𓅯｡𖦹° 8.12.26 "It was time to look at what she had lost. To look at it and see it all. The sunset of spring over the roofs of the City, long ago, and his face lit by that glory—“There, there, you can see what it should be, what it is…” The dusk of the room in Southwind’s house, and his face, his eyes. “To live and die for the sake of the spirit—” The wind and light on Rocktop Hill, and his voice. And the rest, all the rest, all the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed." ⋰⋰⋰ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of the Heron Read all of "The Eye of the Heron" yesterday (it's infuriating how good Le Guin is every time) and then stayed up until almost 2am reading Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park." Perhaps I am not making anything sharable in this period of my life nor great strides in my skills but I am nourishing my practice in a different way. I feel the happiest when I am in bed with a book at night, propped against a pillow so that my shoulder does not sublux, promising myself that surely, this will be the last chapter (and on and on). I want to write a clear thing, a true thing—not simple nor overwrought, but something that sound like a great bell being struck, and the air after. No deception from affect, no fear in simple, sturdy words, of verbs and nouns and the grammar of speaking plainly. Speaking plainly does not mean speaking simply. It is hard to say a true thing. It's hard and so I often seek new words, new phrasing, as if there is a way out of the trouble of trying to understand what it is I want to say. Evading the center is easy; how mortifying it can be to be misunderstood, or worse, to be understood and then exposed. "And they saw that they were naked and they were ashamed." Despite no claims to faith, I am comforted that the oldest stories have in them this confrontation with our nakedness and what comes after. All writing and art if it is true—and I speak not of the certainty of fact but of real things: birth, death, rivers, bread, sex, the history of language, handprints, moonlight, singing, birds—must unclothe itself. There is a singing in it when it comes but it doesn’t come without work. Even if I only write for myself, forever, it is worth it to write one true thing that cries out in its own naked voice. As I write this, there is a little greenish yellow bird perched on the ivy that surrounds my bedroom window. The bird comes every day to hop from thin branch to thin branch or nest in the shallow eaves of the overhanging roof. When my cat sees her, she leaps from my bed towards the glass while the bird, unmoving and undisturbed, blinks at her. There is another bird now, in the center of the window, craning her small head around and around, and staring directly through the glass at me as if she can see me watching her. Maybe she can. Her back tail feathers flick up and down. She leaps from the window in a great unfurling of wings and now the leaves shiver from the wind her flight made. The other bird is undisturbed, nested in the tangled copse of leaves, pecking at the trim edges of her perch. Now the second bird has come back, crying, open-mouthed, black eyes again seeking an opening through the window. Her back tail feathers are pressed up against the glass. She hops from one stretch of ivy to the next. They are both out of sight now, all I can see are the leaves moving. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.10.26 #e3001a - the tomatoes our neighbor brought over from his garden #3d0c75 - blueberries in the ramekin #279dda - one of the pills i take daily to keep my brain working #3f2d24 - morning coffee #ded66c - my duvet where zuzu's claws made indents terming august the the month of miserable sleep. "melatonin melancholy" and "melatonin up and moaning" texts between j and I after I woke and we commiserated on our nonexistent rem cycles. even our cat seems fatigued, though that might just be the summer heat and her tendency to nap all the day, as is her wont to do. i finished northanger abbey last night and found the pacing of the second half of the novel to lag and the characterizations to alter in such a way as to feel slightly askew, but austen brought it home with a satisfying close as always. i generally dislike when people bemoan the early death of an accomplished artist or writer for the sake of "what they might have made had they lived longer"—it feels reductive and coarse, as if we are the ones truly suffering for their truncated lives, yet i confess myself not immune to the same suppositions as i read austen. i wonder about how her craft would have continued to develop, i think about the novels she must have envisioned yet had had no chance to write, i greedily wish that i had more of her novels to enjoy. (this public disavowal of a practice—mourning a literary figure's death because of a hypothetical lost future canon—that i privately indulge in feels very austen in character!) one thing out of many i admire in her writing is how frankly she wrote of her character's vices and virtues, and how these initially unprepossessing depictions reveal gradually the multiplicities, depths, and contradictions in the natures of the characters instead of inuring us to fixed and attenuated impressions. in retrospect, considering how public our childhood was thanks to our mother, it makes sense that my siblings and I do not keep up with social media. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.6.26 i was trying to remember a fact from an anecdote i've known all my life, a story from my childhood that my parents loved to tell and that i've shared many times, and realized i could not fix the proper name to it, this story that has been one of my earliest memories, and i could not tell you when i forgot the facts of it. and then i thought about how i can't text my mom or dad and ask them who it was, and how time eroded the edges of that memory i once knew with utter clarity, that it's now blurry, the image smudged. how sad i am when i forget things; i worry that illness will keep stealing from me and i will not even remember to miss what's gone. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.6.26 took a walk midday yesterday to drop off and pick up my library books, red button up tied in a knot at my waist. i felt cool and collected until i accidentally ran into a branch in front of six construction workers. oh well! j and i did pilates after she was off work and talked through each exercise until our heart rates were too high for conversation. we'd planned to play the fields of mistria release together but i ended up working until nearly 11:30pm, after which i managed to draw (day 931) and then stayed up far too late reading northanger abbey (oh, catherine! to be seventeen again). i couldn't fall asleep, something about the energy this week has been too harried, but instead thought about how the most successful habits in my life are elastic—i need variety and sovereignty within frameworks i've set for myself, otherwise i begin dreading the very thing i was ecstatic about only days before. part of the reason my daily drawing habit or streak has been so fruitful these last few years is that it's unencumbered by constraints or strictures other than that i put energy and effort into drawing each day. i've even avoided naming a time commitment, which was initially difficult for my often didactic self—but having the freedom to do as much (or as little) as i want and can do within each day allows me to move with my energy and commit to a practice. i've painted before surgery and after er visits and during a cross country move and in the five minutes i have before bed and during meetings and for hours on the couch until i look up and it's midnight. last night i felt free and unconcerned about progress or exactitude as i did a gesture drawing session at 11:52pm. all that i followed was the line of the body and the flow of my hand. each angle revealed something, every space between limbs made another shape. understanding felt possible again because it was full of delight and attention and ease. i want to return to that feeling more. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ 8.5.26 warbly in voice mail to e ⋰ cluttered desk ⋰ up too late, again ⋰ a kind of frantic energy, like a bee under a glass or a bird at a window ⋰ tight heat in my hamstrings ⋰ what energy is under all this movement? ⋰ trying not to lose the breath. ﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏ say hello ⋰⋰⋰ yourworldoftext.com/~rhizomehaunt/ I archive these logs monthly ⋰⋰⋰ are.na/han-olliver/channels