mind vs. mind

there is only a week of school left. i have to make a chapbook and finish a story and then i will be done. for break we were going to go to florida to visit rob, m's bf, but now rob got a job in the mountains around ft. collins, so he's coming here instead. this is good for m, but sad for me. i think pontiac and i will have to devise a different plan. last night she said we could go to russia. i hope we go somehwere by the ocean.

i just listened to this (dr. warren brown on the brain science podcast) the other night.

it talks about how we get stuck in the idea that the mind is a noun, and how really we don't have A mind, and how we lapse back into a mind/body dualism that is problematic. my favorite part is when he says, first we act and then we get feedback, and that the only way we know anything is by actively interacting with the world. if the brain is separated from the world, there can be no intelligence. information is dependent upon our interaction with the world.

it seems like what he was saying is that our world view, which was specialized and reduced to the smallest parts (all causes can be understood by something smaller: physics), is now becoming more holistic and we are considering the entire oranization of the parts to help us emerge. emergence became the focus of the talk--emergence as a natural process.

on to the imagination! a few days ago i read downstream from trout fishing in america, keith abbot's memoir of richard brautigan. i had read some of the chapters before in magazines and online, but put together as it now is! it's incredibly informative. he knew rb for almost 20 years and this books takes a chronological approach to that friendship. there are certain times when i don't feel like trusting abbot just because what he says is sad, and the book does have a tendency, at times, to present the material in a way that makes me feel like he has an agenda. but overall, it's an amazing portrait of rb. and instead of ending the book with the end of brautigan's life, abbot devotes the last part to a thorough criticism of rb's work.

he ends the book like this:

"the curse and the blessing of the imagination is that the mind (noun) wants to create an autonomous object, yet it can't prevent itself from imagining that object's eventual disintegration  and it can't fail to understand that by giving birth to something, that something's death is assured. brautigan's tragedy, which he enacted in book after book and eventually in his own life, was that he defined everything, including himself, in terms of an ahistorical imagination. brutigan wanted to round up life in one mercurial, moving, magic vision, but he recognized that he could produce only books--and he called those 'paper phantoms.' 

saying goodbye to blanchot

for the last blanchot tutorial i'm going to present on this:

"the water in which narcissus sees what he shouldn't is not a mirror, capable of producing a distinct and definite image. what he sees is the invisible in the visible--in the picture the undepicted, the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model.

i decided to do a photo shoot and make a movie for my presentation, so i got out the animals.

 

shoot

i forgot about this:

my new house will have a tree growing through it. kind of. this is more the house attached to my new house.

and i went to a place today where i bought christmas presents: ugandan jewelry made of paper! and a nice bag.

dikeou

last night jen, eric, and arda read at the dikeou. the reading was the best. everyone should buy all of their books. right now. i'm really so serious. they are all the best books that you should read if you haven't. here are some pictures from it. i made a few movies of poems being read as the rabbits deflated but i don't know how to add movies to this.

the last picture is from tamara on halloween. she is a woman in a window!

new place

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this is matthew invading- this is the place jen has decided to have us live

photographs of the sun

 

 

this week in workshop we were experimenting with documentary-land poetics. we recorded a familiar voyage from memory and then we went on the voyage (which could be like a quest). this is the place i frequent (washington park, in denver--i usually ride my bike through it to get to school). i found buttons on the computer to push and they made things happen to my pictures, so the world doesn't really look like this. also, one thing to note is that there is a gang of unicyclists that sometimes show up.

and i've also been trying to photograph the sun.

the men

we are reading the men by lisa robertson for ws. it is so fantastic. i have to memorize one part and i am memorizing this:

there were a thousand and twenty-two stars and fear
and lust moving together like make-up over all the
cities of them, their spines laid back in the seizure of
strangeness. their were burnt-out skies of flat and leaf-
laden nature, teh rough territories of their hands floating
over the surface of our ragged breath and their sadness
built of doubt. whether these ideas are true or false they
are certain. everything i can remember about summer is
the men, portraits, still-lifes, and stiff leaf of the camelia.
the men became what they are like rather than what
they are--

this book is the best book.

i also made a movie. it's too long and isn't that interesting but i was playing around with the movie maker on my computer so one day i can make a movie about the sky.

animals!

 

 

 

  

 

last night, a lot of animals came to my house. and someone, near the end of the night, got the cookies. and i was a ventriloquist's doll.

it just keeps snowing

more and more and more snow. here is what it's like. matthew took most of these.

 

 

and here is my favorite line from the difficult farm by heather christle:

                                 i read once
of a man who suffered from what
they dubbed "phantom antlers"--he'd go
to groom them and instead he'd groom the air.

 

 

these pictures are from a corn maze last weekend. it only took sixteen minutes to complete. and at the end was this girl in a dinosaur costume. 

this week

 

selah asked us to fill up five pages using one sentence. here is my sentence. eleni's suggestion for this week was to write a poem whose knowledge is contained entirely within itself. and then an addendum: write a poem whose knowledge of itself is contained outside of the poem. i think this comes from ed dorn's 1977 chat where he talks about external poems: " i'm talking about the lattice of reality operating on you completely. in other words, you're to have as little to do with the poem as possible."

other than these things, i've been reading nietzsche and taking notes about him: "there is nothing internal to which something external would not correspond," and so on. i've been writing very little.