1/23/03: FREEWRITING: becomings, spaces, and identity.

:: My skin has many skins ::

There’s an animal called a Hylobate, with long arms and a small head. It’s dead now, but somewhere inside of my cells there are traces of a Hylobate. This is my POWER animal, raging somewhere underneath. Like at a bar last night, I talked the man next to me. The conversation was intelligent, interesting perhaps, but there were no traces of the ape, no hair on our hands, no wild sounds. Except, maybe this: when I was tired, I scratched the back of my head.

:: Maps ::

If the map of my life were made, it would contain very few places. And those places would be in close proximity. More like a floor plan in which the architect, so undecided about the location of the doors, decided not to build them. I’ve often thought that windows were much like snapshots tucked under the bed. I see myself in all of them. For instance, I look at the tops of buildings, the thousand of rooms and alleys and stairwells, and draw my body into one or two of these.

:: Doors ::

Think of how a skyscraper’s shape resembles a door. The skyline is full of locked doors and bolted doors and door’s snowed it. Think of how small a person is. Think about how many insides and outsides there are. Think about surface area, ways that materials flow, the comings and goings, millions of singing keys.

:: Wish ::

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wished I was someone else. I’ve wanted black hair and red hair and no hair. I’ve wanted horse hair to sprout from the line down my back. None of this seems natural. But actually, the wish is vital. Like the flipside of an action. I’m not talking WISH FULLFILLMENT or anything psychiatric. But a simple wish is like curling your toes over a cliff. You could say it’s like a rainbow, an arc, a trajectory, a going-into-nowhere...