a sleep with no dreams

(Running home, running home, running home, running home...)

____For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver








Akif Hakan,

the girl in this photo is someone i need to get to know. she's the last piece i think. i know she has a messy apartment. i know she vacuums in the nude. i think she's pretty quiet, and we'll have to learn to read her thoughts. i know she says:

Lying in that bed it suddenly hit me how far I was from the earth. From soil. I wanted to be close to it but there I was occupying some piece of sky.
(not my words, credit due to the person who wrote them)

i know she thinks the most dreadful saturday night she ever had was the one where she tried to learn to play the guitar someone left behind by herself. the dress she wore to her sister's wedding is on the floor now. i don't know if she's lost home (like Ali) or if she never could hang on to one (like me). she's an enigma of sorts - even to me. i don't know where i can find her. she's not in a song somewhere. she's not described for me in a book i've read, and i think back through my past and think to myself: who could she be? and can't settle it.

but when i know her... then i think i'll be ready. the parts will start to lock into one another. Ali i already know well, and his history's just variations on my own. and me, well... that's easy enough. but her... i want to conjure her. i want her to be mine. i want her to be someone who would like me (not the Q in the book, the Q in life). i want her to be an expression of that female-limbo, which is so different from the male version. a woman's sadness is soo different. it's a whole different season to a man's. has its own ebbs and tides, and reacts in its own individual way to wind, and to words, and to invisible things. But that's not even it, i don't want her to be sad. no one is going to be sad. there is no sadness here. she just needs some air.

talk to me dearest, who do you want to be? what should be important to you? are you sure you want me to make you so... stoic? so aloof and apathetic and distant? that's not you. i know you're not this person. who are you really? what are your stories, where can i find them? shall your father be wonderful?, i think he will be. and your mother too. but she'll die first, and your sister is typical. she'll take it well. and you'll never quite find your niche. perhaps you work at a vintage-clothing store that you run with a migrant-girl from Nigeria. The migrant-girl's parents are wealthy, and they sent her abroad to study. But she's used her tuition money to open this store, and that's where you work. how's that? will that work for you? i'm still not convinsed.

i don't know.

*___*___*

i had promised myself the next novel would be my happy-novel. it will not be. my next novel will be a story about air. about small confined (figurative) spaces. it will be about contortionists in funny poses, stuck in place, and held in place by time and circumstance and finances and family and religion and drink and everything that feeds off us. it will be a novel abou history, which we hold soo dear and hate soo much. it is a story that's soo distant, and soo insipid there's no room for love. it's a dusty life led by dusty, confused people. it's a story about sensed locomotion, but when we open our eyes, we're still right back where we started (at: who?). It's Bon Iver's Re:Stacks as a story. It's about a 38 year old man who smokes on his balcony. and my sojourn in LA. and this girl, who is naked in her apartment, in the sky. and homelessness of course. home, which is where things are supposed to start, and which never ends at. about the multitudes of homes we can't have. about walking down Santa Monica Blvd. at 3am with a limp and your hands soo deep in your pockets you worry they won't come back out. it's a story about being divorced three-times. it's a story about how much i hate family. and history. and the past. and heritage. and how my grandfather did too. how he locked himself in his room for 30 years and would only leave once a week to buy groceries and books. how he waited it out. sat on the clock till it stopped. it's a story about women and how beautiful their knees are. and their ankles. and how the heels of women are soo attractive. and navels. and eyelashes and why do wet eyes feel so strange to touch? it's about being against a wall. it's about Run Orestes, Run! it's about Bye Bye LA. it's about Exile and the Kingdom. it's about A Sleep With No Dreams, and i think, in fact, that's what it ought to be called. because now that i think about it: a sleep with no dreams is as much solace as it is the emptiest, darkest, most silent, far-flung, edge-of-the-no-where i've never had the (mis)fortune to visit.

*___*___*

when i get her down, i think i can start.

happiness?

DAVID: You see, maybe it’s a boy thing. Maybe you don’t get it.

MARGARET: Well, you know, no, it’s this sort of obsession with sex.

DAVID: It’s a boy thing.

MARGARET: I think girls are obsessed with romance, you see.

DAVID: That’s the difference between us, Margaret.

____transcript: At the Movies With Margaret and David, reviewing Sex ____Drive


untitled, isa marcelli

i am uncertain about happiness. firstly, it's not something i know. is it even a noun or an adjective? why don't i know it?, i feel like i should. it's something we're soo often concerned with, our 'happiness'. certainly i know about all its opposites (and it has alot of opposites). i know about its half-opposites and its nearly-the-same-thing-but-not-reallys.
____every so often, it's important i think to take account of life. and every time, i find the same result: i don't like my life. don't get me wrong, in hindsight i'm always satisfied (enough) with it. in hindsight i even look back on certain phases of it with tremendous affection (and equal loathing). (this is maybe the crux of who i am. the history conundrum is who i am). perhaps only behind the glass of time, bars that prevent me from tampering with it, the folds and wrinkles, the aberations in photographs, sentiment and nostalgia changing the colors, maybe only after all that, am i able to view it, this distorted bastard of myself, this frankenstien stictched together from rainbows that weren't there, and from first kisses that tasted like french-fries and there were no earthquakes at all... the flickering light was just a moth to a lightbulb, making a mild burning noise everytime it landed, maybe after i've dipped it in watercolors and used red-eye-reduction on it, after that, maybe it's ok to look at it. diluted versions of my moments, and think, oh yes, it wasn't so bad was it?

But while i live through it, there is a brutality to mornings. like something being cleaved. i am lonely when i am alone, and more so when i am in large groups. i am unimpressed with women, and them, i think, with me. an impromptu conversation about mathematics algorithms that traditionally i'd enjoy and enjoy i perfunctorily nod and play my moves through. after some digression in our conversation, (we consider: Japan, the Trivium, my Swedish designed wristwatch), i'm invited out. come hang with us, why not? i don't know. but i don't. i can't.

i enjoy playing the piano. it allows me to concentrate on minute movements in my hands. it focusses my body into two palms and i can ignore the rest of it. all the rest of it. i just listen and feel my hands moving. make mistakes. make adjustments. like cooking. like putting a bed back together. i like playing with children. there's something distinctly anti-me about being found on my hands and knees growling like a lion at a 3-year-old. i hate writing. mostly i do not have qualities that i dislike. ("oh, i'm so shy, i wish i wasn't" or... "i must get this whole compulsive-lying thing under control". nothing like that) but i loathe writing. it is after being shot, the trail you leave behind. it's jagged, and imprefect, and never-quite-right, and must be the sort of sickening 'not-again' compulsion drug and sex addicts get before they do something they know they're going to regret. that sort of shaking, 'oh no not now' werewolf transmutation. pains and stretches and aches and reorganization of internal organs.

"What is this thing happiness that I've talked myself out of it a million times and never once in?"
____Jonathan Safran Foer

In the best of times, i still feel as though i am in a dark room grasping for lightswitches. Sitting by banks, waiting for the line to twitch, unable to relax in the scenery. there is something that's missing here. some element that should make Friday night worth its own self.

[shrug]
(but not even once?)

fragments (things i am looking for)

Everything that happens is from now on
____Re: Stacks, Bon Iver








inceptive notions


(which is to say: the saddest thing about you not being here is: unoccupied furniture. which is sad because there's a chair no one sits in, but also, because you still take up space. my heart is full of your inanimate objects. indefatigable memories.)


(the rest removed by author, in piecemeal fashion, over 25 minutes following initial writing, because it sucked)

letter to my future baby(ies)

Dear Wonderful You,

it's not raining now, but it has been. i was driving through the storm last night, could barely see five feet in any direction. terrified, i drove slowly in the slow lane, and listened to the sound of an ocean falling out of the sky. this will be an experience you never hear about. i want to apologize to you for all the things that you've had no control over ; for the bundled together experience of your inheritance. how could you know?, you weren't around to see what your mother was wearing that first time, or why i noticed her shoulders, or that she has an odd intonation when she says ye-ah. You're not to be blamed because one day i walked in and saw my mother (grandma) holding my sister (auntie Sahar) up to her chest in a pink room that was colored so brightly and happily and sobbing together - it was like a miracle i was never meant to see - one of those images you never quite sever off again ; and though you're not to be blamed for it, and though you never had a stake in our victories, and failures, and our pains, and our happinesses, here you are: with it all heaped upon your tiny fat-kneed lap. rings around eyes, unslept hands that hold each other and shiver out of fear, and your mother's still panting and can barely sit up in bed. An entire history that is yours and yours for the taking (but more hopefully: leaving), a heritage, a tradition ; that your father cannot listen to you if there's Brahms playing in the background, and that, even now, sometimes at night, he lays awake feeling more lonely than any stone or pebble or detached tree-branch anywhere. An entire history of the only reason your mother was even wearing that dress was because her mother had made her - she didn't even like that dress. Your eyes aren't even focussing yet, so you can't see our ravaged bodies. Your grandmother's (my mother) gained alot of weight. And Sahar is bent all out of shape by ever-patient-gravity. Me and my eyeglasses. and my hair-loss-prevention medication, and my weak ankle, and the dryness i feel when i hold my hands, like two pieces of paper rubbing, and you so fresh! so pink and rosy fingered! and your curious eyes that can't fathom it yet, can't fathom the harm we'll do to you, the oceanic burden of our memories that we'll unload... Stories about how your great aunt escaped Iran through a desert - and in the night, they were being chased by men with guns and huge-torch lights, and a baby escapee was crying and they forced the mother to smother her baby. About the things I saw in Africa as a 3-year-old that i won't forget - it was only a breadcart, and men with axes, for no reason at all, i still never will won't understand , and pink bedrooms and pink faces, and sobbs launched into chests, trying to shake past skin and fat and breasts and speak directly to heart : hear me? hear me? hear me?

hello in there? hi.

you won't understand for years, why your mother likes to sit and stare out the window for no reason when it rains, and your father likes to sit on the balcony with a cup of tea. you won't know where we are. you'll never know what happened for 28 months in a little mountain-town in northern Israel, and why there are a few extra stars in my sky than yours (but you'll catch up in time). You won't understand why, sometimes when i hold you i'll mumble strange words - prayers, and hopes and incantations into your ear, strange sounds ya Bahaulapa that will make you smile and you'll giggle in my neck. See, the thing is, it's not just your mother and i, you won't know about how your great-grandfather was almost arrested, and how he holds the record for 'longest time depressed, male-category' at just over 30 years, and how your great-grandmother is actually insane, and what i wore to his funeral, and that she taught me how to play chess. you won't know about what they would cook for me when i was sad, and the time i fell in a puddle that was deeper than an ocean and i ran home soaked and crying and what they said. the house i lived in for those years will be nothing to you. and other houses, with pink rooms, and highways where during a storm i saw out of the corner of my eye an apparition driving beside me, until i shouted: you freak your headlights are off! while high-beaming him incessantly till the fool realized. Or that your father doesn't sing, but in his BESS class today, a little girl said: i don't know this one either and the other said, Teacher-Michael, sing it with me for her, and so for the first time in my life, I sang 'Blessed Is the Spot' the way my father would sing to me for years without feeling like an out-of-tune cardboard box. And how three lines in, the other joined in, and in a little crack of space-time no one else could possible steal from me opened up, i remembered life is about moments and not seconds. moments and not details. moments and not oceans. moments and not histories. moments and not events. (i wonder how i feel when i sing it for you... )

and, i'm also sorry that you won't make it all better. you won't make it all better. your mother will still throw tissue boxes at me from the other side of the room when i say naughty things i shouldn't, and she'll still shout and be angry because i'm always late, and how even though you're the happiest little happiness ever ever (that ever was), you can't save me from the midnights that are reserved for us.me alone, and even your mom understands that too. you won't save me from all the mistakes i've made, people whose hearts have been harmed, and Time Time Time whose cut me gently and slowly from top to bottom like peeling an orange, you won't save me from that. You won't save me (or yourself) from the times i'm tired and worn thin, and fretted and don't have time to explain to you who Diomedes is, or why i make you write papers all the time and make you analyze your argument. i'm sorry for being older than the other dads. for not letting you take a sip of wine at the Christmas party i hate attending every year. I'm sorry i tell you you have a history to live up, why i tell you that who you are is the pinnacle of all who've shed blood, and shed time and tears and toil so that we can expand the borders of the universe large enough to fit you in it - i'm sorry. it's not your fault. your great-grandfather crying on the plane while men with big guns knocked on his door, and he almost had a heartattack thinking they'd turn the plane around. or your grandmother and i, walking around Congo-Brazaville alone, lost in mudded streets where no one would speak to us and maybe i was just born into loneliness and never learnt how not to be. maybe that's my lifetime's worth of history that you'll inherit, for that i am sorry.

for my own life, which you will pay the price to even, i am dreadfully sorry.
it should never have been this way.
(only that, simply put: there is no other way it could have been. ever. your history is an ocean, and you're the wave that made it to the shore, forgive the demons of your fathers that have landed you here: we have bled and lived this long only for you).

much love
future-q

Short & Very Short Stories

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

____Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie






untitled, _isa.mar


____i.
and though it had been coming for months, it was that breath - his three hundred and eighth deep breath for the day that brought with it a jagged pain and a calming; and though he must have clenched his teeth and every muscle that still had pluck left to tense, the ceiling above him somehow was a road he'd walked along the day he lost a blue-postcard (and his final grasp on a chapter of his history), a beach made up of round stones that hurt his bare feet but he ran on convinced this was the place the mermaids were waiting for him - and now, they were, and so he swims (having taken off his light white jeans too) into the ceiling, now the wet autumnal fingertips of bright saffron and vermilion leaves while he kicked rocks and held onto the heavy backpack on his back, where the mermaids wait for him by knee-deep waters, and he can see their red hair and their white skin - and now, it rains and he drives his car, cutting across white lines that mean nothing on empty roads (and the water up to his toes and the mermaids wait) and she says anywhere you want, just keep driving, i don't want to go since they both knew things end when people arrive at destinations - and now his shins grow cold too, and he hears a song hummed by the wind coming through trees and the long red hair blows a little and he lifts a hand from off his chest and lifts it towards them on the ceiling - now his sister, he's on his knees, in front of her wheelchair, and has his face buried in her belly, and she has stronger hands than anybody around his head) and the rain, now a swimming pool, at night a translucent slab of blue like an alien ship he walks around to get to the door to his apartment, and in the daytime he lies there in the sun (the sky an alien-blue with not a single cloud), the LA sky stares back at him with all its focused attention on his sweating and frantic searching for dreams - and now he dreams in odd colors his first car crashing into a palm tree and his body falling relentlessly for months and months in and out of love, and now his feat of levitation, none of the nurses could see, and his hand now touching the wetness of the ceiling, up to his knees he slowly (old joints and all) settles into the river and the cold is up to his waist, and he can't feel a thing at all and the mermaids touch with ice-cold hands his shoulders, and one kisses his cheek and winks and they both look identical and he likes that they're freckled, just ever so lightly, and one dips his head under the water and he closes his eyes and

black

but he can feel the tide picking up, like he's being carried along, and he doesn't notice he has lost interest in breathing, slowly, he opens the box hidden in his chest, unpacks his wings at last, and dusts them off. all black, and not a thing left to see now, and he floats on. anywhere you want, just keep driving he thinks to himself, and sees her face spotted with the reflections of rain, and yellow streetlights, and before he has time to


____ii.
It's a mess if you take a wrong turning, that's for sure. He knew that much about his city, God, he'd grown up there, he of all people should have known better. But still, the failure was enough to keep him preoccupied, and he walked right past Belmonte Ave. and kept on walking past Crystal and Carrington and Cardashter too (the three CCCs, which marked the division between where-you-want-to-be and where-you-don't-want-to-be). Easily twenty minutes past, him in his own blurry space sorting out images of lost futures and possible byways back to redemptions, before he noticed he was standing by a dark alleyway with an albino harlequin staring at his black leather backpack. Startled, he jumped back with an audible yelp, and quickly started to cross the street, looking back to see a man in a skin-tight outfit, hood and all, staring back at him walking away without a gesture. Arriving on the other side of the street a short-man pushing a wheelbarrow filled with dirt and sprouting azure-colored tulips reached out for his shoulder, here man, here look at these tulips! fell from the sky this very color, true true - looking back the harlequin, still staring, he couldn't cross the street agian, he kept on walking, where a man had installed a tight-rope (tied around the necks of two very muscly men) and was seated, cross-legged, right in the middle, reciting to them verses from various Holy Books and improvising passages in between, you see gentlmen, life is the most important thing, life and breathing, breathing is important because it happens as naturally as life, once cannot have one without the other, and one is rarely in control of either. breathe now Bruce, if you get tired i'll fall. And not watching his feet, he kicks a Siberian cat, clean and white and well kept who stares him straight in the eyes and reads his mind and being unimpressed with it, says nothing but keeps walking on. Four whores in 18th century costumes, large waists and corsettes and all laugh holding cheap wine glasses in the air and see him coming and shout out rowdy advances, what have you got to lose mister? between the four of us, must be one you fancy huh? more than one? two wrongs always make a right mister, you know that best of all donchya? And a contortionist with his foot in his mouth up to the ankle hums a song to himself, jumping around on one foot, and stumbling past, he accidentally kicks over a bowler hat on the floor the contortionist was using to collect change in. This causes him to lose his cool completely, and he turns, and runs full pelt back the way he came, past whores and harlequins and contortionists and now a cardealer who chases him screaming something about paper cuts and flinging cards at him with impeccable precision and inexplicable speed so that on his first attempt he slices his ear ever so lightly enough for a few drips of warm blood to drip down mixing with his sweaty forhead. And at last, past the three CCCs, left onto Belmonte, and without stopping once for assurance, all the way home, until the door is locked and his shirt collar is soaked in sweat and yellowing blood.


____iii.
They met. They liked each other - but didn't speak of it - each for their own reasons. He left. Most things were the same afterwards, but not all.


____iv.
Life has earned this fantasy - for dreams to unravel and conquer. A newer climate: rainbows for leaves and clouds for rocks. No certain thing left.


____v.
Sure I realized they were getting divorced, I mean, you wake up, the guy's not around anymore, something's up right? But it's easy to placate a child, in my case, dad made sure the weekends were fun, pizza, movie marathons where we watched all three Star Wars (there were only three then), or the Indiana Jones films, and played poker with plastic little chips with some of my friends we'd invite over, and finally played video games for hours with me saying: nnnoooo dad! you have to press both buttons together. It was a full five years, before I, now in high-school, crossing a busy Main North Rd. the wind from busses and too-fast hatchbacks causing my school-tie to wrap around my neck, already depressed by the thought of the one-bredroom apartment with no light and the man with the long beard and still haunted (and forever haunted) by the memory of his birthday with a cake he bought himself that morning, and a single candle, and us two holding sparklers and posing for a picture i wish never existed, because i wish that day never existed because i wish most of this life never existed all the way back to sperm and boy met girl.


____vi.
it's grown dark. cold.
________(autumn's last stand.)
still. i avoid going back.
there are two kinds of darkness.
the night i can deal with.

writer's block

you start to develop ways of dealing with it. in my case, i look through pictures. flip through books of poetry, or magazines and things- see if an image or someone else's work will jog my imagination. contemporaneously with that, i listen to music. certain songs work best: Breathe Me by Sia works really well. Gravity, Big Runga. Spiders and Snakes by A Weather. The songs sift through memory usually, try and find moments i haven't relived correctly yet, maybe i can make them better. maybe there's still some redemption to be found in something of my past. often not though, when you think about, my stories are the same as yours. met person of opposite sex. it was exciting and amazing and tense till we kissed. we rode the ride for a while, through ups and downs. it ends and we're super-duper-sad. (repeat). friends made. conflicts of interests/idealogy/betrayal experienced. friends unmade. perhaps you see each other in crowded places and smile courteously at one another and walk outside and mutter under your breath fu&^ing loser (and take respite in knowing you're being called the same thing). otherwise what is life? lonely nights you wish you were out and partying and younger and cooler and hipper. and other nights you are out and wish you were loved and in a silent place with silent friends that don't demand soo much from you. you want sex you know you'll find dissapointing. you want love you know only comes when it's not called. you want to know how you came to be where you are, how you lost all you did, how lucky you were to dodge the bullets that missed you, express anger at how unfair it was at the ones you got hit by. you want to hold someone by the hand and lead them and point to the ground at the droplets you shed getting through it all. so, here i am, wondering why tonight i have nothing to write about? (now we're listening to Oh My Stars by A Weather, which makes me miss LA, but most songs make me miss someone someothing someplace sometime.

then there's fantasy. there's that. there's no one out there that can ruin that for me. I can write about Odd Orchestras and the characters that comprise them. i can write stories about orgyists and homeless people who swear and argue about Schubert. i can write autobiographies about young men named Dean who dissapear, or stories that end in:

I’ve spent a lot of time here. It has come to be my irrational belief that in everyone’s chest lives a jumble of noises. From the outside, it sounds like a dull thud, a rhythmic dum-dum, ending in a rattle and a semibreve rest with a massive fermata. And then, when the body stops interfering with it, you hear just a few notes, just a few per person, husbands and wives I’ve heard, viola with harmonizing cello… someone buried a baby not too long ago- clarinet… and people’s dreams start to dance, all those things, moments too brief, kisses, and afternoons spent reading alone in rooms we were too young to embrace, all those dreams dance. Three notes here, four notes there. And all the things we’ve lost… left behind, or left us behind, all these bodies; and their final literary efforts

__________FOREVER LOVED

__________FOREVER MISSED

__________ALWAYS REMEMBERED

__________NEVER ALONE

__________DREAMS PEACEFULLY

__________CANNOT BE LOST

__________PERFECTED

__________MY ONE TRUE

__________HUSBAND OF

__________WIFE & MOTHER

__________SLEEPS HERE

__________DREAMS PEACEFULLY

__________YOURS IS THE MUSIC FOR NO INSTRUMENT

(three notes here, four notes there)

__________PERPETUAL LIGHT

__________SON OF

__________DAUGHTER

__________THE BODY OF

__________SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

__________ALL THE WORLDS OF

__________ETERNITY

__________EVERYTHING TO ME

__________EVERYTHING

(three notes here, four notes there)



_____silenced.


_____silent

and i know most of you haven't read that story, i don't think i sent it out widely because i was never really happy with it. and i'm not really happy with it now. and i'm not really sad. and i'm not really anything, and i don't understand why i don't have anything to write about. i seem to have exhausted: the past, love, the present, hopes for the future, dreams i've had, dreams i hope to continue to have, dreams i recall, translating feelings to words, attempting to dissect myself into being more human, failure. i've drained myself of my humanity for these words. and i have failed on all counts. or as i put it better:

_____silenced.


_____silent

fragments

____I would believe only in a God who could dance
________Nietzsche











- what's so sad about it?
- hope?
- yeah, what's so sad about it?
- distance.
-
- it's soo far. soo softly spoken. have you ever thought about it?, just how lonely hope is. how distant and eerie in any light, and barely... just out-there somewhere, living inside certain preconditions that may or may not eventuate.
-
- what could be further away than hope?
- i , don't __know.
- exactly. what's further away than not knowing, but wanting?


*___*___*

those who know me, know i can only write about three things: love, history, and gravity (fate/why-the way things happen). i've already witten the love-novella. perhaps it's time to write the history one... a story about our connectedness to the past. that too-tight union, and the borders of it, how far can we escape it before it catches up to us? there is only one title it could have at this point:

______but and therefore or also is so since,__ until

i can see everyone thinking: oh god.
sooner or later, perhaps the rest of it will start to make itself known onto me.


*___*___*

- and it drifts off into the future the way memories linger in the past, not quite there, just... a thing in your head, images and thoughts and all these virtual-senses
- but why sad?
- because it's distance, and there's nothing sadder than distance.