lycanthropia

Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,
the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell
dispensing damage like a hollow hell
inchling weeping for a minor sea

ticking its tidelets, x and y and z.
The blue beneficence we call and spell
and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well
of constant water, deepening a thee,

a thou and who, touching every what—
and in the or, a shudder in the cut—
and that you are, blue mirror, only stare

bluest blankness, whether in the where,
sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught
drowns and booms and vowels. I will not.

(Karen Volkman) (painting by the talented Jessica Concepción)

[Paula Becker (1876-1907) and Clara Westhoff (1878-1954) became friends at Worpswede, an artist's colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899. In January 1900, spent a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted and Clara studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to Worpswede, and spent the next winter together in Berlin. In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; soon after, Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn. She died in a hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a shame!]

"Reclining Mother and Child," Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906)

The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge.
The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child.
You’re the only one I’ve told.
I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
Otto has a calm, complacent way
of following me with his eyes, as if to say
Soon you’ll have your hands full!
And yes, I will; this child will be mine
not his, the failures, if I fail
will all be mine. We’re not good, Clara,
at learning to prevent these things,
and once we have a child it is ours.
But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone.
I know now the kind of work I have to do.
It takes such energy! I have the feeling I’m
moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,
in my loneliness. I’m looking everywhere in nature
for new forms, old forms in new places,
the planes of an antique mouth, let’s say, among the leaves.
I know and do not know
what I am searching for.
Remember those months in the studio together,
you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,
I trying to make something of the strange impressions
assailing me—the Japanese
flowers and birds on silk, the drunks
sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,
those faces…Did we know exactly
why we were there? Paris unnerved you,
you found it too much, yet you went on
with your work…and later we met there again,
both married then, and I thought you and Rilke
both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness
between you. Of course he and I
have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous
of him, to begin with, taking you from me,
maybe I married Otto to fill up
my loneliness for you.
Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,
he believes in women. But he feeds on us,
like all of them. His whole life, his art
is protected by women. Which of us could say that?
Which of us, Clara, hasn’t had to take that leap
out beyond our being women
to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don’t I dream of you?
That photo of the two of us—I have it still,
you and I looking hard into each other
and my painting behind us. How we used to work
side by side! And how I’ve worked since then
trying to create according to our plan
that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power
to every subject. Hold back nothing
because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about:
how life and death take one another’s hands,
the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
it is myself that kicks inside me,
myself I must give suck to, love…
I wish we could have done this for each other
all our lives, but we can’t…
They say a pregnant woman
dreams her own death. But life and death
take one another’s hands. Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say.

(Adrienne Rich, 1975-1976)

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever
keep a cat, a dog,
a bird—
chiefly because I’d rather love my equals.
Today, turning
in the fog of my mind,
I knew, the thing I really couldn’t stand in the house
is a woman
with a mindful of fog
and bloodletting claws
and the nerves of a bird
and the nightmares of a dog.

Adrienne Rich (1961)

The month’s eye blurs.
The winter’s lungs are cracked.
Along bloated gutters race,
shredded, your injured legions,
the waste of our remorseless search.
Your old, unuttered names are holes
worn in our skins
through which we feel from time to time
abrasive wind.

Those who are loved live poorly and in danger.
We were were loved will never
unlive that crippling fever.
A day returns, a certain weather
splatters the panes, and we
once more stare in the eye of our first failure.

Adrienne Rich (1958)

ANY SINGLE THING

Is so complicated we can talk about it only by a little shove with the knee. The cry of the gulls. The line between water and grammar. Horizon and interpretation. Between two blues. Field of error. My gestures not my own. Desire not a color. And the sound of the sea. Listen.

OFFERS OF SKY

Even a slight curvature in the path of the light will produce dim shapes of possibles. Night minus tears. Or where. The shared adventure. Or amaranth, love-lies-ableeding. Who sings this song? Who talks desire? And she for use as long as. High in the air. Or clouds.

THE EQUATION MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

Allow the first look its density. Before what words make of it. Or often, gusts of wind. Light compact in comparison. With what? Inert reason? But I admit that everything is interrelated. On the model of language. The lovers on the park bench, the bakery, the shadows playing on the wall. Breath quenched in multiple directions.

(Rosmarie Waldrop in Plume)

Should you reject yourself because you count buttons and pick up glass when all civilization tells you: please, this is hardly the time? (Richard Hugo)

Cumulative. An accrual—accretive, like a crustacean gluing tiny bits of shell to itself for camouflage. The small slights given and received and the larger more wincing hurts and the major undeniable fuckups all stick to each other and form a emotional ball of deceptive solidity, arguing I exist, I am real, I am made up not of thoughts but of actualities. Also, the brain helpfully runs around interrogating the sensorium/umwelt for evidence, for confirming data. Seldom a shortage. There is always ample incidence of one’s ineptitude, and thus the obvious conclusion, why would anyone want to be anywhere near.

Someone (a prospective student?) returned my poem to me during yesterday’s workshop with a funny drawing on it, a little ink sketch of a robot-box with arms holding up a sign that read “bizarre machine.” (Because one reader had commented, thoughtfully enough, “It’s almost like a really bizarre machine is speaking, trying to understand humanness.” Cyborg!—though perhaps the compliment wasn’t intended? I don’t know, I decided to be pleased about it anyway.) The more uncomfortable part, or the part the self-hating brain seizes upon and draws to its bosom as a sting to be cherished and pored over obsessively (oh brain), is the rest of the drawing—the little robot-box is standing on a giant crystal ball, labelled “crystal ball,” with a huge question mark drawn inside. Meaning, as several people commented reasonably on their copies, we really can’t figure out what this poem is saying. The word “dissociative” was used several times. I thought someone said “psychotic” but I can’t find that word in my notes, so that is probably my own mind’s interpolation. Oh, the mind. The workshop leader later made a succinct defense of the poem’s “compelling” qualities, its “music, pattern-making, voice, sense of play,” but I understood well that for the group of readers among whom I work, and a larger group of readers, an American poetry-consuming public, these virtues an’t sufficient compared to the burden placed on the poem to be about something. To be complex, yes, and difficult, but ultimately resolvable into a narrative about or a description of or a reflection on—something. Something real in the world.

I cannot dispute any of this nor would I wish to. I am not happy with the poem myself yet, although, it always kind of cracks me up: I’m always disappointed in them for not being far enough out there, whereas my readers seem to wish I would exert myself to make a little more sense. It’s fine.

When we are not sure, we are alive. (Graham Greene)

A colleague wrote, and I think he states the position with admirable clarity,

The job of the writer isn’t to withhold information from the reader and the job of the reader isn’t to break the secret code that the writer has put forward. Literary writing is a kind of communication. When it is difficult, it’s not because meaning has been encoded in it, but because the ideas the writer is grappling with are, themselves, difficult.

Put another way, the ideal mode for a writer isn’t in opposition to her reader, but rather in a mutual attempt to understand something larger and, maybe, ineffable.

I’m not that interested in poetry as self-expression, narrowly defined. I do like to think of it as a kind of communication.  Sometimes that communication includes some self-expression. Sometimes it really doesn’t (beyond the fact that it includes something that a particular self was thinking at one time!).

I think about all this a lot. Wonder where is my work’s place on such a map.

Perhaps I took Richard Hugo too seriously when he said, “If you want to communicate, use the telephone.”

(Have written about all this before.)

Then on my staggery post-workshop walk to the parking lot—I don’t think I’ve ever explained that the English building is really far from the parking lot, and you have to walk through a construction site and across a very busy street with no intersection/pedestrian crosswalk, though drivers will often enough stop politely but then you have to stand there gesturing at them helplessly because you can’t walk across anyway because the cars coming from the other direction are not stopping; and then once you have navigated all this you then have to walk 15 minutes to the far end of the parking lot, and I’m not even exaggerating, because the parking lot is gigantesco and Texas-Stadium-sized, maybe you can do it in 10 minutes if you trot at a breathless clip, so I always allow 30 minutes to get to class, 10-12 for the drive and 15-18 to get from the parking lot to class, but and so anyway—so as I was walking disconsolately to the parking lot, trying to rearrange my too-readily insulted brain, advising me wisely to take none of this personally and to view it as a challenge, a test of mettle, an opportunity to make my next poem better and to reach these American readers,—thinking about all this and walking and receiving a text from a friend worried about another friend, I proceeded to send the reply to the wrong person, and, yeah. I sat in my hot car staring at the phone screen, taking in fully, to the depth of my bones, how badly I had done, very clearly; breathing, living with it.

Living with what I am: a person who consults with each of my friends about the others, which is per the program the plain old character defect of gossip, however intentioned (soliciting support so I can better tend each relationship, tend to myself), and this is the end of this sentence.

Are such flaws getting worse, not being sufficiently checked by me, running rampant, as a friend asked me last year, am I really asking myself the tough questions—in my cobwebby internal card-catalogue I fetch up against Woolf’s pitying take on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (though of course this is a stance, a rhetorical gambit with a certain audience, to distance herself from her more unacceptable literary ancestors):

What could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. [...] What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote ‘the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest’ should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with.

Elsewhere: “Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars.” “Hairbrained, fantastical.” Like the bizarre-machine comment, this seems quite pleasant to me, and agreeable. Anyway at least my congealed quartos and folios are unpublished, safely locked up in a cabinet, for someone to recycle later. And I am not so much a giant cucumber as just a premenstrual brain, numb and dumb and dull other then constantly, mechanically (bizarre machine!) tabulating the hourly goofups large and small (driving to the grocery store without my wallet, uttering inane double-entendres in front of students), a brain really only focused on its heat-seeking-missile strategy of collecting and sorting these lists, these interminable lists of wrongs committed. The mind did this for days during sesshin, when I was an ersatz monk. I’ve even tried to turn the lists into a poem, something useful or beautiful to come out of all the failures, but there were too many of them, like Dante’s shades, too many accusing reproachful faces, and then somehow it would be about me and not them, to my dismay. The colleague who died of breast cancer, hounded in her last months of life by me and another colleague who thought she was doing her job wrong and harrassed her about it constantly, till one day she took a leave of absence and never came back. Another colleague who was fired in part because of me, because our boss liked me more, who stared at me over the lip of her cardboard box with all her desk things piled in it as she was clearing out her office, wordless with disbelief that I was actually trying to talk to her after everything I’d done, and shoved past me as I stood there blankly thinking, well that’s completely reasonable who could blame her. Snapping at Maman who lay cringing in her sickbed, and then going into the bathroom and locking the door and coldly smashing open a safety razor for the blade, cutting my fingers getting it out, rather than just putting water on my face and returning to her, being warm and loving and treating her with respect.

(Or the part where I traded Babe Ruth, divorced him to the bafflement of all who then knew us, and to this day cannot give any reasonable accounting of why. What do you have to say for yourself. Nothing coherent, apparently.)

Self-hatred is without question ungenerous.

I would not have you think this news to me.

When you read Dickinson’s letters, in some sense I think you can watch her mind warping as she ages. I suppose it is loneliness, or more accurately cerebration in isolation, which bends the thoughts. I don’t say it is a bad thing, just a consequence, rendering one even less intelligible, when already “all men say ‘What’ to me.” Concomitantly the last stanzas of the poems become unreadably abstract (somehow I accidentally crossed a mental/spiritual barrier in my thirties and became able to enter into more of those terminal poem-chambers) (I have always meant to write an essay about this, what the final stanzas are doing. It is something inflationary, like the fledgling post-singularity universe. The atoms are all moving rapidly apart from one another, creating an imponderable spaciousness).

Anyway to list people I’ve wronged would be a super-boring poem, without the energy of, say, “The Crimes of the King.” Tedious to watch someone else recount and rearrange such a litany, Miss Havisham among her souvenirs, an eremite telling beads.

(“She is a wealthy spinster who lives in her ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like ‘the witch of the place.’ Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens’s own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-fifties. However, it is also indicated that her long life away from the sunlight has in itself aged her, and she is said to look like a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton, with moving eyes.”)

Anyway at this point I am mostly just a rhetoric-instruction algorithm (explaining the difference between paraphrasing, quoting, and plagiarizing! quiz on Friday! which is mighty ironical coming from someone who steals everything written that’s not nailed down, and many things that are). Whenever I do cough up a poem it’s hilariously worse than the last one.

I’ve lost the thread, but there wasn’t one, and this is the reality of a via profundia.

I just made that up. There’s the via activa and the via contemplativa; there’s no via profundia. There’s La noche oscura del alma, but that’s different.

Could have summarized this entire blogpost into: oh God do I screw up a lot. And it’s worse when I know it, and can’t wipe the blame off onto anyone else. But I’m longwinded, so there you are. Anyway Wilde, who accused himself of the ultimate luxury problems, said it all much more movingly:

I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops.

There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that Nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.

It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, a Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest; one cannot give it away and another may not give it to one. One cannot acquire it except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.

Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I ought to do; in fact, must do. […] And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world….

And I really shall have no difficulty. When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

Bach wants to put in every possible thing, every imaginable version of his harmonic scheme, versions in the style of a fugue, of a French overture, minuet, aria, polonaise, the kitchen sink of style, and moreover to attempt all kinds of virtuosities, in all tempos and denominations, duples, triples, sextuples….Most importantly, at the end of doing everything, he wants to tie it up neatly with a bow and say “there it all is.”

This might be regarded as megalomaniacal, even Gingrich-esque. Bach wants to send us all to a colony on the moon, in G major.

Yes: With all the talk of transcendence, sometimes one forgets the Goldbergs are a bit maniacal, in the best way. For me, this mania begins to heat up in the second half. A good example would be:

Even if you can’t read music, you can see there in the left hand, a gradually climbing set of notes, in a monotonous pattern. Oh, you might think, this is the accompaniment; it does sound a bit like an exercise, but luckily the right hand is playing a lovely melody. However…some measures later, you realize: This pattern is still going on, the left hand is still climbing away, like a creature that won’t stop. The magical, dangerous moment is when the climbing pitches of the left hand actually cross over the melody in the other hand. (This is when you begin to realize that the melody wasn’t really the melody, it has been taken over by the infesting accompaniment.) Because of the way the brain is separated—damn those left and right lobes!—this moment is a special kind of mind-trap, a tangle, exponentially increasing your desire to screw up.

(“This Is Your Brain on the Goldberg Variations” by Jeremy Denk, part of NPR’s “Goldberg Week“)

As a vengeful kabuki ghost?

I can’t word, but I can’t not word, too, somehow. I want to word colorfully and lushly, but it’s not there. It’s Monday and I’m already whipped, albeit laughing about it, albeit a weary sad laugh, from a) workshop and b) screwing up, not that those two categories are in any way mutually exclusive. Someone (more than one someone) referred to my poem as “dissociative,” which I’m sure was absolutely meant neutrally and as a literary-critical term and not used in its psychiatric definition; and I now am smashed flat on the sofa with the second season of Sherlock and a dribble of a very plummy red wine and some dark chocolate with sea salt. There are many wonderful books within arm’s reach but I cannot read them. I went to bed at midnight and then got up at 6 am to finish putting comments on student argument outlines. I want to beat myself up about things, but am finally too inert. There’s a very particular feeling to being too damn tired for self-hatred or really any feeling. “It’s better – almost Peace – ”

We vowed to kill samurai and drink their blood.

Hey y’all, remember that time I had a blog? That was cool, wasn’t it! But, hmm, that must’ve been before my semester looked like this:

Wait, no, sorry—that’s a picture the neighbor took a couple of weekends ago when I played hooky (gasp!) and we took a WALK to a nearby PARK. No, the remnants of the semester really look like this:

Only I took that one a week ago and now there’s another week crossed out. Five weeks left of classes. Five weeks of full-on teaching, and then comes that weird week during which I somehow crank out two research papers and a portfolio, which, come on JLowe, that’s not that bad, and it’s not, unless you’re me, and you’re having a hard time doing things other than a) compulsively housecleaning/practicing flea abatement (since Pyewacket is two days post-spring haircut/treatment and still itchy and hopping with vermin), and b) sucking down calories, lying immobilized in bed reading essays and poems online, and sleeping. Also having sex. And then more sleeping. And then more eating, immobility, etc. Repeat play.

I just, yeah. What can I say. Here’s what I can say—would you guys, um, would you mind just keeping an eye on my stuff while I go to the water fountain/bathroom/Starbucks? I’d really appreciate it. Please don’t let anyone plant cocaine or explosives on me while I’m over there? I’ll smile reassuringly at you (but in a polite, distant, airport-stranger sort of way) from the queue. And I’ll be back around the first week of May, brain slightly fizzled and words a little deranged, but all faculties more or less (eventually) fully intact.

And in the last 24 hours I have graded 25 papers and I still have 25 to go, plus a fugitive two or three in my email account that never got printed out, but I will do those tomorrow morning from school. (School! School.) And then the whole thing will be off-and-running again, and there are only SIX weeks left in the semester, for the students to write two more papers; and then somehow I have a week to write two papers myself. Which all just seems so impossible that I am not even going to think about it.

This particular batch of papers feels like it will be the death of me. They always do. I set the timer for 7 minutes a paper but then have to set another timer for 2 minutes, then 1 more minute, because I CANNOT for the life of me put comments on a paper in under 10 minutes. Because I just HAVE to comment on every damn thing. Even thought it’s poor pedagogy and even worse mental hygiene. The neighbor innocently came upstairs to ask if I was hungry and wanted to eat dinner and was subjected to an impromptu diatribe about how guilty I would feel if he cooked for me, and how I feel suicidal when I have to read more than five or ten papers at a time of clunky horrible imitation academic writing (because god knows even AUTHENTIC academic writing is bad enough, but when it’s such an unfamiliar language to students it’s like they’re dressing up in monkey costumes, it’s outlandish and grotesque and just painful to watch).

Suicidal. After 25 papers. Every time. “They are so bad, it must be my fault.”

(Also there was a big Fight in there, and then some assiduous making up; also a bunch of work which I have somehow still not had time to do, like work on my own poems, read Dickinson’s letters, memorize a Dickinson poem, and, um, something else I’m forgetting but will recall with a stomach-churning lurch and a thud no doubt sometime tomorrow when I realize it afresh.) (And all I want is to WALK TO THE PARK and it will be Tuesday before I next have the chance to do that.)

Side note: this book (which I stole an illicit hour this morning to read) alternately annoys me and is ravingly, lushly pretty—which I envy, and which works on me, pungently, like a very strong emotionally manipulative perfume; and is also why it occasionally annoys me. I will say more about it when I am not getting stupider reading inane pseudo-academic prose, and cursing myself for not getting it over with weeks ago. I love you all and miss you terribly.

Otherwise please ignore. Fiery reentry after glorious spring break. Happens every time. Disregard. Go about your work placidly. Nothing to see here, please move along.