Wilfrid McGreal:

The process of healing or being reconciled is also a coming of age, a taking of responsibility for our lives. Negative guilt and anxiety can often hold us in a prison, which in a paradoxical way can be strangely congenial. As long as I am locked in this state I have the perfect alibi for not engaging with life. We need great trust...as we allow ourselves to live and discover the freedom that is the other side of all the brokenness that has hitherto cramped and even paralyzed our lives.

And, from the American Catholic Council's Declaration for Reform and Renewal, this statement which I think is applicable to any important relationship, not just the one between a church and its members: "We are wise enough to know that we shall never have a perfect Church. We do not, however, want to be far from a Church that is free and honest, even if it is one in which we are called at times to uncomfortable accountability and responsibility."

dissertating

Jean-Luc Marion:

"...in order to be qualified as a lover , I have only to decide to perform love's advance, a decision that depends only on me, even though it always plays out at the limits of my abilities. To decide to love does not assure loving, but it does assure deciding to love." (p. 91, The Erotic Phenomenon, Universiy of Chicago Press, 2007.)

I was reminded of this (well, reminded might be too strong a word, because I'm kind of perpetually reading this book and learning from it) when I ran into one of the department's secretaries today. They're a somewhat fearsome bunch but I don't like to play by the rules of me-vs.-them, so I always smile, say hello, etc., and I've gone so far as to offer cake when I've made some and brought it in. Last night a friend and I went out for dinner and the way he really listened to me when I was talking about my research helped me be able to distill the way that my idea of love is concentric and ripples outwards. (The feeling that someone is really paying attention to you is amazingly affirming!)

I've always felt that what I'm talking about is social but I don't like to imagine it's political (because let's face it, I sit at a desk for eight hours a day, write some stuff, and occasionally check my email). I don't think love or revolution or any of that stuff is something that is 'out there'--it's something you practise (or I try to practise, anyway) on a daily, tiny basis, in terms of the smallest interactions you have with people. There's the tricky area between politeness and kindness and hypocrisy and euphemism to navigate, I guess, but the thing I learn from Marion (well, one of the things) is that if I want it to happen, it's me who has to do it. No one else can decide to love first for me but me. And that's very empowering, too.

more Rilke

From Letter 7 in Letters to a Young Poet:

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

From Letter 3:

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

more Rilke

From Letters:

Life is self-transformation, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, they rise and fall from minute to minute, and lovers are those for whom no moment is like any other. People between whom nothing habitual ever takes place, nothing that has already existed, but just what is new, unexpected, unprecedented. There are such connections, which must be a very great, an almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich beings, between those who have become, each for his own sake, rich, calm, and concentrated; only if two worlds are wide and deep and individual can they be combined.—Young people, it is obvious, can’t achieve a connection like this, but if they understand their lives correctly, they can slowly grow up to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. When they love, they must not forget that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love—they must learn love, and that (like all learning) takes calm, patience, and composure.

To take love seriously and to undergo it and learn it like a profession,--that is what young people need to do. Like so many other things, people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work.—So those who love must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: they must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work; they must become something.

For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.

Rilke:

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

ahem

(This is from the New Art Gallery, Walsall, and I'm ashamed to say I can't find where I wrote down the title and artist)

At the risk of rocking the boat: birdcages? As wedding décor? Really? Something so inseparable from the idea of bondage to decorate a party that in many ways has historically been exactly that for women? Let's not forget, either, that birds code feminine (and that 'bird' itself is slang, though vulgar, for 'woman').

Don't get me wrong--I think birdcages are pretty. But they're pretty for a reason, and that's to help us forget that they're keeping something caged. And none of this is to say what anyone should or shouldn't do for their own wedding; this is not a judgment, it's incredulity. Or, if it is a judgment, it's mine, about how I would choose. But I do also think it's worth thinking about why we find the things attractive that we do.

anti-manifesto

More surety and less looking behind to see whether anyone noticed.

More yes, I can do that.

More I need to say no this time, but I'll let you know.

More your project is inspiring to me.

More thank you for what you've done.

More I am who I am and I like that, actually.

More walks around the lake. More cycling to Attenborough, if you please.

More standing up straight.

More honest with my words and actions.

More Can I Love First?

More this is where I am right now and I wouldn't be here if I didn't need to be.

More take your time.

More this is my space. You're invited.

More actually I'm happy with most things in my life.

More the future will take care of itself.

forecast

The trend for the foreseeable future is cautious optimism: friends lose funding or have to suspend and something falls from the sky for them. Well, that's a combination of their own talent and timing and luck. And something to do with the audacity, as we're told to see it, of putting oneself forward and being willing.

Austerlitz, again

...One of my favorite things in Paris is watching the Metro trains enter Austerlitz Station's curlicued facade on the elevated track. Just as nice is taking that train yourself from the Bastille and feeling the gentle rocking of the cars as they cross the river. These are also from last May.

W.G. Sebald

http://fivedials.com/fivedials: a literary magazine put out by the UK publisher of McSweeney's. Number five is dedicated to the work of W.G. Sebald, whose dark and ebbing prose sits well with me in train stations and sent me scuttling from the Salpetriere to the Quay d'Austerlitz last May, curly-haired co-conspirator in tow.

casimir pulaski day

Casimir Pulaski Day. That's the demo version of Sufjan Stevens' song up there.