E. versus E., the final frontier!

'Existence is inherently experiential'? I don't think it is. Experience is of life--experience is a choice; existence implies powerlessness. Which does not describe this threatened pointlessness. That meaning, too, must be chosen, as a value-posited. The questions, once again, are asked of life alone: the value/meaning of things being based on how much WE value them, and give to them meaning, and more than could (just) be implied.

Think of it in negative terms: you can always stop experiencing, because you can always stop living. But you've no say in existence. None. Even if we're so clever as to kill ourselves, it doesn't change how existence has had its way with us, nor its say in who we've decided to not become. If we reflect the potential/possibility of choice...what does that mean for the distinction of our existences? ...in that each of us are perhaps the result of a decision made by others. Proximately, our bearers, (ha! that is to say, our parents, crazy-head,) but ultimately? Is the WHO arbitrary then?!

[I don't know that things are more or less important, I think they just take up more or less of our time...] [You're either wearing the glasses of your life or you're not--there's no breaking them apart. And when you are, everything you see is yours, as seen by you alone--when you're not, there are no opinions; no almosts; (as though) things are what they are, supposedly, and having nothing to do with you. To say that these are my voices...that's it? Ridiculous.]

This existence playing out for each person, one moment at a time. But also occupied by an awareness of the existence of another. So that every step is like a thought given to those steps of this other, whose heart is beating as surely as mine. [But can you believe it, really?]

Still this other is always wholly absent. His existence like a breath barely noticed, a head hardly nodding its consent, but subtly audible when due attention is spared. And for some reason it is, more often than before...but before what?

Existence is not a given thing!--we are blessed to have it. Do you see this? (Oily skin and all. :) Can you give me a reason for why you do anything!? I wouldn't accept it anyway, so far beyond the point.

What about her? What about them?! The point is that they're inseparable in a multitude of ways. Human; worldly; conscious; continuous and discrete. We've always been tiny-tiny-tiny and almost not here. Something about a tear tells us so...what about when we're not thinking about each other? How about when I'm not thinking about anything that's not possible for me to consider? Oughtn't we practice some form of restraint?! It's like flowers on a palm tree--no way. No way! Think about your steps; the steps you take--how many there are! Can we compare this fashionably to those of another? How so? Why even!? So obviously it's indeterminate.

"This is a statue from Santa Rosa." That's a man sporting stereo headphones. "It's a heart."--"You're the fashionable one!" "And she made me waffles," then, you see? Rock-star girl, Uzi-toting gym bag with sunglasses; something worth seeing... here. So maybe we should just leave.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (12/1/07)

La Sirena in a Tarot deck!?

Sunday evenings are something like supreme.

The tarot reader flips the Devil card upside down, and in the near-future position. He says to me, "Be careful of would-be friends that will try to use you up to reach their own goals." I immediately think of this man, who pretends to have something to tell me. But even liars can accidentally speak the truth if you're listening.

So what if I asked you, "How long do you keep friends?"  Would you already feel judged?

Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (10/7/07 & 7/10/08)

And chapped lips meet rigid jawline indeed.

Oh dearest, you are in question! (Where look you now into the future?) Four months under our belts and counting, we're fast approaching the busted-up timer of something like 'cultured'. Yeah Right. And in the mean time? I bet there's no such thing as an end, my motherfucking sweetie-pie.

'Tis an ode to bruiSed knees and a renegade lock of salty hair! Teddy bears with blackened frozen eyes gaze out to beg a touch; tough peach rotten with contented worms, having a grand ol' time at being devoured so softly. (Rest In Peace.) "i never tried to give my life meaning by demeaning you. And i would like to state for the record that i did everything that i could do." -A.D.

So now? What now!? Just bliss...as often and quiet as possible. I feel the truth of every day as though it whispers breezily on my neck. The tone sounds only sometimes with that cringe of harshness, though almost often now with a slight panicked taste on its tongue. Don't panic!! Cuz you know what? Describing the point of a beginning is even less likely than that of an end - but foreverly more interesting in the attempt, i think. Hmmm?

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/4/07)

Just call me 'Rosy Chapstick.'

I'll mention only a thought. (Besides that i'm not feeling like writing right now, having after all to scoot off in only a few minutes...)

What if we dictated our love, loud and clear, to an invisible audience? How shall it seem? How honest; how distinct?

I read such a blessedly forgiving book by Humbert Wolfe days ago, all in one sitting. It was a work of collected and interwoven poems called Requiem. It was unbelievably beautiful, and chockful of some base type of understanding... (d'you understand?)

Ah well.  One must nonetheless try.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/20/07)

Traitorous wretch!!

Flowers. And in such shades that nature can only gawk. The self-assured patterns of fake blooms riddled with admiring insects reign consummately over this place of deep, rosy-colored carpet and Parisian floral scents. An antique chair, a delicately curving oak vanity, the tall queen bed whose mauve ruffles imitate precisely the shade of the walls which so lovingly encircle it all...this room sings her praise.

But the house chants for him, and among the other doors swinging mildly on worn hinges, the one to her bedroom seems very closed. Open space sprawls out from this casual rejection and fills itself to the brim in rebellion. The dark wood suddenly lining the walls is overrun to near extinction by a massive array of profoundly random images, in proudly mismatched frames. Hulking, mahogany furniture finds sanctuary in every corner, right up to the cabinets that surround the ancient stove, whose every dish smells slightly of hickory.

Stepping outside and into good intentions, the wheat grass is endless. It sways protectively from the red-paint walls of the house to a lofty barn a few hundred yards away, reaching beyond them to reinvent the skyline. Only the smell of the trees, with their fresh and rotting versions of avocados, figs, and kumquats, tolerantly mingling with the almonds, walnuts, and pecans among them, could manage to break the constant impression of silence. At its birth, this house was the neighborhood.

Except, the neighborhood hasn't much resembled this hopeful expectation for years. It exists for the three shopping centers only a jog away in any direction, even as it still graces the base of the northern mountains. There are gated communities of identical houses, built to confuse any form of danger into befalling a neighbor instead. The masters of the town have seized the uselessly empty fields and fulfilled their true purpose as cleanly paved roads. The dirt path on the house's eastern boundaries is now a concrete wall, erected inches from the kitchen window. In its fervent consumption of excess space, this small town in disguise as a big city seems to think itself on the brink of fooling the world.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (6/3/07)

When first i saw her, i thought her sad.

I wish the length of the shadows were scented! The colors deny distinction; black on black on black on grey--like the soles of my socked-feet; like my favorite lack of color. Where's the sky when you need it, Love?! Where's the question exposed? [I wonder what the fuck I'm thinking about, let alone writing...but don't stop!]

I've been imagining up a version of a friend of mine lately. Really, ever since she last wrote me a letter about that stupid boy she loves. I've been thinking paranoid-ly about her, and in terms of my domestic violence advocacy training, in fact.

Now I'm almost definitely being a silly-girl myself in this respect cuz my friend is mostly fine (besides her dating a clueless, asshole-kid), but nonetheless I've maybe-sometimes got to look out for that girl.

So now I'm suddenly thinking about pretending things about yourself--something like a test of character for the people surrounding you, or even just visiting your life. It might be called 'self-deprecation', and much too unrealistic self-humbling, rendering yourself needlessly prostrate. Know you what I mean? Who among you will know, I wonder, to tell you to stand the fuck back up?

[A Power of Procrastination flyer that advertises an "upcoming group meeting" is hanging up in an office window. It's over four months old.]

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (5/23/07)

"Wanna make love on the sidewalk?" "No thanks!"

Think of it. What is there to say? When you watch cars driving by--differentially speeded, so to speak--from underneath a picnic table (the grain gum-stucked), where will you draw the absurd line between the thoughts that seem to spill out of the sights?

These are the questions of and for the Steps-->how what you just did is affecting you to many a varying degree, as is every experience you've ever had, as though you too were not a process and experience.

Consider the strengths of affect-->how close and immediate Things seem stickier somehow...but also a bit of their size is at issue, as unequally influential. My last class is still talking through me, for instance, as is that guy whose eyes i met for a moment, in that it was (unfortunately) I who looked away. These things push along the Steps, so to speak.

But to go even further back we must admit of an even stronger sway of force. An experience from two nights ago is far from you right now, you see, and it is still the sharpest one pervading your thoughts (as i experience them) and also you (as yet a process). Moreso, the person with whom the experience was shared must too be admitted as occupying an even larger part of your passive mind...See?

(Even so, the future is here too. Seven minutes before needing to leave: DV training; two girls you'll see there, one compact/beige and the other tall/tiny/darkdark; a Mr. as yet still expected; and something like sleep, at last.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/29/07)

Not optimism: self-preservation.

The old woman sits shirtless. She is cross-legged on her bed, staring at a candle-stick. She saw it through conception but it will outlive her.

There is a lamp on, defying the day. Its beams are not warm on her skin. They feel like the gaze of a disappointed lover.

She brings her eyes to her lap, looks at her hands. They are soft beyond the shapes they've made. She thinks they are the same as an infant, wrinkled and barely alive.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/18/07)

Oh, to Grandmother's house we go!!

The sleeping woman had never seen her flowers lit by a midnight moon, but they stood before the sleet-gray flood with faces upturned as if this were nothing. This whole place of deep, soft carpet and Parisian floral scents had been similarly neglected, and still its ethereal shapes wore on into their existence. From the streaming light at the wall-swallowing window, the room's only furniture was revealed: the form of a tiny wooden chair; the outline of a delicately curving vanity, itself bathed in the semi-light of its looking-glass reflection; the dark queen bed, furthest and harboring the sound of thick breathing—all these things dressed scarcely in silver and shadow.

To abandon this room through its squeaking, sliding door would be to embark along a corridor that doesn't end past the dark wood suddenly lining the walls. Rather the tight, column of space is further emulated by the back of black sofas and the face of dark desks. With each imagined step the wooden floor beneath feet would whine a painstaking sigh in their course through the room and lead to a tiled kitchen. Only the impression of the hulking furniture would remain in a further venturing of the lightless house, and the dusty cold would seem an everlasting scent. Eventually, the single light source infiltrating the glass pane of a lumbering door, set away in a northern corner, would prove too overwhelming to deny.

Stepping outside, the undulating wheat grass was brilliant as it swayed protectively from the glowing walls of our house to the lofty barn a few hundred yards away, reaching beyond them to disappear into the hollow skyline. Only the warm smell of the trees, succinct in the cold darkness, bearing both fresh and rotting versions of avocados, figs, tangerines, and kumquats, tolerantly mingling with the almonds, walnuts, and pecans among them, gave witness to the whispering of the endless fields. These sights, here under moonlight, were the house's idea of a neighborhood.

From the stars' perspective this house would not appear distinct. Only a few acres beyond it was another, and past that one, still another; strangely boxy things stretching out into the hundreds. Each was free to fancy itself alone, masked by its own tall grasses, and virtually all of them do during these quiet hours. Together, their mistaken claim on township is made nonetheless in earnest.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/15/07)

"They're like my version of Haiku, these fuck-ups."

There's this too-distinct difference, I like to think, between knowing where you're going and how you're gonna get there. There are all these people that you can only translate as possible, so far. The problem?

Well imagine describing what it feels like to fall in love--to the person you're falling in love with. Imagine owning such a thing!, as if your version of love is neither effect nor consequence. If you think you can, maybe then there is no problem. So far, I can't describe it to myself. Failure in articulation, say you?, or else still failing to "fall in love"? I don't really mind, mind you.

Speaking of pretending. I would like to acknowledge RIGHT NOW doors with names that I've closed and windows with faces still tucked beneath. Translate: "doors" & "windows" into real live people! People with FULL-fucking-names; siblings and yards; smiles! "You were not a dot-dot-dot...waiting for me to complete you." (Ani D.)

[Don't forget--don't forget! Solipsism is narcissistic and psychotic! It's an absurdity that only people could have come up with...and then ran with at full speed! Maybe it took the industrial-strength insanity of philosphers, for to articulate most terrifyingly.]

Let us formulate them into a list of letters all jumbled up, as though they could have meant something to me. Let them carry meaning that doesn't imply me at all, not in the slightest.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/21/07)

Cycle Revolution - "Your dealer alternative." [You mean I get to be counted as an emergency!?]

Pumpkin muffins are ridiculously good. Cream cheese and all...

I think I'm watching a T.A. advise a student. Her inflected voice has been carrying her along for about seven minutes - is as colorful as her seventies-style striped, stretchy over-shirt with matching beads encircling her throat - and still I have no clue as to what subject she could possibly be talking about. Too many "it"s and "that"s and "well I would've"s, though I do gather that their teacher is a woman, and cultural forces seem to play a grand and mysterious role. Probably.

Whatever, the student just hopped up and out and now the T.A. is giving up her table to a middle-aged faculty-looking couple, which is nice of her. ("No problem! Now I get to go stretch out on the couch, finally!") I suppose I'll never know what she was talking about. [Cuz heaven forbid I ask...]

Down to the cream cheese! - its pure craziness. And Sublime's playing "Caress Me Down" spiritedly at Cowell Cafe.

It's one of those days outside that rains while smiling. The sun'll be out and making the cherry blossom trees shiver, but it'll be freezing as fuck and dropping raindrops like tears, "she says in a good way." My hands have just about thawed, only the fingertips to get warm now. In the mean time: homework! And sitting across from a sudden kid who's eating citrus & reading Wittgenstein. ("Thanks! It's just so crowded in here...")

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/8/07)

Reciprocity is not a clearly defined thing.

[At least you didn't fall on him--it was a possibility. It always is. This plethora of brilliance! and idiocy, so full and apparent on any bathroom wall.]

I want a decision being made each time. I have to try not to confuse myself here: I hardly know the definition of loneliness. My experience of it must be this different from yours. What I think it might mean doesn't live up to the hype once i've banished it. Most of the time, all i can feel while in a group of people is how much i'd rather be alone.

[I am good company to be sure, but am regrettably aware of its (un)lasting nature, i think.]

It's subject matter, you see, the only kind available in the drowning of too many minds within each other. As far as this goes, we can only do justice to one person at a time--such is the fullness of a personality waiting to be discovered. How is it not time mis-spent among people watching each other be watched, and nothing shared? Or at least, not nearly as much as i can't help but want.

It is for this that I deny the possibility of falling into each other. Or of having things happen to me, and finding myself among the people most readily available--that is, on the strength of their convenience. I want a decision being made each time! I want it based on intuition; on drive; on desire--not on accident. Nor mere circumstance. This is it, the way that it is, so i'm not allowed to be worried. This is what i want.

Introspection sucks. I want poetry in every look. There's got to be something here. Something necessary for me to see, or to know.

[So where's your decision, girlfriend? When are you going to put yourself in the paths of the people you're curious about?]


Geez louise.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/28/07)

What is it about a phrase like "image resounding" that leaves me feeling correct?

You write out all your brilliance and then you send it away! [I wish there was a way to save this. But also, it couldn't be so absolute or precious if there were. To look up right now, the fingers of the branches are touching gold.]

Oh my goodness, breathing is still so good, and with this ever the case, I'm doing fine. It's like how putting on clothes feels unfailingly like playing dress-up every morning, and it's like the wrenching details swimming in the image of the trees that sway and creak. Every time i bump my elbow the sharpness demands a grin to frame the string of profanities to follow--which in turn are funny as hell, justifying the silly, stupid pain. Argh! I have to get myself out of this happiness, just long enough to write something down--something real/true/alive/or of worth? Yeah, right. At the very least, something that will earn me the joy that I already have, but for no reason i can imagine deserving.

[What about all of this? It feels distinctly/potentially like something. The warmth on my neck and arms, the possibility of goosebumps, (right) here. Pretend to believe in consequence.]

So close, teasingly. There is something about this...in the background, simultaneously forth & back, playing in somebody's vision always--playing with their senses but through them also (and thus limited?), finding existence there.

There's a rainbow curtain flapping in a window!, having been put up with intention and interest. And a room to be gathering people as the hour presses up against 4 pm. And a tiny red spider challenging an insect in the midst of cleansing herself there, and even a bearded boy with gently set eyes who's not thinking about me. Ha! It's how the stuff that's not happening is thus in an active sense, for to be replaced by everything that is, or making way for whatever could be. (It's just people doing stuff, all the time. And things, and life too! It's not good or bad so easily.) It's poetry in bathrooms and art on an underpass. A bug playing around in a philosophy class. Why now? Suspended energy of objects at rest?

[It's okay. I think I was an interesting experience for you, in all of my fumbling newness and clumsy enthusiasm.]

Forever!? Why forever? That's the word I don't like--why does everything have to be reduced to forever? (LIFE! LIFE and such. LIFE in capital letters!!) Like a moment--an also--at last. It's not a matter of fact, it's a matter of something all together different. We need to see it differently--the proof of reality, being just this breath.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/19/07)

Dis-dis-dis-turb-ed.

[Such a confusing distribution. The ups, the downs, the shades of oranges and brown, or white to match the landscape. It's not certain that there is even an end to the stupidly-random lines of wall. They're pointless, these numbered ways of getting in my way. Paths open up to me cruelly, only to corner me without the merciful intention of finishing me off. Only a monster bent on the destruction of thoughtful minds could have designed such a worthless and endless edifice.]

[The intricacy of the folds and bends beneath me strike out as envious in the worst way. As they double over themselves in search of some order, the cold cement leaves nothing to be desired for the once lively wood that shelters it. And yet, the illusion of beauty is complete in all of this complexity, sure to convince any passer-by into believing it to possess reason, so unfathomable.]

[Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/15/07)]

Stubbed a toe, hurt like a bitch.

There are so many forces of how we feel for each other. Between attraction and compassion and curiosity and good will; generally, but genuinely, liking one another; having memories and experiences and time in common, or merely mutually reflected thoughts that won't need attending to; responsibilities and commitments dedicated to one another (the following and followed through are equivalently heavy, if you will); as protective or sympathetic or empathized with; any number of these combinations to form countless shapes of what love might look like. That line dividing how we feel about someone else, and how it is they make us feel--i don't think it exists.

(Though it's still worth considering.)

There is this feeling of gratitude--of indebtedness that cannot be articulated, let alone undone--in which we dwell by virtue of existence alone. Life, this world we have for our experience as a thing that will not be spent by any one of us; it is our unification of sorts, or else the basest of all common ground. There is a sense of willingness without shame or lasting doubt. It is a matter of knowledge, decided upon. As in the person within the friend you chose to make; how you wanted to understand their eyes but not those of the faces before.

What's so wrong about belief for its own sake? Why should the value of the pursuit of an irrevocable truth outweigh that of the ideal of contentment, when life is this finite and neither are guaranteed?

(Our guarantee.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/12/07)

Life or death!? Fuck that. It's life AND death, all the time.

(listen, listen, listen, listen...here's what we are so far.)

Glance. Last quarter and a bonafide philosopher. Partitioned all up and on purpose:

Two slices for two jobs; sometimes grateful, slitted eyes of (officially) fallen families; a part already off somewhere like London--blushing for the cliche but determined anyway; a tinytiny part wanting to wonder 'what if', but shutting it the fuck up; my spiritual side alone and quiet, my mortal fate bent over and cackling; a big heavy chunk for classes; for to grin&leer&sail&write&blank&fuck&sculpt&laugh&trip up, apparently; a memory like the spin of potterizing; a fantastical slice, dedicated just to sleep!; kudos for analytical thought; a stench like stale shampoo pretending.

Do you know what i mean, jelly bean? All there is to do is to walk slowly in between them and sing loudly. But i want you to believe me when I say these things. (God knows why.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/10/07)

A momentary stay against chaos... Civility! Join the circus.

What if I called you 'finished'? What would you take that to mean?

My first impression is that you don't think in these terms, as probably I shouldn't. Such thoughts don't last long anyway. And while this fact ought not count against them (for what does last!? not even the definition of the word), it still does. Maybe if they faked it better...

[Speaking of thoughts--I think I'll use my teeth next time.]

"Whenever something changes it's like it was always that way for me." I don't remember how you used to talk to me, or what I must have been thinking of. Evolution is a process of deletion.

There's a woman-shaped Arrowhead water bottle now. Can aesthetics really reach so far? What the fuck.

I found a flimsy, aluminum ring underneath my desk at work, where the power strip sits. I like seeing it on my ring finger, like it's being used for good at last. I wear it on my highest knuckle, just below the tip. I think it will remind me of something, once I remember what. At least I know I've forgotten what your hands look like by now. Maybe there's something to say for that.

My class is about to start. It's called 'Philosophy of Biology' and it will go on for three hours. I'm wondering how you'd like it.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/7/07)

Awareness is the opposite of conviction!

We just watched an owl outside of Oakes College, now we've only the students to look at. (The level of reciprocal scrutiny has laxed, somewhat.) But then!

She stayed perched in a redwood--huge, the both of them--and looked on as we were passed by. (There was a boy talking on his cell phone; a guy riding his bike and singing loudly in key; and a kid on a bike that finally inspired our owl into her next hunt, focused on the movements of a fog of moths descending.)

Just now I think I saw a couple. They walked into this place and ordered something to go, sat right there and waited for it, then left without speaking to each other at all. He held the door open for her on their way out. I don't know anything about people.

When I walked by College Eight I thought of a girl and how she belongs to my distraction. I thought ugly, stupid things on accident--only so, in that they were selfishly-bent, and tiny-people narrow-viewed.

But things aren't so small or easy as 'whose bed?' or 'how often?' The truth of the thing is in what they talk about by default, and when being habitual for each other became obvious and preferable. The truth is the life of things, not the stage they're played out upon. And that little grinding going on in your stomach? You have to grow out of that, call it mistaken.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (1/24/07)