i'mpulse

i'mpulse started as a class project at ucsd and became a small group of writers collaborating/sharing. i'mpulse is about creating a writing community and cultivating a habit of writing. it is about making the practice of writing spontaneous and i'mpulsive and inescapable.

Contributors

05 February 2006

write, right?

It bleaches the soul.

posted by InkSpot | 9:20 AM

1 Comments:

Blogger InkSpot said...

Someone once said that science and symbols bleach the soul, that they’re combined into some sort of toxic substance laced with chlorine that has the elemental potential to become a bomb when you combine it with out chemicals like nitrogen. So the old joke about bleach and fertilizer goes.

And bleach and fertilizer are peculiar things in and of themselves. Let’s make a story out of them, boys and girls and girls and girls and boys and things. And monsters.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying.

I decided to go on a shopping spree because the thin threadbare nature of my clothes made me feel self conscious in public, as if all the things people say about, “It’s what’s on the inside the matters, not the outside” and “It all goes down the same,” the first in reference to a person’s character and the second about food and possibly dead people, were untrue and made up things to make us less fortunate people feel better about ourselves in our less fortunate state.

So after hours of crying while I went through my closet and my drawers and all the little hidey places where I put my “just in case” wardrobe, I realized that we are what we wear and we are what we own, and right now I am a thrift shop, ill fitting, pre-stained, overly mended, lumpy person.

And I don’t want to be that. I used to think that it WAS what was on the inside that was important. And so I spent my early formidable years cultivating my inner person. Reading Plato and Aristotle, Beckett, Didion, Hemingway, Mills, Ginsberg, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. I diverted all of my attention to tending this garden of intellect and reaping the rewards of being at a kegger espousing about the nature of souls and the progress from form to spirit and back again while people did keg stands and beer bongs.

It was only after someone threw up on my shoes that I realized I was horribly out of place and trying to fit into a place that I really didn’t belong.

So, then I switched over to the coffee shop open mike night circuit. The scents of java wafting through the room, nervous people jumping up and down outside while reciting the lines of their poems and the cool guys who sat in the corner pretending not to care and some of them getting up on stage and delivering and some of them leaving me with the taste of “It’s what’s on the inside that counts” after pouring out thoughts about parables and caves and women’s genitalia.

I remembered thinking, and maybe this was the turning point, why don’t you just go out and wear all black you pathetic excuse for a tortured soul. Like I give a shit about your failed relationships and the sexual love and carnal hate you have for your mother because she preferred men outside of her gene pool.

All the cool people had a certain style, the style that said I don’t care what I look like on the outside, but that they really do on the inside. And there IS a certain style in art and the artist and the serious thinker.

I told my friends and they thought, “Fashion bleaches the soul. Do you really want to model someone else’s ideal?” They were disgusted with me. Like I’d just burped up wheatgrass all over my nice five sizes too big man’s button up shirt with the yellow already sown into the collar.

9:22 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home