Jorge's Mother

Having not slept the night before, I feel refreshed. Borges slept with his eyes open, his mother watching him as he slept. Borges lived with his mother until her death, then for some time afterwards. She knotted his cravat, polished his shoes and cinched his belt round the vicarage of his waist; made sure he ate properly, took his vitamins and wore matching socks.

Jorge Luis Borges

Diane Arbus

The Majesty of Words

Borges
wrote by candlelight
the quixotic
Eros of his thoughts
never blinded
to the majesty
of words

Moments Lost

the
moments
lost to

the
moments
in between

Vector Savant

Every move I make is calculated. All that I do, from the simplest to the most complex, is well-thought out before a commitment to movement, thought and action is taken. Sometimes, more oft than not, I move in circles, wide uneven rhomboids or lariats, other times in a straight line without a beginning, middle or endpoint. In this manner, and perhaps in others I have yet to determine or acquire mastery of, I am an algebraic savant, a vector without a proper reason for vectoring. I do math, but care little, perhaps not at all, for proper fractions or equations. Perhaps what I am trying to impart, to tell you, is that all movement, at least movement as I experience it, is incalculable, beyond math, algebra, vectors and reason. Every thought I make is incalculable, without reason, a thought without a thinker, and thereby incalculable.

A Fool's Story

I give you fair warning; this is a story told by a fool. Not one of Dostoeveski's idiots, a boorish intellectual, but a fool whose sole purpose in life is to spread foolishness and confusion. Idiocy is far too common; I leave that to anarchists and idealists. I am the excrescence that fills the void, the otherness to the reality you feel, hear, touch, taste, fuck and shit out of all the holes that you lay claim to. I am no idiot, but a foolish man with little patience or tolerance for fools. I tolerate myself, but only out of shear necessity, a necessity to strike a balance in the imbalance of my life. All other necessities are meaningless.

I don’t like people to ask me for a cigarette, even though I smoke myself, I find the habit in others repulsive. My father smoked, then quite and took to snuff. Black like roe, it stuck to the hairs of his arms and littered the carpet at the foot of his chair. I do not have fond memories of this, nor does my mother, whose job it was to sweep up under my father’s feet. I had an addiction, but some god or the other wiped my slate clean, leaving me with little desire for such wastefulness. If I waste anything, it is time, which I have more than enough of to waste and squander. I am above punition in such matters, as I see no purpose in laying blame where none is warranted. If anyone is to lay blame, it would be I, and that is out of the question. I am blameless. Others, I fear, are not so lucky.

I have worn my hair the same way since I was a teenager, not giving in to the custom of adulthood. It will stay as it is, or was, and that will be it. I have no time for cutting and trimming and behind the ears shaving with a razor sharp enough to slice me to ribbons. It is far less perilous to leave it be, and pay the consequences of not conforming to custom. If necessity should have it, which it may, given the vagaries of my existence, a time may come when I will need to attend to this, but for the time being, I choose not to do so. Hair has become a social issue, as are good looks and the right shoes. If I could, I would wear neither shoes nor good looks, and be done with it once and for all. But as I cannot, I am fated to an indifference that makes life a bad memory. Don’t ask me why it is, it just is, so settle for that or keep your gore hole shut. I have little patience for yammering and bad manners, or people who ask me for a cigarette when clearly I have no intention of giving them one. They are blameful. I am not. I fear nothing, but not fearing anything at all. If I were fearless, I would surely be dead, rotting in some lime pit with arms and legs severed from joints and hipbones. God has seen to that. Others have not been so lucky.

The Other, Other

I have the crassness, or some such respiratory indelicacy. Breathing becomes wheezing because a sputtering expectoration of insides-out, blackleg, phonographic things and not things. I am reading Paul Celan, more aptly, it is he that is reading me, in between the lines and striations of my being: my being-me in the world of things, of not things and things yet to be, to-be-things yet. Thank you P.C. you have closed the abyss of my heart, reawakened my spirit, my humanness, my Being-me in Others, not me and me, the other Other that is me and me alone. My responsibility to the Other other that is me, but not me: Me and the Other: the One, the indivisible Other that is One.

Still Haven't Slept

We might suggest, then, that creativity is an act of imagination, an act of insight into the Ideas of things as they are apprehended and understood in the creative imagination. Creativity moves beyond those things that the senses perceive, into a realm of possibilities where actions of will-less contemplation create things of beauty and merit. In Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, creativity, imagination and insight engender the object of the aesthetic or artistic; it is through the actions of contemplation and reconfiguration that we arrive at things that we call ‘creative.’ We imagine things to be different than they are; we in turn contemplate things, notions and ideas that may be apprehended outside the given domain of the subjective.

Werther's Original

I’m having a tough go with sleeping, even though the exhaustion has set in like gangbusters. What the fuck is a gangbuster, some somnambulist with rickets, a narcoleptic miscreant with a horrible overbite. This not being able to sleep, anti-narcolepsy, some might say, fuckers! might have its good points, the least of which is being conscious for a sunrise or having that first espresso in a weatherglass, fuck. CBC-2 has promised me an early morning of Mahler, a 5th I’d do me just fine right about now, or a brisk walk with my Waterford’s weatherglass topped off with frothy espresso. Werther’s original, a blunderbuss sawed off at the armrest-end pointed directly at the ear-jaw juncture, just below the eye and above the temple. Teutonic cry-baby should have had the good manners to lay out a Rubbermaid mat or a tarpaulin before he messed up the front lawn, sad pathetic whist.

About Forgetting

the worst thing
about being in love
is having to forget
you ever were

Things Best Left Forgotten

We all have stories to tell, mine’s just shorter. He doesn’t remember me, but I remember him. He was smaller then, but so was the world, or the way I remember it. I don’t remember much from then, not much worth remembering. If I were to remember what I needed to remember, all those moments, I’d be remembering things best left forgotten. It’s less complicated that way, and in the end easier to forget what shouldn’t be remembered. I won’t bore you with the details of my life, the moments in between, those are too many to recount, and even if I could, recount them, they’d seem vague and distant, not worth remembering at all.

I don’t remember my birth, that day forty-nine years ago when I was called into this world, drawn out from the inside. If I could remember I suppose I’d remember it as a warm place, an inside that was safe and warm. The outside wasn’t, it wasn’t warm or safe, but a place of confusion and light, a place of speculation and anger, a place that exist inside me now, even though I wish it didn’t. The place that was the outside is now the inside, the inside in of me, my self seen from the inside out. It’s not what you see, but what I see when I look inside of me, at the outside in of me.

I am not to be trusted, so if you chose to read on, remember that I am not someone who pays attention to details or truth. After all, in the end all truths are alike, someone else’s remembering, some seen from the outside in, others from the inside out. It’s always easier to lie than to tell the truth, even though a lie seldom gets told without some truth to it, something about it that isn’t a lie, but the truth told from the inside, from somewhere deep inside the lie. So if I lie, I will be telling the truth, but a truth that lies deep inside, where the difference between the truth and a lie is speculation, a truth told to cover up a lie.

I don’t sleep much anymore; my thoughts forbid that I find some comfort in sleep. Sleep would be too easy, too comforting, a reprieve from the drudgery of wakefulness. Were I to sleep, and wish be that I could, maybe the inside out would stop, maybe it would find some comfort in the inertia that sleep provides. There’s no use in thinking about it, inertia comes when it’s good and ready, not a moment before. Perhaps this wakefulness is sleep, but I’m unaware of it, not yet allowed entry into a wakeful sleep.

Daylight Savings

This morning before pushing the clock forward I daubed nail polish remover onto my eyelids to ensure a good night’s sleep and to remove a discouraging blemish that has been dogging me for years. Should this prove a failure, and by all rights foolhardy, I will peal the lids from my eyes and begin again, this time with turpentine or a mild abrasive. You see, I have no use for my eyes, and being a man of temperance and fair mood see no good reason not to scourge myself of them once and for all. And furthermore, this will ensure that I sleep well past noon, and if I’m lucky, well into next week.

Self-Qua-Self

I see things from the inside out rather than from the outside in. This poses a number of problems, the least of which is my capacity to differentiate between the real and the not-so-real. This introspective-I has a tendency towards solipsism, an inchoate despotism that engenders a self-qua-self delusion, an ego-less-I conflated with an ego-lusion-ism. Best call it a night before I loose the capacity to differentiate between the inside-out-outside-in me.