tiny shop

A few drawings, paper cuts, mushrooms, and things here tomorrow (December 1).
Some pictures here.

a view from the body

"I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity" (Donna Haraway, "The Persistence of Vision" in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

slowly

('Take your son, Sir', by Ford Maddox Brown; Tate Britain)

I want to do better and better at everything. I often feel my work is slipshod, that I choose to do many things well and lose the capability to do a single thing excellently. The writing I'm doing for the Ph.D. really doesn't give me the option of doing it halfway; it has to be right. I don't have much time, and there is so much to do.

The fact that I'm being paid to do this writing helps me keep my other desires (to make clothes again, to open a shop, to bake every day, to work on some paintings) in perspective. In Prufrock's words, indeed, there will be time. In the interim, I'm learning how to build toward something--learning to delay gratification and end up with something stronger and more world-ready than I might have before. And I'm learning this in many ways: with my writing, with my art-making, with planning for my future(s), and with my little red heart. Slowly. Slowly.

*

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.(Eleanor Roosevelt)

What is this thing called love, that makes me do what I think I can't do?

superabundance

“The intention is never to reveal once and for all as truth what has appeared today but to sing some aspect of the real which has today manifested itself to me” (Luce Irigaray, Prières Quotidiennes / Everyday Prayers, 34)

Over-abundance of choice has been plaguing me lately: I could sew, write, read, paint, draw, print, sleep, run, travel, talk, shop, clean, arrange, photograph, practice the guitar, mow and plant the garden. Too much. And when there are all these options, I do feel pressured to do everything. I lose sight of the single task and its connection to all things. The future compresses itself and I experience everything all at once, instead of seeing that things connect, network, and lead into one another. This, combined with some school stress, some election emotion, darkness by 4 p.m., and just daily everything makes for a not-so-nice time.

Hand-sewing helps (especially while watching Grey's Anatomy or The Office online). So does Skype. So does my stack of new books from the library. So does just getting back to work. So--I'm off.

english autumn

These days, it's dark by 4 p.m. or so, and tonight it's raining.... English autumn to me is snails, rainy days, the brilliant green of moss against brickwork. Since I first came to England, I've been entranced by all the moss that grows here--the tiny stalks that come out of it. And seeing all the terrariums online (like here, here, and here) just made me wish I could have something like that in my room. So when I found this piece of moss that someone had kicked out of place in the sidewalk, I took it home. I didn't know what I'd put it in until I thought of this tiny glass bowl--it's traveled with me from Minnesota to Dole to Nottingham. I love the moss in it--it looks so clean and fresh. I've been watering it every day; I hope it'll stay alive. (Next up...a mushroom experiment.) I feel like I'm nesting a little bit.

Show me autumn where you are!

Irigaray, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault

Right now I'm writing my literature review. I'm actually not sure what that entails--and no one seems to have a definitive answer--so what I'm writing is a review of what I've read this year (you can see a partial list on the sidebar, but it really is partial! I haven't added to it for months) focusing on five themes: love, narrative, fragmentation/the fragment, the archive, and heterotopia. I've begun by using two books I found intellectually and personally thrilling: Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Luce Irigaray's The Way of Love to speak with one another textually and to set up the argument I want to make both through the rest of the review and in my thesis, and I'm using two other writers whose writing I love and am inspired by--Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault--to further deepen my thoughts on the two named texts. I have a feeling my lit review will become my introduction, actually.

But I was thinking tonight, as I sat down to write this, about the way I feel about these texts and how differently I feel about them. Reading the Irigaray was really an opening experience for me, as her writing addresses very prominently the fact that she is a woman and is seeking a feminine theory and a feminine language. I do find her writing (well, the translation of it, to be fair) more difficult to read than other theorists, actually--and I think this is in part because she is trying to write into a new use of language. But when I looked for a tactile, sensate piece of writing I could open with from The Way of Love, I couldn't find one. In part I think this is because the whole book is a single argument, and often I have to read back several sentences, if not paragraphs, to find an antecedent when I don't understand something.

It was this that reminded me about why I responded to Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault so well, both in French and in English translation--their language is so poetic (which is exactly what Irigaray argues has to happen to language if it is to move into a communication that is a form of being-with). I don't know that Irigaray would agree with me; she puts forward a strong case on the anthrocentrism, objectification, and domination that are part of traditions of Western philosophy and theory. But it was not only their ideas that grasped me when I first read Barthes, Derrida and Foucault (which it was when I read Irigaray); it was passages like

"But precisely, when my gaze meets yours, I see both your gaze and your eyes, love in fascination--and your eyes are not only seeing but also visible. And since they are precisely visible (things or objects in the world), I could precisely touch them, with my finger, lips, or even eyes, lashes and lids, by approaching you--if I dared come near to you in this way, if I one day dared" (Derrida, Jacques. On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 3)

or

"The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates" (Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces", 1967. Online source here)

that moved me instantly with their beauty, elegance, grace of argument and language. Reading theory has so often, even when I don't understand it immediately, been a pleasure. And in fact thinking of it as a pleasure--and as a poetics--has been helpful. I don't get bogged down; I read it through and sense things. I underline, write in the margins, dog-ear pages I want to remember. And six months later I go back to the book and read it again, and somehow what the poetic language has done is to work itself into useful patterns in my brain, and I understand how larger thoughts fit together. And still I find the language exciting and beautiful.

'yes we can'

I don't, in general, engage in political discussion online. I don't find it productive; it usually degenerates into name-calling and radical position-taking and posturing on both sides of whatever line is drawn. I also don't see much need for me to announce my political positions. Like my religious beliefs, this seems to me to be a private matter.

Throughout the presidential campaigns, I've watched as people I've known have posted some really awful, unsettling things on their blogs. I maintain that it is each person's rights to hold their own views and to express those views. But I was disheartened by the amount of cynicism I witnessed.

It's exactly that cynicism that I think the results election countered--or began to counter. Obama's election, for me, was a show of hands in favor of a positive vision of what's to come--a vision that begins with a call to togetherness and empowerment. This isn't some kind of fairyland delusion; I know Obama won't be a perfect president. In some ways he's not 'liberal enough' for me (he's definitely not the 'socialist' he was accused of being), and in a government as huge as ours in a country as varied as ours, not everything he does will be what I want. I know this. But what I love about Obama as a public figure was that--despite the ugliness of the campaigns--he chose a message that focused on the words 'yes' and 'hope'. I think we've been needing that. There is so much out there that says things will never change; that we don't have the power--or even the right--to change them or to want them to change. I'm talking about change in the way we talk about one another, talk about our futures, the rhetoric that structures our beliefs about our country, our democracy, and ourselves. The rhetoric we choose to couch our identities in, and that we present to the world.

Rhetoric is a tricky thing. It has no tangible substance, it cannot be touched, it cannot be held down. But it affects everything insidiously. How we talk about things, the words we choose--that matters. Words create our reality, we live in language. And for me it was thrilling to wake up this morning to the news that a majority of my fellow citizens had, like me, responded to this unusual rhetoric, a rhetoric of hope, of being-in-common, of saying 'yes, we can'.

I have no background in politics. I only understand the workings of our government well enough to explain to strangers in foreign countries--barely. I don't know what will happen during Barack Obama's presidency, and I'm not interested in rubbing anyone's face in his electoral victory. What I'm interested in is something that can unite people--and that proved to--and that's the discourse that Obama used throughout his campaign, a discourse whose rhetoric was one of hope, of the possibility of change, which is to say, of redemption of a kind. I wouldn't pretend to be able to analyse anything but this discourse--and even that poorly, perhaps. But I am so proud that we, as a country, responded to someone who said 'yes' to us. Whatever else happens, I think this is a good place to begin.

Hunstanton imaginary

We drove east, through Grantham, almost to the edge of the Wash; through Sandringham, to the edge of the island. I burned my hands on nettle for the first time. We ran through the deserted amusement park, watched the tide go and rain fall far out on the bay, the miniature windboarders rising and falling. I brought my mask and my umbrella. We had terrible cake and tea in cups that were permanently stained grey-brown inside.

I have a stone you brought me from last year, from Hunstanton, and one from Dundee. I have stones from the shore of Lake Superior and half a glass doorknob from my best friend. I have a small paper tray full of seashells from Hunstanton, Minehead, St Andrews; also acorns and pinecones from campus.

I thought I would be able to go in the ocean but it's always been too cold. Looking east, I saw only the edges of the Wash and the outlet where it became sea. For an hour before the rain started inland, the air was full of sand.