apples

Tonight, my loves, I have apples and tea and christopher guest.

On the lightness of being

I'm leaving in 12 days' time, he says, and I will not miss New York. That's up to him. I do.

Orwell

I work in the kind of organisation that posts cheery inspirational messages on toilet cubicle doors, the kind of messages that say think positive! your only obstacles are mental barriers! - that is, the kind that make me want to go hit someone and hard. But today I was inspired by this:

"Here is the secret of inspiration. Tell yourself that tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly nore more intelligent than the rest of us, have managed to solve even more difficult problems than those that baffle you now."

Or words to that effect.

You see -

I happen to care about writing. About writing well. I think good writing trades on clarity of meaning and economy of language. I believe with Orwell that clear writing facilitates clear thinking, and that someone who writes in cliches thinks in cliches. I think it is essential to use language well.

It's a matter of style, my boss tells me. If by that he means it's a choice between having some style and having none. Look. If you take three paragraphs to say the same damn thing I'm saying in two sentences and with a far more tenuous grasp of grammar - then stop amending my work.

Do I sound frustrated yet?

But I could put up with the writing, I guess.

I never quite realised how pervasive government influence is in this country. I happen to believe that the point of the law is to limit the discretionary power of government, not increase it. I happen to believe that the burden of justification for intervention should be on the government's side. We're an interventionist government, my boss tells me. Well yes that really clears things up And by what god-given right do we dictate public morality? Or impose our prejudices as policy?

Well the director says so. The permanent secretary says so. The minister says so.

And so it is written.

We have an intern, she's just finished J1, and she says, so what's it really like in the civil service, can you change anything?

Yourself, perhaps.

like water spilling

if you come here please go to spillingwater.freeservers.com.

So you go eat an apple. Change CDs. Pull yourself together. Don't you always pull yourself together, in the end?

I think it might be nice to go to pieces for a while.

On the other hand. We're just friends. Aren't we?

Still. You don't read this and I don't tell you the worst of it. And I answered politely if unenthusiastically your hello-I'm-too-tired-to-write email. That's something, isn't it? I hate emails like that. It's a bad thing to admit to, of course. They usually only come after a long period of silence and repeated pleas on my part. I always feel like I ought to feel guilty and grateful - yes of course you're busy I should have understood my fault entirely isn't it kind of you to humour me at all - when usually all I feel is pissed off. Even if I were beyond exhaustion I'd have written to you, and something more. Something else. To no-one else, but to you. But that's not the way you work, is it? Possibly it's not the way sensible and decent and nice people work.

Alright. Alright. I know what it is I'm looking for in your letters and you'll never say it for all kinds of reasons, some of them good sensible ones, and each time I'll write some drivel in response because I can't possibly ask you to say what is it I want to hear. Language was given so people could communicate with each other, wasn't it?

am in the process of cleaning things up. my blog (therefore posting here temporarily). my bookshelves. in the belief that somehow, somehow, if i can find all the wintersons and put them together on the shelf everything else will sort itself out.

i hate waiting. have i said that yet? i immensely loathe waiting. and waiting for something that may or may not come - waiting to see if anything comes. like being dangled from a string. no, a wire, a wire running through you, that disturbs your sleep so you wake up every morning tense, and do everything you have to with that tension running through you, running under the current of everyday life.

i can't reply to your letter. it calls for sympathy and understanding (oh poor thing have you been busy well of course) and those are rather beyond me now. i want memory to slam you so hard you can't breathe when you walk in through the door. i want you to dream of me at night no matter how tired you are and wake up haunted. i want you to walk down the street with my eyes and start at shadows.

you see - if you were simply (simply!) very far away - things would be different. easier.

ban jia le: spillingwater.freeservers.com

*shrug*

I feel like I'm a teenager again. Restless and rebellious and jumpy and anxious and alone and afraid and lost and heartachey and all for no particular reason. Surely one shouldn't go through adolescence twice, when once was quite enough?

I look for your letters every morning, when my dad brings up the post. They're never there and I look for them all the same and I know they won't come while I'm looking. I know how these things work, you see. Your letters will come - if at all - one day after I've forgotten to look for them, and forgotten that there were letters to look for - and then what fragile peace there would have been will come tumbling down and I'll start looking for letters that will never come all over again.

i got handphone.

a tiny step towards reality.

My brother – eight years younger and rather more intelligent – was trying to teach me Einstein’s special theory of relativity just now. I have gathered that

if (1) distance = time x speed of light,
and (2) the speed of light is a constant, whatever your inertial frame of reference,
then (3) time dilates as the distance increases,
where (4) to dilate = to stretch, to expand (according to the physics textbook).

So.

Elementary physics.

Is that why time weighs heavy when you are away?

On Anne Carson's Plainwater

I'm reading too fast. I know I am. And in all the wrong places too: on the MRT, with Spiritualized on my discman, with the TV on. I'm running too fast to hear the words. Sometimes you enjoy a poem just because, and sometimes you find a poem that rings through you like a bell. And sometimes, sometimes, you find a poem that is both. It seems something that ought to mentioned. And given thanks for.

Afterword


After a story is told there are some moments of silence. Then words begin again. Because you woud always like to know a little more. Not exactly more story. Not necessarily, on the other hand, an exegesis. Just something to go on with. After all, stories end but you have to proceed with the rest of the day. You have to shift your weight, raise your eyes, notice the sound of traffic again, maybe go out for cigarettes. A coldness begins to spread through you at the thought; a wish forms. Perhaps it is something about me you would like to know - not that you have any specific questions, but still, that would be better than nothing. I could pour you a glass of wine and go on talking about the sun still upon the mountains outside the window or my theory of adjectives or some shameful thing I have done in the past, and none of us would have to leave just yet.

You do not know how this vague wish of yours fills me with fear. I have been aware of it from the beginning, I must be frank about this, I have worn it around my throat like a fox collar since the moment I said "Vediamo." Just then I felt your body tense for a story, and for something else. You tracked and peered and stalked it through page after page. Now here we are. Little snouts wake and bite in.

But could you tell me, what is so terrible about stepping off the end of a story? Let us look more closely at this moment that gathers at the place called the end. Up until this time, you have been fairly succesful at holding back your tears, and suddenly you feel brokenhearted. It is not that you loved Anna, or look upon me as a friend, or hate your own life particularly. But there is a moment of uncovering, and of covering, which happens very fast and you seem to be losing track of something. It is almost as if you hear a key turn in the lock. Which side of the door are you on? You do not know. Which side am I on? It is up to me to tell you - at least, that is what other brave, wise and upright men have done in a similar position. For example, Sokrates:

The man who had administered the poison laid his hands on him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. Sokrates said "No." And after that, his thighs; and passing upward in this way he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart he would be gone. The coldness by now was almost to the middle of his body and he uncovered himself - for he had covered his head - and said (what was his last utterance) "Krito, we owe a cock to Asklepios: pay it back and don't forget." "That," said Krito, "will be done, but now see if you have anything else you want to say." Sokrates made no further answer. Some time went by; he stirred. The man uncovered him and his eyes were fixed. When Krito saw this, he closed his mouth and eyes.

(Plato, Phaedo 118)

A cock for Asklepios: What a courtly gesture it is with whcih Sokrates ushers his guests out into the evening air, pointing the way for them (they have had quite a bit to drink). We hardly know such hospitality nowadays. And yet, having held you in my company so long, I find I do have something to give you. Not the mysterious, intimate and consoling data you would have wished, but something to go on with, and in all likelihood the best I can do. It is simply the fact, as you go down the stairs and walk in dark streets, as you see forms, as you marry or speak sharply or wait for a train, as you begin imagination, as you look at every mark, simply the fact of my eyes in your back.

from Anne Carson, 'Canicula di Anna', in Plainwater.

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called "audacity," whcih poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and the participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

from Anne Carson, Plainwater.

I can't find the whole poem on the net - don't know what it's called - and I don't have a copy of One Train. But a longer excerpt, probably with the wrong line breaks because email tends to screw them up:

I thought about this moment from time to time
For eight or ten years. It seemed to me I should have done something at the time
To have used all that energy. Lovemaking is one way to use it and writing is another.
But that is probably human destiny and I am not going to go against it here.
Sometimes there are the persons and not the energy, sometimes the energy and not the persons.
When the gods give both, a man shouldn't complain.

Kenneth Koch

From Anne Carson. Kinda. Too lazy to check my book, which is upstairs:

Let us not say that time past was long, for it is gone.
But let us say that time present was long,
for when it was present it was long.

For when it was present it was long.

what's lost in the distance?

what's lost in the translation of touch into word?

if at all.

in the lima airport waiting for the flight to board - been waiting all bloody night for the check-in counters to open - and since this is the last i´ll be seeing of this continent - this half of the world - for a while i feel i should say something thoughtful about the bits of south america i{ ve seen, even if mainly from a bus window. truth is, all i can think of to say now is, where are you, and why aren´t you writing to me? you´d think that people who traded in words would understand better how important they are/could be. times like this it´s hard to resist the claim that all men are bastards. alright. will probably get progressively tetchier until i reach singapore, if it´s possible to get any tetchier, and then will write long overdue thoughtful piece. or not.

right now - neither the energy nor the persons -

(kenneth koch: sometimes one has the energy and sometimes one has the persons. / where the gods give both, a man shouldn't complain. - i'm butchering the letter of the poem, but the spirit is there.)

i'm home in exactly a month's time. will you all call/write me then?

i always think i can do without sleep and then find out too late i can't. leaving new york tonight and of course it's raining. what's happened to the hot sweltering new york summer?

tired like a broken bottle like spilt water. would give - not anything - but rather a lot - to be home right now - to be in a safe place - to touch solid ground. as if home, a safe place and solid ground designated specific, concrete places. it's a terrible cliche, but home is where love is, isn't it? and if you're not there, you might as well be anywhere in the world.

am in deep denial about having to leave - this city that i have learnt to love - the people that i have learnt to love - you.

resume

education:
new york, 2002-3:

have learnt:
that i want to marry jeff tweedy
or jack white
or anne carson
or frank o'hara, who okay is dead but is still as likely a prospect as all the others
that there is such a thing as too much pastrami even in a katz's sandwich
that woody allen is a god
even if he always plays woody allen in his movies
that hannah arendt can sound good talking complete nonsense
but i can't in my papers on her
to make pecan and pumpkin pies
separately, that is
that sometimes the dying light is golden on the hudson
that love is as possible as difficult as necessary as breathing
or laughter

have never:
taken a man shopping against his will
ordered pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise
or anything with mayonnaise
stolen any CDs (i gave them all back)

am in deep denial about having to work. and in the civil service.

in L.A. for a few days and mexico city for a few more and now back in new york for a few more until i meet mona and we fly to lima.

brief and belated impressions:

L.A.: the mountains and the ocean redeem the city.

mexico city: laden with history and sudden bursts of colonial architecture and oh! so crowded. pyramids. an old man in an orange blazer - whom i remember as a magical willy wonka figure - stopping us along avenida de 5 de mayo to tell us about some building with carved anguished men holding up pillars that used to be named for Atlantis (the building, not the men) and then running across the road to the statue outside the cathedral, the one of the explorer whose name i've forgotten, which says how high that point is above sea level and the longitude and the latitude...mexico city is the capital of the world, he said, and in those few minutes it seemed that it might be.

new york: i've forgotten how annoying it can be to live here. i need a place to live in, first of all.

*tired.* more to come. probably.

Flowers die. A perfectly normal phenomenon. And entirely to be expected.

(But look, the flowers you nearly brought / Have lasted all this while.)

Now silence, silence, silence, and within it
The leap of spirit upward and beyond;
We take the heart's world in our hands and spin in
Out to the distant stars above this ground,
And let it go at last, and let it go
With those illusions that we held too long;
Against our will now we are forced to grow
And push out from all safety into song.
This is one half of it, the saving grace;
The other, the dark struggle, as, like worms,
We riddle darkness, tunnel some small space
Where we can lie with patience through the storms.
And of these two, who knows where wisdom lies,
Deep in the earth, or wandering the skies?

- May Sarton, 'A Divorce of Lovers'

I just read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, which you must immediately go out and buy and read. It's a work of astounding beauty - delicate, tender, wry, tough, and incredibly beautiful. Just finished it and am still stunned. It's a novel in verse she says - she's picked out the bones of the story and limned them in poetry. That someone today is writing like this is very exciting; she makes language come alive. First thing I do when I get back to Singapore is get a camera.

On another note - I've been dipping into Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us - though of course it has to be read all the way through at least once. I used to distrust political poetry but am beginning to change my mind; I still think that a poem is not the best vehicle for a sustained argument but a good political poem makes us remember that the political is personal. That people are involved. That's a simplistic and obvious thing to say; perhaps it's just that I have a tendency to lose the people in the arguments - the individual people, startling and painful and beautiful in their singleness, in who they are.

I think - perhaps - one reason why I didn't fall in love with White Noise is that I'm not particularly afraid of death. Are you? My own, I mean; not my family's or my friends'. I guess I'm afraid of a messy death, but that's more to do with being a complete wimp about pain more than death itself. Maybe it's cos I haven't come very close to death, or been in personal contact with it. I'd never take my own life. But if death should come - not by my own hand, and swiftly, and painlessly - I'm not sure it'd be such a bad thing? I don't have a deathwish. But complete nothingness - which is what I take death to be, rather than some fiery hell - an absolute not-being - I think it might come as relief rather than regret. A way of not having to deal with the messiness of life anymore - a way that takes the messiness out of your hands, a way that's entirely beyond your control. Not that life is not worth living. Not that life isn't good right now. But just that - if I were told I should die tomorrow - I'd be awfully sorry to disappoint and/or upset people - but for myself - it might not be entirely unwelcome. Which is why, I guess, I can't really relate to the crippling fear that the characters in White Noise have about death. Or perhaps this fear becomes more real towards middle age, when death becomes an intrusive reality rather than a misty far-off destiny?

More on White Noise itself. It's been a long time since I've read a novel...well perhaps not that long. I just read Lolita and that one I loved - it's a novel that's as much (as Nabokov himself says) about the writer's romance with the English language as about Humbert's romance with Dolores/Lolita. The language is hot and heavy with longing and desire and despair. But never so you entirely drown in it. And never as an indulgence, the way Rushdie's language sometimes is (more and more so, I suspect) - there's a delight in the language, yes; a fierce delight, despite the unhappiness - but it's never pure indulgence. I really should read Don Delillo again and do his book justice but his language is not as clear and swift and commanding - it's not just because of the subject-matter, I don't think - and it's not about lyricism or pretty words. Some sentences are too explicitly fraught with significance. Occasionally - more in the beginning than towards the end - the story stumbles over its own words. You can't always forget that you're reading a novel - something someone laboured over - and I use laboured advisedly. Of course, the heavy-handedness works in that the characters are themselves very heavy-handed, and take themselves far too seriously - it must be possible to write a serious work without taking your own work too seriously - but I think sometimes Delillo takes the pronouncements of his characters too seriously. These days I've been reading Thurber, and perhaps that has affected how I read other books - I think good prose is clear, limpid, lucid. (Is limpid the word I want?) Delillo's White Noise is clearly carefully and cleverly written - that is beyond question - but his language doesn't move me.

okay it's settled. i'm skipping commencement to go shopping in east village. :)

there are letters and then there are letters. what's getting lost in the distance?

this is all rather skewed because i only write when i'm upset - and then generally when i'm unreasonably upset. perhaps i should make at least one thing clear: i do trust you. i would trust you with my life. admittedly i would trust many things with my life, including all my friends, james thurber's prose, lonely planet's guidebook to mexico and the NHS (okay maybe not that one). i trust you with my words - and the words at least never lie. honest despite the woman.

the thing is - among the things that one can never say to anyone else - at the top of the list is probably, why doesn't it matter as much to you? if it doesn't it doesn't. you say you don't like thinking in terms of costs - as if you were supposed to perform a cost-benefit analysis on love - but the thing is, there is always a cost, and one always has to pay it. it's not a cost-benefit thing - you never know the cost in advance - you just know there will be one and you have to be willing to pay it at the end. and if you're not willing to, then i guess that's fair enough. or at least, that's your prerogative.

it's not like you read this anyway, do you? you could - i gave you the link - but i'm pretty damn sure you don't. whatever. i'm trying not to count hours. trying not to say, this is the summer we have. trying not to say, why doesn't it matter to you, or why doesn't it matter more, or why doesn't it matter enough? i can't live from moment to uncertain moment - or i can, but we don't live in the fucking moment, our minds are always somewhere else, on something else that has to be done, some other person that has to be fucking soothed. this is the age of sedation. i don't want to be coaxed out of a bad mood like a fucking kid, i don't want to be told to fucking forget about depressing things, i want a blazing fight, i want the anger, the passion, the energy. wtf is the point, otherwise?

alright. take your space and run with it. it doesn't really matter after all, does it? i'm the one who's not seeing things. it doesn't actually matter, after all, in the end, at the end.

my hands are tied. what can i do? talking is overrated - or rather, everyone wants to talk and no-one wants to listen. to truly listen, to the words said and not said, rather than counting the cracks while the other person jabbers on. we all talk about our tiny tiny problems as if they could be of any importance. when was the last time we had a real conversation? that wasn't just one of us bitching about our tiny lives and the other automatically offering banal and/or bored responses. if we have nothing to say to each other - if the connection isn't there any more, or if we're not willing to look for it, not willing to sustain it - then perhaps this is really for the best, that it ends with empty rooms and a plane flight; it will seem less of a failure on our parts.

what is it we ask of people; what image do we try to mould them in; what is it we are asking of ourselves --talk to me. what is it i want to talk about? the ancient heavenly connection to the stars (or whatever the ginsberg thing was. americans tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves; it's all there on the surface. this isn't about intelligence -- they're not stupid by any means, or not stupider than most people, anyway -- but about something else -- something hidden, something more twisted, something darker...). only connect. which has become something wince-inducing in our psychotherapeutic age -- but perhaps --

tell me what i'm doing and why any of this fucking matters.

there's got to be a better way to do this. i haven't fucking found it yet, but there's got to be a better way.

these are the letters we don't send. the ones that say, talk to me. talk to me. what virginia woolf called the close contact of a naked mind. why don't we talk about words anymore? why don't we talk about what's important anymore? merleau-ponty said we move through language the way a fish swims through water. we swim through language, just under the surface of the words, almost but never drowning. i want to talk about -- the slipperiness of words. the way they leap out of your hands, like fish. the way we move through them, or barely move through them. the way we are compelled towards them. i thought you might have been able to understand -- that's such a terrible word nowadays, understand -- to see, perhaps -- what words meant. what it meant to be able to play with language -- to return to words slowly, tentatively, humbly, even -- but always with great delight. the words are to me, perhaps, what music might be to you -- something as easy as breath, as necessary as laughter. why don't we talk anymore? (which is all to hide the more mundane but depressingly frequent plea: you're too intense. (life more convincing vibrating like a knife?) you take things too seriously. -- perhaps; but at least i don't take myself as seriously as many do. i would rather take things seriously. like max beerbohm said: i try to avoid the base idolatry of taking myself seriously. alright. i'm not trying to -- steamroll? force? pressure? you. and it doesn't fucking matter anyway, does it? (of course it does. there is nothing you can take from me than i would more willingly give -- except my life, except my life, except my life. you would think that indicative of something -- passion? intensity? depth? i think it's indicative of a somewhat perverse delight in misquotation. new criterion: someone who enjoys misquoting hamlet.) and so.) and so? i've lost track of the parentheses. i suppose i ought to start writing poems seriously again; some good should come out of this. (-- see, i believe in the having loved and lost thing... -- well i don't; i don't take comfort in the loss. -- but it's not about taking comfort in the loss; it's about taking comfort in the love, and accepting the loss as part of that.) whatever.

last minute schlast minute. you'd think i'd learn, wouldn't you?

on the making of the King James bible and the 'descent into dreariness' with the Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible:

The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority. The language of the King James Bible is the language of . . . patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.

parce que j'aime Sieyes (from Qu'est-ce que c'est le Tiers Etat?).

Talkers who lack ideas -- and there are a few of this sort -- drone on and on with nonsense about what they call the importance of practice and the uselessness or the perils of theory. ... Those who clutter conversation with the gibberish that I have just mentioned do not operate either on the practical or the theoretical plane, really. Why do they not pursue the wiser and more practical course of receiving enlightenment from the one, if their intelligence permits; or, at the least, deriving profit from the other by keeping quiet about what they can, privately, excuse themselves for not comprehending?

wilco!

and yankee foxtrot hotel, of course.

uh. tell me what i'm supposed to be learning here again?

i have of course a passing acquaintance with REM's work - and who doesn't? - but never quite realised how good Automatic for the People was.

so i leave here with a handful of songs and memories. what's the point, really? and why would one - give a damn at all?

oh! lee gave me the thurber carnival. which, um, i'm not reading now of course, despite a final to do by oh 5 pm tomorrow, plenty of time...

Ah, grad school. Witness this conversation:

Me: Uh, Professor Cohen?
She: (looks at me warily)
Me: The paper for the colloquium...can I hand it in tomorrow?
She: When was it due?
Me: Uh, today?
She: Oh well of course that's fine.

Later the same day, on the steps of Hamilton:

He: So are you coming to my office hours today?
Me: Uh, no? You know the paper I owe you from last semester -- I was wondering -- can I not do it?
He: What do you mean, not do it? What about your grades -- ?
Me: Can I get an R for it? I have more classes than I need.
He: Oh of course, that's fine.

It's mutually beneficial: I don't want to do the papers, and they don't want to mark them. If I were a PhD student I could submit all these papers at the end of six years as chapters of my dissertation...

‘This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.’

- Hannah Arendt, strangely enough in ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

yes, you, the one reading this -- thank you. for listening, and for more than listening.

Bet you didn't know that the Order of Malta (the Knights of the...St John...Order...Malta...something) is a sovereign entity. They have embassies. They go to international conferences. They are recognised as sovereign by rather a lot of states. I think they took Malta in the 1500s after the Turks were chased off (probably not by them) and then were chased off in turn by Napoleon and have since made ineffectual attempts to regain some territory. They have a few buildings in Rome and do good works.

All that courtesy of Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, which is an entire book saying that states follow the rules they want to follow. IR people have the most interesting topics -- and the most boring things to say about them. Why?

Flood

for James Tate

1. THE WATERS
If you stare out over the waters
on a bright day when the wind is down
and the waters move only to groom
themselves, turning their beautiful faces
a little to guess how the light looks
on them this way, and that. …

If you hear them, contented as they seem
to be, and quiet, so that they seethe,
like a slow fire, and their long syllable
is not broken into music. …

And if you should carry them with you
like the memory of impossible errands
and not know what you carry, nor how,
so that you feel inelevably mute,
as if from birth, then you will be apt
for speech, for books, and you’ll be glib

though it torments you, and you’ll rise
to the sacraments of memory and lie down
unable to forget what you can’t name,
and the wine in your glass will be ink.

2. FLOOD PEAK
Over the rising waters,
like the silver of breath
on a mirror, the shadow
of a cloud luffs by.
This is the way it looks –
beautiful – from far away.

Closer, everything stinks
of the speed it’s being ruined,
exploded, rot with a fever.
Doubtless the graves are open
below us and the roads go
everywhere at once.

The water is herding us
upstairs because the house
is swelling like a grain of rice.
We watch a bloated sow
float by, her teats like buttons
the water will undo from inside.

The window over the bed
doesn’t rattle anymore,
its frame is so thick with sog.
We said we’d never sleep here
again and now there’s nowhere else.

3. RECORD FLOOD
Rain pumped snakes from their holes
and rain was so much rain it began
to leak up and bear on its back

the froth of rain that came
to cover the rain that came before.
Rain with rain on its back goes

where its load needs to go,
all the way to brack, fatigue
from going, the surface always

falling into whatever it covers
until it is gone and the new land
looks as though it always looked

like this, no pod-like propane
tanks blooming against cliffs,
no road the old only know

where it was, no bodies waiting
for dental records, no big time.
Only the blue acres drenched by light.

4. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD
Suddenly the drizzle lifts
its dank voice: a slant
rain and then sleet
sizzles at the windows
like a fury so pure it’s
dispersed by recognizing it,
one of those cramps you get
by loving your children wrongly
that only wrong love and all
your fatal habits will see
you through, though you
rant against them:
lordly as the froth
on the lip of the waterfall,
you urge them to carry you
over, and they do.

5. FLOOD LIGHT
Walking the prairies – sky so vast
and horizon so far around it seems
to fall away from you –

you sense the flood, drained
millennia ago. Here and there the earth
is cracked and scaled, reptilian.

And here and there, as the long light
pours down, you think how the rising
waters would bear up the prairie wind

and its ceaseless murmurs, how silent
this floor would be if the flood
should come again in water.

6. FLOOD PLAIN
You could pick one up, any one
from the scrupulous profusion
by which accident has sown them here,
smoother from their streambed tenure
than jagged from being strewn, and what

would you say you held? You could draw
one of them, or write the letters for stone
in some language, any one of them,
and what then could you say you held?
It would be a clear day, I would be with you,

and we would have a water-lathed box
full of the true history of itself,
to which the history of any treaty
is but a heart-broken footnote.
Only water can read such a book,
or write one. Think how long we’ve
agreed to love each other, and forgot
to care for that dwindling future, as if
we had the time the stones have, or the time
water takes to redistribute the stones.

7. EVERYWHERE
By the way its every
event is local and exact,
and by the reluctance of water
to rise and the way it climbs
its reluctance, so shall you know
flood, and by the way it complies

the erasure of its parts
and takes to itself the local
until all but sky is water.
On this huge page no breath
will write. The text is already
there, restless, revising itself.

- William Matthews

alright. you know what. i really, really have to do some work.

(you're offering comfort: that this too shall pass. that's not really it, is it? i'm not sure -- i know you are -- that i want it to pass, just like that. it's more that -- it is not (it will not be) something you cannot bear -- i wish i could tell you. survival's not really the issue -- how do you, actually, physically, die from love? men have died and the worms have eaten them, but not for love...)

i am torn between -- wanting to be -- gentle? -- to help put this together -- in some lasting form -- to give you what i think you need, even if that's just space and time to find yourself -- and being angry that you are asking this of me -- at this time -- and you are asking it, for all that you say you expect nothing -- (you are frighteningly brittle; i do not want to break you) -- and some kind of -- regret? -- not that i regret the past month -- sadness, perhaps? something duller, heavier. not incapacitating. but uglier than grief. i know it had to end. and i had not expected to take it this badly. (winterson: why is the measure of love loss?) but -- you see -- this complicates matters -- straightforward grief might have been -- simpler -- to deal with --

minz sends me katherine's lines from the english patient, that i was trying to quote: most of the time i cannot bear not to touch you. the rest of the time i feel it doesn't matter if i never see you again. it isn't the morality, it's how much you can bear. it is always -- how much you can bear. the limits of our endurance and our fidelity. not our capacity to love -- so much -- as what we can bear of it --

found it.

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

you say i taught you to be honest about what you feel -- well this is the other lesson -- that it seldom pays off -- it just is, like love, what we are compelled into -- and what we will do again and again (what's the rilke?)

i do resent, however, being pressured into being alright -- into getting my act together so that you can feel better about this -- into being the one to pick up the pieces --

(now comes anger, resentment, bitterness. you made me a CD with beck saying he was tired of fighting a lost cause. i am not a fucking lost cause.)

what's the line from The English Patient? It's not the morality, it's how much you can bear. The limits of endurance. Now I'm thinking of the sides of nature will not hold or whatever the line was, but the truth is that the sides of nature don't even notice. We have a far more limited capacity for endurance. Is it terrible to be talking about endurance, as if love were something to be endured, to be borne, to bear up against?

please.

(help.)

you see --

well.

the last time i could be awfully sensible about it and cry for a couple of days and then go get cookies and flowers which do really help --

and this time (it's been, what, a couple of weeks? this is ridiculous) i want to --

well. i was going to say, kill myself (look, I'm listening to Spiritualized, alright?) but to be honest, i don't actually. i want to sleep. and wake up somewhere else. preferably somewhere with better weather. and have a long time to indulge myself in crying. i would do it now but it seems faintly irresponsible and terribly adolescent when i really really should read something so i can go throw myself at the mercy of my professors tomorrow (today -- is it today already? fuck).

This is the knife-edge of madness.

No, not even that; madness would be too easy a way out. A much more sober -- grief? Like I'm being hit by waves of -- something. Not sadness; that implies feeling something, and the only thing I feel now is battered. And I haven't even started missing you yet.

Of course, I knew this would happen. No, that's disingenuous; I knew it would be bad, and I was beginning to realise it would be far worse than either of us had imagined. I did not know -- it had not occurred to me -- how bad it had been for you. I say bad like the word makes any sense. I knew I would grieve for you -- I wanted to be able to grieve for you. To say, at the end: I loved him, and he's gone now. (To say: I love him.) This would be the time wouldn't it -- to test all the fucking theories I derive from scraps of words and poems and life -- to test the faith I profess to have.

Of course, I'll get over it. You'll get over it. Which is, in some ways, the last betrayal, isn't it? To be able to forget. Or if not to forget, then to let go. How do you let go of love, how do you stop loving someone -- it shouldn't be possible, and in a way it isn't -- but that already gives the game away: and in a way it isn't. And in a way it is. We stop loving people all the time. (I don't want to stop loving you.)

I don't regret. I can say that much. Is that -- going to be -- enough? (Enough for what?)

I want so badly not to have to cry. Of course I'm strong enough, I'm just so fucking tired of having to be.

Conversation without Walt Whitman

After one glass of red wine I think I'm Allen Ginsberg,
walking through West Side looking for poets behind the cabbages
or bananas or watermelons or whatever the hell vegetable it was
Ginsberg found people behind, except even my demons have deserted
and it's just the vegetables and the cleaning people looking at me
while I pretend not to think about where you might be now,
instead of walking through a supermarket looking for the ghosts
of poets -- of poems -- words -- that used to come more easily,
from stranger more familiar places, even from behind cabbages bananas watermelons,
and intoxicating without the wine.


(I know, my alcohol tolerance is shot to hell. And I still need to read on cosmopolitan democracy, how?)

I miss the parks. I know, there's Central Park just a couple of blocks away, but it's all brown and dry and bare still. And you can't walk around at night. Not that one could walk around University Parks at night. But at least they were always green and pretty, and you could walk right up to the river; here you have to stand near the wall along Riverside Drive -- but not too close or you'll see the highway running right next to the Hudson -- to see the lights glinting off the black waters. I miss the river. I'd say, I miss the sea, and I kinda do, for all that I haven't really seen it for -- what, three, four years now? It's strange how being near moving water makes you feel better, somehow.

I swear I'll play by the rules. I'll do my best. And I hope this is working for you, because it's not for me -- but then there was no way out -- no painless way out, that is -- for me. And I knew that from the start. How do you unlove someone? How do you decide, wilfully, not to love them? How can any end -- detract from, take away the value of, reduce -- the love that you did have? This is just rubbish. But my hands are tied, and I swear I'll play by the rules.

The room is suddenly lonelier without you. In a way that books and daisies and music cannot remedy. I told you I'd rather take the hurt with the happiness than not have either. But I had not expected to cry for you this soon.

I think -- I'm going to go out and buy flowers and then come back and put on The White Stripes and eat ice-cream. Alright I should really work; but I think I get to do that much. You'd think -- you'd think happiness shouldn't be that fragile, wouldn't you? I'm thinking of Winterson -- was it Art and Lies? -- and the emotional extravagance needed to stay in one place. Or perhaps Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, saying he would regret the tears but never the love. It seems to be that perhaps I should not live my life through books.

I was going to say -- life's too short to sit in your room listening for familiar footsteps down the hall. But perhaps life's too short not to do that; perhaps life's too short not to rue loneliness, at least, if one can't not be alone. (I've forgotten -- I keep on forgetting -- that no-one can create a safe place for you. That you have to find it -- to make it, rather -- for yourself. That your centre has to be something of your own making.)

Have only just started reading for papers and realise that I have about three weeks to fumble around for three paper topics and write the damn things and do finals so I can graduate at the end of this semester. What have I been doing with my life? Also realise that I don't want to read Hannah Arendt anymore because I am going to scream but it can't be helped because the one paper I have a vague idea about has to do with her and like Macbeth I am in blood steeped so far that were I to go back, returning were tedious as going over. Or words to that effect. I do hate writing papers. Grad school forsooth.

I feel as if I should talk about the war. And I have been -- and I will -- but for now I wanted to say -- however incongruous (to put it mildly) it seems to speak of this now, in New York City, with CNN on every television set in every corner of the university every day -- I want to say to you: I didn't think I'd find a safe place in this city. You bring me back to words and music and laughter. To hope. Not to peace -- or perhaps a kind of peace, a delicate balancing of -- restlessnesses? of all my demons. Peace not as the dry and arid place I thought it might be, but something else, something more. A safe place. A place for love. I'm writing this now with your words and your music still in my mind, writing this -- as I have been living, these few days, these few weeks -- with a sense of amazement. The possibility of happiness is an immense thing. You bring me a breath of hope. I wrote to a friend, who said would you not want something to hold on to, at the end -- wrote with 5 a.m. lucidity that if we end this with friendship and hope -- and poetry and music -- then what more can one ask for?

Addendum: it's not that you learn that you will not -- might not -- be hurt. It's that you learn that although there is no-one you love who will not hurt you at some point, betray you at some point -- and you them -- precisely because you love each other. What you learn is not to be afraid of that. To give and hazard all, as Shakespeare says. Throw away the lights, the definitions / And say of what you see in the dark. Not to fear the darkness. You learn to be alone, and to trust yourself -- and then to trust others, despite, because. To face the possibility of betrayal -- of betraying and of being betrayed -- and not to flinch. I know you'll break my heart, if not now then at the end, which is a matter of weeks rather than months. I said -- it seems a long time ago now -- that I'd rather be the more loving one (-- 'If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.' Have you forgotten your Auden?). I'm here anyway, beyond my own expectations, beyond my own imagining.

Having A Coke With You

is even more fun than going top San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasently definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the "Polish Rider" occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the "Nude Descending a Staircase" or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michaelangleo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

- Frank O'Hara

Hamilton's answer to the democratic peace proposition, that most cherished stricture of american political science:

'But notwithstanding the concurring testimony of experience...there are still to be found visionary or designing men, who stand ready to advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between the States, though dismembered and alienated from each other. The genius of republics (say they) is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.

'Is it not (we may ask these projectors in politics) the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions that affect nations as well as kings? Are there not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done any thing more than change the objects of war? Is it not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.'

(Federalist Paper No. 6)

and then i'm reading merleau-ponty on montaigne:

[Montaigne] saw that he was not required to choose between himself and things. The self is not serious; it does not like to be tied down. But is there anything as certain, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, solemn, and serious as an ass? It is unconditional freedom which makes us capable of absolute attachment. Montaigne says of himself: I have been so sparing in promises that I think I have kept more than I have promised or owed. He sought and maybe found the secret of being simultaneously ironic and solemn, faithful and free.

from 'Reading Montaigne', in Signs.

so it appears that there will be war.

I badly want not to betray. yeah ok even before I wrote that I knew how stupid it sounded. it has, however, the rather dubious merit of being honest.

'There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands: there is something more.'
(Adrienne Rich, of course.)

the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Mozart and Mahler at Carnegie Hall tonight. I can't tell Mahler from Mozart (well okay maybe Mahler from Mozart) -- I always fall asleep when listening to classical music for any extended period of time -- I think I go just so I can go back home with the music echoing just outside of memory and the fleeting impression of beauty. Indie rock concert at Irving Plaza last weekend (Interpol -- remember the name) -- but that's a different kind of music, that's something to truly lose yourself in, not to the music so much as to the rush of sound and smoke and alcohol -- though I find that losing oneself is harder and harder to do. And strangely perhaps easier to do it to classical music, because it requires you to engage with it on more levels. And La Boheme the weekend before, and the ballet after that -- Balanchine to Gershwin, all light and sparkling and charming -- and then a terse modern black-and-white piece by Peter Martin, all edges and tension and elegance -- and then a wonderful tribute to Fred Astaire. I never thought I'd like the ballet, but like the Mahler tonight, one leaves with one's mind still full of light, and that seems something to be -- thankful for?

'Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.' (from Adrienne Rich's 'A Long Conversation').

Something I found from A. S. Byatt's The Whispering Woman. The fourth book in the Frederica Potter series. Frederica waiting for her lover and thinking about their relationship and how it would end and thinking that there comes a moment like this in all relationships, when one starts wondering about the end. But this only comes later; for the first few weeks, months, years, all she thought about when she thought of him were his hands and eyes and lips and their bodies moving together. 'People like us, who think too much, are always so grateful, so glad, at least at first, to be overcome by thoughts of lips and eyes and hands.'