Moving Forward

The night by which we sit
draws a circle with its finger around the hour,
just about to disappear
like the persons we believe icebergs
we clutch to,
we believe in underneaths
that can hold our grip as if dancing,

left to float
with less of time,
borrowed finger missing trace of progress.

Trail

Inevitably, what I write will always cast a shadow away from me; sometimes the shadow will carry my incidental silhouette right to my feet; sometimes there will be a long stretch of smoke-like thread spun from the cursive tails of my words to the ball of yarn I hold in my hand. Either way, you can always find your way back to me. Even if I am one to conjure up fortresses and tread behind tall doors, I will always leave a piece of string for Hansel and Gretel and you to eager your way to me.

So even when my words ooze from the soap dispenser and you attempt to wash your hands with them for the last time until the next time, you'll be able to pick up the scent of me as you go about your day, dealing. Over time, you'll become accustomed to it and you'll think it's part of the furniture. I put that chair there, where I sit comfortably, somewhere in a sideroom in your mind where you come to cry and talk about loneliness. There, you smell reassurance, and you leave me with a trail of my words heading out the door. I remain there comfortably. You've come so often, these past few years, and each time I was able to find something to say to you. But nothing that I said really did it; nothing that I said really made you feel like you could leave me where I was, without returning.

I think that everything I told you could have been bottled. But I never gave you a bottle to hold it all in. I'd always given you cracked vials, ones without corks, or even just poured suggestions of your salvation into your cupped hands and watched you scatter away what refused to be held which was really everything. It's why you always came back for more, isn't it? Because you didn't have enough; I never gave you enough. When you pressed me down, I could expel but a breath of hygienic thoughts, though I suppose out there you had to put your hands on the walls and the walls dirtied them.

Despite the words that follow me out of this room, I think I'm getting tired of never leaving, of you always coming back. I realise that I hooked you with my words from the beginning; my yarn took me to your darker version of the world. I followed you in to the point where I could no longer see my own shadow. It's only when I got to a window that I saw I was somewhere in your mind and my words sewed hallways and rooms together into a maze. What was perhaps a patchwork before was now a quilt, a quilt of someone's life I didn't know I'd write.

But now that I have woven myself cleanly into a history of another human being, I'm kind of afraid of pulling out, of unraveling the entire thing, because you tell me, and I can see it, that my words are holding you together. And what I want to let you know is that you can write yourself together, that you don't need me to do it for you, but you keep coming back to this room and I feel responsible for that, like it's a lure, like my being part of the furniture makes you feel at home where really there is but a chair, with a man sitting down holding a ball of yarn, wishing he could unmix his metaphors.

Inchoate

Calling this post inchoate runs the risk of it fading further into the obscure whatever of the internet. Firstly, because you probably have to look the word up to know what it means, or you may not even care and just read on regardless, or in the eventuality that you do look it up and you realise what it means, you may still not quite get what I'm key-pressing about. Bear with, or not. Whatever. I'm not even here right now. Imagine this on a post-it on your fridge or vibrating through the plastic grate of your answering machine. This is all pre-recorded, settled in pixels, ripe with the possibility of your understanding and yet you come across and read 'inchoate' - no, you skim past it, it barely registers as a thought because while on the internet, you are vacuumed in. It pulls you past the title. If you were paying close attention, you may actually have read it but not registered what the letters put in that order are signalling. I thought of anchovies, inches I ate. I then looked up this awkward word in the dictionary, and was satisfied.

I'm pleased that I can call this post inchoate. It's a sign of my self-expression, my not knowing what will instantiate on this surface. It's a trace. I was here. Call me back. Post below. Validate my existence. Just pin the comment there and I'll take my blindfold off and clap when I see it. I won't much care what it'll say, to be frank. Jodi Dean says what is on the internet is not just an image but an image and its trace. This isn't live, you know. I'm putting this here so you can see it, but it's after the fact, afterhours. You've reached my shop window and instead of a closed sign there is this post titled inchoate. It's kind of here; like the blinds are down over the window but they're partly open and you can cup your hands and put them around your eyes, kind of like putting your vision in brackets, and you can see through the tint to something; like the tension between the comma and the dot in the semi-colon, the pluralism makes you stop, makes you consider what is here, what is left, who left this here? Well, you know who.

I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. I can't really find out, actually. I reckon I'm saying something, though. I think I'm saying something about the internet and the habit we have as internauts to skim-accept-send information that is expendable, not really a thought, ordurary.

Zoom out, and I think a lot of my own thinking has that character. I don't sit with it, I don't really consider it, I just sort of get a thought and post it, utter something, shock with spontaneity. I write to see my writing be written, to see my key-pushing leave a trail of work so that at the end of the sentence I can punctuate and rub the forehead sweat that I swear was just there a vibration ago.

New Zealand is criticised for being an anti-intellectual environment. I've contributed to that, too. Just writing. Saying what's on the top of my head, taking the impulse gut-feeling as worth more than thought thought, thought that has been ruminated, considered. Literally in Latin, according to the etymology dictionary online, com-sidus could refer to the act of observing the stars. If my mind is a sky, and the thoughts are stars, then the light of them takes a long time to reach from far galaxies and other astral spaces. As time goes on, some stars grow brighter, others dim. I must take my time. No, I want a different analogy, because I feel like if I take my time, I actually don't have enough. Thoughts come and go, but I seem to just pick at the brightest and forget about the ones that have yet to really reach me. I recognise that it may take them a long time to get here... to articulate, but there's only so many constellations I can draw with the same thoughts I have now; there's only so much I can divine from reading this one snapshot of the sky. Reading the same patterns reinforces my anti-intellectual attitude; it makes me resist anything new. These lines that I've drawn don't have to make up a lion, they can make up a notion, a new way of seeing. 

So I wait until the stars glow closer.

Love Thy Brother

Just getting started writing this sentence for this piece, I feel an unableness, like the thoughts that are to come through my fingertips and push down keys in the order they wish to be expressed in are stuck somewhere past the funnel and in the bend of a straw of thinking, and I'm sucking in breath but it's only coming out in jitters. It's a similar experience I have when I am around my brothers, because oftentimes any words I have to say get lost in the piping. But the pre-words coil around in the pool of everything primordial and I can feel them wiggling in my second brain. Because of the current piping system, those pre-words don't always get to become words - they deviate down some trachial branches and never reach utterable state. Though they aren't quite old enough to speak, they still propel me that they want out, and they must find a way to navigate through roads less traveled so as to get, if not uttered through the vocal chords, uttered via the hands, or the chest, or the other parts of the body.

The ooze that is cooking and is delivered through the pipelines is a very warm liquid, a warmth that is intensified by being near their source of heat - the heart. The heart itself is a charcoalic glow, and it borrows light only to give back twofold, as it does with temperature. As such, being with my brothers lights up the coal inside. They need not really do anything but be there, and I can feel my heart warm; I can feel it wanting to reach out to them and converse. Sometimes then, words bubble out of the pipery and pop in front of their consciousness, and more often, I simply feel the warmth, like the tips of the plug wanting to connect with the socket to complete a circuit.

When I give them that affection, the circuit completes, and there is a sense of connection there that reminds me why I call these men my brothers. When they do it as well, I am reminded. It's a wonderful feeling, though I sometimes hesitate to complete it. I have put mental bottlenecks and traffic lights all around my body and mind to regulate this process, as if its happening too much may be dangerous. It is a protection mechanism, though I don't know why, except that I have a recurring thought that says I should not show too much affection to them, lest I suffocate them, and I burn myself out. That may not be it. I have thoughts that make me feel self-conscious about putting my hands on them.

This never occurred to me as a child, eager to waddle to give hugs. The word iubire (love) was exchanged without knowing anything about it, as in, without knowing anything other than it. Now... this unableness I feel sometimes flags down the possibility of hesitation. And it is not that I do not love at all - I cannot do that, but it is that the loving is regulated, given in puffs at a decided pace.

Is it not appropriate to love without knowing anything but? As such, can I forget that otherness, and love unreservedly?

I love listening to them, talking to them, sitting with them, patting them on the back, holding them.

I don't see

In the middle of my room there is a space that is clear, an eye around which the rest of the room, furniture, window, door and wall, square. This space is one I forget to acknowledge yet it is the one space I inhabit most. When I think of my room, the image I have is angled at certain points or from installed mental cameras that were never there, but never is this positioning central; never do I hold this space in my attention. Even when writing I have the tendency to fog out everything but the piece of carpet underneath the space or the light bulb turned on lighting the carpet uninterruptedly. In fact, if I put my pseudo quantum physics hat on, I venture that the light diving right below the light bulb has the easiest and fastest route because gravity pulls it down unobstructed, as if there was nothing below. If the light could be a man, then he would fall post-terminal velocity without a parachute but with the weight of a growing number of men on his back, pushing him down towards the carpet until he collapses into the mass. I would never know if he would get there alive, that one needle of man in a stack of weaving. And the space he would occupy, for the briefest of exercises, would go unnoticed.

After Reading

After reading one of Haruki Murakami's short stories, I stood there in my grey pants and night shirt, where his words had left me, waiting, and looking at the walls. The room that the story had left me in had a counter which would have made me think I was in a kitchen were it not that only a little further away there was a shower. I wasn't so much looking at the walls, as looking for them, for the places where the shadows flattened and formed silhouettes of the counter and the shower, and only recently held the pieces of the people that were just in here. The window is blinded, and the light from the outside is interrupted each time by a monorail train passing by as soon as I imagine it, or as soon as I am told to imagine it.

The couple, if they can be called that, were in here talking about airplanes. The woman was remarking how the younger man recited poetry about airplanes when he talked to himself unconsciously. She cried, this woman. Twice, the day she said that. This day. Once before making love, then after she had said to him that she thinks she is happy in her marriage. He was doubtful, but his own feelings for her had somehow progressed and flattened with the tiles of her house.

There was a bed in this room as well, I now recall. I looked at it right there, and I can't help but look at it right now, covered in a dark duvet, looking from near the counter. The two people never left this room, but they were no longer there after some time. Such as now. Now they are not there. I am there, standing, walking from the shower to the counter to the bed and back again to the counter, looking for strings on ceilings and the bold letters of another short story. There are walls, for walls make this a room, and walls allow there to be shadows and darkness, but I cannot see any that don't fade away when I move.

I stood there, where I am standing, angling away around this space, picking up a pen and a piece of paper with an airplane poem written upon it, and the leaving them to fade back into their place. When I looked at the counter the first time, they were there. Then I passed them by, and now I can see them there again. It is a matter of walking around the room, joining the shadows but casting no shadows of my own since this is not a story in which I am in.

OGGB

Re: Sturm and Turner's "Built Pedagogy; the University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace"

I recall in 2010 as a fledglingly timid first year student, I came upon OGGB and witnessed the "thing"ness of it, exemplary "built pedagogy" in that it was the newest, as far as I knew, building on campus, and inside the "bunker"-like structure that held up so much glass that I may have thought it was bulletproof or at least idiot-proof, university stuff happened. Did I belong in such a building? Was I worthy? I like Sturm and Turner's likening of the inside of the building to a hotel or airport – chairs are black, floor is shade of grey, the couches are black, the columns that hold the building up from underneath are black, the carpark underneath the building is grey. Uniformity. Not only is the design expansive and space-occupying, it is also space-defining in that it permits the bipedals inside it to feel that they are in a managed space that is clean and therefore whatever happenings occur are to be infused with the same cleanliness, uniformity, and I would say, an 'office' seriousness. The elevator talks to you if you want to go up to the top of the building where the postgraduates and professoral people impart importance (pardon my sarcasm), but you can't take the stairs from the inside, due to a lack thereof. The architects, as Stephen or Sean mentioned in lecture-time, designed it so that knowledge disseminated from the top and wasn't as accessible to the student body. Of course, on the ground floor, you can see through, but it is as if the windows are, as the reading points out, surfaces, and happenings, students moving about as they would in an atrium of an airport or hotel or conference centre, carrying portfolios or assignments or laughing over coffee, are projected through to the outside. This is student life, moving about under the Stalinistic gaze of the enpainted enthroned Owen G. Glenn who funded enough of the concept to have himself oversee, or rather, seen to be overseeing so that students feel looked after. The students are under surveillance, if not from security cameras, or from Owen's eyes, then from the architecture which wordlessly (but shadely) instructs them on how to go about their 'business'. Looking outside from within, one can see the concrete grey of the Fisher and Paykel Building, and of course the flat green grass of the John Hood Plaza. At least there is some naturalness, even if its mowed down and encircled just like the myriad of potplants inside (I am still calling it naturalness because it's living, even though putting a flower no longer is really 'natural'). Come to think of it, it's not a far cry to say that students are in the same position as the plants – enclosed by walls, cut off from the top so as to control their growth, and towered over by the immensity of seriousness that the building embuildings.

Ex-pression

Re: Flusser's "Letters of the Alphabet - Does Writing Have a Future?"

Flusser notes the concrete significance of a word like "expression", denoting language as a filter through which thoughts are pushed through to create new concepts, new information. Throughout history, that is what writers have been doing – ex-pressing, 'ex' reffering to the pressing out or pressing through of language. I get the image of unthoughts or unmanifested thoughts being put through a language "meat" grinder and what comes out through the little grill at the end is thought, able then to be externalised, whether spoken or written. Throughout history, each time thought was produced, the language grinder changed in that the grill had an 'ex'tra hole for this 'ex'tra newly-made thought. Looking closely at my own pigeon attempt at 'ex'plaining (plaining out, flattening?) this etymology, I venture that a word like "impression", which ordinarily refers to an image or feeling left once something is gone, can be thought of using the same method. The 'im' prefix I would say is the antithesis of 'ex', and thus would mean pressing 'in' or 'inwards', so in the context of trying to impress someone, such as what I may be trying to do with this blog post, what that would mean along the lines of this thinking is that one person tries to press their own thoughts into another, implying (folding inwards?) there is an intention. The impression left by something or someone is the thought that has been inwardly projected upon the self. Thoughts thus can be said to have their own physics. Sometimes when there is philosophising going on, as there could be the case in this blog post, new words are made using the building blocks of older ones. Expression in the case of this blog post for example has (ab?)used morphemes to highlight certain things. What has been created though, is not 'new' per se, nor 'original', but rather an actualised possibility of what language all along could have done (and probably has, just without, and I speak for myself, my own notice).

Self-Design

Re: Groys' "Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility"

'Who are you?' is not the question that gets answered when one human being meets another, but rather 'Who am I being seen as?' As Groys says, modern human beings cannot escape fashioning themselves into signs for what they stand for. Groys notes a shift from peopledom interested in "how their souls appeared to God" to "how their bodies appear to their political surroundings", so after God's death, the judging viewer did not disappear but rather shifted and dispersed into the masses. Because of this, the habit of self-fashioning has remained, though I venture that an increased interest in honesty and authenticity as visible virtues has influenced that self-fashioning "obligation" towards remaining 'true'. As such, it is not enough to simply live a life honestly or authentically but one must show that eagerness and commitment to do so, that visibility, through self-design. The human must be seen to in order to be validated, because validation comes from the seeing Other. The pre-Nietzscheans may have thought God used to be able to see their soul and tell if their being is pure or not, but since His death (and with it, His omniscience), peopledom sought to project their soul-state outwards through substitute soul-reflective clothing and habits, inspirational quotes as Facebook statuses and music that resonated with them. I count myself among this peopledom. This is still manipulation of perception, whichever way one looks at it, precisely because the opinion of the Other is accounted for. To make my example work for me even more, Facebook has increasingly restrictive privacy settings, though ideally, if one lived an honest life, and assuming that this honesty can be projected, one would not have anything to hide and so one would not need to tinker with those settings to limit what the 'public' sees. Facebook simply allows any user to design a virtual self, and through that self one can vise other virtual selves. Somehow, through these distant, pseudo-selves, people can talk to each other that would never even say hello to each other on the street, and they can claim they know each other. Is this true though, or would they just have seen the image of the other? I don't think self-design is escapable, but I also see it as tempting to think it is, with the pretext that if one lives honestly, one would not need Facebook selves or other imagery. Part of me still naively thinks that on some level, to interact, we need to go beyond images anyway. That interaction ain't just images imagining each other. Say it isn't so.

8:00

Have this image in mind.
Pink petals the size and shape of eyes,
spinning in a whirlwind
away from trees
above from asphalt,
the whirlwind draws lines
grey-brown pastel crayon arcs in the air
as if a surface,
the petals blow around the lines
as they are erased,
keeping attention on one is impossible,
they flutter.

Eight Months

It has been eight months since we decided to notice together the heartstrings hanging between us. There, God put out his washing. That day we decided to hang our own string higher up, to rinse out our own garbs and let them hang there to dry.

In times of rain, the clothes hung heavier and stretched the string down, but then there was sunlight and drying and then opportunity for lifting the garments off the line to be folded away. 

A dastardly storm blew through recently. I had put a lot of my own washing on the line for the past few months, and I hadn't taken it off because it hadn't had enough opportunity to dry. Ideally it would have dried within a few hours, maybe a day, but one of my coats took a particularly long time to get there. It's no secret that even with the Sun out, I had been sneaking out to spray it with water so that I could have it out longer, and I blamed it on the passing storm.

Having the washing out for too long wasn't good for the coat though. It began to weaken, unworn, and from all the rinsing by rain followed by the drying then the rinsing by force, it started to shrivel and shrink, holding more of the water in and weighing the string down too much. Too much, I say, and we both know; it leaked onto the laundry God had out on our heartstrings, and we knew that if his garments didn't dry in time then he couldn't take them off and there would be no room for him to place anything else he may be wanting to place there.

I'd have let the laundry weigh the string down if it were simply my line, but it isn't, because it needs a two points to hang from. And heartstrings connect two hearts. It wasn't just my own I was responsible for now. We agreed eight months ago that we would hang our washing on the same line so that we could spread it out and catch more wind and thus dry it faster. I recognise I have been selfishly hogging the line, as if it were all mine. I am sorry.
 
This past month you have blessed me with steadfast dedication in putting up with its putting up. You helped me unpeg the coat too heavy for me alone to lift, so that I could take it down and twist it and release the river it had been holding up its sleeves. I was going to put it up again on our upper line and promise not to go back and sneak water onto it, but I think it much better now, with your agreement, to put it to hang on God's line. It catches warmth more easily, his line, and I think it would be in a safer place there, away from my own interference with it. And when it's dry, God will take it down himself and do with is what he wills.

In the time that follows then, feel free to hang any old clothes that are still dirtied somewhere in your closets. There is more space on the upper line now because my coat's gone, and as far as I can tell, that was the heaviest one I'd owned. If another proves to be heavier, once I know it, I will do my best to let you know; I will push through any hesitance and formality and simply let you know so you can help me dry it as fast and as thoroughly as we can. I would do the same for you.

To months ahead of laundry and metaphors,
Yours,
Cristian