16 January 2006 | Sea
My high school sweetheart used to receive love letters from a pathological liar. We would read them in her room, with the door locked, before her sister, with whom she shared the room, arrived home from school. It was almost as exciting as sex, which also happened behind that door and also in the time before her sister returned home.
The letters were filled with stories of the author’s childhood, none of which were believable beyond the first sentence. The one I remember best concerned Bobby Kennedy, who he claimed to have befriended on a Nantucket bench at the age of seven. Their bond was such that Kennedy insisted the boy accompany him on the 1968 presidential campaign trail, which is how he came to be backstage the night of assassination. Overcome with terror and grief, he wedged through the crowd and held the dying man in his arms just as he drew his last breath. This last detail I’ve always loved. Too much in a sea of too much, it is somehow just right.
14 January 2006 | Ritual
A friend recently shared this quote from Deleuze’s book Pure Immanence: “Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought in return affirms life.”
These days I feel stuck in how I think, stuck in the life defined and delimited by my thoughts. It seems the best prisons rarely require bars and walls.
I’ve had one idea, though. It’s of a kind of ritual. I’d construct a figure, a dummy, of a person, a woman. She would be life-size, I think, and made of wood. Ideally she’d be hollow, or hollow in places. Once I finish making her, I would write on her, describing everything I know about her—her body, her personality, her history, dreams, and desires. In the end these descriptions would cover her from head to foot; they’d have to, because I know so much about her, having known her so long. Then I’d take her to the woods or some other place far from people.
The next part is unclear. The question is whether I’d bring an ax. I know I’d bring matches, but an ax is something else. It comes to down to how I plan to destroy her, the degree of violence involved. This is a problem with made-up rituals: you can’t know in advance how something will feel. At this point, though, I lean toward the ax—not because of the violence (the violence frightens me) but because of the way an ax would engage me, my physical self, in the act of destroying her. This seems important. If I merely burn her, burn her and watch her burn, I remain at a distance, less her destroyer than a witness to her destruction.
I haven’t said who she is. She’s not a real person. In a sense this is her crime. Her crime is that she cannot exist anywhere but in my mind, my desires. Her crime is that she surpasses what is possible, lacking nothing but the possibility of existing. Her crime is that I love her, and have always loved her, and will continue to love her even after I destroy her—assuming that a smoking pile of chopped-up wood equals her destruction, which I have reason to doubt.
06 January 2006 | Story
I thought of a story to tell but didn’t write it down, didn’t make a note of it, and now it’s gone. Will I think of it again? If I do, will I recognize it as the story I lost?
I was upset when I lost it, but now that’s past, I’ve let it go.
Perhaps I will find it again and forget I lost it.
A story idea: A man who continually loses and finds the same thing, never realizing.
This is just to say
I made a new site for my
Business, Luminous
The site includes a
Blog about making websites
Which is what I do
It took me two years
To do this and now it’s done
So pardon my joy
