Tag: habits

574: “TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE” (Ross Gay)

                “I have since begun cataloging delights that I will save for a future date, which, while stacking delights in itself is a useful activity and practice (sounds like a Denny’s pancake breakfast special: Delight Stack), it defeats this book’s purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which I actually wrote on my hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup in Bloomington today…” Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, page 107-8

                This from near the beginning of Ross Gay’s 35th delight in The Book of Delights, as he’s reflecting on his project of writing a delight every day (more or less) for a year. As he’s noticing patterns, five months in, in how he looks for delights, how he writes about them. These words meeting me.
                This also being the page I opened to just now after my love and I came back from a late summer walk, the evening cool and then warm as we washed through it, muscles waking up after a day inside, fireflies flying their fires, neighbors walking their dogs, the zipline carrying a kid across the playground (and the kid carrying the zipline into his games). Which is to say: I also notice patterns. I’ve been writing Uproar for 570-some weeks. Which is to say: I sometimes start “saving up” Uproar posts, making sure I’ll have them. Have enough. Which is to say: that saving turns away from what I love most about Uproar. Remembering, that is lovely. (Just yesterday my love recalled something funny we’d said, and said it again, and without meaning to I said “good remembery!” Remembery like a spell, like magic, I think). But instead of saving up because I’m worried about having enough, these posts for me are about abundance. About what I’m surrounded by and enmeshed in. Abundance of thought and creativity, abundance of lives and relationships, abundance of community powers and vitalities and delights. 
                TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, Gay says, “means, simply, dailiness.” The dailiness of walking into this. The dailiness of being met by so many wonders, and meeting them, open armed and ready to join not just with the possibilities I’ve saved up but the daily possibilities lighting like fireflies or pausing to chat like neighbors.

by Azlan

562: “Only One Script” (Olivia Atwater)

                “Sir Albus flailed at this, flustered out of his rhythm. He had only one script, Dora observed idly, and absolutely no imagination with which to deviate from it. ‘I…I could not possibly answer such an absurd question!’ he managed.”
-Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul, p. 8

                Many of us might have met a Sir Albus. A someone who, presented with almost any social situation, will probably a) launch into their pet familiar script and/or b) refuse to engage with questions that twist their familiar script in unexpected directions. Atwater’s Half A Soul is a kind of Regency England romantic “season” mixed with fae magic mystery. Albus’—pardon, Sir Albus’—script is purebred horses. The “absurd” question is about a creature that is part horse and part dolphin. It’s a world of magical creatures and humans and inbetween-beings, including the question-asker herself, but Albus doesn’t want to imagine any of that.
                The more worrisome—and perhaps more useful to think about—moments are when I recognize a bit of Sir Albus in myself. The moments when, given half a chance, I set out along my script, sharing my pat observations, tending toward my certain conclusions. I think those moments are part of why I like reading new things. Reading new things from people whose work I’ve never encountered. Reading things from people whose lives are so different than mine. If I have the script, I want to have the imagination, too, ready to hear the question and not simply think it “absurd.”

by Azlan