poems

Kahlil Gibran on parenting

2011-10-10T08:29:00.000-04:00

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

The Final Solution – Michael Chabon

2010-07-08T00:34:00.000-04:00

The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth like the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woolen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.

The morning cool, the burning shag, the drowse of the late summer, honey-sated bees: until this recent adventure of the learned parrot these were the pleasures of his life. They were animal pleasures, as he recognized.

“I perceive that I have intruded on you in a difficult time, Mr. Panicker,” the old man said.

“Oh, no, I…” Mr. Panicker began, but then found that he was unable to continue, his throat constricted and his eyes stung with the imminence of tears. There are times, as he well knew, when merely having our sorrow guessed at could itself be a kind of rude consolation.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl

2010-06-30T00:31:00.002-04:00

“Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” Dad said…. “Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that’s no one’s fault but your own.”
“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation.”

Obviously, being able to simply { } was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only “nationwide white noise.” And thus when you met someone who listened, omeone content to do nothing but { } , so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you’d encountered since the day you were born, who’d supposedly listened, had not really been listening to you at all.

His eyes circled over me like old flies. I suffered no hope, no daydreams, that he felt anything similar to the way I did, which wasn’t lust or love….but acute electricity.

It was one of those instances one feels as If one’s skin has abruptly become this as one layer of phyllo dough on a triangle of baklava, when one desperately doesn’t want the other person to go, but one doesn’t say anything in order to feel isolation in its purest form, as a periodic table element, one o the noble gases, Iso.

“’Justice wields an erratic sword / grants mercy to fortunate few / Yet if man doesn’t fight for her / ‘Tis chaos he’s left to.’”

Galileo’s Daughter – Dava Sobel

2010-06-15T00:34:00.000-04:00

She [Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s daughter] accepted Galileo’s conviction that God had dictated the Holy Scriptures to guide men’s spirits but proffered the unraveling of the universe as a challenge to their intelligence.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter – Kim Edwards

2010-05-07T00:34:00.000-04:00

Because she was almost thirty years old, and yet if she died the next day there would be no one to mourn her like Rupert Dean still mourned his wife after more than twenty years. Surely she, Carolyn Lorraine gill, must be as unique and deserving of love as the woman in the old man’s photo, and yet she had not found any way to reveal this, not through art or love or even through the fine high calling of her work.

Her hard work, her ingenuity, and now, despite everything, the wasps were going to escape. She crossed the lawn. With one swift, unhesitating motion, she opened the Electrolux, reached in through the bloom of smoke to pull out the paper bag full of dust and insects, threw it on the ground, and began to stomp on it, a wild dance. The paper bag split along one edge and a wasp slipped out; her foot came down on it. It was Paul she was fighting for, but also for some understanding of herself. You’re afraid of change, Bree had told her. Why can’t you just be? But be what? Norah had wondered all day. Be what?

Even after it was clear that all the wasps inside the bag must be dead, Norah kept dancing on the pulpy mess, wild and intent. Something was happening, something had changed, in the world and in her heart. That night, while the ROTC building on campus burned to the ground, bright flames flowering into the warm spring night, Norah would dream of wasps and bees, large dreamy bumblebees floating through tall grasses.

How had she seemed to him tonight? What had he seen, what had he ever seen, of Caroline Lorraine Gill? Of her secret heart? Nothing. Nothing at all. And she’d known that too, she’d known it for years, ever since the moment outside the church when the circles of his life had closed against her, when she had turned and left. She had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry ad once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

David heard accusation in each remark about his studies—he’d taken too much, taken everything—and in the cars and trucks silence had swelled until it seemed impossible that a human voice could ever break it.

Lumina

2010-03-28T22:31:00.003-04:00

Sheila thought how far she had come, how much further she had to go, and felt like weeping, or becoming a viking of some sort, somebody who would know to wrestle a narwhal, pillage a town, deal with thisshit.
--"Welcome" by Dina Guidubaldi

We drive and drive. The dog looks out the windows and barks. I sit up front and lean the seat back. We pick up my sister's boyfriend and he gets in back with the dog and we drive some more. I guess I start takling and they just listen. I say, "You know, I can think and think on death but there isn't any knowing, you know? It's like a magic show and there's the bunny, there's the bunny, and then where'd the bunny go? Except we're the bunny and we're dead."
--"Sonhood" by Sean Bernard

Look for evidence in the way the girls' nimble hands tie ribbons with knots Kay did not teach. Hear echoes of the same in their schoolgirl croons. In the names of Boone and Crocket, Wayne and Brando--in stretched American vowels that Kay's mouth cannot form.

Know these things could mean hope--lives full of promise, full of Bundt cakes and camper vans, full of stockingless picnics with creamed chowder and root beer floats. But Kay is secure only when digging her shoulders in, only when pushing against full wind. Kay is prone to plopwing and plowing, to being tireless, and to bending her head into breakers.
--"None of Them Sing So Sweet" by Catherine Foulkrod

Rage--I defined it. I have come to know that if you are feeling war on the inside, you cannotescape it on the outside.
--"Peonies for Peace" by Hsin-ya Chow

From Lumina, Vol 9.

from "This is Water" - graduation speech by David Foster Wallace

2010-03-19T01:19:00.000-04:00

"...the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

2010-03-02T01:57:00.002-05:00

While this is not so definitive or scary a move as Anne signing a contract somewhere, it does nudge me a little closer to the edge of the soft, blurry, green forest of denial that I’ve been dwelling in to various degrees ever since I first realized, many months ago, that we really would be leaving New York, and I freaked out.

The feelings were remarkably similar in type and intensity to those that come with ending an intense romantic relationship (if you’re the kind of person for whom ending an intense romantic relationship feels like desolation and despair and seemingly unending waves of anxious grief). There was some throwing myself on the bed and sobbing. There was the painful sentimentalizing of EVERYTHING – The grating subway- door-closing-warning sounds brought silent tears down my cheeks. (It was weird, but people cry on the subway all the time so I wasn’t that embarrassed. Maybe they are also crying cause they love New York. I can look at them knowingly next time.) The absurdly long red light by my house at park place and washington made my eyes well up so much that it was hard to see to ride my bike. Over Tibetan fast food that night, I decided that Tibetan food was the most delicious food ever and I would never get to eat it again, in fact I would never be able to eat any good food again; plus, everyone else who happened to be eating in the restaurant at that moment was so amazing and interesting and smart and probably all my friend-soul-mates, and I would never get to be friends with them now and wherever we go there will be no one as good for me to be friends with as they are. And if Anne tried to point out the things about New York that have always pissed me off (including riding the subway, dealing with so much traffic/hostility/red lights while biking, and the overcrowdedness of everything, especially restaurants), she just became a hateful, manipulative traitor. Etc. – you know the weird cognitive/emotional games your mind plays when you are in this state.

Luckily that experience only lasted a matter of hours and then I was back to my normal reality testing, but it was enough to help me understand completely why so many writers write about the land that they come from with such passion and sentimentality, as if it were a romantic partner. I remember noticing this phenomenon especially with Russian and Irish authors as well as those that dwell in US deserts. Although, for sure everyone does it. But as I was noticing this, I was thinking that maybe it’s partly because it’s hard to live those places. You have to work on your relationship with land like that. You can get so much out of it but you have to put so much into it. And so you get really tied up in the relationship. It’s not just easy and organic. That’s what it’s like in New York too. To me, it’s the most rewarding place in the world. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt completely at home, completely met. But it’s not easy. In fact, it’s a constant struggle. I think those of us who have lived here for a while understand that the kindest, most helpful thing you can do for a fellow New Yorker is to not do anything to push on their already completely overloaded and overwhelmed nervous systems either by making them notice or interact with you or somehow interrupting their carefully timed flow. It’s hard for me not to read someone who greets and expects a greeting back as someone who is being really aggressive and rude. I will have to get over that if we move to the Caribbean. But anyway, I think an element of what can intensely bond a person to a place is the amount of work you have to do to be there happily. Or to be there at all, really.

Something else I’ve always been fascinated with is how varied but strong people’s projections and perceptions of New York are. It symbolizes/conjures/provides a billion completely different things to a billion different people. And these things shift for these people constantly. I wish I could make lots of people anthropomirphize New York or Brooklyn in a story and describe its (his/her) traits. Actually, that’s really hard. I definitely think she’s female. And tall. But that’s all I got right now. But it would be so interesting if people who could do it did it.

Well, the good thing about New York not being a person and our relationship not being romantic is that it will always be there (until the global warming natural disaster) and it will always welcome me back into its respectfully aloof arms. No matter where I am or how alienated I might or might not feel, I can know there’s somewhere that is my home. And that I feel so strongly about that its traffic lights make me cry. I don’t know if everyone gets to feel that. I didn’t think I would when I was growing up. I’m really grateful for that.

--Stephanie Harad
Stephanie at Large

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

2010-02-22T08:14:00.001-05:00

“When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own—with whatever guts you can muster.”

“Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of thing.”
“Pessimistic … Pessimistic…” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

OK, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body’s world. That’s why I’m here. To think about reality. The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible—a place like the bottom of a well, for example.

I know this sounds weird, but when that happens, I feel like I’m right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it’s got nothing to do with you, but you’re not really like that. In your own way, you’re out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can’t tell by looking at you.

It was a picture of what I assumed was an Italian landscape, with a well-pruned pine tree, and several reddish farmhouses lining the hills. The houses were all somewhat small but pleasant. I wondered what kind of people might live in such houses: probably normal people living normal lives. None of them had inscrutable women coming out of nowhere to buy them suits and shoes and watches. Non e of them had to calculate the huge funds they would need to get possession of some dried up well. I felt a stab of envy for people living in such a normal world.

2010-01-25T10:42:00.000-05:00

"I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."
--Conan O'Brien

A Mercy – Toni Morrison

2010-01-25T00:34:00.000-05:00

Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow’s nest. Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thin¬g was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations.

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed.

Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.

You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes.
It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

2010-01-02T10:43:00.000-05:00

"...resisting the seduction of the New Year's 'clean slate' syndrome. The changes I want to continue making in my life do not need to fit neatly into calendar year endings. Next year I will be messy, gorgeous, a winner, a witch, kind, ugly, nasty, gentle, lucky, sad, challenged, defeated, strong and all of the human things that I am..."
- Gretchen Winterkorn

The Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne

2009-12-21T13:43:00.001-05:00

People can lose their bearings when they travel, unmoored from their familiar physical surroundings, and that somehow loosens some psychic connections as well. Sometimes that’s a good thing—it can open the mind, offer new insights—but frequently it’s also traumatic in a not-so-good way. Some people retreat into themselves or their hotel rooms if a place is unfamiliar, or lash out in an attempt to gain some control. I myself find that the physical sensation of self-powered transport couples with the feeling of self-control endemic to this two-wheeled situation is nicely empowering and reassuring, even if temporary, and it is enough to center me for the rest of the day.

It sounds like some form of meditation, and in a way it is. Performing a familiar task, like driving a car or riding a bicycle puts one into a zone that is not too deep or involving. The activity is repetitive, mechanical, and it distracts and occupies the conscious mind, or at least part of it, in a way that is just engaging enough but not too much—it doesn’t cause you to be caught off guard. It facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it’s a reliable place to find that connection. In the same way that perplexing problems sometimes get resolved in one’s sleep when the conscious mind is distracted the unconscious works things out.

++

I enjoy not being in New York. I am under no illusion that my world is in any way better than this world, but still I wonder at how some of these Puritanical restrictions have lingered—the encouragement to go to bed early and the injunction against enjoying a drink with one’s meal. I suspect that drinking, even a glass of wine or two with dinner, is, like drug use, probably considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption is that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all-hell-breaking-loose pleasure, which is something to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons. In a sense maybe loosening up was, for the early settlers, not something to be encouraged, as the farmers and ranchers who settled here had to survive by the skin of their teeth. You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it. If life is hard, if you’re just getting by, then slipping off that straight and narrow path could have serious consequences. Drinking, therefore, like drug use, becomes relegated to “bad” places – to honky-tonks and dark, sad bars.

++

…there, on the other side of the street, a man is walking in a bright red outfit; he is a round German dressed as an American Indian chief, feathers in his headdress, winter moccasins and all. He is all alone—the street is deserted. At first I think to myself, Oh, the nutters here are really inventive! But then I realize it’s Carnival week and he’s probably stumbling home after a long night. There is a whole Wild West phenomenon here sparked by the novelist Karl May. His series of popular Western novels features the Indians as the heroes.

++

Matthias says beauty, being ephemeral, evanescent, and impermanent, reminds us of death. I would never have put an equal sign between the two myself—this statement seems overly romantic á la Rilke, but I see his point. The morbidity of beauty. Huh.

++

[Zimbabwe] The descendants of the original inhabitants from the precolonial era, along with Mugabe’s greedy and opportunistic self-appointed representatives, have begun to reappropriate the farms by force.

Is this fair? Not exactly, but neither was the appropriation of the land years ago by the whites. Justice, some might say, was simply delayed. If I can steal from you, and you are powerless to reclaim your property or land, even for generations, does it then at some point legally and morally become mine? At some point does the passage of time itself transfer ownership? What point might that be? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand?

Mostly like any ultimate attempt at justice will be skewed. Maybe absolute justice, like absolute anything, rarely exists except in mathematics....Almost all of us, of every race, have something to be ashamed of in our history…..I would argue that it is increasingly hard for anyone anywhere to say, “I belong here and you don’t.” Human migrations have never stopped, they’re endless, and mingling is tough, but it can often be fruitful—a source of innovation and creativity.

Will there be a bloody scramble for those beautiful ‘50s modernist homes in the Vedado district of Havana at some point? Israel, Palestine, South Dakota, Tibet—all involve some appropriation of land by one group from another. Does one theft of land or property inevitably prophesize a reciprocal theft? Is delayed justice inevitable? Is it even justice?

++

Our inner policeman says to us, “don’t even think that” when we stray into a forbidden thought zone like this and begin thinking thoughts that might drive us crazy or inhibit much-needed action—thoughts like, Maybe I’m not unique at all. He sometimes says it for our own good—to keep us from going insane and to allow us to do the things we need to do. As a species we have to have our little delusions.
The other self-deception—that life has meaning—if famously dealt with by religions all over the world. Our susceptibility to this comforting idea is impossible to deny. I would argue that while religions might indeed be a lot of superstition as well as an unfortunate excuse for violence and countless horrors, they might also serve a purpose. It would seem that at the very least they make it easier to go on, to function, to make and do, if one believes that our own (human) lives have a meaning.

++

I ride farther out from the center of town [Buenos Aires]. I don’t have a destination. I stumble upon a feria—a village fair—this one an outdoor festival that celebrates gaucho and country culture. It takes place in a small plaza out in the suburbs. On the way I pass a queue of people. One sees only the line, no destination or end—just people standing, patiently, and occasionally inching forward, but toward what is unclear. The line is so long that it disappears somewhere down the road, and where it ends is too far away to tell. The line snakes through a succession of neighborhoods, in and out of small town centers. It disappears from my view and then incredibly it suddenly appears again. It’s four kilometers long at least. Half a million people or more, so I am told later, waiting to see San Cayetano, the patron saint of the unemployed.

++

I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.

++

[Enrique Peñalosa, transportation guru of Bogotá], says:

• Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority should not always be to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.
• Transportation is not an end—it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life—the real goal is not [just] to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.
• A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.
Peñalosa tends to link equality, in all its forms, with democracy—a connection that is anathema to many in the U.S. In his words, “In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy.”

++

I am in my midfifties, so I can testify that biking as a way of getting around is not something only for the young and energetic. You don’t really need the spandex, and unless you want it to be, biking is not necessarily all that strenuous. It’s the liberating feeling—the physical and psychological sensation—that is more persuasive than any practical argument. Seeing things from a point of view that is close enough to pedestrians, vendors, and storefronts combined with getting around in a way that doesn’t feel completely divorced from the life that occurs on the streets is pure pleasure.

Observing and engaging in a city’s life—even for a reticent and often shy person like me—is one of life’s great joys. Being a social creature—it is part of what it means to be human.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

2009-12-17T21:42:00.001-05:00

For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains—in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm—Josef had always taken comfort.

++

Sammy still refused to admit to himself—at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later—that he was in love, or falling love, with Tracy Bacon.

++

“You are going to be like a father to him, you know,” she said. And I could be like a mother. Just ask me, Joe, and I’ll do it. It was on the tip of her tongue to say this, but she held back. What would she be saying if she did? That she wanted to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives.

++

The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa’s idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.

++

The bathrobe, its lapels whipstitched in heavy black thread; that radio, its lines Gothic and its dial, like an atlas of the ether, imprinted with the names of world capitals; those leather moccasins with their beaded tepees on the vamps—these were all things that he was never going to see again. The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday—but when?—he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there—somewhere—waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militariund Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography—that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario—which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera

2009-11-18T23:57:00.000-05:00

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

++

From the start there were people who realized they lacked the temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars.

++

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories are rewritten.

++

To put it the other way, every love relationship is based on unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

++

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to God’s world.

World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when I was young); all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible.

++

“Ever since Joyce,” he said, “we have been aware of the fact that the greatest adventure in our lives is the absence of adventure. Odysseus fought at Troy, made his way home on a ship he himself piloted, had a mistress on every island—no, such is not the life we live. Homer’s Odyssey now takes place within man. Man has internalized it. The islands, the sea, the sirens seducing us, and Ithaca calling us home—they have all been reduced to voices within us.”

++

My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

++

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportion of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

1. A high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
2. An advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;
3. A radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of a nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the motor driving her to write.)
++

The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of “We are all writers!”

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.

++

The absolute quality of love is actually a desire for absolute identification. We want the woman we love to swim as slowly as we do; we want her to have no past of her own to look back on happily.

++

(We must not forget that all heroes of that age had put in their time at a factory, either voluntarily—out of revolutionary fervor—or under duress, as punishment. In either case they were equally proud. They felt that at the factory they had earned their personal kiss from the goddess of the Hard Life.)

++

“The first step in liquidating a people,” said Hubl, “is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

“What about language?”
“Why would anyone bother to take that from us? It will soon be a matter of folklore and die a natural death.”

Was that hyperbole dictated by utter despair?

Or is it true that a nation cannot cross a desert of organized forgetting?

None of us knows what will be. One thing, however, is certain: in moments of clairvoyance the Czech nation can glimpse its own death at close range. Not as an accomplished fact, not as the inevitable future, but as a perfectly concrete possibility. Its death is at its side.

++

What attracted and held Tamina’s attention was his questions. Not what he asked, but the fact that he asked anything at all. It had been so long since anyone had asked her about anything. It seemed like an eternity! The only person who had ever really interrogated her was her husband, and that was because love is a constant interrogation. In fact, I don’t know a better definition of love.

++

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all joyous “onward and upward” slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.

++

One day, about a year before my father’s death, the two of us were taking a walk around the block, and that music seemed to be following us everywhere. The sadder people are, the louder the speakers blare. They are trying to make an occupied country forget the bitterness of history and devote all its energy to the joys of everyday life. Father stopped and looked up at the device the noise was coming from, and I could tell he had something very important to tell me. Concentrating as hard as he could on putting what was on his mind into words, he finally came out with: “The idiocy of music.”

++

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

++

How many times in his life had he put his hands on a various women’s heads and said, “Let me see how you’d look like this.” That imperious touch, that imperious glance, had been known to turn the tide on the spot. It seemed to look forward to (and recall from the future) the all-important scene of total possession.

But this time it had no effect. His own glance was much weaker than the glance he felt weighing on him, the dubious glance of the examining committee, which was perfectly aware he was repeating himself and made it clear that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless. Jan suddenly saw himself through her eyes. He saw the pitiful pantomime of his touch and glance, a hackneyed St. Vitus dance robbed of all meaning by years of repetition. Having lost its spontanaeity, its obvious, direct impact, it suddenly seemed unbearably onerous, like hundred-pound weights attached to his arm. The girl’s glance created an eerie field of increased gravity around him.

He could not continue. He let go of her head and looked out the window at the gardens passing by.

The train reached its destination. As they were leaving the station, she said she lived nearby and invited him over.

He refused.

He thought about it for weeks afterward. How could he have said no to a girl he liked?

He was on the other side of the border from her.

Traveling with Pomegranates – Ann Kidd Taylor and Sue Monk Kidd

2009-10-11T17:55:00.000-04:00

Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility.
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.

…I myself was on my knees, how in need I was of taking back my soul as a woman. The episode propelled me into a collision with the patriarchal underpinning of my church, my faith tradition, my culture, my marriage, and, most illuminating of all, me. It sent me in a search of the feminine dimension of God. It began a spiritual cataclysm. My old life dissolved and a new life, a new consciousness, rose up…..
Now, as I slip into the bathroom to wash my face, I think about that juncture of my life, about the book. One particular line from it swims back to me…about a certain music that comes from the feminine soul, how the strands of it pulled me unceasingly into awakening.

The great dancer Isadora Duncan…spoke fo dance as a manifestation of the soul. I’d been dedicated to invisibility for such a long time that I did not dance, not in public or private. I did not want my soul out there expressing itself. Who knew what it would say?

Are the particulars of your own darkness something you describe to your mother or your best friend?

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I’d come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how do you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

Maybe in the end the big thing we call God can only be experienced in concrete particulars, not unlike William Blake’s vision of the whole world in a grain of sand.

Was there an image—a mere grain of sand—that could be a symbol for me of this ineffable, divine presence? What amazes me, what makes me almost break down and cry in the aisle of the cathedral, is how much I hunger for this.

It has been easy to admit to myself recently that I need some new aspect within my spirituality, one that could take me into the next phase of my life. Uncovering this need has been like finding an empty room in the center of my house, one I didn’t know was there, one I couldn’t pass without feeling its vacuity and wondering how it should be filled.

“Your grandmother’s gift has been different than mine. It’s not just that she makes the bunny cookies, but she finds the depths of herself in doing it…”

Maybe it is a feminine thing, I don’t know—but whenever I’ve managed to find new consciousness and renewals of my work, my relationships, and myself, it has been by going down into what seemed like a holy dark. It has come through a deep metabolizing of my experience and moments of metaphoric dying.

…Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds. Is that the moment she accepts the complexity of her experience and really takes it in? I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound.

It occurs to me then that Persephone came back. I could come back, even if at this moment I don’t understand how. There is an end to this.

“Well, basically, the church reined in Mary’s influence by typecasting her as a virgin and a mother, completely sexless and selfless. So naturally, that’s what became the vision of perfect womanhood.”

…I watch the little swarm of people in front of me, how urgent they look pressed together in the candlelight, jockeying for an unlit votive, wanting to believe in a loving mystery.

Right about now, if I let myself, I could get yanked into skepticism. I could entertain thoughts about the efficacy of what they’re doing, what I’m doing. Sending prayers into the universe. Are they heard? Can they change anything? I don’t know the answers. In recent years, my praying has grown more meditative, a kind of sitting in silence. It has been a long while since I’ve made a concrete petition, but as I linger, waiting for my own moment with Mary, it is faith I wish for. I wish to shape my needs into specific, well-considered words and offer them to my own particular image of the Loving Mystery, believing like a wise child.

I decide I will make my prayer right here, standing on the hearth, the center of the house, the center of me. The place of my mother. I can picture her stamping out her Easter cookies, and I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally “superfluous,” as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self. Let it be. Mary’s words at the annunciation come to me, and I realize this, too, is part of the passage into my fifties—the cultivation of being.

The two most powerful impulses in my life have been the urge to create and the urge to be—a set of opposites—and they have always clunked into each other….I’m good at pushing things into either-or corners. A moment ago it was faith or rationality. Now, being or creating. I close my eyes and try to shift how I come at it. Both, I think, and start to imagine the hearth not only as a place of being but as one of creating. Why couldn’t it stand for tending the present moment and also the fiery combustion of my work? The words contemplative writer form in a slow, measured way across my mind, as if being arranged on a Scrabble board. They give me the barest glimpse of a wholeness shining behind my divisiveness, the possibility of union.

I know Mom wants to say the right thing to me. I can see how hard she’s trying. Going slowly, measuring her words, her eyes brimming. I don’t know if those things I found in Athena are still in me, but it does help to think she believes it. I want to tell her she doesn’t have to say anything, that her hearing all this is what matters. But then she says, “You deserve to love yourself.” And it hits me suddenly how true that is.

Journeying is the predominant means of developing one’s self in this culture, not the habitation of place. It has been true of me. Always the seeker. Yet at this phase of my life, when I look at my house at the edge of a marsh, I want to learn how to be in it. I want to behave like a finder as much as a seeker. The irony is that I had to go on an elaborate journey to figure this out. So much of my growing older seems to be about paradoxes. The reconciliation of opposites. The bringing to balance.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
Except the one to which you belong.
- David White

Outside, on the path to the ferry, I hurry to catch up with Ann. I stare at the back of her short black raincoat, her brimmed indigo hat, her profile as she turns her head. One day she will be in the world and I will not, and for a second the thought catches me off guard, but then fills me with such extravagant love I abruptly stop walking.

A tiny, green fern grows close to my feet, its tendrils fluttering in the air, and I am caught by a sensation close to joy, but not quite joy—what I feel is more powerful, more inflamed, that exultant wildness in the heart that comes with the dilation of life.

Over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about what makes revealing myself so scary. I realize I hide my real self because I’m afraid of being rejected. Lately I’ve tried to confront the fear by asking myself: so what if I am rejected? I can’t count how many times I’ve gone back to the moment when Mom and I were on the ship near Patmos and everything spilled out. All my self-hatred and fear. And I hear her gently say, “You deserve to love yourself.” I remember how that hit me right between the eyes, right in the chest. I know it all goes back to that—loving myself. Believing I deserve to.

I’ve been slow to trust what is inside me—this new well of images, story, characters, and language. I haven’t wanted to confess to myself how plagued I am with skepticism. I’ve finished seven chapters of the novel, roughly half of it—believing in the work while simultaneously doubting the whole thing. Some of that is simply part of writing, but too much of it comes from enfeebling notions I have inside about my creative abilities, remnants of inadequacy that go back to my childhood, with its commanding old fear that I would not live up to expectations, that I would disappoint. How humbling to sit here wanting to believe the fear has been unplugged and find it sputtering determinedly on like a run-down generator in a back room.

I get up and deposit my piece of chain on the altar rail, knowing what I would like to be free of: the part of me that dares to little and fears too much. The terrible voice that pipes up: you can’t, and the next minute, don’t.

At times like this, I feel the small curse of my introspective nature and its obstinate demands, how it wants to be allowed, wants my unhurried and undivided attention, how the moments of life insist on being metabolized and given expression. As usual, having failed to stop and tend to this unmitigated part of myself, it has stopped me.

There is the saying—a favorite of my grandmother’s—“Into every life a little rain must fall,” and while I don’t think the barrage outside means anything particular, I allow it now to have meaning in general. Something about the way life is. Taking the severities as part of it. About the weather patterns in the new country.

One day I thought: what if I approached learning the craft of writing as if it were an apprenticeship? Just do myself a favor and accept that it’s going to be a process, a slow, laborious process. In the Middle Ages, an apprenticeship lasted seven years. That was believed to be the minimum amount of time it took to learn a craft. I started to think of myself as an apprentice. I would tell myself, Relax, you’ve got seven years.

I felt a little cynical about the nun’s words that day, at least at first. Then I thought, why not give up the attitude, the arrogance; there are, after all, mysteries in the world. I would like to be a novelist. The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that—an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.

Rereading the words now, it’s apparent they also resonate with the brooding I’ve been doing about the world and the questions that have begun to simmer inside of me: What will I leave behind? What will become of the world? What indentation will my work make? Why do I make myself audible like this? For what purpose?

The burning question back then was whether my work was true to my voice and my vision. Was it real? I would go into small agonies about it. I’m sure that’s because unvarnished authenticity was always the conflict for me. It was easier and simpler to please the culture and the family that shaped me than to uncover and tell my own truth.

I feel some sadness. This visit with him was an ending—I know I’ll never see him again. I feel a strange happiness, too, as I begin to see my relationship with Demetri for what it is: an event in time and an event in the soul. Our experience together is more than moments in a restaurant or on a dance floor, more than a brief romance. It’s about what I learned that night and what became freed inside of me. Demetri helped me break through my self-imposed limitations, my smallness, my pathological safety. I cherished him because he introduced me to myself, he caused me to fall in love with my own life. That’s what carries the charge, and that’s what will go on in me. It’s so easy to mix that up with the person.

2009-10-05T20:21:00.001-04:00

The right cut of jean & height of heel. the tight or loose, point or square of toe, tucked in or pulled out, bell or snug. thighs this year, & ankles. curves explicitly, in full detail. no mystique, no room to fib, thickness or waif. Hats, heels, miniskirts, roman sandals, tall boots. wedge. messy waves, bangs, layers. shorts. tights. changing too fast to pace.

Yogi Berra

2009-10-04T22:15:00.001-04:00

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Still Life - A.S. Byatt

2009-10-01T01:31:00.001-04:00

Still Life - A.S. Byatt

George Eliot, Stephanie thought, was a good hater. She looked long and intelligently at what she hated, with curiousity to see exactly what it was, and the necessary detachment to imagine it from within and without, these two breeding a kind of knowledge that was love. George Eliot had loved the bonnets and sprigged china—because she knew them, or because writing them down gave her power over them, made her gentle and generous to their meaning? She tried to relate this sudden vision of the things of the pieties of the Dodson sisters to Daniel’s mum’s instructions about how to cook Christmas pudding, and largely failed.

++

He had seen her look at Frederica’s books and had understood what he had half sensed on the occasion of Frederica’s telegrams, her sense of loss. He had his own sense of loss—the grim singleness of himself and his job alone in an anonymous bed sitter.

++

“Can’t you just be in a place, Frederica?”
“No. I think. I have to think. So do you.”
“No, I don’t. To my shame, in many ways, I don’t.”
But he did. He was very tempted to tell her about The Yellow Chair. The whole problem, the way the plays had got wound into each other, would interest her; she would see it was a problem. He turned on his back and swam away, jerky and splashing.

++

… what was known as the “limited revolt” of the intellectuals against the benign and humdrum welfare state. She was able to compare this “limited revolt” with reactions to a family structure known as the Power House, in which the principles and even practice of the parents are so liberal, so rational, so acceptable, that any necessary rebellion against their authority must take the form of absurd gestures, petulant or violent.

++

She believed unquestioningly, with part of herself, for instance, that a woman was unfulfilled without marriage, that marriage was the end of every good story. She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn’t decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband. (It is curious, but true, that the offers she received in no way changed her fixed feeling that the sort of woman she was was essentially not wanted as a wife.)

She believed, with a mixture of “realism” and resignation, that women were much more preoccupied with love than men were, more vulnerable, more in pain. There were imposing tags in her mind. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/ ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” “He for God only, she for God in him.” “I claim only this privilege for my sex—you need not covet it…this distinction of loving longest when life, when hope is gone.” She was conditioned to desire to be abject.

++

Daniel was ill at ease with the “personal.” What Mr. Ellenby had seen as Daniel’s interference in the private lives of his parishioners Daniel saw as a practical ordering of resources of help. He did not require affection, let alone love, from those he helped; he did put a great deal of imagination and consistent effort into helping them sensibly. Gideon was a man, Daniel saw, whose religious needs sprang from an overpowering desire to exact and bestow affection, contact, warmth. He did not know whether it was a failing or a virtue in himself that he feared and mistrusted this.

….In the days of Mr. Ellenby, to whom transcendent truth, order, and authority were living beings, Daniel had been able to afford the luxury of being the rebel, of questioning, in his secret mind, the sources of his religion, of human morals. In the new dispensation, where an almost anthropological vision of the source of morals in the life of the family seemed to inform Gideon’s thinking, Daniel found himself regretting the commandments, authority itself. He loved his wife terribly, and his son with protective fear, his mother with a sense of shared blood and tribal responsibility. These loves in themselves would not have led him to universal “love” if there was such a creature. His sense that the old must be comforted, the sick relieved, the useless made useful, came from a need for order so profound that he had needed the authority of Holy Orders, a form that sanctioned his dogged use of his life to restore a little order to the muddle and limpness and fear we make of things. Mr. Ellenby had believed for him, for Daniel. He had often sat in this church and thought: in another society I would as easily have been a Buddhist priest, a Hindu, a Moslem. What he believed and said he believed every day in the creed was what, in Sheffield in the mid-twentieth century, had been the available and thus the right form to believe. Now, under Gideon, this compromising doubt seemed dangerous as it had not. The church seemed vacant, the altar merely a table, the words…less authoritative, more dubious.

++

Alexander was more than usually given to finding the act of sex ludicrous, popping buttocks, squeaking sounds of flesh slithering or air groaning inappositely outward, but with this silent woman it was simply a question of a peaceful repeated bending and rocking until she closed like a vice, shivered again, and again, and again, still silent and smiling, sweating along the hairline, hardly to be called discomposed. Alexander saw and felt everything bathed in gold, and gave, finally, one cry that broke the silence and heard the woman sobbing. He thought both: this is what I am for, and more distantly, this is not what I really want.

++

“But our human experience,” said Juliana Belper, “is chaotic.” She was not interested in numbers. “We don’t know our own nature—Freud showed us we don’t know our own unconscious lives. We receive random impressions…” Her big eyes brimmed under a haze of soft hair escaped from a loose chignon.

“Sigmund Freud,” said Wijnnobel, “like Johannes Kepler, was a scientist and believed in truth. Kepler observed that the apparently irregular variations in the motions of the planets were a function of the form of the lens of the eye. This does not mean that we cannot study the planets, only that we must also study the eye. Freud believed that there were laws of human behavior that could be truly observed and understood. His results are harder to verify but his intentions were exact and honorable. Your hazy concept of chaos and vagueness depends on ignorance and feebleness of intellect. Good art cannot come from it.”

++

There was a God, he suddenly knew, a God of overflowing order and intricacy, ovals and ants. He saw two Gods side by side, Gideon’s God, who was like Gideon, a golden man opening his arms to comfort, and a God of fine bristles in dark corridors, of segments and interlocking threads and forms, of force taking shape, innumerable shapes. Lucas had been mad to think that any channel of communication existed with this God. He was in and about Marcus and the world. That was dangerous. But it had been his function. He thought of Jacqueline’s curiosity and the beauty of Ruth’s plait. Adrenaline, his own, not the half-moon pill’s, began to run.

++

Part of the joy of falling in love—for the intelligent, the watchers, the judicious—is the delicious license to set something above thinking clearly, the pleasure of being driven, taken over, overwhelmed. Frederica, despite her clumsy rushes of tactless fervor, was doomed to be intelligent, a watcher, judicious, and as she recognized this doom she desired proportionately to be let off, to feel incontrovertibly. There are moments of biological terror between two people when they realize that they cannot keep their hands from each other, that they cannot, temporarily at least, touch, smell, taste, hear, except in terms of the other, which are also love, and also immediate, and also incontrovertible.

++

He had lent her books—that was a beginning, lending of books was a universal sign of the beginning of something. To borrow implied to return. As soon as he was not there, love flooded her again like an easing of pain. She named what she loved: sadness, exact thought, remembered fear, a furious inner life. She remembered meeting his eyes when she explained that she was not Jewish. They were strangers. She loved a stranger. The world was larger than it had been.

++

He walked, and in his way prayed to the God who drove him, for patience in inactivity, for a reordering, for quiet sleep, by which he meant, and knew he meant, some response from his wife. Praying was not asking; praying was loosing these knots of care into some dark running stream of energy between It and himself so that things were delivered from him, to It, to deal with. He walked on. He breathed better.

++

He registered happiness, which was in its way as dangerous as the physical well-being; both presented themselves as empty patches of bright light on the inner eye, ringed by a prismatic flaring of color and danger. He tried to keep still. He considered the tree.

++

“[The negative article] was only really nasty if I’d conducted my life furtively, which I haven’t. But it was a bit horrible. I felt like an object, made into an object.”
“Sometimes you behave as though you were the only subject.”
“All of us do that.”
“You do it so obviously.”
“Oh, Alan. I want to be part of things. You get shut out, as a woman.”
“You’re at the center. In a way most men can’t be.”
“Yes, but they’re together and I’m alone.”
“Newnham’s full of women.”
“Women don’t live in groups happily.”

++

There were two hypothetical future Fredericas—one closed in the University Library writing something elegant and subtle on the use of metaphor in seventeenth-century religious narrative, and one in London, more nebulous, writing quite different things, witty critical journalism, maybe even a new urban novel like those of Iris Murdoch. The trouble was, she sometimes thought, that the two Fredericas were really indissolubly one. The Ph.D. writer would have died of aimlessness and spiritual vertigo without the drive of the worldly one; the worldly one would have felt like a creaking, varnished carapace without an abundant inner life. In the world of the fictive and hypothetical future, they could coexist, and Frederica took steps to promote the careers of both.

++

“I’ve been thinking. I suffer from having to use a limited vocabulary. All the time. How big do you suppose the average used vocabulary is? A thousand words? Two thousand? Will can’t know that many, and Mary even fewer. And the people I see—in the shops—”
“And my poor old mum—”
“And your poor old mum,” she said steadily, “and most of the people in this parish, wouldn’t understand most of the words I really care about if I were suddenly to say them, right out, out of the blue. So the words become ghosts. They haunt me.”
“Mebbe I wouldn’t understand them either,” said Daniel disagreeably. “My own vocabulary has deteriorated since college days. Or since we were courting.”
“Exactly. Have some more beans.” Food improved the temper. “We learn to think and can’t use our thinking words--”
“Like what?”
“Oh,” she said, frivolously, desperately. “Discourse. Discourse of reason. Sophistical. Ideal—in a Platonic sense. Catalyst. Anacoluthon. Mendacious. Realism. The worst things are the words that do have meaning in the tiny vocabulary I do use, like real and ideal, words that lose half their associations… Don’t you understand, Daniel?”
“I do,” he said. He pushed way his plate. “I shouldn’t have made you marry me. I thought that was real. God help me.”
“It was.” Quickly.
“Aye. And your great unopened volumes of vocabulary, they’re real, too.”
“Daniel—I can teach it to Will and Mary.” She was afraid of what she had done. She had meant to say something loving, from her to him. Who was he? What did he care about? He was a good, a practical man. She loved him. Did she not?
“I don’t understand. It wasn’t what I meant. This.” He gestured at the comfortable little room, where Will’s things, including the red engine, were heaped in a clothes basket, where Mary’s nappies hung on a clothes line by the fire. He laughed. “I can’t find a word. It’s all got—muffled.”
“Muffled is a good word.”
“Don’t be nice to me, Steph. Don’t patronize. That I can’t bear.”
“Daniel, I love you.”
“I think you do. It was daft of you. I mean that.”
“You can’t choose, about love.”
“Can’t you? Mebbe you should. I never thought it that important, until…I hate talking these days. Gideon’s a great talker; he gets talking things done, discussion groups and that, but not… It wasn’t what I was meant—“
“You knew so clearly what you were meant for. Before you married me…You’ve lost something, too. As heavy as my vocabulary.”
“Aye.” He stared at the table. The best, she thought, for her solitary self would have been to go on talking, to make him talk to her, but she was too afraid of failure and too unused to words herself now, to dare that. So she did what she knew was second best and dropped to her knees beside his chair and put a hand on his, her bright head on his knee.
“I do love you. Now we are alone.”
He stroked her hair, and put out blind arms, and they clung together. In silence they stood and climbed the stairs and tumbled into the new space of their bedroom. In bed they were happy, they knew each other, they loved each other. And the words wandered loose and unused. Peripeteia. Anguish. Morphology. Infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love, nor yet for constriction of vocabulary. She slept under the weight of his arm.

++

For two or three weeks after The Yellow Chair she was in love with Alexander in the old way. She survived this as though it was a curse pain, or an attack of motion sickness, a visitation beyond her control.

++

Daniel spoke almost savagely, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The words were a thin defense between him and the pit. They were an action, customary and saving, not because he any longer believed any of the more comfortable ones, but because the terrible ones spoke some of the truth of things. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday; seeing that is past as a watch in the night. As soon as thou scatterest them, they are even as a sleep: and fade away suddenly like the grass.”

++

So quickly, so quickly, the English stop speaking of grief, he thought, ungraciously, knowing that he had resented the inadequate words they had spoken, and sometimes worse than inadequate. Maybe Stephanie had been taken, a deaconess said, so young and so happy, because our Lord wanted Daniel to know the way of life without such love. Cordelia was killed, Christian critics argue, to effect the reconciliation of Lear with the heavens, to redeem him. Daniel thought for a terrible moment of Stephanie cycling off to the prenatal unit with her Wordsworth heavy in her bicycle basket. She had had her life. Who could believe in a God who killed that life to teach Daniel Orton a lesson about suffering? Shakespeare killed Cordelia to show that there are worse things than guilt and atonement for guilt, that Lear’s wisdom, painfully acquired and not very great, was of very little moment beside that cry.. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat…And even that, Daniel thought, after he had abruptly terminated the deaconess’s remonstrances, was self-referring. There were times when he was amazed that anything was alive, a greenfly, or an early daffodil someone brought him, when he feared for its green silky weightless life as much as he feared for his children.

++

“I’ve been walking,” said Daniel. “I walked most of the way. Sometimes I got buses. Slept out—sometimes—sometimes in transport digs and such. Won’t bore you with all that. Don’t think I knew where I was going, rightly—the idea was to finish myself off, tire myself out, like—go to nothing.”

How could he say? He had fought his flesh, punished it, and spoken to no one for week after week, treading heavily from surface to surface, tarmac, grass, sand, heather, indifferently, realizing what “tramp” meant. He remembered his feet moving, and the regularity of the movement taking the life from his mind, from himself, from what had happened.

++

The nature of each human

2009-09-19T17:03:00.001-04:00

The nature of each human relationship being unprecedented makes life really complicated.

2009-09-18T11:16:00.002-04:00

Cachetada - slap
huevón - lazy (Mexican derogatory), also means stupid
anillo - ring

2009-09-01T00:22:00.003-04:00

amargado - bitter/embittered person ("it's not funny, guys.")
la mitad - half
chita - Tarzan's little monkey

tercio pelo - fuzzy, and a Mexican flower

un cachito - nibble

escoba - broom
licuado - blended
coro - chorus

cabra - goat (queso de cabra - goat cheese)
tocino - bacon
nuez - walnut

haun - yet
todavia - still/up to this time

chismoso - gossip
tratero/ladron - robber/steal/thief
soplón - snitch (Mex)
chota - snitch (PR)
metiche - eavesdrop? (nosy)
escuchar a escondidas - eavesdrop? to listen secretively

letras - letters
letrear - spell
palabra - word
leer - read
escribir - write
mensaje - message/letter

norte
sud
oeste
este

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

2009-08-18T23:55:00.000-04:00

Clare shrugs. “But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s called determinism,” I tell her. “It haunts my dreams.”

But right now Clare sits on the threshold of adolescence with her faith in one hand and her growing skepticism in the other, and all she can do is try to juggle them, or squeeze them together until they fuse. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I want God. Is that okay?”

I feel like an asshole. “Of course it’s okay. That’s what you believe.”
“But I don’t want to just believe it. I want it to be true.”

“Well, whenever you feel discouraged, think of all the hours I spent, am spending, with your tiny self. New math and botany, spelling and American history. I mean, you can say nasty things to me in French because I taught you.”
“Too true. Il a les defaults de ses qualities. But I bet it’s easier to teach all that than to teach how to be—happy.”

“But you make me happy. It’s living up to being happy that’s the difficult part.”

HENRY: When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the drain before you can say “Liquid-Plumr”; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other’s musical excesses. (How can Clare listen to Cheap Trick? Why does she like the Eagles? I’ll never know, because she gets all defensive when I ask her. How can it be that the woman I love doesn’t want to listen to Musique du Garrot et de la Farraille?) The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated. I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreamy silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.

CLARE: This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. Sometimes I lie on the living room floor and listen to Fleetwood Mac, the Bangles, the B-52’s, the Eagles, bands Henry can’t stand. Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don’t leave a note saying where I am. Sometimes I meet Celia for coffee, and we talk about Henry, and Ingrid, and whoever Celia’s seeing that week. Sometimes I hang out with Charisse and Gomez, and we don’t talk about Henry, and we manage to enjoy ourselves. Once I went to Michigan and when I came back Henry was still gone and I never told him I had been anywhere. Sometimes I get a babysitter and I go to the movies or I ride my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it’s like flying.

Sometimes I am glad when Henry’s gone, but I’m always glad when he comes back.

The return of espanol!

2009-08-15T23:19:00.003-04:00

New job, new kitchen dudes with worse English who help me more. Woo.

Primeria - elementary school
Secondario - high school
Frontera - border
Obligatorio - obligatory
Algunas veces - sometimes

Conjugation of ir (to go) past tense:
fui - i went
fuiste - you went
fue - he/she went
fuimos - we went
fueron - they went

Conjugation of vener (to come) past tense:
(vengo, viene, viene, venemos, vienen)
vin
veniste
vino
vinieron
venimos

cerebro - brain

ganar - to win/to earn
juegos - games

virus - virus
renta - rent
cuchiplancheo - sex (dirty)

desayuno - breakfast
almuerzon/comida - lunch
cena - dinner
(i think i was already supposed to remember that)

yo estoy aprendiendo! - i am learning!

apodo - nickname

demasiado/muchisimo - too much

clientes/consumidores - customers

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey - Lillian Schlissel

2009-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

The women were the actuaries of the road, tallying the miles with the lives that were lost. One must suspect, finally, that many women judged the heroic adventure of their men as some kind of outrageous folly thrust upon them by obedience to patriarchal ritual.

The decision to make the journey rested with the men, and farm men of the early nineteenth century were not inclined to excuse women from their daily responsibilities to prepare for the occasion of childbirth. Women were expected to be strong enough to serve the common needs of the day, and strong enough to meet the uncommon demands as well. The society of emigrants yielded little comfort to frailty or timidity—or, for that matter, to motherhood.

Yankee husbands enjoyed the highest of reputations among the pioneer women, being universally judged the most considerate and gentle. And so was Elizabeth’s new mate. “He is as kind to me as I can ask. Indeed, he sometimes provokes me for trying to humor me so much.”

“I make six beds every day and do the washing and ironing you must think I am very busy and when I dance all night I am obliged to trot all day and had I not the constitution of six horses I should [have] been dead long ago but am going to give up in the fall weather or no as I am sick and tired of work.”

The majority of the overland women wore what clothing they had and prayed that what they wore would not tear. They were too preoccupied with the necessities of the day to consider fashion at all.

Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice

2009-07-23T00:01:00.001-04:00

I’m convinced that Lestat was a person who preferred not to think or talk about his motives or beliefs, even to himself. One of those people who must act. Such a person must be pushed considerably before he will open up and confess that there is method and thought to the way he lives.

[Paris] was the mother of New Orleans, understand that first; it had given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and it was what New Orleans had for so long tried to be. But New Orleans, though beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. There was something forever savage and primitive there, something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague—and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone façade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious, though unconscious, collective will.

I didn’t know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most profound feelings taking a shape they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not thought them out this way in conversation with another. I thought myself then possessed of a passive mind, in a sense. I mean that my mind could only pull itself together, formulate thought out of the muddle of longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind; fertilized by it; deeply excited by that other mind and driven to form conclusions. I felt now the rarest, most acute alleviation of loneliness.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

“What would Christ need have done to make me follow him like Matthew or Peter? Dress well, to begin with. And have a luxurious head of pampered yellow hair.”

I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on everything said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thoughts was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse—the things which often make dialogue impossible.

And after a long interval, he said, ‘I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.’

For a moment I doubted what I’d heard. It struck me as unbelievable. And I was hopelessly disarmed by it, and the wordless vision of our living together expanded and obliterated every other consideration in my mind.

“No, no.” I threw up my hands. I was on the point of a bitter, hysterical laughter. “Don’t you see? I’m not the spirit of any age. I’m at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time! It was too painful, too perfectly true.

But his face only brightened with an irresistible smile. He seemed on the verge of laughing at me, and then his shoulders began to move with this laughter. “But Louis,” he said softly. “This is the very spirit of your age. Don’t you see that? Everyone else feels as you feel. Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.”

A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge

2009-07-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

“Qeng Ho is an empire,” the boy said, looking out at the stars and trying to imagine how those territories compared with his father’s kingdom.

Sura laughed. “No, not an empire. No government can maintain itself across light-years. Hell, most governments don’t last more than a few centuries. Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.”

“Yes…just listen to the peace. It’s a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in the lestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long.”

Pham might have his dream…if he gave up the reason for it.

The plans formed and re-formed in Pham’s mind. It was a far cry from breaking the wheel of history, but there was a strange, rising pleasure in doing what felt wholly right.

“There’s a downside to your virtues, though. You had the patience to play a role for hundreds of Msecs. You stuck to your goals when lots of other people had started whole new lives. Now you’re talking about waiting for Trixia however long that may take. And I believe you really would wait…forever. Ezr, have you ever thought, you don’t always need the mindrot to get Focused?”

Glossary: ethnic: cultural: denoting or

2009-07-08T12:37:00.001-04:00

Glossary: ethnic: cultural: denoting or deriving from or distinctive of the ways of living built up by a group of people

2009-07-07T09:39:00.001-04:00

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

~Audre Lorde

2009-06-25T02:43:00.000-04:00

Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos.

--Alice Randall

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

2009-05-30T23:01:00.001-04:00

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.

+

In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out.

+

I do not mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

+

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.

+

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

+

It’s a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never.

+

My face set to a grim and determined expression. I speak in all modesty as I say this, but I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It’s not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others—and I am one of those—never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It’s not a question of courage. It’s something constitutional, an inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.

+

The rain chilled me to the bone. But I was smiling. I remember that close encounter with electrocution and third-degree burns as one of the few times during my ordeal when I felt genuine happiness.

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

A Stopover in Venice - Kathryn Walker

2009-05-18T22:26:00.004-04:00

My growing loneliness in our own particular outcome led me to speculate that our marriage was based on two established principles: familiarity breeds contempt, and absence makes the heart grow fonder. He was nicer when not there.

+

A friend of mine says that life is nothing but phases; we never arrive anywhere. I was familiar with this idea but liked the way he put it.

+

I used to be a warrior. I’m not one anymore. I don’t know if people can change the way they think, anyway. Life is short. I didn’t mean to lecture you.

What became of the warrior?

She retired.

Once a warrior, he said, what do you do in retirement?

I don’t know. Fiercely not be one.

+

I suppose I became spoiled by my solitude. Perhaps marriage was not for me. I seem to prefer seclusion; I like to experience time passing. I might have enjoyed children, I’ll never know. I’m sure I’ve missed a great deal, but I do not believe so much in regrets.

+

These deaths. They are terrible but full of riches, as you must know. They take a great toll on the usual delusions, don’t you find? The fictions we live by? We know we are powerless and so are more free. We simply live through it or not. If we live, we see ourselves more clearly. For better or worse; our values change. It’s as if the love comes back to us in a new form, larger, wiser, more generous. A kind of blessing. Only if one feels it, of course.

+

Having lived with celebrity although never actually being part of it – not that I hadn’t had attention or praise in my life but never the glorified, gainful version – had provoked a lot of thought. I’d had time to think. These people were not as interesting as they were made to seem, you’d expect that, but what seemed odd to me was that they defined what was interesting because they’d been successful, which was to say, they’d made money and gained reputation. They’d won.

I remembered that one day – I had no idea what provoked it – I had the image of a black river running alongside history, a wide dark column running parallel to what I visualized as an illustrated time line, one of those tidy, authoritative historical summaries that tells with faces and pictures what happened when, and there you are: that’s all, that’s what happened. Who decides? History is written by the victors, and all of that, but this river! It was a revelation. The river was not so much black as deep and invisible; it was made up of all the watchers and standers-by, the doubters, the cynics, the wives, the ones who lost the prize, the unwilling, the reticent, the disdainful, the disillusioned, the genuinely serious, the marginal insiders, the disgusted, and the ones who were driven mad. The others. The unheard-from and forgotten. The ones who saw but were not seen. The river was wider by far than the line.

It sounds depressing but was not. I felt comforted by this huge assembly of heartfelt, perhaps witty, disbelievers – many of them women, naturally – centuries of them, who looked on and, needing no authority, understood.

+

Hope, I now believe, is not a thing heedlessly given to be crushed by the vicissitudes of experience; rather it is the unanticipated reward of struggle endured, a gift of grace. I have in my life found this to be so. I believe as well that innocence itself is won through patience and endurance, nor is it the infantile luxury so often remarked. One must gaze long and with fortitude to begin to see clear. I cannot with my own experience imagine that the world is kind in all things, but I am certain in my soul that rich and mysterious gifts are concealed in the dark folds of pain.

+

Streaks of pink, rosy fingers, were spreading across the sky; the rooftops and canal glimmered in the silent morning. Happiness felt to me like a lotus unfolding, pressing out to every extremity; the pleasure was nearly painful. The lotus in the river. Daybreak, a pink sky, the world. All me, all mine.

+

The Hanging Man [dangling by his foot] was smiling. I asked Signora Marchioni why in his predicament he was smiling. He smiles because he has hung himself upside down himself, she said. He could get free, but he is looking at things from another angle, you might say, and enjoying it. He is not unhappy, she said. He did it to himself. He was not unhappy. Unhappy was too obvious. I wasn’t doing that anymore.

Glossary:florid: aureate: elaborately or excessive

2009-05-18T12:27:00.001-04:00

Glossary:florid: aureate: elaborately or excessively ornamented; "flamboyant handwriting"; "the senator's florid speech"

Land-grant universities have been designated

2009-05-05T11:40:00.001-04:00

Land-grant universities have been designated by each state to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890.

Dreamers of the Day - Mary Doria Russell

2009-04-26T01:26:00.001-04:00

“Pushcart Tony,” Mumma called that kind, though most of them were day laborers, not fruit and vegetable vendors. “Foreigners are taking this country over,” she’d say.
“They didn’t sail on the Mayflower,” I’d answer, “but they came here as soon as they could.”

+

“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.

+

...before long I found myself recounting my struggles with resentful, bitter [immigrant] parents, frightened by their children’s success. Americanization was a Faustian bargain for such immigrants, I told Herr Weilbacher. Yes, their children could go to public schools with no bribes, no fees, and no questions asked, but American tuition was paid in estrangement. Daughters told mothers they dressed funny, they cooked funny, they talked funny. Sons stayed out late and went to dance halls, and quarreled with their fathers over who would keep the money earned from after-school jobs.

+

And, of course, when a couple walks side by side, they look out of the world together, not at each other. The voice becomes more important than the face, you see. The soul and the intellect can be more beautiful without the dross of physicality.

+

And the Great Influenza had taught me how suddenly life could end, how quickly people could disappear from your life, how important it was to say what you mean and mean what you say. If I ever came to care for someone, I vowed, I would never waste our time together with guessing games. I would speak my mind aloud and clearly.

+

“The British believe they are doing a selfless service when they impose their empire on others. They are always surprised when their generosity is unappreciated, but to be frankly conquered is less demeaning, I think.”

+

“Are you an atheist, then?” I whispered, and I admit that I felt a small thrill simply saying a word I had never dared to apply to anyone, let alone a friend.
Karl threw back his head and laughed, blithely unconcerned. “I am an avis even more rara,” he told me merrily. “I am a realist. And you know what they say, don’t you? Birds of a feather…?” He looked into my eyes until I blinked and looked away. He laughed again, though not at all in an unkind way. Rather, his devil-may-care amusement made me feel that he had seen the person I kept hidden even from myself, and that he approved of her and would be happy to see more of her if she dared reveal herself.

+

It was such a simple idea, really, but many things seemed to click into place for me. It was not scandalous or sinful or dangerous to understand a different point of view. I had been raised to believe that to do so was to risk error at least and damnation at worst. Knowing Karl taught me that I was simply good manners, and a more interesting way to live.

+

“It is remarkable what people choose to do, and then insist they had no choice. You had plans to leave as well, but your Mumma cried. Some tears and paf! You gave up your dreams.”

I had no answer for him. I was stunned, astonished that he would turn on me like that.

“Your mother believed she was harmed when your brother left,” Karl said, “but no! That was disappointment.” He sat back in his chair and waved his pipe in the direction of an imaginary vista. “If your home has a beautiful view of a forest on someone else’s land, you may enjoy the view, but you have no right to it. It does not belong to you. If one day the owner decides to cut down all his trees for lumber, you may be disappointed, but you are not harmed. It is his, not yours, to dispose of as he wishes. Your mother acted as though your lives were hers. When your plans differed from hers, she lost a view of the future that she imagined but had no right to.” He leaned over the table, his eyes as merrily compassionate as his words were harsh. “Agnes, your mother was a tyrant.”

+

If we are timid or rebellious or both, then travel—by itself and by ourselves—forces us to leave our old lives behind. Travel can overcome habitual resistance and set the soul in motion along magnetic lines of attraction. On foreign soil, desires—denied, policed, constrained at home—can be unbound. What hides beneath the skin-thin surface of the domesticated self is sensual, sexual, adult.

+

“My people value education almost above God, but what can an educated man do in Palestine? Farm rocks and dodge bullets?”

The Repeatedly Promised Land is what Karl called Palestine, and he was not referring to the pledges of Yahweh.

+

I often envied them their Roman rituals. Conducted as they were in a dead language, such ceremonies could invite a mood of awe while concealing the logical fault lines and scriptural inconsistencies that blared out at me when worshipping in English. Perhaps if Latin chants had crowded out my questions, I’d have found it easier to move away from the mundane and toward the glory of God’s presence. Yet Lillian sat at my side during the services we attended, and she was never troubled by the sermons that made me want to argue. Even as a child, she could always quote a bit of Scripture to settle any question I had. As a grown woman, intelligent and knowledgeable, she devoted her life to the Gospel. Lillian had no need of Latin obfuscation to shelter her from doubt.

+

Unlike the tourists, these ladies seemed undismayed by the lack of decorum, lost in their devotion. With their example to guide me, I required of myself the act of will necessary to grasp at some sense of awe.

+

At last, I had shared my bed with a man I loved, and in so doing, I had discovered a physical ruthlessness I had never suspected. It was like a heartbeat, that selfishness: I want. I want. I want…
Beneath the surface I sensed an element of commerce between us that had not been there before: some quid pro quo that I could not yet articulate, and willfully ignored.

+

The he said the most extraordinary thing: “Fear not, dear friend, but freely live your days.”

+

A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.

A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.

Glossary: hegemony: the dominance or

2009-04-18T13:14:00.001-04:00

Glossary: hegemony: the dominance or leadership of one social group or nation over others

Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

2009-04-07T01:41:00.002-04:00

“Of course one does meet brilliant men,” said Nikolay Nikolayevich, “but they are isolated. The fashion nowadays is all for groups and societies of every sort. – It is always a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together, whether their group loyalty is to Solovyev or to Kant or Marx. The truth is only sought by individuals, and they break with those who do not love it enough. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed.”

+

In times of sorrow or anxiety the two friends lightened each other’s burdens. They did this by provoking one another, their conversation becoming increasingly caustic until an emotional storm burst and soon ended in tears and a reconciliation. These scenes had a tranquilising effect on both, like the application of leeches for high blood pressure.

+

He was clever at exploiting her wretchedness and reminded her, when it suited him, of her dishonor without seeming to do so. These hints brought her to just that state of confusion to which a voluptuary needs to reduce a woman, and left her powerless to resist the nightmare of sensuality which terrified her whenever she awoke from it. Here everything was topsy-turvy and against logic; sharp pain announced itself by peals of silvery laughter, resistance and refusal meant consent, and grateful kisses covered the hand of the tormentor.

+

When the hot, grimy train left them at the station, and while the luggage was being loaded on to a cart and the family took their seats in the carriage and listened to the Duplyanka coachman, in his scarlet shirt and sleeveless coat, telling them the season’s local news, Lara, struck dumb by the boundless, dazed, scented silence of the country, went off to the house on foot.

The path trodden by wayfarers and pilgrims followed the railway and then turned into the fields. Here Lara stopped, closed her eyes and took a good breath of the air which carried all the smells of the huge countryside. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.

+

“I know what you mean. I like the way you put it. I’ll tell you. Do you remember that night, in winter, in the middle of a snowstorm, when you brought me the paper with the first government decrees? You remember how unbelievably direct and uncompromising they were? It was that single-mindedness that appealed to us. But such things keep their original purity only in the minds of those who have conceived them, and then only on the day they are first published. By the day after, the casuistry of politics has turned them inside out.”

+

And in order to do good to others he would have needed, besides the principles which filled his mind, an unprincipled heart, -- the kind of heart that knows of no general cases, but only of particular ones, and has the greatness of small actions.

Filled with the loftiest aspirations from his childhood, he had looked upon the world as a vast arena where everyone competed for perfection, keeping scrupulously to the rules. When he found that this was not a true picture, it did not occur to him that his conception of the world order might be oversimplified. He nursed his grievances and with them the ambition to judge between life and the dark forces which distort it, and to be life’s champion and avenger.

+

“What a summer, what a summer!
This is magic indeed.
And how, I ask you, did it come to us
Unsought and undeserved?”

+

“So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task which can be achieved by physical effort and which brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn’t a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies, are not put down on paper but forgotten. The town hermit, whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco, doesn’t know the strongest drug of all – good health and real need.”

+

“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate and that this dogma, concerning the Mother of God, expresses the idea of all motherhood.

“At the moment of child-birth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man’s part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing were gratuitous.

“It is the woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off upstairs, to some top storey of life, a quiet, safe place for a cradle. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child.”

+

“For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have this feeling particularly, but then, at the beginning, all women are mothers of great men – it isn’t their fault if life disappoints them later.”

+

“I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm in which there are innumerable concepts and varied phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle which comes into every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it.”

+

It was a bleak, rainy afternoon with only two colours to it – wherever the light fell it was white, everywhere else it was black; and Yury’s mood was of the same bleak simplification unsoftened by half-tones.

+

“Those who do your thinking for you go in for proverbs, but they’ve forgotten one proverb – ‘You can take a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink,’ and they’ve got into the habit of liberating and showering benefits on just those people who haven’t asked for it.”

They love each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

To them—and this made them unusual—the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves.

+

“Don’t you see, it isn’t just that I don’t love him, I despise him.”

“Can you know yourself as well as that? Human nature is so mysterious and so full of contradictions. Perhaps there is something in your very loathing of him that keeps you bound to him more surely than to any man whom you love of your own free will, without compulsion.”

+

“As for me, I love you. If only you knew how much I love you. I love all that is unusual in you, the inconvenient as well as the convenient, and all the ordinary things which, in you, are made precious to me by being combined in an extraordinary way; your face which is made beautiful by your expression, though perhaps it would be plain without it, your intelligence and your talent which replace your will – for you have no will. All of it is dear to me and I know of no one better than you in the world.”

+

History is not made by anyone. You cannot make history; nor can you see history, any more than you can watch the grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history’s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days; the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.

Mourning for Lara, he also mourned that distant summer in Melyuzeyevo when the revolution had been a god come down to earth from heaven, the god of that summer when everyone had gone mad in his own way, and when everyone’s life existed in its own right and not as an illustration to a thesis in support of higher policy.

+

It was the very triteness of Dudorov’s feelings and expressions that moved him most; he took the textbook orthodoxy of his sentiments to be a sign of their common humanity.

+

His room faced south. It almost adjoined the theatre and looked out over the roof-tops opposite; beyond them, the sun stood high over Okhotny Ryad but the street below was in shadow.

To Yury the room was more than a place to work in, more than a study. At this time of devouring activity, when the pile of notebooks on his desk was too small to hold all his plans and when the shapes of his projected books were all round him, like unfinished pictures standing with their faces to the walls in a painter’s studio, his living-room was to him a banqueting room of the spirit, a lumber room of unreason, a store-room of discoveries.

+

“I live over a busy crossing. Moscow, blinded by the sun and the white heat of her asphalt yards, scattering sun gleams from her top-floor windows, breathing and blossoming with the colour of her streets and clouds, is whirling all round me, turning my head and willing me to turn the heads of others by writing in her praise.

“The incessant rumbling by day and night in the street outside our walls is as much connected with our thoughts as the opening bars of an overture with the curtain, as yet dark and secret, but already beginning to crimson in the glow of the footlights. The incessant, uninterrupted rustle and movement of the town outside our doors and windows is a huge, immeasurable overture to life for each of us. It is in these terms that I should like to write about the town.”

+

“To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune. To do nothing and to despair is to neglect our duty.”

Glossary: caryatid: a supporting column

2009-04-02T17:44:00.001-04:00

Glossary: caryatid: a supporting column carved in the shape of a person

2009-04-02T02:16:00.002-04:00

"Remember, our urge is to help and to fix. But our charter is to understand, and that's how we help."

- Chris Dolin

"Found Objects" -- The New Yorker, 12/10/07

2009-04-02T02:13:00.001-04:00

by Jennifer Egan

"You don't like eye contact?" Sasha had asked. It had seemed like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.

"I find it tiring," he'd said. "This way we can both look where we want."

"where do you usually look? When people are on the couch."

"Around the room," Coz said. "At the ceiling. Into space."

"Do you every sleep?"

"No."

"You're happy," Alex said.
"I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget."

2009-04-02T02:12:00.002-04:00

"One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star." -- Neitzche

"The habit of wanting so many things makes it hard to give thanks." -- Alex Talavera

2009-04-02T02:10:00.000-04:00

"There are two beautiful daughters of hope: one is anger, one is courage. Anger about what is wrong in the world, and courage to change it."

- Augustine

2009-04-01T21:44:00.001-04:00

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

Glossary: salvo: an outburst resembling

2009-03-31T00:14:00.001-04:00

Glossary: salvo: an outburst resembling the discharge of firearms or the release of bombs

Glossary: antediluvian: any of the

2009-03-31T00:02:00.001-04:00

Glossary: antediluvian: any of the early patriarchs who lived prior to the Noachian deluge

Translation: 'su socio para lograr'

2009-03-26T21:01:00.001-04:00

Translation: 'su socio para lograr' in Spanish means 'your partner for achieving' in English.

Translation: 'salve lindo' in Spanish

2009-03-26T21:00:00.001-04:00

Translation: 'salve lindo' in Spanish means 'nice save' in English.

Tip: get local results; send HELP LOCAL to learn more.

Glossary: bolshevik: emotionally charged terms

2009-03-26T09:10:00.001-04:00

Glossary: bolshevik: emotionally charged terms used to refer to extreme radicals or revolutionaries

Glossary: scapegoat: someone who is

2009-03-24T10:41:00.001-04:00

Glossary: scapegoat: someone who is punished for the errors of others

Glossary: obsequious: bootlicking: attempting to

2009-03-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

Glossary: obsequious: bootlicking: attempting to win favor from influential people by flattery

Glossary: ombudsman: a government appointee

2009-03-24T09:52:00.001-04:00

Glossary: ombudsman: a government appointee who investigates complaints by private persons against the government

gonorrhea: venereal disease caused by

2009-03-22T15:27:00.001-04:00

gonorrhea: venereal disease caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae; symptoms are painful urination and pain

2009-03-22T00:46:00.001-04:00

"I don't know if I could respect someone who could walk away from a gift like that."

Glossary: voluptuary: a person addicted

2009-03-20T20:37:00.001-04:00

Glossary: voluptuary: a person addicted to luxury and pleasures of the senses

Glossary: hyperbole: extravagant exaggeration Tip:

2009-03-19T19:12:00.001-04:00

Glossary: hyperbole: extravagant exaggeration

Tip: personalize Google SMS; send HELP SETTINGS to learn more.

from mom: Kathleen Norris's "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography"

2009-03-12T14:53:00.002-04:00

The silence of the Plains, this great unpeopled landscape of earth & sky, is much like the silence one finds in a monastery, an unfathomable silence that has the power to re-form you. And the Plains have changed me. I was a New Yorker for nearly six years & still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems & essays.

A side effect of this process has been a change in the way I feel when I'm in a crowd, a situation I now experience so rarely that I have the luxury of enjoying it. Several y ears ago, I traveled to New England to visit a friend who had terminal cancer. The journey took on the nature of a quest. First, the 125-mile trip over the prairie to the nearest airport, in Bismarck, North Dakota; a plane to Minneapolis & then LaGuardia, where I waited nearly two hours for my baggage; a bus into Manhattan; a taxi to Penn Station, where I stood for another two hours in a vast crowd—it was Labor Day weekend—waiting for a train.

It seems as if all of the city's dense, humid heat was concentrated in that room, yet I felt at peace. The crowd was a typical urban mix: all races, young & old, rich & poor, sand & insane, quite & ranting. As I stood in this group of strangers, I was happy to be one among many, & a powerful calm came over me. I began to see each of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world. After the relative emptiness of the Plains, partaking in such a feast of humanity was a blessing in itself.

The vespers hymn reads: "May God ever dress our days in peace & starlight order."

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, NY, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, "But what is there to see?"
The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky & the ever-changing light. Except for a few signs of human presence—power & telephone lines, an occasional farm building, the glint of a paved road in the distance—it's like looking at the ocean.

The landscape of western Dakota is not as abstract as the flats of Kansas, but it presents a similar challenge to the eye that appreciates the vertical definition of mountains or skyscrapers; that defines beauty in terms of the spectacular or the busy: hills, trees, buildings, highways, people. We seem empty by comparison.

Here, the eye learns to appreciate slight variations, the possibilities inherent in emptiness. It sees that the emptiness is full of small things, like grasshoppers in their samurai armor clicking & jumping as you pass.

The people of Hope live far apart from each other on the land: paradoxically, I suspect this is one reason they seem better at creating community than people in town, better at being together while leaving each other alone, as I once heard the monastic ideal defined.

One former minister…told me that she couldn't imagine what was happening at the first funeral service she conducted for a member of Hope Church when, as people gathered for the graveside service, the men, some kneeling, began studying the open grave. It was early November, and someone explained that they were checking the frost & moisture levels in the ground. They were farmers & ranchers worried about a drought. They were mourners giving a good friend back to the earth. They were people of earth, looking for a sign of hope.

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

2009-02-23T09:50:00.000-05:00

He had discovered that the presence of a certain bird meant that a snake was nearby, and that a certain shrub was a sign that there was water in the area. The sheep had taught him that.

If God leads the sheep so well, he will also lead a man, he thought. And that made him feel better.

+

“Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked the boy.

“Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.”

+

He still had some doubts about the decision he had made. But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

+

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

+

“Once you get into the desert, there’s no going back,” said the camel driver. “And, when you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. The rest is up to Allah, including the danger.”

+

“My heart is a traitor,” the boy said to the alchemist, when they had paused to rest the horses. “It doesn’t want me to go on.”

“That makes sense,” the alchemist answered. “Naturally it’s afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you’ve won.”

“Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?”

“Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.”

“You mean I should listen, even if it’s treasonous?”

“Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you’ll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them.

“You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you’ll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.”

The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. He came to understand its dodges and tricks, and to accept it as it was. He lost his fear, and forgot about his need to go back to the oasis, because, one afternoon, his heart told him that it was happy. “Even though I complain sometimes,” it said, “it’s because I’m the heart of a person, and people’s hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell you heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

+

“…there’s no need for iron to be the same as copper, or copper the same as gold. Each performs its own exact function as a unique being, and everything would be a symphony of peace if the hand that wrote all this had stopped on the fifth day of creation.”

Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon

2009-02-16T10:04:00.001-05:00

“The greatest vanity of all,” Zelikman said without looking at the stripling. “It’s soldiering, Amram. I want nothing to do with soldiers, armies, chains of command. All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men.”

Filaq wiped the blade on the flap of his tunic and then handed it back, haft first. “Thank you for saving my life,” he said.

“I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.”

[The Wend] had been born a bondsman into a family of slaves, and his life was bondage, and in that regard he counted himself no worse than the general run of humanity, not excluding his master, who was the slave of an exacting God and in this nowhere near so fortunately owned as the Wend.

Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one’s home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one’s home.

Glossary: incorrigible: impervious to correction

2009-02-11T21:37:00.001-05:00

Glossary: incorrigible: impervious to correction by punishment

Glossary: fascism: a political theory

2009-02-10T12:15:00.001-05:00

Glossary: fascism: a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)

Glossary: eugenics: study of methods

2009-02-10T12:07:00.001-05:00

Glossary: eugenics: study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding (especially as applied to human mating)

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon

2009-02-07T01:18:00.000-05:00

Sitka, with a population in the long jagged strip of the metro area of three point two million, averages about seventy-five homicides a year. Some of these are gang-related: Russian shtarkers whacking one another freestyle. The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.

“No,” Elijah says, with a hint of mild emotion that Landsman can’t quite read. It might be regret, or relief, or the grim satisfaction of a man with a taste for disappointment.

As Shpringer has inferred from the marks on Lasker’s arm, the deceased’s apparent tourniquet of choice was a leather strap, black, about half an inch wide. Shpringer pulls it out of the zip and holds it up between two fingers as if it might bite. Halfway along the strap hangs a small leather box designed to hold a slip of paper on which a scribe, with ink and a feather, has written four passages from the Torah. Each morning the pious Jew twines one of these doodads along his left arm, ties another to his forehead, and prays for understanding of the kind of God Who obliges somebody to do something like that every damn day of his life.

With the smell of Pinky on his collar and the cool dry ghost of Goldy’s hand in his, he plays goalkeeper as a squad of unprofitable regrets mounts a steady attack on his ability to get through a day without feeling anything.

“Look at the head on that sheygets, the thing has its own atmosphere,” Landsman says. “Thing has ice caps.”
“Indeed the man has a very big head.”
“Every time I see it, I feel sorry for necks.”
“Maybe I should get my hands around his. Give it some support.”

They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. They pound at each other’s backs, searching for the tubercular spots in their slowly dying friendship, sounding the depths of their ancient enmity like a drum. In the year of misery that preceded his defection to the Jewish side of his nature, before his mother was crushed by a runaway truckload of rioting Jews, young John Bear discovered basketball and Wilfred Dick, then a four-foot-two point guard. It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be. T he foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

There is no doubt that her snoring has not changed in two years. It has a double-reeded hum. The bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respiration.

“You’re really hurt. Tell me you’re not really hurt, walking around so tough and macho when you need to be in the goddamn hospital.” She reaches for his windpipe with the fingers of both hands, ready, as ever, to choke the life from Landsman to show how much she cares. “Are you hurt badly, you idiot?”

2009-02-07T00:32:00.001-05:00

'We come to break bread and give thanks and seek guidance, but also to rededicate ourselves to the mission of love and service that lies at the heart of all humanity. As St. Augustine once said, "Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you."'

-Obama

Glossary: alien: foreigner: a person

2009-02-03T11:55:00.001-05:00

Glossary: alien: foreigner: a person who comes from a foreign country; someone who does not owe allegiance to your country

2009-01-30T00:29:00.001-05:00

Sere la psicóloga - I will be the psychologist
Mi pansa / estomago esta vasillo - my stomach is empty
chiflar - to whistle
chismoso - liar

where the land is low is where the bones'll show through

2009-01-29T16:04:00.000-05:00

Lonely little love dog that no one knows the name of
I know why you cry out

Desperate and devout

Timid little teether, your eyes set on the ether
Your moon in bella luna and
Howling hallelujah

Nameless you above me, come lay me low and love me
This lonely little love dog
That no one knows the name of

Curse me out in free verse, wrap me up and reverse this
Patience is a virtue
Until its silence burns you

And something slow has started in me,

As shameless as an ocean
Mirrored in devotion

Something slow has sparked up in me
As dog cries for a master
Sparks are whirling faster

Lonely little love dog that no one knows the ways of
Where the land is low is
Where the bones'll show through

Lonely little love dog, that no one knows the days of
Where the land is low is
Where the water flows to
And holds you

[Love Dog - TV on the Radio]

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2009-01-18T02:24:00.001-05:00

Come to him in dreams of stars,
of trees and water, a boat that sails.
Adventures of heart, pulse wild beating --
Soul music, ripe and honeyed.
Come to him with all the silence,
bottled, close and safe and sound.
Come to him and push aside tall grasses
to the river's edge,
a path, a hush, the rustle hum
and warm hand reaching out to hold.

2009-01-09T11:23:00.001-05:00

too much too soon

and too much electricity

no transformer, only raw from the wire,

and too much open,

ready to fry.

too much heart she has,

afraid to disappoint

afraid to cope

ran down the street

in a silver car

and lay in the bed in the dark all night

all day

holding pills in the left palm

and hope in the right.

too sad to stay home,

too alive to let on (how much she needed).

agitated and sad

spun round the center,

centrifuge

pushed out and back

into fields of sunflowers

heads tipped back and moving,

that breeze awash with fire and dust, the feel

of earth in motion. agape.

Glossary: exotic: alien: being or

2009-01-02T20:40:00.001-05:00

Glossary: exotic: alien: being or from or characteristic of another place or part of the world

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

2009-01-02T19:18:00.001-05:00

The Road – Cormac McCarthy
(one of the most beautiful and sad books I have _ever_ read.)

By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and window lights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.

He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.

No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don’t dream at all. You say you can’t? Then don’t do it. That’s all.

The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.

He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

In what direction did lost men veer? Perhaps it changed with hemispheres. Or handedness. Finally he put it out of his mind. The notion that there could be anything to correct for. His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep. Correct for that.

Even if you knew what to do you wouldn’t know what to do. You wouldn’t know if you wanted to do it or not. Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
Do you wish you would die?
No. But I might wish I had died. When you’re alive you’ve always got that ahead of you.
Or you might wish you’d never been born.
Well. Beggars can’t be choosers.
You think that would be asking too much.
What’s done is done. Anyway, it’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.

That hurt, didn’t it? The boy said.
Yes. It did.
Are you real brave?
Just medium.
What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
Really?
No. Don’t listen to me. Come on, let’s go.

2008-12-26T21:14:00.002-05:00

"We've learned that we don't inherit the earth from our parents, but that we borrow it from our children."

-- island fisherman, on "Coral Reef Adventure"

2008-12-21T02:18:00.000-05:00

Brendan (4): I don't want to be alone -- you can stay with me.
Aunt Jill: Right - that would be very bad.
B: Yeah, then the police would come get my parents!
J: How do you know that?
B: Because when bad things happen, the police comes and fix it."

2008-12-20T02:22:00.000-05:00

If we had spent the day in bed
I could have healed you, I thought,
and say to myself 11 years later
looking back in sepia tones,
still knowing skin that knew me.
Few things inspire poetry these days (I say
every few years -- just to take note).
Seems it is borne of pain
I have learned to avoid --
a methadone of the soul.

Useful strangeness of decir

2008-12-18T10:01:00.002-05:00

Pocket Oxford Spanish Dictionary © 2005 Oxford University Press:

I. decir1 sustantivo masculino: ¿cientos de personas? — bueno, es un ~ hundreds of people? — well, figuratively speaking

II. decir2 (conjugate⇒) verbo transitivo
1. TO SAY/TO TELL
a. ‹palabra/frase/poema› to say; ‹mentira/verdad› to tell;
no digas estupideces don't talk nonsense!;
¿eso lo dices por mí? are you referring to me?;
¡no lo dirás en serio! you can't be serious!;
dijo que sí con la cabeza he nodded; (literally, “he said yes with his head”)
¡eso no se dice! you mustn't say that!;
¿lo encontró? — dice que sí/no did he find it? — he says he did/he didn't

b. decir misa to say mass

2. TO TELL
voy a ~le a papá que … I'm going to tell Dad …;
¡ya te lo decía yo! I told you so!

3. TO express orders, desires, intentions:
a. (expresando órdenes, deseos, advertencias):
¡porque lo digo yo! because I say so!;
harás lo que yo diga you'll do as I say;
dice que llames cuando llegues she says (you are) to phone when you get there;
dijo que tuviéramos cuidado she said to be careful;
diles que empiecen tell them to start;
le dije que no lo hiciera I told him not to do it
b. ~(le) adiós (a algn) to say goodbye (to sb)

4. TO PONDER/ THINK & TO SUGGEST/COMMUNICATE
a. (opinar, pensar) to think;
¿y los padres qué dicen? what do her parents think of it?, how do her parents feel about it?;
¡quién lo hubiera dicho! who would have thought/believed it?;
es muy fácil — si tú lo dices … it's very easy — if you say so …

b. (sugerir, comunicar): el tiempo lo dirá time will tell;
¿te dice algo ese nombre? does that name mean anything to you?

5. TO MEAN
querer decir [palabra/persona] to mean;
¿qué quieres ~ con eso? what do you mean by that?

6. IN PHRASES
(en locs) a decir verdad to tell you the truth, to be honest;
como quien dice so to speak;
es decir that is;
¡he dicho! that's final!;
ni que decir tiene que … it goes without saying that …;
¡no me digas! no!, you're kidding/joking! (colloq) (literally, “don’t speak/say that to me”)
por así decirlo so to speak;
el qué dirán (fam) what other people (might) think;
ver tb dicho1

III. decir - verbo intransitivo
1. (invitando a hablar): papá — dime, hijo dad — yes, son?;
quería pedirle un favor — usted dirá I wanted to ask you a favor — certainly, go ahead

2. (Esp) (al contestar el teléfono): ¿diga? or ¿dígame? hello?
IV. decirse verbo pronominal
1. (refl) to say … to oneself
2. (recípr) to say …. to each other;
se decían secretos al oído they were whispering secrets to each other

2008-12-18T09:51:00.000-05:00

Was reminded about poetry competitions... I used to do this one in high school.

LITTLE WORD, LITTLE WHITE BIRD(Carl Sandburg)

Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams
in the black night?
Love, is it a bird-a goldfinch with a burnish
on its wingtips or a little gray sparrow
picking crumbs, hunting crumbs?
Love, is it a tug at the heart that comes high and
costs, always costs, as long as you have it?
Love, is it a free glad spender, ready to spend to
the limit, and then go head over heels in debt?
Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave
the one lost and groping?
Love, can you pick it up like a mouse and put it in
your pocket and take it to your room and bring it
out of your pocket and say,
O here is my love,
my little pretty mousey love?
* * *
Yes - love, this little word you hear about,
is love an elephant and you step out of the way
where the elephant comes trampling, tromping,
traveling with big feet and long flaps of
drooping ears and straight white ivory tusks -
and you step out of the way with respect,
with high respect, and surprise near to shock
as you say,
Dear God, he’s big,
big like stupendous is big,
heavy and elephantine and funny,
immense and slow and easy.
I’m asking, is love an elephant?

Or could it be that love is a snake - like a rattlesnake,
like a creeping winding slithering rattlesnake
with fangs - poison fangs they tell me,
and when the bite of it gets you
then you run crying for help
if you don’t fall cold and dead on the way.
Can love be a snake?

Or would you say love is a flamingo, with pink feathers -
a soft sunset pink, a sweet gleaming naked pink -
and with long enough pink feathers
you could make a fan for a fan dance
and hear a girl telling her lover,
Speak, my chosen one,
and give me your wish
as to what manner of fan dance
you would have from me
in the cool of evening
or the black velvet sheen of midnight.
Could it be love is a flamingo?

Or is love a big red apple, and you don’t know
whether to bite into it - and you knock on wood
and call off your luck numbers and hold your breath -
and you put your teeth into it and get a mouthful,
tasting all there is to it,
and whether it’s sweet and wild
or a dry mush you want to spit out,
it’s something else than you expected,
I’m asking, sir, is love a big red apple?

Or maybe love is goofer dust, I hadn’t thought about that -
for you go to the goofer tree at midnight
and gather the leaves and crush them into fine dust,
very fine dust, sir, and when your man sleeps
you sprinkle it in his shoes and he’s helpless
and from then on he can’t get away from you,
he’s snared and tangled and can’t keep from loving you.
Could goofer dust be the answer?

And I’ve heard some say love is a spy and a sneak,
a blatherer, a gabby mouth,
tattling and tittering as it tattles,
and you believe it and take it to your heart
and nurse it like good news,
like heaven-sent news meant for you
and you only - precious little you.
Have you heard love comes creeping and cheating like that?

And are they after beguiling and befoozling us
when they tell us love is a rose, a red red rose,
the mystery of leaves folded over and under
and you can take it to pieces and throw it away
petal by petal into the wind blowing it away
or you can wear it for a soft spot of crimson
in your hair, at your breast,
and you can waltz and tango wearing your sweet crimson rose
and take it home and lay it on a window sill and see it
wither brown, curl black, and shrivel
until one day you’re not careful
and it crackles into dust in your hand
and the wind whisks it whither you know not,
whither you care not,
for it is just one more flame of a rose
that came with its red blush and crimson bloom
and did the best with what it had
and nobody wins, nobody loses,
and what’s one more rose
when on any street corner
in bright summer mornings
you see them with bunches of roses,
their hands out towards you calling,
Roses today, fresh roses,
fresh-cut roses today
a rose for you sir,
the ladies like roses,
now is the time,
fresh roses sir.

And I’m waiting - for days and weeks and months
I’ve been waiting to see some flower seller,
one of those hawkers of roses,
I’ve been waiting to hear one of them calling,
A cabbage with every rose,
a good sweet cabbage with every rose,
a head of cabbage for soup or slaw or stew,
cabbage with the leaves folded over
and under like a miracle
and you can eat it and stand up and walk,
today and today only your last chance
a head of cabbage with every single lovely rose. And
any time and any day I hear a flower seller so calling
I shall be quick and I shall buy
two roses and two cabbages,
the roses for my lover
and the cabbages for little luckless me.
Or am I wrong - is love a rose you can buy and give away
and keep for yourself cabbages, my lord and master,
cabbages, kind sir?
I am asking, can you?

And it won’t help any, it won’t get us anywhere,
it won’t wipe away what has been
nor hold off what is to be,
if you hear me saying
love is a little white bird
and the flight of it so fast
you can’t see it
and you know it’s there
only by the faint whirr of its wings
and the hush song coming so low to your ears
you fear it might be silence
and you listen keen and you listen long
and you know it’s more than silence
for you get the hush song so lovely
it hurts and cuts into your heart
and what you want is to give more than you can get
and you’d like to write it but it can’t be written
and you’d like to sing it but you don’t dare try
because the little white bird sings it better than you can
so you listen and while you listen you pray
and after you pray you meditate, then pray more
and one day it’s as though a great slow wind
had washed you clean and strong inside and out
and another day it’s as though you had gone to sleep
in an early afternoon sunfall and your sleeping heart
dumb and cold as a round polished stone,
and the little white bird’s hush song
telling you nothing can harm you,
the days to come can weave in and weave out
and spin their fabrics and designs for you
and nothing can harm you -
unless you change yourself into a thing of harm
nothing can harm you.
* * *
The little white bird is my candidate
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
the little white bird you can’t see
though you can hear its hush song
and when you hear that hush song it’s love
and I’m ready to swear to it -
you can bring in a stack of affidavits
and I’ll swear to it and sign my name
to every last one, so help me God.
And if a fat bumbling shopworn court clerk tells me,
Hold up your hand, I’ll hold up my hand all right
and when he bumbles and mumbles to me like I was
one more witness it was work for him to give the oath to,
when he blabs, You do solemnly swear so help you God
that in this case you will tell the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth,
I’ll say to him, I do, and I’ll say to myself,
And no thanks to you and you could be more immaculate
with the name of God.
I am done.
I am finished.
I give you the little white bird -
and my thanks for your hearing me -
and my prayers for you,
my deep silent prayers.

2008-12-18T09:39:00.001-05:00

“Offering and Rebuff”
Carl Sandburg

I could love you
as dry roots love rain.
I could hold you
as branches in the wind
brandish petals.
Forgive me for speaking so soon.

Let your heart look
on white sea spray
and be lonely.

Love is a fool star.

You and a ring of stars
may mention my name
and then forget me.

Love is a fool star.

Ponzi scheme

2008-12-16T09:46:00.001-05:00

Pon·zi scheme (pŏn'zē) pronunciation
n.

An investment swindle in which high profits are promised from fictitious sources and early investors are paid off with funds raised from later ones.

[After Charles Ponzi (1882?–1949), Italian-born speculator who organized such a scheme (1919–1920).]

NYT

2008-12-16T09:29:00.001-05:00

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.

2008-12-13T02:17:00.000-05:00

"I keep wondering if God really told me to do this. And then I realize I would NEVER tell mySELF to do this!"

- Ryan Myers

etymology nerd

2008-12-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

whelm

Pronunciation: \ˈhwelm, ˈwelm\

Function: verb

Etymology: Middle English

Date: 14th century

transitive verb 1 : to turn (as a dish or vessel) upside down usually to cover something : cover or engulf completely with usually disastrous effect 2 : to overcome in thought or feeling : overwhelm <whelmed with a rush of joy — G. A. Wagner>

over·whelm

Pronunciation: \ˌō-vər-ˈhwelm, -ˈwelm\

Function: transitive verb

Etymology: Middle English, from¹over + whelmen to turn over, cover up

Date: 14th century

1: upset , overthrow2 a: to cover over completely : submerge b: to overcome by superior force or numbers c: to overpower in thought or feeling

Define definitions...

2008-12-04T21:52:00.000-05:00

pleonastic: repetition of same sense in different words; "`a true fact' and `a free gift' are pleonastic expressions

tautology: In rhetoric, a tautology is an unnecessary (and usually unintentional) repetition of meaning, using different words that effectively say the same thing twice (often originally from different languages); needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word.

(tautology, like praxis, is a word I continually learn and forget.)

The Schopenhauer Cure – Irvin Yalom

2008-12-01T13:39:00.002-05:00

…above all there was Zarathustra’s oft-repeated question whether we would be willing to repeat the precise life we have lived again and again throughout eternity. A curious thought experiment—yet, the more he thought about it, the more guidance it provided: Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.

‘It is noteworthy and remarkable to see how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract….(where) in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colorless, and distant: he is a mere spectator and observer.’ – Schopenhauer

“As I said, we Indians are very serious. Even our cigarette packages have messages for the conduct of life. Life is a passing show—I meditate on that whenever I feel inner turbulence.”

“Is that what you were doing just a minute ago? I should not have disturbed you.”

Vijay smiled and gently shook his head. “My teacher once said that one can not be disturbed by another. It is only oneself who can disturb one’s equanimity.”

“Perhaps,” Pam said, “we may meet again on this train after the retreat.”

“Of that we must not think. Goenka will teach us that it is only the present we must inhabit. Yesterday and tomorrow do not exist. Past remembrances, future longing, only produce disquiet…”

Two sources of instruction had guided Julius in his work with her both individually and in the group. First, there had been Freud’s urging that the therapist should reach out in a human way to a beautiful woman and not withhold himself or penalize her simply because she was beautiful. The second had been an essay he had read as a student titled, “The Beautiful Empty Woman,” which made the point that the truly beautiful woman is so often feted and rewarded solely for her appearance that she neglects developing other parts of herself. Her confidence and feelings of success are only skin-deep, and once her beauty fades she realizes she has little to offer: she has developed neither the art of being an interesting person nor that of taking an interest in others.

And John—poor, effete, pusillanimous John, still unwilling to grasp that there can be no yes without a no.

In his view the work in therapy consisted of two phases: first interaction, often emotional, and second, understanding that interaction. That’s the way therapy should proceed—an alternating sequence of evocation of emotions and then understanding.

“So, mea culpa. I like to be admired, I like to be loved and adored, I like love.”

“Plato,” Philip interjected, “observed that love is in the one who loves, not in the one who is loved.”

‘If I maintain silence about my secret it is my prisoner; if I let it slip from my tongue, I am its prisoner. On the tree of silence hang the fruits of peace.’ –Schopenhauer

Philip ignored Pam’s comment. “Heidegger spoke of confronting the limiting of possibility. In fact he linked it to the fear of death. Death, he suggested, was the impossibility of future possibility.”

“One of Schopenhauer’s formulations that helped me,” said Philip, “was the idea that relative happiness stems from three sources: what one is, what one has, and what one represents in the eyes of others. He urges that we focus only on the first and do not bank on the second and third—on having and our reputation—because we have no control over those two; they can, and will, be taken away from us—just as your inevitable aging is taking away your beauty. In fact, ‘having’ has a reverse factor, he said—what we have often starts to have us.”

If perspective is attuned, attention rapt, and knowledge vast, then one enters everydayness in a perpetual state of wonderment.

“…Schopenhauer made me aware that we are doomed to turn endlessly on the wheel of will: we desire something, we acquire it, we enjoy a brief moment of satiation, which rapidly fades into boredom, which then, without fail, is followed by the next ‘I want.’ There is no exit by way of appeasing desire—one has to leap off the wheel completely…”

'cooperation' in English means 'cooperacion'

2008-11-28T11:53:00.001-05:00

'cooperation' in English means 'cooperacion' in Spanish.

Glossary: snark: (slang) combination of

2008-11-22T14:13:00.001-05:00

Glossary: snark: (slang) combination of "snide" and "remark"; sarcasm

Glossary: proxy: a person authorized

2008-11-20T16:24:00.001-05:00

Glossary: proxy: a person authorized to act for another

Glossary: Polio: Poliomyelitis (polio) is

2008-11-20T16:08:00.001-05:00

Glossary: Polio: Poliomyelitis (polio) is a highly infectious viral disease which can spread rapidly through communities.

Glossary: Adjudicated: the legal process

2008-11-18T22:21:00.001-05:00

Glossary: Adjudicated: the legal process by which an arbiter or judge reviews evidence and argumentation including legal reasoning

Glossary: equanimity: composure: steadiness of

2008-11-18T11:03:00.001-05:00

Glossary: equanimity: composure: steadiness of mind under stress

Glossary: egress: (astronomy) the reappearance

2008-11-16T17:22:00.001-05:00

Glossary: egress: (astronomy) the reappearance of a celestial body after an eclipse

Glossary: labile: Unstable; literally, characteriz

2008-11-16T17:17:00.001-05:00

Glossary: labile: Unstable; literally, characterized by a tendency to slip.

Glossary: Brioche: Rich yeast dough

2008-11-16T17:16:00.001-05:00

Glossary: Brioche: Rich yeast dough with large amounts of eggs and butter, or the products made from this dough.

Glossary: Anomie: a term first

2008-11-16T17:15:00.001-05:00

Glossary: Anomie: a term first used by Emile Durkheim, when an individual or group doesnt support or follow the norms of society

Melanoma: cancer of a skin

2008-11-16T17:12:00.001-05:00

Melanoma: cancer of a skin cell called melanocytes, often metastasising to internal organ; induced by exposure to high UV

Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton

2008-11-12T13:15:00.001-05:00

-- Sometimes it quietens one to smoke. But there should be another kind of quiet in a man, and then let him smoke to enjoy it. But in Johannesburg it is hard sometimes to find that kind of quiet.

Outside there is singing, singing round a fire. It is Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika that they sing, God Save Africa. God save this piece of Africa that is my own, delivered in travail from my body, fed from my breast, loved by my heart, because that is the nature of women. Oh lie quietly, little one.

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

-- To think, said Kumalo, that my wife and I lived out our lives in innocence, there in Ndotsheni, not knowing that this thing was coming, step by step.
--Why, he said, if one could only have been told, this step is taken, and this step is about to be taken. If only one could have been told that.
-- But we were not told, continued Kumalo. Now we can see, but we could not see then. And yet others saw it. It was revealed to others to whom it did not matter. They saw it, step by step. They said, this is Johannesburg, this is a boy going wrong, as other boys have gone wrong in Johannesburg. But to us, for whom it was life and death, it was not revealed.

It is true that we hoped to preserve the tribal system by a policy of segregation. That was permissible. But we never did it thoroughly or honestly. We set aside one-tenth of the land for four-fifths of the people. Thus we made it inevitable, and some say we did it knowingly, that labour would come to the towns. We are caught in the toils of our own selfishness.

But he speaks beautiful English, the kind they speak at Oxford, I mean, not the kind they speak at Rhodes or Stellenbosch, and that makes him acceptable, for he never brushes his hair or has his trousers pressed. He looks for all the world like a converted tiger, and has burning eyes; and in fact he burns bright in the forests of the night, writing his extraordinary paper. He is a missionary and believes in God, intensely I mean, but it takes all kinds to make a world.

They want to hear your voice again, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. Some of them applaud you, and some of them say thank God for you, in their hearts, even at their bedsides. For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born.
No second Johannesburg is needed upon the earth. One is enough.

There are many sides to this difficult problem. And people persist in discussing soil-erosion, and tribal decay, and lack of schools, and crime, as though they were all parts of the matter. If you think long enough about it, you will be brought to consider republics, and bilingualism, and immigration, and Palestine, and God knows what. So in a way it is best not to think about it at all.
In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.
+++
In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished paneling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.

Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni—so in my suffering I can believe.
-- I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said.
His friend held out his rough calloused hands. Do I look like a preacher? he asked.
Kumalo laughed. I look at your heart, not your hands.

And he knew then that this was a man who put his feet upon a road, and that no man would turn him from it.

He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God? And might not another, having no such awareness, live with pain that never ended? Why was there a compulsion upon him to pray for the restoration of Ndotsheni, and why was there a white man there on the tops, to do in this valley what no other could have done? And why of all men, the father of the man who had been murdered by his son? And might not another feel also a compulsion, and pray night and day without ceasing, for the restoration of some other valley that would never be restored?
But his mind would contain it no longer. It was not for man’s knowing. He put it from his mind, for it was a secret.

2008-11-10T23:22:00.001-05:00

"The first 16 presidents could have owned Barack Obama as property."

-- Jonathan Alter, on MSNBC, 11/3/08

oye

2008-11-10T00:25:00.001-05:00

* Oye com ova – listen how it goes
* Mi lindo – my lovely
* Bueno pa’gozar – good for enjoying (para gozar)
* camisa - shirt
* tocar - touch

Me struggling through existentialism...

2008-11-09T21:27:00.003-05:00

Or: Philosophy for REALLY DUMB dummies, in huge, broad strokes...

Existential philosophy (Kierkegaard) -- looking for problems, considering existence, considering consciousness
Phenomenology (Husserl)-- the idea that our consciousness derives from our experiences of phenomena
Existential phenomenology -- our existence as based on our experience of phenomena
Perception (Merleau-Ponty) -- senses informing consciousness of phenomena
Solipsism (Gorgias/Descartes) -- the idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists" (perception = false)
Cartesian doubt (Descarte) -- using doubt to prove credibility, assuming that perception isn't trustworthy. (Ultimate devil's advocate -- winnowing down until you get a nugget that can't be doubted. Using this, he ended up with "I am thinking, therefore I exist.")
Hermaneutical -- understanding a text based on an analysis of its parts, a sum of the parts, and by taking into account the cultural, historical and literary context to deduce a full meaning
Epistemology -- philosophy concerned with the nature/scope/limitations of knowledge
Ubermensch (Nietzsche) -- Man v.2.0, ignoring heaven (or otherworldliness) and striving for 2.0-ness on earth. "overman"
Weltanschauung -- German word for "wide world view" or "wide world perception" that implies a concept of life that generates from anthropological and sociological bases that have more to do with people than political boundaries.

I feel five times smarter than I did 3 hours ago.

2008-11-01T02:08:00.000-04:00

"We decided that the annoying thing about Williamsburg is not the amount of cool shit that's here. What's annoying is that every year it gets progressively richer and richer -- it used to be that you could come here and feel like you were surrounded by artists and people who were also struggling. But now you're surrounded by people who are willing to pay thousands of dollars to feel like they're struggling."

- Ryan Myers

2008-10-31T23:00:00.000-04:00

"If this job didn't work out, I was going to pack up my bags and go to Disney World. Not like, oh, let's go to Disney World. Like, um, I have my house packed and I'm going. I could make it work."

- Meg Maise

A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton

2008-10-31T00:06:00.000-04:00

After the building boom he spent a fair amount of energy going out into the night, making blinders with his hands at each side of his head, and finding a place where he could and see the dark. “I need to know there’s a patch of wild space,” he said once.

At thirty-two I had the occasional shadow of mistrust. I could imagine, as the years went on, my body becoming something outside of myself, something to cheer on, an old friend who is huffing up the hill on a bicycle.

It was impossible not to admire him, hard not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty—drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one’s natural life. After six years of marriage he had the power to occasionally render me weak in the knees.

I thought that we had sometimes seen ourselves in the other, that we were more alike than we acknowledged, that we started from much the same lump and might have turned into something quite like the other if we’d been switched at birth. I had been brought up to be off-balance and was; and she had been raised to hold all things in perfect equilibrium, something that was so unusual it too was beyond the norm. I yearned to keep myself straight and in order, but of course never could, and she longed, without any success whatsoever, to let herself go, to let everything occasionally fall to pieces. We were leagues apart on the outside and I think we were amused by the differences, the variation that had been wrought perhaps most of all by circumstance. We had understood one another, felt a sympathy, an affection, as well as been critical of the other’s idiosyncrasies. We were friends in a deep way, in a way that involved obligation and trust, a solid faith in the other’s love. I had never had a friend like her and I felt her life moving alongside of mine in much the same way I felt my husband’s days and passages to be a complement to my own.

And I didn’t know if the forgiveness itself was light, glittery stuff that showered down and absolved a person and set them free, or if, instead, it was heavy, cumbersome, a new debt, a currency that was continuously renewed no matter how much was paid out.

“Sometimes I just don’t want to live in this world. Maybe the sex in advertising and the movies is triggering children’s neurons and they’re going through puberty earlier than ever before. Couldn’t that happen? We should go to Ireland, to some poor country where there’s no birth control, no plastic toys, where people drink a lot of beer and grow vegetables.”

I had been with enough older women through the years who were appealing at first because they were so eager to please. I used to fall for the long-brown-haired girls with big white teeth who tried so hard to be interested in the world and life. I finally figured out that they were only after the drama of romance. There was a particular way they’d sit at my feet and turn their bright faces to look up at me. They’d switch their political allegiance if I said so, want the same breed of dog, become vegetarian. I guess I understood that adoration is short-lived, and that really what they were giving me was the temporary power to crush them.

She advocated public schools and the rigor of monotony, in fact, because she said it forced a person to cultivate an inner life.
“That’s what I love about Alice, don’t you?” Theresa went on. “She blurts out these things that are refreshing, these searing one-liners, only sometimes she doesn’t have brakes working, and you wish you could gag her.”

I held her face and she smiled in that hopelessly breathless way. I guess I knew there would only be that one instant to kiss her. I hesitated, seeing the night in the distance, already a memory. The desire I felt for her could only be seen as good. She was beautiful and wise, her voice and song, her face and laugh, a salve.

“It’s a shame,” she said with her patrician, sharp diction, “that inner-city youth have to grow up surrounded by cement and broken glass. They don’t know that they, themselves, are of the earth.”

It still seems to me now that it is better to be vigilant, to keep those months fluid, never firming up the story, never calling any one person a defining name. It is better, I think, to never finally decide.

I understood that I had spent my entire young life standing guard as if my body were a great walled fortress around the small thing, as fragile as a twig on its velvet pillow: my soul. It was a delicate, impossible balance—to see, to touch, to feel, and yet to have nothing penetrate to the inner realm, so as not to twist or crack or break the poor twig….Years later, with several experiments in sociability under my belt, Howard had come to me like some exotic remedy, that rare extract calibrated to produce sensation without harm.

Dyshett had so many qualities it was hard to pin her down; she was Joy and Beauty, Rage and Cruelty. I finally settled on Nature.