News

Reposting an old piece, neglecting notes to self, and the burden of the day weighing heavy on a pair of quite brittle but resilient shoulders: this is life. Such is living - and we do it even though we dont like it. Exceptions made, integrity snubbed. And, won't things change?

Yes, emphatically - yes.

How that sun throws the shadow so long on the manicured grass! My, my.

Some news worthy of reportage:


-Everything, contrary to appearance, will be okay. All right, and okay.


-One cat is as thin as me (hips poke, ribs xylophoned) and the other is happily swelling a bit in the belly (swishy side to side as she runs, unaware of her weight when jumping). Both have been parenthetically pinning me to the bed each morning. Cuddling both concave and convex, with me immitating a happy phrase between the two.


-Five apples, sliced and cored. In a big bowl, mixed vigorously: white sugar, brown sugar, oats, nutmeg, cinnamon, small globs of butter. Find one rectangular cake pan and layer apples and dry-mixed topping. Bake until the smell is compelling, remove to cool, and serve with ice cream.

-This week, despite being locked in the middle of October, has been nothing but sweltering and perspirey all over. Damp before even stepping outside, and wishing desperately for a functional desk fan.


-A dream, or perhaps a vision: dark room with bright light. I think its about belief, but for the most part it has to do with calling out and imagining a response.

-Yesterday, the 14th of October, was E. E. Cummings birthday. Happy, &be(late)birth(d) day.


-In regards to publication:

---A small booklet of my photographs is being printed right now by a generous friend and should be shuttled towards my general direction soon. Ordering instructions will be posted once they are sorted out.

---Another issue, the fifth, of Nowhere Fast Photo Journal will be released soon as well and should have several new photographs of mine collected within. Wesley's careful curation is happening right this moment, so excitement is mounting and I can't see it being anything short of a success. The last four issues have been quite important.

---Metaphysically speaking, this blog will be permanently offline. That is sort of anti-news about non-publishing, I suppose, but far be it form me to keep a reader in the dark. What will take its place is still undefined, but it should be considered more like a portfolio and less like the dirty room I've kept here for the past couple years.

---A meditation on cats, "Soft Paws / Sharp Claws", is still forming itself in the mind and unable to be pinned properly to paper just yet. Started and scrapped monthly, it seems - each time it grows larger than the page, each time it scratches then cuddles. We're working on it, and are glad are patients have patience.

As ever, subjectively yours,

BrRaym

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Ne me quitte pas
Il faut oublier
Tout peut s'oublier
Qui s'enfuit déjà
Oublier le temps
Des malentendus
Et le temps perdu
A savoir comment
Oublier ces heures
Qui tuaient parfois
A coups de pourquoi
Le coeur du bonheur

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas

Moi je t'offrirai
Des perles de pluie
Venues de pays
Oÿ il ne pleut pas
Je creuserai la terre
Jusqu'après ma mort
Pour couvrir ton corps
D'or et de lumière
Je ferai un domaine
Oÿ l'amour sera roi
Oÿ l'amour sera loi
Oÿ tu seras reine

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas

Je t'inventerai
Des mots insensés
Que tu comprendras
Je te parlerai
De ces amants-là
Qui ont vu deux fois
Leurs coeurs s'embraser
Je te raconterai
L'histoire de ce roi
Mort de n'avoir pas
Pu te rencontrer

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas

On a vu souvent
Rejaillir le feu
De l'ancien volcan
Qu'on croyait trop vieux
Il est paraät-il
Des terres brulées
Donnant plus de blé
Qu'un meilleur avril
Et quand vient le soir
Pour qu'un ciel flamboie
Le rouge et le noir
Ne s'épousent-ils pas

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas

Ne me quitte pas
Je ne vais plus pleurer
Je ne vais plus parler
Je me cacherai là
A te regarder
Danser et sourire
Et à t'écouter
Chanter et puis rire
Laisse-moi devenir
L'ombre de ton ombre
L'ombre de ta main
L'ombre de ton chien

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas

Nureyev

Nureyev

In 1967, while attending a party in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco with his famed partner, Margot Fonteyn, the two were arrested by anti-drug police who were conducting a raid on the property.


(From Truffaut's "Bed and Board")

Whortleberries

Whortleberries

...

In a timid tremor of young love Hugh wondered if he might dare kiss her at some likely pause in their walk down the winding path. He would try as soon as they reached the rhododendron belt where they might stop, she to shed her parka, he to remove a pebble from his right shoe. The rhododendrons and junipers gave way to alder, and the voice of familiar despair started urging him to put off the pebble and the butterfly kiss to some later occasion. They had entered the fir forest when she stopped, looked around, and said (as casually as if she were suggesting they pick mushrooms or raspberries):

"And now one is going to make love. I know a nice mossy spot just behind those trees where we won't be disturbed, if you do it quickly."

Orange peel marked the place. He wanted to embrace her in the preliminaries required by his nervous flesh (the "quickly" was a mistake) but she withdrew with a fishlike flip of the body, and sat down on the whortleberries to take off her shoes and trousers. He was further dismayed by the ribbed fabric of thick-knit black tights that she wore under her ski pants. She consented to pull them down only just as far as necessary. Nor did she let him kiss her, or caress her thighs.

"Well, bad luck," she said finally but as she twisted against him trying to draw up her tights, he regained all at once the power to do what was expected of him.

"One will go home now," she remarked immediately afterwards in her usual neutral tone, and in silence they continued their brisk downhill walk.

At the next turn of the trail the first orchard of Witt appeared at their feet, and farther down one could see the glint of a brook, a lumberyard, mown fields, brown cottages.

"I hate Witt," said Hugh. "I hate life. I hate myself. I hate that beastly old bench." She stopped to look the way his fierce finger pointed, and he embraced her. At first she tried to evade his lips but he persisted desperately. All at once she gave in, and the minor miracle happened. A shiver of tenderness rippled her features, as a breeze does a reflection. Her eyelashes were wet, her shoulders shook in his clasp. That moment of soft agony was never to be repeated --- or rather would never be granted the time to come back again after completing the cycle innate in its rhythm; yet that brief vibration in which she dissolved with the sun, the cherry trees, the forgiven landscape, set the tone for his new existence with its sense of "all-is-well" despite her worst moods, her silliest caprices, her harshest demands. That kiss, and not anything preceding it, was the real beginning of their courtship.

-Transparent Things, p.54-55. V. Nabokov

NSA

NSA

No Such Agency.

Despite this fact, the compound has its own exit on the freeway marked: NSA Employees Only.

Not to mention over 18,000 parking spots for the 30,000 mathematicians, linguists, engineers, physicists, computer scientists, and other specialists and staff!

Their motto: "In God we trust... In Everyone else, we monitor."

Narrative

Narrative

First Person says: "I am. Me. Immediately, and instantly recognize me here; here, as I am in front of you, now. Now, look, I am moving my arms and lifting and raising each hand, see? See, I am me. I am immediate and all verb. I am a closeness and intimacy which is permanent and solid, a foothold within a shaking world."

Second Person says: "You are full of yourself. You force your way through and you manipulate the picture to better suit your own needs. You, with your singular self always pressing through the now of the second and into the space just before the later, you you, always with you time. The world unfolds itself around you and yet still you claim your permanence, the shapes change beneath your feet and yet still you feign physicality. You , with your always singular self, forcing with intimacy."

Third Person says: "Nevermind him, he was a boy and he grew into a man and he is as much like everyone as everone is. He has insight only into himself, he means well, he tries, he just can't ever find a view that looks out past his own nowness. If there were a time without time he'd vanish into the thin air, he holds firmly to the present and for that reason alone he has worth. To be bound to the present moment is almost to be imprisoned and isn't he already a prisoner in his own self? To be doubly locked up, that is what he is - this First Person."

Second Person says: "And you? You are the opposite, you are the distance and the unholding of time. You, ethereal you, the watcher -- you are the opposite of permanence. You: a mythic amalgomation of everything, a vessel into which all perceptions are poured and out of which all observation flows. You are defined only in the surrounding and never in the deathly details of physicality - a mist isn't quite the actual mist but the perception of the mistyness around it and this is what you are, you Third Person. You are the distance that makes an opposite of and for the First."

First Person says: "I am only me and committed to myself - with neither a debt to fulfil nor a question to answer. I am only what I am now, not what I was nor what I will be. Truth of the Present, that is me."

Third Person says: "He is sentenced to the perpetual Always of the Present."

Second Person says: "You are continually sentenced to the Never of the Past."

First Person says: "I can only speak for myself."

Second Person says: "You are condemned to that forever."

Third Person says: "He is happy for that, having only himself to rest upon. He is at once infinite in his oneness and at the same time as limited as a single finger pointing at the accused: himself."

Second Person says: "You, you are quite accusing yourself. You are Plurality: the speaker and the spoken, and while you have no fingers to point, being the apparition that you are, you are condemned to the hell of the mouth. The mouth speaks but has no say, it carries on with the breath of another organ and the voice of some other part yet is blamed for each and every word that is released from the lips. You are the messenger forever shot at with arrows, and always bearing the burden of perception while being responsible for nothing."

First Person says: "I am responsible for everything, as I am my thoughts as well as my body and in the world surrounding me I am the center for I have a gravity that attracts all to me. I am now."

Third Person says: "He is the statement that the world attachs its beliefs to."

First Person says: "I am also the world, attaching always to myself. I am everyone, the infinite in the singular. I act and all others react, I do and others comment."

Second Person says: "You are full of yourself. You eat the same air that you spit when you speak. You are the intake and the exhale at the same time."

Third Person says: "In each of his deficiencies he is revealed."

Second Person says: "In each of your deficiencies we are revealed."

First Person says: "I can only reveal myself."