Hello babes and bots! I am in the unpredictably sunny/rainy Minnesota right now contemplating quite deeply whether or not to make cookies.
I have now made cookies.
Updates
Am considering the efficacy of calling home more often because I have limited service and a lot of new friends. I sing all the time and it probably pisses people off. I'm excessively loud, but this is not new. And my new life goal is self-improvement without self-deprecation which, I've learned, is an epic balance to strike with oneself. Tough. Very tough.
In case anyone was wondering (no one was wondering), I haven't been reading. I took my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard with me into the woods and didn't read a single word until I got back. And while I recently finished For the Time Being by the same genius author, I can't claim to have made any progress on my yearly reading goal which means a) I will change the reading goal, b) I will fail, or c) I will read like the wind...in December. As for some advice from Dillard on the self-improvement struggle, things are looking bleak. Annie Dillard does not seem to concern herself with such childish matters because she is Annie Dillard I guess. She doesn't need self-improvement.
As I'm writing this a mosquito is biting my butt. I am highly engaged in an epic battle against blood-suckers of the world unless they look like Kristin Stewart which makes things difficult. We here in Minnesota call it "bug stress." Excuse me while I add this to my list of problems. I add this to the list of updates because I've accumulated a number of mosquito bites and if by chance, you wonder why this post is so choppy, you can now assure yourself it's because I've taken at least 12 itch breaks since starting. This is no exaggeration. To ameliorate these problems at night, I sleep surrounded by bug net. This only sometimes works.
existential woes
So For the Time Being was an epic struggle to read because I often had no idea what was going on. Dillard makes puzzles for books and I think she does that on purpose. This is the great problem/prize of poetry, which may or may not be the entire point of life in general. Setting aside these existential woes, I found the last paragraph impossibly, frustratingly captivating.
In Highland New Guinea, now Papu New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside the world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmy to his loved ones that, no matter what hapened to him, he had to see where it came from.
I won't be the first to say that Annie Dillard is problematic. That she is fascinated by the spectacle of secluded African communities and concerns herself with a great other human "abnormalities" creates mystique where she could very well muster subtlety. An overwrought problem in the canon to be sure, and entirely uninformed. I find this ironic for Dillard is informed. Perhaps self-awareness is what is lacking.
Dillard's true gems are her canyons of love. I find love in the man who straps himself to the airplane, and I believe she did too. I find love in her problematic captivation with human bodies, human experiences, culture, and wonder where this captivating crosses from love to something more painful, insensitive, egotistical, or racist. I think now that I have always read for love. And I see it here, too...
'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.' Joseph Stalin, that gourmandizer, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.
How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Qur'ran says, 'not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him.' That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismemebers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.
What about the efficacy of life does she fail to see? What do I fail to see? Perhaps the answer lies in the book I read each night, the second in my list Dillard books, with little success.
You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium...You are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are God--are you tired? finished?
Oh if only I could accept my life and the lives of those who are killed unjustly or leave us too early or are unfairly ripped from us to be, however patiently, the beginnings of trees. I would surely be happier. Would it then be more accurate to say 8 billion people are simply 8 billion trees? I'm sure I've missed the point.
"Trust the process" is something I say a lot now. I say it ironically, looking up to the sky with a quizzical brow as though trying to spot something I cannot possibly see. This, too, is an existential woe. I suppose I have Annie Dillard to thank for that.
xoxo BLT
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