Stories and poems

"The metaphoric image of 'orphan lines' is a contrivance of the detached onlooker to whom the verbal art of continuous correspondences remains aesthetically alien. Orphan lines in poetry of pervasive parallels are a contradiction in terms, since whatever the status of a line, all its structure and functions are indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment, and the task of linguistic analysis is to disclose the levels of this coaction. When seen from the inside of the parallelistic system, the supposed orphanhood, like any other componential status, turns into a network of multifarious compelling affinities.'
Roman JAKOBSON, "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet", Language, 42/2, 1966, pp. 399-429, p. 428-429

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

A Certain Kind of Eden

Mid-december. I had started  a post about teaching children, which I do a lot. Maybe I will keep doing that when I am done. Progress has been slow, and the winter has come accompanied with its usual difficulties: I want to go really slow. This has not been helped by the fact that I haven't had a vacation in a while, and I need one. I am taking one, and I hope to come back to writing with renewed vigor, though for now, I can't stand it. Why did I decide to write a dissertation? I feel like it was a purely masochistic idea, fueled by a need to prove myself to someone, but I don't remember who. All I want to do is knit. I need a vacation, did I already say that?

I am enjoying reading a Hardy Boys mystery with one ten year old. He really likes it, though he doesn't understand everything and I have to explain to him the finer references to American history. The Hardy Boys were from New England, and that is where I am going in a few days. Maybe there will be some mystery to solve, involving my manuscript perhaps, an old library in New York, a stolen book. I think I would like to write children's fiction. It would be difficult to come up with all those details that keep the little reader reading, and I think I would want to get rid of stock figures like the fat friend who is trying to lose weight, the single and overly maternal aunt, the "drifter" (I had to explain that that was an old fashioned term for a homeless person). I like explaining the nineteen sixties vocabulary to my student. Today he asked me, "did they have electric boats then?" I answered him, "yes, I think so". I'd have to get better at writing dialogue. I am not even sure how to punctuate it. In the Hardy Boys series, I like the use of italics. Mostly it announces danger.

I shared the following poem with my poetry group with relative success. It's an odd poem, an old poem, but it describes pretty well how I feel during these darker days. My friends and readers were helpful about what to get rid of, how to rename it, what worked and what didn't. Mostly it did work, so I'm sharing it here too:

Wading the depth that was our eye to eye

I went to the market but there wasn't a market
I walked by the ocean but there wasn't a shore
I watched the sun rise but there wasn't a mountain
I saw the sun set from behind a closed door.

If walking and searching and seeing are chances
To find and not find, to lose and combine,
I'd rather be wading this edgeness of nothing
Then sitting at home dreaming twine and untwine.

And if tomorrow you can find me laughing
Don't take and don't mend, just circle the time
With your finger and gently do place me upon it
And turn me and twist me and find my right rhyme.

I went to the market but there wasn't a market
I woke up to darkness on a sandless shore
I climbed to the top but forgot that the mountain
Was downward bent feeling my heart's hidden core.

One reader said it was a ballad, a ballad to sing perhaps, though I am not sure what it's about. I feels like it comes from somewhere deep, somewhere I don't really know about, the place, perhaps where the poetry comes from, elsewhere. One of my readers, author of a captivating book, Little Venus, which I highly recommend, mentioned that I might like the poet Kay Ryan, recent poet laureate, because of her use of rhyme. And I do. I leave her with you, in this season, when, perhaps, we would all like to go back. 

A Certain Kind of Eden

It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

Maybe that is what I need, a certain kind of green, a certain kind of hope.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Calico Cat

So, I handed in pages, and the reply was encouraging, but I have to reorganize my entire première partie. This totally makes sense. I don't feel bad about it. I had written it according to the flow of my discoveries, not according to the argument which is my thesis. My advisor asked me: Qu'est-ce votre thèse? This question, what is my dissertation, struck me as eminently philosophical and I took a moment to consider it, then realized it was a rhetorical question, to get me back on track. What is my thesis? Well, I have a better idea now. I need to rewrite my outline, defining the argument for each point, in order to be clear about where I am headed, in order to let my reader in on the meaning that is unfolding. But I don't feel discouraged. I think all my bits of text are usable, and she was helpful; I have to finish, "it's promising!" she told me.

So I'm writing here instead of rewriting my outline. My promise has not yet been fixed upon the page. The possibility of my dissertation, what the book could be, lulls me and I seem to prefer this liminal state to that of actually finishing. Somehow I'm scared of finishing. I know I will, I know it will get done, though I don't know how, but I'd rather not imagine it too concretely and sometimes I'd just rather not move in that direction at all. Finishing? What will I do afterwards since I've been doing this for so long?

I do also look forward to moving on and doing something else with my time. I want to be done. I want to teach, to write of other things, I want to be more of an adult and less of a student at 33. I want less time alone and more exchange. I want to move out of this office which is no longer really mine. I want to move out of my little apartment and live with my lover. I want, I want to know what I want. I even put it on my to do list for the month of November: Figure out what I want! Right under "finish first part of my dissertation". One step forward at a time.

Ink

We need to remember what ink is made of.
How they sold us time, all wrapped up,
to make us miserable.
How we wrote and wrote,
how I write to stop.
How the word on paper killed the voice,
how the voice sang anyways.
How they wanted us to forget,
how we didn't yet.
How my body fits with yours,
how my ego gets in the way.
How ink is wet at first, then dry,
spots to tell the color of the cat.

I think that is what my dissertation is, is about. Though I don't understand that last line. Why does the cat appear out of the ink? What is it doing there? But I can't bring myself to change it. Spots to tell the color of what is, what is evident and present, as if we couldn't see it on its own. The cat got let out of the bag. That is what that line makes me think of. I'll leave the cat there, telling me the color of the ink, asking me a riddle, silently smiling. I'd like my dissertation to be like a calico cat.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

On Rain, and Gardens

Rain. My pants are wet because even if it rains I still have to go teach those little boys English and even though yesterday, in preparation, I bought a wonderful yellow bike poncho, I didn't fully understand how to use it until I was almost done with my ride. You can put the yellow poncho all the way over your hands and the handlebars. That is what the poncho is for, in fact, but I didn't understand that until my hands were cold and my pant legs were wet. I was happy that the rest of me was dry, my wool jacket and backpack. I am now enjoying the relative dry warmth of my office.

October just came. I ignored the fall and kept on riding and hiking and writing. Or re-reading. Mostly I've been re-reading, and correcting, then re-reading again. Does it make more sense this time? Do I understand it better now? Soon I will hand in pages, I have already handed in some. I will hand in some more. Nobody cares about how much time it takes to make a sentence right. What I'm interested in now is finishing. I gave myself deadlines. I shared them with my advisor. But we are all busy with la rentrée and she hasn't taken the time to read them yet. That is just as well. I still have some time, to turn another sentence around.

I am wearing glasses because the doctor told me the computer screen tires my eyes; my eyes don't work together. The prescription in my glasses is an old one, and I need to renew it. But for now they will have to do because I can't afford new ones. I feel my eyes are protected nevertheless. My eyes were red and tired and itchy. I have a sty that won't go away, and a cold sore. The results of a summer of work? My eyes are tired of writing. My eyes are tired of the world. I don't always like what I see. I wrote a poem about that. It isn't finished yet.

Here is a memory, of a garden, with friends, after the rain.

In the Garden After the Rain

The smell of water on grass
or as it begins to fall
on dust and stone.

The precise movements of birds,
from limb to branch,
from tree to roof.

The dark light penumbral,
wet grass running,
the lightness of bodies
in the garden after the rain.

It may have been spring, it may have been the fall. I'm not sure anymore, but I forgot, through all this sunny autumn, how much I like the rain, even when I have to ride in it and I am wet. Even when I hate the cars, hate the buses, hate the city rising up and around, hate being pushed around. I love the rain, and I can imagine the world as one big garden. 

There is a Jack Gilbert poem I love about gardens:

Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”
he said, “there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds
later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

I went to Marseille for a last weekend of summer. White light and white cliffs, the soft blue sea sweetly supporting me. I keep returning to that memory, as if to a garden.

I haven't cried in while.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Muse

Monument in Cordoba to Ibn Zaydûn and Princess Wallada
September has slipped away in a sunny haze, end of summer, busyness and bees. Some goals were achieved. I have found some work to keep me writing through the end of the year, now I just have to get back to the writing. Interestingly enough, I'm helping various children write, which allows me to tap into my own desire to write. I wonder at that easy creativity children have, which goes along, I think, with a refreshing and spontaneous naivety. Afterwards, leaving the tutoring session on my bike, I let myself laugh.

I went to a poetry group, which was also refreshing, and gave some air to my poetic thoughts. It made me want to write more. Words and words and words, en boucle; it helps, as though I could put myself in a room of words and wrap myself up tightly there, and stay, and stare, but not alone. Exchange around writing is a necessity, and words engender words, in the presence of others, please. But how does that suit our idea of authorial invention and the private property of the written word? I think it's poppy-cock, and that my poetry is never mine. That's not to say though that I wouldn't want to call what I write here mine, because it is. There's a conundrum: how creativity can be so completely from somewhere else yet pass through this body, at this time.When writing, or singing, there is like a breath which comes from behind and passes through the exact center of the head, then out of the mouth, or the hand. One knows not from whence it comes. Other poets have called it inspiration, or personified it in the figure of the muse.

I wrote a poem once on being my own muse: 

On being my own muse

I would no longer need the body of another to feed my words if I could write like wrapping myself in seamless white linen, having woven the fabric, etching words with thread, tying the knots that keep me in.

Ultimately, I think this poem  is about a desire for self-sufficiency, not separateness. The idea is that the words keep me in, define me, and that their source is within, they don't come from the outside, the result of some exterior passion or pain. I think it's about the wish for the source of poetry to be interior joy, even though the image is quite morbid. In this poem I also see a funeral shroud. I see the death of the poet. 

A medieval writer and princess from Cordoba named Wallada Bin Al Mustafki had her poems embroidered on her robes. She wore them in the street. She also had many lovers and her passions inspired her writing. This is apparently what those embroidered verses said:

For the sake of Allah!  I deserve nothing less than glory 
I hold my head high and go my way
I will give my cheek to my lover
and my kisses to anyone I choose. 

I think she was her own muse.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Meaning

The Meaning of Night
I'm looking for jobs. I'm still looking for meaning. I'm reading another book by H. U. Gumbrecht called Production of presence: What meaning cannot convey and I'm wondering how he hopes to go beyond meaning. But I probably should get back to practical things, like money, like work; maybe that is what he means by the production of presence. Or maybe I should get back to meaning.

Still wrestling with my chapter on the De Nuptiis, I'm reading the Metalogicon by John of Salisbury. Here is a wonderful thing he has to say about meaning:

Le sens en effet est la signification du mot. Et s'ils lui font défaut, une parole est vide et inutile et pour ainsi dire morte, de sorte que, d'une certaine façon, de même que le corps reçoit sa vie de l'âme, la signification du mot lui sert à vivre (p. 170).

This is the French translation by F. Lejeune, published in 2009, and luckily so for me since I would have been slower to integrate the Latin. The translation also solves the problem of quoting him in French in my dissertation. Thanks to en excellent index, I have also quickly been able to find out who Philologia was for John of Salisbury. Here is my English translation of the passage from the French.

"Meaning is indeed the signification of a word, without which the word is dead, since, in a way, like a body which depends on the soul for life, the signification of a word allows it to live."

Another English translation gives:

"A word's force consists in its meaning. Without the latter it is empty, useless and (so to speak) dead. Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word".

This is Daniel McGarry's translation, p.81. Here is the Latin

vis enim verbi, sensum est; quod si destituatur, sermo cassus et inutilis est, et, ut sic dixerim, mortuus: ut quodammodo, sicut corpus ad vitam vegetatur ab anima, sic ad vitam quamdam verbi sensus proficiat.

The word vis gives force in English and signification in French, which comes from the Anglo-Norman  significaciun, according to the O.E.D. Sensum gives meaning in English and the French sens, which feels more natural since it is closer to the Latin. I'm not sure where all this is going, but, in any case, these different translations show the circular nature of signifying : word, meaning, meaning, word. I think John is right; you can't seperate word from meaning without a kind of death.

So what's the point of Gumbrecht's book? I think he is tired of meaning, all sorts, and wants to imagine an entirely other type of intellectual activity that could rise above hermeneutics. But couldn't this be the soul-death of the discipline? Where would we be without meaning? He uses Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," an essay which I once found terribly problematic in terms of how it represents work and how it represents art, as well as his concept of Dasein, being in the world, not interpreting it or being a subject in it. Still, I like Gumbrecht's book, though I haven't finished it yet. I like his attempt to surpass meaning, sort of like a meditative mind clearing, a move to having no head and non-being (his last chapter is entitled To Be Quiet for a Moment: About Redemption). Maybe it is about embracing that death.

I'm having trouble picking a poem today. I have lots of poems which contain the word meaning. I think I'll put one I wrote while mourning the death of meaning, blaming it on men, of course. 

Last War

These men would destroy meaning with
a force equal to the bomb.
Love turned to contract,
its attributes of folly 
which are feeling.

A world without meaning
or feeling like a funeral shroud,
a winding sheet of white
which death announced and called for
as necessity.

These men would destroy meaning.
No poetry, no thought
tapped in movements between bodies,
no sentient wisdom,
no harking to the present call.

Burning the witches of remorse,
leaving us simmering over pots
and singing 
in fires clamped down,
now cold.

These men would destroy meaning,
gather verse to sticky prose
and bind the two together,
frigid
fixed.

These men would destroy meaning.
Let me gather in my breast
the contrast and the opposition,
the pregnancy of thought,
give birth to new before the end is brought.

Sometimes I get tired of reading the work of male intellectuals and philosophers, though I suppose I can't blame John of Salisbury and I try not to be overly aware of the gender of the author while reading. It sort of gets in the way, of the meaning. 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Bicycle

Yesterday I changed the inner tube on one of the wheels of my bicycle for the first time. In French it is called a chambre à air, which literally means an "air room". I changed the air room on my bicycle. I changed my air, I changed the air in my room. I rode on new air, in a new inner room.

Bicycle is one of those words I never know how to spell, and I have think a moment before writing. I always want to put the y in front of the i. In French you can call your bicycle la petite reine.

I love learning how to do new things. It brings out the rawness of life, and reminds me of the joy of process, of old hands doing new things. I get excited and nervous. Luckily there are friends to teach us. Afterwards I felt independent and responsible. September is starting with a new élan, a forward motion or impetus, enthusiasm, pushing me where I want to go.

Crossing the Rhône on Bicycle

Let me go my way,
Put your feet in the water.

Don't come to me,
Let me come.

Let me ride,
calmly and sweetly
down the center
lane of traffic.

Would you like to walk?
I'm staying here, you say.

Your car was parked
in my street yetserday.

Though I feel like it belongs here, I am not sure what this poem has to do with learning new things, though I do see how it is about independence and responsibility. 

I learned to ride late, when I was twelve, and I did it on my own, resentful that no one took the time to guide me through it, to pick me up when I fell. But there must have been some invisible hands holding onto the back rail of my bike. It was purple and white. I would ride it around the safe streets of my neighborhood, curving small town residential roads. 

Now I cross bridges, and avoid the tram tracks. I change inner-tubes, I get my hands dirty. I love the sweetness of being with myself on my bike, just one human on this earth, going against the grain. 

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Origins

September didn't catch me off guard. I knew it was coming. I had deadlines, which I didn't make. I knew Mercury would move forward again, and I thought that I would find a constant rhythm, a way to move towards my goals. 

But today I feel strange. Last night it rained and stormed here, as I rode home on my bicycle after midnight. I had danced so much I couldn't walk afterwards, and felt as though we had brought on the rain.

September

September took me by surprise,
light, rain, change,
my pain.

A cause substantial,
a reason just,
a minimal commitment,
betrayed trust.

The battle fought
between the twins of thought,
against the sure of heart.

Where was the fountain
that gave rise to this flow,
seep, mow, sow, reap?
I cook and weep.

September caught me off guard,
lonely, I can’t tell you so,
hurting, wanting you to know.

I do not act.
The energy recedes
back into the earth,
the harvest progresses.

Maybe it's the hurricane. I looked at pictures of Vermont today for the first time, and though I am so far away, I feel like it somehow affected me, as though I were caught in that maelstrom in the sky, or as though some of my inner roads need rebuilding, small communities are isolated. 

I'm thinking about my origins, which makes me think of a quote in my dissertation, by Walter Benjamin, from his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, on the concept of origin :

Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. (p. 45)

On the way to becoming, thus we are made, within this spiral. Where there is destruction, there is also the forging of the new, creeks and rivers swelling and rolling in their beds, finding a novel way to lie upon the earth. 

Monday, August 29, 2011

Primitive Flowers

I've been thinking about the day the plants produced flowers, the first flowers. My daisy plant is through for the summer I think. She produced many for me, and I was well rewarded for my valiant dead-heading.

I love trimming rose plants, the big ones in a friend's garden, the miniature ones on a friend's balcony. Rose plants love to be pruned, they grow back bigger and better, they make more flowers in the secret clefts of their stems and leaves.

So the day plants produced flowers... I've been wondering what the first flower looked like. Apparently the first flowers may have been magnolias, which is a wonderful discovery. They also greeted me consistently this summer, with their big luscious petals and their almost unbearably sweet smell, at night, in parks. In a primitive forest with primitive leaves I would have loved to have lain under a magnolia tree. Also, magnolias have lovely, plush fruits, sweet to touch too, though hard, with bright red seeds, waiting, inside.

Ophelia 

Why, Ophelia, did you die?  
Your cracked mind, 
and all the different uses for flowers.

Your hair hanging on the wall
for a man who called you whore
and a father, innocent in liking.

Did you not study enough? 
Did language escape you?
The language of flowers, 
so much simpler before,
for you and yours, gentle souls,
for love professed by the body,
that floated by the shore
and crimson somehow, violet,
nosegay, forget-me-not and scarlet
roses tell the sorry tale.

Why, Ophelia did you die?
For loss, for keeping?
Keep coming, Ophelia,
through the cold water,
twisted with leaves and grass
not flowers. Tell your tale,
speak it now, to haunt the man
who in his lies and weakness
made you piecemeal and sore.

He tore a whisp of some sweet fragrance
from your chest and wrestled,
wrestled with another language, not yours.

I'm not sure what Ophelia is doing here, drowned among her flowers. I'm sure she loved to trim them too. A man I knew once likened me to her and this poem came out, a tribute to her, and also to my melancholy, since the man had gone. 

Maybe it is the end of summer which makes me think of the darkness to come, the end of naivity, the passing of girlhood, the marrow of mature life, harvesting the red fruit, or picking up the fruit that has fallen, no longer a flower. 

Ophelia got off the train, poor thing. She gave her flowers. I just learned that daisies mean forsaken love, unhappy love, so it is just as well mine are no longer blooming, though I thought I read they meant innocence. Maybe it is the same thing, or that one, necessarily, leads to the end of the other.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you,
love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts...
There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for
you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o'
Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference!
There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither'd 
all when my father died.... 
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ophelia speaking in Act IV, scene V)

What I love about this scene is Ophelia's bawdy language. Oh, she has lost it, she sees the truth, and learns, too late, that she shouldn't have let him steal her thyme.

Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,(55)
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid(60)
Never departed more.

I think I'm still getting over the loss of mine.

By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!(65)
Young men will do't if they come to't
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed.'
(He answers:)
'So would I 'a' done, by yonder sun,(70)
An thou hadst not come to my bed.'

But I'm not about to die over it.

 

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

L'éternel retour

Reality is strange. Have you ever felt like you were going around again and again, seeing something you've seen before? Sometimes even when things are brand new there is a feeling of déjà vu. Sometimes I think, can't I just get off this train? You can't, here you are, or you don't, and then suddenly, one day, you do, but maybe then you just get back on somewhere else, who knows?


Untitled
 
I thought of kissing you on the train platform
and how you didn’t stop
and how the trains left
but then returned
(as though this poem should be nostalgic
but it ends with a reunion)
or how kissing ends
but then we kiss again;
our lips don’t really change.

Nor do tracks.

For every leaving,
there is a coming back.

L'éternel retour.
It is interesting that the Cocteau movie with this title is translated into English as Love Eternal. In my last post, I was thinking about Benjamin wondering about clouds and ruins, and how the two juxtaposed spell eternity. What is eternal? Maybe an inbetween place of juxtaposition, one thing next to another, a kind of eternal relation, or maybe that is all that is itself eternal, relation, you to me and me to you and to someone else again. It doesn't seem so sinister that way, and means there is something eternal about writer to reader and reader becoming writer. Maybe the relationship of word to word is also eternal. And before words?

"O Zarathustra," said then his animals, "to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee - and return.  Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of existence.  Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; eternally runs on the year of existence.  Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; eternally builds itself the same house of existence.  All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence.  Every moment begins existence, around every 'Here' rolls the ball 'There.  ' The middle is everywhere.  Crooked is the path of eternity”. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No-one. Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen - The Convalescent

I'm not sure, but I'll build this house, this year. I'll laugh at what never ends, with a crooked smile.
 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Clouds


My friend sent me this poem, in German, by Bertolt Brecht, Erinnerung an die Marie A.

An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheur oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.

Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei.
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich, was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: ich kann mich nicht erinnern
Und doch, gewiß, ich weiß schon, was du meinst.
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiß ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiß nur mehr: ich küßte es dereinst.

Und auch den Kuß, ich hätt ihn längst vergessen
Wemnn nicht die Wolke dagewesen wär
Die weiß ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiß und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumebäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.

You might know it from that movie, Das Leben der Anderen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idi4_zHUqZk 
Here is an English translation if your vocabulary in German is like mine. I like to go back and forth:
http://cecilhanibal.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/bertold-brecht-erinnerung-and-die-marie-a/

Here is what Benjamin says about clouds in his essay Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street):

Heidelberg Castle: Ruins whose debris point into the sky tend to look twice as beautiful on those clear days when the eye, through their windows or simply above them, meets the passing clouds. Through the mobile spectacle that it stages in the sky, their destruction confirms the eternity of debris.

This is H. U. Gumbrecht's translation. I'm reading his book The Powers of Philology, trying to understand what he means by a philology devoid of interpretation or hermeneutics, devoid of the search for meaning. I am wondering how he reads, as though he hopes, still, for an ideal language that could somehow be pure and forego representation, or at least the complications of the human imagination. I'm not sure I understand him. But then, he doesn't understand Benjamin: 

I cannot quite follow the association that he suggests between ruins and eternity. More precisely, I do not understand why an awareness of the ongoing effects of destruction (Zerstörung) should ultimately lead to an impression of eternity (Ewigkeit) - even if this process of destruction is "doubled and emphasized by the transitory spectacle" ("bekräftigt durch das vergängliche Schauspiel") of the clouds in the sky.

He writes this at the beginning of the first chapter, called Identifying Fragments, p. 9. 

What do clouds have to do with Philology? Well, along with orphaned lines, philology often deals with incomplete texts, so there is this ideal of the unified text as it was before fragmentation, before the philologist confronts the words he reads as a fragment. This ideal text, of course, is purely the invention of the philologist who can't truly grasp what this pre-fragmented text actually was. He imagines it. But what I like in Benjamin's essay is that the ruins are all there is. I don't think he sees the idealized completed castle. I think he just sees the ruins, which suggest to him the passing of time, which itself is eternal, and the clouds, passing at a quicker pace, remind him of time passing. But he isn't reconstituting the castle. He is just enjoying the contrast : eternity glimpsed through what changes eternally (the clouds) next to the slower decay of the castle, the ruins being in and of themselves complete. What I want to say is that there is no such thing as a fragment, just like there is no such thing as an orphaned line.

And that is the point of Brecht's poem for me. Things pass, but there is still this impression left, by the movement of clouds perhaps, by the turning of a wheel, the change of seasons or the sun, but not by the thing itself, which has gone, and ultimately no longer matters. But then again, the title of the poem contains a name, and an initial, so the person is remembered after all.

Or maybe all poetry is fragmentary? Perhaps all language too for that matter, and every line orphaned. But if everything is fragment and ruin, is anything?

Back from Berlin                                                                              

Germany still has pock-marked buildings,
but ones you don’t see, with all the shiny,
pretty, clean, and new.

Maybe we could look at death in a new way,
or see past the loss of the past.

Maybe today, in all its glitter, is a door,
a way to move on from what came before.

Maybe there is a way to see it all through holes,
like windows, from the inside,

maybe there is a way to shed this skin,
back from Berlin.

Anyways, the rhyme fights fragmentation.  

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Insects

This morning there was a grasshopper on my curtain. I was flattered he mistook my apartment for the out of doors; maybe it was all the plants or the rabbits. I tried to put him outside, but he jumped very high up, and seemed to fall behind the dresser. I couldn't find him, but I left the window open so he could find his way out again.

Summer is a time for bugs. Perhaps because I am alone a lot, I enjoy speaking to them in my mind. I think of Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, and wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with one. Here is a poem I wrote for a moth: 

Insects

Wasps, ticks, spiders,
bees, houseflies,
gather round,
now is your time.

Settle in,
make it brown
or black
with the sounds of your wings.

You are drawn to my heart,
my breath like light
but soon again, move off,
say a prayer for me.

Leave me silent,
moths in the night,
sit tight on white
porchboard.

Fly off now,
sticky residue
of black burnt
feet, stubble, wing.

Sleep now,
tunnel,
buzz,
zs.

Reflections on insects hide my desire for focus and motivation. I like to think the grasshopper will bring me luck and help me finish the chapter I am working on, but only I can summon that. I don't always like what I read. Can I make true statements? True for myself, or being true to myself, that is what writing is. When I leave myself, it is sleep, or daydreaming, the lives of all the infinitely small beings around me. Perhaps I could draw them: all that infinity makes spacious unity. 

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Berlin Notes

I'm leaving tonight, on the train, to go back to Geneva. The week went by quickly. We went to Quedlinburg so that I could look at a 12th century tapestry, now in fragments, representing the Marriage of Philology and Mercury. 
Here we see Piety and Justice embracing.

The Church this tapestry was housed in was an SS meeting hall for Nazi ceremonies during the war.

War as Timeless

In early pictures
Hitler wore shorts,
leiderhosen, sat with dogs,
a friend to babies.

These are the politicians
that make the decisions
that leave holes in faces
as well as places.

Shattered minds now
as when in ancient times,
altars destroyed, spears thrown,
the god of war cried out and made himself be sculpted.

I wonder what the Nazis thought of the tapestry, or of philology. Wagner was a great friend of Nietzsche, and philology was often used for nationalistic purposes. The origins of languages and the fascist cause, bosom buddies, and the dangers of wanting to own history, dictate the future. 

I think she looks lovely, holding hands with Mercury. He says, I am yours, in a ribbon unrolling across his body. I am still deciphering her words. The tapestry was apparently commissioned by an abbess named Agnes, for the Pope. I am glad she didn't have to live to see the 20th century.  

A visit to the Pergamon

Eros has wings and serpent legs,
and he is doing things to men.

With one bent foot under his squatting body,
his buttocks, muscles and folds of skin
betray the tension of battle, captured on the wall.

In the center of the hall gathers all the youth of Germany,
who spotted, braced and badly dressed, stare at each other,
as altars to new gods, at the Pergamon Museum.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Trains


There are few things I like better than taking the train. I went all the way to China once, with a friend, but shorter trips are nice too. I’m currently on the train to Berlin, waiting to leave Basel, Switzerland, for flat Germany and industry. Many people are surprised I want to take this trip by train. Since the flight costs just as much, most people want to go by sky. But I love the rail. I love watching the villages go by, with spires and surrounding mountains, the pink sky rising out of the mist. I saw a dewy field with early morning brown sheep running, a fox jumping after a black bird, rare moments of new day life, often unseen. Once I wrote a poem about some of those things:

Some Things People Don’t See

A hare by the side of a train,
standing ear-tall in the golden grass.

An ancient wooden door,
rounded, brown and weatherworn
welcoming.

The smells of centuries,
lakes and walls,
cracked books and waterfalls.

Strawberries wild
gathered in a garden,
under leaves, secret and red.

Water drops, spiders and insects,
colonies below ground
that come out again.

You never know what you are going to see on a train, or from a train. People waving, embracing, carrying too many bags, with picnics, like me. There is something very human, and touching, about train travel. Conversations arise. Right now I’m alone in my little compartment though, and I can shut out the noise. I can sit and drink tea and work. I found a plug for my computer. I’ll post this later.

I think it is easier to write on trains because you are constantly moving, so your train of thought, and your words, follow the same movement. Funny, I just realized we say "train of thought": I lost my train of thought… I found my train. That is why it is easy to write on trains, you can’t get lost, or lose your thoughts.

I wrote a lot when I took the Trans Siberian. I wrote "list poems", trains of words? It was August then too, and we kept going east under the clear sky, the horizon was always new. The air was different, clearer, and it felt as if it were pushing us forward. We read and embroidered and talked and slept and drank tea and ate what the babushkas sold us by the side of the tracks. The white and black birches, or poplars with pale green, heart shaped leaves, stretched on for days. We stretched our legs. We kept going east until we were in the East, and then we went south. And after a dip in the clear, cold, deep, Lake Baikal, the desert.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Carpe Diem

As an obvious rejoinder to my reflections on death, I wanted to post a poem about seizing the day; I couldn't find one of my own. Then I realized, all my poems are the result moments that I seized, a kind of verbal carpe diem, so perhaps they never need to address the issue. Maybe that is poetry, seizing the day, in words. 

Friday, August 5, 2011

Death

I said I would post more on Death today, since in Pasternak's poem August the poet sees his own death; his writing at the end, as his own death approaches, as his friends come to him, as he dies. Sometimes I feel like we ignore death so much it becomes like the vacant center, the unsaid, around which everything turns. I don't think it's such a big deal, really; I like the rhyme, in July, maybe I'll die which came out in song I was writing the other day. Since it's August now, I can share it. 


I recently saw the movie "The Sea Inside" (Mar adentro, which, incidentally, was also directed by Alejandro Amenábar, director of the movie on Hypatia I wrote about the other day, Agora), which I think is an apt metaphor for death, a going in instead of a going away. Death is a mystery, but there are other mysteries. People die and we keep their pictures, or make movies about them, idolize them, use them in some way. We don't want them to die, but they do. I would have more to say on memories, memory, and how it shapes the mind, and shapes who you are, long after some people only wander through your dreams. But then how many of us are actually awake today?


Then there is writing, which dresses the corpse and keeps it talking long after the dust has been blown away. The holy grail of the written word for many authors I think, Pasternak's angel: Immortality. Which makes me think of an Emily Dickinson poem. I'll see if I can find it.

Because I Could Not Stop For Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible.
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.


That was easy. I love the false subtlety of the rhymes in this poem. I love the way the word Immortality is placed.
Well, people die and we do miss them, still:

Why do we focus on death
when it is not the road?
A transfer station, 
a place to switch over,
circle back. 

Somewhere in you is
a free and seeking bird,
the white of its neck,
your body beautiful to it,
I need not hold.

This time could be long
or short, 
is on our side, what's next?

It doesn't matter still,
our small moments here
eternity were more than
bright lights intermittent.

We have smiled at each other
We have watched the sun rise.

I think the second to last stanza of this poem is nice in the same way the Emily Dickinson poem is nice, but I'm not sure about the rest of it. This stanza also reminds me that I read e.e. cummings a lot as a teenager. What do you think? Will it keep me alive after I'm dead? I wonder. Would a word or two suffice? Thousands of poems in drawers. In any case, thank you, Emily.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

August

The words have slown to a trickle. I've been writing at home, listening to France Culture on the radio, washing rugs, baking, cooking, cleaning, putting corrections into my file, now saved on my old laptop, so young yet so old, in the current scheme of things.  


Technology makes me feel old. Do we think better with our computers? I don't think so. I love The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers. I'm learning and talking about how we used to read, in medieval times. Our minds were huge, if one were to stretch them out in space, then the size of a football field, now the size of a thimble. They built mansions in their brains to house ideas in. I suppose I'm nostalgic. I think my mind, if well trained then, would have flourished. But how can I know? I found a tortorous past life there, once, in medieval times, and one in antiquity, a village in the desert, which was even more traumatic.


I suppose I'm glad I'm writing now, the ease with which I can here. I can look things up at the drop of a hat, what was her name again? What was that quote or the name of that book? The search engine allows me to make leaps in knowledge with an ease unavailable in ancient times.


But I'm still not sure we are smarter. On the contrary. Computers make us lazy.
But it's August, hot finally, and tired.

August

Waiting for summer to end.
Berries on carpets,
blue-black stains of summer ending,
I have flowers on my undergarments.

Five hundred grams of plums,
small, dark and clouded,
bites of time and sun
which I bought at the market today.

My mind changes every day
but my body stays the same.
I think, "Winter will be my Spring,"
I think, "Summer will end."

I'll send you a poem by Pasternak called August,
I'll write one too, which maybe I won't send to you,
waiting for melancholic Autumn,
waiting for summer to end.


I'm not sure I sent either, actually. I wrote that years ago. Here is the Pasternak poem: 

August

This was its promise, held to faithfully:
The early morning sun came in this way
Until the angle of its saffron beam
Between the curtains and the sofa lay,

And with its ochre heat it spread across
The village houses, and the nearby wood,
Upon my bed and on my dampened pillow
And to the corner where the bookcase stood.

Then I recalled the reason why my pillow
Had been so dampened by those tears that fell-
I'd dreamt I saw you coming one by one
Across the wood to wish me your farewell.

You came in ones and twos, a straggling crowd;
Then suddenly someone mentioned a word:
It was the sixth of August, by Old Style,
And the Transfiguration of Our Lord.

For from Mount Tabor usually this day
There comes a light without a flame to shine,
And autumn draws all eyes upon itself
As clear and unmistaken as a sign.

But you came forward through the tiny, stripped,
The pauperly and trembling alder grove,
Into the graveyard's coppice, russet-red,
Which, like stamped gingerbread, lay there and glowed.

And with the silence of those high treetops
Was neighbour only the imposing sky
And in the echoed crowing of the cocks
The distances and distances rang by:

There in the churchyard underneath the trees,
Like some surveyor from the government
Death gazed on my pale face to estimate
How large a grave would suit my measurement.

All those who stood there could distinctly hear
A quiet voice emerge from where I lay:
The voice was mine, my past; prophetic words
That sounded now, unsullied by decay:

'Farewell, wonder of azure and of gold
Surrounding the Transfiguration's power:
Assuage now with a woman's last caress
The bitterness of my predestined hour!

'Farewell timeless expanse of passing years!
Farewell, woman who flung your challenge steeled
Against the abyss of humiliations:
For it is I who am your battlefield!

'Farewell, you span of open wings outspread,
The voluntary obstinacy of flight,
O figure of the world revealed in speech,
Creative genius, wonder-working might!' 


Tomorrow, on death, for now, I love this allegory of writing!
Found online so sweetly and easily, perhaps the internet is the new library of Alexandria, but I miss the smells.

Friday, July 29, 2011

On the Sublime

I'm still wandering through late antiquity, led by Allegory, though I should be writing about 19th century philology. The hows and whys of textual preservation are fascinating to me, how is it we know what we know about such distant minds.


I read about the brilliant philosopher Hypatia, who was killed in Alexandria, and someone else who lost his head for thinking. I dreamed of the library there... A movie was made about her life, in 2009, Agora, which means, in Greek, a place of assembly, and in Portuguese, now. 

On the Sublime

To have been a scholar
in late antiquity
when a thinker got his head cut off
for being an advisor at the wrong time.

There was a woman
murdered in Alexandria,
before the library burned,
when we knew the origin of all things.

She taught philosophy, geometry,
Plotinus hated Longinus
who didn't write, finally,
On the Sublime.

The monk who read it cared too much.
Maybe he too wanted to be
that reader who would pass it on
to posterity through troubled times.

Today we hardly think
about the universe.
We take its picture.
It blinds us. We are blind.

Now, I should get back to work.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Marriage of Philology and Mercury

I've been thinking about how writing often takes you in unexpected directions, and about the need to theorize a new kind of research skill, the one I most often use, based on intuition. Often my best ideas or most useful references come when I am browsing in the library or looking for some other book. Dreams are also a great source of ideas, or the ones that come to me in the bathtub or during a shower, true insights from the blank whiteness of ceramic and tile.

Since it was born in such a way, I have been thinking about the section of my dissertation that I am writing now as a kind of unexpected growth, like a new limb that has slowly emerged out of the original body of what I had planned to write. It is a somewhat strange formation, but I like it. It definitely belongs there. It's a history of philology through her personifications through the ages. She has become very real to me, especially because of the De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a strange and marvelous work by the fifth century African writer Martianus Capella. I fell asleep while reading it the other day and dreamed of figures who turned around me, like planets in the sky, but with hair and faces, in long robes.

Philologia

Yes, read the books I'm reading.
Strange tales of gods and stars,
turning cloudy planets like eyes,
yours, you'll see for yourself,
you'll like it. 

What's that name it mentioned?
A lost word, untracked and marked.
If you can find some meaning,
I can. Read it with me,
you'll like it.

The world is round, the universe an egg,
layers of air, imagined to cross;
we'll go there on clouds
led by horses with names like
Prudence, Destiny.

Hear it out, don't judge.
We'll go there together, you'll see.
We'll watch the gods sacrifice a goat, 
a sheep, a cow, all for the sake of
that slender girl.

I'm not sure who the "you" is in this poem, specifically. Often it is just there, in an open way. Feel free to feel included. In the meantime, I think I'm in love with the love of words.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Le vers orphelin

Writing engenders writing, or so it seems.
I've been seriously writing my dissertation for a few weeks now, watching one page a day become three pages a day, then watching my productivity fall back down again. It seems to come in waves. I've even written a poem or two, in between pages, as a break, or as commentary. I thought of sharing them. Then I realized that I had many to share. So I'm starting here, with one, the first one:

Le vers orphelin

An orphaned line
sits all alone
without a rhyme,
he has no home.

No coupledom,
no sense complete,
no rhythmic fun,
no bowing feet.

An orphaned line
sits all alone
between two more;
one ends, begins,

but him begun,
that thought a rhyme,
could never be
a part of one.

An orphaned line:
A scribe forgot
to put its pair
there in its spot;

no space, no room
for an addition,
just sad, alone,
full of contrition.

On a more serious note, here is what Roman Jakobson has to say about orphaned lines, and I am rather partial to his opinion:

"The metaphoric image of 'orphan lines' is a contrivance of the detached onlooker to whom the verbal art of continuous correspondences remains aesthetically alien. Orphan lines in poetry of pervasive parallels are a contradiction in terms, since whatever the status of a line, all its structure and functions are indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment, and the task of linguistic analysis is to disclose the levels of this coaction. When seen from the inside of the parallelistic system, the supposed orphanhood, like any other componential status, turns into a network of multifarious compelling affinities." 

From: "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet," Selected Writings : Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, p. 135)

An orphaned line, there is no such thing!
Here's to growing a "network of multifarious compelling affinities."