cryptomnesia

What's Going On

2008-07-25T07:19:00.002-04:00

from Rilke's First Elegy

2008-06-30T17:04:00.002-04:00

...Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; so that in the expanded air
birds might feel themselves more inwardly flying.
Yes, the springtimes needed you. There were stars
counting on you to sense them. A wave rose toward
you in the past, or when you walked by an open window
a violin gave itself up to you. All this
was commission. Were you up to it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation?

2008-06-15T20:37:00.001-04:00

Obama on Fatherhood...

2008-04-27T15:40:00.000-04:00

2008-04-27T09:15:00.002-04:00

"...because we don't change because we want to, do we? We change because we have to. Because there's enough pain."

Richard Panek

Feral Ghazal

2008-04-26T18:19:00.004-04:00

Lichen thrives in adverse environments, mountaintops and ice.
A feral animal is one that has escaped domestication.
St. Augustine's definition of God was a being whose center is everywhere, borders nowhere.
The process by which any technology disembodies us is called angelization.*
In a basement in California, a woman sleeps cradling a phone.
The heightening of one sense necessitates diminution of the others.
All change begins with disruption.
The process of one animal taming another is both violent and loving.
And you, Caitlin, what will it take to hold you still,
pockets filled with sea-swept stones.

*This line is borrowed from Nick Flynn.

Moment

2008-04-24T11:23:00.005-04:00

This year is more outside myself than any so far, there has been little time for reflection. I feel like I am learning more than I can keep up with. Often about things I thought I knew, like the importance of living in the present. Drove out to the end of the spiral peninsula this week to find a moment...this sun disappeared with the final note of Brahms Violin Concerto No. 1...

Oh, Me, Oh My Oh

2008-03-02T10:49:00.009-05:00

My friend Sarah Kramer just sent me this picture of Obama from the night she and I worked at the benefit in New York last summer...this is his face right after shaking her hand. I feel like it embodies something of his charisma/cockiness/authenticity. I still didn't know who I was going to vote for that night, and talked to lots of people all evening about the choice. For some reason, the conversation that stayed with me the most wasn't about his politics. I sat at a table next to a woman who is close friends with Barack's sister. She was telling me how thoughtful he is, how he always remembers details about peoples' lives so he can refer to them...(like any politician). But she told me about seeing him at a wedding, and how he brought up the movie "Maria, Full of Grace." (She's a filmmaker, and her husband is Colombian.) He had seen the film and really liked it, wanted to know what she thought. Something about that really struck me...that a presidential candidate would actually have seen this independent film about international drug trafficking and teen pregnancy...and liked it enough to want to talk about it. I think I dated somebody who dated somebody who dated somebody who made that movie. I guess it was the moment for me, when he started to seem like "my people." I told my Dad (who has sometimes voted Republican but is now volunteering for the Obama campaign) this story and he compared it to some comment Kennedy made about Norman Mailer...

First Poem

2008-02-23T13:52:00.003-05:00

some california morning spiritual wisdom from rumi

2008-02-20T13:57:00.000-05:00

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

2008-02-19T03:05:00.003-05:00

2008-02-17T23:58:00.002-05:00

Oakland

2008-02-17T10:39:00.008-05:00

smells of blossoms caught in the fog. Here I thought this place was lined with a particular pain, but find it is quite another. Of course. The reason I cry on tables. Something so bright it can't be seen...four years later I begin to glimpse the dark outline. Your small grip on my back. Loosening. Eucalyptus flower. Weightlessness, beginning to bear.

2008-02-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

what matters

2008-02-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

It's been a week of tempering the big emotions of small people, of small objects flying out of my hands, of braving awkward moments with exes that fade in the shuffle of what matters, of the long metal underground world not behaving as it should, the small rooms and corridors inside me quaking, of the corridors and classrooms outside me behaving a little more as they should, of big 4 a.m. questions and small tremors, of songs in my ears alone filled with wide questions and gorgeous silences, of writing words like ubiquitous on pink paper, of feeling what matters shuffling inside me on its own accord, of laughing on multiple levels, of lining the lining, of sleeping and not sleeping, on the edge of a queen-sized memory-foam mattress with white noise, of thinking about skin, of trying to hear, of trying to see, of wondering, of deciding.

Braved the AWP conference for awhile today, which generally feels like being held over at the Chicago airport during the holiday season with a sea of half-familiar narcissists. It was worth it to hear James Tate read "The Ice-Cream Man" (and field questions in what has got to be one of the funniest interviews I've ever seen...my favorite part was when he paused for about 15 seconds and then said gruffly, "I don't know if I have any pets,") and to run into my dear friend Spring Ulmer. Read her poems on the train home and they are echoing in my mind:

I am so famished I make-believe I'm a fruit.
I touch B's letter to A with my blue-brown skin. Just the edge of it–
Its creamy fold punctures my swollen side. My red insides open.

(from "The End of Our Correspondence" by Spring Ulmer)

2008-01-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"

Some newish poems

2008-01-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

This one was for The Best American's Challenge. First, you had to solve this anagram to find the title of a past judge's book: HIT THE LUMP OF RICH SEAL and then write an acrostic poem out of his or her name.
The answer took me about an hour: "The Triumph of Achilles" by Louise Gluck. In graduate school, one of my teachers told me that Gluck had originally written the line of her famous poem "Mock Orange," I hate this as I hate sex as I love this as I love sex. This has always fascinated me, so I started with that, and fragments from about ten different past judges' poems and made this out of it, (which alas, did not win):

As I Love Sex

Long ago you kissed the names of the muses goodbye
Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
Under the door, and stop before me
I hate them, as I hate sex
Slowly along the flank
Even as she held it, to bring back the picture of what life…
Go to your room, to all the rooms whose damp, cold air you breathed
Like a tiny, African god
Unsay those orders
Companion, good company
Kindness, every unheld breath.

This one mostly combines language from the LSAT, parking tickets and Ulysses...

Silver Stallion

O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the wood.
Between the lightning and the thunder.
soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here now.
Oh, touch me soon, now. Use of placebos
would not lower costs, since a predetermined
number of participants approached the sacrament.
Failure to answer as required shall be deemed
an admission of liability. Knows the taste
of them now. Old Father Ocean. That one
is going too. Privileges suspended. You express
a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.
A cloud covered the sun, slowly, wholly, shadowing
the bay in a deeper green. The answer lies in the fact
that there are two types of laws. What did I say?
I forget. A conscientious proofreader attempted
to mend it at the surface. And what is death,
he asked. Your mother’s or yours or my own.
This response is not justified by the information
in the excerpt. Other interactions across cultures
can serve to disseminate ideas and discoveries.
Hat square on head. Buckles shined and cleaned.
Young shouts of moneyed voices. The discovery
spread to the Arab world as a result of warfare.
Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.
The detection of temperature by a finger touching
a cool surface. I remember only ideas and sensations.
The spread of papermaking technology, increase
in breathing rate while exercising. In my mind’s
darkness a sloth of the underworld, power’s blank
voice spoke. This relationship is not linear.
As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

2007-12-31T09:50:00.000-05:00

What "the road less traveled by" means today...

2007-12-29T10:14:00.000-05:00

This is the kind of thing that makes me love New York.

R.I.P.

2007-12-28T20:22:00.000-05:00

travel reading

2007-12-24T10:50:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has got to be the most persuasive essayist around. His essay against hate crime legislation from the 1999 Best American had me convinced against my better judgment. His recent pro-Obama essay in The Atlantic is almost as convincing. Esp. his salient points about how much seeing his name (Barack Hussein Obama) and face on a TV screen might offer us hope for connectedness in the International community where we've managed to alienate ourselves so thoroughly. But, honestly, I couldn't help wondering how much Obama's face matters to Sullivan in another way, and smelling the most well-masked misogyny in his comments about Hillary...

Also, the New Yorker's publishing of Ray Carver's original draft of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" along with his correspondence with Gordon Lish about the edits was fascinating. He cut nearly 40% of the manuscript. It made me think about the art of editing; Lish really found the core of the story and chiseled it down until it meant something. It was really a collaboration.

On Love

2007-12-05T23:43:00.000-05:00

and heartache, one thing I've learned from watching myself and others: if you want to be free, you should set the other free. Do not blame them and give them a burden to carry about what they could have fixed. Be brave enough to claim your limitation and set them free.

2007-11-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks and Cleaning Up

2007-11-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

Heading up to Rhinebeck today with my sis, looking forward to dried leaves and bare trees over the Hudson out the train window. Time for reflection.

Just looked through the archives of this thing and am embarrassed by some of the earlier posts...thankful I am not in that place anymore. That look at my pain insistence...

All in all, I wouldn't trade this life so far.

2007-11-11T23:27:00.000-05:00

Saw "Into the Wild" tonight and want to write an essay comparing it to Herzog's Grizzly Man--the difference in subject/object--the distance of the camera's gaze, the agency in who is holding it.

Realistically, though, that is probably all I'm going to say about it for the time being.