Brief Updates From a Hole In the Ground

I am getting back out.

Thursday, I was rejected from the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford.
Friday, I was rejected from the Williams Summer Theater Lab.

Saturday, I spent the day researching internships and opportunities for summer employment.

Now, I'm installed with seeming permanence in the coffeeshop, constructing my first official (not theatrical!) resume, writing cover letters, and imploring professors to forgive me as I asked them to write recommendations due March 1st, tomorrow.

What have I learned this week?

There are no sure things.
There are more possibilities than I'd imagine.
People are helpful.
People are silly.
Admissions decisions are made by people.
Doors closing doesn't necessarily mean windows opening: it just means you're free to notice doors you might not have seen before. And,
If the door seems closed, sometimes you can jimmy the lock.
When something doesn't work out, it's a good time to be brave and stupid and just try something else.

My good good mother and father said, you know, you could take some time off. And that's pretty cool.

I'll keep thinking and keep playing.

And keep climbing.

Misc. à Minuit

I love this piece by Klimt because it's so uncharacteristic - I guess I mean that it is not at all like The Kiss. But I also like it just because I like it. The man who painted it described himself: "I am not particularly interesting."

I'm in a mood, somewhat contemplative, mostly scribblative, which I'd like to exploit in journaling and letter-writing and some on -the-page puzzling in my mother tongue. 21 pages of archaic French lie in wait (we've just begun un petit extrait de Les Misérables), but I've been taking my sweet time with Fielding's Tom Jones, C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and a slew of sociology readings. Memory and Identity is burning up my highlighter. I wish the packet were book-bound to add style to my future shelves. I'm working on ideas for our individual research project ... various floating fancies in re: comparative studies. Letters as agents of identification in community, practices of memorization (poems, verses, etc.), or grieving processes and communal mourning.

I've been interested in the roots of "nostalgia" - in 1688, a physician called Hofer coined the term from the Greek words for returning home (nostós) and pain/ache (álgos). He used it to describe the condition of Swiss mercenaries pining for their native lands. The idea of nativity is not, I think, far removed from an empathetic modern understanding of nostalgia. If we consider nostalgia, not as the "pervasive failure of imagination" ridiculed by modern critics - according to Plessner, "anonymity, itinerancy, [and] dispersion" alone offer the modern man a new "horizon of possibility" - if we throw that definition in the dust-heap, we might be able to consider just what our yearning for particular aspects of past history elucidates about our real condition. For all this mitigated media - and even, perhaps, by means of it - an urge for community remains and is expressed. Despite economic inviability and the often brutalizing consequences of attachment, attachment is just what we most want to cultivate. Only now we have particularly shammy ways of going about it. I'm veering from nostalgia in the direction of my own jugular - no one is more hypocritical than I am when it comes to Facebook.

Which leads me to a Lenten promise. For the first time, as a Presbyterian, I'm giving up something. And good grief - it's social networking. 46 days sans that particular foothold.

I've been experiencing a strange phenomenon lately: if I have a quick interaction, in a hallway, in a dining hall, if it ends too quickly, I have difficulty conceiving that it happened at all. Something feels fundamentally off-kilter in these brief glimpses, something more than shallowness. I was diagnosed anxious and stressed, but maybe I'm more inundated than either. And with a natural thoughtlessness to my character, that inundation breeds disengagement. Another memory reading seems to fit here - the cognitive analysis of buying bread.

Repetitive actions such as trips to the grocery store are basically only differentiable by the date of the occurrence. So our minds jumble all those operations together, and we end up remembering just the first and last times we purchased a loaf. Something like that seems to happen to me when there is an undifferentiated projection of self in social situations or online - if I'm telling the same story, repeating the same lines, or behaving in a "coded" way, my conversations seem to fall into that same cognitive heap. This is obviously destructive. Eliminating an element of my life that feels particularly shallow and undifferentiable, and therefore frankly dangerous (oh, I have sermons on Facebook, and I must preach them to myself!) would be wise for a time. And free up more of those moments for writing, reading, throwing open my doors, and reinvesting my energies. I want a better attention span, honestly, and a more generous engagement with my community (also quite selfish, but why not beg the real things?).

Now, I'd better do homework. It's after 1 AM and foreign languages just get harder. I have a mix CD called Homicidal Mourning: Criminal Approaches to the Exercise of Grief. I'm going to play Counting Crows on repeat. If nothing else, I'll write something for my second fiction meeting, scope the local bookstore website for good kids' stuff. I have a gift card, and that is ice cream money, man. If you didn't earn it, you can spend it on a smoothie or a pop-up book, or a journal to write lists in. Lists are also a topic in Memory and Identity - and I've no reason to wish them gone. Currently, my screen displays a folder filled with artwork I love. Currently, I'm reading an article called "Mediated Memories in the Digital Age." Much ado about the physical fact of photographs, so I'm going to print those pieces. For the moment, the top of this post bears evidence from the file, which also featuring Degas - and Corinne Serfass. My friends are really an inspiring bunch.

Private Dressing Room

As my fiction prof pointed out this evening, every character thinks they have the starring role.

This flipped me around in a fine way from the muck I'd been wallowing in the last 24 hours.

I'm exploring the idea of what it'd mean to consciously take the part of supporting cast.

Life is Whole

At a film screening on "Claiming Williams Day," the audience was given a short essay by Brendan Maher in lieu of programs. The topic was the necessity of respect between all colleagues - faculty, students, and staff - in the educational endeavor. It addressed the damaging effects of "divid[ing] standards of civility and respect into those that we apply to persons we define as peers versus those that we apply to persons that we do not so define." Sometimes overwritten, as you can see, the piece had a moment of spare and startling truthfulness. Its best line is my title: life is whole.

Formal education teaches us to "unpack" a phrase like that, sacrificing compact elegance for a clearer view. For a long time, I think, it's a lean endeavor - full of budding for the essayist ("to try" in French), but bearing little fruit for an observer. We tinker with our watches, and hope that when we are through, they will still tell time. But from this sudden sentiment, this life is whole, I thought, well, I can't say what. Very little was actually about staff or students - that was there already. But life is whole! In part:

Who am I to myself? Who am I to my best friend, to my brother, to my ex-boyfriend and my dad? When I save up my anger for my home, or I talk "I changed" while relegating others to always-the-same, what am I saying?

For the last: sometimes I wonder why I try to write it for myself when Marilynne Robinson is still on earth. "Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding." If I will not forgive, I say this, I willfully keep myself apart, I believe something too shaky and uneven to rest on anything but a pile of rubble. I say that I believe life and myself in it can be compartmentalized, subdivided, that I owe different allegiances and standards of being to the interesting people and the older people, the smarter people and the sadder or skinnier or weirder or even the meaner people. I can be different to people who hurt me or people who just don't impress me. This cannot be what I believe.

We cut ourselves a lot of slack by living life one day at a time. I won't chuck modernity out the window, even if I dangle it dangerously near, even if the more I read, the scareder I get. Maybe simply out of cowardice, I keep something, for there is, almost always, something to keep. But if life is whole, and we are whole, we have to live it whole. Not one day at a time, not even really in stages or steps. Let the postmodern BS fly.

In whole lifetime, whole being, life is whole means living how? Packed tightly:
Like a current, like a pattern,
like a home, and like a prayer.

Natural Tendencies

Mine is to be a trifle hot-headed.

Also, to be impressed by smart words from the mouth of Anne Bogart (director, author, & founder of SITI Company).

Given that dichotomy, when this sentence popped out at the end of a blogpost entitled "Instinct vs. Impulse," I couldn't be surprised that instinctive liking was undercut by impulsive irritation:

"The artist seeks out what cannot be comprehended and welcomes the discomfort of doubt. The natural tendency is to forget and the artist remembers."

As might be said, Lady, I don't like your tone.

Do you kid? Woman, do you jest? Sure, I'd like to take a pass on some particular recollections, but I don't think we forget so easy. And when we do forget, if by natural tendency you mean scientific tendency, not willful sublimation, if you mean degeneration of mind, if you mean, for example, Alzheimer's, it's scary as hell and no artistry will keep you from it. Because whether or not we're cuddling with our nagging doubts, a good many folks who you mightn't call artists are bearing with them, many separated from those artistic communities which you have so idealistically raised up. The common man has his artistry, may possess wisdom that runs counter to "natural impulse," and art is not the only predilection that defies Darwin.

Perhaps Bogart means to offer a more inclusive definition of the "artist" by so marking him: he savors obstacles, pauses in the center of difficulty and challenge. Perhaps she points to the artistry of a common existence that eschews cowardice and braves community, allows the time to gather weight. But there is a truer (and God, less arrogant) way to define a someone capable of these rememberings - and that someone doesn't have to "welcome the discomfort of doubt" but only bear it with fortitude, I guess. Why bother with the rarified vocabulary when you talk about living? If you want to speak of some kind of mantle, give it to people, and not just to artists.