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.

Standing by the living room window, staring at the giant billboard at the end of my street, but nothing at all. The smoke from the joint envelops me. Enya’s voice bellows from my speakers. Soon the first semester of my PhD will be done and then it will just continue. Everything will keep going and I can’t stop it from happening. My Saturn fully returned last week on the most ordinary day you can imagine. I am in the fold of the waves, and the only way to get out of the waves is through the folds, but the folds consume you one by one. As soon as I come to any resolve, even on the smallest scale, a new obscurity flows into my mind full of propensity to keep expanding the huge clear ocean, only to be in relation to a fucking black unknown infinite body water I don’t even know exists yet (every time I think I know its properties, it changes, like the angels in Evangelion).

In the last few days of summer 2009, j and I ended up in Brighton & I fell in love with miao & the miao & the miao & we listened to Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting on repeat & Red & I argued about music taste politics & then we ran around into town to get more miao. This went on for three days & I wore the same outfit from Brighton onto the train to Gatwick onto the plane back & then we arrived home in the afternoon & I was still high & everything was perfect & our bed was soft & we laid down smiling until we managed to fall asleep in the sun glow & then he left to work the next day & the best summer of my life was over.

.

I can’t seem to grasp the present as it’s happening at all. Being present in the moment is a notion that is completely lost on my perceptual and sensual ability. I imagine a life with so much less suffering if only I could engage in this act more often than once a year or less! All I can see in front of me is my past, choking me, penetrating me, manipulating me into a futurity, and I totally let it –repeatedly.

.

Since his visit last weekend, I feel more connected to my brother than ever before. I wonder if he feels it too? I feel that the connection I have with him is one I will never have with anyone else, in any way, in every way. I love him more than anyone I’ve ever loved, I love him more than my mom, more than my grandfather. All love is different, but not so completely different. Not all love makes you know you would sacrifice your life for someone.

I fantasize about having children so that they can feel the intensity of sibling love too.

Soon my Saturn will fully return.

On my last river walk I came across a Jewish Cemetery & took a piece of a broken gravestone dumped on the side of the fence home with me.

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.

]]> http://words.raisecain.net/2011/10/29/music-is-math/feed/ 0 http://words.raisecain.net/2011/10/06/first-month-in-montreal/ http://words.raisecain.net/2011/10/06/first-month-in-montreal/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 03:49:44 +0000 Magda O! http://words.raisecain.net/?p=2219 Hi.

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.

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.