a response to prayerless hopes

I knew you were high when I read your writing diminish, diminish us. I still thought what we had was chaos, chaotic, but it birthed our new world coherent. I read your destruction when you contacted me again, writing me high so it could be compartmented, so, ignored. But I resumed living the drudgery and feeling the defeated stench of black saltwater lapping our necks. I didn't care what you felt now, and I had nothing to say to you, so I could not write back.

 

about feelings couples have

 

There were a lot of people like her and a lot of people like me, but still we felt nobody was like us.

 

a note about too long ago

We walk by the ivy-covered fence and kiss on the mouth. We wonder who will die first, and we don't appreciate anything.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

only in dreams

Sneaking into a series of small, connected utility rooms built between the high school and the track, you seemed to know the way, and led me into what seemed like a large maintenance closet, oddly furnished with only a bed. After awhile, we heard people moving somewhere in the complex, coming our way. We started dressing and I was mad at you, thinking, "How careless, to not prepare!" But in a hurry it was forgiven and we started plotting our getaway, having fun, and you looked more beautiful than ever.

Some idea of himself

Imagine Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater working for a living in New York's slums. Or Romeo and Juliet going it alone, deprived of their family fortunes. Similarly, had Jay Gatsby married Daisy Buchanan, we would have lost them. And they would likely lose each other.

But unlike the doomed pairs from the film Titanic and Shakespeare's tragedy, Gatsby was willing to volunteer for his fate. The sacrifice he was to make for Daisy is not unlike the one Abraham was to make for God: Both men stood ready to answer the call of a higher duty--a duty only answerable by renouncing all others. Abraham's duty was to God; Gatsby's to an ideal, the past, the promise.

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality if his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

For years Gatsby believed he could resurrect the past, a few moments of youth preserved under the glass of his memory, observable, close, but too fragile to touch.

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see."
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ...

Gatsby, in his suspension, his nonexistence, is replaced in the public mind with a collection of myths borne from the incurious imaginations of passersby. In Fitzgerald's story, these are all people living a life other than their own: Tom Buchanan has his wife, Daisy, but his attentions lie with his lover in the city; Daisy pretends they don't; Gatsby suspends himself in service of his dream for Daisy; and Gatsby's guests obliterate the night with drink and forgetting, believing themselves to be in the company of a man who isn't, who isn't and who isn't.

Enlightening Limits

Sizing up the limits of thought proposed during the Enlightenment and urging us to peek at what lies beyond, Michel Foucault poses a very Foucauldian question to himself about such a brief investigation:

If we limit ourselves to this type of always partial or local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we have no control?

His answer is priceless:

 ...it is true ... we are always in the position of beginning again. 

But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its stakes.

In other words, Yes, we run the risk. But I have my ways.

These quotes come from his brief 1984 piece titled What is the Enlightenment? The question dates from 1784: That year a German paper posed the question and Immanuel Kant answered. In his response to Kant, Foucault proposes that our modern mode of self-reflection took shape then, and he notes the existence and implications of the shaping mechanisms. The Enlightenment, according to Foucault, is essentially an attitude. Several pages in, though, he tosses off this nugget: "Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits".

None of his major points hinge on this statement, but I'm really taken with it.

My first thought is that limits make originality possible. Describing a work of art as "original" is often high praise. But something may be original and not necessarily good; agreed? Critics also often assert that a work of art has value when it advances a conversation--conversations about humanity, time, life, sports, religion, whatever. And advancement means moving beyond where we are at present, being presently at the limit, and as far as we have gotten. But a work of art and its critiques may also center on how the work functions within and comments on pre-established limits. Perhaps a work could even impose limits on itself. In these ways a work of art, be it a song, painting, a dance or film, for example, may not necessarily qualify as original.

Criticism of policy may also concern limits. Who is excluded from the policy? How does the policy work? and, How far reaching are its implication?

Criticism indeed consists largely of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.