| To love the Stranger, to love solitude |
[Oct. 8th, 2006|05:38 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | la-la-library | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  grateful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | shh! | ] |
This poem is the most important thing that has come into my life in a while. It's long, but worth it. It speaks to my want of privacy, but also gives good advice about community building in stanza 6 ("Find someone like yourself..) xo Audrey
Yom Kippur, 1984
by Adrienne Rich
I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
--Robinson Jeffers, "Prelude"
For whoever does not afflict his sould throughout this day, shall be cut off from his people. --Leviticus 23:29
What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?
The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs
with its electric gate, its perfected privacy
is not what I mean
the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights
is not what I mean
the poet's tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to
the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly
risen
is not what I meanThree thousand miles from what I once called home
I open a book searching for some lines I remember
about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the
dooryard once
bound me back there--yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,
something that bloomed and faded and was written down
in the poet's book, forever:
Opening the poet's book
I find the hatred in the poet's heart...the hateful-eyed
and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitudes may have them
Robinson Jeffers, multitude
is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys
and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines
are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its
scrolls of surf,
and the separate persons, stooped
over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of
harvest
who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams
hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape,
scour, belong to a brain like no other
Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend
a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist's final
solution, have I a choice? To wander far from your own or those you have called your own
to hear strangeness calling you from far away
and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk
to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on
your mind
(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew
the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be
a woman's footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman's god)
Find someone like yourself. Find others.
Agree you will never desert each other.
Understand that any rift among you
means power to those who want to do you in.
close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.
But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say
that to be with my people is my dearest wish
but that I also love strangers
that I crave separateness
I hear myself stuttering these words
to my worst friends and my best enemies
who watch for my mistakes in grammar
my mistakes in love.
This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?
If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.
To love the Stranger, to love solitude--am I writing merely about
privilege
about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,
a privilege we can't afford in the world that is,
who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river,
woman dragged from her stalled car
into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death
young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk,
his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness
Jew deluded that she's escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion,
the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has turned her back
on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a tong between her
breasts)
hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of
the cliffs (did she die as a queer or as Jew?)
Solitude, O taboo, endangered species
on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you
In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can't have:
your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant's hand outspread
her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true
And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?
have I traded off something I don't name?
To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?
What will I do to defend my want or anyone's want to search for her
spirit-vision
far from the protection of those she has called her own?
Will I find O solitude
your plumes, your breasts, your hair
against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird's
singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?
in the old places, anywhere?
What is a Jew in solitude?
What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?
When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock crumble the
prophet's headland, and the farms slide into the sea
when leviathan is endangered and Jonah become revenger
when center and edges are crunched together, the extremities crushed
together on which the world was founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness
within
the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile's child re-open the blasted and
forbid-den city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are char-
tered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude
mean? |
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| One of mine, catch and release style. |
[Oct. 4th, 2006|08:51 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Lib-ary | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | content | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Rachels in my head | ] |
Tuesday
and the morning sky is graying
like a split-level in Nebraska.
Pavement pace,
your legs push you past
dinner plate blooms, falling
gardens
through the final swelling of summer
into the answering echo
of autumn.
The street, sweetened
by rainwater
renders a Shepard,
paws aloft on the gate
shouting I see you
saying see me.
Three miles east
one mile north
I lay thinking of your shoulders
my skin constricting in the September air
and the warm industry of your body
holds me. |
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| Medicine |
[Oct. 3rd, 2006|10:11 pm] |
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver |
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| Love like Etta |
[Oct. 2nd, 2006|04:51 pm] |
Today is Yom Kippur and there is so much to atone for! So why do I want to do nothing but force the world to acknowledge my pain? (ha!)It's barely past 5 and I'm at work. I don't really want to be here, but if I was gone I wouldn't be fasting and praying, I'd be drinking whiskey (like I can afford it) and listening to "He stopped loving her today", most of the Patsy Cline songbook, and all of the Etta James in which she gets really raw talking about that bitch standing at the alter with "her man". I love those songs, probably because I love in an Etta type of way, although I have learned enough to know there no such thing as "my man".
The wonderful toddler boy who I live with woke me up at 7:30 the morning in hysterics. He has started going to preschool, and has finally hit the developmental period where everything is so overwhelmingly frustrating that all he can do is cry. We all want to will our way through this world, don't we? I don't want to go to preschool either, and I hope he knows I feel his pain. R told me while I was brushing my teeth that he said that preschool made him L-O-N-L-E-Y, and we both made our sad face in the bathroom mirror. I hate that he knows this word, and what it means. We all do.
I have been in Seattle for my residency.
Thursday my class was held in the maps and special
collections department, in the basement of the Allen
library. I had been taking the stairs up and down, and
after lunch I spaced out and went down too far into the
sub-basement. Opening the door on the landing made me
realize my mistake, but I was intrigued by the stark
white and cement gray stairs that led to a single
door, also white. Walking down those stairs was a
solitary moment, private and full of meaning that I
haven't yet teased out. The door was locked, but I
didn't feel like going back to being around people and
their expectations yet. I have a special love for
large cement and brick public buildings like libraries
and post offices. They make me feel completely
annonymous in a way that fills me with a satisfying feeling of privacy. Standing there by myself, I felt myself expand in a way into space that no one cares to claim. It was comforting, and I haven't felt comforted for months it seems.
I have an odd habit of holding the hem of my dress up while I go up and down stairs, and I looked down to see I my hand still holing my hem up. My thighs are still tan from the Washougal and all the other rivers I was at this summer, and the white of the walls brought out little blonde hairs on them that I don't usually notice. They looked stark and strong against the utilitarian white walls, and I remembered again that you only have yourself in this world. And maybe that's all I need.
If I wanted to be more literary, I'd extend this metephor and say that once I realized this I was ready to climb the stairs out of the sub-basement and come back to reality, chin high despite taking a few squarely on it. But really I'm maybe only a few steps up from where I was on Thursday. A few times I've come all the way up, only to sneak back down again. I'm patient, I know my fat-ass thighs will get me there. :)
I love you all. |
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| seattle, wah |
[Sep. 27th, 2006|11:09 pm] |
My feet smell. I'm in a house where I know none of the nice strangers, while lots and lots of my friends are having oodles of fun at a burlesque show in pdx. I walked about three miles in four inch heels carrying like twenty dresses for the three nights four days I'll be here. And I won't be able to wear half of them because I forgot a pair of shoes. My contacts, which have been stuck to my eyeballs since about 8 this morning, are giving me a headache. I haven't read all of the book we are discussing tomorrow in my eight hour class. I think I smell from my hike. I am missing a party because I'm avoiding someone. I missed a phone call from a good friend because I was eating food I really can't offord with people I don't know. I'll probably get the rest of my calories on the trip from the ramen noodles, bananas, and energy bars I brought with me. The bananas are bruised.
...but at least in not in Portland. Right? |
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| weak knees |
[Sep. 24th, 2006|09:55 pm] |
Today I wasn't able to finish my usual run/jog without stopping. Twice. I was momentarily frustrated with myself, having just told a friend how amazed I was that I was jogging as far as I have been. My goal was 40 minutes, and I reached it a week or so ago, which made me feel like I was backsliding today.
But then I remembered how six months ago I wasn't even jogging, and about four years ago an injured knee sidelined me not only from jogging and walking, but from life. I lost the two jobs I needed to keep my apartment in Boulder and was living off of my friends charity while I was on the mend. My knee started a chain-reaction that pushed me into the toughest part of my life, off an economic and emotional edge that I had misjudged. Who knows it's that close until you are off it?
So now it's a sick privlidge to jog around the park near my house. It feels hard and good and gets me the fck out of my head and closer to what matters. I leave lots of sadness and disapointment, and the impact of the ground drums up hope in myself and my future. Today while running I thought about the empty feeling I had when my friend told me about taking a shower with her partner after her dog died suddenly. The knowing and care and love I imagined they feel for each other hit me hard, and I nearly started crying. I haven't yet cried despite my recent heartbreak, and am scared for when it comes.
Speaking of my future, I have thrown myself into helping my sorry (fat) ass through my Saturn return. Here's what I've copied from SURVIVING SATURN'S RETURN a very helpful book so far:
"The fear, difficulty, and depression often connected with Saturn are in proportion to the degree that we refuse to own the authority in our lives" pg. 9
"Saturn teaches us to stop seeking the father's approval. This can come in many guises, depending on who plays Daddy to us. For better or worse, during Saturn return, Dad has to be found on the inside." pg 15
And finally:
"Wheter we use psychological or estoreric terminology, the basic fast remains that same; human beings do not earn free will except through self-discovery, and they do not attempt self-discovery until things become so painful they have no other choice". Liz Greene
Okay -- so keep running, own my authority, stop seeking approval in others, and know that pain leads to free will. Check. |
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| bye bye trashy novels, hello theory |
[Sep. 10th, 2006|05:47 pm] |
In case there was any question that summer is very nearly ending, I got my first reading assignment today. My professor from 508 -- History of Recorded Information (fluff, in my estimation) -- has assigned one whole book and the first two chapters of the textbook he wrote. All due by residency, which is three weeks away. This doesn't bode well for my homework level, but does uphold my belief that there is an inverse relationship between the importance and/or academic level of a class and the amount of homework assigned. As in the more busy work, the more bullshit.
Currently I'm reading a totally trashy novel about a whore in the 16th century and James Hillman's The Soul's Code. It's going to be hard to transition from summer reading to fall reading.
Hell, it's gonna be hard to transition from summer to fall in general. I can feel expansive energy that has filled everything for the last few months start to die down. After the social choas and overstimulation that I've been feeling the last few weekends, this might not be a bad thing. But I am worried about how apathetic and stagnant I'm going to feel once the rain starts falling heavy and regular. This weekend I took advantage of the sunlight. Yesterday I rode my recently fix-ed up bike around quite a bit and today I took a long hike in Forest Park and then slept in the sun for a bit. I also have talked to maybe three people today total, if you don't count the dog I hiked with.
The solitude and long, silence-filled hours of the weekend have been the perfect foil to last weekend. My birthday party went smoothly, although I realized why I don't throw parties for myself -- cuz I don't have fun. And I don't get to see people. And I get socially overwhelmed. All of these things happened last Saturday, and it wasn't nearly the end of the world.
I didn't realize how many people I knew, and how small my house is. I shopped thinking there was no way that more than 20 people would be there, but *poof*, there were. All in my house, all wanting a little bit of my attention. I know some good friends left feeling like they didn't get to see me, and some people I was looking forwards to partying with I didn't see at all. This all came home when I emailed a friend to tell her I was sorry she hadn't made it and she told me she had been there. Ye-ouch. Someone get me some Paxil. |
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| Why everyone should shake their ass |
[Aug. 9th, 2006|04:37 pm] |
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"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open." - Martha Graham |
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| theory, people |
[Jul. 24th, 2006|04:38 pm] |
*The Attention Economy* was an article I read last quarter in my Info Architecture and Retrieval Systems class. It was written nearly 10 years ago, before Friendster, Myspace, and other so-called "friendship sites" became so popular. I personally felt the need to share this after I had been to the xx boys site and realized that appearing on kael's site provided currency in the attention economy. The theories set forth by the article are proven by themselves in many other instances since I have read the article, which is outlined by the Michael Goldhaber below:
-Familiar economic principles, and indeed the whole science of economics are good for (and were developed in and in response to) one particular era in economic history, namely the era of market-based, money-dominated industrialized mass-production and consumption (and its immediate forebears).
-As with prior economic eras, this industrial, market, money -based economy reached a limit around 1965.
-Since then, at an accelerating pace, social energies have actually been moving in a quite different direction, under the impetus of a hitherto secondary set of motivations. Chief is the desire to obtain attention, which is intrinsically, unavoidably scarce.
-The attention economy that is emerging is radically different from any prior economy, and certainly from the industrial market economy. In its pure form, it doesn't involve any sort of money, nor a market or anything closely resembling one. It involves a quite different pattern of life than the routine-based, industrial one with its work/home, work/ play and production/consumption dichotomies. What matters is seeking, obtaining and paying attention.
-The new economy also has its own characteristic form of property, which is quite simply the attention that is readily available to its "owner" from other people, which depends on what attention this owner has gotten in the past. This kind of property, located, quite literally, in "the minds of the beholders" is best held onto through practices that are sharply at odds with what the concept of intellectual property would suggest. The new kind doesn't require elaborate policing or other mechanisms for its protection, as intellectual property does, which is one reason attention as property is more natural.
-Thus, the attention economy is fundamentally incompatible with the more familiar kind of economy, and can only keep growing at the latter's expense. We are thus living through a period of major transition to an entirely new, pretty much all-encompassing economic order.
-The transitional period is especially complex, as elements of the old order, and even more the concepts from it, still influence our actions and our interpretations of them. Meanwhile, many forms of conflict break out between those who have most to benefit from the new order and those with current power who have most to lose. This transition may be compared with the transition from the feudal economy in western Europe to the market industrial economy it first gave rise to.
-The growth of the net and the web -- or the entire field of digital information, or cyberspace, if you will -- is simply one aspect of this transition, though an extremely important one.
-There is some value in taking the notion of cyberspace quite literally, as a new space that is coming to flourish precisely because it is so naturally attuned to the attention economy that those who would live under the auspices of the latter flock to it.
-An analogy with many important implications suggests itself: the move toward cyberspace today parallels the move of the civilization of western Europe during the birth period of the market economy, to the New World of the Americas. The rulers of that time, heirs of the feudal aristocracy, along with almost everyone else, presumed that a variant of the feudal economy should, could, and would be set up in the new space of the new continents. They took it completely for granted that the thing to do was fill the new lands with nobles and serfs or peasants, divided into baronies, earldoms, dukedoms and so on.
Okay, so all you dweebs who got through all of that--what do you think? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 19th, 2006|07:06 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | circ city | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | predatory | ] |
| [ | music |
| | law briefs being Xeroxed behind me | ] |
Days like these make me thankful I don't have a credit card. Otherwise I'd be purchasing the following things:
-plane tickets to some place where white sand will feel good on my ass
-massage, manicure, pedicure, facial and other services where people touch me
-a bottle of spanish wine, fresh pasta with truffle oil, fresh greens and everything else good at tabla.
-a silk slip or nighty from oh baby or jane's vanity. how it it possible that i have been an lingerie addict for so long and *still* don't own anything made out of silk.
-cuban stockings. a new garter belt. a bustier that fits me better. and i actually need new bras and panties. really.
-the company of a bearded gentleman who'd like to rub my feet, play with my hair, and generally pleasure me all night while drinking everything in our mini-bar at the hotel lucia.
it's the dreams that keep me alive. |
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| lost books |
[Jul. 17th, 2006|06:16 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | circ desk | ] |
| [ | music |
| | the white noise of the lights | ] |
I have a list of 601 library items that are missing in my library. My job is to find them, if possible. 601 out of half a million volumes--that's not the worst odds, right?
Recently I had an urge to go to the public library and browse. I wanted to go and listen to that crazy expectant silence, get lost alone in stacks and finally find myself sitting on the floor with piles around me and an immediate sense that the world has expanded. It's been forever since I have wanted this. I spend 40 hours a week working with books, and am going into debt learning how to professionally deal with them (and people's need of them).
What brought this on? The rain, of course, which was as much as a "momento autumn" as possible during this lovely sweltering Oregon summer. But until the rain starts falling, I plan on enjoying the world I am present in. |
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| summer skin |
[Jun. 26th, 2006|05:51 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | workin it | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Golden, My Morning Jacket in my head | ] |
Ah yes, five days after the first day of summer and so far I have this accomplished:
1)blisters on tops of feet from walking too much in heels
2)huge chunk of the back of my foot scraped off at the Washugal river
3) humungoid bruise/hemosomething on my right thigh/ass cheek, also Washugal. I can run in heels, have never fallen in heels, yet totally bif it in flip flops on slippery rocks. Maybe I should have worn heels.
4)cut on my knee, Washugal
5) totally exfoliated skin, Washugal
5) tan arms, white legs. WTF?
6) stamps from all the bars I went to this weekend. Why doens't this shit wash off in the shower? Nothing worse than rockin a stamp at work. Or at least my work.
7) Various weird bike related bruises on my calves.
8) Hip bruises that I'd like to pretend are from lovers thumbs. Probably just from pointy chairs or whatever. *sigh*
9) Z pointed out that I always have a pedicure (OPI London Briges Falling Brown) but my feet are always dirty. And in 4' heels.
10) Z plucked my eyebrows with the late-afternoon sun illuminating the Maker's Mark we were drinking. Now I have Maker's Mark eyebrows, yay--they're perfect. Everything is fucking perfect. |
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