13 Comments

I set your reading running while washing dishes, but soon stopped washing the dishes, and paced the room drinking whiskey instead. This is the first thing to speak into certain griefs I didnt think there were words for. Thanks bud.

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Thanks for both of these tellings, David and Peter. Nice to "meet" here, Peter.

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Your pacing of the room and drinking whiskey, your noting of it, led me drunk-willing and curious. I only became more drunk. I only became more willing. I have rolled in the words first, I will take them listening next. To your left dishes I raise a cheer: let the bubbles go flat, let the silence of the unfinished tell us something about tears.

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Jul 16Liked by Andrew

Reading this; I feel like I’m sitting Shiva. Have you read the novel “Laurus” by Eugene Vodolazkin?

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Halflit and company. Yeah. I haven't read that. What's its like?

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“What’s it like?” Wow, I’m really struggling to answer this. It’s like a universe. Here is a review that I thought was good.

https://veritasjournal.org/2023/01/27/laurus-sacramentality-and-enchantment/

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Jul 17Liked by Andrew

There was a sense I got when reading your essay that I also got when reading Laurus. That’s what provoked the recommendation. As if you and the main character were somehow in the same place.

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I've read this twice and listened once and I must admit I made a dozen wrong turns at every go. Probably as much my own cowardice as anything else. But this part here speaks to my sentimental streak: "I wish this place... might for the foreseeable future be a spread of fragments unto Siddur, a poetics dreaming toward some gatherable We at world’s end hanging on the Word of a Bogdown Messiah given over, in the Night coming on, to the Bees, to tailslap and antler. To the Just. "

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Yeah...that is leaving spot for whatever kicks up next here. same streak here. If you feel like telling me a bit more, here or elsehwere about wrong turns, maybe I can tinker with the map.

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That was the one I was gonna echo back, too -- that moved me so much. The whole thing, yes, but it all came down to this.

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I want to add that it' not (just) the hopeful "we" that moves me here but the fresh and genuine ground of images; this mythopoetic mash up feels very close to whatever that New (but not new) Story, the one everyone likes to say we need, Illich included, is supposed to feel like...

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With you.

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Jul 17Liked by Andrew

This often happens to me when I read Andrew’s words. The experience becomes a humbling. Andrew is like a mirror and oftentimes I’m confronted with my own ugly image.

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