Shrug

Note to Self: green daybook, 03.12.03

2008-01-02T21:20:00.000-05:00

03.12.03
"...whenever I find myself, I find that I have always already begun."
Heidegger, 1962

-in this case can one have a trajectory?
--when does one START?

-this is the point, one doesn't
__

-neither does/can the TEXT

Note to Self: resolution, 01/01/2008

2008-01-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

01.01.08

As far as resolutions go I'm at a loss. I've never been much good at making them, though feel strangely compelled to do so. I'd like to try this year to listen better to those around me, to learn from those around me, to give attention its due and let that lead the way.

Note to Self: green daybook 02.07.01

2007-12-20T19:44:00.000-05:00

02.07.01

-of course ethics are based on value

-is syntax based as such on value?
--I suppose it is when thought of rigidly

-but when it becomes lithe
--then it is based on re-valuation

-can individual ethics escape the controlling authority of value?

-No
-ethics whatever guise appeals to an outside authority and thus removes nearly all personal responsibility
--one must simple agree w/ the tenets of that CODE

SYNTAX=ETHICS

___

-The moon light is very beautiful tonight.

Note to Self: green daybook, 01.30.01

2007-12-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

01.30.01
-can one make an image?

__
-what can one destroy w/ words, that is the words of a text

-create?

Note to Self: green daybook, 12.17.01-12.26.01

2007-12-17T20:56:00.000-05:00

12.17.01
-I'm not interested simply in different ways of telling.
--am I telling at all?

-I'd hoped to have a PROGRESS of THINKING
--that is an engagement?

-focus on what it is that is broached, what is broached?

12.24.01
The hero is called the people

__

-an assumption about thinking and thus the text

-resisting is a way of defeating representational thought.

12.26.01

-once again Honesty vs. Community or (family)?

-again, is the attacking of Context a sufficient resistance?
--is resistance necessarily solitary?

Note to Self: green daybook, 05.03.03

2007-12-16T20:36:00.000-05:00

05.03.03

-of course the TEXT doesn't have a "point" any more than the MIND does

__

-one can move from a word like gosling or thunder to the mutating of the pear tree thru MYTH or a gust of wind

__

-is FLUX really the pure and simple answer and DESIRE only the mistaken need to control FLUX

__

-if one falls into using CONVENTIONS in the text is one asserting a constant, dualistic SELF?
--I'm feeling less motivated to move past exhaustion.

Note to Self: green daybook, 12.13.07

2007-12-15T20:48:00.000-05:00

12.13.07
-does narrative require nouns?
--in painting?

-how does one construct predicative cues?

-syntax
-can a syntax be a narrative?

__
"Don't Bodies and Light act mutually upon one another?"
"Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another?"

Newton, Opticks

Note to Self: green daybook, 08.07.04

2007-12-14T21:20:00.000-05:00

08.07.04
-is one different than what one describes?
-what is the effect of DESCRIPTION on one's BODY?
--what is DESCRIPTION?
-which parts of the TEXT and not DESCRIPTION?

-aligning words is a matter of/for DESCRIPTION

Note to Self: green daybook, 01.16.06

2007-12-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

01.16.06
Gerald Edleman, Neural Darwinism

___

-if Intentionality at least requires a BODY doesn't it also at least require SPACE?

-to this end isn't a BODY, doesn't a BODY INCORPORATE EXTERNAL SPACE?

-isn't a BODY MORE THAN THE SUM of its Parts?

-transubstantiation vs. metamorphosis

-so the BODY is a method for acquiring SPACE

___

Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind

Note to Self: GoodReads 12.12.07

2007-12-12T20:51:00.000-05:00

12.12.07

My library will always remain my child whereas my children will eventually leave home.

Note to Self: green daybook 02.27.07

2007-12-11T21:12:00.000-05:00

"...what is he whose grief
Bears such emphasis, whose phrase of Sorrow
Conjures the wand'ring Stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers?"

Hamlet, Act V, Scene I, lines 248-251

Note to Self: green daybook 04.28.03

2007-12-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

04.28.03
"Zen points out that our precious 'self' is just an idea, useful and legitimate enough if seen for what it is, but disastrous if identified with our real nature."
-Way of Zen

__

-is separating TREE from the IDEA of TREE a matter of eliminating DESIRE?
__

-one hesitates putting two words together for fear of creating SOMETHING

-if one doesn't bristle with "reality" isn't one simply decorous?

Note to Self: green daybook, 02.02.04

2007-12-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

02.02.04

"...he behaves as if he were a complete superfluity, a being for whom, in his account, duration has no meaning."

-Bataille, The Accursed Share

Note to Self: from The Die(r), Adventures with Friday

2007-12-08T05:49:00.000-05:00

Plot point 3: a morality play

L: I have this recurring fantasy about killing someone.
L: I have this recurring image of striking someone’s head, just above the left ear, with the broad side of a clever.
L: This fantasy is predicated upon various situations in which my action would be acceptable.
L: Not the broad side but the back.
L: In this image the skull has collapsed flat and sits atop a stupidly hulking body.
L: In this image I am watching myself relax, my shoulders relax.
L: Any blunt object with a sharply defined edge really.
L: This fantasy includes protecting or avenging someone.
L: In this image there is a moment of release in which any notion of personality abdicates.
L: In this fantasy I imagine moving the body out of the house as if it were one of my own limbs engorged.
L: As if by my actions this fantasy body had accreted to my physical body.
L: As if this was a method of making honesty.

Note to Self: green daybook, 03.04.02

2007-12-06T20:50:00.000-05:00

03.04.02

One tires of description

depiction: mouth
description: my mouth

Note to Self: green daybook 03.30.03

2007-12-02T19:58:00.000-05:00

03.30.03
-The problem is I'm not writing AGAINST anything

___

-Can one write the BODY w/out writing description?
i.e. Beckett, Scalipino (sometimes)
-while remaining accurate?

___

"Nietzsche always speaks of the soul's Unterwelt, which designates the most secret aspect of the body."
-Nietzsche: Body & Culture

Note to Self: from The Hungarian, page 23, manuscript

2007-11-29T20:45:00.000-05:00

What one can bring to bear on the transfer of memory emanates from that parka left hulking on the seat adjacent to one, from the girl sleeping, curled into the cupped seat with her earphones askew, from the voices which fail to be voices surrounding one but rise up as a sound one imagines the disquiet to be.

The objects which confronted me throughout the airport were involved in the business of life in a way which seemed unrecognizable to me, in way which made no sense or made too much sense.

People laughed and I bid the Furies to flay their bodies, to run bamboo threads under the skin of their backs and hoist them into the air.

I wanted to be in Florida with my father when he died, but I also wanted to look through the concourse window and see an augur of the naturalness of this, of the simplicity of this.

I wanted to feel as if I was in my own skin again. These things push us to our boundaries and further, perhaps this was a new skin.

I don’t know how to remember anything else. I boarded the plane.

Note to Self: Mind and Nature

2007-11-28T21:27:00.000-05:00

"Information. Any difference that makes a difference."
-Gregory Bateson

Note to Self: green daybook 01.24.02

2007-11-27T20:40:00.000-05:00

01.24.02
-Blake's POLYPUS still reverts to MYTH

Reverting to MYTH is fine so long as one keeps in mind that it is predicated on the notion that all MYTH explains is HUMAN DESIRE.

Note to Self: green daybook 11.16.03 & 11.20.03

2007-11-26T20:53:00.000-05:00

11.16.03
-"Causality is felt."
-Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity

-could Soul be the Death?

11.20.03

:::
contraire

Note to Self: vote.

2007-11-25T21:19:00.000-05:00

Note to Self: weave

2007-11-24T19:44:00.000-05:00

Note to Self: green daybook 02.04.07 & 02.05.07

2007-11-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

02.04.07
-does when things happen in a text insinuate a NARRATIVE?
-i.e. a frequency?

-startle-->coincidence?

-parataxis vs. syntax

02.05.07

pulp test,
one, well, one askance
Errant, two arms hug passed.

-This would require the EXTRACTION OF TIME...

Note to Self: green daybook 11.14.06

2007-11-21T20:14:00.000-05:00

11.14.06
-does an EVENT in a text create a SPACE?
-DESCRIBE a SPACE?
-MIMIC a SPACE?

Note to Self: green daybook 07.18.04 & 07.19.04

2007-11-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

07.18.04
-syntactical invention = proprioceptive fibers?

__

self-subsistent meaning

-is Time self-subsistent?
-is syntax?
-is the text?

-what occurs between the body and Time?

-Time cannot be self-subsisntent because it requires a 1) method of quantification and 2) field of quantification

the body MAKES Time
-as opposed to KEEPS Time

-is syntax always reflexive?
-is not self-subsistent?

-the text is one of those methods & one of those fields, at least in the most general sense

07.19.04
-is syntax the Body in the TEXT?

Note to Self: green daybook 10.02.05

2007-11-18T20:19:00.000-05:00

10.02.05
-is all writing "naming"?
-can one write SPACE?
-if so would a "name" be a distance?
-do "names" define SPACE?
-maybe, to the extent that they are the indexes of distance and the intimate
-so a "name" on one's lips is the issuance of SPACE?
-no, the issuance of the capacity for distance?

--CONNATURAL???

___

Knowledge of sensible things through the phantasies of bodies

Note to Self: blue

2007-11-16T20:43:00.000-05:00

Note to Self: green daybook 07.09.01

2007-11-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

07.09.01
-in thrum all outer form from vase all possible situations

-objects white chrysanthemum sun

__

"The verb of a proposition is not 'is true' of 'is false', as Frege thought: rather, that which 'is true' must already contain the verb."
Tractatuc Logico-Philosophicus

Note to Self: green daybook 11.13.07

2007-11-14T20:52:00.000-05:00

11.13.07
-at what point does one's text become one's body?
-formally the notion of exceeding one's self
-but it's a different questionexceed one's body
-formally the notion of exceeding one's body is implicit in the writing
-so is the text a tool?
-so is the text an adaptation?
-is it an other limb?

-Does one write from the notion that one's body is IN SPACE?

-is the text a method of constituting a malleable SPACE?

-could SPACE be some kind of hybrid of the omnipotent narrator and TIME?

Note to Self: pomegranate seeds

2007-11-13T21:09:00.000-05:00

Note to Self: green daybook 12.05.05

2007-11-13T21:00:00.000-05:00

12.05.05
-continuous text
-or dynamical system

-where pattern is self-similar on both the micro and macro scales
-where lack of redundancy = information(value-free term)
-where creation of information = chaos

__
-"...is brought about in the literary process through the gradual revelation of the priority of paradox."
-Oedipus Myth

Note to Self: green daybook 04.01.02

2007-11-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

04.01.02
-"What is noted is that experience is diminished by simplifying recording surfaces and regularizing the frames of discourse. For example, defining being as presence or the self as subjectivity are too conceptually simplistic for framing and indexing the heterogeneities of experience."
-Winquist

__

-what about fluidity of the text?
-in large part this contributes to its being taken/made as an artifact

-does fluidity necessitate a hierarchy?

-what about the soul/self, is it fluid?
-can it be while also being honest?

-No, overall the soul is not fluid

Note to Self: green daybook, 03.21.04

2007-11-11T21:43:00.000-05:00

03.21.04
crow in profile head turn to cross plane of the body auditory hallucinations

__

"...the auto-effective voice of the self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the Other, the voice that one could not control..."
-source unknown

chirologia
populace

__

populace
crow head shifts plane of

Populace crow head shifts plane of
auditory no not a hand

Populace
crow head shifts the plane of
no not a hand

/auditory/

Note to Self: candlestick, 11.10.07

2007-11-10T20:27:00.001-05:00

Note to Self: green daybook 02.26.05 & 03.31.05

2007-11-10T05:47:00.000-05:00

02.26.05
-"displaying themselves attractively before him as objects in a the field of a subject."
-Oriental Mythology, The Mask of God

03.31.05
-honesty takes one forward by the only locomotion it has, expectation. The expectation of being reciprocated.

Note to Self: Inversion & Delayed Syntax, 12.23.03

2007-11-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

Note to Self: green day book 02.07.05 & 02.11.05

2007-11-06T20:33:00.000-05:00

02.07.05
-can one still talk about VISION w/ regard to writing?

-much of the writing out seems deflated of possibility

-what is VISION?

02.11.05
concision VS. succinctness and the problem of SCALE

Note to Self: green daybook 11.01.03

2007-11-05T21:16:00.000-05:00

11.01.03
-is the SOUL an entropic state?
-or rather the result of an entropic state?

-is it possible that the sense of BETWEEN which best fits a definition of SOUL is entirely OUTSIDE of INFORMATION?
-by which I, of course, do not mean an intentional "unknowing" but rather the chaos as which information exists before it transforms itself into INFORMATION by way of SELF

-INFORMATION = method of staving off Death
Narrative/////////////////////////////disintegration of a system

-could the SOUL be DEATH?

Note to Self: green daybook 08.01.03

2007-11-04T21:04:00.000-05:00

08.01.03
-I can't see a thought in an image, only DISPLAY

flesh is at least as good a gauge as words are
-WCW, Kora in Hell

-how far can one go with a thought and still expect not to be a self?
1) I feel I am evaporating.
2) it smacks of dishonesty & STANCE

-Are all words thoughts?

-is there some fundamental association with thinking a word
-is this MYTHOS

-is my penchant for myth one for explanation or association?

Note to Self: green daybook 01.01.07

2007-11-03T14:22:00.000-04:00

01.01.07
-repetition
VS.
-recollection
-------------------->TIME?
-pattern
VS.
-sequence

__

-SOURCE is SPACE?

-I am recalling or I am repeating this absorbancy was a source in the bed beneath me.

Note to Self: green daybook 11.05.06

2007-10-31T21:22:00.000-04:00

11.05.06
-so is transforming the body transforming time?

-possibly
-one think of nymphs
-transformation into the Natural (IE flowers, rocks or trees) necessitates transformation of time

-one's notion of time is time

-Bodily-time based upon satiety??

Note to Self: green daybook 08.08.05

2007-10-30T20:51:00.000-04:00

08.08.05
-one can assume the surrounding SPACE
-how

-my body is not my body
VS.
-my body is not only my body

-how are these translations of a SOMATIC SENSE?

-"only" = description

Note to Self: pages 16-18, The Hungarian: a Memoir, draft

2007-10-29T10:58:00.000-04:00

I had been told stories, had a number of apocryphal tales about my father, as a child. Like his fainting outside the operating room doors during my birth or driving across Europe in a VW bug with my mother and me to see the ocean in Spain. If stories repeated often enough are memories then I had a handful of memories of my father. The problem was that I felt no connection to any of these stories. They triggered no physical response whatsoever, no emotional response whatsoever; in fact the only response they elicited was disbelief. Not that I don’t believe that my mother and father did these things, but that they have made a mistake: I wasn’t there at all.

When I emerged from the tunnel, facing the EPB with the train trestle behind me and the Iowa River flowing passed me on the right, I just wanted to keep moving. Because it seemed to me that motion was a salve, that by moving, and then it came to me, that by moving away from the quilt I could perhaps move my thoughts about my father back into the realm of speculation. I didn’t want the solved, the settled, but wanted the comfort I’d found in the vague. I wanted ignorance.

Of course I knew nothing for sure. The most logical argument predicated on a hallucination remains illogical. Faced with the facts, or at least what I thought I knew to be the facts, I decided to do nothing. I think I may have told Kelly on the phone that night, but didn’t mention it to another soul for years.

We trust our memories usually without fail. This isn’t surprising; memory is nothing if not a stabilizer and a justifier. But what is implicit in those functions is mutability, the ghost in the machine so often not taken into account. The stories I had about my father were him in my mind, not that I ever turned to these for solace so much as for a sense of evidence that I had lived a different life. That he had lived a different life. And that those lives had a bearing on each other which couldn’t be removed. I felt like an amnesiac as I headed back to my room. Walking through Iowa City was a method of negotiating the underworld without fail, across the ped-mall, up Burlington, turn right, go down a few houses to the faded blue one on the right, the one with spearmint overgrowing the front bed. I felt a guide just behind me laying a hand on this or that should to get me home.

One of the significant qualities of silence that I crave is its capacity to allow the mind a sort of sure-footedness with which to ramble, expanding and exploring, the terrain just fore and aft of a problem before circling in precisely on the point at which there is contention with the outside world. I sat in my room and let the quiet draw out whatever chaos remained in me from my visit to the quilt. I sat and stared at the white plaster wall just over the word processor’s screen. Letting my body collapse into the chair, then by degrees the chair into the floor and the floor into the house, I became a diffused space through which my thinking stuttered and whirled. If your father never knew you who could? A cold sensation in the ankle of my left foot splits me into halves. At what point am I me alone? What are these tendrils to one’s parents? The cold, and now numbness, has moved on to incorporate my left foot entirely. Enough pressure and any connection is severed? Severed irrevocably? …I stand abruptly and pick up the phone to tell Kelly.

Note to Self: green daybook 10.05.05 and 10.10.05

2007-10-28T20:14:00.000-04:00

10.05.05

"Like allegory, the monster depends heavily on the process of analogy and the transfer and combination of intellectual significations that analogy permits, even if, in this case, the transfer distorts normal expectation."

-Deformed Discourse, David Williams

10.10.05

-deformity one calls to it, mouth

Note to Self: green daybook, 01.04.04 and 01.11.04

2007-10-27T05:34:00.000-04:00

01.04.04
-skin from her face
-information

01.11.04

-does information have a past?

__

-what are the consequences of the SOUL being death?
-what do I mean here?
-death=chaos (the ends of entropy)?
-and death of what -SELF?

-the point at which the flow of information INTO ceases?

__

Narrative is the a system of supplying INFORMATION
-once again WHAT CONSTITUTES INFORMATION IN THE TEXT?

(but isn't writing in general such a system?)

__

-if one gives away "authority" in the text what is it replaced with
-information?

__

-the problem with this is that both sides of the information vs. chaos equation are stable systems. It's what occurs in between which is an expenditure

-is that so, a glut or dearth of information creates a stable environment?

Note to Self: a couple of pages about "News" (2007), The Hungarian: a Memoir, draft

2007-10-26T10:19:00.001-04:00

The phone call came on a Friday, while I was vacuuming. I happen to look up and the phone was lit so I turned off the machine and picked up. It was Jim. We started talking and it occurred to me that he had never called before, that it was always Ken who called, but I had sent him an email recently so thought it plausible that he'd called to talk about the email. We spoke for a few moments before he said, "Well, I have some news." News. News is one of those words the sound of which always throws me for a loop. Some words sound like words, but "news" sounds like a plaintive call, somewhere between a moan and a question more basic than words can convey. News. It is expressed from you like breath itself. Then there's the sense of it, how what is "news" is always just beyond what you know, just beyond the present even if just for a moment or two. News is anticipation. It is the effect of everything other than yourself on you, the sum of the world brought to bear on you.

It strikes me now that Jim didn't say "bad news", that he didn't say, "Well, I have some bad news." This could have been simply because he's an amazingly positive person or, of course, it could have been the work of avoidance, of emotional defense, one doesn't relish conveying this
kind of information.

Ken had been hospitalized. Then came the back story. He'd been sick for most January with what they both thought was the flu. Lately though he'd become confused and lethargic. They'd made an appointment with their doctor for the previous Thursday morning. Jim said he had trouble getting Ken up and dressed. That he had trouble getting him into the car. The doctor sent them to the hospital. Shortly after they arrived Ken had become unresponsive. His Hepatitis-B had become active and his liver and kidneys were failing. He was retaining fluids and jaundiced. They were going to try a catheter. Jim didn't know what to expect.

After agreeing to talk again in a few hours I hung up. I remember the silence after our conversation seemed entirely out of proportion as if each thing had begun to busy itself with absorbing every sound. I remember that borders of each thing in the living room seemed to contract leaving my body as a target. I remember thinking this isn't happening, this can't be happening. We assume, I think, that at least some part of our lives has immunity, that at least a handful of our relationships are impervious to misfortune, that in order for us to continuing being who we each are we must, by rights, have these sacred places, but in fact we are wrong in that assumption. We are afloat in fortune and misfortune as if in a sea, in the long run we are washed over by both, turned head over heels by both. And while we may not like it, may, indeed, hate it, it cannot be avoided.

Note to Self: soul

2007-10-26T05:26:00.001-04:00

Note to Self: green daybook, 09.27.05, 09.29.05, 10.02.05

2007-10-25T05:42:00.001-04:00

09.27.05

"But since Substance is one, why are Forms so various?"

"There must be, somewhere, primordial figures whose bodies are nothing but their image. If one could see them then one would discover the link between matter and thought, what Being consists of!"

-Flaubert, Temptation of St. Anthony

09.27.05

-Time --> as predicator of the grotesque?

: How is it St. Anthony :

10.02.05

-is all writing a "naming"?

-can one write SPACE?

-if so would a "name" be a distance?

-do names define SPACE?

-maybe to the extent that they are the intersections of distance and the
intimate

-so a "name" on one's lips is the issuance of SPACE?
-no, the issuance of the capacity for distance

-CO-NATURAL???

__
Knowledge of sensible things through the phantasies of bodies.

Note to Self: green daybook 02.09.03

2007-10-24T20:52:00.001-04:00

02.09.03

-to what extent does thinking itself require Future?

-does Thinking by definition depose all else?

-if so is that then not a constant succession of NOWS?

-what does this do to any idea of Past or history (must have a
re-look at the Henri Corbin on Ibn Arabi)

-is thinking Plenum

-if BODY exists as a triangulation does Thinking?

-No, I don't think so--WHY?

-it seems that SPEECH must assume FUTURE

-because SPEECH is essentially only interpretation in that respect it
is quite different from Thinking

-once again, "Is Knowledge opposed to the future?" -Elizabeth Grosz

Note to Self: a couple of pages on viewing the AIDS quilt (1993) from The Hungarian: a Memoir, draft

2007-10-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

Names. The voice was reading a litany of names, slowly, distinctly, not emotionally but meaningfully. The names were those of victims of the disease; the dead. The names read in this way, in this place, formed a kind of communion with the quilt and the viewers and persisted behind the whole scene sometimes taking pride of place unexpectedly with a particularly mellifluous name or juxtaposition of names, just often enough to draw you in and keep you uncomfortably aware of your own name. It persisted like a tide coming in, an ocean of sound. You could close your eyes and become entranced on that level for a moment like wind on a beach surrounding you, pulling you just an inch or so away from yourself so that all that remains is the Present, fully more than you could ever be, the kind of stirring which incorporates everything without regard. You can’t stop it, don’t want to, really, but ultimately the heat returns, the sand is again biting at your skin and you come back to yourself for these particulars and must beginning living with them once more.

When the sound of the voice settled back into its particulars, the names, diversity took over again. Each name was richly spoken into the air of the hall. It was against your skin and against the sections of quilt. It reintroduced the deep connection between our names and our bodies by pointing out, unmistakable, that while we were flush with materiality, with the flesh of our hands and our faces each name read was deficient. Perhaps this is why listening was so easy, so simple and so horrifying. It was as if by listening hard enough, long enough, you could offer refuge to each name by taking it with in you, by granting it passage, in this small way, to one more brief flirt with materiality. Ultimately we want that for the dead, don’t we, to give them more time with the body, even if only to stave off our own fears.

At the beginning of looking it all seemed wrong. Too intimate, too circumscribe, too…a word just beyond reach. I found myself furious with the limits we come up against, that making and explaining aren’t enough to save who these people were. The quilt sections were arranged on the floor of the hall something like the footings for a large, labyrinthine building. Empty spaces were meant for walking; filled spaces for supporting the considerable heft about to be laid upon them.

The whole thing struck me as something akin to one of the impromptu shrines which seem to materialize after tragedy, structured by grief and offering the kind of coalescing bond in which notions of hope and community are meant to assuage that grief through the immediacy of their construction and their use of symbolic objects. We are bound to symbols in a way that exceeds any other bond. They represent coming up blank, physically, emotionally. The gesture of turning to something outside of us, a lily, a candle, a stuffed bear, and transforming it into an expression of whatever emotions are overwhelming us is at base self-protective and is the mechanism by which we assure our control over the situation (even if subconsciously). Humans make things; it is one of our most fundamental characteristics, to stay busy, to solve problems and to understand. Also, I think we make things out of fear, fear that if we don’t then we don’t exist, so these kinds of shrines are affirmations saying, “Yes, I am here and yes, these people were here and all of that matters.”

The sections were three feet by six feet and held two basic components in common: name and talismanic details. What each section conveyed very quickly was the anonymity of our names when removed from the context of our bodies. Each section of quilt coupled the name with something else, something meant to add weight to it, something to act as a tether holding the name down here among the others to be mulled over and ultimately to be transformed by those few among the throng of visitors willing to do the work.

A backdrop of the planets, musical notes, haunting portraits, small bicycles, baubles, sequins, tiny, intricately carved animals, geometric knots and colors were spread across the quilt-sections, each redundancy a homing beacon to the next. The integrity each quilt-section held, in a kind furious splendor, ran the gamut from Spartan to Byzantine and was live and honest and palpable. We wandered among the quilt-sections with the litany of names continuing sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes blaring with incongruence or rhyme or the hint of recognition, in a kind of daze, bowled over by it all.

I’d always thought my father’s name rather beautiful. Two quick trochees: Kenneth Geary. If repeated a few times it begins to form a wave-like motion, peak, trough, peak, trough, and suddenly you are buoyant.

Kenneth Geary. Had the voice just spoken his name? I froze.

There are times when the fragility of your immediate reality is so tenuous that anything but defenestration seems dishonest. At some point I began again to try and make sense out of the shards around me: the quilt, the voice, the “we”. But until then I was immobile and composed of a kind mania which wove together shock, a sense of inevitability which I found embarrassing and a sudden feeling of aimlessness. I suppose the line of viewers made their various ways around me. I couldn’t tell you how they went, if they’d noticed my being transfixed, if I caused a problem. I couldn’t tell you how long I remained like this or even what specifically I was thinking.

To hazard a guess in retrospect is the best I can do. Running through my mind in an endless loop: Did they just read his name? What followed this was the beginning of a tug of war between the Senses and Logic. Had I or had I not heard my father’s name read aloud? If I had heard it was it the same Kenneth Geary? Had I entered the hall with the seed of finding him evidenced there already cradled in my skull? I found myself trying to remember what the voice had sounded like when the name was read (if the name was read), but I could only hear my voice speaking the name. Had the sketchy facts I had of my father predetermined this?

My father was of the first generation of gay men decimated by HIV/AIDS. I knew this, so on the face of it it was “logical” to have heard his name read in such a context. What I felt was entirely different. How could someone so integral in the circumstances of my being alive have died without my ever having known him?

When I came back to myself, when I could once again negotiate my surroundings, hell, when I could notice my surroundings, I left the hall. I no longer held membership to the ad hoc group of which I’d been a part when viewing and grieving vicariously had been the plan. There remained a line of viewers snaking out of the hall. I needed to cross back through this line in order to leave the union. I was hoping for an immersion when I cross between those lined up, for the chance to expunge some the last 60 minutes, for an ever so slight brush with Lethe. But everything remained and I felt my feet hitting the floor, felt the air moving over my body as walked across the Student Union and out into the parking lot.

Was this what I’d come expecting to find? Had I come to this with any expectations? I was berated with question as I crossed the parking lot and headed toward the tunnel. What do I do now? Who should I tell? Should I tell? Should I tell mom? Should I tell Kelly? What would I tell them? How could I tell anyone anything when I’m not even sure of what I heard? Should I tell my brother? I imagined the questions wheeling around me like a flock of starlings wanting to roost. The mechanics of each action leads to an overall description of the flock. Each moved deftly, with economy and decisiveness into the place they were destined to be, so that the whole did the same. It wasn’t so much an answer as a way of accruing the differences with grace so that whatever happened it was entirely natural. When I looked up I had emerged from the tunnel and realized that my father was dead.

Note to Self: green daybook 12.06.00

2007-10-24T05:59:00.000-04:00

12.06.00

"Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community."
-Bataille

"By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other authorities,
experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value
and authority."
-Bataille, Inner Experience

-what authority does perception have?

-for that matter of value?

-could that moment of transformation, from perception to experience be
similar to the moment between cause and effect in which they can be confuse?

-from perception into experience

-at what point can one assign value to perceptions?

Note to Self: green daybook 11.30.00

2007-10-23T20:55:00.000-04:00

11.30.00
-experience VS. perception

"'communication' only take place between two people who risk themselves..."
-Bataille on Nietzsche

-experience is a way of creating a center which is singular, in the
context of a text, and almost necessarily transcendent

Note to Self: heart

2007-10-23T05:57:00.001-04:00

Note to Self: green daybook 11.19.00 and 11.26.00

2007-10-23T05:38:00.000-04:00

11.19.00
"I don't believe in God--from inability to believe in self. Belief in
God is belief in self..." G. Bataille

11.26.00
-such a thing as images

-image is the attempt to both fashion and consume a thing, any thing assumes a subordinate role

-description VS. image

-real VS. intended?

___

expansive tree which radiates truth and balance

Note to Self: paragraph 1, The Hungarian: a Memoir, draft

2007-10-22T11:28:00.001-04:00

Telemachus

My father's first death lasted eight years, from the fall of 1993 until the spring of 2001. I can tell you this with complete confidence because I know him to have died by my own invention and, eight years later, to have been resurrected by an invention of his own.

Note to Self: green daybook 10.15.00-10.25.00

2007-10-22T05:57:00.001-04:00

10.15.00
-the transformative moment
-the point at which cause and effect can be confused

10.18.00
-it is her mouth, it is her hand

10.19.00
-begin things w/ my mouth. Take these along: the knife and the string.

10.25.00
-I keep falling into the trap of SPECTACLE.

-there must be a way for the body to move so that it can discover

1) a mythology

2) the dispelling of that mythology thru analysis