FIRE ON THE LIFEBOAT

Links and design updated.

Lifejackets are links to my projects.

Crew are friends and interested/ing parties.

Have a look around. 

WRONG WAY

Stripped rooms, bare as a back in which we comfortably lie prone. Things are changing for the two of us, worlds are slowly turning in upon themselves. Inevitably, our waters rise as growing tensions, tidal arguments are measured out upon calendered charts. High tide approaches at noon.

Clinging, holding fingers are stiff cold and yet holding you, the last beautiful refuge, warms me to my core. The room is strange and the house is strange, our voices throw in peculiar ways and many times I mistake your voice for my own. Even the silence speaks. When we murmur, we do so out of turn.

Occasional downpours dampen nothing in our street. The anxiety prevails through like the perpetual summer dawn, a sun always pulling up above the horizon but never quite reaching that point of full exposure. I am sorry for your tiredness, everything will settle. I promise this and many other things. Promise making is all I have to hold me secure to people, to hold me fast to you.

How do you draw yourself when given a pencil, what margins do you sketch? Charcoal grins and blackened finger tips prevail, but for all the muggy smiles, there is no work here

This space, the passing of ships, is a total bore. The wrench to actually press keys and engage brain overawes. I can barely walk let alone spell. Immediately, now with urgency, I want to finish. 

Apparantly 1.8% of all my referers (that is to say links from external pages), arrive from disney.com. The toons are onto me.

The mechanics of forced writing pull slowly, sorry, sorry and sorry although only apologetic to myself; I have expired reminders and goodwill. I am always nearly leaving.

So you find an abandoned lifeboat, and posit reasons - laziness stretched out at the top. However, there is more, and we all are always nearly leaving.

The house above has seen its walls straightened and coloured, dynamic blueprints, cups of tea thrown across a ragged carpet and the bleach bleach bleach smell of newness.

In here there is nothing but boxes. Out there, early heat.

The yard is fat with colour, reminding me that I need to photograph the plants. I should like to make some money from these photographs, I should like to make to some money at some point of my life. I am tiring already.

Kafka spurs me though, Blanchot just behind, screaming and whispering about the process of reading. For me, that damn process takes too long and just won't stop.

Visit elsewhere.

See what happens?

List upon lists upon the wall, these walls still covered by scraps of paper and postcards, dog-ear slides of adhesive staining the plaster. Upstairs, no such thing. After hours of priming and scouring, sunshine streaming in through the north window, the room is prepared, white and straight.

Of course the focus must be dual now, rising to both challenges. The first is the very physical, that is to say packing into cardboard and rearranging and transporting out of doors and indoors, upstairs and down - the movement process, of changing a house once again. It is eleven in five years.

The second is much the same but with books - infinite regress, the impossibility of finishing, and the internalisation of the external act, the externalisation of the internal act.

It is all very unsettling.

The incontinuity of the event, being - as it is - miraged by pain. Today's wakening was like yesterdays times ten. I ache for the math of it. Jawline electricity, the ripped thud of every beat through a face's tired vessels, the tender gauges in the fleshy gum. I am driven to the pharmacist.

Of course illness has become a theme, has become a urgent comma desperate for the next clause. But this is not illness per se, but pain.

Yesterday in the schoolmaster heat of the Lit & Phil, we verged on a debate between two writers from the Dominican Republic. Diaz with sharp-lined suit and occasional 'fuck' pitted against Valerio-Holguín's deeper, more insistent voice - no contest. As one friend said, Diaz was the charmer, he had the stories of the 'hood, the contact with the youth, the adopted "y'all"s and the swift rise into intellectualism that audiences love. The true loss of the evening was that we rarely heard from Valerio-Holguín and that the two rarely engaged.

Valerio-Holguín's refusal to write in English, his self-imposed economic exile, his demands for reappropriation of the American canon were never explored. I wanted to hear more about distinctions between diaspora and immigration and I wanted further definitions of his violence of alterity. Postcolonialisms for sure, but from a vantage point.

After the lecture, we lost the crowd and avoided the sponsored bus, later spotted from our quiet, unassuming bar parading around town like a gross fairy-lit lemon.

Page ninety-seven of the second-hand book heralds the beginning of his resistance towards interrogation. What is the most important aspect here? Which sentence provides a vantage point from which we might look forwards and back, towards and against? The circumference of sight puts paid to linearity.

Perhaps the aspect is approached through character, the naming of people, the titles given within greetings? Could it be the physicality of food and drink, the sheer beauty of imbibed alcohol inked out upon the page? Architecture though, what about architecture? The buildings are covered in snow, as too are the courtyards. Here there are surely stories?
Perhaps, however, the real narrative of the page is not to be found within the text, but in the slight smudge of blood that trails from the centre to the deep crease in the far corner.