By Samarth:
When I’m a red light, I’m bad.
When I’m a green light, I’m good.
I’m between good and bad.
I’m an ambulance.
My nephew is very interested in knowing who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. Amazingly, however, he is already willing to acknowledge that there are people who are “between good and bad.”
Nephew: 1
Most adults: 0
The Daily Show on US funding practices in the Middle East:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=91998
“Nevertheless, people whose duties occasionally make them yawn may be less boring than those who do their business by inclination. The latter, unhappy types, are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they longer know where their head is, and the extraordinary radical boredom that might be able to reunite them with their heads remains eternally distant for them”
“If, however, one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly….Were this passion—which shimmers like a comet—to descend, were it envelop you, the others, and the world—oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be…”
Although I’m more partial to Hockey and the Red Wings, Detroit sporting success is always shared—even if it is underappreciated by us bandwagoners. Anyway, Ryan was remarking recently that the Tigers have a distinctly working class feel to them because anyone is able to buy tickets for $8 and go watch them on any given day. Then I read this...
During the Oakland series, Jones spoke eloquently about the recent trying times in Detroit, with massive job losses due to problems in the auto industry. The Detroit players derived some satisfaction, Jones said, from giving the team’s blue-collar fans a three-hour respite each day from weightier, real-life issues.
Leyland, predictably, got emotional after Ordonez’s homer. But he wasn’t the only one at Comerica Park to pull a Dick Vermeil.
"You can’t go anywhere in this city without Tigers fans talking about their pride in the organization and the team,’’ Rogers said. "As players, maybe we don’t understand it completely, but we surely appreciate it. This is something we’ll take with us for a long, long time.’‘
All that’s left now is to seal the deal. As far as the Tigers are concerned, it’s two celebrations down, and one to go.
The shock of a blinking white cursor renews itself when one steps away form daily writing practice. Thinking of it as a practice, as a draft and open space for exploration rather than the academic drive to “produce” alleviates some of the pressure; yet, there still remains the internal overachiever neurosis to form gorgeous sentences, posts and ideas. Interestingly, although unsurprisingly, writing practice has a material spatial dimension that I am, as I write this, trying to take in new directions.
My practice of late, whether it be for this blog or other work, is to write after my evening mediation, while sitting on a soft couch, my laptop’s screen illuminating the otherwise dimly lit room. The relaxed surroundings are meant to offset the intensity of formulating and articulating the thin strand of clarity dangling between the abstractions of a critical apparatus and specific object it is reading and being read by. However, these cozy conditions aren’t quite conducive to paper writing; my couch will not easily accommodate all the books that simultaneously need to be available, nor will the dim lighting aid in the already troublesome process of decoding. That is to say, the material conditions will not allow for thought beyond the vignettes produced in this virtual space. So, in an effort to transition to conditions more in line with actual academic production, I have placed myself in my ‘study’ (which is also my tv/ movie space, my dinning room and my library) and am writing this on my desktop. However, because this is a process rather than a leap, I have kept the dim lighting. What does your writing space look like?
A few weeks ago, I was out to lunch with Kristine and began to tell her a joke from Family Guy. As usual, I was laughing and squirming even before I finished the story; despite her distaste for the show, she always laughs only because, I think, my own enthusiasm/ delivery is comical.
“You become a 12 year old when you talk about that show” she says.
Ah-hah. Yes, I do! I become giddy, enjoying (and trying to transmit) a space of raw joy that is self-perpetuating like nothing else I’ve experienced, save depression. However, what struck me as amazing a few days later when we met for our Kant reading group, was that Kant took me to that same space, albeit via an entirely different route. Reading a few Foucault articles today took me there again and prompted this post. Although I don’t have the energy to use Kant to critique my own experience of joy in two drastically different objects, let me offer a strange example and some commentary.
“Even from a distance, one experiences Foucault’s death at fifty-seven as an event whose untimeliness affirms the violence and mercilessness of time –– the power of facticity, which, without sense and without triumph, prevails over the painstakingly constructed meaning of each human life.” –Habermas on Foucault
Despite the rather morbid content of the quote, the beauty of its formal construction, the language and the abstract awareness it evokes all strike me as gorgeous. The abstraction of time, death and the ultimate negation of self-creation strike me as an amazing sequence that inverts its very content. That is, despite its seeming moroseness and, at the level of content, the reduction of all endeavors to ephemeral absurdities, the craftsmanship of the sentence itself affirms human projects, of lives devoted to the perfection of self-creation. Indeed, it is this latter space that functions as a performative affirmation, a torch of violence against the inevitable and a defiance of the cognizable abstractions we know will overwhelm us. In sum, fuck off death! Foucault lives!
‘’It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,’’ said Bush, growing animated as he spoke.
One way to experience Kant is through a deep meditative immersion that allows you to swim through the subordinate clauses, which are numerous, if of questionable importance, to be sure, but force an active reading, and endless re-reading. If the previous sentence attempted an amateur performance of his sentence structures, what follows is another performance piece I will call “InDallyMashedupKantAlley.”
“Thus although it cannot determine anything a priori with regard to IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ___dnaaaa dna dna dnaaaa___IDZdna_IDZdna_IDZdnaa those IDZdna (objects), IDZdna Thus although it cannot IDZdna IDZdna”I think I will submit that to Joel for the Wayne Lit Review, along with this second poem:
Want to witness a magic trick?
Yay! I love magic!
Ok, calm down zippy. This is a special trick that you can actually experience in your own life and self, given of course that you are not one who refuses the existence of an essentialized stable self based on some kind of Cartesian ontolotogical…
Umm…can we start the trick please…
(murmurs something evil) Ok. So this is what you do. For three straight weeks, get up around 6:30 in the morning, complete your entire morning routine and be at the office by 9:30…
I’m a burgeoning scholar; I have no need to play by bourgeois ‘work time’ schedule.
No, listen. You do this of your own volition so that you can 1) take care of all those bureaucratic loose ends 2) have a rigorous discipline that allows you to maximum space for productivity.
All right, you may continue.
So; you establish this schedule that allows for approximately 12 solid hours of work and another 4 hours for your meditations, martial arts practice and hygienic duties. You continue this for 3 really strong productive weeks.
That sounds good…
Doesn’t it. You will begin to build momentum, perform your tasks with greater peace and concentration, be more efficient..
Oh wow, is that the magic?
No no, that’s just the start. You begin to accelerate, grow more determined, and more convinced that this semester is going to be the strongest ever..
That must be the magic!
Nope. The magic happens when the universe shoves a barrel full of thick mucus in every breathing passage you have prevents you from thinking sleeping or functioning clearly makes you feel like you’re going to choke if you lay down announces drastic changes in plans so that you have rethink projects syllabi and plans gives you tremendously exciting prospects that will require the very discipline you began to instill before the crippling snot suspended all hope which surprisingly stays alive despite the overmedicated dull hazy consciousness you are slowly normalizing as your own mode.
Uh-huh. How is that magical exactly?
Quiet you. You’re just an imaginary voice used to create a situation where I can vent my frustrations in a clever mode and avoid the always annoying voice of self-pity.
Ah, am I the imaginary or are you?
I’m Keyser Soze biatch…
My unimitable nephew dismisses televised rhetoirc as mere lip play…
...then explores the interface between proprioception and alternate states of consciousness…
I was asked to submit a brief bio for the Community-based writing initiative website.
After chitchatting with the Buddha about Tibet, Shashi Thandra incarnated in South India and was forced to spend eight years with the postcolonial savages learning the Queen’s English. He jumped at the chance to return to Columbus’ India, America, and has spent much of his waking life there. Shashi decided not to walk at commencement after completing his B.A at Wayne State University, fearing that the Phi Beta Kappa key would knot itself in the Magna Cum Laude tassels causing him to trip before receiving his English degree (with honors). He is a humble man.
When Gwen Gorzelsky thoroughly whopped up on Shashi during a sparring session at the martial arts school they both attended, he realized that learning to live a peaceful, mindful life is only for sissies who are not interested in the amorphous, emerging field known as Globalization Studies. Shashi’s involvement in community-based writing is based less on a desire to practice and theorize the aphorism, “Think globally, act locally,” than to take revenge on Dr. Gorzelsky through the Honor students he will be teaching and whose program he hopes to shape at the departmental level.
Shashi believed that he unraveled the question of Being while eating chocolate and shaping his Bonsai, immediately forsook his primary scholastic interest in alterity, but lost his realization when Buddha reminded him not be a ham in public spaces.
And my picture:
What will post-globalization scholarship look like and say?
“Glacial pace;” the adjective has become nebulous and politically charged in the moment of global climate change.
How can I train my cellular structure to work consistently, with great concentration for 10-12 hours at a time?
Although I am deeply wary of “great man/woman” talk, this article about Roger Federer comes after watching him win a recent tournament. Various factors, including the procrastination that partly drives this writing, allowed me to watch the final match twice, to see again the kinesthetic brilliance of a dominant athlete. I instantly became a Roger Federer fan. More than refined talent, I fell in love with Federer’s whole one court persona, which, like Pete Samprass before him, exudes a poised quietude despite the overwhelming genius of his play.
The article is written by David Foster Wallace whose name sounds eerily familiar but eludes placement. Regardless, the piece is beautifully constructed and makes great formal use of the endnotes. More importantly, however, anyone who follows my writings in this space or has talked to me for a day or two knows my experience and fascination with physical-embodied aesthetics, the particular technical artistry understood through proprioception. Wallace does an excellent job relaying, especially formally through his injections of William Caines’ story, the strange –felt- awareness we are capable but often unconscious of. Although the felt awareness, the “thought that is also felt,” he invokes through the formal structure of the article is not the same quiet lightness experienced in performance, one does gain a basic sense of our possibilities. Most interestingly, especially for those readers who also practice an art, Wallace does an excellent job describing the flattening out of Time/Space, and the easy perfection that follows, through a slowed down glimpse into a tennis stroke. My own experiences of this same flattening, in hockey, in martial arts, even in reading at times, are carved into memory as a series of flashes, of perfect movements, of cellular understandings, of an embodied thrill that is experienced and reflected in a space outside of the conscious mind. Wallace’s article activated some of those starving neurons, simultaneously reminding me of the possibilities ready in the space of concentrated immersion.
On a related tangent, I have started my first Bonsai plant. My ex-roommate had been working on Bonsai for several years with varying degrees of success. Craig’s latest, named Tegreeno, began as a living archive of his relationship with Ishita, the love of his life. I had the scary privilege of taking care of Tegreeno for a month and fell in love with the process. So, after returning from my wonderful spiritual retreat, Craig helped me begin my own Bonsai, now named Tyger (pronounced like the Winnie the Poo character) in honor of Tegreeno’s inspiration and Blake’s Tyger, Tyger.
As we worked to pot and shape Tyger, delicately bending hard copper wire around the fragile branches to ‘train’ growth into a particular form, it became obvious why martial artists, and Zen masters of various practices would be so enthralled in the art of Bonsai. The sensitivity and concentration required in each step of the process is balanced with foresight, the vision to see both what you desire and the potential of the living being in front of you. Whether clipping branches, wiring, dekeing a goalie, side stepping a punch, or for Federer, hitting impossible angle shots, immersive experiences offer a organic time-space conflation that carve new possibilities for a cellular proprioception beyond conscious thought.
I was thrown out of NYU. On my metaphysics final, they caught me cheating. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. (Woody Allen)
oh, the possibilities, the joyous possibilities: here are two course descriptions from a scholar at UC Irvine that make me drool.
Asian American (F06) 201 CRIT THRY WORKSHOP RADHAKRISHNAN,R.
So, is humanism "dead?" What comes "after?" How does one determine and respond to the longue duree of humanism? Even if humanism were not "over," is it time to superannuate humanism with a sheer act of theoretical will? Is there a good humanism and a bad humanism? Is it possible to salvage and sustain the good incarnation and eradicate the bad one? Is humanism a worldview, an ideology, an ethico-political blueprint?
Is humanism universal, planetary, anthropocentric, unavoidably Eurocentric? What is the sexuality and the gender of "the human?" What are the fraught connections between humanism as epistemology and humanism as cultural politics? How does Humanism deal with problems of Selfhood and Alterity? Does Humanism participate in the brutality of a world structured in dominance, or does it seek a way out of the geopolitics of nevenness? How does the "human" dangle between Ontology and Epistemology, between Truth and Power, between everyday phenomenology and the density of specialist discourse? Assuming that there is a post-humanism, how is such a "post-ality" a measure both of the post-structural and the post-colonial? These are a few of the questions that will constitute our agenda for this seminar. Starting with an in depth reading of Edward Said’s posthumously published book, Humanism and democratic Criticism, we will revisit a number of important debates that have shaped the historicity as well as the temporality of humanism over the last 100 years. Here are a few voices that will resonate through the seminar: Martin Heidegger (Letter on Humanism), Jean Paul-Sartre (humanism, Existentialism, Marxism), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Humanism and Terror), Michel Foucault (selected readings), Louis Althusser (The
Humanist Controversy), Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), Judith Butler (Precarious Life), and others. I hope that by the end of the seminar we will all have, with a little help from one another, a sophisticated awareness of what it means to reject or accept humanism in "our own times."
—> Some Detroit politics would really be necessary in this seminar don’t you think? word up biatches…
And this one absolutely sent a chill up my spine….yes..*up* my spine…
(Same as Eng 210) The purpose of this seminar is to submit the theme of Alterity and the binary epistemic regime it exemplifies to rigorous critique. The Self-Other grid as the structuring principle of human self-understanding has a long and problematic “omni-history.” Philosophers, theorists, artists, and writers have negotiated this problematic with varying degrees of success and frustration. For a variety of world-historical reasons, this theme has become urgently significant in the last few decades. Alterity has been legitimated as a major theme in a variety of discourses such as psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ethics, nationalist, diasporan, and transnational studies. I am hoping, with your help, to bring together some of the most exciting debates about the Self-Other problematic in Theory with literary practices that have struggled with the same issue in the name of aesthetic representation, and narrative authority. In this seminar we will be elaborating the Self-Other problematic on a variety of registers: the ethical, the political, and the epistemological. What does it mean to be interpellated by the Other? What is all the fuss over the distinction between the big O and the lower case o? Is the obsession with the Self-Other binary structure the metier of the dominant discourse? What is the relationship between a purely allegorical celebration of Alterity and the historical problems of various “selves” and “others” that are situated co-evally in a world structured in dominance? How does the Self-Other theme emerge in the context of Racism, Patriarchy, Colonialism, linguistic representation, Madness, Anthropology? These are some of the questions that will resonate through the course as we dive fearlessly into Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in active conjunction with readings from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said, Johannes Fabian, and Martin Heidegger.
—> ye yea!!
There is an uncanny pleasure in watching someone you admire fulfill your admiration, confirm their greatness and your ability to appreciate it; thus it is for me with Said.
“Texts are protean things, they are tied to circumstances and to politics large and small, they require attention and criticism. No one can take hold of everything, of course, just as no one theory can explain or account for the connection among texts and societies. But reading and writing texts are never neutral activities: there are interest, powers, passions, pleasures entailed no matter how aesthetic or entertaining the work. Media, political economy, mass institutions––in fine, the tracings of secular power and the influence of state––are part of what we call literature. And just as it is true that we cannot read literature by men without also reading literature by women—so transfigured has been the shape of literature—it is also true that we cannot deal with the literature of the periphery without attending to the literature of metropolitan centers.” –Said, Culture and Imperialism 318.
At the very brink of pedagogical sanity, the loss of belief in students’ abilities, in my efforts to ‘teach’ anything, come the student comments that save me from myself. During a recent meeting, a student said that the class has politicized his worldview, giving him both an alternative narrative and a critical apparatus/ space form which to examine the world.
Another student, a former Marine with four frontline tours in Iraq, whose presence drastically changed in-class dynamics, told me today that our class has significantly changed his perceptions about American foreign policy, the Iraq war and his roe within that frame. The student said that he often discusses ideas from our class with his military friends and (former) superiors: dehumanization, the (possible) complicity of language in that process, and (his favorite) the Derridian dictum “as soon as you have the concept of the One, you have violence” (thanks Ken).
Complements such as these deserve more than my usual response to them; a smiling nod and “I’m glad to hear that.” Unfortunately, I am terrible at accepting emotional complements, at other human beings stating that I have/ or had an internal impact on them; the possibility is paradoxically what I live and strive to achieve but one that is impossible to face in the moment of manifestation. Complicating matters is a tiny tyrannical voice demanding spiritual perfection, complete humility, and the rejection of self-aggrandizement. Then, Thich Naht Hanh’s soothing grandfatherly voice reminds me not to do violence to the emotional upheavals but let them float on breath’s stream. He also tells me it is ok to post the complements on my blog as long as I perform the, now canonical, postmodern meta-self-reflexive gestures.
me: am I really?
friend: uh…are you seriously asking me?
me: yeah. I never thought of myself as a metrosexual
friend: (rolls eyes) yes. the answer is yes.
me: well, I’m not as bad as some other Indian males; they get their eyebrows done.
friend: yea, you’re not as metro as that.
insideme: Hmm…I’m strangely offended by this.
For more fun with metrosexuality, or if you are looking to burn a few brain cells, take a look at definitions of the term here, here and here.
blog: Where have you been?
me: Ummm…not sure; it was this really gray place with perpetual guilt and frustration.
otherme: Oh please! You’re just scared that your profs will wonder where their papers are if you keep the blog up.
blog: But I need attention too.
otherme: Quiet you! You’re nothing more than another avenue that draws the world-conquering perfectionism away from its needed spaces.
me: are either of you real?
otherme: are you? now mush
me; why are you so hostile?
blog: yea; you’re what’s preventing new pictures and links to be posted
otherme: That’s it! Shut this computer off and go grade papers, and for pete’s sake, quit trying to think of an clever close to this schizophrenic conversation you have going…what a weirdo…
1) Zarqawi was killed but that will do absolutely nothing to stop or slow down the “insurgency” in Iraq.
2) Installed a window mount air conditioner in my room; it has a freaking remote control! I see in this remote (for an air conditioner that is meant for a small space) the presence of the stereotypical fat American sweating while sitting in a La-z-boy and turning the AC on full blast––using the remote of course, so that the one calorie that would have been used in getting up will not be.
3) A brief part of my last conversation with Kristine was about her paper on Brian Massumi’s work with art and poetics that don’t force your attention on them. Instead, the piece diffuses itself into a setting and opens a space for the passive engagement of multiple senses, their intersection and ultimate role in creating a kind of embodied memory and orientation. (This is a vulgar summation of work that I am not familiar with but am recounting from KFD’s synopsis).
Interestingly, that conversation was followed by an exploration of my music catalog, which consists of a wide range of material but mainly of downtempo electronic artists like Thievery Corporation. K’s reaction to my enthusiastic offerings was mixed, a visible struggle to take the music on its own terms as the politics of its appropriation by bourgeois hip bars and stores (Banana Republic) beat the beats into silence. Among other points, K said that her aesthetic sensibilities were simply not in line with the band’s uber-smooth style (too easily consumed) and favored more dissonant, ruptured textures.
Her critique, although far more nuanced, articulate and sophisticated, is one most people voice when asked about my primary musical groundings; “too mellow”, “can just fade into the background,” “I could sleep/ study to this,” “This a different track? Really?” or the most insulting manifestation, “I think I heard this at Banana.” What I found interesting in her commentary and what we linked to our earlier discussion of Massumi, is the music’s ability to fade into a setting, to be a background that doesn’t necessarily call for attention even while it helps shape the space. To point to the obvious for a moment, the music dictates one’s embodied orientation in a space, the feel of it, which in turn helps regulate other codes such as dress.
Most interesting, however, was the link between the music’s (non) call for a passive attention, a diffused awareness that privileges no single sense but an embodied orientation, and Zen. The latter, as I know it in relation to martial arts, emphasizes both an attention to the moment and what my teacher used to call “flood light consciousness.” That is, despite the metaphor, no single sense or object is privileged for the sake of another. Rather one is called to be aware and feel a given moment, a given space, so that perceptions beyond the basic senses come into one’s ken. I would assume that most have heard this, and dismiss it, in its Star Wars incarnation as Obe Wan’s sage advice to feel and use ‘the force.’ Despite my raw ignorance of Massumi’s argument’s details, let me venture two basic departures in Zen.
First, the call to be aware of the “moment” in Zen, although an embodied attention, also has a temporal component; place your attention in the here and now. Complicating this, lest one think that Zen masters do not care about the past or the future, is the broader meta-awareness needed to be in the here and now. That is, it’s not so much about what “time” you are thinking of but rather that you recognize that you are in that cognitive space; I am thinking of the past, but am doing it (thinking) in the present moment and because that is my present activity, I must be entirely focused on thinking of the past. Here, then, (note the play on words ;—) is the second of Zen’s departures.
In contradistinction to “flood light consciousness,” my teacher used the term “spotlight consciousness,” which for Zen means to be entirely focused on a particular. I leave “particular” purposefully vague because the object of one’s attention can range from washing dishes to questioning one’s being to being itself. (Kristine’s post on experiencing the self discusses this in more detail) To be entirely focused on a particular, to the exclusion of all else, is extremely demanding but equally rewarding. The challenge of living this, it seems to me, is the ability to recognize when either floodlight or spotlight awareness is necessary and being able to shift modes quickly.
to Be (here), or not to Be (now)
...my bed needs my body’s passive attention
I am strangely anxious about publishing the post below simply because this is a public space that both students and colleagues have access to. Regardless, I simultaneously swallow my nervousness and foreground it here to demonstrate that I pretend not to care what you think about how insane I possibly sound in the post below.
yours in human neurotic solidarity,
srt
In order to hold myself accountable and to strengthen the power of my promises, I am announcing the beginning of a two-month long initiative to post new writings five days a week. Although my previous month long trial was both successful and helpful, I found myself drifting far too often into biography; I enjoy writing about my life happenings and offering some analysis of them but I want to focus this initiative much more.
Mondays and Thursdays will be dedicated to writings on pedagogy both in terms of practice, i.e. my class successes and shortfalls, and theory. I am happy to say this will be greatly informed by discussions with Gwen, Justin V, and Cara as we venture to create service learning courses for the Fall and Winter semesters. These discussions, and my writings on them, should have the added benefit of acquainting me with the various strands of critical pedagogy and open a space to think through my place in relationship to those ideas.
Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays will be dedicated to reflections on current readings and projects. Saturday will be only real off-day because I teach all day Wednesday and usually spend much of that evening after classes checking my second class’ work. Regardless, on with the project!
The balance or tension between authority and openness is a crucial one within my pedagogical practice. During my tenure at my old martial arts school, I had the opportunity to teach classes for several years under the careful guidance of Sifu (head instructor/ Teacher). This first venture into a mass teaching setting (I had been a tutor for several years already) was initially an emotionally draining experience with far too many lows for the number of highs. I began helping with kids’ classes and quickly discovered how much energy it takes to motivate young children and be patient with early teenager attitude. The great benefit of this experience, however, was the ability to call forth a great deal of sincerely positive energy, despite whatever happened earlier that day. This early form of “professionalism” also formed what has become a guiding pedagogical principle; I must be what I want from my students: energetic, engaged, creative, focused et al. (I realize how hopelessly naïve or even silly this may sound to some of my colleagues; regardless, this has been a working principle that has garnered great results). A year before I left the Dojo, my daily schedule would normally include teaching several classes to both kids and adults (at separate times). At the peak of my investment in that particular environment, and under that particular teacher, I was one of the top 5 instructors for a school of nearly 500.
Teaching adults, much like the kids, required a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, but also an interesting balance between openness and a purposeful distance. For the kids, my playfulness and humor was always tempered with a firm disciplinary presence that is implicit in their perception; we were nothing short of superheroes. Adults, especially those with cars, houses, kids my age, and the like, had no such impression of us (instructors), except perhaps the knowledge that we were talented in the art. The respect had to be earned slowly; a part of this process involved creating a “fantasy,” a distance that did not engage in ‘get to know you’ conversation. During our teaching, we were instructors first, (highly talented and motivated) students second and always approached as authority figures; the formality of the environment, the detailed etiquette and ranking system all contributed to this.
To be continue tomorrow morning…
When warm bass lines or conversations with Aarthi won’t complete the inner vaccum left by a post book discussion buzz, I call on a melancholic reminesence of the only one who can call forth unconditional love from me…Summy.
Despite substantial cognitive breakthroughs and a reawakened desire to write, I have bare little to articulate in this space. Perhaps it is the abundance of material rather than the lack of it that has contributed to my recent stagnation. Given that this post is an off-the-cuff writing moment, let me briefly list some of the more interesting life happenings.
New roommate; one who is actually more anal about organizational logic and cleanliness than I am–Woo hoo. He actually arranged a plate of oranges into a square accented by apples at the midpoints to form a semi-pyramidal structure––we’re going to get along just fine.
Thinking through Service learning projects for the Fall and Winter semester in coordination with Gwen: leaning heavily toward an transgenerational archival project that would engage 3010 honors students and the Detroit senior community at Hannan House; debating the efficacy of using comedic material in this setting.
Despite three unresolved projects, including a Master’s thesis, I am feeling surprisingly good and engaged about my work; this, I realize, could be one of those strange manic moments in which the melancholic ground of Being is momentarily suspended, giving way to joy, purposiveness and the enigmatic rumblings of groundless love. Also, this could be me attempting to exercise an atrophying linguistic flair; either or.
And now, a pretty picture entitled, Shadows of thought: Ruminations on cosmic universality, sub-nuclear particularity and dinner.
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