We are pond.

First, I became a crocodile, amber eyes and pale green flesh, I slithered through the hot, swampy water, my mouth gaping. All around me was the swish and flow of parting water, beneath me, sulfuric orange and emerald stones; my flesh became like these stones, these fiery, slick pebbles. We scooped them up in our white, puckered fingers and poured them all across our shoulders. They tumbled and slid, down, across our collar bones, across our breasts, down the slope of our backs. And as we laid in the steaming streams, they piled up on us, great mounds across our bellies, piling up on our knees, our shoulders. We slithered and rolled, beneath the water we could hear the stones of our flesh scrape against the stones of the pond. We could hear the pond breathing, it's slick fingers reaching out to us. And we were crocodiles; we scooped up the dark red earth, the black earth, and spread it across our cheekbones, in stripes, over the ridges of our noses, we pushed it down across our shin bones, dug our fingers in, deep, and we knew we could not leave. We were crocodiles; we crawled up against the muddy, grassy shores of the pond, and snapped up at the creatures that passed by.

Do you speak the language of the crocodiles?

They sat up on the grassy slope and watched us cautiously, we could not reach them, we crawled the muddy banks and looked up at them with our yellow crocodile eyes. But slowly, we could feel a change in our flesh that was made of stones, we felt ourselves pouring back through time, coming apart at our slippery seams and folding down into our most basic chemical forms. The pond held us, spoke to us in its gurgling voice, and we receded to the shore, writhing in the slick mud, in each others crocodile limbs, and we began the slow process of devolution. Above us the trees shivered and quaked, and we melted into ourselves, into the red and black mud, into the damp green moss, into the bright stones, the soft flow of water, we became pond. We slumped back against the clay and the stones and mud and our bodies receded deep down, into sludge, into the absolute beginning. We are pond. We became mixed up with each other, bodiless, just soft and warm and wet. We can never leave. We are pond.

Being Bullied

So, this blog is about something that actually happened to me a few months ago. It was a pretty intense experience, but also kind of weird and embarrassing and I put off writing about it for a while, and then when I did finally write about it, promptly forgot about it in the back of my notebook. Today, in my Children's Literature class, we discussed a book called Juul, about a boy who is bullied and ultimately mutilates his body piece by piece in a search for acceptance. It was one of the most intense things I've ever read, and it made me feel compelled to share this. I may no longer be a child, but this was definitely a unique experience for me, and I think there is something to be learned from it.

 

I was walking home with a feeling like iron in my bones; I don’t remember why. I came up the hill, heaved a deep breath, turned right into the twisting narrow streets where during the holidays we heard the incessant boom of dynamite, where a singed bath tub has been sitting for weeks, where once a group of kids burned a chair and left its stinking carcass in the street. I heard someone laugh, it was loud, childish. I turned down a street, there was a group of kids, teenaged girls and a chubby soft-faced boy; the boy was in the street, stepped backwards as I turned the corner and turned to make an ugly gaping face at me. He made a harsh braying sound, and I gave him a kind of skeptical half smile, the tense look that draws up my eyebrows, and kept walking. The boy stepped in front of me. I tried to edge around him, and the girls poured out all around me in this awkward surreal kind of stream. I was looking down at them, they were either young or small or both and were united in a strange unspoken agreement, an instantaneous decision, to be whimsically cruel. There was a flood of sounds, ugly irony, their faces contorted in blind hatred, they got close up to my face, just barely resisting touching my skin, they screamed in mirthful glee, pulled apart my body. An older girl with a Monroe piercing and dry skin stuck out a finger, jabbing at my piercing, ¿que es eso?, she demanded with her mouth loose and wagging. Un piercing, como tienes tú, I finally said, the words coming incredulously from my tense, guarded smile. I guess it broke the spell, I pushed my body forward, finally resigned to move past, to flail if I had to, and they pulled back from me in reluctant, stubborn little steps, crying, ¡un aplauso! and clapping and howling as I walked away.

As the clatter faded behind me, I walked home listening to my breath. My face sighed down, anxious smile erased, I bit my lip and marveled at the silenced that roared in my hollowed out body. I got home, climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and cried resentfully, struggling against each silly tear.

It’s strange to spend your life in a self-aware position of cultural dominance, with that history of privilege, that shameful advantage of being a white, middle class American, to be aware of that horrible dark thing, historical cruelty and repression, with all it’s echoes and ghosts, and to live all your years with the knowledge that you will never experience this twisted thing that you are implicitly and helplessly destined to be a purveyor of cruelty. It’s strange to be taught that this feeling is something you have no right to experience, and then to turn a corner one vulnerable day and be confronted by exactly that.

It’s strange to find yourself in a place where nothing you do is the right thing—your words are deformed, uncertain creatures, violence will only turn around and eat you up, silence is weak and indefensible. So, I cried on my bed, and then tried to breathe and felt quiet and lonely and strange and bad, and counted my limbs and my unbroken skin, and breathed and sighed and went downstairs, and found a new way to walk home. And then I cried more and felt weak and helpless and lame, but at the same time, hesitantly satisfied, because I’d glimpsed the nauseous thing a white American never thinks they will touch, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it, maybe this little piece of trembling, blurry nightmare day will be useful to me in that endless process of becoming—becoming a whole person, a better person, a worthwhile person, a new, never stagnant person, a changing, continual self.


Comic relief:

(I would prefer to use the scene after this when the guys are telling their parents about the incident, but I couldn't find it.)

Festival del Dragón

 

At home we cook the worlds speediest pasta, running around the kitchen, drinking more. We eat out of the pot to avoid dishes, pile our shit into the car, and I’m buried beneath a huge blanket in the back seat with a baggie of MDMA in my underwear, the music up, it feels like we’re flying through the streets, through the dark, towards Santa Fé. In the distance there are little clumps of light and the faint resonance of bass. We take a sharp right to avoid a police check point and pull off to the side of the road.

The Dragon festival is a sparkling circus, a grotesque city of lost souls and free souls and everything in between. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, costumes and paint, eyeballs wide as plates, I feel safe bundled up in my polar bear hat. People touch my head, growl at me, laughing. We go floating form tent to tent, where I hold my hand against my chest and feel a beat that is my own heart all mixed up with the rhythm of the music, and it’s the same exuberant boom in everyone’s chest, in everyone’s loose limbs. We eat up exhilaration, from plastic bottles, bitter fingertips, through rolled up bills, we become infinite, we share, we sweat, we dance, we hold on, we let go. Faces loom in and out of the darkness, big gaping smiles, a strangeness that feels soft as skin. I feel my body in every place, I feel me, and you in every pore, I feel my soul hum.

We are under a big canopy dancing with our arms up when the sky becomes the faintest purple and the sun begins to roll up, beneath a layer of thick fog. Trash begins to emerge from the mist. We sit in the first weak rays of sunlight and watch as the landscape appears, a strange dystopian shire. The music persists, but we wander away from it, boots kicking up whitish dust. We sit amongst the olive trees and look at our hands and look at the clouds, and watch each others’ eyes expand. All around me is a serious murmur; they talk about growing up, about ideal childhood, about rebellion and drugs, about moderation and excess, about the revolution that must begin with education, but all my words are sealed up inside of me. The sun is up now, Borja falls asleep on his back, I pick little bits of grass and watch the ants scuttle busily across the cracked earth. Matteo says the olive trees look purple, and I curl up against him, curl up inside my hood.

Back at the festival, the dogs have returned to their instinctual selves, roaming in dusty, playful packs. I stop every few feet to say hello to them. There is a droopy faced old bulldog, there is a beautiful white-gray husky mix chained to a van, there is a tiny fluffy German Shepard pup being carried under someone’s arm. We see familiar faces scattered all around, exchange hugs and smiles. At the car we eat orange segments and pass around a big plastic bottle of water. There is a short shirtless man standing alone against a truck across the street from us. He looks a little lost, he keeps looking over in our direction with a vague smile, shuffling his feet. I walk over to him and offer water, and he laughs nervously and gulps it down, grateful. A red car drives past and shouts at me, “¡Oso polar! ¡Súbete al coche fantástico!” They rev their engine. A moped stops in from of me. They like my hat. They flash big golden-toothed smiles at me.

We wander, wander, wander. I talk to a boy with a painted face, to see if he has any paint, but he’s lost it. He’s Lithuanian and has yellow eyes like a lizard. He sits with us and we stare and he says, “Natural, natural,” and follows us until he comes across a shirtless man throwing himself around in the street and the Lithuanian lances himself with a gleeful whoop and they begin flipping and leaping and tossing each other to the music. We find Adri, still dancing, shirtless, furious, ecstatic. I’m covered in red paint, all down my right arm and my t-shirt and my sweatshirt. We wander and wander.

Eventually, we are hot and Borja is wilting, so we pile into the car, up to our necks in sweatshirts and blankets and we cruise home, a little anxiously. It’s strange to watch people, walking along the streets, their clothes bare of dust and paint, their faces void of wonder, their destinations somehow certain. Outside the house, I’m unloading beer from the trunk, stained and dusty, still wrapped in my polar bear hat, and a neighbor passes by, a middle aged man in a button down shirt, and he seems like some strange surreal portrait of normality, of the bland nature of reality. In the house, we curl up on the couches, and giggle vacantly at Charlie, delirious and exhausted, but humming with left over adrenaline. We take lazy showers and eat slowly with chopsticks, just because. Over thirty six hours pass without sleep, and when I finally go to bed, it’s because I no longer want to keep my eyes open.

Fiesta de Primavera

 

The weekend begins with little boats of vegan curry, sweet grape juice and a couple of cold forties, hoards of young Spaniards armed with plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic bottles, the pervasive stench of piss and piles of trash. We down our first forties and then meander through the masses, looking for familiar faces, or new faces. I climb up on Leon’s shoulders and call out for his friend, who we never find. Down below, people applaud or raise their drinks up at me. Someone hurls a chunk of ice against my back. I keep drinking up there.

Eventually we have to pee. There’s a high cement wall, and on the other side are bushes, full of women, mostly, as the guys are resigned to just lean against any old wall and let loose. We climb up a skate ramp and a group of girls protest, yelling that we can’t pee up there, go fuck ourselves. They are delighted when I attempt to lower myself over the edge and eat shit. Sydney makes the leap much more gracefully. We wait outside a particularly promising bush that a cute girl in a floral skirt tells us is “occupied.” She quickly gathers that we are not from here, and gives us her contact info, hoping to meet up for tapas some day and practice her English.

 Once we’ve peed, we eye the wall suspiciously. Climbing back over does not seem to be an option, but further down, it’s much lower, so we run over and hop on. But we’re a long way, a tin rooftop, and a group of people away from our friends. Fuck it. We take off, hopping precariously along the wall, and people start to take notice. Three boys are blocking our way and protest, not wanting to hop down, but I just ask them to scoot over from each other, and then step behind each one. A few people cheer. When we reach the rooftop, Syd climbs up first. Now people are really watching. We must look crazy, maybe we are. We dash along the rooftop, not wanting to break it, and people really begin to cheer. Someone throws a chunk of ice, again—sonofabitch. But finally we reach Leon and he lowers us down.

He’s acquired people, and I run into Carlos, serious as ever, but drunk as fuck, complaining that he can’t pee. Andrew, a British kid, has a backpack full of warmish tinto de verano, and I chug some of it, and then Matteo calls, saying to come home, so I take off dashing through the crowd and up, up, up the hill. Later, of course, he texts me saying he’ll actually be a while, so I stop and buy vodka and potato chips.

The Most Lonesome Thing

Creaking and rocking, I am making little echo noises in the void of my own self, the only thing that exists. The world is an undulating thing, made of sand and hope, made of gritty fear. I am a red desert, stretched out in perfect dunes, as far as the eyes can see. You are a ghost, with whispering footprints that are swept away when I breathe in. I never hurt you, you are no solid thing. I can slip through your skin; there’s nothing there. You are a dream, a fragment, a wish, a passing thought.

I am floating in the silent certainty of only me. You cannot reach me here, you cannot touch me, because your fingers are made of white sand, the dust of my own internal experience; nothing.

I wonder what it’d be like to pour myself into you, to spill over you in little particles, slip through the cracks of you, enter your pores. Imagine us in a rusty VW bus leaking sand. We’re in the desert, dunes rolling and rippling and sighing as far as the eye can see. We live in a bus, with teacups, full of sand. We make love in a bed like a dried up sea, fine, orange dust that billows all around us like steam, makes your face look far away, I can see you dissolving into it. We sit cross-legged, naked and dusty, and I paint your body with wet strokes, trying to feel your skin, my fingers hopeful and searching. We stand in the desert hand in hand and watch as a huge dark wave comes rising up and crashes over us, rains against my flesh, your flesh, these flimsy little forms. We erode in seconds, dissolve into the absolute chaos, swallowed up into the explosive whirlwind of fiery sand.

I am the most lonesome thing, the only thing, heaving in the dark black void, the things that can never be known. I am writhing, in a bed. The sunlight is begging to crawl through the windows, through the cracks. You are not real. I can slip through your skin and find nothing.

Solipsism and Interconnectivity

I.

I’m trying to say that nothing feels real. Moments come and go and fade away. Memories seem like dreams, I can almost see myself in them, like a different person. Sometimes reality even seems implausible, sometimes while sitting, looking, talking, I feel the world tilt back away from me, glaze over like a dream. I’m never quite certain if I’m awake.

I’m trying to say that I feel sometimes incredibly disconnected from all that is around me, as if I’m floating through life without touching it. People sometimes seem impossibly distant, impossibly different creatures. I don’t understand the things they do, or why we all behave in this kind of shadowy secret way, as if we don’t have innards. I wonder why it’s not okay to show more. I feel like words are often inadequate for expression—thoughts are so much more than words, they are multi-dimensional experiences that mix up bodily feelings, senses of all types, goals, dreams, hopes, conjectures, memories… And I’m often frustrated by my inability to access the experience of others, and by my inability to share myself, my experience, my thoughts, my inner world, with others. Misunderstanding is a human condition. When a series of events produces a reaction within me, I want it to be touched and held and seen and understood and validated by others. That rarely happens. This makes me feel dismissive. This makes me feel achy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

There is some comfort, but also horror in the idea of solipsism. I am the only thing, just one long thought process blossoming into a complicated, colorful word within which I’ve built a place for a concept of self. Sometimes time feels jumpy, like I’m being plopped down into different settings and manipulated into interacting with varied, imaginative stimuli, just to produce feeling, to test the limits of the imagination, the boundaries of the big, sustained thought process which is the only thing, ever.

Sometimes I feel that way, but more often I guess I feel like we are isolated little units, blundering into each other with no hope of communication. Not only is language inadequate, it’s incredibly personal. A word is a only a symbol, attached to which are a series of experiences, and these will never, ever match up. Maybe this isn’t solipsism in a pure sense, but I think it relates to Gorgias’ idea that even if something exists, and even if something could be known about it, knowledge can’t be communicated to others.

II.

Despite all of this, though, communication does occur, at least to some to immeasurable degree. We can relate symptoms of physical pain, for example, and diagnose illness. We can meet for lunch at 2 ‘o clock. We can even listen to the same haunted notes and cry. And sometimes, quite often, despite the fact that we try so hard to present an outer idea of self and conceal our inner world, the inner world leaks out, and we study each others actions, personalities, histories, and come up with sometimes accurate conclusions. How?

All this makes me feel the opposite of alone; it makes me feel intrinsically connected to everything. It makes me feel as if we are not individual selves but fleshy pieces of a huge, breathing organism, something universal and communicative. Perhaps words are inadequate, but we seem to be communicating through out pores and veins, through our irises and our nerves.

These are the things I’m trying to say. These are the sensations I’m trying to convey. The words are inadequate, but I hope I am transmitting something.

Disclaimer of sorts: I know pretty much nothing about solipsism or Gorgias. These are just thoughts that I had brewing in me today, after watching Solipsist and reading a very small bit about the idea of solipsism. They are also probably influenced by reading excerpts of Emerson's essays on Nature.

Growing Different Eyes

 

Michelle and I are sitting below San Miguel Alto, below us the city is beginning to sparkle. It looks like someone has scooped up a handful of white buildings and tossed them into place like dice. The sky is melty orange red, smeared with wispy clouds, and the mountains are all wrapped up in gray.

I’m so glad the Alhambra still amazes me.

It’s sitting there, lights hugging against its incredible, certain walls. I take a swig of bittersweet beer, marveling, too. There had been a brief moment during these past months that felt like I’d reached a plateau, but it’s gone now, and I’m back in the habit of being amazed and thrilled with every day.

When my mother came to see me, she kept saying every day has been absolutely different, every day an adventure of a new sort. It’s true, and I suddenly realize, sitting up on the hill, wrapped up in my polar bear hat with a beautiful friend and a liter of beer wrapped in a plastic bag, staring down at the ancient castle, staring out at the sighing sky, that this is my life. Everyday, an adventure, everyday a swelling of amazement, strange beauty, curious discovery, everyday a brand new page, a new memory. It’s incredible that after seven months, nothing has grown bland and gray even though I have walked many of the city’s curving streets, even though each day I wake up and sit in class, even though I have seen the Alhambra glowing patiently a hundred times, and even though a certain kind of routine has formed, the sense of adventure has never left. And then there’s a moment when it kind of just makes sense.

When you leave everything behind and embark on a journey to a strange place with a simple quest, to learn the language and see the things that place has to offer, you grow different eyes. You are no longer content to wake up each day and move in sensible pre-determined steps, you are instead inclined to throw your arms out behind you and give yourself to the opportunities that appear, to wiggle yourself into new places, experiment with discomfort and rapture, with ignorance and awe, helplessness and determination.  You become determined to build an adventure with your bare hands, and whatever falls into them.

Spring

Spring comes like honey, dripping, soft, sweet, golden yellow. Little blossoms appear, white and innocent, virginal and quivering, open to the sun and wind, and I am aching for these whispers of green, the sighing roots all down into the earth. I am ready for the clean wriggle of something pure and new to burrow into the stained and scarred earth, into my impure bones.

Remember These Things

Feel good, feel big, wide, spread out, stretch out, soak up. These are the memories that build up your skin, these are the moments that fill up your heart, that pour out your mouth, fill up your eyes, jumble up your mind. Do you want to be a person? Do you want to be a whole person, a person of substance, a person to hold onto, to drift away with? Do you want to be a person that can be seen, a person that fills up a page, a portrait or a poem, a person that can see, with clear eyes, eyes full of reference points yet clean as a blue summer sky? Then open wide, tilt back, soak up, take in these little seconds, their stillness, their incessant hum, just fling back, let go, take it in, let it all fade by in a blur, just so long as you remember the way it felt, at least, let it all come at you, come in you, like the most beautiful film you’ve ever seen, with it’s booming, whispering, with it’s sobbing, laughing, screaming orchestra. These are the sounds that will hold you at dawn, when the sun ignores you, and rises up and reaches out, these are the memories that will come back to you, in fragments, pieces, all cut up and scrambled and coded into secrets, when you sleep, behind your eyelids when you are hiding from persistent sunlight. Touch it all, let the days run through your fingers, like sand, just as long as you remember how it felt, that smoothness, slipping by, and the little scoop it came from, and the little mound it made.

Remember these things: Thursday night plastic bottles in a loft, the deep red walls, the sting of the air on the street, wobble steps, to the door, the brown neck of a beer bottle, the cold clammy glass, a song, or another, and your feet shuffle, and the doorman, who remembers you, he’s a short man, smiling, little slips of paper, foam, those stumble steps, again, some empty place and that laughter when you leave, the rush and thrum of music, music, music, letting yourself fall away back into it, darkness, bumping, someone with dreadlocks, a Santa Cruz t-shirt, the laughing with your hand over your mouth, time that slips and disappears, and those fucking bathrooms, of course, waking up in a stifling darkness, and falling in and out of it, and then the deep bells jangling, it’s four pm, citrus, panting, uphill, hot water, in cups, unexpected neighbor call, the humming belly surprise, tobacco scent soft and usual, easy words, watching them, and, then, a, long, moment, of, sitting, late morning sunshine, stop and go, outside, in like a sponge, open pores, eyes all sparkling, the city down below, the Alhambra, stoic and brown as ever, just perched, the wind, smoking, the soft smell of one spliff or another, picking down the hill, quick hellos, yellow beer in long glasses, counting my silences, but content, and out onto a bench, a stubborn dog, a three man band, strumming, blissfaced eyes closed, beer, bathroom, beer, and out and over and up into a plaza, on a bench, hugging the last rays of sunlight, borrowed music, the eyes that close, the feet that tap, and the growing moving impermanent sway of human vibrations all around, the animals tussling in the dry dirt, the sun blushing out and down, drums across the plaza, guitar and flute, all mixed up, solid redwrapped litros and shared shivers, swaying, watching, all those beautiful people, and as the evening turns purpley the beat rises us and everyone scrunches around, those distant smiles, stamping feet, absolute in the sound, dirty fingers lifting up cigarettes and fingering wind instruments, and it swells up, and down we go, plunging into the cobblestone maze, a sweet teashop pastry hello, living room drinks, bitter and pink, speed cooking, all amped up and hungry, and laughter, and maps, and we’re dancing at the bus stop, waiting, the burning plastic bottle, the last stop, a lucky guess, and hello, hello, we’re here, glow in the dark masked debauchery, fling ourselves around, sweating to the sounds, jostling, climbing, and we’re spotlighted, cheering, arm in arm, conga line, kick, kick, exultation, and singing too loud in the bathroom, slamming on the walls, some angry face, and the whole thing has only just begun, here we are laughing, masked and only us dancing, fuck it, new faces, new places, a feeling like tugging, what are the things I know about you, the hours drank down into empty bottles, cans, cups, dimming lights, and down on Elvira, spilled beer on the ground, salsa picante, and some conversation that I can’t taste, and dark night shivering, drive up easy, collapse, and then, brief oblivion, it starts again, meandering down, dancing steps all on the road, those faces turning, looking, us looking, laughing, finding, some unexpected faces, hello, and we are here, swaying again, sun like honey all across us, smoke curled all around our eyes until sunset is soft gray beautiful, puppy prancing, we move to keep the shadow out, and separate and then find ourselves all mixed up together, again, in the sound, in the beer, rocking on the steps of the Cathedral, curled up on some large terrace, spit down onto the sidewalk, and, then, the silent, walk, home, just quiet, just happy, just cold, just okay.

These are the things that you must grab, that you must not crush, these are the things you must hold soft as a butterfly, that you must retain within you, that you must let out of you, all at once. Do you want to remember? Do you want to be, feel, to know what you are looking for, what you have had? This is how.