Author Archives: evahou03

P – Week 9 Log

5.27.13:  4 reading Neuro, 1 reverie

5.28.13:1 morning pages, 1 yoga, 3 organizing paper, 1 meditation (to calm down because I was getting way too anxious about my paper)

5.29.13:  1 morning pages, 1 reading Everything Being is Dancing, 2 rereading highlights in Poetics of Space, 2 freewriting (trying to generate ideas for paper)

“The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past. I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more.” (Bachelard, 188)

5.30.13:  Train back to Washington, 2 train notes, 1 morning pages, 2 writing poetry, 1 train reverie

5.31.13:  1 morning pages, 1 train meditation, 1 photography, 2 reading David Seamon articles

6.1.13:  3/4 morning pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 6 writing paper

6.2.13:  5 writing paper

Total:  40.25

P – Week 8 Log

5.20.13:  1 morning pages, 1/2 meditation, 2 walking meditation/nature hike, 2 poetry workbook, 1 WordPress, 1 Neuro/reverie

5.21.13:  3/4 morning pages, 1 walking meditation, 3 writing paper, 2 reading Everything Being Is Dancing, 2 reading & notes on House of Incest

“My first vision of earth was water veiled.  I am of that race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.”  –House of Incest, Anais Nin

5.22.13:  1 morning pages, 3/4 yoga, 1/2 chat with Sarah, 3 David Seamon’s website, 2 notes for paper

“…a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually sustain and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times, in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution.”  –From David Seamons’ article “Gaston Bachelard’s Topoanalysis”

5.23.13:  1 morning pages, sudden move to Indiana and loss of internet access, 2 writing poetry

5.24.13:  3/4 morning pages, 1 Bodystories, 5 writing paper, 2 notes on Seamon articles

5.25.13:  1/2 morning pages, 1 yoga, 4 3/4 writing paper,

5.26.13:  last trip back to Kentucky

Total:  41.5 hours

P – Week 9 Poetry/Prose – “Everywhere and Nowhere”

Everywhere and Nowhere

As my journey closes I realize that space is all I’ve ever wanted and that I don’t want to feel penned in by place. I don’t need those markers to be comfortable. The simple fact is that I want everything and I want nothing. I want the fleeting and ephemeral and I want it to be a constant. Not as an unchanging presence but as a constantly changing presence, eternal in its ambiguity and beautiful in its uncertainty. I don’t want to stay the same any more than I want to have the same address two months from now. I have tried being comfortable and found it uncomfortable. Like Fiona Apple said in a song, “I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” Change is the drug I crave and I want to travel lightly but always be prepared so I keep a toothbrush and passport on my person at all times because you never know where you might end up when you go out for a loaf of bread. The world has spoken to me and I answer with my eyes and my heart and now I know exactly where I want to be. Everywhere and nowhere.

P – Week 8 Poetry – “Personal Space”

Personal Space

At the start of this experiment

I worry that we will grow tired of each other

in such close quarters.

All shared spaces with multiple uses,

a clever design but with no eye to privacy.

As one week turns into three and then

a month and more and

there is no bickering or petty arguments

about who left the cap off the toothpaste

or on which side of the sink the soap belongs

I realize how ridiculous my fears are

because how can I get sick of my other half?

Best friends since childhood, attached at the hip,

even through long absences, twins born

years apart to different mothers

–there must be some mistake.

 

But there was no mistake and people come into our lives

when we need them most.

In him I have my brother, my twin,

and we are at home in the world.

P – Week 7 Poetry – “Longing For Space”

Longing for Space

I watch the clock and am waiting anxiously.

My bag was packed days too early and still

I shuffle and reshuffle my belongings,

only one suitcase but it seems like far too much stuff.

I want to be free and unencumbered and

flee in the night with only what I can carry and

this town has always been too small for me.

I am ready to leave as soon as I arrive

and I want to see the world.

When he arrives I am out the door and

not knowing where we’re going is part of the fun.

The big diesel truck eats the miles like candy

and I don’t look back,

the only things that matter are what I see ahead of me.

I roll my window down all the way and the wind

hits my face and I smile because I feel free,

maybe for the first time ever.

I lean back in my seat and let the wind carry me along.

P – Week 9 Reverie

“Emotions course through the veins, engage the heart and the lungs, the bowels and the genitals, the muscles, the skin and face.” (Rose/Abi-Rached, 230)

The physical reactions of the non-physical…can emotions be mapped in the blood even if they can’t be found in the brains? My heart stops and my lungs contract and my muscles ready themselves for the chase whenever I look at love, my veins quicken and quiver with excitement, but I have the same reaction when I look at hate…so far removed and yet so close. Does my body recognize the nuances of difference or only the heat of the response? My face is the only thing that changes and that is cultural conditioning, not something written in my bones and blood.

Word count: 101

P – Week 8 Reverie

“Our Perception of the World Is a Fantasy That Coincides with Reality” (Rose/Abi-Rached, 207)

Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality on occasion if we’re lucky but we never really know if we’re lucky because we never really know what reality is. Is it what we see or is it something more or something less? It changes from person to person moment to moment memory to memory and changes every time it is remembered. There is know knowing in the muddled soup of our brains whether we are up or down and that is a confusing slide of behavior, a merry go round of an experience.

Word count: 97

**Sorry for the lateness.  We had to make a sudden move to Indiana last week and I haven’t had internet until now…

P – Week 7 – Log & Update

5.13.13:  1 morning pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 1/2 meditation, 2 nature hike, 1/2 Neuro reverie, 2 WordPress

5.14.14:  1 morning pages, 2 notes for paper, 1 writing poetry

5.15.14:  1 morning pages, 1 walking meditation around lake, 5 WordPress, 6.5 finishing Place & Experience and notetaking, 2 finishing Perloff (it seemed wrong not to)

5.16.13:  3/4 morning pages, 4 reading Seamon articles on KSU website, 2 WordPress, 3 notes on Poetics of Space

“…though the character and quality of the inhabitants shape their house, the house contributes to the character, experience, and world of the inhabitants, partly through its nature as a physical thing and partly through the history of earlier inhabitants who found comfort or discomfort there.”  (David Seamon’s article on Poetics of Space)

5.17.13:  1 morning pages, 1 writing poetry, 3 Perceptual Experience, 1 trailer meditation

“…in normal perceptual experience the ‘things themselves’ seem much closer to us than a ‘throng of sensations.’ This does not by itself imply that we are not in any way aware of a throng of sensations in perceptual experience…even if the things themselves are ‘closer’ to us than sensations, this still implies that the sensations are somewhere to be found…It is obvious that perceptual experience is sensory in a way that thought is not…” (Perceptual Experience,
127)

5.18.13:  day off–catching up on laundry and other housewifely duties including experimental brownie recipes and amazingly delicious pork chops (J has put on a little weight since I’ve been here)

“Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.” (Bachelard, 68)

5.19.13:  1 morning pages, 2 writing poetry, 2 notes and reverie from a boat on Lake Huron

Total:  46.75

P – Week 6 – Log & Update

5.6.12:  1 somatics/meditation, 2 Poetics of Space, 2 notes for paper, 3/4 Morning Pages, 1/2 revise seminar pass, 1 log/update, 2 poetry writing, 1/2 walking meditation

“It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.” (Bachelard, 54)

5.7.13:  1 Morning Pages, 1/2 Bodystories, 1/2 meditation, 1 reverie, 1 WordPress

5.8.13:  1 Poetics of Space, 2 rereading The Midnight, 1 morning pages, 1 notes for paper, 2 Place & Experience, 1 catching up on Not Knowing Notebook (NKN)

“Concepts of place are often not distinguished at all from notions of simply physical location, while sometimes discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notion of place refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space. Is Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, for example, really about place or space? It surely cannot be about the same space as that of which Newton or Einstein speak—or can it?” (Malpas, 19)

5.9.13: 1 morning pages, 1 somatics/meditation,

5.10.13:  1 morning pages, 1 tai chi, 3 Body & City, 3 writing poetry/workbook, 2 paper, 1 reading seminar passes

5.11.13:  1 morning pages, 1/2 meditation, 5 reading Neuro & Perloff, 1 sem pass

Total:  44.25