i had shown troy my book once.
he became jealous of the ghost which defines me.
but it was fleeting.
he asked me that same night why i called him — the first him — the unmentionable other.
it was a term that came to light as i was writing the draft.
“it gives him a lot of power,” he said to me.
it does, indeed.
but he holds all the power.
by fleeing.
a henry miller quote attests to it.
i found this quote in tropic of capricorn just weeks ago.
it now ends my book.
“Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solution to all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to — and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live — if what others are doing is called living — but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it.”
it is halfway done.
i am re-reading sartre’s nausea now, more than half a year after when i finished it.
knee-deep in my own book, i feel in a sense that my book is an extension of nausea.
be that good or bad.
derivative or not.
but this one is rooted in my experience.
real experience.
in the forward to nausea, hayden carruth says of sartre:
“For a number of years, he has been at work on his autobiography, and in the first volume, Les Mots, which was published recently in France, he has disclaimed hi early works, including Nausea and Being and Nothingness, on the ground that he had had no philosophical right to assume the position of superior, all-knowing authorship in relation to the people and problems in his books.”
in my case… this is my life.
i assume authorship over my own life.
i own it and will therefore not regret it.
not even in its ugliest.
—
la dispute’s new album is out.
the lyrics are marvelous, as with the previous one.
just now, i am sitting in fred meyer’s.
partially with my brain in the world of my own book…
and the experiences which led me to that book.
this song below speaks to that.
kind of.
but i have found more completion in it.
no hypotheticals.
—
What will I find?
Some sacred thing to help me handle the tragedy?
Or did I once-Did I have it and lose it?
No one should ever have to walk through the fire alone.
No one should ever have to brave that storm. No,
Everybody needs someone or something.
And when I sing, don’t I sing your name out
Right at the same time that I sing my own?
Some days I swear I can feel you splitting the light through the window frame.
The shapes it makes are always warmer, always brighter than the rest of what comes through.
Some days I swear I can hear you sing to me or whisper my name in the slightest way.
It’s like the warmest light now laid across my bedroom floor is somehow actually you and
Not just sunlight.
I have the memory climb down the balcony.
I put a flower on the back of its dress.
It’s probably best to forget it.
It’s probably best to let go.
I paint it the shade of where the skin and the lip meet,
Only a moment after breaking the kiss. And
I blur out everything else.
That’s how I choose to remember it.
Some nights are a lot like the days, I lay awake too late, I watch the shadows casted
Trace your shape. Those silver slivers on the wall then on the bedsheets.
I hear your song in the trees. I finally fall into rest.
Often later when I’m sleeping you show up in my dreams.
Just doing simple things, like buying groceries.
And when I wake up I could swear you must’ve just left me
Like you got up to make breakfast or maybe just to get dressed.
But the truth is, you were never there. You won’t ever be.
Sometimes I think I’m not either so what do I do
When every day still seems to start and end with you?
And you won’t ever know, you won’t ever see,
How much your ghost since then has been defining me.
I leave the memory up atop the balcony.
I tear this flower from the back of the dress.
It’s best this time, I bet, to just forget and let go.
Paint it the shade of where the lip bleeds and blur it out.
I blur out everything else, just blur out everything else.
And let go, and let go, and let go.
Everybody has to let go someday
Everybody has to let go.
I wonder when I will. I wonder.
But if I still hear you singing in every city I meet
After I blur it all out, our every memory, if
You never fade with the days, your shape still haunting me then,
Should I not just sing along?
Should I not just sing along?
I will sing sweetly hope that the notes change but
I do not need it to happen. I’m not resigned to it. And
If they never do I’ll sing your name in every line.
Just like I did throughout this. Just like I’ve always done.
In every gun, the empty church, and every tortured son.
In all those giving up. In all those giving in.
Until I die I will sing our names in unison.
Until I die I will sing our names in unison.
LA DISPUTE – YOU AND I IN UNISON.
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