Post-Tween

This isn't really fair, since I'm getting together with the guys next week to have a semi-official post-mortem on the event, but I have so many thoughts that I want to organize/share them.

Firstly, the night before, I dreamed all night about all the ways it could go badly. And there was a guy on Twitter being a jerk about the whole thing, and because I was using the BeTween account I couldn't be as direct as I personally wanted to be. So every time I woke up I thought about that conversation and how negative he was...

But it really went beautifully. I think we had 40-some attendees total, which was the perfect number- enough for the conversations to be diverse and fruitful, but not so many that we couldn't handle them. And it went just long enough- longer than that and people would have gotten tired and grouchy, or we would have run out of content. Shorter than that, and it maybe wouldn't have been worth giving up Saturday for.

I decided to hold back Kohel and Kathy so they could participate in a session before leading one, and I think that was just the right call- it gave them a chance to get the tone of the event and set them up to lead their own sessions successfully. And people really wanted to talk with them and ask questions. Kohel ended up continuing his conversation with a smaller splinter group, which was just fine with me.

We had to really break up the conversations every hour in order to move on, and that, along with people complaining that the sessions should be longer, and that they should be recorded in case you missed something, assures me that they were fruitful and that people wanted to be doing what we were doing. I WANT people to think that maybe they missed something; I WANT them to have a tough time choosing which session to attend. That means we had high-quality content, and encourages people to want to do another one (if there is another one).

And I do think these are really fruitful conversations for animators to be having. The tech community does this kind of thing all the time, because their work is solitary and isolating. They form user groups and get-togethers and monthly stuff so that they can connect and share with each other, so that they can get insight and support, and the whole community benefits from it. I'm not sure why the animation community tends to think that the only people with insights to share are Experts who can Pass Down their Wisdom. It's often fruitful to ask your peers how they handle things, or if they know how to do something. And if we're going to build a more cohesive community here, we need to be talking to each other more. If we're going to start to develop an industry, a set of practices, a legislative agenda, it needs to come from communicating with each other on this level, not just talking about movies and artists.

However, as we did, I do think there's a real role for non-animators at events like this. We need attorneys and CPAs and insurance people, marketing and branding people, IT people and software people... we need to not only connect within our community, but outside of it, to build resources and knowledge that help us all work better. I think that any future BeTween should definitely include that aspect of it, although it's not a requirement of the format.

Finally, I'm personally so pleased that I feel like I gave our community this tool- that now there's a bunch of people who know how to do this and could lead one of their own. It's simple and inexpensive, and it's powerful. Maybe I won't have to lead the next one, or other people will decide to have their own on other topics. I'm beaming.

So yeah. I'm so pleased and yes, proud of myself, for making this thing happen and for having it go well. It's been a long process, pushing it forward, and I'm glad I never gave up on it (and thanks to those people who said to not give up on it). That's part of the learning experience for me; that if I don't feel supported in a good idea, to just keep with it until people get it and see where I'm coming from. I tend to think that if nobody buys in, it must not have been a good idea after all- I doubt myself. But I shouldn't be so eager to doubt myself. And I hope that these things I've worked on and brought to Portland animators; Drinking and Drawing, BeTween, and (to some extent) the local WIA chapter, have a life beyond me, and continue to serve everyone long after I've moved on to other things. Go me!

My hundredth post!

The ASIFA Showcase is Saturday, and it's going to be really good- I'm so impressed with the level of submissions, and the show is going to be very strong. And it's FREE, so please come- Saturday at 11am at Cinema 21.
I think we've done everything we can do for BeTween- now we just need to hope people show up and bring their participation hats. There will be coffee, and bagels, and maybe some swag, and we've left ourselves some room to be flexible depending on how many people show up. I so sincerely hope that people benefit from it- David and I were talking about how hard it can be to get people to come if they don't think there's anything "in it" for them. I wonder why the tech community doesn't seem to have that problem- they benefit personally when the group benefits collectively, so they don't need to be persuaded of the value of collaboration. I wish we had more of that spirit in the creative community. Baby steps, Rebekah- baby steps.

And, as always, let's close with a poem- I've been reading a lot of Jane Hirshfield lately.

THREE FOXES BY THE EDGE OF THE FIELD AT TWILIGHT

One ran,
her nose to the ground,
a rusty shadow
neither hunting nor playing.

One stood; sat; lay down; stood again.

One never moved,
except to turn her head a little as we walked.

Finally we drew too close,
and they vanished.
The woods took them back as if they had never been.

I wish I had thought to put my face to the grass.

We kept on walking,
speaking as strangers do when becoming friends.

There is more and more I tell no one,
strangers nor loves.
This slips into the heart
without hurry, as if it had never been.

And yet, among the trees, something has changed.

Something looks back from the trees,
and knows me for who I am.

Poem and stuff

I'm really excited about BeTween- I think it's going to go really well, and if it doesn't, we've learned what we'll need to do for the next one. Yes, David and Sam really want this to be an ongoing thing, which pleases me.

Now it's just a question for me of maintaining momentum, following up on the loose ends, connecting with the people on my list to connect to. I don't want to get lazy here in the home stretch.

And I've been listening to the Poem of the Day podcast, which reminded me of Jane Hirshfield. Here's one of my favorites from her:

Letting What Enters Enter

Even in January rains
the blossoms open --
absence and longing
are also the plum-fragrant spring.
As the woman with her sign and cart of rags is spring,
beside the highway, stepping slowly
through the undimmed flower of her life.
"What I now most want to happen
in my raving heart, make it happen --"
Sappho's cry to the goddess.
Who knows if that prayer was answered?
Each part holds the rest in the chill
spring rain and the silence; let one animal
eat from your hand and the whole herd comes.
but the woman was not beautiful
or whole in her heart's raving,
and she forgave me nothing that I love.

Online registration now working

Head on over to the website and pre-register for BeTween! It's going to be interesting, and I think a really good group will attend.

BeTween!

So, I've been meaning to blog about this for weeks, but I've been putting my efforts on the project into realizing it, rather than blogging about it. You may remember me making noise for months about an unconference for freelance animators, and finally, with the support of David Billings and Sam Niemann, it is actually going to happen.

Our website is coming together, and the event will be on May 1 at the Art Institute open space. I'm so so excited.

Even though it's an unconference, we'll have some "experts", who can speak to IP and copyright/fair use, taxes, health insurance, software... my hope is that people can get real information out of these sessions, rather than just trading stories and frustrations (although that's incredibly important too).

It's been such a pleasure working with David and Sam, and I've been thinking a bit about that. It was so discouraging all those months when I would talk about it and people would just give me a vague look and nod. And I was so convinced it was a good idea, but so few people seemed to share that conviction that I got discouraged (as I often do). So the process of just continuing to talk about it until I found the people who got it and shared my enthusiasm has been enlightening. I can think of other projects that would have benefited from that kind of persistence and faith, so I need to keep that in mind.

They also really want these to be ongoing events, which is an interesting idea.

So let's close with a quote from TH White in The Goshawk:

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: to say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.

Lucille Clifton

I was wanting to write about leadership, but Lucille Clifton has died. How can I say what this woman's poems mean to me? I am forever grateful for her, to her, and have shed for her today real tears.


poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young

well i have almost come to the place where you fell
tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap
and i have decided to keep running,
head up, body attentive, fingers
aimed like darts at first prize, so
i might not even watch out for the thin thing
grabbing toward my ankles but
i'm trying for the long one mama,
running like hell and if i fall
i fall.

the making of poems

the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job.

new year

lucy
by sam
out of thelma
limps down a ramp
toward the rest of her life.
with too many candles
in her hair
she is a princess of
burning buildings
leaving the year that
tried to consume her.
her hands are bright
as they witch for water
and even her tears cry
fire fire
but she opens herself
to the risk of flame and
walks toward an ocean
of days.



there is a girl inside.
she is randy as a wolf.
she will not walk away
and leave these bones
to an old woman.

she is a green tree
in a forest of kindling.
she is a green girl
in a used poet.

she has waited
patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.




i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

Been thinking of this one lately

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Inspired Involvement

As you can tell, I'm struggling a bit with maintaining this blog lately. It was begun in a burst of enthusiasm for social networking and Portland's open source community, and a deep desire in my heart to bridge disparate elements. I mean, that's the whole reason that I love animation- it's an amazing balancing act between creativity and technology, between inspiration and repetition. It's a place where I can satisfy both my desire to create original work, and then endlessly perfect it.

And yet, despite my excitement about the events that Asifa is putting together (Drinking and Drawing next week!) and my incipient freelance event*, I've also been going through a very introspective period lately. So instead of blogging about events and happenings in the community, I've been blogging about what I'm thinking and reading, or blogging not at all.

I'm fortunate that this blog has so few followers, and all of them know me, so it's not like I have to live up to any particular expectations, and yet I did have some expectations of myself when I began this, when I chose this title.

And I have gone on a slight derail the past couple of months, when I decided I was going to move and that anticipation put a number of things on hold for me (since I'm also not updating the sister blog to this one). And those steps I was taking for personal growth were very meaningful for me- I hope to resume them as soon as possible.

However, I very much don't want this blog to devolve into a journal. I do sincerely hope that the act of reading it is of some benefit to someone, and not just that the act of writing it benefits me.

And on that note:

* I want to put together an event, perhaps an unconference, that focuses on the realities and opportunities for freelance animators (and other creative people) in portland. I think that the film and video community have a lot of resources that animators don't necessarily know about, but that there are also challenges unique to the animation community. If anyone is interested in helping organize such an event, or has thoughts or suggestions to share, they would be welcome.

Thanks as always for your patience with me. :-)

poem

I've been thinking of this one lately, but can't seem to find the text of it online. So here's an excerpt from memory, which I'll correct someday.

James Riedel- Pill Bugs

In the leaves that border the cinderblocks of the house
My son counts pillbugs in his palm.
Beads the color of lead.
One by one they open and crawl
Until a touch returns them to playing dead.

My son's hand is quiet
As the museum of a spider's corner.
That room full of people I will get
If I keep my house.
If my stone-carved year falls from it's orbit
Before my son's.

They will wait for him to close his father's eyes.
To close them more than once, for the grey yolks of the irises refuse to dry.
From years of watching, long into the night
The lean, striped shadow waiting by the stairwell.

When it starts to climb for a child,
I speak to make it look at me.
To show it that I fall quicker to its paw.
And feed its family more.

edit: remembered the missing bit!

Upcoming and outgoing

Women in Animation had their first public meeting last week. I think it went really well- good attendance and great people. They sought input on what people want from the chapter, which was welcome- it's good to be able to give input. I expect great things from them, and am so happy I played my small role in getting it going.

ASIFA meeting last night discussed upcoming events: Animation Show of Shows on Saturday, a drawing trip on November, a Show and Tell in December, Drinking and Drawing in January, and we're thinking about putting on a freelancer resource fair/panel discussion/something in February. Let me know if you have any insights on content for the freelancer event- I'm sort of spearheading that one, so I'm looking for input and suggestions as I try to see who would be interested in participating.

Work is busy and just doesn't seem to slow down. Which is good, I know- good for the company, good for the economy, good all around, but personally, selfishly, I wish I had a little more down time in a given day. I'm out of touch with all the blogs I used to read at work. We've had a really great group of clients lately, though, which helps immensely.

Last week (was it only last week? It seems forever ago), my mom and I took a trip down the coast to visit the aquarium and see Newport. I don't think I had ever been to Newport, and it's silly to miss things that are so close. I need to get to Crater Lake someday. I took a couple pictures that I'll put on Facebook eventually.

I've been reading a bit, but mostly fiction, re-read Neuromancer and some Gaiman. Here are some gems from Dune:

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of mankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness--until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say, "What are hands?"

Finally, it looks like I've been keeping this blog (more or less) for a year now. It went so fast.

Finding a creative job in Portland

I end up being asked for my insights from time to time, so here they are, in my official jobhunting in PDX post. I'll edit this post periodically as I think of new things.

Firstly, tweet tweet tweet. Portland is one of the epicenters of Twitter use, and every interactive agency, ad agency, creative company in town is on Twitter. So get yourself a twitter account and follow anyone at any company that looks remotely connected to what you want to be doing. Participate in the community: ask questions, share insights and information, and help people out. There are a bunch of good blog posts on Twitter use and etiquette, I'll edit them in here as I find them. Short answer: Get on Twitter. Lazy answer: search twitter for "jobs Portland" Better answer: Get on Twitter and participate.

Which leads me to: blog. Twitter is a great place to share your blog, so you can keep a blog about your personal and professional work/insights/challenges, and then tweet your posts. Keeping a blog creates a larger context around your resume (which you will also have on your blog) and your reel (which you will also have on your blog), and gives people some sense of you as a person. Portland is a small town, so personality matters (see participate in the community above).

I guess before you do any of these things, get interested in the kind of work that's being done here. There are a ton of interactive and advertising agencies in town, so get familiar with who's here and what they do, which means doing some research. Also, because it's a small town, sending out your reel and waiting is a poor strategy. Be proactive, be visible, be accessible.

Also: PDX mindshare is a great job posting and networking resource. LinkedIn is a great place to form and maintain professional connections.

That's all I have for now. :-)

ASIFA whatnot

So, as I think I mentioned, we're working on the Mary and Max event on the 3rd. It's very cool, because we have a Q&A with the director afterward.
We're also taking first steps toward hosting a Drinking and Drawing in January, and you know that's my baby.
I'm also thinking of my Laikans, and talking with the chapter about maybe having an event focused on freelance animators in Portland. What's the climate like, how does it work for people who are doing it, what are the resources, etc. Maybe a panel discussion and a resource fair? There are a bunch of resources out there, but I'm not sure how well known they are. I'd be willing to help pull something together if people were interested and wanted to connect in that way. So I guess what I'm saying is that, if you're interested, let me know and I'll see how the chapter feels about it.
I have to say, I love how informal the ASIFA people are compared with the SIGGRAPH board. The SIGGRAPH board had a lot of formal behaviors, like making motions and seconding them, and formalizing meeting minutes... it's nice to be able to kind of skip all that and just talk things through together.

And, as I said just nine months ago, I am so sorry for the loss of the wonderful, talented, good-hearted peeps at Laika. When they move on, the Portland animation community will have suffered a tremendous loss.

Jack Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

The Way We Live

by Kathleen Jamie

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the Lord God of movement, to Absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scary side:
death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.
Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,
comittment, driving fast and unswerving
friendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,
barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-gold
bangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to uncertainty,
of strip-lights, motorways, or that pantheon -
the mountains. To overdrafts and grafting

and the fit slow pulse of wipers as you're
creeping over Rannoch, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.

Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion,
Final Demands and dead men, the skeletal grip
of government. To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.
To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems
to be: let me bash out praises - pass the tambourine.

Bric a brac

Well, it looks like I'm a board member of ASIFA Portland. I have to admit, it seems like it will be fun- I don't have, you know, a Real Job like an elected member, and they are a pretty laid-back bunch. So we'll definitely be putting together another Drinking and Drawing- I may not be hosting this one, but I'll show 'em how it's done. :-)

Personally, I'm going through a few transitions- I can't tell if this is baby steps toward major progress, or just sidesteps as I work out a few things. One thing I've been really focusing on (and it was going well until tonight) is delineating my time- I need my work day to end, period, at some specific time, and the rest of my life to commence. I tend to drag work stuff around with me all the time, and it's poor stress management and doesn't let me focus on other areas of my life that need attention. So even if it's just for an hour or two at night, I need it to officially stop. I've been hitting a gong in my apartment, and it's funny but it helps.

I'm reading Locke's Essay on Understanding. Delightful writing style- he starts out so self-deprecating, with just a few of his humble observations, and then commences to thoroughly, systematically, demolish any competing opinions. Funny how we take the whole tabula rasa argument for granted now, and wrap it into nature vs nurture- when he wrote this stuff, it was really groundbreaking.

What's coming up? Cre8Con, for one. I'm not sure I can afford to go- it's so much more expensive than it was last year, and my job just spent a fortune to send me to Siggraph. Too bad, too- I got a lot out of it last year. Also Art Spark, BackFence PDX, OMPA Industry Night, and Dr. Sketchy. So if you're a creative type, September has a lot to offer.

Madmen

by Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

what's going on?

My job is sending me to Siggraph 2009, which is cool. I'm excited to go and excited to visit New Orleans.
I'm taking an online creative writing class, which is interesting.
Meditative lately- the fourth of July always makes me think of our political history, of war and fear and things I try to not think about the rest of the year. And I'm deeply emotionally involved in current events in Iran, and feel hopeless to take any appropriate action. Which is why I generally suppress these kinds of thoughts, I guess. All my twitter and facebook friends are probably sick of me nagging them about it.

from The Once and Future King

A truly amazing book, by the way.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey rules which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically--she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living--not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth--if women ever do hope this--but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one--knowledge of the world.
The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy--this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a state of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.
And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with all the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.

He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.

Also, the last several pages have some really fascinating thoughts about war and human nature, but I can't type them all out here and the fragments won't be very insightful.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

by Dylan Thomas. Brought to mind by current events in Iran.

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Happy birthday, Walt Whitman

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.