but no, not anymore, still I maintain cheer, still I work, still I think and have my small, silly comforts. I love my raincoat with its flowers and my warm rubber boots which keep the rain out, the rain that falls all day. It's dark all day with these clouds and this rain, but some days the mountains come out from their cloud-shroud and they are gorgeous, bright and yet shadowed, so, so blue, crisp in their new snow. Otherwise it rains and is all wet, always wet.
Projects are tossing about in my mind right now, and deadlines loom but mostly I think about next weekend when I will go to meet him and we will be together again and travel the lest segment of his tour together. It has gotten easier lately, to be apart. Perhaps it will always be hard at first but I'm glad it gets easier to miss him and to think of our reunion and how easy it will be and how life will pick right back up.
Soon we will be together and soon we will have our small wonderful space together and all will be well. So I will think of our plans and of my work and of this small-scale life of mine that is yet so vast in its riches. I listen to Damien Jurado all the time and I sink somewhere stark and yet calm and I wait or I work.
Oh this rain and this cold -- all I can do is lie under feather covers with a cat on my chest and my feet tucked up. Such a myriad of feeling lately -- there is confidence which is good to have about, but it never lasts long enough. More often there is the silly hatred of the mirror and the closet. Virginia wrote about it often -- the fear of fashion, the fear of shabbiness and scorn and the guilt about wasting such time thinking about such things. And there is the longing and the wishing for him and the deep, deep desire to be strong and good and the childish frustration at how endlessly difficult that is.Why can I not be strong? Why can I not just persevere?
Too much Spinoza maybe -- first my mind was muddled up with metaphysics and epistemology and now it's full of affection-passion-striving. Everything becomes dead serious and so seemingly hopeless. Perplexities and pitfalls. And I read as he defines all of my emotions and I think of how they're inadequate and confused and contributing to my vacillation of mind and decreasing my striving and I want to bow my head (despondency is a species of sadness) and just give in -- no blessedness for me, but I knew that all along.
The sense of flourishing is so contingent. Remove one of its supports and it is gone -- maybe a numb stubbornness to keep on continues, but the incandescent health of that state is lost.
So long forgotten, these dusty corners are. I don't want to talk about not writing anymore because there are good reasons for it. Maybe it would be better instead to talk about the good reasons.
I used to have something -- a constant companion -- and this something used to make me smart and worry and work to work it out and seal it up and smooth it out and make sense of it. But when my conflict or dissatisfaction or discomfort or desire or whatever disappeared, I no longer wanted to work it out or smooth it out or set it down. So what I mean to say is that something which used to drive the mess of writing and thought has ceased to drive it at all.
And it isn't as if there has been a stagnation -- there hasn't -- and to make the lack of writing here look like a stagnation or something to be lamented would be wrong. What is it then? Well, I have nothing to say here -- I am busy with my teaching and my reading and my working and my life -- that thing I have for the very first time, a life which feels real and not itinerant. I have stayed in this one apartment for longer than a year. I have stayed in this place for longer than a year. I know some people here, I do some things here, I grow roots and settle. I am in love. I am in love.
And so the things that used to drive me to write things down and display a little and feign some sort of aesthetic figure have ceased to drive me. Now I read for classes and occasionally for myself. But when I read for myself, I am not seized with some desire to scribble anything down. In fact, I avoid those books which may fire that desire to jot and scribble, for, in a large way, my brain is too tired, my hand is too tired, and I would much rather lose myself in Dickens than work myself up over Bernhard.
And so this is a new phase of sorts and one which I will not try to berate or regret or anything else. I will read for my classes -- my Spinoza and my Bernard Williams. I will teach my students and have a beer or two with friends. I will bake and cook and make homemade pastry. I will watch Top Chef and Law and Order and whichever old movie happens to be on. And I will love, and I will live.
Feeling absolutely, utterly overwhelmed at the moment. I have been working so much and yet it still seems I am always on coattails, riding in a 20 year old wake. It is so frustrating to seize on to some new course of thought, some new way of understanding -- to begin to work it out, sketching little questions and problems, noting references -- and then to encounter something, someone who has said what you were endeavoring to say, only far more articulately. Then there is the rebellion urge -- no defeat, it isn't as if all has been said, there may be some other aspect -- but wind leaves the sails and it is hard to muster up some other strength.
I try to return to a paper I wrote on Whitehead 4 years ago -- a doomed failure of a paper. It is so muddled and I try to see what I was tracing out therein, what was I after with creativity and novelty? I put it aside.
I construct an artificial deadline for my research on Avicenna -- new excursions into entirely unfamiliar fields -- medieval Arabic philosophy and theories of intentionality and faculty psychology. I am an utter novice still and fight to just maintain balance in this new field.
When I began philosophy again I thought I would learn about what SJC did not teach me -- and I thought it would be some small pile of things to learn -- and I thought it would fit in nicely with what I understood. So, so wrong. I have a ragged patchwork of new texts -- little stepping stones that I cannot place into context. And I learn every day of the vast tracts of unknown discussions, problems, debates. The worst is that I cannot even find a way of making what I learn my own. Maybe this is what is changing the most, but I still feel so far from the place of understanding, the place of intellectual energy. It is often crushing.
There is always some understanding of directions in which to move, territory to discover, aid to seek, etc. -- but then I know how far I have turned and continue to turn from new experiences with fictional texts and small projects in making and crafting and I must make choices that I hate. I must look to my mortal coil as well -- nails bitten as bad as ever, chronic neck tension, and a persistent and worryingly frequent heart murmur, though I do have quite a nice tan.
Naps with the cat are always best and now as I drift slowly back to the normal tick-tock of my life in this small space I see first the light at the window, strong and slanted, and then I taste the salt on my lips, hear the high-pitched whirr of the washing machine on spin cycle -- someone else is washing their sheets and I shan't be able to -- and I watch her and think she won't want to be woken, but then her eyes slowly slide open and she lets me pet her and I have found again the day and time. It is today, not tomorrow and it is the evening. He hasn't called but I couldn't expect him to, driving from London to Utrecht and playing a show and then trying to rest. I wonder what the philosophers say about tomorrow -- do they have a word for the sort of word it is? What do they say about my wish to see him tomorrow? It is a wish that I know is illogical, I have 33 days left before I can wish to see him tomorrow, but what if I said I hope it is tomorrow? I'm always surprised by what they will say -- sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I wonder how they ever got started, those philosophers.
When I walk home from the pool I worry about the grime I walk through -- the staircase with its paint and its small, steep steps, the ground, littered with people-things, their spray-paint-can-lids, broken and multi-colored, their phone bills and receipts and wrapping papers and tissue papers, their coats and scraps of fabric, dust-covered, their refuse. There is a bright pink foil butterfly there now, it is new. I worry about that grime and then I worry about the walk from the base of the hill to the pool -- past the train tracks which obscure the water which lies between me and the industrial processing plants. I worry about the dusty dusty birds which hop and cheep in the shade of the cottonwoods. I worry about the blackberries, growing along the path, reliably, steadfastly, covered by the grime and dust of the road and the bridge and the train and the gravel.
Then, when I am at the pool and I lie down, wishing for my backyard, the backyard where I could bring a blanket and the cats would come and the dog would come and I would feel the grass beneath me and see the trees overhead and hear only small noises, few noises, where I would have privacy and quiet and would read and watch the cats and talk to the dog. But that isn't my backyard anymore -- I have no small plot of grass for my own and so I borrow a square of concrete and place my blankets so that if I face the curve of the fence I see grass and dogs frisking and running and then the wink of water and then the hills, the mountains arcing into the sky, dusted-blue. But people come and sit beside me, they bring their music (it is loud, choppy, guttural), they bring their fighting ('why do you want me to learn the guitar, I hate you for wanting that, you never listen to me when I tell you I don't want to,' 'she's such a bitch, she knew I liked Daniel and she still told him ...' 'mom, Jason pushed me in and then he told me I was stupid').
I sit on my blanket, reading about perceptual systems, then I read To the Lighthouse, I read about Lily Briscoe painting and seeing -- she sees so well, even with her puckered eyes. I read about Mrs. Ramsey's beauty and I think how strange it is that so many will ruin themselves for beauty -- women will ruin themselves for beauty, and they will ruin each other because of it. Men will ruin themselves for it and will ruin others because of it. I think about these readings I do for someone else's research -- on beauty, on the question of beauty, is there a question? Sometimes I am made nauseous by what I read, sometimes I feel myself buck in response to the smallest string of words. Reading Rousseau I was surprised by the violence of my reaction -- I had forgotten what he said, forgotten.
And I think about his letter and how he spoke of these things and how I responded with ferocity. I am often so angry about the people I see in my life -- angry about how they carry themselves, angry about what they wear and how they speak, angry about how I see them treat each other. I'm angry about the way love and lovers are spoken of, written of, depicted, enshrined in film and cinema. Why do we use that word for the horrendous things people do to one another? Why do we speak as if it is love that causes people to leave their families, betray their responsibilities -- why do we speak as if it is love that causes hurt?
And I think about love, about my love, about how now I have it and before I did not. Was I different before I had love, before I loved? Was I different when I only read of it, spoke of it, wrote of it, discussed it? I was and I was not. The more difficult question is whether I am wrong now -- but that I cannot tell.
And here I am, the nap-haze is over, I feel hunger and thirst intruding, I feel responsibility pressing on the corners of my mind -- I must read about Gibson and perception, I must mark papers, I must prepare notes for tutorials, I must send a report on the research I have done, I must prepare a presentation of my own fledgling research.
There is a new kind of inertia -- or maybe lack of ambition. I no longer orchestrate situations in my life (outfit, manner, scenery, activity, etc). It is not gone entirely, but it is going. With it goes my desire to communicate -- so much of these web-writings were designed -- artifice and effort. There was a persona, or many. I care less for them now. I care less for consumption also -- the search for perfect, lovely objects to keep and cherish. I read less, do less. I feel myself growing spare, the edges sharpening, drawing closer together. I feel myself orienting anew -- orienting to one source which grows brighter and brighter.
But I have my work, of course. My work, my work. I will work busily upon anything, I will sometimes see swiftly to the bottom, sometimes see something of the form, sometimes see the right thing to say, or a right thing to say. And I will take pages of notes -- they will be orderly, well-indented, impressive. They are always impressive, why?
I feel myself growing spare, growing irrelevant. I think again and again of Katherine Mansfield -- of her dreams, for they are my dreams.
Then I want to work. At what? I want to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter).
I want my inertia, I want my limits, I want them drawn close. I want no fame, no ambition, no importance.
