alice-ishbel

[alice-ishbel]

this account is no longer active. but you can follow my “journal” here: 

callmeishbel.tumblr.com

[alice-ishbel]

it’s been a while since i’ve written for myself, so brace yourself for some nonsense. i think of this reading an essay one of my third year students wrote for our seminar (we read didion, plath, morrison). it’s way over the word count but perfect, so i told them to preserve all its million pages. it’s about the inside of psychiatric institutions - about being drawn to or deterred from certain pills by their colour - small and blue, benign pastels, translucent and ineffective - and about not being allowed to wear slippers. about a woman who tried to overdose on her fourteen year old son’s antidepressants. about mad dog (the brand) t-shirts. these are things i don’t know anything about, and i’m captivated. well, no, i know about the mad dog t-shirts. we all used to, once upon a time in south africa, and for some of us, it’s archival knowledge. people are archives.

it makes me think of siri hustvedt’s mirror-synesthesia and becoming other people. we are other people ... that’s what she says in ‘what i loved’.

it’s 11:14 AM on a wednesday morning, and i am not on campus because there are protests again (they come around in october, an unsurprising ritual now). they come with the heavy drought (summer comes again and winter never rains enough and now the water is getting shut off and we haven’t taken a bath for a year now). and they come with fires that demolish the mountains and creep up next to our houses so we pack our cars with all our childhood memories and then, in the morning, unpack them again, wondering why we are all so sentimental and why we even bother. 

i stayed up late last night not writing my dissertation introduction and watching stranger things instead. halloween is supposed to be when the veil between this world and others is thinner than any other time. and i’m here with hair in need of a wash and an oversized faded blue t-shirt from my dad’s university reunion and shorts because summer is coming, tucked up on the couch, eating orange things: toast with marmalade, naartjie juice. orange sugar. because i read and reread plath’s diaries, i know ted hughes tried to lose weight by eating sugar - strawberry jam. is there any sense to that? i burnt the toast (in the centre, on the one side), so i’m eating around the edges.

[alice-ishbel]

My students also must have understood viscerally that I do not regard mental patients as members of another species. Each person has a story, and that story is part of her or his illness. As Hippocrates famously said, “It is more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.” The zeal for diagnosis, represented by the DSM and its desire to isolate one mental illness from another, has created a static model of disease that inevitably collapses in on itself. Symptomology must be a study of dynamic forces—the motion of an illness that cannot be separated from a self or being, a self or being that has a narrative form and that may be described in plural terms.

Siri Hustvedt, “The Writing Self and the Psychiatric Patient” from A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

[alice-ishbel]

As for minute joys: as I was saying: do you realize the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose? I always have, ever since I was a child - there are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous, roll them round jelly-like between thumb and fore finger, and spread them on the under surface of a desk or chair where they will harden into organic crusts. How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood? Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with mucous: in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes. God, what a sexual satisfaction! It is absorbing to look with new sudden eyes on the old worn habits: to see a sudden luxurious and pestilential "snot-green sea," and shiver with the shock of recognition.

sylvia plath’s words on the subject of nose picking? unparalleled.

[alice-ishbel]

“nothing wrong with it, supernatural”

[alice-ishbel]

this morning, i woke up to humid heat, leaned over to turn on the air conditioner, and lay back down for a while, thinking “i’m in new york” over and over again with different images in my mind each time. i was returned to physical awareness by a sudden acknowledgment that the room was cooler, at which point i got up, walked to the fridge, selected a doughnut peach, rinsed it underneath the kitchen tap, opened the sliding door to the balcony, made my way to the wall at its edge, placed by elbows on it and leaned over beneath the shade of a norway maple. i looked into the distance lazily, with morning-blurry eyes, to around where i knew the empire state building should have been, and bit. 

doughnut peaches. a new york delicacy i’ve missed, just like i’ve missed the humid morning air of midsummer, i.e. without really knowing i missed them. i woke up this morning and ate a peach, and now i’m writing from the bryant park public library, where a ridiculously ornate ceiling looms high above me , framing painted pink clouds, and the sheer multitude of books and words pressed between pages, now illuminated in glaring strips of late afternoon sunlight, overwhelms me. i went back to my old university this morning, for the second time since yesterday, where i listened to a banjo busker while trying to keep score of everything that looked and felt the same. then i met a friend for lunch, and she snuck me into the morgan library, and all of a sudden i was in front of thoreau manuscripts and henry james’s favourite paintings and comparing the hastily scrawled, bold strokes of puccini’s handwritten music scores with the patient, identical patterns of schubert’s.

there is something so miraculous about a day in new york city without plans.

[alice-ishbel]

Pommelien Koolen

[alice-ishbel]

journal entry from march: hot, heavy, oppressive heat. the kind that makes breathing an enormous task, shallow and rapid, then the occasional, desperate sigh. lung meniscus. no one was home, mother in bed napping, so I went to the pool in search of air. cheeks flushing, I frightened off a squirrel while stepping out of my shorts, peeling off my old harvard shirt i bought for too much money when i was sixteen and infatuated with the idea of higher education, cut at the bottom to become a crop top. now I wade, ankles first, then knees, and then I’m teetering on my toes, my hips just below the water. I teeter there for ages, resisting, the whole time thinking about how a just-turned-twenty-four body is becoming the testament to my mother’s refrain from my childhood that age would make getting into pools much harder, which I didn’t want to believe, but did believe, with a sadness as heavy as this heat. now, here it is, manifested, my thighs still getting used the water, my nakedness a vulnerability in a giant garden with a meadow behind the fence, stretching to meet a road somewhere in the middle distance. finally, I flatten my feet, dip my hands in, let the water lap at my wrists with little licks. deep breath in in preparation to submerge, but then I breathe out again, my brain having made the decision without my body. try again, the same process. and once more. finally, some courage in my abdomen thrusts me under, and the cold is like winter hands on a warm neck, and I’m up again, and my hair isn’t even properly damp, but I’m used to it now, so I do it again – fast. then I step out with a glide and a splash or two, twist a towel around my hair, step back into the clothes, and, barefoot, make my way across the prickly, dried up grass to the front porch I’ve inhabited all morning.

[alice-ishbel]

today i went out for coffee with my two best friends and we each got a giant slice of cake and it was the best

[alice-ishbel]

thing learned writing a dissertation: it really sucks when you come up with an idea you think is brilliant and unique and then find that exact idea iterated by someone else in a book you found in the library, published in the year of your birth. although you can still include said idea, citing 1993 book author, you also can’t put down as your own. i want validation, but not at the expense of my image tbh ... need all the credibility i can get

[alice-ishbel]

i think the more you learn the more your mind moves, when you see things, along a longer chain of associations, and that makes everything feel richer

[alice-ishbel]

JAPAN. Tokyo. Crossing in the Ginza district. 1996. Harry Gruyaert

[alice-ishbel]

If horror is banalized it is not because we see too many images of it. We do not see too many suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, to many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak. The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of ‘deciphering’ the flow of information about anonymous multitudes. The politics specific to its images consists in teaching us that not just anyone is capable of seeing and speaking.

Jacques Rancière - The Emancipated Spectator (2009 Verso Edition)

[alice-ishbel]

was notified today that sufjan stevens is performing in brooklyn the evening of the day I arrive in new york this july. naturally, I messaged my fellow sufjan fan friend and didn't have to beg him to agree to go with me. now I'm going to see sufjan the night I return to my favourite city in the world! how fortuitous! this is the miraculousness I miss.

[alice-ishbel]

“Using Photoshop, he deciphered the typing on the paper, which is watermarked with an image that might have appeared in a Plath poem – a woman gazing at her own reflection in a pool of water.” 

my dissertation was just reaffirmed, thank goodness.

i fantasize about being the people who make these discoveries. my former TA disinterred one of george oppen’s first papers the year i graduated, misfiled in an ezra pound archive, and i’ve been dreamy about the experience ever since.

[alice-ishbel]

sometimes i wonder if there’s anyone i know who knows this blog exists and knows that i don’t know that they know

[alice-ishbel]

note to self: try harder with your vegetables. (eating and growing)