stand next to my fire

"don't be afraid of your own voice. that is all you have to give people." -my writing professor

I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days...I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive and so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. Dave Eggers




"remember... whoever comes are the right people. whatever happens is the only thing that could have. whenever it starts is the right time. when it's over, it's over."

these photos are from http://papertissue.tumblr.com/, http://www.them-thangs.com/, http://www.thestylerookie.com/ and other places

i hope you liked those pictures, i do. i'm in dc now. sorry about the emo-ness of the preceding few posts. i'm feeling much better now. i got a nice camera for Christmas, so soon i will start posting my own pictures, but i haven't figured out how to use the usb cord yet. when i do you will see my pictures of staying out all night in the district, my fab new roommates, and our lovely capitol. have a good night. xx

as ever,
carolyn

you or your memory

the lights illuminate it enough to see how empty it is and make the sky look streaky. i wish you would put your sunglasses back on so i wouldn't see that you're crying. i would cry but i feel nothing. i feel as nothing as when we were in the car and the rain was streaming down the window, mixing the colors of the aureate gaslights together, and it feels so familiar it seems like more than a memory; like an engram that is part of me now. i want to smoke because i don't know what to do with my hands, but i don't smoke and i don't know if starting smoking is a good solution. driving away and leaving this nothing behind is the solution, but no matter how fast i go i know i won't lose it. it's ironic; how can you lose something that is devoid? it was everything and now it has gone and i am scared of the space it left.

headrush

his eyes were the slightly-unnatural blue of lit-up aquariums filled with bright water; looking at them was to risk developing an addiction. his voice sounded like heat or a magnet and saturated the air. he was so sultry and cultish that he seemed like he was covered in halogen. when he walked by there was suddenly the dizzying spin of being at a very high altitude where the air is too thin to breathe properly.

acres and acres

hello everybody, here are some pictures from my trip to arizona and some nights in chicago and champaign. i picked these because i liked the colors of all of them; kind of wintry looking but with really warm saturating color. i also added some quotes that i have been saving in my cell phone for months when i read something i like and don't have a notebook to write it down. i hope your christmas and new year were as beautiful as you are.

hot air balloon. so high up everything must look perfect from there.

"i have to examine the images that exist at the root of myself." -W magazine in a nordstrom in arizona

get a haircut hippie

kokopelli

on the way to meteor city

this tree looked like spiders

"in the basement of a hungarian church with all the papers scattered around and this striking energy and all the flickering candles" i wrote this in the middle of the night about something i was thinking about from when i went to budapest

"your energy recycles into everyone else's possible energy." i don't know where i heard this but i liked it

this seemed like a cult. WHERE DO I SIGN UP

"kerouac cassady london chimneys" i don't know why i wrote this but i still like it

transatlantic

packing up my room

"torrents of sunbursts" pablo neruda

neon watercolor sunset

the bright-eyed choke on ambition

i'm in arizona now. haven't been able to write much because of traveling and getting ready for next semester, when i will be living in dc and interning for amnesty international. i might be living alone for the first time, ever. i really can't get through an episode of law and order svu without having to change the channel. you may be wondering if moving to a new city alone to work for an organization that deals with the worst human rights violations in the world is like facing your deepest fears all at once. that's a great question, thanks for asking. maybe i WILL be able to conquer all these fears at once: BAM!! and my time in dc will be a smashing success. or maybe it will be like treading water and not even waiting for the ladder to be pulled out of the pool, but saying that they can go ahead and take it- go ahead and take this ladder guys, i plan on swimmin for a while! then they pull up the ladder and then i'll be drowning.

living with someone else is nice because there is another heartbeat under the same roof. i can make them tea when they're sick.

winter, 4 am

i would like you to tell me everything. tell me of the night building the fort in the forest. of the plan to run away on a train. of the waves of lake michigan on your high school graduation. of the sleeping porch at your old house.

i would like to take those things still ailing you. give me the bird skeleton you found in your backyard when you were young. your matches and tylenol and headaches. what you saw that night. your sadness for your father. give it to me. time has proven ineffective, i will fix it for you.

tide pools & oceans

the snow will never look like ash, sheyner ponim. it will always be white and beautiful and look like falling stars. we can learn icelandic and find the meteor impact you're so curious about. when we paint our room, it will be the color of the ocean on the map above our bed.

to broadcast all our dark dreams

my friend keeps recommending that i should read about noetic science, and i want to, but my brain is currently so drained i can't sit and read, so i really haven't gotten any farther than thinking about reading about noetic science. looking up flights to dhaka is basically all i've done the past few days.

also in the past few days i've somehow burnt almost each one of my fingers, on too-hot food and candles and lighters. now they are calloused like i've been playing guitar and i can barely feel it when i type.

maybe i would be able to focus if you would stop touching me with your gaze. it's not fair to distract someone like that.

one of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses. henry miller

"Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with a desire for what its monstrous law have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your red-rose youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—"

“Stop!” faltered Dorian Grey, “stop! You bewilder me. I don’t know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don’t speak. Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think.”

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

felt your poltergeist love like savannah heat

I don't have a problem with obsession. I think it makes me more creative. Doing everything possible to impress someone is exciting. It's like I'm walking in a hallway that is not all the color taupe.

If there is truly a seductive quality to fixation it's that it makes everything more interesting. Day to day life comes in brief flashes of euphoria and desolation. And nothing in the hallway is taupe; the colors are dazzling, called 'muse' and 'manic.' Maybe some people find it terrifying or unbalanced. I think I'd rather sometimes be terrified than always be bored. The payoff can be huge; a high risk gamble that can give you everything or take it all away.

in crooked streets of petersburg

I can't focus on writing or studying at all so these are some pictures and quotes I like. I hope my last post wasn't too crazy. You might notice I changed the name of my blog. I'm still in love with Bob Dylan but I wanted to change it because I didn't think it was fitting anymore. 'Arcana dictum' means 'secret words' (or something like that) in Latin. I wanted to call it 'arcana imperii'- 'secrets of the empire' but that also translated as 'state secrets' which I think has a different connotation that doesn't really make sense.

"As a writer, the only thing you have to offer is yourself. And your unfounded fears, your inexplicable quirks, your desires- as disturbing as they might be- are all part of you. So they all have to be in there too, somewhere, and this is probably one of those things that's applicable to most other things in life too." charlie kaufman

"If I had a rare quality, however, it was getting people to talk about themselves, listening, being always fascinated at the dignity, complexity, frailty and strength of ordinary people. The quality was surely borne of my own very ordinary background." walt harrington

"She sighed in the dark. 'What do you want out of life?' I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Just wait on tables and try to get along.' She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad." jack kerouac

fantasy love is much better than reality love. the most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet. andy warhol

"america i used to be a communist when i was a kid and i'm not sorry." allen ginsberg

exoskeleton of a spaceship

When the schism within yourself gets bigger, sometimes things fall in between and are lost forever. Is that too strong a word to use here, 'forever'? Are things really lost forever? Or are they put somewhere in the cellar of our mind when they resurface when you have forgotten that part of your life ever happened, and make you wonder if anything is truly sprung from within you or if it is the reinterpreted meaning of everything you have ever experienced or read or seen. Did I even just make that up or did Chuck Pahalniuk say it in Invisible Monsters?

It's like when I was trying to write an ethnographic piece and I realized I stole an exact phrase from James and the Giant Peach. I didn't even remember it, until I was thinking, what inspired that? And then I was trying to retrace where this image could have come from, and I realize, it wasn't "inspired" by anything, it was stolen from Roald Dahl from a book I haven't read for ten years! And then all of a sudden I am wondering if all I am doing is winding all these things up inside myself and then regurgitating them. Or if somehow when you think the same things as someone, even for a second, your minds become permanently connected in ways you don't even realize until it comes up again. This thought is too disarming so I take a shower to relax but then I absolutely have to get out of the shower because I am thinking of all these ideas that probably no one has ever thought of or will ever think of again, and if I do not immediately write them down they probably will be lost in the schism and how could I deprive the world of hearing this?

And I see, all these things are connected. My professor and Dave Eggers and my friend from New York all compared Chicago to Oz in separate circumstances: in a book, during dinner, in a lecture. Like Oz from the Wizard of Oz. Either one of them was constantly comparing Chicago to Oz in front of the other two so they all had this metaphor at hand, which I actually don't have a problem with and I quite enjoy, or somehow they all came to it together from different life experiences. It probably has nothing to do with the fact that they were all at some point located primarily in Champaign, Illinois and it is reasonable comparison to make. It must be some sort of weird mental connection. Like when I heard this song by Phish and they say almost the exact same thing Mary Elizabeth Frye said in a poem. Do they all have some sort of ESP and they are trying to filter these thoughts through as many veins of society possible but really they are all coming from the same artery? Or are these sentiments so pervasive once put out there that they resurface all over the place? Well, I've noticed it happening. Maybe they didn't think that the same person would remember all these little references, but I do remember them, because they were never really gone they were just misplaced in the schism. How can people think that everything isn't all connected? When I read a comparison of Chicago to Oz in a book, and then my professor compared Chicago to Oz, and then my friend COMPARED CHICAGO TO OZ. And really, this is just a small example because these things are happening all the time. These things aren't accidents. In the Game of Life it says "We have an unfortunate propensity to place undue significance on accidental patterns." This is wrong, but perhaps even worse, this is boring.

white noise

He made eye contact with me and said he liked my writing; that he understood it and it excited him and he thought maybe we saw things the same way. I looked at him and it was like I had already been in his bedroom and everything would be perfect between us, forever, because that kind of statement was irreversible.

invierno

"the water went shuckashucka and kissed her again and again." p.44 How We are Hungry

I wonder if there is something about snow that absorbs sound more completely than any other element. It seems to drink in sound the way the moon is drinking the night. When I walk through it at night I feel like I can't hear anything but my own thoughts freezing and shattering on the ground.

shuckashucka.