"The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I've written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself."
Franz Kafka, in J.D. Salinger (1963): "Seymore: An Introduction"
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Slay me
The Titanic
So this is how it feels, the deck tilting,
the world slipping away as one
sitting at a desk writes a check.
The Titanic went down titanically
like a goddess glittering,
Pinioned to an iceberg, she sank
almost thankfully while tiny mortals
leapt into the sea
and the band played Nearer My God to Thee.
But what happened to the signals of distress?
Nobody believed it was all really happening.
I still can’t believe that it happened to me.
As a child, I stared horrified at the photograph
and the vision of that scene in the moonlit sea.
We will be one of the survivors, we think,
then something looms up like catastrophe.
All life, it seems, is the morning after
and love is the most beautiful of absolute disasters.
by June Robertson Beisch
So this is how it feels, the deck tilting,
the world slipping away as one
sitting at a desk writes a check.
The Titanic went down titanically
like a goddess glittering,
Pinioned to an iceberg, she sank
almost thankfully while tiny mortals
leapt into the sea
and the band played Nearer My God to Thee.
But what happened to the signals of distress?
Nobody believed it was all really happening.
I still can’t believe that it happened to me.
As a child, I stared horrified at the photograph
and the vision of that scene in the moonlit sea.
We will be one of the survivors, we think,
then something looms up like catastrophe.
All life, it seems, is the morning after
and love is the most beautiful of absolute disasters.
by June Robertson Beisch
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Nature of Intent; Getting what we want
"It is evil to hide your intentions."
Friend Eliza has a documentary on the font Helvetica, and in one of the interviews at a graphic design firm, the artist sits in front of a wall covered in art and posters. One of the more prominent posters reads "It is evil to hide your intentions" or, "to hide your intentions is immoral," or something like that. It's been in my brain for weeks now. It is evil to hide your intentions.
Is it? The phrase has an arresting ring of truth.
Since I was very young, I've been insistent on hiding my intentions. My intentions were usually pretty innocuous--eating Twizzlers illicitly in the living room, leaving the house without making my bed, ending the torture of brussel sprouts at dinner. My processes for hiding these intentions varied. Starting at around age six, I would partially chew my vegetables under the watchful eye of my parents at dinner, and then when their attentions were fixed on my baby brother, I'd scurry to the bathroom and spit out the greens into a wad of napkins, which I left in the trash can. It was gross. When I wanted to sneak candy into a room where candy wasn't allowed, I would hide the stuff in my waistband and cover it with my shirt, casually walking by my parents as smoothly as possible to hush the crunching of a plastic wrapper.
In hiding my intentions, my objective was to avoid whatever was unpleasant and to ensure acesss to whatever I cherished, without regard to the rules. Sometimes I was caught, but most of the time it worked out pretty well.
As I've grown older, I've folded this pattern of dissembling into my behavior in subtler and systemic ways, mostly without realizing I'm doing it. The rule-makers of my childhood unwittingly rewarded my obfuscations often enough to make a habit out of the hiding appear beneficial. When I read the line, "It is evil to hide your intentions", I experienced that pang of shame so particular to discovering that someone has caught you in a personal, embarrassing act--picking your nose, say, or credit card debt. In that moment, I realized that often, when I'm trying to get something I want, my first impulse is to hide my desire, to twist the truth, to sneak around. Which makes me feel smarmy and dishonest. Worst of all: lying usually doesn't even work. People don't like feeling manipulated or lied to; a middling liar is pretty easy to spot. Hell, even a good liar is pretty easy to spot after a few rounds.
Since my epiphanic moment, I've been trying to be more forthright. I've been trying to be as honest as possible as often as possible, specifically when it comes to getting something that I want. I'll let you know how it goes. It's slow going, but I'm trying. When I was having a psuedo-monumental moral awakening around age seventeen, I made my maxim this: "I want to be as happy as possible, but never at the expense of someone else." That's, more or less, what I'm still trying to do.
Friend Eliza has a documentary on the font Helvetica, and in one of the interviews at a graphic design firm, the artist sits in front of a wall covered in art and posters. One of the more prominent posters reads "It is evil to hide your intentions" or, "to hide your intentions is immoral," or something like that. It's been in my brain for weeks now. It is evil to hide your intentions.
Is it? The phrase has an arresting ring of truth.
Since I was very young, I've been insistent on hiding my intentions. My intentions were usually pretty innocuous--eating Twizzlers illicitly in the living room, leaving the house without making my bed, ending the torture of brussel sprouts at dinner. My processes for hiding these intentions varied. Starting at around age six, I would partially chew my vegetables under the watchful eye of my parents at dinner, and then when their attentions were fixed on my baby brother, I'd scurry to the bathroom and spit out the greens into a wad of napkins, which I left in the trash can. It was gross. When I wanted to sneak candy into a room where candy wasn't allowed, I would hide the stuff in my waistband and cover it with my shirt, casually walking by my parents as smoothly as possible to hush the crunching of a plastic wrapper.
In hiding my intentions, my objective was to avoid whatever was unpleasant and to ensure acesss to whatever I cherished, without regard to the rules. Sometimes I was caught, but most of the time it worked out pretty well.
As I've grown older, I've folded this pattern of dissembling into my behavior in subtler and systemic ways, mostly without realizing I'm doing it. The rule-makers of my childhood unwittingly rewarded my obfuscations often enough to make a habit out of the hiding appear beneficial. When I read the line, "It is evil to hide your intentions", I experienced that pang of shame so particular to discovering that someone has caught you in a personal, embarrassing act--picking your nose, say, or credit card debt. In that moment, I realized that often, when I'm trying to get something I want, my first impulse is to hide my desire, to twist the truth, to sneak around. Which makes me feel smarmy and dishonest. Worst of all: lying usually doesn't even work. People don't like feeling manipulated or lied to; a middling liar is pretty easy to spot. Hell, even a good liar is pretty easy to spot after a few rounds.
Since my epiphanic moment, I've been trying to be more forthright. I've been trying to be as honest as possible as often as possible, specifically when it comes to getting something that I want. I'll let you know how it goes. It's slow going, but I'm trying. When I was having a psuedo-monumental moral awakening around age seventeen, I made my maxim this: "I want to be as happy as possible, but never at the expense of someone else." That's, more or less, what I'm still trying to do.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Oxfords and Galician Lace
This post has two unrelated sections. The first is about androdge love, and the second is about my online friend who is a designer in Spain.
I still can't reconcile my love for these shoes with my self-understanding, but you don't choose what you love.
Androdge Love
I still can't reconcile my love for these shoes with my self-understanding, but you don't choose what you love. D.C. via Galicia, or, online friends
If it's weird that I made a friend online, then I'm sorry. The last time that happened was circa 1996 in an AOL chat room. But my online friend, Sarai Fernandez, a gallega fashion designer, sent me a couple of her looks and I love them. Probs everyone will. I want to get her stuff into stores here in D.C.!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
