happy fall and all

school! school has begun! and now i have assignments:

for selah (who is so great, by the way--everyone said it and now i know it's true: she's going to cambodia to see what a university system means after genocide and what forms happen in order to speak this experience. she also says that trauma hybridizes the body and splits the language!)'s tutorial (blanchot), she has asked us to wear blanchot for the next two weeks. i think i will wear this:

"more significant is the 'transcendence' of language in and of itself: that is to say, a given language enters into resonance with itself and determines itself without end: it constitutes, thus, an interrupted, uninterrupted action, which then causes 'the soul to enter into resonance with itself or with the object'"

i also have to, in an "exercise of essentialization," answer these mystery questions through 15 minute free-writings and a lot of reduction to follow that:

1. to whom, for whom, do i speak--am i responsible?
2. is the love i give good and do i deserve it in return?

i just read those questions for the first time! the second one will be like an entire therapy session with myself.

okay. and then, for eleni's ws, i have to notice what i notice--the banality, what's before me. and read spring and all, which has this:

in passing with my mind
on nothing in the world

but the right of way
i enjoy on the road by

virtue of the law--
i saw

an elderly man who
smiled and looked away

to the north past a house--
a woman in blue

who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up

into the man's half
averted face

and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of

the man's belly
at a watchchain--

the supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle

sped me by them
without a word--

why bother where i went?
for i went spinning on the

four wheels of my car
along the wet road until

i saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony

this is so incredible. i can't believe i haven't read it before. the ending goes further away from, or maybe further into humanity, or how we come so close to seeing the distance between life and not life--so close that it becomes us. the other poems we looked at had this quality: the end as precipice or inlet into the starkness of being a living thing. the confrontation. this is what's important. i guess from there it's all how to manage it.