It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language. Everything we reach that seems to be outside language, for example sensation and perception, turns out to be more language. To live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot. We are hard at work trying to fulfill the impossible task of reading from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We struggle to read from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, and what are our dreams but more lessons in the pain of the impossibility of reading, or rather in the pain of having no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not we may have in our discursive wanderings and aberrancies stumbled by accident on the right reading?
...there's something almost comforting about old-school deconstruction on a grey Saturday afternoon.
Yeah, so. It's been awhile. I guess the short version goes something like this: there was the week where all I did was sleep and do the minimum I needed to do to get through teaching. And then got the stomach flu. And then there were some more disappointments, and a large-scale freakout about my brother's wedding, but more about the fact of my attending by myself and feeling like an enormous loser for it. But then snapping out and finishing the damn prospectus, save for another nip and tuck revision and possibly the addition of a paragraph.
There was the night The Poet and I went to Hoboken and made up stories about alternate lives for ourselves. There was the brunch I went to where I ended up having one of those conversations where some dude who is not a literary scholar tries to tell me how to do my job as a literary scholar and you can tell that he mostly feels authorized to do it because he's a dude and you're not. Extra bonus points for his being the older brother of someone who I had a very awkward night with at one of the absolute low points of last December. Though I don't think he knew that.
I did midday zazen at the Village Zendo last Wednesday. Just an hour of sitting. Amazing. I'm going to try to make that a weekly thing.
And today I've been reading, mostly. Which has kind of been nice, though not as nice as seeing J. Who I haven't seen for like two weeks. Again. But how do I tell him that he needs to work harder to get me away from The Poet?
I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of being kind to oneself. And about how much of what I allow to pass as a kindness to myself (often in the form of drinking, several hours at a time of stupid television, poor food choices) are really not kindnesses at all but indulgences that redouble my own reasons for being unkind to myself.
I've been having fun with my students. It has been amazingly fun teaching them a text that I love. At least the ones who are actually doing the work.
I bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs, off of iTunes a couple weeks ago. (An unusual event in my world.) It's amazing and you should download it immediately. I have been doing this thing where I listen to the version of "Most of the Time" that's on this album and then listening to the Sophie Zelmani cover from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack right afterwards.
I got my travel zafu in the mail this week. It's basically a beach ball with a cloth cover. But it's kind of awesome. I'll also be bringing Xanax to Indiana with me because even though I'm not as actively stressed out by the wedding as I was last week at this time (and boy was I rocking the word vomit at this one party--I'm sure anyone who's seen me in the last ten days, my students included, is tired of me talking about hits), I still think it's better to be safe than drinking too much and saying something unintentionally nasty or angry.
I've been practicing with what it means to trust the present, to trust others, to trust myself. What I think made that midday zazen so great for me was that I realized, most of all, that I could trust my posture, that I could trust myself to know how to sit, that what I did at home was also what I was doing there.
And I'm trying to believe that I don't have to be my own worst enemy.
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