Subject: Re: *typo
Date: June 23, 2009 11:57:11 AM PDT
To: C
I went to a few apartments this past weekend; one was in a kind of boring area although there might have been some interesting sights near by. A woman showed me the place -- she has lived in the building for 30 years, her children are married, in their 30s and 40s. she doesn't own a car -- she gets around because the house is close enough to what Los Angeles has of public transportation; there is a meagre subway that goes downtown it just never makes its way to the Westside - by UCLA or Culver City. She was short, hispanic, and had adorned her face with a fierce amount of make-up: deep black up above her eyes up to her eyebrows. So basically if I were to take this apartment (which I'm not going to do) I would be stepping back into a previous era or something. The building is old and the apartment is carpeted - not standard carpet - something different; it was a dark gray-brown-tan color with a raised lattice like surface - it seemed aged like the space and I got the sense no one had lived there for months. It was a 1-bedroom, a little out of my price-range but still pretty cheap - and the front room had bay -windows looking onto the street. The corridor outside the apartment had deep orange walls - I wonder who decided to paint them that color. And now - don't know whether memory is keeping all this accurate - they were like a rusty-orange probably because of time. The woman was nice enough. I don't remember her name now; she hoped I would like it.
The artist Dan Graham had an interesting project - I don't know whether I ever wrote about it - called Homes For America in 1966 - photographs that depict mostly suburban homes in New Jersey where he grew up. he's done other similar projects as well. anyway - I've been thinking about that project of his a bit - it's a documentary project in a way but because it is an art project there is no need whatsoever for moral accuracy; you can do with the information that you accrue whatever you like. I've been thinking about this accruing of information -- or how I build up observations of things within myself (like the observations of that woman or some of the other places I've looked at.. as if looking for a house is both an effort to find myself and obsessively observe places where a self might be found.. different housing situations in different parts of the city where I show up to look and either they are surprised by me (like didn't know I was going to be white) when I show up or show me the house in an incredibly lackluster way. Like a place I went to last weekend as well that I actually liked quite a bit aside from the fact that there wasn't parking and the kitchen needs a good cleaning. The owner showed me the apartment - he lives with his family in a house out front and then there are three apartments in the back of the property that share a garden (I don't think I will get it though) - and everything about it would have been ideal if it weren't for parking and maybe the way the owner - Edgar - showed it to me. I would put him in his 40s - late 40s - he came off as incredibly lethargic; a cigarette was balanced precariously on his lips or in his hands while he walked me through the apartment making a small mention of how the place was going to be cleaned before anyone moves in. Maybe everyone's worried about money more than who their specific tenants are. At least he seemed this way... because I'm looking for a place to move probably either July 15 or August 1st - and he was inflexible: the first person to take it will get it and can move in as early as next week. And then out back in front of the apartments there is space for three cars to fit comfortably parked.. but they want the driveway for themselves - their house upfront - it seems. So there was a kind of inflexibility to him. I liked the place anyway though; the way such an apartment could never exist in New York - with a garden outside your window where you might be able to try to plant vegetables. Been thinking about vegetable gardens quite a bit recently - how I would like to have one: all these desires. What is the desire to have a vegetable-garden attached to? Some notion of well-being and watching things grow - the simplicity of things growing from the sun that then you can nourish yourself with... the ability to take hold of this simplicity within an urban-setting. it seems so much more in the realm of a "might" or "wouldn't it be nice if"... although having a vegetable garden is on the rise these days - has become trendy. Especially out here. I guess I just connect the vegetable garden to my desires for how I might be.
When I got the thomas mann books out of the library (his letters and magic mountain) I saw next to them robert musil's the man without qualities and decided to take this out as well.. and I had left magic mountain in my car last night so saw the man without qualities there and began to read it. i like thomas mann more - but the musil made me think of you.. some of the passages -- ulrich's struggles with different professions (i'm only 50 pages in) and how he easily becomes disillusioned by whatever he might be doing and then finds himself, at 35, unsure of what he is doing. there was one sentence in particular I liked.. p. 54: "There is something special about youthful friendships: they are like an egg that senses in its yolk its glorious future as a bird, even while it presents to the world only a rather expressionless egg shape indistinguishable from any other." what are your new long-term plans? I also enjoyed your description of your trip to the doctor.. the stiffening of blood vessels.
[i learned that as we age, our blood vessels loose their elasticity which requires the heart to maintain a higher pumping pressure in order to achieve the same rate of blood flow; that heightened pressure in turn stretches and stiffens the blood vessels even further, and so the system catches itself in a loop of increasing pressure and embrittlement until either the heart can no longer achieve the pressure required to maintain sufficient flow or a vessel becomes so fragile that it bursts.]
there is a continual back and forth between the mental and physical - how these two relate to one another.
the main character.. hans castorp.. is presumed to be musing.. in the evening.. winter night.. at a sanatorium that he only arrived at to visit his cousin.. and of course his presumed mental and physical health has entered some facade of decay in his initial weeks so that he finds himself still there for an indefinite period of time:
"What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material - it was sentient, to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh" (285-6)
so when reading this then the book turns into a religion.. and then of course the irony (for it is irony that he meant) continues in the continual unfolding of hans canstorp's physical and psychological experience; i am not even yet half-way through. irony is not so bad though.. because i think maybe honest desire for something other than irony rests beneath it. i've never compared myself to an element.. like iron. or maybe I have but am not conscious of having done so.. But perhaps I do not think of myself as filled with irony either.. some irony yes. but not al the time.. and irony is so condescending; I don't associate myself with such condescension although I think I once did and sometimes do still...
the california sun is bright outside now.. and I should probably have some lunch. i am still continually confounded by the brightness of the sky here. terrible trajectory!!! upon reading the beginning of my letter.. I see I have totally abandoned any supposed effort towards working..