slated in
mused at 10:03 pm
email :::
by the way
i read lee’s story.. about his mother…
it really, really hurt.
i read it over some colbycheese and ritzcrackers and brownie mix. while lor and mom have been out all afternoon.
i sat in the kitchen and cried loudly for a while.
it felt a bit strange, being alone in a house, and having nothing wrong, except reading a book, and feeling so hurt and crying so much.
humans/emotions are curious things.
i had to cut my thoughts from the story and leave the kitchen. i think i’ll only remember the story when i’m prepared to feel hurt and cry again.
it is a beautiful book.
i still don’t understand what the natural/genetic/life-sustaining reason is that we cry. nor why i seem to do it extra-much.
i’ll be sad to finish this book.
it snowed today. crazy. but no sticking.
lor and mom just arrived home.
love,
~alicson
daddy replied:::
Mmmm, the Colby cheese I understand, but ritzcrackers & brownie mix???
I’m beginning to cry, just reading your email.
Favorite books? That’s tough. Like choosing a “favorite” friend, or season. The truthful answer is, and I think should be, “the one I’m reading now.” (Which happens to be “1421, The Year the Chinese Discovered America” — a wonderfully eye-opening view of Chinese and world history.) Most of my favorites would be “eye openers” — that made me rethink or consider amazing things totally new. For novels, I can still recall crying during “Grapes of Wrath,” and many others. That’s part of what good writing is about. For the one that “I wish I’d written that”, certainly “The Tao of Pooh” would rank up there — eye-opening, joyful, concise.
Hope you have a decent dinner.
Love,
\Dad
Bangalore
Wednesday, February 25, 2004 4:59 AM
slated in
mused at 12:07 am
i’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.. i’m only at chapter four, but what a beautiful, beautiful book. the style/manner of story reminds me of Vonnegut’s, ”People so smart you can’t believe it, and dumb and nice, and mean.” and Dickens’ ”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” actually, i’m missing Timequake a bit, right now.. and i want to jot down so much of East of Eden... but it’s not so easy to pull out quotes from it, as it often was with Vonnegut’s, and still maintain the poignance; and circling or putting stars next to every sweet/notable/right-on piece of the book would be just messy.. and not really possible.. it’s the whole thing that’s making it so beautiful.. the context of the people he’s introducing.. that’s what makes them so human and awesome and ordinary and perfect.
words matter. well, they don’t always matter terribly, in terms of one for another, since the entire basic purpose of words to begin with is to communicate, and that is simply the act of conveying one’s ideas or intentions or feelings or desires. but when it comes to literature, and poetry, words very much matter, since each one is, or should be, carefully chosen from the author’s repository to specifically convey and/or conjure that particular idea or intention or feeling or desire. there’s a song (by Nickleback)that’s been unfortunately stuck in my head today, since it was on the radio this afternoon… it would be a pretty good song, except that the chorus comes across repetitively, and i can’t get past the choice of lyrics: ”now the story’s played out like this, just like a paperback novel; let’s rewrite an ending that fits, instead of a hollywood horror.” the singer’s singing about a relationship; hollywood horrors pretty exclusively contain violent bloodshed, fear, sharp-objects, and grotesque, inhuman villains. unless the singer is suggesting that those elements are present or potentially present in his (clearly currently unsuccessful) relationship, then the comparison to the however-ideally alliterate and rhythmic ”hollywood horror”, is simply poorly chosen.
and wireless connection, why must you berate me so?
all
day
loooooooong.
“when you feel embarrased,
then i’ll be your pride.
when you need directions,
then i’ll be the guide.
for all time.
for all time.”
~Death Cab For Cutie- ‘Passenger Seat’
having collected the past, curry the present, and cue the future .:.
tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the day a boy arrived in Antioch to visit me, and stayed for 10 days (i think it was sposed to be more like 6, but then that blessed hurricane snowstorm (fyi, a snowstorm generally IS a hurricane… just… with that whole coldness-that-begets-snow-and-ice sorta thing, going on) and that fantastic guy who called, officially informing us that the airports were closed…), and we flew home together.. and we haven’t been in the same state too often after that, but every bit of time in the past year has brought us closer. two days after tomorrow, on the 12th, we’ll fly to London together. our first trip together; my first time in Europe. Two days after that, will be the 14th..Valentine’s Day.. a day we also spent together last year.. this paragraph is actually a little harder to write than it might seem.. well, it actually might seem as hard as it is.. written with many pauses, as it is… remembering the incredibly wonderful moments.. and the very hard ones that are necessarily a part of our past.. and all the bunches of feelings and thoughts that pervade…
i… after trying to write this sentence a couple half dozen times, at least, and having erased it every time.. i’m just gonna stop. i’m very much looking forward to…. ::pauses yet again…and then smiles:: …everything.
slated in
mused at 7:39 pm
i don’t remember quite when this was.. two, three or so years ago? but when i first read this poem, i was told that it implicitly had meaning for specifically/particularly me. i don’t know if i was in mind while it was written, but since the author said directly to me that it held meaning directly for me, i’m not going to feel too out of line ‘analyzing’ this out a bit…
brief on the poem.. written by junior-year highschool friend, currently at school in Lawrence University. i hesitate to write out his name here for privacy issues, until maybe one day he reads this and decides he’s fine with his name being written out on here (—even if it’s already elsewhere on the web). (or he tells me he objects to having any reference to him whatsoever and i have to take down his poem and state my post here so much more ambiguously.)
it was composed as magnetic poetry.. and initially he put up two ‘pages’ of it.. but i really felt that the second page detracted from any power that the first page had, so suggested he cut out the first page as one complete poem. he did take down the second page.
the poem follows here:
“magnetic poetry #20
if this morning you awoke
to a brilliant eternity of beauty
would you worship it
if you watched the rain fall in
a forest on a warm summer night
would you dance in it
if you were presented with a
universe dazzling of diamond beauty
would you embrace it
or would you be the one to ask why”
i really liked this poem when i first read it. to be accurate, though, i… i don’t often identify with or really appreciate a lot of his poetry in general—that’s not to say it isn’t good; it just doesn’t usually keep my attention. there are a few that he has written, however, that do. and that kind of makes them stand out more, i think. i’m not explaining very coherently…
a bit more honesty: when i told him i liked the poem, and he told me i should particularly take it to heart, as it directly spoke to me, i was a bit offended. more by the presumption than anything else. but he says stuff like that to me a lot, and i’m very aware of this particular presumption he makes about me. i know that in general, he doesn’t believe i truly understand or appreciate art. saying that, though, is kind of like questioning whether or not i believe in God. what i do believe, is that: whether i believe or not; whether or not i believe in the glory of art (—what a hugely broad and monstrously subjecting term, btw) is okay. that neither to believe or not to not believe are condemnable states of being. that’s what i believe.
and my comparison between art and God here is not entirely of my own whimsical concoction; i believe he’s used the similie himself, if not spoken with this specific theme.
but you know what, this is my journal and my thoughts on the matter, and my indignant response on him linking me to this poem was two-fold: who are you (of anyone, let alone someone who knows me as wholly as possible), to presume to know or understand how i view the world/miracles/beauty/art/nature/God. ? for that matter, to presume over anyone on the matter of appreciation for life and majesty. i did also pause a bit to consider—since that was what he did ask me to do in the first place—to consider that he was right to presume my view of ‘art’. (in case it’s not apparent, this is an issue that has played well before this poem was ever conceived and received.
and here’s the other thing: i didn’t ‘ask why’ when i first read this poem. i didn’t even think about it that much. i decided it was good and i lost the bookmark of the site it was on, or something, and only remembered the moment it was shared with me, and not much at all about the poem.
until now. now i’ve gotten (what a funny word, ‘gotten’) to read it again. now i have an entirely new question, that i may or may not have briefly considered years ago, but i am feeling very strongly about right now:
what about the beauty in asking ‘why’?
now if this poem had been written by a stranger, and i was now rereading it and realized this other potential dimension in it, i would then imagine that perhaps the author might have had that in mind the whole time, and it was i who had misinterpreted it before. but that isn’t the case. this poem says ‘there is so much beauty. can you recognize it? can you appreciate it?’ and that’s just fine… but word choice, whether magnetic poetry or not, is paramount in poetry. and the word choice in this poem is “or would you...ask why”. which makes ‘asking why’ the opposite to all the forementioned in the poem, and since the forementioned is the positive, and was furthermore what was advised to me to recognize as lacking in myself, ... that makes the act of ‘asking why’ a negative one.
maybe this stood out to me because last night i dwealt again on the concept of ‘timshel’.. a choice to this or that.. to believe or not believe.. to act or not act… to love or not love.. (and it’s not all binary / black and white) ...to be awed by beauty, or to ask why… and hey, that’s the other thing. ‘or would you be the one to’ implies that you would do the one instead of the other. why not ‘or would you be the one to also ask why’. but that implies joining a multitude of askers. lemme think a bit… okay. i think it would have to be something like ‘and might you ask why’.
i’m getting a bit tired. i’m gonna say i have two fundamental points, out of all of this:
one: why can’t you worship it and dance in it and embrace it and ask why ?
and two: the act of asking why is, to me, a potentially incredible and awesome thing. in many ways.. well, no, even more simply. again, this is my view of the world ~ if asking why is the privelege of choice, and choice is a promise of timshel, then that, that—the question, the promise, the choice—that is the most beautiful thing.. . .. .
an old piece, in a new place… ~
all our love and praises—words and phrases..
and deep hope for what we’ve meant to mean.
we’re so much farther than we ever meant to be,
and we’ve come much further than we might have thought to dream..
are we keeping our breaths on what promises might keep?
will you be in my arms when i’m sound asleep..?
slated in
mused at 7:39 pm
so i spent a little bit of time today (not a lot of time. just that by the time i finish this entry, the whole thing may qualify for somewhat a lot of time.) skimming a whole bunch of random blogs/web journals, by various people most of whom i don’t know. and the whole thing was part of a general consideration/contemplating about.. well.. who’s supposed to be reading this stuff? i figure just about every weblogger/journaler muses this a bit… it’s a whole new medium; unique… you can say anything you want, and it might be very private, or very public… it might definitely be seen by hundreds, or only one or two strangers will come across it, or one or two of your closest friends. and you have some control over that, by where you post the link and who you tell about it to… but really, a lot of the character of the medium is that..much of the time, it can go any which way, any which day, and close concentration could fall on any which entry of yours.. or be overlooked completely. the interesting things from there, then, are: why do we write? who for? these are all terribly over-asked questions. but always just as relevant as it was to every each other person who considers it. should more people read it? should we write more about what we’re doing? more about what we’re thinking? more about the music we listen to, the books we read, the movies we watch, the authors/leaders/artists who inspire us, the places we’ve been or dream to go, the people we love or wish loved us, the people we think ourselves to be or the people we intend to be… ultimately it always comes back to an ego-feed. from the first time you ever read aloud your written journal to someone, or click ‘send’ to post your page/entry online.. like a kid holding up the drawing he made, or saying ‘watch what i can do’. well this is fall very uninsightful. really, pretty much every action and advancement and effort is an ego-feed. it’s human survival. and feeding others’ egos? coexisting? somehow feeding back on one’s own? maybe. if the goals of life are to preserve itself, then by design/nature it would like be interested with promoting itself as well. preservation, promotion. so where does experience come into play in that? ... offhandedly, i’ll venture ‘self-justification’. life is made worthwhile through the gleaned and gathered experiences that can be offered to oneself or to others as a self-justification for one’s existence. which is, again, personal ego-feeding. again promotion. and back to preservation. seems to have the potential enough to keep any one person busy for a few thousand lifetimes.
so much time for the spending. but that which i would spend more than i have, i would spend on what i have not here. all that i would do and must do and otherwise might or certainly will besides, those are all elsewhere. and still i’ve this beautiful time and space. and i am undesirous to spend it where i would not choose, though all where i would, is not where i am, to have, till i am back where/when there is not the space, nor time, for anything i would or not do, at all.
intent vs. action. again.
daddy’s home. 
i don’t know how i’m supposed to be. how things are supposed to be. i know my tendencies. i know my capabilities. i know my intentions. i know my responsibilities. it’s all a very splendid conflict because it’s all up to me and the only thing i am sure about is that i want everything to be okay. i never want less than honesty. i never want less than openness. but after years of always pushing that; pushing my way… i try to consider now that some times, for some people, in some instances, i have to step back and let things happen as is most comfortable/right.. whether or not it’s the ideal/comfortable for me. people can be silently grumpy at me, or honestly tell me when things are unhappy… the telling is preferable to the silence. thanks. but i know they’re unhappy. i just don’t know how to make things happy. and there’s little to nothing in the suggestion box.
my brother’s basketball team jersey number is 13. that’s happiness.
the moon’s been beautiful… today weather was perfect… sun was a lil overzealous in the blinding shining… but the colors and light patterns in the sky were fantastic.
“birds singing a song… words can’t be that strong; my heart is reeling.. this is that fresh, that fresh feeling.”
i don’t think i even know how to not take things in stride. it’s a matter of being okay no matter what. and i’m always okay.
slated in
mused at 12:59 am
i like looking at my xanga site. it has pretty colors. :happy: i think good when i’m sitting in a moving car without obligation to talking to anyone. good, clear, symphonious thoughts… whole precise and perfect conversations carried out and actions flawlessly executed… but of course there’s no tape recorder. and would there were, the thoughts are complete in my head cuz of all the millions of other backgroundnesses and the illustrations of other thoughts to color it and all that other…. until the whole mind-reading / social-telepathy thing gets figured out in the whole scheme of human evolution… the perfect thoughts will remain so only in head. can’t even get those all down in an absolutely personal journal…. those words are only the framework of what is all in mind. half-eaten apple’s feeling neglected.
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