Thursday, February 28, 2008

It's hard to know how much I like Virginia Woolf's writing. I have many reservations. She also created basic food groups that are hard to find--things essential and yet so rare that it is hard to say what they are.

Her writing is the island from the missing continent of works created by women. There is something about her thinking and her noticing that is very her and part of that is a woman's way of thinking that many women had to repress to survive.

So I read it and reserve away--she's a snob, limited things she's looking at, when she know her limitations and tries to bring in more, beyond her usual round of living, she's not so good at it.

All that I could define in detail if I wanted. But I can't define what is there and so rare. A bit of the vast noticings tha have been prevented by raw squashing of people.

What she notices and how she notices is freeing. It's also subtle, from here, from the continent where so many ways of noticing have been so submerged they never got to exist. Sometimes it is hard to get with what she is noticing because it is different. I have to be with it a while to get that it is a bit of the missing home.

A book of hers that is difficult to read in a whole other way is the novel she wrote to prove she could write a regular novel. Dragging through it is tough, not fun. She presumably experienced many novels by other people that way--slow, low level pain. The pain of not matching one's own experience of life.

Whereas the novel's she wrote her way, as best she could, can be suddenly light. It's tough to get what she's up to and then suddenly I'm up there with her going, "Yes." I have then more chance of knowing what it know.

She wrote in essays against a common phrase of her time and of right before her time--"an angel in the house."

A woman was supposed to be "an angel in the house," subtly, pervasively making everything work in a wonderful way for people other than herself. In the kind of world where that phrase was used the angel in the house was the woman of privilege who had lots of servants to help with that smoothness, who weren't referred to as angels in the house. The tough, physical labor bunch.

Virginia Woolf railed against the angel in the house and became another kind of angel, making it easier to see how one might see one's own way, one might hear what one truly hears.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Sitting among the dust motes, learning to float.
It's all gravy. From the first breath to the last, through all the incarnations, it's all an extra day.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Larks sing as they fly. Not everyone does.

A good thing about the national anthem of the United States is that the part that is sung all the time is a question or two. No statements. No commands.

Democracy is an endless series of questions. Given that you have be given more freedom than people in many times and places, what are you going to do?

Oh, say, can you be a sage, free human being, and use wisely the power that are ancestors gave us? Write a letter today, vote today, work to include more people in today, sing as you fly?
Hope can be demanding. Cynicism is restful. Someone verbally adept can install a cynicism app in their brain and just let it run as they sit and sit and sit.
Joy and stuff. Happiness makes everything look good, down to pebbles and up to dark grey skies.
The sun lies down on the sidewalk and makes the shadows pretty.
Gentle like still, fresh air, she's there.
There are guitguits, pronoucned "gwitgwits," hanging out toward the warm middle of the Americas, flying, sitting, saying "gwit, gwit" when it's time to, being brightly colored, doing their job, so it would be better if we didn't kill everything. The idea is that if I make peace with my bright colors and know what my cry is I'll feel less need to be part of a rampage that knocks down places where other beings live. I love you, world. Gwit, gwit.
This is more fun than twisting myself into a pretzel trying to think John Kerry is someone I'm interested in