in love with

murmur[ing], which is "a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze."

Grapefruit

Okay while you all are enjoying holidays I had food poisoning and haven't eaten in two days in a country where Thanksgiving is a strange word.... (I am grateful that it is not dengue, for my western style toilet, for my wonderful neighbors and friends, and for modern medicine(

Which leaves me time to find things like this...

EXCERPTS FROM GRAPEFRUIT

by Yoko Ono (as might be remembered from John's Cabin)

PAINTING TO HAMMER A NAIL
Hammer a nail in the center of a piece
of glass. Send each fragment to an
arbitrary address.
1962 Spring

PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT'S
COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED
Let People copy or photograph your
Paintings.
Destroy the originals.
1964 Spring

CLOUD PIECE
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
1963 Spring

TRAVEL PIECE
Make a key.
Find a lock that fits.
If you find it, burn the house
that is attached to it.
1963 Spring

PRESCRIPTION PIECE
Prescribe pills for going
through the wall and have only
the hair come back.
1964 spring

HAND PIECE
Sit in the garden.
Raise one hand.
Extend it until it reaches a cloud.
Have your friend ring a symbol.
Keep extending it until it goes out
of the stratosphere.
Have your friend put a flag out.
1963 Summer

ANIMAL PIECE
Take one mannerism from one kind of
animal and make it yours for a week.
Take another mannerism from another
kind of animal and make it yours
without dropping the previously
acquired mannerism.
Go on increasing mannerisms by
taking them from different kinds
of animals.
1963 Summer

BODY PIECE
Stand in the evening light until you
become transparent or until you fall
asleep.
1961 Summer

Did someone say Yoko Ono and John Lennon Finger Puppets

reUUUnion!

i have been singing that erasure song non stop since i got into utah. and though everything has been pretty ridiculously beautiful on this trip, there are a few things that deserve standing ovations. maybe things like the Inadvertent Navy/Navy TWINS!

or, the return of the Great Action Shot Adventure (featuring new player ASHMAE! doing her one of the kind Russian folk dance/karate chop move)

or, the audition for wikipedia's new fistpump image!

or, making puppeteering dreams come true at kneaders:

or, miraculously adorable/awkward action shots:

so here is to glorious, glorious, reunions of transpacificists nationwide:

Ode to Larry Fink

One of my favorite photographers is Larry Fink. "Larry Fink's photographs are like the stage in a darkened theater. His hand-held flash splendidly illuminates the details of the drama before us and reveals the nuance of the personal moment," wrote Susan Kismaric, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art. Larry has been photographing for almost fifty-one years and teaching for forty-one. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A major retrospective of his work was on tour in Europe for almost ten years visiting more museums than it is possible to mention.

Yet as this video shows, done by Journeyman productions, is he lives an amazingly simple life out in the country, and guess what, only uses film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4izJ0_yTFBo

Here are just a few of his photos:

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing

Below is the complete email conversation that Adelaide man David Thorne claims he had with a utility company chasing payment of an overdue bill. In an Australia new site

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,
You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Attached

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Whose spider is that?

Dear Jane, Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95. Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thankyou for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb ommission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David, As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

I understand and will definately make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Attached

my first crush

julia pott interviews people about their first crushes and makes a lovely animation:

do you remember your first crush?

david gordon green

i might be in love with david gordon green (director of the beautiful All the Real Girls). here is the opening sequence of George Washington. the pacing of it is perfect.

To a child dancing to a harmonica

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?


There is a young girl here, about the age of 3 who just came to Mae Sot with her mother from the Burma-China border. She is one of my new favorite living beings. We play this game where I play the harmonica and she dances, then she plays and I dance. She is quite likely the funniest most determined individual.

Text Message Embroidery

How does one represent a relationship? mixtapes? photographs? This makes me wish I'd saved my favorite texts and that I had time to embroider:

(via Ginger Anyhow)

Sublime Things: Emerson and Exiles

So here are two things from me;

1) This quote from Emerson I'm in love with : "to go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. the rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. seen i the streets of cities, how great they are!..."

And here are a few art works from my neighbor Nyan Soe. I frequently go over to his place where 2 other artists live and they teach me and two other young girls from Burma how to draw. Really really sublime.

just good

zooey deschanel & m. ward "you really got a hold on me"

"paths are made by walking"

by mai yamashita and naoto kobayashi, japanese artists based in berlin, who were shared with me by my own berliner.

"in order to determine whether [paths are made by walking] was actually true, yamashita and kobayashi kept running in a park for 5 days. in the time-lapse movie compiled from digital photographs, a path the shape of infinity gradually emerges as we move with high-speed."

an addendum to amanda's post,
excerpted from Rick Moody's On Celestial Music:

1. Otis Redding as Purveyor of Celestial Music

Music has soul. We operate as though it does. In fact, music is one of the few areas of human endeavor where the word soul, even among secular types, is liable to go unchallenged. All kinds of music are occasionally imputed to have soul. Even music that doesn’t have anything but volume or a tiresome double-kick drum sound. Ray Coniff, to a listener somewhere, has soul. Who am I to say otherwise? Soul in these cases perhaps indicates earnestness, rhetorical force, and/or vocal polyps. Nevertheless, there are persuasive indications that the word soul does indeed manifest itself in music, and so maybe it’s useful here at the outset to point to a recording that demonstrates why music belongs in any discussion about heaven. So, along these lines, I’m going to describe briefly the mechanics of one example of soul music, namely, a live recording by Otis Redding entitled “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Lyrically speaking, “Try a Little Tenderness” starts as an exhortation to do better at peeling away the layers of defensiveness in a lover, a woman (in this case) who is not only weary, in the general sense, but maybe particularly weary of the traditional role of woman...

Still, this is to avoid mention of the dynamically satisfying freak out at the end of the song. The big ending! If celestial music is the music of the spheres, then the big ending of “Try a Little Tenderness” proves that music here on earth can also be tuned to the interstellar realms, especially when the rhythm section kicks in, and the horns start, and Otis begins his passionate exhortation as to how, exactly, tenderness is meant to be practiced (holding, squeezing, never leaving), and the horns work their way up the scale, likewise the rhythm guitar, chromatically, while Redding commences his soul shouting, and the crowd goes wild, hoping that he’ll play through the chorus just one more time! Yes, try a little tenderness! How could we resist! We have not tried sufficiently! So many areas of our lives remain unexplored! So many virtues seem to lie dormant in us! So much is failure and half-heartedness! Tenderness as opposed to oppressing the poor and disenfranchised, tenderness as opposed to military intervention in foreign countries! Tenderness as opposed to the amassing of money, power, and real estate!

What I mean to say is that this live performance of Otis Redding enacts the attempt at tenderness he promotes, and in this way his song proves itself, proves the validity of soul in music, by exercising the soul, and if you are not convinced by my recitation of these facts, get the Monterey Pop DVD and watch it, because I swear just as you can be absolved of your malfeasances by watching the pope on television, you can be made a better person by watching Otis Redding deliver this song; you will go into the next room, and you will look at your husband, or your wife, or your child, you will look at the people whom you have treated less well than you might have, and you will kneel in front of these people and you will beg for the chance to try a little harder and to make their burdens a little less burdensome. If those five minutes of grace are not an example of what lies out there, beyond what we daily understand, if those five minutes are not like unto a candle that glimmers in the unending darkness of life on earth, then I have no idea what paradise is.

yes! tenderness! i am trying it! what is paradise, really, but this soul, this soul. (not to mention the image of ducky singing this on pretty in pink.)

fish, like birds

i had a dream the other day (with my head perched on chapter 26 of my developmental biology text book) that i was exploring a densely wooded country. it was dark, maybe there was a city, maybe i was with friends, maybe i was alone. i came upon a lake, and there were people everywhere, diving in, and they were all crying out that i should follow suite.
so i did, fully clothed: i dove, and the water didn't shock me, it cradled me, and as i fell deeper and deeper into the water it grew brighter and brighter until i came upon an under water city, and as i was walking about, i nearly forgot i was in a lake but for the little fish swimming about me, like birds or butterflies.

i came upon these floating fish on the design boom website this afternoon - a group of korean designers presented the fish, representative of dutch herring, for experimentdesign amsterdam 2008.
lovely, lovely to see a dream incarnate.

Soaking

it all in. The rain, this still-new place, and this music. (Georges Lammam + violin = magic.)

yes yes!

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

xarissa sent me this yesterday too!!! oh my goodness. oh my goodness.

um...

like literally crying with joy:

Love(ly) words from Capucha on Vimeo.
thank you megan (who found this delight on this blog)

spike jonze + adidas = beautiful

why am i so in love with commercials?

against all odds

if you haven't listened to this american life's show on break ups, please do so now. one of the stories is about how a woman wants to write a song about her break up. her inspiration? phil collins. and she ACTUALLY GETS HIM ON THE PHONE. amazing. anyway, she talks about the following song a lot for good reason:

and here is a cover by mariah:

happy wednesday (we are so close to being done with this week!)

cute animals will always save the world

They fear poetry

Yesterday in Burma: Poet Saw Wai was sentenced to two years imprisonment. He was charged under section 505/b of the Penal Code. The poet was arrested after his poem mocking junta’s leader Sr. Gen. Than Shwe entitled “February 14” was published in the Love Journal. The first words of each line of the poem spelled out “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.”

poppies and self portraits

our very own lia has posted some rather remarkable pieces on her blog. i wanted to post one of them here, because i think it would feel at home. thank you for sharing, lia. your paintings are extraordinary. they make me want to learn new words to say things i can't yet say.

Since it is Novemeber 11 - the poem that is the source of all my pacifism

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. —
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Metamorphosen

This past Thursday night I had the pleasure of spending an evening at a free concert at the Kennedy Center. The Opera House Orchestra performed Puccini's I Chrisantemi, then Samuel Barber's arrangement of the poem Dover Beach (words sung by a baritone with a pure, full voice), then Ernest Chausson's Chanson Perpetuelle (sung by a mezzo soprano who was wonderful but I admit I had to close my eyes because her facial expressions were sort of disracting), and lastly, Strauss' Metamporphosen. Strauss wrote this last one after the Munich opera house was bombed during WWII, and in the last eight bars of the piece, if you listen for it in the cello section, you'll hear an homage to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony. Another thing that makes the piece so interesting is that the entire piece is made up of sectional solos. It's a long one, so I could only find it on YouTube split into sections, but I share it with you all here because it reminded me that, regardless of time or inclinations or place, really excellent classical music fills my soul in a way that no other music can.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

(Sorry that I'm not technologically savvy enough to embed the videos, but it's worth the trouble, I promise.)

what winter nights demand

jeff buckley "lover, you should have come over"

Its never over, my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
It's never over, all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her
It's never over, all my blood for the sweetness of her laughter
It's never over, she's the tear that hangs inside my soul forever

this song is perfect. and it sums up so much of how we all feel from time to time.

Prints.

So after Will and I went to High School Musical 3 (yes, that's what I said), we went to to the Gainesville Art Festival, and it was AMAZING. Besides having all sorts of funnel cakes and potato swirls, there was some awesome art. Will ended up with this excellent poster-print of a 1948 football player. I got lost in an intriguing set of photographs by Laura Coppedge. There were these amazing ghosty prints at her stand which aren't on her website, but here are a few from her swimmer series. I bought the one with the gramophone. I am IN LOVE with it. Will suggests that I marry it; I'm seeing what I can do.

the sheen on the skin of a face

we were sitting around the kitchen table this afternoon, my roommates and i, and through the window streamed the kindest of afternoon lights, a warmth indistinguishable (if you were to close your eyes) from the birthing light of spring.
after a moment, my roommate, glowing, just engaged, said:

oh, can't we just be here forever?

what is forever, but the timeless passage of light at the speed of 2.9 x 10^8 m/s through a south facing kitchen window? what is eternity or infinity but the hope of being enveloped by such warmth, the kindness of the earth's womb?

eternity is a terrifying concept. thelma proclaimed this in a visit to our yellow house one weekend in october, and i have wondered at it since. it is the truth that i don't understand it, that none of us can understand it, but something of the billions of base pairs of DNA replicating in our bodies at any given moment, the knowledge of our genetic codes, the reprinting of a genome that has at once always existed and has always been different, makes me want to believe it.

in her book of luke, annie dillard questions,

It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find. It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time. Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors. We live over a bulk of things. We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps to reveal more colored things. Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe. There is no crack. Unbreakable seas lie flush on their beds. Under the Greenland icecap lies not so much as a bubble... Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams? In holes at the roots of forest cedars I find spiders and chips. I have rolled plenty of stones away, to no avail. Under the lily pads on the lake are flatworms and lake water. Materials wrap us seamlessly; time propels us ceaselessly. Muffled and bound we pitch forward from one filled hour to the next, from one filled landscape or house to the next. No rift between one note of the chorus and the next opens on infinity. No spear of eternity interposes itself between work and lunch.

And this is what we love: this human-scented skull, the sheen on the skin of a face, this exhilarating game, this crowded feast, these shifting mountains, the dense water and its piercing suits. And are we called to forsake these vivid and palpable goods for an idea of which we experience not one trace? Am I to believe eternity outranks my child's finger?

we roll at stones, we try to believe it, we think of the idea that "eternity bears time in its side like a hole".
i still am not sure what to think, but i do know this truth: i might not mind bathing in that circle of light with people that i love for as long as i can comprehend it.

A poem by Frank O'Hara that I fell in love with last night

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                      I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                    it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Speaking of home...

my friend brian showed me this tonight and it is just so lovely:

george harrison & paul simon "homeward bound"

Goodbye Mr. Eltayeb

Tonight at this reading I ran into my friend Tarek and realized that he would be leaving soon. The thought made me sad until I remembered his wife and the piano and how nice it would be for him to be back in Vienna. He is a gentle soul. I like how this blog is populated by gentle souls who are moved by passion, beauty, and extraordinary intelligence. I told him that I once gave a watercolor to one of my heroes--Derek Walcott--which was both one of the scariest and most wonderful things I have ever done. I told him that Derek Walcott smiled and handled my painting with great care. Derek Walcott told me that he paints, too: gouache and watercolor. "What do you paint?" I asked. "The sea," he said. Tarek smiled when he heard this and patted my arm. "I want to paint the colors I see here," he said. And I knew exactly what he meant. Iowa is this wonderfully distracted shade of auburn and honey with swatches of green and blue. Derek Walcott painted the the sea beacuse it was his home and I think we all, in some way, want to paint the colors we see in the places that we are in order to know and love the places as our homes. That is a lovely and a humane thing.

William Eggleston at the Whitney

"Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics."

"Naturally, we see the work more clearly now. We know that the dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used produced tones of almost hallucinatory intensity, like custard yellow sunset light slanting across a wall. And compositions that at first seemed bland and random on a second, third and 20th look proved not to be."

Song of the Nuns

(From the Therigatha, Buddhist verses for nuns)

FREE woman,
be free
as the moon is freed
from the eclipse of the sun.

With a free mind,
in no debt,
enjoy what has been given to you.

Get rid of the tendency
to judge yourself
above, below, or
equal to others.
A nun who has self-possession
and integrity
will find the peace that nourishes
and never causes too much of anything.

Be filled with all good things
like the moon on the fifteenth day
Completely, perfectly full
of wisdom
tear open
the massive dark.

I, a nun, trained and self-composed,
established mindfulness
and entered peace like an arrow.
The elements of body and mind grew still,
happiness came.

Everywhere clinging to pleasure is destroyed,
the great dark is torn apart,and Death
you too are destroyed.

one more vote for fall

this is probably my favorte photo of my iowa experience. my dear friend kendra took it (she is gifted):

fist pump = so hot right now

The fist pump is a celebratory gesture in which a closed fist is raised before the torso and subsequently drawn down and nearer to the body in a vigorous, swift motion. The fist pump is frequently carried out in parts of the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Japan (where it is known as guts pose) to denote enthusiasm, exuberance, or success and may be accompanied by a similarly energetic exclamation or vociferation. The gesture may be executed once or in a rapid series.

It can be accompanied by the verbalization "Yes!"

[Thanks Lia, Wikipedia, and gchat status duets!]

Fistpumps all around on this magnificent night!

sartre, baudelaire, wallace, buber, solitude, isolation, the self, etc etc etc

i was convinced that sartre did actually have something valid to say when i read his short book "baudelaire" a few years ago. (nausea was effective when i was 17, but being and nothingness drives me partially mad) quoting baudelaire, sartre writes: "i had a sense of being destined to eternal solitude.” and then continues on with his own analysis: "baudelaire already thought of his isolation as a destiny. that meant he did not accept it passively. on the contrary, he embraced it with fury, shut himself up in it and, since he was condemned to it, hoped that at any rate his condemnation was final."

xarissa posted david foster wallace's brilliant (and i mean BRILLIANT) commencement speech at kenyon college on her blog. this document is so true, and hits at the very core of what it means to engage with our own solitude or isolation, like sartre explains. he states:

"Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real."

do we, like baudelaire, become obsessed with the idea that it is us alone alone alone in all of this? that our view is the only one with validity? are we trapped in this notion of a self-centered destiny? i know how we all search after connection, true real connection with others. but that's not the point of either sartre or wallace's expositions. because even the most self-centered of individuals can be eternally searching for a real other to attach deep and close to their soul. the point is the way we view that individual, that other. the other we're trying to be connected to has an equally self-centered view as we do, it's our "default" setting like wallace explains. it takes concerted effort on our part to actually empathize with others, i mean truly empathize and seek for connection not only to fulfill our own need, but also to see that other person's actual perspective. if we can do that, then we'll realize that none of us are destined to isolated solitude. to not see the other as an object of use, but to see the other as a "you." like buber explains again and again, that ability to say "you" is something we must eternally strive for. it's not just a search for connection, it's a radical shift in viewpoint, and a shocking awareness of our own ego.

it's just like one of wallace's "banal platitudes" that holds such significant truth: "it's not all about you!" :)

oh fall, please stay forever

fleet foxes "white winter hymnal" (my new favorite song)

new artist crush:

michael borremans, manufacturers of constellation (2000)

isn't it riveting how just a few suggestive marks of black and water on paper can leave you feeling so much?

bliss in the mailbox

a few weeks ago i went to my mailbox and pulled out a tidy envelope from dear lia. enclosed were two poems that have virtually carried me through ever since. this one took my breath away:

little things

After she's gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear Liddy's breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood--red glass
in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a pile of my son's
sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before
camp, I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have--as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

-Sharon Olds

a few days before lia's envelope, i got a brown package from amanda. enclosed was this marvel of a poem:

hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
--fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young

pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing,itself hiding one)
life's only and true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin

comes here a man would have from madame death
nevertheless now and without winter spring?
she'll spin that spirit her own fingers with
and give him nothing (if he should not sing)

how much more than enough for both of us
darling. And if i sing you are my voice,

-e.e. cummings

and this is why i love us. thank you my dear, dear friends for keeping me afloat and loving me.