#jennifer s. cheng
desire is suffering
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions, Frank Bidart ( @wahabibi ) | Dante and Virgil in Hell, William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Vestiges, Ángel García | Blasphemia, Eliran Kantor | So We Must Meet Apart, Jennifer S. Cheng ( @yoursoethereal ) | Prigione di Lacrime, Roberto Ferri | Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928-9; Sunday, November 4th, Simone de Beauvoir ( @theoptia ) | Ludwig Drahosch | War of the Foxes, Richard Siken ( @elfreys )
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To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have.
Jennifer S. Cheng
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( You spoke once of boundaries, of your fear about where you find yourself making them. Do you remember? I was trying to listen closely. I have been thinking about how I relate to people. It isn’t as easy as saying that I hold people at a distance, but more so that I am always sensing the insurmountable swimming between us, and sometimes this feels like an overwhelming failure. Rilke says love between two people is loving that very expanse, even considering it sacred, and I wonder if there is something transcendent here—a definition for community. Across the distance we hear the air shifting between us, and recognize it for what it is—miracles of texture and movement, tiny collaborations of our bodies navigating an unwieldy space. )
Jennifer S. Cheng
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So We Must Meet Apart
August 19, 2018
Dear G,
I mean, I am having trouble connecting the fragments around me, where geometry was once a way of moving through the world. I mean, I can no longer say, with any definition.
(
Today in the garden a small animal was making holes underground, disappearing roots.
(
Listening to my husband practice the same composition on the piano each day, I lose the distinction between his sounds and the memory of my fingers on the keys. Lately things just are what they are, yet their concreteness is not grounding. The flowers on the deck are yellow. The body circulates blood. Every day, details accumulate and remain empty at the same time, and that is the hardest thing about all of this—the way nothingness takes over as one sits waiting for the unknown. I am observing every small fluctuation of the body so anxiously, I cannot think of anything else. The fog that accompanies the medications is relentless.
(
In which suspension is a state of being, with no expiration date (how does one decide when to begin grieving?). In which tenderness is a point somewhere in the vast space between grief and hope.
(
I mean, I am trying to make my way through something, toward something. In the meantime my world does not know whether to expand or contract, as if I am straining to peer into a tiny telescope measured in nanometers. Instead of it being a comfort to have a world so small and all mine, it feels like I’ve forgotten something, like I’ve been forgotten.
(
The truth is I often feel awash in the marginalia of my own life. The idea has followed me around for its plainness: an ongoing audio diary of (( )). A record of ephemera, our most habitual wrinkles of air. Like John Cage, I am aware that inside silence are merely the sounds we ignore—am I placating myself when I say those non-sounds carry a meaningful soundness of their own?
(
A friend recently described my essay on the poetics of blank space: an epistolary labyrinth of absences.
August 19, 2018
Dear J,
A man says the miscarriage in the poem doesn’t make him feel anything, and all the women in the room turn into warped boards. Horrible. His toes flex into us.
(
I am sorry to send you this. These spare fragments.
(
My heart has been beating very fast here.
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A poetics of blank space, then: “The visible world is soon emblematic of the intentions of the invisible.” Some days I wake and the fog is already crowding my window, my little green plants, and I know what humans have known since the beginning: we belong and also we do not belong. Somehow we sensed how the fabric surrounding us was not whole but punctured through. Our bodies absorbed a tempo: we search, we suffer, and we search again. In the midst of a buried hour when everything around me is sleeping and straining and I do not know how shallow or deep, my friend H writes to me from the other side of the world: “Prayer cannot exist if there’s any certainty that it will be heard.” This, I suspect, is at the heart of the contradiction that propels me, though I barely know what it means.
— Jennifer S. Cheng.
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Your book, with its waiting boat
& sea. Your book, a reminder of how
much more night I could
wade into.
— Chen Chen, from "The School of Your Book / Letter to Jennifer S. Cheng," Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
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