Relative Bearings

Words read are also forms of haunting.

This seems obvious, until one sits down to notice what is given, and therefore ignored. The easiest example is breathing. I argue something else. The most indignant right is only so because it is the most basic–that is, somewhere to stay and thrive.

A memory from the other side, in a room of chairs and one table, years ago: the instructor asking us, What else do mothers tell their children but “Tahan na”? Then: And where do you go home? Tahanan, tahanan.

Everything around, inside, and about a threshold can also haunt, for all that everything happens too fast. Just yesterday we resisted, the reason for this resistance being hope. So one sees that when every emotion has been wrung dry, motherhood statements are dangerous because accessible, because seemingly facile, but most of all, because even in one’s insistence on intellect, these comforting words catch one’s attention and keep histrionics at bay.

Hope, then, is dangerous because even in one’s meandering in matters that seem more urgent, even then hope rears its head. Summer reading, from what seems like ages ago:

It is important to recollect the energy, dynamism, and optimism of the decolonizing and immediate post-independence era, both for the sake of the historical record and also to enable us to register the successes of this period, however slender, partial, provisional, or unsustainable they proved to be in the long term. (Lazarus 5)

Easier to ensconce oneself in another discourse altogether. After all, distance is everything. Of course, this is also one’s excuse, and what betrays one’s cowardice. If another leaves, that is enough to justify loss of contact; if plans change, lives need not intersect. This is laziness at its best. When life threatens to leave me behind–life, I say, not merely an individual or childhood connections–my own reaction is half-hearted. One would think memory holds meritocracy, but in fact it is easier not to resist. Only half-listen to future plans; imagine a vague future where all these are possible and money can change hands. It’s all very exciting, a little too over-the-edge, so what else can possibly await me but a precipice and a long, long fall?

The school memory says, tahan na(n). Indicates: too much space for garden in the front and grotto in the middle; muddy, rocky expanse at the back, room called “hall” but smaller than one; squarish spaces with paint jobs gone wrong; all the furniture that once was.

Turn to fiction, then, because there, everything can be found. Enough research will tell you what year a character should have lived in given his age in the textual present. Proper Googling will describe riots to you in detail. But here we need nothing so mundane or dramatic.

A constant favorite (those are forms of haunting, too) in times like these:

People come to me <…> They begin to talk and I go with them back to their childhoods <…> Between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. The way he lined his soldiers up under the hem of the curtain. How she laid out the little toy teacups. Their childhoods, because it is only the ones who were children who come to me now. The others have died. When I first started my business, he said, it was mostly lovers. Or husbands who had lost their wives, wives who has lost their husbands. Even parents. Though very few–most would have found my services unbearable. The ones that came hardly spoke at all, only enough to describe a little child’s bed or the chest where he kept his toys. Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there’s one difference: when all of the talking is through, I produce a solution. It’s true, I can’t bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept. (Krauss, Great House)

There is an audacity here: I write to become separate from these things, but my attempt is to establish presence. This is what disturbs me in Danielewski, previously discussed. I only root for Sam and Hailey because even the cover flaps tell me to. But as reader, I can only ask how Hailey goes beyond “the US”? Feb 18 2052 from her epic poem tells you: “Because without him I am / only revolutions of ruin,” but something about her calm (in contrast to her lover) tells you she is capable, too, of soaring beyond Sam: “I’m the prophecy prophecies pass. / Why desire dies at last” (Danielewski, Only Revolutions).

So I am left to wonder if the frenetic nature of current events is just another excuse to move. I think to myself: I must keep up with the pace, too! But for a world in constant motion, with love always in transit, where is stasis, where is departure? Note to self: not everyone who leaves is a traitor; not everyone who stays is good for you.

Tahanan: But if I leave too soon and rip the band-aid from my skin without a second thought (less pain always the excuse), I fear that the desire will, in fact, not die, and will merely be rescheduled.

Things don’t last forever. The bed that one man remembers as the place where his soul was overwhelmed is, to another man, just a bed. And when it breaks, or goes out of style, or is no longer of use to him, he throws it away. But before he dies, the man whose soul was overwhelmed needs to lie down in that bed one more time. He comes to me <…> So even if it no longer exists, I find it <…> I produce it. Out of thin air, if need be. And if the wood is not exactly as he remembers, or the legs are too thick or too thin, he’ll only notice for a moment, a moment of shock and disbelief, and then his memory will be invaded by the reality of the bed standing before him. Because he needs it to be that bed where she once lay with him more than he needs to know the truth. You understand? And if you ask me whether I feel guilty, whether I feel I am cheating him, the answer is no. Because at the moment that man reaches out and runs his hand across the rail, for him there are no other beds in the world. (Krauss, Great House)

But living with what is familiar is also terrifying, not because it hints at missing out on something else, or implies redundancy, but because it denies transcendence. When one’s dwelling becomes a site for ways of old, ways that are cyclical, “experience” must turn to “event,” must be turned into what seems impossible: concrete, yet metaphysical. Thus,

Ziarek argues that the political radicality of the avant-garde should be understood primarily as an attempt to reconfigure experience as event. By the “event-structure” of experience, Ziarek means an experience that is, like the “propriative event” (Ereignis) in Heidegger’s phenomenological formulation, always a “simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal in which what is becomes measurable and representable only at the expense of suppressing historicity” (Ziarek 2001, 13). Because Ziarek’s Heidegger is deconstruction’s Heidegger <…>, Ziarek’s event-structured or historicized experience is never a self-identical “temporal punctuality or an instant presence, but instead, a dynamic and open-ended field of forces…” (Nieland and Juengel 195)

Thus to accept politics as aesthetics, as naturalized, too, on some level brings to the fore a nugget: fascism in an archipelago, and what feels like it in the smallest unit of this archipelagic society–gardens, grottos, yards, familiar spaces–is ridiculous, unjust. Previous summer reading again, this time Quentin Skinner: look at the question that the answers stand in position to (Scott 391). Does it matter, then, if you choose one space over another?

The usual suggestion, also a temptation, is to lay back and let yourself be surprised. But critical mass demands otherwise: “uncanny discipline…as certain political imperatives in our own time urge us…” (Nieland and Juengel 191). And something similar must happen on the national level, too, this urgency in a pre-election season that seems to aestheticize crass fist fights and the teleserye-level search for a daughter’s origins.

But also, in this urgency: tahanan; retain control. This is calm.

*

Danielewski, Mark Z. Only Revolutions. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Print.

Krauss, Nicole. Great House. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.

Lazarus, Neil. Introduction. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge:  Cambridge U P, 2011. Print.

Nieland, Justus and Scott Juengel. “Review: Benjamin’s Urgency.” CR: The New Centennial Review 5.2 (2005): 189-213. PDF.

Scott, David. “The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, et al. Durham: Duke U P, 2005. 385-400. Print.

 

Girl Walks into a Cafe

Finds her bearings.

A parenthetical as much as it is a reminder: find your moral compass. No, no. The woman she must interview sits in front of a large, over-dramatic window, behind which an entire flower bush attempts to conceal the sidewalk outside. And fails. She can already imagine the essay she has been commissioned to write. All these features are the same, which heightens their pleasure, makes the illusion between author and reader so much more joyful to break because I know that you know that I know that you know. Fun fun fun.

Anyway, the essay: As XXX sits across from this writer, she looks nothing like an entrepreneur preparing for an interview. And why would she? Numerous international magazines have attempted to uncover her business tour de force so that she can finally be revealed as a simple woman. But as I sit down and she insists I have what she’s having (some reinvented, fusion dish, originally French, now so much more), I realize that this woman is the face of a franchise because she is Complex, nothing more, nothing less…

No, no, this piece digresses.

Finds her bearings.

If you say: women have no sense of direction, you are wrong. If women say they have no sense of direction, they mean: but I will ask for the north as starting point, and then I can imagine where I will live.

To find your bearings, read something confusing. Case in point: Danielewski, Only Revolutions. Do not attempt annotation. Only highlight. Learn to enjoy cadence, be frustrated it does not make sense. Learn to flip the book upside down every eight pages. In this sense, your departure is your own choice.

The what-if: But what if, instead of a year, you only have two months left?

Marx demonstrates the derivative nature of culture, in this case, the arts, from the material conditions that afford its creative materials. Using Homer as his example, Marx argues that the epics of Homer could only be achieved by a culture in which mythology is the manner of fundamental explanation, in which ‘the real mastery of nature’ represented by ‘the self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs’ have not yet replaced mythology’s ability to dominate nature ‘in the imagination and by the imagination.’ If the subject of Homer’s epics is dominated by the mythology of a simpler time, so too its form is only possible in an age in which the printing press is still unimagined (Deneen 29).

I don’t mean to alarm you, the interviewee says when it is over, But my next appointment’s been cancelled. I know the interview is over, but…would it be too much to ask for some company? My chauffeur’s coming from somewhere far off, you see…

In some other life, she would be allowed polite refusal. The proper answer, the dream answer, would have been: I’m sorry but I’ve got to run. I have two more deadlines and a Skype call that I must make on-the-dot, plus I’m meeting an interior designer in the afternoon…

Find your bearings.

Sometimes this means sitting uncomfortably. Listening to things you don’t want to hear. If you leave one place you cannot destroy it, if you find joy elsewhere you cannot stay.

This is the essay that does not get submitted:

As they conversed, they discovered they were like old friends. Certainly they didn’t know each other, and never would speak to each other again, but the communal spirit was there, because they knew the same people, or had different perspectives of the same, much-talked about events, and could thus imagine a kind of parallelism between their lives. Sometimes, one served to tell the other what to do, sometimes the other can only listen in rapt attention, surprised that language is culpable for being able to enunciate indescribable sorrow. This exchange stretches forever for all that it lasts an hour.

The recognition that ‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’ are intertwined in human historical development–which would continue to reappear continuously in the thought of both Horkheimer and the entire Frankfurt School–indicates a significant departure from strictly materialist (i.e., Marxist) versions of history. Indeed, Marx himself also writes on the “mythic” origins of human history but rejects the idea that those origins exerted any control over future, ‘progressed’ humanity. As he argues in the Grundrisse, humanity’s mythic origins were a consequence of their irrational and nontechnological minds, in short, their ‘childishness.’ Once matured, humankind was no more susceptible to these childlike fears than was an adult subject to anxieties about the monsters under the bed. With particular attention to the epics of antiquity, Marx begins, undoubtedly correctly, by recognizing that certain narrative forms are subject to technological considerations: ‘Is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine?’ Marx, however, does not stop with that and concludes that the human concerns that undergird the epics are equally timebound: ‘Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?’ (Deneen 181)

Imagine a house.

Anaphylaxis, skin lesions: These things, I’m told, wax and wane. Sometimes everything will be a shock–your chest constricting eyes watering heart palpitating, or the work that piles up in ungraceful proportions. There’s only one body, there’s only you. At the end of the day, there is only one question to ask, and it is not about happiness, but about fear, namely: What is the relation of your fear to the tangible?

Finds her bearings.

The essay that wants to be written is this:

That critics have hailed Danielewski as a genius is undoubted. But there is something that disturbs the work. Between finding out the epic quality of such a work, and after acknowledging that it is a love letter to American history, a heartbreak that takes the form of fragments because Sam and Hailey, in their separation (they are always rushing towards, running away from, never still, as countries in a continent drift apart although forever under the facade of federal law and unity) can never take on a monolithic form, can only agree to be separate in the shades of their o’s: a miracle, no doubt, of technology, ink, the printing machine, indeed, after all of this, a better realization surfaces. Something in the narrative fails because never singular, and it turns out, I am just not as dedicated as all that.

Leaves: everything, everyone, earlier than planned.

 

Just One Footnote–

Writing these days is difficult, not because there’s nothing to write but because there is excess, and if the cut-and-dried years have taught me anything, it is that excess is good for nothing. Deadlines are things I can only dread, but I would be dumb to discredit them and ask for a piece of comfort in return. In the last three years alone I have molded tone, style, voice to suit wherever the page was meant to be printed–on the screen, on paper, on a notebook I keep for myself.

E v e r y t h i n g.

Not many people will tell you it’s hard work. This is not a defense of the craft or the elevation of so-called art. It is the confession that I am still trying to justify to myself, perhaps, why I am so hard on this person called me. Every writer has her favorite mistake. Well! Written like that it sounds enchanting! Something you’d put in a love song. A line from a movie you’ll never forget. What you won’t know until you’re old enough, viable and diable, is that what you love will slowly cease to be a division between work and play. In equal measure, your words will stand before you: things you submitted, typographic errors, words you wrote down for yourself.

It is necessary, of course, to think of areas in your life. An essay has its own parts. A story has chapters. You have your multiple hearts. There is a dedication you give to your work (your work, I say, not your job). To casual emails, formal messages, the slippery surface of the touchscreen where, for my part, chubby fingers will never on the right key land. There’s the soundbite that only social media can account for, although that is a platform where so few people wish to be accountable. There is the heart I lay bare when, after years of procrastinating I realize that fiction too, is hard work. That people bang their heads on tables to produce words, and out of them plots and themes and characters that you don’t need to find walking out on the street. For you can find them in one of your multiple hearts, where they each play a part.

*

Is my story a good one? I want it to be. But you know, a large part of you is written by somebody else. On another page. After they’ve already lived their lives. And you are but an afterthought. There must be some caution too, in thinking that you can write your self. I don’t believe you can. Because not all battles are waged or won or lost on the page.

In fact, I think, the challenge is for me to stop. To not write. To let things write me sometimes. I cannot call it breathing, because breathing is writing. You do not stop breathing unless you want to die. I want to call it resting. I want to call it caring. I want to call it, presence, not praise. I want to call it nothing, so that I can have my own space.

*

In life, you can be given warnings, and the blame is never an easy one, a game that should not even have to be played. She writes:

…he died again. This time, I refused to accept his death because I could still communicate with him and so I asked him if he had, of late, been walking on water or on air, and he answered ‘neither.’ I only began to cry at his funeral, and the mourners, they didn’t know that it was I who made them; it was I who glued dragonflies to the scene and said, ‘you must read his stories.’ I woke because in my dream, I had been crying too profusely. I slept again and this time, I dreamt the dream of his resurrection: he arrived in my mailbox wrapped in his fiction and covered with butterflies. I ran around, shouting, ‘he’s not dead!’ But he is, you see. The dream wants to tell me that he is dead to me. The dream wants to inform me not to be fooled by pretty packages, that in matters of correspondence, the body is tragically absent.

But quite possibly, I think she lied. Or that she has not given me the whole truth. In fiction and footnotes both, we choose only the relevant, and leave the rest of language to a lacuna. I want to tell you: I can write facts. I dabble in fiction. I can escape myself. I want to tell you: it’s okay. Everything is going to be okay. Fiction, or fact?

*

My baby nephew hugged me around the waist: the first he’s ever done it, the first he’s ever begged anything of me: Sama ako!, he said. Take me with you!

(You will only understand if you have never been anything but the youngest child, if you’ve never had to work for the affection of a young one, only to experience being shunned by tantrums, and then finally, to have the same little one beg something of you, before the disaster comes).

*

Am I a story, am I a good one?

*

So you write things. Sometimes fiction. Sometimes criticism! But always a part of yourself. Fact.

Brontide

There is a distance that cannot be walked, there is a peace that cannot be named.

Here, she unwraps them for the young girl that has been given to her care for all of the afternoon. She points out the remnants of her project, a work in progress.

Sometimes, she says to the little girl on her lap, there are some conversations that you will not want to have. She pauses, although the little girl is reaching for the mess of matte paper and shiny photographs before them. She does not want the girl to misunderstand.

Not because you do not want to talk, but because you’re not sure if there’s much of yourself that you can give away. To help people, I mean.

She lifts the little girl, who squirms, and kisses her on the cheek before setting her down again. For no reason that she can tell, she reaches for one of the stuffed dogs and hands it to the girl. But why?

For after all, she wants the girl to remember this afternoon of someone else’s memories, like a looping conundrum with no resurrection, until the child finds why leaves fall, or even that leaves falling can bring no desired emotion whatsoever, no matter how poets ponder them.

She tries not to look at the clock–it is a trial that counts–the little girl will get picked up soon, they ought to enjoy the few, pristine moments together (there are snacks on the counter and music in the background, things the little girl has a deeper understanding of for all that her mind is distinctly recording each second precisely: the snag of her shirt, the tug of hair caught between fingers, the faces of strangers on photographs; for these are the things she will remember in the split-second before womanhood).

The future rumbles in the distance.

—

In the Interim

Remember that something exists before you do: that there is a primal stutter before every speech. Before you think, or inscribe yourself, a space has been carved out for you. It is shaped like a comb, like the moon at crescent—a smile.

 

_

Landlocked

It is not that she does not want to do it (having heard how therapeutic it is), but that her imagination beats her to it. The project has its wingspan in front of her, complete with all the materials: the thick string, the wooden clothespins, the photographs (she and her mother, or her mother and her mother before her; he and his cousins, his father and him), the pieces of poetry she had written behind notebooks, or on her old report cards (especially the bad ones), the pressed, wilted, moth-gentle petals of an old sampaguita off a young vendor whom they said was simply part of a syndicate. It was going to be her visual love letter, a time off from graduate school and the kitchen, friends who wanted time with her, the part of herself that wanted only a manicure or a haircut, the look in his eyes that said “I know you even before you speak,” when all she wanted was to strip this heavy household of words. The project would draw the eye in, let visitors know she was more than she seemed, remind them again of the joy in togetherness she didn’t know could ebb into, not lack of passion, but rather a flexibility: an acceptance of the sight of a discarded sock or the lack of dinner, whereas before they went at each other for hours and hours, convinced that life had to be everything, pictures and ancestry and flowers and wood and yarn, thick, thick string that looked frayed but was sturdy, every little thing, every little thing, or nothing at all.

–

Golden

And after the long day: the neighbors whispering behind their hands, over the broken glass of the firewall (to keep thieves out, you know), See how the husband only pecks her on the cheeks whereas before he’d hold her and they’d scream and giggle like teenagers, the small brown birds never now swooping for the breadcrumbs she didn’t have time to throw, It’s so easy to see they’ve been arguing, the silence says it all!, the debt of her father and her father’s father, and the bank calling, “Why, Ma’m, we’ve a new credit card program you’d be perfect for!”, and her professor from grad school sending her an email, where old technology met new: a scanned page of her story, encircled, embattled, underlined, crossed out, proof that so many of her words needed conversion, being merely, her mentor said, subterfuge. But he of the eloquence, never addressed what she said, neither in the space between them in bed or the backyard where, one Sunday she looked up from their homemade gin pomelo and said Perhaps the santol tree needs to be cut down, and he said, No, leave it, we need the shade, even when, in her life, she’d never been as vibrant, nor as confident: being so completely bronzed.

—

 

The Difficulty in Dancing

In order to hold procrastination at bay, one must, well, do. I thought about starting this review long hand, while I have no time to really focus on a laptop or computer screen when there are handouts to think about, but no: what I want to say is easily available in my mind, about Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. I don’t know if it’s taboo to read this right after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — only that I would not recommend these two one after the other.

One and the other

Of course, blatant comparisons are also supposed to be a no-no when writing reviews; let the work stand for itself, is the likely rule. But I refuse, if only because Dance Dance Dance, I feel, strips away what is usually the given (and therefore practically expected) premises of Murakami’s novels, such that they also serve to suspend disbelief. The ability of his protagonists, to put on hold the search for economic stability, in favor of searching for what will fill their frenetic unease, has always attracted me because I believe that it is what many of us would opt for, if we did not believe that even our physical (read: financial struggles) are also somehow integral to our concept of self.

In Dance Dance Dance, all these things (the search for an existential answer, the momentary leave from the day job, the inner turmoil, the unexplainable need to follow one’s guts although nothing else in the plot prior seems to dictate its necessity), are present, but the chronicle of actually telling it is garbled. Many times I wondered if the novel was really meant to start this way, in medias res, and if so, then why?

I rolled over in bed, stared at the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh. Oh, give in, I thought. But the idea of giving in didn’t take hold. It’s out of your hands, kid. Whatever you may be thinking, you can’t resist. The story’s already decided (Murakami 6).

Here, too, Murakami’s protagonist searches for someone he believes is crying out for him. We are told — as we can assume strikes a similar note in his other novels — that something is incomplete in the protagonist’s life, that there is something he missed when he previously underwent a self-imposed hermitage. These, undoubtedly, are the things that make Murakami’s characters endearing, particularly to me; this is why it was a surprise, even to me, that  the protagonist in Dance Dance Dance disappoints.

Yes, I remind myself even now. All of Murakami’s characters dance to a tune that is understood only by the reader seeking refuge from a mega-capitalist world and the characters themselves. But Dance Dance Dance‘s protagonist reads more like a pale reckoning of the other two protagonists I’ve encountered in Murakami — of indeed, all his other complex characters. When I think of this particular nameless protagonist, I realize that I agree with many of his principles on capitalism, and the apparent self-defeating value of “popular” industry.

And with not one speck of ambition, not one iota of expectation. My only concern was to do things systematically, from one end to the other. I sometimes wonder if this might not prove to be the bane of my life. After wasting so much pulp and ink myself, who was I to complain about waste? We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it ‘refinements in domestic consumption.’ I call it meaningless waste. A difference of opinion. Which doesn’t change the way we live (Murakami 12).

The real problem though, is that as the novel progresses the protagonist becomes the horrific, transparent character one might pride herself or himself on hearing about but only encountering (with luck) once in a blue moon. There’s not much excitement in the plot, because no matter what moral dilemma presents itself, Murakami’s character is able to untangle the knots in the situation. The journey to clarity is not as fraught with pathos as would be needed to captivate the reader’s attention. Whether it’s rearing a child, treating women with grace, or confronting instances that only vaguely resemble the paranormal, the protagonist becomes a straightforward book of morals, minus, at least, the condescension.

Ah, but there is the matter of a redeeming quality (sold separately most of the time, as it is not a requirement).

There is still something that at least attempts to be a ballast to the protagonist’s transparency, and probably because of Murakami’s material, it should come as no surprise that it lies in fear of losing one’s anchor. So while the protagonist’s consciousness holds no surprise (perhaps like the mega-capitalist world the novel accepts and bewails), there is still a breath of fresh air at the end of the novel, but it is so faint, it comes only as a sense of relief, instead of catharsis.

–

The rest (to be read, or if already read, to digest, digest, digest):

A question of time (from L – R): Skyworld Volume 1 by Mervin Ignacio and Ian Sta. Maria, The Collapse of What Separates Us by Vincenz Serrano, Love and Other Lemons by Katrina Stuart Santiago, Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy not included because it was too big 😉

–

To end, imagine yourself in the Dolphin Hotel, disoriented by your return to the real world:

Precariousness

To keep your balance in a moving train
                   you must stand parallel to the doors,
                     feet wide apart,
                     one hand outstretched to a safety handle; you must love
                     movement. Do not fight the force–
                     and should other bodies attempt to displace you
                   (like checkerboard or chess), you must stand ground, else crush
                     the bodies seated in front of you

                   And lest you forget yourself, there is that face on the pane
                     imposing itself on the city, reflection and perception both.

_

The Question of (Pre)Occupation

To think of what should be done always pales in the face of what you’ve actually done. 

Random, but relevant thoughts: a child’s sense of achievement is only ever honed; how it is planted, how borne out of the myriad potentialities (dust and bone!, dust and bone!), to me is lost.

It is easy to think of routine. Here, I will enumerate it for you. I think of the past weeks that were bliss. Waking up, eating breakfast, the easy schedule composed (whom to read, in what order, whom to contact, what questions to ask, what needs to be updated).

That–nevermind what they tell you–is a sense of achievement, too.

Preoccupation also connotes precedence. (Pre)occupy your thoughts with the imaginary accounts (pocket, errands, words, due dates, opportunities). “Occupy” proceeds from occupare: ob for “toward” and cupare, akin to capare to “seize.” So that at the thought of disturbance, what has (pre)occupied may lay claim to what is threatened and say, “You cannot have it; this time is already ours.”

From here I announce preoccupations with Self: not self-centeredness, not  selfishness, but the insistence that your space matters, must be cultivated and seized. So to busy ourselves with something, also means to occupy space, conquer it: from the Middle English that tells us to possess something, occupien.

(Pre)occupation means when presented with another choice, there is also a jolt: when enjoyed routine which has been proven essential and productive is disrupted not by a negative, but by another possibility, the larger space is fractured momentarily, to create a smaller, younger, riper space.

The question then, becomes not one of escape from opportunity, but of maintaining preoccupations, without discarding the opportune.

—

Occupy: according to the wonders of free etymology, already above.

Otherwise: this Other, as mine, without the wise (copyright 2012): to realize the question, also already above.

—

A song.