...And the Fury

[Photographs: A lone climb up Mt Fuji I tied my red ribboned bell to the coinstalk a few steps before I met a monk who told me it is too late to reach the peak, turn around NOW (his voice was stern and face was tree-hard with kind eyes), he said, turn around, turn around... you listening? Turn around and follow the path down now, it is not safe, see no one is with you, I will not go with you go down now, will be cold, dark, go down now but I said no I must keep climbing I said this morning I was going to reach the top and I was feeling bad every post along the way I would look up and there was always another large thing in the distance that I imagined was some huge mansion with a kind old man and a huge library full of rows and rows and rows of old calligraphed books and since I spoke English and not a word of Japanese other than daijobu which means are you ok I would say it and I use it so often because I sometimes attract not-ok people towards me (this has nothing to do with the old man and his library) because I am also not-ok and I try to help them because I know how not-ok it feels to feel not-ok but none of us would ever admit to being not-ok so just like that time I met a lady curled up in a ball sobbing sitting in a nook she taught me how to say it and then we repeated to each other daijobu, daijobu, daijobu, daijobu, daijobu until she cracked a shy smile there was not much else we could say to each other and she had unused tickets to the large concert in Roppongi where I was standing tiptoe over the gaggle of college boys yelling on the second story stoops to peek through the barriers where there were slices of jumping balloons feeling dizzy with the colors and the sounds slightly glum because the girl on stage had all these balloons and a mic and was just standing there, just standing there with a shrill cute song she had no pizzazz and I imagined breaking through the barrier and jumping down like a Nintendo character popping the balloons going wild I can yell louder even without a mic and then my sound would turn into a rainbow colored balloon as soon as she touched it she would make a bling sound and go POP. So as soon as she felt a bit better we walked together to the concert but as soon as we made it to the front it was letting out and people everywhere bumping into me because I was the clumsy bump not used to dodging through the rush hour subway systems and I think I was a funny pebble in their streamlined routine and the weird loss-feeling from making it to the front just to see it end was a repetition of that time in Mt Fuji where it was too late to keep climbing but I had made it up so far that it was also too late to start descending, the monk said follow the path, there are people ahead of you if you turn around, you can walk with them, but I'd decided I was going to reach the top I had not planned on climbing at all and had nothing but a pair of hawaiian print tourist cropped pants, tennis shoes and my mother's holey shirt I had torn its yellow sleeve reaching for the bell someone had dropped near the lava rocks and my camera tied onto my empty waterbottle with a white square towel one by one foot long I had found on the Third Summit post on my way up...I met the monk again the moment I was sitting on the 10th Summit I was so close to the top and I suddenly couldn't breathe anymore and I was sure I was going to die, something in my chest was about to pop and the pop had moved from my chest to my throat and my body started turning into a rock for an instant I wondered how Lacan must have felt when the sea-snakes wrapped around him because speared the Trojan Horse and knew it was all a scam, the monk had known how fast sunset would happen, I was fooled by the brightness and thought it would be day for much longer. The monk stood there he was quiet and for a second I was angry he wasn't helping me but also glad he didn't say anything because I was so ashamed about the freezing tears and the wind sound was screaming in my ears and I had the luck to meet a gentleman in white and I do not remember his name he had a holey towel wrapped around his head which in Korea means you're an old person with a very painful headache, or that you've lost your mind, he was walking down and knew how to make my breathing work again and when I did breathe and it was such a wonderful feeling and the breathing was gulping the experience and the happiness in a breath after not-breathing.

My shadow at noon, cast upon an ear in Malcolm Cochran's cement cornfield in the corner of ___ Rd, Dublin OH

My breakfast table, a computer and notebook away from Andrew WIlliam Elvish's book "Death Becomes Her: The death aesthetic in/as fashion advertising" opened to page 64-65, with Footnote 98 facing me:
98 States Kaja Silverman, "The oft repeated Lacanian assertion that woman is the phallus whereas man has the phallus dramatizes the profound ambiguities of the last term. In so far as the woman's body is understood as escaping symbolic structuration, she can be described as being the phallus but not having it )ie. as existing within the real, but being cut off from culture privilege.) "Histoire d'O: The Construction of a Female Subject." (in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 322).