Archives for January, 2008

Someone who has been offended … becomes aware that in the innermost blindness of love, that must remain oblivious, lives a demand not to be blinded.

- Minima Moralia (Adorno); qtd in Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler)

I am two pages into a book I am reading and already I want to stop and share it with someone: this is you. isn’t it? i think it is. and therefore, by extension, me. for a fleeting moment, i know it is.
 

The first day back, I didn’t have class until late in the evening. I finished up some paperwork, tied up some loose ends with a professor, and then I had hours and hours to read.
I found some empty couches, scattered my things over the closest table, stretched out and began reading.
The essay I was reading made staying still difficult, because every few minutes I had to resist the urge to run to a computer to send people emails with nothing in the subject line and only the words I was reading in the body.
Literally: run.

I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense … My readings do presuppose a need, a desire among folk who like me also want to save their own lives.

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I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense … My readings do presuppose a need, a desire among folk who like me also want to save their own lives.

- “The Race for Theory” (Barbara Christian)

Standing at the dark house of my dreams …
Like a fire temple I hoard my inner fires
Hoard my semen, brown with inbreeding. Genetic rust?

Death hums over the wires: what affects the spawn
Is rickets, polio, a drug gone rogue. Daughters
Walk out on the tribe …

A Parsi carries his hell.

- “Parsi Hell” (Keki Daruwalla); qtd in The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (TM Luhrmann)

the capacity to harangue themselves into irrelevance

- The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (T. M. Luhrmann)

The presence of racism in the United States showed the universality of racial thinking, the inevitability of racism, and even justified a system that was “at least honest.” So South Africa’s outright racism was actually moral virtue. The American South proved that South Africa wasn’t so bad. After all, there was no Ku Klux Klan in this country, no privately organized violence.

- Steyn, Melissa. “White Identity in Context: A Personal Narrative.” Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity.
Ed. Thomas K Nakayama and Judith N Martin.

“I hate saying hello and I hate saying goodbye.”

I am standing at your closet. It’s a steel locker really, dented in several places, about a fourth of its front covered with stickers of wrestlers, their muscles bulging out of their skimpy costumes, their faces contorted into grimaces of victory, their arms either raised high in triumph or flexed across their chests in challenge. The stickers are old, faded and peeling, remnants of a shared childhood. I pick at one, its edges already serrated, the glue showing up in thin white ridges against the blue metal.

I can tell that I sound like I’m whining. I can tell that I sound spoiled and anti-social, wanting to avoid the crush of family and social responsibilities, wanting only to spend the light-drenched afternoons playing soccer barefoot on the roof or hanging over the balustrades of the red-floored balcony.

And it’s true, I am whining. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, to keep these fortnights lived and real. I will remember the sound of crows in the morning; I will remember the sudden fall of afternoon flash rains; I will remember the wide crimson stairs and you sitting on them watching the TV through the window bars.

You laugh, saying the logical thing, what I knew you’d say, something bland and vague, and you are amused and teasingly patronising. You’re getting ready to go out somewhere. It’s early in the evening and you’re getting dressed, pulling clothes from the various corners of your room. You move swiftly, darting around the bed and my watching self.

I will remember you doing chin-ups on the bar in the empty garage; I will remember you standing silent at the entrance; I will remember you sprawled lazily across the sofa, arguing.

A year later, the night before we leave one last time, you come downstairs. We’re all watching a movie that really isn’t worth watching. You walk in just as the spy’s unrequited love appears at the top of a flight of stairs. She wears a long red dress and the man in his tuxedo is suitably taken aback at the sight of her. We pause in our various distractions to catch the moment. I grin, amused, trying to be.

It’s clear you’ve come to say goodbye. You’re gearing up to say the appropriate things and to say them genuinely, but I’m having none of it tonight. I keep my eyes fixed on the screen, watching the movie that isn’t worth watching, where women stand sleekly bewildered at the tops of stairs and in their graceful silence render men awestruck.

You say nothing and slip out. I saw you smile, a small tight smile, before you left.

I forget now.

i’m going to learn me some humility.