I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee…”; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together…
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were.
Charles Bukowski, Women (via girlsack)
(via silverhairgoldenyears)
The common event is an amorphous longing, a nagging off-ness of which nothing is known but its existence. Perhaps you name this feeling anxiety, antsiness, worry, boredom or discomfort - but you recognize them as uprooted versions of their everyday equivalents.
The suggestions of this feeling include: the need for some thing, person or experience, or maybe just a desire for these; needing or wanting to consume or create; the compulsion to leave or arrive or remain in motion. You think maybe you want to read, to take a ride, eat or sleep or keep company with a person, maybe a particular person; to alter your consciousness or watch a movie or work up a sweat or write or paint or work — and so on, this formless nameless tension describing the trajectories of all possible responses as you contemplate it.
And in considering each suggestion, each strikes you as equally valid. Cause, nature and meaning of this tension unknown, its possible consequences are infinite - as possibilities always are when coping with that not restrained by definition. Thus radiating from this tension in every direction are the endless calls of endless discrete futures, and we freeze in wait trying continually to find the source of this sensation, or that certain thing waiting in one or another future which will fix and end it.
For it’s a hopeful thing, to believe that a feeling is a consequence rather than a spontaneous occurrence. Causality indicates a process in which present and future are linked to a past and might be understood and shaped to our pleasure, with a bit of luck and effort. Thus causality also indicates that we have agency.
As long as we do not understand this feeling, we also cannot know if it is or is not essentially beyond knowing. In any case we are forced to experience it as abstract, and it is thus all the more forceful. That which eludes definition exists in painful defiance of the everyday perception of time as continuous. Lacking cause and meaning, we only experience present (this tension) and future (the radiating possibilities) and we cannot be certain that we have any agency, because we are incapable of acting or perceiving of anything without reference to the past. A consciousness is only capable of that at its first moment of being (perhaps in conception, birth, or upon acquisition of language — in whatever way a self truly becomes.) Hence communication of this feeling shares the language of the primal clutching of infancy: anxiety, need, want, drive.
This event faces us with re-experiencing that pure potential, only now it is problematic instead of natural because we have no memory of the moment experienced without any reference. It is existence at the edge of an abyss with nothing recognizable behind you and everything conceivable in front. My experience of this tension manifests itself physically as the sensation of an aching tightness located in my the center of my body, behind the soft spot of flesh where my ribcage splits and starts its downward, rearward slope. The same place, strangely, that I keep my left hand on or run my fingers over when I am aware of feeling content.
I imagine this tightness to have a spherical form lacking precise dimension. The tightness also pushes outward: my experience of possibility, of futurity, is a hurt precisely like the expanding thrust of a throb which swells but does not contract. The physical sensation is a paradox: impossible to simultaneously expand and contract. How then can I truly be able to feel this, with my real physical body which should not be capable of anything impossible?
Because this physical pain is only the somatic translation of mental conflict, and I only experience this body through my mental faculties. Indeed it has no more correct mode of existence than that of paradox. This is why it is a throb that only swells: there is no interaction with blood in transit to give the hurt a rhythm. If the pain I perceive to be physical is not subject to the same interactions and conditions of “real” physical pain (the throb from beaten blood, changes in intensity when moving or breathing a certain way) it cannot be located within the matter of which my body is composed and must instead lie in the spaces of nothingness between that matter. By projecting the sensation into this space I realize I cannot exist without nothingness, that I have as much claim to and am as much affected by spaces and gaps as I am by forms and matter. That I am continuous, just as much I as not-I.
To write fiction is to experiment on reality, to create hypothoses on what is, was and might be. But it is only a hypothesis in one sense; it is simultaneously a truth, the acceptance of which is contingent upon the understanding that reality contains not only that which exists, but also that which does not exist but is only possible - indeed, that reality is incomplete without this.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture, but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Don Delillo (via poetryschmoetry)
› The Howling Decorum: Prose piece from an early dinner on eighth
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Looking through my trunk for something to read before coming in, I find instead this reporter’s notebook, heat-warped and half crumpled, but I think I might rather write than read and so here we are, you and I, each as white and blue as the other, so why not muse finally on all that speaks and surrounds. Like the three guys maybe my age sitting in the booth behind, a bounty of belly and acne spangled cheeks the three of you, discussing guns and games and not once in all this time is there talk of a girl. Speak over each other, tell jokes at which the other two laugh only so that you might laugh at theirs later on. None of you are funny and none are amused, and there’s a strain in each laugh to show that you know; and in this economy of egos with currency of laughs you hopefully realize what rots away within, what corrodes and what is stunted. Obese and black with a stare so vacant through windows wiped to a fog with smudges of fingertips, palms, grease, like everybody here before us had to paw their way out – maybe you’re wondering if they made it. And you, sir, you with the textbook: let your girlfriend stroke your back and kiss your cheek, talking and glowing smiles, while you stare up at the menu without response or regard. You who, when she asks what you want and you go up to tell the cashier instead of her, let her step up and pay and then let her watch you with a dwindling smile while you go through your phone. Yes, you: have a seat and hear my guess as to why she wears makeup thick as a second skin, a dress as tight as the first with legs chest shoulders bared in full.
Clouds came and stayed and all went dim. Lightening comes down hard and close and the parking lot blinks at us all through the windows before thunder cracks. It’s raining now, everybody turn toward the windows.
I better get back. Patrons, forgive me for staring.
I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.
- the last stanza of Jeffrey McDaniels’ “Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back.”
