anything frail, anything wild

jeffrey foucault’s desolate guitar and a grey sky, leaves  unfurling despite our best efforts.
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under the rain

this morning i read the article murtada posted on climate change and basic human suffering, which returned me to my usual crisis over academia. (i can justify bringing everything back to myself because of what is an almost catholic solipsism – “it’s not all about you” except that, really, it is: seeing the world also [...]

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in place of a post

i now have a week, or thereabouts, to write about the pastoral and read a thousand pages of anthropological theory and three novels, write two exams.
instead of formally “going running”, like i sometimes do, lately it has been chasing fence-jumping goats around fields they should not be in.
“why you always look angry when doing dhikr, [...]

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morning coffee.

the birds are returning despite the snow: driving into the city, two days ago, hundreds of them, undulating throng across the sky. on the other side of these days reading about the holocaust and the moral mean between indifference and hypersensitivity, with two half-baked essays and an accumulated exhaustion, i was almost moved to tears [...]

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see how far

for four days and three nights i read about the holocaust, breaking for food, sleep, prayers, transit, some classes. a mind full of horrors and a heart full of night, cockburn would say. the efforts of people to approach this/that historical moment, represent it in art, literature. adorno: “perhaps it was wrong to say [to [...]

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and what’d you learn today.

particular strands work their way through years. a curve.
in damascus it was, of course, traditionalism. i left with a very strong sense of the need to be ash’ari or maturidi in doctrine, hanafi shafi’i maliki or hanbali in practice, and to work constantly at one’s spiritual path until the day one enters a particular tariqa.
in [...]

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vat to do.

“i’m done,” i announced during a lull in the evening french class a few days ago. “just done.” and i sat back.
laura laughed at me from the chair beside: “but what does that mean? fine, you’re done. now what? you’re still going to drive home and write that paper. you’re still going to get up [...]

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