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Tonight, though, after all.
This morning I freaked out on M and had to go take a walk, at first I thought I was going to where the big trees grow, next to the Federal building, but I kept going and was turning around the corner of St. John’s Episcopal. Of course. A church; and, just like Christ the King, a courtyard.
Christ the King is a church and school that I used to pass all the time, walking or riding my bike down Belmont Boulevard in Nashville. I took Belmont to get downtown and to get groceries at a little neighborhood grocery store across the street from Christ the King’s sports field. One of the first secret places of beauty I discovered in Nashville — still a freshman — I walked up and there was a walkway going back into a memorial garden, with maples surrounding and flowers filling. A fountain had a Thomas Merton quote inscribed on it, if I remember correctly, and I would go and sit there for an hour to regain sanity. A weather-stained statue of Mary and child Jesus stood under a huge, half-dying oak.
I feel as if I’m betraying a secret, talking about these places in such a public place. Secret places are necessary, for me, even if I rarely see them and they are preserved in inaccurate memory. So I think St. John’s courtyard steps into my life in a time when I needed another secret place so much, a still place in the city, with a labyrinth (which I walked, oh it stills the soul) and great bushes of myrtles and bleeding hearts and rosemary.
What Rilke says about solitude is true, that a great function of friendships is to guard each others’ solitude, since solitude is such a powerful place for God to speak. Which brings Kierkegaard to mind, and what he says about the individual having to stand alone before God. Tonight is growing slowly into tomorrow and I had to write these down. Just some thoughts.
What a gorgeous day. Dawning so bright, so bright. Today I pulled the curtains, took a shower, cut my hair, made biscuits, peered at Brittany’s lustrous ring, finally vanquished the confused tomatoes, tore up the nasty old vines next to my back porch, and planted my birthday-present bulbs (Alpine Bells, Dainty Dutch irises and Angelique tulips) (thanks, Mom and Dad) in the tomato beds and in the bed next to the Dear Spot. THEN! I studied for the GRE, making lists of important points and vocabulary words, and feeling the chills of excitement. I like taking standardized tests, not because I’m a minion of the machine, but just because I’ve learned how to do it. And I feel like I just want to take the practice test NOW.
By the way, does anyone know which phrase refers to the act of pulling a curtain aside to let in light: “pull the curtain” or “draw the curtain”? I’ve always been confused about this, and now that I’m taking the GRE — well!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, of course. As I always do. Sometimes I think it is terrible, contains monsters, or death and decay, sometimes I think it is full of warmth and light. The latter lived mostly in high school … the former is living mostly these days. I drove to Marshall’s parents’ house with him last night, as his grandmother was in from Phoenix and all the Knoxville family was coming over for dinner, and felt like I was hurtling into space. I wasn’t sure anything was going to be ok. I know this is normal for people in my position, but even normal things are sometimes horrible. I’m coming back to a kind of equilibrium today, today all full of a kind of peace I didn’t even think to ask for. The kind I ought to have gotten up in the middle of the night to pray for, before I got.
I’m getting further and further from the fear of love, too. I was thinking about this this morning, how it’s not dangerous to love, it’s just dangerous to live more with yourself than with God. Everything that happens when you love someone has the potential to become beautiful, if you’re patient. I want to put a Rilke quote up here about patience and love and living. I would someday like to have become a patient person.
I’m getting ready to put together a portfolio of poems. If anybody wants to help me sift & proofread, let me know.
1. I was awakened, night before last, at about 4am to the sound of very loud scratchings at the wall next to my head, which had been asleep on my pillow heretofore. The rats are now climbing in the wall above the kitchen sink and about level with my bed. Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard scratchings and walkings and shufflings in the wall above the windows facing into the backyard. The rats are now climbing underneath the siding and swimming through the insulation, toward me, in my bed, to burst out of the wall and attack my face. What a thrill!
2. I’m making a spreadsheet of grad school information, and (shocking!) the University of Missouri is at least leading UTK. All these hoity-toity MFA programs (“full funding is offered to all students admitted” and “ten students are accepted per year” and “solid gold laptops given to first-year students” etc.) are a bit discouraging, and a sound MA w/emphasis in writing could really be very, very fun. I miss studying literature anyway, and Scott Cairns teaches at Missouri. Thoughts.
3. Pumpkin scones, today.
4. I’m going to start yoga. I used to want to be this graceful thing, this little dancer whose body swept along in long, shallow curves. I used to want to dance so much. This is something that I’ve given up hope for, but I can at least have graceful moments, like on a yoga mat.
5. I’m reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and it’s as gentle a source of wisdom as I’ve ever known. I hope it will change me.
6. Me and Marshall hiked the Chimney Tops the other day, and got to sit on top of the world and see the colors creeping up. Far too many dead trees… but there were UT orange ones, crimson ones, and frozen rivers of still-green ones on the valley floors. This old man from Maryville or perhaps an original Gatlinburger had to tell everybody what he knew about it all, which was Siler’s Bald and where Pigeon Forge is and how you have all these teenagers who come up and get tired and turn around a quarter mile from the top! I mean, you’re not gettin your money’s worth if you don’t come own up here! A chipmunk almost sat in my lap.
— later —
7. I’m taking the GRE on November 11th, 9a.m., THAT’S IN TWO WEEKS, OMG EFFING EFF.
Julian of Norwich, medieval anchorite, has been something like a dear friend for more than five years, now. I discovered her while reading a neighboring Margery Kempe excerpt in a Norton Anthology and I still remember the urgency and eternity of that moment, much like the moment I was listening to an Innocence Mission song and realized that it was a G. M. Hopkins poem. Julian: late at night leaning over the desk in my dorm room, underlining every “all shall be most well,” copying passages into my journal; Innocence Mission: Carla’s “Befriended” on Carla’s stereo & me running across the white-carpeted room to turn it up. Marriages of these loves of mine are things that make the beauty of living hard to believe, in spite of everything.
This morning I pulled out this little magenta paperback, “Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich,” and took it with me on a walk. With some tea. I slept later than I wanted to, and the weight of my life — the sense of it no less than the confusion — seemed very heavy and I wanted to hear just one word, one secret that would be alongside. I read this: “He lays upon every one he longs to bring into his bliss something that is no blame in his sight, but for which they are blamed and despised in this world — scorned, mocked and cast out. He does this to offset the harm they should otherwise have from the pomp and vainglory of this earthly life, and to make their road to him easier” (55).
The language is archaic, but the idea here, that there are heavy things we’re carrying that God brought/allowed in order to “make our road to him easier,” this is unarchaic, this is a piece of eternity. I was walking on a bridge when I read this and am reading it still, in my mind, and the hours are passing. I think she means self-contempt every bit as much as other sorts, and the idea that I’m my own outcast more often than anyone else’s informs my understanding of it, too: for this reason (making the road to God easier) I’m allowed a propensity toward self-accusation. Isn’t that amazing. And it does make my road to him easier,
which road, for me, is desperate persistence. Sometimes desperation without persistence, sometimes persistence without desperation: God is kind to people who don’t know to be desperate and don’t care to be persistent. Me being in both categories. And having known that kindness. Just a thought that I had when I was writing an email to you, Katie.
I’ve brought the laptop and five-subject notebook to Panera to do some real work on this World Lit syllabus, this morning, and as I’m getting cut off from the internet and condemning the Panera Big Bosses to everlasting waiting-room limbo with laptops + no wireless networks (harsh, but I feel strongly), I hear conversation from the next table over. These are girls from some high school soccer team, navy jerseys, long straight hair, and the talker of the four of them is saying that she had this bump under her tongue two days ago, and after it went away two more came back. Is this normal, and can you be very aware that this is happening to me, oh my god, etc. This after an animated conversation about boys, the specifics of which both eluded me and are always with me, since you can never forget these high school dramas. But more interesting even than these is the small dark one next to her, black plastic straw in her mouth, still brown eyes, silent and thinking a thousand thoughts.
I’m looking at her as she stares out the window and remembering my younger life, that brief catapult, how I was so bored with things corporeal because the structures of Life were just beginning to gather momentum, to gather names.
I want to run a record of my life, so that when I’m fifty-five and the kids have left and I’m walking into the study every morning and looking at my journals, thinking about who I have become, I will have some kind of answer for the question that someone will ask: “So what have you figured out?” If I am as confused about life then as I am now, I will be both disappointed and relieved: so there was something I understood all along. If I can document the confusion and the strange and beautiful structures that come slowly lifting out of it, then I will have made a kind of sense out it, and if there’s anything I can do to make sense, I will. Do you remember that feeling that there were larger things in existence than you had heard of, yet? Do you remember losing that feeling to another one, that the only things in existence were relics of other people’s religions, shrunken heads or patterns of words? I’m writing it all down. Maybe someday when I’m paying attention I’ll realize how many of these things were on-purpose.
In the meantime, miserably dull things, like being miserable that anyone is thriving since I am not. That anyone is buying cheese since I am not. But I’m writing this down, too, since the structures of life are relaxing into webs and sinews instead of bones and ridges and all the names I find for their forks, elbows, doglegs, are becoming obsolete. Finding better names is mostly losing the most unworkable ones, right now, and that’s ok. Somehow this backward movement is actually forward, counter-intuitively, and gathering a breath, again, of momentum.
I’m rebinding books today, and binding some that haven’t yet been bound. all this on the porch, where the mosquitoes are still taking their midday nap and I’m kind of watching, just watching things happen. there was this awful, terrible stray cat who was having a crouch-off with the little homey striped grey cat that lives across the street, and I had to run over and chase it away. it was yowling in the weirdest way, like a baby crying, and I kept having the dreadful feeling that a cat-rape was about to happen. but now the homey cat is safe. (for now … the terrible cat will live & prowl forever.) so this is what it’s like living in the city…
most days I’m home alone all day, but today I went to KC Leatherwerks and Jerry’s Artarama to get stuff I needed for rebinding Randy’s bible and Liesl’s novel. the rest of the day is falling down like a flight of stairs; those steps there are about working on Katie Gray & Emily’s Box of Treasure, those there are about working on Liesl & Rosa’s World Lit syllabus, and those right there are me checking my Global Seeds email to see if grant stuff is moving along. last year I imagined I would be where Claire (my roommate) is, almost, working on my master’s at UT, money in money out, sometimes writing papers and sometimes writing poems, lots of times writing letters to friends about how I’m doing great, everything’s so great, I love school. I think yesterday and today, all of it, from beginning to end, is about letting God write my life.
you throw the worst fits in times like these, because you feel you’re being treated so unjustly. and God is about justice, so there’s such a chasm of thought that can’t be bridged, how to get from the injustice of your life to the justice of God creating your life.
and the two best moments in this entire week of alternately throwing hate mail down the chasm and trying to act like I could care less about the chasm were these: the moment after I quit throwing the Big Tantrum yesterday, which was me letting God be the author of my life, and the moment last night when it was very still and oil-lamplit and I told Marshall about it. because sometimes it’s as horrid for him as it is for me, when I’m feeling horrid & unwilling to let go of my sense of fairness. and it’s nicer than anyone can say, to lean on someone’s shoulder and tell them about a moment of peace.
the memory of which is v. v. good, right now. Christ will bring opportunities, open doors that I can recognize and unsteadily go through, and my life has never been like this before. so I can have mercy on myself, a little, too.
I usually resist the urge to write blogs in the morning, because the morning is new and by the end of the day whatever I wrote seems impossibly obselete. It’s 9:12, though, and there are things I have to say before they become obselete, or (if this is actually truer) before I become dusty and old.
I’m coming back into some kind of beauty, and I have no idea why. For months I’ve felt either crowded or empty, too much with people or too little, and the fields in my soul have been mown with tractors, leaving sharp stubble, no flowers, etc. But I’ve been reading some of Franz Wright’s new prose, I’ve been finishing Moby Dick, I’ve been grabbing something like the sleeve of God and have been following Him around sometimes with my face upward, upward. Being-in-a-relationship is of course nothing like I expected and now that I’m beginning to calm down about it, about my new roommates settling in, about rent and the other four bills sitting in a stack over there, about God in fact still being interested in my life, I’m seeing this mown inner field growing longer, it’s tender blades now, they’re starting to ripple in the breeze and those are swallows falling through.
I was reading Beuchner this morning and wondered if I would someday be able to write with that sort of transparency, the strong poetic language trying very hard to make something besides itself clear. That’s incredible, it’s almost like what I mean when I say I want the signifier to lead inexorably to the signified. I love style, but the self-conscious opacity of people like Melville (so far) is unsatisfying, so unsatisfying that reading these Beuchner excerpts is like getting the walls and roof taken off your room while you’re sitting there, typing on your computer. They come off with a rushing of air and suddenly you’re outdoors, blue sky overhead. It’s surgical, almost like all good poetry, prying at the artificialness or scar tissue of that one room in your heart.
Anyway, I’m starting the day with coffee, Starbuck’s dark roast that’s been sitting in the cabinet for maybe a year (still good!), with another shortening scone, yellow lamplight, yellow flowers, blue blue garrett and everything either in stacks or bouquets and letters from my sisters on the table. I am not lonely, this morning. I have days that begin with a makeshift hopefulness and then run into the ground, and I have days in which I remember something true in the morning and write it on my arm so that I’ll know what to do when I get lost. Which I will. God, like a parent in the mall, writing down His information on my arm so that I remember who I belong to when I run away and am accosted by strangers.
a trip could be planned, a trip away, since the days are getting cooler and the trees are starting to change, only just starting. you have all these thoughts about getting away, how everyone else is getting away and even the birds are migrating. you see the geese, now, and I think those are starlings that are starting to fan out in huge flocks over fields, on and off phone lines, curving into boomerangs and brushing the mapletops, weaving, waving.
I was in college when I saw my first flock of cedar waxwings, the same semester Jonathan wrote a sonnet mentioning waxwings, the same semester I was editing Exordium and had a staff of six. these are things no one here knows, and I could fill a hot air balloon with everything and let it go and no one would know. because of this & things similar, I live in houses of words because I hope that things that are impossible to say can somehow be said. you have dreams of the wind blowing through your hair or the sun setting over something but my dreamworld is a place where the signifier leads inexorably to the signified and you understand what I mean to say. in all the webs between, the lines being restrung twice a week, I wish silently that a method can be found to tell you what I’m saying, or to be told what you are saying, the pith of it, the center of all the trebly-shifting variables, the place the real arrow is pointing.
the clouds; hills covered with trees; color gradients; the rise and fall of the shuddering cicada song like someone breathing, in sleep: not even nature is direct. it’s as if words don’t ease or further complicate things. it’s as if the spikes, the racemes, the panicles are not signifying any more or less particularly than my five hundred words. if the thing to be understood was a sign, less than a division of a word but covering in its single skin the whole of what you were trying to say, and if things were organized here such that leaves were never bipinnate and you were never torn between two opposing metaphors, would anything be better?
After feeling a little insane for a couple of days, I’m back online. I don’t have anything to make this post cohesive except that I don’t feel insane anymore and want to write things, tons of things, thing having to do with this city and my soul and people I see around. My new roommate, Claire of Polish stock from Lille, locked the wrong lock today (because I forgot to tell her which one was working) and Marshall (providentially there) had to climb in a window to get the door open. And this is after somebody stole the lock off the bike she was riding. This is frustrating, and I hope her first year French students don’t make her hate Knoxville.
Joel came by to say hi after having dropped off the face of the planet for a couple of months and sat in my kitchen, talking about how he was wasting time and didn’t want to become like the guys he hangs around with, who are thirty years older than him and still wasting time. He’s going to try to get into a community college in the spring and then go to UT for law school prep. He’s always wanted to do this, he said, and what he’s doing now is “getting really old.” He’s so long, so big, he just kind of drapes over whatever chair he’s in and talks sometimes into a corner of the room and sometimes into your face with those bright blue eyes. I’ve missed him. And this talking made me three minutes late for my interview, which means the Lord God will have to speak to this woman about me, because I suck at interviews and wish I could do things the right way, once.
Now I’m doing some things at Java and have pizza dough rising in the window at home. I’m going to bake the dough rounds, cover them with ricotta, basil leaves, sliced cherry and sun-gold tomatoes from Annette across the street, and Emily, here is your Coincedence walking her bike up the sidewalk, looking cuter than I’ve ever seen her look. I wish my complexion was like that, brown but evenly rosy with heat or exercise … instead of just white or red, always freckled. Since the thunderstorm things are picking up and rushing off away, blue sky and sunlight here again, heat here again after that cold wind. Today is a day I’m going to not be anxious, then. I’ve been reading the sermon on the mount and can a person believe?
Natalie is flying to Wales in two days. Wales, and I am reading about whales, the humpback, razorback, sperm and narwhal, almost two hundred pages into Moby Dick and being shocked that people used to do this, go out in clumsy wooden boats and stab at whales with long pointy spears. And kill them. Harpooneers. I hope that something I do will amaze some great-grandchild someday. I hope to do something someday that lasts.
since I have a new roommate moving in on Sunday or Monday, and I have the whole house to myself till then, I’m cleaning in my old white-and-grey-clothes. the only things that have been left undone have been the things I did today, already, while the sun is high in the sky, and those are: cleaning the bathroom floor and the bathtub, with baking soda, which works better than any other cleaner…EVERY TIME. it’s just gross, is all. you can get over that, especially if you’re a responsible and mature adult, which I am. so the tub is clean, clean, has a new plug for those who take baths, and I just got done bleaching the shower curtain, which had been speckled and spattered with mildew and some kind of pinkish bacteria or mold or something. you stop up the bathtub, run in water, pour in bleach, and soak the curtain for a while … and when you come in, several hours later, sweep the floor (oh so white and lovely!) and start to pull the shiny white curtain up out of the water, everything pale and shimmery with the sunlight coming in the window, you remember your mother, how she had to have things clean, did things like rearrange furniture for no reason, and soak the shower curtain in bleach in the bathtub. you realize you could turn into a mother. a thought, for sure.
anyways, whatever, and you stand in the bathroom admiring everything in the world, and the roofer hammering on the roof knocks another piece of ceiling onto the floor and it shatters into a hundred dusty bits. alas! out with the broom again! where is justice!
Katie Gray is in Nashville and on her way to NYC again, having left baba gannoush, falafel, watermelon, an apple, an orange, two kiwi, and memories of herself all over my house. this is one of the best women you will meet, and you may meet her, because she is here to meet the world. and conquer. I do love her, I do, and everyone does, and I WILL go to Brooklyn to meet her in the spring. it’s interesting that Marshall’s friend Jason came in this weekend, too, on his way somewhere else far away. Katie is one of my few Nashville friends, one of the few who ever lived with me there and is still a bosom friend. my other life, the school life, the one that nobody knows but a few, the one I miss a lot. she reminds me of the times we sat on my bed in my dorm room, the times we had sushi in Hillsboro Village, the times I was sad and she dropped flowers in my well. oh, man. and now I’m living in the future, the days we couldn’t (any of us) have predicted, and we see visions of us in greys and browns, being refined in the deserts and coming back with singing.
