faced with the impossibility of leading multiple parallel nonintersecting lives, is there a logical and/or moral obligation to lead none at all? if you can’t settle (and by settle i don’t mean accept second best, i mean accept necessarily imperfect, incomplete, non-encompassing of the entire spectrum of your dreams and desires, pastpresentandfuture) and choose one life, do you get none?

can’t one be all things, and to all people, all of the time?

the illustrious K. once said to me, in his icy bitter new york matteroffact way, that one can’t do all things in one’s lifetime.

i’m not sure yet. but i can state for the record that i seem to be trying, and rather unsatisfactorily at that.

Just found this in an e-mail to S from November 22nd.

je ne dis au revoir a rien, je ne pars pas. je prends tout avec moi. et je laisse tout ici.

i am not saying goodbye to anything, i am not leaving. i am taking everything with me. and i’m leaving everything behind.

it is snowing upside the windows in large curling drifts.

love and elation follow crisis and need. again and again.

the heart is a moebius strip.

four weeks till i board a plane and return to Geneva.

it can’t be a literal return, i am not the same, i will be -must be- different there or it will be like i’d never left, a return as opposed to a move forward.

four weeks is such a short time that i am suddenly panicked, not by all i still wish to do or accomplish, panicked at the end of limbo, this suspended state of flux where all is up in the air, potential, possible, within reach. the fact that my grasp consistently exceeds my reach tells me my one great talent lies in being nowhere. minor accomplishments and minor setbacks.

chassez le naturel, il revient au galop goes the old adage. Fight your natural inclination, it will come charging back.

fine.

the attention span of a four year-old, interested in the chase, but not knowing what to do with the prey once it’s in my grasp.

*****

what i want to understand now is when everything is. today a sudden change in the weather and i find myself thinking of my visit with D in Birmingham, the first time i tasted salt and vinegar chips, the way the air smelled and the color of the light, and it is all right now, except i was nineteen, and it was eleven years ago.

now that i have so successfully taken down the support beams, taken everything apart, it all collapses in on itself, telescoping in random ways, then is now is later. and it all makes sense in a self-referencing way, if not held up to outside indicators of where it -where i- should be.

in the corner of the living room stands a steam radiator. the floorboards around it creak, but if you follow along the wall the third board is swollen with the heat and therefore silent. when i sit there immobile and put my ear to the wall, i hear her. and if not her then the potential of her. she will make a sound. and this constant suspense and validation is proof in small increments that the universe exists

like a boundary testing child, i prod and prod and prod and poke and pinch and pull and push and prod and prod till finally it falls apart, comes undone, unravels, snaps, keels over, crumbles, deflates, breaks, screams, gets up and leaves.

such is curiosity coupled with the fact that the observer influences the observed, that knowing excludes being, and vice versa. To understand a thing, to lay bare it’s inner workings, is to dispel whatever magic or appeal that thing may have.

but at least then you know.

am i sitting on the floor in an empty apartment watching tv in my hula-dancer motif orange boxer shorts after finishing a thing of hummus, a jar of olives, half a cucumber peeled with a steak knife, and two dozen teency weeency cherry tomatoes, washed down with a frozen chocolate-covered Entenmann donut? Is M back in Geneva while i stay on for a few weeks living with my cousin?

yes to both.

like water on ice
i watch everything recede
till the constant motion of this overcrowded
street settles into minor oscillation
no longer hurting and hurtling in jumps and
spurts but flowing
ever so slowly.

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, as quoted in New York Vertical, by Horst Hamann)

There are no certainties, only the infinite preexisting variables that, as they enter your ever expanding sphere of awareness render the previous equation incomplete, erroneous or irrelevant, and in any case change the end result, so that there is no definitive right, wrong or moral answer to anything that will hold up to the test of time. How then to move forward from building block to building block with the foreknowledge that you will soon enough disregard all that came before?

an hour a day i glare at myself reflected in the subway glass. I am menacing, now sincere, now sly, now kind, i study myself intently and i know i see nothing.

i move like an imperiled dancer, smooth and flowing, yet my sense of balance flawed. I misjudge openings, forgetting to allow for limbs, shoulders; when calculating width, i omit to factor myself into the space i inhabit.

the man across from me sits calmly in a taut gray gabardine suit whispering to himself. After a time he closes his eyes and rocks his head back, a faint smile on his lips, tasting something of the divine.

the glass is tinted darker and so it is ghostly that i gaze, thinking penumbra suits contemplation, the eyes the only thing remaining unchanged.

wolves in sheep’s clothing,
people on the train,
everyone knows you’re not one of the pack.

There are laws that govern everything.

A watched pot never boils. Toast falls buttered side down.

There is Murphy’s law, though i have renounced my belief in it, because it is used as a blanket excuse and because it is in fact a restatement in layman’s terms of the second law of thermodynamics.

Stand on the edge of a precipice long enough and you will fall. A loose screw gets ever looser. Things crop up and occurences occur.

But there are other rules that one can only formulate through empirical observation. They are the Additional Laws.

a) when entering an unfamiliar restaurant and checking for any of those burning or frying smells that will render your clothes unwearable, said smell will only emanate from the kitchen halfway through your meal, when you can no longer escape.

b) when consulting the schedule for the shuttle train that will take you from Prospect Place to the Franklin Avenue or Botanic Gardens stop, it is irrelevant whether you leave home early or late as it will always go by just as you are approaching the station.

c.1) when shopping for clothes, the last shirt in the size and color you want will have a permanent stain and/or other defect.

c.2) said defect will be located in the center of the shirt.

d) no matter how long you wait or blow on a spoonful of tomato sauce before tasting it, you will scald your tongue in such a way that the enjoyment of the following meal will be greatly diminished.

e) no matter how carefully you turn over in bed, the amount of lower leg you uncover is inversely proportional to the temperature in your bedroom.

f) the laundromat god is equanimous in its exigencies. It will always demand the offering of one single sock. No more, no less.

g) if a bagel is served properly toasted it will contain too much cream cheese.

h) if a bagel is served with the proper amount of creem cheese, they will have omitted to toast it.

i.1) seek not to trim thy sideburns to an equal length. This is vanity and delusion. Anything under a full centimetre difference is acceptable.

i.2) try and you will end up with no sideburns at all.

j) the number of locks of untamable hair that spring up on your head is proportional to the importance of the event you are preparing for.

k) independently of the fullness of the flight, a colicky baby or hyperactive child will be seated directly in front/behind/or next to you.

l) one of your shoes will be laced too tight.

m) the degree of your sneezing fit and/or runny nose will be in inverse proportion to the number of tissues you have with you.

n) no matter how careful and deliberate your movements when going from a standing to a sitting position and vice-versa, your headphone cable will snag on some invisible part of your anatomy or clothing and tear the earbuds from your ears.

o) the proximity at which an attractive member of the opposite sex speaks to you is proportional to the quantity of garlic in your last meal.

and last but not least,

p) if totally alone on an elevator, the pungency of your fart will be proportional to the beauty, sophistication and delicate sense of smell of the people entering on the next floor.

I’ve started using google calendar. And it makes me wonder what is passing me by. In the demo pictures, people have all sorts of appointments and luncheons and dinner dates in yellow and green and orange, their days brimming with neatly sectioned timeslots of colorful activity.

I have two concerts in my calendar. One on the 18th of October, one on the somethingth of November. A few birthdays to remember. So i ask myself, is my life empty? Or turning that upside down, could it be more full? And really, is it just that i wish my days were sectioned into multitasking rainbows of streamlined time, more for the colors and the fun of juggling little appointment rectangles around the calendar than out of necessity?

I was tensed around my life like an octopus holding a heart dearly. Every tentacle petrified and numb from the strength of the squeeze. But as ties are severed or loosed i find myself in increments relaxed, floating, touching on things here and there but nothing that can’t be jettisoned at a moment’s notice and move on. And so also is it easier to be knocked from my rock, unanchored by any shock small or large that sends me reeling rudderless, waiting to wash up against a rock anew and slowly settle, till the next tide carries me or tears me away.