young arsenal

I promise I'll post those stories soon. Work has been really busy (this is a good thing).

I just wanted to post to document (for myself) that something very good and very important happened somewhere between my brain and mouth today. I don't want to lose sight of it or bury myself in distractions again.

I feel free.

the banality of evil

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" after observing the trial of Adolph Eichmann. As The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy expounds, the phrase is rooted in an explanation of Nazi crimes not as some sort of premeditated nefarious plot, but rather the terrible things that can happen when bureaucracy is unquestioned, when you play your part as a cog in the machine without questioning what you're doing. The dehumanized become the dehumanizers. So follows, I believe, the everyday evils on a smaller scale – the rapes, murders, domestic abuse, administrative abuse of power, and so forth – the evil with which I have been intimately acquainted. We are all capable of it, as we are all capable of kindness, altruism, generosity and empathy. Constant awareness of your surroundings and motivations is required to keep it at bay, among other things. This is one of the reasons I'm so hard on myself all the time – I am always vigilant, living in fear of hurting someone else through my ignorance.

At any rate, I think I've found the big theme in my writing – I keep coming back to the everyday ways in which humans, upon being dehumanized, dehumanize one another. In a little bit, I'll post a couple of short stories that I've been working over and expanding for a while now.

variation on a love poem

[Author's note: Long deviation from the word-of-the-day pieces. It's a variation on a poem I wrote a little less than a year ago; similar themes and a couple of lifted phrases. If we don't rip ourselves off, what have we got?]

cat's cradle

Perpetual high noon:
your shadow, cast gentle,
keeps me feeling
that I am carrying home
in my slow breathing:
I shuttered against you
unsure of boarding up
against the winter.

Your body fits around mine
a comma and a question mark
an inkstain on the grass.
Suck in palpable ache
this old accordion
this overextended metaphor
laid to rest. All is clear light.

the old kind of summer

I’m in a really wonderful mood. It’s just a relief to be, at least presently, free of the small, dense raincloud that has been (invisible or not) hanging over my head for the last couple of months.

I have prom hair and a slit skirt and a smile on my face. I have nothing to (falsely) hold on to, but I hug my blankets to my chest as I’m falling asleep. I sleep through the night. I am responsible for myself. I am making quilts out of words and I am returning borrowed things on time and I am culling the wheat from the chaff and I have arrived.

I love (the eminently quotable) R. Buckminster Fuller, even if he was unfortunately wrong about political parties.

Here are some of my favorite Fuller quotes:

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either
case, the thought is staggering.

fear itself

For the past five years, I've been sitting on/refining these modern piano pieces. Last night, I played two minutes of one of the pieces to someone's voice mail. He encouraged me to go forward with it, so today I put some feelers out to see if I could start playing shows – since the pieces are about 20-25 minutes each, one piece would make a perfect set. I've always been more comfortable in DIY venues than I have been in recital halls.

Next weekend, I'm buying a used four-track.

My first show ™ will probably be this one, in Philly at the Veggieplex Theatre (1019 S. 47th Street, West Philly) on June 24.

but i misunderstood

Big dumb animal heart, not so much broken as rain-swollen in my chest, a trick of the brain played on itself, as if encephalitis of the aorta was possible.

beyond all means of capture

derogate \DER-uh-gayt\, intransitive verb:
1. To deviate from what is expected.
2. To take away; to detract; — usually with 'from'.

transitive verb:
1. To disparage or belittle; to denigrate.

* Author's note: Another poem. Sometimes I just work better this way. Also, this makes more sense if you put it in context with the song I stole the title from.

Overactive tear-ducts
mimic alcoholic bloat:
red cheeks, dripping nose, thick throat, sinuses pinched.
"You look like you've been …"
(Well, ain't that obvious.)

Fill your cup from the tap;
turn your head;
noble and small.

Yes, you have that report;
and here's your follow-up;
You're watching for my missteps.
Hawk with the snake in your talons;
never an omen. This is no promised land.

her heart is nearly breaking

aspersion \uh-SPUR-zhuhn; -shuhn\, noun:
1. A damaging or derogatory remark; slander.
2. The act of defaming or slandering.
3. A sprinkling with water, especially in religious ceremonies.

** Author's note: I originally started to write a short-short story about being raised in a fundamentalist household. The religious right's rise to power across the global board over the last couple of decades is both horrifying and fascinating to me – raised, by my parents' conscious decision, without any religion at all, I am a total outsider – and the double meaning of this word lent itself perfectly to an exploration of the use of religion in all of its forms (myth, ethical system, community, etc.) as justification for bloodshed. However, because I have no personal knowledge of what this is like, I figured there would be no way I would even be able to approach a fictional facsimile of the experience, and I'd rather not divest my characters of their humanity. I'd rather not look down on the characters I am creating. I see that happen a lot when authors write from outside, whether they mean to or not.

So, instead, I wrote a poem. I can get at images and sensations from outside, I think. I hope. It is a beginning.

They soaked her to strip off her skin
and how that white dress rippled and clung
how it fit her all wrong

his mouth gaping and closing
words nothing but napalm
remaking her features on fire
deaf, mute, hands cut off
but otherwise oh in His image
and the kiln turned her out
cracked and sore
and, despite her total immersion,
parched. This was what she knew.

The screaming was not reserved for
Sunday. It was a thread that ran
through all her days, high-pitched:
only the dogs pricked their ears.

She opened the paper and said
It's such a good thing we're at war
because look at what they're doing to the
women over there

Oh you can cast your blame in iron,
you can ship it overseas to be smelted by cheaper labor,
but she will always come up gasping from dreaming
as if she was rising up fast
from the bottom of the lake.

armed to the teeth

I promise I'll put a new short-short story up soon, but in the meantime:

I think this might be the most beautiful piece of music ever written.