NoraSawyer.com

I was hoping for Iambic Pentameter (or terza rima), but whatever:

Ahhh. Lovely (albeit busy) weekend. I had class Saturday and Sunday (from 9:30 – 4:45 each day), so Valentines Day was postponed ’til Presidents Day (which is not actually Presidents Day at all, I’ve learned).

Brian and I rented a room at a seedy beachside hotel for Sunday and Monday nights (sure we live in San Francisco, but beachside is a novelty when you live on Haight St). It was just about the ugliest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, with dingy rooms, a boxy, ugly bathroom and a ‘view’ of the N Train, but its proximity to Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach made it worth every penny of the discount rate. And spending time really alone with Brian (no housemates about, no housemates expected) was a forgotten and consummate pleasure. I really am a lucky girl.

My saddest haiku ever (written entirely in jest):

A barren pathway

Indifference, hate and rocksalt

My heart: Dakota

The heart is truly an instrument de precision. My father’s Virtual 1221 is both a labor of love and a testament to the measurability our dreams can have at times.

In The Divine Comedy Dante’s words are weighted (no pun intended) by the wealth of detail he put into his stories. he describes, even down to the measurements the things he saw, making his hell as real and as vividly imagined as any other far off place that exists in space or memory.

This next bit is from Canto XXXI in the Pinsky translation of the Inferno. In it, Dante describes one of the giants set to guard the gates of hell:

To me his face appeared as long and full

As the bronze pinecone of St. Peter’s of Rome

With all his other bones proportional

So that the bank, which was an apron for him

Down from his middle, showed above it such a height

Three men of Friesland could not boast to come

Up to his hair. Extending down from the spot

Where one would buckle a mantle I could see

Thirty spans of him. . .

Dante’s detailed description of the afterlife gives it a reality beyond fable. The space is mesurable, the account measured. This is a place that matters, and every detail, no matter how sensational or insignificant, has its own wieght. This is no frivious vision, no flight of fancy. Here, every detail bears equal weight.

Of course, Dante didn’t invent this sort of trancendental spatial descriptiveness. Witness John’s description of the Heavenly City in the book of Revelation:

And he who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies four-square, its length the same as its breadth; and he measured the city with his rod, twelve thousand stadia; its length and breadth and height are equal. He also measured its wall, a hundred and forty-four cubits by a man’s measure, that is, an angel’s. The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. ( Revelation. 21:15-18)

Luckily, my father’s palaces of memeory are not so horrific as Dante’s underworld, nor as awesome/awful as St. John’s vision. But his labor flows from the same stream as Dante’s.

We are all given to our own visions, and while our underworlds and palaces of memory are not as epic as Dante’s or as Divinely inspired, they are our own, and the responsibity for their upkeep ours alone. And the walls are built of jasper, and pure gold, clear as glass.

This was advertized above my blog today. Made me larf:

http://www.stupid.com/stat/FSLP.html

So, for those of you who know of both my blogs, there will be some downtime over at the salon blog (http://blogs.salon.com/0003044/). My usual computer’s waiting on a new ethernet card (I’m goin’ wireless!), and until then, I’m on one of Brian’s computers, and no Salon-blog-acesss for me (^$$%# proprietary software).

Anywho.

For whatever reason, this blogdoesn’t get as much attention as it should. I got it so that I could blog from work if need be, but I guess, well, that doesn’t happen much. My fear of getting caught outweighs my need to share my deep thoughts with the world.

One of the problems of blogging is (in my case anyway) reining in the ol’ attention span. No matter how great I think my ideas are, or how excited I am to explore them, it seems like once I get into writing mode, the call of the wild internet makes me stray away from my own ideas, and into other people’s. Or at least the hopes that I might find some. In the absence of recently-updated other-people’s-blogs, I usually end up wandering aimlessly, reading anything that crosses my path. There’s a certain magesty to the desperate way I avoid my own thoughts. Like I’m cursed to wander the earth like Cain until I get my BA.

But I digress.

Having left this blog alone for a bit, I hadn’t read my own postings for a while – and was frustrated and a bit inspired by the post I mad about Sartre back in November.

Having read through No Exit since then (the full text is available online, if’n you care to look), I feel like a common theme in both Sartre and Dante is the need for movement from pure self awareness to a more social awareness.

I’m not sure if I’ve quoted this in this or any other blog before, but this quotation has become one of my favorite mantra’s:

“The starting point for critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing thyself as the product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.”

Just as we cannot understand the current state of the world if we do not know its history, we cannot understand ourselves unless we connect with the world as it is, and our place within it.

For Dante, hell was the inability to look beyond oneself. For Sartre the tragedy of hell lay in the inabilty to see ouselves outside the reflection we can see in other’s eyes. Hell is other people, sure, but it doesn’t have to be.

I saw this on a t-shirt when I was seventeen:

Unless you’re Buddist, death is forever.

At the time, it didn’t do anything other than make me laugh. My faux-wise cyncism, unjostled by life’s slings and arrows saw only humor. But there is a coldly succinct truth stated there: we are, each of us, only given one life.

So what to do with it? The question didn’t have much urgency at seventeen. Teenagers feel nothing but raw potential, for good or for ill. Even adolescent angst has an immortality to it.

But still, the question is there, only gaining urgency as we age: what am I doing with my life? And its flipside: what should I be doing?

What indeed.

The GashlyCrumb Tinies – You have a terribly wicked
sense of humour and people are drawn to your
wit. Children beware of the thin, pale man
with the black umbrella!

Which Edward Gorey Book Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I’ve been thinking about cities.

Freud:

let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past–an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand-without the Palazzo having to be removed–the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other. (Civilization and Its Discontents p16)

Perhaps comparing this with the entrance to the Inferno would reveal something? Or perhaps not.

At the end of his play, No Exit, Sartre declares (vicariously) that, “Hell is other people.”

My familiarity with hell is entirely Dante-derived. And Dante (who, if you’ll recall was there and would know) portrays hell as a lonely, or at least self-absorbed, experience.

I’m not sure what to do with this. Perhaps I should off to bed.

So: depressing topic for the day

I was reading today about the columbine massacre (I warned you), and the struggle to identify some sort of motive. And as the author listed off the ususal suspects (video games, partents, trench coats Marylin Manson), I got to thinking.

Now what if this is the scenario: you spend your whole life hearing about how powerless your generation is. You’re apathetic. Your music, opinions and fellings are cliche. Rebellion? Its been done. In every form. So really, what is there left to do?

Something huge. Something awful.

How awful.