LEARN A NEW EASE?

Even in small matters, it can be hard to remember than one is trying to change. I'm trying to wean myself from the Safari internet browser as my younger friends tell me that it is slower and less efficient than Google Chrome. Being as these folks are less patient and more savvy about things digital, and I have had issues with the efficiency of Safari, I began the switch. But even this morning as I sit down to do my editorial job and wind up for a day in Brooklyn, I almost migrate back to Safari because it is familiar, I don't have to look for or think about anything. I know it. But I need to stay the course and learn something new, get the unfamiliar more familiar. Learn a new ease.

In the midst of every day, I come up against the fears and strangeness of looking for work. Some days, it is so overwhelming that I don't even know how to cast my thoughts, my efforts, my persona. The world and work seem so unfathomably changed since 2008, I am unsure of how to take action. Sometimes, it feels like a simple matter of effort + timing, other times I am stunned into confusion about who I am and what I should/can do. Often nothing seems possible. Sometimes possibility exists.

Learn a new ease?

So, I was trundling around FB, maybe trying to get caught up with Jeff Nunokawa's daily post, which I have not been keeping up with as I might like. Ephemeral and kind of iridescent in that his words and meanings are different in different lights. My light at this morning shone on definition of self as I struggle to sell my skills and wares in a confusing marketplace. Work seems utterly unattainable. Desperately foreign and unknowable. Or so we hope?

4159. "the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings" (George Eliot)

by Jeff Nunokawa on Monday, August 27, 2012 at 1:19am ·

Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in . . . deep degeneracy . . . ; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings . . . (Middlemarch)

It feels bad to want something badly: something well within sight, but just out of reach. Of course, not to know, or remember knowing, this feeling brings on its own vexations. For those of us who dwell, just now, outside the State of such aching, frenzied, freezing yearning (having not yet known it, or having known it too well), the closer we are to the sight of it, the further we feel from the fact of it. For those of us who dwell, for now, outside this State, to see it up close is like watching a movie with the sound muted.

But then you remember that they used to somehow make movies without sound. And some of those movies were love stories, loud somehow with passionate regard. You may have seen one of those movies. Who knows, in your dreams or your own dark age, you may have been in one yourself. And who knows, maybe you'll actually be cast in one or another such moving picture, sometime, sooner or later, in a theater near you.

It could happen to you. Stranger things have happened. It's not like the age of miracles is ever really past.

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Note: that roar which lies on the other side of silence (Middlemarch)

"They are leaning out for love . . . they will lean that way forever" (Leonard Cohen)

Or so we hope?

None of this this morning. J and Emmy will have to negotiate morning face pets.