9/28/07

M.C.M.

The fearless mistakes of tonight,
the shameless facts of tomorrow.

9/26/07

9/25/07

from the unwritten history

#113 - silence has killed a lot more people than bombs ever have.

9/23/07

Visiting Day

Don't you know by now
your kind is better at wanting
then you will ever be at having.

This is your gift and your tragedy
that you chose and did not,
your fault alone and
can never be your fault.

(blame the generation before, and the one before that, and the one ad infinitum...)

This, you, is nothing but an animal nature.

But you cannot know this, can you?
Otherwise it would be different,
and for it to be different would mean
that your time is now.

But, no, your time is not now.

Soon enough, yes, but not quite now.

So don't know yet.

Not yet.

No, not quite yet...

Be patient and perhaps there will still be some time left?


No promises.


9/22/07

9/21/07

Self and Other

For better or worse you are what you do, but in private not public.

9/17/07

Autumn Cleaning

I've realized that the sudden loss of faith is not only important but necessary. Without it I would never clean my apartment.

9/14/07

Western State of Mind

sometimes

no matter what you have gained,
or what you have lost;

no matter what you do,
or do do do not do;

no matter what you try,
or what you fear;

no matter who you are with,
or who lives in you
realer in their absence
then they ever did
in your every day life;

no matter what you gained
or finally lost...

every once in a while
you don't look away
and allow yourself to understand
that the so-called soul has vacated the premises,
the concept of "unique" is just another childhood lie,
and all you really are now is


everything

you

can't

have.


2/14/07

9/12/07

In Rememory (Mythologize)


In Memory, R.G.M. - 1974-2001, originally uploaded by levari.

9/7/07

Things i've Seen This Week

Tarred up walls.
Plastic, useless fingers that are trying to be flesh, useful fingers.
A Child's elbow banging against a locked car door window (from the inside.)
Dogs that run away.
The text message that said he really is going to play Carnagie Hall.
Apartment door hollowed out where the lock should be.
A man asleep on a bench with one eye open.
A balloon (happy anniversary!) someone forgot that was trapped in a doorway.
A brown leaf banging across the sidewalk in the wind.
Some letters I needed.
Relief on her face as we sat on the floor paging through her portfolio.

9/2/07

The Garden

We mostly
whittle
away time
by dreaming
of bodies pressed
together all day,

and then these same bodies rising,
walking through corridors
of the photo album
or
the museum;

down long hallways
and out into the open air
surrounded by the crowds
who are forever
searching for the food
to replace
us.

Somewhere
deep inside
we know
that there are
beautiful
things
we are supposed
to have seen,
felt,
touched;

even if we once
believed
they can
only be known

outside
those
walls.

There's little to be done about this.

So for now
we just walk
with the crowds,

let them carry
us,

begin to
melt and mix
away
as it always was
as it always should be;

passing through
and over shaded, unmarked
paths

that are supposed
to be
our history.

Philadelphia - 2/16/07

9/1/07

A Little Nabokov For These Hot Days

On days like this it's best to get lost in the shade, and Nabokov's shade is as wonderous as it comes. My relief to you from nature's discomfort (wherever you are) in the ocean of literature...

The greatest opening of a novel written in the English Lanuage:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita."

-Lolita

[I was] born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person . . . a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera.

A Swiss citizen . . . that dash of the Danube . . . those “lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards”! That Rivieran hotel! That eye for the minute detail! Details that render everyday boringness, ironically, beautiful; or do I mean ironically beautiful? “This capacity,” Nabokov said, marveling (not for the only time) at himself, “to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest form of consciousness.”

-----------------------------------

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form. It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that . . . occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.

Nabokov - "Speak Memory"

Nothing more to say; Nabokov says it...

Quotes taken from Roger Boylan's "Nabokov's Gift" The Boston Review