1/3/16
i'm thankful that d likes the air plants that i got her for christmas. i'm thankful that air plants can remove nutrients and moisture from dust, which feels poetic. i'm thankful that the oyster mushrooms she is growing in a cardboard box in the kitchen are growing so fast. i'm thankful to check in with them over the course of the day and see the changes in their size and shape. i'm thankful for how this reminds me of the ferns that i am charged with watering at the office. i'm thankful for how when i forget to water the ferns for too long, i can tell because of how droopy their leaves get. i'm thankful for the fern across from my desk, on top of the office mini-fridge, which gets particularly droopy and so is my coal mine canary, but which, if i water it well in a morning when i notice its droopiness, will spring back up by the end of the day, refreshed. i'm thankful to hope that it and the other ferns have not died over christmas vacation, which is probably the longest they have gone without me watering them since i started this job. i'm thankful for the line in nymphomaniac about how trees may not be as obviously beautiful in the winter, naked without their leaves, but that winter is the best time to examine them because it is then that you can see the soul of the trees. i'm thankful for the idea, advanced by christian slater's character, that everyone has one particular tree which matches their soul. i'm thankful for the shot, near the end of volume 2, where charlotte gainsbourg's character finds her soul tree twisting out of a rocky outcropping at the cliff edge of an alpine forest.
i'm thankful for the concept in that film of what it means to "demand more from a sunset" than the average person and how it intertwines in my mind with a parable i recently heard in another film, related by the ginger baker about jack bruce's bass playing and his sense of time. i'm thankful for his argument, whether it's true or not, that jack bruce is the kind of person who wakes up early and goes out to see the sunrise, sees the sun come halfway above the horizon, and then turns around and goes home satisfied to tell everyone that he's seen a sunrise. i'm thankful for the ecstatic grainy archival footage of ginger playing drum solos in his heyday, his eyes closed to take in some kind of sunrise.
i'm thankful for the occasional chirp of a bird outside the house. i'm thankful because these chirps remind me pleasantly of how annoyed i got at the constant noise floor of the crickets and cicadas in the summer and early autumn. i'm thankful for the peace of the winter, even if that's a reflection of death and disappearance. i'm thankful to look out the window and see a skin of frost on the grass in the yard. i'm thankful that i finally went down into the basement to change our furnace filters, a task i have been putting off since the beginning of vacation. i'm thankful that there were no wild animals down in the basement and that though i had to push through dense nets of cobwebs, i didn't get bit by any spiders. i'm thankful changing the furnace filters was a simple process and i regret putting it off for so long and letting the task take up space in my brain.
i'm thankful for the knausgaard article about brain surgery. i'm thankful for the structure and the returns and variations he plays, for his admission of his false nostalgia for life in the communist era (something i have a tendency towards also), for his cartographic descriptions of seeing the surface of the brain, and for his somewhat catty impressions of a famous surgeon's personality. i'm thankful that the feeling lodged in my body after reading the piece reminds me more than anything of how i feel after reading a john mcphee profile, even though their working methods and subject positions and everything are so opposed. i'm thankful for this passage:"i had looked into a room, unlike any other, and when i lifted my gaze, that room was inside hasanaj’s brain, who lay staring straight ahead under the drape in the larger room, filled with doctors and nurses and machines and equipment, and beyond that room there was an even larger room, warm and dusty and made of asphalt and concrete, beneath a chain of green mountains and a blue sky. all those rooms were gathered in my own brain, which looked exactly like hasanaj’s, a wet, gleaming, walnutlike lump, composed of 100 billion brain cells so tiny and so myriad they could only be compared to the stars of a galaxy. and yet what they formed was flesh, and the processes they harbored were simple and primitive, regulated by various chemical substances and powered by electricity. how could it contain these images of the world? how could thoughts arise within this hunk of flesh?"
i'm thankful for this vox explainer about why the passage of time seems to accelerate as we get older. i'm thankful for the various theories that are advanced in the article, including the idea that time seems to move faster for adults than for children because adults are busier than children. i'm thankful for this illustrative quotation from william james: "each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly notice at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection, and the years grow hollow and collapse." i'm thankful for the hopeful note the end of the explainer strikes, that perhaps breaking routines and learning new things is one way to lay sandbags against the erosion of time. i'm thankful to think that perhaps another weapon against this acceleration is to find ways to focus more deeply on the present as you experience it, to use your attention as a brake to slow motion. i'm thankful for the gentle click of the keys as i type this sentence, for the rumble of the furnace down in the basement pumping warm air up through the vents into the living room, for the occasional chirp of a bird outside the house.