The pretty coffee girls at my kissaten have been replaced by pretty coffee boys. Not a bad way to start the day! Still, I miss the girl who, after seven months of Tuesdays, said, “the usual?” Confessions like these are illegal under the Constitution. (MacArthur hated being asked, “The usual? He wanted to be all the time new, and tall, our MacArthur.) She may as well have ripped off her head scarf, her head
Now she’s been taken away and boys sent to distract me. Boys! Indeed it is hard to think past them. These boys will never say “the usual?” Never, in any language, will these boys admit to knowing or to being known. Even some (rather formal) fellatio would be more likely. At least in my system of hoping.
(April 4, 2007, Tokyo)
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Masks
When I was a child, I understood a great deal. I was what you'd call ‘disturbed’. Luckily, as time passed I understood less. I became dull. Now I am functional. More or less.
One thing I understood was that every face was only a mask and beneath it was another mask, a maddening succession of masks, so that you could stand at the mirror all day, tearing off one mask after another, until the room was littered with masks wobbling in the afternoon breeze, smelling vaguely of feet, and you’d still be no closer to the face.
Eventually a blank face emerged, with only the shape of a face but not openings, no distinguishing marks, like a paper mache dummy or a corpse wrapped in bandages. This is the end, I thought. This horror is the truth, the face.
This awful certainty lasted approximately a minute before I noticed the blank face peeling away at the ears. A new succession of masks—red, white, gold or black, weeping or laughing or sneering—proceeded. The terrible blank face was just another mask tossed into the corner.
I don’t remember when I tired of tearing off masks. Certainly I never chose one decided to stick with it. Likely I was called to dinner—maybe there was something good on TV?—and just marched off wearing whatever mask I had on at the time.
Later I forgot all this for a long long time. Also, my mask appears to have become stuck. Odd as it is, I’ve become attached to it. Every day I daub at it with expensive useless creams. I am afraid it will fall off.
One thing I understood was that every face was only a mask and beneath it was another mask, a maddening succession of masks, so that you could stand at the mirror all day, tearing off one mask after another, until the room was littered with masks wobbling in the afternoon breeze, smelling vaguely of feet, and you’d still be no closer to the face.
Eventually a blank face emerged, with only the shape of a face but not openings, no distinguishing marks, like a paper mache dummy or a corpse wrapped in bandages. This is the end, I thought. This horror is the truth, the face.
This awful certainty lasted approximately a minute before I noticed the blank face peeling away at the ears. A new succession of masks—red, white, gold or black, weeping or laughing or sneering—proceeded. The terrible blank face was just another mask tossed into the corner.
I don’t remember when I tired of tearing off masks. Certainly I never chose one decided to stick with it. Likely I was called to dinner—maybe there was something good on TV?—and just marched off wearing whatever mask I had on at the time.
Later I forgot all this for a long long time. Also, my mask appears to have become stuck. Odd as it is, I’ve become attached to it. Every day I daub at it with expensive useless creams. I am afraid it will fall off.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
After a long silence and many adventures, I have returned and will resume posting here. Postings will not be as frequent as before--I am aiming for twice a week.
Anyone willing to serve as a reader for longer work will be served with many respectful pranams and email attachments. I have been afflicted with the aspiration to submit work to magazines. Please pray for me.
Thank you very much for your notes of encouragement. I always feel grateful and astonished to hear from anyone.
Respectfully,
Guttersnipe Das
Anyone willing to serve as a reader for longer work will be served with many respectful pranams and email attachments. I have been afflicted with the aspiration to submit work to magazines. Please pray for me.
Thank you very much for your notes of encouragement. I always feel grateful and astonished to hear from anyone.
Respectfully,
Guttersnipe Das
Vocation
It is natural to be committed to something one does well. Everyone understands that. Whereas there is something pathetic, mysterious and vulnerable about being devoted to something one does poorly.
How comic that I should be a traveler. Ten minutes pass before I’m brave enough to speak to the waitress. I am afraid of crowds, dogs, noises and strangers. (This is also a list of things I love.) I cannot cross the street. Recently, on a street corner in Cambodia , I waited helplessly until a soldier came, smiling, took my hand, and led me tenderly across. Helplessness is rarely so lucky.
Tone-deaf musicians, one-legged dancers, lecherous monks. I imagine they feel the same shameful compulsion I feel, as I sit down to write. There’s no escape from being ridiculous. Try to relax into it.
I love Taoism because heaven is a huge bureaucracy and you just have to find the right office. There are problems with this system, however, and they show up in places like these. The official in charge of vocation—the lady who makes the calls—has no communication with the lady who passes out talent. They had a falling out several millennia ago, over some no-good man.
This is no excuse for me, I know. I ought to stick to doing things that I do well: clearing tables, polishing silverware.
How comic that I should be a traveler. Ten minutes pass before I’m brave enough to speak to the waitress. I am afraid of crowds, dogs, noises and strangers. (This is also a list of things I love.) I cannot cross the street. Recently, on a street corner in Cambodia , I waited helplessly until a soldier came, smiling, took my hand, and led me tenderly across. Helplessness is rarely so lucky.
Tone-deaf musicians, one-legged dancers, lecherous monks. I imagine they feel the same shameful compulsion I feel, as I sit down to write. There’s no escape from being ridiculous. Try to relax into it.
I love Taoism because heaven is a huge bureaucracy and you just have to find the right office. There are problems with this system, however, and they show up in places like these. The official in charge of vocation—the lady who makes the calls—has no communication with the lady who passes out talent. They had a falling out several millennia ago, over some no-good man.
This is no excuse for me, I know. I ought to stick to doing things that I do well: clearing tables, polishing silverware.
Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
Imaginations is a collection of five of WCW’s early works, most of them a strange amalgam of poetry and prose. Kora in Hell is here, one of the cornerstones of American prose poetry. It is one of those books that feels like being handed an invitation or permission slip.
For me, however, Spring and All is the book’s great pleasure. Spring and All contains some of WCW’s best poems surrounded by wild prose that offers theories of poetry and rants and zany plans to destroy civilization “west of the Carpathian mountains (also east)”. So much of this material has been extracted and made to look respectable and buttoned-up, like a child at church. It’s so much more exhilarating to read all together.
I should admit that there are several books here I cannot yet decipher. I open pages at random and roll about in this great strange mind and hope to live a long time and become smarter and more patient.
I like to carry this book when I have almost no time to read or think. Somehow WCW was able to make these strange fragmentary books in the midst of doctoring and exhaustion. These are messy books, messy in a way that gives me courage, full of plans and frustration and paths leading nowhere.
Williams’ poetic theories are quoted so often—and yet I found that the most fun, most liberating, part of Spring and All I’d never seen before. I immediately had a fantasy of aspiring writers being made to recite the following, like the Gettysburg Address.
“The writer of the imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste to enjoy the free world, not a world he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,
A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent – moving at will from one thing to another – as he pleases, unbound – complete
and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth – at least one small part of them”
Imaginations is a collection of five of WCW’s early works, most of them a strange amalgam of poetry and prose. Kora in Hell is here, one of the cornerstones of American prose poetry. It is one of those books that feels like being handed an invitation or permission slip.
For me, however, Spring and All is the book’s great pleasure. Spring and All contains some of WCW’s best poems surrounded by wild prose that offers theories of poetry and rants and zany plans to destroy civilization “west of the Carpathian mountains (also east)”. So much of this material has been extracted and made to look respectable and buttoned-up, like a child at church. It’s so much more exhilarating to read all together.
I should admit that there are several books here I cannot yet decipher. I open pages at random and roll about in this great strange mind and hope to live a long time and become smarter and more patient.
I like to carry this book when I have almost no time to read or think. Somehow WCW was able to make these strange fragmentary books in the midst of doctoring and exhaustion. These are messy books, messy in a way that gives me courage, full of plans and frustration and paths leading nowhere.
Williams’ poetic theories are quoted so often—and yet I found that the most fun, most liberating, part of Spring and All I’d never seen before. I immediately had a fantasy of aspiring writers being made to recite the following, like the Gettysburg Address.
“The writer of the imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste to enjoy the free world, not a world he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,
A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent – moving at will from one thing to another – as he pleases, unbound – complete
and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth – at least one small part of them”
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