"pleasure is the infinite experiment. if you are going down it is a wall. that is my message. climb the wall." "the dawn is breaking on another trembling world"

"an anthropologist's priority is to expose the outside on the inside. it is a tribe lost by finding it, like desire." "he turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. he cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. his blood was in revolt. he was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries."

name: becky location: portland, oregon age: 21 hair: brown eyes: brown size: small born: st. paul, minnesota currently: a junior at reed college major: anthropology favorite food: yogurt some have called me: adequate and glistening goal: space is space. you can fill it with rocks or trees or words or heavy rain. "to cover the nakedness?" to complete the design.

"deep play: a story they tell themselves about themselves" things i do: read books, write, take pictures, paint, draw, sew, cook, ride bike, walk, derivé, think, eat drugs, sweep woodfloors, read newspapers, knit, watch people, run, climb trees, take buses, hitchhike feeling edgy lately. i'm finding the limit, stepping off the edge. the limit of what i can take, how much i can feel in one instant. my heart presses against my chest. look at the shapes the telephone wires make when they intersect. something compressing my emotions, things become faster, brighter. the center of the universe: in a city, deep within the tree canopy, the place where you know you're lost, the sunlight making everything look unreal. layers of intersecting rows of houses, trees, streets, alleys: the result of this math equation, when everything cancels out, is a rose garden... there is no center, it is located in the periphery. i love: bridges, trees, cities , coffee, sidewalks, books, anthropology, drugs, design, old houses, cats, typewriters, mystery, people, kitchens, windows, cameras, mittens, architecture, bicycles, trees, bobby pins, corduroy, sandals, the sun, adventure, ideas, dreams, floating, rain "and one shrunk to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. when life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. and to everybody there was this sense of unlimited resources. our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by." places: portland, spain (navarra, galicia), san francisco, vanvouver bc, west coast, minneapolis, chicago, open highways, forests, mountains, oceans, streets "And you, forgotten, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built." how to stop time: ask softly. a secret. then steal a minute in a bedroom when the guests aren't paying attention. it washes over you like a memory, leaves you speechless. the eternal moment before everything becomes real is stretched into a heavy warmth that is waiting, hanging, hovering: like a sound you heard in a dream, that you want so much it seems desire could pull it back. it comes without being asked. something in the air reminds me of the moment before falling. books: anne carson: plainwater henry miller: tropic of cancer jean-paul sartre: nausea james joyce: portrait of the artist as a young man italo calvino: if on a winters night a traveler gabriel garcia marquez: 100 years of solitude milan kundera: the unbearable lightness of being, the book of laughter and forgetting joseph heller: catch-22 karl marx: communist manifesto, 1844 manuscript, capital simone weil: gravity and grace john knowles: a seperate peace f. scott fitzgerald: the great gatsby,tender is the night nabokov: lolita dostoyevski: crime and punishment george macdonald: the golden key plato: republic herodotus: histories william a. christian: person and god in a spanish valley george w.s. trow: within the context of no context j.d. salinger: everything raoul vaneigen: the revolution of everyday life arundahti roy: the god of small things james thurber: the thirteen clocks jorge luis borges, federico garcia lorca, e e cummings, t.s. eliot, jean baudrillard, claude levi-strauss, clifford geertz, guy debord, foucault i am the explorer, i discovered this place and put my flag down and now it belongs to me and i can make it for myself. there is no comfort, no way out, no warm kitchens or car rides home, no rest. i don't know what it would feel like if i had even one relative or someone i could count on. i don't think it would be as magical. there's something about this place that is beyond logic for me. music [classical]: gustav mahler: 1st, 3rd, 5th symphonies johannes brahms: requiem chopin: nocturnes philip glass: glassworks sergei prokofiev: romeo & juliet, violin concerto, etc etc igor stravinsky: rite of spring mozart: requiem rimsky-korsakov debussy henryk gorecki arvo part: a tabula rosa, etc. "pain has no pure cliffs. pain is an oven. where drugs run out and luxury drops away." other music: bright eyes, elliott smith, modest mouse, built to spill, weakerthans, knife in the water, pixies, cursive, piebald, radiohead, lush, the promise ring, neutral milk hotel, sigur ros, kind of like spitting, urban legends, langley music project, sebadoh, waxwing, david dondero, sarah dougher, cocteau twins, the clientele, the shins we talked. she said something about her with gabe and i froze and started sinking. inward. i stared at the vase, the water illuminated from below and behind by a white light, the stem of the rose enlarged behind the glass. my vision blurred, i tried to disappear into the lights and flowers. should i not have said that? movies: requiem for a dream, brazil, la vida es siblar, waking life, mulhollend drive, cries and whispers, last tango in paris, 2001, lolita (1998), the godfather, breakfast at tiffany's, all rohmer movies, my neighbor totoro, the talented mr. ripley, the virgin suicides "Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner... A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image." maybe portland will belong to me because i love it more than anyone. artists: paul gauguin, picasso, paul klee, henri mattise, henri cartier-brassen, eugene smith, mondrian, paula modherson-becker, eugene atget, brassai, kandinsky, marcel duchamp, alexander calder, diebenkorn, tapies, coret, gerhard richter "as the pattern becomes more intricite and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough." the rush imagine the unimaginable. it's like when you're hanging out by a cliff and you fall off. or when you're hanging out by the railroad tracks and you get hit by a train. you feel the sound. the rush. bam. but you're inside the sound, melting into the unimaginable. be careful when you get 1/2 cc closer to the edge, you might fall off. *i saw your face, and i thought you were a dream* credits: things not in quotes are by me. quotes, in order. 1. anne carson (plainwater) 2. same 3. same 3.5 begonia aretxaga (shattering silence) 4. james joyce (portrait) 5. clifford geertz (balinese cockfighting) 6. virginia woolf (to the lighthouse) 7. situationist text (i don't remember which, it's on their website) 8. anne carson 9. article about weakerthans 10. waking life 11. the clientele