In my past life I was an old woman.
I wore my skin like a rare linen. Human
cloth, not sewn but grown. My hair
frayed gray. And in my face, like a map
folded and folded over, I traced
every year I'd lived in the ground.
-----
maybe today this poem finds no audience, no resonance. it will be written off as quickly and quietly as it was written.
I will see god in every particle of snow that falls and melts in my open hand.
20090117
axioms
++\mission statement update! 20090118/++
So upon some discussion with Ruth, we've decided that we are going to collapse some of my ideas into a more eloquent form: we will both update this blog, one writing a jubilant ending, the other a tragic one. As it stands, it looks to be that I will be the former, and Ruth the latter. Hopefully we can make a point of updating on the same day for the sake of juxtaposition. I'm trying to work out a way to make our post formatting different, so we'll see what I come up with. I'll most likely fool around with justifications for now.
++\ /++
It seems that the first post, first letter, first words tend towards self-referential metanarratives. Perhaps, even more so, this is residual mental processing of one of my current reads, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.
I suppose this let's me at least explicate the intended goals of this project, in perhaps more direct speech.
I conceived of this project as an exercise in habit, concentrating mostly on writing on a consistent basis, but the further the idea developed itself, I realized there really are few constraints on content media. That is to say, why not update with a comic? a photo? a song?
Maybe that's copping out. Will that break up the consistency, or aesthetic nature of it all? Subvert the very intent of creative productivity I had going into this? Well, let's put a further constraint on it then: anything uploaded has to at least been a product of my own personal process (or, obviously, whoever the contributor is).
So what is the project then? beyond a ritualistic exercise.
happy endings
How very trite, sure, but I think that the simplicity of that triteness is what appealed to me in the first place. It would probably be reasonable to think that most of us have abandoned the notion of happy endings, and for sure, the very phrase comes off as scoffable and dismissive, a fancy that we grew out of, accumulating lint in the pockets of neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants.
What is that you say? Neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants have been spotted roaming the country and cityside? Feral youths discarding aesthetic evolution for abrasive anachronisms?
Now how about that.
So, why not indulge? At least for a few moments everyday - or truth be told, maybe not that often. Sartre presumes that we create meaningful purposes for ourselves, and that we are only the product of this creation and action, and nothing more. Let's not get into a discourse about essentialism here, but let's maybe see this blog as a project in teleological fantasy, eschatological indulgence.
I simply wish to start a project in which we can reimagine a happy conclusion to our daily lives, and straddle that fence between fiction and its precursor 'non', where the teeth sit hesitantly on the lower lip, neither biting nor releasing. A suspension of cynicism.
Structurally, this hopefully won't all occur within an epistle, or pedestrian rants of "This happened and made me happy". Rather, I hope it presents us an opportunity to explore narrative devices, framing the subtext of our happy endings in various ways: Borgesian invented texts, poetics, a logical mathematical proof for a puzzle Hofstadter presented me in his book to demonstrate logical formalism.
Words words words, and all metanarratives still. But bear with me for one more ambition.
As many times as the coin lands consecutively on one face (I believe it is tails) for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), there exists that other side, inextricably dependent in identity on its other. Likewise, as this idea of happy endings spawned, so did its intuitive twin.
Why not have a parallel blog of how life could take a turn for the worse? Too easy, I hear you say, and that was my initial reaction as well. But I think that if the sister project to this one manages to take off as well, it will provide an outlet for all the black humor and self-referential schadenfreude that blows in under the door cracks of our emotional composition.
In any case, this blog is the current project, and maybe I should keep my eyes focused on one step at a time.
Like Shakespeare's Ophelia, this blog will hopefully act as a prism to break apart the spectrum of ideologies and experiences that construct our representations of, in this case happiness, and in her case, women and madness.
And, in an expected rhetorical blow, can we separate those constructions anyway?
But as you may have seen, the latter association is a rather weak, and poorly formed connection, drawn teleological motivations upon my serendipitous discovery that the name of this blog, teleophilia, contains the name Ophelia. An accidental pun for sure, and a poor stretch even more certainly.
So, for today, let me pretend that I pulled off that pun, and not only was it funny, but profound. Let me rewrite the rest of this day off as having created a successful wordplay, and that you, the reader, are still reading this and are at least marginally amused and curious.
So upon some discussion with Ruth, we've decided that we are going to collapse some of my ideas into a more eloquent form: we will both update this blog, one writing a jubilant ending, the other a tragic one. As it stands, it looks to be that I will be the former, and Ruth the latter. Hopefully we can make a point of updating on the same day for the sake of juxtaposition. I'm trying to work out a way to make our post formatting different, so we'll see what I come up with. I'll most likely fool around with justifications for now.
++\ /++
It seems that the first post, first letter, first words tend towards self-referential metanarratives. Perhaps, even more so, this is residual mental processing of one of my current reads, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.
I suppose this let's me at least explicate the intended goals of this project, in perhaps more direct speech.
I conceived of this project as an exercise in habit, concentrating mostly on writing on a consistent basis, but the further the idea developed itself, I realized there really are few constraints on content media. That is to say, why not update with a comic? a photo? a song?
Maybe that's copping out. Will that break up the consistency, or aesthetic nature of it all? Subvert the very intent of creative productivity I had going into this? Well, let's put a further constraint on it then: anything uploaded has to at least been a product of my own personal process (or, obviously, whoever the contributor is).
So what is the project then? beyond a ritualistic exercise.
happy endings
How very trite, sure, but I think that the simplicity of that triteness is what appealed to me in the first place. It would probably be reasonable to think that most of us have abandoned the notion of happy endings, and for sure, the very phrase comes off as scoffable and dismissive, a fancy that we grew out of, accumulating lint in the pockets of neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants.
What is that you say? Neon windbreakers and high-waisted pants have been spotted roaming the country and cityside? Feral youths discarding aesthetic evolution for abrasive anachronisms?
Now how about that.
So, why not indulge? At least for a few moments everyday - or truth be told, maybe not that often. Sartre presumes that we create meaningful purposes for ourselves, and that we are only the product of this creation and action, and nothing more. Let's not get into a discourse about essentialism here, but let's maybe see this blog as a project in teleological fantasy, eschatological indulgence.
I simply wish to start a project in which we can reimagine a happy conclusion to our daily lives, and straddle that fence between fiction and its precursor 'non', where the teeth sit hesitantly on the lower lip, neither biting nor releasing. A suspension of cynicism.
Structurally, this hopefully won't all occur within an epistle, or pedestrian rants of "This happened and made me happy". Rather, I hope it presents us an opportunity to explore narrative devices, framing the subtext of our happy endings in various ways: Borgesian invented texts, poetics, a logical mathematical proof for a puzzle Hofstadter presented me in his book to demonstrate logical formalism.
Words words words, and all metanarratives still. But bear with me for one more ambition.
As many times as the coin lands consecutively on one face (I believe it is tails) for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), there exists that other side, inextricably dependent in identity on its other. Likewise, as this idea of happy endings spawned, so did its intuitive twin.
Why not have a parallel blog of how life could take a turn for the worse? Too easy, I hear you say, and that was my initial reaction as well. But I think that if the sister project to this one manages to take off as well, it will provide an outlet for all the black humor and self-referential schadenfreude that blows in under the door cracks of our emotional composition.
In any case, this blog is the current project, and maybe I should keep my eyes focused on one step at a time.
Like Shakespeare's Ophelia, this blog will hopefully act as a prism to break apart the spectrum of ideologies and experiences that construct our representations of, in this case happiness, and in her case, women and madness.
And, in an expected rhetorical blow, can we separate those constructions anyway?
But as you may have seen, the latter association is a rather weak, and poorly formed connection, drawn teleological motivations upon my serendipitous discovery that the name of this blog, teleophilia, contains the name Ophelia. An accidental pun for sure, and a poor stretch even more certainly.
So, for today, let me pretend that I pulled off that pun, and not only was it funny, but profound. Let me rewrite the rest of this day off as having created a successful wordplay, and that you, the reader, are still reading this and are at least marginally amused and curious.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)