Wednesday, November 26, 2008

frank o'hara

AVENUE A

We hardly ever see the moon any more
so no wonder
it's so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
your hair over your forehead and your memories
of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
jacket Norman gave me
and the corduroy coat David
gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
in a vast tragic veldt
that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries


everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
to my equally naked heart

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

News

So i'm finally making my poems real-world public;
Stages just got published in
my high-school literary
magazine. It isn't much but I'm glad
that I'll finally be able to say
I've been in print.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

excerpt

"I am interested in two very significant numbers with infinite decimal places that contain no overarching patterns: phi and pi. The two contradict one another; pi makes the statement that randomness leads to circularity, whereas phi's digital randomness produces an infinite inward spiral that comes close to, but never reaches, a point of singularity. When used as metaphors for the progression of humanity, the two produce two very different paradigms; pi states that our random actions will inevitably lead back to the same beginning, whereas phi states that random activity, although still circular in nature, has the propensity to progress dramatically insofar as the amount of energy that is required in order to come full circle. What is interesting about the arguments made by pi and phi is that although a deterministic framework would make both impossible, each outlines a shaky but possibly determinable pattern."

tangential excerpt from SLC application

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Sunday, November 9, 2008

The patterning of my molars is identical to a small area of the Himalayas.

It's almost 2:30
I've been up
for 16 hours,
not very much really.

I wish I had privacy
I've shown everyone
myself

I sit here feeling quiet and
I describe myself as shy and with
some personal issues mostly
regarding trust, I'm indifferent
sad and

the process is like tiny drops
of water emerging millimeter by millimeter
slow-creeping crepuscular rays from between
the folds of my brain;
that's everything then that transmits
electricity arcing quietly through,
yes

a quiet hum
and a pulsation
like the center of the earth
a black hole, the pulse
of a dying honey bee that
is all of us

and my brain is
a phosphorescent halo also something
nobody understands yet, but
I think everyone holds a map of the universe



somewhere inside, like explosions
under eyelids.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

So today was a really weird day. I woke up in philly really disoriented and angry because Gabby's cat Bruce jumped all over me and the sun was in my eyes. The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable aside from the fact that we went to ben's house. I saw Jacen, which was nice. I like him. We hung out there for a while and I watched Gabby and Darian make tape boxes for the Filled With Guilt and Diamonds EP while eating good pumpkin products made by their subletter, Jessie. I had to go at 5, and after a pretty quick bus ride I was home.. for a minute. As soon as I could I was at Felix's, and we were really happy to see each other. I didn't think I was going to be allowed in, but we went upstairs and hung out for a while. I told him about my time in philly and how it made me feel strange. An hour went by much too quickly and it was time for me to go. We both had a lot of homework, and it was almost 10. Then, as I was putting on my shoes, his dad came upstairs and started yelling at us both about how irresponsible Felix is. It was horrible, and I still feel pretty weird even though that was almost an hour ago. It made me realize that I haven't been yelled at by and adult in almost two years.

After sitting on my bed and fuming for a while I got up and went on the computer. I ended up on this blog called kittens and existentialism that's run by this boy I half-know named Gregg. He hasn't updated it in a while; from what I can tell he mostly writes about animation and social anxiety. It made me wonder a lot about two things: why some people are so scared, and what the point of art is. Well, I guess I should say that it made me volver a pensar en estos, because it certainly wasn't something new. It's jsut rare to find actual evidence of people being as nervous as I find myself being sometimes, or that I think some of the people I know are when they're acting strange. The closest one generally comes to are depictions of characters like Franny, and god knows that she could be completely overblown. The problem with fiction in general is that although it's all true in the sense that it came from a human mind, it's also fantastic, and thus impossible to relate to on a practical level. Gregg's entry on April 22nd really affected me; it reinforced once over how real shyness is, and also how intuitive the withdrawn are. I've had this theory forever (and its Fransiscan-ness has made some of the more callous people I know cringe) that nobody is actually very bad; just hurt, or scared.

Gregg's not the greatest example because he never seemed malcontent to me in any way, but to actually be able to see what he was probably thinking when he was being quiet around me and Gabby was still revelatory. I can't even ask why he or anyone else does that, because I do it as well, and I still can't say for certain. Psychiatrically it makes sense -- an analyst would probably say that our social anxieties come from a combination of inherent personality (i.e. not being programmed to process other people very well) and past traumatization. I understand not being entirely socially oriented totally; some people, including myself, honestly prefer thinking about other kinds of patterns, like those in math or science. That's fine, but it shouldn't make us fear others. It is a well-deminstrated fact that humans fear what they do not understand, but that's just the thing: everyone is human, and as I've noticed so far, we're pretty much all the same on the levels of basic communication and functionality. So excluding the fear of the unknown, there is the platform of a past problem that would lead to difficulty socializing as a (relative) adult. This makes but half-sense to me: although I'm a big fan of the super ego/ego/id construct, it seems absurd that people could actually be ruled by sublimated fears and desires that they had at a time when they were too young to effectively rationalize events... or perhaps they were. One of the curses of humanity is definitely the fact that we do not have an infinite capacity for memory. I appreciate the fact that often feelings are so overwhelming that they can outlast an event by great a distance, and make all hitherto judgement of it very difficult, but to be instinctively upset by situations that are similar to events that we cannot remember at all... I can't tell if my reaction to that hypothesis is one of genuine disbelief, or just discomfort; such a truth would be a very scary thing.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but that's how I've been feeling lately in general. I'm in the process of applying to college, and I really don't know where I want to go or what I want to do, so the fact that it requires so much energy throws me into-near constant reflection as to why I bother. Luckily I know the answer to this question, and that's why its still a pretty petty problem. But the bigger things, like where I'm going to be in five years, what I think I ought to be 'in the end', as it were, or if anyone ever really grows up... I honestly can't tell. I see people around me as old as 25 still basically behaving like children, and the ones who can be categorized as 'adults' only seem to be that way because they bear too many responsabilities and are sapped of the time and energy to be frivolous. Additionally confusing is that fact that I have no idea what I want to believe about this paradox; on the one hand I feel as though it is imperative to my future happiness to never have to stop being a child, but on the other I worry deeply about my future security and autonomy if I don't stop. And of course these concerns extend to the people that I love, which makes it all even more bizarre and upsetting.

I'm turning 18 in three weeks and find myself worrying about understanding the state of 'the world' more and more. It's either going to ruin me or save me. I keep doing this thing where I trap myself in a loop of pessimism and cynicism when I think about history, and I have to sort of approach myself from a third perspective and calm myself down before it goes away. Although doing this calms be down very much it also makes me worry that I'm crazy- it feels really abnormal when it happens. More worriesome is when I start assuming that I can psychoanalyze myself to a T, and then get struck with the possibility that maybe I'm just subconsciously picking what I want to be true about myself and then convincing myself that that's the truth. My life has too many reflexives in it for me to possibly be a normal person. Right now we're reading The Souls of Black Folk in seminar by W.E.B. DuBois and in it he talks a lot about a dissociative feeling of double-concsciousness; this is nowhere near the first time I've encountered the feeling either within myself or within literature, but he puts the war that society creates within the self into words more completely than I've ever encountered.

Maybe I'll return to write about the other half of tonight's thoughts. For some reason I half-hope no one reads this. Although the exposure of weakness within oneself is incredibly cathartic when received properly, throwing it out into the void and an articulated form (rather than in shadowy, instinctive poetry) can be kind of terrifying.

So many things are interesting. I could go on doing this forever. Every comment sparks a new thought about something just as important, to the extent that I'm speechless sometimes. Goodnight.