is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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held in a frame of light!
held in a frame of light!
I'm writing the Levinas paper today, called "How (or Why) to Bear the Weight of the World." It's going fairly well. I always get a bit overwrought when I'm writing, especially when I'm writing about Levinas, or justice, or both. I just took a break to bake a nectarine-blueberry pie.
Also, Evany and I start driving across the country three weeks from today. I've already demonstrated that my reasoning can veer towards the positive and the negative when it comes to this Amhersty move I'm making. In the "good for Jill's career" file it's all good. In the "good for Jill's larger life" file, there is some good and some less-than-good. Luckily I'm not the kind of person who lets distance get in the way of her attachments. But still. Things are uncertain. Things can change. The future is unknown.
(Did you notice that I made a link to a previous entry? Evany taught me how to do that yesterday. Linktastic!)
Yesterday I couldn't get myself to take a shower because then the day would start. But I still got some packing done, finalized some course materials for my fall teaching, and ran a bunch of errands, without showering. So when I was invited to go to the movies at 8pm, I had to do that half-ass "wash the armpits" thing and leave the house with greasy hair. Evany's way of not dealing with the day yesterday was much more clean-smelling: she took two baths. Anyway, she and I and Liz and two of Liz's friends saw "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle." It was FUNNY! It makes me very happy that I've now seen two movies in a row that were supposed to be funny and then actually were funny. (The other film: Anchorman!) Both made me laugh out loud more than once, and kept me well-entertained for the majority of the time I spent in the theater.
Today I took a shower. It was very necessary. When I was finishing my dissertation I sometimes didn't shower or get dressed or leave the house at all for three days at a time. Truth be told, I like doing that. But there comes a time when a girl has to put on cute outfits and get out into the sunshine. I like doing that, too. Tonight I have a dinner date with pretty ladies, and I am going to wear something CUTE for them, dammit.
So, today, in the shower, I was thinking about dread. About dreading moving, and dreading missing out on things, and dreading missing people, and dreading the discomfort that comes with being dropped into a whole new social milieu, with people who probably use the word "milieu" without finding it funny, and dreading not having all my stuff with me (since the move is temporary and I've rented a furnished place there), and not knowing what to bring and what to leave behind, etc.
As I was shaving my legs, which is something I really love doing now that I've discovered the Venus razor and the pear-scented lady shaving cream, I remembered a few Jeanette Winterson quotations that fit the themes of my dread in such a way as to rehabilitate the dread into hopefulness. The first one goes: "Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough." That is from Gut Symmetries, and to me it means that the moments we get with people are meaningful even when the future is uncertain and all we know is that we get that moment. Making plans and feeling that the future is somewhat stable, these are human cravings and are necessary to ordered life, but disorder can also be beautiful. (Is it possible that there could be neither beauty nor love without a bit of chaos or interruption of one's projections for the future?) The quotation could also speak to your relation to art, music, anything you love or that moves you, ad infinitum.
This is the second quotation: "Held in the frame of light, was not the world, nor its likeness, but a strange equivalence, where what was thought to be known was re-cast, and where what was unknown began to be revealed, and where what could not be known, kept its mystery but lost its terror." That's from Art & Lies, the last nine pages of which consist of bars of music! That woman has a way, I tell you.
1:31 p.m. - August 03, 2004
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