“Suis-je amoureux ?”- Oui puisque j’attends.” L’autre, lui n’attend jamais. Parfois, je veux jouer à celui qui n’attend pas; J’essaye de m’occuper ailleurs, d’arriver en retard; mais à ce jeu je perds toujours: quoique je fasse, je me retrouve désoeuvré, exact, voire en avance. L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.”
– Roland Barthes
Being in love is the best and most important feeling in the whole world. Nothing motivates unless I am in love. My friend D teases me about this a lot. Many times I will bring something or someone up to him and gush about how amazing and wonderful it or they are.
— “You think everything/everyone is amazing!”
— “No! I am so critical and judgmental! But I am also unabashedly in love with a lot, and want to express it as much as I can.”
Funny (sad?!) that most people think I am an ice queen, selfish, and unapproachable. Probably, because I’m sure I come off that way. Physical face-to-face interactions are weird. I never know how to be or what to say, so I usually just end up promoting myself as a spectacle. I am easily amused by myself, and so an adventure always follows me around.
I tan a lot. People have a lot of judgmental things to say about tanning. People have a lot of judgmental things to say about a lot of shit. HELP ME BE LESS JUDGMENTAL!
Oh, yes, back to being in love. Being in love is like this special sheath you get to wear and it gives you magical powers!
like…
being able to see clearly and with the saturation on +10, having the ability to focus on all your work, having enough energy to do ANYTHING even if you haven’t slept because you’ve been making love for days, having beautiful skin because the blood is racing through your body constantly making everything glow, finding inspiration in everything, forming a world with your lover, seeing the world through their eyes…
I remember when I fell in love the summer of 2010 with my documentary project, before I even contacted anyone, before I even knew what it would become. I wanted to devote all of myself to it, and the love grew and grew and grew and I was so willing to give myself to it, willing to give all of my time, all of my energy to it, and it, in turn gave me so much of itself back.
Why did I not finish it? Why did I get carried away with my doctoral work as if that can be finished later? Why do I discard my work so quickly? FOLLOW THROUGH.
New loves again & again – disposable – New loves turning over make me full of unrequited love for the past, make me intensely sentimental and regretful for the past projects I was in love with and gave up because something else became more convenient. Now my shoulders slouch from the weight of the unresolved past, and my scoliosis keeps curving in. Moving on like this is never moving on, but stuck in all the places all at once, never being able to be in the ‘now.’ Like Erica Jong writes, “I look forward and see myself looking back.”
In September I attended a toy camera workshop with Midi Onodera put on by my department of Communication Studies at Concordia. We had an afternoon to shoot and edit. I chose the Barbie Cam to shoot my short film because how strange is it to shoot holding a Barbie in your hand that has a camera in her chest. The feminist discussion is not lost on me, but that’s not the point right now. The Loyola campus of Concordia reminds me a bit of York: it’s far away from the centre in the suburbs & no one likes going there. Having just arrived, I wanted to get to know the campus and make friends with it. I decided to shoot the garden, as it was just finished sharing its bounty for the season. I emailed j that afternoon asking: “hi / can i use one of your songs / it’s a love letter to the garden / wanna send me something calm and slow?” & what you hear is what he sent me & I love how it works so perfectly.
Many of you messaged me about my blog containing malware. I apologize for the time it took to fix but the end of the semester is doing my head in. It is all cleaned up now & secured. No thanks to my host Mediatemple, but as always, thanks to Mitsu, always willing to help.
Montréal is rainy & full of color. I keep missing deadlines. One of my cats has a respiratory issue & antibiotics obviously made him worse, the homeopathy isn’t helping much & I’m at a loss.
I want to take time to work on my documentary, to workshop it in the new year. I think I will need to take time off to work on it. I am not going about my doctoral studies in the proper way (for me). It is taking me too long to find my rhythm & I think I figured out one of the reasons last night. Doctoral studies are not the same as MA studies & I keep treating it the same way. I gotta stop that.
Last Thursday, I joined a Maths workshop with Sha Xin Wei at the Topological Media Lab & now everything has changed. I have ostensibly never shown aptitude for mathematics, or any related discipline, including science. But high school’s pedagogical interface seems so antithetical to how students should actually engage with/in work so it’s no surprise?
I was intrigued by mathematics and rigorous scientific inquiry, but I couldn’t find it. I mean, the way science was presented to me was ‘the scientific method’ and Cartesianism and that there is a right and wrong in the world and if you just account for all the variables you can prove your hypotheses. This never made sense to me, and enraged me because I couldn’t believe in such a rigid structure of the world. I couldn’t believe that bodies were just the sum of their parts. There was more happening everywhere and it was not a transcendental Kantian perspective either. But without the language to articulate this n+1, this “more than”, I took to music that I could body slam and mosh to (the abject growing inside me then?), poetry, photography and depression instead. No one I knew like this was into science & math. For many years I was anti-science, anti-everything really – a suitable ethos for switching from English Literature and Cultural Anthropology to Women’s Studies in undergrad. But then I met this beautiful boy & fell in love with him & he studied math at U of Toronto & he excelled in it & science & it gave him the rigor & potential to see the world more openly than me. But I was young & unconvinced that my brain could ever operate like (t)his. Instead we devoured drugs, strange cult films & literature. But there were numbers & letter signifiers between us, many of them – formulas of love.
We were talking recently, and he was ruminating on why he dropped out of maths because he was so good at it & why he’s doing social work, in which the type of intellectual rigor that gets stimulated is so different & operates on such a lack (for him). I am so impressed. That is to say I am impressed with a mathematical mind, and math has significantly impressed itself upon my Being. I know it is just the beginning (of this workshop & of me attempting algebra), but there are already moments of euphoria I have never experienced. It’s not better than, but it’s there & it’s happening. I wonder if I could ever ‘get’ math. I have to figure out how to tame it, how to be inside it, and how to re-articulate it for everything I am becoming.
Soon I will be opened up to differential topology.
Should I be self-conscious at such an immediate excitement?
Shortly after the second workshop on Thursday — sitting on the metro uncertain of reality, flushed red, with a diaphragm of vibrations that emanated from every pore in my body, so intense that a crystal positioned in relation to me would express all of my heat as a rainbow of colors — the image of the container came back with acute precision. At that moment I realized that there’s something beyond the cracks in the container. I knew the cracks were happening, but all I could perceive was darkness, a sort of black negative space*. This started in the summer of 2009 and became a constant part of me in 2010. The feeling of being a container, being in a container and wanting to know there’s something happening with/in the cracks but unable to get there. I wasn’t ready to get there. I still don’t know what, why or how but I can feel cracks, the openings.
The vibrations, they’re everywhere.
* Mitsu wrote this to me last year: What’s outside the container isn’t something which is not-you: it is something which is always already you, in a larger sense, but you didn’t identify it as such before. So the search isn’t for something external (the external/internal, outside/inside dichotomy is itself questionable), but for something which is both and neither, beyond that binary. So you’re right, you do need to go inside yourself first, but if you go far enough inside it is the universe.
I am part of a long-term project focused on re-articulating/reviving the old river systems of Montréal. Today I started the walk to acquaint myself with the area of where the Provost used to be (and is now underground), or rather the first small part of where it splits off from the River St-Martin. I will try to document and map as much as possible before the snow fall.
I am living in Montréal now, in the St-Henri neighbourhood in a beautiful pre-war rowhouse. The woman living below me was one of the women that influenced Gabrielle Roy’s Tin Flute. There’s only two of them left and everyone else is dead. My doctoral studies have commenced and I’m not sure what to make of it yet, other than the superficial, oh wow, it’s great, my supervisor is too-good-t0-be-true, the food is great & I’ve made fast friends with people in the Film Studies Department and not my own. I’ve been obsessively updating my Instagram and focusing on color and perception and immediacy.
I bike a lot everywhere and eat cheese and speak broken French in a terrible Anglophone accent.
Lately, I’ve started really missing my brother. A LOT. I wish he hadn’t been so stubborn. He wishes he hadn’t been so stubborn and applied to Concordia for Studio Art instead of just being focused on Illustration at OCAD. He’s 18 now and we listen to the same music and like the same things and generally have a similar outlook on life, although his is filtered through the angsty suburban teenage gaze and mine through a gone-through-too-much-school-too-fast ‘am I an adult or a kid still?’ PhD gaze. I fantasize about us going to shows together, and me showing him off to my friends and him fitting in here much more, and being able to live, because everything is so cheap in Montréal, and Concordia has so many initiatives that you can take advantage of if you’re willing. I have access to a free delicious vegan, and often wheat-free lunch when I’m at SWF campus.
I remember my first year in university. I was on sex and drugs, so self-absorbed that only bass moved me. No future. I need my hair done. I’ll feel better. Next week I’m coming back to Toronto for my Masters Convocation. I’m disproportionately excited for this institutionalized spectacle.
A collection from my iPhone from my first month here.
ps. several of you asked me when I would update this! OK! I’ve not had much to say, words, taking up space, when I am writing and talking, it’s about issues of perception and symbolism and #occupywallstreet & everything else that subsumes me. Maybe more like drowning in the ineffable. Is it possible to have a relationship with the ineffable? Activate a correspondence with it? With a yet-t0-become/yet-t0-be-signified? – the activating of the molecular level of radical empiricism.
pps. I am working on a large several-year project reviving the lost rivers of Montréal.
When John Maus played this at Il Motore last week, tears came down all over me and then I started screaming until I lost my voice and was full of cramps from thrashing my body – the abject becoming the sublime.
This is what one of my former professors and generally amazing person Barry Wellman called me after I went on shouting MASTER MAGDA MASTER MAGDA from rooftops of the rain-soaked Toronto yesterday. It’s a much more elegant title. Would go really well with my Isabel Marant tweed jacket. Ha! Yesterday, Wednesday August 24, I managed to pull through and defend my thesis project. Then Sara and I went to eat Japanese at Japango. Go there! While walking in Kensington a bird pooped on my head – I didn’t even notice until Sara started squirming. That’s never happened to me before. What a sign! Then in the middle of the thunderstorm Toby came to pick up to take me out to Pizza Libretto right before close and we nearly died in the lighting crashes! Today was lunch with the bff Danielle at Amaya. I’m eating the world! And then this antique shop on Bayview had this free poster amongst their treasures. Whirlwind! What will happen tonight I wonder?
Here is me all magdalena dramatica after I realized receiving the title is nice and all but there’s so much to do on the documentary still.
the cool free poster / will go well with my MoMA one.
&
I sometimes post music links. If you want yours taken down let me know. & for the rest of you, if you don't buy music & just d/l links, you should feel like an asshole.
