She ponders here the personality of trees and their intimacy with the human world of suffering and death. 

Deborah Lutz

This Dark Night

 Her yearning nature was constitutional. Something vital seemed unreachable for her, as if she were trapped and meaning happened on the other side of a wall. Occasionally she had access to what she desired, and then existential delight flooded her. For the most part, though, she looked for more and more—whatever she had, it wasn't enough. From this seam of insatiability (or dispossession) she mined the ore of her art.

Deborah Lutz

This Dark Night, Emily Brontë, A Life

Can the landscape hold on to absence? 

Deborah Lutz 

This Dark Night

 The worry is that we might be preaching a kind of acquiescence and complacency by asking people to treat a man-made condition as an ontological condition of existence. But the fact that we are doomed to be anxious in an existential sense should lead us to demand that our material conditions not aggravate the basic anxieties that we already have. This calls for an active engagement with the world. A creature that is bound to be anxious as a condition of its existence should be especially interested in ordering a world that does not make it more anxious than it needs to be.

-Samir Chopra

I might not need to read the book, but I might.

 We will see the next time if there's a nest behind the dissolving head.

 The process of learning to live with anxiety begins with accepting that it is going to be ever-present. I must no longer have a relationship of success or failure with respect to its removal and I also need to fundamentally change how I view it. For instance, I have to stop thinking of anxiety as inherently undesirable. Moreover, I can also learn to navigate certain triggers that exacerbate my anxiety. And this can be quite valuable because facing our anxiety can often lead to greater self-knowledge. When you feel anxious, try not to immediately push it away. As Paul Tillich says, one of the best things we can do with anxiety is to think about it and make it into a fear, i.e. give it a concrete object.

-Samir Chopra

I'm going to cut back on sugar.

For Buddha, there are certain failures of knowledge, particularly our failure to realize certain existential truths, that lead to our suffering, such as the fact that the world is eternally changing or that everything in the world is dependent upon everything else.
-Samir Chopra

 Existential anxiety is the constitutive condition of a creature that has certain conditions attached to its existence. In the case of human beings, we are creatures who know that time is running out. We want to know what lies in the future but we cannot, nor can we hope to change the future. And this makes us very anxious. All of us suffer from basic existential anxiety. But since each of us is unique, with particular life histories and material conditions, the anxiety that we suffer from is also distinctive and unique.

-Samir Chopra

Also we may conflate existential anxiety with a narrative based on the past.

Some trees in the graveyard that were marked for death with the green circle fell in the storm. I woke up thinking about anxiety and an interview, On Anxiety, appeared in The Philosopher.

We can begin by distinguishing anxiety from fear. Fear is said to have a concrete object, while anxiety does not. Anxiety is a sort of formless, anticipatory fear. There are several kinds of anxiety. The first kind, existential anxiety, arises from our existential conditions. The second is a basement-dwelling, ever-present anxiety, which is the fear of death. And the third kind, found in Freudian psychoanalysis, is the fear of the loss of love.

-Samir Chopra

We may be a little anxious about a tree falling on the gravestone we placed, will place. But the tree probably just feels it's time.

 i hope we will watch sentimental value today. it's raining. i'm glad the power is back on and we went to the graveyard yesterday. when i say i want to quell my anxiety i mean in the sense of calm and quiet, to pacify, to make peace with it.

 i need to quell my anxiety. i've always been anxious as long as i can remember. i seem to chart the beginning to kindergarten when i was four, but it must have begun before, when i was born? or before? i may have been born with it. i used to quell it by reading into the night under covers with a flashlight so i wouldn't wake my brother in the twin bed next to me. but reading wasn't enough to quell my anxiety, it only works in books and the penumbra of books. alcoholic spirits didn't work, they only made my anxiety muted and abyssal, anxiously numb.

 Emily Brontë had nervous depression she called hypochondria or melancholy. She called her self a stalking ghost.

 We, we. Locked. It's such a relief to have our toilet again. I had to go twice down 15 flights to poop in a hollow mulberry stump in the woods.

 

 

 typo gravestone.

 I heard we were the last group to get our power back. It took minutes. I hope nobody died.

 i dint watch news for three days and maybe i should continue. i tuned in for a minute and they were saying the same things. i did miss coffee though. that coffee substitute is no substitute. maybe i should continue climbing the stairs. i could maybe get used to it.

 We will never get used to this. It's wrong.

 

 The traffic lights were flashing red and then not on at all and no one came to direct traffic and inevitably there was a crash and then the cops came to direct traffic while the wreckage was hauled away and then the lights continued not working and no one came to direct traffic on the corner of the Obamachron. By the way, bring change home, I wonder, what does it mean?

 The power in the Obamachron may never go out. It's a tower of power. 

 Torch Song is a mystery. They wrap her in plastic and unwrap her, then burnish her with a blowtorch, then paint her patina, and when the storm comes wrap her in plastic again. The statue of liberty got the blues.

I remember I was sitting in the window watching an ambulance and a stretcher and the ambulance leaving and I never saw the stretcher come back out. Like that noose that appeared and disappeared. Minutes later the storm came like biblical like end times.

 The time from Wednesday afternoon, when the first storm hit, to Saturday morning when the power came back, seems like another time, halted, exhaustive. Everything stops and you have to figure out what to do with yourself. And think how other people have to live all the time. Oh my god life can be so hard. We take everything we have for granted. We were safe, but no power, no light, no internet, no water, food rotting, no elevator, fifteen flights of stairs, and oh, forget it, I'm too tired. 

 The power's on again but the last 3 days have been exhausting and there's still no water and I feel like crying. Several trees died in our yard and now the Obamachron looms even more ominously, though for scale it also looks smaller than our fallen oak tree. No, I'll never get used to this.

 Hot diggety dog! Lulu and I found White Girls, by Hilton Als, The Witch, by Marie Ndiaye, and Day Care, by Nora Lange. Meanwhile delusional hacks and ridiculous grifters rule the genocidal zionist captured government. I want to bury my head in books.

 Trump has succeeded in globalizing the intifada.

 We're badly led, misled, insanely led, in fact, that's why we have to wake the hell up in a collapsing world.

 I still believe they will not succeed in normalizing genocide throughout the world. 

 What happens in Palestine does not stay in Palestine. Even if we ignore the truth, the change comes home. 

 Tonight I'm gonna show more of how Obama lights up the neighborhood, but I just want to say Pillion is a very good movie, and very surprising. I didn't even know what a pillion is, and the film opened up my mind and let some light in.

 Oh, my common one. Oh, my secret, outlaw heart. Oh, my cat of peace. Oh, my daily cosmic awakening dream. 

 I promise you, not everyone around here is part of the cult of Obama, even if they don't speak.

 Music of the day, Mymerian, by Ben Richter.

 Don't ask Obama about the change he's gonna bring. It will be plain to everyone who sees.

 We saw 15 cop cars race by, sirens wailing, and disappear. Now the park that Obama took as replacement for a playground he took for the Obamchron will be lit up all night, like his replacement of the women's circle garden. This is doom for insects, birds and other wildlife. Will wildlife get used to the Obamachron?

 

 When I'm in the garden and I look up to see the tower, it's as if it simply appeared there overnight, like from outer space, or another dimension, though I've watched it grow from a hole in the ground for the last five years. I wonder if it will always be so ominous. It has an invasive aura of evil. I suppose I'll get used to it, if I live that long.

 A cat is like a secret self you are compelled to pet. A cat appreciates your secret life.