#...let's generously call this stream of consciousness but really it's me venting. hjhkjgh i'm so sorry S. Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[ragewrites]

When he was thrust into the labyrinth Ariadne gave Theseus no directions, only a look, a look and the spathe, the tightwound ball of thread. Most imagine it red—yarn, spun fine, the outermost rounding stiff, rind, skin almost, all that salt blowing in from the coast coarsening the ply. Red, venous or startling, whichever shade you first think of.

I’ve always thought the string leucistic, a sort of garrote. Translucent whitegreen, like (fitful) (dreaming) eyelids. Thought her hands must’ve shook. (However little.)

Spathe.

Spáō. Spád’eh. It was love for a boy and it was love for a prince that had her do it, but neither of them were that Athenian, he of the quick hands and quick black eyes, cool, cruel, seizing her measure and finding himself lacking. He might’ve known, at that. Suspected he was only means, that this was her choosing a butcher, moving unseen in the dark. Suspected her sin if not the truth of her mercy. Known her cowardice, certainly, because to give him the string was first and foremost to take the choice out from her fingers.

I’m never going to get this right, Franz Wright wrote once (writing about the inability to write about death) and wrote it right. I’m never going to get this right. To do so I’d have to unravel the thread, lie there prone, naked, soul-naked, glass-eyed like someone after a terrible thing. No similes, no metaphor. No myth.

Naked.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Everybody wants it naked, but beautiful somehow. The carnage shot (again) to art. Elevated. The poem Dormition of a sort, you God and Mary, John and Angel, the weave profusion of lavender, no gore in any thread. Film-blood, sure, yes, that we can have, that has aesthetic value, that makes it worth an instagram post—but hold the reeking, ugly shit, the fluid rot of the body as it expires, as it wilts and caves in on itself. Nothing that might unsettle the audience, you understand. No reminder you’re human. Only the sterile, abstract, lovely film blood.

But how can I talk about it? Without the gore, how the fuck can I talk about it?

You’d think the consummate fabulist might make the perfect politician, but in truth the fabulist lacks a quality essential to the job. The politician will lie politely, smiling without teeth; all the while his mind is elsewhere, probably Bali or the French riviera, you get the gist. Meanwhile the consummate fabulist sincerely and fervently believes each and every one of his own lies. Whatever distance he puts between the truth of an incident as it was, as it happened, and the truth of it as he wishes to remember it is then not a divorce but a wedding.

And you can’t count on the fucker not to romanticize. To be useful, strategic, to keep the story neat.

I’m good at stories, but belief—(in general) that I sorely lack.

And he was worse, my Minotaur. Beautiful idiot bull hammered not over the head but at the gut, his lungs, his long legs crushed.

(I told you, I’ll never get this right.)

Good at stories, dark, magnetic (and him magnetic enough.) In another world we might’ve been an Eastern echo of John and Robert, a kind of strange, rippling music. Variation on a nocturne, something at once late August and October, the sound like a cathedral, heavy and open, lanced. A point between Doga and Prokofiev. Not a middle note, no, never that—only a point, a vacillating point, one hovering close always to an apex. Like all who live a half-life we’ve never been good at doing things halfway or by halves. You quit early or you go all in, baby. All in, all of you, in. Cards and soul. Even (especially) when you know you have a losing hand.

So, John and Robert. Music.

Yes. Music, dark. He’d have said Ladies first, half of his mouth curling up. He’d have said it and smiled and still been the first one to get a bullet through the head. Dead. Just like that. (Just like that.) Dead and miraculously resurrected on the fourth day or at the sixth-week mark. No—better yet, Assumed right then and there, the small hole just above his right ear almost clean-edged. Or maybe he’d be dead forever. Dead but known. Dead and fabulated, mythologized, and so dead in a way that means he’s not gone (full stop) but gone outside of death, dead in a way that makes him alive, forever and forever alive, apururea, amin.

Myth within myth. (I told you, I told you, I can’t get this right.)

I and my Minotaur. I and my brother, my big little idiot. (Another thing Franz wrote, a poem just this one line long: and the Ariadne artery—) (Example, the title, and what he meant by it in truth only he knows, of course. But to me that’s the long bodywide vein, the branching circuitry of one’s whole blood.) Girl and bull in Pieta, the bodies abstracted. Marble, maybe, all of it naked and beautiful, naked and art, most of his body mangled and so most of his body draped in shadow, in obscura. Marble is bloodless by nature; thus the affect of the gore is artful, discreet. The splash of red is only contrast, stage dressing, lovely film blood.

Fables. (And aren’t you tired?) (Aren’t you tired.) (Good God stop trying, stop trying, stop fucking talking and put that boy, that man, he was a man before he was dead and you know it, you fucking know it, you know it so go put him down, go put him in the ground, any ground, hallow or not—) But the truth is nonfiction. The truth, the little facts that make up the big one, the body of the truth—that is distinctly, eminently bleak. (Not that nonfiction need be a beige drone, unintelligible and academic, mind. I’m not saying that. I’m not.) (Listening requires the eyes and the ears and the brain. A certain amount of willingness to understand.) (There’s a despairing dearth of willingness in any given audience, these days.) Bleak. Sterile not by virtue of the dispassionate arthaus lens but by virtue of time and geographic space.

I can talk about it honestly or I can abstract and talk about it in something that approaches poetry, but I can’t do both at once. Partly because the thought alone is lurid to me, yes.

But more than that, worse than that, I can’t do both because the audience which ‘consumes’ art expects meaning, expects some sort of conclusion, preferably a tidy, satisfying one. A takeaway. (As if this is fucking fastfood.) (As if mybloodmygriefmylife is fastfood.) And fable is fine. Myth is fine. Those are instances of me abstracting, obscuring, lying in a sense, and mostly (to no harm apart from that done) to myself. Instances of me still stuck at the bargaining frontier of grief. But meaning? Meaning?

The meaninglessness of it is why I need to fabulate now and again, to mythmake, to fantasize in the first place. It’s that or more barbiturates than my already ulcerating gut can stand. That, or commitment of the psychiatric kind.

Making meaning (and a making it would be, because there is none inherent anywhere in the senselessness of either our lives or of his death) would require moralism: I’d have to bring some sort of god, or God, into it. Demur. Say something empty, something good, clean, something I don’t mean.

(Example:) Fable: (Ariadne’s artery—) the Dormition of the Minotaur.

Mary’s in Heaven, sure, but nowhere does it say she is at peace. My Minotaur is dead, adormit apururea, and all that means is that he’s dead. Through Dormition the Mother of God is in Heaven and through dormition my brother is (nowhere) (dead.)

And I can’t get it right. I can’t even make enough of a story out of it to imagine a version where he is still alive. I can’t—I can’t.

I think I might’ve been lying to myself. It’s not bargaining but anger I’m stuck at. And I’m keeping myself angry, consciously, because anger is lucid, anger is clearsharp and lucid even (if) (when) I find the nerve needed to admit that all this fabulating shit amounts to is me going in circles, wearing a labyrinth in the livingroom rug.

It’s sordid enough. Should I ever find myself tempted to try and invent some sort of commercial meaning out of my life, I’ll reach for the hammer and do what Ariadne couldn’t, become myself the bull at the narrowing centre as I swing down and blow my brains out.

Are you kept alive by a fantasy?