Diptych in diary entries

I woke up at seven, left around 8:30...stunning snowflakes, bitter cold. My fingers numbed on the suitcase handle, inside the gloves. Trampling perfect stars, piled delicately on the sidewalk, not packed. It was astonishing. I share that and feel that I have shared my heart. I am transparent at times; the simplest poem is a list, a window. To just see and luxuriate. I am becoming more of a sensualist every week. Only the simplest things are necessary, because they are not, at all, simple — the smell of rice. the six points of a snowflake. fingers numbing on my camera and my one knee dirty from kneeling. Amen.

[Saturday January 22nd, 2011 — 11:01p]

decisions:

*give very freely. human relations are not a conflict between mutually exclusive interests.
*purge my speech and writing of capitalist metaphors (e.g. invest, worth, value)
*reconsider abstraction — a rose is a rose is a rose; a snowflake is a snowflake, there is no such thing as a boyfriend, nothing stands for anything but rather only is, but not only which suggest impoverishment, an is is is, language and classifications to make things simpler but less beautiful and true? look, the snowfall. the sunlight. or both. nothing but. but so much.

[Saturday, June 18th, 2011 — 9:01p]

Sweet hands in the evening

White girls dreading each others' hair in the woods.

Empty mornings in the cabin

I did not speak to the first group of cabinmates much. They were underclassmen and knew each other already, and I am quiet with groups of new people. The fact that I dropped my first class halfway through meant I was the only one remaining in the cabin after breakfast. I slept, cleaned, and felt restless and desperately bored. The quiet and empty space and morning light pleased my eye, though. Looking at the things my cabinmates had left out on their dressers, the way their sheets wrinkled, I felt I knew them in a strange way from these small things.

Studying by the shore

I'm back in California, my friends, and I have two rolls of 35mm from Wisconsin to share. We students returned to the Chicago area on Saturday, and I took a few days there to see my friends. And that was so lovely that now I'm kind of sad that I'll be away from them until October, even though San Francisco is the city I love.

These I scanned in the living room of the apartment where I slept, which belongs to a beautiful dreamy Christian sistren. (Sistren, yes, it is a word! I was pleased.) Their place reminded me of some of the things that second-wave feminists wrote about the need for women-only spaces, about the potential of communities of women; they had realized some of that on a small scale in their apartment.

But now I'm in California, and looking towards another summer class, and I've promised to buy myself a certain amazing and expensive book [this] once I find a job. And here for the next few days, there will be Wisconsin scenes.

Small-town Wisconsin