you were always just a sad boy, a sad boy living out a dream

Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the political use of the image in aesthetics. But its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history. The political meaning of the aesthetic image is manifest in the content and creation of art, whose political connotations might be either latent or nested within the work, but whose implications cannot be denied in any dialectical analysis. For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation and comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than an “either/or” impossibility: both and neither. But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgment from the critical perspective that regards aesthetic production as an event in the material reality, as well as an aesthetic event that is trans-historical because of dialectical critique. This is not to say that all works can be validated through a dialectical method of critique. As Adorno points out, phantasmagoria is not useful in criticism. To this we value the fact that dialectics strip away phantasmagoric material from aesthetic production in order to define key political relationships. Keeping this in mind, the political aesthetician as well as the aesthetic politician must not confuse the phantasmagorical with the mythological: for the phantasmagorical is the image that ideology conflates against its own material reality, whereas the mythological image is the implanted utopian impulse trapped within an ideological rendering. The relationship between the two is easily confused: the key in determining the phantasmagoric and the mythological is to ask what the image does and what it wishes to convey. In the case of the former, the phantasmagorical image will merely provide an animated face of consumption, of products and of accumulation. The latter, on the other hand, is that supporting impulse and desire that undergirds the animation of consumption and accumulation—in the last instance, the two readings are connected only through ideology: the phantasmagorical image is mechanic and the mythological image bears the imprint of capitalism’s ideals that have already been half dismantled into its own system. We all want to make sure our loved ones won’t suffer after we die, we wish that we would not stop existing after death, but in the end, all we can do is take out a life insurance policy. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate.” This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

 

We can always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but are our feet in the shoes?

I keep thinking about the opening pages of Aesthetics and Politics and Lukacs’ subsequent response. There’s something fundamentally missing from his response because he fails to fully see what Bloch is saying. Subjects and impulses come up and re-index themselves at seemingly random moments: Lukacs’ response seems to say “and what does it matter if the topic of conversation isn’t grounded in the Realist Tradition?” But just the opposite is true. At the very moment when fascism was on the rise in the thirties, a renewed interest and reemergence of the Expressionists makes the most sense. It was a movement, in so many words and over-simplifications, of a desire to break out of a social reality and a condition that was intolerable for the subjective participant. And yet, this artistic experience is only possible authentic (in the imagistic sense) for that singularity. What Bloch’s use of the Expressionists signals, is that utopian impulses exist in the most oppressive ideological conditions and enterprises. Whether or not Bloch, himself, had this unspecific appreciation for the Expressionists, I highly doubt, since he frequently queued up the need for greater material integration of specific works into his critique. But then I think that this might have only been one way of addressing a critique whose sole purpose was to show Realism on the first valence.

The recurrence of a “utopian” image, or rather, the image that carries the latent desires of utopia within a full veil of ideological and social constraints that it cannot see, is a theme that Adorno’s letters to Benjamin picks up. He says of the collective image, that it was always a commodity fabrication and that the real objective point of reality for the collective is in its systematic subjective alienation (Aesthetics and Politics p.119). And on this point, I was reminded exactly of the Expressionists, for their systematic alienation from the authentic core of their own aesthetic production. Whether or not Expressionist art is conscious of this, is secondary…less than secondary, it seems to be necessary in order to produce a meaningful “Real” conception of the movement. Additionally, Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the image. But the its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history.

For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation/comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, I think that there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than Either/Or, both and neither. As my professor once said, it really is the limit of the Kantian argument (insofar as Practical reason is concerned).

But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgement. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate”. This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

nichol avenue

I walk down the street. I can’t say that this November’s storminess hasn’t excited some hope for the gothic romance. But this is my first season of maturity, and so I hope for nothing, and resist that warm ache in my arms exacted by the cooling wind. I see a tree next to my old building. It’s an ugly building. It was an ugly time, there. But this tree had every manifest shade of red. I said to myself as I walked past it, that it was too red, held too much in its shaded depths to be real, and that it was just like all the best pictures of a tree that I had ever seen. I stopped, and remembered suddenly that this was not a moving picture. And that I was walking under this slowly ebbing sky which refused to relegate its heavy blueness to a pallid gray. I thought not that this tree in the falling moments of autumn was made for me. And that, like this tree, I might really shade over from the drab brick wall into real life. I walked toward someplace and the side streets cascaded down to the lower reaches of town. Leaves, rich with the color of dying, blotted the sky, one by one, until they hit the dirty street, the hedged grass of an old city. And it was in this promise of hard winter, when I was still afraid of only ever rotting away in the green of June, when I looked at the dirt in my fingernails and dove into that blue withering mist and thought perhaps I really was made in and for this world.

 

Over the hills, #78

 

More perfectly than any other fairy-tale, Snow White expresses melancholy. The pure image of this mood is the queen looking out into the snow through her window and wishing for her daughter, after the lifelessly living beauty of the flakes, the black mourning of the window-frame, the stab of bleeding; and then dying in childbirth. The happy end takes away nothing of this. As the granting of her wish is death, so the saving remains illusion. For deeper knowledge cannot believe that she was awakened who lies as if asleep in the glass coffin. Is not the poisoned bite of apple which is journey shakes from her throat, rather than a means of murder, the rest of her unlived, banished life, from which only now she truly recovers, since she is lured by no more false messengers? And how inadequate happiness sounds: ‘Snow White felt kindly  towards him and went with him.’ How it is revoked by the wicked triumph over wickedness. So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath. All contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations. Truth is insperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

 

the slow ache

The individual, however, find his liberation in duty. On the one hand, he is liberated from his dependence on mere natural drives, and from the burden he labours under as a particular subject in his moral reflections on obligation and desire; and on the other hand, he is liberated from that indeterminate subjectivity which does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no actuality. In duty, the individual liberates himself so as to attain substantial freedom. (Thesis 149, Philosophy of Right: Ethical Life)

The individual liberates himself to attain substantial freedom; and what of those lesser drives under which so much might suffer, regardless of fortitude? Is the freedom that separation that Adorno suggested was the haunting of one’s self: the oscillation between the last separation and the objectification of self? That essence which cannot be distanced from, as much as Hegel would have liked to allow, without Right whispering quietly in the morning breeze, “say goodbye.” That distance between the most tenderly aching sores and the mind that used to understand it, cannot but feel its own pain twofold: in the dark shadows and the mind that knows its solution is not in any isolated patch-up. For Adorno, the personal life attempts to show itself as existing–whether as a foolish ruse in the face of philosophical perplexity or systemic political violence–I try to say to myself something personal, intimate, that is buried under mountains of casual sentimentality. Each time, there is desire and brutal force and emptiness, and with all of this there is still exposed feeling as nerves laid out into the cold air. But the self does not exist in the pleasant way we like to imagine suffering from our bruised egos and torn hearts, a dimly lit room at the beginning of a movie and a promise of return.

To Hegel’s due, we must remember there is no return and so we do not have to look to sell; but the inverse of this means that what we ache for, long for, is the unity based on the disjuncture, itself. We ache deeply and without insulation, for real love realized in the individual and the actual, as the only matter of course for our survival and not the arbitrary choice. It is in the ache for humanity that we might say we ever feel ourselves. This is cruelest when, in the last phases, we find out desires calling to us, in the name of freedom and bliss, all under the artful guise which crushes us further. In these middle regions, whether in weak minds or desperate times, pain seeps further due to our duty to hold out against all odds. And this task is brought to bear not on any petty whim or slowly bleeding individual desire, as much as we intuit it to be this way, but on the whole task of living; which is to say, of everything in common for the one.

the rules for giving in a system of mal-return

I gave away my copy of Minima Moralia today to a friend. I was rereading some of the passages today; I saw old pen marks. It was hard to let go of, that book taught me how to read and write. It inspired my first real communist project, if indeed such projects exist. What happens if I don’t get it back? Is that an object fetish? Or can I just love it? Is that what it’s like to be a teacher, a friend, or am I a weirdo for not wanting to lose it?

writing as event: absent ghost of ontology

We will continue fantasize over our own ghosts until we learn how to remember them without shaking with desire to be dominated by them, or to become them once again. In Bruno Bosteels’ essay “Thinking, Being, Acting, or, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Ontology for Politics,” sketches out the basic issues that a modern leftist ontology would and must speak to in order to constitute itself as a legitimate and emancipatory entity. Bosteels by no means proffers a one-line “solution”  to the “ubiquitous return to the question of being in the field of political thought,” at either end of the essay, let alone in its body. Instead, Bosteels navigates around the demands that an ontology would have to recognize (if not reconcile) the present need for it as such, while navigating its various deployments from the Enlightenment to the present. The first task of a legitimate meditation on the question of being is to zero in on its constitutive demands. This need for a contemplation of contemplation is illuminating. That is to say, when faced with the question of constitution, it is certainly not more acceptable now than at any time in the past to employ a strictly auto-spontaneous Kantian model precisely because it presupposes the question of being as metaphysic. Bosteels continues down the dialectical path, and offers ontology “described as spectral, nonidentical, and postfoundational. It tries to come to terms, not with present being but with ghosts and phantasms; not with entities or things but with events” (2).  This consideration is essential—a consideration embodied and addressed in the writing, itself. In this passage, it is clear that the imagining of ontology cannot be conducted as anything other than a rigorous critique of its history which is only positively considered through the act of writing removed by the second degree from its properly political diagnostic engagements.

A postfoundational, spectral notion of ontology is specifically useful when considering the overall trajectory of his essay and its subjects, regardless of whether or not Bosteels decides to take them on for good. Our political nightmare haunted by ghosts and specters is most successively recognized, remembered, and integrated into memory through the project of writing. The arch of Bosteels’ essay speaks to this necessity incorporates that first demand of a leftist ontology—through the long and arduous tasks of naming the various historical figures and their employment of ontology within their historical contexts. The process of unearthing these ghosts and specters in “A Leftist Ontology” exhumes the ghosts of a half-dead political project and transforms them into a properly dialectical event as writing. Writing, then, is seen as the ontology of the present; the essay shows itself to be A Leftist Ontology.

Writing as a production of truth functions in this capacity as ontological, but its forms are not limited to that of the essay, or even of the political variety. In all cases, literature not only “thinks the thought of love” insofar as love is understood as a mode of approaching truth, but as a method of elevating the most tragic, painful, and important ghosts of our epoch and upholding them without sublating or foreclosing their real implications from the Left’s memory.

the postsituational ontology of emptiness

I used to think something, feel something, hope for something when I listened. Now I only feel the despair; I feel the inherent need for an “ontology” but I reject that it must be so. I say it is a weak mind, a weak revolution, a weak generation. an identity that is too far off the charts to be seen anywhere around these parts, but just a petty bourgeois in the other. you want to talk movement,

fuck movement, fuck mobilization.

our dreams are post situational, that its beings and events are all locked
across the river
in some thanatoid dream.
but we don’t know it and we can’t remember why.

an ontology of the permanently fucked.
talk to me about praxis on the couch; don’t expect it to be a remedy for bliss
–a writing project that soothes the blisters of forgotten history.

art is supposed to hurt
everything hurts
everything hurts

i don’t deliver anything. the post-evental sanglots des violins,
a solitary chest heaving,
but always empty of the wind that had transported it,
foolish with the thought that it might ever be more than a dead leaf.

the answer is without

It’s all the rage, going inward. It makes sense to go inward. It seems to be the only direction that gives. There’s lots of good material, there. Lots of pliability, possibility, even ultimate responsibility; for the failure that comes later on. But the banal lyrics that say “the answer is within you” are still right, even if they don’t mean to be, considering Ray Lamontagne’s song “Be Here Now,” for example. There are many more of these examples that fit into popular musical mechanisms to exercise palaces to college courses, not to mention the entertainment industry that is just about to sell its katrillionth Breathing Easy DVD. Everything seems to point towards the inner power, the neutral nexus, the triumphant wisdom that we all possess (somehow).

But every time we hear the message to “listen within ourselves,” what are the real contingency factors that we need checked off before we give it a go? What I’m saying is, what are we really searching for in that $12.99 disc other than the tools to drone out the mind’s refusal to fully participate with this seriously fucked up planet? If we don’t want to contemplate the real causes of our unhappiness (which we are all-too familiar with on the individual level but “blocked” from recognizing in the communal sense,) don’t we really want to achieve inner peace about our methodical descent into droid-life? And isn’t any quest that doesn’t explicitly refuse our image and stuff-saturated lives really just a quest to make whatever human bit we have left into a droid, as well? What is so often passed off as a genuine way of achieving harmony is the attempt to keep working, but not too hard, eat, but not too much, moderate one’s life, enjoy “what is good” (like we know what the fuck that is) and let-go of what is unsavory. Simply put: retraining us to think like the middle.

What [Buddhism], more particularly zazen, is really all about, is about going without in more than one sense. On one hand, it  marks a clear renunciation of all material possessions and conceptions of “happiness” (in fact, it rejects all consumables, including the promise of emotion). It also clearly demonstrates the inevitable failure of the “inner” and demands a universal, communal, approach of “tapping into” the ebbs and flows. If there’s anything that we don’t have, it’s an ebb for a flow. Funnily enough, that seems to be what those communists are rambling on about, too.

Production is love;

Badiou’s essay on love focuses on the dialectical procedure of love. It is not sharable or experienced by the members (lovers) who create it, for it would not be love. The thing, the love production is not based on a consumption or an experience, rather the production of it. So what is thought of (viewed as) a action of consumption, true “love” is really a creation. Likewise, in Adorno’s Me-Ti teaching that concerns itself with the ethics of revolution, or living revolutionarily, there are more than a few integral parables. The first says that there is no purpose in fighting without learning the best way to live. The second is that there are not many “you should” statements, but one is “you should produce,” and the third follows two lovers who build their love “as if they expected to write history.” The first points to an issue of revolutionary/analytical ethic in varying contexts: there is a way to live in the “everyday” that is revolutionary, that is political; and that this striving should not be in direct opposition to the present context necessarily, but that attention should always fall primarily on the “universal” or always-utopian perspective otherwise the revolutionary impulse falls prey to becoming a reactionary ritual because its physical (contextual) manifestation is repeated and not the over-arching drive. The second statement directly incites production. In the context of late capitalism, it is easy enough to disregard this kind of phrase, or to misinterpret it: after all, isn’t there a sort of over abundance of production? No, this statement is really a variation on the first; it is a question of means versus ends (creation versus consumption). Mass production is really shown to be a direct consumption, only consumption, and this massive production of material items never truly makes anything that is made for itself—it is a binding one-way relationship instead of the dialectical production of love, that will be explained in greater detail below. So, what we think of as mass production really harnesses and re-harnesses people back into the wheel of consumption, which is not genuine. What is genuine does not have any direct tie into the material realm (of course it does have ties, but it is not directly visible in the material schema that capital markets have created), thus to understand what truly “ethical” (this term is highly problematic, see note below) revolution/utopian living, is production for production’s sake. Living with endless means. This follows to the third parable that which highlights what two lovers had made for themselves. Their love was not an experience, ready-made with embroidered towels, because they were not accepting a readymade narrative or idea (see introduction to Marxism and Form), but living for the method by which they lived. Turning to Badiou’s essay, one recalls that love is not an experience but only what it is imagined to be, imagined in an ideology that does not yield to utopian productions but only to the repeated trials and disasters of “experience.” Love as a truly revolutionary and emancipatory force is only visible when the lenses of material existence are stripped away: it is the manifestation of ethics in everyday life, the utopian drive that does not demand a return aside from the method by which it is produced. Production that yields its own fruit and whose “work” is never just experienced or watched or replayed, but always integrated into the analytical fabric of production. Love, or production that is love, is written by the lovers as if they were to write history because there was a close attention to the construction and not the polished surface, because history refused to end itself or expose some impossible root. Where can we see love? In what forms do the ends of production fold themselves back into a distinctly “ethically revolutionary” capacity more than in literary production? What is sold (on the surface) as just another artifact from a broken life of consumption and finance drags the reader into the very context that he is otherwise unable to view. This is not to say that buying and even reading a book is the ethically revolutionary move that allows people to live with endless means, ie emancipate them. Nor does this suggest that all literature is emancipatory, merely that its content and readership take part in a type of “peering” in all cases, whether or not the reader or the work is aware.

What literature (perhaps this might be extended to other modes of creation…) does foster is an interpretation, an analytical extension of the “work” or product, into the intimate life, the lived life, while something like a video game is a refutation of lived experience (incommensurable) [necessary day-to-day items that are created and consumed in the larger web of mass production have other issues that clearly refute their being a tool of endless production; what I am talking about encloses narrative/ideological productions]. Production, then is not only a type of construction but also an ability to analyze, contextualize and reinvision the world in which we live. Production then, in its largest sense, has everything to do with the purpose for which we live.

On vitalism as a mistaken dialectic? Adorno is my sounding board and I don’t care what you think about it.

vitalism: that new topic that mechanically but also rigorously posits itself into my train of thought, right on time at the start of a new semester. (don’t worry, I am more than sufficiently distanced from the idea that it “answers” anything.)

I should preface this entry by saying that this is based on a class that I am taking in lit. theory. But in the conversation in class so far (and here I should parenthetically note that “conversation” usually means undergraduate comments) there has been more “debate” that wishes to side-step the idea of vitalism and live the same old ignorances again and again. [i.e. dictatorship is not a valid vitalist force because it blocks the free flow of energy while libertarianism is the freest flowing kind of vitalism, blah blah.] Which, still ultimately brings me to where I’d like to begin.

Vitalism as a dynamic mapping of powers doesn’t seem to leave much room “in the middle,” which might be better restated as refied vitalism versus truth as vitalism. Maybe I will scan in a drawing later, because this does end up being a visual description–

In simple terms, we have the vitalism of the economy (better understood as “culture” since it is more than obvious that we live under some complex merger of the terms): this vitalism not only fuels its own growth and continual destruction, but perhaps fosters an immense “simulacra” of quasi-vitalist narratives that bridge the gap between individual (quasi organic) and this larger system of capitalist (mechanistic) force. [The zen CEO, the "enlightened" individual who never checks to see if his co-worker or wife or spouse is also enlightened, people who have "coping" mechanisms, love as a means to block oneself off from the struggle of humanity, art that is both functional and aesthetic, etc, etc.] All of these currents that *can only function in a capitalist setting* function as an unbridled vitalist force so long as it does not challenge the over-arching stipulations of whole shebang.

And then, to talk about quite another kind of vitalism (the “real” vitalism) that centers its power on something like philosophy which might also be examined as a function or position that the left might take up. A loose connection of energy towards truth, the question of philosophy as a vitalist structure doesn’t seem to hold up well under the pressure of reification that easily and obviously provides individual narratives and “ethics” to its larger practice. So philosophy as vitalism might fare better with a type of ethic, or structure that can compute the individual as more than a fraction of the “spontaneously imagined common” (I am referring to a Nergian formation that really seems like an inverted a priori Locke situation….). So it seems that even truth needs a structure of ethics if it truly wishes to recover its lost population and realize its power.

The hidden truth of the fame ball tour

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we really saying? Are we saying that we’d like to be remembered? Are we saying we’d like to change something, be a part of something? Maybe pop-fame, in everything it touches/creates/animates shows how interchangeable and utterly communal this disconnection is. I’m thinking here of P. Diddy: no one really cares about him and yet he and anyone he offers a label contract with chant about how untouchable he is. Behind him in stature are hundreds, if not thousands of rappers who all rap about the same thirty-five products, all claiming a throne that is only on loan to them at considerable interest.

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we saying? Maybe we’re looking to change history. Maybe we’re looking to live the right way, the next big way.

Next time Lady GaGa “invites everyday people” to live the celebrity life, maybe she’s saying that we ought to riot against it.

I am what they call isolated, unenlightened, unintelligible

And that is precisely what I should be.

On the subject of solistices

The inherent human urge and pleasure in giving is given its most generous opportunity- a frenzy o f giving contained by Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But the buying of gifts is more misery than joy for many people. I find myself always returning to Adorno’s 44: giving, like love, is arrested and controlled through the brilliant spectacle of things, of shopping, of pre-orchestrated frustration. The frustration of a woman at the bookstore, a sad woman who I want to love, to show I’m trying to love her, but I can’t because we’ve been blocked off from one another. So I surprise her and buy the coffee she loves but didn’t ask for and didn’t think I’d remember.

I still watched “White Christmas” more than a few times today (24 hours on AMC) but it wasn’t as bubbly as a shiny pink cellophaned room. When the title says “white” Christmas, that’s just what it means– the cracks on post-war propaganda a very evident (whereas before I think they played into my flawed conception of history, which is what I think they intend to do)…

Forgive my harping on White Christmas, Bingie and all. On the train scene to New York but then Vermont, why do they have to order two club sandwhiches from a black attendant? Why does the attendant have to be black…? (There are more than one; this is slightly less repulsive than in “Holiday Inn” where Bingie or maybe Fred Astaire have a *mammy* and two small caricatured black children who later play Old Father Time and Baby Time at the New Year’s pageant). The more the implicit message of dominant post-war culture is bashed into my head, the more I see that it’s not enough to see that everyone is white and clean and rich and happy. No, that’s not enough. The other must be present, must be at all times a caricature of himself, he must love his oppression and his oppressor. Perhaps this all means to account for them within the scope of the film (They are not *somewhere else* being middle class, no they are serving Bingie sandwiches.)

The major theme of the movie (aside from Christmas and the fool’s device of the “love” plot,) is nostalgia for war.  ”Gee, I wish I was back in the Army,” is exactly the kind of message that still winds its way into our culture’s romanticization of war, of occupation and imperialism. Because of course, the outfits were free, the meals were free, it was the best place to find romance. But at every moment, “White Christmas” proves, that the culture industry can reach back in time and replaster the finish of the American subject (this hit was made in 1954 and addressed the *forgotten* i.e. domesticated masculinity of WWII Patricians and Plebs..)

More later I’m sure. blah blah blah ’tis the season.

Oh, and speaking of imperialism, there was a Christmas special airing from a base in Baghdad. If you think that’s a “good idea” then please refer to my earlier post where I freak out about cultural ignorance. Noel, noel, let’s go blast some fucking Pakis.

Waning Sentimental

Less than a half an hour ago, I walked out of my French final. I am a free woman; goodbye Fall 2009. But I’m not at all happy about it. This semester was by the far the best experience I have ever had in my life. I learned how to read, how to think, how to write, how to teach.

But I know someone who would tell me that I already knew what I thought, I was already who I am, but I must take one small divergence from accepting that and say thank you to everyone in my life that assisted my education. Made my education what it is;

perhaps I shouldn’t address this entry in the second person informal–my teachers span continents, decades, often miss each other by whole lifetimes. The books they write were sometimes written for their times, but more often than not, they were written for this moment. Then there are my physically present teachers, I should call them my mentors, and without them, one in particular, I think I would have shut down and forgotten the whole bit completely.

To my friend, my housemate and person-I-can-always-convince-to-break-stupid-laws, thank you for writing with me and thank you for letting me be “cosmic” most of the time.

At the end of every Tuesday meeting for my independent study, I walked down the street, the same vacant, dirty, loud street–

There were the buildings, but they did not matter. The puddles on the side of the road, growing deeper. The way that I could walk in and out of sunshine. The frigid clouds billowing in the distance. The strip of sky above the avenue that could not, would not let itself be touched except by a spindling branch. And all the while, the new freeze washed over with the wind. Always brushing across my face, my hair on my cheek, guiding the fraying bits of daylight softly into my eyes. On the sidewalk I was triumphant.