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!