run like the wind

the undo button only lasts for 30 seconds.

fathima — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 06:52:49 +0000

it’s just past 1AM here. 4AM by other clocks. i don’t know which clocks my body follows, i haven’t been able to sleep earlier than 5 in any time zone for the last 3 months.
so because it is, in whatever relevant timezone, some small hour of the night, this email seems entirely reasonable, when i know full well it will seem anything but in the starker light of day.

i’ve moved to this city whose soul evades me, has evaded me for a year now. yet i love place. when my relations with people are questionable, i can say with full confidence that a certain thing i love unquestioningly is place — the way streets meet, how signs light up or don’t at night, how strangers move amongst each other on subway cars, what alleyways do to notions of travel, what the sky feels like on the back of my neck.
and i’ve lived in vancouver for a year, and the soul of this place evades me. lost somewhere between the strange aloofness of this city. i don’t know how to explain it, but when i think of living here, my throat constricts.

i’ve moved into this apartment that belongs in the kind of magazine my mother refers to when she plots how she will decorate this final house my parents have moved into. they’ve been moving for decades, and finally they have a semblance of physical home. you couldn’t see in last night, but the entire ground floor, with the exception of my brother’s bedroom and the den, is unfurnished. strange empty spaces, with bare walls and ugly gifted lamps. it is unsettling seeing my parents go through this process. in their old age, building a homestead, a slow and painful process, at one and the same moment a collapsing of past present and future. it is unsettling and it breaks my heart.
this apartment i’ve moved into has a ladder that leads up into an attic. wooden floors, a sloping roof, an empty ceiling space with windows in the roof. and it has a wide balcony that looks north to the mountains and the ever-bright downtown core. the windows in the other rooms face variously into the sun and open onto the roof of the patio below, seating wide enough for a coterie. the kitchen has deep red walls, the bathroom light blue. one of the bedrooms has french doors.
it is overwhelming, and i am not sure where the sadness comes from, except the deep-rooted sense that i do not deserve this.

i digress, but i’ve forgotten now from what. so this is probably a good place to wrap up.

oh, a story. some girl forgot her wallet on the bus. i was exhausted from not sleeping last night, from flying this morning, then moving furniture, then trying to pretend the costs of moving in weren’t terrifying. and because i was exhausted, i ran after her with the wallet. that causality makes no sense, but instinctively i know if i’d been more conscious i’d have faltered a moment longer. so i picked up her wallet, but she’d already left the bus, and the doors had closed, so i called to the driver to open them. one of those accordion buses, and i’m at the last door, and i never call to bus drivers to open doors. a couple of other people chime in, and the driver opens the door and i call after the girl, who doesn’t hear me, so i have to run after her again, and mostly i’m just very tired and very hungry. i’m supposed to be home right now, not doing this dumb shit. the girl turns and i thrust her wallet at her, turning to the bus even before she’s done saying thank you. and the bus is pulling away from the curb. so i howl please don’t leave at the sky and scrape my hands through my hair like a crazy person. some guy walking by turns around to stare, but the bus is stopping again for me. i run to the door — for consistency, i suppose, since i could have just walked, since he was waiting.
then it’s another three stops to home and my first night here.

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This is disgusting.

fathima — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:12:23 +0000

me: i like eggs, a lot
i think i’ll have eggs for breakfast
i mean suhur
A: i eat eggs
my reasoning is pretty weird though
i think that if i believe in abortions then i should eat eggs

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Keys

fathima — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:55:48 +0000

He settled his long, thing fingers across the keys, began by testing a scale, then fell into a rhythm. His left hand worked chord changes with confidence, then the right came in, tapping out high notes like a chickadee’s call, music as anarchic and hopeful as a summer afternoon in Central Park. Benjamin’s fingers fell in loopy circles like sycamore seeds to the ground, and then, to give the tune an improvised bridge, he clanked out hectic downtown rhythms, musical analogies for the coffee roasting and the docks clanking below the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the city he was he giving his father, a welcome-home gift wrapped in klezmer blues.

– Gabriel Brownstein, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W”

For eight weeks out of the last eleven, I tried to talk about music like it was a novel, and failed every single time.

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Auto

fathima — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:54:53 +0000

One of these days I’m going to get paid to write someone else’s autobiography.

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Scarborough

fathima — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:49:56 +0000

But I’d been unfair to Scarborough. I’d let myself forget that this city operates with its own surly logic, distinct from the hustle of downtown Toronto or the exhibitionism of Montreal. Not that it doesn’t have either of those things — not, by any means, that Scarborough doesn’t hustle, doesn’t preen.

Scarborough is its own city, unconcerned with what other cities are doing and liable to tell you off very loudly if you suggest it should care. Where I live, the bus routes are uncooperative. The malls are big boxes, and the streets quickly succumb into highways, lined with open fields where massive insect-like electric poles stand in for trees. The music in the cars is a lot louder, the drivers a little more aggressive. The people arrange themselves into groups, loyalties worn deliberately on their sleeves, separating like oil and water, brown from black from white, class from class, we are who are legal and those who aren’t.

I took a different turn today, walked down some blocks I generally only drive through. Suddenly, there are patches of green sprouting unrepentantly between the model minority backyards. The thick road streaks over an unremarkable concrete bridge that hangs flat over a ravine that descends into a thin, clear brook. There is a small graveyard on the way to the grocery store, a corner lot that bumps against the six-lane road, large enough to contain maybe 60 people, tombstones tottering into the lawn without a house. And there is a tract of land on the way to the bank that someone forgot to turn into a townhouse, a neat rectangle of untended grass with a lone twisted goalpost. The clouds collect here, in this small space, the way they do not elsewhere, and fall over themselves into the grass.

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Is this the rapture

fathima — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:28:54 +0000

And there are those nights when all you want to listen to is Elliot Smith and Antony & The Johnsons.

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Surgical

fathima — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:56:26 +0000

Over at A Proposal, I provide some context for my last post, which, despite my efforts, ended on a much more ambiguous note than I’d intended.

In Montreal, for the first time, I began to actively seek out and take pictures of people. Before this, my primary interest had been urban photography. Deserted buildings, bright dumpsters, bricked-in alleyways — these were the things that fascinated me, because of the opportunity they gave me to disorient notions of beauty and urban geography. And being a photographer in spaces like those also troubles notions of a clean divide between the public and the private.

But then in Montreal, people sought me out and asked me to take their pictures. It went to my head. Montreal is a city full of people constantly on display. Its people take a good picture. So I was surrounded by beautiful people who wanted beautiful pictures, and I was happy to oblige. I became a little giddy.

But I’ve been thinking a lot these days about human bodies and a camera’s relation to them. I’ve been trying to write about it too, and have been getting stuck. I want to draw a parallel between a proprietorial relationship to language and the potentially limiting effect of a camera (at least in terms of the photographer’s relationship to the models/bodies). There is something so surgical about the process that I have vague, inarticulate concerns …

Meanwhile, I have half a dozen concepts swirling in my head, and am terribly excited to start recruiting models to help in their execution in about 2 weeks.

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Naming

fathima — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:56:03 +0000

What is … what is the name for those striations in lips, those fine wrinkles that ridge up and then plummet away under the exacting touch of fingertips, that tighten into fragile cobwebs of dryness in frigid winters. And those expanses behind ears, those wide and soft landscapes that valley into the sweep of your neck, what do you call them. Ears themselves — each elaborate whorl of pliant bone under velvet skin must have a title, something I could use to explain why their sight makes my breath catch in my throat.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

And now I miss the days I spent in labs, surrounded by the leathered remains of people’s legs and arms on tables, with hearts and lungs in clear jars arranged on shelves, and silent cadavers resting on tables in the cold room behind. I could have been a better student, then. I could have stifled the nausea and committed more carefully those names to memory (of the people? of their parts).

So these are the inner ends of your clavicles. I could have known the names of these and other bones, of all the muscles and tendons that pull things together, that ripple sleek under my cautious palm.

But it isn’t the same to want to name things as to want to know them. It isn’t the same to want to see a thing as it is to want to photograph it.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, and have been unable to look at necks the same since.

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The Bones in His Ears

fathima — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:07:13 +0000

He imagined the girl creating them in her sleep, actually dreaming their lives into existence, inventing the little room and mossy air and everything else in it. God, what labor! The breadth of detail was astounding. Take himself – his own body. Sure, she’d have to envision his face and teeth, his arms and legs and shoulders, but there were the less glamorous parts as well, the unsung bumps and corners: the knuckles of his toes, or that weird mole in his armpit, or even the invisible growth of his nails. She would have needed to start weeks … years ago, probably. There would have been restless nights, products of whimsy or indigestion. How else to explain the bones in his ear? If she were truly dreaming him (and why not, since it made as much sense as anything?), then the hairs in his nose were a work of love, the result of extraordinary vision. And after all that dreaming, the toil and concentration, how could you blame her for getting tired one day and wanting to stop, for being too wiped out to continue?

– Eric Puchner, “Legends,” Music Through the Floor.

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Adventure Averted

fathima — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:32:47 +0000

There’s a ticket with my name on it. My name and two stopovers and 24+ hours of flight. And the date Thursday, Aug 11 8AM.

It is Wednesday night. 8AM on Thursday will find me asleep in my parent’s unfinished basement, my bags still packed from 2 months in Montreal, everything else still packed from 8 months in Vancouver. I survey the small wreckage of half-open luggage at the foot of the bed and feel a flash of perverse, useless pride. My life fits neatly now within every imaginable airline baggage limit.

It’s the first night of Ramadan. These past years, I have come to associate the month not with the moon, or with the athaan, or with hunger or prayers, or any of the things that used to mark this part of the year for me. These years, Ramadan is at its most Ramadan-like when I’m driving, family packed into a fast-delapidating car, nights caught between increasingly scattered iftars and no less scattered taraweeh, too many backseat drivers and streetlights that are never quite bright enough for me to feel like I’m doing anything but bluffing my way through this cement.

The first night of Ramadan. I do more U-turns in that half hour than I have the entirety of my driving history. I love driving at night through Scarborough. The streets are empty enough that I can drive the way I can never speak, 40 over the limit and smooth, one hand easy on the wheel. And this city boasts some terrific potholes, real necksnappers.

“I’m going,” I say. A light turns red behind me.

Ten minutes later, I nearly do a left turn on yellow, but stop in time, fifteen feet from the mosque entrance. I curl over the wheel, rest my cheek on its rough plastic. “I’m not going.” A bus rumbles past, then a truck, large mechanical animals that make the streets shudder underneath us.

I’m not going. After everything’s said and done, the irony of it is that despite everything, I always forget how beholden I am to borders. After weeks of reducing my life in this country to immaculate itineraries of changes-of-address and disgustingly lit passport photographs, I finally grow up and concede defeat. High Commission, you win this round.

But all these things, these larger machinations of exit and reentry, are not why I take a break at a stoplight to not pretend I’m not disappointed. The thing is, I told you, what I like best is leaving. Reorienting myself, when the goodbyes were on the tip of my tongue, is dizzying. I put my head down.

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