New Year's Eve

Am sick.

My brother was so sick in Del Rio that his ears and throat swelled up with infection. He had two earaches and couldn't talk and couldn't hear and his eyes were red and closed. I hardly saw him while I was there though he lives next door to my mother. I saw him enough to catch his virus.

We all did.


*****

My brother said Romulus is a wolf cat. A witch cat. A familiar. "He looks just like a wolf." The gray wolf the ranchers shoot at night is endangered, nearly extinct. A few years ago, after breeding the animal successfully in captivity, it was reintroduced to southern and central Arizona. It slaughters in packs the beef herds and doesn't eat all it kills. I tell Chris: look out: Romulus bites.

*****

Darren's father died last Tuesday, the day I spent driving to Del Rio. I know because Jim kept me company on the road when the cell came back up and he called Vicky to find out what happened. No word from Darren as yet; he sleeps when I wake, I wake when he sleeps, but I am vigilant with you, friend.


*****


Elly's mother is dying of cancer. He sends pictures of his son sleeping with his dog. His son is the age of my students.


*****

I am back in Galesburg. Remind me to tell about the fog.

--and feliz navidad, and love, and kiss your babies for me, and make a little art to give away. We're all doing watercolors around here.

Is Del Rio

home? It is my mother's home. My mother's mother's home. My great grandmother's home. All of them born and raised in the same little house that fell in the flood that drowned my grandmother six years ago. Why does it hurt to come here? I failed Del Rio in the poems. The horror, the sorrow, the filth, the stench, the work, the dogs. I don't think I see it. Or I see it as I always do, arriving, driving in, the misery and what it has to do with me, my roots, and the shock of it shoves me into guilt and pity--because no this is not my life but my mother's--and more guilt for not being one who could live here and survive it. They drink? Of course they do. I drink with them in the evenings and begin to see myself within it and less saddened. I take pictures and think of writing Del Rio, really writing it this time, and it comforts me. But that's what I do to overcome everything. Write it so it doesn't hurt. But I don't get it right. It's too difficult, too painful, to get it right.

I am thinking of you, Darren, and your father. So many lost fathers now. Barbara's father died last Saturday. I am thinking of so many lost fathers while I am here with my mother. It is Christmas Eve. I am blessed.

Blessings to you, my darlings. I am thinking of all of you.

"But I am still here / a lingering along"

Effort at Speech Between Two People

: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

: Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and i bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

: I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

: Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
: I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

: I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.

: What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle ... yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving .... Take my hand. Speak to me

--Muriel Rukeyser

Miguel's

After five years of service at a four-star resort--in banquets, room service, fine dining rooms, high tea, private bars, presidential suites, in white gloves and white jackets, in cumberbund and black ties, in heels, short skirts, long skirts, silver service and bone china, in bartending, table-serving, running trays, cocktailing, among first cooks, dishwashers, sliver polishers, housekeepers, middle managers, dispatchers, and the German woman who all those years hemmed my uniform pants and fitted my skirts ("in a week you'll be asking me to make it tighter and shorter when you see how the other girls wear them," she said the first time I met her and I tugged at the bottom of that tiny black front-slit skirt)--

and knowing full well that all works in miracle tandem, for every table is a theater--

I am no longer a diner at ease. I would rather not be served at all, but if it so happens I am with friends who are treating me to dinner, I try to look away when somebody botches the performance else I become one of my terror memory guests who sent everything back, complained to the manager, and left a poor tip as a lesson--

I know dining too well to be impressed--

but I had the best food I've ever eaten--and I mean it--last night at Miguel's: the calimari breaded in masa harina, flash fried, and served with sliced pepperoncinis, red bell peppers, and sweet cloves of roasted garlic; the ceviche filled with tiny lemon-cooked scallops and shrimp and tossed with fine bits of serrano and cilantro; the halibut crisp, tender, served with thin crisp shavings of fried plantain, a crisp squash medley, creamy rice, wilted spinach, amazing.

Wow and thank you.

My homesickness begins.

Hero

All stories are equally true.

Sartre understands me.
Sartre is my new imaginary boyfriend.

"The total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.

On the other hand, the lover can not be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be satisfied with the words, 'I love you because I have freely engaged myself to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my word.' Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by a pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other's freedom should determine itself to become love--and this not only at the beginning of the affair but at each instant--and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back upon itself, as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity." (Being and Nothingness 478-79)

*****

Panick attack? Run.

Tomorrow may be my last run in the desert.

*****

Bang! Just like that, going out like a candle.

During the night,

Darren's father is dying in my city.

"A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death--a flat encephalograph, for instance--I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit--cadere, cadaver." (3)

"What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains." (6)

But what solace when a father is not apparition but liver, respirator, blood, eyes, jaundice, bruise? Is coma-pain, involuntary, unseeing, decay? Is corpse, not ghost?

To Percy Shelley:

On the Degrading Notions of Deity

What wonder, Percy, that with jealous rage
Men should defame the kindly and the wise,
When in the midst of the all beauteous skies,
And all the lovely world, that should engage
Their mutual search for the old golden age,
They seat a phantom, swelled into grim size
Out of their own passions and bigotries,
And then, for fear, proclaim it meek and sage!
And this they call a light and a revealing!
Wise as the clown, who plodding home at night
In autumn, turns at call of fancied elf,
And sees upon the fog, with ghastly feeling,
A giant shadow in its imminent might,
Which his own lanthorn throws up from himself.

--Leigh Hunt

Start here: degrading. No-tions.

T-I-O-N, shun shun shun shun.

self portrait with loose hair

Went for a short run last night and remembered the smell of creosote in the desert. Watched Frida with Chris and Glenda--they hadn't seen it--and thought about her art again. The body in agony, the body in love. I am braiding my hair.

*****

Not-running, about an hour out the back side of Sage Brook Road towards Naranja where a little bike path begins rolling towards La Cholla and ends so that I had to turn around, get enticed by a path in the wash that led to a tangle of golf cart roads, no one seeming to lead out towards the main road until I did find a street and a housing community, but not an outlet, except towards the desert and more wash and mesquite and cholla and there it went until my shoes filled with sand and rubbed blisters into my arches, but my legs held out and my lungs--who would believe it of my lungs?--could have kept on going...

I am letting my hair down.

Yearning for the Word: Poetry and Suffering

I.

Every so often I manage it. I am driving nine hundred miles through the northern Midwest, parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York to get to Ithaca where I am scheduled to give a poetry reading tomorrow. Fifteen hours, one way. I feel like hell. I had a plane ticket, but at the last minute decided to get in the car and drive. I dreaded flight delays and the lines at security, yes, but I dreaded most traveling this distance without a sense of flight. For I am fleeing, and I can’t really expect to escape while suspended in place: the lines, the gate, my seat, 21A.

I feel bored, overworked, uncreative, prone to despair, and especially alone—a colossal singing in my chains like the sea kind of isolation—which is my own doing and my own choice. It is my cliché, this solitude, my junk-mail pile by my unblinking message machine and my condiment stocked refrigerator and my one dish and spoon for days in the sink and my coffee cup line up where I sit alone at my desk and stare. But I protect my solitude fiercely and resort to calling it a necessary evil, time alone, which is time to write, and time which is to be endured, as Rilke counsels, rather than exchanged:

what…would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy….[1]

Right now I manage to be tired of Rilke. I am feeling trivial and cheap and I don’t have an unworthy soul to talk to. I put my suitcase into the car. I stand on my front porch and wonder at necessity. I wonder at my evil thoughts. If this is what it takes to be a writer of any caliber, I don’t wantmto be a writer. I hear the trains hailing through town and think of the tracks crossing, a tie at a time, the vast country between me and the hours ahead. To hell with Rilke. He just wants company.

II.

I too dislike it: this pervasive belief that suffering is not only inherent to the writing life, but also, I am sorry to say, a valuable poetic commodity. This is how it is. Your most vulnerable poems can also become your most authoritative poems—your most powerful poems—but this power can be devastating, for it tells us that poets must have something to feel vulnerable about. Those of us who worry that we have not suffered enough to write exceedingly vulnerable poems are left to discover a wellspring of misery from which to write. Or to create one. Or to question the authority of suffering.

I don’t know how to question suffering. I don’t want to do it. I’ve been avoiding this moment for a long time because I don’t know how to climb out from under the self-fulfilling prophecy of the tortured artist. But I’ve reached a point in my life in which I no longer trust myself to know the difference between the suffering I sacrifice to my writing, and the sacrifice I suffer for my writing.

Last week, as I read through a student’s journal, I came across this passage:

This morning I remember why I hate getting drunk and forgetting. My roommate tells me that at the party I brought out the box-cutter and told people to pass it around as a reminder—remember you will die—all that—and talked about cutting myself as a way of feeling alive. —And this morning found the blade on the kitchen counter with beer bottles and ashes. Exposed, appalling, exonerated. Remember that cutting is numbing. Calming. You feel invisible but the body weeps red and makes the shit in your life clear. Cutting is expressive, like writing.[2]

I balked, got angry, and wanted to scrawl in the margin: “since when is self-mutilation like self-expression?” But the answer is too plain: when self-expression is self-mutilation. When art hurts. Writing is dangerous work, we are fond of saying, and fond of living, and we are so good at taking risks for the wrong reasons, or for the right reasons in the wrong directions, or in the right direction for the wrong duration—even the best of us—seeking, seeking, seeking, and to what end? Isn’t this the cry in Ginsberg’s Howl?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…[3]

To what end? Sky’s the limit, baby. But if you want to get connected to the starry dynamo, you need to tap into the Great Poem. I remember Li-Young Lee once saying that he would stay up all night, sleep only a few hours during the day, read four or five books a week, and pray that God would kiss him on the back of his head and give him a poem. For Li-Young, poetry and divinity go way back, hand-in-hand, into antiquity and beyond, where in the beginning the word was absolute, immortal, omniscient, omnipotent: perfect.

III.

The train is suspended. It hurls the length of its spine beside me. It flushes birds from the grass and tongues the track. It is not lacking. A dust storm mutes the road ahead, I am driving, I am unmoved. The train is paralysis, a motion in an iron photograph even as it breaks free and glides ahead: I believe.

IV.

Contemporary poetry is tired of thinking about suffering as a poetic subject, but is equally vexed by the fact that suffering won’t be put down. I have no desire to indict the confessional poets, the Beat poets, the poets of witness, or the political poets, and I’m not really interested in rehearsing the arguments of language poetry, or poetry that looks to elide the self. These discussions about schools or movements, important as they are, are alive and well elsewhere. I’m talking about you and me, poets as people who are alive, but maybe not as well as we could be. I’m talking about friends and students who have said to me that they are knowingly afraid to heal because—let’s face it—we believe mental health may not be a great generator of remarkable poetry. And I’m talking about my own struggle to accept that writing has been therapeutic in my life, even as the old archetype of the suffering poet summons, seductively. I need to be honest. The world that sees writing as a way out of hell also eschews the lack it.

Besides this, writing is rarely good therapy against writing anxiety (though it is finally the best). How can you write anything once you know that the relationship between self and word is ultimately schizophrenic? You want to get the words down, after much work and love, precisely. You turn it out of the machine or tear it from the notebook, and filled with conviction or trepidation, you surrender yourself to a mentor, a workshop group, an editor, a friend—no matter. Some alienating force glides in and divides you from that which is written. For it is written: it goes into the world of dark and light, your genesis, your revelation, and is sacrificed to some impossible exegesis, a reading. The creative mind behind the word—your intention—drops out of the story, if not altogether, at least, infinitely reduced in significance. Which is to say that what you say is no longer yours once you’ve said it.

I’m only retelling the oldest story on written earth—old as tongues and the tree of knowledge, I imagine, since the serpent certainly had something to say to Eve on that fateful day when paradise fell. Which makes me think that the loss of Eden had less to do with apples than with words. One thing seems clear: Eve could have known little about the serpent’s intentions from what we are told he said:

“Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”[4]

I might be splicing words, but it strikes me that what Eve says God said, and what the serpent says God knows, are not mutually exclusive. The problem is that while Eve is a literalist, the serpent seems to have a handle on God’s good sense of figurative language. Death is inevitable however you look at it. I doubt that Eve knows what “death” means, literally or figuratively, but I also think she fails to interpret that knowing good and evil, quite possibly, is the same as knowing the pitfalls of language. Death and the word—and words are knowledge after all—collide. How was Eve, cast into literal perfect innocence, to interpret the signs of her omniscient creator? How was she to know evil serpents from holy cows? No, it’s not fair. But I don’t blame God; ultimately, the purest paradise and everything in it would have to be wholly untainted by ambiguity, and that’s not how words work. If even the serpents could talk in paradise, then all was always already lost.

I’m not trying to talk about everything lost to the word in the world. I’m trying to say something about the self that’s lost to the world in the word: the writer, the poet, always already disqualified from her intention, her poem. It is understandably necessary that the poet and her poem can only coexist at odds in parallel universes. We can’t go around thinking that the poet is her poem. Such collisions only result in a terrifying self-perpetuating self-division, in madness by fragmentation—in a bloody mess as readers tear the poem line by line, limb from limb. So it is: I am happy enough not to live up to my poems.

But we’ve fallen into an ambiguous world. We find no pure way of extricating the poet-self from the poem-self. In fact, to compensate for the New Critics’ insistence on dropping authorial intent from our reading of poems, and to atone for the Post-Structuralists’ claim that the author, like Nietzsche’s God, is dead, we’ve become enamored with biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and interviews with the author. The author is not dead to the world or to this poem, we say. Well, we can’t help it. We love our fathers, but we were always destined to find creative ways of disobeying. More: we’ve come to tell ourselves that the writer—and I think the poet in particular—is an exceptional creature, a deviant creature filled with hubris and bizarre sensitivities. And we want to know what makes him, her, tick. The Poet, we tell ourselves, is a mystery. And we have never dealt well with the unknown. Ambiguity creates in us a state of unmanageable want, a desire to identify, distinguish, tell.

There it begins, this cult of personality: the poet between words: yours and mine. How else to deal with unrequited desire but to generate a mythology, to name? Oh bard, oh elegist, oh genius, oh philosopher, prophet, revolutionist, visionary! Oh Byron! Oh Shakespeare!

Shakespeare says “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance / From heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.” Plato says poets are heaven-mad and dangerous. Aristotle says they are mad and muse-inspired. Milton would wake in the morning feeling heaven-inspired and ask to be “milked” of his great poem, Paradise Lost. Samuel Johnson says of Milton that “the characteristic quality of his poem is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great”[5] Wordsworth wrote a fourteen-book autobiographical epic poem subtitled “On the Growth of a Poet’s Mind” which is all about the greatness of his own true mind. Blake accuses Milton of being a “true poet,” one “on the Devil’s side without knowing it.” Emerson says, “poetry is not ‘Devil’s wine,’ but God’s wine.”[6] Percy Shelley liked to quote Tasso as saying that none deserve the name of creator but God and the poet. But Mathew Arnold turns Shelley upside down when he claims: “The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.’”[7]

This is the poet’s inheritance. Somehow, from the beginning, the poet has been linked unhappily to both gods and devils with access to neither a lasting resuscitation nor a final fall from grace. Somebody is always attempting to resurrect the dead or bury the dead when it comes to poetry, but the effort, if noble in itself, revises the old metaphors only to replace them with a language that reflects the bewildered skepticism of our time. If poets were once compared to angels, demons, intermediaries between heaven and earth, demigods, or lunatics, they are now too romantic, too political, too difficult, too spiritual, too egotistical, or too confessional. In a technological culture that holds “the soul” suspect, we resort to “the mind”; over “spirit” we choose “energy” and over “imagination” we prefer “belief,” as if our language is more sobering than that of the past. Yet, as so often happens in history, nothing much has changed. Such shifts in language usage reflect a shift in ideologies, yes; but we still doubt the utility of poetry, the value of poetry—and certainly the necessity of poetry. We tend to see poetry as an embarrassing luxury, and the poet as a decadent talent.

V.

In an essay on the education of the poet, Louise Gluck admits, “I use the word ‘writer’ deliberately. ‘Poet’ must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation. In other words: not a noun for passport.”[8] I have to agree, knowing that in conversation I am more likely to use the circumlocution “I write poetry,” than to say, somewhat ridiculously, “I am a poet.” No actual vocation or pastime is signified by the word “poet.” It is a strange kind of irony: just as the poet-self is exiled from the poem-self, so the writer of poetry is exiled from the identity of the poet. Paradoxically, because the poet represents, as Gluck notes, an “aspiration,” a desire for essentially unattainable recognition or distinction, the term has attained the cultic status of a notoriously suffering figure informed by the trauma of wanting to become a poet but never quite becoming one.

The privilege of crossing over, the “passport” to poetic eminence, too often comes at a devastating price. There are familiar stories qua stories retold. In 1966—three years after Plath’s death—Robert Lowell writes in his introduction to Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection of poems, Ariel:

In these poems, written in the last months of her life and often rushed out at the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created—hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess,” but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines. This character is feminine rather than female, though almost everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head. The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire—a Dido, Phaedra, or Medea, who can laugh at herself as “cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown.”

As it goes, Sylvia Plath taped up the gaps between the doors of her apartment rooms and kitchen, stuck her head into a gas oven and suffocated, willingly, after her husband, poet Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. We know this. Behind the “feminine” figure of the poems, the Medea, the vampire, the “imaginary something”—“hardly a person at all, or a woman”—was a woman, nevertheless, a Sylvia, a me, who I once thought should have been saved by her poems, but wasn’t.

I am alarmed, I confess, by what I now believe is true. Plath’s relationship to her poetry, as well as to her poet husband, eventually contributed to her breakdown and suicide. Her journals are overwhelming fraught with a frantic thirst for publication and a novelistic ambition bigger than both herself and Hughes. Listen:

All holds fire: my poems at Art News & The Atlantic (editor’s gone gallivanting to Europe), Ted’s two good stories at The Atlantic. Woke as usual, feeling sick and half-dead, eyes stuck together, a taste of winding sheets on my tongue after a horrible dream involving, among other things, Warren being blown to death by a rocket. Ted, my saviour, emerging out of the neant with a tall mug of hot coffee which sip, by sip, rallied me to the day as he sat at the foot of the bed dressed for teaching, about to drive off—I blink every time I see him afresh. This is the man the unsatisfied ladies scan the stories in the Ladies Home Journal for, the man women read romantic women’s novels for: oh he is unbelievable & the more so because he is my husband…. How to make it sound special? Other than sentimental, in my novel: a gross problem.[9]

All her world she articulates in terms of writing as if life itself is not good enough—is “sentimental,” nightmarish, “horrible,” uncertain, “a gross problem.” Yet her writing romanticizes her work and her marriage to Hughes in unsustainable fantasies, “unbelievable & the more so” as we read them through the lens of her ruin and wonder whether the dream of becoming a poet in her own right, as well as in proximity to Hughes’ growing celebrity, wasn’t already a form of death in life. And if we cannot bring ourselves to condemn Plath’s illusions, and if we believe her creative life was necessary and inevitable, her death endangers the way we write our lives.

In an article that appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Christina Nehring argues: “In the end [Plath] lost, but her art did not. If ‘dying is an art,’ as she says in ‘Lady Lazarus,’ and she ‘does it exceptionally well,’ so is living, and she did that exceptionally well too. Not wisely, as Othello said, but well—artistically, dramatically, aesthetically.”[10] If living well—“artistically, dramatically, aesthetically”—equates to dying tragically, we are doomed, friends. I want to insist: there must have been a way for Plath to live without the hopeless fetishizing of words and Ted. As circumstances would have it, her suicide will ever narrate her fame and bring us back to her letters and journals where we hope to discover the woman behind Lowell’s “classical heroine,” our most confessional of poets.

VI.

Sun in fog. The blind are showing up red-eyed everywhere on the shoulder, far off and hanging ahead. I cross the floor of the sea this morning and watch for shadows. They loom and freeze. A bridge, a ravine below. No: a valley opens towards a city, unbelievable. My dreams come from God.

VII.

It’s true that those of us who write poetry might feel repulsed by the stigma Plath’s story creates. We can avoid romantic elegizing of her suffering and be thankful for an end of it. Yet isn’t part of her legacy the nihilistic replication of the poet’s inherent misery? That her traumas forge in us the conviction of who we are? That trauma, if compulsively repeated, make us stronger, wiser people? Suppose this is the life of the poet? We hear it all the time: through great suffering comes great art. In Nietzsche’s view, great suffering sorts the sheep from the cud. It “distinguishes.” It makes those of us who have suffered feel impatient and uneasy among those who have not suffered as much.

The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly—it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer—his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing”—this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.[11]

Nietzsche’s main point—that those who have suffered deeply tend to uncover “all kinds of disguises necessary” to safeguard against shame or pity—suggests that the poet-figure is itself a protective cloak to be worn or shed as is convenient or necessary. His last point—that suffering “makes noble,” “separates”—makes plain his esteem for social hierarchies and argues that suffering creates a noble race of people who are ultimately separated from the rest of humankind, as well as, let me add, from each other and from themselves. Especially if, supposing Nietzsche is right, our suffering creates a viable foothold in power.

Oh, we don’t trust it, any of it, especially when we witness it in ourselves, but it is secretly enthralling, the stuff that composes the life of the poet, even as “The Life of the Poet” assumes its place among the crafty oxymoronic titles on our shelves. For we anticipate that to arrive on the shelf in the first place is to know that life indeed imitates art. If there is a life for the poet beyond her privacy and solitude, it swiftly becomes an art form. As Oscar Wilde says with his usual flair for tragic wit: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.” Or again: “Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.” And again: “It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” And again: “Dullness is the coming of the age of seriousness.”[12]

We repeat, and repeat. “What I need to write is boredom,” says Billy Collins. “I need stretches of inactivity, of doing nothing in order for the poem to get generated. I think boredom is like the mother of creativity.” The interviewer asks: “More so than pain or suffering?” And Collins replies: “More so than psychic trauma and suffering and pain. Boredom is my muse. So my being poet laureate and being a popular poet has cut into my boredom. I want my boredom back.”[13] Of course, Collins is being slightly disingenuous. Boredom is just painful enough for most people to avoid enduring, and it doesn’t make poet laureates of most of us. It drives some of us to drink. It drives some of us to drink a lot before adding heroine or cocaine to the equation.

Let me add John Berryman’s Dream Song # 14 to this list:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes,
the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my
mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude I have no
inner
resources, because I am heavy bored.[14]

A friend of mine, a poet, used to quote Berryman at parties when he got very drunk and a little surly. “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. I am heavy bored.” Sometimes the night would end with my friend playing chicken in the street against the on-coming traffic, sometimes with a bonfire in which one of his poetry manuscripts rose up in dim sparks. Once he stole a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary from the front of a Catholic church and spent some days bargaining with her before she insisted that he take her back. I don’t know if drugs, God, or boredom had that effect, but I suspect it’s deeper than that.
When I finally arrive in Ithaca, I see my friend again. He is sober. When I ask how he is, he gives a dramatic performance of Satan’s lines from Paradise Lost: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”[15] Poet to poet, it’s funny. Only a poet could carry it off. Only a poet could appreciate it. Satanic power is part pathos, part passion, and part nowhere to go. I realize, 900 miles from where I began, just how driven I am

VIII.

to end: only a poet. I’m thinking of Deleuze and his commentary on masochism. There is pleasure in suffering because there is also power in renunciation, denial, “a disavowal.” The creator is not dead. Not so long as he is framed and held whole—alpha and omega, alpha in place of omega—in credible metonymical regressive possibility. But such framing is figuration, is fantasy. It borders on the imaginative power of worship, on the idol beyond the symbol, on fetish. Need it?

The fetish is […] not a symbol at all, but as it were a frozen, arrested, two dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration; it represents the last point at which it was still possible to believe….[16]

One hundred and twenty trains on a given day pass through the town I live in. At the railroad crossing a block from home, I wait my turn in the line of vehicles. I look at my face in the rearview mirror. Stasis. Boredom. I am driving home. I wonder at how I suspend what I believe, and yearn. It is poet’s work, though not exclusive. It is poetry, though not the work of a poet. There is nowhere to go, but it is a manageable consequence. Did God say you shall die? I don’t know, but I am not alone. There are gods, and there are creators. Gods and creators. I believe they are not the same.

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Stephen Mitchell, trans., 53-54.
[2] Used with permission
[3] Allen Ginsberg, Howl, opening lines.
[4] Genesis 3:2-6
[5] Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets I, 104.
[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays, “The Poet,” 281.
[7] Matthew Arnold, Prose and Poetry, 225.
[8] Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories, “Education of the Poet,” 3.
[9] Sylvia Plath’s Journals, 376
[10] Christina Nehring, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2004, 122.
[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 220.
[12] The Portable Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” 739-40
[13] Billy Collins, CBSNEWS.com: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/30/60II/main561047.shtml
[14] John Berryman, The Dream Songs, Song 14.
[15] John Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.73-75.
[16] Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 31.

Nogales, AZ / Nogales, Sonora, end

of the road because you run out of country and into another one where the drugs are cheaper. Drove the hour from Tucson with Glenda to cross the border, as much going home as getting someplace alien: la familia de la Glendita se fue: Nana's house isn't Nana's house anymore so we work our way through the vendors, looking for a pinata for Trystan and a farmacia where I can buy the pill:

I am not buying anything y no tengo corazon I tell the vendor who tries to hug me and smooth my hair from my face when I stop to take a picture of the street: Aye, have a heart for me, one Mexican second okay, I have 25 children and you like bracelets, mira, amethyst, tigers eye, Apache tears, mira este, ten dollars put it on: he makes me laugh he puts his arm around me and smooths my hair, take a picture with me for your boyfriend: no:

a woman selling jewelry rocks an infant in a stroller, offers to be in the picture for two dollars: I don't know what it is, but I can get it for you, stop a minute, no thank you no gracias gracias no, no: You want Cuban cigars? Cubanos muy rico, what you smoke? Some Hawaiian marijuana, some Columbian marijuana, what kind you like: and in a Mexican second covered in bracelets and rings and can't get them off before she clasps another cheap chromed thing to my wrist, see model it it is beautiful on you, mira que buenito con tu pelo, you want a Mexican boyfriend I'll get you one for free:

we are walking quickly to la farmacia, she follows us down the street, her hands dripping in jewelry, six dollars, five dollars, five fifty: ask your price: ask for

Nordet at the pharmacy, seven months worth, the girl pulls three boxes from her shelf, takes pesos from her drawer and runs to the next farmacia to buy four more, I pay with my debit card, she runs off again: I've given her every cent I have:

the boy is eating Cheetos, his mother sits on the ground with his sister in one arm, a Coca-Cola paper cup in her one free hand and a box of gum at her knee, she wears a rebozo and a colorful skirt, they are indios, dirty, who knows where they sleep, the boy smiles at me and I ask if I can take his picture and his mother looks away for I am hateful right then and I know it and I know she hates me when the flash goes off and the boy smiles his bright child smile--almost laughing--and I say come here little one and give him two dollars para tu mama and she nods at me, says thank you, it is a transaction, I understand, but later am overwhelmed, should've given more, shouldn't have taken his picture, you stupid stupid gringa fea don't take pictures of the beggars:

walking out of a market we pass he falls in step with me, holds up plastic bags with four avocados and a block of queso fresco, talks to me in Spanish I can't follow, points at his smashed aguacates and cheese, and I walk faster walking away while he follows in step and holds up his bags and talking, explaining, pointing at his bags until Glenda, behind me, says no te intiende she doesn't understand you and he shifts into fluent English: oh you don't speak Spanish, eh? well I was saying to you that I've just bought myself this food and what comes around goes around, yes, and a lot of people think you want money for drugs--still walking--but all I want is for you to buy me a soda to have with my lunch. You see I'm going to eat this now, this food: fifty cents--still walking away--you give me fifty cents: no, I say (how did you choose me): No? no? stupid fucking bitch: fucking bitch:

Dissolved Girl

Shame, such a shame
I think I kind of lost myself again
Day, yesterday
Really should be leaving but I stay

Say, say my name
I need a little love to ease the pain
I need a little love to ease the pain
It's easy to remember when it came

'Cause it feels like I've been here before
You are not my savior
But I still don't go
Feels like something
That I've done before
I could fake it
But I still want more

Fade, made to fade
Passion's overrated anyway
Say, say my name
I need a little love to ease the pain
I need a little love to ease the pain
It's easy to remember when it came

'Cause it feels like I've been
I've been here before
You are not my savior
But I still don't go, oh I feel live something
That I've done before
I could fake it
But I still want more, oh

from Black Sun

Kristeva:

A sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication make up the humdrum backdrop against which our ideals and euphorias often stand out, unless they be that fleeting clearmindedness shredding the amorous hypnosis that joins two persons together. Conscious of our being doomed to lose our loves, we grieve perhaps even more when we glimpse in our lover the shadow of a long lost former loved one. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage. (5)

You're jealous:

It is currently 78 degrees in Tucson, Arizona. I'm going out.


* * * *


Was cooking a roast that needed wine for flavor, and had no wine, so thought to go buy some, but got into the car and felt the wanderlust take hold. Drove for an hour or more. Drove out to Gates Pass, watched the sun sink into the mountains and the sky turn pink, orange, violet, dark. Took pictures in black and white: probable failures. The man standing next to me looked towards the sun and chanted while it dropped and the gold turned blue. He's Native American, the same as the guy selling silver and turquoise on a sheet. I feel thankful and stupid. I, native, tour and snap pictures, but what I want is a prayer at the close of my days, the beginning of my days, everyday. Hail Sun! Goodnight Sun! Then I will understand, know, that I abuse, exploit, disregard, and take for granted the only events that are sacred. Not Christmas. Sunset. Sunrise.

Make or die

don't know much about art history

Darren says

"His train tracks don't go all the way to the coast."

Pushcart Prize

A former student wrote today to congratulate me on getting a special mention in the 2005 Pushcart Prize Anthology. I knew my Black Warrior Review poem, "The Earth Without," had been nominated for the prize, but had no idea I'd been listed. What's almost as good as getting a Pushcart? Honorable mention.

As Frank says, wow and thank you. Wow and thank you.

AND (woohoo I'm going to visit Rick in Lafayette) I've gotta write that Rossetti paper after all:

"Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted for presentation at the 18th-and 19th-century British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) being held in Lafayette, Louisiana April 14th-17th, 2005. Your letter of acceptance and conference registration materials have been mailed.

Some of the highlights of this year’s conference will include:

-Keynotes speeches from Catherine Burroughs (Wells College), Linda Hughes (TCU), and Susan Staves (Brandeis). The first keynote will begin at 7pm on Thursday, April 14th and will be preceded by a welcoming reception from 5:45 to 7pm.

-An exciting line-up of panel presentations beginning at 2:30pm on the 14th.

-A Saturday evening performance of Fanny Burney’s The Witlings, which will be only the third time it has been professionally staged in North America.

-An informal Sunday morning breakfast presentation on local Acadian culture from Dr. John Laudun, Associate Director of the Center for Louisiana Studies and University of Louisiana at Lafayette Assistant Professor in Folklore.

With all of these exciting events planned, please plan to join us for the whole conference.

Our site also contains booking information for the Lafayette Hilton and Towers, where most conference events will be held. As well, the Hilton offers a free shuttle service from the airport. We look forward to hearing from you in the next few weeks. If you have any questions about the conference, please don’t hesitate to contact us at bwwc@louisiana.edu, or visit our website, www.louisiana.edu/bwwc. "

Sincerely, Shelley Martin
BWWC 2005 Co-Chair

sam0658@louisiana.edu

Epipsychidion: a love song

She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o'er Endymion.
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb,
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon's image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:--
for at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew,
And cried, 'Away, he is not of our crew.'
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.


Though being your father's daughter and invisible you took up with the street rats hanging at the courthouse at night and carved your name into the soft old brick with a stone you pocketed in case you might remember what flying is like, watching, listening to the flagpole crack in its foundation while in turn they'd foot the rope loop and swing out over the street below again and again, the flagpole pinging as one did on the playground in wind the four grades Modoc schooled you in getting the crap beat out of you for crying all the time, which you did--cried all the time--and loathed and regretted and panicked about but could stop as well as breaking the fall of any one of the flagpole dares once lifted up and out into the fall that could break you of ever wanting to do it again, fly, cry: what they call borderline in the personality disorders field, the self always already between flying and crying, and because there is no self to attend, because invisible, the self who checks their faces for vestiges of you, the careless, unguarded, phantom recognition of you, the phallic flagpole ping: you: anonymous but for them--Darren, Jim--who did, fly, see:

me:

Fuck me.

That's the second post in a row this goddamned site has lost when I've clicked "publish." Fuck fuck fuck.

David Hume: On Suicide

"Has not every one, of consequence, the free disposal of his own life?"

Last Christmas, I brought volumes of Hume home with me to think about and copied out every reference in his Essays to superstition, thinking that my dissertation's genealogy of the word "superstition" might begin in depth with Enlightenment thought, and specifically with Hume's skepticism. Writers in the 18th century use the word pejoratively to denounce religion--at times they use superstition synonymously with Catholicism; at times it signifies a liberal slam against England's conservative Tory government; almost always it is wielded against anything under the sun that might be seen as dogmatic, in both church and state alike--which, for me, is the beginning of the end of God.

Assuming there is a God, the essay argues, there is every reason to believe that suicide is ethical, socially reponsible, and noble. Only the irrational superstitious fear of sinning against the divine keeps a suicidal mind from acting, and yet, Hume suggests, it is only rational to see that it is impossible for human kind to disrupt the divine plan. Anything you do is already accounted for, which is to say, if you are miserable and suicidal, God wants it that way, and if you slit your wrists and die, God also wants it that way. It is an excess of reason. The essay's subversive edge is that it demonstrates the logical consequential realities of Chrisian belief: all the suffering and misery in the world--poverty, oppression, tyranny--all the suicides? Christian born and Christian made, by God.

The superstitious man...is miserable in every scene, in every incident of life. Even sleep itself, which banishes all other cares of unhappy mortals, affords to him matter of new terror; while he examines his dreams, and finds in those visions of the night prognostications of future calamities. I may add, that, tho' death alone can put a full period to his misery, he dares not fly to this refuge, but still prolongs a miserable existence, from a vain fear, lest he offend his maker, by using the power, with which that beneficent being has endowed him. The presents of God and Nature are ravished from us by this cruel enemy [superstition]; and notwithstanding that one step would remove us from the regions of pain and sorrow, her menaces still chain us down to a hated being, which she herself chiefly contributes to render miserable.

Matter of new terror: but isn't it really the same terror taking its phantom shape in the nightmare anxieties of living day after day, what now, and what next, and when will there be peace, or if not peace then euphoria, complacency, contentment that leads me away from the inevitable horror of my life: I will die.

There is no more pure masochistic fantasy than the suicide fantasy. There is pleasure in cheating death by dying--and a way of denying that death will arrive in its own good time--isn't there? There is no death outside of me having its way; I am death. Death will not happen to me; I will create it and thus break also with birth which also happened to me. And in this fantasy, death is the great punisher for no worse thing could happen even to the best of us than a slow agonizing gruesome death, but for the wretched who are wretched because guilty, death is coming. It is always on its way to carry out the law. You are bad: you deserve to die. But the suicide says: I am bad, I deserve to die, but I will decide how and when.



See Christine Hume: Hume's "Suicide of the External World"

The real rabbit hole

is his mother's face when she sees that you've talked him through The Matrix and that he loves it--gets it even--at five. Not ten minutes into the film he said to me: "I love Neo."

Now I'd like to say that he has no idea what he loves, but that would reveal the small person I'm prone to become when I'm around him. I should say he knows what's loveable but not what's dangerous in loving. The violence? Oh, the violence this son will let roll off--he's never been interested in warfare or kills or tyranny. No. All I said was that Neo was to become a hero, a superhero, and he knew exactly how to feel. A little shaken, full of love, knowing, hoping: there is a savior.

We will be saved or else fucked, right?

"I love Neo."

Christ.

Certain inconveniences

come with coming home; the refrigerator and pantry shelves will be empty but for milk, tortillas, cereal, and coffee, and I will take to living on milky coffee all day the first day home while I clear a workspace and make just enough room at Trystan's desk (among a Spiderman slipper, Uno cards, It's a Big Big World atlas, and a drum I gave him four years ago at Christmas) to write: I slept on a twin last night in a room painted purple and discover first thing in the morning that foolproof babyproofing (half-inch dowel sticks run through chest-of-drawer and cabinet handles) is very hard on bare toes: I broke a jar of powdered ice tea in the garage while reaching for a bottle of something else and know this as a consequence of the conditions of coming home: I will stub my toes, step on toys, make room to sit: I will still be mystified about the lack of food in a household that eats three times a day and more on the weekend: I will pay my fullest attention to questions I cannot answer (and thus it is that the age of five is the wisdom of showing one's elders the fall into unknowing): why? and why? and why why? and why? I don't know, I say. The little mesquite tree outside this window has at last become a tree. And the sun, baby, lemme tell you. This is the land of the sun.

I'm in a t-shirt and shorts.

The family outgrows this house; today is moving day. I want more coffee but am reluctant to find everything necessary to make it. Could take longer than a few minutes. Tea is impossible. The stove is apart for cleaning. I think of cleaning. But I have reading and thinking to do. I promised myself reading and writing and long walks in the sun.