brighter.

I tried to be one of those girls who paint everything with blood, strewing misery like confetti on cold New Year’s mornings, but in the end even fanciful angst can be harder to sustain than any actual violence, so I gave it up. You can’t force fit a lifestyle over your own for very long - like a pair of skinny jeans on a fat day the real you pops out and things get messy. The day my brutal youth choked its final breaths out is a bit murky in my memories, which saddens me. To forget such an important day, no matter how much healthier it may be for the mind to be spared the ordeal of dwelling on that death, seems like an unfair swindle.

Who needs details when a few general brushstrokes will paint the scene? I awoke under the brightest spotlight to ever bathe a starlet, confusedly aware that in this strange place part of me died, and I could choose to follow it or mourn my loss and move on. My heart sagged and I knew she was gone, that petulant child who would make you laugh while picking up boys with Kurt Cobain fantasies and untuned guitars on valium fuzzies and wet kisses. Nothing prepares you for hating the fun, carefree, impulsive and self-absorbed version of yourself that you invented, the one you invited to fill in and play your part in a production lasting a bit longer each night. Hell, there I was, jumping into the magician’s hat, not to find out the trick’s secret, but to be the prop: a puppet in disguise.

I thought I would tell this story plainly and with few embellishments, and yet here I am piling on the metaphor and simile, the long-winded SAT word-laden descriptive text. While I couldn’t say that my life has been a series of simplistic situations with straight-forward solutions and justifiable consequences, I do not see how further obfuscating through thick rococo prose could help me get my point across. Plus, you would probably conclude I am a pretentious princess with little of import to relate and an arsenal stocked by Webster and White.

So let me quit this flourish and tell it to you straight: my point is that you’re never locked into a life, no matter how narrow a box you’ve jumped into, and that you can lie to yourself about causes and effects: your brain will hook onto the pair that both makes the most sense and is simplest to counter. Yes, you can lie yourself into a new world complete with a young civilization’s love of laws and policies to keep the borders static and expectations bounded, but sooner or later some parameter will sneak in well beyond your new boundaries and then where are you? An actor with no lines and a world full of made up rules, that is, right where you started.

No, this isn’t my idea of self-help, and my god I don’t advise anyone to do or attempt any of the actions, thoughts or conclusions that I have. This isn’t because I’m worried about lawsuits - I’ll take them as a given - or some roundabout way of self-deprecation. I just believe you shouldn’t base your life off of some text, like a checklist of experiences to make. You need to figure out what your mountains are yourself, and climb them, or die trying.

Trust me, books are far neater than life. The beauty of living is that it is messy, gigantic and microscopic, fleeting and endlessly nuanced.

I saw the cutest thing this morning while getting my coffee at Variety. A guy was sitting at one of the tables teaching his son how to play Scrabble.

The kid was maybe 2 years old. He kept trying to move the tiles - already breaking the rules :)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.


III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

by W. H. Auden

I’ve always counted this among my favorite of Auden’s poems, and I thought it was fitting to include it after posting one by Yeats. The entire poem is beautiful, but I like these lines the most:

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”