The Quill and Query

Summer 2009 Memorables

2009-08-18T02:23:42Z

So I'm doing a little bit of a switch-up this year; since I didn't make a to-do list this summer, I thought I'd do a "taking a look back" list. I have to say, this is much more satisfying.

Albums:
-Mix #2 from Anna (Sufjan, Blitzen Trapper, Bon Iver, Belle and Sebastian, etc)
-Far, Regina Spektor
-Ma Fleur, The Cinematic Orchestra
-The Con, Tegan and Sarah
-Something About Airplanes, Death Cab For Cutie
-You Can Play These Songs With Cords, Death Cab For Cutie
-American Hearts, A.A. Bondy

Books:
-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
-Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer
-Howl, Alan Ginsberg
-Bells in Winter, Czeslaw Milosz
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
-The Clean House and Other Plays, Sarah Ruhl
- Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag

Movies:
-(500) Days of Summer
-The Brothers Bloom
-Coraline in 3D
-Harry Potter 6
-Up on IMAX
-Star Trek on IMAX
-Requiem For a Dream

Sights
-a school of three hundred dolphins
-twin baby moose
-flying over Alaskan glaciers in a helicopter
-the largest collection of theatre props on the west coast
-Richard Avedon at MoMA

Stuff I Did That I Won't Forget:
-Tinyard Hill
-free concert at Dolores Park Cafe
-living in the house on Orchid St. for three weeks with the craziest people on the planet
-certain nights of certain wild summer shenanigans...
-Last Thursday on Alberta
-finally learning to play the rest of Comptine D'Un Autre: L'Apres Midi on piano
-the epic picnic adventure with Erin and Annie
-cooking and eating fresh, good food everyday with Mom
-breaking mom out of the hospital
-sitting down to dinner with the whole family for the first time in years
-an unexpected Hatsumon sermon

Discoveries:
-Portland Farmer's Market
-Green Apple books (Richmond dist.)
-Dog-eared books (The Mission)
-Bi-Rite ice creamery (Dolores Park)
-Samovar tea bar (Yerba Buena)
-Mingalaba (cheap, AMAZING Burmese food on the Ave)

Two Masks

2008-02-04T07:53:50Z

The division of my loyalties between the two departments of my choice seems only to deepen as my academic career advances. I suppose this should worry me--people love to define themselves by their major (or is that an illusion that I've cultivated?), so what does it say about me that I seem to be torn between two alter egos?--but whether because of self-delusion, ignorance, or sheer laziness of emotion, the observation of this fact has only made me more amused at myself and my circumstances. Theatre and English are apparently two popularly compatible majors, but for some reason I feel like I am exempted from the usual motives for that choice. The first that I observe is the literary-minded people who, perhaps starting in the field of English, discover the literary form of drama and adopt the two to in order to afford themselves the right to the title of "academic well-roundedness." The second is the true actors--emotionally volatile, flagrantly and flamboyantly self-centered, and impressed by any and all passion--who, straying from the familiarity of their stages, fall prey to the romance of poetry and classical fiction and adopt both majors in order to expand their repertoire of "raw human experience." The former would charge me with stereotyping and the latter would accuse me of type-casting; whether at the hands of either form of jargon, I accept full responsibility for my rather condemnatory generalization.

The truth of the matter is, while I may have sounded a little wry in the previous assessment, it only arises out of a kind of jealousy. I love literature with a painful enthusiasm, but I think I lack the necessary degree of focused detachment to be truly apt at analyzing it. Perhaps this is something that will improve with education, but I don't know. Similarly, I hold a severe, star-struck admiration of theatre, but my reserved nature does not make it possible for me to develop this admiration into the same kind of unabated, unrestrained, rather irrational passion that the classic "theatre person" experiences.

Inevitably, I find myself poised equally between the two.

It is undeniable that I love English more: it is my medium, my niche, my safe haven, my talent; I am a rational, logical, subtle, and interior person, and the study of literature is where my personality is most suited. However, what people are is something static that is driven forward by the combination of what they want or ought to be; and this is Theatre for me. I both want and should be more extroverted. I see the boundless extroversion and dangerous enthusiasm of everyone I'm surrounded by in the theatre department and see a rather exciting alternative. Like an audience of one, it is l like peering through the third wall at the fictional extravagance miraculously, incredibly, unbelievable brought to life in the stale air of reality. People should not be like this, but they are--and in spite of "should," the world of everything extreme that they inhabit is a tantalizing miracle that makes "should" sound like a squeak of timidity. It is a world that I am utterly incompatible with, but which strangely needs me. Stage management, production management, technical work, paperwork, research, logistics...they all require people of my character to drive the miracle forward. What it "is" is driven by what it "wants" and "ought" to be. Perhaps it is this imagined need that keeps me hooked. It gives me a kind of participation that is enough like kinship to make me feel a part of the miracle.

But I get tired of the mercurial extravagance just as I get tired of the subversive academic competition, to the point that my superior love of English versus my superior need of Theatre feel equal to each other just as they feel equal to my periodic hatred of both. I suppose someone more poetic than I would claim that the vacillation of such extremes is true balance. I will simply resign myself to fate.

What I Think About Words

2008-01-08T06:57:59Z

1.) throes |θrōz|
plural noun
intense or violent pain and struggle, esp. accompanying birth, death, or great change : he convulsed in his death throes.

Birth, death, and great change. Odd how practically everything can be attributed with violence. Odd, too, how “life” and “death” are both singular nouns but the above phrase using death is the most common use of the word. Are people afraid to make life plural? Or are they afraid to make death singular? Maybe we want our life to be ours alone, but would prefer to share death...I will make a note to widen my use of the word.

2.) chiropractic |ˌkīrəˈpraktik|
noun
a system of complementary medicine based on the diagnosis and manipulative treatment of misalignments of the joints, esp. those of the spinal column, which are held to cause other disorders by affecting the nerves, muscles, and organs.

This unimaginative noun is really an adjective that has undergone an identity crisis. Luckily no one knows that it exists. Have you ever listened to someone trying to get around not knowing the word for the name of a chiropractor's practice? It's much more entertaining than hearing someone use this word and getting stuck in a rut about its schizophrenic grammatical origins.

3.) horrent |ˈhôrənt|
adjective poetic/literary
1 (of a person's hair) standing on end.
2 feeling or expressing horror : a horrent cry.

I found this word in Paradise Lost. Why are all the really good words obsolete? This one has such a good effect...it sounds like horror, torrent, hornet, and horrid all at the exact same instant. I think it actually makes my hair stand on end.

4.) sense |sens|
noun
1 a faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch : the bear has a keen sense of smell that enables it to hunt at dusk.
2 a feeling that something is the case : she had the sense of being a political outsider.
• an awareness or feeling that one is in a specified state : you can improve your general health and sense of well-being.
• ( sense of) a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something : she had a fine sense of comic timing.

This word actually has a lot more meanings (and I won't even get into the verb form), but it always seems to me like a word that has gotten carried away with itself. It somehow manages to be logical and intuitive at the same time: the twins, sense and sensibility. There are words like sensitive and sensual, for example, that are experiential; then there are phrases like "to see sense (reason)" or "common sense" that are functions of mental process that have nothing to do with the senses. So here's a question: wouldn't it be better to say that sense sees us instead of us seeing sense? It seems rather omniscient, if you ask me.

5.)apart |əˈpärt|
adverb
1 (of two or more people or things) separated by a distance; at a specified distance from each other in time or space : his parents are now living apart | two stone gateposts some thirty feet apart | countries as far apart as New Zealand and the U.S. | figurative the two sides remained far apart on the issue.

Mixing up "apart" and "a part" is always a bad typo that I make. How can you blame me? Adding the "a" denotes separation and pulling it away denotes inclusion.

Kindred Spirit

2007-11-28T07:31:41Z

I met with Professor Merchant today. I keep reminding myself that he is not "Professor," but "Paul," and it just does not seem to stick. Actually I rarely seem able to accustom myself to calling my English professors by their first names; strange, considering I have no qualms when it comes to the theatre professors. I guess it stems from the fact that I have an immense respect for my English professors, and what that says about my theatre professors I'm a little hesitant to think on. I suppose I can just leave it at the fact that at any given time they are either my professor, my employer, or my coworker or some combination thereof, and my relationships with them are just generally very confusing.

Anyway, I suppose in the case of Professor Merchant I just feel too deep a respect, of the kind that cannot give way to familiarity. My one-on-one meetings with him are always so inspiring. He is such a modest man and very prone to the admiration of talent, but he really has quite an amazing mind; or maybe it is just that the affinity I find with him is amazing to me. He has the same tendency to apply everything to everything else. When talking about my poetry, we discussed that I am a "poet of ideas": my poetry is usually fairly short and embodies one concept worked through to a contained, summed-up conclusion. I use poetry as a way to force my reader to think about a defined impression, argument, concept, emotion, etc...in short, I use it to make sense of the world and then share that sense.

This was all incredibly interesting to me because I have never really thought about the philosophy of how I use poetry in general--not to mention what that says about how I see the world. Professor Merchant went off on a fascinating tangent (that wasn't really a tangent, which I somehow felt was a realization unique to me) about how this used to be a classic artistic worldview--refined by the Romantics, the scientific revolution, the sensibility of the Victorian age--and destroyed by the violence and chaos of the 21st century. Two world wars and hundreds of smaller ones, economic depressions spanning countries, concentration camps, genocides, Hiroshimas, communist dictatorships, epic mistakes...the fallacies of the human race laid bare on a battle field too big to contain it...how could anyone attempt to make sense of the world after such a century? A century which seems not to have ended, with all its grand disasters of global warming, world-scale epidemics, the repetition of countless disasters of the past? Not to mention the discovery of things like light as a wave and a particle, or the big bang, or that our galaxy is being slowly sucked into a black hole that will eventually wipe us from existence...
People--especially the people of ideas, the artistic people--have lost faith in our world. Disharmonic music was born, along with the seeming meaninglessness of modern art that wears its meaninglessness in a kind of aggressive haughtiness that is nevertheless pitiable. Literature gave birth to the writers of dystopia. Poetry spawned the beat poets and the imagists, who claim linguistic purity in their stark, unadorned language that does not make sense to people. God is dead; religion follows in his wake, thrashing in death throes.

Professor Merchant looked extremely sad when he paused at all this, in the way that makes me think sometimes that he can empathize with all of humanity. I understood him: it's not the loss of the neat packaging of meaning, the order to the universe, that is so difficult to mourn, but the fact that people have stopped caring about meaning. Science too often gives itself over to the accumulation of trivial details that appear to be knowledge but are really just the miniscule fragments of it. Religion hoards itself jealously and uses itself like a shield, a blindfold, an excuse to keep from having to confront the grand questions of our universe. No one will try anymore.

He told me that "making sense of things" is equally dangerous because it too can turn into a trivialization of life and mystery, but he also said that it has a kind of saving optimism that humanity has lost and desperately needs. Religion calls it faith, literature calls it hope. He concluded by giving me a surveying look and saying with a wry frown, "perhaps you'll be the one to show the world that it's ready for a new way of thinking."

I knew he didn't think that the scraps of my poetry he had on the table in front of him were capable of changing the world, but that is the point, isn't it? He looked into my future--the world's future--and saw optimism.

The Lost Generation

2007-11-12T08:28:05Z

School politic lately have been causing my mind to buzz with too many things to comprehend...I see a vast web of interconnected issues that seem to stem from each other, are connected to each other, direct each other...it's like looking sideways at glimmers of thought that tie themselves into a map. Some days I feel like it is too large for me to understand. The thinnly veiled impressions of gathering tension, however, have been disturbing me; I feel like, somehow, a boiling point is not far off, and it makes me unspeakably nervous.

Everything starts with the way student-administration tensions have been forming.

First there was the turnover of management with the Bon (the food service), which caused a multiplicity of changes and policies in our meals that made a lot of people very mad: the elimination of certain foods because of the new no trans-fat policy, a harder press on vegetarian and vegan diets (meaning less of the meat that was scarce to begin with), cut backs in the number of stations (meaning longer lines and fewer options), and a new system of comment cards that hid under the guise of "open forum discussion" while yielding only a proliferation of cynical, half-serious remarks to student requests.

Second was the reformation of the Department of Residence Life, which controls everything from student activities and housing to disciplinary action and residence hall staff. Students returned from summer and were greeted with a large amount of familiar names that had been changed: "Res Life" is now "Campus Living;" "Residence Directors" (RDs, who run each dorm) are now Campus Living Coordinators ("CLCs"); Residence Advisors (everyone's familiar "RAs") are now "Campus Living Advisors" ("CLAs," or more phonetically, "Claws"). There is a new director of the department as well, who quickly proved himself to be full of eloquent-sounding ideas that fell flat because of an unfortunate incapability of listening to the answers to his questions and a propensity for snide condescension. A number of disciplinary policies have been amended and even more have been given more vocalization in an attempt to make them clearer and therefore more widely obeyed. The department's new plan of attack runs along the lines of "we all love LC and we're all good people; making the students realize this is all we need to do to create a peaceful, liveable campus environment. There were many team-building and community bonding exercises at NSO to stress this philosophy, which were naturally met with bewilderment and derision on the part of the students.

Thirdly, an incident at the Law School (later jumped on by the school press) revealed that a high-up official in the administration had sexually harrassed a personal assistant. The validity of the claim was supported by a town paper and consequently the school press, but various vague details in the matter made the issue controversial and uncertain. None of this mattered because it was one more example of the "corruption" of the powers that be.

In the first month of school, a rogue student organization made its presence known. They first surfaced when a number of giant, photocopied "letter's to the administration," written by students who had decided to leave LC, appeared on all of the student bulletin boards one Monday. The group called itself "Action A Week" and vowed as its mission statement to make the voices of the students known, especially in their sentiments of disatisfaction and disillusionment. They promised to post one letter each week. These letters, unfortunately, were badly written rants from people who sounded like little children whining against the parents that restricted their freedom. No one doubted that they were disatisfied and disillusioned; more importantly, no one doubted that they were people who were better off leaving the college. A few weeks later the group dragged a number of couches and chairs out to the lawn in front of the student union with banners proclaiming their presence; when asked, they said they were protesting the lack of "student spaces" on campus--an issue that has snowballed over the past few years from the administration's dissolution of one of the two student-run co-ops on campus.

In the past few weeks, student dissent over the school drug policy has been gathering steam. An incident over fall break involving eight students who were discovered with shrooms (one of whom was hospitalized) has fueled student hatred towards "Campo" (otherwise known as "Campus Safety," our campus security force), the Campus Living Department, and the CLAs. In a campus culture where drugs are a fact of life, where discipline surround them has no legal repercussions, and where all forms of authority are bitterly despised, a general sentiment has sprung up with the mentality that students have a right to use drugs and that the administration, as usual, is just "out to get them." This, of course, completely overlooks the fact that drug use is a crime in the real world, that we are subsidized by a government who expects us to follow the law, and that drugs are (surprise surprise) highly dangerous and just horribly bad for you in every way. Who would have thought.

The school press published an article last week that absolutely seeped with this mentality. The fall break incident was sited as proof that the school drug policy (and the disciplinarians who uphold it) present punishment as the first priorty in enforcement, not medical emergency. Furthermore, this proved that the administration's only concern was the reputation and prestige of the school, not the safety or wellbeing of the students. It went on to point out the school's recent redecoration of the campus-town shuttle with LC colors, insignia, mission statement, and general advertisements for recruitment.

How does this apply to me?

For one, it makes me angry. After volunteering for NSO, I developed an intense appreciation for the people working in Campus Living: the CLCs, the director of housing, the director of orientation, the CLAs--many of whom are close friends whose only motive is to save money on room and board, not to lord power over their fellow students. Additionally, I despise how much of my fellow student body thinks. The hippie culture spawns all sorts of hypocrisy: some self-righteous vegans and vegetarians shout all day long about health through a perpetual haze of drunken hangovers and clouds of cigarrette smoke. Others who claim themselves "politically minded" are really looking for any excuse to trample "the man;" they attack the administration for selling sweatshop-manufactured sweatshirts in the school giftshop at the same time that they support a massive drug economy of cartels, child labor, and general chaos and violence. Too many of my fellow students sneer in the faces of the people who are here to teach us, calling them controlling and tyrannical just because they expect them to show up to class on time and do the work--all while spending their nights in a drunken or drug-enhanced stupor that they claim is philosophically enlightening. If they actually went to class they would learn something about how the brain works. These are the people who came close to assaulting a friend of mine in the form of a drunken, all-male mob in her dorm hallway after they kicked in another friend's door and then locked him in his room. These are the people who don't show up to do their jobs at the rehearsals (even performances) that I stage manage. These are the people who have no respect for everything I hold in the highest regard.

List II: Plays I Need to Read

2007-11-11T08:16:18Z

1.) The Misanthrope (Moliere)
2.) Waiting For Godot (Samuel Beckett)
3.) Dr. Faustus (Christopher Marlowe)
4.) The Glass Menagerie (Tennesse Williams)
5.) Our Town (Thornton Wilder)
6.) The Cherry Orchared (Anton Chekov)
7.) Long Day's Journey Into Night (Eugene O'Neill)
8.) The Pillowman (Martin MacDonagh)
9.) Equus (Peter Shaffer)
10.) Glengarry Glenn Ross (Mamot)
11.) Oleanna (Mamot)
12.) Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare)
13.) The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare)
14.) Othello (William Shakespeare)
15.) Hamelt (William Shakespeare)
16.) The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
17.) No Exit (Jean-Paul Sartre)
18.) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard)

List II: "The Great Novels"

2007-11-11T08:01:44Z

1.) Portrait of a Lay (Henry James)
2.) To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
3.) Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
4.) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
5.) Ulysses (James Joyce)
6.) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov
7.) The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
8.) Catch-22 (Joseph Heiler)
9.) East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
10.) Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
11.) Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
12.) All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren)
13.) The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
14.) A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
15.) A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
16.) A Room With a View (E. M. Forster)
17.) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
18.) I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
19.) As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
20.) In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
21.) Beloved (Toni Morrison)
22.) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
23.) Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
24.) Middlemarch (George Eliot)
25.) Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
26.) David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
27.) Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
28.) The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
29.) Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
30.) Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
31.) Women In Love (D. H. Lawrence)
32.) Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
33.) Nostromo (Joseph Conrad)
34.) The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
35.) The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
36.) U.S.A. trilogy (John Dos Passos)
37.) Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
38.) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
39.) The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgan von Goethe)
40.) Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
41.) The Hounds of Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
42.) The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
43.) An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
44.) The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
45.) Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
46.) Herzog (Saul Bellow)
47.) Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
48.) Pilgrim's Progress (Paul Bunyan)
49.) Don Quixote (Miguel De Cervantes)
50.) Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)

Helicopters

2007-10-10T01:42:55Z

I guess it’s the season for more than one kind of rain. Have you seen all the maple seedpods on the bridge? There are hundreds, all wet and flat, plastered to the wet, flat planks like cast-off wood returning to fellow cast-off wood. In my pessimism I imagined them as a new breed of dead body, felled by some kind of natural war. (It’s a meditative season—the things that are far away feel just a little closer).

I was walking to class with some fellow classmates who picked them up by the handfuls and lobbed them over the side of the rails, watching them peel wetly apart and pirouette down into the ravine newly alive. I wish all things could resurrect their wings as easily.

Advice

2007-10-09T23:31:23Z

The best advice for writing that I've ever been given:

Mr. Cubias: show, don't tell.
Ms. Fontaine: abolish the cliche.
Rachel Cole: force your reader to see easily what you mean; they will not take the time to figure it out.
Paul Merchant: be wary of adjectives.
Ezra Pound: go in fear of abstractions.
Paul Merchant: poems are not puzzles to be solved; they are machines who show you in all their working parts how they function. They are a relationship between an ear and an ear and a mind and a mind.

Static Peace

2007-10-04T20:27:02Z

So life is considerably better as of late...I suppose I can support that claim by measuring the length of time since my last journal entry (because, inexplicably, I am usually only motivated to journal when I'm depressed). Depression is an extreme emotion that demands the ability to explain, to describe, to make sense of a dark haze--happiness, at the other extreme, requires only to be left alone. There is no desperate proclamation of "why?" to the darkness that is the brink of sleep, only a permeating pleasantness.

Well I suppose I haven't been exactly "happy." I still dream of longing, dark moments of introspection still exist in my day-to-day doings, and I still feel the twinges and tugs of loneliness. It's just that there are things that are going well...

I have a fish now. His name is Diego, and he provides an infinite number of moments of parental apprehension. Last night he suddenly seemed to develop an aspiration to fly...lying in bed thinking of curtain calls and spiked scenery, I could hear him plop in and out of his water. I turned on the light to discover that he had wedged himself out of water in his bamboo shoot...which, not knowing that bettas can actually breathe out of water, made me freak out beyond belief. Today was spent with some research on such habits, and although I was relieved to discover that this is normal behaviour, the panic was replaced with the problem of heating his bowl (since I learned it is far too cold for betta comfort). I solved the problem by placing his bowl inside a larger tank that has a heat lamp. Hopefully his aspirations towards flight won't lead him to end up crispy fried like Icarus.

Becomingness

2007-09-18T06:26:04Z

I am having nightmares again. Not a common occurance; their rarity reminds me how much they hurt when I fall back into their rhythm. There are surprisingly a lot of flashes or corruptions of childhood memories...Miko...snakes in the sand...being lost in a garden...dark, echoing, deserted buildings...the same impressions of fear and insignificance in the face of mystery...

Professor Merchant (in his good-hearted way) made much of the differences between the British and American school systems in a diversion in last week's meditations on Blake and Plath; he said, with a melancholy face that called my mind to Byatt's insights of cold propriety and fierce grammar drills, that he had "never kicked a can until sunset" in his youth. I remember looking out the window and feeling a distant echo in the air of slamming doors, of the premonition of emotional violence set to arrive in the guise of a stern, angered voice, of a vast darkness that sprang up and faded with each inexplicable turn of the day, bringing with it new genera of fear. I wanted to tell him that whether or not he had a can at the brink of sunset, the approaching dark was probably just the same.

We idealize the past. Or more likely, we idealize simplicity--a time without nagging doubt or personal flaws or isolation or Unknowingness of the more profound bent, which intimates that there is no possbility of ever Knowing. Nietzche's war on "becomingness."

The age of "being" is here and it is called nineteen. I would have room in my closet for a can if it wasn't filled with ricecookers and Venus razors and pamphlets on scholarly poetry readings. There might be some room between the ears of my tattered teddybears, but you'd have to pull out quite a bit of batting, and I'd prefer to keep one of the relics of my childhood whole.

The Question...

2007-07-31T06:40:57Z

"The question. It's the question that drives us, Neo...you know the question, just as I did."

There is always a question. If there wasn't, there would be nothing to keep us living. There is always, "why is pluto not a planet?" or "how is it that we measure love in loss?" even "I wonder if the paper is on time this morning?" to tug us out of bed, stuff the cornflakes down our throat, and rev our sleepy feet into their bipedal rhythm for the day. If it is only, "how will I get through today?" at least it keeps us curious enough to find out.

Unfortunately, I am at the bottom toe of this bell curve. My slippers are so full of questions that there is barely room enough to stuff my feet in. Lately, I just peer at them from my pillowy nest in the early morning and debate with myself whether or not it is worth it to wrestle with them again. "Fine, keep the slippers!" I say to them in the end, and pad up the wooden stairs barefoot (To tell the truth, it's the white peaches and milk that get me up).

I have been having strange dreams. I can't call them nightmares, but they are definitely not pleasant. I guess what disturbs me most about them is that they are becoming sharper and sharper, which I fear is a prelude to one of "The Dreams." They are all hypotheticals. It is as if my brain is taking possible pieces of my future off hangers and forcing my sleepy mind to put them on like shabby winter coats:

"I've got one, thanks! Black velvet from a thriftstore. Great deal, and it fits like a glove."
"Ah, but is it warm enough?"
"Of course! Got me through my first college winter, didn't it?"
"Maybe your body, but what about your heart? I can feel it frozen solid as a stone."
"That's not a stone, it's a turtle...it's hibernating."
"In the dead of summer?"
"It's from south of the equator!"
"Shell or stone, it's still heavy."
"I'll manage."
"Here, this one's got a nice breast pocket with padding...good for the arrows, eh? I'm sure your heart will thank you when it wakes up."

Really, I'll manage.

Lost In Translation

2007-07-25T05:22:02Z

I find more and more that I do not make sense when I try to write down my thoughts. Something goes missing in translation, like a faded stamp or pixelated jpeg...file incompatible...

I wish you could buy software to fix the problems of the mind.

It disturbs me, sometimes, how incapable I am of seeing how much I confuse people. It is like realizing that I am out of touch--one more removal from the world. Of course, I highly doubt that I am the first person to become frustrated with the fact that the world doesn't think like they do, only, this is not frustration over disagreement or skewed perspective. It feels too much like insanity...like waking up from a dream that made perfect sense while you were sleeping but slowly reveals itself to have been made of things like flight, dual identities, and gravity defied.

Language is so limited.

An Itch

2007-06-20T19:52:23Z

Lately I have been tossing ideas around for writing projects. For some reason that makes me uneasy--I still can't get over the feeling that I have way too much to learn about writing yet to start a serious project. I feel like if I start something, try to pin it down, it will just slip through my fingers and disappear. I told Jessie this and she frowned and said, "why not practice in the mean time?"

Why not indeed? Writers without either something to write about or the means to write it suffer, and I am beginning to feel the effects--poetry does a good job in curbing the itch, but only in bursts. I need a lasting preoccupation.

I suffer from the unfortunate problem that I am actually a poet. (Poets make good writers, no mistake about that: Jeanette Winterson and Markus Zusak, for example, have all the pretense of poetry in their writing; it is possible,.) What it means for me, though, is that I write with impressions in mind--with effects, with moods and atmospheres. Whenever I start to write a story, I become caught up in situation. I forget completely about "plot" because for me stories are in descriptions. Rather absurd, I know--this is the vast gap of unknown knowledge that I have yet to learn how to fill.

Behind Curtains

2007-06-11T01:03:40Z

It's days like this that I feel my identity to be a dark, sickened shadow. How can you live with yourself if you do not know who you are? I am sadness, poignancy, melancholy, despair, shame, desire, elation, poetry...I am light and dark, a continually splitting dichotomy...I am cluttered, confused, cloistered...inexplicable...

That's all well and good, but many people, whole countries, whole universes can be identified thus. There is only generality in such collections of nouns and adjectives--inevitably in all language. Language is but another metaphor-symbol removing things to one more layer, one more facet, one more nothing. What does the representation signify? Who are you under your control, your clothes, your skin, your flesh, your bones, your marrow, your cells, your soul...when the layers have been stripped away, what is left?

Who are you?

Day by day I offer tea and vitamins to this someone. I give it wants and goals and dreams...I try to give it answers...all the while never knowing who it is behind the curtain whispering softly, "that is all, you may go." I blink my eyes in the dimness, hesitating on the threshold, and the voice says, "close the door carefully on your way out; you might let the sun in." No. Give me answers for once.

I throw open the door and am blinded by light.

Meditation

2007-05-21T22:09:52Z

As a diversion from the apparent obsession with love and desire and disconnected connection that has been plaguing this journal the past few months, here is something different. I have been resolving to write something different for a while, but the nature of the topic that has its hold on me has a certain blind tenacity that yields only more and more circles. I feel like I'm self-destructing with sentimentality, as if I am digging my well deeper so as to drown.

As true or imagined as that may be, it leads me to ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I insist on laying down word after word after word as I do? My first judgment was a rather harsh one: I am just another melodramatic young girl desiring the glamor of being a writer. But I knew somehow that that was not quite right, just as I knew that perhaps such a culturally stigmatized stereotype as that was "not quite right." There is greater depth to everything than we can assume. There is something about language--about its rhythms and patterns, its delicate meanings, its layers of metaphor and symbol and human psychology, its inhuman humaness that makes it not desirable, but immediately and desperately necessary. I do not want to write; I need to write.

I have been reading Byatt (Babble Tower) and have been thinking on and off in the usual fading out then fading in way about the difference between symbols and metaphors. After thought, I concluded that metaphors are comparisons and symbols are representations or substitutions; the result of this was a kind of purring, contented flexing of my grammatical being, as if some tense preoccupation with a chaotic element had been reduced and contained. The walls were secure. And yet, my philosophical being (which presides over the delighted destruction of all walls) stirred to life and asked insistently, persistently, but what is the difference? Are not they really, for the sake of understanding, simply the same thing? At their roots they are both simple and perhaps inherently unmerited associations of the mind; the sea is not the sky, is not iron, is not an elephant's hide, is not the soul, after all--it is simply the sea. And I seized on the word unmerited--I knew that it was wrong, as the first words I think of for descriptive purposes usually are--but it had something to say nevertheless. I could not grasp at it fully, only sense that such a judgment (while philosophically interesting) was not right. It possessed an air of that stagnant, incongruous declaration that "nothing matters."

At this moment I am reading on the deck overlooking the canyon, the bay in the distance, reading Byatt while playing instrumentals on this computer. I took a pause at a beat of the book and looked up, contemplating what Byatt meant by separation, connection, and this word laminations that she finds great meaning in, and saw a cooper's hawk wheeling above the trees on the ridge. I heard it making its piercing cries (it was now, and probably had been all the while I was reading) and remembered a meditation of a high school journal that explored the deep significance of the image and sound of hawks to my childhood world: the freedom, the fierce independence that was also abstract, removed, and faintly lonely, the dichotomy of emotional strength and weakness...I remembered seeing a hawk up close at the zoo and wondering at how all the emotions I felt upon hearing a hawk-cry were echoed upon seeing the look in its fiercely swivelling eye...I remembered the hawk turning its head to display the empty, ravaged socket of its second dead eye and feeling that it was one of the saddest sights I had ever seen...I rememberd struggling to characterize that haunting "she" of nearly all of my latest entries and falling upon the image of the wild, wounded animal...

I stopped. I recognized that here again was that sentimentality that I haven't know how to judge: a string of metaphors and symbols that are really the same as each other. The difference is unmerited-- whether or not they are symbols or metaphors is irrelevent, for they are all pointless, meaningless. Stagnant. My childhood is my childhood. The bird is a bird. She is she. All isolated from each other, irrelevant to the identity of each other, ultimately separated.

I stopped again. I knew those judgments were wrong--I have spent my whole education battling them and understanding how I came to be taught them as such inherent truths. For I now believe that there is something critically important about them. I seemed to reach a grasping, glimmering understanding of what Byatt means by separation and connection, and my disagreement with her apparently sterile "laminations." Life, and the mind that lives it, is neither a streaming, linear movement of logic nor a stagnant state of "nothing matters;" it is multi-faceted, it is layered, it is intricately, indelibly, associatively, meaningfully connected. There is no streaming--there are contained, defined, separated elements that connect. Separated connection.

This is my crumb on ebb and flow, my deep well, my wounded cats and birds, my California cliffs, my flashlights in Paris, my alder trees, my spun sugar, my faceted perpspectives of love--it is meaning, understanding, clarity--sentimentality, yes, but feeling at its heart. This is why I live.

This is why I write.

Punch-Drunk Delerium

2007-03-18T19:25:29Z

I never understood the aphorism "spring fever" until coming here. Now, I feel as if some new capacity for new depths of emotion has been opened to me--in a vast dimension of ways, of course, but most particularly in how I experience the seasons. Living in this place of winter has made me look back on my life as one perpetual summer, a singular, streaming season of fickle moods and momentary periods of placidity and torrent stitched together to form the year; here I have witnessed fundamental change. I have soaked in the purest hues of fall--bloody russets, rich golds, a vast rainbow of browns--and then seen it all fall to ruin, like a violent coup d'etat. There is no playful fickleness in how this new world turns; there are upheavals and defiances, overthrows and extremes.

Most of all, however, I have learned to be cold. As absurd as it sounds, I don't believe I've ever know what being cold is until living here--cold at home is a surface annoyance. Like a lake that crusts over with ice, cold is a small, perimeter victory that holds no sway over the eternal life beneath, below, within. Now I joke in phone conversations to family members that I have forgotten what it feels like to be warm--the cold and wetness have seeped so deep that I imagine my very bones are cracking and popping with ice. I feel frozen through and through, even when I am holed in the comfort of indoors with a cup of tea.

In so many ways I have learned to live with extremes. Spring seems like just another metaphor for it--there is no gentle sensing of changing air currents or subtle shitfs in the sky's color here, no peripheral flicker of foliage adapting to vacillating moods. Here the clouds open to let in the sun and I feel drunk, dizzy and inebriated by warmth. Another violent revolution seems on the verge of exploding.