diurnal

To my bleak readership: no apologies for the silent treatment. I've been busy. So busy I've been dreaming in numbers (I do lots of calculation at work. Sadly, my subconscious doesn't always dispose of the constant mathematical debris of my 9 - 5 life, so I often dream of troubleshooting difficult press sheet sizes, laying out a book project, or suggesting the right paper weight).

Plunge into the tableau:

Being & Time is changing my life. I try to read a few pages every day, but I often start circulating around the same swatch of text, reading it again and again. I am especially hung up on the concept of "worlding," the production of a world, right now:

The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.

The opposition of world and earth is a striving.

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...the world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds.

What a filling thought! The overarching membrane of the world, flushing in. The parchment veil, all of us operating beneath and within it.

In addition to my daily reference to Being & Time, I have plenty of reading for the winter, including a beautiful copy of The Maximus Poems IV - VI, a cultural history of labyrinths, Levinas' Proper Names, Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, and the new Oliver Sacks. Oh, and Dune, ha.

Lately I have been working on small, diurnal essays, prose poems, prayers and meditations on a life of "withinness." Moved by Chris Marker's film transcripts, Anne Carson's long poems in Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God, Lisa Robertson's lush occcasional writings, Tsurezuregusa, and zuihitsu, a form of Japanese writing (primarily by women), the name of which translates loosely to "following the brush." I will try to post the ones I deem fit for sharing as often as I can. Here is a recent one:

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NOVEMBER 3, 2007

"The east sea and the west sea rhyme on in her head
Forever instead."
- Elizabeth Barett Browning

"Human love, while it is happening, will seem like something within withinness."
- Anne Carson

Today the mind is a sleeve. Loose and close. We went walking against the afternoon ripple, in the Indian summer-sun. Our faces leering in the dappled hieroglyphics. Our way of making the Outside lingual. The gnarled tree and the city lake and the wild slopes are interior and within. We are spacial lopers.

We sat blank among the leaves, drinking root beer from a bottle and watching camera phone filmographies - short, cellular artifacts. Garden snakes eating toads, ants towing bees, a corn snake bending around an arm. The ant drops the bee and runs away.

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I awake in a waft. Dreamt about a still sea, bloated from the bellows. Water had become a bodily hyper-space, flanked by fractal dunes.

The same water squeezed from the duct forms the cloud, the salt-pool unusually near. It rides inside the body. We are ocean.

There is an old Zen koan that I always mis-remember:

"But the tears that fall are not beads for stringing."