..::sparkle and fade::..

..::29.11.11::..
“I calmed myself by contemplating the water and thinking this Buddhist thought: that the river is everywhere at once, at each part of itself, although it gives the illusion of moving and we think of its journey as having a beginning and an end. Many of our most powerful dreams begin on an empty road, beside a river, which indicates the great depth of the dreaming.”

“it’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back—it tears at a man—to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside.”

“the figure coming up the driveway was clearly a thing too sorrowful to be alive, it was a black absence, the ash of grief, a lost, wounded soul,…”

“the day burned in glory, the sun slashing into dark doorways, the woman surely more beautiful than she’d ever been, more virginal and serene in her role as sacrifice, unconscious target, dead clown. It pissed him off. She’d never been so beautiful. He’d never been so angry. And he realized he’d been feeling it for days—the tapestry laid out, a tale told in panels, by design—for days feeling the tragedy and loveliness of fate. First his own. Now hers.”

“he didn’t like this. Second thoughts started eating him and the clouds began to look like fists and the shadows like deep gashes.
Half-remembered things, words he hadn’t quite heard, details that hadn’t quite registered, suddenly swarmed over his consciousness. The connections proliferating, lighting up, formed a grid that fell down over his understanding like a net.”

“he was aided in some sections not so much by the syntax as by the shape of the brown stain along the right-hand margins. And then what must have been the end page actually written in blood—as if Fairchild had dipped a quill in a vein to record his fading thoughts.”

“then the car wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t, and in a sort of happy torment I ground the starter till the battery gave out and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I’d just discovered about love—that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we’ve maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions—all right, I admit they’re not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute—but they fade, they—look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fountains but dribble away into mud, and I wanted to promise you that these feelings, my lust for Melissa, my fever for the land, the timber, the money, they aren’t love. But now I was broken down and sobbing in my bullshit machine with the future lovely flowers mashed beneath my wheels because I couldn’t get to you. Now listen. Way down there’s something I long for. I don’t think for you it’s possible to comprehend how I wish for this thing, how hungry I get sometimes for this thing I can taste on the wind, when the night carries a sweet teenage music, for a whole history that can’t be mine, a tale of you and me: I’m baffled by school, I play the guitar, I work at the Texaco. I find you on your mother’s porch. You wait for me while I’m in the army. Sometimes I can feel it sliding by me like a twisted self in the house of mirrors, and I realize that’s my life, and I am the distortion. There is the world, and here is the mirror. Here the car won’t work and my father lies like granite in his bedroom and the wind scrapes against the grass and the moon goes down leaving such darkness I can’t see my way to walk, and a stranger steps toward me on the road. And the rain that left everything so wet and cold hangs out over the sea in the night miles away with its ghostly tuba and faint horns, playing for the dance of the dead.”

“I had to lose my life in order to save it.”

“sleep comes, roaring like a train. When it arrives it’s going slow, slow, and the roaring isn’t a sound anymore, but a sort of brown shadow in which you were about to find a thought…then you’re waking up. Lying in bed like a page torn in the middle of a word. Waiting for the fish to move, the fish on the wall. Waiting like a dog for the start of another broadcast day.”

“through the vandalized areas you wandered like a voice.”

“meanwhile you pressed against winona sweating, your heart a black hole. The reverberation of your touch: funeral in flames. And that motel. I bet it was a pink one. With or without the sunset a torturing pastel.”

Denis Johnson
Already dead: a california gothic