22 June 2009
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on June 22nd, 2009 @ 04:45:54 pm, using 1487 words, 1347 views
I had a flute I was forced to play when I was that age myself. Mine was a dark shade of brown instead of that ivory. The brown of my eyes away from sunlight and just a hint of that same ivory right where my name was carved on its surface. A measure of possessiveness in that carving, I can now see, a measure of selfishness, and also a touch of girlishness in that handwriting script. All minor differences in the context of the very dejavu-ish image of this boy and his flute. The one screaming difference was his absolute determination to do what had to be done in spite of the audience in attendance - the worst kind of audience, in fact. One that’s physically there but acts like it doesn’t want to be bothered, one that’s in its own bubble and seems to like it just fine that way. The kind of audience that is no audience at all but rather a bunch of gloomy-faced individuals sharing space for no higher purpose than to get to where they’re headed - simply immersed collectively in the common stretch of their routine and made temporarily lifeless by it.
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24 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 24th, 2008 @ 10:05:41 am, using 768 words, 104 views
Taking a page from Paul Auster’s book (both figuratively and literally) and REMEMBERING.
He remembers that he gave himself a new name, John, because all cowboys were named John, and that each time his mother addressed him by his real name he would refuse to answer her. He remembers running out of the house and lying in the middle of the road with his eyes shut, waiting for a car to run him over. He remembers that his grandfather gave him a large photograph of Gabby Hayes and that it sat in a place of honor on the top of his bureau. He remembers thinking the world was flat. He remembers learning how to tie his shoes. He remembers that his father’s clothes were kept in the closet in his room and that it was the noise of hangers clicking together in the morning that would wake him up. He remembers the sight of his father knotting his tie and saying to him, Rise and shine little boy. He remembers wanting to be a squirrel, because he wanted to be light like a squirrel and have a bushy tail and be able to jump from tree to tree as though he were flying. He remembers looking through the venetian blinds and seeing his new-born sister coming home from the hospital in his mother’s arms. He remembers the nurse in a white dress who sat beside his baby sister and gave him little squares of Swiss chocolate. He remembers that she called them Swiss although he did not know what that meant. He remembers lying in bed at dusk in midsummer and looking at the tree through his window and seeing different faces in the configuration of the branches.
At that, I put the book down and began my own list of ’she remembers’ on this last of my carefree days, just as the intervals between eyeing the clock are getting shorter and shorter.
She remembers being sung to sleep in her father’s arms. She remembers having her mother’s heavy but efficient hands braid her hair. She remembers caring for dolls as though they were her own children. She remembers being startled yet collected seeing despair from a kayak, depicted as hands in the air - her father, suddenly ant-size, motioning her to come back to the shore. She remembers the smell of C.F. from her childhood, now only present in other places. She remembers walking towards a pay phone as it begins to drizzle and swelling up as she utters the word editor-in-chief. She remembers the corner of 18th and 8th as a place where she’d always find something she’d like. She remembers early morning snow in Queens and feeling nothing like one. She remembers the awe with which she gazed at Van Gogh’s Van Goghs at LACMA. She remembers lying on a deck half surrounded by water while not being the least bit scared as bats flew overhead. She remembers whose tears always hurt her the most. She remembers her enthusiasm over the size of her father’s Galaxy - jumping from front to back seat like the child she was. She remembers staying up all night for fear of tiny creatures. She remembers all the lies that once sounded like truth. She remembers waiting in the car in front of a newsstand, shrinking under the realization that secrets were not for her. She remembers the soothing feeling of hands on dog fur. She remembers jumping peculiarly and making her mother laugh while waiting for her yearly check up. She remembers a class where all she did was cast furtive glances at J.M. who sat on a desk to her left. She remembers her father’s green crystal Mosel wine glass that simply enchanted her. She remembers beautiful music being played on a May afternoon. She remembers the red spot next to her left eye that used to give away she’d been crying. She remembers dipping her index finger in her father’s beer. She remembers a funny dessert name. She remembers the moment she first considered writing about Last Words. She remembers the moment she started paying attention to Last Words.
And here are the last words from The Invention of Solitude:
He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.
It was. It will never be again. Remember.
Currently shattering window panes with a rendition of…
Damien Rice - I remember/O
23 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 23rd, 2008 @ 08:08:24 pm, using 971 words, 383 views
Sometimes I feel like my thoughts are doomed to run full circle. No matter what seed they stem from, what route they follow, they will always run right into something else that’s come to me in the form of a thought. I don’t quite know what to make of that. Whether to believe my thoughts are limited in scope (that it’s a small world for thoughts as well as people) or to cogitate the possibility that I may be trapped within a maze looking for a way out, where a wider range awaits me. Or still to flatter myself that I may have a knack for matching thoughts, for recognizing both the outlines of puzzle pieces and the fractional images contained therein… a knack for tying up loose ends in a way.
Photograph by isolano (FLICKR)
Once again I bow to the genius of Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
—— ∫ ——
More of my favorite passages from The Invention of Solitude:
And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing.
As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). What he experienced perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of this room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others. and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory.
By the time of his third birthday, A.’s son’s taste in literature had begun to expand from simple, heavily illustrated baby books to more sophisticated children’s books. The illustration was still a source of great pleasure, but it was no longer crucial; The story itself had become enough to hold his attention, and when A. came to a page with no pictures at all, he would be moved to see the little boy looking intently ahead, at nothing, at the emptiness of the air, at the blank wall, imagining what the words were telling him. ‘it’s fun to imagine that we can’t see,’ he told his father once, as they were walking down the street. Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and did not come out. ‘What are you doing in there?'’I'm thinking,’ the boy said. ‘I have to be alone to think.’
The words rhyme, and even if there is no real connection between them, he cannot help thinking of them together. Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room. Breath and death. Or the fact that the letters of the word “live” can be rearranged to spell out the word “evil.” He knows this is no more than a schoolboy’s game. (…) Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it. In the same way, the world is not just the sum of the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meaning of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. ‘Two faces are alike,’ writes Pascal. ‘Neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh.’ The faces rhyme for the eyes, just as two words can rhyme for the ear. To carry the proposition one step further. A. would contend that it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well.
Possible epigraph(s) for The Book of Memory.
‘Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me.’ (Pascal)
‘As I write down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my own weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for I strive only to know my own nothingness.’ (Pascal)
… everything. as has been noted before, is connected to everything else. And if there is everything, then it follows there is everyone.
22 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 22nd, 2008 @ 10:05:58 pm, using 408 words, 242 views
Who was the first person to repel society instinctively? To lower an arm, receiver on hand in the midst of conversation and take a deep breath. Who first needed such an intermission simply to get through a phone call? Or to sneak through the back door so as not to have to say good morning? To keep people at arm’s length or downright push them away?
What exactly changes from there to here? From the child who stares at anyone and babbles away if they can’t yet speak. The child who will say anything and everything from the moment they learn how, disarming anyone and everyone in the process. The child you yourself used to be. Where exactly does one start and then stop liking people? Closing the circle, reducing the circumference deliberately inch by inch, until eventually there’s room for just a handful of them. When does the great majority of people become foreign to you and you to them?
This flying creature, this vulture soaring above is its own parachute. Enviable flight. Enviable, graceful, nearly slow motion landing. It floats in the air motionless the way I’m only able to stop pedaling my bike and keep it moving for a stretch. It… does it in the air. I can’t help watching it intently and ignoring all surrounding unfeathered forms of life.
It leads this someone to self awareness to be the girl sitting on a sandy beach, camera strapped from shoulder to navel and a black spiral notepad on one hand, pen two-thirds of the way inserted into the spiral. It’s lonely to be the girl who prefers this wind that muffles every other sound to the sizzling midday sun. At once wishing to be taken over by a primal urge to fit in (the reasoning behind that being… eagerness in place, natural alignment would certainly follow) and yet having crossed a line somewhere along the way or rubbed it blurry. Or maybe just having become someone slightly misaligned with the majority.
It’s disheartening to be the person who goes into a shopping center for its benches as though you were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places.
But then again, sometimes the odd one out turns out to be perfect. Or so my favorite photograph tells me…
Photograph by Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
21 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 21st, 2008 @ 11:42:29 pm, using 417 words, 115 views
“A green plastic watering can
For a fake chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself
It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out
She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
He used to do surgery
On girls in the eighties
But gravity always wins
And it wears him out, it wears him out
It wears him out, it wears him out
She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can’t help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run
And it wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out
And if I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted
All the time, all the time”
(Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead)
It’s neither the beginning nor the end of the world… ever. It’s always just the world right in the middle of infinity, which as the word suggests, is comprised of infinite personal beginnings and ends, all of which, in turn, amount to nothing at all. Egos get inflated without forethought along the way. Low IQ feet get tired of flat roads and eager to experience the momentary joy brought on by sweeping motion. Flowers get plucked and flattened against paper and plastic and paper again, thus led to premature death. Silence rules. Needs are not met. Eyes are cast down. Opportunities get missed. Eagerness deflates.
Every action is inherently infinitive and should remain that way for the I’s and you’s and he’s of the world are always set to drop everything - regardless of size and importance - down the same well of ’self-centerism.’
—— ∫ ——
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
(The Circle Game - Joni Mitchell)
Photograph by bratan (FLICKR)
Currently shattering window panes with a rendition of…
Joni Mitchell - A Case of you/Blue
20 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 20th, 2008 @ 11:59:08 pm, using 220 words, 237 views
The Writing Fairy… the one that comes out of nowhere and brings you ease of writing on a tray like a servant and takes it away like God.
It seems to have a list of favorite spots to grace with its presence. Or are those my favorite spots? Picture me using my right index finger to push down (in that order) left pinkie, ring and middle as far as they’ll let me, as I list the following: E.U. … subway platforms… my own desk - very late at night when all means of communication have been turned down and turned down. When firm nos and enoughs to the restlessness of city life have been splurgily distributed. And the collective desertion of the streets is viewed as welcome solitude and invited in even if only through the window - which might be less dignified than coming in through the front door or even a back door, but still.
The Writing Fairy will always get its way. It’ll make its grand entrance… well, not really grand… subtle yet noticeable, and then take its leave collecting everything it brought with it. Everything, that is, but the words you manage to put down.
11 January 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on January 11th, 2008 @ 03:15:13 pm, using 417 words, 114 views
This came to me just as I had decided to experiment with fiction during a bout of inscrutable, overwhelming sadness that has since abated, and left in its wake a clearer, less elaborate perspective.
Her voice is fenced and gated. There’s the question of wrong and right, which she understands – understands full well. There’s the question of past versus future. And then there’s the question mark residing right inside that fist-like muscle of hers. Wedged (pretending it’s nestled) between wrong and right, past and future. An inoperable residence. It could just as easily have been the question between north and south, back and forth, night and day. But it’s humanity in the present continuous she has to contend with. It is very much past versus future, right versus wrong. A spot center stage and no prior rehearsal. Dusk, at a standstill. Neither night nor day. Neither back nor forth. Neither north nor south. That place. That hand she’s been dealt. Limbo. Neither here nor there. A hand met with a sigh instead of another willing to shake it. Perverse question mark that curls itself up top to bottom like an eager-to-please student – that wretched, genderless combination of sexy and obsequious. That combination that gets under your skin and makes it crawl.
So many questions dressed up for the evening, made up and made over, only to be stood up by answers. As an immediate reaction there’s a closing of eyes and placing of forehead on cupped hand. The hand slightly curved to receive the forehead which in turn rests there indefinitely in appreciation.
Sigh.
Silence.
In the morning, the wind blows and the birds chirp under her net, this side of her door, within her fence and gate. Air and sound thankfully know no bounds. Birds, in their invariably hyper state, whether big or small, whether free or in cages. The wind either fueling their flight or constantly reminding them of what they’ve been robbed of. In the morning everything feels more solid. The cages, the doors, the gates, the fences and the hope that in being solid they’ll prove easier to open.
That fist-like muscle of hers and its wormy question mark, ready to explore – any fruit this morning is likely to bear.
Currently shattering window panes with a rendition of…
Damien Rice - Grey Room/9
27 December 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on December 27th, 2007 @ 08:04:33 am, using 969 words, 223 views
e·piph·a·ny /ɪˈpɪfəni/ Pronunciation [i-pif-uh-nee]
–noun, plural -nies.
1. (initial capital letter) a Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi; Twelfth-day.
2. an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.
3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
4. a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and insight.
I guess what I’m about to relate could be perfectly described as an epiphany (def 3). They’re funny that way, epiphanies… They come to you just as the sun is setting or your day is winding down, just as you’re sure you’ve experienced all a given day had to offer. Or at least that has been my experience.
This one caught me completely unawares. And the minute it began to pervade its smoky way into my brain, I knew that it would take a while for it to shape up into words. I knew I’d have a hard time making a coherent paragraph or two out of it. You could say I feel braver and more adventurous today… even if just as unequal to the task. So bear with me, if you will.
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