ON FLIGHT

Been thinking about the anthropological implications of airports. Interior scene: me sitting in terminal C13 at a layover in Charlotte, NC, an airport which is inexplicably populated by rocking-chairs and dachshunds. Yes, it's absurd. But so is the nomadic imperative. Stampede mentality. Mixed-nut subsistence. Airports are the least real places I know. Limbos. There was a moth in the terminal with me, flitting around on the carpet by my bags. I wanted to let him out. Maybe he was thinking about the big steel man-made moths outside.

All my literary prescience goes against airplanes. See also: Antoine de Saint-Exupery. See also: Icarus. Humans are the only animals that forego natural selection and demand their wings.

Called J to laugh off my nerves. I said that one day our texts would be part of the archaeological record and everyone would wonder what strange animals we were. He agreed that we were an awkward stage between neanderthals and supermen. We made new names for ourselves, improvising nonsense Latin: Pseudo avihomo. False winged man.

Arrived safely in Pittsburgh, with minimal airsickness. It's a nice city, big without being intimidating. Spent a good deal of today at the the Carnegie Library. There's a backroom in the nonfiction stacks where you can peek down into the natural history exhibits. I spied the brontosaurus skeletons. The best part was that I was surrounded by books on the Brontë Sisters . Brontësaurus--it was too good to resist.

I took a bus from the airport into Oakland. Along the way, I saw a road sign that read PITTSBURGH and to its left, an exit sign that simply read, MOON.

b r e a t h i n g the b o d y

my myth is this:

one god, no one knows who,

gave away the secret of breath.

as a result, women left the riverbeds,

crawling out of the water on their pale bellies.

men tumbled from dirt to form.

the two met somberly. the men were harsh to

the touch. the women were searching for grace.

and yet they stayed, finding none.

prior to the naming of things,
the hands were eminent.

then G-d gave ADAM the

burden of words to place upon

objects who were, till then,

only themselves.
gestures were no longer required,

the hands withered, distinctions failed.

we no longer look within-beneath-without words.

we have mistaken the name for the thing itself.

i am waiting for my hands to awaken,
for the wolves in my stomach

to remember that

they are wolves.

when an animal forgets the word for animal,

she will know that she is an essence-seeker.

a man slept naked in the woods.

the tree-nymphs spied and giggled:

what a strange animal! i do not know
whether he is beautiful

or merely strange.

l'histoire. l'histoire. l'histoire. l'histoire.

HOW QUICKLY THE BODY BECOMES IRRELEVANT.

HOW QUICKLY THE BODY BECOMES IRRELEVANT.
HOW QUICKLY THE BODY BECOMES IRRELEVANT.

creative ascetics forego their genitals
& worship their lungs instead.
them gawds that breathe them gawds that weep
them gawds that breathe them gawds that weep.

weeping is a broken syllable of breathing.

why are the gods in love with human beings?

how is it my body breathes on its own, effortlessly,

even as i sleep? and how did breath allow

for the trickery that is language?
case in point: lung. what's a lung?

what a strange word!

meanwhile, zephyrus keeps the wind

cold

and

bitter
so that no hyacinths may grow.

ANGEL: how do you do it? i've never done this before?

MAN: (shrugging) i don't know. it's not really something you think about. you just breathe. in and out. inhale.

ANGEL: (looking startled) in hell?

wherein isis
transformed herself
into a kite
& fanned breath

into the body

of her lover osiris.

WHAT IS AIR?

not nitrogen, nor argon, nor any other false god.

unknowable body, only the smallest part

belongs to oxygen-and-things-we-know.

the rest is nostalgia.

breath is divinely ordained.
inspire respire perspire.

i do not know whether it is beautiful
or merely strange.

the gods wept when man invented the iron lung.

Camus to You, too.

I just finished Albert Camus' The Stranger and I was a little underwhelmed. So it goes. I liked it fine. It's just that I like my absurdity to have more of a kick to it. If there were an absurdity calculator with DADA being ten and instructional manuals being zero, I'd figure that this story would land a five-and-a-half.

Then again I guess the book was no more or less absurd than, you know, existence.

Let's take a look at the last twenty-four hours of my life:

1. sleeping most of the day.

2. waking up, finishing The Stranger, and returning to sleep.

3. At least 146 worshippers dying in a stampede at Naina Devi temple as they trek to show reverence.

4. watching Boogie Nights for the first time...with my aunt.

5. scavenging the internet for T. Rex downloads for the better part of three hours.

6. Both of my best friends leaving for the beach without me. sigh.

7. new species of dinosaur fossil discovered, dubbed THE DRAGON.

8. tomatoes&steak for dinner.

9. talking to two different childhood friends for the first time in years.

10. Dirk Diggler's penis.

11. getting a text message from the Jonas Brothers.

12. worrying about college.

13. rediscovering my youth via BALLOON-A-ROONIES.

14. getting invited to an aVODKAlypse party celebrating the SUPERCOLLIDER.

15. lightning strikes 91 people in Norway.

16. dreaming of nothing-again-nothing.

There it is. Real life is at least as, if not more absurd than a Camus novel.

mindless versus mindful absurdity

Rohlfs-Hill and I are currently in an argument about circuses. Circii? Who knows. It all started when I said her coworker had a commanding voice and would make an ideal ringmaster. She gave me that dark look and said, He would be offended by that. He's an intellectual. I insisted that there were intellectual circuses out there. Or I insisted there should be. She gave me that teacherly headshake. No, teaching poodles to ride unicycles is anti-intellectual. Well what about contortionists? There's nothing intellectual about them?! No, but they are limber. What does that have to do with anything? Okay. What if the tightrope walkers recited The Waste Land. Would that be intellectual enough for you? And they were surrounded on all sides by water. Yeah. 'Fear death by water' ! What about that? But. They don't. Don't tell me there aren't intellectual circuses! What about DADA! Why would dada be a circus? Theatre, maybe. Cabaret, maybe. A circus? With dada elephants? Because DADA would reject anything so rehearsed or...sensical. Theatre bah! And Dada doesnt dance. They negate!