Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

custodial repression?

...and everything else

I was watching the commentary of Bride and Prejudice this evening when the phrase “custodian of culture” came up, in some scene or another. Chadha talked for a few seconds on it, then moved on to talking about… oh, the Jane Austen society, or something. But I got stuck on custodian of culture.

I seem to collect certain sorts of people, and one of those sorts is librarians, who people often refer to as custodians of culture. But in thinking about it, well I dislike the term custodian (or curator), because it seems to denote some sort of control over the culture it’s watching and guarding. Culture doesn’t work like that, though – culture is a living beast that morphs and changes as it touches each of us, and we touch it in return. By existing within the culture, we change it as it reinforces itself with us. Having a custodian, someone who is supposed to stand outside this feedback loop and moderate and maintain it, seems completely anathema to the entire idea of what culture should even be in the first place.

Attempting to guard culture doesn’t end up keeping it pure, it ends up keeping it stagnant.

(And for the record, if someone were to ask me what a librarian does, I would not say they curate or custodialize culture in any way. Librarians are hubs in a cultural system; they’re very connected to the system, and trained in how to perceive, manipulate, and organize it into a form that’s readily digested by people who don’t have those kinds of powerlaw relations with knowledge and information.)

Intimacy

...and everything else, life and living

Intimacy is not sex, is it not love, it is not even touching. Intimacy is connection. It can be a foot resting on the chair of a partner, of washing and drying dishes in tandem, a look on the subway or the brush of a sleeve against another in passing. Intimacy is created not through the ordinary of daily exchanges but through the extraordinary, that which is out of place. It is the hair of a stranger playing across your face, fingers touching from check to pen to cashier, two people sitting on the floor and surrounded by those in chairs. It is the quick look that acknowledges the other person out of bounds with you, both of you vibrating with the secret knowledge of your transgressions, shared, connected, intimate.

Concepts of Means

...and everything else, Summer 05, Summer Institute

The concept of means misses their reality. The taste for things, the appetite for reality, is not an agitation to compensate for inner lacks. The water we drink is not just a means to lubricate our inner organs; the thirty mouth drinks too much or too little, savoring the body and the bouquet of the wine, tasting the luminous mirth of the spring pouring out of the rocks. The foodstuffs obtained to refurbish depleted body protein and evaporated body liquids dissolve, for the taste that savors them, into terrestrial and celestial bounty. In the berries we gather as we walk through the meadow we relish the savor of summer. The substances that nourish us are not means for action that will seek for more means which are each time means for something further. After a good dinner, we turn to squander our energies on flowers planted in the garden in the glowing sunset, in kisses and caresses lost on an affectionate cockatoo, on the somnolent body of a lover. The colors and the shadows that contour the visible and lead the restless gaze in aimless circumnavigations through the environment fo not simply serve to locate what we need or want. Sigh is not an intentionality made of distress or desire. Vitalized, illuminated, and nourished by the substance of colored and translucent things, sight becomes high-spirited life. It caresses the colors, forms, contours and shadows, making them glow for themselves with their own lights.
-Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative, “Intimate and Alien Things”

so few sweet dreams

...and everything else, life and living

I took an ambien last night to sleep, something that will become more common the next few days while I reset my sleeping schedule. The resulting dreams were… unpleasent, to say the least. Nightlong dreams of trust and then the shock of betrayal; I know a lot of dreams feel nightlong, but it’s not too often, you groggily wake up through-out the night to note the time, and the dream progresses along with those waking ups. Strange that what was still probably only 5-10 minutes at the very most is so stuck with me now.

It was a dream of breaking up, of getting back together, happiness, and then utter and complete betrayal. Not just breaking up, but finding out about lie after lie after lie, sitting around a table with family and lawyers and just finding one thing after another ripped out from under me, belief after belief systematically destroyed. I would say “but you said” and the counter would be a calm “I lied because you made me.” “But you promised” – “I had no choice”, “Didn’t you ever…” – “No.”

And I wonder why I have trust issues.

and to do

...and everything else, life and living

There are a lot of things I want to do, places I’d like to see, and things I want to accomplish. I’m not going to succeed in any of them if I don’t start applying myself just a wee bit more, to life, health, living.

It’s a sobering realization, and I hope it’s one that helps motivate me to do the things I need to do to take care of myself and reach the goals I’m setting.