foxed

[Julianna Swaney]

I am too lost in lyricism -- in rhapsodies.

Reading these diaries isn't helping either -- the phrases roll over my tongue -- so smooth, so encapsulated. They encourage me to phrase-making.

I want something different and I turn to Dickinson -- these are phrases too, but they haven't been tumbled -- these beat still -- not driftwood washed ashore -- they beat with the thrum of sap. They are bitten off at the ends. They are wick -- green -- and yet dark. Not picture-book green, these are Grimm-green -- the dark-green of woods at night -- the black-green of landscape in sunset silhouette.

I must stop this -- root this mystical vein out -- what would it look like? What does it look like? A shining vein of ore perhaps -- but in sunlight it's cold, metallic, smelling of earth and rust. Is it the source of my metaphors? The source of my discontent? Perhaps not metallic -- it would squirm in sunlight -- riddled with old insect-holes -- a core of rotten wood.

Witchcraft has not a pedigree,
’T is early as our breath,
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death.

Sometimes I think this tendency -- toward mysticism -- toward metaphor -- I think it makes me flabby. I worry, when I sit down with a stapled print-out of some philosophical paper deemed 'seminal,' 'important,' 'foundational,' -- I worry my mind has grown fat -- luxuriant and, spoiled. I worry that I've fed it for too long on lyricism, on poetry, on image and turn of phrase. I worry I won't be able to follow -- that I'll ask a question and be shot for redundancy.

I just had an image, of a lathe -- of wood shaving off of some smooth board -- curling and falling, brittle -- I wonder what I was linking?

But I tell myself that this tendency is OK, that it is good, that it is necessary -- and sometimes I even go so far as to pat myself on the back for having melded worlds -- for being able to also follow arguments and understand logic and apply principles. Oh yes, I even get science now and then! Science, the proof of a rigorous mind. I have a little past-time -- I like to read scientific articles and then re-tell them. I get great pleasure out of being able to retell these articles as if they were stories. I even dramatize them -- and, in telling them as a story, I convince my listeners of some thing -- an opinion or theory, or truth-matrix.

I'm a good interpreter -- a good convincer. I speak with authority, even when there is none. I watch this tendency of mine sometimes -- I watch how much people like to listen to authority -- I notice how few will contradict me -- few will even ask questions. I only speak with authority about things that few other people have opinions about -- so this perhaps makes me safe. I don't speak about politics or economics or consumer reports -- they would invite opinons and I get bored with those sorts of debates very quickly. (Mostly I look for an excuse to wander away, or maybe I turn up the music a bit louder and sing along).

The brain within its groove
Runs evenly and true;
But let a splinter swerve,
’T were easier for you
To put the water back
When floods have slit the hills,
And scooped a turnpike for themselves,
And blotted out the mills!

Glancing

[Yamamoto]

Perhaps it's this time of year, but the sun falls sharply through our leaves -- it's brilliant to the point of being blinding. Perhaps the shafts are tilted just right, or maybe it's the leaves which have changed. Maybe they have expanded in size, maybe their branches have grown longer, and now the lace-work they create sifts and shifts light just so -- just so that when I turn my car from our driveway, I am blinded.

Today I was so blinded that I missed an event -- the taking-off thrust of a great heron. When I could see again there was a massive bird flying before my windshield -- so close, I watched him pull away from me, flying further into the course of our creek. I wanted to see his bill. but he kept his back to me just the same.

Seachange

[Will Sanders]

I feel lately like I'm at a divide -- that I am the divide -- who am I when I am alone? And when I'm with others?

I shall press this -- I think back to when I was living alone -- caught up in school and then in a new city -- I had friends, they came around sometimes. I had a job which put me into the crowd but never anything real. I kept many at arm's length, if not further. And I sunk into myself, deep, to a place where everything is shrouded, blurred and unclear. There were troubled times, but they have passed and I don't want to press them now. I want to press on something else.

Lately I have become more like a child, an animal. The dancing, singing, clever phrases, talking for the sake of talking, making up games, stories, names -- perhaps it's the coaching? Being around children makes me more childlike? But no, that's not all, neither is just being at home, with my family the reason. This isn't regression and it isn't false. This is something real -- this is me when I'm comfortable in my own skin.

When we are with others we can go many ways -- I can try and be a certain way -- I can try to impress, to cow, to inspire, to comfort, to amuse. But I don't often try to just exist with someone else. Take listening to a song. The good ones, the ones I want to share, they stick in my head and they last long and I think about how I would dance to this song if I weren't driving, or, if I'm not driving, I dance to the song with arms and legs and voice. But when I share a song I think first, is this a weird song? Then I think that it probably is and that there's that one section that can be a little harsh on the ears if you take it for what it is and not as part of a whole. Then I watch the person listening and I try to figure out if they like it. And the song takes forever to my ears -- and it doesn't dazzle any more -- and I worry and wonder how it is that one thing can sound so different to two people.

The example of the song seems helpful, but the real problem is the thinking. Because that can work in a group too -- at St. John's it would work -- more often than anywhere else I've been. Some nights, when there was a rhythm and a flow, it could work for the entire time. I was good at being in a group then -- not selfish with words or tyrannical -- it was so fun too -- sort of like dancing. But as soon as class was over, that awkward transition down from thinking and discussing to packing and leaving -- I would close up like my books -- not willing to continue the conversation. At least at first -- this tendency diminished as time continued. but at first it was horrible -- so distant, so cold -- masked with my features and my too-carefully chosen clothes. Masked by what I had said.

And now? Things have gotten better but I'm still so confused. And I'm troubled because I'm moving and moving means retreating from a group where I can be utterly impulsive. I can dance around the kitchen or sing at the top of my lungs or hunt for toads in the garden at night. It's comfortable and I'm leaving that. This might be breaking my heart. What does that feel like?

But I was thinking that it's at least good that I can recognize the different zones of being -- I can watch the transitions -- I can observe my own shifts and subtleties. I wonder if this ability is something that comes from age and from experience. I'm starting to learn to be impulsive with myself now -- and to be comfortable. I've learned my own ways, my maneuvers, my inconsistencies. I guess I've learned to predict some things too -- but still, that transition from solitude to company -- it trips me up sometimes. There are some moments in company when all I want is for a bit of quiet -- to spread myself over some book and to figure something out.

extension

[Serafini via Giornale Nuovo]

Valéry said (as quoted in Axel's Castle)

Reading and writing were becoming dull work for me, and I confess still bore me a little. The study of my self for its own sake, the comprehension of that attention itself and the desire to trace clearly for myself the nature of my own existence, almost never abandoned me. this secret disease alienates one from letters, despite the fact that it has its source in them ... I felt, at the time, a sort of contrast between the practice of literature and the pursuit of a certain rigor and of a complete intellectual sincerity.

No, I don't feel this way, not all of the time at least -- but perhaps this boredom -- the boredom with the work of interpretation, of writing and even of thinking for an audience (which is what I think of my writing here and elsewhere), perhaps this has something to do with my sense of something missing -- a sense which has lately dictated my increasingly fragmentary style -- lack of punctuation, structure, forethought. I don't want this to be permanent -- I don't want to write small articles -- maybe essays, so long as they're an essai -- a try -- an attempt. I want this to be more like the trail of breadcrumbs leading me back to my mind last week, last month, two years ago -- i want to remember what I thought and felt, how it affected me, what I yearned for -- I want to 'trace for myself the nature of my own existence.'

I'm troubled because everything I write strikes me as the attempt to fashion an 'aesthetic figure' -- propaganda for the way I want to remember myself. I'm leaving an electronic trail that will add up to a specific persona, but is it the author who stood behind the thoughts and the written words? No, of course not. It's a selection no matter how unfounded I try to be, how spontaneous. I, myself, behind the curtain am not spontaneous enough for that to translate. So when I look back -- as a sometimes-unified, accumulating self, I am struck and surprised by the splinters I find -- splinters that are both foreign and familiar.

How do these issues affect the basic act of reading -- of interacting with an author who has not only thought for an audience, but also written, published, and disseminated their thoughts to an audience.?

Even the simplest acts, the simplest events -- they can be stripped down, not to simplicity, but to complexity. Perhaps I continue to yearn for simplicity because it always eludes me -- what I find to be small is in fact large, what i think is one is in fact many -- I can't even manage the stream of my own self -- I stay with the flow (well-adjusted and all) but can't I imagine losing my hold, falling under the rising swell of being?

It doesn't happen though -- I keep my head above water -- sometimes it feels as though I'm buoyed by the sea beneath me -- lazily floating and rocking, gazing above at sky and cloud. I can feel the movement of being -- I think of those many ways -- I think of who I am when I'm singing out loud in my car, when I'm explaining anaerobic metabolism to my swimmers, when I'm lying in bed next to someone I can't reach -- I think of a kaleidoscope, rotating, mixing, clicking, image after successive image -- each different -- similar, composed of the same constituent parts and yet so different -- in shape, in pattern, in color -- shutter-frames of being -- how do I find my way round to the lens? How do I telescope in?

reflections

[emmanuelle polanco]

Notes I wrote 8-31-05 on Sartre's Nausea:


What has this book -- these ideas -- done for me? So much. Someone has pointed to a new problem -- the problem of existing too much -- existing entirely. I can't quite grasp what an alternative to the 'existing all the way' would be, but I think -- maybe it would be to rub out the you that is human and thing-involved, and instead create the crystalline persona of existence -- combine the pure and rigid plane or the bar of music with the necessary vessel of human being. How does one do that succesfully? It seems like it must either happen by an expression of the self throught an artistic creation; or it could happen ostensibly by living a life which retained only the hard lines of qualities or traits.

But is that life?

I like this mutable self -- contingent upon the choices we make; choices that are entirely up to us. We owe nothing to a world that we can only inaccurately understand and even trust. If all a self has is freedom, then it can and should make its choices to coincide with the creation of the self it desires.

Essence here is contingent upon the acceptance of existence.

There's contiguity -- we somehow recover our 'self' consistently -- but what is that strange sense when we look back on a moment, a decision, an experience, and we forget who we were then -- or we notice a disconnect between that self and the current self. What is this disconnect? Is it caused by something? Is it an amalgamated perspective -- one that sees the various possibilities while also seeing the one that was chosen -- yet, in spite of this hindsight, cannot see the reason for the choosing?

I'll stop the archives there -- it degenerates into some writing better left unread.

These thoughts -- re-read only three years since their writing -- what do they show me now? What do they show me about myself, about this very idea of the mutable, amalgamated self. Now, as I come closer to the next change in my life, I'm beginning to remember how every transition somehow is swallowed into the fields of unreason -- of non-knowledge. Afterwards, I never know why.

Even the small decisions -- something so small as deciding to not call, to write that sentence rather than another -- to select that book before the one beside it -- I never recall a reason. There aren't reasons -- that's what I conclude. Or, perhaps, the reason wouldn't matter even if it could be known.

The final sentence of my quoted writing -- the idea that reflection reveals more than just what was, but also what could have been. That seems essential -- when we look backwards, it's into a mirror world, a reflective, refractive world. For me it's an underwater world, not clear at all -- some sort of replica of what actually is/was. When we reflect we see ourselves reflected back -- we see a dazzle of selves -- of non-selves as well.

How many days now -- how many days of choosing not to -- of refraining from acting. And in refraining I choose -- to not act. I choose to stay inward, within.


Es muss sein? Muss es sein.

wrinkles and folds

[Miranda Lehman]

I've been playing a part lately -- one I'm proud of, one I've grown used to. It's the part of the naturally happy --

I'm happy at my home, an adult living with my parents and my two adult siblings for just one more month. I'm happy when I drive home at night and I see that the wheat has changed colors, that the trees are wearing a deeper green -- turning dusty. I'm happy when I see a fox dart across the road (about once a week now). I'm happy to look up at the clouds and to see the thin edges of light, the moving masses, the delicate paintstrokes across the sky.

Mostly I'm happy around the people in my life -- a small, condensed world. I've learned to get a long with these people -- I've learned to live pleasantly with them -- they're really the only people in my immediate life -- friends are too far off, too caught up in their own doings, and besides, I've chosen to come back here -- to this forgotten fold in the map -- where I have cats and one dog to love, where I have grass to lie in and smell and birds and frogs and crickets to hear -- there are lightning bugs for catching and flowers for picking -- and I have people who have made the effort to understand me.

And it doesn't take an effort like it used to -- I don't have to try to enjoy myself, I do. And as my father asked two nights ago at dinner, why are you leaving now? now, when you're happy.

Oh I don't want to answer. To answer means to say that I am happiest when things are at their end. No, not that. It means I'm happiest when I have somewhere else to go -- when I can at last stop worrying about 'what next' and just wait till 'what next' comes about. So yes, I'm happiest when there's nothing at stake -- when days are numbered and time must be enjoyed. I don't like long sheets of time rolled out in front of me without a marker or a chapter heading. Something I must address.

I'm happy now to lie on the cold tiles of our kitchen floor next to my dog, I'm happy to come up with a myriad of names for her and for our cats -- happy to eat radishes with olive oil and black pepper, happy to shell fresh peas we buy for a quarter a basket from the farmer up the street. I'm happy to sit in the sun and smell my skin toasting, happy to see my freckles emerge from winter skin.

I will toast goat cheese and serve it with fresh salad greens. We will talk and drink homemade mojitos. We will dance and sing to Balkan music. I will surprise myself with my patience and my kindness and my sheer happiness to be here with these people I have known for all my life. And then I'll leave for another country, another coast, a city full of people I don't yet know.

Every year that passes, every season that ticks over, I know this sonnet better -- I come closer to it -- is it blasphemy for me to say this? Someone without a single wrinkle, a single gray hair? I'll say it.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

what is left

[Simen Johan]

I feel I'm learning all of these lessons too early -- I think I'm becoming grateful for the easy forgetting -- the swift forgetting. I learn one thing, secret away one phrase, one way of thinking, understanding -- and then I dip my head in Lethe -- I dip my head and it is all gone, to be learned anew.

I'll keep forgetting, and then remembering -- losing and finding -- I shall play the Sortes Virgilianae with my memory -- I shall leaf through it at random and pull a phrase from my mind, from some remembered text -- it will help and I will settle again.

I want to forget this book -- The Waves -- I want it to leave me be, but I want it to settle alongside me -- to coat me like a thin sediment -- a fine dust. It's better that way -- all of one piece -- not fragments, not phrases -- all of one piece. I don't want to know how she made this, I don't want to know about her choices, her omissions, her worries. I don't want to read about it, I don't want footnotes or introductions or critical responses. Is it not enough? It was enough for me. This was enough for me -- a little corner of light -- well-wrought -- a patch of yellow painted wall -- it was enough.

I know that I was reading it a bit recklessly -- swallowing up phrases, savoring them -- I was identifying with characters, with speeches -- I was trying to fit them together, to make one out of six splinters clustered around a seventh. It's alright -- so it goes.

What to do with Rhoda? A small creature -- a frightened creature -- a small white fox, still dangerous, not to be caught up, tied in. What to do with those violets -- what to do with her 'To whom? Oh, to whom?' It cuts to the quick, that -- it cuts and then smarts. For whom am I gathering my petals? If I stay perpetually gathering then I will never have them taken away, never see them returned, discarded, trampled on. If I stay perpetually gathering, I can perpetually hope -- I can place hope on an unknown -- the best place for hope, the only place for hope. It springs eternal, no?

I should like to assimilate -- or rather, I should like to stop thinking I cannot. It is an artificial divide, born from hurt -- I have been hurt -- shall I say it? -- I have been hurt by this world. It is too massive, too insensitive, too fast and too demanding. I try to find small places to sit quietly, to lay on a park bench beside a church and watch the clouds, watch the light play with the leaves -- I walk down a small, quiet street with thoughts in my mind, hoping to walk them out -- and what happens? a man in the park waits for my skirt to be lifted by a breeze, a woman on the street tells me to watch where I walk. Small things -- so small compared to the great tragedies, the small tragedies, the minor horrors of our world.

Today I was following links -- I was reading comments about a new favorite online place -- a place where strange music is coupled with associative, wonderful prose. They tell stories about songs -- they tell strange tales -- And you do not douse the chest in paraffin. You do not let it blacken and crackle and turn into ash. You do not haul it to street-side for the garbage-men to pick up, for the recyclers to pick through. You do not throw it in the lake. You do not give it to the fishes. You do not toss it from an airplane; it does not smash in the desert, it does not leave a crater. I read what others had to say about these stories that I loved so much -- the others called it nonsense, they called it drivel, they called it drug-induced babbling. Even that hurt --

And last night, an inconsequential argument about effective coaching -- about why anger shouldn't be necessary -- I said that no athlete, child or not, should have to be yelled at, tyrannized, to achieve success. I said that if that was what was required then it wasn't worth it. And the man I was speaking with, a calm, quiet man -- he disagreed. That hurt -- it hurts when I hear that violence is necessary -- when I hear someone tell me that a human being must be broken -- broken! -- in order to be successful, to swim faster, fastest.

And yet, and yet. Is the violence not necessary? Am I but hiding my head in sand, waiting for this to all just disappear? Oh who knows. I don't know -- I know nothing about living in bold letters -- I don't live boldly, I don't live wildly, I don't live on a glittering stage. I don't love. I don't hate. But I don't hide behind a curtain of hair either, I don't know what the process of life is. I've read about what happens beneath the stream of life -- I've read about the arc the sizzles over top -- I've read about life and even dipped in myself now and then. I haven't been too quiet, haven't been too alone. But really, how does it work? How can I translate myself for you, for him, for them? Can I hope that certain people will just be more fluent? This is strange to think of for now I'm wondering about my own friendships, my own relationships -- I try to understand people, to hear their words, to understand what pulls to them, what they love, what they are compelled by -- but I still don't really try -- I'm too concerned with my own private trials -- my own endeavors.

I don't want to live for others or because of others, but I want to learn something about others -- that's what I need to learn more about -- not about art or infinite texts or the process of self-perception -- I need to know more about the other -- about he who stands opposed, about he who helps me to define myself, to know better what I am not.

Neville -- he focuses on one, on one only -- he focuses and is thus focused. He says something which hit me fully, flatly, with force. He says something which seems right -- Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer.