The arrival gates at Heathrow Airport.

Christmas list, two thousand and nine.



Please, Santa. Please.

Another round, another round, another round.

I wonder how much room is allowed for one to voice a complaint. If I want to say that I am tired or worn down by important elements of my life, of what value are those to the facts that I have youth and ability. Relatively, though sometimes separately, if I say that I am tired from being awake for twenty out of twenty-four hours each day, and that when I do sleep I am plagued by some of the worst dreams I can remember having, the truth is that I have a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in. I can open my fridge and I can type on my computers. The place that we live in is a lucky place, and it is our only one. And, further, I have chosen this life. If I want to keep to the topic of academia, I have chosen this school, these classes, these assignments to write and to grade, these applications to send out, this time of night. 4:37 AM. Wait, no, 4:38 AM.

But I walked home through the loveliest blustering snowfall, you know. And so I do not know how bad these things are in truth. Someone next to me in the library wails "FML," bemoaning their shoe that has been scuffed by some heavy swinging door, and is met by their friend sharing anecdotally in the other's grief by lamenting that there is nothing worse but that their dryer shrunk one of their shirts. And they are going to some beach for the holidays.

We should of course feel guilty, I think, for supposing that our whole lives are so taxing to the energies of our soul. There are complaints to make, though, and yes, if there are negative points in a person's life they may feel that they are able to feel negatively about them. So they may do so, but I wonder when that should be challenged. By what means is one enabled to ache over some aspect of their life, and to what level, and why not some other aspect. When one has the kind of breath that is free to deepen as its body tires, I would wish to know where the brimming aches must cease.

Motion for action.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it kills you too but there will be no special hurry.

Wister left and vanished, so I have enough glasses again.

I have been writing today about a nothingness that exists between the two poles of an intersubjective relationship, and that this nothingness is everything. The space between two ends is that meaning, that the truth of everything is always unsaid.

Right on.

--

I have these Christmas albums waiting to be listened to, but Dustin and Frank need to wait. For now, it's a Wister/Iser/Foucault/Husserl party, and I'm the host. And I'm out of glasses.

I just woke to eat some chocolate.

Fragments.

I might consider including my Winner, Grade 5 Spelling Bee recognition in my PhD application. The winning word was "banana."

Dusk is a perfect time for music listening.

Flipping through my yearbook, I noted that a number of my high school classmates wrote about their brilliant athletic achievements as a favourite memory. I wonder if they still hold that same importance. If they do, I wonder if they feel good about that.

I might also consider including my Winner, Grade 3 Speech Contest in my PhD application. My topic was Alexander Graham Bell.

To have things like "Favourite Memory" or "Nickname" added to your yearbook entry, you had to fill out a form and hand it in by some deadline, which I missed. Those that missed it had a stock movie quote under their picture. Mine said, "What if what you think is great, really is great, but not as great, as something greater." It's from The Wedding Planner. That is a good quote. I've never seen it.

I can not wait for the briskness of tomorrow's cold morning air and for the crunch of frosted grass. The rest is fine. But that--

Tea and toast, then coke and 'za, then coffee and cake.

I'm not really sure.

One does not have it but is in it.

It seems very easy for your self to become buried beneath what you feel. What is it that you feel, and what is it that makes you know what you are feeling? If something so terribly disappointing happens to you, perhaps you consider how to witheringly respond or perhaps that response just occurs, waiting in its ignition for you to then take it up. Where is the line between a framed, sophisticated melodrama and a realistic, callow loss of hope? Introspection, as an examination of the meaning behind the things you are and do, and whatever it is that happens to you, can turn all things into an artifice. And you can live forever wondering what your each subsequent sentence, movement, and emotion are, discerning them in a rationalizing manner before you even understand them through feeling. You can twist out your life wondering if they are really existent, or if they exist because you have concluded that is the proper posture to have. So what is.

For there is none in reality.

When do we start into the future? I mean, when do we start projecting ourselves beyond where we are right now? After being told and told, perhaps, about our own future and how we ought to be considering it. Sitting straight, brushing teeth, choosing careers. A pinpoint, though, has no consequence. Now, right now, we look deeply into the things existing which do not yet exist, and this is what makes and is made into the present. We look towards where our feet will be. Where does that infinite reach beyond ourselves begin? When can it stop?

In the widening gyre.

And we are all so fluid. We create a course, pushed by the movements of others, and pushing the movements of others, but with such a mindful kinesis. And discipline, as if wary of where our waves might be taken by the others' tide. But our fluidity continues a change that we have no control over, making the care we take something superfluous. In every movement we cannot help but make rapids of the air around us, casting others into new pools of being. Touches, looks, words, even if for a moment, even if unbeknownst, are infinite.

Ripe for fatal harvest.

Here we are. Spending Tuesday afternoons talking about structuralism, how everything means nothing, and how we only ever become ourselves because we agree to. Spending Tuesday evenings waiting for Wednesday evenings, for talk about phenomenology, that everything becomes on its own, and how everything contains an essence regardless of whether we perceive it or not. Spending Thursdays through Mondays wondering where my mind is going, and beginning to feel a little unsure about what I'm sure about.

Sure. Sure you're sure?

Le Café de nuit.

We who are the tenants of what has become known as the customer service industry are offered a unique perspective of a person's inner workings when viewed from across that countertop. Often it is a seemingly endless repetition of impersonal greetings and instructions, a mechanical algorithm. And there are these rare occasions where a person will instead show a deep honesty. One recent night, a finely dressed middle-aged woman comes in to receive some lattes from our store. She would drift a little to the side as she approached from the door, and when she had, her voice's volume rose and lowered unnaturally. She had the kind of eyes that a bottle of wine will gift a person. And she was exasperated as her husband waited outside, parked in a needlessly large SUV or something of the sort. Perhaps she could have used anything other than what she ordered, so I offered her a small pastry on the side. And, with what I hoped would sound a caressing jest, I said now don't share that with anyone. That treat is all your own. She swayed with her drink tray. Share, she said, as if I had taunted her for a retort--share with him? Twenty-five years with him. Can you even believe it. Her speech slowed so that the last was not even a question. My surprise made our eyes meet again before she turned to leave, and the sincerity in hers gave to me only a steady, defeated look of unfathomable despair.

Somehow dreadfully cracked about the head.

One of those captcha boxes today said 'halmersi' to me. And I know this sounds a logical stretch but, well, you know. So I started thinking about what those letters say when you sound them out, and how the phrase 'have mercy', all anxiously shouted upwards, seems to have so much more meaning when radically slurred. A refined language loses the deepest levels of meaning. Fanon, Bhabha, Melville, Rimbaud, and on. Have mercy.

Only a wisp of smoke from the chimney.

Now, to wonder what a home is and what makes it so. I hear it said to be a word, a name, a strong one. And that it is no house, no beam or shingle, that it is life's undress rehearsal. That home is where one starts from. I wonder at the unity of souls which make a home, which warm the walls that house them. It seems a home is built upon humility and humanism, its foundation laid by a future's presence. Not a house. And, see, that one may have a blazing hearth in one's soul.

Old odd ends stolen out of holy writ.

Writing and now reading these stories about figures who move behind the plots graduates in/with intoxication. Long ago with In the Skin of a Lion, right now in The Winter of Our Discontent, and Mr. Ethan Hawkley seems to be guiding his circumstances while they at the same timeevolve of their own accord, the other characters thinking as they do. As the circumstances unfold I keep finding myself with some certain expectation, only to be softened with a grey surprise as the pages flip, then flop. Some character who lets the others create events and atmosphere, spinning their motion by sitting back to watch and wait. There is such a difference to be seen in the same young man sitting in a cafe window, whether simply watching the faceless walkers drifting along the sidewalk outside, or waiting for some one who is not arriving. The same stillness, or perhaps swivelling movements, the same one there.

Whether by uproar, music, or cries for help.

"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

I think about this sentence, and in addition think about it within its contextualizing passages, while writing. I do not have conversations about writing with writers very often, and so am unsure of how others tend to go about. But when I write, I have found that I tend to draw my past in with a slow stroke, with some deep inhalation, and sprinkled unevenly with imagination. Or perhaps not just my past, but any aspect of my real life, present circumstances inarguably included.

So I'm writing an album right now while in the process of recording it. And some of the songs' lyrics are already existant from long ago, where their present circumstances were relevant. Some are of other topics that are relevant as we speak. The two are entirely separate. So what I wish to try, and what I'm finding to be incommunicable, is to convey the notion that all of those words sit in my pockets of history, themselves unchanging. But what those words mean when I sing them have changed. It is difficult to present not simply the changed meaning but that secret process of change to make everything whole.

When men of reason go to bed.

If you're asleep all the time.

Days like these make me think of films or pictures where people go mad from the heat. Shirts are sticking, kids are running around with ice cream cones and hula hoops, dogs are in closed doorways with their tongues hanging out their open mouths. These scenes with, remember, those faded old Coca-Cola signs. Everything is a yellowy pale grey. And I don't like a sweaty brow, but hot skin is something so good you can't just imagine it. Maybe to another it's thought best to stay inside where the air is conditioned for comfort, when outside you can see how your eyes change. It gets so hot you can't touch anyone or anything, so I just stand up on my toes, as if either about to reach for something higher up there, or to step quietly enough to avoid a disturbance.

Some boats that are not steered.

I have been thinking about how strange it is, really, that some of the things people are held responsible for are not ever of their own accord. Our names, our birthplace, our meek bodies that we are gifted with and all of their wavering attributes, are not anything we had to do with. Yet people are looked at by others, and they by still others, with some sense of conviction that is, however it came, mutually understood. I wonder, though, how these roles are assumed, and how a person might shape their characteristics, the things they do have control over, around those attributes that happened to have fallen face up when cast upon the reverent dirt.

All the uses of this world.

Go to http://www.inbflat.net.

There is something about a song as a work of art that takes it beyond any physical types, such as paintings or sculpture, at least in a sense. When a person sings or plays a previously written song they are able to create new meaning from something already existent. This occurs just as easily whether the song is one's own or was written by another. And even if it is sung by the one who wrote it, who did so with a particular meaning in mind, when it is later performed it can have some entirely separate meaning when it again courses through one's body. And it's doing so from something that already exists and was created with a particular meaning attached to its authorship. The same song's elements can exist in many forms. So I like to find the elements I might draw from that website and its song, if I may call it that. I would certainly recommend giving it a try.

And there is something about the way one person breathes, and how its meaning is affected by the breath of those surrounding. The gestures and their implicit, or explicit, meanings that are given by one person may be received in an entirely separate manner from what is intended. And, if received at all, they may then be imitated. The same gestures, but with a removal of primary meaning, refitted with something else that is completely unsuggested by the origin. This is a recurring idea that I have grazed over, but there are deep, misty workings that take place in what people give to one another, much more than the simple gaze.

Jude / Thaddeus.

In a twistedly esoteric manner, this is related to this. No, really, I mean that.

I was talking anecdotal analogies with someone I know. The philosophical kind, of course, because what else would I do, right? I don't watch What Not To Wear and I don't watch LOST, so other things have to be made up instead.

We were thinking of a person who, since birth, has no self-consciousness; that is, their mind never registers the sensations its physical body receives. The person's mind does think and, presumably, the body senses, but it never connects with the mind's functions. What would such a person and their thoughts be like? Perhaps a very certain blank and unquestioning understanding. It would seem that a person's imagination is only made up of things, or combinations of things, that they have already experienced. And if this is the case, then a (solely) mental image can not exist. One might think, well, but of course you are using your imagination to think of this person--but that is just it. We were cobbling together the negatives of our experience.

What does that tell us but, among other things, that perhaps it is our tendency to think of things outside of our own experiences, and sometimes even to desire them. And only through the edges of experience. Knowing them as impossibility.* With us, yes, but with this person there would be no desirous hopefulness, no expressive language, no ethics, no revolutions.

They were clouds in my coffee.

The thing I love about breakfast foods is everything.

And he whispered fear is logical.

(This is voyeuristic, I know, so I apologize, but) someone I know told another I know that everything they do matters.

This is true. Every single one is helping us find our meaning in everything they do. It should be given well then, I think, since you are so valuable. But there are people shaking hands, or sitting down, or having tea, these things sometimes conducted towards an unknown rhythm that no one dares to sing. Pretending, but pretending not to be.

This is what cities are made of, it seems. But now I'll always sit insistent on finding the nothingness beneath whatever it is that's covering up. That nothingness is real, and its meaning, though quickly pulled into shadows, is always there to be seen. If there are objects, actions, expressions, even if evasive, there is meaning beneath them (and I apologize, you know, the original statement made by someone I know to another I know did not have the same context as this).

The conventions and humdrum routine.

There are some things that have been making me feel uncomfortable.

One of them, photography. Not in general, no, but the kind where a person is deliberately separating themself from the moment with a machine--in order to capture and remember the moment they are separating themselves from. Like a person who holds their camera up during a wonderful concert performance. Or that person who is constantly taking pictures throughout a night spent with friends.

Another of them, extensions. People who wear fake hair. Think about it. Glued on, you have a chunk of hair that is not yours hanging from your head.

Then again, pants are something also bizarre if you look at them a certain way.

What one regards as interruptions.

This has been one of those times.

Transitions, you know, and in all the facets, as is said. Transfiguration of the involuntary sort, where the only reason you feel yourself changing is because the change is not only happening around you, it is happening at you. And you have to change because it has all already happened.

You can not quite call it the edge of something new, as if it were a clean change, because you are still so vested in that past state or that old hope that does not any longer exist. So you wonder, then, in this time, what part of you is it that does. You feel against you these differing atmospheres before you and behind you, and you want to turn to neither but cannot turn away either, and you wonder where you exist. In your outdated mind, or in your new world.

The trouble with time.

A fiction added to the deed.

Mantled in mist.

There was a fog upon this day, one cool and light and grey.

And things are seen within, their shapes an elusive dimension, without depth and definition. But they're there, and you know. How to find that definition, to burn off mystery, is a shining path perhaps not preferred. A fog is good. This one fell heavy and stuck fast on my brow, hazing all my glances. I could not see as well, but could then feel how well I was seen and seeing. Through a fog, a soft silhouette. Unmoving and demanding, and never quite what is thought. You can see in that fog, in its objects' soft immanence, the weary refresh, the hardness of their truth.

An animal stupor.

Last night, in the dimly lit dusk, I saw a shooting star. Last night, of all the nights.

That dreadful universal thing. / Unless all candied over with art.

One thing that I have been learning lately is that I, and what's more, you, am/are inescapably tied to your nature as a being. This such nature goes unrecognized for the first while of your life, riding small and silent within your steps as you spend your childhood and adolescence in a gradually receding naïveté.

Without the least expectancy, and after shuffling through several identity subscriptions--music, clothing, habits--you trip upon some sharp hole and stumble into your place.

Not precisely. What you stumble into, really, is an anxiety about what your place is and how you ought to occupy it. You cast yourself into deliberation only to realize that your deliberations are your nature, that you are Nature's vessel. You are some thing that would not exist as you are if it were not for the unchangeable substance that constitues you. What are you without your nature? But would you attempt to claw your way away from such entrapment? Is that not continuing, proclaiming, your nature?

You are bound to that, then, bound for realizing the truth of your meekness. For there is a real beauty in becoming conscious of how little you matter. It is easiest to embrace when standing still within the sounds of a light snowfall, watching flakes float out of infinity upon trees and waste. To see these things as they are will show you as you are. Now go out there and be sad, anxious, overwhelmed, excited, comfortable, you.

Truth in the inner parts.

My Wednesdays. My my, Wednesdays.

That profound secret and mystery to every [O]ther.

Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy.

--

A search for wonder is needless when it is so constantly crashing into you.

Out through your mouth in a sigh.

Come on and see these ones on Feb. 28th at The Drake Hotel in Toronto.

Not to be found in the world of objects.

Several nights ago, I stepped into my bedroom and flipped up the switch. When the light spilled out on top of the room's darkness, all of these objects lining my walls and my floor leapt up to greet me. And it seemed so odd that they, these sudden things, existed anew only now that I was present. A couple mugs, keyboard, clothing, computer, guitars, records, rows of books, all things that seemed only just now relaxed from an anxious, wire-framed tensity. Crouched in potentiality. Endlessly decomposing lest I interfere. I felt the guilt of their dependence, and I felt them curdling beneath a skin of vigor, standing just so, for me to impress upon them. What if I stepped back again, flipping that switch for blooming darkness. Now, what if I could let them be on their own.

Untitled, (Crowd 1)

by Alexey Titarenko

(first shown to me by my friend Brendan.)

A grade for learning how to play.

This is merely a faulty reproduction of some sentences I heard from a professor this past week, but here they might still hold form enough to lift up those feeling a disenchantment with the post-secondary:

There might be some people, or many people, really, who will smirk and ask you what good your university education is for, what sort of practicality does it provide for you--how is it even slightly applicable to you in reality? What is its point?

That is an entirely ridiculous question to be asking. To you, philosophy [or, insert your specific discipline here] students, what you are learning in university ought not to be looked at as an impracticality--that is the biggest mistake you could ever make. It is providing you with the most practical skills you need. What you are studying is providing you the skills and temperament for how to conduct the most proper method of thought, which is far more important than material techniques. How to think critically and with an open mind must come prior to what you think and do.

--

And now that I consider it, this mode of thought which is ideally learned in all post-secondary disciplines, can be similarly learned off campus and outside a library--your school of learning is just wholly focused on it. Though such an unfolding that takes place away from your books should not then devalue those books; coming upon it can occur through a synthesis of school, perhaps, as well as interactions with others, art, nature, all places.

All places may thrive in, and concede to, the mind once you learn of their freedoms.

All driven inwards.

This morning I slept through my 8:30 class.

But today I watched snowflakes prance against an evergreen backdrop.
I watched friends skip across puddles in the night.
I watched friends exchange a secret handshake.
I watched a man's eyes tear while listening to another man's song.
I watched the results of an unfolded happiness.
I watched some ones I know make art.

But this morning I slept through my 8:30 class.

On In the Skin of a Lion.

The great triumph we might wish to have, to burst apart foundations laid and send through time our legacy, is so often missed because we sleep right past it.

Patrick Lewis watches others skate, himself weaving within light and dark, foreground and background. This novel has within it some thematics that are threaded so cleanly into its characters that one should simply feel them, rather than betraying them by naming them into clarity. So Carravaggio is painted a blue like the sky to slip outside his prison, to float up beyond its walls.

Patrick leaves history to seek out the lives of others--or, familiarly, he dims his own light to make others' shine. In their lives he finds his own, he keeps a shape though muzzled in shadow, holding up the others' happenings.

Every now and again in my mind I see flames in the distant dark, skating upon the whole world, an image that casts away plot. And I might lay and let their glinting spark keep winking at me just so they will stay. Lights.

In the Skin of a Lion is the best novel I read in 2008. So maybe read it and tell me what you think.

The despairing refusal to be oneself.

Know your roots.

Where you've come from.
What you stand on.
How you grow.
To where you move.

Eternity in each.

There are mugs on our desks and atop our drawers. Empty mugs, but enough to keep these things weighed down. They held tea or coffee or something, held over a good novel or an essay or some conversation. Held over to augment and reflect a goodness that can be felt beneath an accompanying blanket, and there is such goodness there. I have this collection of mugs now that I am almost keeping to know that the odd, dusty residue at their bottoms still lays low to show the warmth that was transferred into moments. I'm keeping them down here and adding more.

What we see is what we are.

Perhaps I don't know much about photography.

Some of the photos I like the most are those where the figure within is blurred in motion. Where what we are looking at, now pinched between our fingers, is the capturing of two separate moments, gnawing at and into each other.

Perhaps I don't know much about time.

The way forward is sometimes the way back.

To celebrate, my workmates and I became Secret Santa's for one another. We would prepare gifts and leave them behind in the back room for their recipient to open the next time they might come in to work. This is an odd thing, because it is best to open a gift when with the person who is giving it, but the rules of secrecy do not allow it, not until the gift has already been opened.

Mine came in a handled paper gift bag, stapled shut with several dozen efficient fasteners to prevent a getting in and a getting out. I left those and tore the bag, choosing another entrance for myself. And I withdrew a Labyrinth. I small game in which I have to balance a shiny orb across treacherous holes along a shifting platform. A labyrinth, with no accompanying note from whomever I was receiving it. Given to me anonymously. Hmm, I thought.

Hmm. I think it is a dangerous thing to open. But, I am sure, I owe it to the benefactor to try, though rickety, and keep balance enough to reach the end.

If you hold a cat by the tail.

Someone I know was telling me about someone they know who believes that all things learned should be self-taught. The only things worth being educated on are those you do yourself. Learning through doing, the only way to be taught. Experience. That most brutal of teachers, as someone else has once said.

But there is instead a person, the quietest, who deigns to avoid such brutality. This one sits in a comfortable, aged chair with a warm mug, listening to every story told about activities never personally partaken. These stories and their secondhand characters, gathered only through such tales, are the ones come to love or loath, who are emulated, who are repaired. Watching the lives of others swirl in a swift vividness, never noticing the passing of his own sun or the changing of his own moon. All of what he learns comes through thoughts and imagery, from hearing others' events, shouts beyond his walls, and wondering at how he himself would act while never doing so. Such a wondering, it is supposed, determines his outlook in case of application. This is a person who sits still, skin grown taught with inactivity, but feels a weathering windburn to have travelled lifetimes. Feeling without doing, but a life, the same vehicle, permitting such similar brutality.

Here, perhaps, whether one does or does not makes no matter. What comes will come as it may. Perhaps, perhaps, that person there, sitting secure, should stand and step into that what is coming. Its waves are breaching nonetheless. That step may be an entrance into a fatality or into a rejuvenation, where both might ease the creak in those bones. To be wondering in the dark keeps them creaking all the more.