#marc4marc

haha @marc4marc and i have been talking about this for like six months, actually. i think it’d be an examination of pop culture and current events through the lens of critical cultural theory. think beyonce and bell hooks, brexit and barthes, stranger things and strauss theory, rihanna and rhizomatics.

but podcasts take some kind of time and effort, both of which marc seems to excel at handling? while i’m over here like

I'm writing a paper on the poetics of nostalgia in the Arabic and Hebrew literature of medieval al-Andalus. I'm having a hard time getting through it because of the feels.

I was talking to Marc once about the feels. So many fucking things are beautiful to me and make me cry. Maybe that's a kind of sorrow? I don't know.

It's all nostalgia, Joshathan, he remarked. All of it. Whole thing. 

Dylan Trigg writes in The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason that past and memory are inseparable, that a man is identified more with his history and past than with his present. There's a line I remember--the passing of time becomes more noticeable the more we are startled by the ruins of memory. 

I think there are two kinds of memory: autobiographical and historical. Historical memory is, of course, easier to preserve. We celebrate and commemorate events through festivals, holidays, reenactments. Autobiographical memory, however, is that which we experience personally; this tends to fade with time unless periodically reinforced through remembrances, often through contact with individuals with whom we shared experiences.

In reading Arabic poetry of nostalgia, from pre-Islamic times to modern, it strikes me that my own poetry is nostalgic. All of it. Whole thing. 

It began, I think, with the memory of an encounter in the desert, ten years ago. A girl walking between doorways of mud. A small oasis town in the Algerian Sahara. A Sahrawi who carried me across the desert for two weeks. The call to prayer from a shepherd entering the air like an arrow. An ocean dry as lavender, the faint smell of cardamom and saffron at sunset.

And people. Lovers, like tides. Sunlight across bodies. The color of flesh burning with human touch. The curve of a name penned and erased, over and over again.

Can we discuss your body pillow????

I'm praying for you because of this post tbh