Days Like Blank Pages...

I don't feel that it's necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we do not know what will be the end. - Michel Foucault

During recent conversations with friends, I've used a certain metaphor to describe the life I find myself waking up to each day; the life I've been waking up to for well over a year, now. It goes something like, "It's as though I spent seven years training as an Olympic skier, only to wake up one day and find I've been traded to the swim team; I'm not going to drown, but I'm not likely to excel in my current arrangement any time soon."

The metaphor refers to more than just what might be obvious to some readers. And in all honesty, it would be excessively self-indulgent, trite, cliche, and unproductive to linger in that most obvious of passings through a medium such as this. Certainly, there are enough short-sighted and short-lived impulses that do not survive the traversal of this or that synapse and to which no one deserves to be subjected, here.

Time sees fewer of such residual impulses anyway, giving way to a (hopefully friendly) acceptance of the fact that one cannot be what one was; whether that's a partner, a member of a community, a believer in or lukewarm apologist for this or that, a resident of a particular (and thus far, familiar) stage of one's life, or a loyal servant of whatever one's onlookers perceive. But such truths are fairly constrained, their numbers finite. Accepting them (insurmountable as that often proves for many, I suppose) is far less daunting than what follows - what some have deemed the quintessential question in Deleuze's work: How might one live?

And I mean that very seriously. Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day offers an unlikely exploration of that question, and my own daily sense of being the unlikely swimmer treading water (waiting for something to find traction) finds a bit of resonance there. In the absence of the larger narratives to which one affords the lion's share of one's daily gaze, the mundane comes into focus and becomes the foreground in which one resides; a foreground comprised less of (if we are to be honest, speculative) what-has-been's and what-will-be's, and almost entirely the moment to moment observation of what is.

Amidst all this, of course, time is passing. A full year has gone by in which I've done precious little beyond keeping afloat and cursing myself for my own inability to adjust. Perhaps here, in whatever spontaneous arrangements of image and text result, I or someone else can piece together something coherent beyond that. And if not, there's always that vicarity of reading novelty into the mundane, from afar.

Either way, I'm not going to drown. The stakes are relatively low.

Hey you. Wake up, wake up.
This is the final and last boarding call...
... From it all.
- Tiger Lou