South Journals

South Journals

Jueves 31 Agosto, Buenos Aires

From a hidden patio a city unfolds itself quietly, bit by bit and slowly fills the corners where a bike hands itself a helmet although that may well be left behind when it goes out to map the streets anew in the fleeting warm light of a river sun of silver that grows crenellations on the old buildings of the city- once new, gleaming alike with their neighbors, but grown older now so that they hunch like the frustrations of someone who hasn’t yet made a city that bends alongside their fickle will. We arrive here by night, not quite so dark as the coffee that, by the account of the face that set it for me, should have had added some of the creamer from the giant white cup slipping through the sky and gently curling into the clouds around the mountains before settling down by the bed of the river to swirl a bit and spread out along the crenellations, hunching its way into night. The dark moves us along at a lovely pace, from beneath us, eternallly less than one and everything that we are, the material substance of a city secreted as the city speaks itself into the absences of night, bright enough to blind anyone foolish enough to look into the depths through which the shadows are pushed out to beyond the other side. Tip tapping along with the strings tickled in another room, a bright white screen bleeds black into the light, effaced multitude of otherwise words pulsing into the other side of the backlit portal to countless other suns.

This river city turns out to be a little bit harder to traverse, a little bit larger, sounds a little bit better, a little bit more like me, or I sound a little bit more like it than is right for someone who grew up in one other swamp and learned in a third; I don’t stick out too much, so much so that I surprise everyone that I don’t stick out to, rising up like a sore thumb that for some reason doesn’t look like it’s hurt in the slightest. A glowing red ember that doesn’t produce any heat, or, more like, a resting coal that burns the hands of anyone that picks it up, yet doesn’t leave the slightest mark. I’m a friend here (secretly I’m not) and I wander around the city simultaneously from wherever springs to mind (secretly I’m not) and existing here like another quiet face on the subte heading home (secretly I’m not) just another being here altogether now (secretly I’m not). Not so secretly I’m not.

South Journals

Domingo 20 de Agosto 2017, Bellas Artes, Santiago

My shadow double dips here, a lanky dog that only just lets itself lurk somewhere in the corner of the room while still pretending to be something that you can put your faith in- consistent, entirely (w)here responding as it ought to to the demands placed on it by flailing arms that won’t settle down and take a name. Be it a bottled cave, entirely too costly for either of me to put my hands on anything, anything at all, or the -1st floor of a building, scavenged from the many bits of moving lives that were left behind somewhere in the above. It’s not a basement, no sótano, nothing that makes for a sense of what is supporting the apartments above, just a shadowing scrap heap of all the things too dark to be thrust out into the light of the positive floors. That is, it’s just that, the only thing, I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the elevator. To leave the reflective box where I was numerous, we were all together, leaning against glass that I can’t see through (but not seeing through glass is nothing to be ashamed of and perhaps the most normal thing of all- I can’t say I’ve ever been entirely sure that, put before even the clearest window, I’m any less confused than the birds, just the obverse, thinking I can see through it knowing that it’s there and as such confusing what bends in the glass for what’s beyond it, if for anything at all); even tempting companions with the mysterious of the negative was just mindless boasting, empty and in no fucking way actually a will to step into that that was beyond the door.

But perhaps it’s not so much that the negative floor is totally lacking in what supports the homes above it, perhaps it’s not so emtpy at all. All homes, all nests, all living spaces are just all of the things that we throw away refracted in the light with which we view what we think we have kept here with us- they are just the negative floors, the -1 creeping somewhere out there in the dark, not nearly as nefarious as it seems. Just, to set eyes upon it, lying there only a button beyond everything that it is in the light of someone’s day (it’s not mine, here it can’t be mine, it won’t ever belong to this husk of a breeze) is to somehow cheat all of the glass we set up between us and there, to let in the light. Everywhere that we rest rests itself upon itself, inverting every angle in such a way as to spring anew brightly into the light that is its due, that it does, that it demands. As my shadow won’t really ever fit inside my name- but what is a name without its shadow, the traces it lets be, (t)here- the unfirst floor is the entire building, shorn from the light that it lets itself, thinking itself a home

South Journals

I haven’t been writing as much non-academic things recently, for really really obvious reasons, i.e. dissertation and job searches. I’m gonna try and keep a journal while I’m traipsing about the Southern Cone, though, so I’ll share those here as recompense (along with anything else that slips out).

Miércoles 16 Agosto, Santiago, Casaltura

The smell of fish in the open is always overwhelming, like their eyes finding their way into your nostrils, like the vendors finding their way into your head, water from somewhere along the floor finding its way into your soles. They see that you don’t quite smell like here, not that they do, either, and their eyes work their way up to behind yours, behind you, seeing where you’ve seen indiscriminately; and where you will see, well, they’re already there, laying out the to come before you. The Mercado Central grounded in what might sooner call it the Central Market, is so center-of-the-sea that you’d be forgiven to not notice the peaks just over there, behind you, fishes eyes on ice and no less observant.

I can’t say I’m going anywhere, just walking through so many wheres, not quite so curious as my new friends might be to be where I am. Two rooftop cats, one more intrepid than the other now, although the second bares all the marks of once having been, maybe even slinking through the same ironwrought temple to man’s disdain for drowning and anything that breathes a bit more fluidly than we do, but now contents itself with behind the potted plants on the stairs where it can watch you come and go and now and then have itself a snack. That is, a not-so-much-defeated-as-defiant witness to the weary but less wary than they who wander in from the corner looking for a high house somewhere with a bit of sun, but not too much, sun nor pretense, where it can only ever mean an errant hand might whisk away with them. The cats seem to have something of a rhythm down for their potted adventures, and I’m tempted to name, let’s say bull and whinkle, although together they’re no friend to squirrels, and bull spends most of the day tip-toeing around their rooftop garden, as convinced that there’s something to stalk as I am that no cat would ever harm a shadow (not to speak of the bird that left it behind some time ago), while whinkle brazenly sneaks up on the sunlight with what seem to be ill intentions. He’s phased quickly enough, though, and makes his way back to his repose, not without some sense of accomplishment. Bull, though, bull by no means will be letting those chrysanthemums away- as though they had some claim on the sun towards which they flee.

The fish eyes poking out again, more forthright, more pronounced, louder yet less sensible. They know when you are not the youth that their handlers slowly coo toward them, when you are, when youth is perhaps still yours but you’re doing everything you can to end all together as an individual; every individual in you coming to an abrupt halt as by accord, as by a bell tolling you to the marketplace, to be gently handled out into the air. Does some savor of that work its way into them? Some trace they’ve carried off from behind your eyes, some spice of being several places at once amongst the images that have affected you and blended together, confused before confused could ever be the word for it, before words. Will they end up rosemaryed and thymed somewhere, on someones plate, an elderly evening in the mountains to while away the winter chill, when suddenly there’s a taste of where there’s summer, an interminable and unforgiving summer that dries out an old mouth that now tastes like a grain of sand has wriggled its way in looking for rain? Will they walk down the lines in the high desert, glimpsing a dry secret in that winter meal, something so fragile and yet so distant, something effaced but never entirely by the alien language that the diners are natives of, as though one could be born in a language, born to it like a sudden new word, all at once change the very syntax of the thing, bigger than it, erupting into it not slowly but as an undeniable there- as though you were nothing more than a part of being in language, a part of language, from language and no where else, only (t)here to burst into it. As though you weren’t more than you, nor I than I.

Whinkle is back and I believe bull thinks it a good idea to make a go at that wasp that, oddly, odd for a predator, that is, has decided to flit around the flowers like a butterfly, like it’s taken itself for a honey bee, poor confused thing. If it’s caught I hope it defends itself once, brilliantly, and plays out an elaborate death, mistaking its spite for something other than eternal. As we all do, I guess, flailing about with our words that we can only use once, as if it were using them that would end us.

April 26, 2017

Streetlamps

Riding over streetlamp
shadows has me worried

And if the shadow
were to wander off?

And if suddenly
in the crown’s absence

there burst
prismatic

a new day? And if
the shade rode

instead over me,
eclipsing my wild spokes?

And if we mistook for
a shadow the memory of finding

change in our path
and accidently spent it?

And if I want that shadow
bled? And if I want it?

And if I want to ride on
over it? I ride on wanting it?

And if nothing, absolutely
nothing at all

were to happen? and
I could never move on

17 notes

Anonymous asked: What time were you born?

If my father is to be believed, always a difficult assumption, name of the father and so one, 6pm on the nose.

September 5, 2016

Odd, that

A friend
an old one, today
asked me roundabout
at least, about
a poetic something

how dogs ease in
to dying
beside a bevy of caring hands
about so

solace I suppose
bound in that
like digging up a bone
yet to be buried

Odd, that
given that,

Moss alonely overcomes a trunk
A swallow will exceed itself

A horsehead pyre dances children down
more steps taken than

Ten hands of flowers
to support a beam

so, Nodding off
in careful arms
seems more alive
its trait poetic

Than holding on
to nothing as a group

2 years ago

Theme: Cavalcade

South Journals

Lunes 11 Septiembre, Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina

It’s been a cold streak with a stop in the middle of it, silencing buses by virtue of the guild’s voice one cold morning in Buenos Aires, surprising so many of us, all of a sudden endless bureaucratic lines and my name had nowhere to live and without a home to respond to how far does a name really go and calling back does so little good and maybe they’ll write me at a different address, a name again, but what good is a name that leaves blanks, doesn’t have any shadows here to be? Bus terminals are simple spaces but exhausting- airports are energizing interstitial places, you can’t leave them once you’re in them or, rather, you are always leaving from different doors, in different places, arriving anew time and again, even returning you never turn down quite the same corners. Bus terminals are never that, never terminal, pretending really never more than pretending a sense- of security, of dislocation, of moving along somewhere, of orderliness- of wheels more than anything, I think, but wheels stuck to the same ground, always anew the same ground. A strange transit, a transition, but always alighting anew in a territory as old as it was the last time you came by, I guess. I can’t say. I’ve never been here before, and I’m not really here at all- remember, I’m all light, all empty spaces reflected in an elevator somewhere, without the slightest base pretensions.

Up the road by a river I settled in again, maybe the only stranger staying around as long as I am- an interruption? Everything is always fine, I keep saying, but I think they’re just asking because they’re not really sure what else to ask me, speaking the same language but I just don’t sound quite right, muttering a different way than they are- same language, different grumbles from some other home that I could never go back to, anyway, even though I’m lingering overlong in this one, slowly erecting itself in the scent of paint meant to cover the frames someone who hasn’t arrived will sleep in as they’re leaving. Even the names here aren’t really here, where there’s no minus one, just a bodega at the bottom of the stairs, behind the iron lift, full with all of the alcohol you can’t bring in, because it’s always already around and we all seem to be speaking some language other than the one from here, settling into this one, for now, guessing at it as it lets out all the secrets of our being afoot where it’s not so hostile- just a letter or so away. River runs long and lingering through the city where that guy was born, you know the one, he kinda just went by guy and a name again only a letter or two away from hostilities and this time, it was all in name, that’s to be believed this time, because that name and everything in it seemed to be what he took with him up the river, over and over again between rivers with a saintly faith in some man to come, destined to arrive a new by the river run wide down which I will, soon enough, literally roll, until we all let out into the sea.

South Journals

Viernes 25 Agosto 2017, Santiago

Outside the window of this chilly box dances a constant chorus of birds, from one perch to another, along the roof lines of a concatenation of boxes that blocks out the sun and, for the most part, the wind, wings flapping in a stuttering tambor of comings and goings that approximates nothing so much as rain that cannot make up its mind about whether to fall or to stall itself on the exhausted shaft jutting out from the corner, where two pigeons make their rest. A cozy enough box, to be sure, well habited and layered with the sudden patterns of photographs and antidotes and layers of plant life and color that are a bit seasonal, seasonally out of place, but false anyway, down the way from a parked castle and the many doors of the library where they’ve deigned to deem me an investigator, what little of it I seem to be doing (and yet an eternity of books accumulate reminders of spaces I’m not at all allowed into again, lest I carry out yet more of them, dooming myself to a weighty flight and shoulders sore from bearing the many little worlds). Heavy metals indeed, and not a shocking sight of me, overwhelmed by all of the words that work their way through that name and the gentleman that takes stock of them all, without quite being able to get them out of him in an orderly, understandable way, charming as that may generally be. But why bother ordering a name when you can know all of the little piles of confuse images from with a flick of the wrist and a gentle tug to dislodge just what I was looking for, as if by magic, as if from between my ability to see for myself.

Routine is too easily settled into, finding oneself passing by the same looming metal beast from side to side before finally working your way in to find it full of the most gentle things- textiles and wood and fine wines tucked away all in the spaces opened up for them in a megalith named for someone who sung of cradles and trees haunting the name of her land. Names within names are obsessive here, or I’m obsessed, because here really doesn’t seem too overly concerned by it at the moment, oddly enough, although so many names speak to me of pasts not my own, and also my own, as much as of daily lives that carry on alone and together, neither oblivious to nor weighed down by the names of things. Well, the names that I know for things- laughter and the day to day wear away even the weightiest things in a way that can’t burden down anyone who has to carry them from one place to another, neither in the daily routine overlooked by the name of the place nor in the exceptional flight of passing along. The weightiest amongst them seem not to weigh down on anyone at all, and the smallest names pile up bit by bit to make simple travel nigh unbearable and so I’m sure that Sisyphus isn’t rolling a boulder nor a single, univocal, heavy load, but rather a ball of countless grains of sand that, the more he packs them in to make the rolling easier, the more they bind him to the hill as birds beat out their dance above, shitting on him so that he might look up, set his sand down, and take a shortcut to the sky.

1 note

Viernes 18 Agosto, Bellas Artes, Santiago

Viernes 18 Agosto 2017, Bellas Artes, Santiago

Every good catholic knows that there are shortcuts to the sky. It doesn’t matter so much to the pigeons as they lift off of the roof across the way from my little corner of the city, but I like to think that they shit on us because they want to remind us that we always ought to be looking up, looking for one of those shortcuts that let us skip a bend and a gate (that’s only really meant to keep out the horsemen) and bring us a little closer to our fixed idea of the virginicita, watching over everyone who doesn’t care enough to just be silent, just for a second, really, just a moment, when they visit her. Really, though, hills remind you of the muscles you haven’t put to good use in some time, the pigeons again laughing at you out of spite- smog doesn’t make it any harder to fly but lordy does it make that hill steeper, switch backs and all, deceptively higher than you might imagine from a distance. Closer, and a bit more forested, until you realize that again, you can cheat it. Cut across paths, shimmying up little slideways to the next bend, wait more time than it’d take to climb the thing to ride the funicular to the sanctuary, ascend the last little bit to the preferential entrance for the sanctuary because of course, if you grease enough palms, there’s even a back door to heaven, right?

Fascinating the little nooks that we can always manage to find in the places we wind up- and how close everything is, and how easily we end up near each other without intending it, and how much they’ll let slide in other places that you desperately want to pretend are palacial and really, really, are just places to smoke a joint and brighten up with a bit of your own words. I don’t remember the name I used to leave around anymore, I’ve lost it somewhere along the way when I switched sides, which is a shame. There’s a name floating around somewhere that’s mine but doesn’t know itself for its namesake, who misplaced himself and can’t quite call himself to order. Walls somewhere far off belong to it now, not to me, always to that name that I pretended was mine, even now that it likely is lost itself, hidden beneath the layers of come and gone politics of restoration, some silly pretension to appreciate the things how once one wished that they might have maybe been to someone else, not knowing that you can never efface the name of things, it is, in fact, one of the things of the name, its unrepentant grasping that that it will never quite be enough for. Better that I left it to be here, nameless, passing, by and by nature, walls that surround me but that I might never touch as mine.