"You've been put in the world to love the act of being alive."

I love Ray Bradbury for a number of reasons but his discussions about writing give me chills. He makes me want to leap from my chair, burst into tears, and love this life with everything I've got. He reminds me what it is I feel I am meant to do in this world. I love that.

My favorite part of the video above is his discussion of the first story he wrote that he considered beautiful. He says, "When I finished the short story, I burst into tears. I realized that after ten years of writing, I'd finally written something beautiful. I turned a corner into my interior self. I wasn't writing exterior stuff. I wasn't writing for the right or the left or the inbetween, I was writing for me. And I discovered, that was the way to go."

Tossing & Turning - John Updike

The spirit has infinite facets, but the body
confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh's sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross
your ankles. Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.

"Tossing and Turning" by John Updike, from Collected Poems 1953-1993.

[I love the form of this poem and the way each sentence changes length like someone trying to get comfortable....]

In Blackwater Woods - Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

[I am going to see her in May thanks to my dear friend, Dee. I am not going to wear mascara because of the probability of tears. There are a number of poems by Mary Oliver that I love. This is a new discovery.]

Fragile and Frightening.

I'm taking a class this quarter where we are focusing on modernism to study how different mediums convey "truth". The coolest part? Silent films. Seriously.

I've seen Buster Keaton films before. He's hilarious. But I only fully realized what sort of genuis-ness was taking place in early film when I saw some clips of 'Metropolis'. Jeez. It's gorgeous. I read somewhere that they spent a ridiculous amount of money to produce the film. Like millions. In 1927. Woah, right? I love the music that's paired with this. I'm assuming it's the original music, but you never can tell with these old films.

Just watch a few minutes. It's dreamy.

Also, we watched 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' in class this week and it was totes creepy. If you can, you should watch the whole thing. This clip isn't very good but it was the best I could find. I ended up picking it because it had the color tint and the music wasn't as awful as it seemed to be in the other clips. Anyway, this scene is when Dr. Caligari is at the fair and he's offering to show the people "Cesare, the Somnambulist". For those of you who don't know, a 'somnambulist' is a sleepwalker. I learned that by asking (really loud in the middle of the dark class), "Whattsa somnambulist anyway?" So, this is when Dr. Caligari shows off Cesare who has been sleeping for 23 years...in a row! It's a shame this clip omitted the title screens. They were pretty funny.

But the point is...check out Cesare's face as he wakes up. Daaaang. And also, I wouldn't want to run into Dr. Caligari on a dark street, if you know what I mean. Shoooot.