for ten issues now, eye candy has been pushing up to some surface. it has been about repeating a word, the wrong name, rattling sound. the lichen, crisp, the stairs— the years—. an ancient face turning, a chest (a chest). the same girl facing herself behind her own back (the you you become in the back seat). nine placeholders for movement, melted to stick, half faced and sludging. a slow knowing, chewed at the jowls, cropped at the shoulder. bent red, bent over, waiting to turn.
as our sweet tove said, palate-ridge painful, (in just the way that i needed it): no more.
-
ten years ago, we bought a zoo (2011) was my favourite movie. it’s not good is what i keep saying: a too-long, based-on-a-true-story tear-jerker, feel good-er, about a widower (matt damon) who moves his teen son and kid daughter to the hope of a broken down zoo. when they find it, his daughter turns for a good minute, golden hour giggling, holding the sway of a feather. the whole soundtrack, composed by sigur rós’ jónsi, is burnt-at-the-top sweet. it’s not good. i watched it every week.
-
i was in the middle of something. i arrived to first period, put my hands on emj’s shoulders; she, as she always did, knew. it’s the only time i remember crying, other than the time the doctor asked. other than when i watched this terrible movie, over and over, as the light broke through the rainiest summer on record just in time for the zoo’s opening day.
-
for ten issues, for these years, for the last two of grad school especially, i have been working on what it is about criticism-or-ekphrasis. what it is about writing-toward, writing-through. to the grief ankle of a movie scene, the space between songs, what is too big to pass through the body, so it splits through a medium instead. how the writing-about sifts the grief out from Durga Chew-Bose’s close description of green. how it lifts the cheek, tilts it up, moving. still moving, even as grief threads the lock of the socket.
-
we bought a zoo is all-over-interlocked knuckles of grief — what i’m saying is, they’re not subtle. the cafe where he met his wife, the photos matt damon scrolls through on the kitchen floor, (which, as he cries, move to life with the sonic shimmers of iceland). it’s her sweatshirt, softened blue, tucked in his daughter’s bed. the aging tiger he won’t let die.
-
ten years ago, i sketched tiger faces, painted a tiger on my right ked. edited (and posted….) a selfie by overlaying a tiger’s face, half-transparent, over my own. instagram filters burned the tigers’ edges. turned tiger paper turquoise. i had forgotten about tigers completely, but each of them pulled the other, tumbling up, until i reached the standing-up memory of living.
-
i watched we bought a zoo again this april, two weeks before top surgery, a year since starting t. the build-to-arrival had piled with it the coalescence of stacked timelines: shrieking pinched my mornings, hot swell through the sides. it was me from ten years ago, pulling at my eyelids, seeing me say goodnight to the youngest, standing in the doorframe’s sliver light.
so we biked in the middle of the night to the tracks, the ghost of sakura, a coyote. the stoners who laughed at themselves for forgetting a lighter. like our first drives in high school, newly licensed, scream-singing to the orientation of elsewhere.
-
as a kid, i oriented myself by rearranging. my mom laughed each time she’d find me pushing a dresser three times my size, or, in the middle of the disarray, ordering the floor books i’d cornered into a library. facing the angels away.
i have lived in toronto almost two years now. my two years of school are over. my room, full of what was given and found, a library of this increment’s movement. a professor wondered to me why he felt emotional chairing defenses for students he had not supervised. i told him, it’s because these are measures of time. ideas three times our size: rearranged, cornered. pushed to the following wall.
-
we bought a zoo’s measure of time is twenty seconds. i had forgotten about this too, the peak of its heaving sap: matt damon saying to his son, in full sincerity, if you allow yourself twenty seconds of “insane courage,” “just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery, [...] something great will come of it.”
i am not like matt damon. i am slow. but i guess i have been practicing something of a similar conclusion, which is just that our lives are made up of choices.
-
two years ago, i had to make choices that didn’t make sense yet. i said, i have to let the tomato ripen. i said, i am standing at +2/-2, between one self two years younger and one two years older. between, first, what i knew two years prior, how that had changed, as well as the sense of what i, mole-eyed, might too not yet know. what had yet not built up enough in the throat to spit out and inspect in the sink. but i could still stage a series of pivots, slow string of pulling toward. it was never really about leaving, or school, or even transition. but choice. choice as a way of structuring life. of measuring time. my threshold for desire such that it arises only just as it touches the material of possibility.
-
at one point, the explanation for my obsession with this movie was the vaguely butch zookeeper with sour turn smile — played, if you can believe it, by scarlett johannson (as resident poser-contributor to this movie lover magazine, this was the first movie i had ever seen her in). but when i saw the son stand in the door frame, listen to his sister’s goodnight, when i heard him yell back, and mean it, his tigers, all of the choices, all of the accumulations pushed through my chest. i rubbed the centre. it was all there. it had only just become possible.
-
i have been writing this column for four years(?), ekphrasis for seven(?). as Durga Chew-Bose writes of her art writing, i’ll devise another layer to avoid what’s at stake. on writing about wanda (1970) specifically: i was writing in code about relationships. ekphrasis has been my way to write through what i love, to whom i love, but also a way to write under the closed lid of the turning tomato.
-
i know more now. i can speak with clarity. as i, as we, sit at a new nexus of twos, i think about becoming strange again. as my choices change, as they must. as i learn that values live in choice, not belief. as we turn our shoulders toward, lean more and more into, desire into possibility into the world of the shape just outside the doorway.
for ten issues now, eye candy has been pushing up to some surface. it has been about repeating a word, the wrong name, rattling sound. the lichen, crisp, the stairs— the years—. an ancient face turning, a chest (a chest). the same girl facing herself behind her own back (the you you become in the back seat). nine placeholders for movement, melted to stick, half faced and sludging. a slow knowing, chewed at the jowls, cropped at the shoulder. bent red, bent over, waiting to turn.
as our sweet tove said, palate-ridge painful, (in just the way that i needed it): no more.
-
ten years ago, we bought a zoo (2011) was my favourite movie. it’s not good is what i keep saying: a too-long, based-on-a-true-story tear-jerker, feel good-er, about a widower (matt damon) who moves his teen son and kid daughter to the hope of a broken down zoo. when they find it, his daughter turns for a good minute, golden hour giggling, holding the sway of a feather. the whole soundtrack, composed by sigur rós’ jónsi, is burnt-at-the-top sweet. it’s not good. i watched it every week.
-
i was in the middle of something. i arrived to first period, put my hands on emj’s shoulders; she, as she always did, knew. it’s the only time i remember crying, other than the time the doctor asked. other than when i watched this terrible movie, over and over, as the light broke through the rainiest summer on record just in time for the zoo’s opening day.
-
for ten issues, for these years, for the last two of grad school especially, i have been working on what it is about criticism-or-ekphrasis. what it is about writing-toward, writing-through. to the grief ankle of a movie scene, the space between songs, what is too big to pass through the body, so it splits through a medium instead. how the writing-about sifts the grief out from Durga Chew-Bose’s close description of green. how it lifts the cheek, tilts it up, moving. still moving, even as grief threads the lock of the socket.
-
we bought a zoo is all-over-interlocked knuckles of grief — what i’m saying is, they’re not subtle. the cafe where he met his wife, the photos matt damon scrolls through on the kitchen floor, (which, as he cries, move to life with the sonic shimmers of iceland). it’s her sweatshirt, softened blue, tucked in his daughter’s bed. the aging tiger he won’t let die.
-
ten years ago, i sketched tiger faces, painted a tiger on my right ked. edited (and posted….) a selfie by overlaying a tiger’s face, half-transparent, over my own. instagram filters burned the tigers’ edges. turned tiger paper turquoise. i had forgotten about tigers completely, but each of them pulled the other, tumbling up, until i reached the standing-up memory of living.
-
i watched we bought a zoo again this april, two weeks before top surgery, a year since starting t. the build-to-arrival had piled with it the coalescence of stacked timelines: shrieking pinched my mornings, hot swell through the sides. it was me from ten years ago, pulling at my eyelids, seeing me say goodnight to the youngest, standing in the doorframe’s sliver light.
so we biked in the middle of the night to the tracks, the ghost of sakura, a coyote. the stoners who laughed at themselves for forgetting a lighter. like our first drives in high school, newly licensed, scream-singing to the orientation of elsewhere.
-
as a kid, i oriented myself by rearranging. my mom laughed each time she’d find me pushing a dresser three times my size, or, in the middle of the disarray, ordering the floor books i’d cornered into a library. facing the angels away.
i have lived in toronto almost two years now. my two years of school are over. my room, full of what was given and found, a library of this increment’s movement. a professor wondered to me why he felt emotional chairing defenses for students he had not supervised. i told him, it’s because these are measures of time. ideas three times our size: rearranged, cornered. pushed to the following wall.
-
we bought a zoo’s measure of time is twenty seconds. i had forgotten about this too, the peak of its heaving sap: matt damon saying to his son, in full sincerity, if you allow yourself twenty seconds of “insane courage,” “just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery, [...] something great will come of it.”
i am not like matt damon. i am slow. but i guess i have been practicing something of a similar conclusion, which is just that our lives are made up of choices.
-
two years ago, i had to make choices that didn’t make sense yet. i said, i have to let the tomato ripen. i said, i am standing at +2/-2, between one self two years younger and one two years older. between, first, what i knew two years prior, how that had changed, as well as the sense of what i, mole-eyed, might too not yet know. what had yet not built up enough in the throat to spit out and inspect in the sink. but i could still stage a series of pivots, slow string of pulling toward. it was never really about leaving, or school, or even transition. but choice. choice as a way of structuring life. of measuring time. my threshold for desire such that it arises only just as it touches the material of possibility.
-
at one point, the explanation for my obsession with this movie was the vaguely butch zookeeper with sour turn smile — played, if you can believe it, by scarlett johannson (as resident poser-contributor to this movie lover magazine, this was the first movie i had ever seen her in). but when i saw the son stand in the door frame, listen to his sister’s goodnight, when i heard him yell back, and mean it, his tigers, all of the choices, all of the accumulations pushed through my chest. i rubbed the centre. it was all there. it had only just become possible.
-
i have been writing this column for four years(?), ekphrasis for seven(?). as Durga Chew-Bose writes of her art writing, i’ll devise another layer to avoid what’s at stake. on writing about wanda (1970) specifically: i was writing in code about relationships. ekphrasis has been my way to write through what i love, to whom i love, but also a way to write under the closed lid of the turning tomato.
-
i know more now. i can speak with clarity. as i, as we, sit at a new nexus of twos, i think about becoming strange again. as my choices change, as they must. as i learn that values live in choice, not belief. as we turn our shoulders toward, lean more and more into, desire into possibility into the world of the shape just outside the doorway.