continental drift

or, “letting conservatism loose” before again schoolwriting, hoping against hope to be done on tuesday:
as distraction (dis-traction, except that i was barely making inroads as it was, driving a creaking diesel ford 5000 from the early 70s) – i’ll have to remember to file this post under ‘narcissism’ (the glowing laptop monitor my pool of [...]

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070409

i’ve joked about this, confessing my commitment issues viz. this semester, that i’d jump at the opportunity to skip town or do important things that weren’t subordinate to that regime of exercises and disciplines. now it is april and the humour has evaporated. but knowing the incredibly foolish inevitable repercussions doesn’t help. nor does incurring [...]

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cartographies

sometime over past weeks i’ve forgotten how to write when aware of audience. not because of your existence as reader but because of the necessarily confessional nature of the blog, about the truths it affirms and assumes and those it refuses to acknowledge, those it cannot. which storylines to perpetuate, and for how long, becomes [...]

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indexical

this space gains a self-legitimating character, after a while. existence wills itself to be justified. this a public sphere organized according to a very particular power-configuration, modulated by strands of various discursive traditions and mutually exclusive politics, leading to and itself producing the control society.
habermas, then, is obermeister of the panopticon maintenance staff.
and yet resistance [...]

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matthew 5:45

the sense that the respite Godallah gives us all draws to a close inducing a determination laced with quiet. “i have to”. there are no other paths. i cannot let the they (they-for and they-in, me) cover. jonah had no choice but to return, and return he did. it is not in itself a matter [...]

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credo ut intelligam

i used to think restoring measures existed. somewhere between catharsis and redemption, a saving grace would descend from on high and transport me toward light. less a latter-day rapture than the simple effects of staking a claim in the wilderness, clearing a homestead. erasing the pastoral to attempt a life with crimson geraniums in window-boxes [...]

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doorsteps of those armies

everything i write i have written before and so become broken speech, halted time, feedback loop and caught ellipse, trying and again to put into words the fragments i cradle. themes surfacing, rising to the light. a half-light: neither night nor day, neither dusk nor dawn, light pushed across, and drawn through, and nourished between [...]

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hills of morning 2

the year of the postchristian era almost through. another few days remain in the hijri calendar.
wandering in the world of the ten thousand things.
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and [...]

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a christmas letter 2

the year’s family christmas letter. it’s also been months in which this world has witnessed the most violence to date, inflicted by me to others and by others to me, but i didn’t talk about that.
i might start posting again soon. alternately, i might not.
–
The sun sets and rises and sets. Our lives cycle through [...]

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halfway down

- what do you find takes you from taqwa, basit?
- pandaemonium.

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