On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous / Ocean Vuong
6
“Have you ever made a scene,” you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, “and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?”
How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing ? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadow of our hands, on two different pages, merging?
8
When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind ?
12
You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”
24
(いじめっ子の言葉に対して)
He was only nine but has already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.
25
My forehead pressed to seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares : the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.
32
(移民であり、英語をあまり話せない主人公の母に対して)
The night I promised myself I’d never wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I could switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
涙。
33
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service : plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.
37
His mouth opens and closes rapidly. He is asking a question, or questions, he is turning the air around his words into weather. Is there a language for falling out of language ?
77
Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there,
94
The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work – want. That August, in the fields, it was he who came into my vision.
96
I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of.
106
Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth ?
110
Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter underneath the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from the two-hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the country, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on his sink in it’s sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the after-scent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.
続きは写真
中略
118
“Keep going,” I said, and leaned back, offering it all. “Grab it.”
I can’t make sense of what I felt. The force and torque, of pain gathered toward a breaking point, a sensation I never imagined was a part of sex. Something took over and I told him to do it harder. And he did. He lifted me nearly off the bed by the roots of my follicles. With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. He let go of my hair only to put his arm under my neck. My lips brushed his forearm and I could taste the salt concentrated there. Recognition flinched inside him. This is how we were going to do it from now on.
続きは写真
119
After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth.
Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.
120
(Trevor asked to be topped, but before it begun, he stops saying I can't, I'm not a girl)
I had thought sex was to breach new grand, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong.
156
Your Trevor, your brunette but blond-dusted-arms man pulling you into the truck. When you say Trevor you mean you are the hunted, a hurt he can’t refuse because that’s something, baby. That’s real.
And you wanted to be real, to be swallowed by what drowns you only to surface, brimming at the mouth. Which is kissing.
Which is nothing
if you forget
179
You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knocking’ ‘em dead”.
メモ : On being のポッドキャストでも、Ocean Vuong は、このことについて話してた。Seth Meyers のトークショーでも。Seth は、How words of destruction is used to define success, particular from male perspective という言い方をしてたけど、まさに (Seth Meyers すごいなあ。Ocean の本を本当読んだのだろうか。)
Ocean (with Seth Meyer) : In this culture, we celebrate voice through the lexicon of violence. I think it's worth it to ask the questions, what happens to our man in voice when the only way they can valutate themselves is though the lexicon of death and destruction. And I. Think when they see themselves only worthwhile when they are capable of destroying things, it's inevitable that we arrive at a masculinity that is toxic.
197
And because denial, fabrication - storytelling - was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong ?
202
When Simone Weil said : Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the souls filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I”.
As he heaved above me I unconsciously reached back to touch myself, to make sure I was still there, still me, but my hand found Trevor instead - as if by being inside me, he was this new extension of myself. The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life. I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like : as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.
203
His cock, touched at the tip with the dark inside me, pulsed under the lamplight as it softened. I was, in that moment, more naked than I was with my clothes off - I was inside out.
229
I remembered looking at you for a long time and, because I was six, I thought I could simply transmit my thoughts into your head if I stared hard enough. I remember crying in rage. How you had no idea.
237
I felt this sudden surge of tenderness for him right then, a feeling so rare in me back then it felt like I was being displaced by it.
237
“Hey” he said, half-asleep, “what were you before you met me?”
“I think I was drowning.”
A pause.
“And what are you now?”
He whispered, sinking.
I thought for a second. “Water.”
“Fuck off. He punched me on the arm. “And go to sleep, Little Dog.” Then he grew quiet.
Then his eyelashes. You could hear them think.
メモ : ↑まじこのパッセージだけでもOcean Vuong の天才みが溢れ出てる。
238
写真で。
240
That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost.
241
I run. I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.
242
Monkeys, moose, cows, dogs, butterflies, buffaloes. What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story - when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.
Acknowledgmentsより
Freedom…. is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” is from Bei Dao’s poem “Accomplices”
Thank you for always reminding me that rules are merely tendencies, not truths, and genre borders only as real as our imaginations small.
