I think New Year's is supposed to be a time to pause and think.

About the year that passed, about the year that's just beginning.

But tonight, I'm not interested in reflecting on the past or thinking to the future.

Every person, experience, thought, feeling of the past is filling me up.

All the potential of the future is making me overflow.

In this moment, everything - everyone - is with me.

And I can only be grateful and happy for that:

to be exactly where I am.

Here. Now.

We are intrepid.
We carry on.

Please, please, please...

Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time.

I believe that accessibility does not equate to disposability.

I believe that quality does not equate to inaccessibility.

I believe that the abstract can be accessible.

I believe that accessible does not equate to transparent.

I believe that pop can endure.

I believe that authenticity equates to quality.

I believe that reproducibility does not decrease quality.

I believe that the context of the moment of exposure affects reaction.

I believe that personal truth is in the reaction.

I believe reaction is performance art.

I believe art is connection, and art is reaction.

I believe art is life.

Goddamn. I just want all of this for everyone, all the time.

"I'm full of bad feeling."

Mrs. Murry stroked Meg's shaggy head. "Do you know why?"

"I hate being an oddball," Meg said. "It's hard on Sandy and Dennys, too. I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're just able to pretend they are. I try to pretend, but it isn't any help."

"You're much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren't," Mrs. Murry said.

- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

"Life is filled with abstractions...

"...and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution--seeing it, knowing it. It's emotion and intellect going together...

"Personally, I think intuition can be sharpened and expanded through meditation, diving into the Self. There's an ocean of consciousness inside each of us, and it's an ocean of solutions. When you dive into that ocean, that consciousness, you enliven it. You don't dive for specific solutions; you dive to enliven that ocean of consciousness. Then your intuition grows and you have a way of solving those problems--knowing when it's not quite right and knowing a way to make it feel correct for you. That capacity grows and things go much more smoothly."

- David Lynch

I really dig this.

(This is long but please, bear with me.)

Lynch talks about intuition as an "ocean of consciousness" that can be nurtured through meditation. I think it can also be expanded through exposure and experience.

Well; maybe "exposure" and "experience" are the wrong words. Let me try to explain. I quoted Robert McGee on story structure last fall:

"We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave accordingly to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this is a truth we cannot know absolutely. This is what we believe to be true.

"We also believe we're free to make any decision whatsoever, to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It's only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.

"Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known--and can only be known--when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and brave its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before."

By McGee's explanation, I feel like the "sum total of our experience" shapes our intuition, and intuition is what we tap into when necessity prompts us to act. To me, McGee is saying, truth is in the reaction. Reaction stems from intuition. Intuition is our "ocean of consciousness," our personal truth.

How do we elicit reaction? We experience. We expose ourselves to new art, new happenings, new places and people and things and ideas. (New nouns? Haha.) Sometimes we partake. Sometimes we observe. Either way, if we are conscious that our reaction is a bit of our own personal truth, part of our own self, we can use that consciousness to identify the truth in the reactions, to sharpen our intuitions.

Jarmusch says to "steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination...select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul" to maintain authenticity. I say, do this also to sharpen intuition. Absorb everything, and be conscious of everything to which you react.

Lynch has something to say about action and reaction himself. He starts off talking about how he fell in love with the idea of the "art life" in high school and wanted to devote himself exclusively to painting.

"The art life means a freedom...it doesn't have to be selfish; it just means that you need time.

"[Painter] Bushnell Keeler...always had this expression: 'If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.'

"And that's basically true. You don't just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves...The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It's always a process of building and then destroying. And then, out of this destruction, discovering a thing and then building on it... Then it's a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find you're leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That's action and reaction."

Joseph Campbell says that destruction and then the rebuilding of something new and better is the work of the hero. The true hero looks deep within himself, identifies the demons of dream and myth that we avoid because they threaten our security and comfort, and in tackling them, discovers his true self. Upon resurfacing, he becomes something better, and then helps the world become better as well.

Isn't, then, the work of the artist the work of the hero?

I am in love with exploring these ideas.

"Sewer Walking"

You and me, we used to talk
Like a river underground, the sewer where we used to walk.
The hole at the end empties out to the pier
Where paperboats disappear

Me, I try to send this note,
Float it like a paper boat,
But paper sinks and words are weak.
I try but I don't speak

Join together in the silent snow
Turn our faces up to see
Not endless night, but day
A pier
And you and me, talking.

- Unknown

"I will not allow it to be more man's nature than woman's to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather," [said Captain Harville.]

"Your feelings may be the strongest," replied Anne, "but the same spirit of analogy will authorize me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments...

"I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as--if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."

- Persuasion

In the center of the first world

It's laid out before us, who are we to break down?

Every day we wake up, we choose love, we choose light

And we try -- it's too easy just to fall apart

Love can free us from all excess, from the deepest debts

'Cause when our hearts are full we need much less...

This is a list of things that are currently taking up space in my brain. Most of them should NOT be there at this moment in time, so I am trying to empty my mind and regain some focus.

• 17th century Venetian opera.
• Let Me Down Easy and how it might compare to a historical theatre that existed pre-1850.
• Edward Albee.
• The degree to which my poetry sucks.
• How the way words sound affects the way we react to them.
• Why music is the one of the most universal art forms.
• The effects of blogging on the publishing industry, and in turn on the flow of [good] art into the public sphere.
• To what extent my GPA this semester will affect my cumulative GPA.
• What makes a given style of anything popular at a given time?
• "Appearance vs. reality," and not as a theme in Shakespeare - to what extent is everything appearance? If everything is relative, based on our perspective, is there a base reality to everything, a sole and inherent truth that is above all else?
• Existentially speaking, does one make a conscious decision in assigning meaning? Or is it something instinctively felt, not something given thought to? If the the latter is true, then is the meaning compromised the moment thought is given to it?
• How there is a distinct possibility that all the chemicals in diet soda will one day give me cancer.
• How bad of an idea it is for me to consider making macaroni & cheese right now when I ate gross amounts of Chinese food today.
• How things are named. I.e. bands, song names, books, eras of history, ice cream flavors, cars.
• How everything, including images, can be boiled down to a chemical reaction.
• How advertising often does not sell a product - it sells an image.
• My obsession with images, their creation, their meanings, and the ways they affect people.
• Art as a way of using imagery to convey a truth.
• The various ways people try to stop feeling empty, including but not limited to drugs, alcohol, food, meaningless sex, material objects, personal appearance.
• The implications of recreational drug use vs. the use of recreational drugs for the purpose of productivity.
• Hedonism.
• The process of discovery.
• The way we ascribe value to physical objects based on the feelings of nostalgia they evoke.
• The way geographic regions and cities become personalities with their own characteristics.
• The power of black and white vs. the power of color, and the contrasting values of both.
• Narcissism and obsession with one's own image, the ways in which interest in self image contradicts the hippie ideology, and the difficulty in navigating this in an age of digital social networking. The degree to which people now form connections through social networking.
• What it means not to care.
• Typography, and the use of different fonts and typefaces to manipulate an audience's perspective.
• The negative connotation of the word "manipulate," the magnitude of the power one has when they can manipulate something successfully.
• An artist's intention when creating, and to what extent his goal affects the overall impact and quality of his work.
• The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Photography as a reproducible art with no inherent authenticity.
• Authenticity vs. originality in the creation of art.
• The differences between dignity and self-respect, and between them and pride, and pride and independence.
• Academic integrity.
• Christmas.
• Grad school. Gag.
• Personal style.
• How pissed I am that I missed the Vermeer exhibit at the Met this fall.
• Money. I'm broke.
• Self-destructive habits.
• How to stop thinking.
• Reality television and how it is demeaning to the whole art of television programming.
• What "home" is and how it changes.
• Giving, what it means to give, what it means to receive, ways of giving.
• Other people.
• Death.

Aside from those first 3 items, none of that has any business being on my mind right now.

Oh, and as is typical for lately:

• What am I doing. What the hell am I doing.

I don't know what number this is.

Mother of pearl. I definitely just spent the last hour and fifteen minutes sitting in the computer lab writing a less-than-mediocre poem instead of doing the massive amounts of work that I have due tomorrow. Whoops.

You won't let me catch you sleeping.
We sit silently on the daybed
in the sun room after midnight, shrinking back
into the shadows, skirting the fuzzy lights
of the color television broadcasting in black and white.
No floor boards creak -- everyone's asleep -- but you
[and I]
stare intently at the screen, thieving fleeting glimpses --
attempts to catch the movie playing in each our eyes.
Glasses serve as shields but can't stave off wayward raids
and the night makes us susceptible
to imperceptible waves of sudden indefinable need
to ask for what we should not have
that is not ours
that should not be.
I won't give up, you won't give in: no surrender, no one wins.
So we just sit, side by side, in the bleakest early light.
The TV becomes a dream to me as I slip into a rapturous repose,
and you become a figment, a sentinel at his post watching over me
with a sincerity that I can't see. Suddenly awake,
you stay to watch me sleep, and somehow I can sense it:
your irrefutably unaffected affection sweetens my dreams.
It spreads through my reverie as you kiss my forehead
and slip away unseen. But the aura doesn't linger,
and when I wake in midday, the television is color once again.
Did you catch me sleeping?
Did you enter my dreams?
Or was it just a black and white movie
playing out on a color TV?

There's nothing I can do

To keep from feeling like I blew

The only chance I had to make it better.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

- John 8:32

I want to be free.

The more we struggle for "normalcy," be it society's definition of normalcy or simply what we perceive as comfortable and regular, the more perverted and twisted our condition becomes - the harder we grasp for control, the more out of control we spin.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

...in short, I was afraid.

"...There was this . . . entire life behind things. And this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever."

I love Explosions in the Sky. This song breaks my heart every time I hear it and I love that I can't explain why.

Peter: I still don't know what to write about.

James: Write about the whale.

Peter: What whale?

James: The one that's trapped in your head, dying to get out.

- Finding Neverland

For the first few weeks of the new school year, Nadia hardly spoke. All the sixth graders--like Mrs. Olinski herself--were new to Epiphany Middle School, but Nadia--like Mrs. Olinski herself--seemed the most disconnected. Both were watchers and waiters, cautious about being friendly, about showing themselves.

Then on the middle Monday in October, Nadia Diamondstein arrived in class with smile and addressed her teacher. "Don't you think, Mrs. Olinski, that autumn is the most glorious time of year?" Mrs. Olinski confessed that it was her favorite season and told Nadia that she sometimes felt guilty because she thought she ought to prefer spring, with its pledge to make the lilies bloom again.

Every morning thereafter, Nadia smiled as she entered class and greeted Mrs. Olinski with a word from her southern past. She said, "Hey."

Mrs. Olinski knew that Nadia Diamondstein was not only incandescently beautiful but was also a star.

- The View From Saturday

E. L. Konigsburg