That's why I loved you, for your magnanimous heart! And you do not need my forgiveness, nor I yours; it's all the same whether you forgive or not, all my life you will remain a wound in my soul, and I in yours --- that's how it should be.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

her paternal anscestors may have founded springfield, mass, where i was born. photo and research from maud.

i've got a shoebox of images and ideas that i dwell on, but unexpectedly the other ones pop up. yesterday it was of the three good fairies in sleeping beauty, and how they have the color of a yimou zhang flic. i thought of this while i was changing a ring of toilet paper in a bathroom with black and white tile.

i travelled over 5,000 miles to a city I've fantasized about for over a decade. the only retrospective I carry is of a french boy and his anti-american, cockblocking friend. I think I've traded good intensions for something sad and exotic.

near shibuya station in tokyo is a statue of a dog named hachiko. i'm glad i saw him during my trip.

i find this video disturbing. his videos usually are. but it reminds me of a place in vermont that i've wanted to write about, take pictures of, draw, turn into a symphony, bring to climax, because it deserves fanfare, acknowledgement and pity as the most important space i know. if i create it, i can dwell for longer. but i didn't create it. i don't want that space in your bookshelf or mine, in your walk to work, or hanging from any wall. i don't even want you to know about it. i don't want it to be mine.

time moves differently in california. i tread sea salt air while days and months become interchangable. if i can't keep tabs anymore by seasons or semesters, i'll default to lines in my face and the trips that accumulate. this land is so voluptuous and beautiful, but i need anchors.

yesterday i went to the ocean and hiked treeless hills. two enormous black birds waited until i was ten feet away before flying away.

No self obsessed apology (requested, or through the granting of forgiveness) can achieve sincerity unless the offending event is revisited and consencrated under a new understanding. The original event has to be reenacted as if both were originally at fault, and without rewriting its history. That takes a certain level of intimacy. I'm not sure what happens when that intimacy is broken, or never existed, or if the two people who hurt each other are destined to become strangers.

Valéry provides my favorite definition of forgiveness:

To forgive. One is unable to. When someone has done us harm, reactions are set up. The desire for vengance is the desire for balance. To accept the lack of balance. To see therein the essential lack of balance.

It is my favorite because I have manically desired forgiveness and it was not given to me; I took comfort in knowing it could not be granted. But I don't think it is entirely true. Québec, perhaps, provides another definition: je me souviens.

what are indie roots?

We took off our shoes before entering our hotel room's tatami mat. Robes were provided on a small stand in the corner. Futons were in the closet. On top of the TV was a large advertisement for pay-per-view porn.