Words From Rilke

"We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good; too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("the hearken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still) , is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion... And then what? What is life to do to this heap of half-battered existence which they call their communion and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that wanted to still come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, diving things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come any more, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty, and rescue in one of the many conventions that have been put up in great number like public refuges along this most dangerous road. No realm of human experience is so well provided with conventions as this: life-preservers of most varied invention, boats and swimming-bladders are here; the social conception has managed to supply shelters of every sort, for, as it was disposed to take love-life as a pleasure, it had also to give it an easy form, cheap, safe and sure, as public pleasures are.
It is true that many young people who love wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily (the average will of course always go on doing so), feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way-; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer-: but how should they who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?
They act out of common helplessness, and then, if, with the best intentions, they try to avoid the convention that occurs to them (say, marriage), they land in the tentacles of some less loud, but equally deadly conventional solution; for then everything far around them is-convention; where people act out of a prematurely fused, turbid communion, every move is convention: every relation to which such entanglement leads has its convention, be it ever so unusual (that is, in the ordinary sense immoral); why, even separation would here be a conventional step, an impersonal chance to decision without strength and without fruit."

-Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet"

Used To

I’m crushing time into cubes of ice and sucking on their edges. Don’t worry about my enamel, cuz it’s grounded down, and grinding out the memories inside of my mind. Like a storage of untried cobwebs and festering mousetraps, my faculties of marbles and jacks collect and connect like hands on a clock, meeting across the rods of their bodies. Fleshly painted with matching tips and counting. Call me cab, I’m drowning in every alcoholic night filled with pestering dance and song. I can’t seem to get along. We don’t get along. Not like we used to... used to...

Summer Reading With a Slight Chance of Rain

Currently, I'm reading Faulkner, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Chabon for my "summer reading," but I think that I will venture out of my mind for awhile and enjoy comedy. Reading these books all of the time depresses me. Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" is comedic at times, but the grisly mood that follows each character's dialogue overshadows the story with darkness. Every time I read it, I feel like I am in the southern part of the United States, where trees form the perimeter around a limitless field of tall grass, and it is raining all of the time, but not the drizzle rain, it's dark, heavy, gloomy rain. Rain accompanied by flashes of lightning that strike down in the distance. Far, but not too far. Loud, but not mind dwelling... anyways...

Hiking in Santa Monica Mountains this Thursday. It should be fun. Maybe I'll watch some cartoons in between now and then. Tom and Jerry, or Looney Tunes. I miss Animaniacs.

The Electric Dance Conspiracy

I climbed into the inconspicuous lavender gray caravan; it’s headlights peering into both eye’s iris. In the dashboard glow of the van’s interior, I fished the phone from my pocket and made a call. On the other end, the voice responded with news of distress. The driver and I thought about our face options: altruism, apathy, indifference, but then genuine concern rose into our cheeks. She turned the steering wheel to the east direction, then four blocks later, to the west direction where it stayed until the search and recovery team was assembled. One arose from sleep, the other from a shower, and the two originals, including myself, detoured from our quest, diverged onto a path full of flashing lights and raving sound.
I remember the pearl white lane changes and crimson brake lights that guided our fifty-five minute drive into the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The rest of the night went as follows.

-Sixteen year olds dressed down from dinner party attire.

-Carnival sounds, and blazing orange bulbs on spinning indigo saucers.

-A steel perforated gate and electric lime roadblock.

-The inside of an “open 24-hour,” International House of Pancakes.

-Valencia orange juice in a glass.

-Handprint bruises wrapped around our rescued companion’s neck.

-A lacquered black grand piano sitting in the lobby of a twelve-floor hotel.

-Fishnet stockings pulled up over thongs, and tucked under harlequin skirts.

-Stairs and an elevator, an elevator and stairs (semi-spiral).

-The frost-like charcoal eyeliner under a blonde’s eyes, her gilded locks falling just before her shoulders, elbows slightly bent into the cherry blossom pink dress that hung a foot above her knees. A bright yellow modish corset flowed from out of her dress near her hips and rested above her shoulder tops. Her translucent bubbly heels that looked like shoe molded out of boiling water rose with the giddiness of ten thousand school children on a first day of class.

-Her eyes catching my stare through the mirror.

-The drive home, completely dozed.

Masking the Unmasked

We sat bundled in the shirts on our backs, renouncing our premature return from a night of alcohol and thought. Headlights zigzagged behind us and we ducked into the marble darkness near the chilled muddy earth. Like a mould casted from the raw iron of heat and political distemper, we buried the lives of few shadow walkers under layers of psychological realism. What remained were ten page tributes to these figures’ motion based stereotypical lives. Their stories, sunk into my imagination much like a tattoo on the skin; deep, but mutable. In the cold frost of the air, I sat buckle-kneed waiting for a moment that would outlast my momentary sensuous pondering. Potentiality. The same feeling came to me in a Starbucks Coffee, while reading a Michael Chabon story about penning a superhero for cash. Metaphorically speaking, superheroes don’t have to save the day either. It’s a choice. A beneficial choice. Then, as soon as I put down the warm tea I thought to myself, “Why did I think of this?”

Christopher Uller

Colours

I do remember a few things. The lights changed from sapphire to magenta and the music pounded our ears. Cool tones from B flat arpeggios rocked our hips left and right, right and left, then back again. Amidst the fuss and static of it all, she grabbed my hip and detected our similarity. “White people” dancing is a sign of togetherness and supposedly made room for small talk. The blacks in my eyes dilated and the drink’s milky froth spilled over our shoes. L.A. Water. She asked if I was “religious” and I told her the truth. The loudness of it crossed my mind, but I couldn’t escape the flashlight and the debased floor mop. It grew hotter and hotter, until we left that floor. Outside and across the street showed the giant martini glass with a cadmium yellow underline. The stars hid from the night, and our group of seven walked through the alley and onto the asphalt. Our ride was waiting. On the seat in the van, my sweater laid. It was electric blue. Still is.

Christopher Uller

I Hadn't Recognized You There

The phone rattled and buzzed and broke out in song.
The woman seated next to me handwriting her crossword score turned and asked,
“Are you going to answer that?”

Christopher Uller