Superfetation

Terrible, terrible day. My apartment has been targeted by a swarm of bedbugs living in the building next door, and this morning I encountered (and captured) a living member of the advance guard. And here I sit, my eyes scanning the walls and rugs for reinforcements while I wait for the exterminator. I'm unable to read, to write, or even think beyond the salvation he offers. Instead, I offer this: a collection of notes I don't remember writing, found in a notebook I don't remember having kept. I've signalled the couple corresponding Library's Grain entries in parentheses.

October 19, 2005

Jon…/…Andy at computers. Jon (reading from a stack of papers): “Jon tends to ramble.” Andy: “English writing classes are disproportionately difficult.” They read aloud, mingling self-satisfactions. In the corner, out of sight, Tim Corrigan struggles with the copier. “Do an exquisite corpse,” I suggest, and Andy snatches what is offered. He and Jon devise an exercise around it. I will be as them someday, I think, my own stack of papers before me, others’ teaching tricks to borrow. The thought disgusts me. (#54)

***

Critical Will, always eating. Like my brother, I tell him, but my brother is not the same. Will with his sandwich in mouth. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he says, pleased at the pun. Handsome Will. “The Black Irish,” he says, and tells me he has it all planned out. I am not jealous, but what if his interests change? “If they will,” he says, “then they’ll change. But there should be some stability meantime.” I have Ovid in hand: his love poems. “Maybe you do want to learn Latin,” he says. He does not threaten me. What is his ethnicity (Adrian is Vietnamese)? Dictee, he hasn’t finished that. There are many holes when it comes to Asian-American fiction. But he knows enough to know what he wants.

***

ME: Do you enjoy the class?
JOSH: Yes, but probably for different reasons than the rest of you.
ME: What do you mean?
JOSH: Well, I’ve taught before, and I’ve taught this, and I’m more interested in watching Vicki’s teaching methods.
ME: Her pedagogy. It’s wonderful I think. She makes the literature feel so relevant to … living.
JOSH (smiles): Yes. She’s very much about relationships.
ME: I’m sure some people don’t like that. But I do.

We argue about Exiles. I say it’s good, but I don’t like it. A good example of bad Ibsen, I say. Josh doesn’t disagree, but enjoyed it. He thought it well-done.

ME: But reading should be first and foremost about pleasure. Aren’t there works you think are good that you just don’t like?
JOSH (smiling slyly): Novels.

We walk down the stairs of the library and stop at the bottom.

ME: I feel like you must feel. One day of classes – today – and now nothing till next week. Have these two years been like that? Wonderful?
JOSH: Yes, they’ve been a gift.
ME: But you’re staying a sixth year, right?
JOSH: Yes. There’s so many holes I have in what I know. Even modernism.
ME: I’m not sure that matters. You missed the last lecture, but she clearly didn’t know things, even though she had produced good work. She’s interested in trench poets now, Wilfred Owen. And I asked her if she knew Jarman’s War Requiem, which is a film version of Owen’s poems. And she didn’t, but she thanked me for telling her of it. What I mean is, she wasn’t at all anxious about the holes.
JOSH: I wish I’d come to hear her. But I don’t feel that way. The holes…
ME: are anxiety.
JOSH (smiles).

***

Jonathan leans over to me: I kept noticing that when he’d speak, sometimes he’d smile to himself. A tick or something. And I’d watch for it, and not concentrate on his words, and when he smiled, I’d feel relieved, like I’d been waiting for it.

***

“Given the risk-taking that characterized your history, how would you say that that could be incorporated into the more traditional academic paths…for us?” I am the first question. He tells us that he recommends to his research students that they be open to what happens, to changes that might affect them. And some, he says, don’t end up academics, but become writers. But Vicki presses him later: three questions: “Talk about the Joyce biography,” “What do you see needed in the future of Modernist studies?” “Going back to what Greg said, it sounded to me like you were saying that your work is driven by love, and that when you do what you love, the discipline follows from that.” He answers the other two first. And then asks her to repeat the last part, which he’s afraid he never answered fully the first time it was asked (by me). Vicki looks at me – how had she put it? “If you follow what you love,” I say, “the job will follow.” Much laughter. “That’s not what I said,” she scolds, smiling. “The discipline will follow,” I correct myself. He talks more about being open to what happens. Laura presses him: isn’t he speaking in paradox? And I say, “It sounds like you’re saying that freedom happens to us. Would that be a fair construal?”

In what follows, he looks as if he’s talking only to me. He has moved closer and faces me as he speaks. I no longer dislike him. He looks down and his voice gets quieter. No, that’s not unfair…but I wouldn’t say freedom. He’s silent for a moment. Value happens to us. He looks up. My two sons, I will tell you, were accidents. They weren’t planned. But they changed my life. They were, I might say, the source of an intellectual revival for me at the time. And it was from them coming each week, and that narrative contract, you see, that the work I’m most proud of was born. The children’s novels.

He was my father as he spoke. And I his son. He had said: I have intellectual love affairs with authors, and then I fall in love with the next. Did he cheat on his wife? Is that why they separated? Why was he in a tiny flat alone? But did it matter now? He had said, of his children: They are my greatest work. One of them is a woodcarver now. Do I look like him? He said my name as he spoke. Greg. I did not like him at first, wanted even to leave in the middle of his biography. But I was calm now. At peace with him. (#55)

***

On the walk home, I passed a line of yellow barrier tape. Caution. The wind shook it in the air and it brushed against me as I passed.

And the living is easy

Of late, it's been difficult writing regularly here. There's simply too little going on. The content of my days has slowed to a summer trickle, consisting of little more than the gym and my reading chair. Philadelphia's cast of characters is similarly diminished. Especially on weekends, Center City itself feels empty. Unfortunately for me, without the frisson of another person, my mind - or is it my soul? - tends to slow and settle, matching its mood to the summer weather. Sometimes a book or a film (or a romantic email) will jolt it into the kinesis of desire, but these prompts always come from too far a distance to prolong the movement into some sort of departure or transcendence.

I'm reading Larwrence at the moment, which likely has something to do with the language I'm crafting lately, if not the actual feelings themselves. The two of us don't see eye-to-eye very often, but some of the sensuousness of his desire is clearly infectious. And his peculiar rendering of time - both its slowness and its suddenness - is perhaps too accurate for me to approve. Though literature is not (or is not foremost) a question of realism, I do not yet know how comfortable I am with the implications of Lawrence's literary psychology. They soothe me and seem to open before me a raw and spiritual materialism - yet the author in me wants (or claims to want) no part of that in my fiction.

Yet it may be that there are two authors at work in me: myself and what the Greeks would name my Genius. And my Genius - who, as Socrates claims in the Phaedo, came before me and will live past me - has a better sense of what I must write than I do. I'm thinking just now of Sarah - Sarah the character in The Grain and all that she's meant to do there. Though she has numerous real-life predecessors of the same name (the first of which is written of all the way back in The Library's Grain #10), her fictional self as it first appears fully-formed (in, as far as I can tell, #87 and #92) owes the majority of its contours to Lawrence. And it must not be taken for granted that Day 3 (October 27, 2004), what I call in my notes "The Day of Love," proceeds thus under Lawrence's aegis.

Of course, of all the 7 days - save perhaps the last - I've had the most difficulty figuring out exactly what happens on Day 3. The middle or perhaps the end of the chapter takes place at a cafe named Chapterhouse, where the novel's two artists - Blake and Sarah - are celebrating a dual opening (you can catch a glimpse at #117). The unease between Blake and Adrian (who first appears in #90) has been much easier for my mind to plot, though it's meant only to be the day's backstory. So what of Sarah then? Perhaps she will become clearer to me with time, or perhaps who she is precisely the author's blindspot. In a 1914 letter to Edward Garnett that might be instructive here, Lawrence says of the men and women that people The Rainbow:

I don't think the psychology is wrong: it is only that I have a different attitude to my characters, and that necessitates a different attitude in you, which you are not as yet prepared to give . . . somehow - that which is physic - non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element - which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to . . . You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, [in order] to discover [that they] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. . . . You must not say my novel is shaky - It is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I want to do. But it is the real thing, say what you like.

What might happen with Sarah and how might others appear to me outside of my fiction if we call this attitude of Lawrence's love?

Skin and bone and what's between

I had many lofty intentions for this posting: a meditation on the number 27, a description of my brother whom I saw to the airport last weekend, or what would be the first in an embarrassingly long series of reflections on the men I have dated. But, it being Friday night, and my evening closed in by the city's sudden barrenness, I haven't the attention to sustain any single idea for long in writing.

Instead, there is the aching of my body, which, since my near-drowning last month, has been rapidly (and strangely) changing. Like Square (see The Library's Grin #99) I've had long and not so-long bouts of muscle-gaining efforts: eating and drinking and lifting in every superfluity imaginable. As it tends to go with these things, nothing worked or worked for long. But now I seem to have gained six pounds - and done so without any conscious intention. And so my body is suddenly unfamiliar to me - bigger, I guess, but also hungrier for strain, for movement and exhaustion. It's all I can do, given the emptiness of my schedule (and of my social life), to try to avoid satisfying it more than once a day. Though perhaps, as I did today - running in the morning and lifting in the afternoon - I should just give in to its urges.

Whatever the case, the sky outside is dark now, and for the rest of the night, I'm intent on finishing the biography of Joyce's father I've been reading. I'll eat a salad somewhere between chapters, maybe listen to the new Johnny Cash. Then bed and an early rise. And another day like this one.