Late last night, after a day of getting some things done and some falling aside, looking for a book to take to bed: and I picked up the big collected poetry by Czeslaw Milosz.
A beautiful book – well, a book full of beautiful stuff – but really too large for a poetry book, even more ungainly than my collected Auden; I'm glad of everything that's in it, but it's hard to carry around.
(And so typical of me: I got rid of any books of his work that were duplicated in it, so now I can't carry around anything more portable. Like when I was complaining to Bennett in a bookstore the other day that I probably need to re-purchase all of Jane Austen, because the Penguin complete works I replaced them all with is in such tiny print as to be unreadable.)
Looking through the Milosz, almost anywhere in it, reading his vast wisdom and sensitivity to time and meaning – it was comforting, and brought me a certain clarity. Sleeping, I had a sense of myself between yesterday and today, between sleeping and waking; between my past stories about myself, and some possibility of a future. I even dreamt of possibilities of love – not really erotic, but more the intimate awareness of another person.
Today I got to work, a bit; had to handle things needed by other people, watched a student DVD (of a country-western musical, of all things) and agreed on a mark for it. Later at night, I was making lists of different books and CDs needed to write different chapters on the book about music and AIDS – and thinking, it feels endless: there are so many bits of things here, so many downloaded web pages, so many pieces I only know a little bit about, so many possible links and bits of information I haven't found yet, or at all. And so very many pieces I'm planning on writing about – have I set an impossible task for myself? Or at least a task that it isn't possible to do well?
Talked to Mitchell, cheered up, calmed down: that Miloszian sense of being suspended across time led, metaphorically, to a feeling of being suspended among all of these works – and a sense of being untroubled, of having plenty to say, without troubling to worry about saying the perfect thing, the final thing, the only thing (which is, in any case, impossible).
Like a brief vision of what it is like – might be like – will be like? – to be 'in the zone' with writing this book: to be aware of all the possible things to remember, and float among them, easily....
So: the book has a future. And I, maybe, have a future: Milosz has successfully reminded me of that....
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