well, i hardly write anything personal on this blog. many reasons and a lot of excuses keep the words muted like a degas chalk drawing. i guess that it all has to do with light and seeing. i remember when i was visiting the d'orsey (spelling?) in paris and the museum had the degas chalk drawings in a special room with special lighting because regular light faded the colors...would keep them quiet or silence them altogether. that's what i am tentative about with personal writing...the light will fade them after being extracted from the blunted or muted and darkly comfortable recesses of my mind....taking these long narratives from one type of silence and giving them voice. however in this process i am not only letting them become exposed to the open air and to song but also risking voice and word to a violent erosion...of being muted again with another type of silence that accentuates itself with shame.
yesterday, i received an e-mail from a former mentor of mine. this mentor has now retired, lives in seattle and is taking art lessons. i am extremely happy for this person but i am also somewhat distressed as well. how can one retire from what we do? i am plagued by my thoughts and now i feel a bit more lonely in the world because this was not only a mentor but an ally. maybe it has been all of the changes within my life that have occurred in this past semester that have exacerbated this "mood" (for lack of a better term)or maybe it's just change in general...mine and others. being left with my thoughts yesterday was extremely painful and not to mention discursive. i thought to myself "i'll go for a drive....maybe get something to eat even though i am not hungry." i drove not unlike one of my infamous run on sentences...thinking and driving...pulling out into the air the conversation that i had milling and coiling around in my brain. i drove for over twenty miles around bloomington and normal...wide circles, concentric and fluid...no sense of direction except the motion of inside to outside and back again blurring the boundary of that stupid binary until i couldn't tell the difference. "how does one retire?" "how does one say this is enough and i don't want to do it anymore?"
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"You can never predict what will happen when the body moves from dimension to dimension--sometimes it merges sometimes it shatters sometimes it dons overdetermined eye make-up and mimics Liza Minnelli." Dodie Bellamy, _The Letters of Mina Harker_, 139
About Me
- commodifiedqueer
- i am a professor, i teach rhetoric and writing, exploring queer spaces, cultural studies, feminism, race, ethnicity, animal rights, afro cuban art, diasopora, african amercian women writers, middle passage, slave narrative but to be quite honest i am always in a constant space of grief, oh and i should be trying to publish something, whatevs
1 comment:
I don't know that retiring from anything means "I'm tired of this; this is enough; I've done all I can." But perhaps it's more like you feel something else calling you. I wonder the same thing about my father. How can he ever retire? How can he say, "I no longer what to do this with my life?" And I think he will retire because he comes to a place where it makes sense for him to do so but I know the decision will also be very difficult.
Your writing is beautiful, by the way. I am embarrassed by the way I write on my blog by comparison.
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