Blogpost #4

The Silhouette of Psyche

It’s in memorizing the sounds of your vacuum in space. The darkness under the table where my thigh brushes yours. There’s comfort in the cavities on molars 2 and 31, sticky sweetness turned sugar rot. In the gold cap I want to get to protect them, your initials in ringed metal filaments. A permeance to the decomposition of love letters back to paper pulp, somewhere in Italy. Somewhere behind bars. It’s in the closeness of our eyes. Reflected in your black pupils the pale ends of my eyelashes and the ghost pipe rooted there. In the blond bits I paint black when we go out. Perhaps ghost pipe likes the saltiness of my tears the way you like the saltiness of my sweat and I like the saltiness of sea breezes that float by my childhood homes. Ours the halves made whole by alkaline air and some semblance of forgotten awkwardness when you throw your head back to laugh. The softness of your skin. Your joy at proving me wrong again, and again, and again, and so graciously. In the way you tell me you love me, a gentle glance to see if I fell asleep on your collarbone. It’s like you can’t see the frost I wash off my sternum each day. You always reach beyond and find those meadows with new green shoots and the thick scent of spring rain, always just there behind the rib cage, before the endless spinal column. How I regret sleeping then, and waking again, and being so far now. Perhaps I will never come to terms with impermanence as art.

Reflection

On me:

            Re-reading old pieces is not unlike being thrown violently into memories half buried. I fear sometimes I write with the assumption it can become singular and stripped from its context; I am always a little disappointed to look back and my fingerprints still show up in every word. I am not divorced from the work quite yet, and time is slow in numbing the raw energy of what I once poured into the writing itself. When I wrote this piece I was younger more than age, more naïve perhaps (though no less dramatic) and my boldness is startling compared to the reservation I approach writing with now.

            And I’ve missed aspects of that. The plain speech, and the forceful nature of my own personality that cannot be obscured even though I am secretive about who this story includes and how much is fiction and even what its about. Somehow through, in writing the pure emotion I captured something tangible that I fear I’ve been chasing for years since. But it is not all the jumping-off-a-cliff either, and I settle easily in the style if not the subject matter. I’ve always enjoyed the freedom of stream of consciousness writing, and the poetry that blends itself with prose and vice versa. I’ve never really been comfortable speaking to people, not without the inadequacy creeping slowly along my shoulders with its hitchhiking cold sweats and beating heart, often so loud I couldn’t hear the others if I wanted to, and I forever turn to the blank page to be my therapist, and external consciousness. It manifests itself most obviously in those who call me shy; I always laugh at that. Read anything I write and there is nothing shy there anymore.

            I couldn’t say exactly that I can always slip back to the honesty with which I wrote this piece, even though it surely deserves it. No, I am somehow set apart in that regard—the past me and the dim future still more shadow than path to follow. And it is with respect that I cleave the style from the subject with something bordering on violence. These paltry scraps I salvage can then be sewn into something else entirely, writing that is more meaning than art.

            It is with shameful vanity that I parse through an absurd amount of writing to showcase only the best for the audience of writers I know can see my finished pieces. As though I need to prove myself yet as one of them, capable of the same amount of introspection as appears natural to them. Understanding form and function and the intersection of soul, and that black temperamental cursor still mocking me from its vast empty canvas. To pay respects to the strength of an Eilidh 2 years ago, I am claiming here and now that I am a writer. Though it hurts to say (people always have better writing on the outside than when their comparison points are authors) it would be dishonest to who I am and what I love to deny it further.

On the piece:

            The first thing I noticed were the extremely odd choices of metaphor I use throughout the piece. In fact I can count about one line that was not written in the floaty, disconnected, artistic stylization that has clearly overwhelmed my voice. I don’t necessarily mind it myself, but I can’t help laughing when I imagine anyone reading this and looking for clarity of purpose or even narrative continuity.

            I did like how I included both natural imagery and human oriented imagery (e.g. salt from the sea and gold caps on teeth), I thought that was pretty effective overall in divorcing the human soul from the human condition.

            The original name for this was “St. Valentine, a Preparation” but I stole the name “Silhouette of Psyche” off another piece I wrote for this submission. Mostly because it is fun to imagine the myth of Psyche from the perspective of Eros, and because the subject matter itself actually works better (re: “how I regret sleeping then”) though some original symbolism is surely lost (re: “A permeance to the decomposition of love letters back to paper pulp, somewhere in Italy. Somewhere behind bars). I think people might be more familiar with the mythos of St. Valentine’s imprisonment though, and I am okay leaving it either lost on the reader or translated themselves.

            Using the expresso-app.org interface I ran this relatively short piece through their generator and was unsurprised to see it declared as 50% weak verbs, 38.9% simple sentences, and 50% stopwords. Though I am capable of writing with more complexity, I honestly don’t enjoy it all that much. I prefer that the words are simple and evocative I suppose, although I can easily see how an outside reader may believe this piece to be overly dramatic and lacking in substance as well.