Haecceity

Running the bike trail, thinking of Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" and the abyss between generations. A man with white hair ahead, separate in his solitude. Beside him perhaps his daughter, who reminds me of Ruma. She is trying to cross the divide, but their love isn't enough. On my headphones begins this song.

While running at daybreak

Sometimes from airplanes glancing the clouds: small figures. Too far to discern color or feature, they walked the wisps slowly, all nonchalance. If they saw him tiny in his window, they'd wave. He thought these clouds were a good place to dwell, away from earthbound fears or metalled anxieties, but he knew their consistency was not his.

Weights and pulleys / Feathers hit the ground

Construction's whir and warm wind, open window. My door is closed, and I could be gone from this earth. I am reading Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, and so much of the book is right, narratives of interruption and story's deep love. This line though

To experience we have to imagine; imagination is consciousness struggling to gain sovereignty over its experience

must be wrong. I rewrite the words in the margin:
To imagine we have to experience; imagination unloosens the sovereignty of consciousness over experience.

Good bye to the 6 month house

Moving

Our last night in the Six Month House.

We walked to our favorite Indian restaurant, Masala Art. Over pakoras and lentil dumplings we chose favorite memories of our adventure here: the winter snow without end, and the city closing; our neighbor William who screams HELLO!!! every time he spots us, with a joy as if years have passed; our porch and the games we played; being together in a house we made our own.

Our sadness: Scooby died before she could move back home with us.

Rain, road / Sous la pluie

Friday and the rain is steady. Smudge of red brake lights, and the sun not nearly risen. I think of Katherine and Alex, snug. They'll be up soon, and they'll wonder at my not being there. Routine will resume with its comforts, and off to school. The radio tells of Jack Kerouac, ti Jean, born in Lowell et chez lui on parle a type of French Joual. English was school language, open door and the road ... but in Mexico On the Road was Sur le Chemin, a manuscript of mishearing.


So here I sit, garage, head full of misremembered French and a sister in Lowell whose baby is coming. She was supposed to learn Spanish but her father is dead. Here I sit, office, and I wonder about this Latin account and its murders and the record in Hebrew. Morning not silent but grey.

Chanson de Roland has never found its English beauty. I asked my student to translate Roland's death into poetry. She would have preferred Chinese or Japanese but the poem would have been lost to me. I've pinned her "he sees a split self" to my wall, next to Alex's vision of God's breath and earth still dark.

The ideation of small things

A changing in season

Waiting for Henry V

The Emperor Crosses the River to Visit His Own Son

I.
William of Newburgh says that when the emperor forded for a land he did not know, his companions complained: risk of treacherous waters. Yet the emperor wanted a son's company. The water was treacherous, and the plunge took his horse. For days the royal corpse was lost. The waves were ignorant of the respect due imperial dignity. That's William, and a laugh.

Or the emperor may have wanted to bathe, the day being hot. The lapping current was not so timid as it seemed. The emperor vanished either way, and became for William a moral of inscrutability. A judgment is here, but I do not know of what.

II.
Folding laundry and thinking of the son at the riverbank. This yellow towel with a monster's head: hers, whom I love. After every bath she folds herself in yellow skin, a ceaseless terrycloth terror. I'd cross a river for her company. I'd chance becoming someone else's moral.

I know the world does not work like this. The towel could be empty in my hands, always empty in my hands, and me here, wondering what river carried her away.

the lengthening of the days

lost tooth

Each time a tooth loosens in Katherine's mouth, each time some fragment of her baby self dislodges and makes itself a gift, she places the piece of bone under her pillow and passes a restless night. She waits for wings or small lights, or maybe a bell. She waits to know if this part of her is worth a coin, or a book, or some magic, something to make a loss desired.

Yaakov / A Hole in the Sky

bubble and squeak

We are a family without strong food traditions, having inherited few and rejecting most of them. Tonight's dinner, cooked for a dinner guest from Israel: vegetarian bubble and squeak (British), spicy oyster, button and portabello mushrooms (Chinese), palmiers with fresh berries (French). Many of our dinners come from cookbooks like 1000 Vegetarian Recipes. We cook them once, then wander onwards to other tastes.

in a Chevy Chase coffee shop

as if we needed the reminder

As if we needed the reminder that
the world can at 4:53 fall in shards and
slabs, take to dust a school
(children at a blackboard, children at their desks).
As if we needed again that postcard
from above that he was elsewhere, that
he didn't see that corpse we're watching on the news
or the baby who died still waiting or
even the orphanage, now gone, and the director
and his children, gone, rubble.

reoriented

First faculty meeting in three and half years in which the chair at the table's head was not mine.

trouble being present

Each morning when I run the hill at Tenley looms, makes me weary even before its slope impends. One morning familiar fatigue hit just at its start, by the VW dealership where a sale is perpetual. I braced myself, but vanished into thoughts of days to come. When I arrived at the Metro station that is the hill's end I couldn't remember space in between.

Too many days have become Tenley hills, swift movement and vague memory and no world better for having lived within it. Trouble being present.

a small tradition

When someone begins a course of study with me (not in a large class, but in the intimacy of independent study), I give them on the first day a clementine. The gift marks the commencement of our learning together, and learning together is sweet.