June 2nd, 2014

What follows is a story written as a class assignment. The assignment instructions were to render Taniguchi's comic tale "A Blanket of Cherry Blossom" into prose. The images are a sample of Taniguchi's from the comic in question. The text, for what it's worth, is mine.

A Blanket of Cherry Blossom

Part 1

            “La Petite Voleuse”—lower-case letters in an upper left corner. The film is French and therefore respectable, and my grip on the box is accordingly casual. Naked flesh running the length of the right corners—shapely arms that extend the length of shapely legs and shimmy delicate live-heels into indelicate high-heels. The film is French and therefore risqué, and my grip on the box is accordingly awkward. Bare limbs, bodiless limbs, flat limbs, fame limbs. Limbs printed on boxes and slid across counters at video stores. “Your membership card please.” “Here.” Rented limbs. This is how it begins, with rote interactions and VHS limbs. This is not the tale of my grip on the box.

This is the tale of a blanket of cherry blossom, but I shan’t let you know what that means yet. There must be suspense before satisfaction; confusion must precede enlightenment; revelation hinges on turning over new leaves. You don’t understand that yet, but you shall. For the time being you must walk with me. Observe. Yes, here I am, a man leaving a video-store. Indeterminate age, you are thinking, and unobjectionably dressed. A perfectly appropriate and perfectly unremarkable addition to the city, you are thinking, with its stopped cars and parked bicycles, its pram-pushing mothers and window-gazing businessmen, its tidy shop-fronts and overdone posters. Come. Walk. White slacks and a striped sweater, you are thinking, slick hair and sizable spectacles. V-neck, you are thinking, no tie and noon shadows.

Where am I leading you? That is what you most want to know. Who am I, and where am I leading you, and what has “La Petite Voleuse” got to do with all this? Patience. We must walk first: walk through the white midday light, pale on passing buildings; walk past the banners and bustle of commerce and down the pylon-lined lanes of lodging; walk until our shadows grow almost substantial as we are. We must walk slowly, leisurely, as casual as a hand on a respectable film box. Walk. Walk. Keep walking. Now look up.

            See! No, no, do not look at me…look at her. I have brought you to the pay-off for all of your labors, for all of that walking. Behold the cherry blossom! Observe her. She is a lone arboreal artwork, framed by the suburban, by geometry, by residence, but outstripping her frame. Oh magnificent cherry blossom! In the midst of the manufactured, she is a vision of nature; in the midst of the angled, she is an eruption of the organic; in the midst of the domestic, she is the smack of the wild. And here at her feet—at my feet, at our feet—she spreads her blanket, her invitation, her unpreventable loss. One thousand wan petals. Tread softly, softly, and as with feet, so too with hands. Follow my lead: reach with fingertips foremost—gently, gently—then drink in the trunk with the well of your palm. And after the trunk, the petals: fingertips, palm. The blanket beckons; it asks to be lain on; I must lie. I am cradled and cushioned and uplooking. This is contentment. This is joy!  Forget the grip on the box. See! I have let the box go. The box is unimportant now. We have left the city behind; there is now only you and me and the cherry blossom. Come, let us unfurl; let us sprawl. Let us consider things from the perspective of blossoms.

Part 2

            And then She shows up, a shadow-fronted presence in the precipitation of petals. She is unexpected. I did not count on her entering my story—our story. I could not have counted on it, for I do not know her; she is as foreign to me as she is to you. And she is beautiful: skirt suit and a white blouse; heels like those on my “petite voleuse”; eyes dark and large and rectangular; hair ebon, back-skimming, loose.

“You’re in my place!” she tells me. The petals rustle audibly as I abandon recumbence. She palms the tree-trunk—gently, gently.

“I came…

                                             …because I miss it.” She palms the blanket blossoms, cups them in her hands, and lets them fall again. Her back inclines toward the support of the trunk and she smiles as young children smile. I am quite taken with her. I say nothing.

“I moved away…before it flowered. I just wanted to see it one more time,” she tells me. We sit on the blanket. Still I say nothing.

            “The Cherry tree grew here…

                                                             …long before I was born. It must be very old.”

I do not know what to make of her, with her beauty and her nostalgia. I study her face and say nothing, but she shows no sign of minding or even of thinking my actions irregular. Airily she herself unfurls, stretches supine, lies with her hair blackly cascading and her eyes shut but still smiling.

            “Ah!” she sighs, “I feel good here.”

I am charmed. I am smitten. I watch her where she lies.

            “When I was a child…

                                                     …I’d often lie here…

                                                                                         …and fall asleep.”

            Has she fallen asleep?

            Come, let us consider her from the perspective of blossoms.

Part 3

            Of course, it is impossible to stay in one place forever. We cannot remain eternally with Her on the blanket of cherry blossom, much as we may want to. We must move on. We must move on to the residence beyond the blossom , to the strip-paneled home where dinner steams preparative on a stove-top, and one’s sister, short-haired and apron-togged, asks the practical questions that bring us full-circle.

            “And the video?” She stirs the tongs in the pot, bowls at the ready. Ah, yes, the video.

            “Ah! I’ve left it.”

             “Where?” An innocent question, but unwittingly loaded. It hangs in the air—rich, unanswered, hovering indeterminate over clouds of aperitive steam. I depart back out into the evening.

            You and I both know where I have left the video. It’s here, under the cherry tree in the twilight, the cover covered over with petals. Lamps shine behind un-shuttered windows, but the light cannot reach me here in my stoop by the tree. Everything here is in shadow. Every inch where she lay, and now lies no longer, is in shadow. I retrieve “La Petite Voleuse”; return it to my hand; restore my grip on the box. This is unimportant. Forget about “La Petite Voleuse”; forget about my grip on the box. The box was only ever an excuse to return to the blossoms.

 Follow my lead: kneel reverently; extend your arm the length of your leg; reach with fingertips foremost—gently, gently—and now with the palm of your hand. She is gone. I press my hand into the cool where her hair was. This is all that abides: my hand and a blanket of cherry blossom.

31st May, 2014

Gratitude and Kindness. Twin totems of the good life.

If I wake from troubled dreams, provided I can only remember to remember "Gratitude and Kindness," the trouble does not make it beyond the first dozy readjustment of arms against the pillow. If my mind floods for a moment with memories of N___, N___ to whom I find it difficult to afford even a pronoun as pronouns provide a presence somehow, a solidity, and it is painful to concede such memories any solidity, Gratitude and Kindness (if I can remember to bring even just their names to my mind) keep my thoughts from dark places. Gratitude and Kindness are the safeguards of courage, and the more courageous one feels, the more natural love becomes. When fear is gone, love is inevitable. 

"Love your enemies..." Matthew 5:44. Every translation I have come across uses the term "enemy" here, and I must believe that something is lost in every translation. Your fellow man may regard you as his enemy, and still you may love him. This I believe. But you cannot regard your fellow man as your enemy and still love him. This is a contradiction. "Love your enemies" is a contradiction. I cannot love N___ provided I account him my enemy. If I am to love N___, I must learn to see him, to truly and whole-heartedly see him, as my fellow man, my neighbor, my friend. As soon as you love someone, that someone is no longer your enemy, and therefore it is impossible to love your enemy. You can "bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that...use you and persecute you," but you cannot love your enemy.

For thirteen years I have struggled with memories of N___. Mostly I have tried to blur, to efface, to repress. Occasionally I have tried to confront the memories head-on, but this is a work for much stronger constitutions than mine and, in my case, never ends well. To be at peace with my memories, I must find a way to love N___. I must find a way to love the most essential thing about N___. His soul. (A pronoun! This is progress; this is a good sign!)

Do I believe in the soul? 

I do not know what I believe. My ignorance overwhelms me. I do not know how to articulate that in a way that properly conveys what I mean by it. My ignorance  OVERWHELMS  me. I feel the need to start from the ground-up learning-wise, but I've no idea where to begin. I have no guiding confidence in any of the available approaches to understanding the world. The scientist, the theologian, the historian, the poet, the philosopher, they ring in my ears as so many tongues of babel, all calling me, but I am as Buridan's ass caught between hay-bales. The limitations of my senses, of my spirit, of my time, of my imagination, of my Reason leave me utterly uncertain of everything. Where does one begin when one's utterly uncertain? If I were a relativist, that would be some help. Even relativists have faith, faith in the relativity of things. And faith is the key; faith is security; faith is a compass; faith tells you how to live and where to go and what to do. How do I develop faith? Faith in science, or faith in God, or faith in the senses, or faith in the intuitions, or faith in logic, or faith in feelings...how? How do I develop faith? Can I develop it? Or do you have to be born with it? Are some people just naturally faith-inclined?

   

Gratitude and Kindness teach me courage. They teach me to genuinely want the best for others, and not merely to act in others' interests because it benefits my own interests. When fear departs, all that remains is love: the most perfect, beautiful, unquenchable love. 

I am thankful for today. I am thankful for almond-milk lattes and for alfresco tables. I am thankful for spinach salads eaten at the window of charming cafes in charming old American small-towns. I am thankful for honey-locusts in the dusk-light and for beautiful shop-girls who think I'm Australian. I am thankful for bare feet on the cool clay of lake trails. I am thankful for memories of wild strawberries rekindled by men with wild hair and cherry-red skin. I am thankful for Abel who keeps inspirational newspaper clippings in his back pocket. I am thankful for the feeling of always knowing someone and being known by someone in the places I visit, the feeling of community--this is precious in a world grown so large and dispersed. I am thankful for the look of my gold-ribboned shoes against the aged wood of the railway tracks. I am thankful for raspberries. I am thankful for the dungeons-and-dragons player at a further table who pauses mid-game to explain the finer points of World War 2 politics to his friend; I am thankful for the carefulness with which he numbers the allies on his fingers, and the gravity with which he quotes Churchill. I am thankful for the scent of flowers at sundown. 

I do not know where to start, but I shall start somewhere. I am thankful for the opportunity to start. 

I am thankful for today. 

I am thankful there shall be a tomorrow.

28th May, 2014

"Come hither, all ye--and thou, and thou...and thou, too, most solitary of all fugitives!" --A--

Call for me also. Call for me, for me as for all the others. Call for me also. Please do not forsake me. I am standing on the rock. I am standing on the sand. My feet are weary, weary. My eyes are salt. I cannot hear you. I do not know what is wrong with my ears that I cannot hear you. I stand in rain, and then in sun, and then in the the slice of the chill Northern Wind. The bushes put forth ghost flowers and glow cool in the gonelight. Does my own skin glow cool in the gonelight? It is only Spring and I am already steeling myself for the Winter. The flowers are only just come and I'm preparing myself their passing. So short a season! Who can tell the difference between lullaby and elegy? Oh trillium...oh darling little speedwell...forgive me. I am a goose. I was weeping for your departure before you ever arrived. 

"Most solitary of all fugitives!"

Call for me also. All this life and all this motion. The gush-gushing of it, the cyclic swoosh of it, the roar and the roll and the whoosh. I must get to higher ground. If I get to higher ground I may at last get to hear you, turn to you, come to you. Where is higher ground? 

I miss Chesterton.

27th May, 2014

It is strange to be 28 and find one's life mostly over. I do not mean by this that I anticipate a young death; on the contrary, if genes and lifestyle are any prognosticators, chances are I'll hit my centenary before the reaper comes a-scything. And I do not mean to indicate a general dysthymia either. Granted my heart aches, but this aching is neither odd nor enfeebling. Scars keep the ego from becoming a tyrant, and this heartache, which does not fade and--I'm coming to accept--may haply be permanent, is but a much-needed scar on my soul. If the heartache helps me think more humbly, behave more thoughtfully, and be a more loving person, I am glad for it; I shall sing its praises. I do not want to be the patient who begrudges my medicine its taste.

     Yet my life does feel over insofar as I can no longer envision it following any of the normal routes, nor meeting any of the ordinary goals. When I was a little girl, I had a notion of what life meant, and of what it consisted, and of how it played out. My notion was not so very far removed from Shakespeare's "seven ages" of man, only I switched out the "soldier" for the "artist." I would progress, so I thought, from child to lover to creative force to wise woman to dreamy dotage and finally to sleep, with no stage ever departing me, but rather with all stages aggregating, like so many sedimentary layers, each casting their subtle influence and shaping the stages piled on top. 

     Yet now this notion is all gone. I had a husband; I was a wife; but that is at an end, and I cannot see myself being in a romantic relationship again. I venerate Eros too highly (I know C. S. Lewis would scold me for it, but I do). Sentimental irrationalist that I am, I would rather never entertain kisses again than kiss any I am not convinced is meant to be thusly kissed, and as by "meant" I mean something along the lines of "Fate-appointed," the odds of me ever kissing again seem unlikely. And I confess this is odd, for in my marriage it was always Wade (admittedly a thorough-going determinist) who talked of "destiny" and "fate" where our relationship was concerned, and it was always I who argued against him. There is even a sonnet, in an incipient sonnet sequence I attempted four years after taking my vows, that addresses this contrast:

My love was never one without conditions,

I said as much right from the very first,

And yet you ask me now for such remissions

As would see my thoughts on this score reversed?

You scowl at me and tell me I'm too cold, 

Too scientific in my heart's affairs;

I know of romance naught, you do me scold,

To calibrate the weight of Cupid's cares.

What sort of love is mine that does not live

Immortal but some day may fade away?

What sort of love, you ask, that will not give

Eternal vows but lets itself decay?

The truest form, say I, that love can take:

The love of man, and not love for love's sake.

Yet it is Wade who, in the wake of our separation, has sought comfort in the arms of another, and it is I who look to the nun's life because I am so intent on keeping Eros and all of his rituals sacred. I, who refused to believe in destinies, would now apparently rather surrender all the touted consolations of coupledom than act contrary to the belief that such destinies might be a reality. 

More than anything else I am terrified by the thought that things might be without meaning. This feeling gets stronger and stronger as I get older. I do not know how to live in a meaningless world. 

I do not see myself again in a romantic relationship, yet neither do I see myself doing any of the other things my young self saw my elder self doing. I used to dream of going to Oxbridge and becoming a highly esteemed so-and-so, someone who contributed something really worthwhile and memorable to the world, a winner of Nobel prizes, a name for the history books. Yet now I desire more than anything simply to do good and die quietly. Like Jean Valjean, I have the feeling of one who has stolen a loaf of bread and two candelabras, and whose life should be now devoted to reparations, and whose gravestone should be unvisited and without name. And I say this not out of despair of myself; I am not trying to cut all my ties with the world; I am not covetous of total abnegation; I am not craving escape. The do-good-and-die-quietly path is simply the path that most appeals to me, the one in which I feel I shall do the most benefit for both my fellow man and my soul.

     It is for this reason that I now wish to study philosophy for my PHD. I shall not be a big fish in a small pond in philosophy, as I might have proven (with sufficient effort and ambition) in a PHD English program. And I might not have much hope of a career afterwards, but the career is no longer the point. I simply wish to learn. I wish to acknowledge my ignorance about everything, and to bow my head, and, with a humble curiosity, begin at last to learn. From scratch. From the beginning. I want to begin my lessons. 

I am 28 and my life is mostly over. I am glad. I am 28. I shall scrub myself clean in spring water. I shall put on a fresh shift. I shall come with blank sheets to the school-house. I shall begin my lessons.

5-15-14

I do not sleep. I do not eat.

Ten years. Today marks ten years. Did I sleep then? Was I asleep this hour ten years ago? I know I was afraid. I wanted to turn into a bird even then. So lost, so lost, so lost, so lost. All circumstance seemed a dread ocean, and I trapped in its undertow. If you fight it, I said, you shall lose all your energy and drown, and so I surrendered for the strength to tread water.

If I could somehow send love back through time, I would send it back ten years. Then perhaps...

I do not eat. I do not sleep. I ache.

There is the rain, though. I love it as a friend. If I do not sleep all through the night, I shall go walk in it when the dawn breaks.

I am so cold. I wear the blanket K_____ gave me, and headphones, and play Nyman on the piano, abnegating myself in arpeggios. I dissolve. I fade. I am not there; only the accents are there, and the tidal arpeggios. And I think: this is it. I shall give myself over to this instrument...to music...to this ocean. The world is too cold. 

And he...and what if he...what if the scans show...

"Over half of people with lung cancer die within a year of being diagnosed."

He has grown so thin. He seems so small, so fragile.

If the car had not broken down, I do not believe I would have spoken to him again. I would never have known. And who am? I who cannot manage even friendship? I who can say only "it hurts too much...I just...but you can call...I do not mind...if you need to...you can call."

And he is respectful; he does not call. Yet I must call and ask soon...

Ten years. An end to ten years. I must ask...

I do not eat. I do not sleep.

And he...

I'm being irrationally anxious...unexplained weight loss could mean so many things...

Yet if...the doctor's concern...the family history...the cigarettes...

And if it is? Half of people within one year?

But is may very well not be. He is not coughing terribly; he is elsewise fine. Statistics are fret-mongerers. I am being irrational.

It is ten years today. Ten years. I went to the library and got book after book on epistemology. Hume. Dewey. Epistemology and the ancients. Epistemology and the moderns. Epistemology and you. I woke. I did my morning exercises. I filled out my health insurance application. I looked into the PHD philosophy program, as L____ recommended. And I felt happiness; I felt excitement. I shall study my reasons for belief and non-belief, I said, I shall find out...

Was it only a stray glance at the date? Is that the root of my present terror of finding out...is it all because I glimpsed a few numbers in a line?

I wish I could live in the arpeggios.

30th March, 2014

I wish I was a goose, a Canada-goose. They fly overhead in the dusklight beyond the window. What would I not give to join them? To not be as I am; to not be this; to not be thus. In despair, wishing to be other than oneself. I wish to be a goose, though I am not a goose. In despair, wishing to be oneself. I wish to be a goose, as I believe to be a goose would be for me to be more authentically myself than I am as a human.

Anxiety gnaws at me from the marrow to the skin and from the skin to the marrow; it consumes me inside-out and outside-in.

I wish I was a goose.

I feel so anchorless, so insecure. Perhaps this is why I wish to fly: because I am falling, free-falling, endlessly falling, and if I could fly, then I would no longer fall. Even if there were no more land in sight than there ever was, I would no longer fall. To fly is to be anchored without the need of a port.

More than this, though: to fly is to escape. Every night I go to sleep begging the world to let me wake up outside of it. Let me wake in another place, a place where I feel more hope of finding my home. I am homesick in this world. So very, very homesick. I am as Tolkien's "man," so described in the Silmarillion, who is always looking beyond the world for the place that he truly belongs.

I want to love my fellow man, but I find it so hard to relate to him. I talk to him--oh so many words do I exchange with him--yet he remains eternally alien to me. The bark of trees is less foreign, the sting of the mosquito, the scent of geraniums, the plink of rain on the river. I stood on the path leading to the library today and disentangled the singings of starlings in the trees, a raucous polyphony, every beak braying a different tune--sweetly and knottily discordant and beautiful--and this confusion, even this,  was less confusing than the simplest "hello" from my neighbor.

What am I doing here? Where is my answer? What am I doing here?

It is not enough to say: "Eat, Drink, and be Merry." It is not enough to advocate an indulgence in animal pleasures. Perhaps some can find inherent pleasure in the satisfactions of the body, but I am at a loss. I do not. I cannot. There is that within me that seeks desperately for that which is beyond me. Home. I want to go home. The neuroscientists do not understand. The behaviorists do not. The psychologists do not. We are at odds with one another, they and I. I have lost faith in their answers, answers that once seemed so adequate. When I was younger, I looked at the scholars and thought them too credulous. Then something happened. I broke. I lost my faith. And now I look at the scholars and think them too incredulous. There are more ways than one to lose one's faith. I need to go home.

What am I doing here? If I could just answer that question. What am I doing here? Why am I a girl not a goose? Why do I feel homesick? Why does anxiety eat at me from the inside-out and the outside-in? Why do I crave the scent of geraniums and the plinking of rain on the river? Why do I despair? Why do I hope?

I miss muskrats and beavers and phoebes and king woodpeckers. I miss trilliums and chipmunks and ducklings. I miss thunderstorms sending frogs to the porch, and turtles laying their eggs in the sand. I miss robin chicks taking their first leaps of faith. Nor is it only some sentimentalized idyll I yearn for when I speak of missing these things. I miss the awe that attends them as much as I miss the comfort. The wilds are righting influences to me, and to be a gardener seems the rightest of vocations: to try to organize the wilderness without effacing it; to marry order and chaos; to live on the threshold of tranquility and trembling. I am never more avidly unnerved than when in the country, and I am never more blissfully content. Oh to be on the river! To be alone, paddling at an unconstrained amble, every sense aesthetically overindulged. Sunlight and river-ripples. Oh beautiful world! Now I remember you!

I must find a way to get back to the country. If I have any home on this Earth, surely that is where I will find it. Do I not remember? I was a child of the country; I spent all my days out of doors, roaming through farmlands and meadows and woods; my chief delight was to go tramping the scraggy Northern highlands with my foremost, four-footed friend (my dear Mitsi) never more than a whistle-distant from my side, marveling over Burnett moths on thistle blooms or catkins on pussy-willows, sucking the sweet stalks of unscabbarded grass-blades, inventing numberless stories to be mumbled seriously beneath my breath. Do I not remember? When we moved to the suburbs, did I not still find every occasion to abscond to the rivers and meadows, or to the unpeopled shoreline, where I could continue inventing my stories with no soul looking on? And even when I was not thus absconding, did I not spend my time in my room painting pictures of what I wished for my future, and were not the pictures all of the country? Throughout my life, as an undying refrain, has the country not called to me, beckoned me? When I beg the world nightly to let me wake up beyond it, do I not always imagine the waking up to be waking up in the splendor of nature? Never in a room, never amid people; always on a riverbank, or in an umbraged glade, or on lichen-sheeted sheet-rock where the ocean laps the land.

Oh goose. Little goose. Is this why I wish for goose-feathers? Simply to fly back to the place where I can again be a girl? Do I desire to have wings to reach the place where I'll be content to have arms? Do I yearn to be of the air only to find a true home on the land?

16th March, 2014

"But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood."

--Hamlet--

Shall I find comfort or terror in the nothingness at my window?

 

The days whir, and I am part of their whirring, and I whir within them. Whir, whir, whir. An endless hum. And I am an academic. So my title goes. I get to read books for a living. Papers put food on my table. I am a good academic, moreover, a very studious one, one who pays great attention to her work, and does everything assigned of her, and does not slouch in her industry. And yet what does it avail? I give myself over to my work just to keep up with my work, and so I have nothing to give to my work. I am replaceable. I am a cog, a whir, a breachless hum. This "me," this version of myself that plies the books and grades the papers, that writes the essays and prepares the lectures, she is replaceable. Indeed, I daresay the university would be better off replacing me. There are others with more energy and less latent recalcitrance; there are others who could do what this "me" does much more capably than I do it. But they do not replace me. And so I do, as best I can, and because I do, I do not think. There is no time for thought in all the whirring. Whir, whir, whir. A cog; an unbroken hum.

 

Perhaps this is why we whir. Perhaps it is all set up so that we do just do and do not think. I lay my finger upon the perimeter of thought and find it caustic as ice and fire. Thought is terrifying. To think the nothingness at my window is terrifying. But I want to think it. I do not want a whirring away into death. I want to become a better thing.

 

Yesterday, at dinner with fellow students (my one monthly concession to university social-life), I sat next to a chap called M_____ who said he hardly ever thought. A dimensionally-robust figure, with a full head of hair on his chin and not a hair to be seen on his head, he sat on a child-sized chair and ate from a plate of fried fish that could have fed the five-thousand. I tried to bury the raw tuna I had unwittingly ordered under the greens of my Salad Nicoise so that the chef would not notice when the plates were returned. I had attempted to eat it, but the magnolia steak was so unashamedly fleshly, with its oxygenate tint, its gelatinous texture, its iron-rich afterbite, I couldn't do it. I buried the thing, hid it from the world like a rabbit laid low in a lettuce patch, and grazed conscience-strickenly on the olives round the edges. M______ cradled a snifter of brandy and described his average morning: "I wake up. I make coffee. I put on the TV, but I don't watch it; I just look at it for about fifteen minutes, without thinking..." The adjacent girls, K_____, A______ and I, looked aghast with appropriate envy. "How does anybody not think? How do you manage to turn off your mind?" M______ didn't have an answer specifically; he attributed his ability to not think to having played sports in his youth. K____ and A_____ were intrigued by M_____'s ability to switch-off his mind, equating it to the mystery of being male. I sipped my wine, and nibbled my olives, and laughed and smiled as a good guest aught to, as a civilized being aught, but inside I knew myself to be breaking. I broke because I couldn't understand the nonchalance with which M_____ described his morning, and the professed thoughtlessness in which he lived the better part of his days. I couldn't understand the company's fond approbation of drunkenness. I couldn't understand this cultural embracing of numbness. I sat in the midst of that brewery, with the dim-lighting and the deafening hum, the whir, whir, whir of socialization, of commerce, of machines, of lives-being-lived, and felt so horribly, utterly alone.

 

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The whir. The endless, unbroken hum. These non-thought numbnesses, these drunken numbnesses, these are not the same as peace, these are not the same as silence. I am not alone. I cannot be so unlike you. Surely you too want to break free from the whir. Surely you too want to know what fresh air feels like in the lungs, and what unwhirring calm sounds like in the ears.

 

I am going to the place without whirring. I am going to the place where the thoughts are. I do not want numbness. Numbness is a dull ache and an anathema. I want strength. I want to feel my self in my body, my being embodied. And if I find terror in the nothingness at my window, I'll take comfort that this is surely better than finding nothing at all.

14th March, 2014

Consider Camilla; coal-colored Camilla; perfect, pendent Camilla. Camilla watches while I count cupflower seeds. Exquisite Camilla; unkempt Camilla; Camilla who droops from the cage ceiling with the weight of rainwater, like a drop set to fall from a Catalpa leaf's lip. Camilla is a Malaysian Flying Fox. I am a human. Neither of us belong in that room, with the great cage hung with fruit-skewers, and the red lights, and the vampire bats quietly sipping cows-blood from vials behind a vast crimson curtain. I suppose Camilla is there because she is unwanted, because a zoo closed or a pet-store went out of business...something like that. I wonder if she's ever been beyond Michigan. I wonder if she spent her childhood on wing over the Malay Peninsula, eating fruit from the Rambutan tree. One way or another, Camilla is no longer fit for the forests. Man has taken Camilla from her home in the most absolute way; man has changed her so utterly that she could not eat at her own table even were that table before her and laden with langsats; she could not sleep in her very own bed. Camilla is a permanent exile. Yet she is not alone. I am there. For two hours every Friday, with my envelopes and my seeds and my stickers. And I, like Camilla, am in exile; I too know no way to get home. Camilla looks at me through onyx eyes, and I return the gaze through grey/blue ones, and we are exiles together. She unfurls a tongue curled as a shepherd's crook and tenderly laps at her wing-tip. I unpeel the adhesive on an Echinacea label and affix it to a corresponding seed-bag. Chris, who was, in bygone days, an alligator animal-handler at a Floridian zoo, talks enthusiastically about Liverpool FC circa 1993, and the names he reels off (Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler, Jamie Redknapp) bring back memories of childhood. My mind capers through long-forgotten details: the bed I shared with my brother; the doll my mother made for him of his favorite footballer; the magazine-cuttings blue-tacked to the wall, men with faces contorted as gargoyles, limbs liquid geometry; Alan explaining to me the merits of players, like lullabies, as I'd fall off to sleep. Camilla shudders and alters her hold on the ceiling. The screech owl turns his head ambivalently toward her, and ambivalently back again. The printer runs out of ink and I am let go early. Camilla preens. I leave her to her Tomis and head back to my Elba.

One day we will get home, you and I.

One day we shall all make it home.

March 12th, 2014

"The modest Rose puts forth a thorn:

The humble Sheep, a threatening horn:

While the Lilly White, shall in Love delight,

Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright."

-Blake-

Today I shall speak of Lili, lovely Polish Lili, who emigrated to America from Israel, and whose accent is landless, and whose words are a balm. Lili has silvering, straw blonde hair--moonlight in a hayloft--and the consistency of her hair is also straw-like: no liquid metaphors for our Lili, no waterfalls or rolling rivers, no, nor any similes cut from the seamstress's cloth, no satins or silks or such-like; Lili's hair is uneven as wild-meadow grasses and Lili is beautiful as the jagged-hem of the dawn. She is round, Lili is, round and complete, and she wears shoes the color of grapes wanting-pressing, and her lips are lacquered red as Syrah. And her lips are crenelated from fulsome years on three continents, and Lili is all the prettier for it, and when she smiles she reveals teeth parted as the red-sea, and you cannot help but smile back in return.  

     Lili had brought Orwell to the coffee shop. Down and Out in Paris and London. It was Orwell who introduced us, for Orwell is a good friend of my father's, and I make a point of being friendly to my father's good friends. Then Lili asked to be introduced to my own companion, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a lady who doesn't socialize round here very often, and with whom even I am only seven-pages acquainted. Sedgwick is rather awkward lass to introduce to ladies at coffee shops; Orwell conforms to coffee-shop banter quite nicely--he'll talk politics, or regale one with a stirring travel-yarn or two--but Sedgwick, well, so far she's only wanted to debate the semantics of "gender" (or "The Epistemology of the Closet" as she puts it), and that's not the sort of topic one brings up in casual conversation. Then again, I was halfway relieved that it was only Sedgwick and not Benjamin Hale who was with me that hour, for Hale had been with me earlier in the afternoon, and he had brought along his articulate, taboo-breaking chimp, Bruno, and as Bruno had, when last I saw him, been running amok, hairless and bloody, biting his way through a buffet of human limbs on his way to a sorely unenviable freedom, I was rather glad that he was at that point sound-asleep out of view. (I suppose I should note, for the record, that it is my professors who have partnered me up with these companions; not that I have not found the company interesting or educational, mind you, only that it is not company of my own, unobligated, free-choosing).

      Lili and I discussed literature, and the unpredictability of life-circumstances, and the difficulty of finding eligible bachelors among, as she put it, the "petite bourgeoisie" of the local area (I think she broached this topic to offer an explanation for my singleness, as she herself had been married for several decades). I asked her if she was happy, and she said no, not exactly. Happiness is a complicated thing. That was her thought on the matter. I agreed, but averred that at least there, in that present moment, in the coffee shop, I was happy, and she added her own hearty assent. It is true, said Lili: it is hard to be sad in a coffee-shop.

      Yesterday, in another coffee-shop, I met a chap called A______ from Albania. A_______ said I must come from the mountains, given my accent. This is an odd thing to say, made all the odder by the fact that A______ is the second person to comment thus in the last two weeks. A______ was with a friend whose name I cannot recall, a friend who had recently married a Russian lady he met on a cruise. A______ said the Russian had attracted his friend's attention on the basis of her ability to cut the heads off of fish, a story I very much wanted to believe, but of course it was entirely untrue: A______, A______'s friend, and I said not one non-fictional word to one another for a full forty-five minutes, preferring to weave elaborate and comic tales about our homelands and upbringings than to approach anything approximating the truth. Yet when A______'s friend left, A______ started speaking sincerely of melancholies and heartbreaks and recently failed relationships. A_______ told me that the thing which hurt most was that he had been really serious about the most recent relationship, and had gone so far as to purchase an engagement ring (for this is what the lady had said she wanted). He asked me why it was only after this point that she had begun to show discontent. I did not know. I wish I were wise; I wish I had answers for questions such as this one, but I do not. All I can offer my fellow man is an ear; I am all confessional and no counsel. The lady had left and he had bought a dog. "I am not a dog-person," A______ said, "but I have bought one. A pug of all things." The pug is uncomplicated. The pug does not cry, and the pug does not leave.

Lili and A______. I wonder if it is quite right for me to tell these stories. I wonder if it is a breach of some unspoken coffee-shop confidentiality. I have discussed with friends, before now, the idea of writing a book of my conversations with strangers, for I have found the very best of humanity in such conversations. And yet, even here, in the vast anonymity of a blog that gets seldom more than five hits a day, I find myself shying away from sharing the full depths of these dialogues. Aught I record these meetings only in pages unseen? Must I be as one led by Schiller's hierophant, brought before the veiled image at Sais, glimpsing beneath the "airy gauze" and never being able to speak of it after? To see beauty is to wish to broadcast beauty; to observe good is to wish to proclaim good, to discover truth is to wish to uncover truth. Yet my conscience advises I remain silent, even though I am under no articulated injunction to do so. A confessional. Is this what I am? Is this my place and my purpose? I go to the coffee shops, for when I go to them the stories come to me, and I love the stories, for the stories are of my fellow man; the stories are of what is best in my fellow man; the stories are of what is most honest in my fellow man. And through the stories I come to love my fellow man. Yet where I love, I cannot help but wish to sing my love. Love is the least selfish, the most giving thing of all things in the universe. But if I am a confessional, how can I, in good conscience, sing my love? How can I share it? Oh world! One day man will be unafraid to expose the best of himself to the whole world; one day he will not look upon his finest virtues as weaknesses requiring hiding, as things utterable only to strangers.

January 1st, 2014

 I have been recently reading writings on Buddhism, texts exploring the concepts of mindfulness, compassion, the middle way, and other similar topics. Ah yes, and even as I admit it, I hear tut-tuts, for I feel a keen awareness of the Western intellectual bias that categorizes Eastern philosophy as alternately quaint, faddish, and self-helpy. Eastern philosophy has a tendency to be viewed as the trifling of aspirant-hippies or aging-hippies. The former, so the cynic assets, are generally university students who turn to Eastern philosophy as a facile means of appearing wiser and more interesting than their peers; the latter are generally high-status white-collar workers, oftentimes business owners, who manipulate Eastern philosophy into managerial mantras in an attempt to justify their latter-day fondness for capitalism. Yet this cynical perspective is fair neither to most adherents of Eastern philosophy (be they students, business-owners, or anyone else), nor to Eastern philosophy itself. Eastern philosophy can come across as overly-simplistic and shallow to those who hold complicatedness to be the gold-standard of truth/knowledge, for Eastern philosophy does use very simple language and does make what seem to be very basic observations. Yet the very reason the language is, after its fashion, so simple, and the wisdom so commonplace, is largely because Eastern philosophy places a much higher emphasis on its adherents applying their own minds and exercising their own thought than does much Western philosophy. Do not suppose you have understood a thing simply because you have heard/read/(etc.) a thing--so teaches Eastern philosophy. And so the Eastern philosopher offers only the sparsest snippet of counsel, requiring his student to figure out what it means for himself. In analogical terms, one might think of Eastern philosophy as providing seeds that its adherents must sow and nourish and tend-to themselves in order to reap the fruits there-arising, whereas in Western philosophy there is an expectancy that we should be given the fruit itself, fully-formed, thereby allowing us to sample widely. There are merits and demerits to both approaches, of course: the Eastern philosopher must devote all his time and effort to a very few fruits and so his scope for happening upon a fruit that is truly valuable is narrowed. Yet the fruits one grows oneself offer a richness that cannot be found in the fruits one buys from a market, a richness dependent upon the personal effort one puts into growing them, and so the Western philosopher, though he may try every fruit under the sun, may never know the savor of an apple from his own garden. And though I do presently and, I am sure, always shall very much value Western thought and Western philosophy, I cannot pretend to grant it the rights of singular supremacy where the discovery of truth is concerned, for the Western methods of thinking seem just as susceptible to sloppy thinking, and just as conducive of intellectual profundity as the Eastern methods. Oh for more time! Oh to have all fruits and for them to have all come from my own garden!

[Image found on the "Conde Naste Connection" website, available here: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/I-just-found-an-Eastern-philosophy-that-s-very-accepting-of-S-U-V-s-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8479909_.htm]