in the hall of mirrors

The Tale

Once upon a time, she said. As he ran, the iron crown began to burn in his hands with a dull red heat. The king’s daughter leaped to her feet to stare at the golden key hanging in midair, inches from her eyes. As he dug at the oak’s roots, breathless for fear of the giant’s return, the silver shovel struck with the clang of a bell. The children crept toward the black castle until the youngest girl stumbled over a thighbone caked with gingerbread. The wolf sat back on his haunches to regard the ragged boy with scorn. The peasant girl looked curiously at the blood-red apple, shrugged, and bit. The eldest son peered through the trees at the iron drawbridge, his heart pounding like a sword on a shield. The cat dropped onto the princess’ shoulder, purring so loudly that she almost missed the jeweled dagger’s flash. The prince fell to his knees, his hands reaching up too late to protect his eyes. The witch slowly crossed the room and, chanting strange words, leveled a bony finger at the small girl. And this is the moral of the story:

[Los Angeles, 1/31/90-5/5/91]

Sunshine and queasiness

Frankly, I'm worried. The past couple of years, my experiences of free time – including those lovely, long Easter breaks we get here in the UK, and summers, with their long high-latitude days – have been characterized by mild illness, by an inertia that is ultimately frightening. Frightening because that inertia is the demon that threatens my view of myself, of my time: it is clear to me that the remaining and best purposes of my life, and the actions/productions that would make me happiest, are to write various things – and that inertia is the greatest threat to those. It would be all too plausible for my remaining days, and years, to fizzle into nothing; there are, after all, legions of mildly failed intellectuals in the history of the world, all stuttering into blurry silences. It's confusing to thus overlay the pleasure of summer, of that amazingly bright sun cutting into my front room around the corners of the curtains, with feeling rather wonky...

Mild illness: that is to say, endless digestive upset sometimes, the tsetse sleepiness of my sub-functional thyroid. Or, that which now threatens, again: taking interferon to fight my liver problems - and interferon unfortunately has many unhappy side effects, including a broad-spectrum psychological and physical depression. I've done different kinds of interferon twice over the past five years, and both were times of long, dragging misery.

What perhaps makes it worse is my own awareness that none of these illnesses is really incapacitating: that, if I could only make myself do so, I could take care of myself enough to both do my job and get writing done, every day. There is, after all, little else left in my life, and little prospect for anything else happening; the truth is, the chaos of my life over the past decade has actually landed me in a place of comfort and security, an environment that supports me in pretty much whatever I want to do.

That way lies guilt, of course, but perhaps a productive guilt: if grieving leaves me simply nowhere, and trying to generate desire/ambition devolves into rather weak puffs of air at this late stage of my life, perhaps the sense of duty to myself, to what I've been given in my life, will drive me onwards...

Difficult poetries

Ha, well, then! - two days after writing about poetry that might seem too difficult (Language Poets, Temblor), I got a copy of Dylan Thomas' Death of the King's Canary, his bizarre murder mystery pastiche, complete with parodies of individual 'difficult' poets/poems. Very fun, very obnoxious, fairly silly...

Admittedly most of the poets parodied have vanished into history. I managed to find somebody's PhD dissertation online where one section explained some of the sources - most of them, aside from Auden, Eliot, Empson, etc., are unknown to me. But the nasty caricatures are still funny (titling a poem 'Lamentable Ode', or a short bio written for the Prime Minister that says, "Sound man, but American wife.... Scarcely suitable").

Hmm, something amusing for relaxation after a mildly chaotic day.

***

[Later:]

There is real humor here, but much is rather heavy-handed – and heavy-handed for an unexpected reason: Thomas seems to combine a real irritation at 'difficulty' with a tendency to dig into the poems and really write them. A lighter touch would have made the parodies funnier; but a bit more work might have made some of them into real poems, if peculiarly directed ones. That ambivalence is perhaps what killed the book, and prevented him from publishing it during his lifetime (the dissertation by Amanda French claims that Thomas was more interested in 'difficult' poetry than he might have been willing to admit). Nevertheless, it's fairly enjoyable – perhaps this has what some 'serious' poetry lacks: it needs to give the reader permission to find passages ludicrous, and to thereby enjoy them.

Abruptness

Wakened by the phone. The doctor wants blood tests redone – liver functions awry, apparently; no surprise. And an argument over the many vitamins I take: we already had a rather boring and inconclusive squabble over this last week – it's not exactly that he disapproves, but clearly he has latched on to them as something to be managed, preferably by him. Rather pointless, as I've been taking them for years - probably about 25 years now, in fact, in relatively large amounts. Ah well... might have to drop some for a while...

Off to school to teach the last class of the year, and the last until early October – which will represent at least four months of relative calm and quiet.

The Book of the Sun

My room grows larger, and daily there is less in it, but it only becomes more beautiful: when small rugs fade and vanish one by one, the bright bare wood floor can be seen, echoing the differently grained walls of the many bookcases.

The various small light sources, floor lamps, swiveling and jointed, vanish gradually, fading into bright motes in the constantly expanding alcoves, although the light remains general, diffused, shifting slightly in hue from gold to green and back. In the large central space, there is only a vast woven rug, its contrasting webs proliferating and transforming themselves, the deep nap comfortable to lie down on while turning the pages of some large volume. Only the bookcases themselves seem to become more numerous, not multiplying, but more of them are gradually seen as vision clarifies and fogs fall away, exhausted.

The books: they become larger and more themselves, the prices and publisher’s names mature and simplify into formal and meaningless signs, the titles grow deep into the spines until they cannot help but be read, even from yards away. They are clear sometimes, or sometimes clearly ambiguous. The things within the books are growing, developing like ancient images in silver nitrate, becoming more truly what they are. The grief and sorrow of a small book bound in Prussian blue cloth purifies itself, flows more cleanly and more according to its real nature, and when the book is opened the shriveled impedimenta of mere characters and place descriptions fall from it like dead, dried silverfish. Or the terrible dark red book, large and expensively bound, which I keep on a high shelf, the violence of whose events becomes more imaginative and crueler with time, so that I can only peer momentarily into its pages and then quickly withdraw, sickened and amazed.

Perhaps most remarkably: when people die, the books about them suddenly become heavier, more solid and precise. Indices appear, events and meetings recast themselves in sharper relief: now it is clear what was important, what was part of the plot, as opposed to things that just happened. The chapters of these books arrange themselves into definite sections: juvenilia, mature life, last words. In several of the books, minor characters (and, in some cases, major ones) have names that are like mine. If I read one some days or weeks later, I realize I am not certain if there are differences: hasn’t the character become more distinct? One thin, dove-gray volume with carefully artistic lettering has a photograph of a man that gradually changes: the mustache, the cut of the cheekbones, begin to look more and more like my own.

Sometimes hot, dirty winds blow through the open windows, pushing volumes off the shelves and covering them with grime. The largest books remain undisturbed, although I become frenzied, rushing to keep the riffling pages from harm, fighting through clouds of dust to reach the windows and slam them shut. The glass shivers, and I hope that it won’t break and leave the shelves unprotected from that which is outside. Sitting then, brushing my fingers across the heavy, soft paper of a square white volume, or wiping off the bindings of small books for children, with their familiar, brightly colored adventures.

The large rug will finally fade and vanish, leaving only the bright grain of the floor, but not yet: and when that happens many of the books themselves will be gone, having finished with the mere concreteness of covers and pages. Only the biggest and strongest of the books, those that last through many lives, will stand here and there on the shelves, so heavy and so vivid.

I want to read the book of the sun. I want to open its heavy brass covers, my eyes naked, unprotected, and look.

[Los Angeles, 3/17-4/19/92]

Correcting blogs

Spurious has made a small error on his May 14 post, where he mentions coming by and looking through Temblor (the Language Poet anthology/journals I keep at the very end of the Poetry bookcase), Milosz, Xenakis, etc. – he says I copied Berio for him; it was in fact Henze, but the most radical and bizarre of Henze's works, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer. (Hmm, do I have the nerve to let that stand without checking the spelling?... oops, I made two mistakes, not spelling but case... and now those are corrected. Thanks to electronics.) Perhaps this is a mistake that interests only me, but – as I've spent a lot of my career trying to get people to talk about high modernist composers who aren't of the Big Three, or Four (traditionally Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, but with Berio always right behind them), and because I just weathered a slightly tiresome Amsterdam conference where Berio came up far too often, it seems worth noting...

The tricky thing: Spurious, who is as intelligent and focused as his beautiful blog shows him to be, is endlessly interested in these products of high art, of the most difficult, most complex, at times most stressful. He played me, indeed, a track by Scott Walker – 'Clara', which he mentions in his post – which was indeed an amazing piece of work, though emotionally brutal; I was impressed, but am not going to go out and buy the recording. Comparisons are of course invidious, but I can't help feeling somewhat unable to compete, both with his interest and with my own younger self, the one who collected and was fascinated by these 'higher' works. It may be just the insecurities of the INTJ (go look up your Myers-Briggs personality typologies), but I feel so unwilling to grapple with these things these days – too much of feeling tired or unwell, too much television. I read Toussaint's nastily wonderful novel Television last month, and identified with it far too much – the dangers of the sitcom...

Ah well. It's not a competition, I know that; and nobody expects me to look towards the difficult all the time. But perhaps my life would be better if I were reading Hejinian more, or even Beerbohm, and watching Friends less....

Consequences

A Monday morning, and a gray one: appropriate for these vague feelings of not being caught up, of not being ready, of not having done what needs to be done. Several administrative e-mails arrived Friday, and I haven't done anything about them; my digestion is unhappy, the back of my mind is turning over whether or not it's worth going in to the office today.

It's that Sunday-evening feeling of not having done work that's due, something that comes from school days. I was a smart but lazy child – which contributes to this disturbing dread of facing deadlines and consequences. I remember a PhD dissertation support group when I was working on my master's thesis – I was the only master's student desperate enough to join it – where we agreed that we were all in the group because things had been too easy for us when we were younger, because schoolwork had always been something we could toss off at the last minute, and we had never learned to actually work at it. A fault of the American system probably, as I suspect that the British system challenges students more.

As an academic who has created his reputation for twenty years on striking but fairly rapidly written articles, and who has never finished a monograph, that feeling of the consequences of not-working-enough has taken over much of the feeling tone of my life. In the past five years, since 'the Australian debacle' (a personal/legal immigration disaster of lost position, lost money, having to leave a partner and come here to a land where I am never really glad to be), I've gotten even less sensible about these things – to the point where I can't stand novels and films at the point where they become dark and stressful, at the place where the protagonist(s) are overcome with the enormity of whatever conflict is going to run the show. When things start to go wrong, when a student says something vicious about me to someone else, when I read about dreadful or miserable things in the news - I've become a real creampuff in these situations, and can't bear to think about such things, and retreat to my apartment, to lie on this couch....

Pathetic of course. Symptomatic of depression I suppose. Surprising what strength the feelings have, though.

A downer of a post. Sorry about that; the difficulty of negotiating between simply saying what is, as opposed to presenting my new blog in some more engaging way, is one of performance – am I supposed to be charming, or honest? Hopefully it will all, eventually, come out in the wash....

Jumping aboard

I'm starting this blog on a typically chilly gray day in this northern city of exile. I still don't know exactly how I'll construct this virtual world – thinking of my own journals, my own writings, other blogs, even the whole elaborate ecosystem of the blogsphere – but, as in everything, jumping in is the only way to find out.

My uncertainty, which is characteristic of my life these days (and intermittently of my life since about 1977, when, in my personal version of my story, things started to go off track) is not unusual in beginning blogs. I could try to carefully construct a First Post, as did a colleague of mine – but that would go against what I need to do in this blog: to just have a space to write, and to somehow link up the too splintered worlds of writing, computers, and personal communications. If it expands to something more interesting, and with a more coherent core, that would be fine – but for now I need to be willing to just write, and see what happens.

While trying out Typepad and Blogger, I'm also sketching out a new Web page that will include published and unpublished writings, and my actual name on it. Although from a distance these various web attempts seem distinct, I'm still trying to figure out the exact differences for me – especially the problems of being private in public, of organizing anonymity, and of personas. Lord knows I don't need any more personas - it would probably be better if I could integrate some of the too-many identities I've assembled over the years - but I need to play with it all for a while and see what happens.

Well that's a start. I'll pause for some peppermint tea - the peppermint dried from a roadside bush in Crete last year, while visiting G– and K– at their house there. Such indulgences of smell (rich spices, incense, bath oils) and taste (chocolate, herbs) have become characteristic of my home life in the past three years – they are how I deal with the cold climate, with living alone. And they are how I give my rather dulled body a sense of aliveness: it may seem odd that peppermint, and chili oil, would be a response to illness, medication, and aging - but it is my response in any case.

As I said at the end of a poem in the early 1990s: "it will be / white cinnamon, / sweet aloes."

Okay, let's have this tea, and get ready for the graduate student coming by to do an interview...