This is killing me. It's dark and cold and no fun on the porch. And threatening to rain. Well when can I stop carrying a jacket around? Spring is infuriating. You see why I lose patience and go home.
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Sent poems to two magazines yesterday, which if you know how I work, you understand I did grudgingly. I know I'm whining. I'm never ready to let them go. But the best way for me to get disinterested in new work is to send it away.
Slow to compose, slow to send out, slow to publish. It's not that I mind this clock. I would choose a slower one (because I am learning something now about my shifting interests and these strange new poems I don't understand or know yet how to shape) if not for my contract review in the fall.
So grudgingly: kicking and screaming against deadlines all the way, but working toward something necessary and good thanks to such impositions and despite all pure id efforts to sit around tinkering happily with one or two poems. Take them away from id and she just makes more.
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from the Annunciation notebook, May 9, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 6:45 a.m.
Here is the Nietzsche that ought to be somewhere in the dissertation:***
"It has always been not faith but the freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith, that enraged slaves in their masters--against their masters. 'Enlightenment' enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is tyrannical, in morals too; he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the depths, to the point of pain, of sickness--his abundant concealed suffering is enraged against the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Nor was skepticism concerning suffering at bottom mererly a pose of aristocratic morality, the least cause of the origin of the last great slave rebellion which began with the French Revolution."
Why you'd make a note of the passage without noting where it comes from tells you how perfectly well intentioned--because you meant to use it that day and not lose it--and how perfectly lost you were. Not sure now what you'd have done with it. It resonates, yes, but so do lots of things.
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Where was I? In the middle of Puree. Cleaned the chilis of seeds and veins, cooked them soft with white wine and a fat yam and half an onion, more ginger and garlic, more cloves, cinnamon, chicken stock, apple cider, and the water the chilis soaked in for a day and a half. Put the whole thing in the blender after, then in a great big pot. Roasted the raw peanuts in the oven and pureed them with walnuts and pecans and ha! some animal crackers. Added them to the great big pot and put the stuff on the stove to reduce which will take all of Thursday before adding bitter-sweet chocolate at the end. Poached 33 breasts of chicken and pray they will feed everyone. Looked in the cabinets for great big storage containers and cussed a lot.
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Saffron rice with red bellpeppers: asked for saffron at the grocery store and had the whole place scratching their heads and asking me to spell it, describe it, say how it's used. They sent me to the organics section, the specialty foods section, the bulk spice section. They hunted and apologized but no one recognized the word saffron. Stopped in at the tiny Mexican grocery store--Jalisco--for avocados, cilantro, queso fresco, papaya, chiltepin, and asked. For the rice, right? Yes, for the rice. We don't have it in stock but we'll find it and bring it on the truck on Thursday around 3 p.m. Also pan dulce, fresh that day. For your guests.
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Black beans. Corn tortillas. Twenty gorgeous avocados. Romas.
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On the phone tonight my mother tells me my grandmother made wonderful mole and loved to eat it. I didn't know. I am self taught. She also made a cooked jalapeno salsa in her molcajete I wish I'd learned to make. We don't talk about the flood.
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And, by the way, I paid three and a half dollars for my molcajete across the border. It wasn't easy to find, is part of a dying art. Everyone said: I use a blender. But grinding releases oils the blender can't. Don't spend fifty. Call me before you do.
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