Heaven/sometimes in black and white

My girlfriend, resting her tired leg on a cold windy day by the sea.

I was finally able to get some film developed, for the first time since lockdown started. Few other things could have raised my spirits as much as receiving the email containing my scans did.

I have been getting back into taking pictures since receiving two unassuming (but cherished) cameras in the past year, and as with writing poetry, the more I do it, the better I do. There were some golden snaps among the photos I just got back...and I missed that feeling of really liking something I had made.

On letters and becoming a writer

"The mindset of the writer I can trace back to the mindset of wanting to control the narrative of my life, which never otherwise felt like something I could control. The fears I had, the things I wanted but couldn't get, I discovered and expressed through writing letters to pen pals. In those days you bought a teen magazine, and it had a list of addresses for young people living all around the world. At one point there were whole magazines devoted to pen pal addresses....There was no security about it - you just wrote to them, and they wrote back. It was like discovering something impossibly brilliant and wonderful, something delightful that was available at no cost - always available. I still have at least one pen pal from those days of my preteen years that I am in touch with.

"But what fascinated me was that...your role was to explain your world to the person you were sending the letter to at a time when they did not have access to other parts of the world. There was no internet. I was living in Jamaica. If something happened for news to go around the world, it would have to be monumental; it wouldn't be about everyday life. If you went to an encyclopedia, it would be twenty years out of date. So, in a sense, I became not just an authority on my life, but an authority on the culture of the country in which I lived - its landscape, climate, day-to-day rhythms, and even its language. If I had a pen pal, they'd be the authority on their space. We'd be the conduit for knowing our worlds. I got a thrill both from receiving those letters and for the thought that what I was saying was being consumed and was shaping their understanding of the world I knew intimately.

"...What I was doing was telling my life from my perspective, my point of view, which, as it happened, was my point of power. I was acutely aware that if something happened to me, if I got beat up in a fight, that my telling could be my revenge, that I could control that narrative. Even if the fact was that I lost that fight, in the retelling of it and the choice of what I could tell, I was very aware of constructing and controlling the narrative, and that I was, whether through the use of humor or exclusion or of irony, the hero in the telling. You can imagine that, if you're doing this regularly, to multiple people, that as incidents happen to you, you're thinking, "I can't wait to write about this." And the difference between a letter and a journal is that there is an audience, and someone is going to write back and say, 'I didn't understand this,' or, 'This made me laugh,' and I think that's the moment when the sensation of writing and the command, the control, the shaping, the texturing of writing began appealing to me, and drew me in.

"And if I were to be honest, and here I am being very honest, that impulse has not changed - it has merely grown. What I mean to say is that the closest thing that I can think of to a prototype for my fascination with being a writer was in my experience as a writer of letters to pen pals in my teen years. Any genuine study of writers of the past, and especially of the 19th and 20th century, will make this point clear. Most writers practiced their craft in letters. At the very least, their first experience of 'publication' would have been in letters. It is a shaping thing."

- Kwame Dawes
in interview in Rattle #65

As someone who also spent some of my formative years writing to friends I'd never met, I loved his explanation of what that process can bring, and it resonated profoundly.

"Such a boom of organized hostility to life"

"As a young girl at boarding school, I cartooned...to possess the unattainable....Today I realize I've got quite the opposite impulse, trying to nail down the normalized malaise that defines the downtown world. My once bohemian city is now pumped so full of tech cash that everyone walks around terrified: of failure, of not enough or the wrong kind of success, of being beat to market by someone with the same absurd idea. I've never witnessed such a boom of organized hostility to life. It's as though the whole city is standing on a shrinking ledge while pretending it's at the best party ever thrown. The twisted creatures flowing out of my finger onto the tablet screen are like the neck-treading demons lurking inside every comely young entrepreneur carting endless confidence and optimist to the streets. Out, out, all of you, into the cold light of day. Let us examine and document the true shape of you."

Jen Burke Anderson
Womankind #21

It has been so bizarre to see how my hometown of San Francisco has transformed in the past ten years. I felt grateful when I read these words from another longer-term resident of SF, for what they capture that I haven't been able to put into words myself.

Mapping lately

A never-published post from November 2011.

I was feeling poorly two weekends ago and didn't leave my bedroom much, so I decided to tell you about its walls, where I have been keeping track of some ideas and words I've been connecting. Topical mapping, I suppose. I didn't get to finish this post until now, though.

The north wall is the happening one lately. The theme is narration. The relationships between narration, past and present, self as subject, and on.

I want to know: the integrity of a life, of a person's experiences, how we find it. We want to understand it before we tell the story, but how can find that clarity without the process of telling the story?

We don't know how to find meaning outside of our conception of unidirectional time, which is to say, an objectified past, a past that we can act upon and master.

The process of narration, self-narration, in order to glimpse an in-process version of that integrity.

"The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to 'frame' life is a technique to forestall the incomprehension seemingly entailed by our 'continued existence,' to achieve some sense and articulation of a life's shape even as it is being formed — to see, if only through a glass darkly, something recognizably meaningful, something useful to us as we attempt to navigate the often troubled waters of experience" (Jacobs).

I realized that the word "journal" is from the Latin root of "diurnal." By the way.

Have you ever felt the grief of thinking, There is nothing story-like about this? "The clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity..." (Lewis).

That clarity — an intense sense of integrity of experience, a certainty that "everything has been leading up to this" and an understanding of just how — you can take certain drugs to get that feeling. Isn't that weird?

I'm interested in the ways that we deal with and act upon the past, through retrospection and "re-vision": "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich). Interpretation and reinterpretation. Continuity versus rupture.

And the way the past acts on us. The "pastness of the past" and the persistence of the past (Persistence of Memory?), which, "of course, presses on the living from all sorts of directions and in any number of ways..." (Keane).

Shared narratives versus individual narratives, and what is lost and gained in dressing one's experiences in shared narratives. "[L]ocal social realities that cannot be fitted into any overarching narrative...without doing some violence to those realities" (Keane again).

Academically: I want to write a paper comparing second-wave feminist consciousness-raising with Protestant conversion narratives.

Personally: I think I am constantly retelling the stories of my life to myself, changing them a little bit each time so that the sense and coherency of them is constantly becoming more accurate. I need them to make sense. INTP drive for understanding combined with the INFP search for meaning. You know how we do.

- 11/27/11

Days, craving some wonder

It feels like I have been filling my days only with the non-negotiables these past few months. Work, commute, eating, sleeping, seeing my girlfriend. Spare moments exist, but they are brief; I use them to space out or to scroll through my social media apps. I've been saving money and I haven't been unhappy, but I realized I've been missing time to do the "unproductive" things that I also need to feel really whole and satisfied.

This week my fingers are lighting on that wholeness again. Two things: 

I let myself stay up very late a couple nights in a row, late enough to catch a certain feeling of electricity and deep focus that I associate with winter, sleeplessness, and driving very fast. Sleeping irresponsibly is something of an indulgence when one is gainfully employed (and therefore obligated to be functional) during the daytime hours, but my creative aspect has been craving that late-night energy.

And I went on a photo stroll with an acquaintance from Flickr, who is lending me a very beautiful old camera. There was a time when walking around with my eye to my SLR was one of my favorite ways to spend a day or night — it still is, I think, but it's only now as I'm getting tentatively back into the habit that I notice I've missed it.

I am pondering what changes I can make to keep this needed balance.

Hesitating

I still sing the doxology sometimes when I am deeply content. I invoke blessings far more often now than I did when I was a really pious Christian.

I still think disaster will result if I say the wrong words; I still believe the perfect sentences exist that would do exactly what I need them to do, if only I can find them and recognize them...

A vague memory from linguistics that induced me to open an old textbook:

"...knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before." (Fromkin and Rodman) 

Radio silence

It's been hard to write recently. Anything, anywhere. I have plenty to say, but I don't know who to say it to, so I don't know how to say it, how to begin. (Should it be a letter? If so, to whom? Shall I carve it down into a series of 140-character musings? Do I need to journal it out, do I wish to save it to tell to my love, could I write a blog post?)

I owe words. Letters especially are overdue. I hope my dear correspondents who are reading this will forgive me. Words written or typed sustain (and are the historical foundation of) so many of my relationships, I feel like I'm failing everyone a little bit lately with this silence, including myself.

Perhaps I just need to be less black and white, and instead begin somewhere (anywhere, anything). Perhaps I need also to pare down my commitments with regard to communication.

I'm still taking pictures. I'm behind on posting my 365, but not on taking the photos. You'll see them.

I'm still here, anyway.

Why I take pictures (one reason)

Documentation can take me out of the moment or it can help me sink deeper into it. That's determined, I think, by whether I am doing it more for the product (the photo, the poem, etc.), which will exist only in the future, or for the process, which can take place only in the present.

And the process changes me; it changes the way I think and see and live.

Even if I don't have a camera, even if I don't take the picture, or even if the picture doesn't turn out — the fact that I often do have a camera and sometimes do take pictures puts me in the habit of asking, as I live my moments, is this beautiful / is this interesting / will i miss this when it's gone? Questions which keep me receptive and paying attention.

An itch

I have a bit of an itch to be making things lately. My hands don't know quite what to do with themselves. What are you bringing into existence?

On blogging / Against compartmentalization

I wonder sometimes what this site is. It's not my journal, but it's not unlike a journal. I would never want to say that it's about me, so I resist calling it a personal blog.

But it is all personal. My intellectual pursuits, my artistic pursuits, they are no less personal than my emotional life or my relationships with family and friends. These things are not even distinct from each other. What I do and what I think and what I make, who and what I love, where I go, what I see, what I believe...it's a big wild soul-party of connection and mutual influence and engagement. It's kinda dialectical. Grounded theory.

I proceed from myself and my life. Always. Who doesn't? What other starting point is there?

It might be tidier, to my mind, if I could compartmentalize in my blogging life. Here's where I talk about my daily life, here's where I get to be a feminist, here's where I talk about embodiment and eating and mental health things... 

But it's impossible. Any divisions I made would be false and unsatisfying. So I'm not drawing any lines — except for the one between what I can write publicly about without facing significant, negative, not-worth-it consequences for my offline life, and what I can't.

Because as my "About" page used to say, this space is not only "about" the unity of experience, emotion, intellect, and creativity that I find in my days, it's also one of my tools for clarifying that unity. Which is to say, precisely as I need and like it.

Read in March 2012

1. Heist Society, by Ally Carter
This was fun. Thanks, Erin.

2. The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
This gave me a very useful concept, that of Resistance, but I didn't care for his voice or the parts where he waxes metaphysical / quasi-spiritual in these oh-so Romantic directions.

3. Live or Die, by Anne Sexton
This was appropriately opened by the following Author's Note:

“To begin with, I have placed these poems (1962-1966) in the order in which they were written with all due apologies for the fact that they read like a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy. But I thought the order of their creation might be of interest to some readers, and as André Gide wrote in his journal, ‘Despite every resolution of optimist, melancholy occasionally wins out: man has decidedly botched up the planet.’”

4. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, ed. and trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
This is a book that I am happy to own. Genius at times. Sorrowful, philosophical, concerned with the mundane, rich with images. I put my Christian upbringing and education to good use catching the biblical allusions that pepper the long poems.

5. Pleiades, by Sui Solitaire
This was heavy with adolescent romantic angst. I liked the last twenty or so pages the best. These missives from Sui's past were interesting partly because I know her now, didn't know here then, but know from her blog some of the context for these writings. Her ear is excellent, and some of these have a distinct spoken-word feeling. Reading this was an oasis in my work day.

These are the materials

[trigger warning: abuse]

I don't want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,
tore up her writing, threw the kerosene
lantern into her face waiting
like an unbearable mirror of his own.    I don't
want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer
how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck
and backed it into her.    I don't want to think
how her guesses betrayed her — that he meant well, that she
was really the stronger and ought not to leave him
to his own apparent devastation.    I don't want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.

– Adrienne Rich
from "An Atlas of the Difficult World"

2012: Intentions

I'm thinking about the word elegance.

Elegance in the way my geometry teacher used to mean: like an elegant proof or an elegantly concise definition.

And the word silence, in particular, comes to me. I had to consider it for a few days to understand the connection.

Elegance means setting what is essential off with spaciousness, emptiness, so that you can see/hear/understand the essentials properly and appreciate how spare and simple they are are by nature.

Silence is the aural equivalent of space, and I crave it. I crave these kinds of sensory empty spaces. Deep winter, silence, bare rooms, dusk.

(My senses get overwhelmed easily.)

(I remember: the silence and pale colors and expanses of Iceland in early winter.)

Elegance is also deliberateness. I would like to remember to do less by default, to choose what I do and how. And then, to choose to do less of what I don't care about, and do what I do care about more simply, more beautifully, with more focus.

More elegance.

2011

Lighting incense / burning rice.

Making friends with winter.

A good production of a breathtaking play.

Getting set up, and going on some dates.

Falling in love with academia.

Lunches with Kathryn.

Social research, culture theory, senior capstone...

Radical feminism.

Meeting Sui and Noel.

Being awake for too many days in a row.

Swimming in Long Lake. In the Atlantic, in the Pacific, in Lake Michigan.

My only digital camera broke again.

This, again. (Thank you, anti-Pharma sentiments!)

Getting to know Niece-Baby.

Watching Xena.

My first full-time job, also the most grueling work of my life — street canvassing for two different non-profits.

Tofu scrambles.

"Hurricane" Irene.

For a few weeks at the end of the summer, traveling light and receiving enormous hospitality.

And seeing my freshman-year roommate again for the first time in three years.

Backaches.

Singing while I walk.

Semiotic ideology.

Gaining and losing my taste for alcohol.

Graduating.

___


Did I realize my intentions for the year? Yes. Especially my invitation to myself to have "more messes, more failures, more learning." More stretching. More experimenting. More biting the bullet.

The primary psychic ordeals, mostly voluntarily undertaken:

• I let my friend set me up with a mutual friend and Went On Dates, despite freaking awful anxiety and cognitive dissonance. I learned that I hate dating, independent of how much I may like the person.
• I went to the undergraduate version of summer camp (an institution I hate) in order to graduate on time. More anxiety (food-related and social). Triumphant in the end!
• I took a job that almost no one can do. AND KEPT IT

Oh, and I read fifty-five books. I made a list of the best.

Food and time

I wrote on Wednesday:

I've thrown so much time away simply because I thought it wasn't mine — time when I was "supposed" to be doing other things. Why is it a rule that when you're procrastinating, you have to be numbing your brain, bouncing around from website to website or similar? It's not. It's stupid. It results in nothing worth remembering, and it's not even enjoyable.

and I wanted to elaborate on that and connect it with eating as Sui did in her comment.

In Intuitive Eating the authors mention several adolescent clients who had gotten into the habit of overeating after school because as long as they were eating, their parents didn't make them do homework. In other words, their right to nourishment was acknowledged, but not their right to leisure time, and the result was that they tried to suppress one need by oversatisfying another.

I've realized that I can fall into a similar trap. When I'm willing to acknowledge my need for, say, an internet break "just to check my email" (ahem) but not my need to do something ACTUALLY enjoyable, like have tea with a friend, or ride my bike, or do some pleasure reading — then I overdo the internet surfing in an attempt to satisfy my chocolate craving with rice cakes. Falling into the black hole that is the internet can take longer than a real break would have, and it's way less satisfying.

I think this also has to do with the fact that I can avoid some of the responsibility for "procrastinating" by blaming the internet's addictive and time-warping qualities. (One earth hour = sixteen internet minutes, to quote my high school government teacher.)

And yet all that's needed to make taking that responsibility less dreadnacious is to accept that taking breaks is allowed — yes, even long unscheduled ones — and that I don't have to guilt-trip myself by labeling them "procrastination." That it really is okay to set aside a paper in order to go for a bike ride. (Appeal to pragmatic side: After all, if that's what I'm craving, then that's probably what will best refresh me and and re-energize me for more paper-writing later.)

Back to the food. I'd like to propose an analogy:

Unrealistic dedication to productivity is to wasting time as dieting is to overeating.

And what is the way out? Intuitive living, something like intuitive eating but bigger? Are there thoughts as trustworthy as the body's hungers?

I think so. I'm experimenting.

With love and vigor

Not long till solstice and still no snow.

This year when I'm deciding what to do with my hours, I have been thinking about what will be worth remembering and what the vigorous thing to do would be. (I love that word. I love vigorous people. I hope I am one.) It often runs contrary to what would feel most comfortable, but it doesn't feel like fighting with myself; it feels more like clearing away the junk from around my intuition.

I've thrown so much time away simply because I thought it wasn't mine — time when I was "supposed" to be doing other things. Why is it a rule that when you're procrastinating, you have to be numbing your brain, bouncing around from website to website or similar? That's not how it has to be. It's stupid. It results in nothing worth remembering, and it's not even enjoyable. More about that later.

Tonight I walked home at a leisurely pace, in the middle of the street and singing. Twenty-five degrees. Orion has swung to the south, and my voice was echoing off of...something. I went past my house to the end of the block before turning back, because it was a good song.

I might remember that someday. I might remember this fall as the one I spent singing, because I was finding out that my voice is not as bad as I'd always thought. I wouldn't mind that.

Our tentative and groping words

"Women have been driven mad, 'gaslighted,' for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other...

"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.

"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.

...

"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I want to tell you.

"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

"The possibility of life between us."

– Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

Anna Akhmatova ate the metaphorical tangerine

"'Who can refuse to live his own life?' Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her refusal not to live her life made of her one of those few people who have given dignity and meaning to our terrible century, and through whom and for whom it will be remembered.

...

Pushkin was the closest of the friends she did not meet even once in her life. He helped her to survive the 1920s and 30s, the first of Akhmatova's long periods of isolation and persecution. Dante, too, was close. And there were friends whom she could meet, including Mandelstam and Pasternak, whose unbreakable integrity supported her own. But no-one could have helped, through thirty years of persecution, war, and persecution, if she had not herself been one of the rare incorruptible spirits.

Her incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to 'the clear, familiar, material world'....In all her life's work, her fusion with ordinary unbetrayable existence is so complete that only the word 'modest' can express it truthfully. When she tells us (In 1940), 'But I warn you,/I am living for the last time', the words unconsciously define her greatness: her total allegiance to the life she was in...Her poetry seems...to be a transparent medium through which life streams."

– D.M. Thomas

Never-published draft posts (2009)

I stole this idea from Heather.

5/12/09: I think

that contentment is a discipline. An art? Yes. Days like today, happiness doesn't float down from the sky and swathe me in bliss. It wants to be practiced assiduously so it becomes part of my consciousness instead of something I feel only when I'm enjoying my circumstances. This is good, I teach myself, pointing my eyes to the shadows of dogwood blossoms on brick. And this. The soles of my feet in cool mud. And on, and on.

___


9/11/09: Changed my mind

I used to think that art was the alchemy we use to transmute the ordinary, to make mundane things extraordinary. I thought it was in the narrating that we made things magical.

Now I think, not quite: Art is just a way to teach ourselves to see that it was already extraordinary.

___


12/10/09: Untitled

I address Puppy —
You know... — and she turns her head to listen as we walk.
Because I am wondering,
three blocks later
I begin a sentence in French.
No, she doesn't care.

Driving around the block looking for parking, I chant to myself:
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Was kann man sagen?
qu'est-çe qu'on peut dire, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
"The more things change, the more they stay the same..."

And then in the evening
I read aloud to myself
very
very
slowly
a poem in Russian
which I do not understand, which I would probably love in translation if I could but
it's hard to see the poem for the syllables.

Eye candy and brain food

Melissa on being seen. "I’ve been sharing stuff I thought was unshareable and prioritising authenticity, even though it’s made me feel quite afraid. I’m not a hundred percent there yet but the barrier’s starting to crack..."

Mentioned once before in passing: free guided meditation audio tracks.

"The Dog Theory of Fatness" (kind of sounds offensive; is not).

Sonnets about zombies.

Photo usage guidelines for bloggers. Most comprehensive treatment of the subject I've read; written by a blogger with input from a photographer and a photography agent.

The Eowyn Challenge: nerdiest fitness site ever, ahh.

"4chan's Chaos Theory." This is about Anonymous, etc.

The Riot Grrrl Manifesto. I printed this big and put it on my wall. Even though I'm a Christian. Ha.

And: riot grrrls + Maoist ballet dancers = this Bikini Kill music video. Dig.

"High heels yay, headscarf nay? Double standards in fashion symbolism."

Seo Min-Jeong's art installations.

Photography by female prisoners in Romania, via English Holly.

A dressing room experiment: "Finding Clothes That Fit." I think I'm going to do this.