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).

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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.

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.

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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:

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insomniac stream of consciousness--addressed

This is an older writing from elseblog -- just posting here to keep my fragments tidy.
***********************************
The damn pills don't work. We are just talking. What are we talking about?
Hard to recount. Do we start over every day, a blank slate that some good
pupil has washed clean with turpentine and aloe? Noxious fumes
never penetrate, they envelop; they soothe. They bring false comfort,
like suicide. But all comfort appears false.
Will I remember that in your arms? Hard to recall.

I still believe in comfort, and sorrow, and sparking flint.
I am softsoftsoft...I am a box of kindling heavy with dewdrops.
There is no satisfaction in finding a twig that won't snap underfoot.
Who doesn't cry out when broken? A smoldering fire is no joy for
eyes used to firecrackers. My bending is supple, unyielding, insufferable.
You can break your neck on it if you don't watch out.
There is no narrative trace, no guiding thread,
Ariadne would order us both shot.
We don't deserve a labyrinth if we are only climbing out of our own skins.
There are questions one should bother to dream--bulls don't just show up on your doorstep.

No one decides, although one may pretend otherwise midway. Who holds the log book, recording all these dank comings and goings? But we're not writing a book. There is neither truth nor lie here. Worse, there's no fiction in our fiction. There is no address between us, there is only the approach. An eternal approach

burning, an unsent letter

I should be working, but I can't. I am distracted by these letters at my feet. This stack of letters from over 10 years ago. Uncanny repetitions in my present-- in form only, but the form evokes the content, takes my mind, wraps it around this thing that was -- bring these letters out of hiding. Among the stack from you is a letter I wrote but never mailed. It is handwritten, and I see the me of the past, licking the envelope, addressing it; I sealed it, and later unsealed it. I don't know why. Did it remain unsent or did I re-write it? I no longer remember. There were so many letters, so many repetitions. My handwriting on the envelope looks childish -- big, careful, almost looping. I wasn't a child, and yet ... And yet, wasn't I?

I re-read your letters with a little amazement. You were my age now (maybe even a year younger) when you wrote them, when you wrote things like these, just one little parcel of the hundreds of pages that for some reason haunt me tonight:

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