28 December

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
-Billy Collins, On Turning Ten

Incongruous I

Holidays, among other things, never fail to remind me why small towns depress me. It is the terrible abundance of tennis shoes, of muss-haired mothers, and of bark-- and the bark colored brick-- and the brick colored sky-- one horrid mound of nondescriptness, of brown. I do not like this nondescriptness because from it I was birthed and from it I flee. Uncle D sells pottery and is very wealthy; he wears cordouroy shirts that smell vaguely of clay dust and mint. Small towns remind me what I ought to have been, and, worse, what I could still mend and become: arriving my tight-waxed blue Nissan into an Edgarsburg or Adamsville, stopping and living and dying there, wearing Carhartt rubber boots and drawling about pottery sales. Small towns remind me of how instead I am flushed and rather fidgety in my white JCrew cardigan, dead broke, rather fragile and classically pretty, my main gig being how I am semifluent in French and Shakespearean English. Uncle D speaks in dollars, and in dirt. B, my cousin, eyes me as though I am a corn sample. On the back porch when the stars prick out white against the clearness he looks at me and says, "I mean, I'd offer you a joint, but, I mean, you know--"

14 december

whoa now.

Love Sonnet #3

I shall not curse the star on which the sky
Leans resolutely: no, nor shall I bow
To any other star of blue or white
With love-penned constellations on its brow.

Celestial point, you, Love of stone and glass
To which I, planets, stars revolve in spires:
Light without which the sky unpins; a Mass
In which the Priest is burned with holy fire.

I, You, cannot forever intercept
Each bolt from an ungracious silver sky:
I know. We place our tangled silhouettes
In tandem, Love in spite of Stain and Sight.

Press palm to palm, and I will hold you till
The lights extinguish from your own black hill.

Love Sonnet #2

Having birthed a child of substance, not of
Water; having loosened the interminable weight;
I must swallow Self to tend my infant fire.
Creation kneels its forehead to my fate.

No planetary love of moon and sun
Could carve from ash of Selves what we have carved:
Cleaved things now sautered, severedness made one;
Love sharpened by and sharpening the stars,

Contained in arms, and noses, and in knees
A beauty to whom, surely, is akin
The bee that swarms and kindly never stings:
Eternity in skin, and skin, and skin.

I fear that it shall feed and flourish, sire,
Till I hold nothing unfed by that fire.

Catharsis

In planetary weakness I've forsaken
My body to the whiteness of the moon:
Have blackened what, in willful adoration,
So struck its heel with love's ungracious tune.

And gaily, having birthed a child of water,
Having loosened it's interminable weight,
I crush the head of love, of erring fathers,
And sacrifice my body unto Fate.

8 December

relationships are straight up hard. all of them.

Für Mein Trommler

you are paper-thin lightning
a sweet liquid baritone

the fluid pinging of a harp.

you are the sweet-smelling juice dribbling
down children's chins from the pulp of a skinned

peach.

you are fragile, a marzipan Eros
whose warmth i cradle in the curve of my spine;

great Greek confection surveying
with affably lung-numbing eyes from
the backs of my eyelids.

you are edgeless, my lone
luckless hazel-eyes, edgeless

and i am the sea in which
space leans on space and collapses,
introuvable.

(fragile) and this is the fear:
to build not an edgeless eternity
but one faceless and underfed

star which bangs out its fizzling
on a moonless celing;
that we shall wake, as dreamers do,

to obscenities scrawled black
across the sun.

(love, and love! cry Eden's
exiled children: love;
j'avais mon coup de foudre et
the heavens collapse with a slow roar.)

your armor is clean and undented.

no, no, no, no
you can't handle me.

4 december

update:
a. God
b. college
c. girls suck
d. puppy love.

1 Dec.

God is in control; I am not in control. God is in control; I am not in control. By sacrificing my control and putting Him in charge of my life I experience a death of sorts, but certainly a justifiable death; I am a superemly ineffective ruler. God is in control; I am not in control. Help me, God, to keep my sight that way.

29 November (Tartuffe infects me with verse.)

Perhaps demented, perhaps mad I am
To such disdain my own Heaven-dealt hand
For something of a nature still unknown:
To anchor myself to another throne.
What shall one have to martyr to possess
The vague promise of future happiness--?
And yet, it cannot be contained or yielded.
It is I who must yield, who must be melded:
If this is madness, then let madness reign;
I'll sacrifice myself to bear its name.

28 1/2 November

I keep learning things. I am never who I think I am, or have become.

Against my will, in incongruous bits of paternal DNA, I Am:
Goal-Oriented; Calculating

I Like:
Security (but not suffocation); Independence; Plans

I woke up Friday night in this incalculable panic about the future. (Too much of my family+ forced food+ college arguments+ unfamiliar beds= stress= Duck Family Holiday Hell.) So, on my phone's notepad, I wrote out a vague and rather unromantically numerical plan. As Fitzgerald said, "It was the first awkward move that she had ever made." (Awkward, no, but "unfighting against a strange attraction to order", yes. And, "non-diametrically-opposed to Father's way of organizing by logic and reason and unfluff,", yes.)

So here's the plan:
1. Go to college. (Cov.? Belm.?);
2. Law School?;
3. Marry mein Trommler or someone rather like him;
4. Pay school debt (inevitable unless I go to Lee, and that I refuse);
5. Kids.

How sterile that all seems; how cold! And yet.... it is calming. Yes.

27 November

I have often said: "It is odd, is it not", when really what I meant to say was, "Truly, it is not odd at all." Today, in this light, I shall say:

Truly, it is not odd at all that I have developed such a manic independence. Something in my lungs began at a whisper and swivelled sharp like from the barrel of a revolver, first parenthetical and then emphatic, growing, (Iwantout), Iwantout, I want out! I want out outoutout OUT OUTOUTOUT OUT

So you see, it is not so very odd as I first imagined. It is not so very odd that I should pick an Idiom, an Outside Idiom, farfarfar from anything related to this idiom, to my father and to his idiom, and cleave to that idiom as if to my own independence. For in that idiom lies my independence. And all other idioms, the idioms of Hixson/ Baptists/ Engineering, how I shun it and all its partisans! For to me it represents every conglomerated bit of whowhat I'm running from. A father. How idiotic; how perverse!-- and yet: this is whowhat I am, this is whowhat I will always be running from. And so I have picked my idiom, my quick-becoming self, the future that I will and must inhabit; a happiness I can be assured of apart from the perennial oppression of malignancy, unservitude, unlove; and this, my choice, born from a love. How wonderful to see a future unfold like chrysanthemums, to witness the existance of both love and unlove, universal self which is axis to both; to choose love and sacrifice a million untread futures for its sake; to feel the ebullient pull of incoherant sureness. How relevant to have something to be running towards.

28 November

A half-blind and a paralytic; God bless our little love.

It's good to be back home.

Song for the Drummer Boy

Oh, gold-struck,
shot-put,
struck unhidden, shyshamesilent in
the sudden obtrusive
ambiguity of
needneedneedneedneedneedneed

want.

Echo & Narcissus

There was, above Caanan,
a lot to be cast:
Ineffable left-or-right, right-or-left
Above God's green ocean and
Humanity's quicksilver sea.
Left-or-right, right-or-left,
Infinite vivisections of Self.

Shall I stomp on the foot of my song?
Shall I strangle--?

Love mirrors Life mirrors Art mirrors--
Infinite refractions of Self receding
Into an infinite and planetary blue.
Sieves sift sieves; no light catches
In Humanity's silver forest.

It is no longer a question of salvation,
And the question no longer shall we
But where, and when, and wherefore shall we dance?
Shall I dance Providence in oceans,
On infinite inferior idioms?
Or shall I dance in favor of my beauty,
Senseless, Senseless

21 November

I can't sing or write today; my brain is clogged up and my body has finally capitulated to sickness. But here I am, surviving.

Autobiography (for AP Eng.... prepare for length)

Section I.

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?”

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet is based on the following two motifs: “Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!” (Must it be? It must be! It must be!) To make the meaning of the words absolutely clear, Beethoven introduced the movement with a phrase, “Der schwer gefasste Entshluss,” which is commonly translated as ‘the difficult resolution.’…

“We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

“Tomas often thought of Tereza’s remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not “Es muss sein!” (it must be so) but rather “Es konte auch anders sein” (it could just as well be otherwise.)…

“(The symmetrical composition evidenced in the novel Anna Karenina)—the same motif begins at the beginning and the end—may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive”, “fabricated”, and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic”. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

“They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life… Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Must it be so? Or could it just as well be otherwise? I would like to think that it could be otherwise; that there is invested in me the power to self-rearrange. This is my motif, my Es muss sein!: Otherness, and a constant need for growth, for rearrangement. It touches every stanza of my life’s composition. What is Theater but the juxtaposition of myself into other people’s lives? Why do I push myself into success, into the inevitable distastefulness of work upon work, if not to procure for myself a new future, a better future, one dreamed up from and grounded upon my fascination with Otherness?

Upon discovering that one is unsatisfied with one’s childhood, there are two possible responses: bitterness, which births a future-devouring pessimism; or a present-eating Hope which both contents and abolishes all possibility of immediate contentment. (I did not choose hope, but rather through the generosity of Christ it was thrust upon me.) An inexplicable sea of in/justifiability and un/love drove me to this point of independence in which I must form my future from the mottled pieces of my past. Adolescence is, perhaps, a self-sanctifying time; its one great purpose is the creation and desecration of Edicts, of an army of militant Es muss sein!’s.

Section II.

“…I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now- six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”

-Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

From My Mother: I have inherited the sharp-toothed curse of loving. I do not only love but am explicitly/ almost religiously loved. I am not a Junior or The-Third but, upon my arrival, joined my mother and my grandmother in a three-generation clump of women whose lot is by birth to fail and be failed by men. From my mother I have learned the love that must temper independence (that there is need of independence, of never giving oneself fully away, nun-tending the important parts in secrecy); and that the love born from/despite this independence is a fierce and indomitable love indeed.

From My Father: I have inherited the singular cankering knowledge that there is one way that is better than the others; that there is and will always be in me an Es muss sein!, and that there is nothing more important than that edict. From my father I have learned that pain love loyalty reality are nebulous, that only the corporeal is real; that there is love and there is unlove, and an infinite expanse of grey that stretches in between. My Father is the grandfather of my Es muss sein! (and therefore my “Es konte auch anders sein”), for from his Es muss sein! mine was born; from his Edict, mine was shaped as a negative. Two such Edicts, our conflicting Es muss sein!’s cannot simultaneously exist. I am so young, and he is growing old: these disparate facts should make us both individuals who are deserving of our dreams, but this is not a possibility. Our Es muss sein!’s cannot exist at the same time.

From Cancer-That-Eats-At-The-Bones: I have inherited familiarity with the fragility of existence. Osteosarcoma is the grandmother of my fragility: it has taught me, through my mother, that there is no guarantee of existence (no matter how vital the existence.) From my mother’s cancer I have inherited perseverance, and sacrifice-for-love; I have watched the martyrdom of chemo-drugs chug through the veins of someone for survival, for love of me. (I have learned, it seems, that sacrifice means love. And living is often its own sacrifice—ergo living often means love.)

Section III.

Thesis of Religion: I have been Agnostic and Anorexic but never an Atheist. God is stronger than I; He is stronger even than my Es muss sein!s.

“But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.”

-Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

“All at once I understood that it had only been my illusion that we ourselves saddle events and control their course; the truth is that they aren’t our stories at all, they are foisted on us from somewhere outside; that in no way do they represent us; that we are not to blame for the strange paths they follow; that they are themselves directed from who knows where by who knows what strange forces.”

-Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

Oh, the glories that the Lord has made

And the complications when I see His face

In the morning at the window.

Oh, the glory when He took our place

But He took my shoulders and He shook my face

And He takes, and He takes, and He takes.

-Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day

I cannot bring myself to regret anything for which at some moment it could be said that it was exactly what I wanted. The regrettable things are the things that occurred to me mindlessly—things that I did not even want. In this sense, I must consider the vague, pre-formative years of my faith a regrettable loss; for the interminable apathy was something that I did not want. But although many years of potential faith were lost, I cannot find my formative years entirely regrettable. In them God was preparing a nest in my heart for my infant faith to grow; and even using apathetic, unsuspecting Me to further His glory.

Although I grew up as a good Baptist—attending sermons twice a week; singing the Special Music in the church service every fifth Sunday; attending a solid Christian school—for fifteen years of my life, I did not love God. Neither did I trust Him—I had never needed Him, and He had never been made to “prove Himself”. For the first fifteen years of my life, God was to me like an expendable limb: He existed, in a vague, disposable way; but always in conjunction with me. My naïveté was actually a primitive form of narcissism.

Even when, at age fifteen, my world shattered—when my mother, my muse and my source of perennial unconditional love, was diagnosed with terminal metastatic bone cancer—I did not think of God. I raised my fists at myself, and at Humanity; but I did not run to Him, and I did not even doubt Him. When, after copious amounts of prayer poured forth from the community, my mother doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled her projected death date: I did not thank Him. When the holes in her bones began to fill, and, finally, eventually, she was proclaimed “stable”, a veritable miracle of God—I made public proclamations of God’s grace; I sang empty praises to the Heavens: but I did not love Him, and I certainly did not trust Him. God had not become an entity to me; He was still an adjective: still an expendable limb.

I am a strong believer in God’s tendency to use unorthodox methods to draw us into His love. I have nurtured a lifelong love of literature; and, ironically, it was Salman Rushdie, an atheist with a strong Islamic upbringing, who God used to open my eyes to my lack of love for Him. In Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, the narrator (An enigmatic Spaniard called, throughout, The Moor) says of his mother:

“Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us and our passive acceptance of our slavery that we mistook for love?”

I realized, then, that this was indeed an Es muss sein!: Stockholm Syndrome. Dominance, a sham, parading around as love. I felt exactly that way about God. In all my years of “worship”, of service and false righteousness, the only thing that was binding me to God was habit. And habit, I discovered, is a supremely ineffective basis for relationship. I realized that I did not know God at all—that, in fact, I would not even know where to find Him. For a year of my life I floundered, experimenting with humanism, transcendentalism, and finally Judaism (the call of my culture is much too strong—in the end, for a short time at least, one always capitulates to one’s culture.). I spent an entire year of my life as an unhappy, narcissistic Jew. In the end, though, God was too strong for me (alas, one finds that He always is.)

I discovered that the fantastic thing about God is that it is impossible to find Him—but we are not expected to do any such thing on our own. Throughout my sophomore year of high school, God gently began to open my heart to Him. As fissures began to open in my reserve, He filled them with His infinite creation and the indomitableness of His love. He showed me the miracle of my mother’s recovery, and how He had used even our suffering for His glory; He showed me the perennial, surprising perfectness of His will, and the blissful security that is the natural product of trust. He placed mentors in my life, both local and literary; fellow followers of Christ who encouraged me to grow in relationship with God. And I found, surprisingly, that as His will began to eclipse mine, I began to fall in love with Him. I found myself living under an inexplicable joy—the joy only possible in conjunction with peace, and the certainty of being loved.

My conversion to Christianity did not occur in the wake of any divine thundercloud— I was not burnt into the ground and re-created—but rather, God used my circumstances and the inherent biases and characteristics that they produced to bring my heart gently into His glory. In this sense, I cannot bring myself to regret any of my struggles—for in them, God was softening my heart towards His love, and, more importantly, He was being glorified. My God is a God who does not coerce; but rather, he patiently woos. Although I certainly cannot declare myself perfectly rehabilitated into God, I can proudly declaim that I dwell in Christ, and that Christ dwells in me. The relationship between God and His children is beautiful: His provisions are immense; He fills us with His strength and love, and His joy—and in response to His glory, we cannot help but worship Him. I am constantly amazed by the opportunities He presents to us—according to His word, everything that we do is an opportunity to praise Him. So whether I am singing in Choral Ensemble or mentoring a freshman in the musical—whether, even, I am eating or drinking—I am given the opportunity to worship God. And this, I am learning, is the most important thing that I can do—for, as a child of God and a co-heir with Christ, my life is a monument to the love and the glory of God.

Section IV.

“Love knows not of death, nor Calculus.”

-Sylvia Plath

(Sylvia Plath seems to arrow my core so truthfully on love. This frightens me, because love was her fatal flaw: she committed suicide by placing her head in a gas oven. This, however, is not in my future. J)

"Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my father and all the fathers I have known who have wanted me to be what I have not felt like really being from my heart and at the society which seems to want us to be what we do not want to be from our hearts: I am angry at these people and images.”

-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So what does she know about love? Nothing. You should have it. You should get it. It’s nice. But what is it?”

-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

It is an often-stated statistic that the Eskimos have over 100 words for snow. This is because snow is important to them, an intimately integrated part of their existence. (I think language is a fascinating because it is the mirror of culture: it reflects and refracts the people who partake of it.) The Czechs, for example, are great connoisseurs of tragedy: the Czech language contains the word litost, a reference to the sudden misery experienced at the sight of one’s own suffering. The French, Greek and Spanish have no less than four words for love, while the English have one. Should this warn us something about our culture? Are we lagging in our giving and consumption of love?

Finding my own language lacking, I shall revert (as I do in distress) into French.

1. Enchanté: To be enchanted by an object, particularly a person. This is vague, fizzy, ebullient love: as the French would say, in a quite workable homonym, “Les Boules!” (“The bubbles”: also an expression of frustration.)

“I am very simple to enchant.”

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

I cannot possibly count the times that I have been enchanted. I start with this type of love because it is probably the least meaningful, and certainly the least important. (I am not even going to go into any of my high-school-boy relationships, because they have done very little to influence my beliefs and who I have become.)

2. Aimer: To like, to be liked. This is an attachment completely unrelated to beauty and anything other than substance. (As the Greeks would say, this is Philia: brotherly love.)

I have had some really fantastic friends. Also, we have, in general, been rather underdeveloped in the Cool department. (One of my fondest middle-school memories is being pulled by Anna Shay up and down the high school hallways on my rolling backpack….) I’ve always found it interesting how as we bloat and shrink and shape-shift as humans, our friendships tighten or grow thin as well: some irreparably grow, some disintegrate altogether. I have watched elementary and middle school friends grow into math-nerds and pot-smokers and musical-theater-fanatics; and as I became the latter myself, new friendships bloomed into my life. To be vague, new and pertinent relationships never fail to grow from the dust of burnt or dying ones.

The verb aimer is singular in the flexibility of its application to concepts and objects as well as people. The CCS musicals have been a perennial application of both senses of the word. Musicals are unique in that they involve three of my four favorite things (Midsummer, heavily literary, actually involved all four): singing, dancing, and people. Although I spent The Wizard of Oz in near-perpetual terror of the rambunctious upperclassmen leads, I also spent it in a corset, a wig and a wedding dress; it was the show that made me fall in love with high-school musical theater. Being thrust into the bizarre world of lead rehearsals—me, the tiny quiet sophomore, watching the likes of Jacob Corbett, Alyssa Harrell, John Drexler, Michael Johnson and Jacob Davis making witty comments and climbing all over each other—was frightening to say the least. It did, however, force me to reevaluate my introversion, and to slip my skin inside out, learning to bare parts of my insides to the outside world.

Crazy for You was equally fabulous (although WORLDS less intimidating), but I still harbored a mild, inexplicable fear of much of the cast. Fear is, oxymoronically, a frightening thing; it is indeed a cycle: fear breeds fear. Fear causes one to build impermanent personality structures, temporary refuges/personalites in which to hide while dealing with the greater and more frightening issues of the heart and the home. I am beginning to sound as though I experienced CFY from the outside of a film, that I was, as it were, once-removed; this is supremely untrue. The musical never fails to engulf me completely, and Polly Baker is certainly no exception (how often do I get to so completely morph my personality? How supremely cathartic! Would Alyssa ever stage-kiss Michael or Jacob; would she, each within ten minutes of the others, slap three boys on the face; would she break spontaneously into choreographed music and tap dance? [All right; I’ll have to admit to my penchant for that last one.])

Fiddler was unique in that I was no longer given the luxury of intimidation. Rather ironically, I found that I was the one that others were intimidated by! A friend recently told me that after the first lead rehearsal, darling freshman Megan Wingard (who played Shprintze, one of my little sisters) thought that I was the most intimidating member of the cast! And she was not singular in this intimidation! This absolutely blew my mind. (This is when I realized the absolute absurdity of intimidation, because I found myself simultaneously intimidated by many of those who were intimidated of me! At this point, intimidation becomes meaningless, an empty coagulation of syllables.) When we began work in July, I kept getting this weird numbness in my stomach—what felt so different this year? What was out of place? And it was, of course, that all of my role-models had graduated; now it was my turn. (There is also an interesting blankness left by the absence of intimidation; almost as if there is nothing more to conquer, nothing to work towards.) This was the year in which the most and deepest relationships were made. While my first two high school musicals were spent in self-discovery, sending roots inward, Fiddler was about sending roots outward, and learning to love others.

This year I have realized how large a role that intimidation has played in all of my relationships: it has been like a sea-wall, protecting me from both rejection and from love. Mostly, though, I think that it has served to protect me from the better attributes of myself. It took me a long time to realize that I was an even remotely likable person; even this is frightening: for when one is likable, one must not cease to be so; one must strive toward betterment, always towards betterment. I think that one of those strange turning-points in my self-image was when darling sophomore Matt Foreman expressed surprise that I had talked to him, “since, I mean, you’re Alyssa Duck.” What? The first thing I said in response was, “What does that mean? Who is this Alyssa Duck?” (And, really, do I know her?) Is that me—Alyssa Duck? Or am I someone gravely different? Am I actually so terribly grandwittybeautifulbubblymagnanimous? Is this one of my Es muss sein!s: to inhabit a personality which is only vaguely mine? Or is the imperative only the fear?

3. Adorer: To “adore”. This is a term of extremely consequential love, generally reserved for the relationship between an individual and God or his/her spouse.

I think that I can safely claim that I have never been married, but I have certainly adored both my God and my Mother. These are my two sources of unbelievable unwarranted unconditional love. I am learning to love unconditionally; this is a radical change from the love which I was brought up receiving. For when one discovers unconditional love (really, when one discovers that one is loved unconditionally), it is foremost a frightening thing: and it is a frustrating thing. Often one wishes that one had never discovered the unconditional love to begin with, because in its shadow, average love pales into inconsequence. Humans are wired to give conditional love; it is the love most immediately beneficial to our agendas and our egos. Unfortunately, however, this is the kind of love that we are neither called to nor made for. The defining factor of unconditional love is that upon discovering its existence, it is interminably craved; there is a new-planted desire to obtain it and to create it inside oneself.

Section V.

“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Je deviens; toujours je deveins.

(from the French. Translation: “I become; always I become.”)

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

It is one of humanity’s most valuable attributes that we never cease to become. This, perhaps, along with the low-hanging axe of conditional love, has birthed my perpetual fear of stagnation. Change—I am a great lover of change; how is this compatible with the perennial solidness of my Es muss sein!s? In fact, how do the contradictions stand in harmony with themselves: insuperable lust for freedom stands immobile against an always-longing for protection? (Humans are, however, their own contradiction; perhaps this is why we are so fascinating.) It is my edict, my Es muss sein!, to become and never cease to become; to always be growing, sprouting new leaves and chiseling away at the dead bits. Once one has ceased simply to dream and has begun to live, one realizes life’s difficulty, and that quite often it is not all that it’s cracked up to be; but quite often, life proves itself to be insurmountably beautiful. Bar motifs, bar literary quotes and German phrases, life comes down to beauty and its acceptance. Life comes down to forgiving the world, humanity for its contradictory beauty and self-desecration, and the decision to live, despite this, in love.

To quote (for the last time) my beloved Plath: “...If this is life, half heard, glimpsed, smelled... let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand.” This is what it is; love mirrors life mirrors art; it’s all interconnected. And it is what we have. This is, oxymoronically, my final, universal Es muss sein!: life itself. Past, future and a million intricate correlated presents; daily crucifixions; Der schwer gefasste Entshluss’s, difficult resolutions ; beautiful, necessary, strange and impossible life.

Notes/Quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

They've wept over it and grown used to it. Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

He sank into thought.

"And what if I'm wrong?" he cried suddenly. "What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-- then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

-pg 27

"What's the most offensive is not their lying-- one can always forgive lying-- lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth-- what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying..."

-Razumihin, pg 137

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

- Razumihin, pg 203

Isn't it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything?

-Raskolnikov, pg 321

(in progress)

title: Existentialism OR Echo&Narcissus

love mirrors life mirrors art

mirrors-- Self?

infinite refractions of self receding

into an infinite and planetary blue?

Sieves sift sieves; no light

catches in Humanity's silver forest.

Situational Irony

if i love you (which i, indeed, do

not) it is only corporeal love.

(i do not love

your stainlessness; your blue

indiscriminate warmth)

if I love you (which, emphatically,

I don't) it is not with the love of

presence, but

with the hate of absence:

love that does not Echo from

the hollows of non-being, love

if I love you (which, surely, I

recant) it is the love of the nose

to the elbow. O certainty of

Otherness, O infinite proximitude

of spaces (you are a virgin/I am not a god).

if I love you (which is, n'est-ce pas,

absurd) it is with the love of the port

for the boat on the shore:

the rowboat sparking warm and yellow

in the superfluous coolness of morning.

process.

something about echo and narcissus? something greek, decidedly

------------> beautiful/destructive simultaneously (? or maybe beautiful/ebullient or placid)

stanza

stanza

stanza

i am publishing this prematurely for you, matt foreman

----------->allusion to Song by Adrienne Rich

if I love you (which I do

not) it is with the love of the port

for the boat on the shore,

the rowboat sparking yellow and warm

into the superfluous coolness

of morning.

Varanasi

God watches from a clean and

Well-lit heaven over India.

Daughters, Sons of Ganges

Drink the waters of their Mother,

Clot her shores with blackened feet,

With ash of former generations.

Now, a man is washing

Garments at the River:

Beating clean a rumpled cloth

Against a stone waxed trim and

Holy by the waters of his Mother.

Shout, sing, beloved country,

For the men, the wars within you:

Cry for brothers (mirrored brothers)

Raising fists along your shores.

Cry for children upon children

Poured into their Mother's store.

Lips Cheeks Knees Foreheads meet

Earth at the Ganges, and

God watches from a clean and

Well-lit heaven over India.

Now, a man is washing

Garments at the River:

Sing, Shout beloved country:

Sab Thiik Nahi hai.

Beating clean a rumpled cloth

Against a stone waxed trim and

Holy by the waters

Of his Mother.

On another Holy morning

Men of ash rise from the River

To beat clean upon the rocks

Not cloth, but God:

And find that they,

Not cloth, Not God,

Are clean.

Ishmael

Fathered by Our Father

And we ourselves great Fathers:

I born of the Moon,
And he of the Sun:

Eloah following Allah.

Planetary blood is shed

And wrists take root in heels.

The sword is dropped

Between celestial brothers

(The sober and ebullient,

Both to father wild men:

Mirroring and mirrored by the other,

By the birth of an enemy-brother,

A nation.)

The sun-child draws his blessed blade at birth.

Favored child of God, he scythes three cycles

From my side and prospers:

I, stripped of berth and birthright, lance

A star from his exterior

And wander.

God has heard, but God has also

Shunned:

Eli, Elohim, Father of my father,

Lama Sabachthani?

Which God decrees, and scorns what He has ordered?

What God has left, no beauty can redeem.

I blacken my iniquity, and wander.

Below the Stellar Cradles battle nations:

Gabriel and Gibreel draw their arrows,

Samael and Azrael draw swords.

Sun and Moon stand shaking in their fury,

Husband, what a foul thing you have done!

Shall I now watch the blood flow from my son?

17 October

Fall break, hallelujaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. We went to verizon today to get new phones, but apparently we're going to have to order them, which means they'll take longer to get here. bahh humbug.

But other than stressing my ears off about college, i'm happy. Life is, in the words of Salman Rushdie, subkuch ticktock hai.

I'm reading his Midnight's Children over the break-- started it today-- we'll see how that goes. So far I'm a fan. (The Satanic Verses was one of those life-altering books.... mmm.)

16 October

Things would be so much easier if I didn't have a migraine.

And if I didn't feel so damnably trapped.

bergen-belsen, 28 May [unedited, not doneeee]

gravel crunches in a multitudinous silence:
all silenced, silenced by a sterile silence,
the silence of a universe, of a God;
and gravel crunches

placid condemnation.
in it crunches bones of moses/asher/miriam
and yeshua, a thousand times yeshua.
life is not here. life is not in the myth
but the moral; elsewhere, where
gravel cannot go, is where life is:
life is elsewhere.
but a platitude cannot efface
the gangrene feet
and bones of beloveds burnt white:

O Kapparot-children,
O blasphemous purification
of that which was already holy.

5 October

I have never felt this muddled, or this perfectly crystalline clear-sighted.

(to quote U2... I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Actually, quite frankly, I'm a little/whole lot hazy on what it is that I'm even looking for.)

I feel like much of my life consists of continual break-ups of marriages-- marriages that occur to me, but so vaguely and distantly that they feel like other people's marriages.

Sonnet #7

If violets for the love of violets bred

And robins for the love of self made homes,

Would not corrosion with itself be wed

And would the sky not clabber into bone?

If sand-crabs raised their necks for martyrdom--

Their vast ideals bloodying the sea--

Creation would not mourn; would lack the hum

Of noble fists that thump out piety.

In future days, in future evolutions

We will see the sand-crab seeped in sin:

He'll bray, and bow in mindless adoration

To gods poking white wings out through his skin.

And boldly, in the new philosophy,

He'll mull, and curse his own humanity.

27 september

i need to write a sonnet for writer's workshop in the next, ermm, say, twenty five minutes.

17 September

Blog posts=shorter and shorter.

I loooooooooove musical practice. Particularly I love Thursday Principals Rehearsals, particularly today: singing Jewish music, blocking filial ballet scenes, Hannah Diamond, Elisa Vizoso, Alec Chandler, Frank Robertson, our intense conversations about marraige and generalities and intense camera hallway escapades.

Have I mentioned that I have four husbands? Alec is my musical husband (Perchik), Reid Austin is my Choral Ensemble husband, Riley is my "Praise Band Husband/Prayer Partner" (Kaylin came up with those for reasons I will leave undisclosed....), and apparently we're going to have Writer's Workshop husbands (???). Plus, I have a boyfriend. Who I'm really very faithful to, I promise....

I am stressed. And very happy.

16 september

stress stress stress stress

newspaper stresssssssssssssssssssss

bible test/AP stats test stresss

praise band/ musical/ CE stresss

freaking college application stresssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

but:

musical+newspaper+choralensemble+marvelousfriends+

wonderfulboyfriend+nationalmeritsemifinalist+writer'sworkshop+decafcoffee+burnedCDs= mmmmm. bizzarely appropriate contentment.

15 September

Home from a quite successful (or at least, I think so) senior retreat! Now I must fervently finish National Merit Packet and homework and college stuff. Stress!

You know you have an unhealthy relationship with your father when................

12 September

I'm learning about love, and about leadership.

Good leadership, like good love-- for leadership is worked out through love-- is all about the small. We are often told as seniors (especially in the musical) that we should befriend the underclassmen, yadda yadda; when we graduate we should leave behind a negative of ourselves, imprinted on the lives of those we've served. This really doesn't seem so bad-- some of my favorite people are underclassmen! But... good leadership, and mentorship, worked out through sacrificial love (for that is the only kind of real love, is it not?), does not mean befriending the witty ones, the bubbly ones, the cute sophomore guys-- although it is important, of course, to befriend to these people, and under no circumstances am i insinuating that it is wrong or unethical to befriend people who you genuinely like, who make your insides form a happy reveille; but in the end, they are not the ones that need us. The nourishment-ratio between us and them is generally equal. But the others, ahh, they are the difficult ones!

Good leadership, loving leadership, means ministering to the untouchables. It means seeking out the silent awkward ones who stick to the back of the stage, who sit by themselves at the cast meetings; in short, the un-cool ones. They are the ones that need us! We the "big kids" tend to impact their lives in wild and sometimes accidental ways. And I'm definately not just making this up, because I was there! I was that quiet and terrified sophomore at the Pricipals Rehearsals, thrown so very far from my comfort zone, that was impacted in occasionally wonderful ways by kind and genuinely loving seniors. So, we should focus our energies into making our impact a good one. So why is that so hard?

Hannah

I think, Hannah, when you say

"I don't believe in marraige", 1. that

You are lying, and 2. that what

You mean is that

You don't believe in love.

You grieve that you have faced

The god not of man but of woman,

That you have faced her with Firstfruits and

Lamb and yet that god has not

Said a word.

I think tha tyou mean that your blood

Does not cry from the ground, that there is

No bitterness like believing

In a ghost.

Oh God, a cheap unleavened bread

Uneatable only by children. And

Sham or no sham the parade

Saunters forward,

A beat that will bludgeon you

Deaf.

I think you mean that you beat out love

Like a cheap irreverent beat.

Slack hymn, a widow's hymn, and you

Widowed before you were wed.

You tap your tattoo shameless,

Not with the concrete glaze of the Athiest,

But the listless longing of the Lost.

There is no shame in the widow's song

But sorrow. There is only

Sorrow, and the disinterested breaths

Of youth retreating, always retreating

Behind it.

Villanelle (A Brief History of Judaism)

Though I may sleep, the burning bush sparks bright.

You are no god; I am not Miriam--

I cannot burn what is not mine by right.

In future hours I see the sacred light

Of stainless souls as pyre eclipses pyre.

Though I may sleep, the burning bush sparks bright.

No dove and olive branch return from flight:

The tichel leadens, packed with ash like earth.

We burn and burn, who are not theirs by right.

The crucible revives and hardens white.

Too strong we've grown in manna and in milk.

Though I may sleep, the burning bush sparks bright.

Of Ariel and Amos, which am I?

Millenia carve out their names in flesh.

I cannot burn what is not mine by right.

We wash ashore like shards within the tide,

(We resurrect) the stars, the sea, the sand.

Though we may sleep, the burning bush sparks bright;

We cannot burn what is not ours by right.

2 September

I never realized how odd it is to have a Hebrew name until musical practice today. Of course no one else at practice had a Hebrew name! But I think that even if you are not Jewish, it is still useful for any of God's children to have a Hebrew name, for was Hebrew not the language in which God addressed the Israelites?

So, world of flaccid American Christians, I challenge you to name yourself!

http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com/ (here's a good website.)

And so next time you see me walking down the street you can call me Ariel Mischka Yael bat Joseph (Ariel for Mizrahi, Yael for Mizrahi and Mischka for Ashkenazi: meaning God's graceful well-loved lioness, daughter of Joseph.) Mischka for short! Now that I'm Hodel in the musical, maybe I should add that to my mouthful-of-steel-shards name entourage.... :)

29 August

Everything's so very tipsy and muddled. So why do I feel so calm?

You are all cowards because you live in a world that is "once-removed", if I may excerpt you. I do not have any homage for anyone in your family, with exceptions of your grandmother, because you all are in the proximity of love, and all disavow love.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Sometimes one is meant, though, to live bits of one's life once-removed. This would be justified not in the proximity of love but in it's absence. Don't you think? Is it still justifiable to disavow the absence of love?

Younger

From this side of the front door i

Hear a giant chewing at the end of a pen.

Gravel crunches it's small grating

Gunshots along the walkway, and from

The kitchen window i see the tops of

Patent heels spark in the lights along the

Sidewalk.

Outside the sky looks like the inside

Of a closed fist.

An angel laughs-- but it is better than

An angel! It is my mother.

From my shy stance, sprawled,

Red rain-boots tucked beneath my legs

On the kitchen linoleum i smell

The ice-clouts and her mink-fur coat,

Her god-smile greets me with the

Reassuring scent of animal death.

I press my small face to her legs and she

Suffocates me smoothly in black fur. she hides

My tiny torso in the bulge of her coat, for

This is what family means in the presence of

Terror or love.

I breathe deeply frozen fur and count her

Rib bones with my fingers. I realize that you

Are more fragile than I, and so i must inflexibly exist.

I exist in case

You need to be protected.

the hanging (wo)man

The Hanging Man

BY SYLVIA PLATH

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

(I really have no idea what specifically she is talking about in this poem, but I love it quite terribly. Such is often my relationship with Sylvia Plath...)

23 August

Ohhhh why am I sick the day before musical auditions! And whhyyy, world, do i have a dislocated knee? Pourquoi ca! (I say that so much that my computer should really have a cedille key...) I am a small bit freaking out. A small bit.

I am almost done with my applications for: Belmont, Furman, UNC Chapel Hill, Auburn, Covenant, Lee. Which is really all but Samford and UTK. Since so many of these apps are free anyway, and I'm pretty quick on my feet at the whole essay-writing thing, I'm thinking about doing a couple stretch-schools as well. (Although with my tightwad parents who think that as an English graduate I'm going to be bankrupt within a year, all of the above might be stretch-schools.) I'm thinking UVA or Michigan.... maybe? But Michigan is so cold! and UVA is so expensive!

My parents keep and keep and keep harping me on college applications and studying for the ACT. This is why I cannot stand to be home in the afternoons, and why I wish to get the whole shebang over with as quickly and painlessly as I can.... Now they've fixated themselves on me going to Lee, since it's close, but quite frankly I want to get rather far away from my family. We'll see how that turns out.... as for me, I shan't worry over it any longer.

Instead I shall worry about musical auditions. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

(Or perhaps I shall simply take my coffee outside and enjoy the weather! Less stressful, less productive....)

22 August

My future is the exact negative of my father. It's one feature stands out stain-like, the way photographer's sheets stand blue and white against the film's intended picture. This is the reason for my frantic fascination with the future, a frightening hopeful future that glares always in my eyes like a doctor's magnetoscope beam which I cannot turn from. That is and only is my future: the exact absence of his power.

20 August

Life is elsewhere, or else it is nowhere.

-Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. Is is the voice of the emptiness below which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

...that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to life, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Today was not very interesting. Roughly half of my US History class can locate Canada on a map, I'm pretty sure I aced an AP Stats quiz, and Nathaniel and I were officially sworn in as Editors-In-Chief of the newspaper. Praise Band sang in chapel-- the success of which is widely disputed-- and I turned in my musical application form. But tomorrow is the Big Sleepover at Bena's cabin! I hope it sunnies up before then.

I love when it rains on sunny days. I love days like today when the sun spatters out all warm and pleasant, and all of a sudden-- jangling torrents of blue on the roof! That's me, I think. I'll always be all right in the rain, as long as the sun is still shining.