3.19.24
I haven't written in a while. Been thinking lately about what it must be like to be inside a brain that is degrading. But there aren't really words - or anything to change about a brain that's keeps you in loops, poking fun, but with glimmers in the corner of his eyes. He usually tilts his head at you to make sure you know he is paying attention. there's a glimmer though not the sense most people get excited by when i mention it. "oh thats good he knows who you are" - he doesn't; or "he knows your name right" - because even if he did, he'd still probably make one up. but there is this other space, beyond the language or culturally agreed upon understanding of how we relate "father/kid" etc. etc. it's something clearer, something tangible, like it's a string connecting presence. and there is no necessity for the details - for names or words, or infomation. the motion of conversation is enough, passing time connected by strings. I've been worrying about losing that, eselfishly, in that i think i might lose myself without it.
3.6.24
8.2.23 (pt2)
there are lilies in the brook and aging blueberries too far in to be picked. I never learned to write letters, the deep meaningful kind..
~what makes branches grow curly~
caleb is reading me a passage of agua vida - i need to get more into clarice lispector
If i were to write a letter i would tell you - the you i'm writing for? well no. this word is not external. but if i were to write a letter, maybe I'd write about the puttering brook, and far away berries. about loons protecting their young, about how i'm sitting on a dock with people also writing letters, perhaps about the same things. i'm thinking about a love i never got to fully flesh out, and perhaps writing for them a bit too. my friends are imitating birds and psshing them close. I'd probably tell you that as well. i think its the greatest gift to have love outside of a necessity for anchoring. the brook is falling into the lake and the hollowness of the sound makes me unsettled. there is a warmth between our bodies in determinance to stay at peace until the sun fully sets. shadows of light flicker in my eyelids as i think of what to write next. so i'll probably stop here
8.2 (pt1)
the brook is puttering . i'm not sure when listening became difficult but i worry about losing self. the pencil is twisting as i try to find the double letters. it is strange to lose self so slowly but I feel it as home looms, soon re-entered. i'm not sure if its the stillness or movement that create such palpable identity - probably both. maybe the constant exchange and barter of living in community. i worry the weight of his dementia will have me permanently lost. i worry i am not known enough to be found. i worry the weight of anchoring is unfair and widdling at the love and care within community. a chair rests at yeti rock, alone, uninterrupted. the brook is puttering. things are.
7.14
thinking about how roses soaked in pedot-s become conductive sources with natural polarity, running current within its xylem. want to make a rose breadboard but worried about the ethics of forcing plants into sources of labor. wonder if theres a way to create reciprocity. also just want to power something with a plant. growing some piezo's, maybe that can be part of the circuit. something really beautiful about a living and breathing circuit. something really scary and off putting about it too. thinking about how everything has a polarity. and the ed young book.
6.18
"you do not have to be good
you do not have to walk a hundred miles in the desert repenting
you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine
meanwhile the world goes on... " mary oliver stuck in my head today
6.13
getting ready to leave for the summer - feeling jittery. excited for greece and turkey, and having more autonomy in creating a workflow and shop space for the kids at beam. finished reading waiting for godot. its' a funny book, but reading through a play is kind of painful. normally i really love absurdism so find it strange that i didn't like it. can't tell if it's a pre-bias that made me read it as just self-important blah blah or if beckett was actually just a self-important blah kind of person. i did like that any meaning people try to assuage to it, like the religious undertone stuff , beckett firmly says to fuck off about. i should probably just watch the play - why read something if they already fixed it .
unsure what books to bring this summer. hoping i just stumble across something good. writing things out like this is a good grounding process.
5/23 not my circus, not my monkeys and other thoughts on distancing being an act of care for the sweet moments - giving space for them to thrive in timelines needed.
4/21 'the men's needs are strong and overwhelming. they need the faggots and their friends in order to know who they are not. But the faggots and their friends will no longer need the men. they can sit and produce high, invisible love energy or they can do anything. But they will not need. And when the faggots and their friends cease being the faggots and their friends. the deathly dance of the men will begin to wane and a new dance will begin to emerge. then the third revolutions will engulf us all.' - finished 'faggots and their friends between revolutions' was so good, starting to be able to solidify what it might feel like to live without the need of imposed structure, not in opposition but just in something created innately through community and care. new dance/third revolution
4/15 feeling rlly lucky to be living with community. reading walter rodney-marxism and national liberation: "one starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism and which we call a bourgeois framework of perception" --> connects to Mariategu's flip of marxism's anti-rural/religion stance, connecting to deeper roots of community in imagining worlds beyond capitalist influence.
"there is one common strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance: the logic, and so on, of marxist thought. and therefore, in a sense, unfortunately when we ask that question we are also fitting into that framework and pattern." --> unwriting bourgouise thought in what we imagine logistically to be possible --> letting that inform grassroots organizing/restructuring/teaching frameworks?
https://hughchen.github.io/qr_image/
3/19:
i wanted to be left alooone to stare out the open window
3/19: finished reading teaching critical thinking.
"education is about healing and wholeness. ... It is about finding and claiming ourselves and our place in the world... to honor the 'sacred at the heart of knowing, teaching, and learning' teachers must have the courage to connect the inner work of becoming a self with the outer work of learning, showing the myriad ways that one can influence the other."
"sacredness is not understood within a particular religious framework but instead as growing out of two basic qualities of our experience: awareness and wholeness. Awareness is a natural self-manifesting quality: it is our ability to perceive, experience, and know... Wholeness is inherent, seamless, [an] interdependent quality of the world. Through experiences of awareness and wholeness, we begin to establish the view of the sacred."
"the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility; a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and all that we know leads us into greater connection, into greater understanding of life lived in community."
!!! "just as it is important that we be vigilant in challenging abuses of power where the erotic becomes a terrain of exploitation, it is equally important to recognize that space where erotic interaction is enabling and positively transforming."
"in dominator culture where bodies are pitted against one another and made to stand in a place of difference that dehumanizes, touch can be an act of resistance."
3/16:
blloooop blah polycam in motion needs to be worked on more.
3/15:
lately i've been feeling a bit stuck but i dont think it will last forever. cycle loops. string grows through me. purely mine purely not.
ssomeone said sentimentality is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel. i wonder if that's true or if we just miss people. maybe grief is a blending of timelines.
i'm proud that my ears are getting good, i want to make good music too
but that might take some time.
