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Stephin Merritt – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
“Merritt suffers from a hearing condition known as hyperacusis; any sound heard louder than normal begins to “feedback” in his left ear at increasingly louder volumes. This has largely influenced the reserved live setup of The Magnetic Fields, which usually consists of acoustic instruments and little to no percussion. Merritt also wears earplugs during performances, and typically covers his left ear if the audience applauds.”
Come home to the refinery
Hiring man say “son, if it were up to me”
The 80s, the Strange 80s, never to return. God. I watched it all, from behind a child’s eyes. Never will go back there, never to return.
Initial thoughts:
Poor Mill, dead too soon.
A city destroyed, devastated. A people with their back broken. The storm.
Me watching it happen from Washington DC, five years ago.
Language and people and the dignity of being poor. You should be able to be poor in this country.
Images: the Great Indian Chief, emerging from the darkness. A man, yes, but also something else.
There are myths in America; American Gods; brought here from across the Middle Passage. Smuggled in Hope Chests. Forged in blood and crimes against humanity. A New World, they called it. The Father of Waters goes unvexed to the Sea. Abraham Lincoln. Asynchronously the bullet is always in his brain. I’ve seen the pillow where his life bled out.
No one ever talks about President McKinley, dead at an anarchists’ hand. Or Sacco and Vanzetti of Braintree, Mass. Or strange fruit hanging in trees. White hoods.
Watching a Bastiat movie at Elsewhere with G & S: “How long does it take to become famous” asks the actor playing Bastiat. The actor playing his friend, who may or may not be Benicio Del Toro says “four years.”
It is now 6 years later. They have won the Warhol Grant. A hundred artists have moved in or out. G is becoming a doctor. The great love affair between G + S has unraveled — details unknown.
A new person has come to the space, and moves precipitously, changing not only the content of the building, but the building itself. The bathroom wallpapered with the King James Bible is gone.
Dust. Barely there. Chicken pecking at laptop keyboards. Free internet at coffee shops. Sleeping in the back. Upstairs with ghosts. A chaste menage in an apartment off Tate. S’s sister. Me a virgin. Time twists.
Six years later. About to be a doctor myself. The Corpus Juris bounces in my brain. Have to go learn torts again. Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten.
Great Berlin. It’s all happening. J getting married. Twisty. How long to get famous. Four years. Ten thousand hours. Expert at life.
Ten thousand words about democracy.
Five thousand words about the law.
Moses at Sinai. The Big Bang Theory of Law versus the Theory of Continuous Inflation. Enjoy learning it, don’t love to be taught. Spread wide and thin like butter on toast. Nothing wrong with that.
Sat in DC and watched as a hurricane moved inexorably towards New Orlean. I wondered what would happen. I wondered
Hated Bush after that. Met a girl with dark hair who read the Economist who hated Bush too. Ari Fleischer even more. “Go ask 1984.” She was writing her thesis then. I write my thesis now. About the need to care for each other in a democracy. About the insufficiency of narrow-interest politics. “Our turn to eat.”
A different President. My president, maybe, finally. He was once a law student like me. I will not be President. I would not want it. Takes a specific kind of man to want the weight of the world on their shoulders — Atlases. It is no wonder monarchies fell — most men, royal or common, are unequal to the task of ruling in this strange and modern world — imperative that we find someone who can do it.
Is he humbled by the immenseness of the task?
Kerry back then. Unexciting. Not up to snuff. Real talent waiting in the wings? Obama spoke then, but I had missed it. I listened to his speech about eighteen months later — and felt myself be moved. Cynicism now had a purpose — the hope for a different world.
Elsewhere. Six years ago. Hope for another world.
Across several many years the thought-tunnels ravage:
April 8, 2007 — the blog was naught. The very next day, in small studio apartment, one block south of Rittenhouse Square, in Philadelphia, with Nutter about to be elected, with me about to quit my job, not a lawyer, not a lawyer at all, still heartsick from the girl that left six months before, beautiful girl with black hair, and another, and another, who I had seen through the haze of runaway excursion to Manhattan Island, tracked down and run into, this girl’s sweet minor obsession — she came to Philadelphia, and she saw me and we talked through our awkwardness and I told her about Elsewhere, and I told her about law school, and about the District of Columbia, and about how I worried it would be sort of square — and she told me about her painting — we had coffee, La Colombe, and then sat in Rittenhouse Square and talked to a homeless person, the world’s last Leprechan or somesuch or something — and strangely he told us a story about what I had done to her years before, when I’d Jupitered her Semele —
No post then. But the next day (or two days, or three days) told the story.
https://practicalspactical.wordpress.com/2007/04/09/hello-world/
April 8, 2008 — One year later, sitting in the District of Columbia. Productive procrastination in pugnacious prognosticators. The post is luminous. I have no idea where it came from, or how. I have no idea what I was doing or when.
R’n’t all itches to act twinned with equalanapposite counterclocksome itches that push the itch outside of temporal reality into contingent uncertain futures which may or may not come to pass, leaving in its setplace alternative excursions that point down side hallways, crack open doorblocks, and abandon us amidst the clutter of other rooms?
Where did that come from, and how? Not sure if it floats everyone’s boat, that’s for sure, but mine, most certainly. A little bit of Joyce, less smart, but easier to read, maybe — and the thought, I mean sure, parallel worlds, this way and that, one wonders if Lost had even begun that journey — not really, we were still watching the story of the Oceanic 6 —
Now, looking back, the moment that at the point stood wide open, the Mother of Moments, the Great and Beautiful Now, has, through the humming of some distant songbird (cesium atom in the vaults of the Sorbonne, over and over again), receded, been fixed, determined, memorialized and sanctified, laid down — I dealt far more with ontology back then, I’ve accepted or bracketed the strangeness of ontology for most everyday matters, and now sit, material, and deal with constructive morals and constructive laws — I will and will remain helpfully agnostic towards our duty to the law — though I try to have some respect for other people —
Other people, other times. R’n’t all itches. Twinned. Outside temporality. Contingent other places. The uncertain future.
Back then — back then “my love comes to see me and tell me what my name is” — she is gone. She still loves me, somewhere 150 miles north of here. Another, the first, sits somewhere a continent away, sitting by the shores of the other ocean. She thinks on me fondly, every now and then, I’m certain. Lover Zero is in this very city. The next one — who knows — are you her? says Lost. It’s very much on my mind. Pictures on radio waves. Breath on waters. Thought.
Could have been a lawyer, or an astronaut, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a novelist. Could have been, should have been, I stand now, years later, at the verge of a great nothingness, a great uncertainty, a break, a pause — I have basically no money in my bank account. I exist on the sufferance of those Great Sufferers, who have suffered me to live all these long years — one supposes that if it came to it, I could return to them or someone else and they would help me get my feet — I am so weak — image of my broken arm atrophied beneath a cast — I sit in a library in New York City. Who’d have thought it. It is a beautiful night, that followed on a beautiful day. I am not so young anymore. 10,000 days have come and gone, and my life, if I’m lucky, will only be another 20,000 and change. It is a long time, but not an endless time.
Procrastinating still. 10,000 words on democracy. 10,000 words to ask a man what race he is. The Shopkeeper’s Privilege. State Secrets. Abstractions. Music of the spheres. A lawyer must make provision for his clients in the event of his death. To be the squire. Serve. Live.
The image of Chronos Emasculated. Blood between the legs. Men and women different. Hair. Men with men. Women with women. Are they happier, knowing each other? What sapphic woman ever had to deal with an inorgasmic lover? What attic man? Forcing puzzle pieces. Broken egg shells. The swell of flesh. Others. Homeworld. Otherworld. Habermas. The hum of the electron. The light that fills my eyes. Lust for life. Van Gogh. Ten years till Map Erasure.
Every book I read takes me one more book away from Joyce. Go back. Go back. Mr. Eccles. Clearly something’s on his mind. Young Updike, my age, publishing Rabbit, Run. A screen pops up. A missive from California, Lover 1. A reply. The tubes run deep. We are not alone. Not Penny’s Boat. My third Lost reference. About to end. She was leaving me, and I had borrowed Lost from my brother, and left her to go watch it. First season’s the best. All downhill from there — Jack is Jacob, clearly. A to B to A. Recommodious recirculation leads back to the flow the wash the blood between our legs make it stop the daily weekly monthly record of time’s passing — oh sweet beautiful mothers, with different hair then us, and soft curves and rises and the promise of recirculation, of angels dancing on the frenulum between our noses, and the rise and fall of backs, the sacred marriage, the plowing of the earth, the growing season — the fullblown bright-eyed light-filled dawn of Spring, Gloriously Hot, What have we done to this planet — oh my god — spinning always – ring around the — up — down — the conservation of angular momentum — half-integer spin — I am a Latter Glossator — break the words open. Suck out the yellow. Sun’s not chicken — Mr. Jones — recirculation, downward — quit smoking a month ago, under gaze of yellow hair who may or may not like me — closer to may not — holla — she has me in her mouth — drunkwine — will I — can I — tied down by gossamer — lying in the dark room —
Divide by zero. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Can’t go back. Arrow flies. Cycles. Spirals. Fractals. Elsewheres. Ifs.
April 8, 2009 – The doctrine of radical freedom. The choosing to be free. Passover. This passover of course I felt the shadow over me — lost, left behind. Gone. Out. I’m ready to be gone. I’ve made my choice. A year ago I chose to stay in law school. Matrix II says “it is not the making of the choice but the understanding of it.” True. Glances on the street, at girls, we all know we’re being watched, because the eyes see before the mind sees, the eyes are always darting, we are choosing before we choose, but we can adopt our choices or revise our choices. We can change path. The mind, determined, transcends its boundaries and emerges, emergence, out there, somewhere, somewhere else — 10:22 on a Thursday, few friends in New York City, none worth seeing, all my love is scattered, fallow — the prodigal returns, will you feast him, the I I was fades, the I I will be is not yet, here I am, stuck between stations —
Choose. This is your life. You are not what you were. So long ago. You were young. Now you’re old. Aged. Eyes wide. Avoided major deaths. But they’re coming. Sooner than they were. A vacation from life. Back to the world, I go. No job. No prospects. Close to hopeless. Not hopeless. The next thing. The meaning of life is not a what but a who. Who? Who?
Us. We. Now. Then. Next. Don’t have it. I lack energy. I am exhausted. Disaggregated. Stress. Too many open loops. Must close some of them.
I cannot choose yet. But I can prepare to choose. Prepare to choose.
https://practicalspactical.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/bad-faith-versus-radical-freedom/
April 8, 2010 – Today. Too nice a day to spend it inside. Sat by the river, and looked at the light. Women would pass by me. I’d look at them too, and think about democracy, hydrogen, and light.
https://practicalspactical.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/sun-on-the-water/
Sitting on the Hudson River, reading a book by Dead John Rawls. Women in bathing suits stretch out behind me. Once, we wore less clothes. City behind me. Was it built because we moved north, and began covering our bodies, setting of a strange chain of Freudian repression? A desire to take off each other’s clothes.
The sun is on my face — it is April, but it is ninety degrees. The Hudson River undulates in front of me. The sun is mirrored in the great body, scattered, and dappled, blinding me, then not.
Breezes sometimes, against me. Deep inhalations. The words on paper in front of me. Democracy. Justice. Reciprocity.
Young woman next to me, now, stretched out. Toes wiggling on top of sandals. She lifts her shirt a little, exposing her stomach, the curves of her pelvis above her shorts — I notice out of the corner of my eye — go back to my book, then look again —
I think about the water — is it hydrogen? The first stuff. Most hydrogen particles were created at the Big Bang. Oxygen? Both. Great strange bodies. And light — light is just filling this entire place — the self-propagating oscillation of an electromagnetic field — our eyes are just tools designed to detect this effect — and yet we find it beautiful —
I am sitting on a bench reading a book, looking at the Hudson River. The wind hits my face every now and again. I am alive.
I was likened unto a 28 year old man until I realized that I was asking the wrong question. Not a what. A who.
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 