Michael T. Stowers

"It's these modalities which hook me. That's how it feels, like hooks with those little barbs on them that prevent the fish from unhooking itself, those 'hads' and 'shoulds' and 'woulds'. Life is, as you know, woven out of a million threads, 999,999 of which end in one of those hooks.

...

Time. Such issues with time. To me, you see, your assertion that the past is unredeemable is the opposite to my reality. For me, the future is the only unredeemable thing. The present is the persistence of evanescence. The past, though, is the only part we can change. And we do, all of us, all of the time. Memory is around seventy to eighty percent fabrication; we know this now. Add the rose-tinted glasses and the exponential fall off of memory and you get a situation where the past becomes more story-like than any myth."


Michael T. Stowers




We would often fight about the all-time-is-unredeemable-motto of the Bridge, whose constant and passionate supporter he had been ever since he first came here, in march 2011. It deeply irritated him and time and again he would try to convince me of the contrary. His sudden death, on the 29th of August, has left this debate open (or closed it forever, it depends on how one wants to look at it). Perhaps it is exactly through this shocking disappearance that he has been proved right: the future may be the only unreedemable thing, and my memory has already begun to fashion the story of him, of our close friendship into a myth, an ever-shifting tale which has become part of my ever-shifting self.


I would like to say more, but words fail me.

we only live in the shadows

"but please do put everything away when you are done playing", i told her, as she busied herself with transforming the entire living room floor into a ship, using wooden bricks, vases, books, glass beads and every other imaginable object she would find around. 

"but i want to keep my ship here as it is, even as i am away at my grandparents'".

"no, this won't do - we will stumble upon these things, besides guests might come and then what".

"no problem, we will invite them onto the ship, no?"

"well..." - i wanted to say something but then i realized i didn't exactly find any tenable argument as to why we couldn't do that. she looked at me, then to her ship again, sprawling over the floor as we were speaking: 

"it is so boring to live as you do. your grown-up world is so boring. you only have rooms, and no ships hidden in them any longer". 

i couldn't make out the expression on her face when she said this, something between sadness and bewilderment. 

(perhaps it is true that, as we grow old, we only live in the shadows of what once was a luminous world filled with being)

fears

there is the fear of waking up in the middle

of the night and not knowing what to do

and also the fear of never being able

to fall asleep again

there is the fear that life turns suddenly still

and one looks behind not knowing where

the past has gone and how it was lived, and by whom

there is also the fear

of failed encounters, even (or especially so) those

one has long dreamt of

there is the fear that the phone will ring

to let one know the child is sick again

and also the fear that the stranger one passes by 

suddenly turns around and the last thing one sees

is the silver flash of an unexplainable knife

(or, for variation, the fear of a temple blow leaving one

lying there calmly and almost gracefully, accomplished, 

as one has never been able to, 

while alive) 

there is the fear that the other has already departed, or will

soon leave, without notice

the fear that this body will never again know lust

or

it will be too frail to contain

that last overwhelming wave of desire

there are so many fears

and yet

above all these fears

there rises the soft gleam of the birch 

when spring is almost 

here.

happy new year

child in time, child against time

on a tide of time

I’m so conscious of the evanescence of experience, so conscious of the fact that everything we do, everybody we know, is carried along on a tide of time and will disappear, that I have a strong sense of wanting to pin experience down before it disappears.

Frank Auerbach

nothing can be pinned down, though~

tomorrow, and tomorrow

time, of course, is nothing to her. "let's do this tomorrow", i hear myself say, and she asks quickly: is today tomorrow? before running away to play with the dog. and forgetting. i imagine every child has asked this question, i myself must have asked it a thousand times and then forgotten about it, until one day i could not forget any longer. i suddenly feel ridiculous, with my bittersweet knowledge and my clear-cut needs --- 

(and what with my unredeemable past)

(Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death)


on the table, the wasps are busy, between the yellow of a lemon slice and a sudden pouring of light. 



 

for you do not describe the past...

Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.

Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?

from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as  Glaring (vol. 1)

.

...

Oh God, Oh God! that it were possible
To undo things done; to call back yesterday!
That time could turn up her swift and sandy glass,
To untell days, and to redeem these hours.

Thomas Heywood

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romantic palimpsest, revisited

you said:

"one may ask all the questions, but one should not"

i don't even think you knew then
about my love for grammar, the awe-struck trembling
in front of the countless doors hidden in modal verbs,
opened and slammed in my face
every minute.

now, when the summer light has lost its gentleness,
when it cuts through the curve of my thigh as ruthlessly
as an indicative,
i ask:

why did you say i was beautiful?

why did you say my hair smelled like red moss
under cedar trees?

why did you say you wanted us to look at each other
the same way as then, as long as we lived?
(i smiled, amused at this image,
coming from one like you, with your deep disdain for romantic
pose and sentimentalism, we were both, damn it, too old
for rose and myrrh -
but too young to know how to look at a face hiding a face
and another face and yet another face,
an endless labyrinth of deception.
i believed it, though, there was something hard and warm
and true in there
like the heaviness of your touch upon me,
beyond modal verbs,
a kiss like a bird in a mouth
who hadn't yet learned to tell the poem
about kiss and mouth).

why did you say you wanted me to have all the books
you had ever read?

























now, inside the walls of this living library
i, the captive, am free to run from modal verb to modal verb
waiting in vain for a flutter of page to hurt my blood,
for light to break your absence
like bread upon my skin, yet again.

















..

the frying pan

(you can change to 720p and watch in HD, if you like - which i recommend anyway. i didn't take it with me so i can't upload it now to my main Exposure Room site, this you tube version will have to do. i somehow was in the mood to post it tonight)

..

the quiet, slow and steady distortion of memory

The broken mirror will not again reflect;
Fallen flowers will hardly rise up to the branch.

from Zenrinkushu (1429-1504)

..

first snow, today

...happiness ... might be just such a matter of the fleeting instant.


Shingo, in Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain


..

in the stale grandeur of annihilation

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.


Wallace Stevens (Lebensweisheitspielerei)










.
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divination in the late autumn garden

the ancients used to draw 卜 and 口
a crack in a tortoise shell and a mouth
told of the future hidden
in the bones of the translucent dead.

the cracks in my waters, the mouth of time lost
the bones of time found
they reveal everything except your silence.

the wind blows and scatters my roses
a handful of petals
upon my waters, upon your silence.

note:

占, pictograph made of the two radicals 卜 (cracks in the tortoise shells used for divination) and 口 (mouth, to say), means "to tell someone's fortune, to predict, to divine".


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