The Reckoning Room

Belladonna Blur Note.

2011-02-15T23:44:00.000-05:00

I am sitting at my desk, smoking a cigarette purchased for fifty cents at a bodega near my apartment, here in Brooklyn. My cat is pressed against the back of my computer screen, he is watching my fingers as I type. I misspell everything, I misspell everything because as a child I was unable negotiate my exterior experience with my internal one. In fact I don't even remember learning how to spell, or having the slightest fascination with words or reading. In my memory of this time I see my body as a kind of blankness, a blankness I crossed in the fourth grade when my limbs began to articulate, create a border, educate. Accounting for this sudden vividness remains mysterious to me.

I am more blur than body.

This occurred to me tonight while watching a performance on the bodies as words, or should I say expression, as text starts with a gesture, a reach towards an external mode of existence, meaning, no a mirror, something to see yourself in, something that says you are and did you are you did, you: a crayon on the page, trying. Burnt Sienna. A sun breaking white. I want to write that I was born this way, but Gaga ruined that last Friday. I'd like to die this way too.

Right now

2011-01-11T06:03:00.000-05:00

I have been up all night, I am awake.

This Morning

2010-11-21T11:19:00.004-05:00

I woke up this morning with my head at the foot of my bed, India Song was playing somewhere in the unmeasurable moment before the eyes open and remember.

Is is possible to shift this much in the night without dreaming?

Something stirs in me, it is the feeling one gets watching a fly die on a windowsill, an unexpected pity for the nuisance body bouncing against the pane, indifferent to its useless wings and the audience their death locates. If you listen, you can hear them now, buzzing against the white electricity of this page, soon they will stop.

The last time I heard something similar to this I moved from Colorado to Rhode Island to New York in order to learn more about writing at The New School. I think of this time in my life as a kind of apprenticeship, and having now passed thought it, I feel incredibly restless. This is a trait I acquired from my parents. Growing up, every transition was marked by dislocation, perhaps marked is the wrong word, maybe I mean understood. Still, there is a physicality lacking in my explanation here that feels pertinent.

Pick up the book you are reading and turn the page, no, tear it out, eat it, swallow the blankness. Keep reading.

I'm going to lite another cigarette, do you mind? I have picked up the habit again under the duress of the past few weeks. Perhaps you will smoke with me. I always liked the way I looked smoking. I am also going to make some coffee, if you like, you can come with me, down the hall to the kitchen I share with the two other people that live on my floor. Notice the smell of cheap incense coming from my neighbor's apartment. I don't care for it either, it does not suit my cigarette. Ours.

A chapbook I wrote nine months ago was published last week. If you like, you may purchase it here:

http://www.thecorrespondingsociety.com/order

I recommend reading it whilst balancing a coffee in your lap on the subway. If you do not use a subway, read it in a car or as walk down the street to a cafe or a friend's house. Read it after you have left something, and have yet to arrive.

There was

2010-06-16T00:19:00.004-04:00

Dear Reader,

I invite you to be a part of a project I am working on. This project involves wearing a birdcage and answering one question. This project involves you. If you would like to be a part of this, email me at rdmay@yahoo.com

Yours,

Ryan Doyle May

THE KITCHEN OF THE FUTURE IS CALLING ME

2010-06-11T13:35:00.007-04:00

Ryan: the kitchen of tomorrow is calling me

Lonely: you are bound to offend some of your more PC Facebook friends with all this...

Ryan: I am in the habit of doing that, and I don't care...for I have had an epiphany while you were away, actually right before you went away

Lonely: do tell

Ryan: not here, and maybe never, but there is one thing I would like your help with

Lonely: yes?

Ryan: I may have told you, as I have told many, but I will need your help the afternoon of the 18th for I am painting a wall!

Lonely: oh my!

Ryan: yes!

Lonely: it's downright unChristian

Ryan: I am turning my room into a door from Israel (in fact, many doors) so that I might dream better, and find the courage for an impending project.

Lonely: impending project?

Ryan: oh yes, I have an impending project, verging.

Lonely: you must tell me your projects and epiphanies I will ply you with drink

Ryan: I have quit drinking and I am joining the priesthood!

Lonely: they don't let boys be housewives in the priesthood

Ryan: but the kitchen of tomorrow is calling me!

Lonely: I know, sweetheart

Then it's almost dawn. Then there's a dark light in the room, of indeterminate hue.

2010-04-24T19:58:00.007-04:00

"The young woman's departure isn't seen. There should be a blackout when she disappears, and when the lights come up again there is nothing left but the white sheets in the middle of the stage and the sound of the sea surging in through the black door. No music." -M.Duras

I could leave. this way. you. don't.

tearing from Buzzeo, Turco, Kapil, Sikelianos, Lasky, and Natahlie Stephens

2010-04-20T22:20:00.009-04:00

When I was younger, I would pile my books in bed with me. I did this then and I am doing this now, but I am doing this now for different reasons. I am doing this now in order to delineate a trajectory, my trajectory.

Reach for me.

There are parts of my body that have never been touched. In reverse things are missed. In reverse things are fallen. I want a forward trajectory. "I will I swear I will" walk and I am walking, just as I walked when I was younger, with other people's sentences, a kind of conversation, orchestrated here, in my bed. I am writing where I dream.

I used to do this when I was feeling lonely. The awareness of a non-existent thing. The readiness with which. I would pull text from my books and mix them with my own. It is to know collapse. Everything can collapse. If you wanted to, you could trace each sentence back to it's source. I am making you a map. Night again/taking the knots out of rain. I am letting someone else answer.

I am doing this now for different reasons. I talk to my little monster. I am trying to surface. At the sight of death/constant wailing. It occurred to me tonight that I am changing. A voice that is not patterned that is playful in pieces. And facilitating this change is painful. As I turn the page something that falls something that's filtered. So I am turning to something that has already been written. The minus things. They are not what comes back. And letting it write.

Tomorrow Morning

2010-04-05T11:19:00.002-04:00

I am leaving.

On the eve of travel I am already out the door.

Monday Gray

2010-03-29T12:22:00.021-04:00

or rather, out of Gray, as I have been busy with new writing, and now that I am writing, new, I find myself abandoning things that feel old, like this blog, and my cat.

In other news, if you have nothing to do tonight or tomorrow night, I encourage you to find the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook. Arrive at eight pm, and for mere change you will have the opportunity to inhabit three different architectures for desire, which in many ways, is the architecture of dream.

In one dream, myth floods into the poetic and spills, it spills out of a refusal to be contained by the definitions engendered by its traditional telling. Because of this spill, a kind of revision occurs that queers the pathos of Selene and Endymion. This is not a re-imagining, This is a re-emerging. (Imagine a tin moon and a table, imagine bodega roses, imagine a boy and an Oscar Wilde of a man licking poems off each others' faces, now swallow.)

In addition to this, there is language red with castration, a singing succubus, and frames of dislocation, dislocation in the form of a constant window, a window that inverses while you are watching it, if you are lucky you will see yourself looking out from it, you will see yourself, and then you will be gone.

http://www.jalopy.biz/performance_show.php?eventid=1030&hpglnk=y

In the meantime.

2010-02-16T12:42:00.005-05:00

I am writing to you, a dull blur, finger penning. I am emerging from the long shadow of a weekend that found me in a new apartment, an apartment without heat or hot water.

I am built for translocation. I have been moving once year, every year, for the past five years. With each move, I abandon more of my belongings, things I’ve taken from the street, chairs, tables, art, etc. I take them, and I give them back.

What is a home? More importantly, what is a home to you? What happens when that definition destabilizes? Do you believe your definitions?

The shape of truth is a tear.

I know that the word home, in and of itself is loaded. I am not as interested in its semiotics. I am interested its malleable architecture, the way we rebuild our definition of it, or don’t.

Who were you before I made definition a home?

Disambiguate.

When I think home, I think of a body, for the sake of this word spill, my body. My body is a clean head of hair in a friend’s shower, hips in a lover’s bed, a chest layered in what seems like hundreds of sweaters in a room that is not a room, but an ice box. I am building myself everywhere, gone.

writing (re) visiting (re) everything

2010-01-27T08:59:00.014-05:00

I have spent the past five months working on a chapbook, a chapbook that is now finished. The distance I've collected since I've written its last line acts as a kind of blankness. A blankness I am filling now with you.

I have have just started a new project, though calling it new is a bit misleading, as it is anything but new. It is a short story I wrote many years ago, one that I was asked to read this Friday for a reading series called Brother, my Lover. I wrote this story and rewrote this story throughout my undergraduate years. I think of this time period as one of apprenticeship, a training in the alchemy of language. This story, in many ways, is the sum of previous existence, a length of words to measure myself against. I want to dismantle this structure, I want to tear into its long shadow and wrap myself in it like a chrysalis.

It occurs to me that I am referring to a writing strategy that uses inversion as a mode of being, a reversal of relative positions, two bodies turning each other inside out in order to see themselves differently, in order to create a blankness that makes new writing possible. Perhaps part of my evolution as a writer is dependent on the constant return to former fictions, abandoned fictions, fictions that I can now reassemble and make a Frankenstein with.

I am writing to you about infusion, a seeding of a former self. This type of intimacy preludes a particular kind of birth.

A birth (re) writing (re) remembering (re) everything (re) blur an edge, one that you sewed into your vision of a sustainable language. Dismember it. Take the ink of your mouth and blacken the air, make a hole in the horizon large enough to fit into. It is a kind of womb. I want to curl my limbs inside it. I want to stay there until the sky aborts me.

I do not want a natural birth.

An Invisible Corset

2009-09-17T13:11:00.009-04:00

I invite you to sip coffee with me at my desk. I am dressed as gray as the day. I have discovered a kind of algorithm that makes writing possible at work. Sometimes, after being interrupted by a phone call, I return to my fiction and find something I don't remember writing. Most of the chapbook I've been working on is written this way, a kind of re-remembering, a constant reach towards an abbreviated memory, like feeling the shape of a word you've just forgotten inside your mouth. This is a haunting. How are you haunted?

Speaking of haunting, find my friends Marissa Ayala and Catherine Borders online literary magazine called Omnia Vanitas it is a space for New Narrative and Écriture Féminine. It is a journal exploring the architecture of eroticism. Their first issue is called The Invisible Corset and shoul go live any day now. Until then.

Pre-Fall Outline

2009-09-03T09:35:00.006-04:00

Take the skin from my lips and bury it.

This is my favorite time of year, the pre-fall. I built a house within the boundary of a dying season.

Ask me what a border is.

"A Border is mainly and first of all a word that can be used in all
directions—painful and essential, beautiful or disastrous, sane or
hysterical. I admit to borders in my works, natural borders: the sea […],
structural borders like house, hoop, container. I expose them, question them
and embroider roots of invisible borders, […] Borders are our definitions…
while helpful in retrospect—in hunting: memory, frustration, trespassing,
seduction, violence, beauty, politics and religion… In a way—borders are the
"skin" of places and also a [rough] skin to most ideas."
—Sigalit Landau, studio note (2009). Accompanying Barbed Hula (2001)

*Thank you Maggie*

When I crossed the border it stuck to my body. When that sentence came to me while writing I wasn't sure what it meant. I had to figure it out through context. I write my way into answers. Please point my to the bathroom. When language fails you communicate through gestures. Language has always been married to the body.

And just like that, I have forgotten what I wanted to write here today.

I think of this as the pre-writing before my real writing. This is distorted thinking.

This morning I went back to an abandoned notebook, one I stopped writing in because it was too heavy to carry around with me. I like large thick notebooks, hard cover, off-white porous paper. I found that is really wasn't as heavy as I thought.

2009-08-06T16:21:00.015-04:00

How do I swell the absence I left here?

I could write about my trip to Israel, about the shootings there. I could write about my boyfriend waiting for me in Tel Aviv, or the discrimination I experienced in customs when I admitted I had left my country to visit him.

But I do not write about these things right now. I'd rather stay buried there. Sometimes my stories hide inside.

As I wrote that I was holding my breath.
Now I am breathing.

I have been working on a project that will be finished this fall. This fiction has accumulated a particular gravity on my face. Despite this anchor, I will be finished with it this fall. In the meantime, What is your first memory?

Leaving

2009-07-15T10:30:00.010-04:00

Morning Filament

I find writing at length in one sitting is impossible. I have always had to leave in order to know where I've been, leave and come back again.

I had to get off the subway early this morning and walk to work. On my way, I passed the Metronome's smoking magician hand. I saw a boy lit like a memory of my first boyfriend, and tasted skin in my mouth. Memory locates the way ghost do, a kind of haunting, like the prints of furnature in the carpet of an empty house.

Today, I am leaving the country, feeling something like paint dragged off the edge of canvas, border thinning.

I have been awake for approximately 3 hours, and waking still.

Sense Making

2009-06-25T17:46:00.010-04:00

I feel like a dog let in from his evening pee, an emptied thing a bone suffices. I am curling my body in the corner, inverting my under shape. If you think closely you will see me there beside you, as still as a stone.

I was sitting in Union Square when she noticed me. she said I looked like the kind of person that could sleep with his eyes open, I told her she was right. She said the wood from Noah's arc is piled in her apartment, that she had been cloned once, that God chooses who to shine his white lights on and lets the others rot. She said my name was Donnie. I told her she was wrong, she didn't seem to notice.

I thought about filming her with my phone, recording the thoughts her mind chased away, a kind of eating. Recording the crude curve of the eyebrows drawn across her brow, her wooden rosary. Through the space where her bottom teeth used to be she sang to me. She asked if I was depressed and I offered her a cigarette.

This is nothing more than a noticing. A reach to make order of my day. A collection of sentences the computer rests on the page, rendering them even and straight, a kind of sense making.

From a Blue Day

2009-06-17T20:57:00.009-04:00

I want to write a delicate word
something to rest my name on without breaking it.
It occurs to me that I am writing about refuge.
I am seeking a line that matches the curve of my spine, supine.
On this blue day I am disturbing the still with my toe, rippling.

I am re-figuring, my breath rising like smoke from the ashtray.
I am as raw as a newborn bird
opening its terrible mouth.
I am fed and fed and fed again.

Sunday Notes

2009-05-24T22:35:00.000-04:00

I am writing to you about something grown out of, or from.

The measure of your toe against my wet print.
A reach that happens when extension is impossible

Today,

skin stopped being skin, and turned
a kind of dishrag
Something hands dry on
and hang from the refrigerator door

I am handle held
bending the way a tongue bends

tasting itself.

I realize I am revealing a kind of encounter to you, reader.

Right now, there are two lighters in my pocket
mine and his
this happens when you forget what you are carrying

I am taking his fire and my own

and writing beneath their light.

Writing to you.

Towards the White City in no particular order.

2009-04-28T20:52:00.000-04:00

I once had a dream I was dancing in front of an identical version of me, a doppelganger. There was a tornado in the distance behind the other me. I have dreamed of tornadoes since I was a child, decided they might mean something.

There are over 100 cases of swine flu in New York, the virus is mutating, reorganizing itself upon transmission, decoding.

Imagine turning into something like a bird human swine. How will you make love?

Answer this for yourself in one word.

From my window I see a man walking around in red underwear. A warm breeze is pushing my bangs.

I am thinking about a Belly Dancer I met many years ago in France. I can't recall her name, but I remember she ate whole tomatoes to calm her stomach before traveling.

Together we saw two of the most beautiful people I have ever seen in my life kissing by the subway. We went back to our hostel and changed into clothes that would blow in the wind.

I think we were trying to replicated something we felt inside our bodies, a stirring.

When I leave, I adapt my structure to my surroundings, even if that adaptation has no visual origin. It is a kind of hyperreality, a cellular recognition/mutation.

I am fading all around me.

I am spending a frame of my summer in Tel Aviv, they call it the White City. I will wear red for the burning.

Lazarus, you warm momma

2009-04-25T19:11:00.002-04:00

I spent the entire day in my apartment writing my thesis, extracting.

I am writing to you because I have been alone all day. When I feel this way I often take sentences from my favorite novel and mix them with my own.

It feels like touching.

If this was a window you could look out of, you would see my bare feet on a white coffee table next to plate of spaghetti and calamari.

Illuminating this is a candle I lit for Saint Lazarus, a candle as yellow as curry. I am reaching for Abraham's bosom, writing towards Sheol.

I lit this candle because I have been thick in writing, barely moving, a kind of still pull, and decided I need to except this feeling of creative poverty, thin it out.

In four weeks I graduate from The New School with an MFA in Creative Writing. I am not quite sure what to expect on the other side of this. I have been in college for almost eight years and feel like I am confronting something as blank as a plate.

I am moving now, I have been inside all day, my body forgot.

How do you approach/cross blankness?

I sitting on my fire escape drinking whiskey from a mug. I have written to you from here before. We are sharing a familiar space, a half imagined space.

What would you tell me if I whispered in your ear, this is it?

2009-04-13T23:06:00.000-04:00

Alright, a shade in between/Busy as a bee.

Right now a man from Israel is in my shower. I am listening to the water change sound on his body.

This is an imagined shape.

I haven't seen him in a week, and in that time the way we define distance has changed.

So, I have been working on a Manifesto about Hyperrealism and Narrative. This exploration has led to some very interesting thoughts about Disney Land and Watergate. Wait, they are not my thoughts, exsclusivly at least, they are Jean Baudrllard's.
I will be sure to blog a bit more about this soon. In the meantime, what is a boundary?

November in the dark. I ate the bear.

2009-03-26T08:52:00.000-04:00

I am looking over your shoulder and writing a story in your book.

I whispered this to a stranger on the subway this morning. He was plugged into an ipod and reading. I doubt he heard me. If he did, he pretended not to notice. Every morning on the L train, I memorize sentences I happen upon in other people's books, and write them in my notebook. I do not know which one of us encounters a given sentence first. I like to think we encounter them together/a kind touching.

I started a new notebook.

A thin notebook, one built for mobility. For three years I have written strictly in thick hardcover notebooks that I found at a used bookstore in Boulder Colorado. For the last year and a half, I had them shipped to me here in New York. These notebooks are particular. Their cream colored pages are perfect for writing outdoors in the in sun without being blinded by white. They also absorb fountain ink superbly. Letters do not bleed. (Did you know that when you write with a fountain pen it learns your handwriting? So much so, that when someone else tries to write with it they can't, the loyal friend refuses them.) I used to imagine being surrounded by shelves of these notebooks as an elderly man, a tidy archive/measures of me.

But I changed my mind. I do not want familiarity anymore. I want something as raw as a newborn bird. Unsuitable architectures/a kind of hatching. How do you go raw again? I need different pages to write on. Sometimes the only way to know where you've been is to leave. Like unpacking your suitcase after a long journey and feeling like all the empty clothes spread out on your bed are skins you grew out of. Something nameless becomes tangible in that moment. The moment you realize that you left before you thought you did.

I am sitting at my cubicle. There is a pile of work waiting to fill Friday. In front of me hangs a postcard I sent to myself, Cezanne's, The Bather. He is looking down at his feet, watching them almost go.

From a Fire Escape

2009-03-15T20:40:00.000-04:00

I am writing to you from my fire escape. There are a little over a dozen windows illuminated on the apartment building in front of me. In one of them, a woman is pushing something down onto her kitchen counter. Or is she cutting something? She is on the phone now. From the time it took me to record her last gesture she has transitioned into another. The phone is stuck between her shoulder and her cheek and she is fixing her hair. Perhaps it is what she would do if the person she is talking to could watch. Wait, I did not come out here to write about her. I was going to write about the Poetry Brothel and my new cat, but I am bored with memory, so I will write about transitions.

On my living room floor there is a book on color and healing, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lorca's plays, and Charles Dickens' working notes for his novels. They are my roommate's books. I pulled them from the shelf randomly. I have finished a short story and it is time to return to a larger fiction, an incomplete fiction, and needed advice on what to do next. I opened each book and recorded the first line I read into my notebook. They are as follows:

"People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist."

"SYLVIA:

My madness goes deep, deep as a lake
You see there. (Anguished) Where is the water
Whose sweetness can quench my restless thirst?"

"Blue is the spirit of truth and the higher order of intelligence. The head and heart speak directly through the blue throat."

"Tom - all - Alone's

The Ruined House

(something marked out)

That got into chancery

And never got out."

then I opened.

Deranged Typography

2009-03-11T10:01:00.001-04:00

"With hello, of course," Lauren Hunter said, when I asked her how to start a blog.

I should not have written that she said that. She thought it most likely, then her fingers, like a trained dog, typed what her mind heard. My computer mirrored it in a gchat square. The communication square is arranged in the top right corner of my desktop, so that it does not interfere with the typeface of the larger square beneath it. Because I am at work, this particular square, showing the status of a woman's application to The New School's MFA program in Photography, must take up the majority of the space allowed by my computer screen. If I were to close this, a photograph of Frank O'Hara's head leaning against some unseen wall replicates horizontally across my screen, his monotony is comforting.

I am seeking a literal translation. I am writing over these shapes and softening them with words. If you are reading this, and you are, there is a kind of reach that is happening that names the space between us. I am writing towards this space, I am extending.