The Constorium of Greater Minds

Her eyes are hard, fixed on the scene in the park below.
“It isn’t fair to you,” he says.
Below a grandmother sits on an ornate wrought iron bench reading to her two young grandchildren who are perched on either side of her eagerly peering at the story’s illustrations. Beyond them down the path two youths laugh and jostle one another while their girl friends shout at them in exasperation from further down the path.
“To make such a drastic change in one’s life on the basis of a single individual simply isn’t sensible. You see that don’t you? Who knows what may happen in the months and years to come.”
He places his hand on her shoulder. His fingertips burn with a cruel flame on her naked skin but she does not make a move to remove them. Nothing can break her concentration on the park below. The park they have lived above for the past two years. The park they would sunbath in during the summer, build snowmen during the winter. The park they would stroll through in the evening after dinner. She would often come to the balcony late at night when she could not sleep to gaze upon the soft glow cast from the art deco street lamps and listen to the sounds a car would make when driving slowly down the cobblestones of rue lacroix. This afternoon sitting on the balcony bathed in the warm August sun she felt she had never set eyes on her park before.
“Darling, we have to be smart about this, don’t you see. You understand,” he insists. “We are both young and shouldn’t be burdened by emotion in a time of such transition. Besides, this isn’t permanent. If we both feel strongly that we’ve made a mistake in two years we can reevaluate and in between there will be opportunities to be together. Darling, you haven’t said a word, what do you think?”
“You’re right,” she says softly. “You’re right.”
“See that’s being sensible, darling.”
He pushes his back from the balcony where he has been leaning and takes a seat beside her at the marble breakfast table. With one hand on her back he kisses her shoulder. Her skin is warm in the sunlight.
“This isn’t easy for me,” he whispers. “I want you to know that.”
“You think it’s easy for me,” she questions in a tone he cannot mistake for wounded sarcasm.
He says nothing but kisses her again on her shoulder and then on her cheek then stands up.
“I’ll go to the store for dinner. A baguette, laughing cow, tomato soup and a bottle of chateau pradeaux just like the night we moved in.”
He was looking for a reaction but got none and for the first time since their discussion began he had the faintest notion that perhaps he was making a mistake but three months of telling himself he was doing the right thing quickly ridded his mind of any such ideas.
Left alone on the balcony for the first time that day she let herself cry and as his footsteps grew fainter once he turned the corner of rue montagne she laid her head against the smooth balcony and watched as her teardrops collected on the white marble at her feet. The apartment was silent behind her, the park was silent below and she wept.

The most difficult part of seeing her again after so long is the realization that the next month together will not progress as so intensely anticipated. The inconsistency of expectation and reality cut deep with the painful blade of reality as the image of the idyllic reunion dissolves in a flood washed forth from an ominous rain cloud that descends upon the city on the third day. It’s in the eyes, the way she looks at him, the imperceptible glance away when he greets her. There is now a boundary between them, a force that although intangible will prove a greater barrier than any physical wall could ever be. She stands in front of him but the look in her eyes tells him she is now unavailable. Gazing at her realizing the change he sees her as she was two years ago when they parted. Her hair, black as midnight, a wild storm against the golden brown of her skin. The sadness in her heart betrayed by a glimmer in the corner of her eyes. Her lips are soft and taste like longing as she kisses him for the last time. Now, standing in front of him two years and three days later her eyes are hard, cold as the accumulation of their two winters spent apart. Where her beauty once engulfed him in a warm radiant glow it now leaves him in the shadow of a melancholy half-light.
Over the following days and weeks she moves further and further away and each day when he sees her it hurts a little more. She has her reasons, which she explains to him, self-preservation and the preservation of heart. Her energy is focused inward or so she claims; it’s in situations such as this that Love makes a skeptic out of everyone. Unrequited love has taught her to be cautious, he has taught her to be cold and he sees in her a reflection of himself. In this turn of fate he cannot help but admire the ironic cruelty with which Love plays her tricks.
For three weeks he exists in a state of limbo. Watching her as if from behind a camera, not in the scene himself but capturing every painful detail on a reel that is to be played continuously in his mind as he lies in bed at night, as he watches the surf crash on the rocky New England coast. He sees the way she carries herself in a group, what role she assumes, what part she plays. He watches, heart aching, as she interacts with other men. The way she laughs at a joke makes his stomach ache and to see her dance is almost more than he can take. When she laughs at another man’s jokes he is reminded of the way she would laugh at his own droll remarks, when she dances with other men he is reminded of the way they danced the night he found out she felt the same way. Now all those little things that would let him know she was his all serve to cruelly remind him that she is slipping further and further away.

have you ever had a night out that just made you sick? i’m not talking about drinking too much; not that kind of sick. i’m refering to the feeling you get after you realize you’ve done something that just didn’t mesh with your philosophy; a feeling that you’ve wasted time, money, emotion and energy on the pursuit of something trivial and base. friday night turned out to be the most ridiculously wasteful and meaningless night i’ve spent in roppongi since arriving in japan. i despise roppongi. i will be completely content if i never spend another evening in roppongi as long as i live. i need a break from japan. my class in newport and the subsequent trip to visit friends could not possibly come at a better occasion. my creative reaction to friday night:

waste

Undeniably, I said
Softly, replied
The past
Dead
Dollar rise, dollar fall
The creation of man-made things
Changed us
God in a neon sign
A generation of degenerates
Subsiding on emptiness
Beckoned onward by a false justification
A tear
From her eye
She’s stopped eating now
She’s so thin
It’s beautiful

On a quiet night the rhythmic pulse of the train reverberates off the hillside and is absorbed by the ocean below. There is a nearly full moon in the sky and I think of you. My thoughts are carried on the cool breeze of early summer and I feel soothed in the satisfying embrace of a melancholic evening spent alone. I am alone and as far as I know you are alone and as far as I know you are not alone. Breath deep the cool night air and let it comfort you in your solitude.

via paul mittleman on the honeyeeblog – i once read an entire book about the science and theory of memes, i think i understood 10% of it…

“These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.”

Lord of the Memes
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: August 7, 2008
By DAVID BROOKS

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.

The Smoking Section reminds us of ’98

My favorite hip hop blog just finished off a week of articles and album reviews of one of the great years of hip hop – 1998.

Then..

I turned 12 that year, and just finished 6th grade as the new kid in my middle school. I met one of my best friends, who I’m sharing a house with 10 years later. We had uniforms at my school, but every month we had ‘free dress’ days. Everyone else would be dressed in Abercrombie, I was the only one rocking Ecko, Fubu, and anything else I could get at Mr. Rags (Urban Warfare brand for the win). I remember throwing on the Love Movement in my 5th or 6th period art class and no one feeling it while I ran through the ‘Find A Way’ lyrics in my head. Jigga and DMX killed it on my portable CD player, eating up double A batteries. Redman’s ‘I’ll Bee Dat’ got put on repeat when I wanted to go crazy in my room. I was introduced to the Wu through Outkast’s ‘Skew It On the Bar-B’ with Raekwon. I listened to ‘Rosa Parks’ over and over to figure out Three Stacks’ verse. I’m pretty sure this is the first year I got shut down by a shorty too. My dad bought DJ Quik’s Rhythm-Al-Ism and Big Pun’s Capital Punishment for… himself after I put him on ‘Hand In Hand’ & ‘Still Not A Player.”

Now…

I just wish I could tell my 12-year old self, ‘you’ll do alright, kid’ and end up with stories that you never thought you’d ever have the luck of telling.

When…

In 2018 I’ll be 32, but I’ll look like I’m 24, so it will be alright. I got carded for a rated R movie a couple weeks ago and some old lady thought I was still in high school at a dinner party. Hopefully I’ll be married or engaged by then and be doing something crazy ill with design. I should be on my second or third trip to Japan by then too. Other than that, who knows, it never works out as you planned does it?

Peace from ’08 ’til Infinity.

In Barcelona it started out as a small fight over dinner. A week later in Paris he mentioned in passing that he had considered returning to New York and it turned into a two-day stand off. In Berlin the following week he knew things could not be repaired. It ended four days later in Vienna when she admitted to cheating on him while they lived together in the apartment on West 11th and 4th. He had always suspected as much. Two weeks later they had taken up separate residences in lower Manhattan.

There is a recurring dream that enters my sleep roughly once a month. It has been with me since childhood. There are other dreams that repeat themselves or versions of themselves but this one is always the same. It is simple and filled with no great event but it is powerful in its permanence. In the dream I am a child. I walk down a stone path; it seems to be as broad as one arms width. On either side are thick hedges waist high. Not far above the line of the hedge drape the leaves of great oak trees that sit further removed from the path. The air is sweet and damp as it is in the spring in England. Sometimes as I’m walking I will see an old stone wall off to the periphery, or perhaps a moss covered fountain, dry for decades. It is not night in my dream but the treetop canopy blocks much of the sunshine, creating a soft dimness that surrounds and envelops me. This is all that happens. When the dream comes to me I am on the path and as the vision progresses I simply walk. Nothing about the scenery changes considerably. No one else enters the dream. There may be birds singing and the natural sound of the garden or wood but these details are not significant. What is noteworthy, the quality that defines the tone of this somber reverie is the dimness of light and the solitude of the stone path. I am alone in a quiet vision, peaceful in the lazy melancholy of the moment, a child again.
Through the work of The National Trust the English have so wonderfully preserved many abbeys, castles, palaces and estates across the country. The defining characteristic of all these historic sites is that they will, without a doubt, inevitably have a garden. Not just any garden, however, but a magnificent, grand, intricately designed, thoughtfully laid out English garden stretching for acres complete with flowers, bushes, hedges, trees, fountains, pavilions, conservatories, pergolas, tombs, stone paths, gravel paths, rock paths, streams, rivers, ponds, wells, cisterns, orangeries, vegetable patches, croquet lawns, bowling lawns, perhaps a graveyard or two and so many other things regal and horticulturaly significant.
When I was a child living in England my family would take the big wicker basket, a couple of tartan blankets, a Frisbee and drive to the local National Trust site which was Fountains Abbey when we lived in Harrogate and Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. We would lay out on the blankets and eat a fine meal of cheese, bread, fresh cut ham and apple slices and my parents would have a bottle of wine of which they would share a small taste with my sister and I. It is my conclusion that the dream of the garden path comes from these special days spent on the grounds of medieval abbeys and Victorian estates.
When lunch was complete and afterwards when my father would tire of throwing the Frisbee and retire to the warmth of the blanket for a snooze I would venture out, often times alone, into the magic of the garden. You see, when you are small, all it takes is a tall line of bushes and a crown of wizened tree branches and one obscured entrance and you find yourself in a magical wonderland of Lewis and Tolkien. I would wander for hours in the quiet solitude of the garden and loose myself in incredible fantasies of Robin Hood and knights in shining armor else I would simply sit on the stoop of an ancient pavilion hidden and obscured deep within a maze of trees and pathways and pick at the lichen growing on the worn stone without a worry in the world.
When you are a child there are no burdens to weigh down your imagination and everything is so big when you are two feet shorter and fourteen years younger. When you grow up the bushes that lined your secret garden path and stretched so high above you can now see over the tops of. The lanes and walkways that never seemed to end are traversed in minutes. The ancient pergola you imagined was your castle is now just a place to rest for a moment. My recurring dream is of a secret garden. A place I can be alone in a way I could when I was a child. The gardens of my youth are the places where my nature was planted and nurtured and grew into my adult personality. To this day I still cherish solitude and quiet repose. I still love to sit on an old stone bench in a place concealed from the outside world by the natural fall of leaves and growth of plant and be alone. I am older now and will never again experience the garden as I did when I was a child except when I dream.

just browsing some of cumming’s stuff and i came across this gem. maybe it’s just me and the state i’ve been in lately or maybe it’s just that this poem is entirely about sex…the car metaphor is great. i really enjoy cummings’ avant-garde style and amazing and artistic use of the english language. a lot of the stuff i have written is in a similar vein…perhaps because it’s easier to write without adhering to certain laws and forms or perhaps the style offers more room for creativity. anyway, below she being brand something cummings-esque i wrote back in high school.

she being brand
by
ee cummings

Read the rest of this entry »

a poem by yeats:

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.