Dostoevsky

This is the first draft of a poem I wrote this morning while reading Anthropology homework and thinking about why I act the way I do. Post comments and tell me what you think (and what you think needs changing).

working title:
Approaching whole mind

from my mother, the gift of candid speech
of laying one’s heart at the feet of another
and trusting that they will pick it up, hold it, and hand it back
rather than step on it and squish it to oblivion.

from my father, the gift of rhetoric
of building an argument
of clarity of logic, thought expressed eloquently
of the ability to turn heads with words.

I married them: the heart and the head
And I use the tools of each one (of each hemisphere)
I build towers of logic and gardens of feeling
With my mother’s purity and my father’s strength.

In the words I speak, and in the ones I write
I look for the hem of the line, the body callosum
Where the fabric of feeling and the fabric of reason
Are met, and marry and intertwine.

Ireland, ourstyle

The following pictures are:
Thomas and me at the Clonakilty Post Office, which is inside a former church. The people of Clonakilty are pretty sure that theirs is the only post office in the world that is housed in a former church. It's quite interesting; a beautiful old church building, which on the inside has a queue and plexiglass with tellers behind it, and a drop box!





Thomas with a bust of Barry McGovern as Vladimir from Waiting for Godot, taken on our visit to the Dublin Writers Museum.







Us with Nick Harper! Holy Cheese. We gave him a present, which he wore the night he played with his dad. We felt very honoured. The gift was a T-shirt with an Alex Ross painting on it of George Bush as a vampire, sucking the neck of the Statue of Liberty. tee hee. (pictured here)







.

Glocality

I'm feeling very technologically interconnected at the moment. I'm sitting in locally owned Sunergos Coffee on Preston (full o' people right now, by the way--cheers to college kids and Christians, the principal occupants of said shop!). It's 10:15 in the ayem, and I'm using my trusty little Apple iBook, mooching Sunergos' electricity to power the thing, sipping Guatemalan blend coffee, listening to someone else's music library on iTunes--someone who must also be in the coffeeshop. There is a band in their collection called the Appleseed Cast, and they are pretty supercool. (Like, I think I'll buy an album kind of cool.) Meantime, I'm reading Elizabeth's blog all the way from Boston and simultaneously chatting with folks on campus and around the country through Gmail and Facebook.

How glocal! (as in global and local at the same time.... It's an anthropology/economics term I learned. Doesn't roll off the tongue well, but it's linguistically interesting).

It all seemed so 21st century to me... and I mean that in a futuristic sense. Sometimes the feeling of living in the future now comes upon me with overwhelming clarity. Timelines, notions of "progress" and "civilization," fold and compress before me, around me, and I get a glimpse of what it must have been like to be Philip K. Dick. In the book VALIS he posits that time actually ended in 79 AD and that this 'modern' world is laid over it, and obscures that reality. I don't subscribe to that particular manifestation of the notion that time is illusory, but I do believe in that general idea. Time as an external, measured and measurable reality is a false notion. Time exists insofar as we create it and then observe (and obey) our creation, but it doesn't exist in some Platonic, empirical, objective, progressive kind of way. And all this intellectual theorizing is tangible for me when I have these moments of supreme surreality, when facets of what we in this culture, day and age call "reality" bends, shifts, or disappears completely, and one can see the pattern of all of it. I guess it sounds a bit like the Matrix, eh? But it is what I experience.

Sometimes I can look through this hazy distracting veil of habit and structure and have these peircing moments of true clarity, when I can see the world full-on, not sideways or peripherally. It's breathtaking, and exhiliarating, and terrible.

So, enough of that. I hope you're all keeping up with Elizabeth's blog, A Room Full of Books , because it is hilarious, and poignant, and insightful, and lovely. Please do yourselves a favor and read it.

And speaking of blogs, sorry I've not been 'round much. The semester is eating me from the outside in. I'm holding off the attacks for now, but it has been disheartening and frustrating and draining in many ways. In equally many ways it's been a grand and worthwhile adventure, full of new and fascinating people, places, ideas, experience and feelings. In all ways it has been taxing. I look forward to rest and press on to the next project.

P.S. I have asked Jimmy and Thomas if I may post pictures of them from the Ireland trip, and they are fine with it, so expect more Ireland pictures SOON! Love and learning to each of you.