Archives for March, 2009

Nina Simone – I Can’t See Nobody (Daniel Y. Remix)

“I’m really here,” I thought. I was standing in the balcony, the bright floor waxy and red beneath me, watching your father walk towards the entrance on the ground floor. He looked old and unexpectedly fragile, his shoulders and slender chest bent beneath his pressed white shirt, as he crossed the dirt path in front of your house. He paused at the iron gate, one hand reaching for his keys and I tightened my grip on the balustrade. It curved reassuringly firmly beneath my fingers, real. It was mid-afternoon. That day it was still out, the traffic had slowed so that the thoroughfare at the end of the street was quieter than usual, and the metal bar was cool against my palm.

“I’m here,” I thought. I could hear you moving inside, walking to the balcony’s door, about to come stand beside me and as I turned my head towards your footsteps, I thought, “I’m really here and this is not a dream.”

I woke up a few minutes later. I stared at the ceiling and I felt as though I’d swallowed light, as though I’d been painstakingly hollowed out and filled with something intangible, a glow pulsing along my diaphragm.

A night a week later I was there again, in a different part of the city. It was night now, crowded with the noise of water. As though I were really there and really had been there seven nights ago, I remembered my last trip, remembered that particular combination of stillness and cool on that balcony, and the sound of you at my back like heat. “I was here last week,” I said, over the noise, to you, speaking to your bemused and concerned eyes.
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My friend knew someone who was cutting herself. She was telling me about it, and there was a fair amount of anger mixed in with the worry and the fear. Exercising an unusual amount of self-restraint, I said nothing. I don’t cut, but admitting an appreciation during that specific conversation for the particular logic of self-mutilation wouldn’t have been productive, so I didn’t say anything.

Coping mechanisms, she asked, how is this a coping mechanism? I remember being taken aback a little by her frustration. Its logic might be twisted and it might not be something that appeals to me, but cutting makes sense to me. It’s a way of both recording and forcing presence. I said I didn’t understand how that was coping. The doctors said I wouldn’t but I had to.

I was talking about substance abuse with a friend recently and he asked me what my relationship with my body was. I managed to avoid answering the question, because some things I can’t say out loud. At some level, it exists disconnected from me, just a physical entity that takes up space in the real world. It’s a body, a space I occupy. Cutting seems to emerge from a similar disconnect. On the one hand, it engages skin as canvas, as something to be worked on or with, like paper or walls. A body is something that can be marked, a thing whose connection to one’s intrinsic self is almost incidental. On the other hand, cutting also realises that self-skin connection. The blood and the hurt provide visceral proof of the fact that our bodies are our own. They aren’t merely trifling extensions of our being; they are what we are. Our bodies are our homes, in ways no other spaces can ever be. And like all homes, the space is often claustrophobic and alienating.

I don’t know that it’s helpful to be able to relate the way I do to self-abuse. At least, I don’t know yet how to talk to people whose behaviour makes sense to me in a way that is both compassionate and constructive. I know a lot of unhappy people; it’s part of who I am, that I have these conversations with people. I know it’s unhealthy (a realisation that took some time in the coming) and sadomasochistic, but the thing that I find most humanising in other people is pain. The problem is that I don’t know how to talk to other people about pain in a way that doesn’t normalise self-destructive behaviour to the point of condoning it.
Because often, there is a part of me that is condoning it, if only because it’s behaviour that I know I’m always close to, if not already, indulging.

I like subway lines. I like pacing their length, I like hearing how the songs I love become unfamiliar over their noise, and I like watching the people. I like taking the train together, feeling the steadiness of your shoulder against mine; I like comparing people’s faces to their reflections in the windows, how the latter are always more expressive; and I like listening to you talk, unable to hear your words over the roar of metal, an excuse to watch your mouth move. I smile when it seems appropriate and under the cover of public transit remind myself to remember the way your cheekbones flare below your eyes.

Someone asked me over the summer, her voice heavy and slow with fear, if I heard voices. If I hadn’t been so blindly furious, I’d have laughed. But I was angry, my fingers knotted into fists, and I choked out a No.
No, my voice catching, I don’t hear voices. I’m not crazy.

I’m fond of subways, but I’m always surprised at how in the time it takes for the train to arrive, other people manage to navigate that waiting in that space so easily, as though none of them have the questions floating in their heads that I have in mine.

It’s never as explicit as the movies or newspaper columns make it seem. It’s a little bored, a little ironic, profoundly mundane: this question of what’s on the other side, this question of what would happen. It’s always a story, just a story that I’m curious about. There’s a line, in subway stations, a line that isn’t metaphoric: it’s literal and yellow and you’re not supposed to cross it. It’s a little bored, it’s a little amused: what’s on the other side. I pace subway stations. It’s something to do in the interim.

mourn [...] the way I was once able to feel grief and pity and know that they were in no way mixed with apathy or contempt.

– Nawaz, Saleema. “My Three Girls.” Mother Superior. Calgary: Freehand Books, 2008. 14.

Grand Analog – Touch Your Toes Part 2
The video makes me want to bring out my air guitar.

I.
I was being serious, and then I wasn’t being serious.
“But,” I paused and waved my hands grandly, “I am a writer.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “That was perfect. With all that sugar all over your face, like coke.”
It was my first raspberry jelly donut in months, and it was good. Continue reading this entry »

Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me (mp3)

For going on nearly a year now, I have been writing and have been trying to write about home. I was trying to write about the spaces we construct between walls and behind doors, what we name them, and how we allow specific people into those spaces and call them blood. I was trying to write about the cities that we occupy, the ways we live in them, the way the shape of a particular street can inform a worldview. I needed to write these things because it was, after a certain point, a matter of sanity.

I wrote the post below in July. I’m still thinking about home, but more quietly now, with less of my heart in my throat.

—-

The first sentence of the last paper I wrote for school was this:
If we could reduce truth to its most literal elements and if we could be sure of the black and white markings of it, we could rightly argue that it is not so far from “here” to “there” – the distance just a solitary letter, nothing more than a trifling lowercase “t.”

Six weeks after I wrote that sentence, I punched in my final period and emailed the essay off, ending my academic career with a characteristically sprawling and inconsistent piece of melodrama. It was half-decent, just good enough to pass, just insane enough to mark it mine.

When I wrote that first sentence in June, those words meant something important to me. And naively I hoped that I could maybe put that important something down into coherent words, if not in this paper, then maybe elsewhere. In the intervening month and a half that it took me to write that paper, weeks punctuated with long days of sleep and nights of writing every other conceivable thing I could sit down long enough to focus on, that particular obsession faded away. The importance of figuring out how it is that we negotiate change in the cityscape and how and why we continue to love places and people when everything is caught in a perpetual flux waned with the summer heat. I grew nostalgic for the cold and for snowed-in beaches and for the stifling clasp of ill-fitting cheap wool coats, the way those things demand and encourage solitude.

I can’t remember now what it was that I was hoping to resolve when I finally typed up that first sentence after having had it float in my head for days. Naively, I started off every academic paper I wrote this last year with the hope that when I finished it, it would say something to me that I could hear, something important that had nothing to do with the text in question, something comprehensible to me.
Not a single paper ever did end that way.
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