The Most Important Things

Yesterday, the lovely A and I were sitting in the coffee shop chatting while we should be working. This is pretty much a daily occurrence for us, and therefore isn't particularly notable (other than the fact that it is a practice I kind of love). But, as is often the case with our conversations, I left mulling over quite a few things. In particular, we have been talking about priorities a lot lately, especially when it comes to people. A's excellent advice: Don't make someone a priority who isn't willing to make you one. There are, she has wisely pointed out to me, times when you have to make someone a priority who isn't making you one right at that moment. We lead busy lives, and in a university town there is always school or work to get in the way and screw up our nicely established priorities. But you should be sure that the person would do the same for you, that when your life gets busy and you drop the ball when it comes to them, allowing them to slide down your priority list, they will keep you high on theirs until you can rebalance your life.


This is the kind of lesson it takes me a long time to learn, although I wish I was a better student.

Love Notes

I bought some watercolour pencils last week and have been having so much fun playing around with them. Last night I decided to make some of my experiments into little note cards to send to friends via snail mail. I have a pretty big collection of stationary already, but there is something extra sweet about sending something handmade.

Branded

You might have noticed that last night I quietly changed the name of my blog and made a few little adjustments to fonts and colours. I've been wanting to do a total rebranding for a while, but since I have neither the time to make massive changes myself or the money to pay someone else, the changes are relatively minor aside from the name. So, why change the name of the blog? Basically, it's just time for something new. "Shape of Your Looking Glass" served me well for almost two years, but for several reasons it hasn't been sitting quite right with me for a while. Yes, there were reasons I picked it that night I decided starting a blog was a good idea. However, I also decided to start this whole thing on a whim and the name was picked late at night while sitting in the apartment living room surrounded by books about Sylvia Plath, and so the significance of those reasons was relatively minimal. Also, the song that "Shape of Your Looking Glass" came from seemed to be part of a very particular chapter in my life. I loved it the first time I heard it. I still love it. But for a while it seemed to be a song of longing for me. I spent this period of time constantly talking about heading east. Toronto. Nova Scotia. Europe. This summer I moved across the country and literally was eastern bound. It's like the song saw me through a particular chapter in my life, and nicely closed it off for me. It was sometime in the midst of moving, of drastically changing my life, that I started to feel like I wanted to change the blog's name. My approach to photography has changed a lot in the last two years as well. I'm more serious about it now. I think about it more. I've invested a lot more time and money into it. But I'm also having more fun with it. It has become one of the things which allows me to balance my life and ground myself. Basically, the place photography has in my life has changed dramatically and my understanding of it has changed dramatically as well. "Shape of Your Looking Glass" began to feel too simplistic. It was unable to capture this new significance and meaning. This new name has a lot more significance for me, a lot more thought put into it. Tomorrow I'll let you know why. So, until then, thank you to those of you who have been on this journey with me. Welcome to those of you who have only recently joined me. I hope many of you stick around for what's still to come.

Non-Facebook Friends

I have a few friends here who I am not Facebook friends with. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I really like Facebook. It makes it nice and easy for me to stay in touch with friends and family regardless of where they are. But I think there are some problems with constant contact, with artificially extending friendships beyond their natural limits. In some cases, I think it just isn't healthy. Sometimes when you move away from people you should lose contact with them. Sometimes it should require effort to find out how someone is doing or what has been going on in their lives. I kind of appreciate having friends that I have to call or send a text message or see in person in order to find out how they are doing. There's more intention behind it. It means more.


By the way, I do realize the oddity of posting about how great it is to not be Facebook friends with people when most of you are probably getting here via Facebook. This is just something I've been thinking about lately.

Coffee and Oranges

Sunday Morning
Wallace Stevens

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirts lingering
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sing,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

A Where's Waldo of Words

If you have ever lived with me, shared an office with me, been in class with me, or just been near me while I was writing a paper, you probably know that I am obsessed with finding exactly the right word for any given situation. I am literally uncomfortable until I find a word that I'm looking for. It's like The Princess and the Pea, if the mattresses were essay pages and the pea was an ill-advised word choice. It drives me crazy when I can't put my finger on what I'm trying to say. I search frantically through the thesaurus, I ask my friends, I ask random people who happen to be nearby. It can get ugly. And I'm not someone who is blessed with the ability to just leave it, move on, and come back to it. No. It bothers me. The wrong word dances around in the back of my head taunting me. It becomes like a game of Where's Waldo. One of the really hard ones. One of the ones where you kept spotting the same guy over and over again and had to keep reminding yourself that, no, that is not Waldo, but that other guy you keep pointing at. It is so frustrating. This obsession with finding "the exact right word" (as Ezra Pound would have it) has only intensified with thesis writing. I'm working on my proposal right now. It doesn't get a grade. It does have to get vetted by a committee. I am agonizing over every word choice because I have to clearly communicate my ideas to a whole group of people. It's a good exercise in articulation, but, man, it is tough.

What Language Can't Reach

What Language Can't Reach
Patrick Lane

And the only way I know how to do that is to stand far off
as if on a low hill under a moon
watching a passenger train stopped
at a siding in the distance of a prairie night in winter.
In the snow and watching. That far away. That sure.


Sometimes things happen in life that leave you feeling ways that just can't be explained. No chance. Don't even try. Sometimes these already rather inexplicable events collide and suddenly you are left speechless. That has been my last few days. So the silence on here was simply a reflection of my general inability to really capture everything. This will have to do. And I think it does just beautifully.

Words

Words
Sylvia Plath

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the enter like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road -

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.


"It's interesting that last year you put up pictures, but this year you chose to put up words." That's how Gabby reacted when she first saw this, my ever-expanding wall of poetry. Whenever I am particularly struck by a poem I add it to the wall. The only thing that came to my head in response to that, and as a kind of explanation for this particular choice, was this: "She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape." (The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje) Language is my first love. I adore photography, there is no question about that, but words are my refuge. I think this wall is delightful and something that I am going to continue wherever I end up next.

Fridge Wisdom

We used to have magnetic poetry on our fridge. For some reason I never put it up this year. Anyway, when we had it up there were some poetic/funny/profound things that emerged. This is one of those tidbits of wisdom. It struck me again today as I was flipping through my photos looking for something to post. So often I fly through life at a thousand miles an hour, so focused on the future that I miss the present. I am getting better at pausing to appreciate the small things of the moment, but living in the present is still a skill I'm mastering. Slow down. Just a tidbit of wisdom from the fridge.

A Pause, A Lift, A Breath

Today was exactly what a New Year's Day should be. I slept in a bit and woke up actually feeling refreshed for the first time in a very long time. I made potato pancakes for lunch and got to share them with three lovely ladies. I spent the afternoon reading The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels and drinking tea. I flipped through some old magazines. I went to Sephora briefly. I caught up on reading blogs. Bean and I watched a movie. It has been a beautiful start to the new year. It was also the first time all break that I genuinely felt like I was on a Christmas break. It was such a busy few weeks with appointments and work that I never felt like I was actually able to breathe. Today was beautiful. I just relaxed. This is not something that I'm good at, but is something I've truly been craving. I am definitely not ready for school to kick back into gear on Monday. I could deal with a few more days like today.

This little phrase is screen printed on the bulletin board in the Starbucks by my parents'. It caught my eye when I was in there with Gabby a couple years ago, so I took a picture. Every so often I come across it and think I should drink wonderful things and relax more often than I do.

Waiting for Love to be Born

Waiting for Love to be Born
Erin O'Donnell

All is set
I know my stocking's downstairs
And the sky is smiling
There is magic in the air

I can't sleep
I am so glad to be home
On this early morning
I'm not alone

This is the season, this is the time
I see the face of a child and that face is my
I'm looking for starlight and I'm listening for angels
Everyone is asleep on this Christmas morn
But I'm awake
And I'm waiting here for love again to be born

Bundled up
I know what's waiting for me
More than a pretty package
Next to the tree

Something else
A gift far greater I know
Born in Bethlehem
Long ago

This is the season, this is the time
I see the face of a child and that face is mine
I'm looking for starlight, and I'm listening for angels
Now the house is asleep on this Christmas morn
But I'm awake
And I'm waiting here for love again to be born

The sun is rising, I see the distant light
Oh what a glorious day will come from this holy night

To us is born
Every December anew
A love that's unbelievable
Given to me, given to you

This is the season, this is the time
I see the face of a child and that face is mine
I'm looking for starlight and I'm listening for angels
Now the house is asleep on this Christmas morn
But I'm awake
And I'm waiting here for love again to be born
Yes, I'm waiting here
I'm waiting here for love again to be born

[Merry Christmas!]

Why do I do this?

Because it matters.

Because I believe that words are powerful.

Because I believe that art can change the world.


[Just a reminder to myself that this is where I am supposed to be and this is what I'm supposed to be doing.]

Please stop putting words in my mouth

It bothers me when people put words in my mouth. This afternoon I was in the kitchen making lunch and a bunch of other people were around, just eating and talking and such. Then one of the neighbours came in (this is normal because I live in a dorm, just in case you were wondering why my neighbours wander into my apartment) and offered us cupcakes. I said "I can't eat cupcakes" (and, granted, my tone of voice was a bit hostile because of general stress and annoyance in my life right now). Then this other girl who was visiting my roommate says "What she meant was 'Thank you very much, but I don't want one' "). My jaw literally dropped as I thought to myself "No way did she just say what I think she said. Seriously. How can you assume you know what I meant, particularly when my actual words contradict your assumption? Uhm, no. What I meant was what I said. Please do not attempt to correct me. Particularly in that condescending way. Seriously. That is how people talk to children. "Did you mean 'May I have a cookie'?" It seriously made me super angry. I had to just walk away, but I was fuming. In fact it still irks me. Clearly it bothered me enough to inspire an entire blog post. But seriously, just let me speak. And stop putting words in my mouth.

I thought a photo of a script was appropriate for this particular topic of conversation. This one is Competition Piece by John S. Wells. I've never read it. I just borrowed it from my roommate to take a picture of it specifcially for this. Yes, that is how much this situation bothered me. Not only did I write an entire post about it, but I also deliberatly took a picture for said post.

Now I'm hunched over a typewriter, I guess you'd call that painting in a cave

Another Travelin' Song

Bright Eyes

Well I'm changing all my strings

I'm gonna write another travelin' song

About all the billion highways

And the cities at the break of dawn

Well, I guess that the best that I can do now

Is pretend that I've done nothing wrong

And dream about a train that gonna

Take me back where I belong

Well now the ocean speaks and spits

And I can hear it from the interstate

And I'm screaming at my brother on a cell phone

He is far away

I'm saying nothing in the past or future

Ever will feel like today

Until we're parking in an alley

Just hoping that our shit is safe

So I go back an forth forever

All my thoughts they come in pairs

Oh I will, I won't, I do, I don't

And I'm not surprised

But I never feel quite prepared

Now I'm hunched over a typewriter

I guess you'd call that painting in a cave

And there's a word I can't remember

And a feeling I cannot escape

And now my ashtray's overflowing

I'm still staring at a clean white page

On and morning's at my window

And she is sending me to bed again

Well I dreamed the dark on the horizon

I dreamed a desert where the dead lay down

I dreamed a prostituted child

Touching an old man in a fast food crowd

I dreamed a ship was sinking

There were people screaming all around

And I awoke to my alarm clock

It was a pop song, it was playing loud

So I will find my fears and face them

I will cower like a dog

I will kick and scream

I will kneel and plead

I'll fight like hell to hide that I'm giving up

Whenever I am writing a paper this is the song that pops into my head. Specifically the section about wrting on a typewriter, staring at a blank page and crawling into bed as the sun rises. Yes, there are some slightly sketchy bits in the song, but it's upbeat enough to listen to while writing a paper at 2 in the morning and some of the lyrics are fantastic. Since I am currently slogging through the whole paper at 2 a.m. process I figured this was an appropriate time to share it here.

The pictures are from my most recent trip to Fort Edmonton. I love typewriters. I actually really wish I owned one. One day maybe I will.

Black and White and Read All Over

Here's the big news of my week. On Monday I was offered a job! FINALLY! I am now officially working as a proofreader at an Edmonton paper. It's actually a really awesome arrangement because I can keep it when I am back in school. It is literally across the street from the campus, is part time, and pays well. Score. I worked at the same paper in a different position during my second year, so I know it means I'll probably lack a social life of any variety, but it is definitely doable. I was so excited when I got the phone call that after I hung up I started jumping up and down screaming "I got the job! I got the job!". This would have been a perfectly fine reaction and I barely even noticed until I realized that I was stading in the entryway of Chapters in West Edmonton Mall. People looked at me kind of funny. It was mildly embarrassing. Oh well.

Motiveless Malignant

Here is the latest addition to my collection of old books. Courtesy of my grandmother, I have accquired a book containing Shakespeare's four major tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Now I am not the biggest fan of Shakespeare ever. I have an appreciation for his work, but after taking a Shakespeare class I'm a bit...unenthralled. Regardless, I do sincerly love Macbeth and Othello. The second picture from this set is Lady Macbeth's famous "unsex me here" speech. She is one of the most fearsome ladies in all of literature. Fabulous. And her speeches are incredible. This particular one is from Act One, Scene Five and is just chilling. Especially when delivered by a great actress. The third picture is from Othello and is the last part of a speech by Iago, the best example of pure evil one can find in Shakespeare. I love reading his speeches for the same reason as Lady Macbeth. The word choice is just so powerful and epic. Iago fascinates me because he is entirely motiveless. As a play, Othello fascinates me for so many other reasons, but linguistically it is all about Iago.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I love taking pictures of words (witness examples here and here). I think it's because I can combine my love of language with my love of photography and end up with an image that, for me, conveys such a depth of meaning. Plus, I just like how some words look. And I think that books sometimes deserve to be looked at in new and unique ways.

Live, Laugh, Love

And today's platitude is: Live, Laugh, Love.

In all seriousness though, I kind of love that phrase. Also, if you know me then you know I have a serious obsession with words and books (the giant Webster's dictionary from 1934 that came to me courtesy of my Gram and now resides under my parents coffee table and the fact that I bought a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as soon as I got into university attest to this fact). It seemed natural for me to combine my passion for words and my passion for photography in some way. I have a lot of fun picking out words in my OED and taking pictures of them. Come to think of it I should take my SLR home with me and take some pictures of my new (well, actually very old) dictionary! Perhaps you will see some pictures from that soon.