through muntin squares

going into the world

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:45:00 +0000

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

excerpted from "Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver

obsessive cycles

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:25:00 +0000

The mechanics of my living cycles through obsessions, which are people and items that I react to with intense interest. They are usually immediate, thus initially irrational. I try to get to know them better, and through the process I get to understand how I think and who I am. As Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

I rarely abandon an attraction once acquired -- the nature of my passion stays the same -- though my level of engagement may change, depending on my day-to-day life and/ or intellectual afterthoughts. The obsessions do not necessarily return in chronological order either; the order is affected by my weathered perception of current circumstances.

The idea of poetry grasped me more about four years ago, when I picked up stream-of-consciousness from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I wrote a piece about "life, a delusion, whimsical -- an enigma," which I was so proud of that I sent it to Exeter's admissions office.

"Growing is a sense of the presence of life. The mountain, no, it never grows but life hides in it ... I am not life and I am not my own life's overseer ... My subconscious overtakes my conscious and runs wild like a gypsy child -- and life is allowing it! ... My being is polluted by life, its greediness, its evilness. But on the other hand, I can't live without life and its every essence. The essence, the essence of life, flashing now and then, like a brand of shampoo on the TV screen ..."

And just now, I found an email that I wrote to someone I cared deeply about of the same time period; it was also structured in subtly connected paragraphs, but with first-hand short descriptive and narrative phrases, pieces of conversation, and bursts of emotion.

About two years ago, after reading Mary Oliver's In Blackwater Woods in Mr. Weber's English 210, I wrote a reaction to this excerpt from a poem with the same title as the book.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The reaction was a collection of ten poems, called A Process of Realizations. It was based on a relationship I had, which soon evolved into one with myself. (There's a distinction between being alone and having a relationship with oneself; the former is innate, while the latter is an obsessive phase.) Relationships could be pretty obsessive.

After the collection, I again substituted prose for verse as my roots paper on family history in English 230, and I continued sprinkling my own lines between prose in following English papers. I did it because I could not express those bangBangBANGS, gel-like heaviness and buzzing white lights in prose. I'm grateful that my teachers were appreciative, because it was a need that molded me. A need that is acutely aware and keeps me hyper-conscious.

When I started off, I was an introverted detective. I meticulously recorded how I felt after moments that affected me, in relation to what/who I interacted with and snapshots of where it happened -- also, in context, because at the time I was transitioning from tradition-valuing Chinese culture to American individualism.

While poetry and the free verse form I use have been personal to me from the beginning, I explored the individualist aspect in great poets. I remembered that Mr. Weber mentioned Walt Whitman was the pioneer of free verse, so I bought Leaves of Grass and read pages of it on the plane. The below excerpt is clipped as a Post-it on my desktop.

"Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?
Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)
My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me."

-- Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

Poems I wrote were private, but I was also eager to share my crafted confessions. I wrote because I reacted, consciously so, and I hoped that the reader would react, too, even if differently. Like Elizabeth Bishop, I loved painstaking accuracy, spontaneity and mystery, though I doubt my mastery of those qualities. I continued to practice.

Summer 2006, I wrote more than thirty poems in eight weeks, and I feared that I was becoming too self-absorbed. Distracting myself, I experimented with out-of-the-ordinary images, combined icky-sounding words and toyed with the gross and magnificent imagination.

This past term, the writing class that I took forced me to write in form -- blank verse, sonnet, traditional stanzas, etc.. It was a rigorous creative challenge that I have never before experienced. I wasn't sure how that made me grew, until I attempted to understand how my self-focused tendencies match up with my eagerness to meet people and my life's goal to devote myself to development. My conclusion, as of a couple of hours ago, was that my life of cycling obsessions -- made conscious -- allows for risk-taking, and my awareness, sharpened by poetry, yields compassion. And, undeniably, I'm a born reactant, infinitely curious...

i think of vladimir

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:09:00 +0000

The glittering city of Hong Kong stands against a purple screen, seemingly lighted from behind. The patches of white-, yellow- purple look alluring and diseased at the same time. (Air pollution, light pollution.)

By the window, I sit at my desk, mulling over applications for colleges in the United States. In an essay, I mentioned this photo, taken in St. Petersburg.

... a polished black stone horse – its forelegs in mid-air, its muscles bulging, veins taut, pulled by wires against an opaque blue ...

The horse's strength and the wires' counterforce have served as an inspiration, and I have had the photograph as my desktop background. This reminds me of a coincidental anecdote.

A muggy summer's day in 2006, my friend JY and I were sitting on the ledge of Au bon Pain cafe at Harvard Square, and I heard intermittent clicks around me. Amateur photographer Vladimir Gitin was angling his camera and snapping portraits of people in the square, as Petya, his Russian street musician friend, strummed the guitar that was connected to loud speakers.

Above is his favorite shot of me, which he posted on his flickr website. A flickr member commented, "На лице написана грусть :)," which translates to "on the person the grief is written." I think, then, I was deep in conversation with JY about whether "God," or a higher power, of different religions was the same One.

He also took some portraits of my dearest friend Victoria and me at his Barker Center office when we visited him over Winter Thaw last year. Hopefully, we'll make it down this year again.

Visit Vlad's flickr, where he uploads his rich collection of portraits and sceneries from St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, Italy, Amsterdam and East Coast United States, among other places. He has an eye for stunning perspective and composition, light playing with colors and emotion. His photographs ask for an immediate reaction and a precise appreciation.

When separated from his camera, Vlad teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literature at Harvard University.

Afghanistan Wedding

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:35:00 +0000

This sobering image, showing a 40-year-old groom sitting beside his 11-year-old future bride in Afghanistan, brought Stephanie Sinclair top honors in the annual Photo of the Year contest sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

-- Spiegel Online

What a lovely wedding picture! If you don’t like it, that means, as Leon De Winter explains, you are just a product of your cultural values...

-- Arts and Letters Daily

"technical" updates

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:20:00 +0000

[Technorati Profile]

Today I connected the blog with Technorati, syndicated its feed with Feed Burner, and opened a del.icio.us account, which all feels somewhat self-validating. See "Subscribe now." :)

beliefs

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:48:00 +0000

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."

I've been having a fetish for Simone de Beauvoir and her "life long partner" Jean Paul Sartre.

...

I am brought up in Anglican kindergarten and primary school in Hong Kong, while I have taken up weekly Buddhist meditation practice in the U.S.. Recently a friend asked me how I reconcile my Christian religious faith and Buddhist philosophy. The incongruence he saw are Christianity's focus on eternity/ afterlife versus Buddhism's "nothing is permanent," and Christianity's "everything has meaning" versus Buddhism's "nothing has inherent value." This is along the lines of what I wrote him:

I'm not doctrinal. I feel the power of God's presence -- I feel grasped by faith, if I can borrow Paul Tillich's words in "Dynamics of Faith." At the same time, I also feel present at dharma practice. I like the "feel" for the Christian religion and Buddhist philosophy; they both represent a way of life for me. Perhaps, all encompassingly, I'm more of a Unitarian. Hmm, I also dislike categories, because they don't seem to allow grey areas.

However, that doesn't tell the whole story of how I have come to accept that "feel." I have agonized over not attending Sunday services my first year at Exeter, and this year I have taken on the responsibility as proctor to make my meditation practice regular. Through a religion course, "Personhood and Belief," I have come to think more objectively about psychology and philosophy. Having read a bit on Existentialism on my own, I try to make sure that I do not blindly following my instincts and am conscious of my thoughts and decisions.

thanks

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:54:00 +0000

nice top & jeans
shirt & tie, slacks

an athlete, a musician, a go-to dorm mate
a chill demeanor in Grill, a brightening smile
we look similar, we do similar things

two parents, single parent, a step family
loving, controlling, aggressive, anxious
middle school teachers, cooks, i-bankers

we could've left home, we could've been kicked out
some of us have
boyfriends we live with, juggling jobs
i've at least heard of four cases

red-bricked buildings, overnight papers
dorm-wrestling, a movie on Saturday
a bite of pizza

we go on, make money on wall street,
embody non-sibi, pursue the life of the mind --
hard and good

"Lose something every day"

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:05:00 +0000

At one in the morning, a friend ended a phone call with, "I will see you tomorrow."

I didn't get back to preparing for my presentation on Elizabeth Bishop, and, instead, lay down in bed, too tired to feel connected.

A couple of hours later, another friend texted me, "sorry i went quiet yesterday." Packing absorbed him -- we'll probably never be in the same place again, as the aforementioned friend, he'll be going off campus -- or did he say cleaning?

The overhead light hummed at five in the morning, consistently. It unsettled me, still in bed but wanting to get up. I wanted a friend, someone I know but not so well, to be by my side. I felt weakened by daylight.

What was it that I left behind that I lost? Renewals -- like checking in with a dear friend daily -- affirm me. New things/people/occurrences inspire, keep me wanting. Potential connections keep me wanting to live.

possibilities excite me
they make me love
when i get comfortable with them, though,
often they become defined
and i have to work hard to get them to melt again

Angels in the Dust, Darfur Now, Kite Runner

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:04:00 +0000

Angels in the Dust

Darfur Now

Kite Runner

All can comment

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:40:00 +0000

:) I didn't realize that previously only registered users can comment.

Borges and I (excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:46:00 +0000

To the other one, to Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and I delay myself, perhaps almost mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; from Borges I find out through the mail and I see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belong to no-one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, although I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being: the stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books that in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belong to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960

College applications are prompting many thoughts and asking for definitions that my fluid self struggles & attempts to give.

serenamay.com

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:09:00 +0000

First Impression

I redid the cover page of my website :)

Google Earth Stalking

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:54:00 +0000

Newsfeed updated me that a facebook friend posted up an album of her and her friends at a coffee shop -- pretty normal, hey ... then as I clicked through the photos, I saw my rendezvous with another friend documented in the background. No, nothing scandalous, but it's curious how our lives are increasingly going public via the Internet.

Humanity

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:35:00 +0000

From Approaches to Auschwitz:

The late Benjamin Nelson succinctly described the evolution of civilization as a journey from "tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood." Inherent in this predicament is the attrition of a sense of mutual obligation even among members of the same community. Insofar as the religions of the West have taught that all men and women are the children of one sovereign Creator, they have sought to reverse the process of depersonalization and to enlarge the human universe of moral obligation so that it includes all of humanity. As the Holocaust's victims and survivors testify, that ideal is far from realized. The Holocaust and the other manifestations of large-scale demographic violence in our time make realization of that ideal more urgent and more problematic.

I sent it to my close faculty friend, and he referred me to Kierkegaard:

Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

Exonian nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:15:00 +0000

by Matt Berardi

... BEST of LUCK to the 130th lower, upper and executive boards applicants! Please drop off a hard copy of your app in the office by 8 p.m. on November 26 (Monday) & sign up for interview(s).

<3, le office cat

"the self" (Hugo)

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:07:00 +0000

From Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town:

The self as given is inadequate and will not do. I remember I was distrustful of both Eliot and Roethke when late in their careers they announced they were happy. But they were being honest. Every poem a poet writes is a slight advance of self and a slight modification of the mask, the one you want to be. Poem after poem the self grows more worthy of the mask, the mask comes closer to fitting the face. After enough poems, you are nearly the one you want to be, and the one you want to be closely resembles you. The happiness Eliot and Roethke spoke of is one that cannot be observed by others because it is only a different way one has come to feel about oneself. "Nearly" and "closely," not "exactly" and "perfectly."

A brief correspondence with poet Dave Smith and the rereading of his essay, St. Cyril's Dragon: The Threat of Poetry, are convincing me that the self evolves but perhaps around some core.

Republican Mayor Supports Gay Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:16:00 +0000

In tears, he followed his heart.

Jena 6

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:18:00 +0000

Justice for the Jena 6

On September 20, Thursday, Afro-Latino Exonians Society (ALES) is staging a protest and encouraging students to wear black to show support.

Clarification to Previous Post

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:32:00 +0000

In my previous post, I was trying to illustrate the vague racial implications in our everyday lives. The purpose was not to judge, thus I have now removed any identifying factors of the characters involved. I recognize that I could have easily made the same playful comment to a friend without noticing it, and we would shrug it off afterwards. I sketched the situation, because it could be a representative of a universal phenomenon. It was most valuable and beautiful when the girls had the moment of realization and mutual understanding. I was touched to have seen it happen.

Jena 6 is in a separate sphere. I should probably have started a new post about it instead of merging the two points in my last entry, which added to implications that I did not intend to make.

Racial Vignette on a Sunny Fall Day

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:18:00 +0000

Sun-soaked, tummy filled with crunchy cranberry Gorgonzola salad, a few students were sitting on the bench outside a dorm. A person left the bench, then a dorm mate asked whether she was coming back, whether she could sit on the bench and proceeded to walk towards it.

"No, you're not allowed to sit on the bench," her friend blurted out.

My first thought was that the girl who was mid-way to the bench is African American. I know it wasn't the case and just a joke. She knew, too, but she added, "For two seconds, I thought you said it because I'm black."

Her friend responded, "You've been saying that a lot lately."

*shrugs, awkward laughter*

Starting

noreply@blogger.com (Serena May) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:16:00 +0000

In May last school year, I received promotional mail from Dell that enabled me to create a website easily for free. I was hoping that it would gradually sort out my cluttered identities on networking sites (facebook.com, abandoned Xanga sites*), through virtual communication (AIM, MSN, emails, phone calls) and in real life (social circles in boarding school at Exeter, family/ old friends in Hong Kong). However, my lack of technological savvy limited how/ what I could express efficiently and stunted my motivation. And here I am to try anew.

My goal is still the same. I want to chronicle, linearize and expand on my flashes of fluttering thoughts. When I went to rural China this summer, I realized that a place keeps us sheltered from other aspects of ourselves that are attached to other places and people. As the blog becomes a record, I could piece together my different aspects and my motives to change how I present myself (or perhaps I change less than I think I do?). Continuing with the idea of change, in reality, everything happens in a *bang* and roll into blob. It is difficult to capture those moments in a fashion that is accessible. In writing, I unfold and layer the milliseconds of these moments to translate the effect. I linearize when narrating, and, in the process, mix in my perception. Often, perception is formed in retrospect, thus writing articulates the bangs/ blobs, while re-framing and re-molding them into something of their own.

I could do all this in a word document, but writing for an audience is meaningful. I feel more connected, and if I'm lucky I could hear from you. :) Having lay low and gone blog-hopping, I have learned a lot. Now it's time to not only take from this rich community but also contribute to it.

P.S. A relating quote:

"the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, 'eunciated'. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always 'in context', positioned ."

-- Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall

* Why did I abandon Xanga? 1) I grew out of the name of my first one, called "blazingpurple." The second one was better,"SariRewrites," but the double "ri" are confusing. 2) I came to boarding school, and Xanga is not so hot here. I still subscribe to check up on my friends at home though! 3) I lost interest in posting/ propping. It felt too much like a journal, and posts are expected to be quick accounts. I did not have the energy and determination to continue such a precedent. (I have for a while used the site to save private bits and unrefined pieces -- but this role has now been taken up by Gmail. Hmm.)