good words

Here's a quote from Donald Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz. Although Miller refers to a different president and time, this passage comes as a seeming response to the commencement speech given by Bill Clinton at my graduation ceremony yesterday:

"The president gave his speech inside the hotel and left through a side door, and they whisked him away before we could shake hands and explain our concerns. When we were done, I started wondering if we had accomplished anything. I started wondering whether we could actually change the world. I mean, of course we could--we could change our buying habits, elect socially conscious representatives and that sort of thing, but I honestly don't believe we will be solving the greater human conflict with our efforts. The problem is not a certain type of legislation or even a certain politician; the problem is the same that it has always been.

I am the problem.

I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of the thing that lives in my chest" (20).

And how can we solve ourselves, our own problem, alone?

Has anyone out there read this book? I've only just started, but it's really great so far.

*orry

shifting blame--this is what i do, and

i don't want to do it anymore

rice.break.bean.break.dine.

Susan Sontag spoke today at the Hopwood Awards Ceremony. The famous radio voice's first words to us were, "Close your eyes."

Apparently, when people see her they tend to respond with a kind of disconnected look, having their mind's image of her disrupted. I suppose the same often happens with the screen adaptations of novels. And the same happened to me with my roommate freshman year, after having spoken with her only once or twice on the phone before meeting. I was certain that she had dark, wavy hair. Nope. Her's was dyed blonde and straight. Also, she was a skinny ballerina with fine clothes. At least Susan Sontag wore a fuscia coat. That made my day. Also, she pronounced Don Quixote just like an American would... not that she didn't know how's authentic pronunciation. It was merely an exercise in freedom and in the work's transcendence over lands and peoples. It's so well known, she said she'd been taught, we ought to be able to pronounce it however we like.

Yay for dinner breaks. Write, rice and black beans... these things combined--make me think of dear Nojay. Guten Appetit!

hedwig remakes

it's been a bunch of sitting around losing my mind. err, time. i meant time.

but--how we spend our days is how we spend our time.
--Annie Dillard (paraphrase)

and the base line from the party upstairs is getting through my chair, my walls, my headphones.

i dreamt that i watched hillary clinton's babies for her. yes, she had babies--twins even, neither of which responded to the name chelsea.

i don't know what to write. these posts are getting... label?

P.S. thanks for your prayers--i could tell people were praying and this was needed, appreciated, answered.

prayer request

Hey, just a request--

if you see this tonight--or any time before 1pm, Wednesday, eastern standard time--and think of me, please pray for me and my work. it's kind of drowning me at the moment... but, i'm way too dramatic about it most of the time. i'm sure i'll see the truth of that statement after this is through.

cheers--

Font makes a difference.

It makes a difference in the amount of writing I enjoy doing on my computer--how long I can sit in one place and stare at the bumps and bends of my lettered words. Font didn't make a difference, however, to John Milton at the time that he composed Paradise Lost. Blind and dictating, I think the words always mattered more than the font ever did. To him. To most. To me, I'm just trying to force myself to write this thing... I want to be inspired. I think I've only had that kind of divine paper-writing experience three or four times in my college years. High school was different. I don't even count high school anymore. And by divine, I mean that I think the writing of the paper was really the inventing and developing of thought--an experience of the creative, inventive personality of God. Realizations came that would never have come without putting the thoughts down somewhere. Those kind of transient thoughts that seem to dissolve almost as soon as they come... and you flail your arms desperately to try and catch them again once they go. Poetry's another story, of course. Lately, I'm finding my poetry dull. It's all been a set of butter knives in my mind's drawer.

Satan's syntax is a bunch of convoluted clauses that only have the sound of sense and intelligence. They don't actually have much proven syntactical sense, except in terms of representing Satan’s instable and/or duplicitous state of mind. I guess this is interesting. I guess, if I hadn't already spent the whole of the semester focusing on these minute poetic details, I might be a little more excited to spend eight pages talking about them again... in a specific case. Why Satan's syntax like this? Pretty much everyone knows why, don't they? I guess noticing the What is the first step... but perhaps not everyone would notice the What. They might wonder, What in fact is Milton's point in making Satan sound so intelligent and convincing? People who aren't already familiar with Christian doctrine, that is, and who don't already believe that Satan exists and Satan is deceptive and tricky and likes to catch everyone off guard by... using convoluted syntax(?). There you go. That's where I started.

Sorry for doing this to all of you readers... I will try to refrain next time I'm tempted. (Ha, ha. Resist the devil and he will flee... isn't that right?)

Slap-of-Wack Bar (George Saunders, anyone?)

I'm taking too many breaks. Hence, this post.

Now I also notice the trio of crows on my wall--taped once and flapping, eyes all open. They may be ravens, Rabens--but rather than write about these crows or Rabens, I ought to start writing about the rhetoric of Milton's Satan or the instability of Lear, as compared / contrasted with the same of Doctor Faustus. Yeah, yeah. Does it sound very enthralling to any of you? I'm hoping I can make it more interesting to myself--but, right now... I'm not sure where to start; this is where the post could get extra boring and self-indulgent.

I've begun to think about Scene 1 of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus as slightly uninviting; though rhyme may have made it worse-so. Both this work and Milton's Paradise Lost employ blank verse--regularly metered, but unrhymed, verse (well, most of Doctor Faustus is this way). Enough of that: I'm getting no where and, I can tell, you're getting sleepy.

So, answer me this. Why do we recycle crows as such symbols of doom, darkness, death? Because they prey on the dead? I think yes. I also think that, as much as they can fit the storyline, budget and setting, crows belong in claymation films. I'm sure there are many other factors influencing my opinion on the matter, but a girl in my poetics class--one with whom I shared my claymation idea--mentioned a poem that she wrote about crows and seaweed. For some reason, both of our ideas seemed to belong not only as poetry, but also as claymation stories. Also, I could see some of this girl's outfits going into a claymation character. Perhaps that's why I volunteered my own bizzarre "dream" to her.

Enough. Please excuse me. I have lots on my mind these days... err... let's celebrate Jesus.

doornail

Happy cold weather again! And... now for a poem. Does this one make sense?

KNOCK US DEAD

We ask about retinopathy, torn toenails,
and broken limbs.
He answers with a sigh:
that’s not what the problem is;
it’s you. Plain we.
With our wheelbarrows full,
our rakes and our paint—we forget
where the problem went.

But, there—it leaks! You leaked. We leak!
See?
All this upkeep and, still, we’ve got hands
full of just
gravel. Stolen—gray
dusty stones with sharp ends. Just
open your fist; your fist;
fist first. Then,
celebrate these old dirty hands.
Piñata—swing-
the-bat time now.

this i know

As I'm in the habit of doing with songs I like, I just put this one on repeat (and not just the chunk I've posted below), listened to it 4 or 5 times in a row. (And it just occured to me that this would probably be a great way to learn scripture...)

Yes, he wants to hear my questions and my thoughts. He wants to fill the troubled, hard and empty spots. He wants to give. He has a heart to give.

From Sara Groves' "Maybe there's a loving God":

I'm trying to work things out
I'm trying to comprehend
Am I the chance result
Of some great accident
I hear a rhythm call me
The echo of a grand design
I spend each night in the backyard
Staring up at the stars in the sky

. . .

Maybe this was made for me
For lying on my back in the middle of a field
Maybe that's a selfish thought
Or maybe there's a loving God

Maybe I was made this way
To think and to reason and to question and to pray
And I have never prayed a lot
But maybe there's a loving God

No, it's an always prayer.