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...)