ft ground

‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channeled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ’see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction. (more…)

Entering my thesis work I was very concerned, from slights I had felt tremendously injurious in my fully one-summer-long professional career, with the reformation of practice into a more democratic or pluralistic adventure. I foresaw a chorus, or at least some kind of organized chaos where I could make some marks and have them left to be noted by someone who took an interest. But perhaps what shook out of that professional experience was not that I wanted to reform practice, but that I want practice to be reformed. I had learned that I had not the ego strength to run an office, and destined to wallflowerdom in the field I wanted to imbue those peripheries with some kind of voice, an intern’s bill of rights. It is hard for me to recall ten years later what made me nauseous every morning I went to the office. I think at the time I saw it as a personality conflict. But I can see a more lasting reading being the acclimation to loss of control. This was not only the loss of creative control, which I had held to varying results over my five years down of schooling and studies, but the loss of lifestyle control that every person must choke on as they edge into the professional world. It was like a first time smoker suffering through those first several butts. I had to really want to stick to it. Having no interest in acclimating beyond emersion enough to provide me fodder for my intellectual inquiries, the experience made me gag emotionally.

(more…)

Sprawled alone with long summer dusk still high and slow through the trees beyond the Kimbell with my back against a bench and my legs flat stretched out across the floor toward the fountain I fingered pits in the travertine. I don’t think about giants when I am right up against them. (more…)

[pdf]

enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

I trudged past the apartment blocks, stopping under trees to stop the rain from falling on my shoulders and my neck. My shoes are soaked through and my socks are soaked through and I feel my feet turning to paste. Each tree has a different view of a different apartment block. Each is a different place. The sky is white from within the rain. It is still day, although I dont see the sun, the air is filled with light racing through the moisture and I have grown to feel time pass in my body even when it doesnt. I know it is after noon. Things slow and there are so many dry empty rooms. The windows of each apartment dont reflect the white sky. They are black. I cant see the glass in them. I think they are painted on. No one would look out of them. Neighbours are in other rooms in the afternoon, rooms that feel wet but are only cold and glossy. They are at different addresses with numbers that I read on paper and all of these apartments only have names, they are places outside of themselves and I couldnt come back to them. When I went to them again they would be where they belonged. Today I believe mine will be there, on the edge of the Adriatic Sea, its walls ending in sand.
(more…)

I had thought that I would spend the stretch of the day watching the sun move across the sky, marveling at how the sky changed and how the sky changed time, how it gave me back time by letting me watch it happen. I would see the sun framed through tree branches, low atop the end of a narrow alley, and reflected in the windscreens of parked autos. As it wandered the skies I would find my way in an oblong loop back to my apartment, making amends with the empty faces of buildings on the sidewalks and the carpark courtyards that swallow the sun. I would stop at every window and buff it with my sleeve, wipe down every doorknob to every apartment in the route, and seal the city off in a clean corner to be buried by time and dust. I knew it would come. When was I concentrating on this. In bed, in the dim, without my body oddly visible from my own eyes, plans to fill the day are plausible. I thought about accidents, happening upon places that maybe I had been before to beautifully cancel out that lost past. I planned accidents. Maybe I would find myself at that beach. It would begin to rain. Something would begin to surface in me and I would fail to stay it. I didnt plan her, but I knew her. I have known since I came to be here that she would happen and change the idle things that block out time into something I look back upon. She wouldnt change things enough to make the day pass. Faces rising out of the endless sheets of paper and my face onto the desk were always the same face, her featureless face. In the mess of the papers that I could fold up and put in my pocket, her face was an intangible curiosity that I could produce to slow down the empty space of that place. It fit in between the cycles of the fluorescent light, it stopped me from seeing my body and where it was for a length of time I couldnt discern. But it was long enough, and then there was nothing else. It was an accident that she was real. She still must be.

The sand has dried around me. It happens slowly and nothing else happens. The feeling of each grain of sand cutting the skin on my wrist is disembodying. I move my palm over the sand to make a smooth area and then I spiral into it with my fingertip unearthing a cigarette filter. Its fine to look away from the ocean because I know it is there. I know it is there when I dont see it. When I wake up turned around I know which direction it is from me but it isnt something I ever need to corroborate. I put my cheek into the pit I burrowed with my finger and look across the sand. I see a face there. Her eyes were closed and her hair feel across her mouth. I look across her now that she is there for a character, some little bit to stop me and redirect me, but I am seeing other things in place of her. It was far away. It wasnt today, this morning. I was just now seeing it. I thought that it had been tossed around the crystal grains of sand, reflected, and that if she looked at me she wasnt looking at me but just looking. I looked back but I knew that she had already changed. She would be looking at something else, something closer. I looked back but I knew that she had already changed and that I had taken too long to get to this point. I couldnt see the character of her face. It wouldnt tell me anything to do with myself. It was probably different now. I ignored her because she was moving, sitting up to look at the ocean and spreading out her dress across the sand. She could fill up a day, doing things and going places, but she isnt there.

The sun is over the end of a street now where it is blocked off from the sand and ocean. I dont think Sepulveda hits the ocean. It goes on forever. I should live somewhere that a wave can just jostle me home to. I should make a day to find the end of Sepulveda. I want it to start and end distinctly. I want to see it in the dark so the beige hills that crush the valleys and trump the horizon are lightless and black. They make me shake. The tail of the ridge just out and seals the beach to the north. It is an heavier shade of white from the sky with a thin silver corona. I recall facing the hills from a street and knowing that the sun was behind them, snatched from the southern sky, and that it would rifle new dust afternoon rays into the bathroom windows when I was home. I stayed all night at my desk. That morning the sky was green. During the night the hills had fallen away and loosed the smog and sun and the morning sky was alive and I stood absently in it for a moment before going back to my desk. During the day, in there, the sun didnt move, there were not shadows. My actions didnt change or progress. When my hands started moving over the desk, feeling the corners of folded paper in between my fingertips, they didnt stop, the paper didnt stop, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, in the metal lamp over the desk and all of the other empty desks light the room into a shadowless gas and that was it. It was eternal and momentary. I had only to move one envelope and I had moved and placed all of them for the entire day, for a lifetime. It wasnt a matter of how long it happened, whether it was each day, only that it had happened. I believe that one moment is different from the next. I wasnt there. I was at the beach.

I need to get a foothold. The sun is limp in the window, between the blinds. It has been floating around my room for so long that my teeth can feel it swirling around them, liquidly, milky, sending me back into sleep and rising me back through itself every so often to think about rolling over, readjusting the pillows, or wondering how orange it could ever get. I will lay here and the light wont change. It will get dark then later again will get light. It wont change colour. When it is barely light and the brick wall outside my window is silver, I can almost see through it. It would be the same colour as the sky would be, and my room is silver. It is damp for a moment at sunrise and then becomes desert dry. In those silver seconds I have my eyes open, they may have been open for hours, but when the light trickles across them I know for certain, and in that colourlessness I wonder whether I am waking up somewhere else, someone else, in a room filled with things made of dark wood, with oval mirrors and mirrored trays with glass phials and atomisers, picture frames with faces and a sky above the window that is waiting for the sun to hit the flocculent clouds that change as the day changes, swirling and parting to show all different colours of heaven. I wonder whether it is all canceled out in the silver. The special things and idiosyncrasies that make me someone are canceled out against each other in reflections and unity of my presence, or that just waking up, or just seeing the light waking up the city it will take a moment for me to snap into myself and into my room and into a day that moves with the natural cadence with the revolving earth.
(more…)