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.