Mind Candy

Yesterday, James Dean fell off my wall twice. Pages of paper curled and just breathing wrung water drops out of the air to condensce on surface of skin. After the rain, the day was heavier and the thick medium of Wednesday required extra enthalpy to move through. First day of classes. Which were brilliant. Absolutely lustrous despite dulling atmosphere. I think I smiled for an hour and fifteen minutes. Neurobiology was illuminating itself but also backlit by glow of summer research. Taught by two professors, the lecturer of yesterday, Haig Keshishian, was terrific. He's leaving us for a month with a teacher who's just decent, but the material will make up for any flaws in the tailor, hopefully. Then the afternoon, a two hour seminar. Romantic literature and painting. The professor gave the best lecture I have ever sat for at Yale last year and I was excited to see how he workied in section. Apparently others were curious too. There were sixty signatures on a page for twenty places in the seminar. Fry announced first priority would be accorded to junior English majors. And finally, I felt perfect. I am not a sophmore, not a non-major trying to squeeze in. I am completely qualified. And that is how I knew it was going to be our year.

A note on the blog's temporary disappearance

Hibernation or hiding. Or it was August and all civilized French flee the city, so I flew from recording or writing in this sparsely populated town. It was neither that nothing happened nor too much occurred to untangle and set down with no time to sit down and unwind. I did not want to blog. I did not want anything. What I thought I wanted. Went from "I want you to want me," a convoluted construction to describe a simple desire, to I want not to want you, to I want not to want. And August I got my wish. I wanted nothing but will. So afraid of being irredeemably incomplete, I needed to need nobody to know I was whole. Somehow not wanting seemed only way to signify I was enough on my own, even when kicked out of the garden, parted from Paris, paradise. And in this biblical parody, lost parity and patience were price of eating the apple cheese. Indigestion didn't hit till I stopped also eating the antidote, the comfort food of Paris' beauty. In cramped New York, overwhelmed by the wideness and depth of my nakedness embodied in the wish, I became Nietzsche's modern man, denying the will to want, which gives us not the right to make promises but is given by the right to existence, to take up space, take in air, take in a movie, take a class. Take and give, give and take like two neurons wired and oscillating back and forth, like the firm soil and the watery main. This moment I am the oscillator, swinging so fast between self sufficiency and want of another that it seems I am simultaneously happily myself and hopeful of possibility of melding with some one else. It might be all illusion. By a fly's sight, fed 200 images a second, experiences last longer and I might appear to alternate, stutter, and stay at each idea a fraction of a second till nostalgia for self-reliance or romance pulls me to the other pole. But by a human visual cortex only understanding 30 frames, it looks like I concurrently might want my wishes without being diminished by having them.

Coming About

The year is coming about like the boat in New York harbor after Dad emptied his father's ashes into the water. The wreath followed and Booker rang the ship's bell eight times. "Watch's over. All's well," he said according to custom of the merchant marines he and Denison separately served in during WWII. This was last week. A turning, but a much more solemn one. This direction change is decisive but different, opposite, a celebration. No mourning of summer. No desire to stretch August out, pull the legs of the gullible days till they believed the season wouldn't change, till time was taller between me and a Horace Mann September start. The month didn't hurry either, though it's happy to turn towards school.

The year is coming to be about college. Post-Paris and my second summer at Einstein, high school, capped by a coda, finally feels sealed and put away in a box on a shelf in my closet. Fond of photos and tickets stubs, saved scraps of past, touchstones of memories (mine), I like that the box exists. I like knowing it's there like nineteen years are there, objects hung on my body, not ornaments on a tree, but clothes. They're not embalmed, the years or the memories. They'll slowly decay, diminish or become decadent with dust. But dry, tied up on a top shelf, I doubt they'll fester. And while I like seeing it sitting there, owning it, I don't want to go back. There's no future in that. The boat has come about. My saucy bark is Yale-bound. Bound to college, fact and place I'm supposed to be at. Along the turn, buoys been helpful markers of change. Turmoil's taken multiple forms. By metempsychosis, the soul of summer's end has blown through moving boxes, a Yankee game - the best thank you present for summer lab work, and learning to ride a bike.

It's just like riding a bike. Never a cliché I liked. To me the antecedent always corresponded to scrapes, bruises, and a beating by a menacing simple machine. But because of a logistical incarnation of the problem of split interests, I wheeled a bike out of the shed of the country house and ended up in a ditch. The bike ended upside down against a white wooden fence. The cause I considered from the ditch was the approach of classes. It looked like Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies and Principles of Biochemistry were separated by a ten minute interlude to take in the distance between Linsly Chittendon on Old Campus and Sterling Chemistry at the top of science hill, a fifteen minute walk. I needed to take both classes. I declared I would learn to ride a bike in one week in August. And like driving, I was fine in the parking lot. (I might be the only person to simultaneously learn to drive and ride a bike.) But a terror of traffic flipped me off and acquainted me with the incline of a particular Route 42 ditch. The back road was better. Cars carefully skirted around a biker with a determined face. Gradually grip on handlebars eased and coasting down through the valley, I almost appreciated why people might get on a bike of their own volition. But thankfully biochem decided to take a lower seat on science hill and I can feasibly make it without two-wheeled aid. Meaning I'm giving up biking, again, with one more knee scrape and a spectacular black bruise on the top inside of my thigh. Like Odysseus's scar, a physical marker of identity embedded in flesh, indentation and contusion branding story of this struggle into body. But they're better than being drawn and quartered by divergent desires for explanations of being human. "Science of English, which do you really love?" they asked me repeatedly at the neuroscience lab. The question does not have to be solved now, on the eve of classes. I came home from a candlelit poetry séance and I'm waking to a first neurobiology course tomorrow. Hopefully, I won't ever have to answer the question.