Speak, Memory: on Nabokov, time, body, and musing.

The beginning bits of Nabokov's Speak, Memory captivate me, like voice and nostalgia captivate me. He writes:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between to eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated ... I rebel against this state of affairs ... "

Nabokov goes on to deconstruct contemporary assumptions about time-- says he won't take the bait-- that time is something he doesn't believe in. But he's dead. His memory isn't flashing flip-book faces any longer (except, perhaps, in text: call it a Grecian lark, but some part of me connects to that old mantra of immortality through fame--if only fame weren't fame at all, but a series of humble engravings whose etchings echo down the well of humanhood, that is, to say, if only fame were fame with a twist: with a writer's humility, which is, in fact, a writer's self-consciousnessness: a dancing meta). And sometimes I wonder if I could really do it: the writing thing. Not the teaching-writing thing. The writing-thing. Wonder if I could congeal all the octopi tentacles of thought smothering me and create something theoretical that isn't just a rouse and something like poetry, too. But then I wonder if that isn't just a bit escapist (or worse, a selfish attempt to dodge Nabokov's abyss, to appeal to some deconstruction of time). Yeah, then I wonder if I shouldn't just quietly dig my fingers in the dirt instead.

Folks always distinguish between the ethereal (spiritual) and the corporeal (bodily), but I think there is this other place of residence, too: the intellectual: not a person, but a place. And then I wonder if these boundaries between the three aren't as unreal as time to Nabokov.

"my useless, uncalloused hands"

title from Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters.

The tension between intellectualizing and acting pervades my skin (until I'm crawling) every time I vere to some dyadic end. Wholeness in living requires some balancing act that is inevitably ungraceful. Maybe liminality (between work and thought) is like vulnerability in relationship; uncomfortable, but necessary and enriching (when you don't fight it).

I've had a perpetual layer of dirt under my fingernails since Saturday.
And I haven't been writing.
I swear, my body's been going through detox.

Tired of its "useless uncalloused hands."

Tired, too, of being by itself.

(The rabbithole is bright and magnetic, but best shared--lest you find yourself lost, and in danger of losing head).

Anyways, I'm off to ride my bicycle.
And Thursday, I'm going back to Good Earth Farm.
Farm-magic reminds me how simultaneously small and big I am,
and when I ride my bicycle, it always feels like I'm flying.
I like that.

Always,

L

weeds//sidewalk-cracks by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

strangers to change/window-panes

something about doors and windows and openings and closings.
yeah something about that.
--
I got two and a half hours of sleep last night. (I'm tired) (but everyone's tired/but nobody's tired enough). And I had a strange dream, with dream-water again.
My thesis is 45 pages in, and for the first time in a long time, I can see forward and inward and in front of me.

also, Iron & Wine's Daytrotter sessions are really beautiful. I almost like them better than the album versions:

"I recall, the sun in our faces
Stuck and leaning on graces
And being strangers to change

The radio and the bones we found frozen
All the thorns and the roses
Beneath your window pane"

Just one near-perfect thing.

"If I could do just one near-perfect thing, I'd be happy.

They'd write it on my grave, or when they scattered my ashes.

On second thoughts-- I'd rather hang around and

be there with my best friend if she wants me"

-Belle and Sebastian, from IF SHE WANTS ME

..

Dissonance: n. A tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.

Meta- Meta- Meta --- dancing.

Have you ever been simultaneously a character in your own dream, and a third-person, omni-present dreamer? Not a dream where the dreamer is a character, but a dream where the dreamer is distinct from the dream and you are the dreamer but also in the dream. I have them often, and oftentimes they carry over when I wake up-- so I am experiencing and watching myself experience at the same time. Self critiquing while being. Fully engaged in my actions, and their results, but also fully distinct from them.

This is dissonance; sometimes land // sometimes ocean. This is the artist's tension. The observing hand. This is the lodging between ethereal and corporal: suspension somewhere--ambivalent-- in-between. --

Like mid-winter springtime.

Like on-the-brink again.

....

I'm gonna go buy some yogurt. (That's exactly my point).

Hunger is as corporal, but also as real as it comes. And thinking, no matter how precious

doesn't taste like Plain Greek Yogurt with Strawberries.

My prospective reading lists

are getting out of control.

to read academic:

1. Borderlands (La Frontera): The New Mestiza; Gloria Andaldúa
2. Strangers to Ourselves; Julia Kristeva
3. Of Hospitality; Jacques Derrida
4. Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization; ed. Margerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos
5. Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation; ed. Wendy S. Hesford, Wendy Kozol
6. Out Of Egypt: A Memoir; Andre Aicman
7. El fuego y la palabra: una historia del movimiento Zapatista; Gloria Muñoz Ramíre
8. Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity; Ira Livingston
9. A People's History of the United States; Howard Zinn (I've read excerpts, but the entirety deserves my attention)
10. Democracy Matters; Cornel West
11. Race Matters; Cornel West
12. The American Evasion of Philosophy; Cornel West
13. Where We Stand: Class Matters; Bell Hooks
14. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Bell Hooks
15. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology; Slavoj Zizek
16. The History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays; Randolph Bourne
17. War and the Intellectuals, essays 1915-1919; Randolph Bourne
18. The Radical Will; Randolph Bourne (esp. the essay "The Undergraduate")

to read for fun (not that academic isn't fun; I actually put many texts on the academic list myself, for fun; but oh, you know-- this is still a different list)

1. Breath Eyes Memory; Edwidge Danticat
2. Krik? Krak!; Edwidge Danticat
3. Crescent; Diana Abu-Jaber
4. Arabian Jazz; Diana Abu-Jaber (I started but never finished)
5. The Unaccustomed Earth; Jumpa Lahiri (ditto)
   
6. Drown; Junot Díaz
7. Negocios; Junot Díaz
8. Marina; Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Gary- if you're reading; I promise to get it back to you soon!)
   
9. ¡Ya Basta!; Subcomandante Marcos
10. Off The Map
11. The Spell of the Sensuous; David Abram
12. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World; Michael Pollan
13. The Three Sisters; Anton Chekhov
14. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business; Neil Postman
15. An Unnatural Order: The Roots of our Destruction of Nature; Jim Mason
16. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat; Oliver Sacks
17. Awakenings; Oliver Sacks
18. The Mind's Eye; Oliver Sacks
19. The Color Purple; Alice Walker
20. Picture of Dorian Gray; Oscar Wilde
21. War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy
22. Thoughts in Solitude; Thomas Merton
23. The Seven Story Mountain; Thomas Merton
24. Sula; Toni Morrison

-----
(I'd still welcome all your suggestions).

And another thing.

"The poet and the dreamer are distinct. Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. One pours out a balm upon the world, the other vexes it."

FROM John Keats' "The Fall of Hyperion"

----

In his dream, the speaker visits Moneta, the goddess of memory. He swears he's a poet. Oh, and she swears he's wrong.

(I will never be a poet).

----

There are two kinds of chaos: commotion, yes, but also the void. Today concluded with a sinking feeling of the latter. And I know this sadness is temporary, but the realization doesn't seem to be helping, because it's temporary-ness that's making me sad in the first place.

How am I supposed to 'vex' it when my agency's conditional--out of (my) control?

Thesis work isn't so grueling

When the light-bulb hits and you realize all you really need is more theory on the feminization of Chaos.

And when your thesis adviser points you to exactly the perfect text for said theory.

And when you are sitting outside, reading on College Green for the first time since fall.

This sundress may be too short for such a breezy day, but the warm wind on my legs feels so good that I don't care.

Winter was a grumpy introspective tunnel, and this is the light: 2 applications for post-graduation programs in this week, a completed annotated bibliography and research proposal, a preparedness to finally make-manifest some of my ideas in writing, and some Vitamin D that isn't coming from a dietary supplement.

Welcome, spring.