Virgo full moon

today, I choose abundance—says one and all. revisiting Passages (Ira Sachs), finishing Shirley Hazzard Transit of Venus after prolonging the experience for ages was so upsetting I actually felt motivated to do my taxes.

blooper

they should make a drink called "chassis", pronounced like Pastis. the kind of throwaway line that would have "done numbers" on wordcel twitter c. 2021. 

the meaning is in the middle

reads a cartoonish illustration of a man holding a scroll in Mary Douglas' Thinking in Circles (p. 35). juicing the animal. I remember an art class in the first days of fifth grade, embarking on what would be a yearlong project of producing our own dinosaurs from "scratch" (how else), with papier mâche, etc. the project was legendary among the students, who had grown up watching older classes divine their own variations, who had theirs all planned out, comparing what personal touches they would add, but completely new to me, a last minute transfer, as of a few weeks before the start of the school year. the teacher (thick curls, loudmouthed but in her way, very kind, a nicer Susie from Curb) asked us, where do we begin a sculpture, how do we build it out? silence, some errant guesses. with the dinosaur's torso, I said. I don't know where the answer came from, I was very shy, but: we start there, and only from that hard core can we append on its protruding legs and hands, a head. Steiner's threefold being and naturally, our dan tian. 

showing up with

There is grief in the now, and then there is pre-grieving the world. What’s funny is, showing up with the wrong one.

inferences

the "I am X, so ofc I am/do Y" (#ofcoursetrend) meme template suggests that normative statements of I AM inference have been cleaved apart by the broader erosion of whatever material/identity signifiers are represented in them and thus affect and action have to be deliberately conjoined, affirmative magic for last hurrah of certain attachment styles. i.e. liberation otw, and already present.

Meanwhile, picture x and y like solitary islands, two nips of Baked Alaska meringue (surely Jameson says this somewhere) and the swipe-scroll generation of content to lock in that paradigm as a gratuitous attempt at their bridging—Christ consciousness along the spine—see for reference, above, literal Christo's Floating Piers project at Lake Iseo, Italy 2016, except not really, because they were working with only one island there, trying with those two nodal points to duck-tape tack it, dial back to the mainland, whereas I prefer the model of shedding the very idea of "mainland," shedding the frame by framing to shed, by being content to circle the sentiment of desire-to-conjunct, but no we cannot always get what we want, so let that become the unifying form instead, and in the hot pink bush beaches, an indication of human imprint, human presence, as in the Biscayne Bay wrapping from 1983 (with Jeanne-Claude, maybe that's the difference), how were we less greedy then!

derivations

from the looks of me, and from my own language, people assume I meditate. people will assume a great many things, don’t we all. or we derive, and the nature of the derivation is what’s true, stuff the content. Again it becomes about the container, or the shell of the act that determines its direction, how hard it is to steer a drill, so you learn, once you turn it on. anyhow I wish I did, but instead it’s something less simple, less elegant, a cornucopia of tools and summoning the right one when, well, another healing process.

Basically, what it is, is that

I can't stop thinking about certain scenes, mainly the exterior shots of the small town, in Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), first watched a few years back. In my memory, it's usually the Time of the Return, as if appending a bookmark to spatio-temperature changes it all. Street lamps, water, rounded shop windows, except it's cold. The potential for gambling with the ominous presence of the casino, to which Delphine, shown ugly, gauche, middle-aged, hanging on, almost English, a Natalia Ginzburg character, must be accompanied, and from which she is then steered away. She cannot help herself, it being there, just like people in Monaco are forbidden to run ragged at their places of employment. Her convertible domesticity, ye olde furniture shop. Her errant, mysterious son, lover. Lapsed, lopsided storytelling—people resented Resnais for this. More easily accepted: intergenerational affairs, mutual violences. Colonist comes home, to sad, pathetic home, poor effect. Awkwardnesses pluralized, spliced and spread among conversation's participants. All humming separately rewinding respective reels. I do not "like" this movie much, but I think it is somehow very important now, or will be.