week two: spring

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Sunlight, cold wind. Came in through the bathroom window.

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This is very exciting and arrives right on time.

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That kind of day.

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first day

Obscurity

TO make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For this purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring, he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors:

—The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed;
For each seemed either; black he stood as night;
Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell;
And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.

--Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful

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Pressed coffee!

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Fevery. Cold. My head feels like the heavy end of a sledge hammer. My limbs too. I slept through the alarm for hours and dreamed of a night club called "the power," its series of dark green rooms and velvet couches, its shower stalls, and industrial lighting, somebody's vision of something we could all do to be together again. Michael and Becky's son, Rene, was there, but he called himself Michael, and he wore his father's black-framed glasses and his father's adam's apple, and he sat in a motorized wheelchair. I haven't seen you since you were three or four I said. His collar was round and black, faintly reminiscent of a priest's, so I said I always thought you were preparing for the priesthood, and he looked at me hard, examining my face as though I'd been cruel, and wheeled around and rolled slowly down the steep sidewalk path away from us and our hang out.

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Spring is at the doors again. At the windows. At the chimes. At the heads of the trees blowing around. It's aroar out there. The trains and the cars. The dog on the end of its chain next door shaking off damp grass. The yellow house in the sun too bright to look at straight.

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week one: spring

...altruism refuses to go far enough. I'm appalled at people's tiredness, my tiredness.

Wrong minded in this, habitually, which is of course why so much of me is always so weary: it is incapable of going far enough--it is not even possible for it to go far enough--to the end--since it sees itself, myself, as the means to the end, where the means is the end, and the limits of my source are the limits of myself, though the demands of my end (which is not my end but my impossible goal, and which I have confused, one for the other, endlessly again) are endless.

In the dream, a blue river. That dream where I believe I am following the ribboned limestone to the secret place I left behind. After all, what does it mean to say I am not God?

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Broke the other plum-colored coffee mug from Colorado Springs, swept it into the corner below the coat hooks, and left it and the broom there to look at each other. The same with the suitcase. The same with the sleeping bag and blanket. The pillows on the floor. The clothes I shed last night before bed.

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Em gave me lilies, iris, red and yellow daisies, a coffee press and coffee, a frame of a delicate thing that wants framing. A bag of velvety black and white polka-dots. The lilies are pink: morning clouds.

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Romulus the shorn lamb paces in the hall, crying.

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Expecting rejection anytime soon from any direction. Nothing personal. Just the numbers at work. Romulus is off to boarding school this morning. I'm off on retreat by this evening, so all will be quiet here until Sunday. Taking a notebook but not the computer--maybe. Oh and may as well say it: altruism refuses to go far enough. I'm appalled at people's tiredness, my tiredness.

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Dreamed of the Chrism.

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spring break

In the dream I'd bought a house with a dirty and gigantic jacuzzi tub (tawny plastic spigots, a 70s austere dinginess) and a labyrinthine basement stairwell tied off with baby-blue shoelace every ten feet. --An effort by the previous owner to keep their toddlers from a nasty fall. One did fall, stories down to smack the basement floor just as I asked the mother about the netting--this when the family showed up unexpectedly through the back door to sleep in the house a few more nights, as they said. Inconvenient for me as I had about four dates last night and would attempt to see all of them (Darren, you were there), though now with a house full of strangers and some scheme about rotations and my father (who was not my father) somehow ever in the next room.

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Estuart was my real estate agent.

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It is finished.

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Now that spring is waffling in and the trash remains on the porch another week after weeks of being left behind because it is Friday morning (and when is there anything extra left on Friday morning?) the bottle green flies will enter the screens to set the porch alight. Meanwhile, something departing by today's post and clouds flying by the office window. The bare tree in the frame shivers in the sun.

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The $1.6 million Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?”

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I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

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Dragging the kid away from the violinist now.

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last day of class

The light came up in a rush. I woke in the dark, woke late, disoriented, because it could not be both dark and late, but it was. Still I'm looking at the clock, not seeing, or looking at the sky and feeling there is time yet. There is not. The new yellow vacuum swallowed a plush mouse yesterday while I stood by with a hose in each hand (we're still getting to know one another) making decisions for us both. Smoke rose from its yellow nose, and an awful smell, and still my head was going on about time--not enough time for this--while I grieved for what had been a very good new relationship and yanked fur and catnip from the bristles. The new yellow vacuum does not suck the same. I'm trying to pretend it does.

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Ernest A. Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the notion of paying the principal less than the teachers “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s nice to have a first violinist, a first tuba, but you’ve got to have someone who brings them all together,” Mr. Logan said. “If you cheapen the role of the school leader, you’re going to have anarchy and chaos.”

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Basically took all morning and still haven't dealt with the cat vomit.

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Here it is at last, the determining thing. Sore throat, sore back, sore mind. None of the influences you think of brought this on, no. Something closer to the kind of rest that brings more weariness when rest might be what you want but not what you need. There's a lot of that going around now and catching, want fulfilling need making need bigger.

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Bathtub epiphany:

The how question: so many ways to deficit. The why question: I'm missing something is.

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Sneezy.

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Someone please teach me how to make pdf files. Some things you can't write about here. This might be one of them.

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--& "what makes a great poem"? I'm to answer in about the next six days.

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week ten of eleven

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