1932

This afternoon I found a very intriguing book at the Goodwill thrift store downtown. It is a green, clothbound hardcover. The title is ‘Palestine Land of the Light’, written by Frederick DeLand Leete, and published in 1932. On the front is a small golden image of the Dome of the Rock with the Mount of Olives in the background.

I am really excited to read this book. It was written in the early ‘30s, just a bit before so much went down, before Israel was created, but just a bit after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It should be very interesting to read about Palestine in that historical context….not as a look back from current times, but to read descriptions and stories from that actual time. Of course, it was written by a western visitor and that will certainly influence the book’s narrative and perception.

Already, just opening the front cover, it’s exciting: old maps! I love old maps. And there are two in this book. The maps make me think of how I sometimes hear from people today that there never was a Palestine or Palestinians, that this is a made up group of people. It’s completely absurd and has been manufactured and used in attempts to justify expulsion, occupation, and other horrors inflicted on the Palestinian population. Thinking about those inventions and looking at these maps from 1932, clearly labeled as Palestine, just makes me so curious to learn about the Palestinian population that became the first generation of Palestinian refugees. And to simply learn a bit more about that time and environment.

Things were already changing, gears already in motion, by 1932. I’m curious as to how this foreign visitor saw the land, the people, the situations. There is, I think, a lot of historic and religious observation and narrative in the book but it seems that there is also some current (at that time) description of people and places.

gin and music

the last two entries....a couple of drinks and watch out!

tears in the rain

i usually at least write somewhere else first and then cut and paste it here. but not now, i guess. i'm just here. when you put your hands out, what do they touch? christ almighty, i want some music in my brain. i want some tall grass and maybe a wood stove, too. oh shit, i miss old friends and i wonder what their lives are like. what do they think about?

i'm gonna take a walk. it's dark out now and i bet a little cold. which seems appropriate. the moon is never old. i like to think that it's always a bit young. at least in my life it is. i remember walking from a hotel to downtown craig once, last year. it was really cold out and the moon was never so young. when i look back at this, i'll probably laugh, maybe blush or something. i don't know. sometimes everything is possible. "we wait all day for night to come." i guess sometimes we do.

if anyone has anything to say, say it now. that makes some kind of sense. in all the hills and valleys and old streams that flow somewhere. i had a dream once, years ago. i guess i never have forgotten it. a stream with level ground and short grass and a forest with wide spaced trees. and i was walking along it and this was something important, a part of my life, what i was doing. i can't relate in this medium what it felt like. it was wonderful.....i don't know what to liken it to. maybe like opening a book and that becoming what you need it to be.

maybe i should quit writing here, now, before i embarrass myself. i don't know anyway. this day has been something coming. i've been reading recent news about palestine and i'm so worried and angry and sad. all this pressure from outside, trying to foment a civil war. it's close to happening, it seems. the kettle is close to boiling. or whatever goddamn analogy you want to use. the thing is, these are human lives we're talking about. in this flat little reality we create with words, this can easily be lost. but it is people, me and you and your family and friends. that is the kind of people this is about.

i'm going out now, i think. i'm listening to a song about a poet bleeding and her song a weapon. where is this now! we want words flowing over all this violence, being stronger than it. bullets are a momentary event, short and violent. but words can bridge generations, can outlive trees. we need these words. please write! we need these words. we need these stronger actions and we need this love. waterfalls and rivers and words that walk all over the guns, that plug up the histories of violence and fear. words that speak truth and emtpy hatred of its seeds. please!

mirrors in bathrooms (ad hoc and post mortem)

i was rolling in a land of dinosaurs huge ferns as tall as a person were climbing right out of the ground it smelled wonderful like rich black soil like our compost heap i just want to get back i’m talking about when i was a secret intergalactic spy all over the place and i was in a boy’s bathroom taking a leak and thinking about all these things and i was just this little kid with a little kid haircut and then before i knew it i was older and with friends and doing things together and all this stuff together and then i was drinking and still together with all these friends and everything was kinda mythical and legends we felt were being written as we walked imagine that jesus thor you woulda been jealous and all that shit and now all i know is a vacant dry riverbed and sage growing and vacant really only works when you’re talking about a human place, one built up by our goddamn machines and money and concrete but there i am in an honest to god wilderness with this sage growing and maybe an old antler lying in the dirt, sticking out of this fresh snow and i’m in these boots that i bought at some goddamn country cowboy store with these little leather fringes coming out along the toe and i’m here working on some pipeline that cuts across this land like the hypodermic scar of some goddamn user who can’t kick it no matter how hard they try and forgotten trails through old trees and new snow and old snows and friends a thousand miles away

hatred

People say that hatred always begins in fear, and I believe this to be true. I’m sitting here in this apartment, just writing and thinking. I just listened to a song with the lyrics:

i search for peace
i search for hope
i search for love
and one day for release

Good things to be looking for. The afternoon is early although already fading. Winter’s like that—at noon the sun is bright and sometimes it warms your skin but then just a few hours later the sun is falling down, getting low and far away and the light is a little muted and the warmth is leaving.

Soon it’s going to be evening and dark. It’s a clear sky but over in the west clouds are moving in. Maybe they’ll cover up the stars tonight.

We stayed up late last night, talking. It was a beautiful night and I really feel close. Sometimes this means the most and it’s enough, it’s so much.

It’s moments like this that I am aware of time in a good way. The future is the present and everything is open. All the shadows are possibilities; it only depends on which you look into. Nights and days unfold and there is snow and summer and spring and falling leaves. Hills ripple into the distance and we can walk anywhere. It’s like looking out the back window of the house I grew up in, looking out to those distant hills that I could see, wanting to walk to them. There is dry grass and rusty colored willows in the riverbottoms.

Now there is change in the wind. I can feel it. I feel like a whole person. Looking out from a high cliff, you can see the land stretched out below, where the deer come to sleep and in the other direction you can look out across the vast grasslands, over to where the sun will someday set. Right now, wind moves the grasses.

I’m still listening to some music. Actually, I keep listening to one song over and over. I’m sort of inside it. But I’m outside, too. Looking in and out, forward and backward through my own self. Everything seems part of the same moment, the same instant. The past and this moment and whatever is to come. All these landscapes and faces and feeling merge together, leaving the open sands you see at low tide. They all coalesce, together with everything that is me, into some sort of vision that expands to fill me up and spreads out into the fields and through the snow and grass, climbing trees into the sky. It’s all the same and the colors are those you find in winter.

yes

i just read an introduction to animal farm (i didn't want to read it first since they so often reveal some of the book). in it was this quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

the manor america

i just read animal farm for the first time. i read it in one sitting. i haven’t done that in a long time.

i’m hungry right now, i didn’t realize it while i was reading. the sun is bright now, too. it has become afternoon.

the comparisons are endless. creating enemies. blaming enemies. fear. changing rhetoric (remember when hussein and iraq were u.s. allies and business partners? remember learning about wwii—how people were encouraged by the government to consume less, in order to aid the war effort. now it is the opposite—this administration asking us all to be good patriots of our great country by buying more, consuming more. we have to keep the economy strong, after all). it is absolutely right in stride with the point of the book when critics and reviewers say that it is a comment on totalitarianism, as if such a thing could never happen here.

the nationalism, the pride and the flag. the just work harder and success will happen. working jobs so a few can have greater and greater profit off of others' labor. the need for those in the know to keep things running, you all wouldn’t understand.

i guess i had an idea about the book already but the experience of reading it was more powerful and meaningful than i could have imagined. and the cat, i think about the cat.

knitastic

Two nights ago a good friend taught me how to knit! I’ll have to practice a lot more and I wouldn’t be surprised if I forget some of it (although, I think I still remember how to ‘cast on’) but, still, I am really excited about learning the initial basics.