Snowtations 02
riches and expenses
I am not “a survivor.” In the beginning I was many survivors, all of them shoved into one body. And then fewer and fewer as time went on, the way these things always go, like an old box of chocolates with just the toothpaste-y ones left over.
Men for whom the first epithet that comes to an enemy’s mind is “dick”… often have a rare sort of benevolence to them??? They’re inconsiderate, which means they don’t intervene in your feelings, for good or for ill. They thrust and fail to penetrate.
Say a refrain (a meme, a cliche) enough times and it starts to sound euphemistic, like a variable in algebra. Dylan’s “When The Ship Comes In” is a nice example of this; every lyric of the song winds so tightly around the ‘ship’ metaphor one imagines there just has to be a deeper, real-er prophecy threatening to break out. The refrain you hear about every three sentences touring certain archaeological sites is “housed in the British museum.” As in: want to see caryatid no. 5? Well too bad, she’s housed in the British Museum. I realized today I don’t actually want to kill myself, I just wish to be “housed in the British Museum.” Whatever that really means, perhaps only to learn whatever that really means, and then be “set free.”
I need to figure out a way to be "happening" more than I am now. Lately I've been fleeing-slash-traveling, and life of this kind seems nearly the opposite of "happening." Though I guess you could say I'm "happening upon" many wonderful sights, hemorrhaging my happening-ness on things and people I will not see again.
Quoth the Substacker: “My goal for the new year is in fact to read fewer, yes, fewer books! And to give to the few the attention they demand of me, and to get really intimate with them, and to go to more of the parties I’m invited to, and to do more coke off of more of the strippers’ tits and asses that are shaking so desperately in my face, literally all the time.”
Been getting into Henry Green these days. Love his extravagance, love how fast it liquifies and evaporates, his leave-no-trace “maximalism.” This is an emergent property and not something I could cite quotational evidence for, unless I wrote something really really good and long to buttress the quotes. So you’ll just have to read him and see for yourself.
There’s this eerie feeling I’ve always gotten from hanging out with both my favorite and least-favorite people, those I spend the most time thinking about. I was never able to explain it, until a friend suggested it’s because I elaborate on them so thoroughly in my imagination, conjure them from nothing again and again, to the point where in real life their flesh and putative blood seems simulacral, too.
(three paragraphs of a failed short story ENJOY)
There is a certain energy in the world; it circulates among the people. At the time she was not with it. At the time her socialist peers were rich with it, with their graphic smiles, and their salubrious frizziness-of-hair, and for a while she hoped she could make them see she wanted the very same things they did—she told them food and medicine, enough downtime to read and watch enough important things to become a dinner-party critic who strikes fear into everyone’s hearts all the time—first for herself and then radiating outward, for all who were going to live.
“Snaps for that,” Talia Overalls said, but she and the others were galled at her specificity. People like her, in firing off so many particulars, ran the risk of burying the future alive, of suspending it in resin. But no one gave her any feedback at all; the president just flagged her as the kind of person who was born with nerves that were wrongly routed and already fried, such that no revolution—no simple good thing—could excite her as much as the chintziness of death, and Death in June, and the fascist crags and pleather of Dolls Kill goth.
But she had not come into their world, this non-representative sample of a “real world” she didn’t know, to ruin it from the inside. She had come instead to annoy them a small amount, to grate at the walls of their world for shavings, such that when she quit, and there was always to be a great quitting, she’d have something of them to jam into her pockets and sprinkle around, for wherever she’d go.
Sometimes you know nothing about a girl other than she’s one standard deviation better a person than her surroundings imply. And you know this by her very fog—warm air upon a cold place.
I love the film Live and Let Die (1973). I love that the tarot-reader girl relinquishes her powers of divination when she lets James Bond fuck her, because it’s the only lesson of its kind I ever got as a child. Science would tell us that to lose your virginity is in fact to become better at predicting the future, that the more life we have behind us, the farther ahead we can see through the looking glass of past experience. But I think, also, that there are irrecoverable things we are born knowing, swiftly sanded away in our brushes with well-traveled imperialist polyglots.
Here is a poem I wrote when I was 17. I still kind of like it:
And I know what it means, now, better than I did when I wrote it. I think if we understood how concentrated all the evil in the world really was—how much it’s not up to “material conditions,” or webs of association—I think the knowledge would skewer us alive, that bed of nails becoming one.
I really like the poem too. :)