Grace, Author at Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

Author: Grace (page 11 of 13)

Effigies of Innocence

The double grief of a lost bliss
Is to recall its happy hour in pain …
We were alone with innocence and dim time.

Dante, Inferno, Canto V, ll.118-19

“A woman’s sexual identity is bound up in shame, desire, ecstasy, and grief. The emergence of such an identity functions simultaneously as an act of loss and of utter fulfillment: amidst the conflicting social views of female sexuality that exist between generations, what we gain as women from our sexual experiences also furthers a physical and emotional distance from our mothers that begins at the moment of our birth. In a variation upon the classic innocence-for-knowledge exchange that characterized the fall of Eden, sexuality in the works of both Bechdel and Morrison can be construed as a means of further separating ourselves from the women who birthed us—and in knowing ourselves, our bodies, and our desires, we depart from an implicit state of grace. But in accordance with Winnicott’s theory, when we widen this distance from our mothers through further inhabitance and exploration of our own bodies, we are in fact completing the necessary destruction of the subject by the object through our creation of the identical wounds in which we can recognize both our mothers and ourselves. It is my belief—and, I would argue, the implicated beliefs of Morrison and Bechdel—that to know our mothers, we must first be truly separate from them. Sexual experience and identity provides a vivid lens through which we can observe the pain and potency of this conscious distancing; thus, the multifaceted implications of sexuality in the works of Bechdel and Morrison are conveyed through symbiotic representations of separation and joining.

The mirror exists as a visual and conceptual paradigm of this thematic representation in Are You My Mother?. The presence of a mirror reveals the subject’s isolation from external objects; upon seeing one’s own reflection, Bechdel explains, “…you can see that you’re separate from everything else ” (Bechdel, 232). This notion of separation entails immense physical and conceptual distance: the second panel on this page depicts Bechdel’s silhouette in a terrifying free-fall into vast darkness. But in the same way that the mirror conveys this notion of absence, it also indicates presence, as the reflection of a physical self visually reaffirms the subject’s existence. Because of this, the mirror can also be read as an allegory for Bechdel’s sexuality, which separates her from her mother in countless ways but also establishes her autonomy and inspires the necessary subject matter for a novel that ultimately repairs the distance between the two. On page 156, Bechdel asserts, “If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.” The very language of this passage implies the healing of a certain form of emptiness: the gap between the body and the mind. In the textual recounting of her sexual identity, experiences, and relationships, which constitute a substantial portion of the novel as a whole—and implicitly distance Bechdel further from her mother, who explicitly opposes this joining of the personal and the aesthetic (Bechdel, 156)—Bechdel constructs a story that heals the separation between her mind and body, and by extension, between her mother and herself.

In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Florens initially demonstrates a fear of dark, empty spaces not dissimilar to Bechdel’s represented fear on page 232 of Are You My Mother?, stating, “How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?” (Morrison, 5-6). By the end of the novel, however, Florens satiates this sense of distance that applies to both her mother and her lover with a visceral expression of language that is inspired and recounted through the story of her developing sexuality and romance with the blacksmith. As she carves her story into the walls of Vaark’s house, Florens fills her own emptiness until, “There is no more room in this room” (Morrison, 188). And just as Bechdel concludes Are You My Mother? with an act of physicality between her and her mother, symbolizing her successful separation from and rejoining of the subject (Bechdel, 287), Florens concludes her narrative having finally understood her mother’s desire for the hardening of her feet (Morrison, 189). Like Bechdel’s metaphor of the mirror, the hardening of Florens’ feet serves as a symbol for her sexual experience and growth: initially sheltered, vulnerable, and then wounded by her encounters with the blacksmith, their hardening finally provides Florens with both a separation from and an understanding of the decisions of her mother.

Through the development and exploration of their sexuality, both women come to at once understand and distance themselves from their mothers. In Are You My Mother?, Bechdel finally confronts her fear of darkness and emptiness as she concludes her novel and finalizes the destruction of her mother that its publication implies, explaining, “The further I moved into this imaginary space, the more it opened up” (Bechdel, 287). Emptiness in this passage suggests possibility and formation, not unlike the dark matter identified by Scully in A Mercy, which is “aching to be made into a world” (Morrison, 183). Thus, through the darkness and distance wherein Bechdel was once afraid and Florens thought she had lost her way, both women form the narrative realities in which they finalize their separation from their mothers through acts of sexual and physical autonomy—but in doing so, they engage in acts of empathy with their mothers as well. At the end of her novel, Bechdel explains of her mother, “She could see my invisible wounds because they were hers too” (Bechdel, 287). Wounds are themselves visceral representation of absence, depicting areas that form distance where there should be the presence of flesh—and as both Florens and Bechdel come to realize the identical wounds and distance they share with their mothers, conveyed to them as a result of their respective sexual identities and experiences, they are at last given the ability to heal them.

In my own experiences, sexuality gave me a means of reconnecting: in the act of entering the body of another, or of being entered myself, I became more deeply, physically close to another person than I had been since my own body separated from that of my mother. Through the bodies of other men and women, I have learned the natural language of my physicality and my gaze: how to peel back incandescent layers of solitude and vanity to seek what I am as it bleeds through what I was and will be: what I fear, what I think, what I hope to become. My sexuality has challenged the comfort and political conservatism of my mother, testing directly the strength and resilience of her love for her only daughter—and so it was through acts of sexual autonomy that I destroyed the subject, and after years of this mutual wounding, the subject survived its destruction. This was the completion of my sexual identity and my journey to rejoin my mother; in a cyclical manner not unlike the sequence of natural life to which womanhood is bound, it was the moment in which we connected again.

Our physical liberation and the emotional rejoining of our mothers occurs only when women abandon of our search for our effigies of pre-sexual innocence, which—lost to the pulls of experience, grief and “dim time”—existed only when our bodies were one with theirs. In A Mercy and Are You My Mother?, respectively, Florens and Bechdel both wield an extraordinary mastery of language that is derived from love, loss, and their sexual experiences. Through her utilization of psychoanalysis, Bechdel conveys the power of sexuality in destroying the subject and repairing the mutual, invisible cicatrices of separation. The Biblical power of Morrison’s narrative implies that the Eden-like gaining of sexual knowledge and its symbiotic separation from the innocence of creation provides the human connection, the mercy, which renders us effigies of the divine. In both instances, woman’s sexuality is conveyed simultaneously as power and vulnerability, isolation and connection. It binds us inextricably to our own autonomy, and by allowing us to construct our independent identities, makes it possible to understand our mothers’ wounds of separation—and to heal this distance between our creators and ourselves.

How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All

February 4, 2015 / Grace / 0 Comments

Politics of the Transitory Body in the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, the second album recorded by Neutral Milk Hotel, is an unearthly meditation on the rapture of vitality and the tragedy of nonbeing in which the terrors of a young woman’s war-torn world are lyrically interlaced with the solitude of vocalist Jeff Mangum’s shattered childhood. Functioning simultaneously as exaltation and eulogy, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea chronicles three characters—the Ghost, the Dark Brother, and the Two-Headed Boy—who each present conflicting views on life, death, and sexuality through the lens of gender. Emblems of pure, sensual womanhood juxtapose and at times overlap with jarring images of masculine violence, establishing a richly visceral artistic landscape wherein life and death become inextricably bound to language, consequence, contact, and space.

The Ghost functions as a paradigm of femininity throughout In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, while a unique and ethereal instrument called a singing saw serves as her proverbial “voice.” References to a birth “…in a bottle rocket, in 1929,” (Appendix A, Fig. 6), death in 1945 (Appendix A, Fig. 3), and burial in 1945 with “…her sister and mother and five hundred families” (Appendix A, Fig. 3, 5), all clearly establish the Ghost’s living identity as that of Anne Frank, whose diary immortalized her astonishing will to live and love despite the horrors of the Second World War. Mangum often describes Frank in divine and reverent terms: “drenched in milk and holy water,” with wings emerging from her spine, and white roses blooming in her hair and eyes (Appendix A, Fig. 6). Through her archetypal fulfillment of seraphic feminine imagery, Frank conveys the fragility of the physical, the purity of adolescence, and most importantly, the fleeting exultation of vitality, which can “flash on a screen in the blink of an eye and be gone” (Appendix A, Fig. 1).

That is not to say, however, that the female body reduced to merely an object of narrative desire or artistic symbolism throughout In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. In the haunting acoustic ballad “Communist Daughter,” (Appendix A, Fig. 4), Mangum celebrates female autonomy through his image of a young prostitute—her name an allusion to her body’s paradoxical existence as both capitalist commodity and public property—who masturbates to reaffirm her own existence. Using imagery of cocoa leaves to symbolize pleasure, depictions of cars careening through the darkness to evoke the discord of midnight city streets, and a vision of snowcapped mountaintops—a woman’s genitalia stained by semen—Magnum tenderly recounts the moment in which the Communist Daughter uses the pleasures of her body to reaffirm her existence: assuring herself of her own worth through a communication of sensuality, isolation, and visceral ecstasy. As the music reaches its climax, Mangum’s voice soars gloriously above the melancholy strumming of his guitar: describing with reverence the way in which “Sweetness sings from every corner”—the sound of the girl’s self-induced orgasms, echoing through an empty room—as the young prostitute, “Proves that she must still exist / She moves herself about her fist.” Furthermore, this bittersweet exultation draws parallels to Anne Frank’s own developing sexuality: as she explains in her diary, “Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts and listen to the quiet beating of my heart….” Both Anne Frank and the Communist Daughter find their visceral ecstasy and autonomy in spite of a world that offers them none: but as the relative shortness of “Communist Daughter” reaffirms, their physical rapture remains transient and fleeting.

These ephemeral but potent instances of beauty, represented through the notion of femininity, are directly juxtaposed by Mangum’s second character, the Dark Brother. Functioning as the Ghost’s antithesis—and created by Mangum in response to the suicide of a close friend’s brother —the Dark Brother exited this world an exhibition of terrible violence: “…with [his] head filled with flames…as [his] brains / Fell out through [his] teeth” (Appendix A, Fig. 7). Independently, he seems to exist as an ambiguously tragic figure, but in “Holland 1945,” the song wherein the Dark Brother is introduced, Mangum employs the wailing refrain: “And now we must pack up every piece / Of this life we used to love / Just to keep ourselves at least enough to carry on” (Appendix A, Fig. 3). This bitter and passionate language, underscoring the ability of a single act of abandonment to fragment the lives of those left behind, interlaces the violence of the suicidal Dark Brother with the infidelity Mangum’s own father, who, as Mangum explains two tracks later “…made fetuses with flesh licking ladies, / While [he] and [his] mother were asleep in the trailer park” (Appendix A, Fig. 5). In the grief-stricken refrain of “Holland 1945,” which simultaneously depicts the Dark Brother’s suicide, the fragmentation of Anne Frank’s childhood, and the shattering of Mangum’s own family, the savage violence of the Brother’s actions becomes inextricably bound to the sexual exploitation employed by Mangum’s adulterous father. With repulsive and visceral language, including references to “Fat fleshy fingers” and “green fleshy flowers…smelling of semen,” (Appendix A, Fig. 5), Mangum conjures the first overtly negative depiction of human sexuality in his album. His depictions of female sexuality, though perhaps misinformed in their romanticism, are clearly far more positive than the damning image of masculine sexuality as a conduit of violence, power, and exploitation that Mangum’s father and the Dark Brother represent.

The final and most important character in the album, the Two-Headed Boy provides the transcendence, overlapping, or joining of these binary archetypes of gender. He exhibits both qualities of darkness related to the Dark Brother and violent masculinity (“The sun, it is passed / Now it’s blacker than black,”), as well as a spiritual and physical connection to the feminine paradigm of the Ghost when he references the vertebral imagery essential to her seraphic feminine representation, singing, “And in the dark we will take off our clothes / And they’ll be lacing fingers through the notches in your spine” (Appendix A, Fig. 2). It also becomes increasingly evident that the Two Headed Boy exists as a representation of Mangum himself: the vocalist’s intimacy with the character is evident in the passion and physicality with which he performs “Two Headed Boy,” the track for which the character is named. Throughout the song, Mangum’s singing is volatile and augmented by little more than his own guitar, which he strums with almost astonishing energy and force.

The notion of the Two-Headed Boy as an extension of Jeff Mangum becomes almost undeniably evident in the album’s final track, “Two Headed Boy Part 2” (Appendix A, Fig. 7) wherein Mangum, while addressing the Two-Headed Boy directly, switches between first and third person so fluidly that the two identities seem to linguistically interlace as one. It is in this track that Mangum, through his conversations with the Two-Headed Boy, finally harmonizes the violent, masculine imagery of both the Dark Brother’s gruesome death (“Push the pieces in place / Make your smile sweet to see”), and his father’s infidelity (“For a lover to bring a child to your chest / That can lay as you sleep / And love all you have left”), with the tenderness and sensuality that he ascribes to Anne Frank’s femininity (“I’m still wanting my face on your cheek”). In the aftermath of these lines, Jeff Mangum’s own Janus-faced identity is reconciled at last when, in a moment of catharsis, he encourages the Two-Headed Boy to align himself with feminine ideals of the Ghost rather than the violent masculinity of the Dark Brother, asserting that the beauty and rapture embodied by Anne Frank, however transient, is “all [he] could need.”

In this final meeting of the feminine and the masculine, the sensual and the exploitative, the undaunted and the suicidal, the “Two-Headed Boy” can finally be fully understood as the Mangum himself, caught between the violent, masculine, and suicidal urges of the Dark Brother, and the eternal beauty, tenderness, and optimism of the Ghost, Anne Frank. Thus, the representation of the narrator as the “Two Headed Boy,” as well as the recurring motifs of severance and duality that permeate the album, indicate that the divide between the Mangum’s two identities is, in essence, the divide between two opposing ideals of gender, and the various interconnecting facets of power and sexuality that accompany them. In his final words to the Two-Headed Boy, Mangum actively chooses not to commit suicide: he resolves to live fully, to accept that the ecstasy of existence is, like existence itself, only fleeting. The album’s overall narrative, a testament to the inevitable sense of tragedy experienced by individuals whose histories are rooted in their families and their homes, uses the artistic joys of human existence to comprehend and come to terms with the sorrows of the past. It is Mangum’s transcendent vision of a young girl with roses in her hair and eyes: carefree and unbroken—as she might have been but for the senseless evils of the world—and destined to live forever in her diary and his dreams.

Works Cited

Carioli, Carly. “Mangum’s Opus.” Boston Phoenix. March 7, 2008. Accessed January 7, 2015.

Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Globe Book, 1992.

Lyrics Cited

Cooper, Kim. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. London: Continuum International Pub., 2005.

Cleaning Out My Bookshelf

January 22, 2015 / Grace / 2 Comments

“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories

In which I attempt to validate what it means to be a writer amidst apathetic hyperrealism, and also to remember who I was, and what I am.

Water runs from the tap, floods each crevice of my body. I wish I could write that it covers a lustrous expanse of smooth alabaster skin, but it trickles over an imperfect marring of birthmarks and freckles: fine white hairs visible on my stomach and pale breasts tugged slightly outwards by gravity. My incandescent beauty is only fantasy—one of the few I am able to have anymore.

When I was a little girl, I stepped effortlessly through visions of smoke and half-truths: Arda, Tír Na NÓg, Cittàgazze, Aredante, Charn. I read and wrote with a blissful abandon that I can scarcely imagine today. I sought to walk in worlds of shadow, and return to the daylight when it suited me—but as years passed, I was not permitted to. I do not know why, but the people of this world will bind you here. They will mock what made you, insist that in their ill-kept reality of cheap television and organized sports, what you find true is absurd, childish. Eight years later you will have hickeys and scars and half-shaved hair and a smoker’s cough; you will have acceptance letters from your top universities and a lifetime of disappointment to forget.

When I was a little girl, every word I wrote felt inspired. I walked through dreams more real than any lover’s lips against my skin. But in the harsh light of adolescence I learned to seek that same clarity in razor blades or fingertips—in blood dripping down an empty sink or a quickening pulse as my lips parted and my body arched to meet the curve of my spine. Ecstasy and agony joined in these moments: they were all that I had left of my vanished worlds.

When I was a little girl, I killed characters often, and sometimes brutally. I do not believe it was macabre. I wept for them, and for those they left behind. I wept for myself and what it took from me and what it all meant. I think I killed because my protagonists needed this: even then I knew that living for something was a fallacy–that we had to live in spite of something if we hoped to live at all.

How could I have conceived something like this so young? Maybe I foresaw my depression, my self-loathing, the fragmentation of my family, the departure of the father I loved so desperately, who came closer to walking in those worlds with me than anyone else ever has. But I do not think so. I think that maybe I knew the worth of tragedy long before I felt it, simply because I had read the stories: I knew that Frodo never truly returned to the Shire, that the last of the Valar faded into Westernesse, that Lyra healed wounds in the world with a love she could not keep, that even Narnia fell into ash and ruin.

It’s funny what registers as candid for me. I’ve written about my body, my family, my depression, myself. But this strikes at the untested heart of what it means to make me vulnerable. I have never before written about my childhood, about that love of the intangible that forms the burning core of who I am. These are my words, my worlds, my solace. What would it mean to let others in?

Fantasy and science fiction: The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials and Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. When I read or I write, I remember who I am and no standard in the “real world” can take that from me. I cannot be ashamed to walk through other worlds, any more than I can blame those who remain shackled to this one. We are where we come from, and I am what I write; my eternal childhood is captured in paper and ink.

Water trickles out of each margin, each gap of my still-breathing flesh, where I used to see droplets of spilled ink and little pools of Garamond font. The bathwater drains and then there is nothing: no mist-filled forests or canyons of wind, no barren seas of moonlit snow or skies frozen with stars. It is 11pm on a Wednesday, 30 degrees outside, my history essay needs writing, and I am alive. I begin to think that maybe its time to start cleaning out my bookshelf.

Social Death & the Murder of Mike Brown

November 6, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

Seeing as it has been about a month or so since I have last been able to really write, I figured I’d post a piece I wrote for my English 517 class (Automortography). Comments and critiques are, as always, welcome.

On August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old Black man named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The exact circumstances of the event remain heavily disputed, but Brown was reported to be unarmed at the time of the shooting. Although the anger and grief of Ferguson’s Black population inspired tumultuous protests that animated the area for several weeks following the event, an allegedly militarized police force attempted to contain the protestors, which resulted in several violent clashes. Regardless of contradictory witness reports and the minor allegations against Brown for an unrelated crime, officer Darren Wilson’s willingness to end the life of an unarmed Black man without absolute and indisputable justification reflects the general devaluing of Black bodies that characterizes American culture. The deeply problematic social perception of Black bodies and identities as something other than fully human can be traced as far back as the antebellum slave trade, and establishes the murder of Mike Brown as not simply an instance of police irresponsibility and brutality, but also as an exemplification of African American social death.

In order to analyze and comprehend the relationship between Brown’s murder and the Black social death, the concept of “social death” must first be defined. In the practice of automortography, mortality can be examined as an extensive but always-shortening spectrum between a life/death binary. Upon this spectrum, human beings exist as animated “subjects”— fully realized beings with emotions, desires, and identities. But in death, humans exist as non-sentient objects—corpses. Ordinary human death is characterized by the transition from subject to object: person to corpse. Social death, on the other hand, is a rare phenomenon in which cultural factors force the subject-to-object transition to occur prematurely, resulting in a still-living individual who exists, through the social lens, as an object rather than a fully recognized person. “Social death,” in the context of this essay, is any transmutation from subject to object that precedes the physical ending of one’s life, and is a form of subjugation that affects both the public and private spheres.

The cultural ideologies that compelled the social death of African Americans were contingent upon the notion of property in a bourgeois society, and more specifically, the United State’s status as an independent slaveholding economy. In Orlando Patterson’s work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, the practice of slavery is defined as “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave.”3 The power dynamic of the master-slave dialectic stemmed from the commodification of enslaved bodies— the reduction of enslaved persons to property (or objects) within a commercial system. This premature (that is to say, pre-death) reduction from subject to object in the public sphere was further ingrained into African American identity during the 1857 Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. Sandford, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney essentially established the status of the American slave as interchangeable with that of private property. In the aftermath of this decision, Black men and women were socially and legally reduced to objects before their physical deaths in the very language of United States legislation; as such, their social death was cemented into the American public sphere.

But as Patterson demonstrates in his writing, the reduction of a living individual to an object impacts the private sphere as well. In Slavery and Social Death, the interviews with form American slaves reportedly include statements such as, “I was so bad I needed the whipping.” The immense personal ramifications of social death are unavoidably clear here: in reducing their status from human to object before the moment of physical deaths, slave owners staked a claim to their slaves that stretched past the fibers of their forms and towards the very foundations of their identity. The quotation highlights the inescapable fact that the Black body is, in essence, a body that has been colonized, raped, brutalized, murdered, and always commodified—and that now, haunted by a specter of visceral subjugation barely rivaled in human history, men and women of color are tasked with establishing their physical presence as more than that of an object within a white supremacist society. Perhaps they believe that in doing so, they will be able to resurrect their bodies and themselves from the personal degradation that accompanies social death.

Even now, in what too many consider to be a post-race era, the frequency of police brutality towards and mass incarceration of Black individuals makes this reclamation and redefinition of the Black body nearly impossible. Instances such as Mike Brown’s murder, in which Black individuals, and particularly Black males, are victims of senseless and excessive violence, shed light upon the lingering strains of racism and the racial objectification that devalue formerly colonized bodies for the benefit of a white audience. In the aftermath of Brown’s shooting, certain media outlets feigned impartiality by using potential evidence of Mike Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store in order to justify, or at least rationalize, his murder. While some sought to vindicate the white police officer by affirming allegations of Brown’s theft, others attempted to emphasize the criminal nature of the shooting by denying Brown’s involvement in the robbery. In these unceasing conversations in a white-dominated American public sphere, the Black body was continuously stripped of its value: whether outlets were affirming or denying the claims against Brown, these discussions reduced Black men to a fundamentally lower social group—a class of not-quite-people for whom, in the aftermath of a minor misdemeanor, assassination can be considered a potentially valid response.
In the actions of Officer Darren Wilson, as well as in the subsequent media response, Black social death emerges as an inescapable and deeply horrifying American reality. The excessive force used by white police officers, disproportionately high rates of incarceration among Black males, and imposed economic and legal circumstances—most notably the so-called War on Drugs—that seriously limit the possibility of upward mobility for Black individuals, have all contributed to the establishment of a contemporary sociopolitical climate within which the full reclamation of the Black body seems almost unattainable. The white public’s commodification of the Black body, which brings with it the legacy of American slavery, has reduced the identity and visceral autonomy of African Americans to that of an object, and formulated an inescapable cultural death that begin to take effect at the moment of their birth. In recent years, the social death of Black community has never been more evident than in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, wherein social objectification of the Black male body has skewed the definition of humanity with which the public considers identity, autonomy, and the worth of a human life; nevertheless, the actions of the Ferguson protestors are the first steps towards Black social resurrection. It is here, amidst the very commercial culture in which the Black body first became public property, that African American individuals and communities can transcend circumstantial restrictions of their respective realities by overcoming their objectification. The Ferguson protestors’ full recognition of the value of Brown’s body and life was, by extension, recognition of their own inherent worth: a collective struggle to complete the transition from object back to subject in which Black individuals can—and ultimately will—triumph.

Works Cited

Schmidt, Michael, Matt Apuzzo, and Julie Bosman. “Police Officer in Ferguson Is Said to Recount a Struggle.” The New York Times. October 17, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Bello, Marisol, and Yamiche Alcindor. “Police in Ferguson Ignite Debate about Military Tactics.” USA Today. August 19, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Ruminations

September 30, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

Posting notes directly from my journal again. I guess it just seemed preferable to starting my homework. I also miss someone.

I do not know why this ability was given
To me, of all people
To unravel the sweet mystery
That is your guarded heart

It should not have been mine.

And yet it is the natural language of my gaze
Peering through incandescent layers
Of gossamer and vanity
Seeking what you are
As it bleeds through what you were and will be,
What you fear, what you think, what you hope to become
Running my hands through hair like cropped silk–

I could still see the imprint of your form beside me
When ultimately, I woke alone.

Notes In Aruba: Directly From My Journal

August 9, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

While I was here, just outside of the city of Oranjestad, I jotted down some thoughts I had at the bars, beaches, and nightclubs that I visited. None of them are especially impressive, but I have recently decided that I will no longer be ashamed of my “unpolished” ideas and creations. Visiting San Diego for the International Comic Convention, coupled with the excessive amounts of Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Milton I have been reading lately, has inspired me to start writing freely again. So here goes.

August 6
I’m out and the lights are like stars. I dream that death is my salvation. I know that in truth it is oblivion. “What a piece of work is man!” “A God! A God their severance ruled!” And so I live on, speaking words that have no meaning, breaking promises I never really intended to keep.

August 8
I found the corpses of two decaying serpents, lying in the dust beside a great structure of stone on this ancient island.
• The fantasy and phobia of decay: it is innate to us
• Two beings entwined in themselves
• A half-foot of distance between them (us?)
• A slow stench hanging in the warm air

I found a beach full of stones stacked together by tourists, all who had hoped that their wish would come true, or perhaps simply wanted to join this manufactured “tradition.” I reject them, and yet I do not disturb them, and instead carve a winding path through wishes unfulfilled: making my way slowly towards the sea.
• I understand now why Tolkien writes about the sea
• Spray kisses my face
• Those colors: a thousand shades of blue and green crowned with white foam
• All water returns there, unchanging
• What a wonderful way to die

Perhaps I discern, beneath layers of tourism and manufactured existence, the ancient vitality of this colonized island: the lost but still-living history that breathes richly, dimly, and slowly throughout its foundations of volcanic rock.

We found this man, Robb he calls himself, and with the appearance of this young father of two other children, all of the briefly forgotten tragedies of a broken home recommence. I’m attracted to him; Cole won’t leave his side. My own father’s absence is stitched through our realities in a way that leaves us dissembled, fluttering in the wind like the skin of that decaying serpent: exposing bare, intricate, beautiful bones.

For Emily (whenever I may find her)

July 22, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

charcoal and #2 pencil. july, 2014. (unfinished).

Driving Me Crazy and Keeping Me Sane: My Time on VII So Far

May 30, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

candid6 plip14
If you are reading this post, you should join The Phillipian.

Why? I am honestly not sure.

I guess you should join The Phillipian because we are inseparable. We do not all necessarily love one another, not even close: but I know that we all love what we stand for. During my time as an Associate, The Phillipian led me to mentors and role models who influenced me more than I could ever have anticipated, and who I have missed more than they might ever understand. But in their absence, the basement of Morse is becoming a second home, and my fellow VII editors are becoming the family I never really had.

You should join The Phillipian because we are passionate, more passionate than you could possibly believe. Five months in the newsroom was enough to transform us into aspiring journalists, loving every new sleepless night a little bit more than the last. We have learned to care about one another as much as we care about our work; because after all, every one of us has something in common — we dedicate all of our time, some of our health, and most our sanity to the well-being of that paper. And somehow, it just inspires us to keep on trying for more.

You should join The Phillipian because it teaches you what it means to fail. I remember sitting down to complete the Upper Management application as clearly as though it were released this very evening. I remember the 60 sleepless hours, the countless coffee stains and cigarettes strewn across my bedroom floor. I remember being told I had no chance, and trying for it anyways. I remember pouring everything I was and everything I had to offer into those fourteen printed pages, and I remember what it felt like when I learned that none of it had been good enough.

You should join The Phillipian because it allows you no time to grieve. You will hold your head up, and you will congratulate your new superiors, and you will write and you will edit and you will organize and you will print—and soon enough you will find yourself laughing again. Soon enough you will find a new story, or a new article, or a new idea, and it will all seem worth it again. Soon enough you will select your own Associates, see your former dreams and determination echoed in their eyes, and you will hope to God that they succeed in all of the ways you could not.

You should join The Phillipian because it will inspire within you a love and a vitality that will transcend the trials of your disappointments, and may in fact be born of that very pain. You should join The Phillipian because despite eight months of what often felt like living hell, I can say in good conscience that not a moment has been wasted. In that newsroom, I have achieved things I had never thought myself capable of, and I have failed in ways I could never have anticipated. I have conversed with Gail Collins in the New York Times editorial office about a Commentary spread I helped orchestrate, and I have cried in the Morse bathroom more times than I can count.

You should join The Phillipian because the people you meet may surprise you. I have worked and fought and fallen in love with the other editors on our paper, and they in turn have kept me alive during the most difficult year of my life.

You should join The Phillipian because with or without you, it will soon begin its 138th year of bringing information and opinion to the Andover community. And you may well find, as I have, that being a part of that is the most beautiful thing you ever do.

Signed,

Grace Tully ’15
Commentary Editor, The Phillipian vol. CXXXVII

Electra

May 29, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

A duplicitous scene of memory and motion, seraphim and song: the sensuality of two lovers—one a mercurial visionary, the other a gentle pragmatist—juxtaposed by the violent ecstasy of a fallen angel, whose wings are freed when a mortal tears her skin away.

Rough fingers move across euphonious strings,
Working slowly through the muscles of my throat
The inexplicable is nondescript:
I can only do you justice in metaphor.

In the visceral beauty of evening
I seek solace in your warmth, your flesh,
Your presence reverberates against facets of memory
Breathes dimly through the twilight of my body.

Crescent curve of my form beneath your hands
The soft steady rhythm of your palms:
Moonlight shines pale across vertebral ridges,
Illuminates softly feathered cicatrices of skin.

I can feel, in the silence, his retrograde absence
Working backwards through my reality,
Tearing at the seams of faintest recollection,
Leaving me empty: a labyrinth of want.

My fingernails claw across leveled mortality
Echoing desire in their bite against your flesh,
Go on—tear against me
Push your fingers towards my lips, my jaws
Lace your knuckles through each cleft in my spine.

Go on—
I want this,
I need this.

Silence your doubts, as I have silenced mine.
Tell yourself that I have suffered enough,
And that you want what this is,
And what we are,
Or could be—

And for the rest of my life,
I will love you for it.

The motions are beautiful,
Plumed sockets and soft pulsations,
As your flesh laces through the fabric of my reality,
And with the unfurling of each feathered joint,
I remember what it means
To feel these muscles move again.

So when bare wrists press together
And trembling limbs intertwine:
When fingers clench the wrought iron bed frame
And bodies bend to meet the curve of the moon—

Revel then in raw openings of flesh and memory:
Release me from this nightmare of skin

Your mind is like his: pragmatic, keen—
But when you hear this music in the darkness,
Each note lingering like a trace of falling silver
Tell me please, my atheist, why only for an instant
In soft, sweet, clenching muscles,
We both believe in God.

Let me fall asleep as the sun is rising,
And watch the flecks of golden light
Tangle in the lashes of your azure eyes.
Let that be my final memory.

And if you stay—
Please stay—

Maybe I will wake beside you.

Rhapsody in Crimson

May 4, 2014 / Grace / 0 Comments

An unfinished love song, a eulogy.

The only girl I ever loved was seventeen, with ivory skin, eyes like winter mornings, and hair to rival the autumn in which we met.

There was a certain inexplicability to the beauty and the chaos of that hair: no ordinary shade of red but a blistering conflagration of vermilion and rust, cascading past her elbows in a cacophony of curls. She had makeup like graffiti and a gaze like shattered glass, but none of it compared to her voice, which rang through the air with vivid incandescence, and lingered in the silence like a trace of falling silver.

As the phoenix ascends from an insensibility of ash, so the girl I love emerged from the dust of her broken home, seeking vitality in an apathetic age. Her dissonance held the promise of new beginnings, but its transience left the tragedy of absence in her wake; in the end, it was discordant silence that carved her memory into my skin.

I never asked what happened to her, never tried to find out. It involved a razor and her wrists, and that was all I cared to know. Sometimes I like to remember her as an angel, all flame and song and shattered possibility, teaching me to live again. But other times, without meaning to, I envision a car on a fog- shrouded highway, hurtling into oncoming traffic: her blood on the windshield, mine on the seats. We should have died together, her and I.

In the melancholy traces of half-forgotten melodies, her voice stitches silently through the fabric of my reality, my infinity echoing with the virtuoso of her grief. She never knew I loved her, and yet some nights I dream of her still: starlight trailing from her fingertips, tangling in that fiery hair. In my dreams she is alive, and she is crying: my universe contained within the confines of each cyan iris, her mouth moving softly in mine.

It has been two years since I last heard the melody of the beautiful, broken girl who bared to me her renegade heart and a soul like tinted glass. She had a voice like the landslide of a thousand falling stars, but she never found a song to match the violence in her eyes.

Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

XXV