Bloomsday Edgestories

I learned today from reading Jean-Luc Nancy's The Discourse of the Syncope that the feminine form of Kant--die Kante--means "the pointed, the thin and sharp edge, the angle, of a ridge or divide" (91). I am thinking of this as a razoredge or a tightrope or--to think less laceratingly for the moment--the silvering of the mirror (and I'm thinking here of Derrida's reading of Ponge's "Fable," mostly in "Psyche: Invention of the Other") and watersurfaces of the kind that lend themselves to a confusion of shadow and substance, as in the scene in Book 4 of the Prelude--a kind of multiple vision--the sky and trees reflected there, but also the reeds and fish underneath the surface, a dual visibility that in some sense makes the surface "itself" in-visible. (This all seems, at times, like a hopelessly old-fashioned exercise in deconstruction deployed to cover over my own personal stupidities. If I could set the scene for you I would, but I'm not sure I could do it unless I could make it into the third person first and even then I'm not sure I would despise myself any less.)

And I am thinking, on this Bloomsday (inevitably a legacy of my ex-boyfriend; there are certain textual transmissions that occasionally make it hard for me to do what I do) of tightrope acts and walking on water and I have been trying for the last couple of hours to recover from a certain multiday stupefaction (something like this always seems to happen when I should be writing--I end up reading, and badly) and to think in paragraphs, to make another try at staking out a position within the Critique of Judgment and I am turning around on what seems to me to be the dual question of the essential spontaneity of aesthetic judgment and the suspension that secures the instance (I hear this with a French accent today) of freedom. (Simply being here is to risk a complete collapse; I come here, I say, so that I will be more productive and more disciplined than I would be at home; coming here, though, is always a risk, and there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways to force myself into a kind of disappointment. Why can't that be me? Suspension is exhausting; I didn't know what I would be getting into; in some ways the forced lightheartedness is almost worse; having him know what he knows about my life is worse than him not knowing anything at all; this is not conductive to writing about the sublime except when it is and I wouldn't have written this if I had stayed home today.) I find myself wondering as I contemplate this spontaneity--and I'm not sure Kant ever uses the word, only implies it--this instability--I find myself recurring again and again to the question of the razor edge and the water surface, specifically: Do you ever get used to walking on water?

The story goes that Peter was okay until he looked down. What's the opposite of looking down? What did it mean for him to look down? Is it simply a matter of knowing or not knowing what you're doing? This seems to make faith a matter of ignorance--no, it's more than this, to walk on water you almost have to know what you're doing at every moment. (I see you past the shoulder of the person I'm talking to don't you realize that all I wanted was to be able to do this with you, to work side by side? This is all I've ever really wanted of the people I've loved, and perhaps this is why it would be difficult, as things stand now, to fall in love with The Poet, who seems very far from here as it is.) To know but not to look--some sort of action, some kind of energy--nervous energy, tension, a suspension that is almost a churning, lifting you just far enough above the water not to fall. You can't get used to walking on water--that's when you fall, that's when you go slack, you let your guard down and you become ever so slightly too heavy--there was never much of a margin for error to begin with and now it's over and you might never be able to regain that first lightness, you will have to learn some other trick. (It's only now that I come face to face with how much I have been depending on some illusion of a singularity that went both ways--not in an absolute sense, but at least in terms of the immediate context--and by a bad accident of positioning, a choice that I made before anyone else was here this morning--I get to watch this get chipped away moment by moment--)

And I am trying to write about Kant and get myself back to Christabel and I am still turning over the same set of ideas, more or less. I call it something different now, moving beyond humiliation and its overdeterminations, thinking now more broadly in terms that I am preparing to live with for years--funny, how one's longest relationships are revealed to be with texts, with certain words, as people themselves come and go.

Late on Friday night I told The Professor what I have been thinking for several weeks now--that I would be happier if I could write something like poetry, if I could regain the kind of relation I used to have to theory, philosophy, and literature, that graphomania that had me writing in several locations and in several discourses all at once. No doubt this was dangerous when I was 20 and 21; no doubt there would be risks this time around, too, not the least of which being a kind of absolute self-indulgence or just trying too hard. I might be happier, too, if I could slip into the third person sometimes, like I did one afternoon sitting in the St Mark's Churchyard in the summer of 2000. I used to write to survive; when I stopped writing, I stopped surviving. I am still working alone; I have been looking outside to see if we're getting the storm they promised us (we're not); I need to decide what I have the heart to do the rest of today; maybe I will let myself get beer if I go to the gym first.