Peer into me while having coffee. I am reading Fiskadoro, or wanting to edit it as I read it so that I like it better, and I think, 'sun on the balcony' and then I think 'coffee in small ceramic cups.' Its a food tied directly to an emotion AND a circumstance.
The way she could escape college seminars into long bouts of cigarettes and coffee cups carried over from the pleasure of being jammed into a Denny's booth with a racket of skateboarders from a city nearby. The twins with the Bruce Willis' voice boxes, and Kenny with camera eyes and footage. No one had to know that she was a secret person. It was a blurred all night picture from a dream in which no one turns to you and says, 'How about you...?' Something had kept them all from asking this question, from exposing her before she could flick off the switch, rapel out of the nightmare of being observed too closely. Gratefully anonymous, now she imagined herself, and this quiet self of hers involved in the hand to mouth of smoke and coffee, was as involute, and deadening as sucking a thumb long into prepubescence.
Dear People,
Food cannot change emotions. It changes your body. It zooms in and up to your globed eyes, and your body says, "Oh yes, now I feel even. But insidious as coffee is, it is like guerillla warfare where your eyes have a pelucid infant clarity hidden in the brush tasting the air, wildly alert yet immobile, while your energy is lost in the dark echo of your body being impelled by a heartbeat unnaturally fast for your stillness. So food changes something that lead to emotions but I'd say an emotion is a folk concept, anachronistic, and yet still an effective meaningful compound idea. So food can change the sounds you pay attention to, or the way you walk through woods with filtered light, or bound up the apartment steps, or shlup across the hall, which certainly affects what you feel. . But it is the true 'even' that cools temper. It is the 'even' that remains compelling. I seek the 'even' as its own form of high. The even of mint and almond milk with a hint of pineapple. It is like drinking the blood of a fairy. Emotions can be so potent in their 'even' form. The heightened essence of dread is trumped by the rarified unattached smoothness of presence.
It was the way I felt that morning without a bra on in a white T shirt. I went for Dunkin Donuts drinks, age twenty. I lay my head on his lap, silent tiny fetal cells winnowing. Don't be so clingy he said. On the red sofa made by the scorpio ballet dancer on cocaine, I felt a moment of longing so destructive I must have killed myself in order not to remember its full length and breadth. I wanted to force him to love me, the tips of my nipples turning up in jitterbug love for the hormones of milk. He was folding his origami legs under himself, perhaps, he was only responding to my smell shifting; responding to smelling the future decade of burn scars peeling and searing below a lithe snake-woman stare.
Dear people,
Body is mind. All is mind. Eat better psychic food. Has anyone ever seriously claimed that all is body? Its all food. Mind is food. Mattmuirhead relayed the point that 'will' is nothing real. Destruction of anachronistic philosophical constructs is a good idea. They represent clutter in the psyche. Lets not get to burning books or anything. What if I tried to 'be' Zen Essence' in Farenheit 451? If mind is food, then I am not eating well. If mind is matter, why are things still so contrary and obstinant?
We are still separate from somethings. Things will make you angry and will make you sad. They differ in mind from your mind's differences. The 'Other' is looking back through the keyhole at you. Here is the true dualism. And so when I say I am trying to purge the unnatural length of emotions, I mean this. However I know that food is both psychic and physical. I think I eat more psychic food and I spend more time with psychic food than physical food. We must purge differences by separating them from ourselves. Or by rising up from them and caring less about them by pretending to care more. Ah, such fundamental irritants! I am allergic to this medicine.
Oh for laconic spirits to leave me to a strict materialism for once!!
Dear People,
I tried to move around the physical things in my space in order to change my life. Can you clean your mind by cleaning your home?
I started yeast from flour and water in the corner of the bagua associated with love and relationships. After the little microorganisms flourished, I fed them honey until they died of shock and pissed themselves. I hung up a strand of chili peppers instead and put our sun-fearing plant in the window until you said, honey, the purr plant doesn't like all that sunlight. But the chili peppers were a good idea. I still have tender bruises on my thighs. I moved the plant. I moved everything around ferociously for days. Notebooks and tarot cards and every book on healing, painted purple onto an old painting, and tied a red ribbon around a drain. I'm sort of a neophyte at Earth. I can't quite decorate using space instead of items. Books sing a low hum of soul spinning at 65,000 miles an hour eternally. I can't believe things have less of an effect as the way you think about them. Mind and matter blend and blurr. I am the rug for an hour. I am the computer screen. I am oily onyx stain under my fingernail from making pine poles into window curtain rods.
After awhile you can move beyond all the things. These physical things you touch which seemed to weigh on you, are now all made of the same thing as you. You have put them in a place, is all.
Dear People,
I hope one person gets beyond things until they find this. A sort of deep end sounding for treasures. What if I made psychic smoothies? What sort of curious herbs would I seek? What sort of emotion sifting plants would I grow in the windowsill by the basil for such smooth, 'even' tempers as I pretend to desire? How do you grow a soul?
She was tiny, soft blond curls in sweat. COuldn't have been more than a year old or more than six inches from the curb of the thruway. It was a fragile distance and yet as I watched, the child, alone as an adult at a bus-stop, waited and watched the world from her considerate stance. In the late afternoon light, I could almost believe the girl was watching the sun's descending rays gilding an old row-house as she thought of the rushing cars and her own death so close by. Her patience with precariousness slowed the world, spun destinies in the tiny fingers of her small hand. I didn't want to save her. I wanted to watch her choose.
Love,
Emily
