A fluffy snow fell. I slept late. Tried not to feel guilty. On our walk (trusty ear buds in place) a little of my soul was restored by the smart pundits behind “Pod Save America”.
(this morning’s main point: pleeeease people! It’s not the fucking profanity that offends, it’s the underlying racial animus).
Off to the page. This morning already written a few paragraphs wondering what it’ve been like to see your breath for the first time as an underdressed bondwoman from Africa?
I will leave you with with an excerpt from this week’s reading:
“We follow the speaker and their shifting states, look at their shirt (do I want it?) carefully examining their shoes, taking their pulse in terms of the rhythmic pitch, the seismic by which we know what is going on in the ocean on earth right here in the room in terms of information mattering. Each of us is a cell of that potential knowledge cluster, that mammoth great dog being lead right now through the cosmos.
More and more of us came and the patterns got swifter and the knowing entirely disassembled and we will never reassemble it again but instead we now return to knowing’s just before. It is attractive.
To add. I did this in my childhood too. And you too else you would not be here. In adulthood we must relearn the wisdom of the young who feels her inside while she is being taught she is wrong. To abide in the totalitarian, to survive one must look straight into the face of the nun or whoever and muse. Yet this brought so much upon me. Warily I learned not to absorb their enmity. Choose listen.”
Eileen Myles, Afterglow (a dog memoir).
PS if you’re an SNL fan, there are strong echoes with Aidy Bryant’s recent Weekend Update performance, in which Aidy Bryant apologizes every other second and tries to craft her message about equality in a manner palatable to men.
a friend got picked out of 100’s of applicants for a rental property in the highly desirable inner city recently by writing the application from the point of view of her dog!
Well. There you go! I have another dog memoir on my list.
Oh geez Mo, love this!
Great SNL clip Dee (I’m not usually awake for it these days). It really brings the point home. When I read “the wisdom of the young”…it made me return to my thought while watching the news this am…the same old news about a word that may have been said and the meaning that it may have…I was thinking, on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, about when I was that young girl and did my report on him in grade school (a report I still have)…how very deeply I was touched by this man and his life/death…how it takes the young to learn to be better people than those adults that came before. we sure have gotten away from that, haven’t we? 🙁
I love that you still have that report! I see a lot of reason to feel hope in the young people coming up.
I love that top photo…
Me too. There is something so poetic in the dereliction of that couch.
Agreeing with Jude about that photo love. & that beautiful piece of writing took my mind to an old old book, “The Book of Rhythms” by Langston Hughes. It acknowledges/celebrates the rhythm/connections of our world/universe, and I’m thinking of how hard it seems these days to find them, and how absolutely necessary they are for surviving this piece of history. (& thanks for the SNL clip!)
I’ve read no Langston Hughes. So thanks for that (2019 book list is already long). She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, only weirder.