Friends,
     This blog, even compared to most of them, is not worth reading.

     It is three o'clock in the morning, I am drunk on my father's whiskey, have just watched "Everything is Illuminated" (Jenny, on the outside chance that you read my blogs, and have ignored my first line, you should know that your glasses have been trapped in that movie; go find them), and am writing to complete a day maybe worth doing something about. Today I had some romantic struggle with Morgan and came to what may have been the most fruitful conclusion of a disagreement I have ever had with a lover, I saw family on the far side of this state I no longer live in, held a baby that may or may not be cursed to be the family's next artist (admittedly, it is unlikely, given that his father was the last one and the kid will never be estranged enough to grow into that kind of flower; I, incidentally, am the place holder until the next one, a role to which I am well suited), played Scrabble in an effort to turn a rightfully estranged former-lover into a friend, and read a book that stood at the edge of the feel-goodery that has been most of my religious life but which faced something of the social obligation that religion of this kind usually fails ("Selling Spirituality," a very decent argument that "spirituality" has been sustained if not constructed by the worst of our capitalist structures). It has been a long day, I thought I would leave a note.
   
   I took up smoking because it was something to do quietly. I used to smoke only one cigarette a month, usually sitting on a park bench, and would pray the month's only prayer. I had already drifted far enough towards my present Atheism to realize that whatever God there is should not be bothered more than that (Ecclesiastes 5:2). Of course, I now, fully convicted that whatever God there is is too great to be bothered by prayers at all, pray regularly and smoke freely, though I think giving up both might be best for my health. Tonight, after a day like today, I had my first smoking prayer in a very long time, one of those vernacular Protestant apostrophes which may or may not be largely recieved by light-post dryads.

   Love is a mess, and I am terrible at it; love is terrible, and I am a mess at it; tonight, though, in that prayer, I was pretty sure that the work of love is work, and I may be (not to say, of course, that I may not have often been) in a position to work well through it and to meaningful effect.

Over this year my skin has crawled every time I hear the words "product(ive)," "customer," or "consumer" except in those rare cases that I am standing in one of those few department stores that still use entirely appropriate language. You find these words ("you," here, meaning "I") much more often now everywhere else. When I was working with kids with Autism this summer, I was horrified to hear the agency for which I was working calling the kids "our consumers" as if we were "producing" wellness for them. On the flight to Phoenix the stewardesses addressed us as "customers" not "passengers" or "guests" (which is at least comfortingly disingenuous). Everything is financialized.

The language of "work," though, and in this case the work of love, is somehow less tainted. If dear uncle Karl left anything for us (and God knows, he might not have) it would be that word. Maybe there is a sense in which we do our best by imagining more things as hoeings of potatoes or diggings of holes.

To say that "work" has not been my dominant metaphor for love does not mean, of course, that it has not been a difficult. But the labor has been alienated from its object. I think at some point, finding myself in possession of the means of affection, I began to fetishize love, to struggle for the aura about it rather than the physical substance that makes it up. Love has been a struggling over words and ideas, efforts to make feelings right and to think good thoughts rather than to dig up stones or spread mud on bark.

Today I held a baby, and friended an ex-lover, and re-lovered my best friend. I am drunk, it is late, and there is work to do. For now, the work is sleep.

God bless,
  Vincent

Friends,
    This is in many ways a short form, and a quite different form, with some more systemic  meditations and substantially more hidden and substantially different life situations, of the "cups" blog that made it briefly to the intertubes only to be recalled. It is, though, a cups type blog, a writing of the watery parts.

    The content is this: I think depression is coming. Last night I noticed a single instance of one of the three thoughts that drift on its surface most frequently. I suppose it could have come from anywhere, only a convincing replica, an indication of something else entirely, but I have been inhabited by and have inhabited these emotions for long enough that it strikes me something like the rumbling of distant trains. Whether what is coming is a single train which one may step aside from and watch quietly, or "all the trains," a wall of trains, of course, is entirely obscure.

     Of course, even if it were only a model train, I am not quite sure the mechanism by which one steps aside in these matters. The "cheer up, little guy" advice that one sometimes gets is the surest sign that a friend has never really been depressed. I think the confusion of well meaning friends is a result of the fact that the most obvious symptom of depression is the affect (bodily/facial and emotional) of sadness. Not to say that this is bare coincidence, of course. They are intimately related. Sadness often does trigger and permeate depression, but it is another creature entirely.

   Sadness is an emotional, perspectival issue, the opposite of happiness. It is a change of tone in the narrative of one's living, and is accompanied by the performance of the new story wherein everything is going badly, no matter what is happening.

   As an aside it should be noted that depression is also distinct from apathy, a matter of focus. That one is the opposite of interest, the tendency towards obsessive (obsessive), repeated and concerted effort.

   Depression is the opposite of excitement, a neuro-somatic condition wherein interest is common and happiness is eminently possible. Depression is the state wherein one's synapses delay their proper firing producing a sort of cognitive dissonance (it is only "a sort of" becuase cognative dissonance rarely is used to refer to cognative states in the first case, usually referencing failures of expectation which can, but do not usually, produce marked change in cognition as such. Depression is cognative dissonance). We slow down because we are not when we are.

     Brian Massumi, in Parables for the Virtual, discusses two experiments wherein there is a half second gap between the human's recieving physical sensation, even directly to sensory receptors on the brain, and its knowing that this has happened, and a similar gap between desiring to perform even the simplest physical action (twitching a finger, in this case) and knowing that one desires to do so. This is to say, we are non-simultaneous with ourselves ever, depressed or not. We do and then we desire to do, we know we are feeling when we have previously felt. This is to say, we are "virtual," we are our own ghosts, overlapping subtly with ourselves, but draping over on either side.

     When one becomes depressed, changes occur in us, that is, in that unthinkable half-second (by Massumi's math) before we are where we are, after we do what we will have wanted to have already done. When the brain-juice dries up a little, we begin to recieve the new datum of our shifting "virtuality." We know that our temporally fissured selves are wavering closer and further from one another with respect to clock time. The body detects its own virtuality, of course, before and after it happens but there is no "now" in which to do so.

    The effect spirals. Remember the story of the caterpillar that did its lovely and spontaneous dances until a jealous roach wrote her a letter asking which feet she moved first ("Dearest Susanne, do you spin first on your eighth or seventh left leg?) crippling her. The caterpillar is not a symbol for all action, of course, there being many acts which are well polished through reflection. Even psychological states can be well refined and clarified through "talk therapy." The caterpillar is the sacred icon of the virtual self (though we who will never live again as virtual butterflies after we die have, admittedly, reduced her to a sort of centipede): We were never meant to be meta-meta-cognitive.
   
    Depression is a spiral of virtuality which extends us further and further from the saving illusion of being somewhere doing something.  The result, of course, depends on the particular brain-juice that has dried up (mine, I have been told, is the "d-word" and not the "s-word"), but the somatic upshot is the opposite of excitement. This is only saddening (which is different from it being sad, which it is not) because it disables the self-winding mechanism which is pinned to the lie of self-similarity. We lose perspective. It is only productive of apathy because one is suddenly presented at all times with the spectacle of one's own body, a creature that had previously trailed safely behind one, and an object of endless fascination. What else is there to look at when a body is suddenly so close by, closer than anything (though always only near)? And how much more interesting when that body begins to do all of the peculiar things that it does when it is watched like this. Excitement for other things goes quickly.

   But today all I can report are rattlings and rumblings. Perhaps nothing is coming at all. If there is news, it will not be a story, and there will not be any reason to tell it, and if I tell it I certainly will not tell it here.

Love always,
 Vincent

I removed the cups blog, though I know it is too late. I am sorry. Fuck. Sorry friends, I thought it would not hurt if it was written right. It should not have been written.
-V.

Friends,
So, onto the second suit of my blog: the air, intellect, spades, the hot and wet blog (incidentally, the last one was, to omit the obvious, the suit of diamonds, the cold and dry blog). I am presently undergoing a shift in academic and intellectual focus towards "religion and media." I will be turning my thought towards questions of how media shapes religious subjectivity. This sounds, I know, one part meaningless, one part trivial, and three parts unstable. I did, after all, change my academic focus halfway through Emory to focus on the occult, and I largely chose my present program because it provided a real opportunity to study magical things like I just couldn't in a Jewish Studies program. Why would I change again right now?

Well, the first reason is easy: I do not think I am actually making a change, just seeking legitimation for the kind of work I was doing anyway. You see, I don't think occultism has ever become a cultural force because of individual enlightenment, the action of invisible masters, mass hysteria, or the accidental emergence of coherent and/or ancient traditions. As far as I can tell, the heritage claimed by contemporary occultists only makes about fifty years of sense, a hundred and fifty if you really want to be generous. This is to say only that the Tarot cards, alchemy, and kabbalah of contemporary occultists would be unrecognizable to those ancient wisemen to whom they are attributed. If we can allow that much, the shifting (and perhaps arbitrary) *content* of occultism, though, there are some similarities along The Tradition worth noting.

As far back as Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola (use your Wikipedia, goddammit, that is what Jesus put it there for) in the fifteenth century, that is, since the emergence of Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah and arguably well further back, those few we want to call occultists seem to have been consistently wealthy, populist, syncretists with a predilection for chartmaking. "Occultism" seems to be an index for what I would call "tabular syncretism," the effort to put everything, including teachings of religions which one's contemporaries (and maybe even one oneself) find reprehensible, into elegant schemata. Big charts, they make big, big charts. And usually think that the making of big charts that contain all truth will reform society (not to be dismissive, of course, because in some cases it has at least a little).

This is important because this perspective on occultism makes its history dependent on certain technological and social conditions: Occultism happens all of the time, but more occultism happens when technology empowers the creation of big charts, and occultists are noticed and remembered when religious people come into new kinds of contact and kind of freak one another out. Occultism answers the question: What are those people talking about, and how are we still right? And it thrives through new media.

For instance, the afore mentioned protoccultists were writing where the popularization of movable type meets the creation of Spain (big issues with Jews, Muslims, and the Classical philosophers they sometimes got to talking about). Victorian Occultism cannot be separated from the newspaper boom and the opening comparisons of anthropology. So, I think the issue is a media issue, and I think what I am studying is about media.

And the truth is, I am really only studying the occult because it is (really cool and) the best platform I have found for asking questions about the ways that religions sculpt personhood. Modern occultism, at least, is to the study of religion as large print editions are to the study of John Grisham. I mean, it is not so tough to ask "What are these people doing and what needs are they trying to fulfill?" when what they are doing is writing their desires in rhyme on pieces of paper and burning them. And it is not so hard to ask how that changes people's subjectivities when they report those desires fulfilled (or denied) in ways their neighbors rarely recognize.

And, of course, given the social reform component that is rarely if ever absent (I cite Reuchlin for the Jews, Eliphas Levi for the destitute, and Aleister Crowley for sexual deviants), I study occultism because I think that it is only as bad as everything else; I think occultism is not such a bad place to start, frankly. Knowing my alignments and my favoritisms, once, a best friend wrote on a to-do list I had foolishly left unguarded, "Buy Cauldron, pull rabbit out of hat." I think, if no religion is convincingly truer than any other, occultism is more socially responsible and more readily adaptable to strange situations than most.

So, what the hell am I going to do now? Am I going to write papers about the Jews in the DaVinci Code, the elemental systems in Final Fantasy games, and those tacky sites on the internet that sell spells that are guaranteed to work or double your money back? Am I going to play religious videogames and listen to Christian rock music? In five years will I be an expert on Magic Cards?

Yes. Hows about them apples?

The big challenge now is twofold: I need to learn a great range of basic stuff like Post-Structuralist film criticism (I am reading Deleuze on film [I] presently. Agh.), and works on religion and popular culture in America (books about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Catholic kitsch), and other fun stuff like that. I am very excited, really, that there is a decent chance I can do this well. A musical troupe that deeply influenced my childhood (really) said, "There is only one thing I know how to do well, and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well[.]" So I am doing religion and media now. Send me the Madonna.

Cheers,
Vincent

Friends,
Sometimes you crack a plate evenly into thirds and you can join them back together with a little trouble. Sometimes you drop a plate on the floor and hear it smash. And it has turned into a teacup. There are some mistakes you cannot fix. I do not think that to say so is pessimistic, really.
Always,
Vincent

Friends,

This is the first and last (the next will be the second and third) of four blogs I am going to write this week to bring all of you up to date on what has happened to me since I started my forty days of vows this Spring. You see, I want to begin with the more mundane things like my new living situation and work backwards to the strange affair of my desert experience after we know each other again a little better. So, backwards through the fog, home (disks), intellectual matters (swords), love life (cups), and spiritual changes (wands).

The small news is that I have finally replaced my stolen scooter and am now off of the shoes for the most part. This one goes about fifty, and most importantly it does the good and scooterly work of making one feel environmentally responsible for zipping around like a little rocket (for those of you who know Laurie, be sure to congratulate her for getting the same model in the Carolina Blue which I had to avoid for geographical reasons).

This has been very helpful given the medium sized news that I have begun working with children with Autism again. I did this work four years or so ago when I lived in Arizona and there is nothing better for one to do. Of course, it pays decently and the hours are not so bad, but frankly waiting tables (the other thing I am not so bad at) would probably be better in both regards. This is good work because it is good for the heart and it is... good to think. We take so much about our cognition for granted. The fact that something in us wakes up and desires to acquire symbols is classed too often with the fact that our skins were not born too slick to hold onto gravity, but it is not the same at all. We could have been born on the other side of that wall past which symbols can mean nothing sometimes. There is a pleasure to tiny things which we non-autistic people can never know, and a horror. To work as a liason across that wall, to translate from this arbitrary but common into those arbitrary but incredibly rare cultures is the closest thing to a holy task I can think of. Of course, this is exactly the task that those children are doing as well. If there is no God they may be doing the only thing that matters. Like anything holy, it is easy work from this side, anyone who is willing to handle feces sometimes, and sometimes get punched in the face can do it.

The big news is that I bought a home. It is a delightful place (which, by the way, I am trying to rent a room of, in case anyone has a friend who is good people needing a room) in a delightful place. Here, you see, is a map of my daily dogwalk down to the granolamart which is the swollen heart of the progressive South, the green arrows pointing to the homes of seven of my ten favorite people in this quarter of the country, and the light green are secret cut-throughs which take me to their houses: [I had here a amp that I realized was probably not the sort of thing one places on the internet... but suffice it to say it was encouraging and happy... if a bit revealing.]

And now, instead of telling you about the paperwork nightmare that was the home buying process, or about how because the sellers were out of the country we thought the whole deal may be a scam right up to sitting down to close, or about the other place I considered which was lovely but just not as perfectly in the middle of everything I care about, or about the endless torrents of scambots from Britain which are trying to rent my room (I am not, of course, prejudiced against scambots, but I do wonder if they would wash their share of the dishes), I will take you on the grand tour.

Let's walk in my front door:


Past my neighbor the really fucking huge snake:




And look at my living room:




Now straight on into the kitchen, and out the window to the porch (You really are, by the way):





Now upstairs past the built in shelving:


And from my room out the window again where you can see the lovely little creek (I like creeks, hufuckingmungous snakes like creeks. We can be friends on those grounds if none other, I am sure):




There are still paintings to hang, and plants to buy, a muddy patch to cover, and some porch with nowhere to sit, but it is becoming a home rapidly. All of this is to say that I am blessed, as I am so often blessed, quite nearly but never quite to the edge of an unreflective theism.

There are echoes that some of you might hear from this house already. Much of my late youth was spent in a house shaped not unlike this, a two bedroom, two story house, and though there is something in the lack of a piano, the unstained ceilings, and whatnot that make it new, some of you will see quickly how all of this is dreadfully old. But that is, I suppose, why it is already home and not just the place I now have. I have already broken in the memories I am yet to make. Let's hope no ghosts find their way through. Well, let's hope there is a reflective moment before any ghosts come in. So many of them are dearly welcome, but I'd certainly have none of them before I'd have them all.

And I am surviving on credit, and missing my friends still far away for the summer (not to mention, by way of mentioning, those far away forever), but most of that should be broached in my third and second blog in a few days.

Home again, home again, jiggity jog,
Vincent

Friends,

I suppose it is strange to propose that I have some answer to that previous post. What the hell could I say to answer a tacky mixed metaphor about the ocean and a grumbling against our Rav? I don't know, friends, but somehow I do. Where to start?

Oh okay: The thing that I left out of the last few explorations of the binding analogy has been an exploration of the nodes between the cables. What, anyway, is a person under the analogy wherein all embodied relations are ropes that spatialize experience? For my money, the individuals involved are only tangles of the same stuff, balls of yarn, knots. We are collections of the bits of things that had run through us; the ends get frayed and snap, but the parts that held others to us run straight through sometimes, they *are* us.

So, to place myself within the analogy, the delicate and indelicate work of building a new network has been stressful. Picture the human, a ball of yarn with frayed cables frizzing and frilling out on every side. I have bound each of my new connections to some thread running straight through me, onto my academic interests, theological preoccupations, sense of humor, or my sexual fantasies, these ropes that I am. Every one of them has been amazing, fine cables to well wrought knots, but they have been each partial connections. In avoiding laying a mainline I have connected only to my most deeply woven fringes. It has helped me avoid drawing my own tangle close enough to another that we might begin to substantially interweave, but it has also produced this terrible feeling that my *me* is being pulled out slowly and from every side, a fraying. I fear that if I continue as I have, I will discover someday soon that in cutting off temporary connections I have cut with them cords that once ran through me.

But why would one want to preserve their own cords and cables? Aren't they all accidental? Couldn't one be composed as easily of somethings else? I don't know. I imagine so. And there may even be good reason for it. I mean, if we decide to clip the extending and connecting part or a connection that was a bad idea to begin with, a razorwire running through us, why would we not want to draw it all of the way out? Sure. But the things that I feel pulling out of me seem to have once all been a single substance, a shape that was tied inside of me over the last few years, around which I have woven myself, and I don't want to lose it for whatever reason. I cannot imagine peacibly losing them. I want to be retied into something beautiful, something that holds me from many sides, and I cannot yet loose that structure within me. Maybe someday I will be strong enough to hold together under these circumstances, but for now I need to preserve and reconsider my structure.

What to do now, then? Fortunately there is precedent: I am going into the desert for forty days. It is what one does under such circumstances. And Pure Random Chance, thank God, has conspired to clarify the contours of my desert. First, I happen to be beginning a research project on Kabbalah Yoga DVDs (oh yeah), so I need to do yoga daily for the next month or so anyway. Secondly, under some recent exasperation I made the mistake of smoking and now am fighting the physical repercussions of this mistake, though I had been faithfully without smoking for over a month. It has gone back from a habit to a pennance. It sucks, but I can use it. The decision to end my sexual tendencies should not come as a surprise to any few of you that know how that has been going -it was just not sustainable- but it is conscientiously part of the thing.

The total project is forty days of yoga and meditation, without smoking, without anything that could be called sex. A time to tie myself back to me, to reconsider what I am most and to what I like best to tie myself.

[I appologize, the binding analogy here becomes theological. Get out while you can.] I cannot say that there is something right, a proper second snarl for me to knot with, but so much of me suddenly is sure there is. I feel that there is sense in this mess, a way to find a network in which all of those deepest lines find purchase, a way to tie together without falling apart. This is an intuition of a pattern from which I feel I have separated myself. To find harmony again I am going to use this time to tie me to me, and to the Other Thing, the God thing. You see, there may be a perfect second, but there is no future to change. We are always here right now, always in the Rav's damned elevator, and there is only one story that is happening. The end is already told, and I am hoping to become more harmonious with it. To be like the whole story right now.

The grand hope is that there is something more than empty space surrounding the tangles that we are and the flosses we send out. Maybe the primary sense in which I am a religious person is in that I believe that there is a deep weave, a relatively three dimensional fabric that surrounds us, an infinitely more regular loom of meaning within which we are anomalies of disorder. I hope to relax into that system because it will catch me, and because from there I can find what patterns look most like my own.

And what if I cannot do it? What if twenty days from now I am just living as I had? Lord knows I make decisions like this periodically. Well, forty days is not very long, and if I cannot do it, if smoking and screwing and slacking mean more to me than this resolution, then I will remain as I am. It will mean that I do not care enough to merit something more than what I have. In short, maybe this will not help me refind the patterns of my own knotting, but if I do not do it, then maybe I really am trying to fray myself, and maybe going as I am I will.

Here's to it, friends,
Vincent

Dear friends,

It recalls the expression about those who can do and those who can merely teach, and those who cannot teach and who then do something else. Oh the endless aphorism. In any case, that which you cannot speak you should theorize, that which you cannot theorize you should draw, that which you canot draw you should describe. It goes, of course, forever, but that is where I can stop for now. I can describe.

1. Around the country at coffee tables and desks of diverse sizes and finishes there sit, together and apart, a collective of young men smoking. And as they smoke the inside of their houses distantly oboe like seashells, the sound rolling in and out rythmically. Of course, it is only the blood in their ears, as with the seashells, but it sounds like the sea. One of them wrote on a sheet of paper, "It is the sea."

And cigarette paper is a metaphor: dry like driftwood. And cigarette filters are metonyms: the cigarette butts already smoked poking out of the sand, cigarette butts as chimneys on the sand suburbiae of children without imaginations. And the smoke is somehow really itself, a hot dirty wind. And their coffee tables and desks are placed somehow at the shore; their toes, not yet socked and maybe not to be socked until next time they need to go to work, burrow in piles of loose papers as if in sand. Paper as sand is always the crushed shells kind, dishes as sand is always the lava rock kind, laundry as sand is always sand like pulverized stone.

And they are watching the television like the ocean, the whoosh and wheesh of the blood in their ears washing back and forth, a gentle working surprisingly like thought. They watch, together and apart, for real ships to arrive on a poorly imagined shore.


2. The Kabbalah Centre (and I present the Rav Philip Berg as a synecdoche for the Centre) claims to have broken the mystery of chronology by drawing a picture of a great hotel building. The image is scrawled in the impossible flatness of Flash animation, somehow flat even against the white paper of the internet, a building crafted in the opposite of origami. The lower floors, the Rav explains, are the past, and the upper floors are the future. A lighted window somewhere in the middle is where I am. The building having something like thirty floors in this parable, maybe I am on floor seven or eight. Look, he exclaims, all of it is right there at once, always existing together. The past never leaves, he shouts, it is always right here, acting on us in surprising ways.

But his ommissions add up to a lie. Why, Rav Berg, does the building have a ground floor at all or a roof? You believe in reincarnation, and I believe an nonfinite present, and most of your readers believe in something smoky and neverending. None of us believe that a year moves us a single step toward such a low roof. But we move, don't we? We climb steadily up the structure of this bottomless and topless building in ways not described at all by serial residence on discrete floors. We are trapped in an elevator, Rav Berg, and you know why. We move through this endless time always in the same place with respect to ourselves, and always in the endless middle with respect to the structure. We never stop moving to find our bed and sit down, we can never pull the plastic off of our little cups or drink our grainy coffee, forever moving up.

But that is not the worst of it, Rav Berg, why do you say that there is no time if all causes ascend to their effects upwards along faster or slower vacuum tubes? Maybe the message that I ate pork or touched mentrual blood will not be sent up immediately. It could sit in an in-box somewhere for weeks before facing the bureaucracy, and might only be sent along at great length, my fitting curse (in this case, failure in business) only finding me four years into my next life as a little boy in Spain. But the sins are always shipped upwards, time always follows our arduous and invisible ascent through the futures.

If there is no time, Rav Berg, why can we not send our sins back to the past? Why can't we do wrongs later that will have hurt us soon? No one really wishes to recieve or not recieve what they are due, we wish to have recieved now what we did not think we wanted then. And you know it, Rav Berg, you know we are not vexed by time but by chronology. You know we want to change the past with today's virtues and vices. Perhpas you can, and I like to think that you are cruising up and down on your private escalator, sometimes getting out and relaxing, taking off your shoes at sixteen years old, coaching now the games of catch you played with yourself even then. But you have never told us how, and until you do, there is still time. The hotel does not change that.

What sort of terrible service is there in this place that we cannot even send a not down to the lower rooms? Why can't I relay even the simplest thought downwards? I'd say, "stay right where you are, someone will come down for you soon."

>-----------------------------------------------------------------<

I am sure I will have more of these soon. They will either keep coming for a very long time or they will not, for whatever reason.

Much love as always,
Vincent

Hello friends,

I am not sure how many of you knew about the Atlanta Kite-Flying Society, but it strikes me this morning as meaningful, so I will tell you about it a little. Laurie and I met on Okcupid; we can admit that now, it being much easier to explain why one is no longer in a relationship that began on the internet than to explain why one would ever start that way. But somewhere around our fourth date, once we began to suspect that each the other would be around for a few more dates, perhaps, we decided to create a truer story still. The AK-FC was truer than what had happened, really.

And, given the binding analogy, the image of any affective connection as a cable between people whether as thin as floss or like those iron ropes that tie down radio towers, I think kites really made sense of us. When we met I thought she was the one on the ground, and I could be the flimsy, imperiled, playful one at the end of her string. Quickly, though, I found her laughter and her tragedy and her playful morbidity, one can hardly miss them, and it was clear that she was the kite and I the little man down there, a graduate student. But over our year I think we found out that we were somehow both the kite, an apparatus that could fly itself because one of the two kites was always fell under water just as the other one came out. We tumbled like that for a year, but when I left we both went under, and when we both came out we were no longer connected.

And now, a year and a half after the foundation of the AK-FC, Laurie has recently fallen in love, and I, as her best friend, am absolutely dazzled and delighted that such things can happen at all. It was hard that love ever withdrew from her, but thank God it has come back to her again. Maybe we were like plants and not kites, maybe we had to turn black and crumple into ourselves for this winter. And no matter what Lu sometimes thinks, she needs shining on as much as any I have ever met. Spring-time is maybe the only predictable miracle.

So now, this morning I look at Laurie's facebook pictures and I see her beaming with a roll of kite-string in her hand, her love Andy at her side. Kites, and love, and the binding analogy. Her main tether is set, at least for the time being, they are hooked-up, and she looks so happy. He seems to be somehow *actually* more stable than she is, and the connection between them seems to be making each of them more beautiful. The physics of kite flying can only work like this. It also means I can stop now and ask to what I am attached.

Well, in the last season I have, in my three fellow first-year students, found a support network closer than most I can remember, and from this tiny square of cables, we have each begun twining in new connections; something wonderful is being formed, a sort of popsicle-stick god's-eye. But the connection Lu has found is exactly that I am trying to prevent. I cannot fall in love this season, I know it is unreasonable (though not any mroeso than any other forethought of love) but I only want to build a rope like that I had with Laurie one more time. I do want to fall in love again, you see. My not wanting to fall in love this season is really my trying not to fall out of love again. I have never been without a central cable, I know so well what it is like to be a kite or an anchor, but I have never been a telephone or a spider. I have to think, at least for this Spring, what I am when I am not pendant on anyone else's life.

Oh yes, for anone with whom I have not shared my math: I started dating in earnest at 16, so I have been falling in love for ten years. Of those years, between Laurie (1.25 years), Laura (4.25 years), Jeannette (2.75 years [officially]), and Lena (.25 years), that is, between my four relationships that I planned on hanging onto forever, I have only been without a rope that impersonates marriage for a little over a year out of ten. I really spent only a few months in the unconnected space each time, never really figuring out how to connect in a way that would last.

So I have been trying to lay a filagree of thin ropes out to dates and arrangements, flirtations and new friends. Of course, I would only tie a ribbon to the sort of people to whom I would tie a rope, having no real interest of hooking-up even in the flimsiest sense with uninteresting people, so there are never actually *many* connections romantically, it is just that there can never be exactly one. But this also means that I am constantly flirting with real connection, and the surgical fraying I have to do sometimes, carefully weakening bonds or running ropes in parallel to any that seem to become central, is often rather sad. Thank God that most of the people on the other ends of these tethers are either in the same position, or deeply sympathetic. And for anyone to whom I am connected who has not really accepted my current position, I thank God for honesty, and pray that it is enough. Though it never is.

But I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed. The people who have been entwined with me in this process are some of the most amazing I have ever met, and I trust that when silk cables are severed entirely (as they will be severed in at least nearly every case) there will remain shoelaces, and jute, and vines in their places. I think I have found some real friends, and for the first time in my life maybe, I think I finally feel the miracle of being neither alone, nor absolutely connected. Looking at the smile on Laurie's face and the kite in her hands, I am so glad she has found that kind of connection again, and I remember why I always went looking for a new connection once I lost one. And who knows, maybe I will not make it to summer, but I have to say, this morning, things are beautiful, never simple, but beautiful.

Cheers,

Vincent

Friends,

So, I have decided to move half of what I write here elsewhere. The theology and religious studies stuff, frankly, the stuff that probably interests most of you least (bless your hearts) will be moving to a blogspot account named "pacmanides." That is, Black Fire on White Fire . Feel free to stop on by. I will still be placing the emotional stuff here, though, and if I can't tell the difference odds are I'll just write my thoughts on scraps of paper and hide them in my pillowcase.

Cheers,
V'nt