staying afloat

"All of us swim in the one sea all our lives, trying to stay afloat as best we can, clinging to such lifelines and preservers as we might draw about us: reason and science, faith and religious practice, art and music and imagination," says Thomas Lynch in a book review of David Reiff's book on his mother, Susan Sontag, in a recent LA Times.

what life preserver(s) am i clinging to these days in the stormy sea that is my life? sleep. books. cooking. family. friends. a reawakening creativity. my belief in fate. an overwhelming feeling of being guided towards something better. sheryl crow. alanis morissette. regina spektor.

memory and forgetting

still working on those bookshelves...it's a LOT of books we're talking about here. and i'm remembering so many things about who i was. i was a person who wrote a 32-page scholarly paper (that got an A, i might add) on madonna. for that purpose, i bought books called things like deconstructing madonna and the madonna connection and from hegel to madonna. it was quite fashionable in the mid-90s to write serious, scholarly cultural criticism on people like madonna at arizona state. there were elvis studies departments at major universities. ahh, those were the days. as i recall, my madonna paper was really more about me than her, but i digress...

i also was a person who read (and extensively underlined) slavoj zizek. he's still churning out books, one every 3-4 months, but i can't keep up anymore. i used to purposely feed my inner homicidal maniac with doses of dostoevsky. i read balkan history for fun. i paged through coffee table books on the world of art movement. i used to dream that i was alive and at my prime in 1913 (who knows, maybe i was...but that's a whole 'nother posting).

i was totally into postmodernism, but didn't agree with jameson that it was the cultural logic of late capitalism. i thought it grew more directly as a reaction to modernism and my explanation of how it came about had more to do with russian formalism than anything. ostranenie. making strange, now there's a word i haven't thought of in awhile. the constant search for the new...aren't we still doing that?

how could i have forgotten that person? lost touch with her? life clearly took me in another direction. and i don't regret it, but i do wonder how i've lived without her these past few years. but i am happy i can stroll down the memory lane of my bookshelves and get in touch with her again. because she's right there, within me, just waiting for me to pluck down baudrillard or bourdieu or kristeva or maybe even zizek from those shelves. better yet, how about some of that dostoevsky...

the tacit pleasure of the book

i spent the day today arranging books on the shelves upstairs...i really love working with books, it feels so wholesome and good. i love handling them, remembering them, and just gazing at them there on the shelf. they just make me feel very good somehow. many of them conjure up memories...of classes where i had to read them, of airports where i bought them and sat and read them for hours, of holidays where i carried them around in a backpack, of libraries where i made notes in the margins, of helping my father-in-law with his translations of his work on technolution (a field of study he invented and was the first professor of at lund university), of bookstores i wandered as i lovingly selected them. i love paging through and looking at what i've written in the margins or underlined or where i've put a little sticky note to mark a passage. it's like a flash of insight into who i was at the moment of previous reading. i surely wouldn't be that same reader if i reread the book today...i would underline new passages, as surely new things would speak to me. i even feel that way reading recipe books...i look at the recipes i marked in the past...totally dependent upon the mood of that day and very often i mark a whole new set of recipes as i go through. it's rather fascinating to think we can be one reader one day and another one the next.

of organic lemons and plump chickens...

i just stuffed two lovely, plump chickens full of organic lemons and sage. why is that simple act so satisfying? it is especially satisfying as the delicious smells of the lemony, sagey chicken begin to waft from the direction of the oven. it's so nice getting back in touch with my inner cook. i've missed her!! and it seems that everyone else has as well...

identity regained

when you leave a job, you feel as if you are losing some part of your identity...in today's world, we so much ARE our jobs, they define us and consume us and our world revolves around them. so i was a bit sad, thinking about losing my identity, but already now, i realize i haven't lost who i am at all...but in fact, i'm already regaining it. one lost identity: regained.

liminal spaces

i've long been attracted to the notion of liminality--the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process. with it there is also that sense of being in between. i've been suspended in a liminal space for nearly ten years now...living outside the country of my birth--i feel less and less that i belong in the u.s. and actively resist entirely belonging in denmark. while it can be a lonely feeling, mostly i feel it with a sense of expectant anticipation. i go through life always feeling that something is on the verge of happening. the same with being between jobs...you let go of the last one and look expectantly towards the next one. you hover on the threshold, not knowing what's ahead, but know that it must be better. it's tied for me to my ingrained presbyterian upbringing's notion of free will/destiny. although i must actively seek the next thing, at the same time, i am guided towards it by a firm hand (whose hand that is, i am not sure, but i strangely trust in the guidance). it remains hazy and unclear as of yet, but i feel in the (now) calm core of my soul that it is a brighter, better place. i feel also that it will become clear and then i'll be on the threshold of whatever is beyond. it's not really so bad, this liminal space which i inhabit.

cook, read, sleep

i think my own version of liz gilbert's book would be "cook, read, sleep." that seems to be how i'm getting through this. making my way thru nigella's feast cookbook and paul cunningham's madjournalen and tamasin day-lewis' good tempered food and the first Moro cookbook (waiting impatiently for #2 from amazon). cooking with a glass of south african pinotage in hand, what could be better? other than curling up in bed with a good book, a mug of fragrant tea and then a small snooze. how better to rejuvenate one's soul? especially when my overwhelming feeling is one of simply being run down and bone tired. i gave so much for so long and i'm no longer sure i was getting enough back for it to have been worth it. but it feels good to return to myself, through cooking, reading and sleeping...