Fallen Verses

Just an fyi:

Over the next few days I’ll be moving the site over to a new hosting.  I’m switching from wordpress.com to bluehost.com; they already host another site for me, so I figure I might as well use the vast storage and transfer rates and get a bit more customization.

I won’t be changing the domain, so everyone using http://fallenverses.org shouldn’t have any issues once I change the nameservers.

Anyone subscribing should use the feedburner feed which I don’t know what it is off-hand.  That will be automatically redirected as well, or redirected by me, or something, before I make the switch.

If you have any problems with the site now, after the switch, during the switch or have any problems with the rss or just want to harass me: tom (at) fallenverses.org.
Unless something screws up an mx record that shouldn’t have any problems.

For my poetry workshop, we were supposed to write an ekphrastic piece.  I knew the piece of art I wanted to write about, but I had some difficulties getting a good concept.  After talking with my instructor a bit (and having to turn in the portfolio tomorrow), I wrote this:

On the Technique of George Seurat

It’s at the end of a long gallery. You can’t help but to stand in the doorway, just for a moment and look at Seurat’s masterpiece. It fills the entire wall at the far end. The time he must have put into it…
We stood, just like the thousands before us and the giggling teenage girls being quietly shuffled along by the art historian whose MA should qualify her for a job better than tour guide. We stood and looked over the parquet floors to see that little park in Paris.
The working-class man with his dog, the upwardly mobile strolling with parasols and gloved hands, strangers all, and inhabiting that moment together as they shared some purpose for being on that island.
(Seurat! What would your painting of this hall be? Would you catch the giggles of the girls or would prefer something less fleeting?)
We stood for our moment to take in the painting, stepped inside the gallery and sat on one of the benches. Ever the instructor, you told me about Seurat’s life, his influences, his technique. You suggest I take a closer look. I stand, look at you, expecting you to join me. A slight shake, “no.” My solitary footsteps, then, echo.
(Seurat! These frames lining the walls surrounding the work of your peers: would your keen eye see green in the shadowed recesses of their gilt scrollwork?)
I can’t see the whole thing as I near it…. I have to focus on smaller and smaller sections…. and Bernadette Peters really does look like this woman in the front…
Sunday in the park with…
The people start to get fuzzy, not blurry, their edges bleed into the trees and the trees into them…
Sunday in the park with…
“He used a technique we call pointillism. Instead of fields of color, the entire image is composed of dots of discrete colors. At a distance, they eye blends the dots together and you see the colors as if they were unified.”
Sunday in the park with…
Your voice blends into the moment in my mind and I see the dots: blues reds pinks even yellow in the dress… bright dots of spotlights… (Seurat! Seurat! How did you see all these colors? How close to the dress and the tree did you have to stand?) the small dots of atoms I will never see and the large dots of stars and the distance is dots of nothingness and your face, half shadowed above the bench in the distance…
On the interstate that night, you’re asleep in the passenger seat. As the headlights of oncoming traffic flit past, I see your face lit for just a moment. Ahead, the intermittent red of taillights.

I came across someone (though I do not remember who) musing on a blog about the utterly solitary nature of human existence.  And it’s true, isn’t it?  We are all born into a unique universe; no one can share the same set of experiences, the same set of responses and reactions and secret, hidden thoughts.

Granted, for most people there will be a lot of overlap.  The reality we share is fundamentally similar and allows at least a facile sort of communication between people.  I think, though, about intimate relationships.  Mostly of the committed-intimate-romantic type, though I think the ideas hold as well for other sorts of interactions.  Does this limit to communication ultimately help or hinder?  Even the experience of seeing a color is going to be different between two people, not only for ocular differences in observing its color values and the situational differences in viewing angle and reflectance and the silly physics stuff, but for the connotation of color.  The random incident where someone wearing a red shirt pissed you off or the guy in the teal sweater-vest creeped you out or the pink of roses bought for a special someone on an incredible night.  Any experience is the sum of all experience, and that could never be communicated.  There is a disconnect between language’s ability to communicate and our ability to experience.

Is this good?  Does this maintain individuality in the face of intimacy?  That on some level any “shared” experience is still yours, alone?  Or is this disconnect, this failure of communicate itself, a barrier preventing true intimacy?  Is the mystery of an Other a necessity or a tragedy?

Attraction is such an ephemeral beast; I hate it… I like it, too… it’s an ambivalent relationship.

How can I possibly be attracted to someone with whom I’ve had virtually no interaction, of which all I know of her is that we share one small interest, and that her voice is maddeningly appealing.

Don’t know her age, her appearance, her politics, what cuisine she like… none of this.  So how, on this slight knowledge of her existence, should I be attracted to her???

I’d like to touch on a subject I’ve talked about before, at least a bit, is that of the Conversation.  Every experience we have as people informs us and alters our later behaviors.  As writers, artist more generally, but as writers, we seek out these experiences, these influences, and we seek to be those influences for others.  I like to think of it as a web of piano-wire, the entirety vibrating in some cacophonous glee.  As wires are tightened or loosened the rest of the web has to adjust to accommodate.  And the whole song has changed.

For me, one of the highest honors that can be paid is to have influenced someone, to have changed the tenor of their conversation with the world.  Paisley paid me that honor this week.

Today has been a, well, a pretty good day.  I showed up to class on time and prepared (that’s a shock), met with my instructor after class and received some useful feedback on my poetry.  One of the hardest things about being a writer, is finding out who we should be in a conversation with.  Frankly, Longfellow would not inspire me much at all.  My instructor suggested Wallace Stevens and, even more, John Berryman.  They’ll be added to my reading list.

After that, I managed to get done a giant research project that I had thought I could not get done.  It’s not great, but done and… solid.  Got a paper back, an A, yay, got out of class early.  There’s a nice bit of pride in all of that… and yet…

And yet…

At the end of the day, I still drove home to an empty apartment.  I’ll still be sleeping in an otherwise empty bed.  As nice and intellectually satisfying as The Conversation is, it still falls flat compared to shared experience, compared to intimacy, compared to directly twisting those piano wires and hearing the song…. 

We’re all special snowflakes, unique.  Some are beautiful.  Some intricate.  I suppose I’m just looking for a snowflake in my life whose structure appeals.  But how?

The longer-time readers of my meandering thoughts may have caught that I enjoy Boston Legal.  For the last week or so I have been re-watching the series.  Tonight I began season 3.  Fantastic show.

For forty-five minutes at a time, I can ignore the complete barrenness of the midwest (barren culturally, there is certainly enough corn).  Or if not Boston Legal, there are books, or video games: distractions.

The problem with distractions, after you have piled distraction upon distraction is that eventually you come back to reality and no matter where you went, no matter the adventures and insights, you’re life is still there.

The dream while wrapped snuggly in the warm blanket of distraction fades to the flatness of an Iowan plain.  You still wake up to… I still wake up to my life as me and something in the relation of those two things is the issue.  The relation of entities… what’s between… I think, perhaps, that I live too much in gradations.  I should introduce more absolutism.

I can’t decide if the chocolates are attempting to proffer advice of if they are just taunting.

Don’t think about it so much.

Naughty can be nice.

Send a love letter this week.

Dare to love completely.

Love without rules.

When two hearts race, both win.

I wrote the piece below for my workshop class and is a “found” poem by the criteria the instructor set forth. Because of the formatting, I had to post it as an image, which I set so you could click it and see the full image which is slightly larger than the one below.

I opened up a tasty chocolate morsel and it told me:

Lose yourself in a moment.

Better than a fortune cookie, and better tasting.

Fortunately, it didn’t tell me

Finish your freakin’ homework.

Because that’s just not happening.  Back to procrastination.  And chocolate.