"People have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue..."
-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Godspeed You Black Emperor! - The Dead Flag Blues...
What a harrowing piece of music. The narrator's initial monologue frightens. I don't worry about losing any veneer of masculinity, when I admit to being able to imagine some scenario in which upon hearing the violins, begin shivering uncontrollably.
A chilling voice describing a lifeless view.
we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to deaththe sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
* Title shamelessly adopted from an Explosions in the Sky piece, "The Birth and Death of Day"
NorCal's recent rapturous weather has stricken me speechless. I've spent large sums of time to lounging outside, not at all beholden to the vices of studiousness and productivity, for better or worse. Suffice to say, it's been every positive adjective you can imagine.
During one of these idle exercises, a thought struck me and hasn't really left. I was reading this Tom Hoagland poem "Patience" describing the need for someone on whom you can "lavish your affection in perfect safety", someone to love without fear of love in return. These lyrics from Voxtrot's "Your Biggest Fan" sing a similar sentiment:
The argument here is that there is a significant value to added by someone un-fazed by endless devotion, by someone you can enslave yourself to with confidence that even as a result of your actions, between the two of you, nothing will change. It is an expectation game of sorts: with this person, you will always fall short of expectations, and so, there are no real expectations. Also, it is an act of purity, or a sense of innocence renewal when you can give without agenda.And then I saw you in a doorway
For a moment you looked tender and I know
That I could never ever ever ever ever touch you
Because you might touch back
I guess that sounds about right. Or at least, the fact that it sounds paradoxical and counterintuitive gives it some merit... If so and you have such a person in your life, a person on whom "you can lavish your affection in perfect safety", cheers to you. Or even better, if you are such a person in somebody else's life, if you are a person that receives endlessly, doubly cheers to you.
This explains it, or it is just a crippling fear of commitment. I'm fairly amused how little sense this makes. But that's okay. That's a recurring feature on this particular reel of film.
but it's taken me a decade to recognize that I love John,-- not for his cuteness (he is)
or his endearing manner of being always on the brink
of falling apart,
but precisely because he doesn't ever threaten to love me back.On someone like that you can lavish your affection
in perfect safety ----
that's nothing to be proud of, I suppose ---
and, yet, obscurely, I am.
--- Tom Hoagland, "Dear John"
"Your heart beats 900 times a day
And there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean."
Anis Mojgani, "Shake the Dust"
26 January 2008: Berkeley, California for the Stanford-Cal Basketball Game. Stanford prevails 82-77.
Despite my Cardinal loyalties, I find myself smitten with Berkeley. The college itself has such exciting history (Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement). And the town reminds fondly of Austin and its many-a-quirk atmosphere.
"Slow Thinkers Stay Right."
-- T-shirt in Berkeley, CA
Great times.
"As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." - Abraham Lincoln.
As a good as Obama is (and Clinton brayingly horrible), nothing we hear now even remotely approaches the stark superior Lincoln.
To better appreciate the transcendental genius of Simon and Garfunkel, read this New Yorker piece.
Austin, TX Lake Tahoe
2 January 2008 12 January 2008
Patience, by Tom Hoagland
"Success is the worst possible thing that could happen
to a man like you," she said,
"because the shiny shoes, and flattery
and the self-
lubricating slime of affluence would mean
you'd never have to face your failure as a human being."
There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then
and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat on a long gray river
of silence,
watching it until it disappeared around the bend
while I smiled and listened to her talk,
thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,
because I wanted to see what I was made of
besides fear and the desire to be liked
by every person on the goddamn face of the earth—
To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,
letting her believe that I was just a little bird
opening my mouth and swallowing
the medicine she wanted to administer
— a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison
Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful
in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an
epileptic fit of telling the truth?
And anyway, she was right about me,
that I am prone to certain misperceptions,
that I should never get so big or fat that I can't look down and see my own naked dirty feet,
which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked—.
It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.
I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,
I could succeed at anything.
"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
[Norman Mailer]
Laugh. Out loud. What a beautiful statement, regardless of its truth. My first insight into the wit and cynicism of the late Norman Mailer is a good one.
"...these days
I'm trying to find God everywhere, trying to figure out a little better this little
thing he made called a man."
[ Anis
Mojgani, "For Those Who can still Ride in an Airplane for the First
Time"* ]
Clearly the obligatory end-of-freshman-year/start of sophomore year post never materialized; let this atone, to the extent that there exists some divine scale devoted to weighing such petty matters. Instead, writing for no better purpose than its action, here I go.
Just under a year later, I guess my stasis has not changed. The appeal to be smitten still stands, slightly modified but fundamentally intact. I am probably overeager to have some movement, some cause, some one sweep me away without looking back. It is difficult to imagine how in this respect I seem to have regressed since coming to Stanford. I have never been to an institution with such concentrate knowledge that also begets such utter confusion.
I wonder a lot why I and from my observation, nearly everybody struggle so much to show appreciation. Some defensive mechanism shuts us off from exploring what others mean to us, what we mean to others. Now I am not saying that all conversations should comprise emotional confessions. Yet, articulating the importance of something, someone can result in awkwardness comparable to titanic elephants.
I also wonder why such ideas have increasingly occupied my thoughts of late, as though some nerve just now found the passageway to my grey matter. Or does going to college usually open the floodgates? That can't be right; nascent alcoholism can hardly be conducive to self-inspection.
So I definitely want to start writing in this thing more often; let it be fodder for perhaps the occasional bored reader or wayward websurfer. Ideally, my vox could come to approximate something like "The Writing Life Too, " an online notebook with a writer's thought-provoking ruminations. Realistically, I have no expectation of this to be more than the rarely updated and sparsely seen virtual abode of an imagination known as Peter.
In a bit akin to a cop-out, some things occupying my thoughts of late:
- Emilie Autumn - What If (Blackbird Mix)
- Anis Mojgani (Poetry Slam) "Shake the Dust" (starts at 6:30)
- *Anis Mojgani (Poetry Slam) "For Those Who can still Ride in an Airplane for the First Time"
- Senator Joe Biden
- Flock >> Firefox
- According to AP, at least 430 Iraq, Afghanistan veterans have committed suicide.
- Sanjeev's pick-up lines. "Are you Copper Tellurium because you are CuTe!"
Remark: For the purposes of this exercise, Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone will be considered one and the same. See wikipedia for the distinction. End remark.
I've thought long and hard for a satisfactory metaphor to describe, justify, contextualize my current lull. Sadly, I've come up with nothing good, but I think this might approximate par.
Arthur before Excalibur, unheard of.
I also like the word coveting: more active than waiting, but also with connotations, the far too extant possibility that Excalibur belongs to another.
So here I stand, submit: Excalibur Coveting.
I am reposting this brief post from an earlier blog, mainly because I like it but also since tonight, it feels at least tangentially important.
Thursday, April 20 2006
Somewhere between 12:38 and 12:39 tonight as I navigated my browser past my homepage to my e-mail account, I experienced the overwhelming sensation of, what I imagine to be, love or more specifically, the torrential feeling of concern for some external figure without any real rationality. Maybe it was because I had just started to listen to Rachael Yamagata or perhaps because I had concluded watching an episode of House.
Regardless of the cause, after about five seconds, when I "epiphanized" that love was indeed the transformation I had just undergone, I had already forgotten the object of my whole-hearted infatuation.
I guess that, at the end of the day, is what makes me first and foremost, a deusterostome.
And as Danny would exclaim, "Blastrula," truly.
Maybe at 12:57, this is not suppose to be a metaphor, just the necessary relation of some folk story not so important to you and immeasurably irrelevant to me as well. Just fodder for the rare reader.
