blanche ingram has dark hair damnit

because sometimes i understand things about the way that i "write" in a sort of really really toned-down saul-on-the-road-to-damascus kind of way, i'm going to make a note as to a thing i just realized here and now:

repetition in my "stuff" functions, i think, in the same way that it functions in my mind, which is that it can be a blessing or a curse. that sounds stupid. let me try again: on the personal emotional level, repetition, i think, is the closest that a person can come to emulating meat in art, the actual processes of feeling-in-meatsack as opposed to what we think feeling means in words (i've made this point before, but i'm repeating it [heh!] because i don't understand it). like i think that the way forster described emotion, sometimes, was just as alienating as the way that, say, nora roberts describes emotion (and i'm not knocking nora roberts--i'm just saying that she is, more than other authors, within a genre, one in which she shines often, that uses certain types of description)--with forster it's alienating because it's too cerebral, too controlled, too intentionally new, and with roberts it's alienating because it's too cliched so that one's own personal experience comes as an actual surprise to one when one has something like what the books describe, right? i don't think that repetition comes in and fills the gap between over-cerebrality and over-reliance on forms. i think it approaches the problem of personal physical emotion from a different standpoint. and i'm too stupid to be able to pinpoint what that standpoint is. but the point isn't that--the point of this particular entry is just to say that this lanthorn is the moon, i the man in the moon, this thornbush my thornbush and this dog my dog. no it isn't. now i'm deeply confused and will have to start over.

comprehension of the power of repetition is something that i don't have much background or experience in trying for (hey, once again, i don't know what i'm talking about! who saw that coming?). from what i understand of o.c.d. (which isn't much), repetition's intensely comforting and just as intensely driving--i don't have o.c.d., but i get it, or what i think is it, to a certain extent. because my mind repeats words, phrases, melodies, ideas. like gertrude stein, i understand them as different each time the same word or whatever is spoken in my mind--they gain form, feeling, depth, in the same way, i feel, that my understanding of what is the body gains form, feeling, and depth: they become incomprehensibly deep objects. and i personally think that's a good thing--or not necessarily good, but true, and realer than either forster's or roberts' approach...though not necessarily better. i mean, the point of emotion-depiction-through-repetition is, in part, to divest what's felt of its cerebrality and its clichedness, but that's not necessarily desireable. it's just necessary, for me. maybe.

hmm. what i maybe mean is that i don't like these poems. they're stupid. they've gone beyond the point of the lorca poems, which were over-obvious, over-personal, and have kind of gotten into laughing idiot god territory. they aren't saying anything. there's no flow, no arc; at the point of the last one i'm not even playing with concepts. they're heartless; they're not t.s. eliot fragmented, but fragmented in an even dumber way. none of this may be visible to the naked eye. i should probably revise them. but they don't mean enough for me to do so on any but the most basely instinctual plan... (what else is new?) the point is that i don't want to be writing what i've been writing. it's trite, stupid drivel. but the repetition is driving. because i can only allow myself to feel a very certain type of thing, because everything else offends my sensibilities, and yet i have to feel something. god, that sounds ridiculous.