from Blue Episodes

6. COMPOEST 2: Fort Collins, Sonia Sanchez, Hannah Arendt, Eugene, The Roots, Kathy Acker

When my father died, I felt old for the first time. I said to myself, there in that large, empty house, pacing across its echoing expanse, I feel old. “A blues, I could not / drink away.” I cannot see myself, the Greeks say, but we can see you, each with our different version, yet one we all recognize too in each other’s, you in us as we in you. Ready for it, just not the process of it, so not ready. Every wank’s an orgy, you say, every fuck a foursome. Your words hurt, that means they work. They Wark? I’m over-eager, slow down; I slow down, but now you’re romping. She say’s “turn over.” I say, “What leaf?” Every thought a polylogue, or is it all now follylogue? Nine thousand spoons, when all you need is a butter knife. He rolls a joint for himself alone to smoke. He’s new to Oregon, so we forgive and forget. You there, alone at the bar, loud and clever, laughing at your own remarks, long there with your blue tooth. Finished with having to make something of it. “I will not apologize. I will not apologize.” Almost out of isolation. Can I take that seat?

I stopped reading Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker when Andre Gide’s Marshland arrived in the mail, but, soon after, I found McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders on my doorstep and so, as Bellamy merged into Gide and Gide into Wark, the four of us, hand in hand, entered The Marshland of Mina’s Spiders.

November in West Berlin. Feeling dark in that cold, coal-heated, Cold War apartment. Dark streets, dark light, dark nights lit up by Kneipen like Zwiebelfisch off Kantstrasse at Savignyplatz, like Tango at four in the morning, the bartender playing chess with a friend, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina, Coltrane and Miles on the playlist. Could I have made a mistake in coming here, I pondered, in accepting your invitation? Flying out to see you again after five years apart, after that other love had broken back home, only to face an old love briefly regained but then broken too before made new again, and then what? Just us there, falling back again into distant-love? “Oder wie Beckett sagte: Scheitern? Ja! Aber immer besser.”