Harnett-Hargrove

Entr'acte / the Meta      

12th-2/9 entries for annual ROM / muse - any quote by fernando pessoa / jahh 

Sacrifice feels like you’re winding up to do. + the slaughter is not the end unto itself. There are reactions of what you want to happen, + when you want something bad enough you can talk yourself into needing it. What remains is the longing for things that didn’t happen. 

It is more difficult to make a beautiful painting interesting than to make an interesting painting beautiful. Someone needs to not only understand this, but put it into practice — then, please, explain it to me. i think Pessoa could have. When he said you or they, he meant himself. + when he said himself, he still meant himself.  His switchbacks + sideways created authors unto themselves. You are excused from being my idea of you. i seem to channel him on my blank writing days. i simply cut + paste everything i think into saying, because that really is as non-sequential as i feel. 

It becomes the winding up to say something unique, + after a launch from the tongue + now almost landed onto paper — the phone bleep-bleeps because i’ve forgotten to switch it to airplane mode. Then it becomes a chase back to the idea. The time lost has severed the thread. Finding even one word to get back on the track is impossible w/ every lost moment. What is that lost time called?  Were does it go? There must be a word somewhere that simplifies this feeling of difference between unfurling + unraveling. What ever that word is, Proust must have been the inventor.

i awake excited about the day + end exhausted from it. +, somewhere in between i visit the central gardens at a distance of 6 feet. i absorb details surrounding me. Sort of like superman hearing everything yet waiting to hear the one thing that piques his interest. i land on a pair of converse shoes w/ laces tied together, apparently granny thrown to sail up + whip wrap around the electric line going from the street to the park privy. (EW! Helen! A public bathroom!) That’s not all i see. Focusing on these keds, i make out the structure of the shoes gently swinging above me. The black cotton canvas, + the work involved in making it. The fertile land in Egypt where the raw materials were grown, the sweating backs of the laborers, their homes, their families setting the table for the evening meal. i see the manufacturers in distant regions, the machines, the dyers coloring the threads + weaving the tough cloth, the seamstresses,  who cut the individual pieces, stitch them up, the shaping of the iconic stamped rubber toe + converse decal,  lacing of the shoe laces + mashing of the plastic end tips so they will not fray. The schleps that brought the pieces here + there + those truckers that connected the dots to make the product displayed above me. Beyond them i see their thoughts + hopes for their lives + their days + their next moments. The domestic lives each play out as their realities unfold before my eyes. All these hours, all these lives dedicated to the building of a pair of shoes someone has casually thrown up on wires. i become dense smoke + feel myself shrinking + implode in my seat. i’ve traveled 30 years + 3000 miles w/out out leaving my bench. i leave the park exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a multitude of lives.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself. -Fernando Pessoa

It is what has happened in the shadows that will remain w/ me forever.