the worst grief of all

has a clarity to it - is actually snow, on the distant top of a mountain. night-white under a moon. or backed by a break of the first light - untouched. Where the choke starts, paper-thin, slivered air. Where the morning thaws glass from under the snow. the which rivulets. fragile pools down past the treeline

Prompted

What is the worst greif of all?

Prompted

Oh my God, like, that place is (like) soooooo unHeimlich!!


I am always afraid of jumping from heights. Sartre and an existentialist friend have assured me that this is no different than a fear of heights in itself, pure and simple, and that just because I get a terrifyingly irresistible urge to throw myself over the edge of a cliff when visiting the Grand Canyon does not mean that I am a suicidal maniac. Because fear of any kind is essentially a fear of the self, of confronting the self, which is truly unknown but at the same time undeniably familiar. And so my fear of heights is really a fear of my own stark uncontrollable self, without railings or windows constraining it, and its knowledge of the workings of gravity on the pathetic flesh of a woman's body dropped (hurled) from a staggering 5000 feet. SPLAT! is a word that I learned probably in the second grade.
But what about the impulse to lock myself in a refrigerator or to cook small live animals in the microwave? I've only recently gotten over this, and probably only because I spend less time in kitchens as an adult. Perhaps this is why it was so easy for me to believe in sin as a child. Like the wide eyes and pale face of a friend as she guarded the switch to the garbage disposal as I groped for a lost fork. "At first I was afraid that someone else was going to come in and flick it," she told me afterwards, "but then I was afraid that I was going to." How twisted. Like my mangled hand would have been. But something about bodies, and their inherent untowardness, begs for these kind of responses. The slopes and curves of muscles, eyes rolling expressively in their sockets, the articulation of so many joints that goes into any one movement -- what are all these things exactly, as far as their relation to a creature's existence is concerned? I would tear them all apart, violently and bloodily if necessary, to know the answer.

Prompted

The places we fear the most

[interpolate Freud and "The Uncanny", from the Interpretation of Dreams]

Response to June 27 prompt

Oh my God, like, that place is (like) soooooo unHeimlich!!

C.H.U.D. proved to be the synthesis of my aesthetic virtues. It's the ecological horror story of homeless people being transformed into zombie cannibals by toxic waste dumped into the abandoned subway shafts of New York City (Manhattan) by unscrupulous business assholes.

It only follows that I should become an environmentalist and a vegetarian, and that my childhood terrors lay not in that monster beneath the bed. I was quick and could easily leap from bed and to the light switch and extinguish him with the flare. It was the cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller who was hungry enough to suck me, ass first, down the toilet drain went I went for a midnight piss.

Response to "Ingredients of Home?"

The recipe was vague and uncertain, even though the ingredients seemed standard fare. The place you grew up, mother, father, other family, activities and games, annual events such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, a room with decorations you chose, this language on your tongue, the rites and rituals, the patterns of motion, the life ebb and flow.

I glanced up at the cooking instructor, at the other people in the class carefully scanning the list of ingredients with an index finger. Some accounted for the items with a decisive slash of ink through the item and a firm nod of the head; others sank their heads into their heads, vacantgazingdespair, fluffing their thin piles of ingredients with limp fingers.

Whispers swirled, sliding over the stylish hardwood tables of the center of the classroom. “Do you have any extra father,” snaked its way through the room, along with the occasional, “Does anyone have some mother to spare?”

Prompted

Here is the (not so) daily writing prompt for Monday, July 9th:

Confronting the self in Other:
Two uncooked muffins were sitting in the muffin tin waiting to be baked.
One muffin says to the other, "You sure are one lumpy S.O.B!"
The other one sniffed and said, "At least I don't have cellulite."

Prompted

Every document of civilization is at the same moment that of barbarism.
paraphrase, Walter Benjamin

Prompted

Oh my God, like, that place is (like) soooooo unHeimlich!!

Prompted

What are the ingredients of Home?