I want, and do not want, to add

I want, and do not want, to add to the platitudes of being a “20-something.”

Yet, as far as mistakes go, a writer could do far worse…right?

One of my Poems: “To Tour”

via the Lovely Rebelle Society.

Longing is Just the Heart

“Perhaps longing is just the heart changing/ its colors.”
-Olena Kalytiak Davis.

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter or purpose…”
-Ecclesiastes 3:1

I have been ominously quiet about my experiences here in the Bay Area since migrating here last October. For good reason.

First: I won’t show something that might be material for “Thought Catalog,” or, even, Vice, and their penchant for “Amphetamine Logic.” No. But, people-in-their-twenties, I hear, know you…all too well. You, in self-destruction, doubt, and anger–know it will not end quite as you think…not yet. Long, yet; wait.

I have waited since October 2012 for some thing, some voice, to rouse me from my problems…it did not happen until May 6th, with the “Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions,” or BAASICS, that I finally listened…

Selene Foster, the BAASICS Co-founder, opened the most-recent session of BAASICS: the Deep End, with a statement regarding familial bonds, mental illness, and art, that quite literally, impacted me for the better. Selene’s frank statement that she “is not” her “problems,” was impetus for this post.

This is all to say: I am here, healthy, and well; I am about to post about the new Star Trek (or STO update)…which may not fare as well.

-Mt

This post best typifies: “Whoopi Epiphany Speech”

Renown.

No Ship Should Go Down Without Her Captain

It Never Fails.

Saw Malick’s To the Wonder two weeks ago. Thoughts? Many…and maybe in writing this I’ll find some meaning (not of the film, but of a much larger topic).

View First:
Now, a Transcript:
My sweet love…my hope…
…
You’re everything to me…

Speak with me…
…
Love is not only a feeling; love is a beauty.

To commit yourslf is to run the risk of failure,
The risk of betrayal;

But the man who makes a mistake can repent…

You fear your love has died;
It perhaps has been waiting to be turned into something higher.
…
Here I am…
…
Do you know what you want?
…
Awaken the love which sleeps in each man, each woman.
Know each other in that love that never changes.
…
I’ll love you forever.

“You Stood on the Other”

The Present

I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule’s fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

-Jane Hirshfield, from Come, Thief

This poem really caught me this morning. Jane is a wonderful poet, and here, she is at her best (as nearly always).

The epistolary format, the “you,” is powerfully employed, and the speaker, consistent. From the opening in with a past-tense first person, followed by the strikingly different articles (the immutable stone, the mutable clay, the human-forged matter as jewelry, and the natural sustenance of the leaves), the speaker captures a totality of “presents” which could also be “presence,” in that the following line refers to molecular pervasiveness as “fragrance by then too large.”

Hirshfield’s speaker conflates materiality and meaning with subjective actions of exchange and evanescence; “giving” is “taken,” which makes the metaphorical shift within the epistolary context, a kind of phenomenally temporal foreboding.

Line six relays a lamentable air, in that the speaker can only offer “puffs.” Air can be seen, too, as an atmosphere, or an article, or medium within which speech/sound travels. Utterance, then, for the speaker, captures presence, the present, gives it meaning, yet, as line seven reveals, due to the absence of the referent, these speech-acts remain “air.”

Lines eight and nine comprise a rheotical device the speaker deploys to cinch the notion that memories -even those scrawled in ink (paper and ink as air and vocalization)-, too, are “fallible,” or, in a more stark sense, mortal, and bound to the present presence the forms provide for their duration of existence (like humans consciousness?).

Line 10 is a decisive shift  (now that I see it as being 12 lines, I am almost going to say it is a sonnet of sorts…), the shift from materiality being “offered” to the emotional. Here the speaker casts a narrative of retrospective suspense. She HAS apologized; she WAS filled with sorrow; she WAS angry–a nice move, as the speaker has opened the door for (as I mentioned earlier) a caesura.

The last two lines, wow. Hirshfield’s speaker has taken an elegy-of-sorts, captured the nature of the present amidst presence and absence, between the physical and immaterial, and led the reader to two explosive closing lines that encompass what it is to be separate, separated, apart, and yet, a part, of memory.

Death, being a “fine” “mesh,” is almost a direct reference to “seeing through a pale glass darkly,” except Hirshfield employs the speaker to entreat the reader to consider the obscurities of embodied consciousness and loss as comprised of coin-like “sides.”

We exist. We die. We stand apart, but we find presents and presence in memories that solidify the sensation of loss.

-MT

Wherein Discussions are Rekindled.

I am here; I figure if I lay it out here, things will make sense.
Here?
San Francisco here.
*nods* Go on…

It has been…god…almost six months since moving to this City. Six months–a new year, new films, new books…all this now-latent content, lost time. Sentiments are many -as are regrets-. I suppose being realistic is important here, that I have accomplished some things; I have. Haven’t I?

I could lament, but that settles little. What matters is that I have moved forward. Continuity makes conscious experience, and, at the very least, I have kept a paper journal of this transitional point in my life.

No. I will not beleaguer you with details, because I have other designs for this entry. But I CAN say that I have reached some conclusions about how I will deploy, self-employ, my affairs. Starting here.

This blog has been neglected because I have been so focused on forcing myself to evolve more quickly. Considering this kind of move, to a City that proclaims ample opportunity, my writing has dwindled to some poems, poems I intend to share, because, well, I honestly lack the funds to submit them for publication in the journals I would like them to be in. It would also be nice to keep a register of any academic progress I make, and some thoughts regarding significant world events. SO! I welcome myself back to being Wicked Cultured, with an aim for more frequent posts, more content…whatever that is comprised of, I cannot say.

Here is a synopsis of what I “have been up to:”
-Rereading Honore’s In Praise of Slowness and discussing it with fellow writer, Denise Li.
-Finished The Windup Girl (Fantastic!).
-Started The Ego Tunnel, Teachings of Don Juan, the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, Rereading Kora in Hell, and The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart.
-Managing my online presence in Star Trek Online and Guild Wars 2.
-Getting into “Mobile Gaming…” -ugh-.
-Finding a good place to have a chat and a drink with Denise Li.
-Catching up on the recent American poetry circuit (yes, it is a circuit).
-Employment search (always important).
-Watching MariaHolic, One Litre of Tears, and constantly rewatching Umineko No Naku Koro Ni.
-Saw Les Mis, Cloud Atlas, Hobbit, and Side Effects (stoked about Star Trek: Into Darkness [for obvious reasons] and To the Wonder [Terrance Malick]).

I want to go into more detail about all the things I have been reading and viewing, but I need discourse. So, reader(s), give me thoughts about games, films, books, graphic novels, social media, almost anything, and we can establish a dialog. I want that sort of atmosphere, more than anything else, for this blog…because, everyone is has a little aspect of being “Wicked Cultured” about her or him.

OH, and Dr. Sylvia Feng will be providing more commentary on the state of mental illness in contemporary “Terran” society/culture. Be prepared though–she can be a little caustic about our “barbaric” mental health procedures.

It is refreshing to be back.
And “trope” discourse will follow soon, readers.
*smirks*

That concludes this session.

Sylvia Plath had a saying, regarding writing, which is ironic:

Although you’ve already wasted two hours writing stream-of-consciousness stuff in here when your stream isn’t even much to brag about, after all.

Of course, we have a “Post-Confessionalist” here, (aside from Beth Bachmann)–Olena Kalytiak Davis:

She set to make of nothing most,/better: an everenlightening mark:/ghost gave her this: a piece of flint: that if/you rubbed the right way,/the lightlessness would come down, give up, lift–/and then there would be nothing left to say.

So, on one hand we have one person saying one has wasted time writing in a journal; on the other we have a seemingly calm and straight-forward statement about the effects of writing. So I ask you, reader–is all for naught? Certainly NOT.

Plath is writing in a mode that is clearly influenced by a mood of pessimism, a mood so dense that she fails to realize the density of her ignorance–of course she is wonderful! But she finds herself distraught over spending time writing in a diary than studying for a midterm, and she does recognize this later: that such comparisons are trite in many ways, but she does make it to this point, nonetheless.

Olena has masterfully fabricated a sonnet that says exactly the opposite of Plath; she makes most of nothing -her writing-; she betters it; she attributes it not to inadequacy, but to a gift, a ghost; she finds an icon, or amulet; she uses it to speak the language of the ghost. She says nothing because there is nothing more to say than what the magic has proffered her. Impeccable. Well-written. Narrative.

Plath, I love you, but there are some things even you were not great at, namely, narrative self-expression (journals aside). Daddy does come close though…but check out Berryman or Thomas James for something that reads more like a poem than a journal entry.

Believe me, I love Plath, but…reading her journals (Holiday Present) has been a battle of respect and criticism.

Ever-So-”Self”-Conscious,
MT

Trying Too Hard?

It’s funny…really, it is, how, after two years the image of Wonder Woman, the eponymous Lady of War, can change. I prefer the presentation of the Wonder Woman I originally posted when I discussed the Lady of War Trope. You?

We Are Between Infinite Commas

Shields–Pun Intended

Repetition does not breed; repetition is birth itself. Repetition is an extraction prolonged into strings of embryonic copies. Given room to repeat, blurriness is definite due to a nature of reality: flux. In spite of flux, however, repetition rises to counter change with a manifest, deft hand that sways, adapts, re-presents itself over, and over, and over again. Reality is the flux of being reborn—mimetic coagulation. Post-Platonic copies of nothing, and everything being presented.