Angels in the Dust, Darfur Now, Kite Runner

Angels in the Dust


Darfur Now


Kite Runner

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:) I didn't realize that previously only registered users can comment.

Borges and I (excerpt)

To the other one, to Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and I delay myself, perhaps almost mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; from Borges I find out through the mail and I see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belong to no-one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, although I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being: the stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books that in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belong to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960

College applications are prompting many thoughts and asking for definitions that my fluid self struggles & attempts to give.

serenamay.com

First Impression

I redid the cover page of my website :)

Google Earth Stalking

Newsfeed updated me that a facebook friend posted up an album of her and her friends at a coffee shop -- pretty normal, hey ... then as I clicked through the photos, I saw my rendezvous with another friend documented in the background. No, nothing scandalous, but it's curious how our lives are increasingly going public via the Internet.

Humanity

From Approaches to Auschwitz:

The late Benjamin Nelson succinctly described the evolution of civilization as a journey from "tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood." Inherent in this predicament is the attrition of a sense of mutual obligation even among members of the same community. Insofar as the religions of the West have taught that all men and women are the children of one sovereign Creator, they have sought to reverse the process of depersonalization and to enlarge the human universe of moral obligation so that it includes all of humanity. As the Holocaust's victims and survivors testify, that ideal is far from realized. The Holocaust and the other manifestations of large-scale demographic violence in our time make realization of that ideal more urgent and more problematic.

I sent it to my close faculty friend, and he referred me to Kierkegaard:

Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

Exonian nostalgia

by Matt Berardi

... BEST of LUCK to the 130th lower, upper and executive boards applicants! Please drop off a hard copy of your app in the office by 8 p.m. on November 26 (Monday) & sign up for interview(s).

<3, le office cat

"the self" (Hugo)

From Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town:

The self as given is inadequate and will not do. I remember I was distrustful of both Eliot and Roethke when late in their careers they announced they were happy. But they were being honest. Every poem a poet writes is a slight advance of self and a slight modification of the mask, the one you want to be. Poem after poem the self grows more worthy of the mask, the mask comes closer to fitting the face. After enough poems, you are nearly the one you want to be, and the one you want to be closely resembles you. The happiness Eliot and Roethke spoke of is one that cannot be observed by others because it is only a different way one has come to feel about oneself. "Nearly" and "closely," not "exactly" and "perfectly."

A brief correspondence with poet Dave Smith and the rereading of his essay, St. Cyril's Dragon: The Threat of Poetry, are convincing me that the self evolves but perhaps around some core.