Sunday, February 21, 2010
81 Days of Tao: Verse 2
Verse 2:
Under heaven all can see beauty as
beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only
because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing
nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.
Going Public
So here it is. I have shared the link with very few people. (Hi there. If you're reading this, it means you mean a lot to me. I'm glad you stopped by.)
It's become a little overrun with training log stuff, but I hope to get back to the earlier impulse to revel in all things Iowa, maybe more about music (just went to a concert last night, expect a full report on that soon), and generally holding myself accountable for my 2010 lifestyle change.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
81 Days of Tao: Verse 1
With roughly 81 days left in the semester, I plan to ruminate on each of the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching with the hope that I will emerge in May a more balanced, peaceful soul.
Verse 1:
The Tao that can be told is not the
eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the
eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of
heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten
thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the
mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the
manifestations.
These two spring from the same source
but differ in name; this appears as
darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
I realize the contradiction (and impossibility) of attempting to interpret the tao in words when it defies such definition. Rather than go stumbling into that futility, I will point to the moments that have held it for me. It is something between an endorphin rush and that moment just before sleep. It's looking out across the land, street, neighborhood, and seeing it for the first time after you've traversed it for years. It's the right turn onto Scott Blvd. from Muscatine when I could see the cornfields unfold in the distance and knew that Dinah was waiting for me to return home. It's when the perfect song comes on the radio -- one you've never heard before, but the one you needed to hear.
The song at the top of this post is just such a song. The lyric that touched me: "it must taste like peaches eaten by the road side."
On Superbowl Sunday, I stopped at Hy-Vee on my way home from the gym to pick up snack fixins for Laura's SB party. As I was pulling into the parking lot, three songs in a row came on and I just could not stop listening. The first one came to me and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that precise moment. Then two more followed right behind it. I sat in the car for 15 minutes, snow falling around me and temperature dropping, before I finally went inside to get snack fixins. Such a wonderful moment.
I think this song captures the essence of this first verse. The nature of the tao is that it defies definition. It cannot be expressed, but it can be known.
Verse 1:
The Tao that can be told is not the
eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the
eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of
heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten
thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the
mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the
manifestations.
These two spring from the same source
but differ in name; this appears as
darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
I realize the contradiction (and impossibility) of attempting to interpret the tao in words when it defies such definition. Rather than go stumbling into that futility, I will point to the moments that have held it for me. It is something between an endorphin rush and that moment just before sleep. It's looking out across the land, street, neighborhood, and seeing it for the first time after you've traversed it for years. It's the right turn onto Scott Blvd. from Muscatine when I could see the cornfields unfold in the distance and knew that Dinah was waiting for me to return home. It's when the perfect song comes on the radio -- one you've never heard before, but the one you needed to hear.
The song at the top of this post is just such a song. The lyric that touched me: "it must taste like peaches eaten by the road side."
On Superbowl Sunday, I stopped at Hy-Vee on my way home from the gym to pick up snack fixins for Laura's SB party. As I was pulling into the parking lot, three songs in a row came on and I just could not stop listening. The first one came to me and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that precise moment. Then two more followed right behind it. I sat in the car for 15 minutes, snow falling around me and temperature dropping, before I finally went inside to get snack fixins. Such a wonderful moment.
I think this song captures the essence of this first verse. The nature of the tao is that it defies definition. It cannot be expressed, but it can be known.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
"How Romantic!"
...said my office mate when I told her I took my time walking back to our office after lecture so I could take some pictures down by the river.
Bridge over the Iowa River
Danforth Chapel
Old State Capitol
Bridge over the Iowa River
Danforth Chapel
Old State Capitol
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Iowa Winter
Right now a snow storm is dumping 5-9 inches of snow on us. I was leaving downtown this afternoon when it started coming down in big, fluffy flakes -- my favorite! The next thing I knew, I found myself down by the train station, so I fired off a few pictures.
I love Iowa.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Night I Leave Iowa
As soon as I knew I would be coming to Iowa for grad school, I immediately went in search of any and all songs that mention Iowa in them. Turns out there are quite a few -- an entire CD's worth. Some are obviously better than others, this one by Abi Tapia being one of the better ones.
I decided when I got here that I wanted to have the kind of experience here that would make me cry when it came time to leave. After three years, I've been doing more crying here than ever before (and not in a good way), and I'm itching to move away ASAP in May...it makes me sad. I don't want to go out like that. Maybe it would be better if I stay through the summer and do all the Iowa things I want to do before I go -- like RAGBRAI, for instance. Or an adventure race with Laura. Then again, I should really try to get a job. Wouldn't it be great to be a park ranger in Alaska or Yosemite? What an adventure either of those would be! Even better to have a tenure-track job waiting for me in the fall? Well, I have time to decide. And no job offers yet, so it's not productive to imagine an entire path with any of that on it or worry about decisions that haven't even been presented as choices yet.
But what a wild blue yonder ahead of me, no?
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Te of Writing
One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog is to un-block my writer's block. This is another one of those things that I attribute to my dissatisfaction with the social aspects of this program and the entrenched structural inequities and epistemic violence that runs rampant in the academy and that it is loathe to acknowledge in any meaningful way. (I'll go into this more directly in another post.) In addition to unclogging my writing pipes, I also know that I want to develop my writing so that it is performative and embodied. That is, I need my writing itself to do something (this is political, related to my research, and the "beef" I have with the academy that I alluded to above), and I need the body to be present in my writing. This last part might be more difficult, but these two goals are what I am focusing on this semester.
To this end (returning to the writer's life generally, embodied writing more specifically), I have done two things:
1. Added links to journaling/writing prompts. I hope to spend 30 minutes each morning doing some kind of freewriting.
2. Enrolled in a course on ethnographic writing that is something of a workshop, complete with guided writing activities. Today was our first meeting. It went well.
She asked us to first brainstorm on different sheets of paper the forms of writing we do, the kinds of texts we produce, and the audiences for whom we write. After the brainstorm, we paired off and discussed out writing processes, issues, concerns. Then we returned to the room for a bit of freewriting. Here is mine:
Writing is an embodied experience for me. Though I often think too fast for my handwriting to keep up, I love the way writing by hand feels in comparison to typing. For our brainstorming activity, I switched writing implements three times: from gel pen to pencil to thin pen before I finally settled on the pencil after all. It felt the best on the single sheet that separated it from the conference table. The gel pen always feels good, but today it scratched across the surface in a way that didn't allow the gel to flow freely. The black ink didn't trail behind in the thick lines the way I knew it could on the softness of multiple sheets. And the thin pen. Oy. No matter how many sheets of paper separate its ball point from the hard backing surface, its ultra fine point always seems to scrape across the paper violently – like one false stroke will tear the page. And I never use it to write in cursive. I always use it to print. My printing is something closer to angular than flowing. It's my Deliberate font. But anyway, I ended up back with the pencil. After years and years of strict loyalty to pens all through college, PhD school has returned the pencil to my hand. Even though it's erasable, pencil makes me feel like I'm really writing. Maybe because I can hear it. It's like I can hear and feel the lead being transferred to the paper in ways you just can't with ink. Ink just stains. It seeps. I guess I can hear the thin pen too, but that's the sound of the roller scraping against its housing and the metal against the page, not the actual transfer of ink. Yeah, those gel pens feel smooth and look great, but they don't sound like pencil. Even when you have filled both sides of a piece of paper, the penciled paper sounds (read that as an active verb) – it makes sound, the way it has been warped by the writing. Gel pages are just soaked. And silent.
I admit, I couldn't help but channel an old poem I wrote in the mid 1990s (1995, I think). It's not too difficult to see how these two pieces are connected:
I think this is an interesting first step down the path back to my writing self. I'm tapping what it is about writing that nourishes me. It's not necessarily the turn of a phrase or brilliantly capturing/expressing an idea, but the very act of writing itself -- putting pen to paper, self on the page. This is probably why Gloria Anzaldua's writing resonates in me and gives me the courage to even attempt to "write the thing that scares me" as my advisor so wants me to do. (Don't worry, I'll take up Gloria and Aimee and all the rest in future posts.) For now, I'm pleased to have put words on the page (screen). It's such a comfort to know that my writer's voice hasn't been silenced forever.
To this end (returning to the writer's life generally, embodied writing more specifically), I have done two things:
1. Added links to journaling/writing prompts. I hope to spend 30 minutes each morning doing some kind of freewriting.
2. Enrolled in a course on ethnographic writing that is something of a workshop, complete with guided writing activities. Today was our first meeting. It went well.
She asked us to first brainstorm on different sheets of paper the forms of writing we do, the kinds of texts we produce, and the audiences for whom we write. After the brainstorm, we paired off and discussed out writing processes, issues, concerns. Then we returned to the room for a bit of freewriting. Here is mine:
Writing is an embodied experience for me. Though I often think too fast for my handwriting to keep up, I love the way writing by hand feels in comparison to typing. For our brainstorming activity, I switched writing implements three times: from gel pen to pencil to thin pen before I finally settled on the pencil after all. It felt the best on the single sheet that separated it from the conference table. The gel pen always feels good, but today it scratched across the surface in a way that didn't allow the gel to flow freely. The black ink didn't trail behind in the thick lines the way I knew it could on the softness of multiple sheets. And the thin pen. Oy. No matter how many sheets of paper separate its ball point from the hard backing surface, its ultra fine point always seems to scrape across the paper violently – like one false stroke will tear the page. And I never use it to write in cursive. I always use it to print. My printing is something closer to angular than flowing. It's my Deliberate font. But anyway, I ended up back with the pencil. After years and years of strict loyalty to pens all through college, PhD school has returned the pencil to my hand. Even though it's erasable, pencil makes me feel like I'm really writing. Maybe because I can hear it. It's like I can hear and feel the lead being transferred to the paper in ways you just can't with ink. Ink just stains. It seeps. I guess I can hear the thin pen too, but that's the sound of the roller scraping against its housing and the metal against the page, not the actual transfer of ink. Yeah, those gel pens feel smooth and look great, but they don't sound like pencil. Even when you have filled both sides of a piece of paper, the penciled paper sounds (read that as an active verb) – it makes sound, the way it has been warped by the writing. Gel pages are just soaked. And silent.
I admit, I couldn't help but channel an old poem I wrote in the mid 1990s (1995, I think). It's not too difficult to see how these two pieces are connected:
Opus
I like the sound of crispy pages --
ones that have been
written on
glued on
spilled on.
I saunter-jaunt
through states of mind
with the turn of each
wobbly-edged page.
Until I find a hungry one.
My blood warps the pulp
with every
letter comma word:
paper lapping lovingly
from my veins.
Watching capillarity
caterpillar over fibers,
I forget how to spel
I think this is an interesting first step down the path back to my writing self. I'm tapping what it is about writing that nourishes me. It's not necessarily the turn of a phrase or brilliantly capturing/expressing an idea, but the very act of writing itself -- putting pen to paper, self on the page. This is probably why Gloria Anzaldua's writing resonates in me and gives me the courage to even attempt to "write the thing that scares me" as my advisor so wants me to do. (Don't worry, I'll take up Gloria and Aimee and all the rest in future posts.) For now, I'm pleased to have put words on the page (screen). It's such a comfort to know that my writer's voice hasn't been silenced forever.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)