision not compatible with our own, and vow to slump into complacent old age once we've replaced our predecessors as the established brand-name of innovative thought. We have the formula, and we're locking it in the vault.

Is the entire aim of beginning to work the promise that we'll eventually reach an end? What end is there to reach when what we apply ourselves to isn't a product we can place on the market, when we step outside the arena of profit and loss, when there is no criterion against which we can measure how far we've come?

I wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I wanted to be a great writer, but I never asked myself why. Here in America we have a mania for producing, we're nothing without evidence of our usefulness to society at large, various slips of paper bearing large numbers and a string of polished bullet points. The money in the bank, the manuscript in the drawer we're sure will make us the next overnight sensation, the portfolio we rest our fate on, tidy columns reassuring us that all this will be worth it in the end; these things tell us that we exist, that there is reason and an order we can follow if we apply ourselves with a single-mindedness. I had my own work to do, a sense of purpose attached to my own slips of paper and the promise of some measure of success I believed they contained.

But I didn't know what form I expected that success to take. I was published a few times, in some small magazines, and that was pleasant. I participated in readings and workshops, I went to school briefly, I learned how to learn, I was on the right track. Sometimes I was satisfied with what I made, most times not, but as I had been told all writers feel this way I was undeterred. I had a product, I was producing myself through my writing.

This is the point in the story where I'm supposed to say that I was a colossal failure and couldn't understand why, or that I was a great success and was disheartened by the futility and emptiness behind the great machine that is the world of publishing. I was neither of those things. What I did was realize I had a desire that I had channeled into writing, but that writing couldn't possibly contain. And if writing wasn't the answer, then all of the trappings associated with it certainly weren't what I was after. I could go on to achieve my mature style, get a grasp on my subject-matter, maybe become part of a scene with like-minded people, or failing all that I could give up writing forever and get a real job. I chose neither.

There is no end to this story, and there is no end to the desires that don't tell us why they belong to us. We all have our own, and it's the lacunae in all of them--the missing text in those slips of paper that stack up to simulate a life, what is left to die outside the closed doors of the manifesto, the spaces we're left to fill in once we recognize we're not seeing the whole picture--that I'm trying to take the measure of. This might not be so productive; it's certainly maddening. William Carlos Williams wrote:

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness

--and moving towards that elusive "something", out of order, without a terminus, is the work of a lifetime.

What holy image are we attacking?

I feel so forsaken I orient my instinct for perfection on any sacred image...

--What can I do? I know work; and science is too slow. How prayer gallops, how light rumbles...

Take heed, soul. Don't fall prey to sudden salvation.

No hymns now. Don't lose the ground that's gained...

The moment we surround an image, a person or an idea with an air of inviolable sanctity is the moment we obstruct the very release that worship is thought to engender. To even attach oneself to an image, subscribe wholesale to a prepackaged movement or philosophy, or search in the eyes of another for our reflection eliminates any hope of transformation; we don't need inquisitors or zealots to kill us by gradual amputation, we do it to ourselves.

The human heart finds comfort in numbers, clear and concise rules, a grid the mind may fit itself and what it encounters into, a patch of ground where one is sure of where they stand and where there are few shadows and fewer choices. There is great comfort in belonging, faith and the light of logic. None of us are beyond the pull of the heart, there are no buddhas or saints walking among us. What there is no lack of are institutions, categories, tribes and authorities promising us that in a few easy steps, we too can be on the fast track to enlightenment, popularity and a spotless soul, if only we choose to follow the correct path.

So we have a cup surrounded by identical cups and embraced by climbing vines; we have a heart within a system, but the circuit is interrupted, the arteries that are essential to its functioning never reach the mind. Pursuing those comforts of the heart without questioning why and blind faith in someone else's answers are a kind of brain-death; too often we're suffering from a sort of intellectual hypoxia, starving for a belief that will take our lives out of our own hands, euphoric with illusions that seem to lead to the promised land but instead lure us farther into ignorance.

Or we may see an individual nestled into the cushion of society, a church, a worldview built by someone else and controlled by a few, always at a remove from those they lead, always higher up the ladder. The cups arrange themselves into a grid, each indistinguishable from the other, vanishing into sameness.

The wall behind the couple on the Sun card is another grid, and the man on the left seems almost to be in the process of merging with it, his leg turned to stone, frozen in an odd angular gesture like a figure carved in bas-relief. The woman appeals to him, but what is it that she wants? This could be a moment of choice; will he follow her, is following the only means of action he has? They regard each other warily, the way animals sniff out a stranger, each looking into the eyes of the other to see themselves. When we cultivate a pleasing image or act only according to someone else's whims and expectations, we're in danger of trapping ourselves within it, dancing in lockstep with no room for improvisation.

We're so desperate to inject our lives and our actions with meaning. If we can't find one we're happy to surrender our own will completely, if only someone will give us an answer and light up all the corners we can't see. It's not a question of rebellion purely for the sake of rebellion; any disenchanted teenager, clothed in the correct partisan uniform, worshipping at the altar of their various pop- and counter-culture idols can fail to accomplish anything with that. It's a matter of being constantly in the act of revision, reappearing to ourselves the way the Star reappears, never finished unburdening herself, emptying in order to fill.

Words aren't sacred, not our own, not anyone's. Rimbaud understood this when he dismantled his own work in "Alchemy of the Word", old poems he resurrected but appearing, as Graham Robb says, "curiously hobbled: syllables have dropped out like stones from an old wall.". And in the holes he pried open he saw through to a space where "From human praise, / From common urges / You free yourself / And fly off accordingly.".