Caught between every rib.

When I was young, perhaps around nine or ten, Oprah (yes, that's the one) long ago changed her show's theme from something upbeat and fabulous to a more solemn celebration of "spirit." This was still long before Dr. Phil came along, though here she was already largely focusing her shows on miraculous stories and self-improvement. She did still have those episodes where she gave away cars like pieces of gum. But there was one day where with a guest she proclaimed that every person should look at themselves naked in the mirror every day. She does it and this, she said, was the best way to get to know oneself, and the truest way to see one's own beauty. To see one's body without any form of clothing is, I think, a nice point of advice. Clothing, material or metaphorical, can hide a person from even their own face.

There is a further element that I have been thinking of. A mirror shows us ourselves, it shows me my furrowed brow, my shoulders freckled like paint flecks thrown from fingers, but what it is doing best is showing us that we are not a flat reflection of a world we can stare at. But that we have bodies--that it is because of them that our lives must move, bodies with which we can taste food, hold puppies, and see the spectrums of the bright grey sky. Bodies through which (or in which, or with which, or as which) our souls can grow in goodness or whatever other direction. And the only way to do those things and to understand them best is by looking at oneself in the mirror without clothes on. Thanks, Oprah.

It's me and the king and the beast.

On account of my scheduled creativity being sapped or invaded by PhD rejections and MA coursework such as reading about humankind's coevolution with technology and textuality, self-reflective novels, and Derrida lately, here is a story.

I have these dreams about God. Where God is that majesty, and I am this speck. And there is a demon who chases after me, bounding over coal-coloured mountains. God does not move, and the only way I may reach him is to chase after, while being chased by that snarling and morphing being. The one whose energy reaches and claws at me is one that I do not want to be devoured by, and my energy is as if reaching toward a cool pillar, unmoving, and one that turns whichever way required to face anything but the curling tips of my own fingers.

Driving along the Highway of Heroes a few days ago, the overpasses were populated by what must have summed to be several hundreds of people, accomodated by firetrucks, ambulances, and whatever other municipal vehicles. I thought perhaps there was an impressively organized Olympics protest going on that stretched over a good number of kilometres. I wondered, while listening to Andrew Bird and then Rancid and then Interpol and then an old mix I gave someone, why all of these people were hanging or waving their flags and only facing the direction opposite to what I was driving. Why not both sides? Was I and the dirtied white Volkswagen that just cut me off not worth advertising to for protest? This was before I realized what kind of a highway I was on, and I apologize Northumberland. But I began to think of the forms one must take to be celebrated, the types of deaths required, the commitments one must make and keep. I passed the oncoming hearse, then, and the procession of unlabelled police cars. And considered the unlabelled velcro stickiness by which we keep our presentative selves.

Of course, those citizens were repatriating a young soldier and memorializing the goodness that his absence has produced. That would have been a related news item, if I were to have read the news. This worldly neglect of mine is one thing which creates such horrendous analogies. And that, of course, followed by a related dream where some ones I know were chasing me with bloody mouths, equipped with shouldered artillery and eyes like slits in an endless Team Fortress 2 sequence of ridiculous yet terrifying animation. My thoughts were that I was driving away from these things so that I could better understand them upon my return, but they followed me anyhow. So now that I am home, and that they are elsewhere other than their homes, makes me really wonder about my understanding. I can sense that there have been "meantimes" which have altered these situations in my absence--meantimes of circumstances that involve and are shared by myself, but which my self is not present to be interacted with--and am now sensing those meantimes as existent throughout all the parts of life. So there is my own present, then, where I can roll along for an evening and let my treads fix momentarily upon thoughts that have placed me in a sense I might previously have been unaware of. Because I am a part of some thing which is beyond me, where my reach, mine, is truer than my own arms' immediate wingspan. While I am gone and reading in a different city, people back home can be refereeing a hockey game, or getting surgery, or enjoying a movie with their siblings by an old windmill, or out dancing downtown, or at home cleaning the bathroom, and these are things that occur because I am gone. These are things that can occur because I am gone. And my nervousness for each of these, in being gone, is then without consequence. The gone-ness is a goodness, then, where the hope of my substantive fluidity can finally dissipate into another's. That is where the heroism is, at least for these next seven or eight minutes--in being bitten by the beast, to be gone for some goodness to go on.

Save your applause for the end of the show.

Incense hangs upon the boughs.

To have your eyes open and to sit up straight. But you open your eyes too wide and for too long to see more than is good for your body. Your eyes dry up and strain and you have to squeeze them shut. Now your lids together feel like your hands do while on a washcloth's tight twist when wringing it out.

And I would say a plague is the opportunity to think far ahead of a moment. And that this is brought out of pasting together what drips out, into one interpreted picture, something which turns the crisp of that present moment into translucence. But it may just be a thing of this life, to see pieces that are floating about separately and severally, yet to see them as already come together. The image of this dimly lit metaphor I offer, this candle, would be of a figure looking at the parts of a photograph, standing still as if before a camera, and watching them fit into place. To see a lense through which to see.

The whole of the photograph already exists, then, for each piece to be fitted together. There is an inverse of this, though, and though still flickering dim and noiseless. As if it is that photograph's puzzling pieces that peer, and see the person as if they are instead the object of view. The photograph taking the person. Where, and only analagously, if you think of an intervening camera being brought into an event, when standing within the sudden frames of a candid photograph, one blinks, and suddenly that candidness means more than the moment being captured. As if that blink is letting down, disobeying the camera's flash that has shot out, reaching, choosing only you. There is, always, more than that. And those eyes can open as wide as they can to see as much as they can, only to blot it all out with the longest blink.

No sphere of immanence.

Someone I know said that Merleau-Ponty said, the best way to read things closely is to sit up with your eyes open.

Nothing where virtue is not.

A new child met his uncle today. I had never held a brand new baby in my life, had never thought I would or should. I had wished to, but the kind of shaking that my hands always have I thought would lead to some harm. But this, my young nephew, how could that be resisted.

A little boy whose sparking eyes looked up at me and whose hands grasped my fingertips. This perfect sort of thing, which made me think that I ought to tuck in my wrinkled shirt or clean my dirtied boots. Because it deserves the freshness it also holds. Such a change occurs in people when they hold in their arms this being that contains an entire long life in its freshly weighted lungs. They receive joy from the sight of the confident sleep of a baby.

Outside of his own blanket wrappings, surrounding structures and the hospital were under construction. All different sorts of objects on wheels were strewn about the hallways, incubators, computers, catheter stands, these things that seem important and like they should be in use or at least placed elsewhere, in a right spot. Sitting about, doing the things that they should not. Some rooms had those translucent, zippered curtains to seal them off from the hallways. And so now, of course, I am back over here on this armed chair with wheels and never elsewhere for use. There is that little baby boy, and if I could have carried him with me.

A giant's dead body.

Starting one of those very timely new year posts here, the sort where you begin to talk about spending your time really living this life, and Lord knows I'm trying. But writing that can sometimes not quite work when the year just past is made to be continually precipitating upon the moments in which my eyes can not be anything but awake, the year end's abrupt changes occuring one after another to where you almost want to let them pass by while under a most incredibly perfect wool blanket. To keep things wrapped up where things can be, that is where I type this from.

What I have been thinking and writing about for some while now is that, as persons among people, we gain a sense of ourselves from others, most often to a greater extent than from only sensing ourselves. They have themselves been woven, like us, and what they present then wraps around you. When, suddenly, you are no longer able to spend that close time with those people because they have moved away or because of your own move, you can feel your whole stabbing insides stop as a result. This happens at varying levels per individual, but this stoppage reveals the sort of dependence you have upon standing nearby those ones closest to your soul. And that is because they are not simply close, or near, to your soul, but are within it. In addition to what and who you are, what they are is what has made you become. I may say for myself, then, that I am so brokenly grateful for the containment of souls I have been given. It is a grace which, to my specific ones, is an inexpressible sentiment. One could whirl obliviously and forgetfully into a new January, but it feels best to sense that grace from within this wool. From right here is where I am able to do so.