notes

(from Jay Griffiths's article for Orion, The Sound of One Trickster Clapping):

"Motivated, like the Trickster, by powerful appetite, the winged media swoops on the odd, glinting incidental."

"but the boulevard of public life needs both Les Funambules and Le Grand Theatre, needs what in Latin is called altus, a word meaning both high and low: high as a man on wire, and also low, profound, deep as the spirit under the land."

"The tricksterish media needs to be heard against a backdrop of the older, slower voices of the pantheon: storytellers, artists, shamans, call them the poets for short--those who attend the deep voices of the body politic." 

"The academy is terrified of taking up a moral position as if that would undermine its authority; although arguably this abnegation is a corruption of its authority." 

"In Greek, truth is alethia where lethe means forgetting, as the souls of the dead drink to forget from the River of Lethe.  To tell the truth then is to be unforgetting, holding the past in present mind."

"There is a direct--inverse--relation between environmental devastation and the respect given to the voice of the shaman-poet.  When either one is in ascendance, the other will be in decline, which is why that voice has never been more ignored, never more reviled, and never more needed than now." 

link to the article: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4944/

some notes from the week:

A. drinking an entire bottle of wine and a 40oz b/c she wanted to be drunk when she saw S.  Depressed that he spends all his day time with another girl, his best friend, and only wants to see her (A) at night, 1/2 hour before his bed time.

Alumni in the quiet room of the library with her two sons.  Telling them about how smart their mama is.  Now she is a housewife, but she was the first person to achieve honors in economics at Whitman in three years.

A sad separation between Noah and I.  Sad because we spent so much of our (short) time together talking about how we didn't want to perpetuate old, destructive habits.  We had a lot of hope for this, but maybe history is inescapable.  Is it?  I, the motivational half, kept insisting on agency, then did the same things I did two years ago to L. 

 ("To tell the truth then is to be unforgetting, holding the past in present mind.")

We're still trying to figure out if people can change.  Yes they can, but can two people change together?  Do they have to be exactly the right kinds of people (together) in exactly the right circumstances?  Is that thought just another fall-back on fate? 

--first venture in the direction of campus since we spoke & somehow ran into him. awkward.  rainy, he on the phone, I, unsure of whether to keep walking or wait in case he wanted to get under my umbrella. he crossed to the other side of the street. 

The worst part is that we talked about God as much as we did (& is God just an excuse to run after white rabbits?)

I miss Austin and not feeling claustrophobic.