The river is high but it hasn't rained much. Indiana summer. The weather been just about perfect for the last three weeks, fairly dry but the creek was overflowing when I tried to cross it the other day. I'm not sure where the water's coming from. Temperatures in the seventies and sunny. During the last couple days there have been two black ants hanging around my kitchen, and I can't decide if it's the same two ants or if they only send two ants at a time. There is a single dried oat, spillage from some oatmeal, stuck to the stove and they seem to like hanging out around it. A couple cool dudes hanging out on the stove stuffing themselves. I caught one of them by a drop of mango juice when I was making lunch today. He seemed happy and relaxed.

Lazy days in Indiana sort of and sort of not. After one glorious week of no teaching responsibilities, the end of the Spring semester, I'm back working at the OEPP as a summer tutor, writing in the mornings and early afternoons, and finding distractions in the form of company or media or music or all of the above in the evening. Next week I start studying for preliminary exams and the summer will become more complicated. I planted some flowers on the porch and am the pitcher for my softball team. It's fun because I get to touch the ball every time instead of touching my knees or wiping my forehead with the back of my hand in the outfield. I have to admit that I like performing as a pitcher. Throwing the ball, catching it, throwing it, catching it, etc.

The reason that I'm writing is to just say hello. All the writing I've been doing has made me wonder where you are. Do words conjure people or is it the other way around? There's a bright moon almost every night in the Indiana sky. Only a few clouds, and the sun doesn't set until 9:45. Jinx pretty much sets repeatedly all day, usually on the blanket on the porch but right now he's on the couch with me. I have to admit that I like small town living after spending the last fifteen some years living in variations of cities. There is nothing here to buy but that's okay because I don't have any money. Forthcoming on this blog: about an hours worth of new music, stuff that I have been working on since last summer and over the course of the year. Once I figure out how best to put it out there. Anyway. I hope you're well.

Since Spring began I've been watching the tree next to my porch. I chose a single bud, one bud in from the tip of the branch, close enough to reach out and touch, and have been paying attention to how it's been changing. First, it was a red cluster, a little wound ball, and then the cluster began to peel away from itself and the red tips of leaves began to appear. The tips started to separate, turn green, and grew out into the beginning of singular leaves. I lost track of the bud for a week or so and yesterday looked for it, but it was no longer where I thought it should be. Its branch had moved lower by a foot and a half, the weight of the branch's leaves bending it closer to the ground. Of course, this must be the same for every thin branch, sagging from the weight of its leaves. I'd never noticed this before, that the shape of a tree in Winter is different then in Spring. The trees in winter stand straighter and more erect, and we can see through their branches and wish for warmer weather and imagine what it will be like when it finally comes. And it has come, but in my mind the image of a tree is still the one made from cold air and contraction, inward and stiff. I can no longer see the shape of the tree, its parts, but instead see its color.

Across the street in big sloped yard of the victorian on the hill yellow daffodils are coming up. The tree next to my porch is starting to grow its leaves. Yesterday in this same tree I witnessed a cardinal, a woodpecker, a flock of little brown birds, and a bluish grackle like bird all hanging out and twittering at each other. Spring feels so good after such a long winter and last week, after passing through a number of deadlines, has brought the end of the semester. Three more weeks + a week of finishing up papers/projects/grades/evaluations for classes and soon it will be summer. Did I mention that it feels good? Yesterday I presented at my first conference, a paper connecting David Hume, Buddhsim, and making a case for the pedagogical functions of "expressive" discourse. I ran out of time and didn't actually get all the way through what I wanted to say but it was a good experience. Next time I'll make sure to time my dramatic reading of academic prose more carefully. On Friday I finished a midterm for the empirical class and on Wednesday wrote a response to the Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman and now all I have left to do for Post Modern Rhetoric is write one more page and an end paper that doesn't need to be researched, as it's more of a response/synthesis paper of all the books that we've been reading. All this to say, the semester's end is in sight. 

This week I have to read student drafts for their Discourse Community reports which under such a short deadline (10 papers in 24 hours to be ready for Tuesday conferences) is kind of stressful but all the hard work and hurdles of the semester have for the most part, been traversed. The other day I was meeting with one of my students at the OEPP, a graduate student in the material sciences, and out of our conversation, uncovering problem words and sounds, and collecting them into a sentence, we arrived at the following: "We can imagine the image of a very ugly diamond in our minds for months." Sometimes longer. A couple weeks ago when the leaf buds in the tree next to my porch were beginning to appear, I touched the one closest and wondered if that little bud would remember, if it would grow more or less, faster or quicker, and I looked at it today and it seems to show no difference but my eyes are big and if there has been a change its too small to be seen.

Summer is going to be busy but pleasant. For starters, Indiana summer is nice and this apartment, with its light and doors and air coming through is good place to work. I'm flying out to Portland as soon as the semester ends to visit Aric and his family, and then flying to New York to see my brother and his family, along with my New York friends that I haven't seen for three or four years. When I get back I'll have about a month to work on writing, a new project born out of the reading I did last month, putting together a manuscript and with my remaining time hopefully writing out the dregs of the fall, of trauma revisited one last time, extending my memory to the page and letting the page do its archival work. Writing stories like I'm putting away winter clothes, and maybe I'll need them again or just move back to California. Work wise I'm tutoring at the OEPP, the perfect summer job in that I don't have to teach but meet one-on-one with students. No grades to drag on the horizons of conversation. But the main event is studying for prelims, the big test that I need to pass so that I can get started on my dissertation, and those come at the beginning of August and stretch towards the middle. All this I'm excited about, and I'm also on a softball team. Carter, #5. Got a glove the other day and this afternoon I'm going to go play catch. Yah.

Once when I was eleven I told my dad that I was "bored." It was a Sunday afternoon. He was laying on his bed watching This Old House and on Sundays us kids would head back to Madison for the school week. He would drive us to the parking lot of Club 18, a biker bar located outside of Mt. Horeb, the halfway point between Mineral Point and Madison, and we'd find my mom waiting for us in her grey Buick Skylark. Every week it was the same, leave for Mineral point on Friday and come back to Madison on Sunday. Bored was the best word I could find, that I would go to school for a week and then come back to the farm for the weekend and it all seemed the same and nothing seemed to change. And even now its hard to pin down exactly what was bothering me, but it was more an existential pain of being without purpose, a fear that regardless of where I was or who I was with this odd, empty feeling would always be there. And I walked into the room and said, "I'm so bored," and started crying and couldn't help it, and I layed down next to him and he held me a while, and later we all got in the car and drove back to Madison.

I've told this story before. I wrote it down in the blog about seven years ago. I write it again today because today is one of those days where I'm feeling that odd, existential sadness. Maybe this is Spring, when the cold turns to warm rain and all day it's been grey. Low pressure weather systems carrying invisible change. Spring time is sleepy time, some of the Chinese students I've been working with keep saying, that we need more sleep and feel more tired when Spring comes. I think this is true. But I've also been thinking about the last couple months, about not writing and taking a break from telling stories, that since my dad died, and the initial waves of grief and shock and weirdness have passed, I've been oddly happy. Not happy like whee, this is fun! happy, but happy like free. Like wow, I can't believe it's over. Happy like relieved, that my dad and everyone can finally move on. And it seems like a space long occupied has been freed up. Like an old sofa that I'd spend years sitting on has been taken away, and there's an empty spot, an outline and a few dust balls where it used to be.

One night, three or four days after he died, I was going through the pictures I keep in an old shoe box, looking for pictures of him for the memorial service that my sister and brother and I were planning. I pulled out the pictures of him that I had and set them in a pile. Along the way I couldn't help but notice all the pictures of myself, my twenty year old self in Japan, my twenty-three year old self in Seattle, my twenty-five year old self in Providence, my twenty-eight year old self in California, my thirty-one year old self still in California; and thought about how for my entire adult life it's felt like some sad secret I've had to carry around. That because it was difficult to explain, that he was both alive and dead at the same time, I simultaneously had a right to grief and no reason to grieve. Jan told me, in a conversation a few days after his death, that he wished I didn't feel like it was secret, that I felt like I could talk to other people about it, and did on occasion. But I never talked about it with my family. And I kept waiting for him to die, and kept waiting to have those conversations about him and his absence, about growing up and missing him. I am thirty-five years old.

To put it another way, now that his death and all this has finally surfaced, and seemingly, at least in these initial months, now that we all can move on, I'm wondering how to do so when my entire adult architecture, especially in terms of writing, has been built around the idea there is something wrong. It could not have been any other way that they way its been, but if I'm not running for my life then why am I running? If there is no longer a darkness to skirt around, then what will be the mystery? If I am free to say what I need to say then how can I be lonely? There is a river and then there is the river's bed. Something like that. Today I came home and said to no one in particular, "I'm so bored." and I sat down and cried. And I don't know why. But I feel better now. And I miss you.

On Friday it was in the sixties but today it's fallen back into the high twenties. When I went out this morning to move my clothes from the washer to the dryer (having forgotten to do it last night) I thought I saw a few errant snow flakes flittering around and on Monday night it's supposed to officially snow. Today is the last day of Spring Break, a break from classes spent catching up on work, sleep, and attending the College Composition and Communication Conference (the 4C's or CCCC when one speaks the lingo) in Indianapolis. Six more weeks left in the semester and tomorrow I'm subbing for a friend all week long. His class begins at 7:30 in the morning so I'm going to have to get up earlier this week. I'm not looking forward to that but am looking forward to subbing for a 106i section, a composition course for international students that I was thinking of teaching at some point while I'm in graduate school. This week will be my trial run.

It's been a while since I've written in the blog, relatively speaking. This lack of public processing has been intentional for the most part, deciding that I wanted to let the energies and conversations of the last couple of months do their thing without interference from my meaning making / story telling tendencies. Observation of the thing changes the thing and it had been a while since I let anything just be. Of course the gap in writing is also a response to a shifting attention, and I've been more locally oriented lately, towards school and my future as an academic. This recent conference serving as a good example, the first time that I actually physically enjoyed being part of Rhetoric and Composition. I spent two nights and two days there, mostly attending panels. On the first day I listened to some folks who used corpus linguistics (the study of word frequency) to investigate the question of students shifting from written to oral language (or in other words, the question of if "text speak" is infiltrating academic prose...answer: not really), next I watched a movie about adjunct/contingent labor at universities and listened to the discussion that followed it, then I attended a panel on Chinese rhetoric that poked holes in stereotypes about "direct" and "indirect" communication styles (the prevailing stereotype being that students from Asian countries are more "indirect"...which is not necessarily true. The researchers suggested that direct and indirect communication styles are more about power dynamics than any inherent feature of a language or culture), and last I tried to go to a panel on recent trends in teacher mentoring but went to the wrong room and listened to people speak about technology and race. At that point I was too tired to listen anyway.

The next day I went to a panel on mindfulness practices in the classroom, followed by a panel on crossovers between creative writing and composition, which was helpful because I met somebody who knew something about empirical studies on creative writing, which has been a recent interest of mine and there's not too many people out there doing that kind of work so was glad to make a connection; then I went to another panel about adjunct/contingent labor, and the last panel I went to was about "cultural rhetorics," the world of R/C growing to include rhetorics beyond the Greek and Roman (thanks post-modernism!). I learned a little bit about Chinese and Japanese rhetorics, the idea that we have to look through these approaches to understand them rather than judge them with a set of outside criteria. At that point, while there was more to do and see and say, I decided to get back to Lafayette and start preparing for the week. Anyway, all that is to say it was exciting and fun and full of generally nice people talking entirely about rhetoric and composition. Which is why I wrote that it was the first time I physically enjoyed R/C. Positive associations felt in the body (of smiles, eyes, handshakes, cigarettes, being away from home and the bonding that takes place between others in a similar situation, a massive group "high" of indoctrination) that ultimately form habits. Another reason I came back before the conference was over was that I was beginning to feel like I was part of something. 

And so I wanted to write today to swing things back the other way, a singular voice speaking in grey words over a black background. The crux of the entire "problem" with becoming an academic here, that if I commit to R/C fully maybe I lose my connection with poetry, and what has been a fairly fruitful process of introspection? I don't know, but most everybody tells me who has gotten a PhD that the creative writing thing goes away in the process. I don't know, but I'll keep writing, poetry or not. Speaking of which I'm going to get on with the days work, beginning a short paper for class that I think is going to be a post-modern music review, applying Foucault and Althusser to the new Bill Callahan record, and then getting started on the mid-term evaluations for the OEPP. Onward. Happy Spring.

Actually, you know what? I don't think the story I planned to tell in the previous post is going to be a public offering at this time. Not for any other reason than I don't feel like writing about it at the moment. Maybe all the talking, people, love and kind conversations that have taken place in the last three weeks has burned off the immediate impetus. Or maybe I'd just rather be looking ahead. Speaking of which, the reading that I was going to join a month ago is happening again, in a different incarnation, come this Thursday. My first poetry reading in three years. Very exciting, through I'm still not sure what I'm going to read. I prepared some things a month ago about love-ish related things (since it was going to take place the day before Valentine's Day) but now looking at those pages again I'm having second thoughts. As of today I've been leaning towards a prose poetry medley (kind of like a fruit medley but with prose poems instead of grapes and melon balls), and will make some decisions about it tomorrow. Regardless, here is the flyer (apparently Jared is from Indiana), and oh, it seems like Spring is coming. 

Three weeks ago Tuesday, February 11th, at a little before midnight, my father passed away. He had been sick with a nerodegenerative disease called Pick's disease, a kind of dementia associated with loss of speech, memory, and early on-set. He was diagnosed in December of 1998 at the age of 54, and by the end of 2004 most all his language and human-ness, including the ability to recognize other people had dissapeared. It had been close to ten years since he said a word, eight years since he'd been outside, four years since he'd stood on two feet, and since then, he's been confined to a bed asides from when the nurses would take him out and set him at a table with the other speechless old men. In this sense of decay it is with great relief that his story has finally come to an end. In another sense its impossible to know if he was suffering or what possibly could have been happening inside of his mind during the last ten years. It's comforting to think that with language comes judgment (or is it the other way around?), and without words from which to create categories of self or time, one moment is as good as the next. Or at the very least, that successive moments are not compounded onto each other, i.e. memory; human misery more a product of our relationship to suffering than the suffering itself. Regardless, my father's death has brought an odd mix of sadness and relief.

**

Over the next couple months I plan to write the story of the last three weeks + digressions. Granted I am busy with school and teaching, so it won't be an intensive project like the story I wrote over the summer. One caveat: I'm writing from a single perspective, and do not make any claims that this perspective is shared by others, or that it is the "right" perspective. His official obituary, that my family and I wrote, can be found here. As much as I would like to write a long story about "who" my dad was, the fact is that he has been under the spell of Pick's for my entire adult life, and frankly, I didn't know him as a person. So as, under the cliche directive of "write what you know," the story continues through the strange and ill-defined parameters of blogging. Onward...

(it will actually begin at 8:30 and i think i'll be reading towards the tail end of this thing...come one come all)
(update: due to circumstances i will actually not be reading tonight. bummer. but i hopefully in a month i'll read at the next one)

At the bus stop today I noticed that there were some puddles mingling with the ice on the sidewalk. It rained heavy on Saturday and got cold again. Ten inches of snow due tomorrow evening. But I was wondering how there could be water on the ground when the weather machines tell us the temperature is below freezing. Maybe these numbers are more of an average, and the "real" temperatures are more dynamic, where the sun hits or where the feet and the tires keep coming through. That it might be 26 degrees in one spot, and 34 a few inches away. And then an hour later, maybe this shifts, because the sun moves or traffic gets redirected. All that is to say that maybe the temperature is not a fact, but an approximation, and while it means something to us, paying attention to the moment to moment of where we are and what we are doing is another way to consider the weather. The colored temperature maps on our screens make it look like we're all of one thing, but maybe our sense experience isn't so universal. 

These thoughts vaguely related to the reading I've been doing in post-modern rhetoric, thinking about "modernism" and the almost impossible-to-imagine idea that there was a point in history (pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment) when ideas of universal truths weren't what we were going for. Pre-science, pre-searching for facts and 'better' ways to do things. Books like Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis and Heidegger's Parmenides suggesting that it hasn't always been the case that us humans have been looking for answers to questions of why and how. That history hasn't always existed, and we haven't always wondered where we came from or where we are going.

"In a play propelled by macho decision and action, the idea that there is an order of success that can come of knowing the right moment to go with the flow is appealingly counterintuitive—if you can't create the right moment, you'd better be able to recognize it when it comes."

            -Joanna Biggs, writing on Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea

**

Ugh. School started this week and by started I mean really started, like, work has started to pile up and there's not enough time to do it. A big part of my coping strategy when it comes to this kind of stress is to deflect or "subvert" my energies into existential questions of why am I doing this? Do I really belong here? Should I really be spending my time trying to enter a discipline that, from my perspective here at Purdue, has little regard for what I value? Of course during the break and the early stages of the semester I'm in such a good mood and am so ready to engage with these questions in productive ways. Yet by week three the palpable sense of alienation I feel on a daily basis begins to acquire momentum and push me off of the autonomous base I'd spent the break recovering. Making it through the week becomes the priority and I lose perspective on what it was I came here to do. So as, I seek ways out of this immediate discomfort rather than engaging with the work. I'm not talking about drinking or drugging, but about worrying and blaming others (self-as-other included) for my situation. But I move through, I hope either something will change (as something inevitably always does...for example this semester and prelims and then I'll have more latitude to determine my time) and try to stay ready to take advantage of opportunity when it comes up. 

Or maybe I just need a mommy to feed me and enforce nap times. Maybe we all do. My students this week were feeling it too, as well as many of my colleagues. Last week was so atypical that the grind didn't really start until now. That picture I posted a few posts ago? People flitting round like birds yet anchored to the ground? Anxious importance? Graduate school. Sorry for complaining so much.

**

"...all is not to be thought at one go..."

                                             -Derrida

**

The True Encounter

 "Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.

"Wolf! Wolf!"—and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.

At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace.

               -Edna St. Vincent Millay

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.

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.