It's now nearly December and I haven't written a word of the two term papers demanded by my graduate classes. Oh, I've written--I have pages of scribbled notes, little yellow sticky-papers mark choice passages in a stack of books, and a pile of photocopies is filled with asterisks and double-underlining. But straightforward, intentional production of relevant ideas on paper has so far escaped me. It's the old problem again, not yet shed despite my halting attempts at self-analysis and purposeful distraction. I just can't seem to connect the buzz of ideas in my head with the process of writing. If you asked me to talk about the synthesis of post-structuralism and Marxism in feminist thought, or about the difficulties Kantian ethics has with "grey areas" in morality, I could go on for some time. I think I'd even sound intelligent. But somewhere, a crucial link is broken. I sit and stare at an empty computer screen. I go to a cafe and sit over a bottomless cup of coffee, and the blankess of my ruled notebook assaults my mind until I find myself on the edge of crying. What is wrong with me? Why can't I write? What do I need to do?
November 30, 2001
November 15, 2001
I've been craving Bulgarian food for the last few days, and I finally did something about it. I splurged a bit on groceries and whipped up that ubiquitous Mediterranean roasted eggplant and red pepper salad, made a pumpkin banitsa (a phyllo dough pastry) for Thanksgiving, and I've just put a feta cheese banitsa in the oven. You've gotta love the markets in Greektown. I bought Bulgarian feta cheese for two dollars per pound, and a package of phyllo dough was only a buck-fifty. The Greek guy behind the register was cute, too. Happy day. I can smell cooking...
Two snakes wriggle lazily across the void, each one lapping the tail of the other. Thought, conveniently captured in silver spheres, makes patterns of perfect mathematics. Somewhere, a bell rings.
"Get up, child! You'll be late!"
"But, MOM." This sleepily.
"No arguments, now. Today is picture day, and you have to look your best."
"Get up, child! You'll be late!"
"But, MOM." This sleepily.
"No arguments, now. Today is picture day, and you have to look your best."
November 13, 2001
November 9, 2001
Gaston Bachelard quotes George Sand: "What is more beautiful than a road? It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life." Roads are, of course, powerful images. But, perhaps a distinction must be made between a "road" and a "path".
A path is a spatial phenomenon--it guides a journey between cherished locations. In our memory, the path establishes the separation between points of rest and reflection: the house and the school, the backyard and the pond where we once caught tadpoles and chased frogs. A path leads "to" the climbing-tree or "through" the field. It defines a topology, an ordering of things in space. A road, on the other hand, defines a duration. It moves, not to or through a terrain, but "between" two points--and, unlike a path, a road vanishes once it is traversed. It is used up in the travelling, where a path keeps the way open for further travel. The morning traffic reports deal with roads in this way: "45 minutes from the Loop to the Dan Ryan Expressway", "an hour to downtown". Far from remaining present in our memory, the road's persistence is designed to be a brief as possible. On a path, we are invited to linger, to appreciate the journey; on a road, five minutes is better than ten, and the best would be no time at all.
Navigation through the modern world is most often by means of roads. Our memories are becoming mere lists of isolated facts, locations with no spatial order, held together only by the chronology of "this happened and then this". Paths are beginning to disappear, to vanish from our consciousness. Soon,there will only be "here" and "there", and there will be nothing on the way. This is the forgetting of space.
There is one way in which space remains, or more accurately, is being discovered: as extraterrestrial space. Here on Earth, space is used up, forgotten. But in the vast distance of the stars, we have begun to imagine a new kind of space--an openness that has been lost in the overcrowded conditions of our terrestrial world. Still, for now, there are no paths laid to the stars. There is time, to be sure--in the elliptical orbits to the planets that are measured in months or years, in the transmission delays between the distant probes and Mission Control. But humans and their memories cannot abide in a vacuum. The empty, airless distances of this new frontier are traversed only by machines. Perhaps, someday, we will forge new paths through the heavens. But for now, we are left scrambling to preserve the nearly-forgotten paths of our youth.
A path is a spatial phenomenon--it guides a journey between cherished locations. In our memory, the path establishes the separation between points of rest and reflection: the house and the school, the backyard and the pond where we once caught tadpoles and chased frogs. A path leads "to" the climbing-tree or "through" the field. It defines a topology, an ordering of things in space. A road, on the other hand, defines a duration. It moves, not to or through a terrain, but "between" two points--and, unlike a path, a road vanishes once it is traversed. It is used up in the travelling, where a path keeps the way open for further travel. The morning traffic reports deal with roads in this way: "45 minutes from the Loop to the Dan Ryan Expressway", "an hour to downtown". Far from remaining present in our memory, the road's persistence is designed to be a brief as possible. On a path, we are invited to linger, to appreciate the journey; on a road, five minutes is better than ten, and the best would be no time at all.
Navigation through the modern world is most often by means of roads. Our memories are becoming mere lists of isolated facts, locations with no spatial order, held together only by the chronology of "this happened and then this". Paths are beginning to disappear, to vanish from our consciousness. Soon,there will only be "here" and "there", and there will be nothing on the way. This is the forgetting of space.
There is one way in which space remains, or more accurately, is being discovered: as extraterrestrial space. Here on Earth, space is used up, forgotten. But in the vast distance of the stars, we have begun to imagine a new kind of space--an openness that has been lost in the overcrowded conditions of our terrestrial world. Still, for now, there are no paths laid to the stars. There is time, to be sure--in the elliptical orbits to the planets that are measured in months or years, in the transmission delays between the distant probes and Mission Control. But humans and their memories cannot abide in a vacuum. The empty, airless distances of this new frontier are traversed only by machines. Perhaps, someday, we will forge new paths through the heavens. But for now, we are left scrambling to preserve the nearly-forgotten paths of our youth.
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