angelsinangles

should things be better left unsaid?

i want nothing to be left at the hands of my shoddy memory.

this is more than imersion, this is a whirlwind of all encompassing chaos and calamity. im loving every minute of it.

my birthday was slightly untraditional, but completely apropos.

this has to be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

kremlin three straight days in a row, unpredictable moscow weather, late nights and early mornings, bustling metros lined with soviet stained glass, blisters, head spinning cyrillic, lingering smell of cigarette smoke in everything and vodka shots to whatever.

my childlike wonder has created a perpetual state of never ending bliss.

there are no words, language fails at explaining this feeling in my soul.
i feel it all.

st petersburg adventures and star gazing at 3 in the morning as the twilight illuminated the horizon.

the solitude is becoming unbearable though, the lack of familiarity is taking its toll on me.

The body as a narrative
She finds, on her own body the making of a novel (a tragic comedy of sorts). The scrapes, cuts, bruises, freckles and scars tell the story. At birth, she acquires her first of many- the dip in flesh near her left shoulder. At nine, she falls off a fence, falling on glass; on her right hand you can see the patch of brown skin (three shades darker than the rest, staring at her), a testament to her youth. Around seven, falling off a tree, she gains the pale yellow discoloration on her right knee. At twelve, after spinning around in her backyard she falls, scrapes her left elbow. At age twenty, she still falls off her bike; she still gets bruises and cuts. Her scars tell of her accident-prone existence, giving her body more meaning (depth) than others can perceive. These remnants of the past can be seen as notches (cuts/scrapes) on the post (body) of her proairetic sequence (dismembered in her memory; pieced on herself). She can tell a fraction of her history by pointing to parts of herself (reinforcing false sense of wholeness).

Non-sequiturs
She finds absurdity and non-sequiturs to be the ultimate source of humor (seme). She finds that the absurdity (every part) of life, transposed onto language creates an intense disruption in discourse and she teems with joy whenever they are heard (said, felt, expereinced, noticed etc). These fissures in language, the gap in cohesive (logical train of thought) speech, produce an intense uncertainty in the narrative. She therefore finds more anxiety in language- waiting for the next fissure (eruption), the next bout of joy (borderline bliss).

she was becoming all too comfortable with loneliness.

pleasure of the text.
classics. culture (the more culture, the greater, more diverse, the pleasure will be). intelligence. irony. delicacy. euphoria. mastery. security: the art of living. the pleasure of the text can be defined by praxis (without any danger of repression): the time and place of reading: house, countryside, near mealtime, the lamp, family where it should be, i.e., close but not too close (proust in the lavatory that smelled of orrisroot), etc. extraordinary ego-reinforcement (by fantasy), the unconscious muffled. this pleasure can be spoken: whence criticism.

fuckity fuck.

today i learned that jesus was the first communist.

if i had a dollar for every time i used the word 'object' this semester, i wouldn't be in college anymore.

Penguin classics 60th anniversary has been celebrated in style with covers designed by Manolo Blahnik, Fuel, Ron Arad, Sam Taylor Wood and Paul Smith. Fuel brought Fydor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment into the 21st century and carried the brown paper of the cover throughout the entire book. Part of a limited edition of 1000. 100% paper. Made in the UK

holy fuck.

Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things--
With life and nature--purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

i'm losing, but i'll try.

I, for instance, have a great deal of amour propre. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment -- the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And when one is slapped in the face -- why then the consciousness of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is, look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of nature.
- Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky.

shooting stars don't grant wishes.

I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me -and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter - not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.
In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I was ridiculous.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

in short, man is comically arranged; there is apparently a joke in all of this. but still, two times two is four is a most obnoxious thing. two times two is four- why in my opinion, it's sheer impudence, sirs. two times two is four has a cocky look; it stands across your path, arms akimbo, and spits. i agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing; but if we're going to start praising everything, then two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing.
-- dostoevsky

I'm becoming too self-sufficient. Don't need anybody. It makes my blood run cold to recognize how little this or that individual matters to me.
- Saul Bellow

The earth is a graveyard and the one and only project of humanity is to reclaim it for life. That people dear to us should disappear into eternity is intolerable, and we can't accept it without cowardice. A beginning must be made with the immediate family. Sons and daughters must restore life to those who gave it to them. Even if this means going to the moon, we must retrieve every particle of our dead. The dead and the living form a single community.
- Saul Bellow, More die of heartbreak

He no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it is.
Everything was necessary. He saw an old white woman fishing through a garbage can. That was necessary. He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer. It had to be there.
And so on.