Love Now Angrily in Protest

It's been almost a month since I've posted here, and - as some of you already know - this gap has been anything but intentional. For the last two months school has finally functioned like a job, requiring my presence on campus from 9 to 6:30, and sending me home with piles of work still to be done each night before bed. Today is, despite my writing here, no exception - but the demands made on me are beginning to taper off or sound with less urgency.

"The nihilist, no matter how many people he or she might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor, and only the actor's motives are real. When the nihilist pulls the trigger, turns on the gas, sets the fire, hits the vein, the world ends. Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, call them into being. Still, the tools the negationist seems forced to use - real or symbolic violence, blasphemy, dissipation, contempt, ridiculousness - change hands with those of the nihilist."

That's Marcus, Square's "holy Greil," writing at the beginning of Lipstick Traces, and it's a distinction on which I've been reflecting since my class first struggled to explain it on Monday. Square was born from that book, quite literally: an idea in between the lines of Marcus's prose waiting for something - or someone - to dream him into being. But what Square is - a nihilist or negationist - is often impossible for both me and Stephen to tell.

But today he was the latter, and I saw him with me after class, the two of us walking through the city at night, his arms full of lillies or a stack of homemade CDs. He was at once the monarch, the egoist, who had sat cross-legged on a desk in front of his class while he lectured; and then, abruptly, he was the friend, the comrade, the rebel, so that when his students had separated off into groups the zealous laughter that passed between them was the desired effect of his absence. "Here are three words," he might as well have said. "Now write a poem."

Or that is what Stephen might have had him say, though he knows well that the line between music and poetry forbids such casual translation. "Here are three characters," I would offer him instead. "Now write a novel." Stephen and Square are two of them, and it is in Square's class on Day 3 or Day 5 where Square is, to Stephen who watches him at least, his best. The wall-mounted speakers sound the messy chords of the Pistols while his students cut and paste in groups. They practice per his instructions the fine destructive art of detournement.

The two, for all their mutual admiration, are not so easy to reconcile: Square and Stephen, the punk and the poet. Inspiration, as I see it now at least, is nothing like negation. But they are fast friends despite their differences. And there may yet still be other friends to come. "Here are three dreams," one might say. "And three names by which to know them." Three different paths for my single prose to follow.

Like a ghost on the highlands howling proud

He sat down in one of those olive gardens, and, all within and around him turning still to reverie, the course of his own life hitherto seemed to retire from him into some other world, distinct from the point at which he was now placed to watch it, like the distant road below, over which he had traveled that morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, detached from the present, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping or delighted, escaping from various dangers. And the vision brought, first of all a forcible impulse of nothing else than gratitude, as if he must actually look round for some one to share his joy with - to whom he might tell of it, as a relief.

That's Pater, from Marius the Epicurean - just past the middle of the book, and immediately following the death of Aurelius's son. The book's plot, despite the apparent drama my last sentence ascribes it, is indiscernible: airy and non-linear, it's as though the usual events of a story were replaced with shades of light. It's easy to start and stop the book, to forget what one's read, or to recall it hazily while searching after some other, more useful memory. I've read eight pages this afternoon, and now have set it aside. Retaining so little from it, I am nevertheless (or for that very reason) not eager to see it finished.

All day the sky has been overcast, the clouds occasionally darkened by the weight of rain, but now, as it sets, the sun has rent through them, and a sliver of silver light falls across the bookshelves of my office. I'm shirtless, in pine green sweatpants, and am drinking a cup of lukewarm tea that I made some time ago, then, leaving it to steep on the kitchen counter, forgot. I'm continously distracted this September, my thoughts in transit always: from here to Virginia, from Virginia to here, and never alone or begrudging the journey.

Sunday, on a full train to Philadelphia, I chose an empty seat by a young man I knew from my days as a barrista at Millennium. His name, like mine, is Greg, and, like me, he is slim, olive-skinned, dark haired. Were he shorter or I taller, we might be - though not quite mirror images - at the least uncannily similar in appearance. Though we know each other vaguely, and I have more than once attended a party at his apartment, we have never spoken to each other. And neither did we Sunday on the train. Each of us, in doubled poses, sat with crossed leg, a book open on our respective laps: on mine Modernism and the Ideology of History, on his The Q Factor. When we arrived in Philadelphia we climbed the stairs together to the Station, and then, under the gaze of the winged statue by the north entrance, we parted ways, he turning left to the taxi stand and myself right to the dirty underworld of the El.

There is no real significance to this passing, no justification for what my mind has made of it. But I felt, as we separated in Philadelphia, that until that moment atop the staircase we had been the same, and that it was not him that left to catch a cab home, but some previous me - and that it was then, there, suddenly that I was given to see my past leave off and travel on without me.

There's much writing to be done now, much reading too. Preparations for my class tomorrow. Assignments to draft. And poetry to set its course again in The Library. And between my muse and I an echo, and a line I'd written previously that I'm remembering now, a promise: Ho, tell 'im what's to come. Hi' it non in werdsome phrases. Assay, essene, in keen greene words: do not d-nay whithout him.

Will Be-s and What For-s

Finally I'm returning to writing: both here and The Library's Grain. I apologize to those few who read this for the silence of recent days. It's been largely outside my control. Though I might add that the summer has been laboring to teach me to hear the music and rhythm of such lacks and losses, and the means with which to sing by them. The breaking of the will, I think, is in a key all its own, and it may very well be the key of genius (in the Greek sense, of course).

Today, as I sat in the Last Drop while Jeehyun ordered a coffee at the counter, an odd and nervous girl approached me at the table. She had heard me answer Jeehyun about my reading, and felt moved, I suppose, to speak with me. "You said you're reading Yeats. I've heard he's really wonderful." She was timid, severely so, and kept her distance while speaking, her hands brushing repeatedly at the strands of hair that fell past her ears. "Do you know The Vision?" She asked, "What do you think of it?" I answered vaguely, half-remembering what I'd read as an undergraduate. "Try it," I told her. "I'm sure you'll like it." She sighed with relief, and replied, "I'm so glad to hear you say that. I think I will then." And with that, she turned and left the coffee shop.

These past few days have been full of such moments: strange, but beautiful, and unaccountable by any system whose rules I can discern. And I have tried to play my part, returning the city's surprises with my own. I'm thinking specifically of a long delayed project for the The Library's Grain. In the novel, Square, Stephen's sidekick, is engaged in the practice of CD-dropping. Though I've never heard of the activity in that particular medium, tape-dropping - the act of leaving specially designed mix-tapes in odd places where strangers will find them - has a long and fascinating history (see, for example, the January 2006 issue of The Wire). Though I don't much anymore identify with such artistic games (the stuff of Square's aesthetics), I had promised myself to give this one a try, if for no other reason than for the purpose of lending my writing an added layer of verisimilitude. And so, three copies of the first mixed CD, compiled month ago, have finally been dispersed (one of them, admittedly dropped in the hands of a friend who enjoys such things). The CD has a silly, though somewhat well-plotted narrative, and is a strange mix of religious sincerity and very ridiculous (I might even say bad) pop. For those interested, and for the sake of obsessive cataloguing, here is the track-list:

Elijah, by any other name...

1) Ebony Rhythm Band "Drugs Ain't Cool (instrumental)"
2) The Wolfgang Press "Shut That Door"
3) Weezer "Tired of Sex"
4) DMX "Lord Give Me a Sign (a capella)"
5) Daedelus "Doorbell"
6) Voice Farm "Come on a My House"
7) Ramsey Lewis "Do What You Wanna"
8) Barry Manilew "Why Don't We Live Together"
9) The Homosexuals "Hearts in Exile (full mix)"
10) The Clash "The Sound of the Sinners"
11) Pest "Heard Your Bird Moved In"
12) WhoMadeWho "Out the Door"
13) Daedelus "Back Doorbell"
14) Tamia "Stranger in My House"
15) Masada String Trio "Rssasiel"
16) David Byrne "The Great Intoxication"
17) Johnny Cash "God's Gonna Cut You Down"
18) The Streets "Get Out My House"
19) The Soft Pink Truth "Kitchen"
20) Essential Logic "Wake Up"
21) Kate Bush "Get Out of My House"
22) Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds "God's Hotel"
23) snippet from The Simpsons: [phone rings] "Troy, Mack Parker - ever hear of Planet of the Apes?" "Uhh...the movie or the planet?" "The brand new, multi-million dollar musical, and you are starring as...the human!" "It's the part I was born to play, baby!"
24) Tim & Mollie O'Brien "Shut De Do"

Otherwise, it's evening. The sun is just starting its descent. And my thoughts are full of things meant to be written elsewhere.

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.

Trees and Groves

As I've been reading all things Irish - Irish folktales, Irish history, Irish poetry, Irish fiction - I've been wishing I were Irish (or, in the words of the Library's Grain: "I were Irish, Irish"). I'm not, however, and - as those of you who know me know - I've never been much of anything other than me. No thread or collection or wave of history has ever claimed me as a member. And I've been happy with that. Happy, that is, until recently. Maybe it's the Irish, maybe it's Joyce, maybe it's the almost drowning, maybe it's God - but I've been wanting these past few weeks to belong to something bigger than me. To know that the words that make up myself were written by hands other than mine, and written ages before I was even imagined.

My mother's parents are both from Russia - Jewish and, if I remember correctly, fleers of the pogroms. Neither myself nor my mother know much about my grandfather's parents, but his life was large enough to contain its own history: baseball coach, concentration camp liberator, man about town - he was, at his death, a legend to the many, many people who knew him. My grandmother is, contrary to first appearances, of similar stock. She grew up in Brooklyn where her mother raised her alone and worked as a seamstress. Though her life was more stationary than her husband's, she was no less active: she fought doctors over the care of her daughters, drafted legislation that introduced rights for the disabled, worked with politicians to reform the county libraries - and, at sixty, earned a Bachelor's degree from NYU.

Much of who I am owes something to these two grandparents - and I mean that by way of the most conventional of causalities. Growing up, I spent a great deal of time with them: army reunions, New York museums, libraries, my grandfather's liquor store. I have a strong connection to their lives (and also, as I learned through my grandfather, their eventual deaths), but the arc of their significance begins and ends with them. I know very little of their parents and even less of what lies further back beyond them, and their religion was never mine, nor will it likely ever be so (though it should be said that during my childhood it did not even appear to be theirs).

My father's parents, on the other hand, are a different story entirely. I was never close with them. My grandfather, whose parents came from Austria, was a simple and often cranky man. And my grandmother, in all of my experience of her (and, I would hazard, much of my father's), was a bitch. But it's her family's history that - I learned yesterday - offers the transcendent relation I've been asking after. And, curiously, it's a relation which I have, unintentionally, already been pursuing. Simply put: both sides of my grandmother's family have lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania since the 1600s. Not only that, but, until her great-uncle's death (and owing to a very unwise marriage on his part), her mother's side of the family was wealthy and owned a decent amount of land.

There's research still to be done here, and there is something unusual about tracing my lineage through my father's mother's side (though, if I were to write more here of my grandfather's life, it would seem less unusual), but for the moment something has suddenly made sense, and my place right now in Philadelphia no longer feels so accidental. As I walk through this city that I have lived in now for eight years, I know that I am but the most recent of those who've shared my blood to walk these paths. Even my father, whose inheritance I have struggled for years to reject - I see myself in him now, see him living in this city as I do and at my age. His steps too are mine. Why has he spoken so rarely of this that we share? And why has it taken me so very long to ask of it?