Archive of things to do with 'change'

• 04.10.08 Two roommates:

  Two roommates were avoiding each other. One would come, the other would leave. It was month four in a six month lease. One night noise outside brought them both to a window.

  They watched, straining their eyes. The noise ceased. One turned the corner to get a glass of water. The sink was full.

  Can’t you wash your dishes?

  
  Tags: psychology, change, water, sink, fiction, home, window.
• 04.02.08 Transition dialogue:

  A: You’re on your way now. That process you have been working on for so long has finally begun! You must be in a strange state. How does it feel?

  B: It’s strange to be in between. I’m not here any longer, I’m not there yet. I can’t really relax. It is a strange state, it’s like not being any state at all. It is exactly like not being in any state at all.

  
  Tags: change, travel, dialogue, future, fiction.
• 03.23.08 Rereading and rejudging:

  I had read W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo in a copy that was missing four or six pages, in the first part of it, about Stendhal. The hole was in one of the most interesting parts of the whole book, and I was curious to know what I had lost. Today I got another copy out of the library, and it had all its pages, and I reread the Stendhal section, and was surprised to find that I seemed to recognize all of it. I couldn’t tell what was missing. Everything I saw I seemed to have seen before. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe: Sebald is a continuous, viscous substance, that reforms itself over any gaps that appear in him? Is there such a thing as counter-vertigo, the sensation of not changing position, while things about you are objectively moving? It was uncanny.

  There are three, maybe more, but at least three, kinds of rereading: I read something at two different times in life, both times leaving myself open to what the thing has to tell me. I learn how I have changed, I learn how the thing is layered, I learn how the times have changed, or pressures formerly on me are missing. I reread something to see what I have missed, as in the case of Vertigo, something doesn’t add up, I look to fill in a gap or make up for something. And also I reread because I am looking for a specific thing or trying to answer a specific question, and then my question changes, and I go back with something else in mind and change the weight I throw on the parts of the thing I see. It is a question of angles, the different ways of seeing the one object, that somehow don’t interfere with each other, or exist on separate planes.

  
  Tags: reading, change, time, history, memory, nietzsche, arendt, rebecca west, judgment, w g sebald, film.
• 03.20.08 New habits bear easy:

  I have started up a couple new habits recently. It makes me have to do things a little more deliberately, because I am still having to choose to do them instead of doing them automatically. But it’s important to keep changing habits, or at least it has become habitual, to me. There is something about a habit that shapes the time it is found in, or that flows through it. And old habits which I resurrect seem to bring with them a little bit of the former time, like a flavor of the atmosphere that you didn’t necessarily feel at the time. Like when you are away from home long enough that you notice how it smells on your return.

  It’s an accidental time capsule, like a picture of the pile of library books I had out at one time, or an old recipie file, there’s an atmosphere that comes with that. The ghost of a life that you used to live, ghosts being distortions in the air. I remember the carpet that I fell asleep on one night up late working on a short story I was writing, I was in the habit of walking every evening twenty minutes to work on it and not leave until I had met a certain word goal. I think I was seventeen, I was working late, I thought I would lie down and take a rest, and when I woke up I had a spotted red area on my cheek, but the carpet I was on had waves on it. I remember that result seemed unlikely. It’s a whiff of the past in the present. The feeling was alienating and it remains a little strange.

  
  Tags: blog, change, writing, thinking, time, memory, habit.
• 11.27.07 Message in a bottle:

  Listening to the radio the other day I heard a program (sort of) about the 1977 Voyager spacecraft, launched into space with a golden record and other goodies; the hosts of the show talked to several moderately well-known people and asked what they would include. Philip Glass, for instance, would include Bach and Tuvan throat-singing (details unspecified); Neil Gaiman would include the The Wizard of Oz, among other things. Several of the folks interviewed included things it would be difficult to include on a gold record: mandarin oranges in syrup, or an entire meal at Chez Panisse. Naturally, this got me thinking…

  
  Tags: self, reading, personality, change, taste, travel, detail, project, boredom, philosophy, thinking, water, fear, library, future, letters, language, context, value, music, unfinished, rhythm, mood, pace, time, smell, idle, anxiety, performance, perception, concept, kaleidoscope, level, character, arrogance, navigation, politics, cicada, memory, dream.
• 04.01.07 Those magic caskets:

  I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt; I wished I had not trodden that ground as myself, but as Bernier, Tavernier or Manucci did … Once embarked upon, this guessing game can continue indefinitely. When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief.

  
  Tags: reading, personality, change, travel, detail, dialogue, philosophy, thinking, nationalism, fear, research, ghost, letters, language, context, rhythm, mood, time, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques, fatigue.
• 03.24.07 The nature of the beast:

  Having read the first two chapters of Tristes Tropiques, I can only say that I like how Levi-Strauss fleshes out his narrative…

  
  Tags: reading, personality, change, travel, detail, dialogue, composition, thinking, translation, research, ghost, letters, language, context, value, mood, time, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques.
• 01.24.07 Post:

  Shortly before I moved across town at the beginning of December, I sent a letter to my new address, as a welcome home. But I didn’t include my apartment number (it had slipped my mind). I sent it a couple days too early, there was no one by that name at that address. So it was sent back. But by that time, I had changed my address at the post office: so it was forwarded on. But it had already been sent back from the new address once. So it was sent back again, and went into postal limbo, from whence it emerged only last week; but I had forgotten about it by then. So it was a little time capsule.

  
  Tags: change, travel, writing, dialogue, thinking, simile, future, letters, unfinished, rhythm, pace, time.
• 01.19.07 Low:

  I haven’t been blogging, because I haven’t been writing posts, partly because I’ve been feeling low, and strung out. That shouldn’t keep up for too long.

  By wieght, blogs are 75% and upwards apology, like zines and communications with thesis advisors and editors.

  
  Tags: self, blog, shame, change, writing, draft, composition, thinking, drained, failure, unfinished, mood.
• 01.02.07 Off on the right foot:

  Today I feel like my life is a series of setbacks and I pass the time in between them struggling to make up for lost ground. I took off from work today to fight a cold I felt approaching. Result: I feel worse, I spent an hour and a half walking outside in the rain, and I feel like if I see my office again I might have to scream. (I whimpered a couple times today thinking about it, but that was purely optional.)

  Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t feel like drawing the full-detail picture that would indicate its place in the larger pattern I seem to see. Partially because I’m sure I would be ashamed of the inadequate result. In any case, I would never finish it. The cruelest hit I took today was logging into google documents, I saw that I had nothing showing in my active documents: I haven’t touched a single one of my projects for a whole month. Hoping to shame myself into getting back to work, I had the idiotic idea of talking about one of them in a public place.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, shame, change, setback, travel, writing, project, siberia, turkey.