"It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming." A Prayer Journal, Flanner O'Connor

"If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings." ~Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine.

the growl at 2:10ish, the CourtneyCox-esque side shuffle dance near the end, all of it

"If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt." ~ In the Light of What we Know, by Zia Haider Rahman.

I woke up in the night thinking about that quote (from the book I started yesterday after I'd finished, finally, the painfully accurate Abandonment - yup, bonkers lock changing and painful extraction of self bits from idea-of-self like shards of glass from a cheese, I did all of it except stick my ass in the face of a weird neighbor thank god). For the eclipse, I had thought yesterday to doublecheck that I have no Gemini in my chart, and no, I have no air anywhere of any kind. Just Virgo (mutable earth) all day long with big dollops of Pisces (mutable water) and Leo (fixed fire). I am hot mud. You cardinal and air signs make no intuitive sense to me whatsoever. You are Other. You get mad, or sad, any kind of upset, even abruptly happy/moved, and just blow around so it seems to me, hot or cold air in my face. Like a stuckcrust I feel you all over me but it's on the outside, and I stir myself inside out to internalize it, a process that is often uncomfortable, occasionally/inevitably painful. To you, I must seem like a vast plain, my fluidity hidden from view, a distant threat of lava under quiet. You would have to be highly motivated to stick with me (on me), waiting as I churn. But blow away from me, and how does it feel? You leave me baked fetid, wanting your breeze. Do I go with you even as you think you're over me, grit in your veins?

Aoife O’Donovan: Hearts And Bones
bonus track Colin Meloy: Summertime it's still cold as balls outside, but hope springs eternal and I'll be seeing The Decemberists next week at UBCFA

Beautiful moment late last week when I realized this week was spring break. I gave the cuddle buddies a bath last night in anticipation of the nothing I'd be doing today. "Nothing", that's what most people call *reading*. I'm catching up on listening to some music at the moment (I love this version of 'Fever', but to be honest I love every version of it, like every kind of chocolate covered anything), still lying naked in bed, sipping coffee and reading the illustrated Thought Forms (Bessant) and trying to get through The Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), which gets a mixed review of it being too good to bear it more than a few sentences at a time, the narrator's mind trapped in self-referential habits of loss, dismantling itself. Meanwhile, Aaron just texted the news that he's losing his job by way of the facility he is at being closed.  Say la vee, I think. The Witch told me that would happen, more or less (FYI if you're a Gemini, a lunar eclipse is gearing up for a hit on 4/4, at which time you will abruptly lose something that you probably started getting rid of last year around this time, consciously or not - if you have Gemini in any of your houses, it will apply to you in that area of your life. If you forgot how to check that, refer back here for a basic natal chart.) Change scares me, everything scares me, but I wasn't always this way and it can't stay like that - he hates that job and so I must have faith that the universe is leading him (us) somewhere better. He cast his beer and I also cast my spell yesterday, I wrote it all over him like grapherotica, my intention to strain fear out of my lovethinking by handing over the power to him to heal (me), like agreeing to the surgery you've long held out against, and viola he loses his job before noon. Sooo, yea.

"And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself." ~ Days of Abandonment

"Affirmation"

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything. 

~Donald Hall

if these (inner) walls could talk..

I'm moving. New building, new office. I've had my office for, like, most of my adult life or something. Since before I bought my first house in Buffalo. I have tree rings of life in it, all that will be thrown away. So I spend an hour here and there, looking in a drawer.

the be good tanyas - in my time of dying (dylan)

"Whoever travels without a guide needs 200 years for a two-day journey." That's an old Sufi saying sometimes attributed to the poet Rumi. I don't think it's accurate in all cases. Sometimes we are drawn to wander into frontiers that few people have visited and none have mastered. There are no guides! On other occasions, we can't get the fullness of our learning experience unless we are free to stumble and bumble all by ourselves. A knowledgeable helper would only interfere with that odd magic. But right now, Virgo, I believe the Sufi saying holds true for you. Where you're headed, you would benefit from an advisor, teacher, or role model. 

Hmmmmm.

I went looking for the entry below, which I had unblogged as it turns out, I don't remember why, maybe trying to erase some of the damage done me by the final picture wherein my ovaries were kicking out 4-8 eggs per a month and exploding when I wrote it, when actually I became too sick to remake that trip. I just booked it again finally, which is why it's on my mind.

I didn't take the trip insurance this time.

_____________________
3/5/2012:
redux

That pic was taken by me, alone in a palatial hotel suite in Boston at the American Literature Association. It was half gambit, that trip. By half, I wanted and needed to attend the conference, to begin again to think academically, to write ... the other half was John, who seemed when I booked the trip months earlier to be finally willing to try to function, drive in a car together, stuff like that, and who by the time I needed the ride was long gone (again, and amazingly enough, finally). I took that pic to mark the time, my alone time, staring at ceiling and doing nothing but thinking. About all that I was missing in my life, which was not John actually. And I thought of all the people who had partnered and how I would not; I thought about Aaron, in Mexico that weekend, for instance. I thought about how the fact of not partnering was not, in itself, overly troubling to me. It was reception I was missing, an interlocutor .. I had lost the will and ability to build meaning on my own for everything, to tell the story of myself to myself alone, to decide everything and set the value for everything. I was not suffering from "o woe is me, I shall grow old alone", I was suffering from writing such a thing either as a joke or serious fear depending on TO WHOM I WAS WRITING, which had become, well, nobody. I mean, maybe someone is reading this, but nobody immediately implicated in the content or outcome. If I set my hair on fire, your pillow won't scorch. I don't need an audience so much as someone to wrestle with, to write for not just at. Otherwise, I can't keep from going to/too quiet. Now, Aaron does not read this blog, the writing I do for him I prefer to be in midair (alive). Does that count? (Am I writing?)

I am going back to Boston. Same conference. Only this time, I will have a partner with me and I will be giving a paper. I will have someone listening with interest to a paper I'm going to give about the concept of mating versus marriage, in literature ostensibly, my favorite author to whom I return for solace endlessly, whom I reread (this) again last night. I have yet to write that paper, I don't know what it will say, I don't know what it will matter that Aaron exits vis a vis what I will say, what I'll decide I think. I don't know more than I do know about many things. I don't know how it will turn out. What will my intellect do with Aaron with me there? How will that not matter, also? Everything has changed inside me since the last time I wrote and read aloud a 'treatise'. On this subject in particular, how mating and the spirit are entwined and at odds, every single cell in body has turned over since I left a husband who tried to kill me, passed through years with a lover whose indifference and chronic absence was infinitely gentle by comparison, and now to this place I am now, with much more that I cannot say (that I cannot write about at all, at least not yet) than I can in words I've found.

I have a pile of books in front of me right now. I'm looking at them, anxious not to be speechless.




redux (internal view)

"I will not wait to love as best as I can," says writer Dave Eggers. "We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love." That's your keynote for the coming weeks, Virgo. That's your wake-up call and the rose-scented note under your pillow and the message scrawled in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. If there is any part of you that believes love will be better or fuller or more perfect in the future, tell that part of you to shut up and embrace this tender command: Now is the time to love with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind.  (armscrossy)