Same building, another view. I keep forgetting the plants need watering, need repotting, that now is the time to start looking at pots, to buy tomato seeds, sunflowers. The tulips on the porch have begun pushing up, little fools, not good. I'll not have tulips this year, nor chilies. Lost the container garden last year to leaving. I left. This year, not so certain. Many things must happen. In exactly the right order.
***
And Caleb:
"The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my mechanical turn; I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. [...] In fine this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance" (emphasis mine 60).
***
Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe in narrative, you'll have to believe in that kind of God. I don't even know what that means.
***
Little shit thinks he can eat from my plate.
***
And then there is sprung rhythm, "his need to back up his poetic practice by a theory which demonstrated the immanence of God."
Eh.
***
The story of the big blue chair:
Everything is ludicrous
in blue velour.
You tell yourself the fuss of
cleaning up basement mold is
nothing next to seeing the product
of your labor in your study.
Decadent beast. How to concoct
a room for it? You end up with blue
in the rug, the painting, the punching bag,
all self-consciously blinking at you
and you feel you've
taken to wearing blue eyeshadow
and you fear someone will try to love
you, will make room for you because of blue.
***
***
I only own seven or eight editions of some kind of Shelley so why are none of them here? Trying to recall the context of this line, the other lines around it:
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Someone said, you've got to read that line with a sense of Shelley's sense of humor or you miss the point. You've got to read a lot of Shelley that way to believe it. (--the point, get it?) Is there any other way to read thorns? A critique of Catholicism, I wager.
***
"yes there's something mournful autumnal and righteous about the terms"--and resilient. Mythic, even. "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe."
***
Or that the points (thorns?) form the story, the "spring of action." Something like that. Because I don't seem to have a sense of spring without Genesis--nor a Genesis without Milton. Nor a Milton without Blake. It's not just metonymic, it's cause and effect when I'm feeling lazy, which is most of the time. At which point I'm back to pointing out that spring, for me, is allegorical, much as I might dump on the idea.
***
!
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Rap is only fun to listen to if you're in the same room with it. Otherwise it's like listening to the oldest washing machine in the world run its cycles against the basement walls. A mechanical series of thongthongthongthongthongthongs. Decidedly not narrative. The whole house vibrates. And because they're being evicted, they're making sure their fuck yous are heard. And on such a day--sunny, crisp, lazy--it is a real thorn in my side, yes.
***
Associative logic again: why don't I have a sense of the word thorn without Christ? So that the expression "thorn in my side" always brings to mind the piercing of Christ's side, the wound itself. Who put that there? It doesn't belong there.
***
Sticky:
Wordsworth's Note to 'The Thorn,' "their minds are not loose but adhesive": by which I think he means associative in the most hyperbolic way--minds that love the relationship between cause and effect--that turn juxtaposition into metaphor--that love a good story and the repetition of a good story--sequences and contingencies and narratives--and rhyme (repetition compulsion), obsessively so--and ritual, especially if ritual is associated with ends. This he suggests (and he's stealing much of it from Locke), is the superstitious mind. Which in the 19th century was still synonymous with Catholicism, or at least with the enthusiastically religious. But look, he's also describing the way poetry works, and he admits it's a bit of a problem because he doesn't want to say that what poetry is for is what religion is for. Or what I mean is, I don't want him to say that. But I can't seem to crawl out from beneath it because, I suppose, I am superstitious. Gluey minded, whatever, you see what I'm saying.
***
Spring Term 2006. Of course I'm getting ready to teach the Romantic Literature course again. You pieced that together, surely. Tomorrow, the syllabus. But I won't bore you with it.
***
