As teaching ended last Friday, I am putting myself back together, after what felt like three months of scrambling to keep up.
And yes, I know that there are many people in the world – more energetic, harder-working – who would have been easily able to keep up with what felt like a heavy teaching load, and various demands pulling at me. But I am, as you must know by now, not one of those people.
I'm trying to focus on ruthlessly hacking my way through the great, dark forest of unfinished research – these things must be done: the Jarman article (with all its identification with grief and death), the graphic scores article, the Meredith Monk article, and of course the Stäbler collection.
Mentally this does not seem impossible: of course I procrastinate too much, but life in the gap between the end of the semester and Christmas, and the New Year, and exams, is quiet; and though I had promised myself I would travel, that never got arranged, somehow. So I will stay home, and perhaps during Easter vacation will go with Thomas, and perhaps Rumana if she can come, to Firenze, or Venezia (indulgence!).
Perhaps. Or instead study for my second set of exams in Zürich...
But after two days of a virus last Monday and Tuesday (and I somehow got through a birthday dinner, the preparation of a lecture, the two-hour lecture itself, and a reading for a celebratory Cage concert, while the damned thing took hold), I am weirdly weak: even a week later I am bumping into things, my legs are shaky, I don't want to stand up...
And I am frequently, disconnectedly sad: not depressed exactly, but apparently always aware of time and loss and distance. I'm sure these seem to be my usual feelings (I would apologize to more optimistic readers of this blog, but then it's not up to them, is it?); but what feels noticeable this time is (1) the distinct and literal presence of the emotion, not connected to events or things read or seen; and (2) the sense that all these feelings are floating, strong and deep but invisible, just below the surface of consciousness.
As though the past is present, but not in a literal or clearly outlined form: just the clouds of feelings that have arisen from loss and disappointment, floating free of their origins...
Strange. Not awful, but strange. A winter space where the distinction between past and present, between real and imagined, is not particularly important....
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