and then our exile

outside to check on growing chicks, red heat-lamp glow - something foundationally leveling about this night, cool slight breeze, undark with no moon (as though the air itself radiates invisible light to slip through the dark bodies of things), crickets and frogs, but more than all of these - its essential smell, incredibly sweet, to defy even the associations i try to imply, quiethoneystarburst, beauty compressed.

then in with tea and ckua, the piles of patiently waiting papers. over the past day i have plunged through half neruda's memoirs. these are possibly all mechanisms of evasion, because i have one week to complete the feats of hercules.

today sabri's farewell barbecue, then coffeeshop with 'adil and taqa. i try to avoid referencing taqaji much on here, as it will go to his head, but he was on whyte avenue last night with all the drunk people, and has pictures - for some reason i did not think the white people of the modern world would lose themselves in such frenzy, i used to think that was reserved for the developing peoples of interior africa.
(when everyone was celebrating was right about when on the other side of the world survivors in java were beginning to sift through the rubble.)

they meet and make plans in strange half-lit tableaux

zhivago perhaps lived for years in the big house at varykino, after lara and katya left in the sleigh forever paused at the crest of the hill. pasha arrived, round iron-grey spectacles, to face the inescapable and be buried in innocuous snow, but yuri himself? we know he arrived in moscow much later, an older man, to live his days until he finally collapsed anonymous on a busy grey sidewalk, but what of the time between? how could he leave, but how could he remain? pasternak doesn't outline it, nor do either of the movie versions. an institution: "what would zhivago do".

iconodoulias

a asked what was up in late july, and it seems to be hanging out with women (and t). piksi-wise i'd guessed i would be the only muslim, to be the only canadian is flattering, but now it seems too the only male. some of the readings make me nervous - "the inevitability of pluralism", for example. it is because of imperfect understanding on my part, there is some cinch in pretheoretical reductionism i haven't yet been able to pin down, but when i do it will be a courageous stand for absolutism.

links: ductapefatwa says things straight. haroon at avari must be read, have been going through some of his archives. javed now in osterreich was stopped by the police for not being white.

& i miss sham.


-
..i should try posts which actually follow a narrative, aren't so thrown-together.
& pictures down below.