That purple- or black-eyed monster

I have been beset by a capricious DSL connection, and so have found even the simplest of online acts to require a heroic level of faith and persistence. Emails, blogs, the OED, etc. have practically closed their doors to me. At this moment, however, on this morning (Sunday), the connection is - though not constant - frequent. I am prone, as most of you know, to read into this "dis-connect," occurring as it did on the same day that I had finished school for the semester. I won't, however, do so here.

What I will do, is tell you how, contrary to all expectation, my days have continued to be spent on campus. The ostensible reason for my going is to return some of the hundreds of library books I have borrowed this semester. Once there, however, I hover, wander, roam around campus, as though lost and on the lookout for something familiar. I rarely find it. But sometimes there's a face or a patch of light or a book in the library that belongs to me or the lines in which I move.

Which is to say that already I am lonely. It's my curse, I suppose: a monster (Jordan named it "the black-eyed monster", but I prefer it "purple-eyed") that's ever stalking me, withdrawing when others come near, and then returning. It sits across from me as I read in my study, lumbers into bed with me at night, follows me through the streets when I walk to school. If it were truly as anthropomorphic as my metaphor implies, one might suggest I befriend it. But the truth is, I think, that it's a structural gap, a beance. It's what happens when one is all or mostly will and wills oneself be otherwise.

A Portrait of the Author (in the image of his son)

Having been away from this blog for a week or two, I've had time to reflect upon its current direction, which - Jeehyun notwithstanding - I've decided I don't care for. With each new entry the posts have increasingly approximated the stucture of the confessional. Lugubrious, straightforward, and mimetic in a way I neither practice nor trust in my day-to-day, their apparent authenticity should be treated with a good deal of suspicision. By myself, that is; you, the reader, are free to do as you choose.

But, with that in mind, I decided earlier today that this blog's return should be marked by some kind of intellectually or materially obscure meditation. Say, for instance, on the limitations and potential of what I named with Jeehyun this afternoon "heterotextual desire." That, I promise you, was the plan. But an hour or two ago, as I lay shoeless and shirtless in the sun at Rittenhouse Square, I read this in Vicki Mahaffey's - who is named Valerie in the novel - Reauthorizing Joyce: "Stephen, like Telemachus, begins his odyssey by looking for a substitute father who can tell him about his real father." An answer - or at least a coherent description - of everything I've been doing (at least, discursively) since this month began.

Which begs, I suppose, the question: Is that what my Stephen, unbeknownst to himself, is doing for those 7 days in 2004 that make up my novel? If so, there has been only one hint - a phrase from King Lear where Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, calls Gloucester (who is present but does not recognize his son), "the foul fiend Flibbertigibitt." That phrase is, I proclaim here, the one and only reference to Stephen's father that will appear in the novel. Which is not to say that those 7 days aren't filled, the way a tomb is filled with traps, with other forms of fathers.

The structure, in simplified terms, is threefold. Square has a father, Corey has none. And Stephen has a father in-between: a duplicitous father. This name, this concept, this structure in itself, is not (though I have previously called it such) a moral judgment. It belongs originally to aesthetics. And it is for me now the opening of a question where there has previously been the most unyielding (because invisible) of impasses.

My father is, like my Stephen's father, a duplicitous father. One who owns and disowns simultaneously, who insists by way of rejection upon a lineage, and who rewrites his history and his devotion with an ink invisible to all but him. I have resisted any kind of acknowledgement of my father (in thoughts if not necessarily in deeds) for every moment of my life since he left. I say that with no exaggeration, no melodrama, no confessional apology. But here, at least right now, I venture to say something else: I am of my father. And am of him in every claim and denial of me he makes.

Of trials and other testing grounds

It's been almost a year since I was attacked near South Street. Though the attack itself lasted no more than five minutes, the incident as a whole has dragged on in a seemingly never-ending series of courtroom visits and line-ups. But today, it has finally ended. The bad guy, Zaki Salahuddin, has been convicted of simple assault, and - except for the sentencing (which I won't attend) - the case is closed. It's a relief, I guess. Although the outcome has no real effect on my life, save for "justifying" that abstract principle of Justice we all assume is rewarding the good and punishing the bad.

What I feel most is drained. Sitting on the witness stand is an emotionally wracking experience, even if you're not the defendant. Not only do you not always have a clear idea of how the law works, but you're not allowed to speak unless spoken to. The cross-examining feels like you've gone to war with your hands tied behind your back. When the defendant's lawyer questioned me, I tried as best as I could (however pointlessly it might have been) to fight back: I poked holes in his language, answered literally what he meant figuratively, and forced him to define the terms he was using. A silly show, apparently. Mr. Salahuddin likely would have been convicted had I sat there and pliantly responded to each query.

He has a record: theft and assualt 12 years ago and a more recent assault on his wife. But I don't think he's been to jail yet as an adult. From a reasoned sociological view, it's probably better for everyone if he doesn't go for long; but the vicitim in me (the one who couldn't read or write for months after being knocked out) hopes he gets the maximum time. What did the judge say to Mr. Salahuddin in the form of a prequel? "It'd be in your best interest to have enrolled in an anger management program by the time of your sentencing." Who knew that court would be so much like it is on TV?

After the trial, I walked to the park and sat on a bench alone. I longed to be with someone - not to rehearse what had happened, but to be reminded of what had been threatened. Jeehyun was on campus, Sara at work, Erica busy. The park was full, but anonymous. Later, in Whole Foods, I spotted a man (blonde, blue t-shirt, my age, handsome) who likewise spotted me. And then, a few streets later, we saw each other again as his car passed me on the walk home. To say what I longed for from him would be difficult (and would violate an edict I made earlier here). But I stopped at that corner, sat on a small, concrete wall surrounding a parking lot, and waited, in the slim chance he would return.

A perfect shade of blue

A few of the few who read this have wondered if I have stopped writing here. But I have not (as you can see). The lag is a lag of exhaustion: I have an obdurate cold, a stack of essays to grade, and a paper (or two) of my own that needs writing. I wish there was more to me right now, but if there is, it's hard to say what or how.

But school ends in a week, and with it the structure (however tenuous) of my days. No more classes to suffer through, no more pleasure to be had from teaching. What will replace them? Days of wandering where the weather takes me. A map of the city collected in notebooks. And, for better or worse, a yearning that is wholly mine.

They sit around and clean their face with it

All evening, I've been listening to a song by Broken Social Scene: "Lover's Spit (Redux)". It's long and slow, intimate and swelling. It's the sound, I think, of love being made, or the memory (or anticipation) of such love making. It's the state I'm in, though I'm not in love and see no prospects for being so. I've been sick: some kind of cold. And that's probably where the romantic feeling is coming from.

But - how can I say this without the guise of melodrama? - something has happened to me these past few days. Something has happened, and everything is starting to change. On Friday, I did what I said (in my last post) I never do. At Chapterhouse with Jeehyun, and without any provocation, I told my story. An abbreviated telling of a story that Jeehyun already knew, but I told it nonetheless. I felt - again, such melodrama - as if I might cry as I did. Because I saw - as Jeehyun nodded, said softly, "I know" - that this story of mine didn't in fact belong to me. That it belonged to others who had long since offered new stories in its stead. And to it I, like a child to its mother, had clung with the insistence that it be remembered.

Since that night, what have I done? Nothing unusual. I've written to students, told them to ignore their papers' due date. I've asked professors for help, and have, in their responses, been given everything that I needed them to give me. I've walked through the city with Sara and Michael. I've written a grant proposal. I've made myself dinner and watched old episodes of Smallville.

But over the weekend, I didn't open a single book. And today, though my nose was runny and my throat soar, I sat in the sun in Rittenhouse and read The Tempest. A fitting play with which to end the semester. Shakespeare's last, it's said: a story of usurpers, of transformation, and of love. And then at home, in my office where the afternoon sun flooded through the windows and onto the carpet, I stripped off my clothes and lay naked in front of the mirror. My hands travelled across my body: carressing my thighs, my ass, my neck, my chest. I lay there in the sun for an hour, touching and watching myself touch. There was no orgasm serving as fullstop, no erection to lead things forward.

And now it's after ten. I drink tea from a ceramic mug, and write for this blog. I listen - again and again, so that its ending merges imperceptibly with its beginning - to "Lover's Spit (Redux)." I think of how little I know about things anymore. My mother, my father. I think of that story I told Jeehyun. And all the writing I've still to do, at some point. And all the writing that will write itself eventually, and will often take the guise of melodrama.

The past is a word (and one of many)

I've written here before about the competing "poetic" structures that I employ in order to understand what (in less precise moments) I call my identity. But what these structures have not yet learned to offer me is a strategy of responding without resistance to the needs of narrative when they do, as they will, arise. The one effaces its origin, substitutes development for dispersal; the other takes that origin and exalts it, removes it from the world with a devotion that can only conceive of movement as a fall. They are both different forms of a similar stasis. Stephen in nothing and Sqaure in everything.

Luckily, the need, in my own life, for narrative does not too often confront me. No one asks (as perhaps I wish they would) how I got here, through where my travels have led me; no one asks me, that is, my story. Not, I think, because they lack an interest, but because they already know, assuming (rightly or wrongly) it inscribed for them to see in the spaces through which I move amongst them.

Recently, I've rediscovered a friend from high school, the long gap in our knowing each other having, if anything, only strengthened the original sympathy. We talk on the phone when our schedules allow, she talking more than I, and myself preferring that. I'm loathe to offer myself up in a story to her, loathe to say, "This, Shanna is what you missed, what has passed. This is the interim." If she asked, however, I would answer, turning with the words from Square to Stephen. But could I tell her - is it possible to tell at all - without the fixity of Stephen's backwards gaze, the insistent trace of the origin? If not - and perhaps the answer may very well be no - is it possible to rest in that no, to offer and be offered by it? In an email, I asked Shanna, whose husband had been overseas for the beginning of the war in Iraq, what his absence had been like for her. She answered, but with a preface. "As weird as it sounds, I think you're the first person to ask me that."

Henceforth

A pause before my evening reading. Laura Marks's Touch, which I'm taking as a primary example of what's wrong with recent theories of corporeality and synaesthesia. Maybe some comic books too. And a chapter from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. There's so much to do - to read and especially to write - that there's little chance of life creeping into my days this week. Unless by life I mean my throat's sudden tenderness, brought on, no doubt, by the freak storm of simultaneous rain and snow that accompanied my morning walk to school.

Tomorrow there are meetings with students, a talk with our wayward grad chair, and two good hours of my not-so-good film class. (This is the part of these entries where I usually write something like: If only something or someone else would intervene, if my hands touched more than books, etc.. But from here on, dear reader, I pledge to forego such easy endings. Feel free, however, to interpolate their presence in the gaps that follow - indeed, in the very spacing of the lines that comprise this blog. You will rarely, if ever, be mistaken)

I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn...

Last night, I attended a party with M., a friend who would wish to remain anonymous if she knew I were writing of her here. She's a fellow graduate student: smart, willfull, and beautiful. And she's recently begun seeing a bartender and "Philadelphia hipster" who lives in Old City. He is 32, has brown hair (dyed black when I met him), a toothsome smile, and large dark eyes (a little tired, but kind). For all I know, he'd make a perfect boyfriend (and I saw nothing to suggest the contrary). Still, before the party ended, I had turned to M. and whispered that I thought she could - simply put - do better.

Of course, that judgement, so "simply put," is anything but simple. And, for many reasons, is anything but fair. And yet I make it, and am - as I mean to suggest in this sleepy posting here - likewise made by it.

There's much I might cite - ready signs not easy to misconstrue - to describe Rich (for that's the name I'll give him in my blog). His smile, his friends, his dress, his history (or what he gave me of it), and the tastes that he professed. But they signal too clearly, illuminate too well, and there is little room amongst them in which to situate myself. I use that metaphor, that word room, without innocence. For it's Rich's room, after all, that I'd like to conjure here tonight.

It has dark blue walls (a window) and a door with an old-fashioned hook-lock. A bed, a table, a dresser. In or near the center there is a large box of a TV (upon which sits a model of the X-Men's Gambit). An X-Box and a tall stack of games beside it. There is, on a shelf, a collection of Transformers (the action-figures) arranged in lines. And other figurines too, the details or names of which escape me. In the corner by the foot of the bed there are two beautiful electric guitars, propped in their stands, and a rectangular amp in front of them. And above all, I should note the odds and ends, ephemera, the debris of life: papers, change, photos, magazines. It could have been the bedroom of my childhood, except my bedroom was often carefully arranged, had an antique writing desk near its center, and was - from as early as I can remember - overcrowded with books. In Rich's room, as I observed in surprise last night to M., there was not a single visible book.

What I mean to suggest in this description - and what the experience from which it is formed suggested to me - is likely obvious, and I will not write it here. It was obvious, I imagine, to M. as well, who - as we sat on the bed for a moment - identified each object aloud as my vision passed over them. Obvious perhaps - and yet she stayed, found me a cab at the end of the night and returned to that bed alone. She was happy - till the morning at least - in his room. And not in spite of it.

All day long, meditating on M. and this room, I've been envisioning another's with it: Kenny's room. A room I've never seen but in a single photograph snapped in 1979. Kenny's room is small, much smaller than Rich's - and messier. The stack of games is replaced by a pile of clothes, the guitars a turntable. The debris that's gathered is much the same, though more compacted perhaps. And the deep blue of Rich's walls is instead here a grimy brick, across which hangs a sheet or tapestry of blazing, patterned red. In the photo, the sheet, like a curtain, is folded back, and beneath it - an object on display - is Kenny, asleep without blanket or pillow. Asleep without coverings or clothes. Where today is Kenny (if, that is - unlike so many of Nan Goldin's early subjects - he lives today at all)? Does his life (or does his death) still bear the room for such sleep, or at least such sleep as I see there?

My judgement, simply put, stands, as it always has, in question. And the words, as they do, move and multiply. Room becomes room; sleep becomes sleep; Rich, rich, M., am. They double upon each other, make games with my desire. And I hear them - write them as I hear them - and others like them, whether in the day or in the night, alone or in company, on the street or in my apartment where each space is a space for the printed word. I hear them, as I do tonight, as they congregate in patterns, novel and familiar, old:

Pier that I saw dimly last night when I looked from the windows,
Pier out from the main, let me catch myself with you and stay . . . . I will not chafe you;
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world,
And am curious to know where my feet stand . . . . and what is this flooding me, childhood or manhood . . . . and the hunger that crosses the bridge between.