finally. a suitable description of this quality that has quite literally haunted me all my life.

the last few months- like six months- there has been such a conflict in me that i wasn’t even aware of it. i was dimly conscious that something is wrong, but finding this phrase today- the archaic smile- has brought this messy storm out of its hole and now it crouches on the dimly lit floor in front of me.

the bifurcation of the soul. mine, in this case.

i think it all goes back to noa, and myself in noa, which may come as no surprise to you, dear reader.

the real question is… is this just an excuse?

perhaps i am being harsh. perhaps i need better seats to watch this game. perhaps i am in one of those material gathering stages again, the ones that used to worry me but then go away. and this one is sticking around for a while, i guess.

fleeting encounters. funny how the end of my saturn return has ejected me out into space here.

my first and only request for a blog entry has come in, from halfway around the world. write about the fictionalization of the self please.

how can i ignore such an appropriate and loving order.

and so that’s just it, that thing that goes back to the archaic smile and bifurcation bit. in order to thrive…the only way i can do so, i know, is to fictionalize myself over and over into the media of words, color, hard labor.   i need to come back, come back from this place of focus on what i am not, how much further i need to go, how much societal and economic headway i am making. these preoccupations are killing me, slowly, and i know that wrinkles and grey hairs and insomnia are their symptoms.

i wrote again on the mirror:

the myth of inadaquacy

and i know that i cannot succeed if i continue to worship it as i do.

come back, leahla, i am sorry i have made it so hard for you to thrive in me.

trust that you have not stopped making art, that you have not shut off the magic of interacting joyfully with the thousand other mees. yous. i.

trust that your baby girl is herself a work of your art, and indeed the most beautiful one. she will take and has taken what you have given her and along with her own magic spells is weaving a tale for the ages.

and my sweet in order to fictionalize myself i need look no further than the life i have created thus far, the peripatetic mind states, the willingness to explore for its own sake, for the beauty of the awe, foreign religions. this i carry with me and it is my lens on the world, what happens in front of me. thus the bifurcation.

see yourself as i do, she says to me and i to her.

floating, or flying, in that space

between past and present that informs aesthetics, humor, hunger for proximity to the edge, to you, and to myself.

for h.

footnotes to my soul:

http://leahla.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/otto-rank/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_smile

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