Wild Weekends, Weak Wills and Knees to the Gut
It's Sunday, doomsday to holiday, and the bells of the ten o'clock masses are ringing religion. Room mates return to watch their other gods go to the superbowl. If every day were holiday, to sport would be as tedious as to work. My Sunday worship is to work. We've had enough sport, sported with enough emotion, sported hearts on sleeves too often. Active forgetting is the answer. Do you remember that Billy Collins poem? It's not the one where he undresses Emily Dickinson, scary thought, I don't want to see what's underneath her clothes of damn dashes, or the sonnet where Petrarch strips those crazy medieval tights, or not another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house, although I like that one. Not the one that goes, "Bare branches in winter are a form of writing. The unclothed body is autobiography." Though the branches do look like lines scribbled on a blank page and beneath the blankets, undercover, the frigid world hides its identity, waits to warm up, thaw out, and throw back the sheets of snow to show itself blushing in cherry blossoms and naked crocuses, the organs of its reproduction. And it's not even, though it could be because of the line "and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened," it's not even that one with the egg salad stains, Marginalia. Nostalgia is the one (did you forget?) I was looking for.
Been reading all day. In my mind thinking the thoughts of someone else. Reading, my own individuality supposedly receding into the background, but I do not disappear completely. Still between the lines of Mill, Milton, Gide, and Iser, there is space for fields of emptiness. I fill in the blanks. Weaving myself between the lines, I tie sequent sentences together and tie them off to my experience. Iser says reading is recreation. Sex of a sort where writer and reader birth this other complete with its own conciousness. Lying in bed, between the sheets of a book, we forget, tangled together, who we are. Overtaken, penetrated by an alien thought, the text becomes our present while own ideas fade into the past. But I am too much with me late and soon. I am all hippocampus, a memory. And it is immediately obvious how there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no PRESENT, without forgetfulness. I am the dyspeptic. When will I ever digest and be done?
I've given my loneliness a name. Painted a word on the void. It's not a very good one. But how could Adam know transparent was too thick with letters to describe the concept or rose was too hard a name for sweet, tender petals? He didn't have it figured out on the sixth day. Just because it's about my seven thousandth doesn't mean I write the right word, afix the appropriate sign, screw the right sound on the idea. What I do know is this. Loneliness is a hole in my stomach crying to be filled with letters, some symbol. Man is an idea, and a precious small idea at that, a closet I've called a house and want to crawl inside. The plans are not structually sound. Got to build my memory palace on new ground. Not in the shifting drama of this weekend but in firm soil won of the watery main, Shakespeare, of live life to the point of tears, Camus again, I'm erecting my monument to the memory of the will. At no point will I tear it down. Nietzsche promises me memory of the will will give me the right to make promises. Promising myself that when, as usual, I think about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water, I will think a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess. Thank you, Billy.
Been reading all day. In my mind thinking the thoughts of someone else. Reading, my own individuality supposedly receding into the background, but I do not disappear completely. Still between the lines of Mill, Milton, Gide, and Iser, there is space for fields of emptiness. I fill in the blanks. Weaving myself between the lines, I tie sequent sentences together and tie them off to my experience. Iser says reading is recreation. Sex of a sort where writer and reader birth this other complete with its own conciousness. Lying in bed, between the sheets of a book, we forget, tangled together, who we are. Overtaken, penetrated by an alien thought, the text becomes our present while own ideas fade into the past. But I am too much with me late and soon. I am all hippocampus, a memory. And it is immediately obvious how there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no PRESENT, without forgetfulness. I am the dyspeptic. When will I ever digest and be done?
I've given my loneliness a name. Painted a word on the void. It's not a very good one. But how could Adam know transparent was too thick with letters to describe the concept or rose was too hard a name for sweet, tender petals? He didn't have it figured out on the sixth day. Just because it's about my seven thousandth doesn't mean I write the right word, afix the appropriate sign, screw the right sound on the idea. What I do know is this. Loneliness is a hole in my stomach crying to be filled with letters, some symbol. Man is an idea, and a precious small idea at that, a closet I've called a house and want to crawl inside. The plans are not structually sound. Got to build my memory palace on new ground. Not in the shifting drama of this weekend but in firm soil won of the watery main, Shakespeare, of live life to the point of tears, Camus again, I'm erecting my monument to the memory of the will. At no point will I tear it down. Nietzsche promises me memory of the will will give me the right to make promises. Promising myself that when, as usual, I think about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water, I will think a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess. Thank you, Billy.
