[speak, memory]

revising the past.

the mercury mouths of the sirens were beautiful against the rocks, vivid and soft and open, cloying, calling out. i thought of them the other day when i was picturing odysseus and penelope and all the stupid shell-shocked characters from homer, i thought of the way they looked on the rocks. when you’re a writer, people assume that your talent is a corollary of your twitchiness and neurosis rather than a consequence. they sit in awe of how an unpleasant and withdrawn individual can be this in love with the world. what they are unaware of, your nameless and formless audience, is that in order to argue that you have the talent to make sense of things the world must start out as looking rather threadbare to you.

i would like to stylize myself as an inventor, but i’m an archivist. the i infests my work, a senseless direction back to the curator. you want to know who i am? i’m a poet. i write things down.

the sirens have beautiful beautiful mercury mouths. i don’t even like the odyssey that much but i like the image, suspended in time like a butterfly behind glass. isn’t it happening again, all over, but with a different cast of characters this time. isn’t that the nature of years, cyclical celebrations, held in your hands like honey. see, water spills out too quickly. anything else keeps its form. honey is a supersaturated solution. it is a liquid at room temperature. it is more or less akin to the months running out on you.

so back to the point about lovers and writers and never being able to parse which of the two is in the room with you. back to the debt of forcing a great number of illogical and unpleasant things into a sequence from which it is possible to assess the following things: convergence, preservation of the given order, limits. i worry that i have gone from being a more or less accessible writer to the ivory towers of my childhood, those authors that didn’t understand how to hold the reader’s hand from one thought to the next. their work subsequently becomes intractable unless we pretended to have their minds in ours. what do penelope and odysseus have to do with it? how is a raven like a writing desk?

you have questions. my palms are sweaty already.

this is not finnegan’s wake. this is not mrs. dalloway. and i would never be so presumptive as to call this in search of lost time, because i am not marcel proust and this is not paris and i don’t write fantasy stories. i don’t write fantasy stories: i mean to say, i don’t write about lost time because i don’t believe it can be lost, only sit beneath your skin in a careful silver film until you choose to pluck it and make the whole thing a wreck again. i tell you a lot of things i would never dare to say out loud. your lover, your writer, your slave to the slanting lines of written word and happy little metaphors. your eyes lift off the page, i never knew you felt this way, of course not, i never told you.

and you weren’t supposed to read between the lines.

i explain the best way i can. if you write enough, you start writing the same thing again and again, there are only so many words language possesses and not enough good permutations. there are a lot of good permutations you will never find out, n choose k and leave the repeats out. if you write enough you begin to be haunted by images, by sentences, like a noose around your neck. one place i live is the dream where i have my head in your lap and i wake up embarrassed because even admitting to vulnerability in a dream seems a horrific broach of propriety. of the way i would like things to be. i explain this to you and you’re touching my hair and i can’t remember how you replied, sorry, but i can remember i slouched back down because i felt, oddly, understood.

who is a writer? do you get to love people or does it have to be the dictionary alone? what is artistic license? what is fact? how do you reconstruct a memory without putting it to death?

vladimir nabokov wrote an english memoir and he called it conclusive evidence and then he translated into russian and when it ended up in english again it was called speak, memory. every time you speak you change the memory, a transmutation of evidence, a perversion of fact. we all live in these little castles of the past suited to our liking. occasionally we’re allowed to walk between the rooms. occasionally you see a picture and you think to yourself, i never read all the lemony snicket books in elementary school, and then you shove it back beneath the weight of your personal myth.

is anybody really an archivist?

or am i the only one who thinks like that, lost in an internal library of babel, all the things that might and should have happened. how do you only pick the logical permutations? i’m sitting here on the rocks, kicking my feet above the foam, waiting for odysseus to come over and make the catastrophe of my personality seem special again. there are certain people who i don’t want to commit to memory, who i want to keep suspended in front of me in amber lest my recollection ruin them entirely.

i am unpleasant and withdrawn and my personality is a catastrophe, i promise, i’m not saying it for poetic license. (of course, if i were, why would i admit to it? you see why i can never get anything done.) and there is a silver thread which underpins my life that is growing bright and tangible, which i can touch, which i do not need to justify.

writer implies lover implies writer implies lover again.

if you’re in love, you don’t need to be interesting.