Backwash

Last night I dreamed about a lady with a VHS tape for a mouth and when the tape started spooling out she couldn’t speak any more she just stood there, mouth lolling open and eyes wide. We kept taking her apart and trying to put her back together. It’s not exactly what I’d envisioned for the new year but nothing ever is, is it, and did I really think a mantra of not leaving things worse than when I found them would catch all the stuff life chucks up? Mad how it’s still surprising when you’re absolved of blame and the hurt sticks anyway. In the end it’s the same over again: happy about what I’ve found, sad about what I’ve lost, hopeful that whatever finds me won’t hurt me. I never intended for this to be the place nuance came to curl up and die.

Louise “I’m up all night to get Glücky”. My old tricks don’t wash with you and that’s partly why I love you so much. Starting reading Glück and I’m getting the impression there’s something about legs. In general I find it lovely when poets put “O” in their poems, I find it brave and endearing. Take out the breathy “h” and o wow you’ve managed take out the disappointment, the relief or the longing, you’ve just got that O announcing itself joyful like a morning person.

Are my children going to look at me with the same disgust I trained on you, punishing me for a word out of its time, for licking my knife after a meal? Of course now I want to say eat up, enjoy it, my god, have fun, lick the plate if you want I don’t care. I won’t indulge now in pretending we didn’t enjoy things together. On our holiday in Sitges we swam in the sea and then walked into town at three or four to get these carrot cupcakes, totally erroneous and so delicious, us smiling at each other with matching freckles. We probably only did that three, four times max but we got the same joy out of carving out a familiar routine somewhere new didn’t we?

Often I feel full of emotion, somewhere between a giant squid and a too-full glass of milk, do you understand? When I think about liminal space I think of the loading screen (the Animus) in Assassin’s Creed II where you can run and run and even kick out if you want to, but you won’t get anywhere. Maybe someone who helped make Assassin’s Creed had a penchant for psychoanalysis. According to Jung, “No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus …” Jung, dumb and full of Joanna Newsom who sang: “This is unlike the story / It was written to be / I was riding its back / When it used to ride me.” I collect these things, this ephemera. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”.