The devil’s new October. Everything has a fever. I am too pure for you or anyone
But the Trader Joe’s clerk was kind to me. Appreciated my help with the bagging. Someone else liked my hair. World of blessings, dream kingdom, day after day—
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
And I was given fruit to eat.
Later, he dropped me off at the pension. I walked through the moonlit garden, went up the stone staircase, took a shower, and wrote copy until I fell asleep, with the feeling of leading “a full life.”
—Elif Batuman, Either/Or
Look at this, mom. Look at this, mom.
Somehow I make things real by looking at them. Even when my ghost feet don’t touch the floor.
Being a ghost could be a full-time job. We tried that, didn’t we. Is that why you wanted to be a writer? Yes and no. Half in and half out of everything.
I was telling Nicole that (what I understand of) Jewish guilt is a communal and other-directed matter, all the mitzvot you’ve slacked on; but Catholic guilt goes inward, toward the filthy things you want in your horrible heart. “Oh. Well, that explains you.”
Black bile baby in love
Took two eighth graders to the Mitski show! This time around the band is country but her persona is a dapper-dyke David Byrne, marionette stylings to hold off all that raw feeling. She thanks the parents and guardians who brought their kids out. Maybe this wasn’t your first choice for how you wanted to spend your evening? The eighth graders were having the time of their lives, it’s true; but there I was one row over, having my cry through all the Puberty 2 material. Funny mom. I say unto you, teenagers at the Mitski show: right now you know, and in time you’ll forget, and if you ever have a second puberty and start to remember it all over again, woe betide you. Youth after age, doubled over. Susan Fraiman’s sodomitical mother, the monster who pursues pleasure (or pain?) independent of function. What a seedy Deleuzian corner for a nice girl like you to end up in.
tell your baby that I’m your baby
E quella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria.”
In Christian time, which moves from ignorance to revelation, death is the local apocalypse that uncovers your soul as it always was. So Francesca in the whirlwind, casting her mind back to that time of happiness in the library (al tempo d’i dolci sospiri), understands that she was in the whirlwind always and didn’t know it.
In Dōgen’s model of time, that’s half right. What the apocalyptic view obscures is the effect of desire, which always looks to the future and so pierces time with an asymmetric arrow. If Francesca was already in the whirlwind when in the library, it’s equally true that she is still in the library while in the whirlwind. We know that; we hear her verses bring it to life. You want to say that’s her nobility, her superiority to circumstance, to any torment God could devise for her. At the same time (nessun maggior dolore), her wish to return to that place is what ensures her separation from it. Her punishment’s perfect architecture.
After a period of sitting, a wooden sensation, rigid but yielding. There was give in the grain. Clean and dry, sap smell. It was like a desert gully, a channel where water ran once and might run again.
Dig under that tree, is the challenge, and find the bones of an interesting person. I do my best. But once the first layer of dirt is scraped away there’s nothing between the roots but trash, a dead crab, vegetable slime. I pull out something like a long fibrous husk. It doesn’t count.
On TV there’s a show about a small surviving population of Homo habilis, who have been living in the open all this time adjacent to urban civilization. A young female, eyes bright under her brow ridge, listens as her new friend from the city explains science. “I understand you,” she tells him, “but how did Einstein and Schwarzschild feel when they made these discoveries? Where was the emotion?”
Bad Trip
Heart, unhitch
from future time, dire honey
of the not yet opened. Idle
in the garden, the light won’t eat you.
Faust chasing his pleasures
was always in hell.
The shark afraid to drown in stillness
carries time in its gills, ceaseless.
Yourself is the shear of what swam. Swim.
I said, I was drawn to Kannon at the start because I felt in need of her comfort and protection, very much the relationship one has with the Virgin if one happens to grow up with the Virgin. But as time went on, and especially after becoming a mother, I began to feel a reproach in her, an ideal that I was always falling short of.
My teacher thought a moment and said, it’s true, there are two Kannons. But in my experience, she only pulls out that sword when there is real need of it.
We sometimes said the problem was “quantum entanglement,” but it would have been easier just to call it a three-way light switch, where you never knew if up or down was on or off because you had no insight, that day or any other, into what anyone else was doing at the other end of the goddamn hall.
Silence as gift. That Peter Stamm novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, had a good title even if as a novel it was mood and not much else.
The “vulnerable narcissist” is a new type to watch out for. From a distance we do no harm.
Climbing, ladders and skylights.
