"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"
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
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"
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.
]]>"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:
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.
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