to balboa

I saw everything was tinctured by giddy hope and fear. Around this corner you'll see a treasure, or a terror.

Walked on and on. Into this sunny landscape I'd seen plenty of on screen but here it was in my face. Kept walking into it completely aware of every person I passed, staring and taking in such horrors and delights. But what were the smells? Very few. The sun had baked them away. Dry pavement, lush grass on campus en route to the park. A plain faded brown baseball cap, sunglasses. Earbuds, pulsating tunes. Into the sun, opening up into a view, arid enough, and distant. But then into a weaving crisscrossing path through the hugest most diverse desert trees, and a shocking edge: the cliff. Or a mere step, ten feet or so of a steep-ass slope down to the true drop. Blinding heat now. Glorious revenge, silent and technically non-threatening, of nature; mutely terrifying, as in you know what it can do. Helps to be reminded.

thriving overheated life, arid and still

Arugula in the Morning

This is all I've got for you people, you see, I do still have that edge--

Says the teacher of writing writing about writing so that he can feel as if he's written something

But he hasn't. Sad bastard's washed up.

You'll need to keep on going

this than that

I'd established a certain aesthetic, and I had to stick you to it. Otherwise you would've gotten away!

The perfect malady for what you cannot suffer, that is what I offer.

The shapes sneaking away; I hated waking up to the thought: the water will run out and you'll have to climb the mountain. But that's the part I looked forward to. What came before is still dragging smartly behind me. When you've already got your ambition, this will counteract that, and what are you left with but a regret you'll by necessity ignore? Dry eyes, tired mind, wasted day.

All the same, Clea is fierce in her imagining of loves whose bodies she sees no more than twice a year. And she too has an ill-fated love (in Narouz) of whose existence she has not been made aware nor can she spare its death pangs, loneliness calling out for the unknowable beloved when caught in the situation of dying.

(Nearly excised: In the way of illustrating to myself that soon I'll need a paragraph break, she is leaving the room: she has seen the extent to which she is an Other—by that I mean censorious, tyrannical. Yet if she is like most subjects she is concerned above all on realizing her own ends, pursuing her Will how she'd better retrieve her own project of subjectifying, subject-constructing, and the like: writing, love, learning, and finally, the F bomb.

I am finally unable to revive my writing about literature by steeping it in quotidian Ids and Egos; for these can still be seen truncating discussions on cyborg selfhood, ghosts in machines and leading to truly well-applied theories of relativity: knowing there is no actual point but throwing ideas up to make life interesting, at least if one stays at home reading as I do.
The problem I find is a benefit for Harraway; it might approach a solution. She says that a cyborg begins its existence lacking any notion of lacking anything: there has been no Fall for the cyborg race. It simply began, for all it knows: except we know how it happened, and the cyborg has in its databases access to all that we know on paper; and as a cyborg, it too can feel the portents of this knowledge, the qualities that defy normal terms in our daily lives, all that elusive stuff experienced most frequently with music or before sleep, betwixt the shower and the street. This could be the uncanny, but as an inescapable buzzword in literary studies, for the purposes of this paper, the uncanny will happily take a break.

We can all agree that the tone established in the last movement was caused by lighting (primarily).

"Good work here," said I, the father, the prince of pauses. I am endorsed by a mother who never knew misery until she met my father the contractor, the would-be architect who wasn't interested in the great schools of building and design. I cannot say why he never took it in that direction, simply not one for grand moments in history, even those forming the backdrop of his art?

My feet, disturbing dirt, land just before the door, half on and half off the Welcome Home mat. I am most welcome here, I see the props of an extended family through the fog of the door window. On the dining room table, poking out from a heap of bills is the brim of an orange hunter's cap bowed from a shaggy unkempt head whose owner was last seen marching up a path through tall pines. I'd like to call them spruce, but those form the border between our property and Ray's--they are taller than you'd expect of a line of Christmas trees, and would have lost their convivial roundness if they weren't set so tightly together. Our property (technically their property) is surrounded by a breed of pine that is freakishly tall and thin, not one of which has collapsed during our valley's periodic windstorms.

I wonder what I've abandoned, the people recently depicted or merely mentioned. I have only just now introduced them...you know why? They mistrust me and my artistic plans, they insisted on working for me only if I cast my personal motivations aside. It wasn't a set of ghosts they have successfuly fled until now. They did not, in point of fact, flee. More likely I forgot to collect them after school: two sisters, waiting an hour before closing their books, just slipped their other belongings back into their bags, glanced at the time, and trudged off. They aren't likely to suffer regret on my account, they know I haven't changed. But I persist in summoning them--join us at once, Steff, and call your mouthy sister Emily, let her know your brother is in town, he might step out of his bedroom in time to interact lest this family never look and feel like the real thing. But he's been dyeing his hair black, Dad, he avoids the sun for a pasty complexion and all that. His reality isn't doing so well, the sisters maintain, closing with, "Certainly you are so bold as to call James yourself."