Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

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When I think understanding matters most, I can only think of bad analogies. Are there good analogies? All covers of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” feel like a step back from or a stylization of her original’s raw emotion. As if her style is not a style and instead only lays bare. Avec Sans uses the song for bodily oomph, and Placebo makes me feel like a hot air baloon of my own drama. I listen to the original a lot in the car. In her car she played another cover, by Chromatics. She said she plays it to feel something. I suggested, attempting to understand, that the spacey, numbed inexpressiveness of the Chromatics’ cover gave her greater access to her own feelings. That wasn’t really it, but she played along with a hint of sarcasm, and said that the original is too intense. I remember her shifting gears while we talked in her car, but her car is an automatic. We have the same car, but mine is a manual. When I got in I said idiotically that the interior looks exactly the same.

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If it’s all on my face

It’s all in my mind

You don’t get to let it slide

—Róisín Murphy - Simulation

There is a photo of my brother and I that I’ve found over and over on various backups. We’re sitting on a couch, both facing the camera. My face is soft, bulbous and red, like our father’s and his is angular and bloodless, like our mother’s. I’m smiling and he’s scowling. Is my smile like our mother’s cover-up of dopeyness, or like our father’s dopey incomprehension? My face is a mask of openness, his is a posture of foreclosure. When I came across it most recently, I wanted to say that he looked how I feel. This is of course false. Only because over the years I have gotten to know what’s behind his scowl. There is only one thing to know about poison oak and before you know it, the plant looks cheerful. But you have to go with first impressions. His friends have sometimes mistaken me for him on the street. The photo makes such a mistake look improbable. Never have we looked so different, but in such a way that looking from one to the other is like turning something over. My first impression is that the photo is a key to the affective flows, the flow of affection, between him and I. At first I think that kinship is like an analogy. Then the photo is just two appearances, or two expressions, not especially related or exemplary.

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The almond blossoms are falling petal by petal into the gutter, spiky clumps of green leaves are poking through, and it feels like a late commentary on Valentine’s day. Last week, a coworker qualified her praise of the cherry blossoms by saying it’s a girly thing to notice. Therefore I overstated my love for the flowers of this time of year, and this in turn led her, as if she were this week’s storm washing the first February petals down the gutters, to the topic of the cottonwood cottons that in summer clog the air and everything else. She spoke as if the cottons were a consequence of the flowers. Effusions of pink flowers could not be qualified enough, perhaps because they last for such a short time, and their beauty can’t be counted upon. At the time I was reading The Name of the Rose, in which a Catholic monk writes of “the female body, that great sink of the sins of the flesh.” Our conversation seemed not that far from the monks’ tremulous, witch-burning notion of women, or at least equally troubled by the pleasures of the senses. There could be no statement where the season’s flowers were concerned, only overstatement and qualification, excess and austerity.

Are we offended by words, or by what words reveal about minds, like the still-wriggling tendrils of Sannakji? But there are no minds. I think that the brain, with all those thinking wrinkles, is a poor metaphor for what it does. The digestive tract has wrinkles but it has an input and an output. Digestion is more cybernetic than the brain. People are out walking their horrible dogs. No, they are horrible. At other times they are not horrible, years ago or on occasion. “I know it’s your passion, but is it profitable?” “I have to believe that it is, otherwise it’s too discouraging.” Sometimes people carry the output of their horrible dogs, in a bag between two fingers. In any case, digestion is a better metaphor for the horrible things people say. Everyone farts, but some fart more than others, and farts come in a wide variety of smells, still nonetheless similar. It is culturally prevalent to defecate in private. The movements of a creature of language come at a different rhythm. Thinking the unspeakable can go on for months. It moves in my journal, at a party, talking to myself, in a passing remark to a stranger, etc. This is where digestion is instructive: Shit can not be reabsorbed. The unspeakable is unspeakable until it isn’t. Sometimes it remains unspeakable until death but meanwhile it bends you. Anyway, shit in itself is not interesting. Its qualities tell you everything: What you ate, how well you digested it, if you are ill, etc. It is meaningless to say “everybody speaks” without also saying something about the threads running through their words. And here we are back to more tangled metaphors. From the first invertebrate with a tube running through it, a body has always been simple; food chains have never been simple. No. Bodies cannot be known fully, which is their great generosity; food chains are knowable and can be tracked and analyzed. No.