Kierkegaard Moment

Sin is this: before God, or with the conception of God, to be in despair at not willing to be oneself, or in despair at willing to be oneself. Thus sin is potential weakness or potential defiance: sin is the potentiation of despair.- The Sickness Unto Death

today i feel a bit like Simone de Beauvoir and letters and the color grey... maybe she was writing poetry inside all those letters. here is a poem i've written from her letter:




_______________________________________14 March [1941]
____________________________________________Paris

my love,

still living in expectation,
_____ I haven’t seen
your Paris_____Paris hasn’t forgotten
you
there are paragraphs about you here
sayings- “informed that M. Sartre is
__________________ working on a novel”

The Age of Reason
_____hope you reach it


nothing new
_____happens to me
________spring’s changed lovely___a
__________splendid moonlight
longing to relive such nights with you

working_____polishing_____alone in my text
________to feel sick___pretty
_____long run ____I saw shameless
spoken


I have a screaming_______quarrel
_____ collapsed ___from fury
idyllic

I am living gently
_____in the midst of
______this whole
________ little world
______________________ waiting for you


- Your charming



*Words taken from Letters to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir

Saul Williams for thought:

Our music is our alchemy

We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussion factor of forever.

If you must count to keep the beat then count. Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious.

~Saul Williams, Coded Language

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

my sister once wrote a poem: it was titled one half of a love letter or something like that. i don't remember the details, but i feel like it describes my life... a lot of things started: few finished.

happy 2008. i wish i could remember the last time something changed with the new year. things tend to change at other times of the year. may--graduation, or august a big move. nothing actually changes on January 1. nevertheless, new years is the day to reflect. i can look back on last year and see all the grand changes and completions that did take place: i completed my bachelor's degree. i finished a few good books. i wrote a 75 page thesis, defended, and passed my oral exam. all good things. somehow, with the changing of the calender, it is the bitter events that stick in my mind more fervently: mistakes with friendships and relationships, never finishing that one book, only learning 1/2 as much spanish as i would like. why does the word "new year" elicit such a negative response in me? is it because i am growing older? feeling older? feeling less-wise?

behind plastic wine glasses, half drinkable mojitos, and long games of "taboo," i see my reflection in a college apartment mirror. it is the same. almost like high school- thin and strained. and yet, i feel 55 not 23. years are not kind to bodies that run too much and sleep too little. writing is supposed to be therapeutic, but sometimes it is a disease. "happy new year" sounds more like, "be happy, but know that time is escaping you." what would i have done differently last year if i could live it again? call that friend instead of cramming for an exam that i already knew the information for. raised money for more charities. stayed in peru longer. too many things i suppose. but life is not about regret, it is about living and looking forward.

i don't want to be 1/2 of a love letter. that is what i feel like. unfinished. unresolved? how to make 2008 great.
for starters... i am going to read. i am going to sleep more. and i am not going to make those things "new years resolutions" because i hate that concept. instead, i am going to keep working on being a better person. because when the next new year comes knocking, i don't want this negative feeling to creep up on me. does anyone agree?

Ulysses
~Mary Ruefle

Dropped down and hauled up, dripping
like a tea bag.
And if he is a little darker now, more obscure, quieter,
it doesn’t mean he is gone from us.
Don’t you think every butterfly you’ve ever seen
is the same one?


~I looked out my window this morning and knew that the day was written in poems. The type of poem you never write down, you scribble inside your mind and reread only upon deep sleep. The sun hurt my eyes, but I could still see the throng of crows that swarmed in like bees near the edge of construction laden building crevices. I could hear them screaming and singing at the same time. Why this continual land and flight off the edges of the red tinted oak? They were in constant motion, and I couldn’t tell one from the other. The black blemishes on the blue sky weren’t so much distracting as they were confirming. Imperfections authenticate beauty. Someone asks for a phone call in five minutes. Someone asks for the answer to world hunger. Someone asks for a poem about the prairie. Someone asks to see more of belief written in black on white. Someone asks the meaning of the word “humble.” I would create new worlds with my pen, but that doesn’t erase my old manuscripts. Watching the birds I imagined myself walking among them. We were holding hands; the sun was stagnant on the horizon and casting barbed wire shadows across our dusty faces. They were taking us to the tree, past all the rubble. They were calling to us with that terrible noise. And we were soaking it in. We were not yet gone. ~