through the green fuse

What is important is keeping a hold on the telescope (which is to say, the total of events and circumstances which one currently perceives), remembering that what is visible at this point is not the sum of all things but a very limited set of the possible outcomes and junctures which will or may one day become apparent.

Not collapsing everything into one crisis. This is what they called perspective (when I took drawing class), and I was never good at it.

What isn't seen. What can't be predicted. What is unpredicatable, unverbalizable until it happens. What is not known--it is difficult because it is uncontrollable by its nature. But still important, somehow (many hows).

Hob hej.

poems

Here and here.

And my book's been nominated, and is now a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Hob hej. Pretty surreal.

a lover's discourse

The writing I'm doing right now is about ethic--about the systems each person forms to understand the world and relate to the other/Other. I'm writing about these systems particularly as they intersect with instances of love--systems of love or of renewal of affection and care between and among individuals--and with aesthetic--the beautiful.

Today one of my friends told me that since I've come to England he's seen me change, become comfortable with my own difference. Become more fully able in that difference. To me this means I've become more open, more able to give affection and love. I do feel like I'm expanding.

My research feels very integral now to who I am and who I want to be.

As I write this I sit in my office, sharing a desk with my friend K., thinking about how much the world fills itself with wonder, beauty, joy, and something like the edge of pain. How much has happened--will happen--that is not easy. But I do think, and my reading and thinking here is only convincing me more of this, that approaching the world and the changes with love and openness is the best way forward.

(A Lover's Discourse is one of the books I'm using in my research; it's by Roland Barthes.)

event * more of the same

Documentation is surely the most difficult part. Or the easiest part, just reflection on the event (not the event itself).

I need to read some Badiou, apparently. Event. And love, too--what about that! Thinking about how the lover (oh, Roland, you are my philosopher-boyfriend) collects documentation from the world--and is given documentation by (and gives documentation to) the beloved--in order to continuously prove that what has happened actually happened (and keeps happening). A willful prolongation of the event.

More of the same is here.

菊次郎の夏 ＊ beautiful film week

This is the song "Summer," from the soundtrack of Takeshi Kitano's film Kikujiro (in Japanese, Kikujirou no Natsu--the summer of Kikujirou). There's lots I love about Japanese film in general that is represented here--the everydayness of it, the playfulness, the mingling of the surreal and the realistic. And of course I love to hear Japanese spoken. But what touched me most about this movie was how strongly it seemed to me to say yes to love and to acts of generosity.

(The soundtrack is beautiful, too.)

(Abby's posts.)

because my life without you

University Hospital, Boston
(Mary Oliver, American Primitive)

The trees on the hospital lawn
are lush and thriving. They too
are getting the best of care,
like you, and the anonymous many,
in the clean rooms high above this city,
where day and night the doctors keep
arriving, where intricate machines
chart with cool devotion
the murmur of the blood,
the slow patching-up of bone,
the despair of the mind.

When I come to visit and we walk out
into the light of a summer day,
we sit under the trees—
buckeyes, a sycamore and one
black walnut brooding
high over a hedge of lilacs
as old as the red-brick building
behind them, the original
hospital built before the Civil War.
We sit on the lawn together, holding hands
while you tell me: you are better.

How many young men, I wonder,
came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains
from the red and hideous battlefields
to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers
while doctors did what they could, longing
for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound,
wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died
staring at the leaves of the trees, blind to the
terrible effort around them to keep them alive?
I look into your eyes

which are sometimes green and sometimes gray,
and sometimes full of humor, but often not,
and tell myself, you are better,
because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees.
Later, walking the corridors down to the street,
I turn and step inside an empty room.
Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.
Now the bed is made all new,
The machines have been rolled away. The silence
continues, deep and neutral,
as I stand there, loving you.

game/theory

[Each vertex or node represents a point of choice for a player]

the glass essay

I believe in transparency.