It's a warm day in Indiana, warm for winter, no snow on the ground and the sun is shining directly into my eyes as I write this. School resumes on the 13th and until then I'll be here working on various writing, reading, and music projects, sleeping in and trying to remember how to cook, and after the New Year going up to the meditation center to do some sitting and some service work. So, I've posted more this year than any year since 2007. Being in school surrounds me with interesting people and ideas, and its rigor keeps me firmly entrenched in habitual content production, whether I like it or not. This is one reason I've written so much. The other is that is that the writing took on an urgency that I've rarely felt before, convinced that I could change the material future directly with words. Over the Fall I continued to indulge this impulse, and my system, rewired over the Spring and Summer, is still grasping for reasons and causes to explain the disconnect between my ideas of what love can accomplish and reality as it played out.

**

My gizmo is probably just tired. To put it another way, while I like to think that all my experience mediating, adademicing, and articulating the minutiae of my feelings has given me a modicum of control over the future, I think what it's really done is helped me write more words, with the end goal of typing a single word that makes everybody's computer explode into a terrific light of happiness. This sent to me recently by a friend, translated from the Kurundogai, a book of Tamil poetry compiled around 2AD:

It was midday in summer. There was some butter on a rock; it was melting in the heat of the sun. There's a person who's supposed to be watching the butter--to make sure it doesn't melt. He's just watching it melt. He can't do anything. He has no legs, no hands, he can't speak, so what on earth can he do? He's just watching the butter melt. Like this, love has spread over my body like a disease.

**

I turned 35 in November, which is significant not because of the number, but because I had never really considered my life beyond the age of 34. I guess I assumed that certain things would happen by this time and that I would naturally be a different person...no need to plan as my future self would take care of that. I assumed that I would have found some kind of stability in my work and romantic life. Neither has happened. On the one hand this could be seen as a failure, where on the other it means that I'm in the bonus.

**

 “He had elbow pasta, and I had shell pasta, and I told him how my shell pasta was better than his elbow pasta, and he was pretty upset about that. He loves elbow pasta. But I disagreed. I think shell pasta is better. I don’t care. I will stand by that. Shell pasta.”

-Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) in response to a reporter's question about an altercation during the game.

**                                                           
 
I finally got a smart phone. I've made an Instagram account and signed up for Twitter. So far I've posted three pictures to Instagram and nothing yet to Twitter. Still not sure about that one. But even better, I finally have a camera that can take real pictures and videos with, like this one:

Thus I move into another diaristic area of media consumption. It seems to be where people are, so I'd like to be there too. Or at the very least, I'd like to be able to capitalize on the three times a week or so that I have the impulse to take a picture, and share it with my three (so far) followers.

**

After dinner on Christmas, all of us still sitting at the table, my aunt pulled out a pack of "wish papers." Thin little tissue papers that you first crinkle up, and then roll into a structure that will stand vertically on a flat surface. In this case, our plates. You then light the paper on fire from the top and as it burns down you make a wish. When the flame reaches the bottom the heat propels what is now ash into the air, and if you can catch the ash as its falling back to earth you get your wish. We did this, first my brother and then my aunt. We made our way around the table (my mom didn't get her first wish but on the second try she got it), including my brother's 18 month old son. He wanted "more" (which he indicated with a hand signal) and so my brother and I both lit one more and made one more wish. The ash rose and fell, and landed in our hands.

The night before I left Lafayette I went to the grocery store to pick up some cat litter. I also got some beer, cat food, a cylinder of oatmeal, and three frozen pizzas. The cashier asked me if I babied my cat, and I said not really, and mumbled something about him sleeping a lot. I really baby mine, she smiled and said as she put my groceries into plastic bags. I put the bags into the cart and reached back to get the cat litter which was still sitting on the conveyor belt. It was heavy, and I quietly grunted as the lady behind me in line stood watching. "That's why I don't have cats," she said to no one in particular. I turned and pushed my cart towards the exit and as I was walking, thinking about that lady, about Indiana, a guy hands me a piece of paper folded into thirds. I said thanks, and continued walking out the doors, through the parking lot to my car.

I figured the piece of paper was some kind of religious message, as the guy seemed a little sheepish giving it to me. In my experience its an unusual event in Indiana to have someone actually put something into your hands. "Indiana nice" as far as I can tell, is a kind of hands off politeness. Opinions are offered but not put upon you. The mysterious and un-articulated discourses of the mid-west. I turned the car on and unfolded the piece of paper. A hundred dollar bill fell out. I looked at it making sure it was real and wondered what the catch was. I read the letter:

I thought, wow. My next thought was about the guy. And then I thought about what I was going to do with the money. I don't consider myself to be someone in need so the question was who I was going to give it to. 

I got home, put away the groceries, and went over to my neighbors to return some dishes and chat. The whole experience made me think, kind of like a performance that demands audience participation. Only in this case instead of an art world impetus, the kind of activist art that I became familiar with living in the uber-political Bay Area, the gesture seemed to come out of a religious impetus. The two oddly similar in their thought and guilt provoking effect. So I talked about it with my neighbors, and because I didn't want to randomly profile "people in need," and couldn't think of any people I knew off the top of my head who needed a hundred dollars more than the next person, they suggested giving it to the food bank located at the end of the street. A little bit the opposite of what the man who handed me the money was doing, putting himself out there. The next morning on my way out of town I gave the money to the lady at the food bank's desk. I told her the story and said, "weird huh?" And she said yeah. And then I got in my car and drove to Wisconsin. The only part about this experience that made me feel "good" was getting rid of the money.

last night i had a dream that i had 3.2 bitcoins

no context. but now the semester is over, or at least the classes are. in about ten days i will be able to say that the semester is really over, two papers, one class to grade, and one set of final evaluations to fill out. my writing students finished their podcasts and they were generally pretty good and most of my OEPP students were certified (to teach courses) so that is also good news. if i worked hard on anything this semester it was teaching. i know that the blog has been quiet lately but well, i've probably said enough to last at least until the new year. and i am so looking forward to the break and getting some rest, maybe going to new york, and getting back to creative work. finishing up a new collection of music and debating how to go about a few different writing projects. applying for some grants and to the TESOL certificate program. that is to say, i got nothing to say, plenty to do, and it's cold as hell not a leaf on a tree the birds have all went south. the river is low and calm and the moon. from the last paragraph of No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

(hi. there is/was a picture of a tree here that I've heard is not visible on some computers. so, i wasn't even trying to post a blank space, but in case that is the case on your computer, the pictures is of a dogwood tree full of fall colors that i took with my phone camera. it's not a pretty picture but it is a pretty tree)

                       

There was a new bird in the tree this morning. It's about twice as big as the little brown ones that hop around and chirp, and instead is darkly colored with thin streaks of white on its back and wings. It puffed out its cheeks and sang a little as I listened. This morning is cold in Indiana, twenty-two degrees as I write. In a half hour I need to get dressed and get on my bike and head to school. Most mornings during the week I'm at the Oral English Proficiency Program working with the same eight students, one at a time, one hour per week, individually on pronunciation and other speaking skills. Even more than teaching writing I enjoy this work, in part because it's one-on-one and more often than not the students are motivated. Not that any of these students, graduate students, can't speak English, as all of them are more than fluent (and quite far advanced in their respective fields), however the purpose of the program and my work with them is to make sure that they are ready to teach undergraduates. If you are lecturing to a hundred people, say a hundred freshman (since tenured professors rarely teach introductory classes) it's more efficient to make sure the instructor is an effective teacher than it is to make sure that the students are skilled learners. In terms of the work itself, there is a fine line between helping someone become a better communicator and telling someone how to speak and behave, the former approach as a more collaborative process and the latter as a top down imposition that at the end of the day, is less likely to help a person speak well.

Thus the job is one part tutor, communicating the nuances of why English sounds like it does, working with students to develop their ears, bringing attention to lingering grammar issues, intonation, etc; one part therapist working to build trust, since tinkering with the way another speaks can  quickly turn into an counter-productive self-consciousness; and one part detective, working with a student, particularly students who have had to take the course more than once, trying to figure out exactly what little idiosyncratic hitches are holding them back. By this I mean it is rare that a person is not able to make particular sounds given proper instruction and intensive practice, however there is so much more to the choice and voice of how we sound than a mechanical knowledge of where to put our tongue or which word to stress. 

Yesterday I was speaking with one of these students about speaking English in Korea. She talked about the perception that if your English is "native like" (I put this in quotes because the term "native" indicates that there is such a thing when it comes to language acquisition. For example English is spoken fluently in many countries in the world, such as India and Jamaica, however the variety of English is radically different than the variety spoken in the United States. So as, in the field of World Englishes using the term "native" is to suggest that one variety of English is more authentic than another.) and she went on to say that to use the American variety of English is to indicate that you have had excessive schooling and opportunity and in short, is interpreted as a kind of showing off. So as, to speak like an American is actually not a desirable quality at times. We wondered together how her preferences to be, and be seen at any given time were shaping the words coming out of her mouth.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend from Japan over the summer. We were talking about identity in other languages and she told me that she was suspicious of  people, born and raised in Japan, who spoke English, like somebody who was born and raised in the United States. She couldn't relate, and saw it as the person casting off their "home" (not her word, but it's the one I'm going to use) identity in order to fit in. In fact, she continued, there were certain words and ways that she kept distinct from the American variety because she enjoyed her status as an outsider. We talked about that. We talked about if there was a difference between the status of men and women in this regard, that maybe a Japanese woman can enjoy a higher status in the United States because she is Japanese but a Japanese man may not. Anyway, it was interesting. My point is not so much about Korea or Japan or the United States, but that there are certain aspects of our identities that sometimes keep us from getting with whatever program certain interest groups are encouraging us to get with. And I admit, the word identity is awfully ambiguous but it will have to be a place holder for the time being. Or a more English centric example, that just because one was born and raised in Boston doesn't mean that a person necessarily speaks with a thick New England accent. Studies (not cited here) have shown that the voices we adopt and choose to speak with are more in relation to who we relate to and model ourselves after than our geographic location.

My interest in this idea relates to the OEPP, discovering these little social context issues that solidify our preferences, so that I might better understand and help my students develop competencies on level with being effective teaching assistants (nice huh? can you tell that I've been doing some serious graduate school writing lately?), but my interest in the relationship of identity to learning also relates to the writing classroom. Because reading and writing is something we all know how to do and something that we've been doing our entire lives, to teach writing is to come against these solidified identifies (that manifest as "voice") that may or may not be helpful to learning other varieties of writing. Voices want more of themselves. Others to talk to and be heard by and listen, always projecting in some direction.

Today is my birthday. I am 35 years old.

To briefly interrupt this on-going discourse on decision making, 3 Scenes from Indiana:

1) The corner of Perrin Avenue and Main Street that my porch overlooks has recently developed a puddle. I noticed it a couple weeks ago and thought it was strange that water was pooling on a single square of sidewalk. I rode my bike around it and went about my business. Last Wednesday I noticed from the porch that some utility people had painted some lines on the street around an area near the sidewalk, blue lines that I suspect map where the water mains are located beneath the pavement. On Thursday there were even more lines, and a few words: OK, OK, OK, OK. On Friday morning, standing with a cup of hot tea I saw a water utility truck parked across the street and I looked at the man at the wheel and he looked back at me. When I came home that evening I found that they had dug up a little patch of street and refilled it with black top. Now there is a crack extending from the patch of blacktop to the curb, and it oozes water constantly. Clean and clear water, and in the street light I can see ripples, quarter inch waves covering this small patch of street.

2)

Little plane! You move
so slow it seems like you might
fall out of the sky.

3) Since July of this Summer, I've been hiking the same stretch of trail on a semi-regular basis. For a while it was hot and full of bug noise. By late August the weeds growing on the East side of the river all of a sudden shot up ten feet high. During the last month I've been looking for signs of Fall and until this weekend hadn't seen much. Tracking progress gradually, over the rusty bridge that crosses the Wabash, though the canopied valley where Burnett's Creek flattens, crossing the creek on the mix of concrete and rock stepping stones, passing under the highway, and climbing the little ridges on my way to the trail's end. I usually bring a snack and book and a notebook, and sometimes I bring some music, and sometimes I bring a friend. The leaves have begun to drop from the highest trees and but most of what I saw was still green. I noticed that the chest high foliage that makes the canopied valley so pleasant was beginning to droop, and as I was walking imagined them gone. I imagined mud, and rain, and eventually imagined snow. I imagined that I would continue walking this patch of trail, and I imagined changing too.

There have been two times where I have had a real decision to make. Of course I make decisions constantly, hundreds, maybe thousands a day. Little ones about when to get up, what to wear, what to make for breakfast, to run a red light on my bike or slow down and stop. Or even smaller, what word to use when I write, what to say to a student who hasn't been to the last couple of classes, when to turn over in bed, or in what order I eat an assemblage of lunch items. Some of these are so small I wonder if they can considered choices or inevitabilities, habits and reflexes of deeply ingrained preferences, petting my cat absentmindedly as I read an article for class or staying in the hot shower for an extra minute or two. Most of the moderate size choices, when to head up to Wisconsin to visit family or replacing my computer's hard drive, seem like choices that have already been made, opportunities that present themselves as one way trips to a now or a never without too much consideration of an alternative. Or even bigger choices, the decision to come back to grad school for example, or move back to Oakland from an unaffordable San Francisco, presenting themselves as logical next steps in the social and economic momentum of the moment.

But there are two decisions I have made that I have always wondered about. The first was when I was living in Seattle, about a year out of college, working at the accounts and distribution office of a small publisher named The Laughing Elephant and doing an intense but satisfying long distance thing with Amy. My father had been diagnosed with his dementia a couple years previous, and every Sunday since then I had made it a point to call and try to have a conversation with him in his increasingly fractured English. My motivation to call was tied to a deeper motivation to do the right thing, to "do unto others," to be a good kid, as much as it was a desire to engage with my dad or share the details of the life I was living. Susan, his wife at that time, offered praise, that my dad really appreciated the attention, and Amy and Joel and others commended me for my efforts (these were the days before ubiquitous cell phones, making a phone call in a house full of people more of a public event). Feeling bored with my job, and wanting to devote more time to writing, I decided to leave Seattle and move out to the farm to help Susan take care of my dad. It seemed like his mind was going fast, and my twenty-two year still developing adult self still didn't really know much about him. I figured that if I was going to I had to do it before he slipped further down hill.

About three weeks before I left, and a week before I was going to give The Laughing Elephant my two weeks notice, my boss offered me a position managing some of the accounts in addition to my shipping and filling duties. It was a family business, a small publisher that specialized in "gift books" (books that are given for occasions like weddings, or new borns) and atypical greeting cards. There were five of us who worked at the business office: Skip, Brady, Susan, Binder, and me. They were all implants to Seattle via San Diego, proto-punks who settled into jobs as they got older. A group of friends ranging in age from their early thirties to their early forties. They were cool and smart and funny, and I looked up to them. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and when Binder offered me the job I had to say no, and explain the plan. When word got out, Skip asked me if I was close to my dad, and I had to say no, not really. And I could tell by the expression on his face that he thought it strange I would leave Seattle to go back to Wisconsin. Part of me at that time thought it was strange too, not entirely comfortable with the story I had been selling: the good son doing the right thing. It was also for selfish reasons, I thought to myself, so that I wouldn't have to get up and go to work, to have more time to write, and even more so, to gain the experience my father's illness as a subject to write about. In every story that I ever told about being back on the farm I could claim righteous motivation. 

I could not admit to myself at that time (or maybe even in the present) that it was much more comfortable to be the sweet boy I saw on the TV of my mind than to forge a new and uncertain way forward. The thing is, I was never asked to help take care of my father. There was never a real need for me to be there. Susan had been watching after him, and I was the one who suggested coming out there. Some of my other friends were confused about what I was doing; not entirely buying the caretaker angle or seeing the value of gathering poetic experience. Regardless, I spent three months with him, futzing around the farm and Mineral Point, doing some writing and making sure he didn't light anything on fire or kill himself. And then Susan, more or less, asked me to leave and I went back to Seattle, depressed and broke, but proudly in possession of having done "the right thing." Unfortunately the right thing didn't help me find a job when I got back. I broke up with Amy and started dating T. T went back to Japan and I tried to date Amy again, and then there was nobody. I found work making minimum wage as a business card delivery person and lived in a cruddy little studio apartment in an old drafty building. etc. etc. It was a confusing time. 

But I have always wondered what would have happened if I had taken the promotion instead of leaving Seattle. Maybe I would have gone into business, or at least I would have learned the ins and outs of managing accounts and getting book sellers to pay up. Maybe I never would have moved to Portland or gone to poetry school. Maybe I wouldn't have broken up with Amy and we would have followed through on our plan to move in together. One never knows. Or maybe that decision became a kind of regret because I had so much time, underemployed and relatively isolated, to think about what went wrong. Maybe its value as an event arises not intrinsically, a two paths diverging in the woods kind of thing, but maybe its a product of the kinds of attention I gave it sitting alone in my green chair, and have given it, in retrospect, through the silent analysis of fossilized sentiments. As if anything could have turned out other than the way it is. It's also possible that no matter what I would have found something to regret about that time. And I know, it's unfashionable to talk about these things, to dwell in the past. Instead we should concentrate on the present, etc. etc. But goddamn, this is just one of those things I've always thought about but never articulated. Thinking about decisions.

Last night I went to dinner with a friend. He was telling me about a class that he was thinking of dropping, about the difficulty he was having with the material and how much time it took away from his other classes. Plus he was running, at present, a high C, and didn't want that kind of mark on his transcript. He told me about this ongoing debate he was having with himself, where on the one hand it was a class that he should take and besides, at this point in the semester he was already half way through. On the other, he could take it later, another semester where he had more time to devote to learning its concepts and performing well on the tests. After he finished speaking he asked me what I thought, and I told him that it seemed like he wanted to drop it. He asked what gave me that impression, and I said that it just seemed like he did from the way he was speaking. Who am I to tell another person what they are thinking or feeling? But that was the impression I got, and I reported my impression. 

There's a concept in Eastern philosophy that has some analogs in Western thought and philosophy about the three "minds" that help us make decisions. The first is our thinking mind, the mind that reasons and analyzes. It makes lists of pros and cons, listens to or disregards advice, it plans birthday parties and balances budgets. It works hard to find words to explain, usually in the past tense, why we do what we do. The second is our heart mind, or moral mind, the place that tells us an act is good or bad. It is the voice of should or should not. It's not so much reason as it is a disembodied presence that affirms or gives us pause. I should prepare for class and I should clean my cat's litter box. I should not stay up all night watching Breaking Bad and sleep in tomorrow. It is love in a universal sense, love for others including oneself. In a sense it is our social mind. The third mind is our body mind. It thinks in terms of feeling, of hunger or sleepiness, or fear or desire. It tells us we are uncomfortable or warm, that we need to move somewhere else, or are happy where we are. It dances, or feels terrible when everybody else around it is dancing, and it is not.

All three work in tandem, and people tend to rely on one more than the other. There are analogs in Freud's concepts of the ego, super-ego, and the Id (respectively, in the order presented above); in the concepts of logos, pathos, ethos in rhetoric; and more recently in neuroscience, where a group of scientists diagrammed every single synapse and neuron in the brains of round worms (which are much simpler, but considered to be a reliable analog for the human brain) to discover that there are three systems of synapses constantly interacting, rewriting, and changing each other i.e. three minds. Further, all three are located in different places: the head, the chest, and the pelvis. In a more popular application, when people say to "follow your heart" it might be more accurate to say, like G.W. Bush, to follow your gut, or what feels right. But what feels right is complicated, like the round worm's mind, by the other two minds, and it's easy to get confused as to "who" to listen to, all three changing and influencing each other.

Cultures too, have preferences. We could say that certain parts of the United States and most of "The West", at least historically, has been a logo-centric / ego-centric / thinking-centric culture, governed by laws derived from reasons. A country like Iran, where the laws come from Islam (Sharia law) could be said to be governed by morality, or the heart. I think it's very difficult for one mind to understand the other, simply because other minds function through an entirely different "language," though language isn't the right word. How do we compare feeling bored with what the word "bored" signifies? How do we compare what's "right" in social situations with what's "right" in logic (linguistics is a kind of attempt to solve this problem)? Not that it's not worth trying to find the answer to these questions, and the humanities have made their living mashing different modes against each other in a logo-centric framework.

But back to my friend's dilemma. We talked about all this because he said that he was told to "follow his heart" but didn't know which part of him was his heart talking. It's a good question. How do we know and is it even possible to separate these minds? In my opinion, when we can somehow come to a place where all three centers of thought align, we feel good about our choices. (Though this idea too could be seen as a cultural construct rather than a universal principal. In Japanese culture for example, from what I've been told and from what I've experienced, one's ability to hold these contradictory minds together is seen as desirable and as a sign of strength.) Of course, this rarely happens in important matters. Sometimes we run out of time, and are forced to make decisions. Sometimes we make a decision and come to feel good about it afterwards. Sometimes we regret decisions we made. Sometimes we just know, and sometimes we never do. Sometimes we are sitting on a ferry, coming back from a long day, watching the sun set and the other boats find their way home. Sometimes we are so caught up in the process we don't realize a decision has already been made. Today I saw my friend, and he decided to drop the class. He seemed to be happy with his decision.

 

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

 

                                                 -Walt Whitman

Fall. The leaves are turning and last night it was cold. The old radiators in the apartment have kept Jinx and I warm and right now as I write the living room window is open. It rained this morning but the skies are supposed to clear by this afternoon, maybe by the time I get done writing this. This morning I got up relatively early for a Saturday, put some clothes on, shuffled through the wet leaves and got some breakfast at a diner down the street. Read the paper. On the way back I stopped by the farmer's market to pick up some apples and some cider, and came home and cleaned up the kitchen. Last night Corey and Eric came over to play music and we did, and drank some beer and later played Sheep's Head, a complicated trump based card game late into the night. 

School has been incredibly busy but this weekend is the first weekend for about a month that I don't have a crushing amount of work to get done by Monday. Of course I could spend the entire weekend working and still not be done with everything I have to do, but I can put some of these things off. The sun is starting to peak through the clouds as I write. I finished a paper last weekend for writing assessment, trying to answer the question of what can't be assessed in writing, or in other words, cataloging some of the unsaid expectations we have for our students that are difficult to justify to the administrators who determine our budgets. Things like "critical self-reflection" or "creativity" or "empathy." As it's said in the world of writing assessement, what doesn't get assessed disappears from curriculum, or more broadly, if you are one of those who believes that young people can't write, look no further than programs like Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's current Race to the Top initiative and their focus on testing the surface features of writing (grammar, structure) for an explanation.

This coming week I'm writing a proposal for my first ever conference, a paper about Purdue and Mitch Daniels and what is being said and done here at Purdue, on the front lines of Higher Education Reform. I'm excited to get started working on it. Speaking of Daniels, he came to the Writing Assessment class on Monday which was kind of amazing. Props to Daniels for meeting with us, though much of what he had to say about writing assessment and assessing the humanities in general was predictably the polar opposite of what much of the literature about effective and meaningful writing assessment has said. Time and time again, people like Daniels make it clear that the interests of those at the top are not the same interests of those who keep their institutions running. While there is much in theoretical rhetoric and Second Language Studies that are interesting to me, political issues like these are still the only thing that can compete with my creative interests.

Everything else, Modern Rhetoric, teaching and tutoring at the Oral English Proficiency Program are going well for the most part. Busy busy, but progress is being made on all fronts. Personally, I am finally crawling out of the depressive/anxious hole that I had been in since August, and finally starting to reinvest, and relocate a sense of self independent of she who will not be named. Finally starting to realistically imagine a way forward. There are trade offs from this perspective, where on the one hand, getting away from a desperate need to confess and explain and communicate with the ether of her possibility impacts my output in terms of poetry like objects, and it feels like I am writing into a void. No taters. No sop. However how I had been oriented, entirely towards her, wasn't healthy. Now that I am shifting out of crisis mode the impulse lessens and the river slows. I haven't reached its banks quite yet, but at least my feet are touching bottom. Of course I still miss her, still can't look at the moon without thinking of her, and still hope, but now I'm also hoping for other things as well. And I could dwell on this, tell a few stories, but I have work to get on with. I'm going to close the window, pour a cup of cider and get started.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

                                         -James Wright

Today was a good day because I finally discovered how to get a better signal from the small radio that I keep in the kitchen: hang it from a cabinet knob, twist the antennae back inside the cupboard, and let the wooden door hold the rig in place. In the mornings, and when I come back from work I like to turn it on, though before, I could barely hear anything the news people were saying because of the heavy AM static. If I held it in my hand, the static would stop, but when I let it go, it would come back. My body must be conducting radio signals. Something about the air, my blood, the saliva in my mouth, nervous system, picking up signals from wherever signals come from. 

When I first got this radio and set it in my kitchen, I was just happy to have a radio. Over time I became dissatisfied with the signal and stopped turning it on. I think I also stopped spending as much time in my kitchen. Occasionally I would listen to some very earnest Christian radio because at least I could get a clear signal. One night on the Christian station they played a public service announcement about how they found pieces of an old boat high up in a mountain, evidence of Noah's Ark, and went on to say that the world actually wasn't that old. Or at least not as old as the scientists say it is. They might be right about a few things, those Christians on the radio, but I'd like to hear them explain dinosaur bones. 

For awhile I was thinking of getting an internet radio for the kitchen, something better than the radio that I have, one where I could listen to NPR back in the Bay where they play the talk news shows all day long. Forum with Michael Krasny from nine to eleven, and Fresh Air would come on at two. But I didn't. Never even looked up internet radios on the internet. I don't even know if they exist. But I also think that eventually, I believed one day the signal would change. Hoping a little, but doing what I could: picking it up, moving it around, shaking it, attaching wires to it, and turning that little black dial trying to get everything lined up just right. Maybe this all seems like wasted effort, but I'm satisfied with the way things have worked out.

2 poems by Lorine Niedecker, as found in Collected Works,

Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
            my clarity
with me.

 *

                                     To my small
                                     electric pump
To sense
and sound
this world

look to
your snifter
valve

take oil
and hum

Hi. It's Thursday evening. Today it rained heavily around one o'clock, right as I was getting on my bike to ride back from the pool to a workshop about teaching pod casts. My pants got soaked in the front and when I walked down the hallway my comrades said either "awww" and frowned, or laughed. My shoes were also untied,which probably didn't help the cause of dignity. This weekend is the Fall Break, which means two days off, Monday and Tuesday. The break is not going to be much of a break as I have eight things that I need to work on. Eight. I counted them. I won't list them off here, because that's boring. Like a grocery list or a list of parts that somebody might need to fix a ceiling fan. Despite all that, I'm still looking forward to the break, sleeping in a little, playing some music, and watching Breaking Bad at the end of my work days. 

Fall is here and the leaves are beginning to turn. It might go without saying, but school has been busy. Lots of storms passing through my mind these last two or three weeks, but everything seems to still be here, and the surface is calm at the moment. I have about two hundred pages that I need to read by 11 AM tomorrow, and there's no possible way that that will happen. Not because I'm lazy but because my mind just doesn't have that kind of endurance, and at some point it stops being able to intake words. As my friend Aric said, "you're going to be really really really really really really smart when you finish." Yeah. In the last twenty four hours I've read a good chunk of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A highlight, to illustrate what I'm up against, completely out of context:

"A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original. The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry of discourse concerning the others, and if we think of  a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it." (Section 3, Paragraph 3)

I read this out loud to my office mate, and she said, wow, so now that you've discovered the meaning of life, what else are you going to do? I guess I'll keep reading. But it is quite interesting stuff that we're looking at in the Modern Rhetoric class, starting at the beginning of the enlightenment, the printing press and the religious wars that contributed to a cultural and institutional shift away from god given truths to the systematic development of analytical knowledge. The roots of science as well as our modern education system all beginning during this period, and for the most part, not too much has changed as far what counts as truth as Hume and others talked about it back then. But that's a long story, and one that I only have a vague grasp on. We're reading not books about this time, but writing by Bacon, Locke, Hume and others. Primary texts. Old books that have been scanned and put on the internet, where the letter 's' looks like 'f' and every book begins with a dedication to the noble sponsor who published it. I'm surprised by how contemporary their ideas are, and that I truly learn "new" things as I read.

On an entirely different note, here's an old poem that I wrote almost ten years ago that for some reason the Hume has made me think of. Back to work:

Window

Because everything is right here an ending is right here. I snap my fingers and listen to the aftershock. I pick my head up to hear the sounds of traffic. I don’t mean to be obvious but I stop for a second to think, and air goes out the window. And I hear somebody driving by. There was an idea to work through, to not stop until something happens.

Lorine Niedecker, from New Goose:

A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. What
is it a sign
of? The sign of
an owl.

Liz told me to be careful, not to assume that other people shared the same beliefs and assumptions as me. When I told Professor Peterson that I wanted to be a poet he recommend that I find a rich woman to marry. Steven said that love transforms, and my mom told me that a person should do everything they can if they love someone. Kawabata wrote that a slender neck on a young woman is a sign she has never been in love, but a long hair on the left eyebrow of an older man is a sign of a long life. The Bible (Ephesians 4:26) says not to let the sun go down on our anger, and CD said to put our anger into our work.

When I was a kid my dad told me that if you become an expert on one thing, no matter how trivial, you will be successful. Nate told me about a person he knew who made a living selling antique cast iron sandwich presses. Aaron told me to be direct. Stacy told me there was nothing more that I could do for my cat, and my landlord told me that there was nothing to be done about the enamel on the bathtub. Katy asked me why I needed confirmation to make a decision and I'm still thinking about her question. Susan told me that I didn't have to follow him.

Lacan identified the central inquiry of obsessives as "Am I real?" Goenka said just observe. John Cage wrote that if you're tired, go to sleep and John Locke wrote that we should learn to follow the tendencies of our minds. My uncle told me I should get out of California, most everybody tells me to get on with my life. Advice is the worst vice, said the man playing the devil in a movie, and that same summer in Oregon I got a job at a factory because that was all there was. If you dream it you can achieve it, said the Jesse Jackson quote printed on card stock. Bob used Know Thyself as part of his email signature. Michael said we can recognize the truth by what still has the power to shock us. Thalia said "It's hard to be ready."

Lorine Niedecker, from For Paul and Other Poems:

Paul
      when the leaves
             fall

from their stems
      that lie thick
              on the walk

in the light
       of the full note
              the moon

playing
      to leaves
               when they leave

the little
        thin things
                 Paul

My Other Cat is Not Rhetorically Effective

He wanders around the apartment looking for her. He yowls when I am reading on the couch. He yowls when I am eating at the dinner table. He yowls when I am changing my clothes getting ready for work. He yowls when I am taking a shower, and puts his paws on the edge of the tub, and looks at me, and yowls when I am holding a bar of soap in my hands. He yowls when I am sitting outside on my porch smoking. He yowls when I am talking to a friend on the phone. He yowls when I am washing dishes. He yowls when I come home carrying my bike up the stairs. He yowls when I clean his litter box. He yowls when I am sitting in the morning. He yowls when I get into bed. He yowls when I am standing outside talking to my neighbor, and we can both hear him, and he yowls when we are laughing at how loud his yowl is. He yowls when there is nobody around to hear him. He yowls when I tell him to stop yowling. He yowls when he looks for her under the bed. He yowls when he looks for her behind the door, or when he peeks he head up to see if she's on a chair, or peeks behind the stereo to see if she is curled up in the corner.

He is sleeping now. He does not yowl when he is sleeping. He does not yowl when I sit down to rub his ears or scratch his chin. He does not yowl when his mouth is full of cat food. He does not yowl when I give him a little bit of the food that I am eating. He does not yowl when I yowl at him. He does not yowl when he is laying on my pillow next to my sleepy head. He does not yowl when I pull the covers up to cover his cold and thin ears. He does not yowl when he is biting the hair behind my ears. He does not yowl when I take my shoes off and he rubs his head into the warm cavity where my foot once was. He does not yowl when I say, "Jinx man" or, "Jinky" or "Jiiiiinx" and smack him, like a man smacking a man, on the side of his sagging belly. He does not yowl when he is chasing a big moth or cicada that has somehow found its way inside. He does not yowl when I get up from sitting and find him still on the bed soaking up the warmth in the imprint of my body, and I mash my face into his neck and chest and feel him purring.

He is dreaming now. His legs are twitching and his whiskers are moving. It's hard to know what he thinks. It's hard to know what he knows. It's hard not to project what I feel onto him. It's easy to say, "I'm sorry buddy, it's just me and you now" but it's hard to actually live with this. Who will take care of the care takers? I love that question. There is no good answer to it. Only turn taking, and the unsettling reality that one creature cannot entirely be of one thing. That the roles we have to play are fluid. There is happiness somewhere in this understanding. Not here in these words exactly, but somewhere. How embarrassing it is to be so undone by a cat! I think sometimes to get another, to make this one curled up next to me stop yowling. But I think what I would rather have is a human. A warm one that I can make breakfast for, and say hello to when I come home, and sit with on the couch, in the silence of our respective worlds. One like Kitty Girl, who comes to me when I cry, or whistle; one who will let me kiss her behind her ears without a word passing between us. A sweet one to take of, to be taken care of. 

Trust

If I would be walking down the road
you told me to imagine and I would and find
a diner kind of teacup sitting on its saucer
in the middle then I would feel so good
in my life that is just like mine
I would walk right up and look into my face
eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup
and say, "Thank you, I have enjoyed
imagining all this."

                                       -Liz Waldner

I need to pick up Kitty Girl's ashes from the veterinarian. Amy has expressed interest in waiting until Jinx dies so that their ashes can be spread together somewhere in San Francisco. The little coin from India that I found in the grass while waiting for the bus late February, that I've been setting in front of the totems that sit on my mantle, a totem for Jinx, for Kitty Girl, for other creatures that are important to me represented secretly in what looks like a random collection of objects; the coin representing a wish for good fortune, godless heathen that I am desperate for order and meaning cobbling together esoteric rituals from half remembered history lessons; I think I will put the coin with KG's ashes as a kind of payment to ferry boat man to get her across the river.

Amy told me that last Friday night, Kitty Girls previous owner, Amy's cousin, who took care of KG and Jinx from 1995 until 2006, without being told about what had happened, dreamt about KG. She woke up with a feeling of loss, and started looking at the SPCA website and found a cat that looked like her, and later that day, went to the SPCA to see if it was her (for some reason forgetting that she was in Indiana). It wasn't, but as she was sitting in her car getting ready to go Amy called her and told her that Kitty Girl died. Quote: "It was really weird because the cat I went to see sounded like her. I can't explain the feeling. I felt such a loss before I knew she was gone."

When I got back from the vet after putting KG to sleep, I was sitting at my dining room table, sitting there, and I heard an unusually loud chirping coming from the tree outside, and went out onto the porch to investigate, and there were a dozen little brown birds chirping, which I hadn't recalled ever seeing before en masse. I stood there for a while and watched and listened, and wondered if they knew something about the little brown cat who had moved on that morning. I thought about the swarm of black birds that showed up in the tree six months ago, right around when KG got sick (amongst other things), and wondered if all this was some kind bird-centric message from the gods. Opening and ending ceremonies.

 

Sweet one. We will miss you.

Drawing by Christian Nagler

Jinx and I have had a quiet weekend. On Friday I took the day off of school and work and went for a hike. Saw a movie with Kamal and Saturday did a thorough cleaning of the apartment, did some school work and played music with Eric, hung a out a little with him and K. It's a bachelor pad now, our apartment, and we both miss Kitty Girl. 

Jinx has never been without her, or lived without other cats around. I worry about him, and he seems to be looking and listening for her. An uncharacteristic worry in his eye. How he will adjust, or if he can, is something I do not know. They had a long life together. Next to the dry food, I've always set out two plates for them; two water bowls. One half. Yesterday, 

This week is Kitty Girl tribute week. Pictures to follow.

R.I.P.    - Kitty Girl -    1995-2013

Who taught them instinct? Who taught the Raven, in a drought, to drop pebbles into a hollow tree, when she chanced to spy water, that the water might rise for her to drink? Who taught the bee to sail through the vast ocean air, to distant fields, and find the way back to her hive?

                                                                                    -Francis Bacon

My Cat is Rhetorically Effective

What is rhetoric? Sometimes I don't know, and sometimes it's hard to say, but a good working definition is that rhetoric as a field of study is the study of how language acts on the world, how words get us to do things. How being the key word. There are other definitions, but this is the one I find most useful. Kitty Girl also finds this definition useful though she has no facility for the production of words. However she does have a facility for language. Since March KG has been dealing with kidney disease. She's getting weak and thin and scraggly, and sometimes I wonder how long she has left. But she still gets around, meows weakly when I bring out the cat food, and sometimes displays signs of her old self, curling up on the end of the bed, or on my hip, or jumping on my lap while I write and say the words that I am writing outloud like I am doing now (she is not here at the moment). 

To care for her I inject her with a plasma solution every morning. Around 80 milliliters. I also add a substance called epakitin and an anti-acid to her twice a day wet food servings. She doesn't really clean herself anymore and spends most of her days under the bed. It's sad sometimes, but she still has sweet blue eyes, and she still smells good and is soft. And she still purrs when I hold her. Lately she has had trouble making it to the liter box, and the cruddy carpet square that came with my apartment and has been serving as insulation for getting out of bed on those cold Indiana winter days has become a mine field of little patches of cat piss. Gross, right? But that is what we're dealing with.

The kidneys, from what I understand, all us mammals have at a least a couple, process the fluids in our bodies. Everything we injest runs through the kidneys, where the kidneys absorb the nutrients or poisons or whatever, and basically clean this liquid and turn it into piss (which as we have all been told, is clean). Because KG's kidneys don't work, water goes in, but doesn't really get absorbed, thus two things happen: 1) she is constantly dehydrated (hence the plasma injections) and 2) she has to piss a lot because she keeps drinking water, and is always thirsty. In the last couple of weeks she has urinated directly in front of me a number of times, mostly on the carpet next to my bed while I'm laying in it. Not a lot of piss, but little spots. Everytime I say "goddamn it" and get out of bed, pick her up and take her to the litter box, get the towels and clean it up. In the last couple days, she has been pissing on my flip flops, which of course I only discover after I put them on, and I say, "goddamn it."

It all seems kind of hopeless and for the first time I'm thinking that maybe the time to put her down is near. Of course there is something entirely selfish and cruel about this, that this creature that has given me so much love and that I have loved so much, now that she is inconvenient, that I should just call the vet and be done with it. There are other solutions however. For example, getting another litter box and putting it a little closer to where she sleeps. 

Last night however, I figured something out. She jumped on the bed at four or five and I was dozing, but noticed that she was off the bed and again pissing on the floor. I picker her up and took her to the liter box. I got back in bed, and thirty minutes later she was pissing on my flip flops. I said, "goddamn it" and picked her up and took her to the liter box again. There was a strong smell of cat urine that I had only begun to notice because I had turned the kitchen fan off because the weather has gotten a bit cooler. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the little closet where the liter box lives stank of urine, and the reason was that the mat the box was on was soaked. I went to the internet, looked up how to clean up cat piss, went to the store, bought some baking soda, cleaned the closet, did a thorough cleaning of the liter box, threw down all kinds of baking soda, and the smell, when I came home from work/school today, was for the most part gone. KG had not peed on my rug today and I'm hoping that the reason she kept peeing was not because she had lost her mind, but because she was trying to communicate to me that her liter box was nasty, and that I needed to do something about it.

All this may make me look like a negligent pet owner, and I hope that you believe me when I say that I've been doing the best that I can. That said, the moral of my story is that KG is an excellent communicator. She knows how to reach her audience, and knows that if she continually pees on my shoes, she will get me to do something. Sometimes it must be hard to be a cat. Especially a sick cat. It's hard enough to communicate when we have words, but I wonder how hard it is when all you have is a leaky bladder, some broken teeth, and an old, scraggly body. They have no facial expressions, or very minimal ones. Their eyes don't tell us much either. They use their body, and their voice, and if you are Jinx, the other cat, you use your paws to poke at my arm or my face, to wake me up so I can make room for you on the pillow, so the both of us, together, can outlast the early morning cold. And so, this is a story of rhetoric. This is a story of how you get somebody to wake up and pay attention. Some of us are good writers, some good talkers, some of us are good at being cute, and some of us just have to piss on other people's shoes to get them to do what we want.

Walls

Walls are
relief in lifting
themselves. Let

you also
lift yourself,
selves, shelves.


           -Robert Creeley

Sunday. It's overcast. Yesterday storms rolled through Indiana and it rained here briefly, a little lightning, but the red and yellow light bath as the sun was setting made up for any discomfort caused. Today I have to do some lesson planning for the oral English tutoring, type up some documents to make them official, and try and finish the reading for writing assessment. All so I can be in a good position tomorrow to dive head long into the reading for modern rhetoric, which approaches two hundred pages (at least) of not so easy to read writers like Bacon and Locke. I wish I could say that I was looking forward to it, or that I could feel anything other than dread while thinking about the rest of my labor day weekend / week. It's times like these that make we want to run away screaming from academia (of course this kind of workload and high standards is what makes the program such an excellent education). Plus my cat is getting sicker, starting to pee in inappropriate places, and I haven't fully recovered from my illnesses of the last three weeks. The beatings will continue until morale improves. The good news is that the plant that hangs in the window is doing well, the neighbors that live below seem to be moving out (along with their stereo), and none of my light bulbs have burnt out since July. May September go well.

But what I really wanted to write about today, other than making a list of my worries, is what I haven't been discussing, or until recently, admitting to myself; that despite everything that happened in the last six months, there is still a sizable space reserved for N (whoever that is) somewhere in my body. The question for me at the moment is if I can embrace some form of longing, or acknowledgment, while at the same time move forward. Or if the only way to quit is to go cold turkey. Which I've been trying to do: to repress/ignore the fact that I feel a severe shortage of "juju" / feel empty and sad, and that I should stoically "deal with it." Generally, this is the advice that I have received: it's time to move on, and I am in complete agreement. However in practice, I am not fully present here in the new semester, particularly when it comes to teaching. And when I sit in the mornings, or wander into my thoughts at the end of a day, all roads still lead to N. I think part of what I have been holding at bay is the fact that I still miss her, which stands in contrast next to the roller coaster of the last six months. The former I can make sense of, but the latter is still an open wound, and thus I  am in disagreement with myself about how I actually feel, which in turn, is a disagreement about what I actually want: to be angry, or to move forward.

Of course the right answer is to move forward, but I don't think that's entirely possible without more clarity. As a wise friend put it, "you don't need to forget about her, but it might be best to forget about the situation around her." Maybe so. The upshot of admitting failure, or that I am affected and uncertain, or that I was wrong, is that at least I don't have to pretend to be happy, or that I am the same person as I was six months ago. Thus, stretching toward one, non-political, version of freedom.

 

Failing

The practice of piety. The practice of music. The practice of calligraphy. These are exemplary pastimes. The practice of re-reading the novels of Jane Austen. The practice of cookery. The practice of drinking coffee. The habit of worrying and of having other strong feelings about money. All these are vices. We must try not to write nonsense, our eyes will fall out.

  In answer to all this my head falls off and rolls all messy and smeary across the floor K E E P T A L K I N G squelch slop ooze.

                                                                                  -Philip Whalen

Discussing things called facts, persimmons lying around

                                            -Hosai Ozaki (trans. by Hiroaki Sato)

Jinx is barely keeping his eyes open. Laying on the opposite end of the couch looking at me. Now they're closed. His head resting on a front paw. Now his eyes are open again and he is sitting up. That's the news from Indiana. Now he is laying back down on the couch. If only he knew how famous he was. After class today, after tutoring students in the morning, classwork and teaching in the afternoon, after doing some reading for Modern Rhetoric (and by modern we mean 1500ish), I went swimming, feeling better today than I had the previous couple days. Not having smoked for four days means that I can push my body a little bit, careful not to push too hard and injure my left shoulder, which happens sometimes. I'm still coughing, and there's a little bit of a sinus headache left over, agitated from the pressure in the pool. The guy in the lane next to me kept sprinting, and then resting for a minute. And then sprinting back. It felt like the tortoise and the hare. I kept passing him, and then he would catch up. It's hard not to feel competitive in the pool, but it's not as bad as it once was. About five years ago I realized it was not that much fun to go fast, and as a result the focus became about stretching out in the water, making my strokes carry me as far as possible. When I have energy this is how I like to swim...it feels good. But this is also how my shoulder gets injured. Now he is cleaning himself, intently. At some point in the last year Jinx became more interested in being clean than Kitty Girl. I wonder why. Okay. Now I'll do some work. Sorry this was a post about nothing. I'm trying to create some distance between the present and the past. Lecture about nothing. Appearances. The Tortoise and the Hare.

Ideas they sit in me for days, sometimes weeks or months before I finally sit down to write them out. For example I've been meaning to write about swimming, about going to the Purdue pool and jumping in the water that they keep a little cold, and how every time I jump in I'm reminded of all the times I've jumped into a pool of cold water and that feeling, that shocked and uncomfortable and unpleasant feeling that only lasts for a second, if that, and then once you start moving again through the water, once you start generating heat via your limbs and legs and rising to the surface, breathing from one side and glimpsing the pool side or lane line, the person swimming  next to you or the lifeguard walking back to her chair, and begin to think of lengths and laps and how far you've come and how far you have to go, and how it feels to stretch an arm out, to drag your fingers tips across the surface of the water, to breathe every other stroke from the same side or when my lungs are feeling strong, to breathe every three strokes, and how I decided to learn how to breathe from my left side after realizing that I had relatively little sensation on the right side of my body, and how I decided that I would make more efforts to redistribute my habits of movement, and how just recently I was looking at the bottom of my shoes and noticing that the worn out pattern on the sole was more evenly distributed then when I was younger, often off to one side or another, and I wondered if all that work in trying to balance out the movements in my body has had an actual effect in how I walk.

This evening I was reading an article by Anthony Easthope about history and rhetoric, a reading that makes me feel like everything I ever thought was wrong, and I am happy to get the chance but know that it will take me some time to consolidate what he is writing with my own beliefs. Though it's not like I totally understand what he is saying either. Last week I had time enough to go swimming three times. To take a hike up Burnett's Creek twice in a seven day span.This week I am sick again, the penalty for not taking care of myself when I began to recover from the worn-out / strung-out illness that I had two weeks ago. Not a penalty though, that would mean that there is somebody who is there to issue it. There is no one what will take care of us? Instead I will dose myself with cold medicine, read twenty pages of book four of the game of thrones and fall asleep. Because I am not smoking my sleep gets all screwed up. Because my sleep gets all screwed up I cannot rest. And so on, I take cold medicine. 

But when I get back into the pool, hopefully tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday, my lungs will be strong and I will breathe every three strokes instead of every two, and I will pull the water down the length of my body and climb horizontally through the resistance, and when I come to the end of my set, swimming my set of 6x200 with 5x100s of kicking in-between, or 4x300 with 4x100s of kicking in-between, when I wind down and warm down and let my arms turn through the water without resisting anything, letting the muscles drain of the stuff that makes them sore afterwards so I don't feel sore afterwards, sometimes I stop in the sun or kick on my back with my arms loosely dangling from my body and I get out of the pool and stretch and take a long hot shower, put my clothes on and get on my bike to ride back over the bridge to go feed my cats and start in on the night's work. All this and more which was not what I wanted to write about swimming. Instead I wanted to write a story. I wanted to write a story that circled around emptiness. But instead I wrote this.

Scholarship

Late this afternoon
I tried to find a poem about a deer
running, or sleeping, or staring
back at me
through the page (the screen), or about
the memory of a deer
running through the train station
or down a wooded path along the river. Unsuccessful
I wrote my own.

The day before I left Japan I met W, an old friend, at Sugamo station, four stops past Takadanobaba on the Yamanote line. He had been living in Tokyo for the past year, but we had fallen out of touch for the previous five. It was good to see him. His hair had thinned into a proto widow's peak like mine, and we were both wearing a purple shirt. We joked about it, and walked to a cafe, sat down, had a beer, and talked. I told him why I had come to Japan and apologized for not getting in touch sooner. He told me about his wife and his son, who were out of town that weekend. We walked back to the train station to get his bike, and I took another train one stop where he met me again, and we walked back to his place to drop my bags off. It was another hot day in Japan, and on our way we saw television cameras and reporters getting footage for the evening's report on the uncomfortably warm weather. Sugamo is known as the hip, young place for elderly people, and there was concern that the extreme heat and humidity would cause heat stroke, particularly for those without air conditioners. We stopped at a temple, and W took my picture standing at the base of a huge sitting deity, a piece of evidence to support the unlikely scenario that I had gone to Japan.

When we got to his place, we had a cold drink and I declined his offer to take a quick shower, opting instead for a towel, a clean shirt, and a swipe of deodorant. He and his wife and son lived in a highrise that over looked a large park, what used to be the foreign studies branch of Tokyo University, but had been converted into residential units. The park had a large playing field, a pond, and two shallow wading areas that were filled with children and their mothers. In the distance, looking north east, was a large tower, the same one that I saw from the bus on the day I arrived, and an otherwise undistinguished urban skyline. We put our shoes back on and took the light rail back to the Yamanote, and got off at the Harajuku stop. We wandered into Meiji Jingu park and the dense trees and sandy paths made the heat almost bearable. Talking, joking, remembering college and his year in Iowa, where we met. I was a senior in college and he was doing his junior year abroad. W and I spent a lot of time together, playing basketball, going to parties, wandering around cornfields, and doing the college thing. Later, when I was living in Seattle, he came to visit. During a discussion about a frozen pizza in my refrigerator he offhandedly said that it was classic to have a frozen pizza in the refrigerator. I asked him what he meant by classic, and he thought about it, and said, "a classic is something that is always nice."

We kept walking through the woods in the middle of the city, and stopped occassionally for drinks: once for a soda, once for a beer, and eventually we wandered out of the park and headed to Shinjuku where we met P and his wife, an old friend who I had last seen fifteen years ago when during my year in Japan. P and I had kept in touch sporadically, and we had made plans the previous week to meet up. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant, the four of us, and then went an had drinks. Afterwards, all of us a little drunk from the ice cold Japanese beer, always a good, light headed kind of drunk, we went to karaoke. P and I started with Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" and then the four of us took turns: W a few sad Japanese songs that he kept jokingly dedicating to me and an Oasis song; P's wife some fairly upbeat Japanese pop songs; P sang some Nirvana and Weezer; and I sang a Willie Nelson song, tried to sing a Sugarcubes song (fail), and finally found a groove singing Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." How does it feel? How does it feel? Which has been the question during the last couple of weeks coming back from Japan and starting the semester. Last night was the first night in three weeks that I slept more than four hours continuously, and it feels like I'm finally coming back to my senses, at least the ones I had the weeks before I set out for Japan. It feels good to teach again, to see my friends here, and be in the second year of grad school. It feels like I'm finally settling into Indiana. Onward.

another one from Holderlin's Fragments (1805!) as found in Hymns and Fragments (trans. by Richard Sieburth):

In the Forest

Noble deer.
But man lives in huts, wrapped in the garments of his
shame, and is the more inward, the more alert for it, and
that he tend his spirit as the priestess tends the heavenly
flame, this is his understanding. Which is why recklessness
and the higher power to fail and achieve are given him,
godlike creature, and language, most dangerous of
possessions, is given man so that creating, destroying,
perishing and returning back to her, eternal mistress and
mother, so that he might bear witness to what he is, having
inherited and learned form her the godliest of her attributes,
all-preserving love. 

Walter De Maria Time/Timeless/No Time, 2004

The room is a cavern and sunlight bends around the slab that blocks the opening in the ceiling, and the light reflects off the golden bars. The people who let you in ask you to speak quietly and step softly, and it feels like a throne room, ascending the three flights of stairs to the top. Now I am looking back at the immense black marble sitting on the middle platform, in the middle of the room. There are gold bars on gold platforms, each around four feet high, formed in geometric shapes: square, triangle, and hexagon. Each set of three contains one of the three shapes, asides from the set of three at the top back wall, which is three squares. Math, geometry, rationality, symmetry; shapes and forms that do not exist outside of our minds. Where there should be a throne, there is a blank patch of concrete and the expected thrill of discovery at the top of the stairs gives way to wondering why you were invited into the room. What it was you came to see.

You walk back down the steps, and walk closer to the marble, and in its polished surface you begin to see a reflection of the room: the concrete, the steps, the divots in the walls, the seams, and the gold bars standing behind you. And then there is you, standing inside the marble surrounded by the concrete, the steps, the divots in the walls, the seams, and the gold bars standing behind you, reflecting the sunlight. And here, from this perspective, the impossibly sharp edges of the room bend inward toward the center and soften. The marble contains this frozen world as a mind contains a thought. Not a feeling, fleeting pleasures or pains, or the sound of another's voice or footsteps, but a thought centered precisely from where you stand.

from Holderlin's Fragments as found in Hymns and Fragments (trans. by Richard Sieburth):

                                         stripes of blue lilies
Do you know              of the work
Of artists alone or like
The stag rambling in the heat. Not
Without limitations.

人生は難しい!

 

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


                                          -Jack Gilbert