The Chosen Ones
I bought a Bible this week. I'm getting a second when King James comes back to Book Haven. Stole one from a hotel once, but that was to quote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and had nothing to do with a desire for the text. I got gifted half of one by Central Synagogue on my Bat Mitzvah, but buying The New Jerusalem Bible with footnotes aggressively interpreting the familiar testament in terms of the new, reading mixed verb tenses as signs of the trinity, and inserting Jesus on top of Moses is an interesting, strange step.
Mondays, Wednesdays I wake with European Intellectual and Cultural History in the 20th Century at the rational hour of 10:30. Then Major English Poets with Satan and Annabel, my Milton heroes. The Bible as Literature, taught for 26 years by a little, lovely, and startling Jewish man, completes the day. Tuesdays, Thursdays I twirl through philosophy and philosophy for English majors, Ethics and Lit Theory. Mind struggles to mine crystallized objects, something to hold onto from the lectures. Want to only connect class to class, theory to theory. Or to just spot off some fixed point. Yesterday I came out of the turn of my morning classes spinning, dizzy and delighted. Walked out of Linsly Chit, home to me and three classes this semester, into the fog. Yale was hemmed in close and murky as mind. Kline Biology had disappeared. All the silhouettes of Science Hill were missing. Appropriate omen for the semester. On the other side of the Old Campus, my old dorm was a ghost. Harkness Tower rose and retreated beyond the reach of sight, the top only a myth in the haze. Dazed by discursivity and the hermeneutics of suspicion, I didn't doubt the possibility anything could emerge from the fairytale fog. Going to enjoy this mysterious cloud-pole of uncertainty with lightning flashes of lucidity that disappear justlikethat but leave behind a changed atmosphere.
And did you notice? Friday's freed. No class. For the first and only ever. Fighting to schedule my three sections on other days. Elvis Costello, welcome to the four-day working week!
Mondays, Wednesdays I wake with European Intellectual and Cultural History in the 20th Century at the rational hour of 10:30. Then Major English Poets with Satan and Annabel, my Milton heroes. The Bible as Literature, taught for 26 years by a little, lovely, and startling Jewish man, completes the day. Tuesdays, Thursdays I twirl through philosophy and philosophy for English majors, Ethics and Lit Theory. Mind struggles to mine crystallized objects, something to hold onto from the lectures. Want to only connect class to class, theory to theory. Or to just spot off some fixed point. Yesterday I came out of the turn of my morning classes spinning, dizzy and delighted. Walked out of Linsly Chit, home to me and three classes this semester, into the fog. Yale was hemmed in close and murky as mind. Kline Biology had disappeared. All the silhouettes of Science Hill were missing. Appropriate omen for the semester. On the other side of the Old Campus, my old dorm was a ghost. Harkness Tower rose and retreated beyond the reach of sight, the top only a myth in the haze. Dazed by discursivity and the hermeneutics of suspicion, I didn't doubt the possibility anything could emerge from the fairytale fog. Going to enjoy this mysterious cloud-pole of uncertainty with lightning flashes of lucidity that disappear justlikethat but leave behind a changed atmosphere.
And did you notice? Friday's freed. No class. For the first and only ever. Fighting to schedule my three sections on other days. Elvis Costello, welcome to the four-day working week!
