today:
wycliffe common room, i played cards with 5 men, while another repaired hockey equipment. the tv was playing ufc.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
CHAPTER XXVIII. -- A VIRGIN WHO FELL
AGAIN, I knew a virgin in Jerusalem who wore sackcloth for six years and shut herself up in a cell, taking none of the things that bestow pleasure. In the end she fell, abandoned (by God) because of her excessive arrogance. She opened the window and admitted the man who waited on her and sinned with him, because she had practised asceticism not with a religious motive and for the love of God, but with human ostentation,192 which springs from vain-glory and corrupt intention. For, her thoughts being engrossed in condemning others, the guardian 193 of her chastity was absent. |109
AGAIN, I knew a virgin in Jerusalem who wore sackcloth for six years and shut herself up in a cell, taking none of the things that bestow pleasure. In the end she fell, abandoned (by God) because of her excessive arrogance. She opened the window and admitted the man who waited on her and sinned with him, because she had practised asceticism not with a religious motive and for the love of God, but with human ostentation,192 which springs from vain-glory and corrupt intention. For, her thoughts being engrossed in condemning others, the guardian 193 of her chastity was absent. |109
CHAPTER VIII. -- AMOUN OF NITRIA 80
[1] (ARSISIUS) used to say that Amoun lived in this wise. When he was a young man of about twenty-two he was constrained by his uncle to marry a wife----he (himself) was an orphan. Being unable to resist the pressure of his uncle, he thought it best to be crowned 81 and take his seat in the nuptial chamber and undergo all the marriage rites. When all (the guests) were gone |60 out, after settling 82the pair to sleep on the couch in the bridal chamber, Amoun gets up and locks the door, then he sits down and calls his blessed companion to him and says to her: [2] "Come here, lady, and then I will explain the matter to you. The marriage which we have contracted has no special virtue. Let us then do well by sleeping in future each of us separately, that we may please God by keeping our virginity intact." And drawing from his bosom a little book, he read to the girl, who could not read at all, in the words 83 of the apostle and the Saviour, and to most of what he read he added all that was in his mind and explained the principles of virginity and chastity; so that convinced by the grace of God she said: [3] "I too am convinced, my lord. And what further commands have you now?" "I command," he said, "that each of us lives alone in future." But she could not endure this, saying: "Let us dwell in the same house, but in different beds." So he lived in the same house with her eighteen years. During each day he occupied himself with his garden and balsam-grove----for he prepared balsam. Balsam grows like a vine, requiring cultivation and pruning and much hard work. Then in the evening he would enter the house and offer prayers and eat with his wife; and then having said the night prayers would go out. [4] Such was their practice, and both having attained impassivity, the prayers of Amoun prevailed, and she says to him at last: "I have something to say to you, my lord; that, if you hearken to me, I may be convinced that you love me in a godly way." He says to her: "Say what you wish." She says to him: "It is just that we should live apart----you being a man and practising righteousness, and I also |61 eagerly following the same way as you. For it is absurd that you should live with me in chastity and yet conceal such virtue as this of yours." [5] But he, thanking God, says to her: "Then you keep this house; but I will make myself another house." And he went out and settled in the inner part of the mount of Nitria----for there were no monasteries there yet----and he made himself two round cells.84 And having lived twenty-two years more in the desert he died, or rather fell asleep. He used to see that blessed lady his wife twice each year.
The blessed Athanasius the bishop in his life of Antony told a marvellous story about this man,85 how that he came to the bank of the river Lycus with his disciple Theodoras, and shrinking from removing his clothes lest he should see him naked, he was found on the other side, having been carried across by angels without using the ferry. Such then was the life of the blessed Amoun and such his perfection that the blessed Antony saw his soul carried to heaven by angels. I crossed this river once in a ferry, but with fear; for it is a canal leading from the great Nile.
[1] (ARSISIUS) used to say that Amoun lived in this wise. When he was a young man of about twenty-two he was constrained by his uncle to marry a wife----he (himself) was an orphan. Being unable to resist the pressure of his uncle, he thought it best to be crowned 81 and take his seat in the nuptial chamber and undergo all the marriage rites. When all (the guests) were gone |60 out, after settling 82the pair to sleep on the couch in the bridal chamber, Amoun gets up and locks the door, then he sits down and calls his blessed companion to him and says to her: [2] "Come here, lady, and then I will explain the matter to you. The marriage which we have contracted has no special virtue. Let us then do well by sleeping in future each of us separately, that we may please God by keeping our virginity intact." And drawing from his bosom a little book, he read to the girl, who could not read at all, in the words 83 of the apostle and the Saviour, and to most of what he read he added all that was in his mind and explained the principles of virginity and chastity; so that convinced by the grace of God she said: [3] "I too am convinced, my lord. And what further commands have you now?" "I command," he said, "that each of us lives alone in future." But she could not endure this, saying: "Let us dwell in the same house, but in different beds." So he lived in the same house with her eighteen years. During each day he occupied himself with his garden and balsam-grove----for he prepared balsam. Balsam grows like a vine, requiring cultivation and pruning and much hard work. Then in the evening he would enter the house and offer prayers and eat with his wife; and then having said the night prayers would go out. [4] Such was their practice, and both having attained impassivity, the prayers of Amoun prevailed, and she says to him at last: "I have something to say to you, my lord; that, if you hearken to me, I may be convinced that you love me in a godly way." He says to her: "Say what you wish." She says to him: "It is just that we should live apart----you being a man and practising righteousness, and I also |61 eagerly following the same way as you. For it is absurd that you should live with me in chastity and yet conceal such virtue as this of yours." [5] But he, thanking God, says to her: "Then you keep this house; but I will make myself another house." And he went out and settled in the inner part of the mount of Nitria----for there were no monasteries there yet----and he made himself two round cells.84 And having lived twenty-two years more in the desert he died, or rather fell asleep. He used to see that blessed lady his wife twice each year.
The blessed Athanasius the bishop in his life of Antony told a marvellous story about this man,85 how that he came to the bank of the river Lycus with his disciple Theodoras, and shrinking from removing his clothes lest he should see him naked, he was found on the other side, having been carried across by angels without using the ferry. Such then was the life of the blessed Amoun and such his perfection that the blessed Antony saw his soul carried to heaven by angels. I crossed this river once in a ferry, but with fear; for it is a canal leading from the great Nile.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The Prof's Question:
Reflect on your life in terms of desire, discernment, and community as they have shaped your sense of vocaiton. What have you desired? How have you discerned, in desire, insights into your vocaiton? Who has been part of that discernmnet?
My Answer (i.e I cannot actually hand in this answer can i):
Derrida wrote an essay just before he died, called A Silkworm of Own''s One, that used the idea of the veil in the Jewish Holy of Holies, the rupture of that curtain by Christ, and the generalized idea of veiling, unveiling, ruptures, and tears, seeing and unseeing, and the physicality of self to talk about what it meant to believe. He talked about language, about how the language we use to talk about these ruptures are indicative about the ruptures in our own experiences, about our own blindness, and lack of vision. The narrative of Christianity is interrupted, from the beginning our attempts to engage in those narratives are like having silkworms of one's own. In a life's work there is not one narrative, only a set of often failed negotiated attempts at completeness. There is no meta-narrative, or at least the meta-narrative is like the temple curtain, torn asunder, our own small attempts can only make the most infinitesimal linguistic attempts at an impossible repair. I continue to raise the same worms to do the same work, even though the meta-narratives are so threadbare because they are the language that has been given to me, because they pose a set of almost impossible problems, problems that cannot be solved by meta-narratives, but through a careful and delicate deconstruction of rotting tapestries never fully repaired. My three fattest silkworms, the one that shit the most silk, are masculinity, sexuality, and language. Their absence and presence within a directly ecclesiastic context has provided the most thread, the thread that traps me—too thin to cut through like Alexander. There is not enough space here to do anything but record the barest anecdotes, to mark my own ruptures, my own tears and loose strings.
I grew up Latter Day Saint. My dad left to go up north when I was 7. I waited a year when I was to see if he could see me baptized. He didn't. My mother never remarried, she never dated, she became a widow, and we became orphans, in a Desert kind of way. I grew up in an oil town, people would leave and come, so there was a set of men in the ward who worked to make our lives better but they never stayed long. I can list them, from 9 to 12, and then again from 14 to 17. Brother Lowry, who was now in Georgia, who bought me ice cream sundaes and camping. Brother Andrews, who taught me about hard work and human decency. Brother Christenson, who got me the scout badges and Brother Bowes, who continues to help my mother. They brought me to the temple, they prayed with me, they put their hands on my head and blessed me during migraines, they told me how to serve the sacrament. They taught me mostly about what it meant to be a man.
I went away to school when I was 12. Anglican, private, all boys. It was a formal attempt to make me a man, in the ways that the informal training had failed to. The connecting of virtue, masculinity, and religiosity. The easy thing would be to treat it as a mirroring; a snow white thing. The LDS would be good, and Saint John's would be bad. The lessons that the Mormons teach me would be reflected in a skewed and broken way in the lessons of the church. Here is the easiest anecdote to prove that: sometimes during those two years I would get the weekends away from home. When we returned home we said Compline. After Compline, we would get ready for bed. Sometimes the other boys in my class would engage in rough horseplay, sometimes I had the shit kicked out of me, sometimes there were clandestine circle jerks. But most Sundays a teacher would take me to his room. He would make sure I was taught a lesson, about hygiene, about proper behavior, about social control. The tender care and attention would lead sometimes to a spanking, if I had not learnt the lessons well, or sometimes he would teach me how to masturbate.
Here is the first rupture. The language of the LDS was not liturgical, and the lessons about devotion, desire, and the teaching of God's lessons were always oblique, present but oblique. The language of the Anglican boys school was liturgical and the connections between sex acts and religious language were direct. But I wanted most of the LDS men who taught me to fuck me, and I wanted the teacher to fuck me. I wanted the lessons of desire to be fulfilled to completeness. This rupturing desire for what I thought was completeness led to a continuing connecting for me, between the bodies of men, and the bodies of G-d in ways that refuse to stablise. Returning to the LDS church in grade 9 in the years after that experience, made the bishops interviews, the discussions of sexual sins, the politicizing of my queerness, and the ambiguity of working class bodies talking about Christ as an aphrodisiac. My body, my queer body, my holy body was not a body, but a set of competing desires. I ended up leaving the church under strained circumstances, circumstances that were directly resulted from these competing narratives of completion and desire.
In high school, aching for a corporeal solution to spiritual problems, and isolated from the LDS church I went to Catholicism. I thought that the history of the Catholic body w as weird enough, problematic enough and had enough women that I could hide. That I could forget the Vatican, live in the medieval ages. That I could think about the words, and pretend that I was thinking about bodies. I spent a lot of those years having a lot of sex with a lot of men and women. The two were unconnected, the rupture was a gap that could never be closed. In the first years of undergrad, I thought that I was called to the priesthood, and I met with Father Hero.
He would here my confession, both of us bowing heads close, our bodies almost touching. He would absolve me and I would go back sinning. I wanted him to touch me: to touch my head and my arm, to hug me of course, but to also touch my penis. He was sweet, quiet, naïve, intense, and conservative. He never did. I would go to his office on Wednesday, and then on Sunday, I would go to St Joes, the catholic ministry on campus, where a crowd of very attractive mostly rural, mostly working class men would live. They taught me the gospel, they taught me devotion to the gospel, they sinned a bit, drank some, but none of them fucked me either.
Though it might seem like it, through this essay, sadly my mission is not to get fucked by straight boys who are earnest and lovely, who love Jesus and are incapable of irony. I think that the intertwining of what it means to be a man, to be a sexual creature, to be devout, and to be hungry are foundational. They began from the LDS, they moved through Saint Johns, and they did not stop when I went to Rome. Men are a mystery, they have been dangerous, and they have broken me. I have let them break me. I have been in the last year, been going to an Anglican church, and moved into an anglican dorm at an all male floor, and started in an Asperger's social group which is almost entirely men, and started dating instead of just having sex. I am seeing a male therapist. I am learning how to be a man, and because so much of my training in masculinity has been in religious circumstances, the best way for me to repair the ruptures that have existed from the beginning is to reform what it means to be a man, to be a sexualized man, in a safer version of the context that imprinted those negative reasons in the first place.
Reflect on your life in terms of desire, discernment, and community as they have shaped your sense of vocaiton. What have you desired? How have you discerned, in desire, insights into your vocaiton? Who has been part of that discernmnet?
My Answer (i.e I cannot actually hand in this answer can i):
Derrida wrote an essay just before he died, called A Silkworm of Own''s One, that used the idea of the veil in the Jewish Holy of Holies, the rupture of that curtain by Christ, and the generalized idea of veiling, unveiling, ruptures, and tears, seeing and unseeing, and the physicality of self to talk about what it meant to believe. He talked about language, about how the language we use to talk about these ruptures are indicative about the ruptures in our own experiences, about our own blindness, and lack of vision. The narrative of Christianity is interrupted, from the beginning our attempts to engage in those narratives are like having silkworms of one's own. In a life's work there is not one narrative, only a set of often failed negotiated attempts at completeness. There is no meta-narrative, or at least the meta-narrative is like the temple curtain, torn asunder, our own small attempts can only make the most infinitesimal linguistic attempts at an impossible repair. I continue to raise the same worms to do the same work, even though the meta-narratives are so threadbare because they are the language that has been given to me, because they pose a set of almost impossible problems, problems that cannot be solved by meta-narratives, but through a careful and delicate deconstruction of rotting tapestries never fully repaired. My three fattest silkworms, the one that shit the most silk, are masculinity, sexuality, and language. Their absence and presence within a directly ecclesiastic context has provided the most thread, the thread that traps me—too thin to cut through like Alexander. There is not enough space here to do anything but record the barest anecdotes, to mark my own ruptures, my own tears and loose strings.
I grew up Latter Day Saint. My dad left to go up north when I was 7. I waited a year when I was to see if he could see me baptized. He didn't. My mother never remarried, she never dated, she became a widow, and we became orphans, in a Desert kind of way. I grew up in an oil town, people would leave and come, so there was a set of men in the ward who worked to make our lives better but they never stayed long. I can list them, from 9 to 12, and then again from 14 to 17. Brother Lowry, who was now in Georgia, who bought me ice cream sundaes and camping. Brother Andrews, who taught me about hard work and human decency. Brother Christenson, who got me the scout badges and Brother Bowes, who continues to help my mother. They brought me to the temple, they prayed with me, they put their hands on my head and blessed me during migraines, they told me how to serve the sacrament. They taught me mostly about what it meant to be a man.
I went away to school when I was 12. Anglican, private, all boys. It was a formal attempt to make me a man, in the ways that the informal training had failed to. The connecting of virtue, masculinity, and religiosity. The easy thing would be to treat it as a mirroring; a snow white thing. The LDS would be good, and Saint John's would be bad. The lessons that the Mormons teach me would be reflected in a skewed and broken way in the lessons of the church. Here is the easiest anecdote to prove that: sometimes during those two years I would get the weekends away from home. When we returned home we said Compline. After Compline, we would get ready for bed. Sometimes the other boys in my class would engage in rough horseplay, sometimes I had the shit kicked out of me, sometimes there were clandestine circle jerks. But most Sundays a teacher would take me to his room. He would make sure I was taught a lesson, about hygiene, about proper behavior, about social control. The tender care and attention would lead sometimes to a spanking, if I had not learnt the lessons well, or sometimes he would teach me how to masturbate.
Here is the first rupture. The language of the LDS was not liturgical, and the lessons about devotion, desire, and the teaching of God's lessons were always oblique, present but oblique. The language of the Anglican boys school was liturgical and the connections between sex acts and religious language were direct. But I wanted most of the LDS men who taught me to fuck me, and I wanted the teacher to fuck me. I wanted the lessons of desire to be fulfilled to completeness. This rupturing desire for what I thought was completeness led to a continuing connecting for me, between the bodies of men, and the bodies of G-d in ways that refuse to stablise. Returning to the LDS church in grade 9 in the years after that experience, made the bishops interviews, the discussions of sexual sins, the politicizing of my queerness, and the ambiguity of working class bodies talking about Christ as an aphrodisiac. My body, my queer body, my holy body was not a body, but a set of competing desires. I ended up leaving the church under strained circumstances, circumstances that were directly resulted from these competing narratives of completion and desire.
In high school, aching for a corporeal solution to spiritual problems, and isolated from the LDS church I went to Catholicism. I thought that the history of the Catholic body w as weird enough, problematic enough and had enough women that I could hide. That I could forget the Vatican, live in the medieval ages. That I could think about the words, and pretend that I was thinking about bodies. I spent a lot of those years having a lot of sex with a lot of men and women. The two were unconnected, the rupture was a gap that could never be closed. In the first years of undergrad, I thought that I was called to the priesthood, and I met with Father Hero.
He would here my confession, both of us bowing heads close, our bodies almost touching. He would absolve me and I would go back sinning. I wanted him to touch me: to touch my head and my arm, to hug me of course, but to also touch my penis. He was sweet, quiet, naïve, intense, and conservative. He never did. I would go to his office on Wednesday, and then on Sunday, I would go to St Joes, the catholic ministry on campus, where a crowd of very attractive mostly rural, mostly working class men would live. They taught me the gospel, they taught me devotion to the gospel, they sinned a bit, drank some, but none of them fucked me either.
Though it might seem like it, through this essay, sadly my mission is not to get fucked by straight boys who are earnest and lovely, who love Jesus and are incapable of irony. I think that the intertwining of what it means to be a man, to be a sexual creature, to be devout, and to be hungry are foundational. They began from the LDS, they moved through Saint Johns, and they did not stop when I went to Rome. Men are a mystery, they have been dangerous, and they have broken me. I have let them break me. I have been in the last year, been going to an Anglican church, and moved into an anglican dorm at an all male floor, and started in an Asperger's social group which is almost entirely men, and started dating instead of just having sex. I am seeing a male therapist. I am learning how to be a man, and because so much of my training in masculinity has been in religious circumstances, the best way for me to repair the ruptures that have existed from the beginning is to reform what it means to be a man, to be a sexualized man, in a safer version of the context that imprinted those negative reasons in the first place.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Chastity makes incorporeal nature its own. Chastity is the beloved abode of Christ, and the earthly heaven of the heart. Chastity is a supernatural renunciation of nature. It is the condition in which a mortal and corruptible body competes in a marvellous way with the incorporeal. A chaste person is one who drives out love with love, and puts out the fire of the flesh with spiritual fire.
John Climacus.
John Climacus.
Pseduo Marcius:
check out the eucharistic language here:
The tears which spring from a really great affliction and from an anguished heart, which is both in possession of the truth and burns with interior ardour, are nourishment for the soul provided by the Bread which came down from heaven. This bread was shared with Mary, as she sat in tears at the feet of the Saviour, as he himself testified: "Mary has chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from her." What precious pearls these blessed tears! What docility and eagerness to hear! What courage and wisdom! What keenness of spirit, inspiring a passionate love of the immaculate Spouse! What burning desire of the soul for the God the Word! What intimate communion of bride and heavenly bridegroom!
check out the eucharistic language here:
The tears which spring from a really great affliction and from an anguished heart, which is both in possession of the truth and burns with interior ardour, are nourishment for the soul provided by the Bread which came down from heaven. This bread was shared with Mary, as she sat in tears at the feet of the Saviour, as he himself testified: "Mary has chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from her." What precious pearls these blessed tears! What docility and eagerness to hear! What courage and wisdom! What keenness of spirit, inspiring a passionate love of the immaculate Spouse! What burning desire of the soul for the God the Word! What intimate communion of bride and heavenly bridegroom!
Of the humility and obedience of Abbot Patermucius,[159] which he did not hesitate to make perfect by throwing his little boy into the river at the command of his senior.
SO far let it suffice for me to have told a few things out of many concerning Abbot John: now I will relate a memorable deed of Abbot Patermucius. For he, when anxious to renounce the world, remained lying before the doors of the monastery for a long time until by his dogged persistence he induced them--contrary to all the rules of the Coenobia--to receive him together with his little boy who was about eight years old. And when they were at last admitted they were at once not only committed to the care of different superiors, but also put to live in separate cells that the father might not be reminded by the constant sight of the little one that out of all his possessions and carnal treasures, which he had cast off and renounced, at least his son remained to him; and that as he was already taught that he was no longer a rich man, so he might also forget the fact that he was a father. And that it might be more thoroughly tested whether he would make affection and love[160] for his own flesh and blood of more account than obedience and Christian mortification (which all who renounce the world ought out of love to Christ to prefer), the child was on purpose neglected and dressed in rags instead of proper clothes; and so covered and disfigured with dirt that he would rather disgust than delight the eyes of his father whenever he saw him. And further, he was exposed to blows and slaps from different people, which the father often saw inflicted without the slightest reason on his innocent child under his very eyes, so that he never saw his cheeks without their being stained with the dirty marks of tears. And though the child was treated thus day after day before his eyes, yet still out of love for Christ and the virtue of obedience the father's heart stood firm and unmoved. For he no longer regarded him as his own son, as he had offered him equally with himself to Christ; nor was he concerned about his present injuries, but rather rejoiced because he saw that they were endured, not without profit; thinking little of his son's tears, but anxious about his own humility and perfection. And when the Superior of the Coenobium saw his steadfastness of mind and immovable inflexibility, in order thoroughly to prove the constancy of his purpose, one day when he had seen the child crying, he pretended that he was annoyed with him and told the father to throw him into the river. Then he, as if this had been commanded him by the Lord, at once snatched up the child as quickly as possible, and carried him in his arms to the river's bank to throw him in. And straightway in the fervour of his faith and obedience this would have been carried out in act, had not some of the brethren been purposely set to watch the banks of the river very carefully, and when the child was thrown in, had somehow snatched him from the bed of the stream, and prevented the command, which was really fulfilled by the obedience and devotion of the father, from being consummated in act and result.
SO far let it suffice for me to have told a few things out of many concerning Abbot John: now I will relate a memorable deed of Abbot Patermucius. For he, when anxious to renounce the world, remained lying before the doors of the monastery for a long time until by his dogged persistence he induced them--contrary to all the rules of the Coenobia--to receive him together with his little boy who was about eight years old. And when they were at last admitted they were at once not only committed to the care of different superiors, but also put to live in separate cells that the father might not be reminded by the constant sight of the little one that out of all his possessions and carnal treasures, which he had cast off and renounced, at least his son remained to him; and that as he was already taught that he was no longer a rich man, so he might also forget the fact that he was a father. And that it might be more thoroughly tested whether he would make affection and love[160] for his own flesh and blood of more account than obedience and Christian mortification (which all who renounce the world ought out of love to Christ to prefer), the child was on purpose neglected and dressed in rags instead of proper clothes; and so covered and disfigured with dirt that he would rather disgust than delight the eyes of his father whenever he saw him. And further, he was exposed to blows and slaps from different people, which the father often saw inflicted without the slightest reason on his innocent child under his very eyes, so that he never saw his cheeks without their being stained with the dirty marks of tears. And though the child was treated thus day after day before his eyes, yet still out of love for Christ and the virtue of obedience the father's heart stood firm and unmoved. For he no longer regarded him as his own son, as he had offered him equally with himself to Christ; nor was he concerned about his present injuries, but rather rejoiced because he saw that they were endured, not without profit; thinking little of his son's tears, but anxious about his own humility and perfection. And when the Superior of the Coenobium saw his steadfastness of mind and immovable inflexibility, in order thoroughly to prove the constancy of his purpose, one day when he had seen the child crying, he pretended that he was annoyed with him and told the father to throw him into the river. Then he, as if this had been commanded him by the Lord, at once snatched up the child as quickly as possible, and carried him in his arms to the river's bank to throw him in. And straightway in the fervour of his faith and obedience this would have been carried out in act, had not some of the brethren been purposely set to watch the banks of the river very carefully, and when the child was thrown in, had somehow snatched him from the bed of the stream, and prevented the command, which was really fulfilled by the obedience and devotion of the father, from being consummated in act and result.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
mark lewis makes films of lasting beauty, but not much depth. because his aesthetic so closely matches mine, and because his sites of interaction are mine, esp. w/i the GTA, I think I give him more of a pass then a non t oronto film maker, that said he understands film--the erotic potential of rear projection, the gaps and black screens made automatically, the tilting, the panning...it becomes an act of mourning film, the moving of super 8 or 35 to dvd a hyper self aware damage.
(oh his film about the 54th floor, how it makes me ache)
(oh his film about the 54th floor, how it makes me ache)
a) is misogyny in sexy dance music more acceptable when it is created in a hip hop context?
b) is the amalgamation b/w the urge to dance/fuck and the urge for emotional rawness only allowed among high indie? (ie aren’t 3OH!3 and LCD soundsystem playing the same game, just the 3OH!3 is less mournful and more angry? Is mournful a more acceptable emotion then anger? Losing yr edge is not a concern for 3OH!3, but losing desire is?
c) It does objectify women, for sure, but this clucking about that seems to be a fear of sexual frankness, or at least a certain kind of sexual frankness.
d) for me, the line about not learning to pronounce love, or not knowing how to say sorry, or about perserving innocence is indicative of this trend i find in young men, where they hide a lack of knowledge about the protocols of sex with a braggadocio about having it–though this is present here, it recognizes the phallocentric fear of doing damage, the paranoia of going to far, and having that go far, going out of control. some of it blames the female partner, the whisper chorus of the gun metaphor is play acting though, it follows with “i think i should know”, which is a profoundly ambigious gambit in the desire to seduce, and actually fairly similar to Wilson’s gambit in God Only Knows: “i may not always love you” (the ambiguity of the gambit, and then the closing of the gambit is unpresent in 3OH!3 because the ambiguity is not a problem not to be served by romance–this is not a falling in love song, this is a Post-AIDS, Post Femminism, Post-Rape Crisis Let’s Fuck Song. (it is not nearly as good as god only knows, but there is so little that is as good as god only knows)
e) also, it means something but i am not sure what, that there are any number of female fronted versions of this on the web. rewrites, responding to the original text.
f) the video features a polymorphus pile, a pan-racial pile, and a pile where gender is blurred, there is free floating miasma of fuckability, a puppy pile of initial play here.
g) i think it is aproblematic text, but a brilliant one.
b) is the amalgamation b/w the urge to dance/fuck and the urge for emotional rawness only allowed among high indie? (ie aren’t 3OH!3 and LCD soundsystem playing the same game, just the 3OH!3 is less mournful and more angry? Is mournful a more acceptable emotion then anger? Losing yr edge is not a concern for 3OH!3, but losing desire is?
c) It does objectify women, for sure, but this clucking about that seems to be a fear of sexual frankness, or at least a certain kind of sexual frankness.
d) for me, the line about not learning to pronounce love, or not knowing how to say sorry, or about perserving innocence is indicative of this trend i find in young men, where they hide a lack of knowledge about the protocols of sex with a braggadocio about having it–though this is present here, it recognizes the phallocentric fear of doing damage, the paranoia of going to far, and having that go far, going out of control. some of it blames the female partner, the whisper chorus of the gun metaphor is play acting though, it follows with “i think i should know”, which is a profoundly ambigious gambit in the desire to seduce, and actually fairly similar to Wilson’s gambit in God Only Knows: “i may not always love you” (the ambiguity of the gambit, and then the closing of the gambit is unpresent in 3OH!3 because the ambiguity is not a problem not to be served by romance–this is not a falling in love song, this is a Post-AIDS, Post Femminism, Post-Rape Crisis Let’s Fuck Song. (it is not nearly as good as god only knows, but there is so little that is as good as god only knows)
e) also, it means something but i am not sure what, that there are any number of female fronted versions of this on the web. rewrites, responding to the original text.
f) the video features a polymorphus pile, a pan-racial pile, and a pile where gender is blurred, there is free floating miasma of fuckability, a puppy pile of initial play here.
g) i think it is aproblematic text, but a brilliant one.
Hello Saferide "X Telling Me About The Loss Of Something Dear, At Age 16" (Fantastic Dancing)
historia sales page for an 19th century mexican silesio.
more ways to stop gay sex in public places
6 year olds reading where the wild things are.
DNA evidence can be fabricated.
73 fotos of Wisconsin carnivals.
a viking feast in yr home.
Sweet Pro Gay Marriage ad from Ireland
torygraph op-ed about some recent anglican nuns who haev become catholic.
Laura Bush is taken off her leash.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Wayne Theibaud, Peanut Butter Toast, Oil on Board, 2009.
ameila bauer does these really clever, really well crafted, media constructed handicraft work, broken window lace, explosion needlepoint, that sort of thing.
kentucky failure of seperation of church and state.
joe fig interviews and shoots artist studios, the chuck close shots, about how exactly he paints big while in a chair are useful context.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
San Fransisco Artist, not sure of the name.
small, hyper minimalist chapel in sao paulo.
650 drawings of the civil war via illsutrated journals, drawings and the newspapers, contemparay.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Sean Foreman, from 3OH!3, live.
mike monterio drawings bitchy sayings, in a white san serif font ona brush strokey black ground.
a list of items left on the moon
oh hijackings in mexico, its like the 70s never left.
Bowie on the Old Grey Whistle Test
Morissey, 1983
Stipe singing moon river.
this LDS positoning of digital media above print and television is prophetic,
the foriegn and commonwealth office in the uk tries to figure out the whole closet not closet thing in relation to diplomatics.
i cannot figure out if flaherty has no idea what is going on or if the economic system is this chaotic.
howard schawartzs fotos of boxers before and after matches are fashionable, have the violence mediated by a digital blankness that seems really popular, and the linear conceptual base that passes for documentary work, but mens bodies destroyed by other men have a constant resonance.
80 fotos of steve reeves.
The Wombats, Let's Dance to Joy Division.
weirdly processed shots of Richard Netura shots from 1968.
tree hugger used one of my photos
foreign policy on gay killings in iraq.
animals with light sabers
53 photos of
the glass house.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
I don’t think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S&M tendencies deep within our unconscious, and so on. I think that S&M is much more than that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously. The idea that S&M is related to a deep violence, that S&M practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid. We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization of the body. Cite Arrow Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1982/1984)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
I have been experimenting with collectivity this summer. Not in the ways that people going back to school do, not in the historic way, in the hippie ways or the lesbian separatist ways, or the religious groups that blossom like mushrooms in the middle of America—not like Brigham Young, or Joseph Noyes, or even Rajneesh. I have been using Us more often or the second person more often, I have thot more about what I have in common with Christians, or men who have sex with men, or with those who are on the autism spectrum. Because for the last decade I have been Christan, and Queer, Depressed and Autistic. There is language to describe the collective nature of the first two of these things, a history, a linguistic heritage, a tendency to know that it means when collective nouns are spoken. Maybe having Aspergers is too new, or too hip, or still too strange, or maybe the awkwardness of the social means that there is less spoken as a collective noun.
It used to be, until fairly recently, that to see a culture emerge we went to the movies. There are a million moves about rapturous, difficult, and aesthetic Christs. The movies made me Christian—the swoon of Falconetti, those two Ben Hurs, all of the sins of De Mille's Sodoms, the spectacle of Ray's King of Kings, the Kierkegaardean suffering in the knights of the Seventh Seal. Every movie ever made about Nuns, and most of the movies made about vampires. Not only did the movies make me Christian, it made me Catholic. Miracles made of light, commissioned in the dark, secrets about sex and death, of violence redeemed, even in the multiplexes there is a confessional aspect, there is a collective aspect. They work in conjunction.
It is not only the Christianity that works this dual mystery. My queerness as well. In The Celluloid Closet, Lily Tomlin told a secret—she told the straight people who went to that move to be educated, that queers went to the movies to have their stories heard. The stories were not always positive, they were often broken, but you would see yourself from the beginning when the lights went out. They told us how to talk, how to move, how to swing, how to fuck, how to love, and how to hate ourselves. We became queer in the dark. Some of the mystical transference, like the hand jobs in back rows or that feeling that Frank O'Hara talked about when he wrote about those “gratuitous bags of popcorn” or “the immediacy of a bad movie, or to be as alive as the vulgar. “ The catholicism and the queerness grew like moon-flowers in the cinema's dark gaze.
The darkness is also about depression, the cinema feeds the glamour of my depression. Sometimes it is the explicit suicides, the melodrama of self destruction in characters played b y Shirley McClain in the Apartment (for laughs) or that silly kid in Swing Kids (because Nazis are sexier when they are dead), or all of those vestal virgins in Sophia Coppola's first film, or the Elliot Smith orchestrated wrist slitting in the Royal Tennenbaums. But also, the whole list of addicts, closet cases, tragic wastrels, and starlets lost that provide a meta-narrative to the central role of celluloid.
Movies then made me a homosexual, a catholic, a melancholic. There wre 100 years of stories, and stories about stories, and stories about the people who made stories that gave me context and ammunition. There was a collective of responses that allowed for me to enter the slipstream. The last of the items on the above list was the most difficult. When I was diagnosed with Asperger's there was scant resources on the ground, and those resources were about training. But this summer I went back to school to do religious or at least theological work. I entered an evangelical anglican dorm, I went to classes, and I sought help so that my grad school experiment would end as less of an unmitigated disaster then the flunk out of my undergrad.
So I met with this guy who was in charge of all the autism guys, and I started going to meetings with other people who had the disorder. They were all guys. They were going to teach me how to be an Aspie, how to construct a collective identity around this piece that was so unmoored for so long. Mostly it was meeting in the 70s era basement of the big library in Toronto, and talking. It was sort of like an encounter group, or a baptist youth group, or one of these al-anon meetings I would go to, or a cocktail party where no one was networking, or one of those cruisey dances where everyone was a stranger—except the emphasis was on strange, and none of these people were adroit enough to cruise. There were no movies, no corpus of collective energy that has emerged about this kind of awkwardness,
Here is the thing about Aspergers. It is to live constantly without awareness, but the assumption is to always be in error. You are constantly awkward. I did not know how to be someone with Aspergers, people with Aspergers did not know how to teach me, and I could not just go to the movies. My experiences was not reflected in the medium that spent the most time teaching me lessons, both positive and negative. So about 6 weeks into the experience with the group, with the emerging into a new kind of self, Adam comes out. Adam was a movie that was sold as a rom-com where the male lead had the same condition we did. I was sure that it would be one of those gork of the week movies, because in the last few years the condition had been fashionable enough to have fiction written and television shows constructed around us. People were telling our stories because we did not have the skills or the resources to tell our own. I wanted to see Adam, not alone like I saw Milk, or with straight friends like I saw Brokeback. I wanted to see Adam in a jury of my newly discovered peers.
Not everyone goes to the movie. There is the facilitor, me, a guy named Dave who I have meet a few times and a new guy, Timothy—not new to Jason or David, but new to me. Conversation with Timothy was to be reminded of a tight knot of almost physical pain, an awkwardness that rests unutterable near the root of my being, somewhere below the belly. The tightness never unwinds, the asking questions and not quite knowing what to say. Timothy has the same instincts that I do;th e same stutter starts, the same geek infodumps, it was like being recorded. It was like finally knowing what the spectrum was. It was not belonging, but understanding. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies, I might have found it. (what ever it was)
What it was, was centered on the film. In Adam there are two men and a woman. this is not Jules et Jim.One of the man is a father who is going to prison for finical malfeasance. one of these men's father dies at the end of the movie. one of these men is successful but emotionally stunted. one of these men has a (disorder). one of these men has to be taught how to be loved. one of these men will never be a husband, but will be a lover. there is a mirroring, aside from all of the oddities of one of the characters, he progresses. He is a moral neutral, he can be taught.
To evade Aspergers is to be trained like Adam is in the film, like the father cannot be. The pedological instincts of this film are transparent. They show people reading, making notes, how to books are given as gifts, and interview practices are shadowed as erotic rituals...to be taught how to be normal (ie neurotypical) is to be taught how to love, how to fuck, how to be part of a family. To not be taught is to avoid order, and to be taught order is to be taught love. Adam is a naif but honest, he never lies, and is cruel to his lover (Beth), who does. Beth's father is venal, dishonest in love and business, his cruelty comes from another kind of absence.
The movie centers on autistic ordering rituals, rituals that are assumed to be secret--not only the aforementioned melt downs, but the info dumps, the checking in with friends connecting all of this to a desire to be taught and the desire to teach. In this film, social currency is traded for intellectual currency, but neither of those casues as much trouble or holds as much power (to destroy) as the hard currency that the father the trader deals in. That some of the social traded for the intellectual is done in bed, leads to a difficult question. There are other things that must be approached before asking it. Aspergers asks that we construct an ordered set of rituals around teaching--a clarity of narrative, an avoidance of lacunae, of narrative gaps. Adam cannot be taught, and because of this lack of teaching he lives a monastic life, a life that seems to learn nothing, to vary nothing.
He eats the same things, he sleeps at the same time, he wears the same things, he meets the same people, he is tight and small. He has his father, and his father's friend, but neither are able to do the kind of work that Beth is able to fulfill. Adam is a child (and is called a child) until he has contact with a woman. The training of a father figure, or father figures pales in comparability to the (erotic) contact of a woman. But that teaching cannot be transitioned into relationships, into actual human contact. Both Adam, and Beth's father maintain a kind of permanent adolescence.
That Adam is fascinated by cosmology--that the largeness of the universe can be contained in such a small space, but that this large/small dialectic can be disrupted by the emergence of the erotic, and the possibility of another life and family suggests that there is an erotic component to the training, to the pedagogical aspect of those with ASD--but all of that training, the with holding of sex, the insertion of Adam into the family, and Adam being unable to love, the separation because the training was a refusal to integrate eros into the context of other lives--but this might be that Beth chose to be with her father, who was paying for the apartment, who was going to jail, whose narrative was more important.
It is a taboo in this culture to talk about how the emergence of sexual skills leads from a childhood state to an adult state. That Adam learns how to fuck becomes the signifier that allows us to view him as an adult. But that he is unable to sustain the fucking with in a heterosexual context means that he is as much of a failure as the other men in his life. In this way, the film is not about how to have Aspergers, and it is not even a movie like I Am Sam or Rainman where the simplicity of neurological otherness can provide a prophetic holy fool role. The film wants to tell us how to be men. That Aspergers seems mostly about men, that there are more men then women, and that the woman is forced to make Adam a man, problematizes the narrative of erotic teaching and learning, the text becomes gendered, and this gendering adds to the tension of the collective.
The movie was in an afternoon screening, about 1:30 in the afternoon. There were the four of us, and three other people who could have had aspies ahead of us, and a room full of middle aged women, who I think wanted a happy ending, and never got one. Beth and Adam broke up, Adam went away to learn how to socialise, and Beth becomes a loose thread. It is not the romatic complition expected in most comedies, but it does allow for an autonomy, a new kind of travel towards adulthood. I wonder if what we expected to be taught was different then the middle aged women in the film. There are very few places that make me feel like I am a man, and this was one of them.
But what exactly am I one of—of my gender, of my sex, of my disorder, or of my compulsion to ordering. Going every Friday this summer to that meeting, there are no women, on the list of people who get the emails, there are one or two out of 15 or so. This seems typical, from my reading--it seems mostly straight men. That Adam did not conquer, that he was better trained but did not live with Beth, was it a disappointment for the rest of the audience that it was not a comedy, because comedies end in weddings? Was it a disappointment for us because the message we got was not about erotic satisfaction, but another message about being educable, trainable, was the message about passing. Did the gender, the sexualities in the story work through these issues--because it does seem gendered.?
I never felt trained by the movies. I never felt that it told me how to be queer, how to be christian, how to be depressed, but that there was a myriad of options were presented. Some of those options were tragic, and some of those were comic, but I could weave around a labryinth of choices, make ones that were interesting. The difficult inabilty to be a man, to know how to construct masculinity and masculinity within a context of disordered thinking, and on top of that, attempts to attach this construction to a romantic comedy, ultimately fails, because it knows that things must be taught, and that teaching is ordered, but little is made to the implications of that teaching, and that order.
It used to be, until fairly recently, that to see a culture emerge we went to the movies. There are a million moves about rapturous, difficult, and aesthetic Christs. The movies made me Christian—the swoon of Falconetti, those two Ben Hurs, all of the sins of De Mille's Sodoms, the spectacle of Ray's King of Kings, the Kierkegaardean suffering in the knights of the Seventh Seal. Every movie ever made about Nuns, and most of the movies made about vampires. Not only did the movies make me Christian, it made me Catholic. Miracles made of light, commissioned in the dark, secrets about sex and death, of violence redeemed, even in the multiplexes there is a confessional aspect, there is a collective aspect. They work in conjunction.
It is not only the Christianity that works this dual mystery. My queerness as well. In The Celluloid Closet, Lily Tomlin told a secret—she told the straight people who went to that move to be educated, that queers went to the movies to have their stories heard. The stories were not always positive, they were often broken, but you would see yourself from the beginning when the lights went out. They told us how to talk, how to move, how to swing, how to fuck, how to love, and how to hate ourselves. We became queer in the dark. Some of the mystical transference, like the hand jobs in back rows or that feeling that Frank O'Hara talked about when he wrote about those “gratuitous bags of popcorn” or “the immediacy of a bad movie, or to be as alive as the vulgar. “ The catholicism and the queerness grew like moon-flowers in the cinema's dark gaze.
The darkness is also about depression, the cinema feeds the glamour of my depression. Sometimes it is the explicit suicides, the melodrama of self destruction in characters played b y Shirley McClain in the Apartment (for laughs) or that silly kid in Swing Kids (because Nazis are sexier when they are dead), or all of those vestal virgins in Sophia Coppola's first film, or the Elliot Smith orchestrated wrist slitting in the Royal Tennenbaums. But also, the whole list of addicts, closet cases, tragic wastrels, and starlets lost that provide a meta-narrative to the central role of celluloid.
Movies then made me a homosexual, a catholic, a melancholic. There wre 100 years of stories, and stories about stories, and stories about the people who made stories that gave me context and ammunition. There was a collective of responses that allowed for me to enter the slipstream. The last of the items on the above list was the most difficult. When I was diagnosed with Asperger's there was scant resources on the ground, and those resources were about training. But this summer I went back to school to do religious or at least theological work. I entered an evangelical anglican dorm, I went to classes, and I sought help so that my grad school experiment would end as less of an unmitigated disaster then the flunk out of my undergrad.
So I met with this guy who was in charge of all the autism guys, and I started going to meetings with other people who had the disorder. They were all guys. They were going to teach me how to be an Aspie, how to construct a collective identity around this piece that was so unmoored for so long. Mostly it was meeting in the 70s era basement of the big library in Toronto, and talking. It was sort of like an encounter group, or a baptist youth group, or one of these al-anon meetings I would go to, or a cocktail party where no one was networking, or one of those cruisey dances where everyone was a stranger—except the emphasis was on strange, and none of these people were adroit enough to cruise. There were no movies, no corpus of collective energy that has emerged about this kind of awkwardness,
Here is the thing about Aspergers. It is to live constantly without awareness, but the assumption is to always be in error. You are constantly awkward. I did not know how to be someone with Aspergers, people with Aspergers did not know how to teach me, and I could not just go to the movies. My experiences was not reflected in the medium that spent the most time teaching me lessons, both positive and negative. So about 6 weeks into the experience with the group, with the emerging into a new kind of self, Adam comes out. Adam was a movie that was sold as a rom-com where the male lead had the same condition we did. I was sure that it would be one of those gork of the week movies, because in the last few years the condition had been fashionable enough to have fiction written and television shows constructed around us. People were telling our stories because we did not have the skills or the resources to tell our own. I wanted to see Adam, not alone like I saw Milk, or with straight friends like I saw Brokeback. I wanted to see Adam in a jury of my newly discovered peers.
Not everyone goes to the movie. There is the facilitor, me, a guy named Dave who I have meet a few times and a new guy, Timothy—not new to Jason or David, but new to me. Conversation with Timothy was to be reminded of a tight knot of almost physical pain, an awkwardness that rests unutterable near the root of my being, somewhere below the belly. The tightness never unwinds, the asking questions and not quite knowing what to say. Timothy has the same instincts that I do;th e same stutter starts, the same geek infodumps, it was like being recorded. It was like finally knowing what the spectrum was. It was not belonging, but understanding. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies, I might have found it. (what ever it was)
What it was, was centered on the film. In Adam there are two men and a woman. this is not Jules et Jim.One of the man is a father who is going to prison for finical malfeasance. one of these men's father dies at the end of the movie. one of these men is successful but emotionally stunted. one of these men has a (disorder). one of these men has to be taught how to be loved. one of these men will never be a husband, but will be a lover. there is a mirroring, aside from all of the oddities of one of the characters, he progresses. He is a moral neutral, he can be taught.
To evade Aspergers is to be trained like Adam is in the film, like the father cannot be. The pedological instincts of this film are transparent. They show people reading, making notes, how to books are given as gifts, and interview practices are shadowed as erotic rituals...to be taught how to be normal (ie neurotypical) is to be taught how to love, how to fuck, how to be part of a family. To not be taught is to avoid order, and to be taught order is to be taught love. Adam is a naif but honest, he never lies, and is cruel to his lover (Beth), who does. Beth's father is venal, dishonest in love and business, his cruelty comes from another kind of absence.
The movie centers on autistic ordering rituals, rituals that are assumed to be secret--not only the aforementioned melt downs, but the info dumps, the checking in with friends connecting all of this to a desire to be taught and the desire to teach. In this film, social currency is traded for intellectual currency, but neither of those casues as much trouble or holds as much power (to destroy) as the hard currency that the father the trader deals in. That some of the social traded for the intellectual is done in bed, leads to a difficult question. There are other things that must be approached before asking it. Aspergers asks that we construct an ordered set of rituals around teaching--a clarity of narrative, an avoidance of lacunae, of narrative gaps. Adam cannot be taught, and because of this lack of teaching he lives a monastic life, a life that seems to learn nothing, to vary nothing.
He eats the same things, he sleeps at the same time, he wears the same things, he meets the same people, he is tight and small. He has his father, and his father's friend, but neither are able to do the kind of work that Beth is able to fulfill. Adam is a child (and is called a child) until he has contact with a woman. The training of a father figure, or father figures pales in comparability to the (erotic) contact of a woman. But that teaching cannot be transitioned into relationships, into actual human contact. Both Adam, and Beth's father maintain a kind of permanent adolescence.
That Adam is fascinated by cosmology--that the largeness of the universe can be contained in such a small space, but that this large/small dialectic can be disrupted by the emergence of the erotic, and the possibility of another life and family suggests that there is an erotic component to the training, to the pedagogical aspect of those with ASD--but all of that training, the with holding of sex, the insertion of Adam into the family, and Adam being unable to love, the separation because the training was a refusal to integrate eros into the context of other lives--but this might be that Beth chose to be with her father, who was paying for the apartment, who was going to jail, whose narrative was more important.
It is a taboo in this culture to talk about how the emergence of sexual skills leads from a childhood state to an adult state. That Adam learns how to fuck becomes the signifier that allows us to view him as an adult. But that he is unable to sustain the fucking with in a heterosexual context means that he is as much of a failure as the other men in his life. In this way, the film is not about how to have Aspergers, and it is not even a movie like I Am Sam or Rainman where the simplicity of neurological otherness can provide a prophetic holy fool role. The film wants to tell us how to be men. That Aspergers seems mostly about men, that there are more men then women, and that the woman is forced to make Adam a man, problematizes the narrative of erotic teaching and learning, the text becomes gendered, and this gendering adds to the tension of the collective.
The movie was in an afternoon screening, about 1:30 in the afternoon. There were the four of us, and three other people who could have had aspies ahead of us, and a room full of middle aged women, who I think wanted a happy ending, and never got one. Beth and Adam broke up, Adam went away to learn how to socialise, and Beth becomes a loose thread. It is not the romatic complition expected in most comedies, but it does allow for an autonomy, a new kind of travel towards adulthood. I wonder if what we expected to be taught was different then the middle aged women in the film. There are very few places that make me feel like I am a man, and this was one of them.
But what exactly am I one of—of my gender, of my sex, of my disorder, or of my compulsion to ordering. Going every Friday this summer to that meeting, there are no women, on the list of people who get the emails, there are one or two out of 15 or so. This seems typical, from my reading--it seems mostly straight men. That Adam did not conquer, that he was better trained but did not live with Beth, was it a disappointment for the rest of the audience that it was not a comedy, because comedies end in weddings? Was it a disappointment for us because the message we got was not about erotic satisfaction, but another message about being educable, trainable, was the message about passing. Did the gender, the sexualities in the story work through these issues--because it does seem gendered.?
I never felt trained by the movies. I never felt that it told me how to be queer, how to be christian, how to be depressed, but that there was a myriad of options were presented. Some of those options were tragic, and some of those were comic, but I could weave around a labryinth of choices, make ones that were interesting. The difficult inabilty to be a man, to know how to construct masculinity and masculinity within a context of disordered thinking, and on top of that, attempts to attach this construction to a romantic comedy, ultimately fails, because it knows that things must be taught, and that teaching is ordered, but little is made to the implications of that teaching, and that order.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
The Oxen, Thomas Hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
orphan burn:
three anecdotes:
a) after swimming naked in lake ontario, i walk back to the fire put on my clothes, and ray makes a joke about baptism by immersion.
b) the theme was about resoultions, and frankly my life is going in the exact direction i want it to go.
c) smoking a captain black on the pier with pat, i've been craving one since wednesday (since the session with jason, since sjsa memories), and then eating a peach afterwards,the tobacco made me light headed. alchemy/one on one substitution.
three anecdotes:
a) after swimming naked in lake ontario, i walk back to the fire put on my clothes, and ray makes a joke about baptism by immersion.
b) the theme was about resoultions, and frankly my life is going in the exact direction i want it to go.
c) smoking a captain black on the pier with pat, i've been craving one since wednesday (since the session with jason, since sjsa memories), and then eating a peach afterwards,the tobacco made me light headed. alchemy/one on one substitution.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
grant us a peaceful evening
and a night free of sin...
read those lines to jason today, at about 8 pm, as sun was setting. i read those lines at sjsa. i have not read those lines b/w those two events. i read those lines again at about 2:30 am at fran's eating a banana split sundae, after walking for 40 minutes, being careful not to marr the pages. there is less sin in the night these days, but the nights are longer as well. i feel better about divinity week.
and a night free of sin...
read those lines to jason today, at about 8 pm, as sun was setting. i read those lines at sjsa. i have not read those lines b/w those two events. i read those lines again at about 2:30 am at fran's eating a banana split sundae, after walking for 40 minutes, being careful not to marr the pages. there is less sin in the night these days, but the nights are longer as well. i feel better about divinity week.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
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