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Wednesday, February 25th, 2004
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3:47 am - Precision
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Tidily on my shoulder you sat,
back to the TV, half-asleep, bruxing
lungs tiny bellows under my ear.
Never once did you grab for my earring
and I made sure not to lean too hard
on the framework of bone
so apparent under fur and skin.
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1:58 am - Snow Day
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Consider the starlings. Outside
their shrill voices rise and chatter
as they slipdance on the ice slick.
(In fifteen minutes
I must muscle the car uphill
or lose my job.)
They bathe their brown bodies
in the frozen runoff, singing
like the birds who nestled
in Walt Whitman's holy beard.
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1:27 am
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After tea
the porcelain bowl
is warm
and delicate as flesh.
I'm not even sure how much that makes sense or how well it communicates the image, but I can't do much about it at the moment.
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| Friday, February 6th, 2004
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3:00 pm - fragment
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In later years it was rumored that he had a puppet wife: a marionette made of ivory and silver, with articulated limbs.
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| Tuesday, January 6th, 2004
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8:07 pm
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Our lunar stand-in has gone off-shift, and the Columbus moon is now back. It is higher and colder than that other moon, which I suspect was visiting from Japan, or maybe China. That moon rose a little early, as if it were unaccustomed to our time-zone; it was a Buddhist moon, large and diffuse, generous as a monk. It was the kind of moon that would say to you, "So you need light? Take all you want; there is plenty to go around."
The Columbus moon is brighter and a little more focused, but it sits further above the city than did the earlier moon, because the soot from the COTA buses tends to soil its clothing. Even though it approaches its duty with intense dedication, it has had to retire whole outfits because of the soot-stains, and it doesn't want to go to further expense if it can help it.
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It's a little tacky to post this in two journals, but this is my writin' journal and even though it receives less public attention than the other one, I wanted to know where this little blurb was and this journal is a lot less cluttered. Or something.
If anyone does drop by, can you tell me if I abuse my commas? ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) resmiranda, who has a good grasp on writing style and language use, insists that people who use commas where a pause is intended (rather than as a clause/phrase separator) should be dragged out and shot. I read that, oh, months and months ago, but it has haunted me ever since. I am a comma-heavy sort of person.
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| Tuesday, December 23rd, 2003
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6:59 pm - excerpts (i.p.)
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...like those nights when the wet streets shine with promise.
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...which tear the heart because it knows, secretly, that what is human and yet beautiful cannot remain.
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...Chaplin survived, in part, because he was for all people; he was diffuse, adaptable. Keaton's singularity, his focused intensity, caused him to be a swift fierce light which flared quickly, reached apex, and was gone. Watching him in his decline...[...]... His singleness is also our singleness, and in him we find our own sorrows, regrets, dispossessions--the promise of loss. ... Seeing him in his prime provokes both joy and bereavement at once; his mannerisms, although hilarious, always contain the kernel of sorrow. Disregarding danger and even reality itself, he flings himself outside time, and we laugh freely, with real glee. Balanced for a brief moment in eternity, he demonstrates the immortality for which we always yearn. These same splendid moments, ironically, are those which tear the heart the most; the heart always knows, secretly, that what is human and yet transcendently beautiful cannot remain.
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| Thursday, December 11th, 2003
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6:38 pm
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Reading The Nomad, it struck me that, for humans, there are three kinds of awareness:A fearless awareness which apprehends only the here and now, and the most basic urges of human life, due to a lack of imagination;
A fearful awareness which apprehends not the now, but the potentiality of the future; which constantly envisions the past, and brings it into the present; an awareness full of imagination without comprehension, knowledge full of terror;
An awareness which is fearless because it understands, and can release, both past and future; an awareness which, through enlightenment, can live fully human within the present moment. These categories do not apply to other animals. They may live in a perpetual Now (although how much so is certainly up for debate), but it is not because they have less mental capacity than humans do. They are what they are, complete and full in themselves; to the best of our current knowledge, the human is the only creature so flawed as to not know its purpose or how to live its life.
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3:50 pm
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The office park behind my house is full of starlings. They clustered thickly on the bare trees, as still as fruit. Some huddled on the ground: fruit already fallen.
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| Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
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7:51 am
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In the early morning, the windows of the downtown skyscrapers shine like opals. They reflect the sky, and sometimes each other. This makes them beautiful.
Across the street the Leveque Tower, big-boned and strong as a Wagnerian diva, stands next to the new Provident building. The difference between them is not quite the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. The Provident's rugged facade absorbs the sky's moods all year and gives them back crosshatched, multiplied. The clouds reflected in its windows appear to be moving across the surface of a lake.
This dialogue of earth and sky is built on our backs. One could argue that these are but bigger and better Molochs--Molochs which sing to us instead of croak. But if the works of man must crumble into dust, maybe it's all the better to build them beautiful in the first place.
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| Friday, September 5th, 2003
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8:13 am
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In reading Wendell Berry's essays about the nature of the soul and the body, I've been led to wonder how we came to conceive of "soul" in the first place. What is it that caused humans, however many millennia ago, to believe that the essence of who we are is somehow a distinct entity, apart from our body? Even the most holistic philosophies--even Mr. Berry himself--speak about "body" and "soul”; even when the mind is perceived as inseparable from our physical existence, we still think of our mind and body as two different parts of our being.
Our recent advances in the understanding of the human brain have but little altered that concept. Despite increasing evidence that every thought in our heads is the result of a rich, complicated chemical reaction, we persist in envisioning the thinking part of ourselves as intangible. Although modern religious beliefs perpetuate this notion, it may have its origin in a time preceding Christianity's divisive and hierarchical soul/body duality. We will never know for certain, but I suspect that primitive humans and Neanderthals would have early conceived the presence of what we now call a soul.
Modern humans in industrialized societies have a poor relationship with death. Our experience of food is divorced, in our minds, from the deaths of the plants and animals we eat. Our own deaths are conducted in a pomp designed to keep our contact with mortality as brief and superficial as possible, our bodies treated with bizarre chemicals to prevent their decay once in the ground. Ancient man, however, hunted his food; he sickened and died at a rate astonishing to modern humans. The awful spectacle of death would have been before him always. What did it mean to our ancestors to see the life end in a body? If the body remains, but is no longer alive, does that not imply that “life” is something distinct from our physical existence? Forced to ponder these questions with frequency, ancient humans must have quickly drawn the inevitable conclusion that we, as living beings, are bodies inhabited by a spark of life--by a soul.
So elementary is this concept that it is almost impossible to believe that our thoughts and identities have a permanent home within our bodies. There is not even language available by which to express that idea. When saying that we are the product of our bodies, and that our bodies are not separate from who we are, we are still forced to speak of “body” and “soul.” But if a major shift in consciousness were to occur; if we suddenly realized, as a species, that we are each one whole being, would we live differently? Would it not require an incredible change in moral values and a tremendous alteration of behavior? If this life is what matters, if our bodies and our souls are one, there is no escaping our responsibility to live the best and most decent life we can. Since our bodies are extensions of our souls, we would not want to engender filth, pain, war, famine, or cruelty with them. If the soul is holy, the body is also holy: thus would we not want to behave in a holy way? Instead of focusing on arbitrary dogmas, would the concept of “holiness” then be centered around harming as little as possible, consuming as little as possible, living a life of the best quality, not the best quantity? Would the world become, gradually, a better place?
current mood:  anxious
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| Tuesday, September 2nd, 2003
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8:23 am
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This is from an e-mail exchange about a friend's daughter, who is into the Terrible Threes and is driving her mother crazy. I wanted to preserve these thoughts, although as an "essay" it starts and ends very abruptly. Consider it a slightly-coherent stream of consciousness, if you will.
I really doubt that ADD, as such, actually exists. Perhaps I should say, instead, that I believe that it's misdiagnosed in the majority of cases. ADD, as it's generally recognized, seems to be a collection of symptoms which do themselves exist, but which indicate cultural changes rather than physical brain deformity. The only other serious alternative to that theory would be to say that a mass brain-chemistry change--an evolutionary change--has occurred in Westerners within the last 60 years, and that doesn't make sense at all to me. It doesn't make sense, period.
Kids play outside less than they used to. They have less physical labor around the home/farm than they used to. Their games don't involve imagination as much as they used to, so their brains aren't kept as busy. And they--all of us--are exposed to the rapidly-changing images and sounds of television, a medium which both excites the brain and puts it to sleep. I've noticed a lapse in my own attentiveness since I started watching more TV; is it any question that the still-malleable mind of a child would be more greatly affected, and more rapidly?
Also, any deviation from a boring, flat-affect personality is considered signs of a "disorder." I question a psychology which declares that the only healthy people are bland and conformist.
current mood:  exanimate
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| Monday, August 25th, 2003
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8:19 am
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After listening to a Starbucks employee talk about her cousin's rash marital practices, I'm wondering again about divorce and the stability of marriage. Many people claim that the availability of divorce causes modern marriages to dissolve, and I guess that's true, but it strikes me that divorce is just the tool, not the motivator. It just doesn't make sense to believe that otherwise happily married people, upon realizing that divorce is possible, would say to each other, "Oh, let's try that, honey!" Divorce doesn't cause unhappy marriages; divorce ends unhappy marriages.
Do we really have more unhappy marriages now than we used to have? Is the problem with the institution of marriage itself, and our expectations of it? In a time when women demand equal opportunity (in-between bouts of guilt for wanting it), a time when individual growth is paramount, is it possible for marriage to survive as it once was?
Also problematic is the romanticization of marriage. Matrimony, although always wrapped up with love and desire to varying degrees, has until fairly recently mostly functioned as an economic unit and as a forum for rearing children. Contemporary expectations of marriage, however, concentrate on romance and the partnership of equals. When a marriage no longer gives us these, we dissolve it. How can we have greater assurance, in advance, that partners will meet each others' needs in the long run? Should we, with our increased demands on marriage, have longer periods of introduction before we charge into matrimony? Should people simply get to know one another a little better before tying the knot? Alternatively, should we endure, with greater patience, a marriage gone flat?
It's possible that none of these questions can be answered the same way for everyone. Certainly there are marriages which should be dissolved; are there marriages which could have been saved? Should a person be forced to "save" a marriage if he doesn't want to, or is his disinterest sign enough that the marriage is dead?
Until we realize that marriage has changed irrevocably, we will be unable to come at any sort of "truth" regarding it. Until we stop forcing the questions of marriage, love, divorce, sex, romance, economics, childrearing, and partnership into a Procrustes' Bed of absolute "answers," we will continue to see dissolution and dissatisfaction in others' marriages, and in our own.
current mood:  contemplative
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| Monday, August 18th, 2003
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11:52 am
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I woke up this morning at 5:15, craving a Starbucks raspberry hot chocolate. I don't know why, but I think I might even have been dreaming of it before I woke. I could almost taste it. Once I got downtown I dutifully purchased said beverage. The Beast must be fed; if it craves expensive milk drinks instead of the blood of innocents, so much the better.
current mood:  indescribable
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| Sunday, August 17th, 2003
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6:59 pm
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"It feels good to be picked up again," sighed the needles. "We were made for work."
The yarn said nothing, relishing, for the moment, the sense of being knitted. It always had been closed-mouthed, in some ways older and wiser than the needles, who'd come straight out of the bamboo grove and into the shops.
"It was such a pity, we thought," the needles tried again, "that you be left unknitted. You're a fine yarn, and the rest of you is already part of the scarf. What's left isn't enough for a new project. It's nice, isn't it, working together like this to make something beautiful?"
"There was never any doubt about our project," the yarn finally responded. "Our only purpose is to create. But you will stay the same forever, and I..." It trailed off, growing confused as it neared the end of its length. Soon it would no longer be yarn; it would be a new thing, a finished thing. "...I am changing," it pushed out, at last.
"Does it hurt?" said the needles. They were kind, despite their sharpness.
"No...but. I remember. I felt different once...unmade...I came to myself in a clash of shears. Washed...combed...dyed...a woman spun me. Have you met a spindle?" it asked the needles suddenly. No, they hadn't. "A spindle is like you...wood...but older. Very old...even when new." The flow of words was silted up as the yarn became lost in introspection.
"We've lost him again," the needles said to each other. "It'll happen more and more as we get close to the finish. Yarn is introspective even at the best of times." During the next few rows, they spoke together in hushed tones, as if they watched at someone's deathbed.
"You...will become...worn...by years of hands," the yarn muttered as the last row was completed. "But you...will remain the same. Now I...am not I...but something else. I have been change itself...but this is the end. I am knitted. As yarn...I will know...nothing more."
A crochet needle, stranger to them all, silent and efficient as an undertaker, began working the final cast-off. The knitting needles were reluctant to speak again, but at the last stitches, they cried out involuntarily, "You were our first project!"
"Then remember me," said the yarn, falling away from them. "In a moment, I will no longer remember myself."
Cross-posted to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) muse_treats and edited while writing, but not much afterwards. Forgive me.
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3:02 pm
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In yet further news, Karen has sent me a card congratulating me on my acceptance into the Gingrass gallery show. The picture on the front of the card is a sepia-toned portrait of a very sad-looking woman in a very horrible hat. Karen's note, on the inside, postulates that the woman is sad because her gloves fit badly (they really do look uncomfortable). I'm more inclined to think it's caused by the hat, which is like a huge upended wicker basket, with an even bigger roll-brim. The whole thing extends beyond the woman's head for a good four inches all the way around (eight inches on top), and has been recolored in dark purple before printing. The cluster of fake fruit on the brim has also been printed in lifelike color, as has the enormous purple ribbon. It is stunningly awful; I can't stop looking at it.
current mood:  amused
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2:35 pm
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Eating biscuits and reading an unintelligible postcard from Queenie, who has been on holiday in Cornwall. I can't find a date in the postmark, so I have no idea how long ago it was sent, but she hasn't e-mailed me yet to let me know she's back. Maybe they stayed longer than I thought.
At any rate, so much for standing stones and other archaeological wonders; they went to the beach. Queenie's pretty, but mostly unreadable handwriting informed me that she has been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett novels, her son is a natural surfer, and she burned the backs of her [garbled]. It doesn't look like "knees," so I'm stymied. I believe the last sentence invites me to check out the Polzeath webcam, but no URL for said webcam is furnished.
In other news, the honey butter I mixed up a few weeks ago seems to have gone rancid. It certainly smells rancid; I'm not tasting it to make sure. I didn't think butter could go rancid unless it was left out of the fridge. Clearly, my assumption was all kinds of incorrect. I'm happily making do with regular butter and honey, except I forgot that one stick of butter had been cut on last night by a knife that had also been chopping garlic. I thought at the time, "Oh, it's not like I'll be using it on bread or anything, I might as well let it get garlicky for the next time I make pasta." I promptly forgot about this upon waking up this morning and thinking, "Hey...I want biscuits." I have another dab of butter in the fridge, however, which has been untouched by garlic. Problem solved.
current mood: content
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2:17 am
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| Saturday, August 16th, 2003
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6:50 pm
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Looking forward to a nice, quiet evening of Monty Python, reading, and a good night's sleep. Possibly my friend will call me back. Maybe not.
My social life isn't very active, but today I feel a pleasant satisfaction with it all.
current mood: content
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| Friday, August 15th, 2003
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9:38 pm
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"It's very European," said with great approval, is something you hear a lot of in America. "European" means a lot of contradictory things, from sleek and ultramodern to old-school, massive and classy, but it always means, if not something good, then at least something enviable. It's hard to pin down, but as an example, a building done on a grand scale in America is exclusive and pretentious; a grand old building in Europe is beautiful, awesome. Is it age that gives Europe its dignity? Do Americans think of Europe and, imagining the vast continuity of its history, understand just how brief a tenure we've had over here, and feel childlike? Whatever the reason, it's as if, on some level, Europe is a standard to which we hold ourselves.
Europe is the weight of time--permanence, to America's evanescence. In turn, America is the fantasy to Europe's reality, a place where anything is possible. Certainly, in America change is effected with the speed of thought. Impermanence is so central to American culture that our lifestyle can seem a little unreal.
I imagine our dyad in terms of Hindu mythology. A god drowses on a lotus; his dreams are Creation itself. When he opens or closes his eyes, the universe is destroyed, and a new universe is created. America's one-time origins lie in the dreams of Europe; I wonder if, these days, we still seem fleeting and fantastical to our overseas cousins.
current mood: contemplative
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exhausted