the godforsaken blog is not forgotten

Try again.

I was in a different place last year. It was a time when I felt I had to talk about the Sinophone women poets who were influential on the way I was thinking. It was necessary work, deep work, even, as I put them in conversation with Balthasar. I even had a whole set of podcast episodes with my friend, poet Nicole Ann Law, on Diana Fu and Pope Francis.

I’m in a different place now. Over the last year — and indeed, in the hiatus of my reading of Balthasar — I feel like I’ve grown as a scholar. Maybe it’s because I’ve also been watching Doctor Who while reading theoretical works like Amia Srinavasan’s The Right to Sex. Perhaps it is because I’ve moved offices too and uncovered so many books and things I want to be part of my reading diet.

In any case, I’ve long felt that Balthasar is an integrative thinker that I like to think with, even though he is most certainly problematic. What I like about what he and Speyr do is that they stay close to what they know to be a ‘godforsaken’ world, much the same way that Diana Fu meditates on the way that ‘real godforsaken rain had not fallen in years’ in California.

And so, my blogging will shift. Instead of trying to find things to put Balthasar in dialogue with, maybe this will become a reading blog, a way of quilting together what I’ve read over the day with Balthasar as a thinking partner — albeit a problematic one, as I’ve said (I really can’t stand him on gender, really). Some of it will be scholarly, others more fun, and definitely still more with many problems. The trick is to begin. ‘Beginning,’ Balthasar opens Seeing the Form, ‘is a problem not only for the thinking person, the philosopher, a problem that remains with him and determines all his subsequent steps; the beginning is also a primal decision which includes all later ones for the person whose life is based on response and decision.’

I am no philosopher. But I am a geographer, which means that most of what I do is still to read and write as a person. Beginning is hard. Edward Said knew. His first book after making full professor was called Beginnings. Maybe I want to read that with Balthasar.

Let’s begin again.