Saturday thoughts

"For it is with this world that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." -- Browning, "Essay on Shelley"

This might be the year we all become famous. So far, I've had two friends' shows get fantastic (and well-deserved) reviews in the NY Times Arts section. Another friend is in what's apparently a major off-Broadway revival of a classic play. Yet another is having a play he staged several years ago (and which, at the time, I thought was one of the very best things I'd ever seen) mounted at another major off-Broadway theater. And, though it's not quite as big or artistic as these, I'm about to have my first article published in a major (in my field) academic journal.

Yes, this might be our year, as the world begins to collapse, no longer just the crumbling around the edges that we noticed for years before. (What happened in my hometown just over a year ago now becomes readable as a kind of harbinger, a very particular kind of despair--half-triumphed-over in the election of Obama, but also lingering unredressed.) It's a strange precipice. At times it feels sublime, but then again everything does if you stare at it long enough to let your eyes unfocus. Which I almost have to do when I stare at the parts of the NY Times that are not the Arts section, when I think about the post-May future, trying to inhabit moments of wall staring meditation. I've been doing these intensive cardio workouts that have me at the gym for nearly an hour and a half. Yesterday it was treadmill / elliptical / then back on the treadmill. I don't even read magazines there anymore; it slows me down. Sometimes podcasts. San Francisco Zen Center and The Moth. Or music, but so much of what is on my iPod isn't particularly helpful for keeping up the pace. I'm not sure why I started doing this, but I do know that I was furious when I ended up not being able to do it on Thursday--going to the gym only to find all the machines taken, waiting around until they were supposed to be free and having my face lied to instead--I snapped like I haven't snapped in months--a kind of sputtering and shaking and all this stored energy of pulling myself through the exhaustion of a teaching week comes out on the Nevins Street subway platform and I hold myself to myself and try to make it home but everything's slow and it's one of those nights where I hate Brooklyn or more specifically being poor in it, though eventually some beer (Karma Ale, natch) and spontaneous company pulls me back up--that and a phone call from D., as he drove home from some show in East Williamsburg.

My days are busy but more or less stable otherwise; it's my dreams that are ominous. I had hoped that the cardio workouts would help me sleep better, especially when I want to go to bed earlier before days I teach. I thought I would crash at 10:30 on Wednesday night and instead am up using the bathroom at 11:15, 11:25, and 12:04. I wake up at 5:00 on Thursday morning after an intensely realistic dream in which I lose my keys and engage in an extended and somewhat violent self-recrimination. This morning, only half sleeping with D. in the bed next to me, I start yelling at security guards at some airport-like checkpoint for entry into not-NYU, complete with metal detectors and no one will tell me where to go....this afternoon, napping on the futon in the sun, I am staring at my torn-up face in the mirror and I don't know what happened. I am afraid that this is anticipatory deja-vu; otherwise I am happy and solid and working (kind of--I've been tired today and just trying to get my bearings again after the intellectual sinkhole of Tuesday-Thursday and living for others) and it's getting lighter earlier and staying lighter later and I don't understand why I sleeping to scream.

We both have trouble sleeping, and these problems have been intensified the three times we've shared a bed. I worried a lot, in that first year after breaking up with The Ex, that I was going to lose the ability to share a bed with someone else. Even now when I'm alone I tend to sleep only on one side of the bed, nearly falling off the edge. And it's true that I don't sleep especially well with other people. Of course you're only going to sleep fitfully on a one-night stand, and it occurred to me today that, up until last Thursday when I went to D.'s house, the last time I'd been in someone else's bed when it wasn't a one-night stand was with K., right before I moved to my current apartment. I never slept particularly well with E (the lawyer) or The Poet. D. is actually somewhat easier, at least to the extent that he doesn't snore and I can at least doze a bit when I'm really close to him, which tends not to be the case with a lot of other people. And the thing is--I like having him here, I like being with him at his place. Even the exhaustion has its sweetness, though of course this is of somewhat limited utility. He's possibly the first person I've wanted to sleep well with me.

I watch him move, I watch him interact with other people. Some of it I understand. This kind of cultivated unpredictability--I start to wonder where it comes from. I admire it. I wish my mind could move that quickly, could make these kinds of jumps. There's a softness to it. It's not the Shelley-esque assault that The Ex used to perpetrate--he's never out to annihilate the other person. But there's so much about it that seems opaque to me right now. I suppose this is okay. It's hard to remember that we've known each other for basically three weeks. Four dates, three nights spent together, one brunch and a walk in Prospect Park. If we make it to Spring Break, I'll turn off my Nerve profile. I want to believe that we could work and write together--not collaboratively, necessarily, but simply that we could find each other's company in a shared space helpful as we work on our very different projects. Could we hope to work in the same room if we can't sleep well in the same bed? I don't know. In some ways he seems incredibly young (he's about six years older than I am, which makes him younger than The Ex and there's no point in talking about either K. or The Poet in this context)--this is both exhilarating and terrifying. At some point I will have to tell him the things I haven't yet.

I want to write a story or a poem about using numbers as metaphors.

My brother sent me a bunch of drunk text messages from the Mardi Gras parade in St Louis. In retrospect, I realize he was doing this because my SIL probably didn't want to hear it while she was at home and pregnant and certainly my mother's not interested. I hadn't realized it was that time of year. No doubt my Catholic grandparents would spin in their graves to know that their Protestant granddaughter would be going to a Buddhist zendo on Ash Wednesday. But one thing that practice has allowed me to do as of late is appreciate certain kinds of Christian rituals from a slightly more formal standpoint and I find the idea of Lent to be kind of compelling right now. Not so much in the renunciation department. While I've certainly cut back on drinking lately, I'm not interested in a vow of sobriety, nor am I interested in becoming vegan for a month or giving up caffeine. (These being the sort of stupid and decontextualized ways that we talked about Lent in the church youth group.) What I find appealing is the intention to clear a space in your life to allow something else to come in--something as unexpected, perhaps, as the resurrection itself. Spring cleaning in the being-human guest house, to distend a metaphor from Rumi. It's possible that I've started that work a bit early this year; I want to take the opportunity in the next couple of days to form that work into a more deliberate intention. And all of this seeming especially powerful since the period of Lent (if we're meteorologically fortunate, of course) takes us from winter into spring--a sense that this space may potentially get easier to maintain as each day passes, that we can look back over this period of weeks and see a progressive loosening of tensions, relaxing of preconceived notions, letting go of distractions.

Something like that is my prayer for the next few days.

In the archive of the evanescent

"...a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume....A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing-fan, the dust in the barn door. A moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." -- Walter Pater, "Joachim du Bellay," from The Renaissance

It's probably a travesty of modern literary studies that people think that all you have to read of Pater is the Introduction and Conclusion to The Renaissance. This last line to me seems to be worth a hundred gemlike flames and I'm not sure we understand that either.

A few days into our correspondence, I told him that I was writing a secret dissertation motivated by the question of walking on water. This is true. It has already developed here, it is still developing--and I am slowly, belatedly, beginning to find it everywhere in Browning. It is the place where my life and my work--very long estranged, breached by teaching and other alienations--strain back to touch each other, promising the kind of coherence that I used to take as a kind of birthright, back when life looked a lot easier because we didn't know a damn thing about it. It's something with moments, like the Browning sonnet I posted last month, to get beyond asserting and against...I am sitting at my desk right now and looking at the quote I wrote out from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind a few months ago, the quote about "losing its balance against a background of perfect balance." The right to a beginner's mind not entirely recognized where I am, except in matters that are convenient to others. (A brush with triggermemories of the Worst Job I Ever Had this morning reminds me that I will never volunteer to organize an academic conference if I can help it.) And yet. Finally clearing spaces, a few at least, and this is all I can do for now. Withdrawing from the world, from excuses to spend money taking car services instead of just walking in silence, a withdrawal from talking to people all the time so that I can come back to my archive of the evanescent, to start thinking again.

"And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom....For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?" -- Pater, "Wincklemann"

My funny Valentine needs a pseudonym

But nothing seems right just yet. Perhaps because so much of our interactions involve the invention of monikers for ourselves and each other, because these move quickly, because he comes up with the best ones--and so, anything I attempt to pull out of the current will be rendered almost immediately obsolete. It will never make sense and it will leave me feeling a tiny bit guilty for writing behind his back. (He has a blog, tied to his band's website, where he writes things that are impersonal and crazy and funny and beautiful. He's only written one post since I met him--it is based on a conversation we had over email and in person over the last week, and it includes a reference to something that I said, which makes me rather weak-kneed and butterfly-stomached--and all of it is completely surreal and nonsensical. He doesn't have a Facebook account.)

For now, then, he'll just be D.--the biggest box I can put him in, as non-signifying as possible.

He's beautiful, funny, and smart--a madman to be sure, but not one that raises redflags. He is changing the way I think about presence and the present. He spontaneously started reading from De Profundis when I was at his house on Friday morning. We share certain neuroses about noise and sleep and our fighting for mental and emotional space. I managed not to lead with all my traumas this time.

In short, I could get used to this, to this being able to smile without being obsessive, to getting phone calls at thoughtful times and mindspinning emails that make me laugh or empathize or--perhaps most of all--think and create. I could get used to holding hands in Prospect Park, to mornings in the suburbs, complete with a schoolbus and a hausfrau waving in sweatpants and overcoats. I could get used to white noise and not drinking so much I get hung over and to the ability to put uncertainty and stress into a box that doesn't take over my life. Yes--and I hope I get the chance.

For the moment, though, I am working through Browning, finally, trying to deal with the enormous amount of work that has piled up while I have been grinning into greenbrowngrey eyes over brunch tables and museum exhibits. Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" is on Radio Paradise. I decided this week that it's stupid to even think of going on the market in the fall, and that stressed me out for the rest of the day but now I feel better. I am trying to remember that impermanence and uncertainty has to be welcomed even when it seems like a bad, destructive thing, and that I need to keep practicing even when I don't think I need to.

And I wouldn't tell you that my life is perfect. School is hard for a number of reasons. My computer is dying and I'm worried about money perpetually. My work habits have been embarrassing. I know that there are a lot of loose ends right now and I don't know how that's going to shake out.

But what I will say is this--I looked back here at the archives for last February, and I am grateful to have many of the same problems without the feeling of abject wretchedness.

And so, happy Valentines day indeed.

"When the shoe fits / The foot is forgotten"

I was wrong in the post that I made last Sunday, about how by now I'd either be foolishly and stupidly happy or I'd be disappointed and angry with myself.

I am happy, yes, but it's not the feeling I've expected. All I can say is this:

Yesterday was one of the best days I've had in New York in a very, very long time.

Perhaps that's it; nothing else to say right now except to mark this calmness. Certainly a bit of grogginess--I've come down with a head cold, so I'm pretty run down, going to bed soon, and facing the lesson planning monster for most of tomorrow, hoping for a good night's sleep. But even this cold may be, in a certain reading, auspicious--I was telling him just the other day about my experience of the psychosomatic head cold related to Maud and certain other texts--and in a way it's possible to see this as a gift, the sheer physical impossibility of working myself up to the heartracing nervous excitement that accompanied most of my interactions with J. What I feel instead is a kind of groundedness and peace, a sense of gratitude, almost, for a day of being in affectionate physical contact with another person. I've never had so much fun at the Brooklyn Museum. Holding hands over dinner and in the car as he drove....But I don't want to get all mushy about it because it isn't that, not at all.

I'm trying, for the moment, to realize trust in the present, to allow myself to be present to where I am and who I am with. Another small gift: I was awake at a certain hour this morning, in spite of head cold / grogginess / it being Sunday because I thought my bathroom ceiling was going to be fixed. That didn't happen, but it made me available for something vastly more important.

And, again. Reflecting on the week, it seems now that I can perceive a kind of opening to this, how everyone else who could have made these kind of claim on me had faded a bit. The Poet in Puerto Rico and not emailing or calling (until tonight, a bad signal before we could even say hello and I didn't call back), other email exchanges dropping off, a substitute meditation leader on Wednesday, not running into K despite many hours spent in the library, making peace with J on Monday in a way that cleared some space there as well...I didn't even have time to sign into Nerve this week, and it stopped seeming important. It wasn't just him, it was the beginning of school, the need to be present for several friends, to finish the fellowship application, to go to the gym, and on and on. And I won't put too much on this. It needs to remain what it is for now and we'll go from there. I'll appreciate things like the fact that, for now, most of my apartment is spectacularly clean and that I woke up this morning feeling more ready to work (in spite of the cold) than I have in a long time. I did my Key Food grocery shopping to make this fantastic bean / sweet potato / peanut soup. I finished The Renaissance and started thinking again, despite the slowdown feeling from the cold. I don't feel my usual Sunday night impulse to make a thousand impossible lists. There is a lot to be done tomorrow, but I know what I have to do, I always know what I have to do, but this is different. He's coming to Brooklyn again on Friday.

(Parenthetically, I will admit to the fact that he is also incredibly pretty. In the best way possible. In certain lights he reminded me of a taller, somewhat less tough version of J; from other angles he could seem almost impossibly young. All of this should make me nervous, but how could I be nervous when less than five minutes after we enter the museum he threw his arms around me from behind and we proceeded to spend two hours walking around holding hands? This never happens to me....)

I'm going to sleep now, hoping that the cold will work its way through my system tonight, having done the work I needed it to do. In the meantime, the text of the poem by Chuang Tzu--the source of the title of this post and something that's been quoted in several of the podcasts I've been listening to lately:

Ch'ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
"For" and "against" are forgotten.

No drives no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

I suppose I will have to find him a pseudonym.