5.19.20. - 2.20.23.
5.19.20. Heroic.
Day after I gradually lost awareness of all signifiers until I was left w/ nothing. Could not even remember myself except that I am Elias. I longed for connotation to return and I was worried I'd be stuck in that purgatory forever, even when I first woke up today. The night past, I felt as though reality crumbled and I was left w/ total white, questioning what existence was and had been, communicating only between my confused self and G-d. I imagine that this is the feeling of death - the dissolution of meaning, not an overwhelmed climax.
The apple, half-eaten and exuding its own life force (which spurred a tremendous guilt in my chest on account of the three bites I had previously taken from it), presented itself in biblical fashion. In this frozen moment, I was aware only that I occupied this strange carnal body (I was concerned w/ my brain at the time) - but in an equally strange Cartesian sense. The apple convinced me that time itself had hurled me back to Adam's first look-around. The Talmud by my bedside grounded me. I recited the Sh'ma a few times. Language was difficult and I uttered the word 'forget' over and over again. 'Concept,' 'language,' 'G-d,' I repeated as well. This was our human, elemental state. I had traveled back to a moment which predated culture, definition. And yet my confused state could still remember words like 'forget.' What were these things? I knew their appearance w/out their substance.
I also knew that a perusal of social media would jolt my memory. I resisted at first. Once I had conceded, my facebook timeline immediately presented me w/ an advertisement about Christian prayer, my phone having performed alchemy to transform the utterance of the word 'G-d' into a cheap piece of marketing. Disgusted, I resorted to a Jazz Messengers piece, "Ugetsu," which had always comforted me. The narrative of music was strange. I did not derive pleasure, or enjoy much anything about listening in the absence of connotation. It was pure narrative, the purity meaningless.
I recalled the names of my friends throughout the night, helping to calm me. I would know them again, in the morning, but last night they were abstract - just names. I held to their image (not visual) as desperately as I could. I could only vaguely recall that I live in the midst of a pandemic. I had reached a relaxation which I have never known, but, again, one devoid of feeling.
I woke up. I have never been so tired. I’ve come back for now, but I am certain that all humans return to this realm one day. All life from time immemorial must surely face itself in the moment of passing.
6.1.21.
The Boston sky - far from the Floridian wisp-core I had adored mouth agape only a few months ago - always brings to my mind the colonial undergirding of the region which school teachers must give as compulsory reading material to their 4th through 8th grade pupils (despite the efforts of a few who instead offer a predictably alternative image of that past, whether by subterfuge or telegraphed agendas). Hellfire sunsets in winter matched by humid and steamy mirages of orange and cotton candy blues in the warmer season might only be described (in my own view) as remnants of cannonfire on the waters of a well-worked harbor, perhaps occupied by British naval vessels, traders, or a dissident (dissident when it mattered) brethren from across the pond. Striated lines of one warm color are interspersed with cooler (or, rather, grayer) fragments, only to initiate themselves again in repeated fashion as the eye strolls further down the horizon from its brilliant apex, each color block fighting for dominance in a perfectly balanced composition which poked fun at the meditative and tepid Agnes Martin’s I had so loved throughout my time in college. My brother tells me that, if you’re not careful, Boston will suck you in. The East Coast has a magnetism, he says, and he is right. It is putrid and it pulls, it draws you, it draws you in, inescapable, there is no leaving now.
Trip Home. 4.17.22.
I left early this morning to fly home (my home). A Passover trip home (our childhood home) to our parents was highlighted by my brother’s attempts to film my mother and father at opportune moments. Our parents watching his baby videos; my mother’s travails as she fended off a dying mouse in our basement; and the few minutes that my brother and I had spoken alone to our mother around the seder plate while our father was at work: about her parents, her childhood, her opinions on art and performance and preservation, her relationship to death. And we would make sure to talk to our father about all this at some later date. There just wasn’t enough time this week. My father drove my brother to the airport, an hour away, in the middle of the night–I should have insisted that I go with them and arrive early for my flight, but instead I gave in to my corporeal desires (sleep, jesus): my mother drove me a few hours later to the same destination on the same roads, and both my parents drove home from these respective trips alone. What a waste.
Once I’d landed in Boston, I took a shuttle, the Blue line, then the Green line to get home–actually not so bad a trip. I carried my purple trumpet bag on my back–something which draws a lot of eyes and is generally assumed to contain a tennis racket, an assumption with which I hate to be labeled in a crowd–and a green suitcase with a long piece of red tape on it to distinguish it from the nonexistent pack of other green suitcases which someone might confuse for mine at the baggage claim. My hair was disheveled and I wore a worn-down button-up underneath my jacket. I thought I looked quite strange and felt so too. On the Blue line–and it seems to me like the only time I really see Black and Latino people on the Boston train system is on the Blue line, but I realize that’s just because of where I go on the subway–a friendly man with a teardrop tattoo and his daughter asked the crowded car for directions. Most others around us had also come from the airport, and of those, most were tourists (it was Marathon Monday, but I don’t know if that was related). One young person spoke up to help but when the man told her that he was trying to go to Boston City Hospital next to the jail, she said that she only really used the Red line so she wouldn’t be much help (‘typical Harvard lass,’ I thought). He called someone (a family member or someone close) who verified to the silent crowd packed around him in our corner of the train that this was indeed the right hospital. I asked for the address (like most young, mobile Americans in my class, I’m still essentially a tourist in the place I’ve lived for a year) and looked it up on my phone, Maps, showed him the directions. I tried to describe the directions but it seemed as though he wasn’t used to taking public transit and he didn’t take out a phone to take a picture of the directions from my own screen. I wrote as much as I could on some paper before they left, unable to scrawl the final direction in time: the 47 bus that would take them nine stops closer to the Hospital–a huge walk from where my unfinished written directions would take them. They would never find it. Shit, they would probably be further away from their destination now than if they had just stayed on the Blue line a few more stops. What’s worse, I had it in my head that waiting exactly one more stop to catch my next train was an extremely important, inflexible task–but I had nothing else to do for the day! I could have followed the father and daughter to write the last direction and have taken an alternate, only slightly longer–maybe ten, fifteen minutes–route home. I didn’t even consider this as a possibility! ‘This is simply what I have to do to get home.’
On the Green line, someone my age (and very visibly Jewish–had a Star of David, or maybe it was a Hebrew tattoo, I can’t remember) saw an Orthodox family and tried to smile at the kids, tried to make visual, silent, train-contact (the kind of sustained contact you feel when a stranger in another place is locked in communication with you as a primary traveling companion, the communication of acknowledgment) with these kids’ parents. The young passenger was also visibly left-leaning (left-presenting, may I say). And when a young collegiate here is left-leaning, they are naturally globo-homo (please, it’s worth a little research, that globo-homo business). Anyways: buddy, it’s more than possible that this Orthodox family hates your secular ass. This is how plenty of PMC’s treat working class people too. The people we’re ogling, hoping to befriend simply to raise the value of our psychic currency–they have a pretty fucking different set of vested interests than the viewer. Obviously it doesn’t mean that we (the PMC, the secular Jew, whatever) can’t smile: we can see the politically disempowered Other as an actual person, we can even act outside of our vested set of interests–it’s just that all individual, personal social relations are superimposed by the broader social relations of our context (secular and Orthodox, not Aaron and Malky) and so, for the plenty of us who treat these others by ogling them, it means, in some sense, that they can’t move past the broader social relations. All individual relationships for this plenty-of-folks (and this isn’t just PMC’s, we’re just at the head of the pack right now) follow suit with the general cultural dynamics of their time and place. Between strangers and friends, matters of class and race and whatever the fuck else (the cultural values in place and the set of social relations installed in your particular locale) always dictate the initial interaction between two individuals, and they often dictate the underlying meat of the relationship too: ‘You belong to a different class, you cannot care about me and I cannot care about you.’ And shit, this sentiment doesn’t come from nowhere, it’s a decent rule of thumb, even. But if we treat it as a given, we’re lost.
8.25.22.
Frederic Jameson: “[A]n essential feature of any utopian construction or imaginative operation and too often forgotten in the conventional stereotype of utopia as an edulcorated conflict-free zone of social peace and harmony, is the necessarily antagonistic nature of individual life and experience in a classless or communist society. ‘Classless’ in this context means the elimination of collective antagonism and thereby, inevitably, the heightening of individual ones.”
Three or Four Years, on and off. 1.12.23.
My writing is, first and foremost, a cry for help. The only difference between myself and those who journal to process their lives, is that I submit my words into the digital ether rather than read it back to myself in private.
Well, I do read it back to myself in private, although only after I’ve launched my diatribes into a self-consciously public space (Instagram). And only then do I read my public proclamation. In private, on my phone usually. G-d knows if anyone else reads that shit.
So it begins.
My girlfriend just left my apartment. She arrived at 7:30, our usual, and left just after 8. It did not take long to end things, reciting the proverbial funeral rites to one another, points of incompatibility and cordial tears, goodbyes, all things we had already shared with one another nearly a month earlier. That was just before the holidays. We decided to let things ‘sit’ for a week or two apart. Having caught Covid at the tail end of my vacation, I spent another week in my dusty little room staring at my phone and getting high, occasionally performing some antiquated tune on my flugelhorn in the hope that my roommates would remember I was alive. I called my girlfriend nearly every night–I appreciated her keeping me company. And I was surprised with the ease of conversations, how natural things felt. Things kick into gear when you are reminded of death–this is what we talked about the night she decided to bite the bullet and visit my sick-den before my quarantine had officially ended; we watched White Noise, mediocre but full of ideas. For example: we consume because we are afraid of death. Fair play. Well, let me return: things seemed all right between us and then they weren’t. They never were, but she woke up, stopped consuming, realized this was never going to work, it was comfortable and beautiful but far far short of what each of us could really expect in a life partner. Not at this moment anyways. Not that we’ll be bad for others, she told me. I think she’s right.
My mother read some trivia cards aloud over the holidays. One asked for the calendar date with the most breakups each year: January 11th! One day off my own! Something to celebrate after all, as I’ll soon inform my pitying family that I’m merely a data point in a silly commercial game.
Get a Job. 2.15.23.
I told my roommate to get a job last night. Don’t get me wrong, take the unemployment checks, but make use of your freedom. I’m constricted eight hours and change every day, the last thing I want is to rail against your leisure - and if I ever do, it just means I’ve lost hope in my own salvation (join me in my turmoil, there is only equality in suffering).
Throwing aside all material considerations of unemployment for the time being: it’s possible to be industrious with your ‘free’ days. Not just to produce and be proud of yourself, but to experience life to the utmost. So I only say “get a job” when we’ve mistaken our own hedonism (video games and getting stoned) for the freedom granted when we’re not at work (the ability to feel deeply, which is prohibited to bureaucrats behind their desks).
“Get a job” because we shackle ourselves, not because there is any freedom in work. “Get a job” because it’s better to be conscious of your oppressor.
Empty Space. 2.20.23.
At any given time in my life, I have either been anxious or a little insane. Anxiety, today, is the feeling of empty space, of not knowing what to do with oneself in the absence of emotion to its fullest extent. But when we are filled in our veins with passion–anger, lust, grief–there is no room for trepidation, only will and action. And to feel in this manner is to be insane. How else can we move through life with confidence?