I.
On Facebook, feisty young poet Genine Lentine (who also, let’s be honest here, just has the best name) starts a thread: What are our scarcity narratives? A close friend adds hers, quietly perspicaceous: “I have an I and the I is not adequate.”
Both parts fiction—that there is an I in the first place; that it is not-enough.
II.
Day of student conferences over, throat hurts, feel stupid.
Student brought me glazed Shipley Do-Nut which I should not have eaten but did. Wildly uneven drafts, oh God what I have done wrong. One student somehow got hold of an actual book-shaped thesaurus and ruined his paper methodically, apparently spending many hours doing so. We backtracked as best we could. Another unexpectedly showed up after weeks of being absent and never handing in any work and claiming he’s on an athletics team but never bringing me any proof of this—suddenly showed up smelling unbelievable, like he’s been living under a bridge, and I worry this might even be true, with an incoherently passionate pro-life essay (the one thing they’re not allowed to write about being abortion), all about maternal instinct and the beautiful innocent eyes of a newborn etc. And, you know, or maybe you don’t, but they look at you and hand you their paper and your heart just falls down into your feet, and you wonder, what did I do, because clearly this is my fault. —Though presumably this is exactly how my poor teacher feels every time I bring in yet another confessional poem riddled with flagrant torrid sex. Speaking of which.
After working together on the sofa for a couple of hours, blew him at midnight for no good reason, unreciprocated. Despite thorough washing, right hand still smells suspicious today. Feel cheap despite knowing better.
“Every time we do this I tell myself it’s the last time.”
“Why?”
“Because that way I don’t ever have any expectations. It’s always the last time.”
“And hopefully someday it will be the last time.”
“Hopefully? Is this, like, some kind of horrible experience for you?”
“No, I just mean, someday we’ll start acting like grown-ups and quit hooking up every time we see each other.”
“Seems pretty adult to me.”
“…”
I complain mildly about a new acquaintance only flirting with me and not asking me out. He says, well, does he read your blog. I say, I have no idea, why do you ask. He says, maybe he’s afraid if he slept with you, you’d write something unflattering about him.
This is such a legitimate observation that it silences me utterly. Both sprawled with jeans around ankles in the dark.
Shame is completely fascinating and tangled and, I think, the chief source of all suffering in my brutish little life. There is an I and the I is not adequate.
So all day now my hand smells like dick and I can’t blog about it and my heart is kind of ripped open afresh every time I walk past that office door and the whole thing was so fucking untenable to start with, being here in the first place, and I am taking home a stack of papers to grade this weekend and have six or seven essays/research papers/book reviews to write and egads I have November all over me. Just ALL fucking over me.
[/end of blogpost I can't write]
III.
Pye finds a dead young bird in the yard and suddenly goes from housecat to feral. She narrows her eyes, looks all around furtively, then bends down and sinks her entire face into the thing, only eyes showing above the feathers, starts to drag it away. I take it away from her, throw it by one foot over the chainlink fence into the community garden, come inside to wash my hands.
(Which needed washing anyway) (op. cit.).
Sit outside in the last thin trickle of November sunlight, rolling up heart of romaine leaves and dipping them into blue-cheese dressing. I am wearing dark blue sweatpants and a brown cashmere sweater. I last felt this ugly when I was 13 and had bad eyeglasses and a perm.
“People still think a blog is just an online journal!”
“But that is what it is.”
When I walk past that office door, there’s a tattered whooshing feeling in my chest, like the air-cabin pressure being suddenly all lost. Pavlovian.
Writing the same thing over and over compulsively even though—
Sam and Liz read just beautifully last night, they were also very funny. It was outside, and I was cold, shivering despite my old green British wool-lined raincoat and two sweaters. Instead of going to their party afterward I decided to go home and keep working on my essay.
(One of the essays. There are essays plural.)
As I was getting in the car there was a white Honda four-door pulled up next to me. In the driver’s seat a young (thirtysomething) man poured red wine from a paper bag into a plastic cup, blasting Bon Iver (“Re: Stacks”). He looked up, I looked over, our eyes snagged. I started my mom’s green van, which is like a battleship, and made my demoralized way home.
My research proposal came back yesterday covered in suggestions, suggestions of the sort like “if you take all these suggestions you may be able to salvage this proposal, you just might,” and I am thoroughly daunted. I will admit it. The last research paper I tried to write, in 2009, tapped out at 20 pages instead of the requested 40 (because I started it two days before it was due, probably), and I got a B in the course. Just thinking about it makes my blood run cold.
Things I must write between now and December 2, just because I need to list them somewhere so I don’t forget anything:
• that goddamned motherfucking cocksucking book review I should never have signed up to do, but oh I wanted to, I still want to, I am just too thick-headed for it
• (I swear explaining the same concepts over and over semester after semester is making me really dumb: each paragraph needs to be about only one idea, support your claims, cite your sources, can your intro be more creative and draw the reader in)
• a blogpost for GC
• I said I would try to write a guest post (on my favorite trashy movie) for the wonderful Kinemapoetics but tomorrow is the deadline so I guess I won’t, which is too bad, because it would have been so much fun (either Notting Hill or The Breakfast Club)
• this 20-25 pp research paper, which for now is on David Lynch, at least until I get ten pages in and then dry up completely
• (I don’t even like David Lynch anymore—compared to some of the other things we’ve been watching—films that are so subtle, so layered, so un-American!)
• this piece for HTMLGIANT, or maybe The Rumpus if they don’t want it
• my portfolio for Intro to Doctoral Studies which includes a couple of short essays, one called a “dreamliner” where we’re supposed to describe our fantasy job UGH plus a book review of another “institutional history” off a list and I haven’t picked the book yet much less read it etc. etc. etc.
• and most heart-shrivelling of all: 15 pp portfolio of revisions for workshop and these need to be real revisions, thoughtful and purposive, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit I dread getting feedback on the semester’s work.
I may not be a poet, you know, I might just be a hypergraphic who had one trick (“a good fiddle” Pinsky once called it, and I think that’s accurate), and why not, it happens, it happens to mathematicians, I don’t see why it can’t happen to a poet too, that you somehow, through medication or mental illness or anything, really anything, blast out part of your cerebral situation and after that it’s not the same, you can’t do it anymore.
(Or maybe I’m just thinking of Proof.)
I have spinach fettucini for dinner and the last episode of Brideshead Revisited. Tonight I am not doing any writing or any grading. I am curling up on the sofa and letting myself leak and ooze and gasp for breath. I hurt all over, and ache to be held.
Maybe I have to go back on medication. Maybe this is not working.
IV.
“They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; Mummy’s requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in—I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me—and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?…Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it.”
