field notes; week of october 8, 2018
happy canadian thanksgiving! i celebrated by fishing a half-price, shrink-wrapped pumpkin pie out of the cooler at shoppers drug mart yesterday. the celebration will continue tonight, when i go to see liz phair, for whom i am thankful. let’s get into these field notes.
two hundred and thirty.
i have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
-- audre lorde, the transformation of silence into language and action, 1977
if i were to assign this year a broad, overarching theme, it would be silence versus speech. i do think audre’s generally right, and that what is most important to you must come out, at some point, one way or another. but encouragement to speech generally fails to account for just how badly that bruising might hurt. it’s hard to begrudge anyone their choice of quiet over being misunderstood.
two hundred and thirty-one.
you are too timid to embark upon a future without having it thoroughly explained in advance— which is plainly impossible. what seems a sense of responsibility on your part, and honorable as such, is at bottom the official’s spirit, childishness, a will broken by your father. change this for the better, this is what to work at, this is what you can do at once. and that means, not to spare yourself… for sparing yourself is impossible; this apparent sparing of yourself has brought you today to the verge of your destruction… one cannot spare oneself, cannot calculate things in advance. you haven’t the faintest idea of what would be better for you. tonight, for example, two considerations of equal strength and value battled in you at the expense of your brain and heart, you were equally worried on both their accounts; hence the impossibility of making calculations. what is left? never again degrade yourself to the point where you become the battleground of a struggle that goes on with no regard as it were for you, and of which you feel nothing but the terrible blows of the warriors. rise up, then. mend your ways, escape officialdom, start seeing what you are instead of calculating what you should become.
-- franz kafka, diary entry, august 27, 1916
two hundred and thirty-two.
you can withdraw from the sufferings of the world -- that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature -- but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.
-- franz kafka, the zurau aphorisms, 1917-1918
scalped by mr. kafka on this cold october night! actually, upon reading #231, i immediately navigated to indigo.ca and impulse-bought kafka’s diaries, and after doing some cursory research and reading while waiting for the package to arrive, i believe i’m truly ready to fling myself headlong down this rabbit hole.
in the interest of not making this literal entire e-mail kafka, however, because i like to deliver a diversity of thought unto your inbox, i’m going to now catch us up on the backlog of beautiful words i’ve encountered in the wild.
patrimony: inherited from one’s father
in the crawlspace, in the safe, mae borowski found a strange sort of patrimony: a single tooth.
temerity: excessive confidence
as he fell down the stairs, and moments before he was nearly crushed beneath the weight of the animatronic frog’s body, gregg lee realized his temerity had been his downfall.
hybristic: proud and arrogant
so hybristic were the followers of the black goat that they grew brazen in their misdeeds, failing to properly hide the evidence of their crimes.
unctuous: excessively flattering or ingratiating, greasy or soapy
mae couldn’t understand what so attracted bea santello to those unctuous hipsters from bright harbour.
elegiac: mournful
as mae snatched the last pierogi, gregg let out an elegiac howl.
crepuscule: twilight
in the golden crepuscule of that autumn day, mae and her friends stepped out of the clik-clak diner, so content after their pizza that they very nearly didn’t notice the severed arm on the sidewalk.
probity: the quality of having strong moral principles
angus, so full of the probity his parents lacked, carried mae out of the mineshaft on his back.
remoulade: salad or seafood dressing made with hard-boiled egg yolks, oil, and vinegar, and flavored with mustard, capers, and herbs
if you put remoulade on a pizza, where would that pizza fall on gregg’s pizza scale?
lèse majesté: the crime of offending a monarchy
in the eyes of the cult, mae’s defiance in the face of the black goat was tantamount to lèse majesté.
apposite: apt given surrounding circumstances
though they had little in common, their shared struggle to find purpose in their hometown brought mae and bea into an apposite friendship.
night in the woods is a good game
i have to go see liz phair now
send me a reply if you feel like it! i always love hearing from you guys!