the ugly earring

sometimes when babies are happy, they don’t know how to express it, and they cry.
and sometimes when adults are sad, they don’t know how to express it, and they laugh.

in honor of wearing my i love yoko tshirt
and rebelling against corporate attire guidelines.

Claude Monet, Camille on Her Death Bed, 1879

“… One day, when I was at the death bed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself, my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead, in the act of mechanically analysing the succession of appropriate color gradations which death was imposing on her immobile face.  Tones of blue, of yellow, of grey, what have you?  This is the point I had reached.  Certainly it was natural to wish to record the last image of a woman who was departing forever.  But even before I had the idea of setting down the features to which I was so deeply attached, my organism automatically reacted to the color stimuli, and my reflexes caught me up in spite of myself, in an unconscious operation which was the daily course of my life – just like an animal turning his mill.”

No, love is not dead in this heart these eyes and this mouth
that announced the start of its own funeral.
Listen, I’ve had enough of the picturesque, the colorful
and the charming.
I love love, its tenderness and cruelty.
My love has only one name, one form.
Everything disappears. All mouths cling to that one.
My love has just one name, one form.
And if someday you remember
O you, form and name of my love,
One day on the ocean between America and Europe,
At the hour when the last ray of light sparkles
on the undulating surface of the waves, or else a stormy night
beneath a tree in the countryside or in a speeding car,
A spring morning on the boulevard Malesherbes,
A rainy day,
Just before going to bed at dawn,
Tell yourself-I order your familiar spirit-that
I alone loved you more and it’s a shame
you didn’t know it.
Tell yourself there’s no need to regret: Ronsard
and Baudelaire before me sang the sorrows
of women old or dead who scorned the purest love.
When you are dead
You will still be lovely and desirable.
I’ll be dead already, completely enclosed in your immortal body,
in your astounding image forever there among the endless marvels
of life and eternity, but if I’m alive,
The sound of your voice, your radiant looks,
Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things
will live on inside me.
In me and I’m not Ronsard or Baudelaire

I’m Robert Desnos who, because I knew
and loved you,
Is as good as they are.
I’m Robert Desnos who wants to be remembered
On this vile earth for nothing but his love of you.

A la mysterieuse

~Robert Desnos

(painting: By the Deathbed E. Munch)

saturday’s dream:

In my childhood bedroom, two black widows made their home under the bed. Each day their web became more elaborate and grandiose until they had taken over half of the queen size bed (including the pillows where one would lay her head). I tried to explain to my father he had to get rid of them immediately.

I watched them the night before, late into the evening, dart playfully under and over the pillows.

“What if the girls’ were to sleep in the room?”  I asked him repeatedly.

The thought of their spindly spider legs trekking across bella’s sleeping chest or little m’s newborn head turned into panic. Yet, I could not capture the thimble-size arachnids myself.

In a fit, mainly because of my nagging, he went into the bedroom and broke the widows’ web. He failed to remove the widows from the room.

significance of dream:

Two widows remain in my past.

today as i was driving down mcdowell road a woman pushing a shopping cart wore a turban and cardigan.
the homeless in phoenix are quite chic.

just when i started wearing and loving the bun thoughts of bowl haircuts (a tribute to mlle. royal), bangs, and this infiltrated and corrupted the mind. 
on friday, i surrendered six inches.

****

and then i learned a few things about hair:

• Asian cultures see long, unkempt hair in a woman as a sign of sexual intent or a recent sexual encounter, as usually their hair is tied up in styles such as the ponytail, plait or any bun.
• The traditional connotation of “long hair” in English meant, roughly, someone artistically knowledgeable or wise, an aesthete.As a descriptive term, it has been applied to Merovingians and classical music enthusiasts, as well as hippies and aesthetes.
• Long hair is traditionally accepted as a female characteristic in western cultures. Feminists and women’s rights activists have long debated whether to advocate long hair as a solely feminine trait, or to call for short hair in opposition to a stereotype.
• Anthropologists speculate that the functional significance of long head hair may be adornment, a by-product of secondary natural selection once other somatic hair (body hair) had largely been lost. Another possibility is that long head hair is a result of Fisherian runaway sexual selection, where long lustrous hair is a visible marker for a healthy individual. For some groups, however, short hair is the selected trait.
• Some Psychoanalysts and Freudian commentators argue that long hair represents the id and aggression, and that cutting the hair is thus akin to castration. Hair is thus considered to be a potent sexual emblem, both for men and women, having many parallels with intercourse. Further connections made with sexuality are made with the fact that historically, adulterous husbands would cut off their wife’s hair if she threatened to reveal his secret, thus violating the role of her husband.
• Women often have a stronger inclination towards long hair than men do. Younger women tend to have longer hair than older women. Hair quality is correlated with women’s health. Hair length and quality can act as a cue to a woman’s youth and health and, as such, signify reproductive potential. Some feminists have declared long hair as “irrefutably feminine,” while others argue for shorter hair. Some religious scholars even believe that without hair or long hair, a woman is not complete. In some cultures, long, well-kept hair symbolizes wealth and luxury, as such hair is difficult to maintain in poverty.

I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you’re climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.
~Arthur Miller, After the Fall