molle meum levibusque cor est violabile telis,
et semper causa est, cum ego semper amem
I will drink cerveza preparada and play the prepared piano, and in that way I will be ready for anything. Even the Spanish Inquisition.
Corelli for a lonely morning. Having the house to myself I cleaned it and discovered I’ve become fond of its midcentury long lines. I never thought this was my aesthetic but it’s been a long acquaintance now, and the Ruth Asawa blowout in the city must have primed me for form. I am so glad someone gave her a tumbleweed halfway through her career.
But how is it that Asawa was able to do what she did in a house full of children.
The new band has been playing little sets around town. We have a lot to sort out but the stakes are low. It’s as if that old questing, lonely life in Portland has been at arm’s reach all this time, waiting for me to turn around around and notice it; but I was doubtful, at the time, whether that was a life worth living.
I wish the heart didn’t spill over.
You will have to confront each of your objects of desire at close range, under polarized light, in order to perceive them as the ignes fatui they are. Otherwise the lesson won’t take.
Listening to Mitski out of your phone because the car stereo doesn’t work is the purest aisthesis possible, but nothing can be built on that foundation and no merit will accrue.
The pink sliver that appears in the minutes after sunset, over Marin and beneath the marine layer, is real enough but too far off to be relevant.
I went out back to be with language, and was, but also disassembled most of the cobwebbed electrical box that once powered the broken sprinklers, to get it out of the way before the painters come. I have to figure out where you switch off the current.
Fanny Howe hit the mark. We’d had a nodding acquaintance but this time something turned in the lock. The mystic’s concision. It made me think of childhood in the desert; M. texted photos from our old 7-11, which gives out free Slurpees once a year, and I remembered the planet at night that was its glowing sign, the only thing on that stretch of road. Saguaro arms shadowing the lot. It’s the intersection with Swan Road where Skyline terminates (and J., who is rereading the Aeneid, sent me a note that three-way intersections are ruled by Diana of the Crossroads).
The things I do at night follow me around the next day, warm and concealed. I have to be cautious of my phone, which will lead me back to them.
I feel sane, though, turning pages in the sun; and sanity has been awfully coy these past few months. It’s possible this is enough. One can go back inside and manage the second half of the basketball game.
I was right, I did worse.
There is not even solitude in the mountains
The title track from Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock. The counterfeit diamond, “It’s not real—you don’t need to tell me that it’s not real.” The sapphic thing, right, is to set the bar that high. That if it doesn’t drill down to the core of the earth it doesn’t count.
The fear I imagine as a small, quick bird alighting behind my sternum, dark-eyed and defenseless. To relieve its worry it scrapes its beak against my ribs. I have compassion for it, and would like to give it what it’s looking for.
A prominent example in the Wu-men-kuan is case no. 35 which reads simply, “Master Wu-tsu said, ‘Ch’ien and her soul are separated. Which one is the true soul?’” This case appears to be dealing with the philosophical topic of non-duality: how can a person be divided into component parts, such as body and soul, when she constitutes an indivisible collective unity? Yet, the case is just as clearly based on a famous T’ang legend recorded in the Li-hun chi, expressing the theme of duty versus passion (which later became such an important influence on Tokugawa literature). The folktale uses supernatural elements such as a spirit journey and bilocation in the story of a young woman who appears to her parents, who have resisted her wedding plans, to be sick and lifeless when she is separated for five years from the man she loves. Yet the “other Ch’ien” has run off with her lover and spent the time in a secret marriage. When she returns home out of a sense of responsibility for her family, Ch’ien is reunited with her tormented soul that was manifested in a body lying motionless in bed the entire time of her flight. Everyone, now purged of feelings of guilt and deception, is able to experience a sense of harmony and fulfilled responsibilities.
—Steven Heine, “Putting The ‘Fox’ Back in The ‘Wild Fox Kōan,’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996).
