A lifetime’s like a fine-spun thread
The road goes up by the rope at the edge
When he pours his libation of tears to the ghosts in the stream
The ghosts gather, a shimmer on the waves
Meng Chiao 751-814
When your tears pour out to rain uncollected, to pool on the end of your reddened nose and sparkle on your eyelashes, is there still a gathering of ghosts? I suppose you simply can’t tell in the harsh bright phosphoresence of SAJE’s bathroom, it’s not a good place for such experiments though that couldn’t stop me today. Still, I would have liked to have seen one, might have scared me the hell out of sadness, I think I’m wearing thin, getting stretched taut, my smooth happy surfaces growing rough and jagged and becoming unfamiliar terrain. I’ve never been through such sustained and unending constant though low-level drama, will I last three more months? Three months and I’m gone, not a day longer, I’m afraid my bones will break out of my skin and my heart will just break beyond repairing. Today I felt like crawling under my desk and sitting curled up in the dark, listening to sad songs…it’s brutal to laugh and smile and work and play at normality.
The wind and waves know no pity for for the frail pond-chesnut’s branches
In the moon and the dew who can sweeten the scentless cassia leaves?
We tell ourselves all love is foolishness –
And still disappointment is a lucid madness
Li Shang Yin 812-58
Brutal, but what else do you do? You can’t really refuse to go gentle ino that good night, rage rage against the dying of the light while at the same time making an appointment to visit yet another poor family in yet another roach filled slum building to get some really good photos of cracked plaster, broken plumbing, and if you’re really lucky, a rat or two. I’m hoping for rats, we’re going early so they might not have emptied the traps yet…I need to round off my power point of horrors, and will all this work make a difference? If my analysis is correct (and in all modesty, I am almost always right) and unbridled capitalism is essentially the problem, then fuck me, I doubt it. It requires poverty and a desperate uneducated work force to cook clean and serve, though you’d think that rich people would care that their cooks and nannies live where TB still roams free, where women suffer from mysterious rashes, roaches in their ears, rat bites, lead poisoning…
Well then, now I’m more angry than sad, that’s good. Maybe I’ll return some of my friend’s phone calls and come out from under the table (two attempts at humour now! I’m writing myself better thank god). I’m a naval-gazing idiot as well, probably need a good shaking more than anything. Might just be the lack of someone to give me a good shaking that’s the problem, take my mind off things, girlfriends don’t tend to do that for you. It would, however, destroy the precarious balance currently existing in my house and I certainly couldn’t take 3 months of despair and fury so I believe it’s out of the question. If I wasn’t so well balanced I’d pick a fight I think. With a yuppie. I’ll just be dreaming of the promised land of Scotland and my freedom…
Step inside this house, girl
I’ll sing for you a song
I’ll tell you bout just where i’ve been
it shouldn’t take too long
Show you all the things that I own
My treasures you might say
couldn’t be more’n 10 dollars worth
They brighten up my day
That’s just about all I own
and all I care to I guess…
Lyle Lovett, 1957 –