these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.

Oct 19, 2010

crutch. cross.

the boxes we've been given.

the boxes we've accepted.

the boxes we've constructed.


i have constructed more than a few horrible boxes for myself, that's for sure. horrible rooms of horrible silence, horrible stillness- the evil twin of what i'm experiencing now. the hateful flip-side of solitude and graciousness. maybe the word would be "abjection"?

in my mind now i can see those horrible boxes i constructed for myself. i can see them with the label ABJECT stencilled across the front in spray-paint and Jasper Johns lettering. though that description makes it seem almost romantic. and maybe there are moments when abjection rubs shoulders with romance? maybe sometimes our pain would be too great, our loneliness too hard to bear, if we did not romanticize it a little. romance provides strength. it makes the world tolerable in intolerable moments.


but i will not climb back in to particular boxes.

i will not accept particular boxes.

i will not construct particular boxes.


i do not want to contain so much pain that i must romanticize my self, my life, my pain, in order to bear it. in order to move even the shortest of distances. i have lived too many years that way.

i am tired of bullshit pain and want the pain that finds me to be real and necessary. not made-up, not unnecessary. and in the in between times, a soft joy. pencil scratches and ink dripping and words to rummage around in. i am learning to appreciate the open air now. feathers and leaves falling. the wind cracking through tall trees. angry squirrels clawing the roots. and such a luscious moon.

2 comments:

Elisabeth said...

Abjection is inevitable but we must find ways to comfort ourselves against its raw cruelty as you do here with your words, Angela. Thanks.

angela simione said...

hi elisabeth, i was thinking of you when i was writing this post.. that expression you lent me: a wool-gathering time. i am very much in one at the moment. it is a perfect description. warm and lovingly accurate.

long moments of silence, long mornings and afternoons of contemplation.

abjection finds us all, you are exactly right. and repeatedly. i don't think that that is neccesarily horrible. i suppose i prefer abjection to falsity: the needless pains... the contructed traumas, the inauthentic, the faux, a lie cast as reality. and i know i have been boxed in by those in the past... looking back, i think sometimes it was a result of simply being a child: powerless and dependant. other times, an inability to face life head on and play it where it lies.

well beyond the very human wish for an easy life, i wish for an honest life.