Ether Waltz

I'm in an unusually good mood right now- which is odd, considering my ire towards the world just a few short hours ago. The benefits of a well-timed nap, I guess.

It's a shame I don't choose to take more time to post on this thing; I know I would appreciate looking back on it after Institute has ended. Reflection will have to suffice, which is disappointing because time is a great equalizer- present passions often lead to future ambivalence.

Keeping on my Latin kick (previous post was Borges-flavored), here's an Octavio Paz:

--
My steps along this street
Resound
Along another street
Where
I hear my steps
Resound along this street
Where
Only the fog is real.
--

Show me the man who can't appreciate the light, airy feeling after a refreshing sleep.

Harbinger (or, My Problem with Blogs)

The other one, the one called Allen, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of New York and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Allen from the mail and see his name on a list of teachers or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, important scientific works, the taste of oranges and the prose of Garcia-Marquez; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Allen may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Allen, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his work than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Allen now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.