The strings were red.

They were thick threads, round, a glossy plastic.

They had no end to themselves.

You cross the room with your arms behind you, feet pointed, torso lowered and nearly parallel to the floor, or else upright and elegant, powerful and twisting, your eyes shut and your mouth smiling that smile full of joy and brightness—your body serving you in dance. It’s a wonder the light shining from inside you doesn’t blind us all. But now and then it does.

Soon another smile takes over you, one of inwardness. Yet it isn’t a smile exactly, this I realize later at other, deeper dance sessions—the face slackens, and at the same time engages all thirty-three muscles tremblingly, revealing (and reveling in) a series of grimaces, ecstasies, and moans, one after another or all at once. A mood face: intimate, open, in the midst of surrender, in the aftermath of conquest. We see the orgasmic in others but sometimes hardly in ourselves. The nakedness in a musician’s performance, for example, is so terrible and keen; even the shyest find release in their fingertips or their lips, and, whether onstage or in an empty rehearsal studio, manage to center themselves in their art—but do they see this, beyond the notes they play? Likewise, dancers expose a portion of their soul during performance; the soul has been knit and knit in preparation, only to be unraveled like ribbon when shared with others. It is good, this unraveling; it is fitting, this unfitting, a daily recurrence in dance, in emotion, in words. But do we see this in ourselves? Do we see what’s been unraveled?

I know now why we have become friends: we are witness to each other’s unravelings.

love,
wmc

That night I counted myself lucky to be considered his friend, even if the friendship was to last a mere five hours. There had been a firm beginning to our acquaintance, when we shook hands earlier in the evening and then sat down to dinner, and a clear conclusion, when we shook hands once more around two a.m., the promise to see each other again implicit in the parting word “Goodbye.”

*

“This will be the night I fool everyone,” wrote Lu Xun in his final essay. He must have known that in eleven hours’ time he would die from the tuberculosis that had plagued him for the past year, that in the following week wreaths of flowers would overwhelm both his doorstep and the capital square, that his wife would wake to the aroma of chrysanthemums for months after. This essay, found recently in a lost trunk, is testament to his foresight. “I walked through the house,” he wrote, “with my hand tracing the memory of a pleasure: above the ribs, against the breast. How extraordinary that a textured sensation as pleasure can be erased or, as in my case, more accurately, buried. I am already dead, my body informs me, yet I continue on. Writing these essays about dying must be folly, then, for ‘the end’ does not exist, given how we are constantly experiencing determinate beginnings. This is a unique debt to pleasure, for pleasure, whether visible, as a fire in the eyes, or ghostly, as a yearning inside the heart, is the accumulated circumferences of things. I find infinite value in measuring out one’s past and path mathematically; after a medical prognosis of sure death, all one can do is calculate one’s position in life’s time line. Li Ting, a colleague and sometime fortune-teller, taught me this lesson, and indulged me, before the prediction of his own death the week before, one fate: ‘This, too, is life.’ ”

*

Here’s the full line-up:

1. Christine Lee Zilka czilka.wordpress.com
2. Nova Ren Suma novaren.wordpress.com
3. wmc wmcisnowhere.wordpress.com
4. Nina LaCour ninalacour.com/blog
5. Stephanie Brown scififanatic.livejournal.com
6. Jamey Hatley jameyhatley.wordpress.com
7. Matthew Salesses matthewsalesses.com
8. Krystn Lee blog.kryslee.com
9. Bryan Bliss bryanbliss.blogspot.com

Dad is laughing at the drama they’ve rented, set in pre–Cultural Revolution China. Two scenes ago, the patriarch in the story was dying. One scene later, he died. I’m not sure when they started watching dramas from China. The picture quality is stunning—startlingly bright primary colors amid all the heads of black hair. It makes me wonder especially whether the look of the characters was re-created from posters that we’re all familiar with, the ones of rosy-cheeked young men and women wearing cloth jackets exposing only their hardiness and none of their sexuality. How is it that fabrications exist?

Mom says: “The Chinese wake up with money on their minds, yes. There’s a saying . . . well, I forget exactly what it is—but it has to do with how we wake up every day thinking of buying seven things: oil, salt, wood, rice, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. What do you think of buying when you wake up?”

“Coffee, Metrocard, entrance fee for that night’s event.”

“What about lunch? Don’t you eat?”

“Lunch, too.”

Dad laughs again at the television drama. The oldest daughter in the family is threatening the village chief in his office with a sit-in if he doesn’t compensate her for some loss. The father has been dead for a few months now, and the show’s music and color palette are now even livelier.

(Just now I’d written: “The father has been for a few months now.”)

Mom says: “Yesterday we had a fright. We were going to call you, but then the fright turned into relief—yes, we spent four hours in the emergency room, but it all worked out and there was no need to call you just then. He needed to take his medication, that was all.”

I make fun of Dad for walking like an old man. At the same time I realize how good his posture has always been. I think of two photographs of him in his swimming trunks—one with him standing in front of a snowman, another sitting with his legs crossed. His back is ramrod straight in both, and his hair is black, his chest filled out. Tonight I am unnerved by something else: fuzz above his lip. I suppose he’s always shaved, and thus never gave me the time and pleasure to study his mustache, but the truth is that we are a relatively hairless family—the men have never dealt with facial hair and chest hair, and the women have never had to shave their legs—and so seeing his upper lip unshaved, or rather spotted with patches of white, is a shock, and my toes curl from the shock, the way one feels in a moment of vertigo. This toe-curling also occurs when I see that he’s taken out his dentures. I’m resisting these signs of age.

Dad pours himself a dose of liquid Tylenol. I say, “Cheers!” He doesn’t drink for a full minute, because he is laughing too hard.

I wouldn’t say I get Barthes, but I get how to read him: with attention to Pauses, to how a sentence opens itself up with clause upon clause, like a telescope extending itself forever, or almost forever. The copy editor I’d hired for the newly translated edition of an early, seminal Barthes work has a tin ear: she cut up all the long sentences into “proper” shorter sentences: colons and semicolons were slashed to make way for commas and periods; capitalizations, demoted to Lowercase. It’s taken me three days to go through the manuscript marking “stet.” Said Howard as I listened to him shaking his head: “I stopped looking at it halfway through.”

*

My father’s heart is to be operated on next week: the continual editing of the body.

*

Tonight I stay in Flushing, and in the morning I will accompany my parents to the doctor to help them go through pre-admissions testing. Since chewing over the status of (burgeoning) Brooklynite for the past week, I haven’t had a moment to myself; but tonight, in the company of my parents, I will read a book for the fourth time: the first time had been in awe; the second, with blue pencil; the third, a pleasurable skimming; and tonight, now, a once-more now, with red pencil in hand.

Every day there is a third-person narrative of my life going through my head. There’s nothing exceptional about the narrative except for how incredibly dull it is.

Today’s example, when mulling over my dread of an appointment next week: She spends all her time dreading the next time she sees X, but when in X’s company, there is a beautiful brilliant light in the sky.

Now and then I almost hear the silent first-person narrative of somebody nearby. I pay little attention to those whose first-person narratives are set to inelegant exclamation points. That is, there are elegant ones and there are vulgar ones.

Every day she yearns for a quick affirmation from those around her. Why else would she send out something in its raw state?