emo human

The city is empty but for the men who sweep the streets, sweeping and happy to sweep in the quiet, eyes cast down on pebbled pavement, wishing for always to sweep up alone. Your presence there makes them stop with contempt, eyes cast down to trim the edges of your shadow, still as statues until you pass, the echo of your heels reverberating in the dust that floats then settles to be swept. You wonder aloud why the street is so quiet, asking one of the men with brooms but he speaks to you in nonsense, eyes focused on some mirage, lips making shapes for shallow nonsense words to flourish.  This city is eerie. Makes you tally and take stock of what contents you carry, how much bread and water, oil and cheese. Is it enough, you ask yourself. Enough for what, comes the reply and it sends you back inside yourself where the hearth is wide and warm and burning well. Still, these sweeping men line the streets, sentries of a disordered realm, brooms held crossways like matted shields, hunchi

Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord and Cary Grant as CK Dexter Haven in 1940's The Philadelphia Story I have gone back and forth a lot this week. What should I say, how should I say it, or should I just keep my mind to myself and say nothing at all? I've started and stopped, erased and rewritten, tried to reframe bad feelings and amplify good ones, and still, I'm here, professing my confusion but hoping it will disappear before I publish this so I can take it all back again. To be both an artist and confused is a terrible plight. I have set myself up to be a confidence factory, certainty factory. Pumping out the short and the long of what is True and Right and Worthy. The public sphere is no place to air out your confusion, I'd think. Keep that in your journal, I'd think, away from the eyes of those who wouldn't care, or worse, understand. There's a character in film history who has been coming to mind these last several days. Tracy Lord. Do you know

The City is old. Its streets, uneven and paved in stone, the main road stretching the length of the city and never breaking. Alleys snake off from it in curving detours, too narrow for two carts to pass at once. If you continue from where you began and walk the Rue de Saphir, your leather bag slung across your back, your pockets heavy with antique coins, you will come to a convergence of streets beneath the statue of the Angel Michael and the maiden who bends to gather water from a brook with a jug. The road to the right finds the Hills of Moriah. Take it on a Tuesday when the café shutters fan open along the way, the aproned proprietors standing in their doorways, wiping down their hands from butter and flour, smiling invitations, wordless grins from knowing racks of  warm and fragrant pastry and bread, and stop before the dirt path at the vignoble to buy a bottle of rouge saisonnier before trekking up the dusty, weedy, knotted mound of seasoned earth. At this convergence of street

      There’s a little cafe on the corner where the buildings huddle together at the bend, and past their angled edges you can sight the line of the beach, over the hill like a hump as it rolls into sand.       I sit at the little cafe most days and drink sweet coffee or sparkling mayim , little round table, dark    glasses on when the sun hangs at offense, though she could never truly offend me. The coffee always tastes so sweet and I must sip it slowly, dabbing at the corners of my mouth with a cloth napkin, vowing to only sit like this at cafes which can afford me such finery, as this. A tiny porcelain spoon for sugar. A porcelain saucer with silver scuffs. A cloth on the table which waves in the breeze like a flag or the hem of a jacquard skirt, dancing, flying, waving at the sea. The waiter brings me a little cookie on a silver platter. “For your kafe, ” he tells me in Hebrew, and I know that he is fond of me, coming here every day, glasses on, pen like a dagger, pen like a kite.

For one month, I could rent an apartment in Tel Aviv. Go out to the beach, to the shops, to the parks and the restaurants. I could keep to myself, only coming and going, making no friends, no new acquaintances. Always alone. Cooking dinner. Gazing out the window during breakfast. Always rising early but not knowing why except to do it. And I could scribble, scribble, scribble in my journal, just like this, accomplishing only an awareness of my own feelings, desires, and shortcomings. At the end of the month, as if I had never been there, I would put my belongings back into my trunk, leave a handwritten note for the landlady to say todah rabah , then leave.