-Amelie Andrezel
Break up, get down
There’s a mirror at the bottom of the sea and either way:
You’re gonna drown.
I keep my eyes to myself
But I see them when I see you and I know that it ain’t no good
For my health.
You need from me
All the shadows down the highway of your head
That you swore you’d never be.
This road is ours
Let’s settle down into the sheets and drive away
Real slow like classic cars.
You need from me
All the shadows down the highway of your head
That you swore you’d never be.
I’ll play a part
But my heart is loyal to the state of sacred nothing—
It’s been sovereign from the start.
My heart is loyal to the state of sacred nothing—
It’s been sovereign from the start.
As far as any of us knew, time was the beast that clawed its way out of the fog and lay down, dripping, on our doorstep.
It was the warren of cracks growing up from the foundation; the white veins of ice congealing thick across the window pane.
It was the poetry of the sound of a sob against silence.
A breaker in the tempest, it walled us from the sea.
Here are some things I think I would like.
To let down my hair, and to pause by the window. To run from my voice to the water.
To hear the stars, yellow-violet, peering through the glass of night, opaque with the haze of pent-up summer, exploding through the windshield.
To wallow in a dancer’s body, bent against the double-frame exposure—impaled on two pale shafts of sunlight.
To stare back out from the photographs, into the eyes of the drowning few; to beckon them on into madness.
To play.
But I have surprised my surprised self before, with the thing that I want: not to want it.
This will almost certainly get taken down, but…
A little song called “Lullabye for Dreams”
(tune borrowed—loosely—from Karen Elson)
If I could have been Laura / Or if I could have been John… / Maybe I could have been / One of them / Now I fear that my chance is gone.
If I could have been smarter / Or if I thought further ahead / Maybe I could have been / One of them / Now I fear that my chance is gone.
Words meant so much on paper / Dreams feel so real in your head / But at the end of the day / The time you’ve given away / Is just gone, it’s gone, gone.
I know I could have been smarter / I know I could have planned further ahead / But the choices that I made / And this life that I gave / Is a life lived inside of my head…
If I could have been Laura / Or if I could have been John / Maybe I could have been / One of them / Now I fear that my chance is gone.
Good night now / Unquenchable passions / Go to sleep now, unspeakable dreams / Tuck yourselves away / ‘Til the end of the day… / When the truth doesn’t bleed quite so loud.
-Amelie
what dOEs ThIS sOuNd like? — The Hairpin
This comments section IS SO INTERESTING. Do you hear a narrating voice in your head when you read? Do you “see” a film when you read fiction? Do you pick up writing or speech patterns? OTHER PEOPLE DO/DON’T.
Oooh, this is a really interesting topic. I don’t hear anything when I read, and I find trying to imagine it really disconcerting! As I’m sure is equally true when someone who does “hear” what they read imagines hearing nothing at all.
I almost never “see” what I read, including characters, which is part of the reason that names/nicknames are carry so much weight for me as a reader and a writer. The closest I’ve been able to describe how I read is sort of like a page-to-memory transcription, where my brain puts the sequence and meaning of the words into my memory without processing them as sounds or recognizing what’s being described as an image.
Another interesting question: how do you remember things you’ve read? If I’m trying to remember the specific words (like for the purposes of quotation), I generally see an image of the words on the page/screen. If I’m just trying to remember the sense of a passage, I can generally “see” particular actions or settings, and characters to a lesser extent, but still don’t “hear” dialogue as sound. I kind of just see the written speech on top of the image. (Basically, my brain is a Tumblr gifset, lol.)
i imagine things almost entirely in terms of language (like. if i try to imagine my dad’s face it sort of looks like my dad’s face until i sort of mentally zoom in on it and then it’s just the word ‘dad’ over and over again, it’s a little bizarre) so the idea of imagining texts in terms of images is a bit…foreign to me, because i imagine images in terms of texts anyway.
and the way i read is also unusual—i read in paragraphs; i’ll read the first and last sentence of a paragraph and then skim backwards and forwards over it until i get the gist of what’s happening. which isn’t particularly…conducive to audio imagination?
a friend once took a philosophy of mind class and one of the things that really stuck out to her was an exercise they did, which was to imagine a blue triangle and a red triangle at the same time. i can’t do it, unless i give them both some kind of signifier other than ‘blue triangle’ and ‘red triangle.’
oh and someone mentioned dreams!!! my dreams are all genuinely incredibly weird, and i’m pretty sure that they’re actually just disconnected images that i subconsciously attach a narrative to because my brain wants everything to be a narrative.
I am loving this conversation! Aside from being an innately pretty fascinating topic, I’m having fun envisioning different ways people are digesting my writing. After all, I try to write in a way that is pleasing for the way that I read.
Because I “hear” the words being read aloud when I read silently, rhythm is incredibly important to my writing, especially in my prose. In my mind, I have a particular set of beat patterns and inflections with which my writing is being “read”. One of the reasons I’m fanatical about punctuation in my writing (seriously, have you seen the number of semi-colons and em dashes I use?) is because I tend not to use it for grammatical meaning, but as a style guide to force the reader to read each sentence with the same beat structure I have for it in my head. Another side-effect of this is that when I write my drafts, I use a lot of place holders in sentences where I know the structure and number of syllables of the word I want to go there, but not the word itself. Here’s an example of what I mean from the Harriet/Peter fic I started writing and haven’t had a chance to finish yet:
‘There is nothing more maddening,’ said she, ‘than to question one’s own motives after the thing is gone and done with.’
Peter swiveled slightly at the torso, so as to bring to bear on the matter the full force of his perspicacious expression.
‘Well,’ he invited, making infuriatingly little effort to conceal the amusement on his lips, ‘let’s hear the gravamen, then. One hardly [ 1 ] the [ 2 ] without intending something in the way of exposition.’
Harriet frowned.
‘Damn, Peter!’ she invected, ‘I’m hardly as dramatic as all that.’
Where [1] is a three-syllable word with the most emphasis on the first syllable (and least emphasis on the middle syllable) and [2] is a one-syllable word. In addition to number of beats and emphasis on each beat, I also pay very careful attention to the distribution of sounds in a sentence or a paragraph. To zeroth order, you can think of this like managing consonance and assonance in poetry. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that I have sound-texture synesthesia: when I hear a sound, I feel an associated three-dimensional space taking place in (roughly) the space of my throat, ears and sinuses. Essentially, what happens is this: I read the words, I hear the words, I feel the space linked to those words. Therefore, “balancing” the sounds in my writing is literally like balancing a physical composition. I strive to create an aesthetically pleasing juxtapostion of sounds that are tall and wide; sharp and round; hollow and full.
That being said, all of this structure falls away if you are reading a paragraph the way poins describes above, for example! To a large extent, the characters and the plot will carry over between different ways of processing reading, but I feel like a huge amount of the details won’t translate (in a visceral way) to people digesting it differently.
I guess the larger point I’m driving to is this: is there some common ground at which we all meet when deciding whether writing is accomplished vs. unaccomplished? Certainly, there is a stereotype that no two people will agree on the “best” writing style, and these types of processing issues no doubt play some kind of role in that disagreement. But in this discussion, I’ve learned that a number of people who’ve said nice things about my writing (at one point in time or the other) have been processing it COMPLETELY differently—not only from me, but from one another! Is there some meta-pattern that links them all?
Like I said, fascinating discussion.
Oh, and don’t even get me STARTED on dreams.
I sleep hand in hand
With a grey kind of ghost
(The kind that your eyes see straight through).
My ghost keeps me warm
With its grey kind of love:
The kind that your heart bleeds straight through.
We walk to the bus stop, we
Buy two tickets downtown
(Driver say it don’t need one but the ghost say it do)—
We stare at each other across the
Grey little aisle and
Watch the people keep a-walking on through.
I live my life beside
A grey kind of ghost
(The kind that your eyes see straight through).
I stand in the shadow of its
Grey kind of love:
The kind that your heart bleeds straight through.
We go to the graveyard
We lie on the ground;
Green grass is a kind of grey too…
And its grey kind of lips make a
Grey kind of sound
That the grey kind of time slips through.
I gave my life to find
A grey kind of ghost
(The kind that your eyes see straight through).
We sleep together in a
Grey kind of love:
The kind that your heart bleeds straight through.
I gave my life to find
A grey kind of ghost:
The kind that your love bleeds straight through.
We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
i’d like to be able to do to you
what you do to me, but
it’s too late already, we’ve seen
too many baseball games.
(lay your arms across my canals, let the boats go by ‘til morning)
we were once a solitary pair
with our jean cuffs rolled up
and our heart sleeves turned down
guns cocked to cards, colors dripping
i’d like to be able to do to you
what you do to me, but
it’s too late already, we’ve seen
too many baseball games.
(lay your arms across my canals, let the boats go by forever)
One dark and rainy morning
On the 22nd of May
She made her debut in the alley
Where the satin sisters play.
With her ivory, looking-glass fingers
And her armies made of clay;
They took one glance at her mission bell stance
And couldn’t turn away.
He woke up in limbo
Between jumping and paying his fare.
And took one look out the window
To see them drowning in her care.
With her highwayman reflection
And her fallen martyr stare;
The stained glass code of her gypsy robe
Was more than he could bear.
She always took her coffee
With more water than wine, she said.
So she handed him a cigarette
And went to sleep instead.
With her music box memory
And her conscience made of lead;
He watched her breathe and he believed
That he’d probably be better off dead.
The note blew off the table—
He let it burn like a midnight flare;
She’d left the window open
Crimson leaves strewn across the chair.
With her raspberry perfume skin
And her auburn incense hair;
The hollow weeping of her song;
Her taste in his mouth the whole night long;
Of all the visions they used to share
The cotton coat she used to wear
Was all of her that still was there
That’s all that still was there.
