“to wait, to make oneself attentive to that which makes of waiting a neutral act, coiled upon itself in tight circles, the innermost and outermost of which would coincide, attention distracted in waiting and returned all the way to the unexpected. Waiting, waiting that is the refusal to wait for anything, a calm expanse unfurled by steps.
he experiences the impression of being in the service of an initial distraction that would let itself be reached only when dissimulated and dispersed in acts of extreme attention. Waiting, but subordinated to that which could allow itself to be awaited.
to wait seems to signify for her the relegation of herself to a story that she would make it his obligation to carry through to the end and that must have as its outcome its progressive movement towards a goal. the attention should be exerted, so to speak, by this narrative in such a way as to draw it slowly out from the initial distraction, without which, however–he senses it well–attention would become a sterile act.
to wait: what did he have to wait for? She manifested her surprise if he asked her this question because for her, it was a word that sufficed on its own. As soon as one waited for something, one waited a little less.”
– maurice blanchot, awaiting oblivion
Posted by f | reply »yesterday/today/tomorrow
The weekends were less exciting to him than were the weekdays. On Saturdays and Sundays, a hollow feeling washed over him and he struggled to make it through those days. Time was spent with the T.V. filling his musty wood-paneled apartment with welcoming sounds, going to the Men’s Club and sitting there alone while the rest of the men were with their families, and going through the weekend paper, methodically. At night he would warm up some old pasta from the night before and check/recheck his lotto tickets while still allowing that T.V. to add some dialogue into the apartment.
Weekdays however, were different. He had a routine that he really enjoyed and with this being Monday, he had five amusing days in front of him. Getting out of his apartment and heading over to the Club was his first priority. At around 8am, the first wave of straphangers would make their way to the subway and this was the first of two highlights of his day. Born and raised in this neighborhood and having left only once, for the war, he had seen the dramatic change to the neighborhood occur right before him. Today’s commuters were composed of twenty and thirty somethings who had little regard for tradition. They seemed to be slightly unconscious to their immediate surroundings…which he found curious. What were they constantly entertaining that made them seemingly exist outside of the present? Life seemed a little overwhelming to the younger generation he thought. Their distracted faces, the way they dressed, the young couples, this all kept him in a stupor until about 10:30am when the parade subsided.
Midday was mostly spent at the Club eating lunch, going over neighborhood gossip, watching t.v., and playing either pinochle or breaking out the cribbage board. Recently though, he felt the need to slip home and try to grab a few hours sleep. Nights had turned into restless endeavours and at his age, sleep was a necessity.
However, once 5:30pm came around, his favorite morning routine started its second act. He tried his hardest to read their faces, seeing if he could decipher those expressions to come up with certain conclusions about their day. He thought about all the meanings of the word “communication”. He was never mistaken as a poet and this form of interaction suited him just fine. Eventually, the procession from the subway to the various apartments came to a slow trickle.
On this night, as the dark clouds started their march over the neighborhood, and everybody made their way home for dinner, he thought it would be a good idea to head to the deli and pick up a few Lucky 5 scratch-offs for the long night ahead of him.
Posted by joe | reply »took a bike ride, found Robin Hood
at night i dream i speak
for the full moon tonight, the others away or asleep…中秋安
“晚上我做梦说话, 白天做不了什么”
[still image from new work-in-progress, www.overseasproject.net]
Posted by 丫 | reply »sit down next to me
they call it the modern sky
the inside and the outside and the secret of the fear of the fear
“It is true, part of us has disappeared, but reality itself remains. The fact that, today, we can say that the geography of the outside has changed, that the outside no longer exists, that we are all enclosed within, means that, at the same time, the outside is everywhere. But we should have to be able to divide the division to recover what is left.
It is a trap we accept and that maintains the fiction of ‘this totality’ which paralyzes us as much as it amputates a part of us. And thus we are not, not even sentimentally, without strength and courage in our zeal to maintain a worrying normality which we have not really chosen.
(…) this is the reason why what we can still recover no longer concerns ourselves but our remains; I believe this is the only hope we have for simply making use of our lives. For we can no longer separate ourselves from what is incrusted within us. We can no longer lose ourselves, because we are already almost no longer here. However, we can try to abandon ourselves there where we are shattered in a thousand pieces and perhaps recover our outside. and i am not in a position to say whether, in this case, the form does not come anymore than it leaves.” (alejandra riera, enquiry into the/our outside)
(reading through old notebooks, looking for things to hold on to, lines becoming blurry, the summer dissolving in front of our eyes..)
Posted by f | reply »理变奏曲 variations on lǐ
filmed in new york city, autumn 2006. summer 2008 finally got around to… thank you sim-chan and aka-chan and D-chan!
Posted by 丫 | reply »|
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