…in Tracyland came and went without much excitement. The extra load of reading is exhausting, but I’m feeling like I’m getting somewhere, although where that somewhere may be, I don’t really know.

I went to my 4 classes, got a mark back on my annotated bibliography, tried to finish one epic and move on to another, looked into numerous application procedures for various things, got behind on my reading, and I booked some tickets for some poetry research.

For those unaware, my travelling companion and I’ll experience a new way of life for a few weeks in April of 2007, hopefully delighting our senses with places of some significance. After staying a short amount of time in Vienna, we hope to make our way to Neulengbach, Austria to see the Viennese Forrest, and then perchance to alight our feet upon the rails, and wander through the trees to Cesky Krumlov, medieval home of the 2nd largest castle in Europe, and home to the Egon Schiele Art Centre. I don’t think 2 weeks is long enough to experience everything, but I’m pleased to say, it’s long enough for something.

…is a miracle?

…something to amuse oneself. I started with Nikolai Leskov.

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving, and the remedy for unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two remedies belong together: forgiving relates to the past and serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would ever be possible in the relationships between men”—Hannah Arendt.

…I’ve noticed about this blog is my supposedly private sphere of not linking to Google or other search engines, seems to be a fallacy. I did a google search of the blog title and viola–there I was.

What does that have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing. And everything if you consider everything is nothing, and something. We work, we labour, we act, and we react.
On labour, work and action:

I found this on the net tonight–it’s a bit of what I’ve been reading lately on Hannah Arendt. Although her philosophy is hard to pin-point, I believe she attempted to keep it that way on purpose. She wanted people to think about their roles in politics as on-going, a flux of thought.

Many try to sweep a net over her theories, but I believe she tried to avoid being labelled as one thing or another. She didn’t like stasis, in fact, part of her philosophy believes that the more alike we become, the less we tolerate difference.

I think she was anti-Utopian in her ideology through her difference. Arendt appears to be dialectical (not in a Hegelian manner–but more in the traditional Greek way) in her philosophy to the point where she assumes that people should think about the idea, re-think about the outcome, and the opposition to an idea, then think the synthesis as an open-ended judgement, not a concrete judgement. There seems to be a flexibility to her thinking that moves almost in a circular way, a flux that can’t be labelled, because if it did, it would become something concrete, and static. And, of course, none of this makes much sense, except that it keeps me thinking that I’m thinking something worth thinking about.

Or, I could be completely wrong.

…I’m wondering about is why people have the tendency to pronounce the names of philosophers in the pronunciation of their language, such as the name of the philosopher Benjamin that I hear pronounced quite clearly with the German “ja”, with a sort of silent “j” for “yaw”. But, quite frankly I find this odd. Why you ask? Because the people who say his name call him Walter with an English “w”, not a German pronounciation of the “w”, which would be “Valter”. So, why is it some names are anglicized , and others are original? (Jaspers is another one). It seems fitting to me if we do justice to the pronunciation of the last name, why not the first?

…of study today: Gerard Manley Hopkins, infamous for his sprung rhythm.

And because there are too many hours in one day, I must compile an annotated bibliography based on 5 critical articles that deal with “The Windhover”.
I’ve forgotten how much work is entailed in reading this style of poetry, but I’m liking the rigour of the reading. Hopefully I will gain some editing skills from this and maybe a great word or two for a poem somewhere down the line. Or not. Hopkins was infamous as well for making up his own words. The lexicon of Hopkins.

We dealt with the curtal sonnet this morning mostly– another form invented by Hopkins. (I’m so Hopkinsian). Or not.

…for something completely different.

I don’t normally work in this fashion, but I’m beginning a phase of doing things that I don’t normally do (yes, be afraid, be very afraid).

My last honours class in English happens to be a creative writing class. We are all working in our own genre specific areas; the class is heavily theory laden, which is fine, part workshop, and partly based on exercises which we have to hand in for a final portfolio. Our opening exercise consisted of writing a letter to one of the authors on our list (we were required to make up a reading list specific to our genre and style of writing) reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s “A Letter to Borges”.

Here is my letter that I wrote yesterday(apologies for the double line spacing, as I can’t figure out how to remove it–please feel free to make any comments you may have as it is still new and raw):

Unsent letter to Sylvia Legris

I never worried much about the fish.

Like language, fish were foreign

to a younger me

unfamiliar as the prairie fields that addressed

an émigré while travelling

by train. The departure

beginning from the past.

Reading you, I’m looking out

that window. Remembering a migration

of dogs. I followed

impossibly. Do you

like my hat?

Yes. Yes.

Imagine a bed big enough

to sleep everyone.

Even at the age of four I believed

it was possible

believed there were beds

with room enough for all. A moon

roosted in the bedroom window.

And later they drove

cars to a celebration

in the biggest tree on the flat, migraine

                                of a white page.

And how is it

I didn’t understand dogs

don’t climb trees

until the other day when I read

to my nephews, their eyes fixed—

paper on pause, each child

eagerly waiting the next flip

of fingers.

Or how reading a book in the sun-

fingered limbs of shadow’s past

is akin to the awareness

                                of pain. The fissure—

your squall clouding my brain, the swell

of my own nerves, thinned and tightening.

Repetition is the mother

of all movement. I am that

child again.

There are memory-tornadoes looped

in the words I read.

                                Looping.

You said the word is embouchure.

Our blood pulsing from the heart

to each peripheral region. You said

limbic. You said swim. You said

words that were in my mouth, formed

by my mouth. An immigration.

What you said landed on me, a spring

rain escaping the staggered sky

or a sudden snow layering sheets on

to shape one big bed.

Quote and references from Go Dog Go—by P.D. Eastman

…is something I’ve been thinking about and writing about for the past few months. Maybe all poetry is a form of displacement.

…it feels like to be in my shoes today is like my comments on these posts–for some strange reason (I don’t know if this is new or just that I’ve never paid attention before) there is a question mark above my name. It is reminiscent of my state of mind today and I think it suits my questioning persona these past few days as I struggle with my own sense of identity as friend, mother, student, barber, lover and writer. Why do we flounder in some roles and excel at others?

There is a question mark above my head. I hope it stays.