Posts tagged prose

A State of Knowing

“…I suppose I ask that question about what is waiting for you in the world, then, not in terms of what you desire from it, but rather, what you hope to contribute through it. I expect that satisfaction/happiness/contentment all exist when you are doing what you feel like you ought to be doing, but there should be higher demand upon us who can envision such a possibility, and THAT is the current state that I am presently working through.  It is the state that philosophers like Nietzsche and others have inspired me, or clarified me, toward: a belief that humanity is meant to evolve, to become something more, to rise up out of itself and move on into a world of self-understanding and respect that no longer looks at the world as something to fight against, but to move with; to look at each other and know that we are not a means to our goals, but an end in ourselves; and to maybe, just maybe, have an idea that can inspire change in the definition of what it means to be human. 

That’s all written in a state of wonder about the world. Yet, tomorrow I will wake up normally, eat breakfast like anyone else, grumble over my coffee, and retire upstairs to read for the few hours I have before I have to be at work. I’ll fly and hate myself for not being good enough, for never being good enough, because we’re never good enough, and I’ll release all that bodily stress through some borderline destructive workout that fills me with endorphins and light, and I’ll come home to wonder over some other book or some other sunset or bird-spotted or song heard on headphones that most couldn’t afford on a year’s salary, and I’ll see if I can come any closer to flipping a gear and getting past this state, to suddenly arriving at a knowing stained in a copper-colored confidence that shines in all forms of light and tells its story because that’s all it can do…”

At the end of the night’s work, I come home to a house that is ready to be left.  I have perhaps three hours of sleep ahead of me before I move slowly in the morning, refusing to give up my normal morning routine, knowing that it is even more necessary to seat myself in the world before I begin to travel. Every journey is part of our need to both replenish and build our sense of self in the world. Regardless of the simplicity and banality of some actions, regardless of whether travel defines your life or if trips are rare and shine like diamonds amidst the stark and pale motions of everyday life, the quotidian movements of our basic lives are always highlighted once we demand their change.  Logistics to be planned; point A’s becoming point Q’s and then back again; all moods and feelings existing only to show us that home is a vague and almost vaporous illusion, that we can settle anywhere, that people can come again into our lives with an immediacy that never fails to take one’s breath away. I’m heading back to the States for more work, but with the tacking of a quick shuffle of movement, greeting, and reminiscing at the end of it, the trip has become one of relief and excitement. I’m eager to again be acquainted with the world I’ve left behind—I’m curious as to the shifting feeling of change that one can only know has come through change of one’s self. And though there is no conscious thought of destiny or life yet to be lived, of scores to be settled, one can only imagine what lies beyond the horizon when you travel back into the place you once called home, when you once again meet the people that helped define it.

At the end of the night’s work, I come home to a house that is ready to be left.  I have perhaps three hours of sleep ahead of me before I move slowly in the morning, refusing to give up my normal morning routine, knowing that it is even more necessary to seat myself in the world before I begin to travel.

Every journey is part of our need to both replenish and build our sense of self in the world. Regardless of the simplicity and banality of some actions, regardless of whether travel defines your life or if trips are rare and shine like diamonds amidst the stark and pale motions of everyday life, the quotidian movements of our basic lives are always highlighted once we demand their change.  Logistics to be planned; point A’s becoming point Q’s and then back again; all moods and feelings existing only to show us that home is a vague and almost vaporous illusion, that we can settle anywhere, that people can come again into our lives with an immediacy that never fails to take one’s breath away.

I’m heading back to the States for more work, but with the tacking of a quick shuffle of movement, greeting, and reminiscing at the end of it, the trip has become one of relief and excitement. I’m eager to again be acquainted with the world I’ve left behind—I’m curious as to the shifting feeling of change that one can only know has come through change of one’s self. And though there is no conscious thought of destiny or life yet to be lived, of scores to be settled, one can only imagine what lies beyond the horizon when you travel back into the place you once called home, when you once again meet the people that helped define it.

In March I realized that the center could not hold—that what I had, up to this point, based my life upon, would no longer suffice. I’m almost 28, and I’ve finally felt the awful pains of the twenties.  Woe is me, perhaps. But I’ve no words, no words, just birds and nature and the blooming libido of spring banging at the door, telling me that the world turns whether I think it does or not; that I will age yet again this year, perhaps more, perhaps less; that the inevitable nature of humanity is upon me and I had better spend some time staring at the horizon, asking myself why ever for. Upon moving to Germany, I took to watching Cast Away almost obsessively, sure that his island was my island, that I had been removed from the one that I loved and that I would never see her again, that I had to learn to see anew because the world would not wait for me, would not stand against time as gently as a man simply telling himself that he must breathe. It’s all melodrama, of course, and tonight is one of the few times that I will allow myself to indulge in it. But the film has a point, as disjointed and splintered as it is: all our lives slit and slide from one moment to the next, some more dramatically than others, but all with moments that suddenly shift our lives into a new focus with a new lens, a perspective we hadn’t imagined before.  In time I forgot the girl, but the damage that was done has left me with lines in my face that I never expected, cynicism and nonchalance that I had never known before. When someone tells me that I live a dream life, that I have come out so, so lucky in this unintended gamble, I can only agree and nod, break eye-contact and wonder what it is that I see that so many others do not. Or, in a moment of harsher blame, what it is that I lack that they do not. Whether they mean to or not, life’s currents will drag me back to the most general sense of home I know, to the one of the most awful particulars, soon enough. I’d like to think that it does not matter, that I can continue on as before, that I can take this time to continue to improve, to think, to surprise myself with sentences whispered into the phone that I had not known were part of me until they were spoke; but I know the truth: the tide will bring something new, the mornings and the years will slowly, or suddenly, reveal their hand, and again I’ll be tumbling into the surf.

In March I realized that the center could not hold—that what I had, up to this point, based my life upon, would no longer suffice.

I’m almost 28, and I’ve finally felt the awful pains of the twenties.  Woe is me, perhaps.

But I’ve no words, no words, just birds and nature and the blooming libido of spring banging at the door, telling me that the world turns whether I think it does or not; that I will age yet again this year, perhaps more, perhaps less; that the inevitable nature of humanity is upon me and I had better spend some time staring at the horizon, asking myself why ever for.

Upon moving to Germany, I took to watching Cast Away almost obsessively, sure that his island was my island, that I had been removed from the one that I loved and that I would never see her again, that I had to learn to see anew because the world would not wait for me, would not stand against time as gently as a man simply telling himself that he must breathe. It’s all melodrama, of course, and tonight is one of the few times that I will allow myself to indulge in it. But the film has a point, as disjointed and splintered as it is: all our lives slit and slide from one moment to the next, some more dramatically than others, but all with moments that suddenly shift our lives into a new focus with a new lens, a perspective we hadn’t imagined before. 

In time I forgot the girl, but the damage that was done has left me with lines in my face that I never expected, cynicism and nonchalance that I had never known before. When someone tells me that I live a dream life, that I have come out so, so lucky in this unintended gamble, I can only agree and nod, break eye-contact and wonder what it is that I see that so many others do not. Or, in a moment of harsher blame, what it is that I lack that they do not.

Whether they mean to or not, life’s currents will drag me back to the most general sense of home I know, to the one of the most awful particulars, soon enough. I’d like to think that it does not matter, that I can continue on as before, that I can take this time to continue to improve, to think, to surprise myself with sentences whispered into the phone that I had not known were part of me until they were spoke; but I know the truth: the tide will bring something new, the mornings and the years will slowly, or suddenly, reveal their hand, and again I’ll be tumbling into the surf.

imageshack.us

Here’s the question: What do you write when you’re no longer sad, but certainly not happy?; when the days begin to warm and lengthen, but the gray skies remain, a frigid breeze appearing every now and then to remind you that you haven’t made it out yet?; when you spent Christmas alone, staring out the window, thinking of what exactly you wanted to do with your life, if you had an answer or if you were just as full of shit as most, if you had any other answer better than knowledge, than learning, knowing full and well that this could be as great of a mistake as any, but no matter how many times you weighed the issue, you could see no other answer?; what do you write when you weren’t happy with your writing and the way you thought about the world, with what the world was offering you, with the faces and voices and lack of fear about a poorly lived life?—what do you write when the conflation of these ideas imploded, turned into a vacuum inside of you, demanded that you retreat as far as possible from the world, and when you surrounded yourself with books and solitude, Rilke’s great and solemn emptiness, the questions now being ignored, the year dedicated to slowly living yourself to the answers? At the moment, I simply don’t have the first idea what to say. 

Here’s the question: What do you write when you’re no longer sad, but certainly not happy?; when the days begin to warm and lengthen, but the gray skies remain, a frigid breeze appearing every now and then to remind you that you haven’t made it out yet?; when you spent Christmas alone, staring out the window, thinking of what exactly you wanted to do with your life, if you had an answer or if you were just as full of shit as most, if you had any other answer better than knowledge, than learning, knowing full and well that this could be as great of a mistake as any, but no matter how many times you weighed the issue, you could see no other answer?; what do you write when you weren’t happy with your writing and the way you thought about the world, with what the world was offering you, with the faces and voices and lack of fear about a poorly lived life?—what do you write when the conflation of these ideas imploded, turned into a vacuum inside of you, demanded that you retreat as far as possible from the world, and when you surrounded yourself with books and solitude, Rilke’s great and solemn emptiness, the questions now being ignored, the year dedicated to slowly living yourself to the answers?

At the moment, I simply don’t have the first idea what to say. 


…and the weird fever that runs behind our blogs.

Duckbeater

In correspondence to you all, to the surprisingly large number of attendees to my somewhat daily milieu, there is a tremendous amount unsaid on any given entry to the public.  What is lost is sometimes found in the direct correspondence that we send one another, the purposively forced communication (sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but always a direct decision) that we send with intent for only one other set of eyes.  

With this letter, I join the blogger-union and subscribe to their unwritten demands of a single, catchphrase, hook-line-and-sinker sentence as the second paragraph.

I often have so little to say because I find the exercise of relating trivial failings and upstarts as exactly that—trivial.  What I don’t find trivial is the search for some meaning, some Reality beyond the primitive allowances of our own senses. We devour books like porn, sure that our obsession is in a greater realm than one of sensuality, and ask questions that have plagued all of humanity since the first moment that we realized we were going to die.  We listen to music, searching for a trance that takes us beyond the basic moment of our lives and try to relegate meaning to the bass-line, the sudden kick of the guitar along the bridge.  We move and we travel, scarring beaches with our footprints that we know will only too soon be erased and left for another to imagine that he is the first to walk where ancients walked, regardless of the imaginary time-gap that separates us from the Ancients to the Now.  It’s all a fingernail shaving of a king dictating his measure of time.

I’m home alone for the first time this Christmas, and though I do not pity myself, I feel my pain in the ache of too-hard movements in the gym, in the grappling of meaning in the oblivion of pain.  All thousand selves of mine that are catered toward cry out in unison of this solitude having meaning, even if they will later bicker whether that should come forthright with the night or after the sweaty embrace of so many anonymous faces in a crowd of others searching for something that I may or may not imagine.  

With interiority comes acknowledgement of its existence in others, even the most simple of beings whom we come across in our global dealings.  The bored face of my driver tomorrow in a foreign country will most likely be lost in the subdued song broadcasted on his favorite radio station, chords that are unfamiliar to my ears, but represent a home and love and dreams that I cannot begin to fathom.  The letters this man may write may come with quotes from the Quran, so removed from common thought in its power that it arrives as a spell-checkable item in my own diatribe.  And when we attempt to share this interiority, when we flounder at giving it words, there is so much we’d rather have understood unsaid than cheapened by being put to the verse and chorus of a language that in seldom shared.

The “weird fever that runs behind our blogs”? How about the one that drives at the marriage of sensuality with intellect, how about the one that searches for an early night in bed while facing a 4am phone call to tell him that work is about to begin, that his rooster has come in early this morning and crows just as shrilly? How about the trance of life, that sits in the moments that are bound to come, when I sit exhausted and spent in the back of a van that takes me in circles, driven by a man I will never know beyond his nodding head and his patience at watching me button up the tasks for the night in red, flaring seals?  

This is the man that you follow—this is the fever that runs behind my words. 

a bright wall in a dark room.: Keanu Reeves Week: Point Break (1991)

My unnecessarily dense and slightly overwrought piece on Point Break.  The winter does this to me.

brightwalldarkroom:

by Edward Montgomery


“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophical wreck.”

-Immanuel Kant

The ocean only seems overt.

Though Heraclitus has been immortalized contemplating the quiet flux and power of a river over time, to me,…

brightwalldarkroom

Multi-Tasking

“Martens…Yes, sir…they’re of the weasel variety…well, in the winter they climb into your car when you get home, to capture the warmth, you see, and when they find wires they start to chew on them…of course we can fix the wires, but we can’t fix the martens.  You’re gonna have to do something about the martens if you don’t want this to happen again.  Uh-huh…uh-huh…okay.”

Outside it was snowing again.  This is Germany in the winter: a gray blanket that covers the skies for months at a time, the temperature hovering between snow banks and wet brown shit slush tugging at your tires while you drive, the ground never dry.  All of our cars are falling apart because of the ice and the snow and the salt.  And the martens.

At the counter, the manager had finished his phone call, recommending mothballs or dog hair. He said he didn’t know exactly how to keep either of those in your engine without them burning, but with cars falling apart all around him, he had to let this one go.  His attention settled on me and I explained my problems.

“Well, first, she needs an oil change and a new oil pressure switch.  She’s leaking oil from there. “  He nods.

“Then, the hood-stand is rattling in the engine, or at least I think it is.  The clasp broke a while ago, so I need a new clasp no matter what.  Probably just vibrations.  When I shift from second to third and simultaneously think of all the loves that I have let pass in my life, all the failures, it’s just this strange rattle.  This seems to happen especially when I’m no longer feeding it gas—do you think that could be a metaphor or a message from car?” 

The manager, his beard twitching, admits that he isn’t quite sure.  He makes a note.

“Oh, and I’m pretty sure the brake discs are warped…awful shudders when I brake all of a sudden.  But I’ve noticed that comes and goes, so perhaps not.  It’s like when you see a pair of eyes, vibrant and brimming with their own universe, and you are suddenly reminded of that night when you stared into a different set as you sat next to this girl who you were sure was going to define your life for, well, your life, and the way her mouth opened in a half-moon of anticipation for all the words you were saying.  And I knew, I mean, I fucking knew, that this moment, this connection, was special.  That I was a bird flying and suddenly realizing the air that held me aloft was all around me, was everywhere, that I existed in its space just as it moved through my mine.  Hell, I finally knew air was air, that this world was flowing and always moving, that at my most stationary I was still coursing through the entire world.  And then, a year later, the shuddering just stopped and everything was smooth and technically correct, perfect, as-advertised, except you had that memory of the shudder and you could only wait for it to happen again every time you drove, the anticipation driving you mad like one of Poe’s murdering characters, the idea of heartbeats, of your brakes failing, fear circulating in your bloodstream.  How can you operate a car with those memories?”

The manager asked me how often it had happened.

“With the girl, five to six times a day.  With the brakes, it seems to be when the car’s sat for awhile—driving it more smoothes it out.” 

He pencils me in for a week from Thursday, hesitates, and asks if there is anything else.

“What’s your name?”

“Andy.”

“No shit—that’s my name, too!  Man!  Absolutely wild!  Say, have you ever wondered about all the people in the world with your name, all those who wear it more proudly than you do and those who it let it fall about them like a tattered cloak, torn and soaked in mud?  Don’t you hate all those people?  If anyone you know comes in contact with that person, they immediately think, ‘Oh, you’re Andy, too?’ and begin to compare.  The person with the strongest personality wins, even if they’re the biggest waste of a perfectly good name.  Then you’re always in this cage-match to the death in that mutual acquaintances mind, always fighting for premier rights to that single word.   What a waste of energy and organization.  I sometimes wonder if she knew another Andy, if I couldn’t beat that Andy in her mind, if being the second-tier Andy switched on something in her mind and I kept losing this American Gladiator style pugel-stick fight with some shadowy doppelganger I hadn’t even met.  Oh, sorry.  This isn’t to say I think you shouldn’t have your name, of course—it’s just a thought.”

He says there is no offense.  The phone rings and he glances at the clock.  He says he has to take this. We can talk next week.

“Well, thanks for the help, Andy—I’ll see you next Thursday.”  

Drive (2011)

A piece I did for BWDR - I hope you’ll read it.

brightwalldarkroom:

“THERE’S A HUNDRED THOUSAND STREETS IN THIS CITY.”

by Edward Montgomery

Step one for this essay is the communal recitation of our postmodernist plight:

“Nothing is simple these days. Little is whole. We are part technology, part broken-family, part digital, part unknowable, and…

brightwalldarkroom

aprettywar: it’s like living inside of a giant fantasy novel. red clouds against a purple sky, foreign languages rising and dropping like an incantation, matted hair from hours watching the river lap up against the side of the dock, boring away like it has inside my head. you can’t imagine the self-conscious isolation, or the wheeling triumphs, or the silence I live here. you can’t imagine what it is to have lost every understanding. now I’m back in the city with more distance and more ideas, proximity winning over the web inside my skull that the acid trips and glass boxes put there. nothing makes any sense and yet it feels usual now. I took a boat there and back and came out something new. I’m always coming out new. Avenida del Libertador, Buenos Aires

aprettywar:

it’s like living inside of a giant fantasy novel. red clouds against a purple sky, foreign languages rising and dropping like an incantation, matted hair from hours watching the river lap up against the side of the dock, boring away like it has inside my head. you can’t imagine the self-conscious isolation, or the wheeling triumphs, or the silence I live here. you can’t imagine what it is to have lost every understanding. now I’m back in the city with more distance and more ideas, proximity winning over the web inside my skull that the acid trips and glass boxes put there. nothing makes any sense and yet it feels usual now. I took a boat there and back and came out something new. I’m always coming out new.

Avenida del Libertador, Buenos Aires

catarom