27.2.07

weakness

I am weak-willed. Weak-fleshed. Welcome to the world, you might be retorting smugly under your breath. Ah yes, surely. But as Rousseau said, "it's the common lot of humanity; I felt it more than another." It's perhaps not that I am more weak-willed than any other, but I feel it now in such excess... A phrase of Sappho comes to me: that "loosener-of-limbs" she calls desire, but she could have just as easily meant despair (and perhaps she did -- indeed). My tendons have given in; they gape about my body in horrible slack-jawed puddles. That's just one example.

My heart, a black barreled stove, beckons, smoky and warm. The path to it must be littered with exquisite little objects marked "drink me" and "eat me", or "come closer" and "even closer than that!". It lures the kind of Alice whose games are still running about on other boards, whose words have not yet decided to obey deixis, and whose cards have not started to take her seriously. There is another sign, it seems, just on the netherside of the little stovepipe's lid, wherein translated from some uknown tongue into a barely decipherable script are the words "run the other way"--or "pull your tendons back up"--it's hard to make it out through the smoke.

My weakness is for literature, for reference. The girl plays at the labyrinth only as long as she still believes in minotaurs needing rescue, in crumbs to be trailed behind her, and in sorties of various kinds.

If only I had something to write. If only you would wear my tendons like Humpty-Dumpty's suspenders.

23.2.07

would you trust a barefooted meaning?

It's this Fido business again.

“People are born and die and sometimes wear boots; meanings are not born and do not die and they never wear boots—or go barefoot either.”

--Gilbert Ryle from "The Theory of Meaning"

22.2.07

false coincidences, tumors and imaginary dogs

I do not teach what I want to teach; not often. This is due to a certain positionality, not to my own desire. Perhaps it is my own desire that put me in this position, but that is no matter. I developed a class on memory after several months of deteriorating memory, with no intentional or causal desire therein. I was not obsessed with the memory lapses and losses; I affectionately called them collectively "the tumor", and I went about the world constructing the idea of a little marble-shaped pebble in my brain, pressing down on something and causing things to go awry. Of course, I knew better; this was the way to describe it that attributed absolutely no meaning to it--who can be expected to control a tumor that suddenly springs into the brain, like a lazy cheerleader springing to pert attention with a smiling bob of the head?

Vapid tumor--what can be done? I treated the whole situation more like a sitcom than anything else, and the occasional stroke of anxiety was treated to the same derision, even offered up under the "absentminded professor" stereotype for general amusement. I stayed away from all analytic postures towards my memory question (while I poured over such postures in relation to the memory question). It was someone else who pointed out to me the odd coincidence of me researching and teaching a class on memory after months of having shilled my deadpan brain tumor through its paces. Why yes, how odd, now that you point it out. (Oh, come now, it was better than denying any coincidence at all, herr dr. at my head).

house cleaning

A housecleaning tip comes from Adrienne Rich, via Jules (thank you to her for drawing my attention here). It's from a poem called "Living in Sin":

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime.
A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl,
a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

I've always disliked that in our times we constantly refer to relationships as "hard work" -- I understand the comparison, but I think there's something stultifying for us to reduce every aspect of our lives to the rules and descriptions of labor. Alienated labor, no less. But this poem captures the bewildered awakening to the fact that love accumulates dust. That someone must take the decision to dust that furniture, or to ignore the dust and live joyously and messily through it, or to be confused and turn to some other form (poetry?), or to be disappointed and move on once the dust accumulates (surely there's something defective with the armoir of love if it can't keep dust away, the latter seem to say).

If it's labor to dust the furniture of love, though, it's not to be confused with a time-clock, a salary, a list of duties, the fulfillment felt from achieving goals in that realm. Is it too cute by half to say there's something like "a labor of love"? What I mean is that love is not 'hard work", relationships are not work in the typical sense of the word. No more than being alive is work. It is, of course, yes, yes--but not in the typical sense--and to reduce it to this precise manifestation is a limitation that leads to alienation. Rich's image of a young woman discovering with astonishment dust and messy traces where she expected a magical continuity of brightness is thus a fitting image. No one is shocked that dust appears in that other realm of labor ("what did you expect??!"), but in the realm of love, one has to do more than become accomodated to the fact of the dust. One has to come to love the squeaky stairs under the relentless milkman's step. Astonishment, but not alienation.

20.2.07

My Personal Disaster Management Act of 2007

Let's play at ill-fitting analogies. If my break-up with J. is a hurricane, then I'm FEMA. My friends are the Red Cross (and other concerned citizens) who sweep in with assured competence and blankets, rescuing and comforting. But FEMA--what a mess!! Having seen this one coming on -- it's not like there weren't warning signs, and we all knew the levee was vulnerable in spots -- FEMA should have been more prepared. FEMA should have been able to do more pre-emptively, pro-actively. But this wasn't recognized as what it would become when it was just a little thing brewing on the horizon -- there are so many types of tempests, after all, even those in a teacup.

16.2.07

St. Etienne in technicolor--memoirish

Once in Paris, a felicitous encounter that since serves as prototype for letting myself be unexpectedly taken by chance.

Several of us are walking home from a bar in the 5th, in the night that Paris allows. It's darker than one might imagine, the city of light, especially in the medieval offshoots of tourist districts. The darkness forms a cocoon of sound as our drunken footsteps echo through the muffled decorum. (There is a way in which drunken students too in love with literature inhabit the landscape of Paris--being there is a comfort and a shock to the system, through which one discovers a new way of being intoxicated.) On this occasion, the city itself seems buttressed by our gleeful gloom. There is no need to invent love in Paris, nor history, nor life. Glum little pupils of the night, we know this, and feel the hearty pulse of our uselessness to be both sobering and comical. The result is a dour gaity as we flit through the night scene like shadows on some black-and-white street-scene Paris photo that at least one of us had hanging on a dorm room wall somewhere.

14.2.07

simple greeting on the 14th

On this day I say love whatever sustains you, even if it eats you up, like the addict loves her habit, his killer of pains, her intensifier of dasein. If sustenance is toxic, this doesn't mean you won't learn to love yourself better and more. Let this day call you to look at that and those you love; just look. Tomorrow can begin changing, if changing needs be. You don't have to seize, hold, drink down, succor, proclaim, no matter what the tv says.

Look the way an infant looks, with all its being both concentrated and dispersed, feeling a different axis of gravity (one whose rules we can't chart). There's a love in that both modest and extravagant. But for those of us with words more than anything, we can jangle them around like a sachet of teeth hidden under the pillow, hoping to attract good spirits; we can string them together, making jewels and knives, making occasions for coming and for leaving (love's first cousin, incestuous and innocently sinister.) My friends, you sustain me, and words, but most of all you. So, take these:

13.2.07

desperately seeking Stendhal

I was up all night, or nearly, trying to find a single passage in La Vie de Henri Brulard. It would have been much easier if I owned the book. Instead of searching pages, I was searching google. But this one passage, that I knew almost by heart anyway but had to see for myself, had to see it, mattered more than anything. The hours pulsed on, tangents crept down my ankles and took root in the carpet, and meanwhile I sorted through mentions and gestures towards and knowing smiles and bad summaries and notes for the bac and everything else except a goddamn direct quote of the piece. And it's famous, this bit, I keep insisting to myself--I'm flabbergasted! If you look up (in a desparate pique) "Proust quote" on google, you get a million little gems. You can send them to your friends in email, without typing them or translating them yourself--it's quite efficient [not that I advocate efficiency with literature, mind you, but so be it, shameful little truths]. But Stendhal is another matter. Oh sure, you get some quotes. Try it, as I'm sure some of you are in another open browser, just now doing. But not from HB, and/or not THE ONE. [of course, I just then assumed in writing that I have readers, but much like Stendhal I know differently, hence the endless need for writing, for prefaces and re-prefacing, the postpreface, the posthumous preface, which it will all have been one day...]

The quote was supposed to somehow sum up the state of my love life -- a solidarity of feeble dust-scratching between me and Marie-Henri Beyle, or Henri Brulard, or whoever so scratches into the dust a collection of names and ponders them. Not in a Sesame Street way (one of these things is not like the other, a sing-song matching game), but in the way of a question that is at the same time an impossible gesture of inscription. The set isn't complete, and even a man out walking with a stick knows that. They repeat. That's why the letters can be interchangeable--and we like to add "but never the people"--but I'm not so sure. It depends on the view taken, and it's no accident that this bit of dust-scratching happens in a place with a view out over a city (or a town--you see, I can't remember, and I couldn't find the quote). Of course, that's where you go wrong -- the view over, from above, the mastery of the question applied, the list, the summing up of "the state of my love life" -- that's reading in the wrong way, although such a reading is invited. Clearly. But such would be to close the set, not by scratching the final initial, adding the "so that's it", drawing lines of similarity, or any such maneuver; but simply by extricating oneself from the dust. It is not only by manner of memory, or manner of reflection that one finds oneself there.

It will have been ironic, in the Alanis way at least, to think that I will have devoted a good part of my intellectual life to reading about, thinking about and writing about love; and yet, perhaps no one will have asked it such fervent questions, put it into such contortions of interrogation-under-torture, into such radical doubt, as the men who have claimed to have loved me. It is divine comedy, at least sitcom style, that the questions from the not-set go in ways I haven't prepared for, in ways I can't write about "for tenure", in ways whose repetition I can see but not understand, in ways that leave me seeking Stendhal on google at 2am, looking for something I already know by heart.

11.2.07

love: sinking or floating?

"Buoyancy" --by Rumi

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours
but I couldn't.