Future Lost Archive

rainy night dessert, Chevy Chase circle

2012-01-09T18:37:00.000-05:00

Shadow. New Year. Ash.

2012-01-08T13:38:00.000-05:00

Day of sun, restless cloud, chill. A family that walks together, said a neighbor: you know that old Catholic saying, something about prayer.

I'd found a bag of bulbs in the shed, twenty five late for planting. I couldn't say no. Objects, demands.

Too quick, and a blistered palm. I am sitting in this cold sun, thinking of resolutions from a year ago, thinking that this year brings no resolutions, thinking of the chill sunlight that comes from sitting in an empty yard.

satis

2011-11-01T18:25:00.002-04:00

A lunch like our many rituals: food and work talk, and family, and music. Four years now and into the fifth. I sometimes wonder if I am doing right, these purchased meals: what message? Who excluded? What return?

For once he doesn't finish and we are both surprised. Enough, and a fragment becomes a symbol, a message, but he doesn't see.

a sudden flux of creativity

2011-10-31T18:12:00.000-04:00

Propelled by wolves and beachwalks, have been writing. And fashioning.

Not my book, or not often enough my book, but somethings emerge.

Finicky muse, I hope you stay.

Luna undarum sive frigoris

2010-12-21T09:52:00.000-05:00

by J J Cohen

i. solstice
I didn't set my alarm, trusting body and the moon. 1:28 and sleep gone. Coat and gloves and a keen ice night. A moment and I have it, white circle in bare trees. A crescent of darkness slides its edge.

I am thinking of the oceans, lunar roil on my boyhood tongue: Mare Undarum, Mare Spumans, Mare Imbrium, Mare Ingenii, Mare Cognitum, Mare Nubium, Mare Insularum, Mare Frigoris, seas of waves of foam of showers of cleverness of the known of clouds of islands of cold. Oceanus Procellarum, ocean of ceaseless storms, but as still as any gray dust. Consult the atlas: frigid, arid, dead.

Before I knew Latin I knew the moon seas in their meanings. I knew the wet life of the moon, its tidal pull on our waves, on the water in our skins. Why shouldn't it have troubled rollers of its own?

Wendy came down from bed. We hugged in the cold, and I thought of waking the children, but it was late and they had school. Alone again, I took some pictures, luminous smears on vague black. My camera would not capture the shadow spreading lunar swells. The impossibility seemed just.

ii. maria
Run tempests travel umbra wind. Rhythm of words that pace with me. 5 and I am out again, running with the moon. My constant changeful companion. I romanticize that cold thing. Panpsychism, anthropomorphism, animism. The satellite is frozen and dry.

Lunar indifference cannot hold.

Winter's early mornings draw me, stay with me, even when their coldness hurts. Some clouds drift the low brightness, but it is good to see it round again. The shadow of the earth has passed. I run my circuit, alone but not solitary, thinking about Mandeville and the English star and wandering, of a year that has seen York and Berlin and Barcelona and Bayeux. I am thinking of a childhood haunted by oceans, by the promise of storm and tempest on the moon.

morning reading, snow delay

2010-12-17T06:46:00.001-05:00

the books that stir us most

2010-12-12T11:49:00.001-05:00

Is this not indeed the desire of my heart, however miscolored

2010-12-11T14:21:00.000-05:00

Night of restless slumber

2010-11-17T07:19:00.001-05:00

Night of restless slumber. Storms pass and the windows rattle. Strange dreams: of catlike visitors, children and danger, and explosion and blood. A morning of math test grades and Katherine deep in her covers, struggle against dawn. The sun is pale, the morning wet, but calm.

Haecceity

2010-07-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

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.

2010-06-16T07:51:00.001-04:00

While running at daybreak

2010-06-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

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

2010-04-08T11:06:00.000-04:00

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

2010-04-03T14:46:00.001-04:00

Moving

2010-03-30T20:17:00.000-04:00

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

2010-03-12T07:46:00.000-05:00

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

2010-03-06T16:26:00.001-05:00

A changing in season

2010-03-06T16:26:00.000-05:00

Waiting for Henry V

2010-02-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

The Emperor Crosses the River to Visit His Own Son

2010-02-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-27T16:44:00.001-05:00

lost tooth

2010-01-26T20:01:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-25T15:13:00.001-05:00

bubble and squeak

2010-01-24T15:06:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-23T15:12:00.000-05:00

as if we needed the reminder

2010-01-22T21:36:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-21T15:56:00.000-05:00

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

trouble being present

2010-01-20T13:48:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-19T14:47:00.000-05:00

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.

warriors and graves

2010-01-18T20:01:00.010-05:00

Today we visited the the terra cotta warriors exhibit at the National Geographic headquarters. Alex and his friend Carlos marveled at the preserved weaponry. Katherine waited for the figures to move, thinking them robots. I found the enormity of this trove against death sad: to believe that a life to come would be infinite extension of the world we already possess.

a house with music

2010-01-17T17:40:00.001-05:00

My mother taught herself to play a portable organ, a gift to an unimpressed daughter. She knew one song especially well, and she played it happily, lilting of a bride and a bicycle. Her gift to me: a guitar and a teach yourself to play manual, but no lessons. It was like being given a book in Polish, or Urdu.

Two musical children inhabit this house. When they are not hammering melodies from the piano, they are listening to something, or asking. Both their tastes run, for the time being, to sugary pop. Coldplay and Lady Gaga are shared favorites, Black Eyed Peas not far behind.

Not the best music, maybe, but I love living in a house with music.

progress

2010-01-16T17:28:00.001-05:00

night traffic

2010-01-15T13:32:00.000-05:00

When Katherine asked me why cars now run so late, what she really wondered is why we should be so long out of place. We're in our Six Month House, and the end is not in sight. The old house is problems in a litany: pipes that violate their codes, floors that reach towards each other but miss at the touch.

Here we are well past midnight. She has been sick, and I keep the bedside watch. We're listening to traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, conduit of night trucks and unknown cabs, a metal light stream that doesn't know to halt its flow. When she asks why cars now run so late, I tell her that they have always done, they will always do. A day of more familiar sounds is coming. Closer, still, after this ill and worried night.

Earthquake in Haiti: Photoessay

2010-01-14T14:07:00.000-05:00

Link to red Cross video from Matt. Donate here.

Wondering and Christianity

2010-01-13T20:40:00.001-05:00

[cross-posted from ITM]

My family spent part of last summer living in Paris. We rented an apartment near the Rue Mouffetard from a professor of 19th C literature at the Sorbonne. My kids loved the city for its food, its art, its mode of life, its parks. I've written a bit about our visit to the Mémorial de la Shoah, and we did eat at a deli in the Marais ... but like most old European cities Paris is place whose Christianity is inescapable. I wouldn't be much of a medievalist if I were surprised that cathedrals had shrines to saints and Virgin Mother altars and stations of the cross within. These religious artworks always startle my kids, though -- especially Katherine, who at five remembers the gelato we ate in London a few years ago but not the many churches we explored.

We'd been sailing boats in a fountain of the Jardin de Luxembourg and decided to make a visit to nearby Saint-Sulpice. At the Louvre earlier in the week Alex had declared himself an admirer Eugène Delacroix, partly because he recognized Liberty Leading the People from the cover of his favorite Coldplay album. Saint-Sulpice has some murals by Delacroix, including a spectacular envisioning of Jacob wrestling the angel. We were gazing at that image in the dark of the church when Katherine called us away. "What's this?" she asked, pointing to a depiction of a man leaving a tomb. My wife shrugged her shoulders and said to me "You can explain it better."
   "Well, " I said to Katherine, "Christians believe that Jesus--"
   "Who's Jesus?"
   "Their messiah."
   "Their what?"
   I tried a different tack. "The person they pray to ..." She nodded. "Christians believe that after Jesus was killed on a cross and placed in a grave, he came back from the dead. It's called the resurrection."
   Katherine jumped from my arms and ran from the mural. "He's a zombie!" she yelled as she retreated. She had no desire to see the picture any more.
   Well, that really backfired, I thought. It didn't help that her older brother had been scaring her with nightly tales of the undead. But Christian narratives like the Resurrection are not yet part of her cultural literacy, and I am not always the best interpreter for her, as my stumbling shows (in retrospect I'm fairly certain the mural depicted Lazarus rather than Jesus). But the episode did make me think about how much we take for granted -- or perhaps, how much I take for granted -- when it comes to the Christianity of the Middle Ages. We tend to assume that the stories behind the images were always well known, and that such narratives caused universal nods of assent rather than the shaking of a head in disbelief. We comb through the Patrologia Latina to discover what people really thought, to trace the coherence of orthodoxy, but we often don't leave enough room for what John Arnold calls unbelief, for what might also be called wonder. Sometimes I think that Jews became such figures of danger to Christians because they brought to presence the ability Christians surely had to be astonished by themselves.

Addendum: We are good friends with a family from Mexico. Last week they gave us rosca de reyes or "three kings bread." Into this cake has been placed a baby Christ figure. Katherine was poking around her piece and declared "I think they forgot to bake a Jesus in the cake." Suddenly a small, white plastic doll toppled out of her slice. At first she was happy, thinking she'd won a prize. Her brother told her, though, that the person who finds the figure has to cook the tamales for the family for the year. Now she keeps it by her bed and calls it ... the zombie baby.

ruah

2010-01-12T18:59:00.001-05:00

sundae monday

2010-01-11T19:42:00.000-05:00

I.
Dessert to celebrate a return to teaching: we walk to the ice cream shop with the $3 Sundae Monday special. One with cake batter, one chocolate chip, one cookie dough, each with a whipped cream pinnacle and a cherry redder than nature. The night moves with commuters and bus lights and shoppers. We watch from the window and we joke. As if to render the moment perfect, snow falls.

II.
The idea seemed good but I am weary: a return to teaching has taken more from me than I thought. "Alex stop" and "Katherine stop" are my imperatives, and they are as tired of commands as I am. Still they tease and scream and run when traffic is near. They push those buttons that only siblings know to tap, fights as frequent as fooling. The night should be more magic: the lights are here and the confections and the snow. But I am tired, and they are pushing buttons.

Sunday morning

2010-01-10T16:42:00.000-05:00

Complacencies of the peignoir

Movement, and complacency will not hold

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair

Coffee in a cold store, staring at Staring

And the green freedom

Tomorrow's anxieties: teaching, and teaching

silent Palestine

This morning we had guitar, piano, Hebrew songs

'Is not the porch of spirits lingering

I left the children at synagogue, and after a walk "Myths of Britain"

It is the tomb of Jesus, where he lay.'

Not my messiah, not for me.

isolation of the sky

My teaching is all the religion I have, and all my poetry.

Deer walk upon our mountains

I don't know nature, and I do not love it, and it is not god

Ambiguous undulations

But maybe poetry

The need of some imperishable bliss

But maybe poetry

Not as a god, but as a god might be

In this life without permanence, where every trace fades, where Sunday morning and reaches only towards Monday's class and is leaving the children in Hebrew school: its flight towards literature will someday also fade.

pain au chocolat

2010-01-09T14:46:00.000-05:00

snow, again

2010-01-08T14:45:00.000-05:00

An early walk with the dog. For once, no wind, all still, as if time had stopped. Thin crunch of white, burnt radiance of sodium light. The world was ours: the alley, with its cement and trash graved; the sidewalk, on which our prints were lunar; the cold air, with its absent traffic. All of this shared between me and her.

Though her sight is dimming now, and she does not walk well, and it was hard not to find in that silence something nearing.

what the earth might swallow

2010-01-07T15:25:00.001-05:00

To every parent a nightmare, as irrational as it is compelling. Mine for Katherine: that she will leap a storm drain, the dark rectangle beneath city corners. She will not see the slope. She will slide inside.

She will fall, maybe forever, into dark. I will lose her. I will try desperately to gain the inside, but my body cannot go where children slide. I will lose her.

Crazy, I know: she also would not fit into that opening. Yet I grasp her hand tightly every time she jumps that mouth. Every time she leaps I think of what the earth might swallow, and how I might lose her, and the impotence of love.

metapherein (every object conspires)

2010-01-06T14:50:00.001-05:00

Every object conspires to draw metaphor
or to be dragged into something it does not hold.
Every house is on offer for family
Every dog for domesticity, contentment, or contempt
Every bit of weather a fragment for a mood.

In this room this morning I wrote the Shoah,
pogroms and massacres,
children dead, blood on sleeves.
I wrote events that murder.
I wrote the left behind reeled.
There are no meanings here.
Beneath this room the pipes were banging:
not little bangs, either. The house was shaking.

Clanging pipes, technically: water hammer.
Check it on Google.

But the pipes wanted something more than air and copper.
I'll stop pondering the underneath,
stop considering that the bang is loud,
an intrusion, a ruin of the house as shelter.
Yet I can't help thinking that the fault is not giving metaphor to objects,
but in refusing them that draw.

circling back while rolling

2010-01-05T15:07:00.000-05:00

Done with graduate student, nontenure track teacher, assistant professor, associate professor, professor, chair. Today a new office, small and a little shabby. New view from the window (a grage, a rising building, a hispital, the Metro). Folders and boxes in piles.

Today, something commences, at once old and new.

Illustration: the graphic I'm using on my "Myths of Britain" syllabus this semester.

At home

2010-01-04T18:58:00.001-05:00

The smallest god is the god of small things

2010-01-03T18:31:00.000-05:00

I keep a little notebook, cardboard around worn pages, in which I write the things that I might file for this archive. Today on that pad I inscribed a phrase that has become the title of this post, a phrase that is really for the post below, a post I pretended was yesterday's deposit but is a snippet of Sunday breakfast table.

I've been thinking all weekend of lares et penates, the household gods who do not know the sky, little divinities who watch after soap, bruises, clementines and dropped magnets. I've been thinking I prefer them to thunderous destinies. I have been thinking how easy to make of the house a church. These small gods watch the notebook I keep. They ask me to record the view from the porch of the Six Month House, inscribe the sound of citrus in a red bowl, fight in vain small ways against a world full of death, loose words that the words not become lost yet.

of all the loves

2010-01-02T20:20:00.000-05:00

of all the loves the smallest is love of tables
nothing sidereal in this one
no gods unless minor household idols
blank visages of benevolence
nothing warmer than tea

but here the food and the books
tears cake coffee theses
I'm just trying to relax and she keeps
quarrels over apples or milk
What? Stop looking at me like that. I said
dissection of the who and the why
the dosing of the medicines
Another whine out of you and you will have to go somewhere else
the thousand things to forget and make the past lovable
the small details to send to the future,
postcards from the time we had

Drink Play Temple

2010-01-01T17:28:00.001-05:00

MHT to BWI (happy new year/suspended between years)

2009-12-31T10:43:00.001-05:00

Medial spaces

2009-12-30T08:30:00.001-05:00

Holidays are dark not light

2009-12-29T09:43:00.000-05:00

BWI to MHT

2009-12-28T06:50:00.003-05:00

At the Museum of American Art

2009-12-27T13:53:00.003-05:00

Wandering the day. Canvas of blood, revelations shouted to the vaguely amused. Monuments to a god who tells his chosen to sculpt fat Jesus in limestone, to fashion a cathedral's interior from tin foil and gift scraps, and to keep this monument to divine election unfinished in a garage in Shaw. Art and religion, revelation's siblings, not even a distant cousin, but there we stand before.

suspended

2009-12-26T16:01:00.000-05:00

Upended from the rhythm of a week, the space between holidays is food after feasting, travel after movement, a broken yearning for quiet.

december 25

2009-12-25T15:40:00.002-05:00

hesperidium (for Vivienne)

2009-12-24T15:15:00.001-05:00

Algerian orphan fruit

Are those clementines or clementina on your shelf? So orange like in Italy where they sell the leaves still on.

tough rinded, limonene oil

Where I buy them when I buy them sweet fruit at three euros not a pound but a kilo

or Canton Guangxi mandarin

At the supermarket on the hill where I do not shop, only two euros fifty for the same amount.

Christmas oranges

I bag them myself, with that juice that is bitter and the cheese your mom likes. The lady at the register doesn't speak English but she's efficient, the line moves

Father Clément Rodier in his garden, seeking for the children

and then I am home, but never at home when this world's not mine.

the unexpected, mercy of a desert place

Do you know that I always think of you, when I peel the clementinas, sweetness of a bitter life?

Did you know that Segni used to have a Jewish quarter (Via della Giudea, recognisable by the telltale horseshoe loop shape of a miniature ghetto)?

Coming back, coming back soon, but never close.

the future is a prospect yours not mine

2009-12-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

I.
the future is a prospect yours not mine
whatever slope you'll clamber and not regard who's left
I'll watch you recede, and wonder at the day
you rose so quickly and without my fear
that the future was a prospect yours not mine

II.
A day with you as any other day
but you are not the you you were
Traces linger (Sprite with your dal) but
now you are past my shoulder
The future is a prospect yours not mine

III.
white mountains
each day for me and I think so few days
each day for you to clamber and recede
sometimes I think I'll lose you at the verge
you'll topple and I'll be here and I'll be here and
the future is a prospect yours not mine

snow day

2009-12-22T16:16:00.000-05:00

A record fall of December white, called by the locals the Snowpocalypse. Holiday break, we have learned, has had an early start: no school now until January.

Today we took the Metro to the Air and Space Museum. Both kids wanted to ride the flight simulators; both hoped to glimpse Miss Alexis, a former teacher of theirs who works at the museum. The entrance we use for the Friendship Heights station requires deep elevator descent. The doors opened to reveal a station trimmed with tinsel and hung with Disney Christmas posters. The station manager gave K. and A. a small bag filled with cookies, a candy cane, and hot chocolate mix. "Can Jews take them?" I asked. She smiled (she had heard that one before) and said "I make these gifts for everyone."

So we spent the day throwing snowballs on the Mall, wandering a museum filled with jets and spaceships and the detritus of war, watching a planetarium show about black holes and the engulfment of space into time. The snow gave a day we will keep for all time.

The wailing escalator at Tenley

2009-12-21T16:10:00.000-05:00

An entrance to the Metro at Tenley is carved beneath an apartment building that used to be a home improvement store. The moving steps groan against the constraint of metal sides. Tired, I sometimes think, of bringing commuters to their work or towards their homes, but never themselves arriving, a doom of perpetual circles.

And so from the darkness of the entrance comes the endless wail, complaint against drudgery. Or a sound of whales, submarinal or subterranean babble not meant for eavesdropping, but always heard. Each morning at 5:20 I run up Tenley's hill. I hear the reverberation through my headphones and wonder how those who dwell above do not sleep troubled dreams, so much metal kvetching.

This morning on the way to work I saw the man who gives free newspapers at the entrance to the Metro. He was dancing. He said the wailing was a rhythmn, and that we needed to be cheered by it.

a day like childhood

2009-12-20T16:04:00.000-05:00

White and blue, slope and snow, sleds and forts, a day to keep.

snow was general all over Washington

2009-12-19T18:52:00.000-05:00

The view from the bedroom of the Six Month House, a record December snowfall of 14" or so piled on trees, houses, car. A calm holds Wisconsin Avenue, barely visible beyond the back of the bank.

change

2009-12-18T22:16:00.000-05:00

I emptied my seventh floor office of its books and folders and notebooks today. Also moved are the many tchockes I've gained over the years, the small gifts like antelopes and boomerangs and dishes with the queen's head that colleagues have given me when they traveled.

the house is not strong

2009-12-17T19:36:00.000-05:00

The house is not strong but we are propping its walls with bits of red steel. The foundation is moving but we are piling rocks. Water enters so seals and pumps array. The house is not strong and as all in the world the pieces move away. The cracks are there to be seen. We are patching and soldering and wanting some years before the house is not strong and moves into cracks again.

gifts

2009-12-16T15:12:00.000-05:00

Tis the season. From a friend: a gingerbread blemmyae, or acephalic gingerman.

To think that the future of the Plinian races should be as baked goods.

the dance

2009-12-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

No matter how hard you try, no matter what festive frock or attractive chapeau you don, the dance just won't allow you your entrance, or moves on and leaves you behind.

Steps that do not lead, doors with drops

2009-12-14T16:03:00.000-05:00

A house that Katherine spotted near the Six Month House, herald of indefinite futures, places not to be reached and movements towards wicked surprise.

dogs from kabul

2009-12-13T13:21:00.000-05:00

Our neighbor's dogs bark and bark, sometimes in the window (movement on the sidewalk, and they throw themselves at windows, with happiness or something else), sometimes in the yard (someone at the trash, or a squirrel, or the sun is high and the day is brisk). Are they thinking of their other life, war and wandered streets? Who transports such dogs, who saves them from a city where people need saving? Are they barking at the smallness of the new world, at the great age of their keepers, at the orientation of the sun? Do they remember better days? A flight on a plane? Could they have wanted the life into which they were flown?

The end

2009-12-12T17:29:00.001-05:00

See the post here.

Hanukkah O Hanukkah

2009-12-11T09:45:00.000-05:00

[window of the Six Month House]

First candles tonight. The miracle will not involve oil this year, but -- should it happen -- my getting home by sunset and wrapping a buttload of crazy small gifts. Favorites: a frog holograph generator, a Cat-a-pult that flings small fake felines, and a collection of multilingual document clips (all variations of the English word "crap").

dogs in salerno

2009-12-10T08:05:00.000-05:00

(a chain of remembrance)
1.
Morning run and a dog not controlled, white sound from its teeth. I cross the street but the walker has no management, he is pulled, the dog nears, leash taut.

2.
Alien city and a language I can almost grasp, though words of sense elude. These are the days before running, so I walk the promenade, cement healing of a war wound. The sun is yellow on the Mediterranean. Up a hill then and into the sleeping city. I am thinking of an evening when a choir's practice made a warm night glint. Lost in remembrance of voices, then dogs appear. The streets are vacant, just these strays and me. At a distance, always at a distance, but they are eying, and keeping pace.

3.
I have few memories of the child I was. A gift of a scooter, or the photograph recording that gift. Nightmares of giants wrought from stone. A day with an ambulance. And subtending fear, as in the morning a wandering dog noticed a wandering child, and the child ran for the door and found the door locked. Of all the stupid barricades he used a plastic pool, and the dog hurled itself, and hurled itself.

novel author

2009-12-09T16:31:00.000-05:00

I.
Sometimes I think of him as me, the me I would have been had I been as smart as I desired, had I possessed the eloquence that escapes me, were my memory not deficient, had I succumbed to a desire to live in solitude, roam inner worlds. I tried to say hello at the supermarket (I had latkes, blueberries and applesauce in a basket, he had chicken and cheese and milk in a carriage). I wanted to tell him I am here, hello, but he ran me down with a casual excuse me.

I didn't register. I'm not the him he might have been. I am buying food for a family dinner. He is writing novels while in a space he does not dwell.

II.
Sometimes my archivizing bends the world. It is possible the author was composing a vignette. He told me once that he pieced together a novel while at Safeway. But maybe he was hungry to eat his chicken, and maybe he isn't fodder for metaphor, and maybe my life expands too much when it includes him as a character, to be surprised without reciprocity.

celestial eye

2009-12-08T08:10:00.001-05:00

אל
Morning drive, and a swirl of clouds has become ocular. The sun is smearing their bottoms pink.

The empty circle that is their middle hovers over National Cathedral. I smile because God is angry, or vamping for photography. I might pull to the side, record some livid beauty, this rose of blood. I don't. I don't, because I don't want what the cumulus fluff wants of me.

Past Micah. No thought of it, nothing of adonai or elohim, nothing until I write.

Wisconsin to Massachusetts, eye always on the eye. A minaret looms, the Islamic Center and my turn to Rock Creek, hematic sky gone orange. A postcard, I think, from Allah to Switzerland, a raised middle finger against banning of majesty.

Orange to pale to ordinary, a morning like every other morning. Thirty-seven degrees and a man is washing his clothes in a creek cold with melted snow. When I turn onto Virginia the eye is nearly gone, distant tatters obscured by a monument.

day at home (not snug)

2009-12-07T15:29:00.000-05:00

rise shower dog breakfast dishes lunches kids to school email blog email apple walk to hardware store caulk the bathtub email laundry tea report lunch email dog walk to grocery email broken iPod restore calculate proposal impact Alex and Wendy home Hebrew tutor to arrive off to get Katherine email dinner ...

The elation that the snow causes is nearly as beautiful as the falling snow

2009-12-06T09:23:00.000-05:00

goyische festivating

2009-12-05T07:27:00.000-05:00

My failures of seriousness are so profound, so chronic, that a post like yesterday's surprises me.

Today's archival photograph: the GW English Department office, festivated. We use this peculiar verb annually to announce the successful deployment of the materials we keep in a box marked 'festivating apparatus.' The theme of such festivation is typically "decorating to annoy": we dangle colorful ornaments at precisely the height at which people are most likely to walk into them, turning the office into a labyrinth that must be negotiated with a fair amount of agility. Admittedly, many who pass through swat at the ornaments, cat-like, to move them from their path. Since these colorful globes invariably swing back and hit them, the office staff watch a perpetually unfolding comedic show. Isn't that what the season is about?

Many of the decorations are silver and deep blue. White and blue are the colors of Israel flag, and I believe this accounts for why so many Hanukkah decorations appear in these shades. A menorah (actually a chanukkiah) or two can also be found scattered among the baubles. But Hanukkah is not an important holiday, in the end; it has been magnified to compete with the one that features indoor trees, a discotheque of lights, wreaths, stockings, gifts. And that list only goes to show how many other traditions have been absorbed into December 25.

Still there are some who are displeased with our festivating. For some we seem to be mocking what ought to be taken seriously; for others we've succumbed to goyische celebrations. No matter what, though, this year is likely the last in which the office will be transformed for a few weeks. The next chair does not like decorations of any sort.

shabbat shalom

2009-12-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

This bar mitzvah year, we spend more time at Temple Micah than we ever did in the past. Tonight we coordinated and then set up the oneg, the small meal we eat as a community before kabbalat shabbat (welcoming the sabbath). Wendy is in California, so the arranging of the plates and cheese and hummus and fruit belonged to me and Katherine and Alex. A few other families assisted. By the end of the evening Katherine had smeared cheese on my shoe and cupcake icing on my suitcoat: minimal staining, for once.

All those adonais. A part of me is irremediably uncomfortable with prayer. Even the word prayer, a human impulse that I do not understand -- even when it is not petition, even when it asks for nothing, even when it is ritual without request. Without belief in god or gods or in a way much of anything at all, what am I doing in a synagogue? A part of me, though, feels even worse, because there are times when I, born with a lack of spirituality, feel myself at home in the place.

last of the litany of lasts

2009-12-03T08:14:00.001-05:00

My last faculty meeting as department chair.

Today's was supposed to be the one where a semester's erratic behavior would make them happy to be rid of me. After the mood swings, the sudden amendments of the schedule, the mandatory Saturday powwows, the shuffle of offices: after all these disruptions of the semester's arc they were supposed to drive me out with pitchforks, or at least sharpened pens. But now we're at grading, end of courses, finished business.

This last term was too full to practice antics. Instead I will conclude without concluding. I will not mention at the meeting that it is the last. We'll carry on as the world carries on, indifferent to something momentous only to me.

day of broken things

2009-12-02T11:29:00.002-05:00

Today I reign over broken things: the unraveled strand that pings from my daughter's bookbag, sorrow of scattered beads; my car key, its inside gone missing, lost to a leafpile during the walking of the dog. Everything breaks, small shatterings, little signs yearning to portend.

Catastrophe.

Each day I reign over broken things: families that unravel, and leave their members pieced; friends who depart on airplanes, hoping to mend what a telephone broke; a gunshot; a cleaning spree; the end of an impossible sojourn to a foreign land. All these pull and pull apart.

Yet the scattering of the beads is more hopeful than it wills itself to be. Something in its chunky plastic, something of its desire to hang once more on a running bookbag, something about the beauty of its little morning tragedy moves on.

this the verse

2009-12-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

Waiting for As You Like It. Alex beside me, slumped.

They may not mean to, but they do.

He reads his book (the undead are fighting somewhere), I read mine.

They fill you with the faults they had

I show him a poem in my open book

And add some extra, just for you.

And he laughs at fuck in poetry.

But they were fucked up in their turn

But then I apologize

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

And tell him that I have lived around my faults

Who half the time were soppy-stern

Parental gifts, that hounded me when young,

And half at one another’s throats.

And keep them in a circle, middled,

Man hands on misery to man.

So as not to pass them along.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Have they deepened like a coastal shelf?

Get out as early as you can,

Beneath the waters, all the same?

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Have I loosed them from myself? Or dumbly passed them on again?

a single month remaining

2009-11-30T11:11:00.000-05:00

Today we set the move-out date, what office furniture will remain, what goes with me. My time as chair nears its limit.

Sad, yes, sadder than I imagined I could be, but also expectant, relieved.

paper guardian

2009-11-29T11:03:00.001-05:00

Because decorating the Six Month House for October lifted our spirits, we spent last night with scissors. Colored squares yielded to the intricacies of unnatural snowflakes.

Alex, though, would have nothing to do with our storm god business. His endeavor: the Death Master, crown of spikes and sword of flame, paper guardian against anxiety's predation. He'll place it by his bedroom door.

clouds / motion

2009-11-28T17:15:00.001-05:00

Playground, Livingston and Western. When Alex was so tiny I couldn't picture the young man who was his destiny, I'd stroll him here, thirty minutes maybe from our home. Now it's ten from the Six Month House, and I am with Katherine, seeing so much girl in her, the littleness of both children long departed. These bodies they live in now I am always learning to know too late. Time is motion.

Clouds scud, approaching cold front. The wind is unrelenting in the bare trees, but here we are on swings and monkey bars, running games. The sun so low that for a moment the sky holds fire. We stop, I take this picture, and then homeward into night, running all the way.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T07:23:00.001-05:00

Dinner with friends. Leek and potato soup with thyme; salad with lettuce, clementine, cranberry, goat cheese; stuffing of baked bread, sage, onion, broth; roasted sweet and yellow potatoes with pineapple; homemade bread; macaroni and cheese; pie with chocolate, caramel, pecans; red wine and more red wine. Children loud and running, house filled with life. Slow end to the evening, kids departing by twos, divorced partners conveying them to second halves of the holidays. Happy to be nearing 20 with Wendy.

Tottenham Court at Charing Cross

2009-11-26T07:06:00.000-05:00

July 2007
Alex beside me, reading a book of lands that never were. We're on Tottenham Court road, American chain coffee shop, across from the flat where Katherine sleeps and Wendy keeps the guard. The world's every language drifting. He is happy to be with me, though I'm lost in my notes from the British Museum, writing, eavesdropping French and then Polish. To watch my work and to have his book and to sit like an adult at a chain coffee shop, pleasure.

When the man rushes up the stairs yelling, I think city, ignore. He throws ice and water at a couple, slurs them for gay. All rise, I rise, and he is gone, the drunk. Water on the floor, ice not even close. Like ocean that closes round an idiot's yell noise returns. He was never there, even the couple cold glancing the cubes on the rug, back to their talk. Alex's eyes are wide. I know this evening's talk will be of hatred and life that continues all the same, Tottenham Court or Dupont Circle or in the histories my notebook failing to contain.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T06:32:00.002-05:00

I'm not a big fan of the stench of cooking birds. I also don't love pumpkin pie. You will think I'm being a fundamentalist when I tell you that vegetables do not belong in desserts. Zucchini bread and carrot cakes are listed among the abominations in Leviticus for a good reason: placed within something sweet as a repast's final course, they become matter out of place. To eat them renders one unclean. And don't even get me started on beets, the only vegetable that, because it oozes blood, is actually a meat.

Happy thanksgiving!

[x-posted]

sick day

2009-11-24T07:48:00.000-05:00

[paper anxiety warden, by Alex]

Sickness seldom seizes me. More often my body rebels from the day: stress I did not know I was holding, the clenching of the jaw that imprints headache. I wonder about yesterday, when ache and weariness kept me prone. Flu? Migraine? Or years of leading a department, slowly releasing their hold?

sick day

2009-11-23T14:34:00.001-05:00

I'm on the sofa or the bed. Rain and chill wind. The funeral at the Armenian church gathers its mourners, black huddled against wet. One blue umbrella in the crowd.

Obsequies, and then they depart for whatever grave yard holds their dead. Back a few hours later, black coats slick and eyes downcast, and again the blue umbrella.

A meal I suppose or some other affirmation. They depart. The church is silent.

middle

2009-11-22T19:55:00.001-05:00

Today I posted a brief history of In the Middle.

I'd composed a longer version of the darker events, but cut its long account to scant words, history not to be saved.

Glimpses of the Week

2009-11-21T06:43:00.009-05:00

I.
I had wanted to compose a post about food: how meal and wine make the symposium (sumpotēs 'fellow drinker'). The weekend had been convivial meals with friends. Two colleagues taught me of the courses they teach "Food and Culture" "Food and Politics." For me though it is "Food and Wine and Thought." Or maybe just "Food and Wine and Meeting."

II.
I had wanted to write about the weakness of my house: the trouble the builders found with its foundation, its lack of durability, the poverty of its enclosure. The outside has been breaking in, only we didn't know it. While we dwelled inside, we thought the house was strong.

I wanted to write about how I realized during these builder's reports the weakness of my childhood house, how a marriage that seemed happy remained happy, until I saw its grim now, aftermath and future. The weakness of the house: the trouble with the foundation, the poverty of its enclosure, not known until I looked.

The two had everything in common, even their desire not to be metaphors.

writing for the archive / another word for word

2009-11-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

An admission behind my vow: my daily post arrives because words escape me. After four years of memos bulleted lists missives to donors MOUs, I don't find words easy to love.

terms appellations expressions designations names locutions vocables

The list of words for word in my thesaurus, its window ever open. I didn't want to use word twice in two sentences. I couldn't think of word's twin, I tried to find something as beautiful, I wrote terms appellations expressions designations names locutions vocables as the thesaurus suggested, nothing worked. I don't find words easy to love.

I don't know what has happened to my language. It doesn't want to breathe.

The Looming Bar Mitzvah

2009-11-19T16:43:00.000-05:00

Alex has selected a song that absolutely will be on the playlist, probably as the last of the party.

Why? Look at the lyrics:

I feel stressed out
I wanna let it go
Lets go way out spaced out
and losing all control

Fill up my cup
Mazeltov

On the Way to School

2009-11-18T08:20:00.000-05:00

K: "Every time I put a sticker on myself it falls off."
J: "That's a problem. Have you tried staples?"
K: "That would hurt."
J: "Superglue?"
K: "Then it would NEVER come off."
J: "I could nail your sticker to your body."
K: "You think you're very funny. You're not funny."

Future No Future

2009-11-17T07:46:00.000-05:00

Advice for those who have asked about children.

I understand the dangers of the following: suburbanization, conformity, heteronormalization. I understand the violence of compulsion to replication of the same.

But I wonder if in worrying about futures that look like infinite extensions of now we don't grant too much agency to the present. Can anyone really fashion a child who is a self in miniature? Can anyone predetermine the shape of the years that child will inhabit? Can anyone persuade a child not to say no?

"The children are our future." What could be more maudlin, trite, wrong? They're not our future (who is this our?) but a future that unfolds regardless. To send a being into that unknown holds more risk than reassurance. Sacrifice, too, but not complacency.

I often think of the choice Wendy and I made to raise our children as Jews. I research antisemitism's long history. I know that times of peace are broken, suddenly. I wonder, sometimes, in my darkest moments what the consequences of this choice not theirs will be for them, for those who come after them.

And yet.

Crazy Hat Day

2009-11-16T08:33:00.000-05:00

During Spirit Week, each day of middle school is given to an activity that makes students feel gathered in community: wearing the school colors, for example. Or donning crazy hats.

Alex labored this weekend to create the perfect chapeau, one that expresses his own personality while eliciting amusement from peers. What could be more fitting than a Platypus Hat? This work of fashion Alex created from a balloon creature that he taped to the remnants of a foldable frisbee. Both these objects were the gifts of a bank that opened over the weekend, a block from our Six Month House.

As I drove him to school this morning I watched as Alex note in silence that no one walking towards the place was wearing a hat. As he prepared to depart, he tucked the platypus under the seat, where no fellow student would glimpse the thing when he opened the door. Though he suggested I wear the hat at work today, the forlorn creature is sitting in my car at this very moment, in the cold of the university garage.

Future No Future

2009-11-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

Advice for five who have asked about children.

To think the life of the present will be its life in infinite extension: the dream of idiots. Few are so.

Children are risk not replication. The future into which they never asked to be thrown, precarious. The span to come could hold possibility unimagined, all the tions and nesses of desire. Or cattle cars and gas chambers. Pretend that tomorrow is today only with flying saucers and what comes after microwaves. Hope that history wearied itself, at last, with repeats. The holiday of chaos has been infinitely extended, he's not coming back from St Thomas. Pretend, but the world is limned with catastrophe, and borders are centers after all.

The child you did not ask before worlding will ruin your life. What you had closes. Another begins, not yours alone, and you will mourn the loss of something that (let's face it) you never loved as much you do through retrospect, as if it was ever yours to love.

Habit and routine are the nemeses of innovation. The new collaborator will devise art from your ruin. You will hate and you will love. But you will not be one of those who believe that tomorrow is today, that the future is anything less than knifepoint, that you have sent a being forward into death.

And you will cease to be yourself, you will learn your smallness in a world not yours anymore.

Scholar with Fez

2009-11-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

Good to be reminded that others share my passion for some silliness mixed with the seriousness.

Do zombies poop?

2009-11-13T08:29:00.000-05:00

Two monsters haunt Alex's almost-adolescent mind, zombies and clowns. His fear is so intense that he's enabled me to realize that zombies and clowns are actually versions of the same nightmare creature.

Last night I descended into the creepy basement of the Six Month House to retrieve laundry. The stairs are ancient and creak. I could hear Alex behind, in stealth mode, attempting to startle me. I turned tables by quoting some lines from Night of the Living Dead that never fail to chill him ("They're coming to get you, Baaaarb-aaa-raa!"). I observed that behind the mysterious door with a black knob a zombie was likely lurking. "DAD!" he scolded, "NEVER SAY THAT BEFORE BEDTIME."

The door and its odd colored knob did suddenly loom with menace.

"Look," I offered, "I'll open it, and you'll see nothing waits inside." I pulled at the black knob gingerly. The door swung to reveal the toilet that sits inside the closet-like and uselessly placed powder room. "No zombies here unless they are defecating." To lighten the mood, I asked "They do poop, don't they?"

"They have to," Alex observed. "Otherwise what would happen to all that flesh they eat?"

Deluge / Calm

2009-11-12T09:33:00.001-05:00

Incessant rain snakes the hole they've dug, widening basement or pool for mud. Work stops, too wet, but we can see the walls, and their top. The window through which I took this picture will be soon gone, and with it the stickers that pleased the children.

We are learning to live with our new companion. So many things gone wrong: the financing unsecured, the grade of the soil not right, old crawlspace and foundation built by men for whom a future was five years, maybe ten years, not sixty.

Something, though, about that gray wall where brown pit had been promises.

Cold Wednesday, wind and rain

2009-11-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

Bite of wet cold.

Thoughts of my grandfather, and a lonely seder I once watched him perform; my father, who on the first day of his life was Alfred but on the second became Robert; childhood memories of bagels and rye, before these breads lost their ethnicity; Alex and his Torah portion, about the clean and the impure.

Doorway

2009-11-10T08:39:00.000-05:00

גיור‎
Because this year is Alex's bar mitzvah year, Temple Micah has become a home. Not a dwelling of God or gods, not a metaphor or a heaven or a redemption, but home in the sense of mystery. A place of welcome that discomfits.

Can a doorway resist analogy?

Can I be so proud of secular, if I choose to stand before that door? Can an atheist linger at a portal, and resist the poetry of belief?

Yesterday at the threshold. The doors to the synagogue were locked, as they are when congregants and children do not crowd, when police are not at guard. Three times I pressed the buzzer. Three times the elderly man at camera's end sent a pulse to open the bolt. Three times I pushed at refusal. I knew the reason. I had seen the wood restained last week. Swelling and poor rehanging were my bar, not some act or mystery.

And yet. When after three tries the doors would not open to me, the old man I did not recognize rose from his seat. He led me to accustomed and unsettling welcome deep within.

Squirrels

2009-11-09T08:33:00.000-05:00

Alex is fascinated by DC's black squirrel population. During a trip with his science class to the National Zoo, he learned that these ubiquitous rodents are descended from eighteen animals released during Roosevelt's presidency. Something about the steady infiltration of their gray cousins' stomping grounds hooks his imagination. A fascination with invasion is our payback for having a child with a namesake in Alexander the Great.

Katherine, meanwhile, has taken to placing grape tomatoes in her month in such a way that the squirrel has become the animal she most resembles.

Behind her, by the way, you can see my birthday gift to myself, perched atop the piano. When we moved to the Six Month House we donated our stereo system to charity. CDs are so 1990s. Our strangely silent new home yearned for music, and now we live with a soundtrack again. Aural furnishing, we have discovered, is just as important to a sense of place as any coach, rug, or piece of art.