Heart of Bold

FOREWORD

Reading this book feels like reading a forgotten journal found beneath the seat of a train. With words that run off the pages in a flurry of mad passion, penned by a woman who holds her wickedness and wonder in her open palms like a gift.

I've never met Sophie in the flesh, I don't know how she moves in the world or how her laugh sounds but I don't need to, she spills herself into her writing and through reading her I feel like I'm meeting her. Her words remind me I'm not the only one born with rose-colored eyes, seeing magic where others see mundane. I'm not alone in being both excruciatingly sensitive and tough as nails. In thinking endlessly and feeling everything, sometimes all at once. Through other's acts of vulnerability we realize we're not quite as alone as we think.

How precious a book is. The way it contains not only all the sleepless hours the author poured into it, but also the lives they have lived. All their experiences, the delightful and the difficult, give color to the words we get to enjoy so effortlessly. How incredible it is to hold a part of someone's life in your hands and how soon we take it for granted.

How precious this book is. Savor these words for what they are, a piece of Sophie's heart. A marvelous piece.

– Nirrimi Joy Firebrace

INTRODUCTION

August 2015, Los Angeles

This year marks my twenty ninth rotation around the sun, and I am suddenly nostalgic. A decade of wild memories, sweet memories, hard memories, green and rough and candlelit memories. Suddenly this last decade – it ends in six months, has a soundtrack and a photo album and feelings and salty tears and the memory of freedom. What do I do with these whispers, these achingly beautiful memories? They open up like reverse origami in my consciousness and I wonder where on earth they get tucked away all these days. I particularly remember a time when I found myself torn between two gentlemen, one older, grounded, steady and calm, the other effervescent, ebullient, romantic, a bit crazy (the best kind of crazy) steeped in French culture, literature, cinema. I remember the milkshakes and the cake on the balcony and the bare feet and the hearts breaking in Cape May and the denim shorts and furious writing, writing, writing.

I remember the arriving in Australia and arriving in New York and leaving Los Angeles. I remember the arguments and the hidden truths and the hats. Oh, the hats. And the rolled cigarettes. The way we could stop everything and just sit outside, our muse the moon, and smoke. The space I had in my mind then to think about scenes we had just written, and stories I was molding. I am recognizing now a part of myself I had shelved as I entered this process of becoming a mother. I am recognizing a true part of my self. It is me I’m remembering, me I am missing. I see reflections of myself in the most intriguing places. It is comforting to find oneself again. I don’t want to stop writing. I don’t want to stop putting down these thoughts and feelings and memories and the mysteries I adore. I thought I might drop this ‘pastime’ for a while, see what happened. And I’m realizing that this is my breath. This is breathing for me.

So here I am. Behind the memories of the last few years are the memories of the years before them and the years before them, as if it were a bookshelf of old tomes I’d forgotten to look at. Dusty. But full. You open a wormhole and the floodgates unfold. Stay with me words. I don’t know who reads them but I don’t mind. I just want to write. I just want to feel what it’s like when I let it pour out like this. In the leafy night, in the nebula of nostalgia, unfurling through my fingers from these hallways, these milk white moonlit roads, they lead me back to myself. And I am happy for it.

These words are me.

This is my breath.

This is life.

. . .

The following pages are taken from a blog I once kept called Big Long Open Gash within the digital walls of my New York based publishing company Paper Castle Press. That home is no longer, and so the words live on in these pages. May the sober and psychedelic musings of my adventures across the planet bring you life and joy. May you find what you are looking for.

From my heart to yours,

Sophie

Big Long Open Gash (2008)

BIG LONG OPEN GASH, AUGUST 12, 2008

It strikes me that the word blog ought to be an abbreviation for something along the veins of Big Long Open Gash. I am giving you my wrists here, so that you can read what is written in the veins along them. I don't want to tell you anything unnecessary in this BLOG but parts of me know that everything is necessary, and that being what I intend to be here, which is a source of inspiration, is a noble cause. Before you leave with disdain for my pompousness, let me say that when I talk about being a source of inspiration, I want you to please think of this in the way true philologists understand; for to be a source is to be a kind of tap. I will show you water, but I am not the place where the water comes from. Where does the water come from? That is the question.

And so I enter this BLOG with infinite eyes. What a strange word that nub of letters is. I won't go into my musings on the odd conglomeration of letters that word involves. I will, however, say straight out that I refuse to be one of those people who disdain the demise of the English language. I think everyone ought to endlessly celebrate the creation of new words, even if it means English as a language turns to dirt. Think of the worms!

A little known fact: Norfolk Island pines, those tall, bendy trees strewn along the coast of my austral country were introduced by seafaring men to grow and erect into masts for their weather-beaten sea vessels. Isn't that a very sincerely GREAT endeavor?

And so I end this Big Long Open Gash entry with the visions that grace my eyes these new hours. Isn't the drip of new hours astonishing? And still we keep reappearing. I used to be surprised that cars stopped for me in the street, as if I wasn't really sure I actually existed. Nowadays, I am more apt to expect that the very fabric of space and time is going to rip open, and suck everything away with it down a black hole. I find it odd that things just stick around. I have strange visions of reality like a film screen ripping open with The Creature emerging from it, and sucking everything in the vicinity down again, into its big long open gash.

Emphasis on the I have strange visions. More to come.

This fire is combustible, resin-streaked:

Who is the being that keeps putting wood on our flames?

THE STILLEST I HAVE EVER BEEN, AUGUST 16, 2008

The morning is a mystery to me. It is the same with the rain falling. If it is raining, what is it? I guess in the morning you must send imaginary letters to me because I wake up with them at my eyelids, distant and sleep-drowned, along with a maddened glance thrown from this other man, further from you and yet so catastrophically close. I don't know which way to roll. If I step on the floor, will it vanish beneath me? What keeps it there all the time? Why is it still there? Sometimes I fear that the fabric of space will rip some way open, like a screen being buttered with anarchy by a bread knife, a slit carved in the celluloid of this great scene before me. What came before me? A series of summers, different hands on different bodies, quantum deviations; learning that, like ocean waves or fire licks, one can never be the same as the next.

The sun fell into the lake this afternoon. I don't know what on earth will be next. What if, when you look at it, you can't see straight anymore? The other man crouches on the tabletop, with its bloating wood and bled nails, and bakes in the sun off that lake. There are newspapers flaking from the wooden top like onions and skin sores, blistering in the air so still and clear, that the boats are all skewed in the water, and from across the bay we can hear wooden things fall off counter corners. A cautionary shout, a sigh: you can hear it all from this place. A milk light commands a far corner of this house from the reflection off the lake, possessive, direct. I am this place, the light says. This is where I lie. I wonder if people are like that.

It seems the sun is so certain. Is it only the elements – the earth, water, air, and fire – that are so secure? The water is certain, and the sun is, but I know the spiders who surround me aren't. I saw one with only seven legs today, the other mangled and charred. Did the sun do that? I am not sure what is happening, only that I am wandering wondering.

WORDS, WHO NEEDS THEM, AUGUST 28, 2008

All of life's a stage, and I am writing its frenetic scenes. Line after line, word after word. I often just wish I could say: _____________ and you would understand me perfectly. Much of the exactness of what we are saying has roots that are yet to burst forth from the dirty soil of our hands as they work their way around the world. We are all doing too much. We are all expecting and wanting and throwing out too much. Why this immense hunger for newness, and life, and this desire to be flaring up in giant flames? Why the constant thirst for more? What is it that we think is more? Why are we not content at the top once we get there? Why are we not sated when we sit? Why are we not happy when we roam? Where are we going? Where are we trying to get to? Do we even know?

This reminds me of a Rilke poem I keep going back to, in days of past thinking about issues like these. Life: What on Earth is going on with it? Why all the deepness, and lightness, and what is it all for? What am I doing, and how did I get here? Who are you? Who am I? I look at my hands and remember, oh yes, I do have a body. Sometimes I feel like my eyes are disconnected, that I am a watcher sitting deep in a dark theater, ambiguous, anonymous, not acting in those giant lights, but just at the point of consciousness at which all of it is embraced into. The point of awareness is important: I think without it, perhaps what extends from the point wouldn't exist? I am sure if this were paper that by now most of you (including myself) would not be able to read my own handwriting.

FRUIT ON MY SHORES, AUGUST 28, 2008

I add another of my scribings from the hilltop verandah (full of spiders) at Palm Beach where I was living for a while. The spiders certainly moved in for the scenery. My screenwriting friend, the fine Blake and I held a good fiesta. Top hats, devilish black capes trimmed in velvet, ash, and fire sticks. Book burning. I burnt a book. It was actually a journal, filled with the extraneous words of a rotten love affair. It wasn't worth existing in the fabric of space which I so value. So I burnt it, along with the boy it symbolized in my mind. The effort I went to wasn't exactly worth the pages I wrote on. The effort was wasted. The boy was laid to waste. The waste blows in the breeze now.

Blake walks around the high-cliffed weatherboard house painted in mascarpone and sky-blue ribbons. A heart of fire, and a searing song fills it, shimmers through the walls I sit masked at. For you see, I am masked by my writtens, and he by his immediate desires: a piece of yellow fruit, chocolate from a glass pot. The lights down, the fire mad in its belly there, mania-driven by the joy of fresh fuel, its many amber tongues speeding around in triple time. The fire is a speedy element. What about water? What about wine? What about you, who I write to every night with my eyes?

I tear my whitened tearful gaze from you. It is an excruciatingly perfect gaze which you return, but still I look away from the ship that you are on the horizon, to the immediacy of fruit on my shores.

I AM REPLACING EXTRAORDINARY, AUGUST 28, 2008

I have reached the place where I refuse to absorb what I don't need anymore. I have begun to live on the outside of society and on the inside of my own reality. I insist most people do the same. But I wonder what would happen if we all did that, because it could get bloody. The urge to run is bad, all the time. I can't listen to as many people as I used to listen to. I know who to run to, and who to run from. I will screw myself, if I'm not careful, by offering my throat to the knife edge of reality, and all the murderers who hold the knife will drive it into me if I don't make any noise from this place. Society is big and bad in this country. I'm in a gigantic city, and car noise has taken the place of ocean waves; I tell my friend that the landscape is just noise, and movement, and sometimes the things that fly are birds, and sometimes the things that fly are people.

I am not about to get into a pained discussion about why society is rotten and we should all be free spirits and live in tents. Because I want to be a part of my society as much as anyone does, and I think artistically, and even beyond that – spiritually, humanly – it is undeniably beneficial to be absorbed in the time of my life. This is my time, and all over the world, people are living in the time of their lives, literally. What is going to happen in the next moments? No one knows. We are all watchers privy to the unfolding of time and space in front of us. No one knows. And this is our time.

1 result for: amazing

Main entry: fabulous

Part of speech: adjective

Definition: So remarkable as to elicit disbelief

Synonyms: astonishing, astounding, fantastic, fantastical, incredible, marvelous, miraculous, phenomenal, prodigious, stupendous, unbelievable, wonderful, wondrous.

MY HEAD A ROSE, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

I am here only for the love I want to give, and the reality I want to be immersed in. I am here for no other reason than for the fact that I intend to share pleasure. I am here to live within the essence of life itself. I am here to go back to the soil, not the roots – the roots are me – but the soil. To be pushed on like trees are, in all directions: roots, branches, rings, and leaves. I am here to do what I can do. I am here to give you all that I can. To drink, empty my cup, and hold it out for filling again. Where does the water come from? I would say it comes through you. You are like the cloud that does not know why it rains, but occasionally drops its being on the shadows it makes. Sometimes your rain is gentle, sometimes like gunfire. Always it is water that is feeding planted seeds. The questions must be asked though: What seeds are planted? What fertile darkness did you plant them in? Whose seeded hands really did the digging? Whose garden? The garden is everywhere. I used to say that life is a tilled flowerbed, a fruit tree, a degustation. I used to believe that we were islands. But now I see that every man is a planet. Not an island garden but a magnetic thing who, like me, hardly realizes her own deep soil, the heaviness that reeks havoc on all roots, that sends veins thrashing toward nutrients, towards water. Have you felt the mud of this water on your feet? Have you brushed it off? Still, the human race amazes me in its fitness, and yet its ineptitude. Magnificent ineptitude. Humanity stretches itself like gum from a gum-sore mouth. When does the chewing stop and digestion begin? What is life but this? I sell cotton, in different shapes and colors, says the clothing store, gaudy and still. I sell sugar, in different shapes and colors, says the candy store, hot and fat with air. I sell wood, in different shapes and colors, says the furniture store, dark like moss. I sell paper, in different shapes and colors, says the newsstand, dry like onions. I sell nutrients, in different shapes and colors, says the cafe and the restaurant and the grocery store, thick with longing, salvation, promising the wandering souls. Says life: This is what I'm giving you. Take it or not, I am still here, I always have been; offering life, experience. Love is part of this; just different shapes and colors. John Lennon, Jesus Christ. Who are we, this human race, from this time? These marks: Are they even going to stick? My tombstone would probably have more weight than these words in the end. My dark hands will be darker, my mind decaying back to the dark spaciousness of garden from which it arose.

The ink a mark, the book a mark, the man a mark, the house a mark, the city on the land, the country on the sea, the Earth in galaxy, in universe, in what darker mark? All is marked and marking a much darker, damp glittery stamp beyond everything. But mathematics helps. Whatever is between the numbers is what I am, all is. The garden breathes.

ONE LAST GASHING RUSH, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

The questions burn and you sit there alone, and I sit here with two people. The cloud edges towards a new noon. The fish swim still, and all the paper cuttings lie shredded on the wood. The skins break, the souls tear, my unknowing knows, my knowing doesn't. I have no answers and too many questions. I can't glue anything together anymore; the glue doesn't stick. The song screams, the silence breaks at my spirit, the noise is encroaching pain. The future is encroaching madness. The split is insane. The bind is too powerful. The mind reading, the night talking, the dead trance of light and dark and powerful madness of two souls without bodies, with two bodies, with a third the only thing between them. And I can't know, I can't figure this out. I can't now. I can't sometime, I can't find the sometime, I can't find the thing to do now. What to do now, everything, and nothing.

In nothing there is everything, in everything there is nothing. I am scared, I am not scared, I am alone, I am not alone, I am here, I am not here. I have never been so here and yet so not here. The scissors lie, the water has been drunk, and more water falls. The cigarettes and the coffee and the wine, and the Australia. This long lone island, this massive house, this tiny house inside of me where I can't fit two people. Two people converged and melted towards me, a vessel of a heart too big, and yet too small to fit two larger hearts than mine. Your heart might be larger than mine. His heart might be too cold for the heat, or too hot for the cold, the cold sitting of the balcony, the cold hard wood soaked with rainstorms and pacing, and the pacing. The pacing. The birds chirping, the objects still and muted. I can't know. I can't find. I am movement in a still world. I am moving the movement. I am listening to the unheard noises, the unhearing noises, in the night with the tea and the madness of people asleep, dread, dead. To the light, to the light, to the light, you screech, and I hear your silent screams. I can't know how to solve this, or salve this.

The glasses are off, the fog is all blurry, the horizon is a sharp knife coming out of the cloud. How can I act? What do I do? The questions sear my spirit and yours too, I know that. My questions, my aching painful mind, my ripping burning sharp cutting heart is cutting yours and this is what I am most afraid of. How do I deal with you? How do I deal with myself? In a land where there are no boundaries, I have no limits, I have no fences to knock me back, and so I go, and I go, and I go. I do whatever I like and it hurts me to see my going go through you, to cut your cutting heart. I see your eyes and I know what is in them.

And as you sit on the balcony smoking your cigarette, how do I know what to say to you? I have no expression left. I have no words and no ink and no paints, and no emotions to explain to you this emotion. This bond is an emotion. And it makes me sick with unknowing love and free passion. I don't know which road to go down, only to go down deeply into it. Perhaps I am not walking on the roads anymore, I have sunk down deep into them, like quicksand, lava, like hot fire, like clouds, like a dinner of weather. I don't know what I am doing, what I am feeling, what I want. Time is speeding up. What is a second? It is ten years right now. I have no water. I have no air. I have no air in this place. I have no space. I have all the space in the world and yet no space. And you press in on me with your questions which I cannot answer. And your boundaries which I keep pressing up against. What are your boundaries? What are his? Perhaps neither of you have any. Perhaps your boundaries are both me. Perhaps I am a boundary. Perhaps life is a strange, strange place to exist in. Perhaps I wish I never saw you, and so never gave you this pain. Perhaps I wish I had known you my whole life. Perhaps I wish I could vanish into a sheet of blank paper and be in front of every single newborn for them to write on. Perhaps I want you to write on me. Write your wishes. Tell me what you need. I ache I ache I ache for you to tell me what you want to do. I cannot lead all the time. Because I want to be a sheet of paper. Because I want to be in the arms of perfection. Because I do not understand perfection. And glue doesn't work anymore. There is no glue. There is only clouds, and paper, and weather, and meals, and air in my lungs, and air in yours, and his. And it is beautiful, and disgusting, that we must be cleaved together in this accident of love. An accidental madness, with the purpose of sanity promised. I cannot promise sanity. I cannot promise madness. I can promise me. I can promise me.

A VIBRANT SENSE OF VANISHING, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

Trinity of love, converging possibilities, the forks in the road. I have a life loosely based on two men, and the death of a superstar who didn't want to be a star, only super.

Don't you sense me ready to wake in the world, and exist only in love, and everywhere in life? I am lifted into the sweat-warm wishing of your souls and mine, which march together in a lullaby of exhausted continuation.

I have a vibrant sense of vanishing, each day, to the wind and salt and scrawl of birds retching along the sun arcs of warmed blue sky. This is a pollen day, a honey day; place with a cherished sense of being loved wholly, yet conquered in two fragments.

I vanish because of this: I exist in the in-between, I exist in the gap between them. Do they know this? That if destruction set in, I would not keep reappearing? I am sometimes shocked that I exist, that when cars reverse, they stop for me, and that this vessel I travel in is so definitely here with you.

I see the dry frozen twigs etch, like children have been scribbling in the brambles. I see the stillness, and I greet the morning house as I tread its floorboards thinking,

Hello wood chair, tea box, saucepan, wine glass.

To be honest, I am surprised they are still there.

SWEAT-WARM WISHING, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

And so here is this night again, with supposedly the same stars but the Earth spins, doesn't it? So what stars are in the blue sky that we don't see, come day? Perhaps they are just the same as the ones I breathe in through the cooling darkness, just cyclical. Perhaps they are the same lights but in different places. I would like to write a story about a girl who plays piano, builds fires, and can't find the moon until it turns out she might have swallowed it. I think this because I haven't been able to find her for many, many nights, many more nights than usual. I don't understand: Where on earth did it go? Perhaps I should say where in the galaxy, the universe, the multiverse did it go? Perhaps she went through a black hole. Only one other person has noticed she is missing. Perhaps she went walkabout. Perhaps it was an accident that I swallowed her down. But if there is no moon, where is the light coming from? If I can't see the big white coin in the sky, flipping around on its axis, where does the light for the night come from? The stars are still burning, even brighter than usual. Maybe she really was swallowed. Maybe the moon exploded and the stars are now shards of the moon.

I was walking with my friend Blake along a highway recently, holding the paper bag of a bottle of wine in my hands. He proclaimed, C' è la luna! C' è la luna! to the moon, loud and exalting, and told me that one day he will buy me a hot air balloon. In this, he tells me, I will be able to take all the people I love up in the sky, one by one, with me. Just me, the air, and a gigantic balloon. The heat of the flames roaring into the open chasm of taut fabric. I think I would like that. I began to muse with him on other gifts (he asked me) and I told him I would like a bath carved from diamond, full of coconut milk, from the most isolated desert island in the sea. I told him the moon. He understood immediately. I laughed, telling him in an Italian accent that, Darling, he ought to name the moon after me. He replied, Yes, and that one day in the streets of Italy, instead of the children who proclaim, C' è la luna! they will say, C' è la Sophia! For certain.

I have many wishes, I know, and a large ego. Perhaps it is selfish of me to dream, but I think that this is what I am, and we are: dreaming creatures. I admit that I want everything. I do. I say that a lot. Blake is correct in saying that, come romance, it doesn't really matter who is saying the words and giving me the love I absorb and thrive on. It could be a different man, or men. I sometimes blink extraordinarily hard to try to reckon with myself that you are in the situation now. I cannot deny that I have somehow found myself in the middle of two extraordinary men who wish for my hand, and that I do not believe it. There is a different kind of affection going on, a different kind of life. I believe I have fallen off the cliff of society and I am in a great sea filled with ever-expanding roads and paths, and I do not care. I neither care nor don't care, because I have escaped with little scathing. I can reckon from a distance now, I can do what I like to do and think how I like to think. I do not need the daily news to tell me that the oldest polar bear is dying. And that's a big deal to the people out there. I understand that such a loss is a shame, but I think he was quite old, and good on him for living so long. Perhaps we should all eat as much fish.

I realized today that I have been struggling and stretching and wishing and willing myself to be exactly where I am when I stop. When I stop and enjoy what I am doing – because I did choose to do it – only then do I realize that I am actually wanting to get to this still appreciation