lotta stuff.

i think i ought to give northern exposure the credit of saying that the manner of its images, the way they are, is completely self-knowledgeably, like, jungian or dreamlike: the things you never knew existed but always wanted to exist exist in northern exposure, like that guy's review of the director's work in the black rider program. the things they come (well, came) up with are so beautiful i find myself in tears at the end of every other episode, on the average.

i think i have a fever, but the thermometer says otherwise. to which i respond, in the manner of ira gilligan, hey, i know my body.

i do so many stupid things; it's good to start seeing things as sponges. this is the new face of my slight and ineffectual obsession with the feeling of things, the meat of things, the reality of things...sponges. objects (events, flora, fauna, phenomena, places) are like sponges that have been super-saturated with a liquid which is thicker than water but less ominous than car fluid of any sort--olive or canola oil, i think, especially in an afternoonish sort of light. golden, in short, and thick, without being honey and sticky. ANYWAY, this liquid has saturated the sponge to the point that if you do so much as pick it up, it drips--squeeze it ever so lightly and it overflows. it has an inherent shape, like water in a pitcher, but unlike water in a pitcher you only have to touch it to get it all over you... it's heavy, loaded with liquid. and even left alone it seeps, slightly, glistens. it's time, i think, to tell williams he was not wrong but not right: language is mimic of things. it's not just an arbitrary structure placed on top of distant and rocklike things, but instead an intimate mirror: in naming something, the something becomes named and hence changes, but doesn't the name change too? and powerfully? if you're thinking, and not being lazy? gertrude stein's disbelief in repetitions are an example of this, except that i'm saying that the interaction isn't just word on word, but word on world. if we're stuck in a sensory meatsack, at the very least we have access to its every part. we're sensitively tuned. new facilities replace old ones, new deficiencies old. language isn't just a desperate intellectual need to control, to stagnate, to hold back, to reform into something knowable, defined, solid--because if you say that, you condemn art in the same breath. which might not be a bad thing. but why bother? art is every sensual interaction, i firmly believe: every smell the brain interprets is a piece of art, because it's an interpretation, a making-private, possibly an interpellation of the thing-smelled, everything sighted, tasted, heard... anything that cuts and is bled from, anything that hits and causes pain--a bruise, by this logic, is an art form. a scab is an art form, a muscle, a smoke-riddled lung, a cancer, a death, a laugh, a moustache. the working heart and the orgasm. i don't know.

it isn't war being waged between ourselves and our outside surroundings, our spongiform things--it's a relationship. it's not necessarily a healthy one, you know, i know. if an idea can't stand the test of pain it has to go back to the drawing board or possibly the punishment closet. but this relationship ought to be facilitated instead of shoved to the back of a consciousness in which the battle between concepts and objects heaves on like the wine-dark sea.

the more negative way of expressing it is, i experience freshness anyway, no matter how badly i want not to. i shove certain terrors into certain compartments, because i can, because it's easier, or at least less frightening--but the drawers i put the things in are badly packed. there's air, gaps within the drawers because the edges don't match. and if i'd pick up each and squeeze slightly, each drawer would be full to the brim not just of terrors but of their juices, and this would be good because i'd know each--i'd have my own set of distinct terrors, each interrelated in a complex yet infinitely satisfying web of correllations and ownerships, and each time a new one manifested it would go into the web supplying the whole with infinite freshness... but my mind's too weak to do it. the things that frighten me remain shadowy and dry, incapacitated, insufficiently, by their own indistinctness. i don't want to avoid terror any more. i want to slam it to the ground and get its liquids all over me--i want the same for every object in my brain. because these parts do make me. they just don't make me in the manner that it would seem.