betatext

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Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:38:00 -0600

Transit of Venus (1882) It rained. It had been raining for...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:37:00 -0500

It rained.

It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”

“Yes, yes!”

—Ray Bradbury, “All Summer in a Day”

WE LIKE TO say how things are, perhaps because we hope that’s how they might actually be. We attempt...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:29:24 -0500

WE LIKE TO say how things are, perhaps because we hope that’s how they might actually be. We attempt to name, identify, and define the most mysterious of matters: sex, love, marriage, monogamy, infidelity, death, loss, grief. We want these things to have an order, an internal logic, and we also want them to be connected to one another. We want it to be true that if we cheat on our spouse, it means we no longer want to be married to him or her. We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged.

After my mother died, everyone I knew wanted to tell me either about the worst breakup they’d had or all the people they’d known who’d died. I listened to a long, traumatic story about a girlfriend who suddenly moved to Ohio, and to stories of grandfathers and old friends and people who lived down the block who were no longer among us. Rarely was this helpful.

Occasionally I came across people who’d had the experience of losing someone whose death made them think, I cannot continue to live. I recognized these people: their postures, where they rested their eyes as they spoke, the expressions they let onto their faces and the ones they kept off. These people consoled me beyond measure. I felt profoundly connected to them, as if we were a tribe.

It’s surprising how relatively few of them there were. People don’t die anymore, not the way they used to. Children survive childhood; women, the labors of birth; men, their work. We survive influenza and infection, cancer and heart attacks. We keep living on and on: 80, 90, 103. We live younger, too; frightfully premature babies are cloistered and coddled and shepherded through. My mother lived to the age of forty-five and never lost anyone who was truly beloved to her. Of course, she knew many people who died, but none who made her wake to the thought: I cannot continue to live.

And there is a difference. Dying is not your girlfriend moving to Ohio. Grief is not the day after your neighbor’s funeral, when you felt extremely blue. It is impolite to make this distinction. We act as if all losses are equal. It is un-American to behave otherwise: we live in a democracy of sorrow. Every emotion felt is validated and judged to be as true as any other.

But what does this do to us: this refusal to quantify love, loss, grief? Jewish tradition states that one is considered a mourner when one of eight people dies: father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, son, or daughter. This definition doesn’t fulfill the needs of today’s diverse and far-flung affections; indeed, it probably never did. It leaves out the step-relations, the long-term lovers, the chosen family of a tight circle of friends; and it includes the blood relations we perhaps never honestly loved. But its intentions are true. And, undeniably, for most of us that list of eight does come awfully close. We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

For years, I was haunted by the idea of this imaginary boat of life; by the desire to exchange my mother’s fate for one of the many living people I knew. I would be sitting across the table from a dear friend. I loved her, him, each one of these people. Some I said I loved like family. But I would look at them and think, Why couldn’t it have been you who died instead? You, goodbye.

Cheryl Strayed, “The Love of My Life”

John Baldesarri, “I will not make any more boring...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:29:00 -0600

John Baldesarri, “I will not make any more boring art.”

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Thu, 26 May 2011 17:30:03 -0500

Alex Haber, Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces

Tue, 10 May 2011 12:00:21 -0500

Alex Haber, Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces

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Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:29:08 -0500

youmightfindyourself: A collaborative work by artist Micah...

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:14:41 -0500

youmightfindyourself:

A collaborative work by artist Micah Lexier and poet Christian Bok. (via)

I like to equate space in sentences to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. Emptiness is not devoid...

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:44:36 -0600

I like to equate space in sentences to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. Emptiness is not devoid of, or a lack of meaning, rather emptiness indicates a potential. Emptiness is like zero where zero is not an indicator of nothing but the beginning, it is the possibility of what can come after that makes zero so crucial. Emptiness is not empty in the same manner that words are not reality. What I would like to say is that language used and understood in dualistic patterns might not be the vehicle to speak of non-dualistic emptiness. And yet, words are all we have for now.

I love sentences. I see and think in full sentences even if most of them reflect my preoccupation with the mundane. It is when I sit down to write poetry that the quotidian becomes the place of investigation, and an attempt to dislocate it from its place of comfort and habit. It becomes possible and necessary then to think about the (non) essence of phenomena as a complex, interdependent body of many parts, like a sentence that takes shape through construction and deconstruction.

A sentence is a group of bats flying out at dusk without injuring each other. It is squat and short as a slug. A sentence can make itself and the self reading it feel utterly solitary and helpless. It is a private garden. A sentence transforms or transfers words with each reading so they are no longer themselves.

—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, This wor(l)d as an illusion

"Now excuse me, I have to go."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:16:09 -0500

"Now excuse me, I have to go."

So, there’s a business of being an ‘ordinary person,’ and that business includes...

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:36:00 -0500

So, there’s a business of being an ‘ordinary person,’ and that business includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects so as to see how it is that it’s a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in its usual ‘nothing much’ fashion, with whatever variants of banal characterizations you might happen to use, i.e., there’s no particular difference between saying “It was nothing much” and “It was outta sight.” That is to say, we’ve all heard the usual characterizations of ‘our Protestant society’ or ‘our Puritan background,’ which involve that ordinary people/Americans/Europeans are built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i.e., the Puritan ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc., which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in Western civilization. Though that’s manifestly important, it misses an essential part of the thing, which is: Were you to have illegitimate experiences, the characteristic of being an ‘ordinary person’ is that, having the illegitimate experiences that you shouldn’t have, they come off in just the usual way that they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc. you find that it’s been the usual experience that others who’ve done it have had. Reports of the most seemingly outrageous experiences, for which you figure you’d be at a loss for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened, turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints—as people report they’re being removed—and our utter usualness, the ordinary cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about doing ‘being ordinary.’

My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching ourselves live in the world—or watching somebody else if that’s more pleasant—we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g., the ease with which—after practice—you see only the most usual characteristics of the people passing (that’s a married couple and that’s a black guy and that’s an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there’s some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of things would not explain how it is that, e.g., you can come home day after day and, asked what happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you concealing something, if it were reported, it would turn out to be nothing much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and unknown costs, i.e., if you come home and report what the grass looked like along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it routinely, then people might figure that there’s something odd about you; that you’re pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.

—Lectures on Conversation, “Doing ‘being ordinary,’” Harvey Sacks

via Bobulate