In Diegesis

I tend to think that I remember my willing of life to happen when I was 12 years old, at Andy Jackson’s birthday party. Andy Jackson was a bully who used to tackle and beat me up a good deal in 6th grade. (Of course, that’s not who he is or probably who even was, but hey – metaphysics is messy and who’s the author here?). He did beat me up and that’s a fact. Colin Bailey was my friend and he used to encourage Andy to do it. He gave me pain, and I learned how to not cry. Yeah, I did have to learn (I’ve spent most of my life learning this, and the last year i’ve spent trying to un-learn it). Years before, Shane Craker and I were getting changed into dry clothes after swimming at the YMCA and some boys decided to get their kicks by whipping us with wet towels. I cried; Shane didn’t. He was proud of himself and I felt ashamed. I remember wanting my mom to say that the injustice was the same and that the reaction didn’t make much difference, but she didn’t. I don’t remember what she said.

I remember twice that Andy tackled me in the snow. Pain feels weird in bundles of snow-clothes: muted, maybe like an Avalanches song, but poignant and effective, like an Avalanches song. Once was by the ditch behind my house (but in the elementary school’s property). I was running, Colin was chanting. I really can only remember the fear. I don’t even think it hurt all that bad that time, but the fear can make you cry – even after it happens and you’re not scared anymore, just hurt. Lying in the cold snow, but it’s not cold, because I’m wearing lots of cotton, it’s strange to think that after someone tackles someone else (intending for pain), they are lying on top of them in typically intimate fashion. I don’t remember much of Andy’s mass like, say, I know Erica’s mass, but Erica and I have cuddled a lot more…

Another time in the snow was behind Colin’s house. Again, it was the three of us and I don’t know what the hell we were doing, but of course it happened again, and this time I snapped. I leapt onto my feet only to fall back down onto my knees to pummel Andy with punches. I wanted to hurt him, I wanted to destroy his chubby face. I hit him with my soft gloves, and he laughed and Colin laughed. I cried and punched and they laughed harder.

Once we were in class (there was a storm outside and recess was kept inside), and Andy pushed me on the floor and he and Jimmy kicked me in the stomach and ribs. I crawled across the floor, looking for help; Colin was laughing – what else? I got up and got punched; across the wall, by the sink, jogging past the teacher’s desk, finally ending up in the corner between a tall filing cabinet and the wall, Jimmy stamped his four half-fingers hard all over my stomach and chest. Then the weasel with the southern accent, Weston, came over and dug his thumb into my shoulder just because at that moment, he felt like being a buzzard for pain. Days later, I would punch him in the cafeteria, because I was friends with the other kids. He didn’t even mind.

Once I was just minding my own during recess, and near the end of the period I got slammed harder than ever before by Andy. We must have both flown at least a few feet. I learned later that Colin and Andy had been on the opposite end of the playground from me (about twenty to thirty yards) when Colin said something to this effect: Andy, nail Ian as hard as you can. I laid on the ground, tears stained on my face while the rest of the kids went inside. After everyone had gone, I got up, wiped my face with my hands and returned to class. (Later I would hear Colin say joyfully in front of me: that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen Andy run, and he’s a big guy!)

I don’t know why I went to his birthday party. It’s hard to explain, especially because I really can’t remember it all that vividly, but I do know that I really appreciated these guys just a year before. In the 5th grade, we had lots of laughs together: Andy cheated off me for history tests, Colin was as friendly and gentle as can be, the three of us were in a group called CIA (after our initials) when Mr. Sperry held the paper airplane tournament. Andy threw a plane that I had designed and it stayed in the air for a record-breaking 23-seconds. I guess everything has to crash eventually.

It was out in the woods, on Andy’s family’s hunting ranch. To this day I recall that spot of forest as one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, but then again, wasn’t it some ancient Greek that believed we find beauty in the face of terror? To me now the night is a blur, and I guess I should say at this point that eventually I’ll write this all as beautifully as I can – it’ll be a book – but now’s just for the sake of it. Having said that, I don’t remember what insults I endured, when Colin told Andy to make me tap, when Jimmy and Doug shoved porn in my face (they were all fascinated that I abstained from masturbation). Perhaps the worst was that some moments were so awesome and loving. It was a birthday party! I climbed terrifyingly up 100-foot-tall boulders! Honest to god, we played a game of capture the flag where the flags were atop two enormous rocks which only had, like, a couple avenues of climbing…

I did guard my team’s flag, but that’s not when I seriously considered jumping. It was later, I don’t remember when exactly. I had abandoned the group; all we had been doing was walking, mostly in trios or duos. The last things I had heard from the Doug and Jimmy duo had been how much they hated Colin because of how mean he was. I had to escape, had to get alone; Oh, cripes, is it too poetically blunt to say I was already alone (who the hell else was getting physically tortured? – After Colin’s request for me to tap, Andy dug his knee into my back and pulled my hair up towards his chest). I found a bench and sat.

I sat atop a tall precipice of rock. Trees opened up to my left and right to make a V-aesthetic, funnelling my view into dead-ahead. I cried. Why did my friends do this to me? This was not fate, surely, but free will – and on my part too, because in some awful way I consented, always giving benefit to the doubt like an ignorant masochist who in reality despises pain. For the first time, the option made itself clear: I could jump. I want to jump.

And ever since, I’ve had to grapple with that decision.

Life is given. I don’t remember exactly when, or if, I willed it to be. My life has been perceived (by me) in constant relative terms to my relation with the god of my life – my mother, the giver. I spent the last decade getting sentimental about getting older. I dramatized my relationships; yeah, I fantasized about all my loved ones dying – Keith, Janelle, my mom, my dad, Sam, other folks (in GA I fantasized about Corry friends dying) – not because I wanted you to die, but because I wanted to feel how close I was to you. I wanted to cry over our distance, and if you’ll believe me – look into my face and believe this stoic philosophical mind – I really did cry over our distance. It was all drama, yes, but it happened and by god did I sob.

“Every great poet creates

his poetry out of one

single poetic statement

only. The measure of his greatness

is the extent to which

he becomes so

committed to that

singleness

that he is able to keep his

poetic Saying wholly within it.

The poet’s statement

remains unspoken. None of his

individual poems, nor their

totality, says it all.

(more…)

It’s warmer of a sudden, lying in bed,

sun-studded fun swimming stale in my head:

oh, too hot. Now at home are two red dots

on my arms; an itch has begun sometime last night

when a prudential vessel of energy took bite

to build blood farms without meaning

any harm. A loose post-it noted yesterday

with Erica’s beautiful sharpie marks:

“Spagetti Rigati

Wine

Beer”, each letter’s lines so dark,

so deliberately steered

and indeed, last nights never have to fear

purposelessness or inanely purpleless

existence. You and me -

where you are all the strangers and I am

standing alone before the wayward -  will be

forever dancing to Major Lazer:

“Girl, I want to party

with yoo-oou.” Tell me what pursuit

could ever rid me of these red beacons

of itch, or simply of my thin page

of flesh, because

I don’t need Plato to know what is

best, and I don’t need anatomy class

to see the rest. Do you remember

last night when I sang,

“Take me Hooo-

ooohhh-oohh-

oh-ome”; well, it doesn’t matter

if it was beautiful or not

or if I even meant it,

because it happened and I was

smiling, and your face was flush

bloody pink and beautiful

too, and that’s

that.

We circulate up to our height,

from the bed to the front door,

ignorantly permeating persona through the air,

disrupting the divine, stagnant current,

ignoring the whoosh of noted post-its

past our asses as we last,

and we sometimes consider that we won’t ever

last if we go this fast, so we listen to OK

Computer like a congregation at mass,

hoping and praying for a moment – not

scribbled bits of linguistic crass – to stick.

I’m a brush-stroke away

from being a blue-white speck on

a Caspar David Friedrich painting. On the verge of

the horizon sublime, novelty dissolves into cliché

like sky and sea into

eternity.

Awesome beauty becomes

standardized: Brando just another

time, another day; All My

Friends‘ guitars going through the motions

of life’s episodic plot

until

‘Mad Men”s Don Draper

in his bathrobe peers

at my trembling, naked body. Like a reflective

lake and an overhead cloud, we share

a watery look that says,

we know what we know what

we always know. Beauty is

my master, and

it never

ends.

On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Friedrich Schiller
Twenty-Sixth Letter
1.        Since, as I have argued in the preceding Letters, it is the aesthetic mode
of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom, it is obvious that it cannot itself
derive from freedom and cannot, in consequence, be of moral origin. It must be a
gift of nature; the favour of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first
physical stage and lead the savage towards beauty.
2.        The germ of beauty is as little likely to develop where nature in her
niggardliness deprives man of quickening refreshment, as where in her bounty
she relieves him of any exertion—alike where sense is too blunted to feel any
need, as where violence of appetite is denied satisfaction. Not where man hides
himself, a troglodyte, in caves, eternally an isolated unit, never finding humanity
outside himself; nor yet there where, a nomad, he roams in vast hordes over the
face of the earth, eternally but one of a number, never finding humanity within
himself—but only there, where, in his own hut, he discourses silently with himself
and, from the moment he steps out of it, with all the rest of his kind, only there
will the tender blossom of beauty unfold. There, where a limpid atmosphere
opens his senses to every delicate contact, and an energizing warmth animates
the exuberance of matter—there where, even in inanimate nature, the sway of
blind mass has been overthrown, and form triumphant ennobles even the lowest
orders of creation—there, amid the most joyous surroundings, and in that
favoured zone where activity alone leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment alone to
activity, where out of life itself the sanctity of order springs, and out of the law of
order nothing but life can develop—where imagination ever flees actuality yet
never strays from the simplicity of nature—here alone will sense and spirit, the
receptive and the formative power, develop in that happy equilibrium which is the

soul of beauty and the condition of all humanity.
(more…)

Meanwhile, we think we know

that the apartment is

beautiful all the time. However, our minds

project interfering interpretations

that come from God-knows where – the soul’s ancient history,

brightly burning subconscious artifacts – mucking up prospects

for appreciation, riddling life with

existential angst. Our microcosmic civilization is

chaotic, a mostly ugly mess

of Christmas lights that spell LOVE and

wood and glass and plastic and

so much fucking paper,

but when you’re peacefully make-believing death

in your sleep, I smile and know that tragedy is

Homo’s greatest invention.

Crashing on the floor, music awhir-

ling, my eye lands next to a chess piece.

If Socrates could see me now…

Ha-ha with a smile; its silver pedestal reads “KNIGHT”.

A german shephard with little wooden

hairs, wooden silver armor, sword hilt, empty

eyes; lost in space – having been rejected by an angry god

after I forced checkmate – KNIGHT knows no abyss,

just is: visibly alone, standing oddly upright for a dog, failed,

endlessly orbiting. Bored pupils

dart up. Brightly beneath the lampshade

is a newcomer: a friend’s copy of Kerouac’s

‘On The Road’, big, thick, white and orange,

the original scroll. It leans precariously

atop a small, fat notebook’s grocery-list,

next to a beer opener. And to think:

once drigh and amid a sea of a neo-Beat friend’s

friends, in this very apartment I toasted our

mutual birthday boy (who had intoduced

me to Kerouac via loveable, Crazy-validating “Big Sur”) with

a passage of Plato’s “Symposium” (“…must think that

the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than

the beauty of their bodies”) and something that means: Twenty years. Everyone here, grooving, just to say time passes, watch it go. Here’s to dancing and social.. Recognizing time, and forgetting it, like – (and later, from a very nice acquaintance, “That music that was playing was intentional,

wasn’t it?”). Awkward laughter, semi-

touching compliments, nervous after-

thoughts, high-five-handshakes?

chased me to no avail.

I was running, dancing alone among people,

subjectively and cowardly living

that which I now realize as this

awesome and frightening thought:

there is no righteousness not

touched by judgement or

love. we deserve what we get.

Society provides least-common-denominator happiness, it’s a fact.

To know joy is to be Dionysian and awkward,

like us, an hour ago dancing to LCD Soundsystem:

“No one is getting any touch. Everybody thinks that it means

too much, and no one is coming

undone; everybody here is

afraid of fun.” Happily tripping over

the corners of the TV-stand and end-tables:

arms don’t defy gravity themselves,

and I don’t just feel beautiful all the damn time. Effort:

like my quiet lover playing make-believe

with some life-affirming truth, so she can believe

her mass is still in orbit (it is -

it always is, whether we believe it or not), and all

for me: in part to keep me hidden

from the abyss, in part to keep my keen love

alert, and in part to validate my philosophical ambitions,

because she’ll believe in anything if

I’ll believe in anything. Oh, Hegel, God,

Bergman and the rest: I feel my days turn into metaphors,

my life into divinity, eternity into one sublime moment;

thank you.

A sentient particle as spiritually vast as the space outside my sunbeam,

I stretch into a timeless wave.

My black hole ego inhales the gravity of our galaxy’s

situation until

the ex-loving space-betweens – the regret and the wounded

times – become too heavy, densely acute;

at which point lonely darkness blots out all light:

I explode mid-shower, and without thinking, exhale

the brightest thing in the universe.

Kids play for fun,

but because I’m making meaning

that you’re so willingly perceiving,

I must fear you, fear the divine Truth. Oh, for God’s sake,

stop jerking off. Not everyone likes the taste of your

cum, ha-!-ha-ha!–ha-!-

-!

aaaahhhh!!!!

Glowing, monotonous

monitors suggest divisible individuals.

Still I type

away, determined

to be significant.

[publisher's note:

remarkable unto what, I wonder?

It's my blog, cripes.]

the same sidewalks, campus lanes, arranged

stone pushing up on my feet, making buoyant my life.

i say to myself, “art is perceptual individuality, but

art is standardized, the same individual constantly

for all. mountains are always changing, alive and new

every moment.” your life is relative to mine, to

sadness, to love and happiness and the best imaginable,

which, of course, is only ever sublime appreciation

for what is, because

there’s nothing else.

[[non-poetic blog note: I think maybe all these poems should be read with the accompaniment of "useful chamber" by Dirty Projectors. or cripes: Rihanna wisdom - if yr inspired and trying to read these poems, then "please don't stop the music", whatever that might be]]

DINNER SEEMS FOREVER AGO: loving energy

evacuates space, leaving all

boringly still. FEELING SHAKY AND

ITCHY: now thunder claps

violently like killer slaps on the spine,

but with good intentions. FRIGHTENED:

lawless lonely autonomy makes me

nervously consider, what might I own? wonder,

destroy? WHAT will i DO?