both, and, oscilatio

halfway through the year.

and such a strange year, so far.

on Independence Day this weekend, we're gonna stay home. I don't think I'll make a cake but you never know when or if a cake-baking mood will strike. (the cake pictured is from two or three years back, I think.)

what we are planning on doing is watching the on-demand film release of Hamilton at least once. very excited for that.

it's the middle of the year. halfway. for another six weeks, I'm inbetween official full-time tenure-track jobs. I'm biding my time to see what this pandemic is really going to do to the university's plans for fall semester.

from the middle of Arizona, these precious summer days are ticking along, all of them similarly sunny and breezy and grand.

Richard Lanham (one-time academic idol of mine) writes in Economics of Attention about the concept of oscilatio. it's the way we can look at something and through that thing in turns. like the screen of your phone or laptop or television. if there are cracks and smudges on the glass, you can look at them--consider the glass and its material conditions on their own. or you can train your eyes to ignore the cracks as much as possible and look through them to whatever the light behind the screen is showing.

it's been a little too long since I read Lanham's book, so I remember the concept itself much more than I remember why it's so rhetorically important. the concept itself is so interesting though.

oscilatio reminds me of something I read even longer ago from C. S. Lewis, about what it's like to look at a beam of light vs. looking along it to see the things it touches. in his metaphor, standing in the light and seeing through that light is more valuable than standing outside the light and watching dustmites dance within the beam.

that depends, I imagine. there is beauty in both vantage points. dustmites are a simpler beauty than a garden landscape, and the cracked screen itself doesn't tell you as much as all the news and social media you can read through the screen. maybe all it tells you is that it's time to save up for a new phone.

it might be impossible to look at and through something at the same time. but that still doesn't mean you have to choose only one or the other forever.

oscilatio means the skill of shifting positions. recognizing the difference. having it both ways depending on what you're after.

right now it's halfway through the year. and sometimes it's good to take out your calendar and look at this set of moments from above. June gone, July unfurling in similar languor. six weeks left til I go back to work. other times, it's better to look through it or along it. let it engulf us like all this steady sunshine. what can the days and their cycles show me? time with myself, my love, my two silly pugs. time with books and crafts and food and creativity.

one of my flaws is a tendency to look at everything--time especially--as a scarcity. there's only so much of anything, and the everything I want to cram into my life is a glacier of potential that completely dwarfs the handful of moments I can hold in my brain at once. but that's only one way of looking at it. in another sense, time is a constant. even if I can't cram the everything into it, I still have plenty. life is a brilliant candy store of possibility. I want and need to stop focusing so much on the what ifs and might have beens.

this is the gorgeous, uncertain middle of the year. there is light and dark. screens and shadows and stories to look at and to look through. so it goes.

and here are a few other things that I am in the middle of right now--

- replaying Horizon Zero Dawn. it's one of the first videogames I've ever touched that feels like more than a game somehow--it's easier in this shiny, open-world design to get lost in exploration, combat, questing, and so on. I like it. the sequel looks very neat, too.

- reading the old science fiction novel Dune. I'm not sure what made me want to read it after having heard vague praise of it for so long. it's good though. very engaging and well-constructed.

- editing various projects on the side. some computer graphics analytics, some organizational leadership stuff, some orthodontics, some social work. editing is almost always fun.

- working thoughtfully through this workbook, slowly. it's not easy, and not enough, but it is important stuff. it feels important for me and for the world. it also led me to the author's podcast: Good Ancestor, which is quite lovely stuff.