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#WQWWC, Abstract, Addiction, Animals, Black and White, Cinema, Death, Experimental, Florida, Grief, Hope, Nature, New Year, Night, Ocean, Photography, Quotations, Sunset, Water, Writing
As juke-box skies flame in a maze of trenchant light and sun-blotting days brand neon-frenzied holes into this guncotton mind, my grey stubble-feet dig deeper into the gelatinous ground.
What happened to me? I pulled out my own vertebrae somehow. My hands are sticky-brown, the bone is smiling white. There’s a saturating scent emanating from somewhere…
I became a flaccid unformed creature, self-entombed, scraping along the primordial murk of life on a truckling tide of apathy.
“My characters are drifters and searchers and they look for something. The journey is a state of mind for them.” -Wim Wenders
So many things can be used to build an enclosure…planks, steel-mesh, vanes, feathers, shadows, rage.
My legs are corked with lavender peelings of armadillo skin and punch along monotonously.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” -John Milton
I seep and writhe and scrabble about, tracing the arrow of time, completely unfelt. Through the years, I snuffle, mulling over decades, with gobs of mud dripping from milk-spot eyes and unwanted blotches of memory microfilming in the margin, I can hear the whir now and then.
“It all looks the same. You can’t imagine anything anymore. Above all, you can’t imagine any change. I became estranged from myself. All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever.” –Alice in the Cities (1974), screenplay by Wim Wenders and Veith von Furstenberg
Look at all those swarming micro-worlds beating against a drop of swamp water…feel the endless coquetry of the prancing night sky. There’s that rancid stench, again, all over me like a mucid skin. And I can see a maw wedged open, now, revealing the densest blackness I have ever seen.
“I want to remember that the sky is so gorgeously large, I feel stranded beneath it.” -Anis Mojgani
I was nineteen when my mother died, but I started stepping out long before then, retreating to the zebra-shadowed dusk beneath the sagging porch of childhood. The stagnation of grief only made it easier to inhume myself there.
When I was four, my brother did a strange thing to me in the summer’s panting heat, his eyes intent and empty. He said we were just like animals.
“This is YOUR world,” sang out from the television screen, lurking somewhere in the background.
“Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me. I am oppressed by such strange thoughts, such gloomy sensations; questions still so obscure to me are crowding into my brain- and I seem to have neither power nor will to settle them.”- Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
The smell, the smell, the wretching stench! It saturates her coarse dying-sheets, now blackish red and shining. She’s hidden her wedding ring between her legs…I can still hear the mewling cries she made, lost in a Roman candle of pain. “It’s safe, it’s safe,” she breathed, staring at the ceiling. The ring that would ultimately join a nest of others in the glitter of a pawn-shop display.
Like sun-burns on the bracing waters of an autumn lake.
How does one step out of the perennial gloaming and begin to disentangle from the overgrown nettles and mounds of grime, to disengage this automaton-existence? How does one fashion a new beginning after such a prolonged sentence? Years of existing as a mute with no face- a writer divorced from language, an artist who burned all his creations in a self-maiming tantrum that lasted 15 years.
“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one. – Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
How does one dare to look up and meet the gaze of another, again?
The black maw is her mouth craned-wide in the shock of the final moment. I’d placed a white feathering of shamrock blooms and a bulbous, sherbet-orange-crested cactus next to her bed, just two days before. For the first time in months, I played her favorite music, and tears hovered in her eyes. A few hours later, she died.
Change. It is a vital thing.
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“Over the years, I became, you might say…a haunted person.
I really wanted to see him again.
I never did.” –Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), screenplay by Nagisa Ōshima and Paul Mayersberg
There is a dull thrum tip-toeing through my mind as I gaze upon my big brother, his prone, plasticky body sinking deeper and deeper into the paunch of his hospital bed. It surrounds him like a cradle. His chest is bare and heaving slowly. His eyes are like clay, his face pocked and about to bleed in places.
I give him phone-numbers he’ll never call, an email address he’ll never write.
“I don’t take care of myself. I think, if I don’t take care of myself and I sit still and I don’t move, maybe they’ll forget about me. But then I’m scared of that too, because I think maybe if I sit there too long, maybe when I want to move, I won’t be able to move.” –Mikey and Nicky (1976), written/directed by Elaine May
“Caine was like a father to me,” he says more to himself, “When he found out I was fucking around with coke, he drove me out to a parking-lot one night and had me get out of the car. ‘Stop messing around with that shit!’ he screamed at me, then kicked my head into the pavement. He beat the hell out of me. Blood was everywhere, the cops came. We said we were just wrestling.”
His vacant eyes filmed with bitter tears, “I didn’t stop of course…but he was the only one who really cared.”
“I can feel myself dying,” he said, shortly before dismissing me with the twitch of his arm, that strong, familiar limb that would prise my own smartly behind my back, or fling me about like a rag, or barrel me up in a violently jovial embrace.
As I blinked in vanquished silence, he added:
“I can’t hug you this time.”
So many things have no resolution, abandoned to the scattered scree of the past. Entropy surges through, scrambling all that would be tidy and neatly arranged…if I had defter hands, a more obdurate determination…
No. I’d have to be a deity for that…and I’d much rather be a human being, as bizarre, brash and delightfully haphazard as they are.
“…if you laugh at somebody, you’re going to have to be connected with them…When friends get together, they laugh at each other. When enemies get together, no chance, baby. No laughter. Comedy is more interesting to me…because there is more life, more possibility in it. More different feelings.” -John Cassavetes
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“We all talked about leaving, but only one of us, one morning, without a word to a soul, actually left.” –I Vitelloni (1953), screenplay by Federico Fellini
A little over a year ago, I traveled north and did something I’d never done before. I toured a series of universities.
Abiding inside the sodden clam-shell of coastal Florida for well over a decade, I choked on the euphoria of my own torment and watched my aspirations bleach and feather in the roiling sea-wrack.
But I never lost those aspirations.
And somehow, I still remain on these two stub-feet. A little askew, with flecks of white in my sea-ruffled mane, leaning on a gnarled walking-stick with just a dram of possibility pulsing through the mist.
“There is really no better word to describe what electrons do than dancing, and it’s not embarrassing or random dancing either; they follow a beautiful series of patterns and steps that were laid out by a single mathematical equation, one named after the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who did extraordinary work in the field of quantum theory. These dance steps vary, and the electrons never tire, and no two will follow exactly the same steps, something known as the ‘exclusion principle.’” -Ella Frances Sanders, Eating the Sun
Time for a new beginning.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Søren Kierkegaard
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This little scattering was inspired by this week’s theme, “New Beginnings,” which is a part of the Always Write: Writer’s Quotes Wednesdays Writing Challenge, #WQWWC, created by my dear blogging friend, Marsha Ingrao. I invite you to post your own pieces and pingback if you would- how to create pingbacks here.
Here is further information on How to Participate in the Wednesday Writers Challenge.
Some previous posts from the splendid bloggers who contributed to last week’s #WQWWC #4 Celebration:
- It’s Tradition by Myrna Migala
- Here Comes the Holiday Season by Tina Schell
- A very Merry Christmas by Sadje
- Beach Walk Reflections by Frank who included some music via YouTube Fantasia on For All the Saints
For those who choose to join in- I cannot wait to dip into your own musings on this topic.
Wishing you all an edifying and ebullient New Year, and…
Thank you for drizzling by. 😉
Autumn Jade
Below: Song by Improved Sound Limited, from Kings of the Road (1976), written/directed by Wim Wenders
Autty, this is raw and beautiful. Despite the sorrow and troubles that have weighed you down since you were 19, your beautiful life is like the bird, about to take flight. There is so much hope in your New Beginnings. This is lovely. Is one of the blurry pictures, Sir? Thank you for being the first guest host of #WQWWC. Your post is fabulous.
I agree! A poignant and moving reflection that speaks to the story of humanity.
I agree, Clanmother, we constantly go through trials them remake ourselves as we pick ourselves up and begin again. I am so proud of Autty for her courage to start a new beginning.
How very well said, Marsha. As Joseph Campbell once wrote: “If you are falling….dive.” Happy New Year. Looking forward to diving into 2021.
Tell Joseph that works better if you are near water instead of boulders or parking lot pavement. I’m a little nervous around those things! 🙂
YIKES!!! I live by water, but it is rather cold so I will consider a virtual dive!!!!!
So let’s agree in 2021-no falling for either of us!’n
Thank you for sluicing by, dear Rebecca! Always adore your visits. Aye, an attempt to reflect one small glimmer. Happy, happy New Year to you, dear friend!
Smiling cheers,
Autty Jade
We have celebrated many New Years together! Grateful for your friendship.
Jubilant embraces to you, Marsha. Thank you so much for the inspiration and opportunity to join in, and thank you for patiently reading. My words feel like loopy, fun-house-mirror abstractions. I had hoped to present something more polished and coherent, but it seems I’m still on a quest to articulate, which I accept. Each attempt is another furtive step in the right direction. Thank you so much for helping me along the way, dear friend.
Yes! Sir always lends a nice touch of the human element to my otherwise staid and detached images. He’s in two shots here. The poor, long-suffering lone man. 😉
Meanwhile, is there still a dusting of snow outside? Hope you and Vince enjoy an exquisite New Year, Marsha. Would love to collaborate again.
Smiling cheers,
AJ
I just sent you an email from my new account which I’m suing for my website endeavors. Give Sir my love and well-wishes for the New Year. I hope you have a wonderful move. It seems like so many people are moving (to cope with COVID?) I don’t know but we are loving our new homes here – Cindy’s and ours. There is still a light dusting of snow in the shadowy areas, but the bright sun melts most of it away right away. I’m working on a post with snowy pictures for your New Beginnings. Check your Spam for missed messages. 🙂
Reblogged this on Marsha Ingrao – Always Write and commented:
My long-time blogging friend is the first guest host of #WQWWC. This week’s topic, “New Beginnings” has many facets, your life, your goals, a new year full of promise. Autty shared a beautifully illustrated raw and vulnerable story of her life and her hopes for the future. Share what matters to you using quotes that reflect the meanings you choose to highlight in “New Beginnings.
Pingback: The Journey is a State of Mind: Guest Hosting for #WQWWC #5 New Beginnings – Marsha Ingrao – Always Write
This is a fascinating post. I found you through Marsha’s reblog.
First timer here via Marsha, whom I encountered a short time ago. Your words are beautifully written and in an esoteric way, stimulating thoughts. The human experience is filled with chances for new beginnings.
Here’s a beach walk that I wrote two weeks ago that fits this theme. I invite you and your readers to stop by. I’m a friendly host. https://beachwalkreflections.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/21-dawn/
PS: The posting of the handbell piece surprised me, but it was a new beginning because it was commissioned for our choir – and this was part of premier weekend. A new beginning on an old song – and since then, I imagine played by other choirs … well, I hope.
Thanks for retrieving me from the Spam folder. 🙂
Thank you for the gift of words and quotes. I will carry them with me into a new year!
Hugs. I trust it shall be a scintillating one- happy 2021, dear lass 🙂
Happy Happy New Year!!!
Hi Autty,
This is a very long, interesting, and thought-provoking, counter post on the subject of using quotes, which is what we are doing in #WQWWC to motivate our writing. I left Khai a long comment, and I think you might like his writing. It’s academic, and he covers many topics.
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2020/12/19/misquotation-pandemic-and-disinformation-polemic-mind-pollution-by-viral-falsity/
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