Words, Words, Words

For those few of you who may have followed this blog for a while, one and only one thing might have stayed common across the seven years or so that we have spent together. Words. Duh.

It's true, I admit it. I love words. Before this blog. During. And hopefully after.

Words make me go weak in the knees. One syllable and you will pass muster; two may get you a nod; three might merit an elevator chat; four will move you into conversation; cross five and now we are seriously talking.

Words to me have force, real force. Not force like the way words signify some meaning that's out in the world, but rather words that create meaning as they go along. Maybe one word, maybe a chain of words. Maybe words that are clearly connected to meaning, maybe words that only describe what they seek to mean, maybe words that paint for us a state wherein we are abe to imagine what they mean to say. Are you with me?

Let's try something, shall we? So I demonstrate more clearly what I am so clumsily trying to argue?

a. Lie down and look at the ceiling (no really)
b. Close your eyes (again, really)
c. Make a mental image of your state of mind.
d. Now describe to me what your state of mind is.
e. Tell me what the image was.

Leave me comments and, I will tell you more....my next post will use your states of mind to talk about language, the world and self.

On other fronts, I have begun to talk like an academic...damn!

Here are some words; why don't you make me a sentence?

Sentient. Pocorn. Terrible. Scarlet. Umbrella. Tower. Bookshelf. Street. Reproduction. Repercussion.

Argh, ugh, damn, damn, damn, damn

Blistering barnacles, thundering typhoons and murdering mimosas.

Damn damn damn.

Ugh, argh, double argh.

(Yes, this has become one of those ranty, boring, diary-like, teenage chronicles.)

Okay sorry, now we are done.

Writing

I am writing notes to Peter. And stop asking me if I am writing the dissertation. If you still want to know, yes I am. I can multi-task like that.

Staring at Photographs

Sometimes I am mad at my digital camera. For capturing a life so full. And emptying it.

My parents have an old red suitcase. It has stainless steel snap locks and is red. And it spills over with pictures. From three decades ago. And every alternate year since.

One random sepia tinged picture where my mother looks thin as a reed and innocent as morning light. One tattered polaroid with my father and his friend staring straight into the camera with a fervor I cannot reproduce in my most inebriated moments. And no pictures for the next few years. One can only imagine the life that slipped past the image. Until it regroups again in another photograph; black and white and not so yellowed this time around. Many unidentified children of monochromatic clothes and white teeth. I am in the middle and my teeth are bright too. My dress looks black and white, but I know that it was red. As poppies. Red was all I wore then. Then in the next set, we all look grown up and everyone around me is too. My parents look grown up. Even though they were probably then as old as I am now. The years look as though they are flowing gently. In my memories and in these photographs. These capricious accounts. These sometimes memoirs.

To say that I am nostalgic for the past is an oversimplification. I do long for a past. But not for its experience, not for its lives. What I am attached to, sometimes melancholically, are the suddenly remembered images and textures of the past. A texture and an image that are never available to the present. One only sees the present in the future when it has already slipped into the past.

The present is meaningless, a mere jujube. The present is the realm of the tactile and can be lived by any distracted person.

(Do read: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Michael Taussig's "Tactility and Distraction" and Roland Barthes' "Camera Lucida")

-- The Storm, Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944)

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

-- Adam Zagajewski; translated by Renata Gorczynski