![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Mens sana in copore sano
Apr. 24th, 2005
09:22 pm
"I was born into the long cold flatness of the Midwestern North, where justice speaks in the voice of thunder, forgiveness falls like a mantle of snow, and the endless turning of the seasons weaves humility and caution into the very fabric of our lives. Wihtout knowing it, we become watchers and distant observes, valuing objectivity over passionate involvement, because we sense it in our bones that the wheel of life, like the seasons, is always turning and will leave us grasping at something ephermal and fleeting if we invest too strongly in any passing emotion or passion.
At our best this makes us clear-eyed and fair-minded, with an unnerving instinct for the essential. At our worse we become cynical and retrograde, holding life at a distance and making a virtue of intractability. But in either case, gradually and unwittingly, we take on the face of American Gothic, full of stolid honesty and spritual severity, bound to the earth and its hard lessons, aware in our bones that the wheel of fate, more than the trajectory of progress, is the light by which our lives must be lived.
In my youth this was just fine. I was surrounded by people who shared the same worldview, and I knew no other way. It was quite enough to be the laconic watcher, the ironist, the cautious skeptic who held the world at arm's length, putting it in context and parsing its deficiencies. But as I grew, this critical distance became stultifying. Irony casts out love, and I, like everyone else, wanted love. Not just love of another person, but love of life. I wanted to embrace, not analyze. Kerouac-crazy midnight drives, paper-bag cheap-whiskey drunks, and Woody Guthrie walking the railroad tracks with collar up almost sufficed. But that was drunken love--an embrace of disengagement, a cloaked celebration of detatchment from something larger.
I wanted something else. I wanted union, oneness, wholeness.
I wanted belief."
Kent Nerburn, "Road Angels"
Apr. 19th, 2005
Apr. 17th, 2005
12:26 pm - I had the motivation to paint yesterday, but currently the thought is lost.
So I went for a walk yesterday to clear my head. The colors flew out, bruising the night into purples and greens and it was so beautiful that I couldn't take it anymore, I had to close my eyes. Every time they flew open the lampposts and trees met me halfway. I walked, then stumbled, then found myself back at home where the colors died and faded into the periphery.
For ten hot minutes the world fragmented into shades and light and I moved among them, unobtrusive and lost.
Dec. 6th, 2004
09:29 pm
I watched my father sit, slightly hunched over, his graying hair draped over his ears, the brash sounds of the television braying truths that only he could hear. The scene stopped me in my tracks.
It killed me to see my father alone and old like that.
Sep. 19th, 2004
05:19 pm - Back in Evanston
The sun touched the buildings and for a moment they shone like gold. I was half asleep all creaky kneed in my bed-curl position with eyes like slits. I saw all this with memories of last year's window seat chats still in my mind.
I am back at university and it feels pretty damn good.
Aug. 14th, 2004
08:34 pm - fictional notes on a manic depressive
things are simple again. it challenges her.
she knows that she won't feel this way when the cold hand hits her cheek so she holds on to what she has, collecting the confidence like stones in a jar.
she hopes that she will save enough to last the darkened skies and numb winters. it waits for her as it always has, like a tattered man, raggedly grabbing with decrepit teeth and scaled fingernails. hello, he says. i've come to steal you again.
the maudlin image sparks dreams of bitter arguments, parties spent alone and flailing with the overindulgence of others, winds biting the ankles until the tired tears congeal. she wakes up in panic at the inevitable seven month heartache depression madness.
i hate you! she spits and her voice hurts from the bleached breaths. where do you take me?
what does she become every winter, a worse disease every year?
Jul. 1st, 2004
05:21 pm
Places that I want to live:
South Africa
San Diego
Cuba
South Korea
Chicago is alive. Sometimes it feels surreal. It's the Indian neighborhood and the kids at Lakeview High School and the art fair that strolled through. Chicago is the blue collar work ethic and the tough guy accents. It's the Buddhist monks who came to create a sand mandala, only to dismantle it four days later.
I am in love, with all of the people and the places that I've known and hope to know.
Jun. 23rd, 2004
08:34 am - Northfield Minnesota
The yearning needs of my dreams have changed;
now there are houses side by side
and the new lives of delicate leaves
and the chaste winter and the righteous firewood.
As on the seventh day, the earth is good.
Deep in the twilight something carries on
an old murmur of Bibles and of love.
Ambition waits for me on every sidewalk,
but I feel in the falling light of afternoon--
today so long and yesterday so brief.
Minnesota, it is along your streets
I go on walking in peace.
May. 27th, 2004
12:54 pm - The eve to Minneapolis
We walk enclosed in clouded windows
hot cold in dense nostalgia,
hours aching with recognition.
Emotions wrapped across telephone wires
of hymns sung in shower stalls,
of forgiven fleeting references,
of laughter more crowded than farmers' markets.
May. 18th, 2004
12:46 am
Eva Cassidy and velvet relaxation
delicately hover above
intimate secrets. Rivulets,
the artist's philosophies
become withdrawn into
the gentlest of time's shapes.
May. 13th, 2004
11:23 pm - Contact
the bile sweet the tender lapped up golden stars. everyone is mine tonight. i hear my own voice ring with the laughter required, the laughter needed to pierce dreams. perhaps, i reason, perhaps with the sharp blades of my grandiosity, the innards of such passions will merely congeal, will merely remain and not fade away. </p> i stumble out of myself rich and aware. my arms, slinging back with parabolic motion, stun all around me. this is my declaration. these are my desires. i coo around necks and hips and let the contact slide. it is with touch that i know that i'm alive. </p> -audrey devereaux
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/bitospud/courier/black/full.gif){kind=small}
fullApr. 25th, 2004
02:06 pm - simple simple
"i can hear your heart," i told him matter-of-factly. "it goes bhomp bhomp lub dub."
he laughed. all complexity, all complication of communication, or lack of--dispelled. i decided then that i didn't want anything from him. like he didn't want anything from me. we could stand there by the river, just stand there and never move and never move. i didn't want anything from him. hearing him laugh was everything and it was enough.
"how does my heart go again?"
"it goes bhomp bhomp lub dub."
Apr. 8th, 2004
09:03 pm
It was the transition, the hope, the heady idealism of escape in education, the mania of summer weather and stale night breeze.
We talked for hours. We discussed the reforming government in South Korea and our mysterious affiliation and severed roots. We spoke of promise and a need to emphasize the value of the liberal arts in a burgeoning consumer economy. You sipped your drink as we chatted about the chaebols that dominate the landscape of Korean wealth and possibilities of reunification.
Alcohol went around as the conversation moved to art. The very idea of art, the philosophical absurdity of its very definition. People swirled around us, their confusion and limbs everywhere, the desperation of the summer. The carelessness of it all (everything felt arbitrary and random and haphazard).
Literature was tossed around. I thought of Holden Caulfield as we walked home. The land, a backdrop for paper bag fits of cheap highs, land once coveted and now dismissed; the land it held us and our fragile plans for grandiosity, our senses of accomplishment. In that space there was no room for pragmatism.
I stumbled home dizzy and fumbled to the bookshelf. I wanted to run throughout the night I wanted to build something I wanted to carve out the weary expressions and faded ache of a Minnesota summer.
Books flew off the shelves and my brain heaved with intention as I memorized physics formulae and read Spanish poetry. I searched through chem texts and uncovered Jewish novels and wanted to realize the truth behind all of the language, the diction, the tone.
This is what I wanted life to be. I wanted the discussion the knowledge the uncontrollabe impracticality of physicality and ideas. I wanted the mania and the impermanence of such feelings and the earnestness of it all.
This was what I thought that life was all about.