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[03 Dec 2009|10:38pm] |
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he's not home. but I am. working on the laptop, with his headphones on my head, his warm black socks to on my feet.
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| Is there anything better? |
[15 Nov 2009|09:44pm] |
Is there anything more beautifully comfortable than dinner at the local French restaurant a few steps from home with your long-time love? Moules & frites and a carafe of white wine.
No powder or tight dresses and forced laughter--just a bare face, jeans & cashmere and knowing smiles.
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| it leaves me wondering |
[02 Nov 2009|09:47pm] |
"...when it comes to compounds meaning a sword or a spear or a battle or any bloody encounter with foes. Old English abounds in vigorous and evocative and specifically poetic words for these things, but I have tended to follow modern usage and in the main have called a sword a sword."
--wondering if things of great centrality or poignancy in human lives create little pools of disturbances in the oceanic deeps of language, little vortexes of lingual multiplicity. Pressed too close, we are unable to truly see and describe them. So there are more words, like a messy halo of pencil lines to sketch that hard-to-define-shape. Some hyperopia of the mind.
But when the event is far or the object loses relevance through the onslaught of time, then the battle-light, blood-drinker, wound-biter, flamebearer (I imagine), become just a sword. The thing becomes a thing. Clearly defined and put in it's place neatly. But to do that is to set it aside--be done with it--sheath it from the light.
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[24 Sep 2009|09:21pm] |
There is a Japanese bookstore on the skirts of Bryant Park that I've noticed before, but haven’t gone into until today. It’s three floors of glossy magazines, Japanese novels, impeccably designed stationary, and even a café filled with teas and Japanese edibles. I spent three hours there, just browsing. I picked up a Banana Yoshimoto book too. I wasn’t sure I’d still feel the same way about her writing after these last two years of heavily cerebral humanities, yet it was as it always was: simple, lovely, thoughtful without the baggage of erudition; like drinking something normal and commercial, nothing fancy, and enjoying it while ultimately forgetting what the precise taste was.
Then, even though the store wasn’t closing, the people around me at the separate tables picked up and left; they seemed to have the same internal clocks. I had finished a chapter just at that moment, and felt like there was some rhythm of leisure that had ended cycle, and so, followed suit.
Leaving was the strangest feeling. I had just been so absorbed by my experience there; having eagerly devoured the Japanese commercial aesthetic with my eyes, eaten their food (a green tea pudding, matcha saturated to the point of bitterness with light gelatinous milk), and through the novel, in a way, undergoing their lived experience mentally. It felt reality-altering. Breaking out into the warm night, after that aesthetic and sanitized environment, felt like emerging from elsewhere. The sour, putrid scent of the New York summer. The city lights glinting off the brashly colored metal of American automobiles lining the streets. So….New York.
Strange how there can be these pockets of elsewhere in the city. I guess globalization has this heterogeneous effect; to call it a capitalist fantasy of nationalism is probably even more apt. It was at the end of a day a commercial experience, traveling geographically through our pocketbooks, knowing a place through their goods. Their national tastes.
My mother called me while I was indulgently flipping through the purposely-corporate stylized binders and notebooks to tell me that my father has received funding from the Wuxi government and several private investors. The total was $10 million, but I couldn’t focus in on what she was saying, so I could be very wrong. Then she encouraged me to go to Beijing and work with him on the company as a director of some branch. I thought ironically of all the news articles that I read on Chinese business practices, often going out of my way to defend the country from the xenophobic harangues in the user comments section on poisoned milk and nepotism, perennial topics regardless of the actual topic of the article. I won’t lie; it was tempting in its own way.
I often wonder at the fact that I lived in Beijing for an entire summer on my own, in thick of it all—polluted air, bicycles, streamlined Tsinghua buildings, the soap operas blaring from the TV….a slew of memories rush back. I never bother to revisit it in my memories. Very few times since I’ve been back. What a raw place. How different from this dirty-rich American garage that we call New York, the childish sophistication of that Japanese bookstore. The varying textures of that lived experience impress me so much. Sometimes I get the ABC version of the Roots mentality, as if going back would change things, make them better. As if I could discard all this Western baggage. On most days, though, I realize now, I live an exclusively Westernized intellectual space, even in private—and not even a very modern one, only on the parchment pages of its library. Sometimes, I think it was a mistake to professionalize this dreamy aspect of my life. It becomes denuded of pleasure and escape. Maybe I was only meant to be a lawyer or corporate cog, that dreams in the interstitial points in life—during dry meetings, on the subway. Maybe for me, art and philosophy was meant to flourish in the sparest places like dandelions in the sidewalk slats.
This, I realize, has no coherency like a preacher who has no native talent for homiletics, but it is a relief to be writing again.
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| breathing for once. |
[25 Jun 2009|05:24pm] |
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eating summer peaches, sifting through old memory boxes and writing wistful e-mails to professors
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| the death of leisure |
[06 Dec 2008|05:48pm] |
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friday night there she was, sprawled on her roseate cotton sheets, drinking white wine, reading rilke and picking at her belly-button.
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| chasing paper trails |
[14 Jul 2008|05:14pm] |
with all these books on medieval mysticism sprawled around me in a semi-circle, the burn in my eyes from staring 2cm away from the screen in reading a wikipedia entries on those such as 'weak theology',
am i really getting any closer to God?
or are these intellectual acrobatics of some sort of new 'cool', an academic hunger.
there must be something tragic about seeking divinity in a world like this.
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| Paulding, 19th C [excerpt from a dissertation] |
[12 Apr 2008|08:44pm] |
For “Musa, or, the Pilgrim of Truth” the idea of the Oriental quest was probably by Johnson’s Rasselas. Musa, the son of Abdallah the merchant of Bagdad, decides to take a journey in a search for Truth. He travels through Asia, Africa, and Europe, meeting people of many religions. He finds that each group insists that theirs is the only true faith. When he fails in his quest in the Orient, he tries Europe with no better results. In Marseilles, he sees riots against the Protestants.
“In the name of the Prophet!” cried he, “What does all this mean? Is the city become a prey ot banditti or hostile barbarians…?”
“It is nothing,” answered [his Catholic companion]…
coolly. “They are only punishing the heretics for not believing in the Pope.”
“And is that the name of your God?” asked Musa, with perfect simplicity.
“No—he is only his vicar on earth.”
“But do not these poor people believe in your Bible, which you have told me is the great volume of Truth, and in that Supreme Being who you say is the only true God?”
“Yes—but they deny the supremacy of the Pople, and deserve to be punished with fire and sword.”
“Then the Pope must be greater than your God,” said Musa.
In England, he find the Protestants persecuting the Catholics with equal ferocity. When he attemtps to reason with them, he is mobbed with critics of “A Papist!” and barely escapes to his ship. On his way back, in his conversation with a hermit in Asia Minor, Musa finds the Truth. It consists of “reverence for the Creator of the world, and charity toward all his creatures—charity not only for their wants, but their errors and opinions.”
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| i get it |
[07 Apr 2008|12:09pm] |
i miss being a frisky, young thing full of hope and full of playful bravado
--but it bursts.
i know we have to taste the bitter, for such sweetness ----it's the compact, the haggard beauty of life---and yet...
where am i going to be in the next five years?
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| can't sleep |
[05 Feb 2008|02:36am] |
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heart troubles - this is new. this is very new.
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[05 Feb 2008|02:35am] |
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ghost town are like little skeletons - shed by human locusts moving by the trafficking forces of global and economic networks. scattering. skittering.
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[13 Dec 2007|11:30am] |
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whenever i pour from my clay chinese teapot, a tear of tea slides out from a loose spot along its lid at an crooked organic angle along its curved face.
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[08 Dec 2007|09:10pm] |
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love is kinda crazy with a spooky little boy like you
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| defeat? or happiness |
[19 Nov 2007|02:37pm] |
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lately, i haven't felt like leaving my room much. wallow in the womblike comfort of this space that is, for the time being, my own. everything in here is an extension of myself, sort of exteriorizing myself until it reaches the wall and everything within these walls reverberate me - a physical projection of my mind. i'm content just to leave the window wide open and hear the outside world roar.
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[11 Nov 2007|01:09am] |
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sometimes i look in the mirror and think i look prettiest when i am the most miserable
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| post-elizabeth bishop, they asked well, can a young girls of 7 have an existential crisis? |
[08 Nov 2007|09:56am] |
they can. i distinctly remember being younger than that, and in not so trite and sophisticated terms, being truly worried that years later, when i was all grown, or even just a little more grown, that if the 'me' that was thinking then was still going to be the same. would i still feel that 'me'?
as if that wee emphemeral yet clear cognitive voice would be a skin that grows sheds and evolves? the one i heard clearest and strongest when i was alone. perhaps i am not that same 'me' anymore. sometimes i wish i was that little girl again.
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| the floral scents of the cup of tea merged into something distinctly chocolatey |
[28 Oct 2007|02:49pm] |
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sometimes i don't think it's worth it - it makes me want to hide all those little gem-like thoughts back inside me - or maybe they are just those blue-grey pebbles that could be ugly that i find lovely - and save them for someone else. then maybe i haven't lost anything. and then maybe i can still find them lovely.
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[19 Oct 2007|01:32pm] |
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i want to sleep and wake up on monday
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[27 Sep 2007|10:04pm] |
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Helena is so stupid.
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pesche's journal