notes

2000-07-13

Dear Ms. Duras,

     I must apologize for the English. I should have had this translated into French before sending it. It will be hastily written and sent. You see, I have written three fan letters in my life. I have sent none. This is my fourth and I don’t want anything to detain it.
     I could not tell you in words which have not already been spoken to you. I could not admire you in ways you have not already been admired. My compliment, then, as I wish you to know and feel it, must excel in its uniqueness rather than by its grandeur. I must tell you how your work became important to me, why it became important to me. And then……I don’t know. I haven’t a word for it past that. What can this kind of mundane admiration be called? "Agreement"? "Concurrence"?
     Is there an edge to the stream flowing through crowds? Is there an unseen place, along this stream, where some of us hold hands, behind the backs of others? Are those who stand back--made to stand back, made to be the obscure—are they holding hands in their aloneness? It is the "being there" in such a place that counts. And in it, the admiration of the soul, the line of souls, holding hands, proceeding.

     In our writing we share this about the people, the Asians, the people where you were born. It may not be the same but it is there for both of us. Inexplicable, this interest.
     Those around me have only understood it as a fetish, a perversion perhaps, in my fondness for those people. Yet it is much more than that, so much more that I refuse to discuss it. It’s too much to say and much easier to be understood as a pervert than not to be taken seriously at all.
     I noticed the fullness of it in my twenties, living in the international dorms. To look into the faces of my friends, my asian friends, there was peace. To watch their routines, there was order. I felt a balance with them and no one else. My intensity and my ethics were considered noble, trustworthy. I was their child and their hero. I was something I couldn’t be and couldn’t feel in white society, in the nation that was my family. It was not only peaceful, it was princely. With them, where I was princely and noble, I became.
     Like you, I met him. Much the same, the same as the young man from Cholon. I became enthralled with this young Chinese, tall, thin, perfect; wealthy. He was my antithesis, the perfect bane. He asked for me and I followed. I wanted so to be loved by him. I couldn’t bring myself to know it but I wanted for him to love me that way. We were desperate. It was a long, rich friendship. It was an arid friendship. It was all dry and distant. Out there. Never quite happening here.

     I saw him cry once. He cried only once. Otherwise he denied all deeper emotions. As he was leaving America for the last time, returning to Hong Kong. We thought it was just another trip, another movement from one place to the other. He did this several times a year; he had already changed countries three times in seven years. But this was death. The entire person he had developed for America, every success of his adult life, was about to become pointless, overlooked.
     He was about to die.
     As he queued with the others boarding the jet, something shattered between us. Despite our boredom with this, the latest transition, a wall we had unwittingly put up as reality, it was not reality. Not the way things were.
     It was as if two flat mirrors were slapped together, unaware of each other until that moment, and now shattered into the thousand pieces. Solid and heavy and real for years, then, unable to resist even the wind, even a breath. The pieces flew apart to dissolve and there we were, suddenly real, inappropriately real, suddenly realizing that there had been much more between us and within him, that we were not bored but human, entirely human, and we were afraid, pained, tortured with this thought, this passing, this death.
     We were wrenched and crying. We were separated. Then alone. Untouchable. Inconsolable. He was gone.

     My trip to Hong Kong, the next year, was merely the finish to that final moment. I thought it was the beginning of a new phase but it was not. It was the last struggles of our old selves, our old collisions, the pieces of our mirrors brought back together in surprising seamlessness.
     I left demoralized. I left having felt the cold of falling into someone’s arms to be ignored. I had rekindled love for a ghost who remained as intangible as ever, as frightened as ever, as frightened as one who tortures the ones around him until they leave, until they become intangible.
     Our circle was closed. We agreed. It closed. I left. I was full. Of all of it.

     I didn’t know what to do with this fullness, this too much of all the wicked and mournful. I was speaking to myself every day in words and textures that flowed spitting from a water tap. I could not reach it to shut it off. And it ran itself through my head and throughout my thoughts with such torrent, such disregard.
     My thoughts. They jumped from here to there, surreal connections that only mattered to me. How the weather in Hong Kong was cold and never changed; how our hands were so different yet exactly the same size; how my lunch was a leatherjacket fish and my leather jacket had made me popular and he wanted my jacket and my celebrity and, strangely, not me.
     Then it was the book, The Lover, the film, The Lover, it was Duras, the stream of consciousness, the connections that only mattered in the writing mind. It was beloved Marguerite, writing in the way I was thinking, remembering Hong Kong, remembering the asian lover.
     With her example, with her permission, I began to write. With her permission, Hong Kong flowed out of me and began to make sense.
     With her permission: I saw the bridges in the fog; I saw the temperature of Hong Kong on my skin; I saw the constant third person, he always brought a third person into it.
     I dove and swam in it. I knew this trip, these emotions, like a pearl-diver learns and knows the sea bed. I could dive for what I wanted. And I could leave when I felt breathless, when I felt cold, or when I remembered……I was me.

     This is yours, Ms. Duras. Your work. Your permission. I can be no more grateful than to be it, to be what I have done.
     But if we were walking along the stream-edge, behind the crowds, behind everyone, if I were every bit myself that day, maybe, I would ask to hold your hand and we could all run together, all of us, all holding hands in that unseen place, behind the people.

     Your beauty, inside and out, has shown me the greatest peace.

Thank you.

---je
posted by Jeffrey Nolan 11:45:11 PM

2000-07-05

04jun00

the redwood door......

......has closed on our fingers, each of us. so when it happens to one us, we
all feel it happening again. that redwood door, heavy as a tree and reaching
to the ceiling, up there in the quiet above, the quiet cobwebs gone fuzzy
from Mom’s cigarettes. that door swung as quietly as the billowing cobwebs,
quietly on cast-iron hinges, quietly for all its weight, like Homestead, Florida’s
90-ton coral gate.

it swung in a guillotine hush, smashing fingers to the doorframe; we all felt
it; we all howled feeling the slices of open skin and the cold air icing into
the wound, cold air whispering until the stinging began and the alarm signals
howled from our mouths. it was wet and hot red flesh beating through everyone’s
fingers.

to the closed eyes and tears, the mind painted the picture of bloody white bones,
open and crushed, the gnarled hand, gnarled forever by the biggest, friendliest
door in the world that didn’t mean to do what it did to us.

howling down the hall, five kids, to the Nupercanal in the bathroom; the very
name meant burns and torturous mutilations, those wounds always got the Nupercanal—-which
I thought forever was the actual cause of the pain I felt. it was a cold, angry tube,
wrinkled and out of date, the titanium paint crackled like everything in an airplane
graveyard.

beneath the redwood door, the portal to our great hallway, a hall as long as
the front yard, as long as church processions, as long as five-kids-who-didn’t-want-to-go-to-bed
long, with its blue carpeting tacked under the lip of every doorway, the blue
carpet that gave blue static shocks out of perfectly fine fingers if you could
just sneak up on one of us; the carpet was under all of those doors, nine doors,
where we used to play hotel, each framed by dark cherrywood-colored panels,
panels trimmed at the edges, flaired at the top, by some carpenter who wanted
to do more but wasn’t allowed to. this was the whole house: just short of
fancy, a practical sort of fancy, doors with thirty panes of glass but simple
steel doorknobs; bricks in the fireplace with no curves or carving, just bricks
turned every way you could turn a brick (variety had six predictable sides).

atop the king of doors, atop every door in the blue-carpeted court, atop the windows
in groups of two and three, atop them all were cherrywood-colored panels, with the
carpenter’s lines and flairs emphatic and dimmed above them, quietly referring to
each other like stacks of rulers, speaking to each other, glancing, grinning,
socializing nicely in the quiet above, near the ceiling, each adopting a cobweb
once a year.

they were pairs of columns, the window frames, holding up the sky, cubist-flat
porticos all about the house, holding the blue sky, the bright daffodils, and
the cottage-cheese bunches of the white lilacs. They stood by at lunch and
leaned against the walls at dinner and held the outside like two open palms……unapologetic,
firm, but not judging the gift they proffered.

I swung from the redwood door, grasping the steel knobs and hanging as it swung,
the guillotine 90-ton hush, the wind hush, the strands of my hair eddy in the little swirls of gentle wind. we were friends then, a sailor on the edge of the moon, gliding to a few seconds of internal rapture in the soft breeze that was here, that was in thunderstorms, that was in Hong Kong, the soft breeze that is my lover’s breath as he sleeps.

even in the dark, the door is still orangey-red. the colors persisted.
the colors of the house were still visible under layers of dark, like colors
beneath the soot of the Sistine Chapel. it was white walls, cherrywood doors, blue carpet, all dyed the color of night and more felt than seen. I would wander through when they were all asleep and the tv wasn’t even warm, our nation asleep. Dad’s whiskey evaporated into the quiet above with the lingering fluffy stings of Mom’s cigarettes. down low, it was only silvery browns beneath windows full of moon and stars, the still padding of coats and shoes in the closet, the cold fireplace-temple with its icy slate on bare feet. only at night could I escape the mandatory red slippers and sometimes, just sometimes, I would escape my buttoned pajamas to walk about the house, to fly naked about the house with equal symphony inside and out.

if you could only hear that symphony, flying naked through my house, dyed the
Sistine colors of night, in cherrywood, blue, orangey-red, the silvery brown
in the twinkling granite bricks, and musty window-frames bursting with leaded-paned stars.
if you could only run alongside the cubist porticos and watch the moon move
second by second to the next place it thought it should be. no tv could
match those panes of glass. no song could touch my skin as these.

sometimes, you just shouldn’t wear your pajamas. sometimes, you should wake
and wander at night, to drink and listen, to drink and listen and fly.

18may00

try

I’m riding the subway on which I hope to take you. it’s been an unusual morning
for my brain—-each half not talking to the other. of two minds talking separately,
looking in frustration for each other, all activities in disaray and on hold
until each side gets what it wants.

I’m riding the subway and the order of things is not with me, is a casualty of my brain.
I’m worried because I can’t tell which stop is which. I can hear the sounds
of words but I forget the order of their letters and their meaning. if someone
speaks to me I may not understand their vitreous, insoluable language, even though
it is my own.

the order of things is not with me, like ¼ of my brain is not yet awake and
is lying dead in the darkness. part of my brain has become a dark shiny prune
in my head and isn’t taking messages, it isn’t remembering its neighbors.
it is rude and it is not there and I am left to remain sane wherever it is
that I have ended up, because ten subway stops are thirty if you can’t remember
where you’re counting from.

I can see that there are empty seats but I can’t count how many. clocks
everywhere become, not time, but round pictures on walls staring back at me.
it means nothing to me. it can’t mean anything to me, not like this, not when
events can happen in any order they wish without the sequence of time. I’m
amazed that people aren’t stepping off the train before the doors open, that
trash falls from that woman’s hand when she lets go, that the roof rests lightly
on the building despite the arbitrary walls, following some rule beyond my
current comprehension. I’m amazed that we aren’t all killed.

this vitreous insoluablity of order, this absence I’m not able to perceive,
this leaves me staring through everything I pass. everything I pass is missing
vital elements of being, points of being, definitions, definitions.

this leaves me drinking the texture of things, involuntary convulsions of experience,
to look is to absorb and to become colors I can feel; the still and zen arrangement
of stones on the walk......or the steel corners of trash bins standing coldly in
my heart......or sandpaper french fries......or someone’s fingers, the surreality of
fingers arranging themselves randomly on a hand—-they don’t always have to be
in the order we expect them. it’s a relief to see on my hand that the fingers
are where I’m used to them being. it’s not something I can take for granted,
standing on my hand in line with the other versions of myself.

if we let the order and the expectation disappear, it all becomes phenomenal;
anything is profound art—-even a sequence of people in time, walking past me,
filling roles I can’t understand, fulfilling dreams that they do not understand,
someone else’s dreams. this lack of order is synaesthetic and must be the
basis for synaesthesia.

the train track next to me, the rail lines, are "in order". I can’t count the
spaces or the ties or the feet. and without the numbers of these things, they
just become THE RAIL LINE glaring at me, the whole of it, the whole long thing
of one; I can’t see the beginning nor the end and I’m counting it as a THING,
as ONE. like swallowing a piece of bread in one bite; it condenses, gets
caught in your throat, forcing and ripping the tube where it stands, slowly
if it moves at all, an eternity in your throat, an unbearable pregnant eternity,
and you can understand how ONE (thing) can be an ETERNITY. the one rail line
is an eternity that I cannot swallow. the ability to count, the ability to
limit, is a gift of freedom, freedom from eternity tearing within my throat
on a morning when I can’t count.

this is (my) stop.

14may00

loud.

the world is loud. a brain isn’t like ears where you can put your hands over
them. or settle calmly in a quiet room. the world is loud and I hear it all.
no quiet in the room where the swirl of latex water bouncing off each molecule
to the others is the same as the swirls of nitrogen and dust in the heat above your body.
flakes of skin shatter when they collide, sometimes impaled by hair or blood torpedoes.
I can only hope to drown one harmony with another. sometimes music I like.
sometimes silence with no tv, no persons, no me. just empty floating. just a
drink of something louder than my beating heart or the tubular whine of my
nervous system. thinking about itself and calling to itself reminding itself
that all the other members are still here, still working, still laughing and
singing into the warm bloody void of my body.

turning the page on which I write sends swirls of paper dust into the nitrogen,
green sunlight nitrogen with its fingers reaching to the ceiling along the pictures
of you with all those alarming colors I certainly don’t think about……but enjoy so fervently.
that’s the first picture you sent me. and I can write about that, gently
leaping from peak to peak of the amplitude waves in the scanner, touching only
the peaks even though my knees and thighs are dragging through the maelstrom-cone
beneath each one, a traveler forever mired in quicksand, and pretending that
each step is somehow as easy as everyone else’s, that sinking from the peaks
is trite while the voices of hell surround my legs, singing final choruses I
can only feel, like the pelting undertow in the lake.

is it alright, then, when the hydrogen-bomb in the telephone rings. or the car
as loud as hiroshima drives by, leaving a carbon and sulphur trail I will clean
off the chairs and windows in a month? is it alright when you come into the
room, your tubular nervous system remembering things in your day, things I can
hear just as well as you, can feel because they’re here in my mind now too,
with the pulses of direction and hormone, the squeezing glands and reticuli
pushing their sour fluids off to one another to make the sweetnesses you
recall and the delicious feeling of wind and rain about you on the walk home?
is it alright, that in the nano-seconds between molecules and dust where
I was waiting for you……and waiting for you……my love sweeping out like
the spinning nova of an imbalanced star……waiting for you to touch you
to relive the beginning again in each moment……that you didn’t look
at me? that your light came out of your eyes in the wrong direction,
off to the window or the other noise, off to the transparent wave
functions of sound I can see riddling from your coat to everywhere
but where I’m waiting for you.

can you hear me? because the world is loud and there was a lot to tell.
and there’s only a few seconds between what’s out there, what’s in here, and
the floating harmonies, where I might drink peacefully. and hope.
while I breathe I hope. and while I hope, there’s you.

posted by Jeffrey Nolan 10:32:39 PM