Unfolds with great freshness, Ken.
Sent me to the Hokusai image, and I note the tendrils of surf curling down
menacingly - not safe to be under that wave, too late to get up on it.
Had to look up Tommy Udo -
but did recognize Mister Death...
I hope this piece gets an outing with live listeners, Ken.
Max
Quoting Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>:
> WRITING HOME ABOUT IT ANYWAY
>
> 1
>
> I have never seen the aphorism spelled out that proclaims self-love
> is evidence of magic on the horizon, for instance
> Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
> Yet what is that trompe l'oeil artistry but reality betrayed,
> a lovely but lying impersonation of a surfer's perfect wave
> that can purge your impurity and self-disgust,
> but only if you're willing to drown.
> Don't like the terms? They are all you have:
> the unacceptable idea that self-love may grow out of ordure,
> out of the timeless rage of self-hatred,
> which you have no choice but to accept.
>
> 2
>
> There is a full-length mirror in my bathroom.
> I avoid staring at my body because I know what I will see
> (like an old married couple locked together in the special hatred
> of a life sentence), "nothing to write home about,"
> and I am never wrong for that is what I see
> and I don't and won't like it.
> But for the rest of the week, each morning I go
> out of my way to avoid looking at how I am wondrously made,
> let myself get suckered in by a sight-denying vision
> of myself as an American beauty, as though that's who
> I really am instead of what time and I have made of myself,
> and I marvel that women ever found me passingly attractive.
>
> 3
>
> I peer up through the dark at a vaulted ceiling
> and the laughter is mine but I cannot tell its source.
> I feel endangering and endangered, Tommy Udo in search of a private
> wheelchair.
> I am more dangerous on my knees than I'd be with a razor in my hand.
> This is why you made me?--and how do you like your blue-eyed boy,
> Mister Death? Gave me imperfection, monstrous defects and warts,
> a surgical scar of a broken heart, cleaved in two since
> the day of my birth...and then you have the gall to tell me
> I am perfect in your eyes? Good enough, if that's what you want me to buy.
> Just whisper that last part again when a woman asks me to take off my
> clothes.
>
> KTW/9-28-09
>
> --
> Ken Wolman
> http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/
> http://open.salon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman/
> http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
> ---------------------------------
> "All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine
> du Plessix Gray
>
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