For Philip Guston

I think I cracked the code. Not to Morton Feldman’s, For Philip Guston—I don't know if there's a code to be cracked there. It’s all timeless and primordial, liminal and alien. Listening, I imagined myself in a petri dish, germinating, widening, pre-conscious and pre-linguistic, waiting to hear the right phrase and only then would I explode into sentience. Stuck in the petri dish, scientists in lab coats sticking their noses in my “face,” measuring me, whispering behind my back that I’m not where I should be, developmentally. I was reminded of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia—an instrumental album for plants, composed so that it might help them grow. There’s no code to be cracked, the thing is breath and depth, circular movement that both always and never wrong-foots the listener. There’s no code to be cracked, because the thing is both so much and nothing. 

Rather, I cracked the code to the magical inner workings of my mind. I have never felt so seen through as I did listening to the piece, save for moments in therapy or significant nightmares. For the first ten minutes or so (I really can’t say how long it was, refer back to the timelessness of it all), I recalled many, many moments of shame and fear, uncouth remarks and that time I stole my sisters ring and lost it, only to find out it had been in the family for generations. I was laid bare, afraid of my own thoughts, introspective in a way I would rather not have been on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by classmates.

I’m not sure what changed. I can’t say I really heard, or processed the music auditorily so much as felt it somatically. I don’t even recall what inspired me to start writing, but I did, and I opened. I filled four full pages of my notebook, scrawling out a love letter, or a letter to love, or about love, interrogating it. The writing was rapid; I was overcome. I was aberrant, manic, a child throwing a tantrum for attention. I was a vessel, I was an old pen in a cold hand, I was an idiot, and the best in my field. I wrote for however long I wrote for, and I knew exactly when it was finished. I was hungry, so I grabbed my laptop and the half sandwich in my bag and left the room to transcribe what I had written. 

***

Lovely

I think that when the time comes I’ll write a damn good love letter. Maybe it’ll take me a few tries but I think I’ll nail it eventually. I think I’ll write good vows too, but I’d like to have a few more specifics to work with by then.

I think I would try to describe the opened heart. I’ve never had much luck there. My attempts have all been in blood and mended wounds or air and clear blue water coursing through, but they’ve never been about the opened heart. I think I would try to understand it pre-cognitively and write it pre-linguistically—the way it feels to shiver and stutter in presence and absence, the way it feels to misspell and misplace and replace words, always seeking impossible synonyms for things I’ve never been able to define. I think I would try to write in my lightest diction—all feathery and breathy and breathless and white. But as of now, there’s nothing to be done, is there?

Wouldn’t you like that? To discover it as I do, as I write it and sound out each syllable? As I let the sound of the last word determine the next, as input becomes output becomes input and I iterate and iterate and iterate and trail off and lose my train of thought?

I’m an idiot, and I’m the best in my field. I know exactly how to forget. I’m an old turtle in a thick shell and I only come out when the time is right. And boy, is the time right. I’m so fucking stupid. I’m all sighs, massive and dense, and I’m always muttering something under my breath. I’m a portrait that doesn’t exist yet and I’m waiting for someone to come along with a camera who knows how to shoot in the dark.

I said I would try to describe the opened heart, but I think I lied. I’m not sure it’s really there yet. I’m a black hole and I descend and descend and descend. I’m leaning into mystery. I want to be reclusive and elusive and I want to be those things with you, sir.

Every morning the sun rises and bleeds through the slats in my permanent blinds, and every morning the water runs too hot in the bathroom sink but I can’t change either of these things. I can only change my clothes and my earrings and the cereal I eat. Every night I swallow a handful of pills and the doctor says I shouldn’t change that so I won’t.

I thought this was going to be a love letter, and maybe it still can be, so I’ll try to return to that. I think it’s always good to take the self apart so that it may be glued back together with a new type of glue each time, in an effort to find the most binding glue there is.

How is it to be in communion? Creative, spiritual, psychic? Complete unity and unfolding sheets together, splitting the spring cleaning so you dust the bookshelf and throw out the winter books as I pull out the box of dresses I keep hidden under the bed and hang them up. I want to watch you do your laundry, pour in the soap. I want to watch you grocery shop or shop for a new pair of pants because you haven’t in a while and you think a new pair could be nice. And I think so too. I want to watch you read and scan the lined bookshelf. I want to be a woman. I want to be lovely and to be told I’m lovely because I am. Lovely in my blue dress with my hair down and air dried. Lovely, in my purple glass earrings and black nail polish and inherited family rings. Lovely in my perfume and my makeup and maybe more lovely without any of it. Lovely in the morning and evening lights with my wide blue eyes that green a little towards the inside. Also lovely as they dilate, black in the dark. Lovely as I burn and throw extra logs and old newspapers on the fire. Lovely as I write and sing. As I am known and held. As I recount my terrible dreams but it’s okay because they’re just random neurons firing without cause. Lovely, as I skip a stone and break the surface, circles working their way across the stream to either side.

And you, too—lovely. Lovely as you make me toast or dinner because I’m no good at cooking. Lovely, as you sit and stand, walk and run. Leap, lunge, backtrack and fall over. Lovely as you recite every bad word you know as if you’re in third grade and just learned how to curse. Lovely as you say my middle name and get angry with me when I forget things I really should know by now. Lovely as you read my journals, which I made you promise to never do but you do anyway and actually kind of like what you find. Lovely as you realize I’m a little crazy but that’s life, baby. Lovely as you find out I’m picky when it comes to meats but not at all when it comes to vegetables and nuts and seeds.

I think we could probably discover the universal soul together. We could take a high dose of mushrooms and get pretty close, if not all the way there. We could stand on our toes in the grass and stick them in the stream and we could go underwater and sink and forget how to swim back up. We could lie on my bed and watch ourselves on the ceiling and realize that we’re beautiful, unsuspecting. We could go to the park too, and read to each other aloud and soft under the shade of a summer tree, all leafed but greenly uneven. We could find the man who attacked me and kill him. You could drink from my water bottle and ask what that grainy stuff is and I’ll say it’s creatine because I’m trying to enhance my athletic performance. We could photosynthesize.

Lovely, when you notice that I’m a little shy in groups of people I sort of know but not at all around

complete strangers or one on one. Except with you, but maybe I’m lovely for that too.

I think that if the opportunity presented itself I could write a damn good love letter, but it’s so much easier to write a weird fake one to no one in particular. I’d like to be able to write a good one though, so let me practice.

***

That was my first leaving. When I came back in, I was exhausted. I balled up my jacket and laid down at the front of the room. In the halfsleep I typically experience after a snoozed alarm, I was stuck—unable to fully drift off, unable to hold onto complete consciousness. I was liminal, in a room in a library in New York City and so isolated in my own mind, split between two places and unable to find even, middle ground. Blood pooled in my feet—the only part of my body fully asleep. I moved through time as the performers moved through the score, the only difference between us being that they knew exactly where they were. I was lost. I was nowhere in the music, it wasn't even registering in my mind. I was inside it, I was next to it, I was above it and below it, but it was never within me. 

I realized, laying on the floor, that it was a Sunday afternoon, and I was only staying because I really had nothing better to do—a poor, procrastinatory excuse. I realized I was delaying the outdoors, work, the miles I promised myself I would run, the train ride home and the dinner I would have to make. I realized that, in my first leaving, in my drifting off, in the space between the beginning and end of my stay—the only times I really, really listened to the music—I missed nothing. I felt the absence of the “now” and realized I need it to make sense of the world, to map the chronology of my self-states and I cycle through them. I realized I need sequency, not simultaneity. I was freaked out, so I left.