On Tuesday I went swimming. It was the first time since two Monday's ago, which was the first time since the middle of December. That Monday I swam for about ten minutes until the pain in my left should forced me to stop. An old injury, first appearing eighteen years ago during my senior year of high school. An inflamed rotator cuff said the physical therapist at the time, and I bombed out of competitive swimming. The shoulder being one reason, the other being not wanting to swim anymore. But my shoulder, the left one, has always been the "normal" shoulder in comparison to the right one, in that the right shoulder can pop out of its joint. Without any difficulty the right can rotate 360 degrees in a circle, bending backwards like a G.I. Joe or a Barbie until it comes back to its normal position. My left shoulder has always felt pressure to keep up with the right, and it can do the same thing but does so not by popping out of its socket, but by being flexible and flexed for many years. If the right shoulder needed a good stretch, I would clamp my hands together behind my head and give it a good stretch backwards. It felt good, though from what I've been told, looked gross. 

But I think all that spinning and stretching has caught up to it, and these days it just hurts. Last semester I went swimming a lot and I think I aggravated the rotator cuff then. My guess is that the other muscles in my left arm, from being somewhat in shape, made up for this aggravation but now that I'm back in the pool, and not really in shape, I'm feeling the inflammation more. On Tuesday I took a couple ibuprofen and tried it again, mindful of not putting too much pressure on it during the "pushing down motion" (not sure how else to say that, the part of the stroke when swimming the Australian crawl, just after my hand enters the water in front of my head, and pulls down the entire length of my body, exiting just past my hip) and generally the shoulder felt okay. Not throbbing or throwing off sharp pains when pushing down. And I noted a few kinds of pressures that aggravated it, like holding a kick board, and compensated with other motions and positions to keep my body moving through the water. 

I did my usual set, about a mile of swimming and kicking, taking about thirty minutes not including warming up and down. After I was done I got out and stretched on the side of the pool, as usual. First my arms and legs using the tiled pool wall, and then on the ground stretching out my calves and thighs and back. While I was stretching I watched the little kids who where there for swim practice in the evening. Some of their parents were sitting up in the bleachers above the pool watching their children swim laps, talking with other parents or reading books. I thought about going to swim meets and swim practice and how I never wanted anybody in my family to come watch me. I thought about how important it was to me to stay separate from my family when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. I wondered how that distance has carried over into my adult life, and I wondered how responsible I am for the aches and pains I carry. I finished stretching and got up and took a hot shower and put a warm hat on. When I got home I made dinner and watched the President's speech. Today was a full day, and I'm going to get on with some school duties before I get into bed. The intense cold of the last couple days has lifted and tomorrow I'll finally be able to get back on my bike.

This apartment has been so cold lately. It's lovely the other three seasons but when the temperature falls below 20, draftiness begins to constrict functionality. I have to close doors, cover windows, wear blankets, and stay close to the heater. Jinx has been camping out under the bed, where I put another little space heater, and when the covers are draped over the side, makes a little hot box / sauna that he hangs out in most of the day.

Come tomorrow morning it's supposed to drop below zero by six or seven AM, and if you include wind chill, negative 25 or or something, I'm wondering if they're going to cancel school. This possibility seems unlikely because last week, with MLK day, a half day on Tuesday because of the shooting, and all of Wednesday off (to give everyone a moment to catch their breath); it seems unlikely that the powers that be will offer any more days off. Productivity cuts you know? We have to keep things rolling or else the terrorists win. Last night I went and saw the Bucky Badgers play the Purdue Boilermakers, and the Badgers beat them pretty handily. I felt guilty, like it was one more crappy thing that happened last week at Purdue. There were school shootings in Pennsylvania and South Carolina last week as well. Of course what happened at Purdue was not classified as a school shooting, but as a "violent crime" or a "homicide." Categories that make us feel a little bit safer, I guess, but give the impression that there is no institutional connection to this violence. 

In my composition class on Thursday we talked about it, and my students were a little freaked out. There was a vigil on Tuesday evening and a press conference. The school newspaper has been writing stories about the student's reactions. I learned from a professor that the shooter attended a linguistics class and hour and a half previous to his actions. Amongst us teachers we've been discussing what to do in the future, the old barricade the door and turn off the lights trick. Logistically everything has been backed up, but along these same lines, it doesn't seem all that important to try and catch up. That we, students and teachers both, can take our time and get done what we needs to get done when we get to it. It was a strange week last week, and whatever haze we slipped into seems bound to continue. I have a feeling that when the cold goes back to wherever cold comes from we'll begin to unwind from all this. 

**

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arepeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenier of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclodued concerto...
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

                        -Wallace Stevens

Today at Purdue there was a shooting. You can read the newspaper story here, or here, or here  (post script: more articles on the shooting, one is a short history of gun violence at Purdue, a day after summary by the local paper, and a link to a CNN article that is interesting because of the comments...predictably they have nothing to do with Purdue and instead are people arguing about gun regulations in the abstract).

At about 12:15 I was sitting in the library reading when I got a text from campus safety that read, "Shooting reported on campus. Bldg Electrical Engineering; Avoid area; Shelter in place. Check (website) for updates." It seemed a little bit unbelievable. I looked around and others were reading their phones. We looked at each other, but eventually we all went back to what we were doing. I can't speak for them, but I figured that if something was really happening, I would get another text or hear an announcement. Since I was sitting pretty far back in the library I also figured that I'd have time act if the trouble came closer. I could see nothing from the windows and had no other information. So, I sat. There was an announcement, and we all stood up and exited the library into the foyer, receiving vague instructions to head into the shelter in the basement. Some people went, and some people, like me lingered, and went back into the library, back into the back of the library and sat down. I texted with some friends on campus, all was well, and messaged for a while with an off campus friend. All clear text messages were sent out by campus safety, and that was that. I got a burrito with a friend, stopped by the IRB office (Institutional Review Board, they handle the ethics of studies that involve human subjects), and went home, unsure of what exactly went on today. I'm certain that over the next couple days some answers will be provided.

 

The Week in Graduate School

"It could be that we are wandering about in an unnecessary delusion if we believe the essence of the negative is itself something "negative."

                           -Heidegger, from Parmenidies (trans. by Schuwer and Rojcewicz)

**

Since the beginning of the year I haven't been smoking. On the one hand its an effort and I miss it. On the other, and its usually the other, I have more time (8 cigarettes a day = 50 minutes of standing outside smoking contemplating standing outside smoking, chatting, watching snow fall, taking cigarette breaks, etc.). I notice that I am less patient, more irritable, hornier, hungrier, quicker to jump into a discussion, more decisive, more testosteroney. Some of this is physical, and some of this is mental. After all, when smoking, no matter how bad things are going, I can always just step outside and have a cigarette. Ahhh. That's better. Now what was I worried about? If only for a second or two I could be "Alive With Pleasure!" (Newport). A feeling I know quite well, an old friend. But without this option I kind of have to deal with things as they happen. Or be annoyed, which is also an interesting feeling.

**

"When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace."

                             -Leibniz (though I wonder if the two are necessarily distinct...)

**

Of all strong feelings, sexual emotion appeared the gravest threat to the hierarchical Nation-State. Novelists from Defoe to Thackeray and on knew that "love", and "falling in love" are no respecters of class distinction. A scientist who loved his Goethe, and who, like Goethe, saw no strict division between science and the humanities, Freud took pleasure in emphasizing the power of repressed sexuality in the life of "respectable" social climbers.

                  -Stephen Toulmin, from Cosmopolis, writing on some of                                            the cultural impacts resulting from assuming the mind is                                          separate from the body (Descartes, Newton, etc.)

**

"Live unnoticed."   

                                 

                      -Epicurean proverb

"Be concealed in the way you conduct your life."

                      

                     -Epicurean proverb translated in closer alignment with its                                           original syntax and semantics (i.e. Greek)

**

As I finish this post I look out the window and it's snowing again. Again and again and again and again this week. I love it (when my heater works and I have food and the internet and don't have to drive anywhere). Last night I went to a memorial service for Linda Bergman, a professor in my program here. I did not know her but wish that I did, R.I.P. and again, our lives are short. While there is virtue in patience I do not believe that we should wait to do what we want to do. On Monday there is no school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While in past I hadn't ever really given the "holiday" much thought, I was reading Ray Allen's take on the day, that it should not be regarded just as a day to celebrate MLK and black civil rights, but all civil rights, genders, sexual orientations, etc. and our societal push towards inclusiveness. It's crazy to think how much things have changed (in the U.S.) over the last fifty years, but it seems that institutionalizing and promoting the acceptance of others is a good thing. So yeah, MLK day as a secular spiritual holiday for all. Or as they might call it at the meditation center, Metta day. As far as I know there are two things most Americans can agree on: money is good, and discrimination is bad. I can agree with one of these things.  Man, its really snowing right now.

This morning, the last full of day of winter break, I went for a hike up Burnett's Creek. About half way I stopped off at The Trails, a big red barn looking building that serves brunch on Sundays. Most of my cohort that I started the program with was getting breakfast and I joined them. The woods along the creek were quiet, and because of the rain yesterday, it took some energy to trudge through the thin layer of ice that covered the still thick snow. This break has been eventful, finally arriving back into town last Thursday night after a week of unexpected travel. Last semester was miserably busy, and as I put the finishing touches on my schedule this evening, I'm afraid that I've set myself up again for the same kind of rigor. Hopefully it won't be as bad, not having to do nearly as much prep for teaching as I did last semester. I'm taking post-modern rhetoric and empirical research methods in writing, two courses that are required for my degree, and teaching second language pronunciation. I'm also teaching two courses, a composition course and a speech/pronunciation course, the same courses I taught last semester. In a perfect world I would only be taking two courses but I could not resist finally getting an opportunity to take an actual "teaching pronunciation" class. At long last I will get my hands on some theory and research on one of my favorite subjects. I think of you everyday. O! I had a thread to pull but I spent the entire day working on school things, and have used up all my writing energy. Ah well. Something about old friends calling me on the phone over the weekend, and investing energy into people who aren't actually here. From Hilare Belloc's poem "Jim",

Always to keep hold of Nurse,
For fear of meeting something worse.

My apologies for the incoherence. I'll try and come back and finish this post later. In the meantime I'm going to bed. Goodnight. (postscript: nope, not coming back to finish this post. onward...)

from une semaine de bonté, Max Ernst, 1934

school begins on Monday...

 

Hi. Happy New Year. Today I wanted to post a poem that had something or other to do with a "new year" but didn't find anything appropriate asides from this gigantic rubber duck. Instead here is a very long Friedrich Holderlin poem ("In the Forest" said to be a fragment, i.e. an unfinished poem written not too long before he went a little nutso and stopped writing, 1805), translated by Richard Sieburth, and at times, by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (two translations mixed together, sorry if this is against some kind of translation orthodoxy), and slightly edited by me. Though it's not really a new years poem, it's what I found most interesting today. It's quite long (keep scrolling) and there's lots of space in it. Also, in the middle section there are many many names from many languages (Tip: they sound good read out loud). Holderlin was into names, the act of naming things, be it people, places or more broadly, giving shape to narratives. He thought that names/words were where humans and gods / god found a middle ground / neutral channel through which to communicate. And sure, why can't this also be true? But I love the little patches of lucidity that appear amongst the monuments he describes. And how the poem ends is one of my favorite little bits of poetry. Always on my mind. May the year go well,

In the Forest (Im Walde)

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.  

He remains nowhere.

No sign

binds.

Not ever 

A vessel to contain him.

Good things are three.

I have no wish 

to destroy your images

                            and maintaining the sacrament

Holy keeps our souls

Together, the ones that God has given us, life-light

Companion

To our end

By all means, 

                                differences are

                  good. Each

                                    and every

Has its own existence. 

                                         the dark leaf

                             And the growth

Was perceptable

           and                             the Syrian soil

   shattered, and flames underfoot

Stinging

and queasiness coming

Over me from raving hunger

Friedrich with his bitten cheek

Eisenach

The renowned

Barbarossa

Conradin

Ugolino—

Eugenuis

Heaven's ladder

                The farewell of Time

                         and in peace they part 

Thus Mohammed, Rinaldo

Barbarossa, qua free spirit

Emperor Heinrich,

But we confuse

our dates

                  Demetrius Poliorcetes

Peter the Great

                         Heinrich's

Crossing of the Alps and that

with his own hand he gave the people

food and drink and his son Conrade died of poison

Perfect visionary

Reformer

Conradin, etc.

all significant

as relations.

Tende   Stromfield    Simonetta.

Teufen    Amyclae    Aveiro on the river

Vouga    the family    Alencstro its

name therefrom    Amalasuntha Antegon

Anathem Ardinghellus Sorbonne Celestine   

and Innocent interrputed the dis-

quisition and dubbed it (the Sorbonne)

the nursery of the French bishops—

Aloisa Sigea differentia vitate

urbaanae et rusticae Thermodon

a river in Cappadocia Val-

telino Schonberg Scotus Schonberg Tenerife 

Sulaco        Venafrom

                    Region

of Olympos.    Weissbrunn in Lower

Hungary. Zamora    Jacca    Baccho

Imperiali.    Genoa    Larissa in Syria

When there are flames above the vineyard

Which looks black as coal

Around the time

In autumn, because

The reeds of life breathe fire
In shadows of the vines. But

How pretty when the soul unfolds

And this brief life.

And the sky becomes a painter's house

With all his pictures on display.

Like the man who eats men

Is he who lives without

(Love)

                             

               and describing shadows, his eyes

Would fill with anger

                                       Quite simply
                                       this time, but often
Something happens inside one's head, impossible
To understand, but when a freeman
Goes out for a walk, he finds
the path waiting.



As for the horses, an endless desire
For life, as when nightingales
Sing their sweet-home-song or the snow goose
Sets the tone, high above
The globe, longing.
                        




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





Narcissi, ranunculi and
Syringas from Persia,
Flowers, carnations, cultivated in pearl
And black and hyacinths,
As when instead of music heralding an entrance
There's the scent of an evil thought,
My son should forget to enter
Loving relationships and this life
Christopher's        dragon has exactly
Nature's walk and spirit and shape.


He should take
Everything
Except the long ones
To a pure place
Where someone
Scatters ashes
And burns the wood with fire.






From pagan
Io Bacche, let them learn to work with their hands
And, by the same means. Be
Forward or avenged. Vengeance,
In fact, should return to its source.
While we are raw, don't let God
Lash us with
                     waves. To be sure,
We are godless,
Common folk all,
Whom God tests
Like nobility,
Yet it's forbidden
To boast about this. But the heart knows
A hero. It's for me
To speak of my homeland. Don't
Begrudge me that. In the same way,
A carpenter makes
A cross.


                Sword
and hidden knife, when
        sharpened
                                more or less well,
But don't let our native land become
Too small a place. Heavy is the              to lie
at rest, feet and hands outstreched.
Only air.






I want to build


and raise new
the temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles lived



But there's no money, too much spent
today. I had a guest
over          and we sat together.