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

When I was unstrapping James from the car seat today I called him Jinx. One more week of babysitting ("child care" sounds more dignified) and then I head back to Indiana to get on with the work of summer. It's starting to get hot in DC, and today we got out "Sprinky" and plugged her (?) into the hose, an octopus like tower of tubes with a face painted onto it that shoots water randomly and in all directions. It was a little cold but fun. This morning James and I drove out to the horse barn in Rock Creek Park and looked at horses and took a walk through the woods. We saw some deer and took time climbing the wooden steps that eased the trail's inclines. Last Friday they took off all their clothes and played in a creek. That is to say we've been trying to get outside as much as possible before the weather gets too hot and the bugs come out. My sister pulled two ticks of James over the course of last week.I pulled a tick off my belly on Friday.

Over the weekend I went to Virginia to visit Erika and John and their daughters Elsie and Rosa. They have land and chickens, a functioning garden, and we ate well and caught up and talked about kids, about being a doula and the story of Rosa's birth. Elsie hosted a "snake party" and so we all sat on a damp bench and talked about the flowers she had gathered. It was cute and entirely wholesome. Not that my experience last week holds a candle to the endurance and commitment required of actual parents (and it's easy for the uncle to swoop in, have fun, and swoop out), but I feel like I have been getting a taste of what it's actually like to have full charge of children, which is helpful in light of the fact that about half of my old friends have kids, and I can relate just a little bit more to the experience. It's also made me think a little bit about kid's toys and books, and how empty we begin when it comes to ways to live and judgments, and how easy it is for a kid to pick up an idea or a habit just from seeing it done or hearing it said. Like how Beatrix picked up the Disney princess thing from other kids at her school, and is now nuts about all things princess, which was not something anybody in the family introduced to her. I think about all the junk that I was into as a kid, and wonder how much of that is still with me. I wonder if any of this stuff really matters in any sense other than aesthetically. Maybe the content of what we pick up doesn't matter as much as our relation to it when we grow up enough to have perspective. Or maybe feeding our kids plastic and sugar is actually a real danger. I'm not sure.

In other news, a few self-promotional items: 1) here's a link to a video that Cole made using a song of mine, as posted on his most excellent music blog Field Mic (there's a link to Field Mic proper on the right sidebar), and 2) here's a link to the Lost Roads Press blog Lines, that I had written a little piece for, about John Cage. Yup. Tomorrow I think James/Jinx and I are going to go to the Natural History Museum and to walk around and yowl.Hanging above the toilet at Erika's and John's house is a poem by Robert Creeley, "Walking"

In my head I am
walking but I am not
in my head, where

is there to walk,
not thought of, is
the road itself more

than seen. I think
it might be, feel
as my feet do, and

continue, and
at last reach, slowly,
one end of my intention.

Washington DC is lovely right now. Flowers are blooming, traffic is flowing, birds are singing and shitting on my car. Granted I haven't made it too far from my sister's house, where I'm staying and taking care of my niece and nephew while the regular baby sitter takes a vacation and gets her driver's license. This week will be a full week of 8-6ish child care and right now, as my nephew is sleeping, I have a little time to read and write and continue the work I started at Purdue to be ready for the Fall semester. He's squawking and squeaking right now and soon I will have to pick him up out of his crib and make some lunch.

Yesterday we spent the morning playing "garbage truck/man" putting pieces of torn up newspaper into a toy garbage truck, napped, made lunch and hung out at the house until 3, where we went and picked his sister up from day care and (oop. i just picked him up, started making lunch, ran around the house with an accordion.etc.(six hours later...)). Okay. Today was a long day. Had an afternoon with James drawing pictures and changing diapers then picked up Beatrix from school, had a snack, and took her to ballet. Meanwhile James and I hung out at the toy store and played with a toy garbage truck. Got Beatrix from the ballet and then went to Chipotle and fed both of them dinner. This was not fun. They would not sit down and kept flopping all over the bench and Beatrix kept getting up to get things and meanwhile I kept trying to feed James who kept laying down on the bench. After we left they both started crying, Beatrix crying over a mermaid doll that she wanted me to buy for her and I don't know why James was crying, but we made it home eventually and had a tea party / birthday party for "elephant" and waited for her mother and father to come home but both were late. It really wasn't that bad but I saw how things could turn south quickly. I made a mental note to meditate tomorrow because tonight I'm drinking beer. Overall though, it was a good day.  

Originally I was going to sit down and write an insightful and sensitive post about my first year of graduate school but I guess that will have to wait. Viva la summer!

A letter I sent to The New York Times a couple weeks ago in response to an article about disgraced public figures and their absorption into academia. I'm still annoyed about how they covered Occupy Oakland...

 

Dear Public Editor,
 

Interesting article on the trend to hire public figures who "flamed out," or however Ariel Kaminer put it. Since there were no comments, I wanted to respond in person:

 

The article seems to suggest that universities are the refuge of washed up sexual miscreants, and does a great job discussing what it's like for the school and teachers and the students who come into contact with these people. That said, many of these public figures were written about in this very newspaper, and you all did as much as anyone to ruin these people's reputations. Mr. Kaminer's article still makes them, and universities, look like fools.

Another way to put it might be that universities are willing to hire remarkable people with interesting experiences. It's a classic second chance, and an acceptance of other view points. Universities get much from them in the form of attention and celebrity status, and of course, money. I'm just saying that it's not surprising that The Times, who are just as guilty of following the heard mentality, reporting exactly what officials tell you, pick a bone with institutions that absorb people screwed over by reporters reporting on other people's reporting. As if sending a picture of your penis, or whatever, to a college girl is really that much worse than whatever we've done at some point in our lives.

While the university system is less than perfect, and headed towards changes, it's an example of a public institution that has fared reasonable well in the last twenty years....Unlike mainstream journalism, which, The Times included has, more or less, been co-opted by conglomerates of politically driven billionaires. If not directly than indirectly in the sense that its the big medias (CNN, Fox News, ABC, etc.) that drive the market for news, and how much attention you devote to each story.

In short, I'm saying you could have just as easily spun this as a good thing, rather than an implied bad thing. Or taken some responsibility for how they got there in the first place. Or better yet, provide critical analysis of things like the Moody's report on the economic state of higher education, rather than just telling us what Moody's says about it.

Maybe I'm just confused about what newspapers are supposed to do, and maybe it's in your every right to call it like you see it (or don't see it). But as a representative of academia, we do a lot of good work, and are a heck of a lot more careful than you guys about what we say and why. Who knows what the future of journalism is, but you all could stand to take some criticism yourself, beginning with owning up to how much influence you have in shaping public opinion, and how much that influence is squandered on politically driven slander.

Sincerely,

Writing a paper about Occupy and found this in my notes. An oldie but a goodie, 2011

Spring breezes sweep the green meadows.
Rains have stopped, but from the oak leaves water still drips
Suddenly a white bird appears on the scene.
He breaks the green universe of the mountain slope. 

                                                     -Po Yu-ch'ien

Ode to an Empty Jelly Jar

You were some good jelly

You laid down on my sandwiches and my toast

I liked to eat you with peanut butter when I was too lazy to cook which sometimes happens when you're living alone and are a graduate student living in Indiana

Back in California I'd probably get a burrito

Anyway, at first I thought you were overpriced 

A dollar fifty more than Smuckers or Kroger
And I thought why not try it? At least I'm not giving those assholes my money

Every time I spread you on wheat bread I could see actual strawberries

And you tasted delicious

O jelly jar, how empty you are

You were really a pretty good tasting Jelly

This last month has been a strange one. About four weeks ago my hard drive stopped working. I took it to the computer shop just up the hill from where I live and they replaced it. Unfortunately they weren't able to recover any of the data. The items of the most immediate importance, documents relating to teaching and all my school work from the fall I had luckily backed up at the end of last semester, but all my creative work from the beginning of the summer; a play, hundreds of music files along with random writings and field recordings are, at the moment, lost. I'm going to take the "dead" hard drive somewhere else and see if they can revive it, and we'll see. It was surprising how disturbing the whole process was, as someone who likes to think that he's not too attached to objects or ideas (there's always more where that came from + we imbue things with meaning, not the other way around), perhaps I'm not as free as I'd like to think. I was talking to a friend about it and he made the connection between a loss of monuments to self (selfish objects? rhet/comp is getting to me...) i.e. art objects, and a loss of parents, i.e. idealized monoliths of people we use to negotiate ideas of self. A loss of identity naturally leads us to search for new ones. Granted the last ten years of writing was not lost, but all the momentum of the last year was. Identity not as an idea, but as a real time indicator of how we spend our time (days, hours, minutes, seconds).

Two weeks ago Monday I took my cat, who had not been eating and was uncharacteristically spending her entire days under the bed, to the vet. She was diagnosed with a fairly advanced kidney failure plus and infection in her mouth that prevented her from eating. It's hard to say which lead to which, as both were feeding off each other (the vet speculates that the mouth infection exacerbated the kidney failure), but everyday of Spring Break was spent taking her to the vet, testing, giving medication, and talking to doctors. The good news is that she's feeling a lot better, her mouth infection is gone, and she's out from under the bed, but she's still not really eating all the much and there's really not much to be done about kidney's that no longer clean the blood and absorb nutrients. Twice a day I have to inject her with saline solution, which as a process means sticking an thick needle into the folds skin on  her back. Oddly, she doesn't seem to mind this nearly as much as when I was giving her oral injections for her mouth infection. In the long term, care for her does not necessarily promise a long life or good quality of life, and I've been weighing options in terms of cost, time and money. Taking care of her while considering that it may be soon for her to move on, trying to enjoy what's left and make peace with possibilities.

The third loss I'm not going to go into explicitly, and it's not a life or death loss, but is still painful. Oddly enough, my spirits are generally good, I've been exercising, meditating, eating well enough, and talking a lot with friends and family about this absurd month, which I think is probably the biggest reason that the bumminess of all this isn't sticking, the fact that I am loved, etc. School is generally good as far as the work, and teaching is generally the best part of my day, as usual. Two quotes from the paper about six weeks ago, the first from an article about education in China, and the second about the meteorite that fell into Russia. The third is from Plato's Phaedrus (line 249c):

"All the parents in the village want their children to go to college because only knowledge changes your fate."

"A meteor fell. So what? Who knows what can fall out of the sky?"

"...the things our soul saw while traveling with god...."

Sunday. Sun Day. The cat lies in it, his body a jackknife his hind legs the blade. Nothing to publicly reports aside from school work, but two poems in relation to rhetoric (the first in relation to Memory, the second on the dangers of literacy as "skill") that have been floating around in my head. The first by Kiwao Numura translated by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida, the second a section from George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous." See you,

On Prose

Then I
committed to memory everything
I felt compelled to remember

I don't know why I felt that way
but one winter night.
I was driving my car over the limits
along the highway that stretches west from Tokyo
hurrying to see my dying mother
but the traffic backed up
and I lost time
finally emerging from the congestion
a radio tower
crowned with radiant purple light
that eerily stained the night sky as I passed beneath it
my cell phone abruptly rang
I pulled over to the shoulder
and listened to a relative's voice tell me the hour of my mother's end
and then I noticed
that a large tanker truck
whooshed past within inches of my car
and that across the highway
inside the incandescently lit convenience store
a scattering of people were browsing magazines
and their heads looked like fly heads
and that on my side of the highway
inside the driving range already closed for the night
golf balls sprinkled on the grass
looked like mercury drops or something floating in the dark
I committed all of it to memory
compelled to remember
in other words
I lost at that moment the residue of my umbilical cord
and definitively tumbled into the world
or rather into the universe
in other words it was
the moment of my second nativity
and as though it were leaving me behind
a refrigerated truck whooshed past me
followed by a sport car
followed by another truck
then some of my own verses occurred to me:
there goes rust and lichen
there goes the soul's departing shadow
there goes the orgasm peddler again
up through the windshield
a few stars sparkled in the sky
and above all the radio tower
the radio tower
from whose apex
purple illuminations glared fiercely down at me
in a kind of swelling intensity
as if the radiance
ominously announced the calm of tomorrow
or tenderly announced the unrest of tomorrow
the purple singularly purple
thing I committed to memory
I felt compelled to remember 

                -Kiwao Nomura (trans. by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida)

**

13 (from "Of Being Numerous")

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

                    -George Oppen