[Holly blogs here]

Relocation

2015-12-29T13:00:00.001-08:00

Strangely enough, I'm blogging again.

If you'd like to follow at my new address, just send me a note at wie.ein.lied@gmail.com.

A Sunday morning

2014-10-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

Small pleasures: regaining the ability to be still. To read. Thoughtfulness without the building whirlwind.

7:10p

2014-09-19T19:10:00.000-07:00

2014-08-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

Dusk as cathedral.

2014-07-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

October 2013.

I have always gone
looking for poetry;
I have, right now,
windows full of backyards
full of trees and I am
in love (still), I am doing
everything exactly (maybe)
as a twenty-something in
2013 is supposed to --
going to my stupid job,
chasing cheap food,
chasing poetry. Yesterday
I realized I had gone
three days
without conversation.
Once there was a life,
and in that life was a night,
in which there was loneliness,
a bicycle, stars, fear,
a playground. There was a sister.
And once there was morning,
with breakfast and
a book of poetry.

Read in February 2014

2014-03-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

1. Peace Begins Here: Palestinians and Israelis Listening to Each Other, by Thich Nhat Hanh

2. Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. M.D. Herter Norton

*Titles link to the pertinent Goodreads page — feel free to add me as a friend.

March 1st - March 2nd

2014-03-02T21:11:00.001-08:00

Notes/quotes, coworkers at an old job

2014-02-26T20:52:00.001-08:00

I liked the people at this job. They were a fascinating mix.

From 2011.

I moved to San Francisco as soon as I turned eighteen.

I feel like our generation is the generation of SF fuck-ups. Like, the generation born between 1985 and 1989, well, 1990, I know some twenty-year-olds who are pretty crazy, but our generation, we're all so fucked up, but we have such a good time.

I need to raise $600 today [or I won't have enough from commission] to make rent. I might starve for a couple days.

Canvassers are confident almost to a fault. You have to get told "no" again and again for five hours a day.

I rode down from Seattle on my bike...I have a storage unit there and four panniers of stuff with me. I'm camping in Marin for now and coming over the bridge every day. I'm going to be here for a month to earn some money, then I'll be riding again. Working my way down to San Diego.

I mean, she and her wife are literally living in poverty, and if she loses this job, it's all they have.

It's kind of a thing for me, everything that's important to me, I always have with me in my backpack.

Gratitudes + things that are making me happy

2014-02-22T15:05:00.003-08:00

• trees full of blossoms

• spring air (I know it's only February, but this is the Bay Area)

• reading Letters to a Young Poet, and how comforting it is when I am lonely

• breathing and thinking

• the yummiest mocha and blueberry cornbread at brunch this morning

• having an old favorite toy camera back in my possession

• yoga twice this week (I usually go once a month max)

• connecting better with a new coworker I didn't think I'd like

• biking under the full moon with my dear one

• the gift of a rainbow votive candle

• my roommate's rants and monologues and listening ear

• a feline houseguest

For sanity and staying inside my body

2014-02-03T22:31:00.003-08:00

Fall 2013.

I went to a secondhand store
today looking for a pair of
jeans. The rules
for staying sane are gentle
and have not changed:

When the body grows
(smaller or larger),
keep feeding it what
it wants, keep moving how
it wants, find clothes
that in all ways feel good;
keep knowing
what knowledge (pounds,
calories, and the like)
is not valuable to you.

The project of the past few
years is listening instead
to the wordless shifting
constellations
that pass beneath and across
my skin. To the wise
if sometimes frightening
wants and body-thoughts,
the certainties and
contentments of this animal self,
as well as to the spaces where
I can hear
nothing yet, where long-learned silence
(quiet, quiet)
is not yet unlearned

For dogma,
I will have
only this, that
nothing the body does
or doesn't
do is wrong,
nothing the body
does is wrong,
in my terror and longing
and unbelief, I am reciting
to myself: how
nothing this body
does is wrong

Read in January 2014

2014-02-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

1. Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown

2. Glass, Irony and God, by Anne Carson

Womyn's Land

2014-01-29T23:57:00.002-08:00

November 2013, Northern California. I tagged along with a new friend and her girlfriend on a three-hour drive north, to a small rural lesbian community that has been in existence since the '70s. It was deeply quiet there — one of those places where I notice how noisy my ordinary life is because all of a sudden that noise is just gone.

The pond was too cold even for just my feet, but if I'd wanted to go swimming, I could have. No swimsuit, but I could have just taken off my clothes and jumped in. Maybe come summer. Doors remain unlocked, and you can fall asleep alone in the grass without worrying about your safety or possessions.

My friend had to point that out to me when I said I was sleepy; it didn't occur to me. I was reminded of what Sylvia Plath, nineteen years old, wrote in her diary about the "awful tragedy...[of being born a woman]":

...all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery....I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

That awareness of the constant potential for danger that comes with being a woman in a violent patriarchal world, that is a kind of psychic noise too. And again, it's easy not to notice how it wears on you until you feel what an afternoon is like without that. And that quiet is almost bewildering...

I am carrying that afternoon with me. That taste of freedom, and the conviction that by rights I should have that freedom anywhere.

I am trying to imagine who I would be if my safety and privacy were always so inviolate.

Crystals on my windowsill

2014-01-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

Some bought in Perth, some bought in San Francisco, and one taken from home where it had been a childhood plaything. I carry one in each fist sometimes, my fists resting deep in my pockets as I walk. To anchor me to the earth by my fists, with their weight. To remind me that I know what I want, which to me is nearly as magical and determinative as believing that they can give me what I want.

January 26, 2014

2014-01-26T19:50:00.000-08:00

I ride my bike to the train station at 7:45 in the morning. On the street with the grassy median, pigeons circle in flight. Mild magic: the swirling patterns they make, the flash and vanish of the white undersides of fifty sets of wings.

I have right now the best job I've had yet, and that is doing a lot for my all-around happiness and mental health.

Currently receiving aesthetic nourishment by Agnes Obel's latest album Aventine. I love these "glimpses" she released before the album came out:

The mystery exposure

2014-01-02T21:52:00.003-08:00

Sometimes this happens with film: I have no memory of taking this photo, and no idea what this place is.

Read in December 2013

2014-01-01T23:11:00.003-08:00

1. Life is Elsewhere, by Milan Kundera

2. Empathy, by Sarah Shulman

Mapping lately

2013-12-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

A never-published post from November 2011.

I was feeling poorly two weekends ago and didn't leave my bedroom much, so I decided to tell you about its walls, where I have been keeping track of some ideas and words I've been connecting. Topical mapping, I suppose. I didn't get to finish this post until now, though.

The north wall is the happening one lately. The theme is narration. The relationships between narration, past and present, self as subject, and on.

I want to know: the integrity of a life, of a person's experiences, how we find it. We want to understand it before we tell the story, but how can find that clarity without the process of telling the story?

We don't know how to find meaning outside of our conception of unidirectional time, which is to say, an objectified past, a past that we can act upon and master.

The process of narration, self-narration, in order to glimpse an in-process version of that integrity.

"The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to 'frame' life is a technique to forestall the incomprehension seemingly entailed by our 'continued existence,' to achieve some sense and articulation of a life's shape even as it is being formed — to see, if only through a glass darkly, something recognizably meaningful, something useful to us as we attempt to navigate the often troubled waters of experience" (Jacobs).

I realized that the word "journal" is from the Latin root of "diurnal." By the way.

Have you ever felt the grief of thinking, There is nothing story-like about this? "The clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity..." (Lewis).

That clarity — an intense sense of integrity of experience, a certainty that "everything has been leading up to this" and an understanding of just how — you can take certain drugs to get that feeling. Isn't that weird?

I'm interested in the ways that we deal with and act upon the past, through retrospection and "re-vision": "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich). Interpretation and reinterpretation. Continuity versus rupture.

And the way the past acts on us. The "pastness of the past" and the persistence of the past (Persistence of Memory?), which, "of course, presses on the living from all sorts of directions and in any number of ways..." (Keane).

Shared narratives versus individual narratives, and what is lost and gained in dressing one's experiences in shared narratives. "[L]ocal social realities that cannot be fitted into any overarching narrative...without doing some violence to those realities" (Keane again).

Academically: I want to write a paper comparing second-wave feminist consciousness-raising with Protestant conversion narratives.

Personally: I think I am constantly retelling the stories of my life to myself, changing them a little bit each time so that the sense and coherency of them is constantly becoming more accurate. I need them to make sense. INTP drive for understanding combined with the INFP search for meaning. You know how we do.

- 11/27/11

Shadows / bedroom and San Pablo Avenue

2013-12-14T21:15:00.002-08:00

Dissociation + loneliness

2013-12-12T00:33:00.001-08:00

Here is an anxious response my mind sometimes produces: The sensation that I am possibly inside a movie, alone, and this movie is all that exists, and no one else in it is real. I see sort of from the camera's perspective as well as from my own. If I put on my headphones and the right/wrong song, my mind wants to go swirling out the top of my skull.

(Is that tiresome of me to talk about? Possibly. Bear with me.)

The feeling of being alone lingers. The world sometimes this very large and silent thing that I rattle around in.

Tonight on my train ride home I am thinking, Alone alone alone and feel so sick and sad of it that for once I stop and think up another thought to correct that one and dissipate the mood it brings — Supported and loved, and exploring my freedom and space, and tonight honestly, yes, it does help, and honestly it is more accurate too.

Rainy Saturday, September

2013-12-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

Before an expedition to the city with my love.

The only way I can fall asleep is clutching a heating pad to my chest

2013-12-06T00:16:00.001-08:00

In the thirties at night. That wouldn't be notable for, say, Chicago, but this is coastal California; consider the limitations of our wardrobes, how our houses are (not) insulated, for example...

The hardwood floor in our place feels cold enough to burn the soles of bare feet. Tonight before bed though I microwave the last inch of coconut oil until it is transparent and liquid, strip and stand in the lamplight, bend to dip the cup of my fingers into the jar. The best moisturizer. Considering myself through the lens of a nonexistent camera, considering myself through the eyes of an absent lover (think: that part in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and I hurry. Open-water swimmers smearing their bodies with goose fat. Bending down, the cup of fingers, straightening, how quickly a drip of oil solidifies on the cold floor. Of course I regard myself during this exercise, and I am somewhat exasperated. Body strange, what are you doing — keeping secrets from me with such indifference. I admit I am angry about the excuses I feel compelled to make, even if only in my head, for you. Control must be released again and again.

Read in November 2013

2013-12-01T10:19:00.001-08:00

1. Three Russian Women Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Bella Akhmadulina, ed. and trans. by Mary Maddock

I shared the poem "Winter" from this anthology. A melancholy and very lovely collection.

2. Queer Theory: An Introduction, by Annamarie Jagose

Picked up in a used bookstore, persevered through for intellectual curiosity's sake.

Unpublished drafts

2013-11-25T23:14:00.000-08:00

1/25/13

Poetry under my umbrella, as I walk

As I am pacing my bedroom floor late at night

As I am waking slowly on a Friday morning (hello, unemployment!)

In the sun on our hammock

2/17/13

When my older sister was my age, she was already married and pregnant with her first child.

When my mom was my age, she was assaulted on the street and almost died from the injury.

I have traveled some and worked a little and I have a bachelor's degree, but I don't have much to show for the last five years of my life other than the fact that I am alive and even in relatively good mental health.

I'm still terrified of job applications. I'm still living at my parents' house. And this is my life for the time being, which is to say, for now, which is to say, this is my life — I

2/24/13

days made of beautiful small things and beautiful big thoughts.

6/1/13

on the inside of my forehead aches
a wide empty horizon named
afraid (I am) alone and sorrowing

7/14/13

What this year is about for me: Doing things my way. Wanting. Testing the limits of apparent mutual exclusivity. Growing roots and making myself at home.

It's been raining all morning.

2013-11-20T14:29:00.000-08:00

Goodness knows California could use it, though.

And I am in bed, taking care of my sick self instead of earning money, which makes me a little nervous, but given that I'm not in dire need, in this regard I am not one of those people who's good at ignoring their own body.
Lately I have been luxuriating in this album from U.S. Girls, and rediscovering Writer's Block.

"Winter," by Bella Akhmadulina

2013-11-18T23:25:00.000-08:00

This same poet wrote one of my favorite autumn poems, which I have posted here twice before. I discovered this poem just a few weeks ago, and it continues to hold me in thrall.

Winter became my season during my years in the Chicago area — the sensory sparseness and the deep cold lent themselves perfectly somehow to the different moods and struggles of each year, and my memories of what was so striking to see, feel, and hear hold the emotional memories tightly. I mostly look forward to it now as a time to turn inward, read closely, turn big ideas over and let my thoughts steep without hurry. This coming winter will also bring the time to celebrate a year spent with my love.

The feeling of these memories has accumulated, though; I feel them lying layered and translucent against each other. And I read and love this poem because of how well it evokes (and invokes) some of my winter selves.

Winter

Winter's gesture to me is
chilly and persistent.
Winter has something
mildly medicinal.

Why else does
my unsuspecting sickness
stretch its hands toward it suddenly
out of darkness and pain?

My love,
practice witchcraft.
Let your icy ringlet's tonic kiss
brush my forehead.

The temptation continually grows
to meet deception with belief,
to look dogs in the eye,
to press myself against trees,

to forgive — playfully —
to run and turn,
and when done,
forgive again.

To equal the winter afternoon's
empty oval,
its nuances,
and always be aware of it.

To reduce my self to nothing,
so from behind the wall I can shout
not to my shadow, but to the light
not blocked by me.

– Bella Akhmadulina
trans. Mary Maddock