Winter is hard for several reasons but one is that you can't pet the cat without her fur matting down and sending electric shocks something awful.

It sneaks up on you. Today, for example, it was bright and clear and crisp as anything and I thanked God to be alive and able-bodied as I raced my bike out the driveway and down Wellington. But tonight I am in the pit. You are in the pit so deep and fighting hard but then I guess you realize that you're here because it's February. And things won't get better til late March, probably, when Spring comes with a warm wind stirring up and you can smell things outside again other than just cold and frozen-nose. You can smell things again like mostly melting snow and road gravel, wind (this is biking at night with bright white street lamps, feeling my handlebars without mitts on for the first time in a while). 

 

Sam Ripat slicing up cheese so little

 One of the things I will think about and probably talk about on my death bed, when I have dementia, and remember nothing else, is Sam Ripat slicing up cheese with a Swiss-Army knife so fine, trying to make shredded cheese without a cheese grater, that one time, camping. I would have been 16. When that comes into my mind like it did just now--cutting up cheese finely for my pita lunch--it comes from a place beyond memory, not just something I remember but something I know.

What I remember about that camping trip, also, is a few things. I think we might have gone to that same site for two years so I might be conflating the memories. I remember a plastic jug of white wine I would throw so high in the air at night we were dancing around and try to catch it. Mostly empty the contents getting all frothy from the motion. I remember some people trying weed for the first time from Sam Ripat's joint and we have a picture of that too, somewhere, on my colour film I think. There's also a picture from Ionas camera I took of myself with the flash on, shirtless, on the dock, being funny I guess, and I remember looking at it a few years ago and noticing that I didn't used to have chest achne which I thought I always had and still have now. Theres also pretty b&w photos I took of us walking around at evening time in high grass near the lake, but those must have been from the other year.

I remember trying to sleep with Anil on a inflatable double mattress, one of those huge thick ones not a camping one, in the centre of our big tent and it deflated. The next year we brought camping mattresses but I was meant to bring one for Sunny and I forgot and we got some pillows and stuff to sleep on at the MCC so Sunny could have my mattress. I remember one time, probably the first year, having some drawn out languid sexual thing with Anil one night and emerging from the tent to the circle of our friends embarrassed, I guess, but not enough to refrain from saying something about "sexy time" in apology, somehow to Lena, who was understanding, but that phrase has also stuck with me, though I hope to have forgotten it by the time I am on my deathbed.

on the dominion of man over nature and loving my cat

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26)

 

    Recognizing the disgusting hubris of humanity in pillaging the globe—abusing and killing animals, levelling forests, polluting waterbodies—we conclude that this has been allowed by a misconception that humans have dominion over nature, when in reality we are part of nature: just animals, like horses or mice or birds, and not superior to them but maybe even inferior; for our stupidity and failure to live in harmony. People do a lot of meditation trying to unlearn our perceived separation from nature. 

    Nonetheless we are separated from nature--inexorably so--because we have the potential to love it. Nature cannot love us, but we can love nature. My cat cannot love me. This is a one-way street. God gave us dominion over the world not to abuse it but to love it. As if “dominion” meant you can do whatever you want, free of responsibility! Precisely the opposite: dominion entails responsibility, as the dominion of a father or mother over their child. 

    What else could God have said? There is no other way. There is only one thing to do with the world (love it) and everything else leads to destruction. It was precisely in giving us dominion over nature that God told us to love and protect it.

November 23 list

1.  So many years spent on the edge of giving up

2.  Pastels again out the window. 

     A web of branches, angled winter sunlight, stripped paint, getting dark now.

     Our world is dying and it is incredibly beautiful.

     Our only responsibility is to care for and attend to and love it, and to love each other

3. 

4.   Youth is a precipice because you really don’t know, as a 16 year old, if you’re going to survive this life. And everything you do and experience is evidence for and to the contrary of this supposition; small things take on great weight. So the metaphor of a bird leaving the nest really makes sense: you are 18 and are on your decent downward towards the ground, having just jumped out the the nest, and you need to figure out how to fly before you hit the ground and die. Well into your 20s, you start to feel yourself flying and gliding along. But the stakes are real high when you’re young and on a precipice. 

 

5.  This black bread they have in Estonia, and specifically the one grocery store I would go to, where I got mint for Andrew and the face creme I still use, though it is almost out. This black bread they have in Estonia.

 

 

 

 

Eating an orange for breakfast is always romantic. I had a toasted bun with honey on one side and jam on the other, and coffee, and then my oatmeal. I took my time and looked at the bare, clean apartment and the dull gold light on the walls. I listened to Up in Wolves; I had  awoke with it in my head, clear and musical (that lyric guitar melody). I made it to class on time, despite my leisurely morning.

Youth is a glaze of beauty and romance. Aging brings you in contact with reality, unglazed. This is good because reality is truthful and the beginning of love and the fear of God, but tragic because you feel disqualified from romance and beauty. Your experience of beauty & romance is partly extrinsic. I experience my sublime breakfast through an imagined spectator. If I am not beautiful, that spectator turns away, and I’m left with the bare facts of my existence: the actual foods I’m eating, what I am planning on doing today, what I am worth.

Winter in Winnipeg

 

Winter in Winnipeg

Walter J. Philips 

Stayed with my great uncle in Saskatoon once and he brought me to a church supper. Actually he had been asked to volunteer and he brought me as surrogate: he was sitting there at the table smiling and watching us work. Sometimes he would make a distasteful or confusing joke.

So I was opening cans of tomatoes, and the pastor was Italian and he was telling us how he needs to get his tomatoes from Edmonton, these San Marzano canned tomatoes are the best and you can't get them in Saskatoon or Regina. My uncle would call him "an aye-tal-ion", really emphasizing the I sound.

There were other young adults there and one lady was a butler. That's what I remember, that she was a butler, and she told us about being a butler, like that, these days, butlers work for multiple masters. And she had a special butler Blackberry that was never on silent. 

 

clear air autumn walk

hit in the face by a leaf 

dichotomy poem

 

September 2 Poem

I want another cookie 

I am reminding myself that there'll be a new heaven and a new earth where everything is reconciled

No more longing

$4.95 Starbucks cookie

 

Was pretty good though

Minor taste of preservative

Also ate a tuna sandwich and a Fresco slice and other things

today (turkey club sandwich, )

 

Staring Contest

 

July 3 Poem

 

 

 

Kissing sits heavy in my mouth
Here alone in my room

My insides all still
Sitting here bent over

Light leaving the pale blue dusk
It is darkening, making grey

And pocked with dark leaves

Out the window

Ghosts

I processed some ancient film that I found at a flea market, but to no avail. Some interesting textures, mostly blank, no images. This film was probably from the 1960s, and it was sold to me all rolled up, exposed but never processed.

 

Looking at these scans, years later, I saw two ghosts emerge from the chemical marks and scratches in this frame:

 

 

 

Enlarged slightly...a woman and man stand side by side in the centre of the frame.

 

Tina Modotti on the Riverbank

Found somone's dissertation on Tina Modotti frozen into the mud on the riverbank, open to this page.

A photograph: printed, forgotten, discovered, printed again and studied, forgotten again, multiplied across pages and digital images, and a book is printed and forgotten and loses its original purpose.

 

At moments of danger, Benjamin argues, earlier generations alert us to the mistake that we are on the verge of making through an image that bursts out of the continuum of time and travels toward us. 

Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, page 12.

A picture flying through time and through different contexts, but never losing its essential being, greets me, startlingly, as I bike through a big ice puddle near the river bank.

 

Where the painting remained in the possession of a particular family, now and then someone would ask about the person portrayed. But after two or three generations this interest fades; the pictures, if they last, do so only as testimony to the art of the painter. With photography, however, we encounter something new and strange [...] something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in " art. "

Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography, page 510.

They do so because we are in a position to "change the character" of their "day." If we recognize the present in this image from the past, and also understand that it is "intended" for us, we will redeem both the past and the present. At the moment in which this redemption occurs, which Benjamin calls "Jetztzeit" or "now-time," "what is" because co-present with "what was."

Silverman, continued from quote above.

--

 

 

 

 

 

Laid in hay surrounded by bright aspen trunks

     Laid in hay surrounded by bright aspen trunks glowing from the sideways late afternoon-into-evening sun of May time. Some clouds, too, but none obstructing the sun.
    Bright aspen trunks and black bare branches silhouetting against the blue and cloud. Golden hay coming up all blurry in the foreground of my vision (my head is on the ground).
    My head is on the ground looking at Mia’s hand coming up with the rest of the grass and the same golden colour. Disappearing into the straw except for her silver rings. And that it was moving and stroking some straw, the way one would when they are absorbed in their own thoughts and not thinking about me: the silence bringing us into intimacy finally.

bottlecap.berlin

 

From Warshauer Strasse to Alexanderplatz.

News (December 16)

B r e a k f a s t

I ate voraciously this morning and I felt lonely.  I ate dinner rolls toasted crisp and buttered, with peanut butter or with honey or just left plain, and perfect over easy eggs—my best yet—fried thick and bubbled in butter on a cast iron pan. I had that feeling of overwhelming pleasure in my mouth biting into one egg as the liquid yolk filled my mouth, I drank coffee with hot chocolate powder in it because we have no milk, one cup, and another black, and I ate two clementine oranges afterwards. They were sweet but also tart and full. Today is the first time I’ve truly enjoyed black coffee.

W e a t h e r

The cold now is the pleasant kind which you can derive pleasure from shoring yourself up against, using down-filled coats and long-johns. The air is clear and refreshing and it strikes you unexpectedly, creating the desire to take a walk.

S o n g s

Tournament of Hearts (Weakerthans)
So Much Wine, Merry Christmas (Andrew Bird)
No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross (Sufjan Stevens)

 

 

Report on the Birds