One thought on waking: don't move. And then: pain. Big blue chair neck much worse and the day ahead full. I have nothing else to say about that.
***
Because I'm inclined to snivel, and I don't know enough to snivel. I don't know what I'm sniveling about. C on living with pain, in which pain could be how you know what you know: aesthetic, ethic, economy, community, body. Not an epistemology, but the location of one, as well as the location of being afraid. Pain could be teacher. Not guru, but the location of guru. "It has to do with altering the way I move in the world." Pain could be pay attention. To everything. It's just pain, someone said to me when I was hurting. Say: I am not my pain. Me: "I am not my pain," the declarative somehow reiterating: do as words do: you do not represent: do not exist in this equation except where x (the other side of am) is ever the variable. That's the confusing part, when the self finds itself in pain. Locates, I mean.
***
Photo: time and place of Mary's last honors meeting with Natania and me. My solution to too many independent studies this term? No not the pub. Contain them to Wednesday meetings so Wednesdays look like this:
9:20-10:30 Beginning Poetry Writing
10:40-11:50 Romantic Literature
12:00-1:00 Andres, Spoken Word and Slam
1:00-2:00 Brian, Frank O'Hara
2:30-3:30 Howard, Teaching Assistantship
4:00-5:00 Mary, Honors Thesis
6:00-7:00 Hilary, Stefen, Chris, Poetry Writing
Thursday will meet with the 13 BPW students individually, convene the first Campus Diversity Committee meeting of the term, then home to pack for the spring ACM Committee on Minority Concerns meeting at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, and that goes all weekend.
***
Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe in the difference between pleasure and pain--between master and slave, mind--you're going to have to write those kinds of poems.
What? No.
***
And Burke:
I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other. Nothing is more certain to my own feelings than this. There is nothing which I can distinguish in my mind with more clearness than the three states, of indifference, of pleasure, and of pain. Every one of these I can perceive without any sort of idea of its relation to anything else. Caius is afflicted with a fit of the colic; this man is actually in pain; stretch Caius upon the rack, he will feel a much greater pain: but does this pain of the rack arise from the removal of any pleasure? or is the fit of the colic a pleasure or a pain, just as we are pleased to consider it? (emphasis mine, 31)
***
from David Rivard's Wise Poison
("...to call your pain a fugue...because it sounds lovely").
Earth to Tell of the Beasts
Because it's summer a trellis of Gulf air curves over the day,
buckling resiny.
--------------------6:30 one morning,
you killed yourself.
-----------------------And in one of the minutes since then
I'm drawn to the porch by a ripsaw's
E-flat run through plywood, a crude lullaby
about shelter & endurance. Between cuts, from the shade
of a hawthorn, a jay whistles
the sassy hyms & palpitations
fate will never be able to outlaw.
-------------------------------------So, ears filled by all
this singing, fate cowers, & trembles,
and agrees to the erasure of every word placing your Toyota
on Maui, parked off a cliff road. Words like the syringe,
your deft fingers tying
off, & shooting, while flames eat the wick of rags
you stuffed in the gas tank. A junkie,
but not only that. As for mercy, when the gas ignites
no words will be allowed to flare outward with the explosion,
each syllable elided that would scorch
clumps of fuchsia, fleshy leaves of wild ginger.
--------------------------------------------------It's a good bet.
It's easy. A sure thing. That the warmth & abiding
plenitude of this morning would permit me
to call your pain a fugue, an intricately feathered
spiral, because it sounds lovely. And lovely implies consolation
and accuracy. But all the while, buried inside, hurt
is still hurt, shame is still shame.
----------------------------------And though you turned, once,
at the edge of a pool in Tucson, green eyes intensified
by the water, snub nose peirced by a tiny silver stud, gossiping,
you would never have claimed
your laughter was a music, as I could now,
the run of notes
a stampede, & after the stampede just tracks in the earth
to tell of the beasts & their escape.
***
Those kinds of poems: no, the eligist can't help it, turns to consolation, solace, song. The building of a shelter, the music of the building of a shelter, the convention of elegy such that everything you can say is a violent sawing through and building up of a loveliness to hold suspect: easy. Burke says smooth things are relaxing, beauty a small delicate thing, an ordered thing. Tracks that tell of beasts but not the beasts.
***
Anyway, I am tired of difference. Am a slave to likeness.
***
From a student tonight, just now:
Sure, everyone knows about my headaches and whatnot, but there's only like 4 people in my entire life who have actually seen what a migraine does to me. Everyone else hears about it after the fact; sees me when I'm better, with a wry grin on my face and a shrug of my shoulders, doing what I normally do.***
On the other side of am.
***
