redemption shoes: gestures flung out

part 1.

Relentless snow. In the yard, wrought iron chairs buried under mounding pillows; arching rose canes; circled peony rings, their thin blue shadows.

Type etches a white screen, a page. Notes race over keys, under fingers -- courante, rondeau, capriccio -- drawing lines, circles, bodies; dancing out of the room.

part 2.

part 3.
Once, not too long ago, I was doing an assessment in a dementia unit. Several elderly men and women were sitting in a living room having random, and from the sound of it, fairly meaningless conversations. I could hear phrases now and again. One person said "What day is it?" Another voice rather thoughtfully said "I don't know". After a pause I heard "Where are we?" and again a thoughtful response "I don't know". There seemed to be a collective sigh of wondering before someone chimed in "I don't know either but I am just going to try to be happy".

part 4.
I miss you, [too]. I miss you Shannon. Things are busy and scattered, but good.

I have been bad with communication--save for these
tiny videographic gestures flung out into the world.

News, soon.

on redemption

“Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man...The collector’s passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object--something that is classifiable--but is inflamed by its “genuineness,” its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. (Arendt, Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, 44)

Selected Bibliography

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Illuminations; Hannah Arendt, ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1969; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); Anna Farova, Josef Sudek, Poet of Prague: a photographer's life / biographical profile. New York: Aperature Books, c 1992; Susan A. Handelman, (f)ragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; Stephen Mitchell, ed. and Robert Hass, transl. Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989; Marianne Hirsch, Family frames : photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997; Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1954; Adam Zachary Newton. The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance: Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005; Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things: Life, Language and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert. New York: Riverside Books, 1997; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Translations and introd. by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1971; Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel. translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1988; Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: World Pub., 1956, 1972 printing; Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Tavistock Publications, 1972; Donald Lyndon and Charles Moore, “Axes that Reach/Paths that Wander, in Chambers for a Memory Place. MIT Press, 1994; John Broomfield, Other Ways of Knowing, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions Press; M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

redemption shoes

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

gestures flung out

There is a street named Asja Lacis street, after her who, as engineer, cut through the author...

on redemption

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Postcard of the Crazy Water Hotel