You do it to yourself

You’re drafting this on the back of a printed-out OED definition and etymology of the word “presume.” This is by chance but you have to wonder why you knowingly, on some level, but mostly unconsciously, bypassed the word “universe.” Nevermind, this pointless, circular analysis is not why are came here. You came here to put together thoughts that have been tossing around in your head like seeds in a tin can. You want to connect how Watts’ Hope is why our world is different now, why you can use Dad’s health insurance for five years longer, with the disaster and heartache and emotional shipwreck of Haiti–why you feel obligation and helplessness in equal measure. Why maybe it feels like the world will end. And how long can this cultural preoccupation with apocalypse go on before it happens to us or we let it happen to us or we do it to ourselves as the ultimate and maybe inevitable apotheosis or manifestation of this mass obsession? Sometimes you use words not because it’s the right word, but because you don’t know what other word to use. You want to write about your mother maybe dying. “How this makes you feel.” All the memories of her that you begin to drudge up–the decent ones, the ones you wouldn’t mind sharing with strangers, even the strangers who read what you write on the fundamental assumption of oversharing, which is what this blog is–are of your youth, specifically pre-high school. When the “family” was divided more distinctly into “sides” and you knew which one you wanted to be on. It was the right side and you felt good about that, very secure in that unequivocal knowledge. Hatred and your meaningful silences are not as simple anymore.

Found this scribbled on the back of an 8-page OED printout. I must have been distracted in the library. Around January or so.

In the sunset of dissolution

I’ve been drugging myself to get to sleep the past few days. It’s the only thing that works, though it feels sort of sinister, like I’m holding myself hostage and going under is when I can perpetrate nefarious deeds upon myself. Sleep is escape and oblivion, cliche but true, it feels good, it feels like nothing which is good. So why does it also feel laced with guilt, like I’m cheating? This whole mess sometimes has an air of the universe grabbing me by the shoulders and turning me in the opposite direction I was facing, sun now all in my eyes, the blinding truth, and whispering forcefully into my ear, “Feel THIS.” And every time I sleep for no other reason than to avoid, I am shielding my eyes and covering my ears all at once and refusing to feel it. I think I resent the childish way I handled everything, the hollow, barbed comments I shot, the accusations I slung that I didn’t believe in, the petulant, vindictive impulse to make him feel as bad as I do and to prolong it. The part of me that is smart and objective wants to learn from this. That part of me is sounding fainter and fainter daily, either I’ve stifled her completely or she has just given up. Which means I have given up.

Fall is here. It was hot out today, but autumn has definitely arrived. It’s getting colder in the Midwest, and whenever something happens out west I assume it will eventually make its way to me, everything moving always to the right like lines in a book. I depend on that inevitability perhaps too much. Leaves are falling, the sun is falling, the temperature is falling, everything is falling. Fall. As I write this the sun has dropped almost completely. No more blinding light. If you ignore something for long enough it will get fainter and fainter and duller until it’s gone.

There’s a regular at 61C who plays a Yamaha keyboard outside and comes in for a coffee hourly. He tips a dollar for each cup of coffee so the baristas here listen to his insane ramblings with a mixture of deference, pity, and detached interest. He has thick lips and a bushy black moustache. I wonder where he lives. “I’m trying to re-discover what I knew how to do at age five,” he says emphatically, with the sort of tone that AA participants use to talk about the time they were on the verge of going over the edge and were pulled back by the merciful hand of God. How they almost lost everything. Hit rock bottom, saw the light, finally came up for air gasping and sputtering, gave themselves up to that higher power. When they decide to finally annihilate and then discard the shrapnel of their broken will. “It’s never too late,” says the barista noncommittally, assuming he’s talking about his keyboard. I can see it from where I’m sitting, straddling two cafe tables like a saw horse.

It’s dark now. Sky the same color and texture as my navy suede heels that are starting to blister my skin. I’ve been wearing them all day because I think I look good in them and they make me feel pretty, but now they just hurt. Everything’s a metaphor now. And now that it’s nighttime I can’t shake the feeling that I wasted the sunlight while I had it. Am still wasting it even in that knowledge. Like I’m steeping in this regret and resentment until there is no more to soak up, until I’m indistinguishable from those poisonous feelings when I should be trying to learn, and in learning move on. Just, go forth. I still can’t. One day I will not feel this way, and maybe not even remember what this feels like, but what I hate more than anything is that I can’t see that point anywhere on the horizon. It exists somewhere, maybe, in that nebulous pitch of the night. If I had been paying attention when it mattered, it might have been discernible. For now it feels like some myth, a dream. Dreams are for dreamers. Oblivion is for me.

The child of a moment ago enters without a word

Kiva Han was out of the fruit they use in the granola bowl I usually order–all of it, apparently–and six dollars is too much to pay for milk and cereal so I just got a muffin. It was stale and made the pads of my fingers sticky. I drank my coffee with the lid off, so it was cold before I could finish it. Skim milk swirling, the surface looked like that day’s sky, which possessed the same dull, gray flatness as an old road. They had given me a large cup in apology for the granola, though I had paid for a small. Even though I had said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

I found myself across the street at the Carnegie Museum. My half-full cup found itself in a trashcan on Forbes. Into a black room, small, three short films projected onto a wall each, like the allegory of the cave. They were silent, the only noises were the clicking and whirring of projectors. There was only one film with a bench in front of it, so I sat and watched that one first. Its title was “Punctured.” It was almost cinematic in its presentation, with the projector hidden and the bench a certain distance in front of it, the projection sort of larger-than-life, totally occupying my field of vision. The shot begins as a close-up of a black hole, a dark, blotted imperfection on an old photograph. 1930s, America, Depression-era. Always something so stagey about images from that time, as if they were taken to conform to our nostalgic, non-experienced conception of it. The grayscale tones only enhance that feeling. Of course, how can an era be aware of its condition as an era? It’s not one until it is remembered as such. Nostalgia cannot be lived, but only applied secondhand. Therefore nothing about the floral frocks, long felt coats with collars upturned, fedoras, and general stores with their hand-painted signs advertising malted milk for a nickel would have seemed to the subjects of those photographs quaint, simple, adorable…nostalgic. The effect of the black spot and the zooming out from the center of it is that the content sort of materializes around it, quickly building up from Nothing–emptiness, darkness–to pieces, parts, then a recognizable tableaux, and once a discernible scene is visible, the camera’s lens has reached the boundaries of the photograph and you realize the knowability of that image is absolutely finite and limited. The black splotch, rather than seeming an elimination of form and content as it would in a normal slide show, is now something spatially positive–a palpable nothingness. Everything physical that appears around it is a chipping away of that blankness, the image itself is a negation of nothingness. The absence of form becomes more significant than the forms themselves, proven by the fact that those “imperfections” were why these particular photographs were selected for the film. The blot is now the primary accepted element of each image, rather than that which renders it rejectable. In fact it is the singular element that threads together all the images. The viewer can only witness the whole image because of its glaring imperfection, the black void near its center. There is something deeply existential there. At the same time, it is not a slide show. It would have been an entirely different art work as a set of slides, blanking in and out of existence instead of scoping. The rapid, outward movement is crucial. Each photograph, from the center of its black dot to the outer edges of the shot, is visible for about two seconds.

There seem to be a lot of blind people in this city. Every time I’m on a bus, someone is sitting on one of the front benches with a dog or a cane and looks as though they are asleep and surprised at the same time. Extra alert to compensate for their blindness. I always wonder what they see exactly, if it’s a blurry, smudged version of the visible world, or if it’s just blackness. Or something else I haven’t been able to conceive of yet. Montaigne says we cannot trust our senses to present reality to us in its complete form, if reality is even capable of manifesting itself in a form that can be described as complete. Sight is subjective, dependent on light and nerves and no two sets of eyes see precisely the same way. Even if everyone saw perfectly, there is no way to know what other senses might exist that could take in all the information the universe has to offer. We can’t imagine them because we can only know what is familiar to us, what pertains to our experience as humans with limitations. When I see these blind people on buses, I always think about how limited they are as humans. But in fact they are only marginally less capable than everyone else. People are all limited and crippled in some way. They always seem to know when their stop is approaching and shrug off assistance from the presumptuous and sighted. And I wonder if any of their other senses have sharpened to compensate for the loss of one. Do they hear more, or better? Is their sense of smell more acute? I remember something I noticed as a child, that the scent of flowers is stronger in the dark.

This week is different from any other week for me because it is prefaced with the strongest heartbreak of my life, from what was incidentally also the shortest relationship of my life. It’s funny in a stupid way because this time I was the one who was ready to be with someone, ready to commit to another person, ready to not be alone again. I was completely invested in the idyllic visions of our future together that I couldn’t help but conjuring. I always thought I was beyond the youthful idealism of my peers, but it’s simultaneously necessary and hurtful to be reminded so forcefully that I am exactly twenty-two years old.  You think you’re wise beyond your years and then you do something so embarrassingly cliché that will make you never forget again that you are living the same life that billions of humans have lived before you and will continue to live after you. Furthermore, the feeling of smallness, of vulnerability, and of general susceptibility to the world at large is something you don’t mature past or learn how to conquer. That child is ever lingering in the eaves and darkened wings of your heart, stepping forth in your worst moments to make you remember what you are. You feel totally isolated from the uncaring, unburdened masses all around you. But everyone has felt this. If they haven’t, they will. I have to assume that either I am the only one feeling as though I’m always trying to Get Over, or everyone is. I’m not sure which is a more consoling thought.

(I always slip into the second person when talking about my feelings, somehow. Always trying to put distance between my head and my heart. At times it sounds more accusatory than anything. That you. And I feel I should apologize for the artless, unpoetic prose of the last paragraph.)

I ride the 64 bus home from work. At night the buses are long, transparent prisms of light gliding through darkness. The yellow pools spilling from streetlamps are like buoys, reassuring you every second or so of your precise boundaries. If I focus my eyes right, I don’t see the reflection of the bus’s interior when I look at the window. It is just blackness, a void. Why is that emptiness so attractive to me? It never lasts long before variegated heads and steel poles filter into my view, chipping away at the infinite exterior from within. The bus’s electronic marquee  is reflected in the window at which I’m staring, scrolling the names of neighborhoods backwards, looping endlessly. The letters are square and chunky from the individual round lights that compose each one like huge pixels. They remind me of the Lite-Brite toy from my childhood, and suddenly the faint smell of molded plastic being warmed by electricity wafts by me only, a figment. What did I design with those colored pegs? The same things I doodle on notebook paper today. Flowers, spirals. Cartoonish things. Illuminated from behind.

There are no blind people on this bus tonight. Just me, ever facing a transient darkness, and these other people and things that intrude on it. All of us looking, seeing, never learning anything about the world or each other. There’s no comfort in all of that. Leave me to my nothingness.

The Kiss

All in all, she was pretty happy with him. He was funny in a sidelong sort of way and looked good in bookish glasses. He did have trouble dealing with her morning mood swings (after nights when she didn’t get much sleep, usually for no real reason) and judged her silently for still using blue putty to hang posters on her bedroom walls like some college freshman. But framing was expensive and drilling was a pain, and she refused to let a wrinkled Klimt print with worn corners stand in the way of a healthy relationship. It was in that spirit that she didn’t push the subject of deciding what “their song” would be because she knew he thought it was so prosaic. The way he had half-smirked at her when she casually brought it up and said “Yeah, right” had told her all she needed to know about his opinion of relationship anthems. The sort of thing high school kids did when they were caught in that relentless hearts-in-the-eyes stage of “love,” which wasn’t exactly love but was rather a less direct way of engaging in youthful self-obsession. She remembered feeling that her every movement, every inflection in her speech was in some way being witnessed by whatever boy she was throwing herself into at the time. Seeing herself through the shallow eyes of boyfriends accounted for every self-conscious hair-flip and lip-bite, the rhythm with which she strolled down the hallways, arms crossed over binders and books pressed to her chest. The feeling was nearly filmic, as though constantly starring in every major and minor scene of a movie. Performing herself, perfecting that act. She understood perfectly his condemnation of that reflexive selfishness in his “Yeah, right.” What annoyed her wasn’t his insistence on being so very Adult about their relationship and the quirky proclivities thereof, but his refusal to let her look at herself always or even sometimes through the lens of Him. Any superfluous twist of her hair went brutally ignored as a reminder that she had not enticed him, or drawn him; he had chosen her. She looked up at the Klimt poster stuck to the wall over her bed. She had always found it romantic and pleasantly decorative. Looking now, the paper-white woman appeared mangled and bent under her lover’s pressing kiss. His skin was swarthier than hers and the contrast made both look sickly. Rigid and unyielding fingers pulling her to his mouth, his face hidden, hers so open and bared. The woman had turned her face away from his lips either out of coyness or resistance. It was impossible to tell for the flatness of the painting and simplicity of design.

She felt altogether humiliated for reasons that were too complicated to articulate. She ripped down the poster and threw it in the open closet. Slammed the door. She didn’t tell him not to come over later but when he did she felt hunched and bloodless and avoided his kiss.

So far away

Everyone in this coffee shop seems to be banging loudly on something for some reason. These two old men are playing cards. I can’t tell what game. Some Old Person Game like canasta or rummy, probably, I assume. Whenever the man whose face I can see shuffles, he bangs the deck hard on the edge of the round table, maybe to align their edges, or test their tensile durability. A good solid pack of cards is something you can hold in your hand and contain with three fingers and trust in completely. Of course any uncontained deck of cards can be scattered by the mere horizontal brush of an errant hand. A forceful exhalation of breath.

The barista empties the used cakes of ground espresso by banging the extractor on the sink. For another example.

I told myself I would write something worth posting tonight.

I have this memory of when I used to live in California. Because it’s a Californian memory, it means I can’t be older than four. My then-boyfriend, Joey A., is involved. (There were two Joeys in daycare. I don’t remember what the A was for. Anderson, maybe. Allen. Adler. No clue.) This episode is probably embellished heavily by 18 years of reminiscing and reimagining. But what I remember is a house in the middle of this vast field. Not a field. Whatever a huge amount of berry bushes is considered, if there is even a term for a certain quantity of berry bushes. So many rows that from even a marginal distance it all converges into a vast abstract pattern. Blackberry bushes. I should have mentioned that.

I don’t remember the picking, or the thorns, but I do remember the baskets of berries and the scrapes. At that age, nothing is knee-high, everything overtakes you. When you reach into a bush, there is no kneeling, there is no condescending attitude towards it. As an adult, you sink to the level of the bush, you understand the perils of putting your hand in there, there might be thorns or some sort of mostly harmless insect, but you’re not afraid of them because of your ability to preempt their existence and also because of your superior size, comparatively. But when you’re four, it’s different. I don’t need to explain how or why…you just have never, for example, touched a stove, so you don’t know that it’s hot and that you shouldn’t. And just because this bush is thorny doesn’t necessarily mean the next will be, and so on. And whereas when you’re older you approach things of nature with this intrinsically dominating attitude that comes from years of learning about evolution and food chains and how paper is made and so bushes, little thickets of wood and quaint berries, are plaintively seen as this thing that we really don’t even have to bother ourselves with but do on occasion on some nostalgic impulse or due to some stupid notion of purity relating to hunter-gatherers, our ancestors who ate food this way and knew where it came from and touched it themselves instead of choosing the most attractive basket on a shelf in a sterile grocery store where little overhead sprinklers mist the fruits and vegetables to keep away insects which were probably born and will probably die in that very store, totally alienating this picked and sorted fruit from its original state of dirt and falling on the ground and rotting and total physical connection to its environment–on a twig on a branch on a bush in the soil in a forest or field. Hand-picking blackberries is a pure act by way of being dirtier, a simple act by way of being much more time-consuming and complicated for the individual than the grocery store method. But children have no concept of returning to some state that can’t really even be described as the “natural” state anymore, they pick blackberries because they’re there and someone suggested it to them and told them how to apply pressure to the berry so it snaps off its branch but doesn’t burst and how to drop them in the basket on your arm and to keep doing this until you have a good amount. For children, there is just the doing of the act, and there is no meaning behind it. It is literal. And whereas adults have this pre-determined notion of what a blackberry bush means and is, what it used to mean and what it should mean, children conceive of them in a totally opposite manner, in a way that is both, again, extremely literal and extremely fanciful. The bush is a bush and the picking exists for itself, but who knows what else could be inside the bush besides slender wooden limbs and serrated leaves and fruit? It could be anything. In children’s stories, innocuous objects and locations are portals to surreal worlds, rabbit holes lead into Wonderland and wardrobes lead into Narnia etc. Wonderland and Narnia, just as examples, are both magical and perilous. Every one of Alice’s experiences present some existential drama or a confrontation with the absurd, which conceptually is terrifying in ways that children will not comprehend until their sophomore year of college, but on a more basic level how absolutely frightening is it to fall down a hole of unknown depth and then shrink almost to nonexistence and then nearly drown? Even Alice never seems to actually mind the pain and confusion of her journey, she is just fascinated by whatever is next. And to me that is what a blackberry bush is to a four-year-old girl and her male companion whom she will consider her first boyfriend. It’s an ellipsis followed by a question mark, a statement turned wryly into a question, a fact turned into an unknown.

Whenever I think about this memory, I find myself always focusing on the aesthetic elements of it. The indigo stain of burst berries all over small hands. Sunlight so intense that it saturates the air and makes everything solid seem like negative space cut out of a white sheet of paper maybe; brightness that pools around the silhouettes of things and eats away at their edges. Dry heat. It doesn’t feel like work but it doesn’t feel like play either.

And then stomping up unpainted wooden stairs, into a house, then a kitchen where two adult women are sitting, all huge and grandiose with this air of being aware of so much infinitely more than I am or Joey A. is or will ever be. A sense of approval exists now in the room. There are enough blackberries for whatever they’re intended to be in. There is the idea of pie…maybe there is one on the table or maybe the berries are going inside one. The way I remember this is almost as if the berries transform immediately into the pie; I look in the basket and there are the berries, then I look on the table and there they are inside of a pie that has been cooked. This is the most surreal element of this memory and makes me think I might have dreamed it instead of experienced it, but it’s so so far away that I’m not really sure that distinction matters at all.

After the idea of a pie is established, the cuts and scrapes become all at once apparent to me. I realize they’re the color of blood even though there is no blood really flowing and that scares me, I assume I’m in extreme pain even though I’m not so much, broken skin signifies fear and crying and so that is what I do, and the attitude of the two women is so glib, like what a childish thing to do, to cry over dozens of little breaks in my skin. In this memory or dream I feel betrayed by these women for letting me get hurt, for understanding that these bushes had thorns in them and that even little sticks can scrape the epidermis and for not telling me, for not stopping me from all that picking due to the fact that I would acquire these cuts all over, for treating it like some mundane thing. As if Alice came back from Wonderland still the size of an unlabeled tonic bottle and everyone thought it was the most natural thing. Please just notice this transformation I underwent. Please respond to it. Please care about it. Please anything.

Hope

This is the teaser for my research topic that was handed out before I was to present it to my fellowship group.

Can a single work of art shape the destiny of an entire modern nation? It seems like a stretch to even think so, but in fact the political landscape of the contemporary United States could be vastly different from what we know it to be today if not for a certain painting by Victorian artist G.F. Watts.

In 1886, Watts painted Hope, an allegorical work depicting a blindfolded woman on a desolate globe, plucking the last remaining string on her lyre. It is a cynical, modified representation of a rare classical subject that some critics have said would be more accurately titled “Despair.” Despite its visual gloominess and eventual descent into relative obscurity within the pantheon of art historical masterpieces, Hope made its way into a series of lectures, sermons, writings, and political speeches, all leading up to and including the political campaign of Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

In my presentation, I will first detail the extremely serendipitous circumstances under which this topic manifested itself to me, then give a brief overview of Watt’s biography and oeuvre. After providing a formal analysis of the painting Hope, I will precisely trace a series of textual references to it, beginning with a 1980s lecture by a Michigan pastor which inspired a 1990 sermon by Chicago-based Reverend Jeremiah Wright, entitled “The Audacity to Hope.” Present for this sermon was a young Barack Obama, whose susceptibility to Wright’s influence may already be evident by the aforementioned title. Over the course of almost two decades, Obama simultaneously internalized and transformed the theme of hope that he inherited from Wright, expertly crafting it into wildly effective political rhetoric. Finally, I will analyze the now iconic poster HOPE, designed by Chicago street artist Shepard Fairey on commission by Obama himself, specifically comparing Obama’s brand of hope therein to Watts’.

This comparison will illustrate the mutation of that singular idea over time through particular texts and interpretations by individuals. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the legitimate influence that Watts’ painting did in fact exert over our political future. The boundaries between art-as-therapeutic and art-as-propaganda are not as distinct and unassuming as we like to think.

Because I could not stop for death

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers.

Yesterday I was 45 minutes late for work.

Well, to begin with I was already running about 10 minutes late. I had lingered too long making sure my morning croissant was toasty and subsequently missed my usual bus by a hair, and had to wait about 8 minutes for the next one. The Piccadilly line was slow as usual, and by the time I had gotten on a District line train at Hammersmith I knew I was going to be a good ten or twelve minutes late. As I was waiting for the train to come, I kept hoping for some miraculous delay so that I could claim it was the train’s fault, not mine.

The order of stops goes like this, once you’re out of Ealing (which is where I live): Turnham Green, Hammersmith, Baron’s Court, Earl’s Court, Gloucester Road. When we hit Baron’s Court, the train stopped and the conductor said over the intercom: “This train will not be continuing on this line, and all District and Circle lines are hereby suspended, as somebody has gone under the train at Earl’s Court.”

It took me a good seven seconds to register what that meant. When I realized, I felt as though I had been winded and a stone had dropped to the pit of my stomach. To my shock, no one in my car reacted at all. Not a gasp or even a murmur, just some heavy sighs as some realized they would be immeasurably late for work. 

Everyone was crowing around this single Underground worker who was dispensing advice for alternate routes. She was trying to restore some order to the situation, but everyone seemed to be both frustrated and misinformed. At some point, a gruff, authoritative old man with a cane said clearly, “It’s simple, you see. Someone has committed suicide in front of a train at Earl’s Court, and so the electricity has been removed from those tracks. Therefore the District and Circle lines are no longer running today.” For some reason everyone listened to him; he was the type of old man who might give you the bag of magic beans in a fairy tale, or knowingly impart some ominous fortune to you that eventually comes true. I ended up having to get back on the Piccadilly to Holborn and take a line I’d never been on before to a stop slightly farther away from Guildhall than my usual one.

All day long, I felt like I was in a Camus novel. These are the things I could not stop considering: That I was supposed to be on that very District line train instead of the one behind it. That I had wished for an excusable delay, and had gotten it just minutes afterwards. What the conductor had seen. How the person standing behind the jumper must have felt when he leapt. Whether he had simply fallen straight onto the tracks from the platform at the right moment, or if he or he had walked deep into the tunnel until he met the oncoming train. How many of the unwilling spectators would need therapy. Which person had the macabre job of cleaning the mess. The huge number of daily routines that experienced slight or major hiccups. The fact that no one seemed to care. How someone decides they want to die at 10:08 AM in front of a District line conductor and dozens of anonymous people and disturb everyone’s day. How someone can propel themselves over the edge like that. How many people throw themselves in front of a train every year in London (50, I found out later).

After that, I’ve started staring at that thick yellow line that runs all down the platform, demarcating the beginning of the “gap” you are supposed to mind. There is absolutely nothing there to prevent you from falling onto the tracks if you suddenly wanted to. I always remember that Milan Kundera says that vertigo is not the fear of falling, but the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, “the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” I will never forget that quote. I have been feeling vertigo in varying degrees since 10:08 yesterday morning.

It’s not even that I am irked by the fundamental selfishness of the act of suicide. Whether suicide is selfish or not is something about which I am undecided. Hume believes no one ever ended their life “while it was worth keeping.” Maybe that is true, I’m not smart enough or in possession of the correct sensibilities to be sure. But the whole episode of this suicide and the mundane attitudes surrounding it reminded me heavily of being in a lit class reading Mrs. Dalloway, and the same girl who had a problem with Clarissa’s stream of consciousness because she didn’t think it was realistic to dwell on mortality as one crossed the street to the florist shop was the same girl who was ethically offended at the condoning of Septimus’s leap from his apartment window–his suicide. “I think it’s selfish,” she had said, rather sanctimoniously. I argued against her for the sake of combating sanctimoniousness but wasn’t basing my retort on any sort of moral certainty. What I liked about this real-life instance of random suicide–or at least found rather neat, tidy–was how it wedged this undercurrent of mortality into the otherwise predictable ebb and flow of an urban London morning. It positioned the suicide in the realm of the rebellious, of resistance. Septimus could not subscribe to England’s institutionalized tenets of Conversion and Proportion, he couldn’t separate his internal experiences from his external ones, so his only choice was to separate himself from the world in which he could not functionally exist. It was liberation, and by denying the mainstream, it was also revolution. The sense of  tidiness I felt probably came from the fact that it seemed almost as if Woolf had predicted this very event specifically for me. In London, of all places.

This is from the blog I kept when I lived in London in 2008. It is so typically me in its overwrought high-mindedness…it’s almost comical.

Beautification

This is a Letter to the Editor I wrote tonight regarding a recent article in the Pitt News. [EDIT: A slightly clipped version of this letter was just published in the April 22 issue.]

This is a response to Jenelle Pifer’s article about Bob Ziller’s mural painting initiatives around Pittsburgh. Murals are ubiquitous in just about every Pittsburgh neighborhood, most noticeably in ones which are, as the article describes them, “run-down.” Many of these murals are valuable and effective: for example, some carry strong overtones of environmental sustainability. Shepard Fairey’s recent murals publicly exhibit provocative content while implicitly legitimizing Pittsburgh as a fosterer of relevant and marketable art. While I appreciate the role that well-executed murals can play in affecting the collective consciousness of residents in an urban community, as well as the power that its content can have to influence ideas and galvanize action, an essential criticism is decidedly absent from Pittsburgh’s dependence on them. 

Murals should not be considered a solution for anything except how to make a particular exterior wall more aesthetically pleasing. “Beautification” is an accurate term for what it describes–it makes underdeveloped areas seem prettier by covering them in paint. In fact, murals do nothing to solve the problem of abandoned and/or dilapidated buildings, of which there are disturbingly many in Pittsburgh. A lot is being done to renovate buildings in historic districts so that they may be repurposed and become useful to the community or potential residents (East Carson St. is a perfect example of how successful redevelopment can be), but the problem of downtrodden areas remains a major one for Pittsburgh. When the G-20 came to Pittsburgh, I was saddened to see abandoned buildings covered with flashy banners in areas through which dignitaries might pass. It seemed disingenuous to Pittsburgh’s claim as a progressive city in the midst of an economic and cultural renaissance of sorts.

While Ziller’s accomplishments in community-building should be applauded and his efforts taken seriously, it is important to realize that, ultimately, murals are to problem areas what very colorful Band-Aids are to broken legs. They “beautify,” but they do not in any way fix the real socioeconomic issues at stake for run-down buildings and neighborhoods. Making a neglected building more appealing from the sidewalk does not mean our job is done there.

And of course you can’t go without that

she’s looking for things
before my great-grandfather goes on a trip
to teach at a university
i believe that’s what the song is about
she’s running around the house 
fetching his things
funny to think he’d travel with his file/drill and clam shells
I believe by drill she meant a hand drill that he’d use to crack the shells into various shapes
then he’d file the edges
so they were soft
before he’d fit them together
the color of the clam shells go from white to blue/purple
and various shades between

 

Ed Droste on the inspiration for “Marla” (on Yellow House). His great-great-aunt went to New York to be a singer, failed, and drank until she died at 40. She sang the original lyrics to piano accompaniment. Her recording sounds the way old things should: grayscale, distant, muffled, wavering with vibrato. Vaguely haunted.

I might make more of this later on.

(Via)

In vino veritas

From my old blog, over a year ago. I was very drunk and it was very late.

Isn’t it amazing how skin seals up, it jsut heals and sews up and devours wounds the way quicksand devours things. even the worst cuts go away but they don’t just go away, disappear, they get swallowed up by more skin. if only the mind or feelings were like that, or if it is like that, if only it were as fastas skin. 

what did Dali mean by hanging a fired egg by a string. what is holding up the string and why is it tied to the end of a fried egg. The yolk isn’t solid it’s bright red and slding off the egg white and the shape is like a testicle. and the thing next to it looks like a giant carrot but I can’t tell because the lamp in the corner is covering up the rest of it. and is an egg nailed to the wall too? I’ve never noticed that before. Everything else is typical dali but the sky is a sunset a typical sunset it reminds me f a book I read when I was very young about a young indian boy who instead of hunting was told by the sky gods to paint so he painted a sunset using various pigments made from plants the gods led him to and with brushes made of animal fure and as he painted the sunset it appeared before him, in the sky. What did dali mean by the vertical fried egg held up by a string. It’s probably sexual like the rest of his such. The lugubrious game etc.

It’s so funny how some people know ecactly what is wrong with them but they dont want to get away form it. I know exactly what is wrong with me and so does M and so do other people..I guess I don’t get them enough credit for being introspective I always think I must be the only one who things about things in a serious manner but what do other people think about if not themselves. I always wonder what people think about me but people never think about you they just wonder what you think about them. But the remaining question is why we are so relctant to change ourselves when we know it just screws us up, we don’t want to change, it’s like how i said sometimes my sadness is another friend, when it’s not here for a long time I miss it and I like the way I am with it. we all jsut seem chained to these things that we know are bad. but we love them. and we love who we are with them. or maybe just too used to it.

I was thinking today on the bus as I tend to do that I always say the humantities are more important because they essentially cater to the soul and the sciences cater to the body and what importance would the body have if not for the soul. but I also don’t believe in the soul, my intellectual side which is much much stronger admittedly than my spiritual side says that every emotion is just chemistry, it’s all various synaptic reactions in the mind reacting to extrenal stimuli and nothing is really reall. So why do I love so strongly and why is it only that one person and not everyone and why can’t i just write it off as chemistry in my brain and not real love. why are humans always irrational when we get down to it. is this how we are not like robots? am I being fooled by my body’s own chemistry? and if there is no soul then what am I doing studying art and novels and plays and europe? it must be something else. as an existentialist i know the idea of a soul is just a delusion to mask the crushing truth of the inevitability of death and the futility of life and the meaning of life being that we are to enjoy ourselves. and that is why I love history and literature and art and music ad infinitum because it all has this unreal quality to it, it is as real and unreal as religion and politics adn causes and the sherbert colors of a sofia coppola film are as significant as the crucifixion. loving these makes the shortness of this life bearable and sensical so I will continue to love them and whoever I want. I will love rococo and beat poetry and him because it is the only way that I know how to live. i can and i want to and it might be the only thing that lasts as long as I do. I must also mention that I intend to get my hair cut tomorrow.