If these walls

............

The light from my alarm clock is glaring at me, marking each minute i lay here about to burst at the seams of my existence. The walls are whispering of things they’ve seen and heard although it happened one night far way and long ago. Their murmuring gossip passes behind coats of paint and reminds me of little old ladies early in the morning with their coats and shawls and empty baskets over their arms waiting to be filled. The walls and these old birds choose to speak of what they’ve never dreamed of and fill the emptiness in their lives with nonsense and chatter about the choices i’ve made that fulfill my life.....

All of this is rather none of their business, but walls will be walls and continue to provoke me, making me long for a sound-proof, light-proof box to sleep in. For a minute, this box is my coffin, a bed of feathers where i am weighted down by bricks. For a minute, I am dreaming so vividly i know it can’t be real but i enjoy it so much, my dreaming self feels it must be wrong and so i create people to save me and pull me back to reality. I want to stay with the vampires in my dreams and they want me to stay with them. They invite me to a ceremony where I am pulled in by a sweet song and when my monomythical saviors think I may fall for their tricks, I strain to keep these notes within me. I am chasing my monster down street after street clogged with grass, rain, ice, snow and grass, rain, ice and snow.....

As my breathing and thoughts become heavier, so do the walls continue to breathe their thoughts to each other and ebb and flow dangerously close to my body. The pen beside my bed grows larger and larger and i want to scrawl dirty words on the walls, to call out the unmarked space, to give them something to talk about once and for all. If i mark their empty spaces as my own, perhaps they would not be walls any more, but become art or graffiti and therefore have no right to hold my darkest secrets against me. These are my stories to tell, to draw out and create. I am afraid of sleeping for fear that as soon as i doze off, my secrets will spread like wildfire amongst these walls that keep me contained so i lay awake, marking each minute of my existence with words that are bursting at the seams of this notebook.....

weekends

I remembered my past about a stroke past midnight. I was a gypsy and he was my lover. All the memories that had past had suddenly come up to remind me love does not last nor is it anything to write home about.

“Do not ask me to spend eternity with you,” she whispered with one closed eye. “otherwise else we are only going to see half of anything for the rest of our lives.”

She saw her future, muted. Silenced by jogging, running, being a drone in front of the t.v., or listening to everything… remixed. It was not original but it could never be. This is she. She saw it unfinished in her thirties, just like that one show that everyone talked about fictions so long ago but she had no idea of it would be close to reality. This is the end of the twenties. Fighting for the place on the next rung, everybody killing to the great unsung song. What is life? what is the future? Here are we and we do not want to mature.

“I want you to tie me up against a tree, to rape me, to let me know who is in control. This is my fantasy and it is breaking my soul.”

Reality is what i am afraid of. This typing and making characters out of nothing seems all that is what of life made of, but, perhaps if i make spelling mistakes, it will not come true. Who knows? Who knows that it hasn’t all been said before, that i am not knocking on the same closed door which never lets myself in? Is it because my antecessors sinned? I hope to Allah it is not, i fight for what i’ve got and to make a new future for me… without great apathy or great regrets may be the only outlet.

However, it was once said that the mountains love me, that they are calling my name: “away we go,” they cry, “here is your infinity.”

Running, walking, watching t.v. in the hum that all else calls oblivion... working, drinking, pretending my friends are my own. These are the things that keep me awake, that keep me preserving. Perhaps if i feel nothing for ever, so that nothing i can forsake.

untitled

i want to be released and for all my
inhibitions to dissipate.
i want to know the feeling of no
pain and sincere emotion.
i dream of pure nothingness and sleep
for this alone.

pain is my rapture, on the cusp of lifelessness
and ghostly apparitions.
waking surreality brings me to
the brink of pleasure and i admonish
consciousness and am convinced only those
with no purpose should walk the face of the earth.

i deserve nothing.

who am i to say i am meant to change my own existence?
Is this not the job of fate and destiny?
who was the jerk that thought of flesh and mortality?

I prefer to sink in empty skies and float in endless seas.
I long to sleep in a bed of feathers, weighed down by brick.
my silent screams awaken me to the wish of one more
minute of unadulterated loneliness. i face the day
with my hands covering my face in hopes to be
invisible to the light radiating off of humanity.

There are few moments when i feel absolute well-being and
pleasure. i am affected to live for these moments.
it is then i can open up and release all my inhibitions.

i consent to be consumed by you.

Remediation in it's finest form!

After reading The Orchid Thief and viewing the film Adaption, I came up with these similarities and differences.

Connections:

Adaptation – Orlean is adapting real people to fit in her non-fiction accounts just as Kaufmann wrote real into his screenplay; all characters are adapted for these spaces through what is included and what is left out.

Anthropomorphization – Often the orchid in the book are described as having features of animals or people. This is shown visually in the film by a montage of people at an orchid show while stating physical features or by stating a type of animal in conjunction to the orchid it resembles.

Idea of Research – Just as Orlean surely researched her topic before writing her book, so did Kaufmann onscreen which hints at the idea that there is no new story to tell, just different ways to convey it.

Temporal Stability – Neither the film nor the book is chronological in narrative but rather slip into different stories which may or may not be sequential.

Themes of Evolution and Mutation – One of the first sequences in the film is the story of evolution which takes from the book the idea that orchids are one of the oldest living things on earth.

Differences:

Auditory Elements: Part of the story line of the movie was the Monkee’s song “Imagine You and Me” which moved character development along although music does not play a role in the book.

Exclusion: While Orleans writes long segments on other “characters” other than Laroche or herself, these Seminole Indians, other orchid lovers, and historic explorers, these people are largely left out of Adaptation.

Fictional Elements: Orlean had a journalistic responsibility to hold to the truth in telling the story while Kaufmann did not and thus was allowed to write his fictional twin into the movie who served as a plot point whereas the book is said to have no plot at all.

Interpretation: In Adaptation, we see the world of the Orchid Thief through the lens of filmmakers and the interpretation of the actors instead of using the imagination that comes with reading a book.

Underlying Themes: The humanistic and existentialistic themes are easily inferred from dialogue-heavy movie whereas the reader has to assume these themes from description-laden book.

whisper

His friend leaned to whisper in his ear, “that is the girl that disappeared a while ago and now she is back.”
He didn’t believe him nor was he ready to feed into the fantasy that long played in his mind. His fixed a disinterested gaze on the television screen that was mounted on the tavern’s wall. A sports game was playing and in the brief moment the camera panned to reveal the crowd, the image of a woman reminded him of someone he once knew. His friend insisted the girl across the bar was the same one he once felt for and put his life on hold for some time ago.
The girl across the bar resembled the girl in the camera’s eye and in an infinite amount of torrential bits, he tried to make some kind of connection but his mind had a hard time linking that physical being with the person he reveled with in his memory. Her hand was in her hair and she was in casual conversation with a group that seemed to be her friends. He wanted to be the person she smiled at.
Although her bright eyes shone, he saw something more passionate in her than this moment in the crowded tavern and for that brief second, he thought that he could understand. The crowd erupted in appreciation of a good play and he lost sight of her as he tuned his attention to the collective roar.
Hours later, he stumbled back inside after gulping fresh air between drags of cigarettes and slouched back into his assumed position on the bar stool. His friend was swearing up and down that the meaning of existence could be found in slice of fruit at the bottom of his glass to the girl next to him. It was her.
“you’re you,” he said to the girl on the other side of his friend.
“i am” she answered.
“i heard that you went away for a while.”
“i am back.”
“how did it go?”
“there is something to be said about getting away from all of this,” she raised her hand to indicate the surrounding rowdiness. “but really, it is all the same anywhere. I came back to feel more out of place than I did before.”
Her hair was different than the last time he saw her and her completion radiated atmospheres of sun and high altitudes. He wanted to confess that he couldn’t stop thinking of her and that his dreams were tormented of times they never spent together. He wanted to confess that she was too erroneous for him, he was too dependable for her, and that eternity was better left for fiction and films where adoration, reality, and consciousness were better left unaccountable to each other.
“there were things I missed, though, and some part of me is happy to return and to find my place is here,” she continued. “I tried to escape but I can’t imagine ever leaving and not longing to be home.”
His eyes returned to the game on screen and as much as he tried to focus on the plays between teams, his mind wandered to the struggle within him and the desire to make the game of her and him begin again. He felt the gaze of her affection was possible and wondered which of them would win this fight.

Sincerest Form of the Deus Ex Machina

“What was it?” I asked. One of the vessels had broken open and the colors were swirling out in little eddies around our feet.

“Dreams,” you said, “They were formed by irradiation illusion. It’s the interchange and scattering between light and our eyes. It is a little of what is heard, seen, sensed and touched throughout history, time and space. It is all interpersonal relationships come in from sea. We tried to take all thought material and broadened it into a being of beauty and benefit to create The Dream. We planned on all these interesting mutations to form One Dream that was real, touchable, tangible – but some things refuse to be limited in existence.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like if my world was populated by Dreams – refracting, crystallizing and expanding into infinity – but I couldn’t. I asked you what was going to happen to all the broken Dreams. “We don’t have to do anything. They will eventually just evaporate and return to nothingness,” you said.

I admired you and what it was that made you choose to do this in the first place. I wanted to know if you felt as all of your dreams were slowly dissolving. I wondered how it felt to create ten thousand new dreams and then have to abandon them. Through the silence of your eyes you said, “Well, sometimes they’re better if they occur by themselves. Dreams are because emotions can be overwhelming.”

The sun could be seen dawning through the Orchid Jungle, so you had to go but promised you’d meet me back here. I lingered there alone for a few more moments, just to prolong the beginning. As I turned to go, I glanced back for an eternity.

(Imitation of Orlean, Susan The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998. 151-152)

hobbies of learning and discourse

I decided I am uncomfortable discussing identity constructs. It’s messy and complicated and I don’t know enough about Life and Communication to be confident in any Statement I make. This is not to say I am apathetic to the foundations and movements of different groups. Anyone who wants to join in matrimony should be allowed to do so. Have 16 wives or husbands or lovers…. I don’t care. A human is a human is a human and anyone should be allowed to love and display such. But now I’m reading that some self-identified LBGTQA radical groups don’t want to be granted the same institutional rights as everyone else because that is just the Powers That Be trying to assimilate them? Ideas of Heretonormativity and Homonormativity …discuss….

I decided I would be uncomfortable discussing any combination of gender and sexuality in a public space. I’ll listen to people talk about it, but me and my white on white hetero relationships don’t bring anything new to the story. I don’t like when people talk about their bedroom life. It’s probably my religious upbringing that makes me feel a little prude like that. This is not to say I don’t believe that Combinations of Relationships shouldn’t allow to exist.

Movements are not for me. However, knowing my Self, if i Identified with something different that what I do and was ostracized for it, I’d be pissed and probably want to join an appropriate movement to demonstrate the unfairness of the situation. Or maybe I’d rather change things quietly from the inside – sleeper cell style. I understand that radical movements would rather not be assimilated into society but rather have space made for them and their cause, but I think there is a line between radicalism and extremism. Radical movements are tricky because if they are not radical enough, their actions could go unnoticed or if the actions are too radical, it may only increase exclusion.

I believe in the power of the Media which can spread new ideas and open up space for discourse by reaching the Masses. Of course, spoon feeding is not always the Answer, but if I to choose a way to make a change, that would be the way for me. I think it is undeniable that American Society’s way of looking at Gender and Sexuality has become more accepting than, say, 15 years ago. Ellen, and before her, that characters on Roseanne, may have not changed everyone’s opinion on the politics and semantics of LBGTQA rights, but they did open doors for discourse.

Sometimes I feel guilty about feeling guilty that I am a Privileged White Female and that I should find a Cause to support, but if I did would my feelings of biased advantage just increase? I guess it’s kinda a moot point with me because I found happiness of just Being Okay with dismantling normative ways of thinking within myself and all that I can ask of me is to be open and understanding to others. Humanity is always going to find something to argue about… it separates us from the robots.