melanie jane parker

Photo

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:01:50 -0400

excerpt from Hermitage

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:01:42 -0500

I thought it was appropriate to be reading about Smithson’s sites/non-sites in a place that is all too full of American history, that still has sand on the floor of a small, crouched building once used to house slave families. And now the farm is used to grow feed grains, which livestock can’t actually digest or assimilate properly, but damn does it make a burger. Earlier that day I had accidentally watched a fly die while I sat on the toilet, peeing. I flipped its body over to see if it could get going, but it did not. It feels funny to cycle into a new phase—constructed or not—in a place that does not belong to you, like sometimes I feel (not without anxiety) as though my home (just an apartment) could really use all the sentimental but meaningful Big Day energy I can give it. But a change is a change is a beginning and an ending, and the radical thing to do is to let that happen anywhere. All the holy sites/non-sites were anywhere once—the Ganges, Jerusalem, Mecca. I’ve always thought this end point on a dune jutting into the Long Island Sound felt like heaven, but my father recently told me it was man-made. Somehow it was used to draw the water from the harbor. For the boats. Industry versus tide. Like how consumer holidays are more recognized than equinoxes and solstices. I’ve been using the word “auspicious” when it feels appropriate, which I find is more and more often.

Photo

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:59:26 -0500

beginner's mind

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 10:24:00 -0400

There are perhaps three kinds of creation. The first is to be aware of ourselves after we finish zazen. When we sit we are nothing, we do not even realize what we are; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! That is the first step in creation. When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once. When we emerge from nothing, when everything emerges from nothing, we see it all as a fresh new creation. This is nonattachment.

The second kind of creation is when you act, or produce or prepare something like food or tea.

The third kind is to create something within yourself, such as education, or culture, or art, or some system for our society. So there are three kinds of creation. But if you forget the first, the most important one, the other two will be like children who have lost their parents.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Photo

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:23:16 -0400

Photo

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:42:20 -0400

winter kill

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:36:00 -0400

We hit the deer going thirty miles per hour. It was snowing, we were being cautious. The deer was the reckless party. There were four of us in the car and we spilled out into the night seconds after the collision, staying near to the ground in case anything had happened to our bones or nerves or equilibrium. I say ‘our’ because everything becomes collective on a long journey. Our eating, sleeping, pissing. All together.

The driver was my friend. The other two were friends of my friend. The man who stopped to help us, he had nine fingers. A beard. A voice like a shovel hitting wet sediment. He helped us drag the deer to the side of the road. When I say helped I mean he did it while we observed. We were one woman and three men, watching the stranger’s breath plume around his beard. The body, the beard, the exhalation. It was cold and dark and we told the man he could keep it, and he laughed and shook his head. You’ll be taking care of this one, he said, as though he’d take care of the next thing we killed. What you’ve got to do, he said, is skin it. Cut off the head, the hooves. Carve up the meat. Put it in bags. You’ll eat for a year.

But sir, I said, we don’t know how to do any of that. I’ve never skinned a thing! Never severed a head. Never carved up anything larger than a piece of chicken breast. This is all wrong, I said. We’re going somewhere we’ve never gone. We couldn’t see, the visibility was weak, the deer — the deer was the reckless party. It wanted to die like this. Let’s leave it here. For other animals. Let’s leave it, let it turn from warm to cold. But the man was standing nearer now and he was explaining that the law clearly stated that it was our mess to tidy. Not the county’s. The deer couldn’t go on lying there, it had to be moved. It belonged to us now. I was mad at the driver, my friend. The other two passengers, they didn’t seem to mind. One of them raised ducks for slaughter in his backyard. The other had watched movies about hunting.

The forest that ran the length of this road was swelling with unfathomable darkness and my head felt cramped. I looked at the deer’s dark eyes, and then I looked at the man leaning on his truck. He was looking at the deer’s dark eyes, too, but they were turned towards me. I watched his breath, like a second full yet fleeting beard. This configuration of gazes: the dead, the panicked, the obscenely serene. This triangle of nowhere.

You might think the reflection of the flash is obscuring...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:16:00 -0500

You might think the reflection of the flash is obscuring something. It isn’t.

We are not the dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:23:00 -0500

We are not the dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

Slavoj Zizek

the three registers

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:55:00 -0500

We came in wanting. Wanting! Milk and warmth. Pale light and oceanic sound. It’s what got us to talking. We murmured our want, screamed it. Moved towards it, grasping. This is how we began to perceive distances. The far-away. That which is not in our own hands. Every twitch of the eyelid in the act of looking, gesturing around emptiness. We came in with austere bodies aching for abundance. You rambled on all fours in the backyard, doe-eyed and moist, a small traveler. On the path of ordinary lust. This means you are real. This means you are damned. Even the timid cannot go their entire lives without shouting and writhing from the force of it. One day you’ll look for another to pour your want into, and this will be more painful than you or I can imagine. But it will happen. Not once, not twice. But again and again, until all of the world escapes from your lungs.

essay

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:58:00 -0500

Excerpted introduction to “The Body of (Dis)content: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Study of Murder & the Mother-Body in Medea,” one part of a dual thesis project entitled “The Book is a Body, the Palm the Page.”

To utter the name Medea is to evoke images like those printed on tarot cards: a woman collapsed in despair; a woman rigid with fury; a mother quiet with contemplation; a mother clutching the bloodied bodies of her children. Contemporary readers might render ancient Medea as a tabloid monster or the archetypal betrayed housewife. Despite any temporal framework, Medea was and is woman and mother, contained in a body, a body drawn and quartered by language.

One comes to know Medea through the page and through performance. She is a textual being and yet was created in order to be embodied by others, cast and recast over time. Much like a flesh and blood woman, her image shifts according to fluctuations in the words used to describe her.

Medea’s tragedy is to be both read and performed. In the act of reading a literary work, the page is vulnerable. For all of its words, it cannot speak back. As one watches a play, the fourth wall serves as barrier. A member of the audience may object to the director’s interpretation but is nevertheless restricted to her role as silent viewer. The actors, meanwhile, replay a drama for perhaps the ten thousandth time, and it is in this repetition that generations of audiences are implicated in a linguistic, literary, social history. Repetition constructs, it aids and abets the survival of certain beliefs, assumptions, habits, and laws; to read and interpret Medea is to commit a repetition. What justifies this reiterated investigation is the not-knowing. What seems to be and what actually is are two different things, and so there is always room for rediscovery.

My particular reading of Medea, both the woman and the text, is caught up in this fever for rediscovery, re-cognition. A crucial element in my study of psychoanalysis is the searching, the endless untangling that always results in more knots, more puzzles, more layered collages of questions and possibility. My methods of navigation are my love of literature and language, and my hunger for psychoanalytic illumination. I believe in these tools because of their deeply human(e) focus on matters of the heart, the voice, the body, and the psyche.

In the excavation of this text, Medea’s bones have much to show us. At the core of both Medea and psychoanalysis is the very question of love. For if psychoanalysis raises truths, and we are in fact split subjects, unknowable even to ourselves, then how is love wrought? How does the the mother-body come to be, how is it branded by words and bound to social, cultural, and political networks, and how do these circumstances influence woman’s desire to annihilate the fruit of her own being?

The power of psychoanalysis lies in its attempt to reveal the unspeakable and to do so with respect for unconscious truth, no matter the horror. Indeed, what Medea does is horrific – she murders her two sons in order to strike back at her adulterous husband. This cannot be dismissed as an isolated crime; she is implicit within a history of the female body (which must take into account both life and death), specifically the maternal body, and her act cannot be divorced from that.

This is not to say that what she does is fair. It is worth pointing out, however, that psychoanalysis strives to comprehend systems of logic that privilege other, and perchance graver, ideas over that of fairness. This reading is not only a psychoanalytic critique of the mother-body as it is found in Medea, but an interrogation of the very concept of naturalized motherly love. We must consider Lacan’s understanding of desire and lack, for desire emerges from the lack inflicted by the individual’s subjection to language and castration from the mother through the Name-of-the-Father. All components in the relationship that consists in the continual construction of the woman-body and the mother-body.

Jacques Lacan’s theory of sexuation, along with Freud’s writings on sexuality and Julia Kristeva’s feminist texts, serve as a compelling tool for this consideration. To conduct a psychoanalytic reading of a literary work is to treat each sentence, each paragraph, as if it were a body. That is to say, the vigilant reader locates double meanings, just as a listener may second guess what she is hearing out of another’s mouth, or scrutinize her conversational partner’s gestures and mannerisms. The person speaking and moving intends to convey her statements in a certain way, though will not necessarily be understood according to that intention. The author of a work puts forth the text as she believes it to carry truth, but that work will never be immune from the unconscious materials of the reader. From this perspective, to write and to speak are dangerous acts.

To this end, one can see how the text and the reader interact unconsciously, since the unconscious, as Lacan defined it, subtly (and at times not so subtly) intrudes upon our every experience in ways we cannot wholly imagine, and this includes our daily reading of texts.

To look at this drama in its written form and then describe its contents to you (another reader) through the lens I have chosen to adopt, is to find myself in a spiral of association. This is not an exploration of the text’s unconscious, or Euripides’ unconscious, or even my own unconscious. Regardless of my intention to not enter into this territory, the unconscious will undoubtedly have its say.

I, like Medea, am housed in a form, which I have come to see as a woman-body. The body has its possessions, unbeknownst to its inhabitant. As I pry open Medea’s chest, crowbar in one hand and pen in the other, I am also prying open my own. The challenge here lies in the imagining of Medea’s act and what it means for love, specifically the love of a mother for her child. For this is the most glorified form of love, the love that is supposed to be enduring, unconditional, intrinsic. We are all concerned in this narrative – we are all of us children.

Photo

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:51:25 -0500

short poem: long feet

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:31:34 -0500

i have drawn detailed renderings of the circumference of your ribcage, tracing the angle at which one would chisel, trying to figure how to best crack it open, only hoping to settle down into your lungs like so much smoke.

how might i remove your soft organs. place them in jars, sealed until winter comes.

the last time i heard your heart it was beating its wings like a trapped bird. arteries like feathers. veins thin and precise as violin strings. i listen to your insides like a radio. you are animal. you are music. you are machine.

All straight lines are deceptions Sections of one great...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:32:00 -0500

All straight lines are deceptions

Sections of one great arc.

Inuo Taguchi

dear friends

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:31:00 -0500

creators/producers

musicians

comedians I & II

movement, performance, new theater

designer

artist

culture vulture

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:03:00 -0500

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Anne Carson

story

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:57:00 -0500

Down to two dollars and eighty-six cents and all I want’s a cup of strong coffee like the kind my grandma used to let me sip when I was a small girl sitting on her lap while she ironed in her housedress, curlers in her hair, cigarette in her mouth. And then I’m thinking about how here I am wanting and broke and maybe the money’d be better used for train fare and how my grandma was the age I am now when she had her first baby, and how six kids and one divorce and much loneliness later, my grandma’s in assisted living in Illinois and her kids are scattered like so many seeds, and her ex-husband’s buried in Florida, has been for over ten years now. I’m looking at the dollars and coins and thinking about how everyone hated him, my grandaddy, everyone. And how no one knows where he came from, how he was a man without a past, a ghost alive, a ghost dead, except when he hit, then he was something real. My own father, all his violence is just heat lightning, never touching down. More than a cup of coffee I’d like to talk to my grandaddy, bring him back up from the ground and ask him to let me in on something good about him, something he liked about himself maybe. Like did he know how to make a fire, could he carry a tune, would he consider himself a morning person? Did my grandaddy even drink coffee, I don’t know. I’m walking down the street and thinking about the time my grandma looked at me and said, It’s funny, I thought my life would be a certain way, and it didn’t turn out that way at all, and how I wanted to say to her, But grandma, that’s just everybody. But I didn’t say a word because I think a lot of things without saying them outright. I guess that’s everybody, too.

prose poem

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:54:00 -0500

To Virginia: My Arms Are Tired

I imagine you enjoyed the afternoon, when the sun begins to lean toward its eventual vanishing. I prefer the morning, the gradual turning of the sky, when waking is like swimming up towards the light through seaweed.

The day imprints itself upon the body, and time swings on, and we get older. I am getting older, I find it happens faster the closer I am to water.

But let’s not discuss water. Let’s discuss air, or levity, or ink as it evaporates off the page.

Let’s let things be light, not as heavy as your slight body, made much heavier by your wet dress and overcoat, the weight of which made Leonard reflect, after it was over,

my arms are tired.

We carry one another as long as we can, Virginia, and when it is over, no matter how strong, no matter how true, our arms are tired.

. . .

In the afternoon you left your room to eat a peach, nearly rotten, and to have tea with honey and milk. The smell of time was haunting.

Virginia, you were getting older. You felt it in your teeth, because the mouth is where you feel age first.

It was only in the afternoons that you felt suspended like a marionette strung between two inevitable undeniable points in the continuum, open and shot with light filtered through shut eyelids.

Let’s talk about air and levity and fruit and tea and ink, not time, not haunting, not the breakdown of bone. The air as you knew it has changed; levity is scarce; the fruit is in bloom; tea means war.

And as for the ink as it evaporates off the page: Humans like us, what we end up wanting to discuss is not the ink that has left but the ink that remains, and I am learning what you knew well: ink lasts longer

than teeth.

(excerpted from a collection of prose poems dedicated to deceased writers, entitled Between Dreams)

melanie jane parker

Photo

excerpt from Hermitage

Photo

beginner's mind

Photo

Photo

winter kill

You might think the reflection of the flash is obscuring...

We are not the dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that...

the three registers

essay

Photo

recommended

short poem: long feet

All straight lines are deceptions Sections of one great...

dear friends

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the...

story

prose poem