after midnight | in the morning
Posted on | September 6, 2010 | 4 Comments
There is a quiet now that I’m unused to. The way the house almost hums: the ambient noise of all the things we use all day, plugged into their sockets, sleeping with green blinking eyes open. The baby sleeps; the boy too, spread-eagle on his bunk. I can hear them breathing.
Outside there are crickets in the dark, calling with their stick-legs sawing legs for summer to last a little longer, and also to have the of encounters with a mate.
It’s 1am. My mind is a hive of whirring thoughts. Heidegger and his mysteries coupled with all the things I do not know about how to make a video capture of my screen, or how to alter images the way I see them in my mind, and there are also things about aperture and chance and promise. And this: what will I do when the day comes fast and hard and I’ve had only five hours of sleep, backing up against a handful of other nights with barely six. How not to take the world personally then?
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I wake up with “you are the best thing… that ever happened to me..” running through my head in loops and I can hear the boys downstairs clattering, laughing, fighting over the fire truck. My husband has let me sleep in some, and when I slide into the skin of my waking self I feel still, like the hive of bees swarming through my limbs, each finger quivering slightly, and the thoughts I went to sleep with are still there, like a trace of sugar on my lips. I remember, I gather, the thoughts coming faster, too fast until there are words before sentences.
Heidegger. Oh my. Have any of you read Heidegger? The piece I was working through last night was called “The Question of Technology” and oh, how his circular, mysterious sentences thrill me. I am a girl for whom philosophy speaks truth. I’m versed in this. The way words, when traced to their origins reveal certain truths. I love it, even as the questions themselves make me uneasy.
I keep meaning to show up here in a more reasonable way: with a complete story, with a real update–of all the things and thoughts and ideas that have filled my days, but I can’t seem to yet. So the fragments will have to do. The snippets, whenever they come, making a patchwork memory of these moments.
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I am Christina Rosalie
Hello. I'm so happy you've stopped by!
I am a multimedia storyteller, digital strategist, idea starter, stalker of wonder, finder of four leaf clovers, MFA graduate student, and mama of boys. My first book,
will be published by SKIRT! Books in September, 2012.
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September 6th, 2010 @ 9:15 am
Put in a movie for the kids and NAP! Have your lovely husband take the kids for a bike ride… You can do it! If I got through it, so can you. What I found was that after a late night (or all-nighter) I didn’t do any work accept the house stuff of feeding and nurturing. (And being grumpy, sometimes.) I was honest and told everyone that I was up all night and tired. It worked out fine, you can do it!
September 6th, 2010 @ 3:50 pm
Too many late nights and you’ll find yourself giggling at Heidegger instead of thrilling to him.
And I, for one, think these snippets of verse and word and dream are scrumptious.
September 7th, 2010 @ 11:44 am
i’ve surrendered to the fragments, too. and yours are lovely, indeed.
September 8th, 2010 @ 3:01 pm
Heidegger . . . He is impossible . . and amazing. I think I could read Being and Time for the rest of my life and always discover something shockingly, movingly, new. How’s your German these days?
If you can muddle through looking back and forth between the original and a translation, well, to me a lot of the language feels more natural in German . . . I like his definition of technology as a kind of bringing forth or bringing into being. Beyond that, I’ve never known quite what to make of the essay . . . it feels a bit quaint and sort of 19th century (though I know it was published mid-20th). Will you be reading Walter Benjamin as well? Can’t wait to hear more about everything you’re reading and thinking throughout your program!