bara

on doing more

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:01:00 +0000

I think the biggest difficulty creative work poses to me is the potential that's inherent in it. I'm talking about the thing that continually generates ideas, makes connections, gets me interested in new things and keeps me wanting to make. This is a paradox, of course, since that potential is the fuel for creative work as well.

The 'could'--as in, I could make a new bag for myself, and it could be the most perfect bag ever; or I could go and work on my manuscript; or I could read some Derrida or any of the other books on my worktable, and then write what would assuredly be a brilliant addition to my dissertation; or I could make a drawing--usually comes when I'm at a peak in the energy/creativity/mood swing barometer. And on the good days, it's a spur to do something, which is useful and healthy for me. It can prompt new work, new ideas.

On the bad days, 'could' is an overwhelming word. Things I know I love and want to do--my desires--start to feel like pressures. I feel all my interests vying for time, I lose my ability to prioritize (and, with it, my routine, usually). I overthink and overdesign projects without getting them off the ground. The end result is often a headache and a petulant hour or two reading craft blogs.

I'm trying to be more aware of my own tendency to let possibility overwhelm me--to keep the fact that the things I do are really a privilege (how many people can say they read and write for a living, and in their spare time make some drawings and sew the occasional skirt?) in mind and to remember that this is a life I've chosen with my eyes open. I'm learning how order helps (and hinders) my work and how to use it better--thank you, Google calendar. I'm trying to remember that 'could' means just that--potential, not requirement. And when those voices that say do everything! do it now! start up, I want to remember that even then I have a choice--and that often, for me, choosing to do less--and do it in a thoughtful, holistic, deliberate way--is healthier and more productive than bending the the compulsion to always do more.

english

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:15:00 +0000

On the train from Nottingham to London on July 1, I looked out over the roofs of house and couldn't keep from crying. I don't know what England is but I knew then how much I would miss it. I feel rooted there. Like I've grown into it. There's been so much moving around for me in the past few years I didn't even realise how vagrant I'd become until I was leaving this adopted country--that feels more like 'home' than the city I grew up in, at this point.

England--it is Victorian trainsheds and stations with gingerbread edging, light in the afternoon when half the sky is slatey and there's light coming across it making things shine. Being offered tea. Sainsburys--I know it's silly to love a grocery store, but I do. Terrace houses with their roofs all in a row, and chimney pots. Plants growing out of buildings (whole streets of bricked up houses in Liverpool). It's a certain feeling in pop music. Young girls who look too young to be trying to look so tough. The word 'sea' where I'd say 'ocean.' Allotments. "All right?" as a greeting. Men calling me darling and sweetheart and love and duck; women calling me love and darling, my love. The peculiarities of accent. It's music festivals and train rides. Feeling comfortable on the Underground. Snails as long as my thumb I sing to when no one is looking. The sky is so big in England. And there are things like fish pie (not a pie! and it's good!) and sandwiches in packages, and more cups of tea.

England is where I am learning to be comfortable singing. And thinking. And opening. I think I love England because I've learned to love so many people there (and learned how beloved I am by them). If I can write my history of England it will have to begin as a history of this kind of love.

*

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:42:00 +0000

If you've been reading this since back when I used to make things that you could hold onto--clothes and so on--you might remember this fabric I printed two summers ago. I have two panels left and I'll mail one to you if you leave me a comment on this post relating somehow to poetry. I'll pick two names randomly on Saturday (the 19th). Please make sure there's a way for me to contact you!

The fabric is hand-printed cotton. It has been heat-set, but should still be washed with care in cold water. Because of how I printed it, there will be little variations in the ink. The panels are about 15"x32". The image is a folkloric scene of birds, goats, rabbits, squirrels, and plants.

--

One of my favorite poems (I posted it about two years ago this time of year):

A Portrait in Nine Lines

E. Ethelbert Miller

I want to hold your face in my hands
just for its laughter. I love your hat.
I was standing in a bookstore when
you turned the corner. Page after page
reminds me of your arms. The wind
sits in a park reading a book of your
poems. Is today your birthday? Yes
is such an easy word to say. I know.
This is the portrait of you I love.

'yes, yes'

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:31:00 +0000

"...to say yes is to bind oneself to the future, to further confirmation in a second yes, which promises to keep the memory of the first yes and confirm it, to repeat it. When we say yes, we do not know yet if we have said yes" (Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, 65).

"A yes always renders thanks to this danger [the 'menace of forgetting']...." (Derrida, Jacques. A Number of Yes, 132-33).

The Postcard.

indices, archives, libraries

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:15:00 +0000

When I was doing my undergraduate I began to develop (well, I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time, but it was) the research method I use now, which is three parts randomness and one part extremely good luck. I walk into a library, get myself familiar with the classification system, and wander through the rows of shelves until I see something interesting. This method does have its problems: for one, it means that I tend to be overwhelmed with information, sometimes to the point of feeling really awful because I'm too interested in too many things! But its strength is the connections is allows (forces) me to draw between ideas, disciplines, objects, and ways of thinking.

I remember going into the library on campus and wanting to find a book--a sort of magic index--that would contain and anticipate everything I'd ever be interested in: red silk ribbons next to the history of medicine next to botanical illustration next to print ephemera next to practical sewing next to Derrida. And everything would be linked to everything.

Turns out that index is the university, or maybe the people there and the university, or maybe the whole world, everything referring to something else. So my method is working for me--I'm developing my own index, one where improvisational music production does link up with love. Where memory, poesis, and desire are on the same page as Japanese craft books and natural-colored linen.

There's at least one person I can think of who would not be surprised by this--he pointed out my tendency to contradict myself (joyfully and wholeheartedly) early on in our friendship. He's also the person who got me thinking about indices and archives and libraries. All this is about systems of classification, which, in the end, are personal--even the ones we take for granted, like the Dewey Decimal System (not, I was shocked [shocked!] to find out, in use everywhere in the whole wide world), or color names, or kinds of weather.

As I've gone through my boxes, I've taken photos of some documents I don't need to keep but don't want to forget--things that connect, somehow, to what I'm doing and where I'm going. I've begun a sort of archive of them. The process of categorizing information and sorting documents is another way of learning how I think about networks between objects and ideas.

love letters

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:19:00 +0000

'One day/ I throw away all my love letters/ without noticing'

I'm going through boxes stored in my parents' garage. Finding all kinds of things I had forgotten (and, mostly, giving them away or recycling them, in the case of papers, without second thoughts). But I did find, in boxes and packets held together with decaying rubber bands, many, many love letters--from a high school boyfriend, from my college boyfriend, from the boy I dated the first year of graduate school (who began writing to me when I was a junior in high school), and from the printmaker (most of these written on the backs of proofs, or on Rives BFK).

Was I completely blind? I don't remember being amazed by how well-loved I was, at the time. I can't believe the love and kindness I found in these letters--and the humor, the tenderness, and the sweetness. I hope I was aware. I hope I was as sweet to them.

I guess I was a little surprised that I didn't feel regret as I read the letters and went through the tiny gifts I'd kept with them--a New York subway token, a tiny mirror made in an architecture lab, packets of lemon juice. I felt glad I'd had these boys and men to teach me about relationships and friendship. I felt really aware, too, that despite their goodness, and despite the importance of my relationships with them, I'd made the right choice when I needed to move on. Anaïs Nin: And then the day came/ when the risk/ it took to remain tight/ in a bud/ was more painful/ than the risk/ it took/ to blossom.

There could have been no 'blossoming' without such kind care in the first place. I put the boxes of letters back in the garage for now.

Derrida on love

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:50:00 +0000

"This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other--to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other--and this is the preliminary affirmation, even if afterwards because of this love, you ask questions. There is some negativity in deconstruction. I wouldn't deny this. You have to criticise, to ask questions, to challenge and sometimes to oppose. What I have said is that in the final instance, deconstruction is not negative although negativity is no doubt at work. Now, in order to criticise, to negate, to deny, you have first to say 'yes'. When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise--that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That's an irreducible affirmation, it's the original ethics, if you want. So from that point of view, there is an ethics of deconstruction. Not in the usual sense, but there is an affirmation. You know, I often use a quote from Rosensweig or even from Levinas which says that the 'yes' is not a word like others, that even if you do not pronounce the word, there is a 'yes' implicit in every language, even if you multiply the 'no', there is a 'yes'. And this is even the case with Heidegger. You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said 'yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking,' and it is what he called zusage, which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say 'yes', to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say 'at least I speak to you', 'I say yes to our being in common together'. So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation."

(From here. Emphasis mine.)

manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:42:00 +0000

I love the life I've chosen. I'm proud of it, if I may be allowed to be proud of it for a moment. I'm happy with the ways I've learned to love people and take care of them. I'm aware often of my heart getting bigger and of feeling more capable of care and love.

I feel awed by the luck I've had--all the lucky breaks, from my MFA (acceptance, classmates, advisers), to my book, to getting the job in France, to coming to England. And the luck that preceded that--the luck of having a family who love one another; of growing up in a church that puts love first, as well; of being surrounded by books and music and art and possibility. I know not everyone has this (or wants it, maybe. I can't presume to know what anyone else might want).

I'm thankful for my parents, who showed me from when I was tiny that making things myself was freeing and joy-giving. I'm convinced my imagination and creativity are my best assets--for myself, as I can keep myself entertained and interested in almost anything, and for the people around me, too.

Of everything, what I'd like to do with my life is make the kind of luck I've had available to the people I come in contact with. I'm trying to be more and more open. Where openness stands for love, I suppose. More loving. Luck and love (again); for me, they're bound up together.

It's not Pollyanna. I know bad stuff happens. I think I've gone through some of that (although when I think comparatively, I still find the word 'lucky' fits). I know there's hard stuff still to come, too--that's the way life is. It's that I'd rather, as much as I can, take the hard times and make them useful for this loving. I'm aiming away from bitterness.

Sometimes I feel like I only write a few things, over and over: 'yes,' 'lucky,' 'love.' Well, I suppose those are good things to repeat, if repetition's bound to happen anyhow. I hope you don't mind reading them.

on the list of things I don't need to hear again

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:51:00 +0000

"Ladies and gentlemen, the vibration you're feeling is engine failure. We're going to be heading back into Cleveland."

Yikes.

Whew.

minneapolis, i'm waiting to see you

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:33:00 +0000

Minneapolis: I'm waiting to see you in the highest heat of summer, lines shimmering off concrete. Mesh of my screen door smells like wet metal. Late at night when the house is quiet and it's still too hot, staying up to write letters, draw pictures, make dioramas, read books. Waking up early, working, writing. Sewing in the afternoon.

I dreamt I could go home and bring back my books, and now I finally can. Norwegian Wood, American Primitive, what else, what else? My prints from grad school rolled in a poster tube (not to jinx things, but there may be shows here I can take part in when I'm back), my little books from the class where I met B., a few drawings in frames for my walls.

When I come back to Nottingham (with, I hope, a finished draft of my first chapter, part of the next one, and a more polished introductory section written), it will be the beginning of fall, or at least the end of summer--things seem to merge into one another here. I'll have the view from my window only a few more days, and then a new one, high in the attic of a terrace house in my little town.

I can't wait to see my mom and dad, my brothers, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my friends. To work and sew in the house where I grew up. To pet the rabbit and the dog. To feel the newness of England again when I come back.

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.

(Gerald Stern, from "Lucky Life")

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Being kind, loving, and generous is always the right way to proceed, I think.

young girls in flower

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:58:00 +0000

For my new house, my proto-crypto-dreamhouse: linden-leaf tea, old linen towels, wool blankets, embroidered pillowcases. A madeleine pan. A bundt pan. White sheets. A basket to keep my knitting in, a bowl with blue flowers on it. A clothes rail (and hangers for my skirts). Bookshelves with all my books (I dreamt I went home for three days and could bring back all my books and things). And paper edging on the shelves. And two tables, one for my computer and writing, and one for sewing and drawing. My sewing machine. Sugar with lavender. A tea set. And friends to come around for tea, and one redheaded boy to draw pictures and laugh and listen to music with.

*

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:47:00 +0000

SPRING, OR THE SOURCE WE NEVER SPEAK ABOUT

Nights waking
to rain and the sound
of thrushes, I know
you have not told her.
In dense ivy
is the smell of fox.
Somewhere dogwood
has begun to bloom,
and you have not
told her. Apple
blossoms. Hedgerows
into chartreuse leaf.
I think the world
continues in beauty
and she will never know.

--

histories of the world (love as a sidenote)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:26:00 +0000

When stories are told in my tradition, which is the Western tradition of history and narrative, there is, for the most part, a beginning, a middle, and an end; events have causes and consequences, civilizations rise and fall in orderly progression. Ancient History gives way to the Middle Ages; the Renaissance, Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, the Atomic Age and the Cold War come and go as expected. History is a neat line, which conveniently organises events into sequences that create order, intelligence, and sense. But what if I were to think about the history of the world as a set of concentric rings: stories appearing to stand within stories; a narrative of containment and exclusion. Some stories, when history is conceptualized like this, will appear larger than others; appear to contain the smaller narratives, surround them, dominate them.

This is a traditional way of making history into narrative (that is, of doing historiography), which privileges some narratives over others, designating them objective, truthful, and universally valuable. The larger narratives take up more space, are studied, disseminated, known, believed, and eventually become part of the tissue of information that makes up our social and intellectual life.

These dominant accounts are problematic, though: they inevitably leave out or cover up parts of themselves. Their claims to 'completeness' are at the expense of what they have to forget in order to sustain themselves.

But the trick of this idea of concentric rings of meaning or narrative is one of dimension: rather than being a flat plane onto which figures can be drawn, history and the world have multi-dimensional space. If I change my perspective, I can see that in fact the rings seem to be linked or contiguous, not simply contained/containing. Concentrism is one facet of what can actually be represented like this:

The same rings, in this perspective, are involved with one another, touch one another (well, almost, so imagine it; the Paint program on this computer is foul), participate in one another. They contaminate one another, complicate one another, but are not contained by one another--or not simply, since after all we can conceptualize them as concentric rings. But, seen like this, it's easier to understand 'separate' histories as mutually integral.

What seeing the history (or histories) of the world as concentric rings and then as a set of rings extended and linked does is to offer us a pattern of supplementarity that challenges the dominant form of historiography. That form relies on the assumed objectivity of its narrative, on the seamless narrativization of history so that there are stories we don't even recognise as stories, but as complete facts: in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That's one such. Think of all the particulars that that little verse, or any account of that event, must neglect, or smooth over, or misread, just to continue jauntily along the path of Progress and Expansion and the Glory of Exploration!

Expanding the rings (like a telescope) allows us to see that no one story could be complete without the others. Each is integral to the rest--which means that self-representation by certain narratives as 'complete' is a fallacy. Either the stories are all linked and participatory, or there are some which are 'outside' the accepted canon of stories, proving the canon's value and reality, as it were. And if there are stories 'outside' that canon, then their existence is what the canon requires in order to be canon. And so what is 'supplemental,' (that is to say, extraneous, extra-canonical) is in fact necessarily part.

I'm writing a paper to give at a conference in Liverpool this weekend, about the novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes. To be more specific, I'm writing about the so-called 'half chapter,' an essay (or story? Genre's unclear here, and, I think, purposefully so) called "Parenthesis," and how the novel and the story model this idea of concentric supplementarity. Here's my (very professional) diagram:

That's the 'real' world there--the immeasurable, innumerable, unnameable total of all human experience, of all time. And to its right are the authoritative histories that are written of it, the textbooks and the underlying social myths, which supplement the 'real' world. And then there are the contesting histories, which is what Barnes' novel is--it retells or revisits many familiar narratives and themes--and these narratives are the supplement to that collection of histories we designate (or have designated for us) as 'official.'

And then there is, in my case specifically, "Parenthesis," (that'd be the 'book' witht he loveheart on it) which is a fragmented, personally voiced lyric essay about love--about the narrator's love, and about love in general (as much as it is possible to speak generally). Parenthesis--even the word implies exclusion from the main text; afterthought. But the utterance of Barnes' history needs "Parenthesis"--it is the supplement to the 'alternate' history.

"Parenthesis" pretends to be exterior to Barnes' history, just as A History of the World (note the use of the indefinite article) claims to stand apart from the histories it deconstructs. Actually, these stories are interior. But there is the problem of completeness--are we to consider "Parenthesis," which is resistant to the larger scale of the novel and of canonical history, somehow more complete than these other narratives?

In the end, we can't. "Parenthesis," in the end, is still representative--in both senses of the word. I mean, here, that Barnes is both showing us something (rather than giving us the 'complete' thing itself) and is limited in his showing to something that still is standing for something else--in this case, the particularity of the experience of love. "Parenthesis" privileges the fragment, the particular, and the local, but it can never get beyond its own generality. This is no endpoint.

Endpoints, however, aren't the question.

Instead, "Parenthesis" does the work that literature and art have to do, which is to point us towards the particular experience as an 'antidote' to totalising or generalising narratives. So the next step in the diagram (the next concentric ring) is the private experience and narrative of each person. And this brings us to the final/first figure in the diagram, the whole world, the ‘real’ world, world of experience, the place where are these stories are constructed (and which is constructed by the stories).

psychogeography (3)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:43:00 +0000

I can't get over English place names: Hammersmith. Elephant and Castle. Barton in the Beans. Found it on the map on our drive home from Minehead, exclaimed over it; we took a half-hour detour to find it. Ahhh, yes. Barton. In the Beans. What up, English. Your language is cheerful-making.

landscape, language, and poetic self-fashioning (part I)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:54:00 +0000

Riverside Towers, Minneapolis, December 2007

I am a migrant.

I've chosen my migrancy: I didn't flee civil war, or lose my home to natural disaster. For £400 and a ten-hour flight, I could go back and see the street I grew up on, intact. But I don't need to. Twenty years in the same place formed me so that I could identify a house from my city by just a few details: dark wood trim in white rooms, arched doorways from living room to dining room, built-in cabinets. Here are the words that mean Minneapolis, the city I was born in and where I lived, in the same house, from the age of four until I was 25: windowsill, prairie square, lake , parkway, mill.

Kitchen on 4th St., Minneapolis, 2003

I count seventeen lakes inside the city. Eight other bodies of water (ponds and wetlands). The Mississippi River, useful tool for teaching US geography and English letter-names to French highschoolers, runs through it, fed by Minnehaha Creek. The lakes are called Hiawatha, Nokomis, Calhoun, Harriet, -of-the-Isles, Diamond, Cedar, Loring, Powderhorn, Birch, Wirth, Ryan, Brownie, Spring, Mother, Taft, and Grass.

My students' concept of midwestern geography (Dole, France, 2007)

The city is on a grid, and the grid runs to the edges, where it meanders into the cul-de-sacs and loopy drives of suburban space. But in places the grid runs itself right off the map, becoming rural routes and county highways. The beginning edges of what's left of the Big Woods on one side, the Great Plains on the other. The grid means any street you walk down could go on forever. You could walk to the Pacific. Or squint to see the wheatfields, a pale yellow glow in the distance, covering western Minnesota and South Dakota.

Red Wing, Minnesota, July, 2006

A city grid was a formal, material representation of Progress: Onwards! was the slogan, which didn't look to see who, what, or where it trampled, caught in its wheels, and lost. It was a way of taming the landscape, rendering it. Ordering it (and the streets run east/west, and the avenues run north/south; they count up from downtown; run in whimsical alphabets; name Presidents, seasons). Claiming it: the application of a language 'we' could call 'ours' meant the land we named was ours, too. And, tacitly, not yours. Not theirs. Ours not always (not, in history's terms, often) the inclusive second-person plural.

But to me, the grid means possibility. It means expansiveness. Opening. Before I could take the city apart to see its existential injustice (Minneapolis sits on land used for centuries by the Dakota people), I knew the straight roads led out of the city to everywhere. And I cannot lose this connotation: the grid connected me to the rest of the world.

Mayfly hatch, Minnesota, July 2006

If the grid represented what could be to me, what was outside the city both continued and arrested that feeling. It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been in the middle of a prairie what that experience is. The sense that the world goes on, limitlessly as far as you can tell, in every direction--360° and the whole hemisphere of sky--feels like flying. Feels like being in a cage, too. In that much space, how far could I ever really go?

Who I am, I made and was made in this space, which both contained me and freed me. The contradiction of a wide-open space is that from it I could go anywhere, but leaving it--by sheer geography, by miles and dollars, by gasoline, bus tickets, and interstate signs--is a lot longer thing than just my say-so. At one point in time, I would have had to walk out of this place, or sit on boards at the back of a wagon, and a day's journey might not get me across state lines. When I left, I flew to Chicago and then to London, and for the first flight I could see the grid of the city get smaller, and then the country grid, another scale entirely. The little pill-shaped window by my seat contained the places I had come from.

Because I come from a place where space seems as endless, as expendable, as other things we take for (ruthless) granted, like water or electricity, my relationship to space itself is a particular one. Living in England I sometimes feel confined, knowing that in ten hours I would have hit the furthest edge of the country (from where I live, by train). Knowing everywhere here there is water nearby, or hills, or peaks, or cities--something to obstruct the eye in ways a prairie doesn't. I imagined the landscape everywhere could be as big as my midwestern, North American one, which stretched and was full of the sound of crickets and cicadas.

Minehead, England, May 2008

I am learning a new vocabulary in this place, words that mean England to me, like 'allotment' (now I know, Jane, it's a little garden anyone can have, and they are beautiful), and 'close,' which is the word here for what we'd call a cul-de-sac, and 'commons,' land which is privately held, but open to certain public uses. Words that have to do with ownership, right to land, interiority, belonging. All the land here fits on this island that is smaller than my state (about 80,000 square miles, compared to Minnesota's 87,000). But at the edge of land there is the ocean (people here tend to call it the sea). Which both contains the island and points away, showing where else I could go.

Dunes at St Andrews, Scotland, March 2008

magpies

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:19:00 +0000

(They are everywhere here. My new favorite birds. The rhyme goes 'one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy' when you see them. I'm working on updating the site, which hasn't been done since 2006 [!] in some cases. I've put all my links in one place, for instance [see sidebar], and now all the pages should look fairly uniform as well. New links on the actual links page, and I'm hoping to get some work up in the work section, too. We'll see.)

(I always find two for joy.)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:35:00 +0000

I want to refuse, as much as I can, a lifestyle that compels me to feel stress about doing the things I love.

I wake up, I lie in bed and watch the light come in through the window. I can see my books and things around me. They are pleasing to see. In a while, I go and eat something I like. I do a few chores. I pack my bag and bike or walk to the university, where I am surrounded by buildings, landscaping, and a park that are made to be calm and beautiful. I work in a room with my peers, who also love thinking and learning, who are kind and intelligent. I read books and articles. I spend time wondering about things. I write. I eat my lunch.

Later I go home, or I go to the cinema. One day a week I go and make prints in a printshop in another city. I have adventures. I cook with a group of economists. I have tea with friends. All this is lucky. Important to remember that when things seem overwhelming. I'm doing what I chose. I'm doing what I love. It'll happen. I'm good at that.

psychogeography (2)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:39:00 +0000

The last time I was in that church I was probably ten...it must have been Christmastime.

For me, everything in this place was new. I was a tourist. My methodology was feeling: romantic and Romantic. I had false starts, a map printed from a search I did online. Found the tourism office, showed two women paper us. Took their maps, cut and folded them to fit my notebook. Wondered whether they'd recognise your paper self. It took me two hours to walk through the town (red door of the Corn Exchange), finally stumbling over St Andrew's Church, little overgrown path to the back of the Castle.

Which I captured, ink on postcard. And sent to you.

love and luck

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:53:00 +0000

About a year ago I walked down the basement stairs in my parents' house and watched my mom have a stroke, and everything I understood about the world, and my place in it, changed.

Memory, for me, is completist. This is why I make a poor storyteller: I can't leave things out. I tell lists (long ones), not stories. So I could tell you about the seventeen minutes we waited for the ambulance, name the nurses in the ER, trace the shape of the monitors listing emergency surgery patients in the air. And that would be the beginning, in facts, of the change.

I have always felt lucky. Even in France, where everything that could go wrong did, I was surprised to hear my colleagues describe me as 'unlucky.' I had a beautiful childhood, full of books, stories, music, possibility, adventure, imagination, and love. High school and college taught me so much about what education meant to me. And the thought of how much I learned in my Master's and in the year I spent in France is humbling--the luck, there is no other word, of it.

Actually, if I'm being truthful, things began to change for me when I was in France, an outsider. Foreign, alone. There is nothing like it for developing a sense of compassion, empathy, and humility.

And then to come home--and when my family most needed it there were meals left on the porch (months' worth), and cards, and letters, and the support of people we didn't even know (bloggy people who contributed to the auction, generous strangers who made bids). I didn't know how much we were loved.

Sometimes the only response was to cry, but I'm not so good at that. I'm better at working, going out and fixing something or getting the laundry in, or heating something up. Making cake as declaration of love. I learned this from watching all these strangers love my family.

I arrived in England on a clear day in September with three suitcases and a memorized recipe for plain cake. And within two weeks I was making cake almost every day. Oh, girls from Flat 6, oh, economists, oh Matt and fellow theorists: I was so lucky to be found by you.

Every day since June 4th of last year I have been aware that I can choose to be open and to love (or to be closed and bitter). And more and more I find I'm able to choose to love and to be kind, be really with the people I love. I have made this luck and they have made it for me, with me.

This feeling of being beloved. This luck.

imaginaries

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:15:00 +0000

Thursdays in the printshop, I'm working on a series of imaginaries. A friend of mine here noted that I am often as attached to the imagination of a place as to the place itself, which I think is a fair analysis. It's a deeply personal and private way of relating to space. The prints I'm making are etchings with chine collée.

This is the Beeston imaginary: foxes, daffodils, beehives, cranes, and girls in toggle coats.

psychogeography (1)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:19:00 +0000

St Pancras International, London.

mancunian daffodils

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:00:00 +0000

The sun is coming through the clouds in a particularly English way, the sky is blue above the edge of the building across the courtyard, my work's been very good lately, and I'm leaving for France on Wednesday. My insides feel like Spring.

lucky

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:39:00 +0000

How could I have ever anticipated the presence of a ragtag bunch of economists in my life, their dry humor, their awkward care, their surprising tenderness? I found them--or they found me--in early days, and now it's like having cousins around who offer hugs, advice, a gruff shoulder, jokes, nights out. They are wonderful. (Missing from the drawing is Robert, who wasn't in the pub then.)

on rain in the afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:15:00 +0000

It makes me turn off the sound on my computer during "Fight Test," which is my favorite song by the Flaming Lips (although I do also love "Suddenly Everything Has Changed") so that I can hear it, by this point almost horizontal, hitting the parking lot, cars, tin roofs, my window.

I think that's the Postal Service covering "Suddenly..." there.

The best thing about England is the light: light while it rains, the changing light before storms, light in the morning when the sky is clear. Sometimes you can lie on the bed and watch out the window and in the course of a single day things will change so much.