The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.
The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—
Somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet
this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
Why are my cough-drop wrappers all up in my grill, being so aggro and bolshy and obnoxious and shit? They’re all hortatory and EXHORTATIONAL for some reason, adjuring me to quit whingeing and man up to life:
Flex your “can do” muscle.
Tough is your middle name.
Elicit a few “wows” today.
Get back in the game. [But...I'm sick?] Impress yourself today.
You’ve survived tougher.
Conquer today.
Inspire envy. [?!] Nothing you can’t handle.
Take charge and mean it.
Power through!
March forward!
Push on!
Why do the last three sound like I’m retreating from Moscow? Step the fuck off, cough drops. I’m doing my goddamned best here, okay, so why don’t you just calm the hell down.
Don’t give up on yourself.
Let’s hear your battle cry. [Battle...cough?] Bet on yourself. [Is that even allowed?] Put your game face on.
Put a little strut in it.
The show must go on. Or work.
Don’t try harder. Do harder!
These last two don’t even make sense, drill sergeant cough drops. Also, you are apparently actively encouraging me to be a mucus trouper, and trust me nobody wants my coughing ass in their classroom/office/hallway right now, spreading germs along with my strut. Get a life, you codependent cough drops! Stay out of my program!
Why can’t Sunday be Saturday? Why can’t we have three weekend days? I would call them Saturnday, Neptuneday, Plutoday. And how can it already be 2:48 pm? Because I only woke up at 10:46, and then only because a groggy up-all-night-working theoretical chemist slithered into bed next to me, and he and the cat have been up there in an inert heap of bedclothes ever since, while I’ve come downstairs and picked up discarded clothes and cough-drop wrappers off the floor, have made tea and typed and coughed and tried to get a handle on the whole seething mess of it. Why don’t I do more work on Saturday, instead of sitting around numbly, and only scrambling into panicky motion on Sunday?
I make nominally blueberry muffins from a dusty box in the cupboard, which I must’ve bought during one of those weird dazed middle-of-the-night trips to CVS when one purchases many ill-advised things. Pad silently around the kitchen, take out the recycling, water the catnip. Poach an egg. Think of my mother, as I always do now—her farm-raised eggs, butter I helped her churn, sitting with her chatting on the sofa like the companionable old ladies we are as we slosh the buttermilk back and forth in half-gallon mason jars, slosh slosh, slosh slosh. Then suddenly, without preamble, the butter comes in a clump. Write her an unsendable letter in my head. Dear Mother, why am I so stuck. Why didn’t this work out better. Is it okay that I didn’t have a daughter or teach her all of your Civil War songs. Is it okay that I still read the same Dickinson poems you taught me and I haven’t written anything yet nearly that true.
Eat buttered egg. Eat muffin. Answer a dozen student emails. Manage to delete/file another 50-60 emails. Success. Fleeting. Fugitive. Read through the AWP schedule to see what panels I might want to attend. Small surges of pre-conference nausea, predictable, dismissable: I’m never on a panel. These panels look boring. Why aren’t the writers who interest me most on these panels? Why are there so many panels? Do we really need panels on half this stuff? Aren’t we just trying to feed the beast we’ve created, the creative-writing-program factory that squeezes so many of us out now, so many hundreds per year, like so much sausage no one wants to eat?
Done because we are too menny.
Try to read submissions for Gulf Coast, which I should have done on Friday but was too ill to go to the slush party. Read five submissions. Cough. More tea. There is a bee drowning in the cup. Rescue it. Tiptoe upstairs for more cough drops. Post pictures of the baby possum instead of reading subs. Because literally, look what the cat drug in on Thursday night:
(Photos by neighbor.)
Possum story:
I didn’t know Pyewacket had even caught it and brought it in, because she wasn’t meowing, presumably because her mouth was full of possum; I just heard vague crashings-about downstairs for a long time, which I ignored, but then finally heard her mewing imperatively and went to look and she was sitting on the top step with the baby possum all slobbered-on and trembling, her watching it attentively. I tried to move past them to go get a bowl to put it in (knowing better than to grab it, my what long teeth you have) and Pye swatted out and the baby possum went tumbling, fell all the way down the stairs and hit the concrete floor with a truly sickening thwack. Cat and I raced downstairs to see. Baby possum lying immobile, stretched out, lips drawn back in a death-grin. I scooped it in a bowl gently and went to show the corpse to the neighbor.
“And it would have been fine, only it fell! It’s my fault it’s dead.”
“Are you sure it’s dead?”
“Look at it!”
“Um, but that’s what possums do.”
Sure enough we waited, and one little beady eye came open cautiously, then the other, then the little feets and tail began to wiggle, then the nose wiffled, then when it sat up and looked angrily at us we put it in the grass, and it wobbled off into the night. Will s/he survive? We don’t know.
Pyewacket was however extremely pleased with herself all that night and into the next day.
Sunday. Must do more. Two letters of reference to write (for one student) and a book to read by 2:30 pm tomorrow and, mother, how do we do this? How does one be 43? I don’t know how. I have some strange non-relationship relationship with the boy next door and I’m doing my best to pretend it’s not really happening because I’m pretty sure it’s going to stop happening any second now and I have to steel myself somehow, have to not fall on the floor when the rug gets yanked out underneath me; anyway it can’t get yanked, there was never any rug there to begin with. It’s happening in null space, it’s a parallel-universe affair that has no reality in this world, that’s the only way I can place it in my mind as something that seems real (Solaris); but ultimately I must not, must not count on its actually existing, as it is scheduled to end promptly on or shortly after May 1. Or when he meets someone more age-appropriate and prettier, whichever happens first.
In the meantime we study together, eat together, listen to music together, watch movies and British television together, sleep together (badly) (for my part, because apparently my new thing is to wake up every time someone breathes/twitches/rolls over), meditate together. This was his idea. We sit quietly for ten minutes after every hour of work. Pyewacket sits cozily in between us, mrrtling. The egg timer goes off and we dive back into our laptops, frowning slightly.
I find myself remembering that I know how to sit still. That my brain and lungs and pelvis know how to organize themselves automatically into that ultimate yoga pose of stability. This surprises me a little, but I guess it shouldn’t. If you spend a squillion hours sitting zazen, I don’t suppose you can cross your legs and drop your gaze without remembering how.
Now I try to pick up a shattered wineglass silently. This is hard to do. The floor is concrete painted gray, which seems redundant to me. If it were my floor I would have painted it sky blue, or pale yellow. Last night we were pretending to watch The Fifth Element, which is preposterously silly, and during an ambiguous scuffle/embrace moment the wineglass slid from my hand and met its demise. It cost 25¢ at the thrift store. I try to find every piece of glass, so the cat paws don’t.
I get my hair cut and blown-out, the stylist lectures me on how to use a round brush which they always do, even though I’m sitting there reading a monograph on Victorian literature and tell her repeatedly I don’t even own a blow dryer. Afterward I feel so fancy I venture into Victoria’s Secret, downstairs from the salon. But for some reason this year everything is suddenly neon-pastel colors, with words written on them. I don’t want my underwear to have sparkly hot-pink or neon-orange lace, and to yell SUGAR or HONEY on it, like roller-derby outfits. Against which I have nothing, but I like my underwear to be black and ivory and ballet pink and have tiny sleek bits of lace and ribbon. A bit more Victorian to my way of thinking.
The bee has dried itself off and crawled back up into the tea mug again and is drowning. I rescue it again, with a cough drop wrapper.
Sunday. What does Sunday mean? To Wallace Stevens, to Protestants, to me? Why am I forever asking myself these unanswerable questions? How does the woman keep going? Where is she going? Are there any friends there? Are friends enough? What happens then? Who reads the words? Who writes them? Who are all these people? What will happen next?
And as always, from the gentle perspective of Saturday morning, it stretches out before me with all this promise of catch-up and naps and oodles of time to call friends and loaf and watch movies and play with the cat and—
But wait. Every weekend I fall for this. And actually I said “morning” but I didn’t get up until noon (12 HOURS SLEEP YAY) and it’s now 2 pm and here I am and I should be working and—
Coughing, but quietly. I woke up hungry and chopped the leftover baked-potato half and crumbled the leftover strip of cherry-smoked organic bacon and fried them in a pan with lots of butter and two of my mom’s farm eggs and some of her homemade cheddar. The last dollop of sour cream on top. I’ve had my vitamins and my lactobacilli, I’ve had my zinc/echnicea cough drop (cherry) and my vitamin C cough drop (grapefruit). To my left the big J. mug, full of Thai Delight tea, with a bit of agave and a lot of milk.
There is a theoretical chemist passed out on the sofa, wrapped naked in his duvet, with all the signs of a wild party last night strewn across his living room hardwood floor—cups of green tea, bottle of Shiraz with corkscrew still in it, small glass jar of herbal preparation, electronic cigarettes, lighter, a scattering of dry erase markers, enormous white board covered with words like these: Assume the system is completely described by the unique element in S. So we may assume S —> Z and for any injective S, we define… and then it trails off into wads of symbols, concerning which I am illiterate. He’s very good at talking me through it, very patient, coming up with analogies and illustrations and x/y graphs, frowning slightly and gesturing with his dry-erase marker. He reminds me of another physicist in my past; also of my mother, who was for many years a high-school math teacher—who was in fact MY high-school math teacher; which I think explains why I was ever any good at math at all (I was okay at it): because she made sure I was.
Gray outside and cold, but not windy or rainy. Last night we made aforementioned baked potatoes (also with avocado) and watched The Five Obstructions, which I have to admit I loved, and which made me laugh aloud many times. The machinery underlying that film is discomfort vying with pleasure: von Trier is clearly an a-hole of the finest water, but he’s dead-on in his denunciations of Leth’s aesthetic limitation; The Perfect Human is gorgeous, also heteronormative and Eurocentric; and Jørgen Leth is fabulous, even though he’s patently a dirty old colonialist man. Despite/thanks to these uneasy ambivalences I loved watching Leth, again and again, come up with beautiful cinematic surfaces even though von Trier was knocking himself out to ruin them—to force Leth to create something ugly, cheap, barren, maudlin, confessional, sentimental, wrong. (I also feel pleased with myself for deducing that the unnamed Austin, TX animator who helps Leth with the fourth obstruction [making The Perfect Human as a cartoon] was in fact the same guy who worked with Linklater on A Scanner Darkly.)
But where was I. Ah yes, lolling on the sofa eating with my neighbor and watching movies and NOT WORKING, even though there is more work to be done than—I mean, let me just list it. For myself. So I don’t forget—and also there is the part where I leave Wednesday night for AWP, and a good lot of this has got to be done by then. Just has got to be. So.
1. answer many frantic “help me with my introduction, JLowe!” emails from students
2. read 5 subs for PANK
3. read 50+ subs for Gulf Coast
4. read the book Between Women by Sharon Marcus (which I’m actually really excited about, because I love Martha Vicinus and Lillian Faderman so much), and take good notes, toward writing a paper next…next Tuesday? Actually if I would start writing that paper THIS Tuesday, that would be smart.
5. email Dickinson professor and apologize in advance for missing class and find out what I’ll need to have read by next Wednesday
6. grade a zillion student posts on Blackboard. Okay not a zillion…more like 200, I think.
7. calculate students’ attendance and post on Blackboard so they know where they stand.
8. read Franz Wright book for workshop on Monday
9. somehow pick up tickets on Monday to Rae Armantrout and Christian Wyman reading! and go to that on Monday night
10. write a poem, two poems actually, for workshop because I am a week behind
11. do laundry before AWP
12. go through ripped-out pages from Poets & Writers (good airplane/airport activity?) and take note of all the contests I am not entering but should probably be entering, especially looking for chapbook publishers for Cherry-emily, my poor unloved child (whom I, yes, think is flawless and adorable)
13. appointment with endocrine gynaecologist on Monday, forgot to email them photocopied driver’s license and insurance card as they requested, hope they won’t be mad
14. scan “A Cyborg Manifesto” and email it to fem theory prof as my student-selected reading for seminar
15. and this seems like such a small thing, but clear sinkful of dishes, load dishwasher and run. Run! Run like the wind!
But you know what I’m going to do first? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do first, because it’s SATURDAY and I have a head cold and am lethargic and groggy. I’m going to go back to my house and put on pants. Then I’m going to a Paul Mitchell salon, using some of my mom’s birthday money to me, and I’m going to get an extremely fancy conditioning treatment, which helps middle-aged white lady hair be a lot less frizzy, and an extremely expensive haircut. So that I will look FABULOUS at AWP with my new chocolate-brown knee-high suede boots. And, I am going out to dinner with my girlfriends, and we are going to DRINK, and then I am going to collapse in an extremely tall and poofy, sleek-sheeted white hotel bed which I can ill afford, and I am going to wake up and have a forbidden CROISSANT and COFFEE with milk and SUGAR and then I am going to hang out at the book fair and smile cheekily and not mind one bit that I’m not reading anywhere or signing anything, secure in the knowledge that I am, per one poet, a genius without a book.
Because I’m not sure how, probably just that I’m ovulating, but it has somehow come to my attention that my attitude toward my coursework and workshop leaders and my chronological peers who are somehow my professors has undergone a subtle shift, just, like, in the last 72 hours. I don’t know why. But suddenly I am thinking—
I am remembering an interview I read in, like, 1991 with Shawn Colvin in Acoustic Guitar magazine (which I could not afford but which my friends who could afford gave to me when they were done reading it because they felt sorry for me). And in the interview she talked about the long period before she got her first album out, and people would always have suggestions for how she could make her songs better/more marketable. And then she said, very simply: “And one day I just realized: ‘No, they’re wrong. I’m right.”
And somehow when I was 23 or whatever, this seemed very clear to me. That they were wrong and that I was right and that however blunderingly, however tortuously, I was making my own way toward the kind of lyric writing I wanted to be making. And somehow in all this trying-to-get-published and not-getting-published, and trying-to-be-the-best-horse and being-the-worst-horse, I have totally lost that confidence. I see it in my fellow PhD students, though; the three whom I think are the most amazing writers. That perhaps part of what makes them amazing is their unshakeable confidence. That they are just here to do what they do and if certain professors don’t like it, too bad, this is what they do and they aren’t going to stop doing it.
(This is probably kind of boring but it’s important to me so I’m not going to stop typing until I’m done. Thank you.)
And that little insidious whisper-voice in the back of me, the one we all have, sibilant and imperceptible, suggests: Well, but that’s because they’re better than you are. They’re better writers, with more sophisticated and interesting projects. So they can afford that kind of confidence. They have books. You don’t, and you can’t. You need to be humble and whipped and crucified weekly and to be forced to try to remake your writing because you are one of the Bad Writers—the ones everyone knows are in creative writing programs, we’re never quite sure how they got admitted but let’s be honest, they’re in there, you’re in workshop with them and you privately think, this person is going to graduate and will never be heard from again. And then you feel ashamed of thinking that, and also wonder if everyone else thinks it of you. Do they feel sorry for you. Do they have nothing to say about your poem (crickets!) when you’re workshopped, because it’s just so completely dreadful.
But then I come back at that voice: Okay, well, what if you’re wrong? What if it’s the other way around? What if it’s actually that very confidence which gives them the ability to be good? Why not try it? Why not be unassailably confident and unapologetic and up-front—”my writing knows exactly what it’s doing and it’s completely awesome and if you don’t get it you just aren’t trying”—just for a change? Because doesn’t part of you think that anyway? (Yes.) (It’s just gotten beaten down from years of workshop-crickets.) Isn’t that what Lars von Trier would do? He would be all loud and Danish about it: this is what I have made and it is awful and I love it and you should too, and if you don’t then fuck you, because it’s so awful that it’s actually completely AWESOME?
I mean, it’s a thought. I don’t have much to lose. I could just write the way I want to and see what happens. I mean why not. I’ve always said there’s room for all kinds of poetry. That we don’t have to pick and choose, we don’t have to give up Lyn Hejinian in order to have Paul Muldoon. So why not actually stand by that? So what if my colleague cavalierly referred to the beginning of Cherry-emily as “that kind of boring-ass language experiment that people stopped doing twenty years ago” (fairly accurate paraphrase)? So what if s/he did. So what if workshop leaders have discussed my poems with lips fairly curling with distaste, handling the edges of the paper as if touching something loathsome? Didn’t I write many things I liked while being gloriously over-encouraged by Norman? What’s so bad about being encouraged? Do we have to tear every little thing apart in workshops?
Maybe I should take my own advice, and stop being in workshops. As I keep telling other young poets who are getting fed up with the process (process as in cheese- or sausage-making). I think I’m only required to take one more for my degree anyway. Maybe I should just write alone.
Once more with feeling: I am in this program to learn how to write the poem I don’t know yet how to write. That’s the only reason I’m here. And I know what kind that is, as surely as if someone pig-headed and sneering had assigned it to me—my internal von Trier, always pushing me in directions I’m unwilling to go: it’s densely lyric, thicketed with phanopoeia and melopoeia, and almost incomprehensible, “resisting the intelligence almost successfully,” where certain other poets and I differ on the precise interpretation of “almost.” I checked out Eleni Sikélianòs and Ron Silliman and Brenda Hillman and Brenda Shaughnessy and Bin Ramke from the library, my first week here. All those books sit untouched and workshop leaders suggest I read Carl Phillips and Tomas Tranströmer and Franz Wright. Who are fine writers. But that is not the kind of poem I want to write.
Holy moly, and now I just looked at the time and realize I have to go get my hairdid! I will blog better later. For now: The Perfect Human. Before Lars got in there with both hands and tried to wreck it. And failed.
I have an appoinment on Monday with a reproductive endocrinologist! Isn’t that fancy? But this person will draw labs and test my hormone levels and figure out various things, chief among them why the ongoing twixt-nethers drama. There’s something ghastly sounding called “atrophic vaginitis” (translation: old-lady hooha); however, a certain person has rediagnosed me with “horny-schoolgirl-atosis,” and that certainly seems equally likely. Anyway it will be fun to find out how much estrogen remains in my flagging perimenopausal system. Is there enough to support human life? Why do I persist in thinking about this? When I have no money, no partner, no home, no non-mutated eggs left, no career, no—anything?
Just now my Dickinson professor sent me up to her office to collect her three-volume variorum Franklin edition (“because I so appreciate your comments,” God bless her, and she didn’t want me to struggle through three hours handicapped without a text)—and I walked down the stairs delightedly cradling it, the heavy three-volume boxed set, feeling absurdly proud and pleased (and thinking I should just break down and buy it for myself someday)—and I realized I was cradling it at my left breast like a baby. Came down the staircase toward the classroom half-smiling, half-grimacing. Spinster. Mother to words, godmother to students. Wife to no one. Cradling that variorum edition like I could keep it alive.
Faith — is the Pierless Bridge
Supporting what We see
Unto the Scene that We do not —
Too slender for the eye
It bears the Soul as bold
As it were rocked in Steel
With Arms of Steel at either side —
It joins — behind the Vail
To what, could We presume
The Bridge would cease to be
To Our far, vascillating Feet
A first Nescessity.
Suddenly? PhD school is completely KICKING MY ASS. I was more or less on top of everything until this weekend, somehow—say for example that there were four essays to read for a class; I would have read two of them closely with pencil, read the third but without marking on it, read the fourth hastily in my office right before class, skimmed the class website’s comments, and then been able to show up in class sounding more or less competent, confident, and on point. Mostly.
But now. Now it is all going pearshaped and it’s all because of teaching, and the excruciating SLOWNESS and RELUCTANCE I have around commenting on paper drafts. The weekend I drove to Dallas set me back, but I’d recovered from it neatly, nearly, until 53 paper drafts showed up and I began wrestling with my own rebellion and procrastination. I’ve commented on 33 of them and have 20 to go, and have done exactly NONE of my own work. How much none of my own work have I done? Well, I have Dickinson seminar in half-an-hour, and not only did I 1) not read any of the 20 poems for today and 2) not read any of the three essays for today, or the one essay I didn’t have time to read last week, but worst of all 3) I left my copy of Dickinson AT HOME so I don’t even have the book, which is for some reason just completely mortifying. It’s like that dream where you’re in front of the classroom and suddenly realize you’re teaching naked. Or worse, it’s like that moment when you actually ARE in front of the classroom and realize you’ve just said something way out of line.
(Like, um, today? When I first compared a good paper introduction to an appetizer, “You know—you just want to give your reader that little bit of bruschetta, with the artichoke heart on top? and that little dab of goat cheese?”); and then, when the students still didn’t get it/stared straight ahead expressionlessly, as though I were giving the most boring PowerPoint ever, I made the following ill-advised comparison: “You know, a good intro is like a girl with a low-cut dress! It just makes me want to see more!” And then there was a brief uncomfortable moment where suddenly some of the students woke up enough to think very loudly OUR TEACHER = BIG LESBO, until I hastily changed the subject. That’s the good thing about being a teacher. You get to change the subject when you say something moronic.)
(So where was I. Other than low-cut dresses.)
Right, I am going UNDER right now and I don’t know how to get on top. At the beginning of the semester I was doing things several days ahead of time. Then for a few weeks I was doing things the day they needed to be done. Now I’m doing things about four days AFTER they should have been done. It’s frightening, like I’m scrambling up a slope of loose gravel, incurring all kinds of ugly scrapes and contusions, and nonetheless slithering backward with every elbow-knee movement. Scree. Gravity.
In fact more than anything I just keep thinking of Aeon Flux, which my ersatz companion has started me watching (I can justify it because each episode is so short, and so evocative and episodic and elliptic—especially the first six, the ones without dialogue) (actually I’m kind of crazy about them). Watch “Gravity” and see if you don’t get it. I love how, in these six episodes, Aeon is repeatedly doomed by her own fallibility (she dies in each one), but how wry and practical she is about it. The look on her face as she’s falling. Maybe there’s a lesson in here for me, about the inevitability of imperfection. About her doomed efforts against her own hamartia; her struggles against entropy.
Maybe, as Ms. F. says, I don’t have to be the valedictorian of everything? Which, that’s good. Because I’m about to go into Dickinson seminar with NO BOOK, having not done ONE WORD of the reading, and having had nothing today but coffee and almonds. I’m not only not the valedictorian of everything, I’m pretty much flunking out of the special ed of everything.
This influence at the age of forty or forty-one marks a period of major transition in your life. This is the crisis of middle age when you have to come to terms with a number of realizations that may not all be pleasant. For example, even though you are not very old, you are no longer young. Have you accomplished or begun to accomplish what you wanted when you were younger? If you have, was it an appropriate accomplishment for you? Are you happy with your close relationships, your marriage, your work?
Many people encountering this influence discover that the answer to several of these questions is no. If this is your situation, you may become seized with a feeling of urgency that you have only a short time to correct the problem. Consequently you may begin to act rather disruptively and quickly. You may leave a marriage or an old job and take up a lifestyle quite different from your earlier one. Your friends are likely to be rather shocked at the change. You may spend more time with younger people, for their youth is a symbol of the opportunities you feel you have almost wasted. This seems to be your last chance to take advantage of those opportunities.
It is also quite possible that you make none of these drastic changes. If you have taken advantage of opportunities right along and have not allowed your life to become prematurely old and rigid, this time will not be so upsetting or disturbing. You will experience the real meaning of this influence—a climax of the direction your life has taken since childhood and a shifting of direction toward the issues you must confront in old age.
If you have been successful in your dealings with the outside world, you will continue to be, but now it will have to mean something in terms of your own life and perception. You will not be able to live for some external purpose, the purpose must come from within. If you don’t reorient yourself, your life will become hollow and meaningless, regardless of what you accomplish from here on.
Uranus Opposition Uranus, end of March 2011 until 18 February 2012
What words or harder gift
