Life from Decay

I've been having trouble maintaining clarity of mind lately. It's been honestly quite pleasant.
Back to work.

In order to justify running a blog,  I guess I have to eventually post in it every once in a while. I've recently been exploring my own unpolished, untrained thoughts in the form of poetry, or at least mimicry. Unfortunately, there really aren't a whole lot of references I can make to the Great Poets of Our Time, because frankly I just don't know them very well. Maybe I've come across a handful in the occasional English textbook, but these have been relatively infrequent. My contemporaries are my inspiration more than anything else. This may or may not be healthy. I'd be a pretty poor judge of that.

So I paid some attention when Billy Collins was mentioned on campus. Apparently he was the United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, and the New York Laureate for some time after that. I have no idea what this means, but it's impressive to me that someone could make a living off of poetry. He'll be giving a presentation next Wednesday, and so I picked up his book Horoscopes for the Dead. It's incredible. I will be there. And I'll bring all my friends, relatives, and oxford commas that are into this sort of thing.


On the subject of inspiration, I've been looking up to a few new faces to feel my own thoughts. I'm not looking so much for the sense of "Yes...I've been there, I know this..." anymore. These are new thoughts, new emotions. They are difficult and weird.

First name on my list is David Foster Wallace. This one came about in an unconventional fashion. I was having an impromptu conversation with a man that I never saw again*. He claimed to have just given up his addiction to hallucinogenic drugs last summer. His coping mechanism to control relapse was to read up to 3-5 books a week since. When I told him how legitimately interested I actually was, David Foster Wallace was on the top of his recommendation list. Apparently this particular author made the biggest impression on his desperate mind. Almost 1/5th into Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, I'm beginning to get discouraged with his writing style. It's also likely the longest book I've ever picked up. Wallace has a certain intentional lack of appeal that I've never seen an author use so generously. I realize it's probably just masterfully written, because the emotional distance he places between me and his characters is...effective. His strange vision of post-consumer depression is doing it's job on my attention span, but I'll push through if for nothing but the experience itself.

Of course, Billy Collins. It's hard to really say I've been taking influence from him already, but I am definitely inspired by his style as well. This one isn't so mentally challenging, but it is complex. I guess I might call it a very 'masculine' style of writing, in that all the emotion, no matter how powerful/subtle/deep is implied instead of addressed. He writes about his thoughts, his actions, and his experiences, but never emotions. This are the most powerful part of his poetry, because you literally have to fill it in with your own exact representation of what he's feeling. You fill in his little boxes with yourself. And then he has you completely captivated.

There's another name on my list tonight. Been up there for weeks now, actually. I doubt I would have initiated this blog without her indirect influence...but I'll get back to that later.
(Hi there)

Also, as far as visual arts projects are concerned, I've decided to pick up where the artist Casey Murphy left off.
Amateur taxidermy.

You see, Casey Murphy was an artistic fellow who occupied the halls of my college right before I came in. He was a big contributor to the magazine I'm working with now, and some of his art was a bit...controversial. For example, he had a piece titled The Sounds of Nature that seemed to set a good amount of people off. It was a photography piece, showing a good sized stereo speaker on a wooden table. Crucified to the speaker was a squirrel with it's midsection split open and it's various organs spilling out onto the table before it. It looked like there was an input/output jack fed into his intestines. That would explain the title, anyway. As strange as this piece was, I know for a fact it was art like this that must have caught my eye at some point during my first semester at the college, and thus it was art like his that caused me to join the magazine team in the first place. So I've had a thought in the back of my head that I might someday to a tribute piece for him.

It came to me during a contemplative walk; I found him in a woodchip garden by the sidewalk. He was posed in a perfect dive; his wings folded against his back in the most natural, flawless curve, as if he had sustained this free fall for miles before the ground found him. His head was bent back in grimace, in the experience of pain that inevitably took his life, but at a closer inspection, it was seemingly cocked in some sort of final defiance as well. His little muscles were tense, easily seen as a flex of whatever authority this creature could muster, as if his death was his first and only act of rebellion and he wanted to savor (or at least experience) every millisecond of it. I found him upside down in this agony/pride, his rigor mortis forever preserving his emotion.

So in classic Casey Murphy fashion, I put him in my freezer in a brown paper bag.
 I think I'll call him Testa.

*...yet.