clay

i'm searching for time. a certain hunt, a certain spectacle. Just enough time to settle into a thought.
to move it around, to discover something of hope...

thinking that if the world were right. i would have time enough to write.
and play with clay

that desire absolute, to find time to explore abandon.
and abandonment
and bindings...

pauses

I'm not quite sure what to make of the daily attempts at language, save that in the midst of worrying over class loads, I find myself thinking still about the cape of good hope. what is that but.

I am always surprised by that moment when space is cleared, and other goals start to take shape. So that with the advent of the ability to throw thin pots...I no longer set the goal of learning that skill on a saturday, and what is left is space to try out different kinds of thrown objects. Pitchers this week. When batts arrive, plates. cups. bowls. etc. that steady work towards functional this semester. but also, the skills that move beyond functional...

and when those are done?
or in that space of worry over africa. suddenly room. no longer that same thirty year old holding on. to something lost. and the room. the space. that wide expanse. i think i'm fascinated by the moments when our duties as people who must carry are revealed to us. what we are to carry, how we are to manage. that moment when we realize that the other's grief wasn't alleviated through whatever tactic, and now we will carry the marks of that loss. we will grieve too, for as long as is expected...or until we can untangle ourselves, find a way to carry our own grief. or....to move into that space without Mr. Ramsey. without his "we all perish each alone" grief roaming, seeking someone on which to hang. both Take this grief please. hold it for me. and hang. as in noose, as in let me die in your arms, you will need to watch my sorrow, you won't be able to do anything about it, but i will findi t somehow appropriate to make you watch...curious, no?

memory

my brother and I at what ages? three and six? standing in front of one of those vivid memories...the times i have remembered this shot, of a huge croc mouth, eating red red meat...and then these pictures, a certain proof of memory...

that somehow memory must be proved? That something of sanity comes in realism? if it existed, if memory is accurate? Then...then all is okay? as if accuracy is useful, except that how else to make sense of memory. did this happen? Did I really see a huge croc gobble down meat as an early memory? Why should it matter?

And yet, having returned to that place, the relief, the comfort of memory confirmed, of re-membering. even if that nebulous territory of identity can never include an african sense of self...there remains an african sense of self...

that which cannot be named.

i remain curious about memory disrupted; it means something of a disruption of a certain perspective on entitlement. at the moment at which, all that is familiar is lost, what remains?

what is written over?

maybe riches are lost, maybe wealth is gained, maybe the new landscape is much better, but how one interprets that new space, has much to do with how one perceives the break...that moment when reality fragments...

i think of those disruptions that happen in families--a father suddenly falls apart with a house burning to the ground, or a kid's reality shifts radically with parents divorcing, or something happens that marks a before and after moment. before this was...a sense of belonging that remained stable. After this was, a slow steady constrution of reality that would appear, again, to be stable?

how to make sense of those moments of disruption?

formative life events, some would call them...those moments when one realizes the ways in which safety is constructed...

if one travels to south africa, if one sees for the first time the kinds of poverty that are so apparent that one couldn't ignore them, and then one returns to the states and starts to see that poverty more clearly here, how might one struggle to make sense of a life, of what it means to live ethically?

is it worse for that life formative event to happen at older ages? In one's fifties? or in one's childhood? or at twenty something...

join the peace corps?

but memory. memory. that image of cape of good hope, of george's danger moment...of the irony of that name...cape of good danger...the wave rises, we watch the spray, the oblivious person out on the rock, the moment before, the moment after the spray/water washes over the rock, taking the tiny figure down. the gasps, the figure re-emerging, our relief. good hope..

still hoping

So today, in the registrar's office, a woman whose name is Memory.

Transported by the thought of another Memory.

People name their children this...my favorite name, i've concluded.

and making my way through old papers, trying to figure ways into research, and reading, again, this work on home, and these cocoons. That woman's work I discovered (how?) a few years back, those cocoons you could use in your office, or on a bus, to somehow block out reality...Jennie Penius
http://www.promisepark.com/D_cooc.htm

Thinking of ways to mark that home concept with the other article next to it on memory.

Thinking also that a great game might be to find five arbitrary articles, and take the topics of each, and figure a way to a paper. That challenge. Would that be good hope?

this good hope, still. still. If someone in my life were called good hope, and someone else were called memory, would it be enough? Good Hope and Memory found themselves looking around a restaurant for a table, one of those busy metro places, no chairs, nobody making a move to leave.

Memory turned to Good Hope, and asked, do you want to just forget lunch.

You know, the problem is...the temptations to use verbs like "forget" is too present...

good hope

so these are not just any rocks...but ones at the cape of good hope. good hope.

it seems a little much, no? over the top in language.
good hope?

yet as common as breathing to name that location. Does everyone know about the cape of good hope? sort of like knowing about the garden of the gods? or victoria falls. or

if you watch out my window, you will inevitably see ceramics people cycling by on the old lady bikes. To see these people, moving past, is always just a little entertaining for me. On their way to...

Jane, with her good posture, perched. or this one today...whose name i cannot remember...to ride a bike in character. perfect.
good hope.

coming back

i don't know how much, in what way, whether, to use this blog, but i think. i think. that it might be amusing. and in that spirit. I've decided to give it another shot...

The day's excitements are few...

trying to get ready to teach.

What i think today is that I want real possibilities for joy this year. and so...that reaction to South Africa, I think. It's not that South Africa is a panacea for joy. Just the opposite. but to somehow make room for joy. still such a viable necessity.

I was thinking about this moment with Lori, where we're looking at pics, and we come to one of the images of kids filling up water jugs that they will then try to carry home...and thinking...how difficult it is to find a way to make sense of a life that is not about trying to find water. How to live in the midst of the privilege, the entitlement...without turning into a person whose knee jerk response is to say...well, i have no right to complain because...

I want more complicated responses
including opportunities for laughter in the midst of horror.