salinyay-blog
paris, fr
234 posts
Latest Posts by salinyay-blog
Four out of Five / Arctic Monkeys : Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
The letter be
I do not think I’ve ever told anyone this story. Right after it happened, the memory lived then left, trespassing the dark edge that neighbors the mind: the void at the back of our head. I once read somewhere about a neurological effect, one in which memories forever stay inside our heads; they linger camouflaged into the wallpapers of our minds until abruptly popping into thought again. Like this morning when I woke up to the bright lights of this story you’re about to read; it seemed to be the only thing to fit inside my head: omnipresent as the blues in the sky; self-evident as sin in a church.
It happened in New York City a while back when a lady on the N train sat by my side. Books laid on both of our laps, only none of us read. She asked me if like her, I stopped my reading when the tracks of the train rose above ground. I can’t remember what I answered, but next thing I knew her words were walking me through her world: 67, a widow, avid reader, a walker when her knees cooperate.
She seemed to have a predilection for the affirmative; a sort of soft spot for full stops. At some point in our talk she voiced “You’ll think me a lunatic, but I’ve spent a great chunk of this day thinking about the letter B”. “How it comes second in the alphabet; how nobody acknowledges its prominence despite being of more consequence than any other letter there is. Do you ever think like this?” I said I didn’t, her eyes spotting my lie.
“It has become my favorite letter, the more I think of it” she added, then moved on to explain —through the deafening shrieks of the tracks—how many words beginning with the letter B were pivotal to illustrating the nuance of a life. “Think of the bright & the burned, the born & buried, the blessed & the blamed, the bountiful & the broke, the balanced & the belligerent. It goes full circle, doesn’t it? A cycle where opposing extremes slip their skins into the same gown. Black & white, beginning & ending are just that: sisters” Her eloquence, exquisite.
I stopped listening to commuters and their pressing chatter, the train’s wheels in the tracks screeched the weight of friction. My thinking surrendered to the dragging strengths of the wave this lady had spilled out of her mouth. I flicked through a million thoughts. “You’re absolutely right” I uttered.
“And isn’t that how we conjugate an existence? With the verb to be?” she topped her previous words.
This lady's imagery & clever murdered me unready. For a split now the world paused, our bodies yanked to the rhythm of inertia bred by our train hitting the brakes.
Awestruck & blank, I didn’t know how to react. Her analogies were skilled.
“Oh BBBBBrooklyn, this is me”.
She walked out, sly as a cat, and stood on the platform looking back into my eyes. Her lips spread a smile whilst the MTA guy begged for the 50th time to stand clear of the closing doors, please.
As the rubber edges of the doors rushed to a close, she mouthed:
“BBBBBBYE” & laughed.
“The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation.
[…]
Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones.”
The Genesis of Blame, Anne Enright
To be touched so lovingly, so fondly, as if one were still healthy. As if one were still worthy of affection and respect? It was cheering. It gave us hope. We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe
George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo)
boats | julie zlo
I leave this out too how I still defend him how a wound like that over a decade becomes a kind of heart
— Hala Alyan, from “Cliffhanger” published in The Offing
my kink is when people actually stay
i’m getting a new apartment very soon. i can see the melodrama / wes anderson deco ideas piling up in my head.
It occurred to me last night, while the moon cried for Xanax, how maybe if I focused hard enough for the right amount of time, I might learn to accept the fragments you left. Perhaps one of these tomorrows will find me walking into the ghosts of you the way I now walk into that cold Parisian rain: compliant and composed, unbothered despite every pore on this skin that clothes my bones begging me to bathe under the fires of the sun.
Jezzini (Parisian Rain on Orbit(X))
lost o’clock by jezzini
but isn’t time just the carbon copy of a man-made concept brewed when a few thousand breaths twist their heads in reverse?
then there’s daddy hawkin saying time is an everlasting pie where its ending meets our cries & its purpose, don’t dare to fuckin’ ask.
some nights, when my minutes end their shift & my sighs wander adrift, i hear the clock spill its sins in pointless ticks; the way those seconds come climbing up these bones then diving down my throat in emptiness. in the grey & the low; in these words i aim to draw on the skins of poems screaming love with perfect rhythms but no blood.
thoughts on youth & this dusty skin. fear of years. a mirror maze. how great to drift in a city with no name. alone.
Both colour and language have their mundane, pragmatic, adaptive functions; we use colour to recognise objects in our environment, and we use language for everyday communication. But in painting and poetry, colour and language become as it were aware of themselves; it is indeed as though they know themselves better than any human being possibly could.
Elena Maslova-Levin, ‘Rainer Maria Rilke on Colour and Self-Awareness’ (via thebluesthour)
back in paris. 22 ideas for poems & short texts. massive amount of work for the upcoming months. im v excited to deepen on these thoughts.
please could you be tender and I will sit close to you let’s give it a minute before we admit that we’re through
hard feelings/ loveless, lorde
What’s closer to god: thirst or confession?
Kristin Chang, from “Outcall #,” published in The Wanderer (via tristealven)
exposed, tortured, ecstatic—
Denise Levertov, from Sands of the Well: Poems; “Unaccompanied,” (via violentwavesofemotion)
One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in—of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.
Marguerite Duras, Writing (via mythologyofblue)
* by Alexey Dubinsky
Do you ever realize how badly you’re going to miss a moment while you’re living it? Like wow, these are the good days. I am here and I am happy and I feel alive.
Unknown (via sunsetquotes)
I hope, or I could not live.
H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (via kerryquotesquotes)
We've been having so much fun in Italy; a lot of strolling, talking, swimming and diving into the Mediterranean. I've been writing a lot too; this country, a fistful of love.