Moving Forward

January felt like a black hole; a sinkhole. I observe, I don't fall in. Here we were not writing, we were trying to get out of bed. We were trying to move forward.

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

In this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, there is a feeling of falling upward which I admire. Reading down the lines, the poet falls from the sky, yet the reader moves upward, the image of standing on fish. This past month, though I felt like I was falling downwards, I also had experiences which brought me upwards, or made me feel larger in knowledge of myself, moments when I saw myself more clearly, when I grasped something I hadn't seen before. There were angels in this movement, so I wasn't alone. Moving down, I often felt lifted up. Winter stretched from white sky to white sky and I could have been above or below. The deeper parts of my life are opening, but sometimes the going is slow and painful. This poem reminds us of reversibility, when down is up, and up is down, and how there is an equilibrium to reach where there is clarity and harmony, a peaceful mind despite a constant cough and dripping nose. 

I lost my voice, but know it is a chance to feel how I speak and sing in a new way. I feel my throat.

Louise Hay links throat problems to fear of change in her book Heal the Body. I suppose I am scared of change, like most of us. I don't like it. They changed the tram lines and I wanted to complain along with the entire city. They added a preposition to my favorite bus stop and I wanted to protest the first time I heard it. I found it irritating. Then there are the larger changes I fear in my life. Letting go of the past, of loved ones. I have anxiety about what will come next which makes me unable to be in the moment and appreciate what I have. I lose productivity. I look inwards only. Looking back, looking forward, I miss what is in front of me now, which is often sweet, bittersweet in February, and makes me cry. A weepy month for saying goodbye, though I'm not even sure to what. To myself I suppose. An old version of myself I already miss. But holding on to it makes me sick, so I purge and clean, go over the reasons again, watch it drop away, far below. In the spring I'll be new again.

The Only Ever Constant Change

We choose what we will call it,
Chemicals or Sense,
Dumb Individuality,
Science or Intent,
Will or Intuition,
Helplessness or Force,
The strength is in the giving,
The subsequence of naming,
Despite the Truth of course.

A special thanks to Helen for the Rilke poem and to all my fellow fish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.