Istanbul 04: The Dervish

By revolving in harmony with all things in nature--with the smallest cells and with the stars in the firmament--the semazen testifies to the existence and the majesty of the Creator, thinks of Him, gives thanks to Him, and prays to Him. In so doing, the semazen confirms the words of the Qur'an (64:1): Whatever is in the skies or on earth invokes God.

Monday, May 19, 2008, Turkoman Hotel, Istanbul

Ate at the Rumeli restaurant before going to the large outdoor tourist cafe to watch a whirling dervish spin and spin. He was such a beautiful boy, probably in his mid-20s with a heavy five o'clock shadow and exquisite Sufi outfit. I kept thinking of how he (the man) disappeared in his dancing à la anātman in Buddhism, yet really more akin to Western mysticism because the experience of Śūnyatā within Buddhism is not supposed to be mystical at all.

Here he was, dressed all in "death": his robe a shroud for the ego; his camel-hair hat, a tombstone. But as any mediocre Tarot card reader will tell you, death is merely a symbol for change.

Anger (Under New) Management

I could login here almost daily and list a dozen or more complaints about bothersome conditions that invade my otherwise placid world, but I’m tired of bitching. Tired of being a bitch.

Yeah, that’s right: you read it here first. Being a grumpy, middle-aged, overworked adult—despite all justifications—just isn’t who I ever thought I’d be. Primarily because I’ve been saving that up for when I’m 80.

So in an effort to conserve, to preserve, to reserve all that is good about who I am, I hereby list the conditions of my life for which I have every cause to be thankful. Enjoy.

• Two beautiful and delightful cats.
• A partner who still adores me after almost 17 years of washing my clothes.
• A handful of intelligent and beautiful friends spread over the globe who refuse to acknowledge my many flaws (or at least hold them against me).
• My passport as well as my ticket to Istanbul.
• Esteemed colleagues and mentors who challenge my intellect even when we’re drinking and laughing our asses off.
• Enough money to pay the bills and then some.
• A lifetime of experiences, loves, passions, and thrills both behind as well as ahead of me.
• The good sense to know what I need to do not to lose my mind.
• Stable (and relatively healthy) relationships with (what’s left of) my family.
• Good manners and a sensible diet. Remarkable hygiene. Straight teeth. A wicked sense of humor.

the grandeurs of risk

I'm convinced that such a circle [that is, the unclosable circle of an encounter, which revolves around the undesirable] only exhausts the strength of those who don't enter into it with the grandeur of risk, the amorous and loving truth, slow devastation which breaks every tie with a life that is still immediate. To forget that is the obverse of disaster, because time's subtle desire upsets every foundation. A faithful weakening must meet the other and immemorially lose the other in the self.

--from Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages [Amour bilingue], translated by Richard Howard

This desire and promise let all my specters loose. A desire without a horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where, striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.

--from Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah

The principle that birth is presencing-of-total-working concerns neither the origin nor the end. Even though it is the great earth and empty space, it neither obstructs birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working nor death-qua-presencing-of-total-working. When death is presencing-of-total-working it becomes the great earth and empty space and it neither obstructs death-qua-presencing-of-total-working or birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working. The great earth and the empty space exist exhaustively in birth and death.

-- from Kigen Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, qtd. in Geron Kopf's Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self

Pitstop on the Way to Mensa

My popularity has soared over the past several months, while my faith in such things as popularity has plummeted.

When I was in high school, I always thought it strange that I wasn’t invited into the honor society until the end of my sophomore year. I had been earning the highest grades of my class since my family moved into the district when I was in third grade. And of course I was destined to be the valedictorian of 1986.

Even though I knew I was “the smartest hillbilly in Hillbilly Town,” I really received an education with the politics of popularity because one, after all, had to be invited into the honors club; one could not merely join based on one’s merits, or grades, or intelligence, or aptitude, or IQ, or any other factor. One had to earn it, ostensibly by being noticed by those already accepted.

But I too was destined to obscurity, especially among my peers. I think eventually enough of my teachers or perhaps the honor society’s advisor probably felt awkward enough to convince the popular kids to invite me in, even though my gpa had always been and would continue to be several points higher than theirs. It would’ve been scandalous, no doubt, not to have the soon-to-be valedictorian as a member.

I did join. And I also briefly toyed with the idea of not joining just to prove an already over-proved point. By “accepting their invitation,” I also proved that I could play nice even when the cards were stacked against me. That lesson, I’m certain, was lost on my smart (in a popular sense) classmates.

I’ve always felt clumsy and shy when people noticed my intelligence anyway. Just in the past couple of weeks several of my friends, colleagues, and professors at the university have made very flattering comments about how I stand out on campus as “the smart one.”

I’m even more flattered by the fact that I really value the opinion of those people whom I respect as some of the smartest people I’ve ever known. It’s like an ungainly feedback loop of smarts and flattery falling back upon itself as if upon a black hole. But lessons learned at sixteen temper too much egoism.

That said, I’ve always been jealous of Stephen’s graduate school cadre of geniuses who would spend hours sitting in coffee shops having fabulous and articulate conversations for hours at a time. I’m not sure if it was the number of people in the group (popularity) or the quality of their conversations (intelligence) I was most envious of. But now it seems I have some of that for myself. Finally. After how many freaking years in school! I’m really looking forward to the next couple of years working with these people.

To quote an email I sent just last week: “P.S. Do you think Andy likes me?” And no, I'll never join Mensa.

The New 30

I think it’s fairly telling that I should lose my earrings just a couple of weeks before I turn 40. I had to remove them at the doctor’s office while they were taking an EKG. I wanted to get my heart a little look-see since midlife is fast approaching. I put them in my shirt pocket, joking with the nurse that I couldn’t remember the last time I had removed them. Afterwards, I sat at Nodding Dog Coffee Shop in Bishop Arts for an hour working since I haven’t had an Internet connection since Friday afternoon and I’m supposed to be teaching an online section of philosophy this term. When they closed, I returned to the old apartment to do some more gathering of my things to move them to the new flat. It seems most of our things are finally here, and there are even some books already on the bookshelves! Today we finally got phone and DSL. (And AT&T sucks absolutely, but that’s another post altogether.) It must’ve been while I was cleaning and packing that my earrings slipped out. Perhaps I’ll find them when I go back for that last transport of framed art and a vacuum cleaner. So, my heart is healthy. The doctor said I have the heart of an athlete. That’s good news, especially since both my maternal grandfather and my father died of heart disease. No diabetes. No high blood pressure. And he’ll send me the results from the thyroid tests once they return from the lab. Another year. Another decade. Another (new) home. (It wasn’t until we were saying goodbye to Mary that I realized I spent my entire 30s at my last home: I moved in when I was 29, and I just now left—not counting a couple of years in Japan and Europe.) My 30s were good, and so much better than my 20s. I’m looking forward to the future, no matter how short that may prove. This is probably the first time in 17 years that I don’t have any of my rings in any of my 7 holes. I miss body jewelry. I miss the sleepless nights that turned into blissful decadence instead of exhaustion. Now it’s off to bed. Or to work.

Nothing to say about love...

This interview suffers from the “Dance, Monkey, Dance!” Syndrome: flaccid American asks the world's greatest living philosopher (at the time) to perform for the camera on a topic he clearly isn’t interested in. But Derrida, in his generous generosity obliges, indulging the weak-minded question with a somewhat articulate—particularly for being impromptu—response about the difference/différance between/among the who(s) and the what(s) of love.



Do I love you for who you are? My friend? My lover? Or for what you are? Intelligent? Sexy? Do I love you because of what you do? Because you love me too? Do I love the absolute singularity of who you are? And when I stop loving you, will it be because of who you are [not] (no longer my lover), what you are [not] (no longer sexy), or for what you have [not] done (not loved me in return)?

Or can I love you purely because of your replaceability? For the fact that I can choose anyone else at any other time—knowing full well that the metaphysics of identity and time collapse just as fully and unequivocally as all [other] metaphysical systems in the end?

But can the modality of love bring us even closer together by helping to eradicate the notions of I and you (and us) altogether? That is, if—in the same way that each word engulfs an equally and conterminously unsayable silence—the I and the you embrace the not-I and the not-you (mere placeholders in an attempt to say something (which remains not-a-thing) real about the irreality of love in the first place)—we finally move beyond/through the metaphysics of identity which we sorely cling to in the West, especially as it perpetuates itself [gets perpetuated] through language, and approach a pure modality of love wherein no I and no you [and no us] exist, at which point existence itself—neither it nor self—ceases to ex/ist.

Or maybe we should just spend the rest of our lives searching for the “true love” Charlene sang about all those years ago:

Scars & Wrinkles

Several years ago I blogged about scars. Here is an updated engagement with that post as prompted by a question that came to me out of the blue (from where all interesting questions arise):

As for “fetish,” it’s definitely a bit too loaded for me to fully embrace. If we use the term not in its Freudian sense—I’m not sexually stimulated by scars—and probably not even in an anthropological sense, but rather in a purely “pop cultural” sense, then yes, I have a scar fetish ... in that I am at times mesmerized, enchanted, and intrigued by them. I’m also not sure I find scarred people more beautiful; probably more often, I find them ugly(-ier) ... or at least their scars. But I perhaps feel a bit more compassion toward others with (visible/revealed) scars.

What fascinates me is the scar as trace—what remains from something/someone in a person’s past that is brought forward and carried over into the present/future. “Embodied” or “incarnate” in a fundamental way. It’s much more narrative than, say, a wrinkle. Every scar has a story to be told ... or hidden.

And the entire ethos of scars—their permanence, for example—means, at least for me, that they must always be confronted/regarded; in some ways, it’s as if they open up a space (for the possibility) of pure self-acceptance: they’re never going away no matter how you may try to hide them; they will be with you “till the end.” So maybe I’m much more interested in what the scar hints at instead of the scar itself.

That said, I do tend to like scars in the brow—little lightening bolts that disrupt the hair growth, and I find abdomen scars kinda sexy … on the right abdomens, of course!

Perhaps I was just trying to draw attention away from the tribe of wrinkles that have colonized my face over the past several years: scars have stories to tell! Pay no attention to the wrinkles!

Year of the Whirlwind

In honor of a Japanese tradition I recently learned about, I have chosen sempū as the kanji to represent the passing year. Sempū means “whirlwind” and is written thus:

From teaching new courses to conducting some of the most advanced research of my academic career, from hitting the gym up to six times a week to beginning to learn German, this entire past year has whirled about my dizzy, complicated, overly complex, and insomnious head.

My wish for 2008—itself admittedly a silly designation that has nothing to do with science or any other respectable metaphysical system—is for the wind to continue to whirl but that the center to remain forever (and always already) still.

Other things to look forward to this year: the first major move in more than ten years, the fortieth anniversary of my birth, a vacation to Istanbul, completion of my coursework and exams and the beginning of my dissertation, teaching new courses, conferences, writing projects, relaxation and meditation, better health (and less of me to love), and—the gods willing—more than a few nights of blissful sleep.

Happy New Year.

15 Songs for a Solstice

...to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here's to a new season of personal (and universal) growth.

For those of you not on MySpace, I'm currently reading Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins. After only the first 35 pages, I can definitively state that it will be one of my most favorite books I have/will ever read:

The word is distance within non-distance, that is, the width of a gap that every letter stresses while bridging it. What is said is always said in relation to what will never be expressed. At these extreme limits we recognize ourselves.

This winter will (always already and yet again) prove the truth of the infinite distance I must travel in order to recognize myself in the extremities of the here and now. And now to the soundtrack that will be playing on that trip:

• "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" by Leonard Cohen
• "Winter Kills" by Yaz
• "Drink Before the War" by Sinéad O'Connor
• "Dreamer" by Toni Childs
• "All the Candles In the World" by Jane Siberry
• "Bells Ring"by Mazzy Star
• "25th December"by Everything But The Girl
• "Trouble In Mind (The Return)"by Marianne Faithfull
• "Mad World"by Gary Jules
• "Untitled 3" by Sigur Rós
• "New Lost World" by Chris Whitley
• "Soon This Space Will Be Too Small" by Lhasa De Sela
• "Baby In Two" by Pernice Brothers
• "Wo willst du hin?" by Xavier Naidoo
• "Archangel" by Burial

Skin Deep

There are already so many things wrong with the story about the French woman who received the first face transplant. Like how did she “lose” her face to begin with? Well, she took an overdose of sleeping pills in a botched suicide attempt. She didn’t wake up when her pet Labrador retriever started chewing on her face. But she did wake up after it had already gnawed off her lips, chin and most of her nose. Note to self: feed the dog before killing yourself. Or better yet, kill the dog first!

I’m thinking this would’ve been a ripe time for another suicide attempt, but no: instead medical science in all of its vast uselessness decided to cut the face off a brain-dead woman and transplant it on our heroine. After a couple of near rejections of the face—we could be here all night if I was going to pursue this line of thought!—it seems the face was there to stay. Now she has regained nearly full use of her facial muscles. Or the facial muscles of the other woman. I’m not sure exactly where one woman ends and the other begins! Our heroine is currently “satisfied with the aesthetic result,” according to her surgeon.

Of course, none of what I’ve written or thought about thus far concerns the real problem at hand. The most disturbing aspect of the article I read in the New York Times is the final two sentences:

Ms. Dinoire’s [face] is a bit crooked, with one side slightly higher and one eye more open. But it is not unlike that of a typical Frenchwoman trying to convey a vaguely insouciant sarcasm, with hints of mordant wit and a certain je ne sais quoi.

I have lost all respect for the New York Times for publishing such an offensive, misogynistic and xenophobic article. I have lost all respect for modern science for thinking it was within acceptable ethical bounds to perform such a surgery in those circumstances. And I have lost all respect for Labrador retrievers, or as I shall henceforth refer to them: “face eaters.”

It all reminds me of something my mother used to say when I was a kid: “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness goes clear to the bone.” (She would know.)

Excerpts

Something I've been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I'm not writing here--which is happening more and more frequently--I'm most likely working on papers such as these. The work I did this term just about did me in altogether: I started working on the first paper in May, but I was able to write the second paper in just a few weeks. It seems I always shoot my load on one project (usually the one for my major professor and mentor) and then do a second quickie. (And yes, all academic metaphors must be sexual; otherwise, you're not doing it right.) By the way, my first essay earned me a "gifted," and the second one was termed "brilliant." (I'm not braggin'; I'm just saying....)

In die Fremde der Heimat:
Celan’s “Schibboleth” and the Ethics of Translation

Mem’ry, in addition to being short, is also (always already) a matter of convenience. A covenant both enjoins and excludes. Our inclusion in a community is a function of how we enact our communal memory—which flags we pledge allegiance to, which political slogans we cry out, which language community we find ourselves born into—in short, how we embody our covenant. Memory is the shibboleth we use to segregate: it either allows passage or cuts off the return passage home. This scar—this syllable pain, this wounded word, this death sentence—bears the memory of our covenant, a circle of forgetting, bereft of a center. Memory, therefore, is what must be transversed, transported, crossed over, and translated; it is the liminal border between the alien and the homeland, the superliminal space where the blood of the Passover sacrifice demarcates between the Chosen People and the(ir) other. Memory is the shibboleth—mispronounced, death-bringing, inarticulate; the unsayable that demands utterance, performance, invocation. The promise—the sign of the promise—the promised covenantal sign scars the human body. This scar—a genital, genitive scar—wounded by the past, is passed on to future generations, to those also born of the wound, born of disaster.

The half-mastness on both sides of mem’ry bisects “Schibboleth” with a reference to a political act: commemoration of the dead, of national heroes. Yet this flag at half-mast (from the fourth strophe) is not (necessarily) the same flag to which the poet has sworn no allegiance (from the second strophe). Instead of being unfurled in the market square, demanding allegiance, this flag at half-mast signifies the presence of death. Yet Celan’s dead remain doubly absent: not only are they no longer present (having been murdered and reduced to ash) but neither have they been properly buried and mourned for. No national flag had been set at half-mast to commemorate them. They are absented in both language as well as cultural memory, and it is an inherent characteristic of Celan’s poetological project to call those absent dead back into presence through language and to rescue them from forgetting/forgetfulness.

But just as Heidegger wants us to think being as some thing other than beings, so we too are called to think the other as some thing wholly other, as something more than the sum of all others—uncoordinatable and incalculable, unbounded and aporetic, unmappable and undateable. The wholly other exceeds all Cartesian coordinates as well as any Cartesian cogito: all that I can know of the other is that I do not know.

Initiation into Redon’s Initiation to Study

The fifth and final work in Redon’s two-woman sequence is his circa 1905 Initiation to Study. This oil painting is marked by a flattening of the pictorial space as well as by a sharp delineation of line of the two figures. The priestess is clothed entirely in blue; the novice wears white. Instead of holding a red branch as in the 1896 oil painting, the novice casually holds a scroll that has been partially unrolled. It seems that the natural element from the first painting has been replaced with a cultural artifact; the mysteries of nature have given way to the mysteries of a secret society whose knowledge is written down on the scroll. But no text is exposed; to the viewer, the scroll is empty and blank.

Though the novice’s eyes are still downcast, we get no sense of her emotional state from her otherwise expressionless face. The priestess, however, appears somewhat sterner than in previous depictions: she is clearly frowning, and the severe profile line only accentuates her one visible eye. Redon’s noirs were often populated by round, globe-like eyes, but in this series, the women’s eyes are almost always closed, further resisting the viewer’s gaze.

The women appear within a space defined by heavy brown lines to the pair’s left and right as well as beneath their feet. The light brown floor recedes a short distance before ending at what looks to be a white plaster or stucco wall behind the figures. The pictorial plane, nevertheless, is further flattened with blotches of paint that transgress across all three strong defining lines. No shadow or shading interrupts this compression to give the viewer any impression of dimensionalized space. Redon flattens the vertical as well by repeating the light brown of the floor in the upper right. Moreover, the illusory depth is shortened by the dark pink tones of the oil paint: Redon uses the same tone for his signature and the dominant background behind the priestess. In this way, the surface and the background are the same color, disrupting any sense of depth and preventing any penetration beyond the work’s surface.

I am the walrus.

There's nothing quite as funny as the number of drugs I've taken over the past few months (years) to help me sleep. But the week of Thanksgiving, I stepped down from the Amitriptyline pony I've been riding since September. Now I've reverted to constantly waking up throughout the night and then waking up for good around 4:00 AM every morning. What's funny is that I don't seem to mind too much: with the meds, I was groggy even with eight hours of sleep, and now without them I'm considerably more awake. Even when I'm tired. The next step: get off this shit Rozerem that never did do anything it was supposed to do. According to several friends, it only makes me angry and bitter. I certainly have felt very on edge since I started on it in May. At first I thought it was just all the coffee I was drinking in Europe and all the shitty administrative annoyances I had to endure in Marburg. But it wasn't. Well, at least not just that. Even without the strong Euro-kava, I've been one angry fucker all term.

And yesterday I grew even angrier after spending almost three hours at the dentist office. One must suffer if one wants to be beautiful. And yes, my teeth are indeed beautiful. For the first time in my life. Too bad it took throwing almost $700 at them before they took on the glamor sheen of celebrity. But I'm only now enjoying my first coffee since yesterday morning. And I'm sipping it through a straw. And I must go brush my teeth immediately after I'm done. But even with the unbearable pain, the expense, and the inability to eat or drink for most of the past 24 hours, it really is worth it.

Once, on an osobowy (oh-so-slowly) train from Warsaw to Szczecin during the summer of 1991, my compatriots/companions decided to sing songs by the Smiths to help me sleep. (And to support my growing dependency on angst and ennui.) I need those friends now to sing me to sleep....

• Asleep
• Unlovable
• This Night Has Opened My Eyes
• Back To The Old House
• Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
• William, It Was Really Nothing
• Girl Afraid
• Half A Person
• There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
• Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
• Reel Around The Fountain
• That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
• The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
• Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want
• Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

Thanksgiving Thursday

A random selection of music to be thankful for:

• "Beaten Thursdays" by Prefuse 73
• "The Columbia" by Lackthereof
• "Elvis Cadillac" by Rickie Lee Jones
• "Four Three All India Radio" by Echo Other
• "In a State" by Mojib
• "Kitten Who Did Not Want To Give Up" by BrainStorm
• "Masca" by The Duke Spirit
• "North American Scum (Radio Edit)" by LCD Soundsystem
• "NYC" by Interpol
• "When Under Ether" by P.J. Harvey

Just thinking about the multitude of ghosts that haunt every Thanksgiving and the network of friends around the globe who have made this a special holiday: 44 years ago President Kennedy was killed just a couple of minutes drive from my home; 10 years ago Michael Hutchence was found dead; Sonia in Kumamoto and the apato I painted green with the windows closed--I don't think my brain cells have really fully recovered; Tak & family in Osaka with my first bottle of beaujolais; Jola & the girls in Warsaw with several other bottles...; Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade way back in 1986 and the crappy meal in the basement of the Empire State Bldg.; "In this fateful hour..." over and over; and now me alone with a stack of books and one painting by Redon to keep me company.

Bullet-Point Friday

• It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your ears are not trained to interpret that form through that medium. After a few moments, a new synapse fires, and you are better prepared to hear flamenco piano again: a new possibility has been created in your world.
• It’s like, you know, when human beings rely too heavily on infrastructure designed to keep them safe (i.e., guardrails, stop signs, traffic lights) that they behave irresponsibly because someone else is policing their reckless behavior; they have a false sense of security because they’ve relinquished responsibility for their own actions. (It’s also like, you know, when parents expect legislation to supplement their demonstrably poor parenting skills: they want society to be policed instead of being responsible for the raising of their own children. I mean, think of the children!) Remove the guardrails and pedestrian accidents fall 60% because pedestrian and driver behave more responsibly when they must think for themselves. If I choose to jaywalk, then I’ll be sure to look both ways—twice, even—before jumping out in traffic.
• It’s like, you know, trying to get through a lecture on Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism when your students would much rather hypothesize about “crazy people” or “people on LSD” or “the blind”: if someone falls in the woods and no one is around to perceive it, did the person really exist in the first place? (Thankfully, for Berkeley, God is omniscient and omnipresent: He’s always watching/perceiving! And even if you don’t believe in God, He still believes in you.) I sometimes wish my students would stop invading my sensory world so their drug-induced craziness would simply stop existing, even if only for me.
• It’s like, you know, hotdog!
• It’s like, you know, accepting the alternate relationship with truth that wanders to supplement one’s acceptance of truth that remains coordinated on a grid. To start walking with the right foot (techne, the logos of techne, the word: “technology”) is quite alright as long as the next step is with the left foot (organic, systemic (uncoordinatable) episteme, the organicity of the epistemic); otherwise, you spin around in circles going nowhere. And no guardrail is going to protect you from doing that!
  
• It’s like, you know, attempting to speak language as such without using any of the words from the language of humankind. Or perhaps like, you know, speaking a word to(ward) an other all the while speaking a word as (an)other. This too shall not pass.
• It’s like, you know, Liberace’s famous question: “Would you rather have roses on your piano or tulips on your organ?” Vote now!

Bullet-Point Friday

• I'm enjoying my trek through Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with Love, a book about his friendship(s) and (professional) relationship(s) with Joseph Brodsky, translation theory, Russian, literature, and death. It is everything that John Felstiner falls short of. Throughout Felstiner's work (specifically Translating Neruda and Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew), he steers the reader toward this totalizing conception of identity and poetry: he reads Neruda and Celan as if their names were always in capital letters, as if they were homogenized, monolithic, unified Cartesian subjects, as if his biographical/literary/psychological/physiological uncoverings and excavations had the final say on what their poetry was all about. Weissbort, on the other hand, speaks toward an actual and real person he met, befriended, and knew, and yet who escapes any insincere attempt toward totalization: was 'Joseph' a Jew, how much of a Jew was he, how does his translation of his own poetry speak the same as their Russian versions. 'Joseph' is always moving away, eliding Weissbort’s efforts to read him, his words, him through his words, his words in his (own) voice, his words in his Russian (or Russified English). Felstiner reminds me of why I stopped reading literature and poetry all those years ago; Weissbort makes me want to read everything Brodsky ever wrote (as well as everything Weissbort ever wrote).
• I have approximately 50 pounds of books about Mark Rothko I need to work through this weekend as I prepare for an in-class presentation on the Rothko Chapel next week.
• Tonight is First Friday at the Ft. Worth Modern. I thought I would take myself out for the evening to enjoy the new exhibit and then maybe a nice vegan meal at Spiral Diner. (I can’t wait for the Spiral Diner to open up in my neighborhood!)
• Tomorrow is already “full up to the neck”: German class from 10:00-12:00, a visit (during the Texas-OU game) to the Dallas Museum of Art to come up with a subject for my term paper, and then Lauren’s party in the evening celebrating the release of Superficial Flesh. Perhaps one of these days I’ll actually have some down time and do some pleasure reading or spend an afternoon just brushing my cats. Maybe December.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Conversation over breakfast of Swiss oatmeal this morning included Alan Watts’ lecture over the coincidence of opposites, Huston Smith’s Zen training, and the metaphysics of becoming (as opposed to the Heideggerean notion of Gellasenheit, a letting be). All this before 7:30 a.m.
• There is no front without a back, no heads without tails, no sickness without health, no I without you.
• Now that it’s almost 9:00, I can also think about bringing in Parmenides’ attempt toward deduction: one can’t make negative existential statements, nor can one make positive existential statements (because by saying what something is, then one is implicitly saying what something is not—if this is a dog, then it is necessarily not a cat—which takes you back to the first premise).
• Therefore (in all of its metaphysical/rhetorical glory), all is one.
• There is no Buddhist monk without a dictator-general.
• And every poet has her other.
• But who is the poet’s other? The rhetorician? The philosopher? The linguist? The poem’s reader? The poem? The poet herself? All and (n)one::all is (n)one.
• It’s now 9:02, and I still have so much more work to do....

Scivias

I remain
Together:t(w)o-gathered
A union w/o unity
Identity w/ difference
Singable yet always (yet) unsung remainder
Twinned coils twining through
Here & (t)here & no(w)here:now/here
Wo ist der Mensch?
W(h)er(e) ist der Mensch?
Here- her- he- ach
And a thou-
Sand hands to hold at night
And an eye
T(w)o-ward
Hath an ear
Near- 'ear 'ea- æ
Farawaywayawaywayaway
Let be--this subjunctive that terrorizes time
I'm set ... for now
Know- now- no-

Sweet Substitute for Joy!

My neurologist prescribed a new drug for me yesterday to take in addition to Rozerem, and last night was my first ride on the Amitriptyline pony. It’s classified as an anti-depressant, but since the only thing I tend to be depressed about is my insomnia, my doctor prescribed it for my insomnia. It didn’t do much for me last night in the sleep department, but I woke up in an appreciably better mood than usual. I actually sang out, “Good morning!” to one of my neighbors. She was scared and ran inside to lock her doors. You see, I’ve conditioned most people in my life to fully appreciate my asocial, misanthropic self.

On the commute to work I found myself mostly flipping between the classic rock stations and actually enjoying the gratuitous guitar solos I’ve shunned since the early ‘80s. When I heard Coldplay as I was scanning the other listening options, I immediately shuddered and switched back to the oldies. Amitriptyline strikes again, I thought. What else could make me both sing greetings to my neighbors and listen to hair bands from my teenage years? Was it depression after all that turned me into my post-punk, spiked hair, black-clad self? I’d probably be married with kids in college and living in the ‘burbs if I could’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep in the past few decades. I’d be driving a Lexus instead of that damned sensible Camry!

Perhaps tonight I’ll up my dose and see where the Amitriptyline pony takes me tomorrow down the stony path of self-rediscovery.

Poet/Novelist/Writer/Blogger/Scholar

toothpastefordinner.com

Guilty.

I wrote bad poetry until my poetry was published by a publisher of bad poetry. Then I was too humiliated that my heart-wrenching poems were enclosed in the same volume as this stellar work:

There once was a mouse.
He saw some cheese.
He went for the cheese.
But it was a trap.
There is no longer a mouse.

In college, when I was president of the English honor society, I organized Bad Poetry Readings. If you showed up with none of your own bad poetry, I would hand out that collection and have each person find an equally bad poem to read for the group. I haven't written poetry (too) seriously since.

A few years ago, when I was gainfully and woefully underemployed, I too participated in a "write a novel in a month" program. My novel remains unfinished--like much of my life--as I do actually concentrate on finishing the Ph.D.

Perhaps Dr. Skajlab will revisit that writing project at a later date, perhaps when tenure is not looming quite so large overhead. Perhaps retirement. Perhaps when Wendy Faris reads the last sentence of À la recherche du temps perdu I'll be walking to the post office with my manuscript in a brown paper envelope to send it to a respected and reputable publisher of fine letters. Perhaps.

Until then I have much work to do on my dissertation. And all those writing assignments for my last semester of coursework. And articles to submit for publication in peer-reviewed journals. So it looks like I'll be able to delay and postpone the fear that I'm really a shitty novelist for years.

Until then, I'll just focus on the fact that I'm a pretty shitty blog writer.

Voices

Nothing abides. Nothing remains.

Today I found out that Ray Williams died. (We raise our voices.) He was the chair of the fine arts division at the community college I attended. (We learn to speak.) He listened, especially when I had something (important) to say. (We speak our minds.) He spoke to me as if I had something important to say. (He taught speech. And humanities.) Although we certainly were not close, he had a deep impact on my life. (I teach.) He was sensitive, and intelligent, and passionate. (I am still learning to listen when my students speak.) Rest in peace, Ray. (Your voice will be missed.)

Euro-Franz Say Auf Wiedersehen

Euro-Franz isn't one to cherish or even approve of long goodbyes. Perhaps he's said goodbye too many times. When he lived in Japan all those years ago, he was even known to pop in and out of town without a word. Somehow he was always able to book tickets for flights either too early or too late for others to care about showing up at the airport. Or to even know. He's left too many countries to name without so much as an acknowledgment that he was on his way out. Perhaps the best goodbyes are the ones unspoken that leave no residual emotional messiness. No remains for those who after all remain where one has left.

Which is why yesterday's orgazmo of farewells was particularly unwelcome. I didn't mind saying goodbye to my professors, but when I was forced to interrupt classes to announce to people I barely knew that I was leaving, a line had been crossed. It's nothing personal because I don't even know them. They certainly do not know me. We passed each other a few times in hallways; I perhaps noticed them in required gatherings. But there was never any real chance of a connection. We are far too different, and I am considerably more different than they, than Thou. Making such announcements made me want to cover my head and duck into a dark corner, abandon my bags and jump on the next train pulling away from the station, stick out my thumb and accept the next stranger's offer of a ride. Life is far too short to attempt or move toward something lasting. Like breath: you aren't doing it correctly if you only inhale. At least one half of the process is letting it all go. Escape. Release. Goodbye.

Fauxhawk

Repeat after Euro-Franz: Don't fear the fauxhawk. The fauxhawk is your friend.

One thing I will miss about being in Europe: having considerably less social pressure about how I style my hair in the morning. Not that that ever stopped me before....

One thing I will not miss about being in Europe: mandatory smoking. Oh sure, there are "non-smoking sections," but each one I've seen still has ashtrays ... right below the non-smoking sign. I've suffered through enough secondhand smoke these past five weeks to equal at least one week of firsthand chain-smoking.

Pieces of Me

If it’s not the hunger and lack of interest in any of the food I find on the streets here—I mean there’s only so many cheese pizzas, cheese sandwiches, tomato salads, falafel pitas, and gummy, cheesy pasta dishes with limp vegetables I can stomach—that will kill me, then it will be the utter inexplicability of my inability to sleep throughout the night. Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour (11:30), but I was wide awake (again) by 12:45, and I couldn’t get back to sleep until almost 3:00. In the meantime—and I mean this in its meanest and most unreasonable sense—I began reading another life-changing essay by Derrida about Gadamer and the poetics of Paul Celan. And then I took out my iPod and listened to some tracks from my Lazy Sunday Afternoon playlist, just allowing my mind to drift and reflect in a letting-be (perhaps—as if—a move toward Gelassenheit). Perhaps it will be the anticipation of the arriving/letting-go that will finally do me in.

“There are pieces of me you’ve never seen. Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” These lyrics by Tori Amos continually float through my head. Knowing that people—and ultimately all things, including the great to be (it)self—are ultimately unknowable, I know that I don’t even really know myself. So, how can anyone else know this me that I don’t even know, this no-ing, unknowable I that reverts to a me when faced with the face of the radically alter in its (own/un-owning/un-(kn)ownness) radical alterity? A good question to reflect upon and face at two-fucking-thirty AM. Kids: don’t try this at home without adult supervision. I am a trained professional, and it still hurts when I do it.

I like the subtle subversion of irreplaceability these lyrics hint at: as if to say, you don’t need to replace me with her because we are the same. Do you not see that which draws you to her is also present here in me? Do you not see that the continual/continuing race toward the (metaphysics of the) new is just as questionable as the issue of knowledge of self and other (it)self? We are ultimately reflections of one another, each other: “The killer in you is the killer in me.” (Lyrics by Smashing Pumpkins. Maybe I should just stop listening to music altogether.)

I like how da in German can mean both there as well as here. I like how nach can mean both to(ward) as well as after. This is a great language in which to lose oneself, especially when the first person-pronoun is never capitalized (except, of course, as the first word of a sentence) and the second-person polite Sie is always capital(ized). But true Gesprach takes place only between (ein(e)) ich und (ein(e)) du....

Speak my language.

Unfit for Life

Learning German is making me even more unfit as a human being. As if having studied Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Latin have made me either marketable or more lovable! But German is becoming a special case: I’m not learning to communicate (i.e., how to buy falafel from the Turks) but rather to sit in a dark room alone with several dictionaries in order to decode, decipher, un-encrypt—to translate, carry over—semantic meaning from the Devil’s tongue to the language of angels. And I’m learning this “skill” from an angry Romanian woman whose smell I’ve grown accustomed to already.

So, I won’t be making friends in German. That’s involves a specialized vocabulary that my skill set can not at the present time manage. My morning language course, too, can attest to the fact that in German I will be (in the most absolute sense) all by myself: I’m not only alone in my endeavor to take the advanced reading/translation course alone but I’m also enduring, surviving the more remedial—actually the most remedial—course in the program. I’m surprised each morning when the short bus does not appear outside my dorm to carry me off to class with the (other) retards. (But at least I actually brung myself a real wordbook from Amerika to helps me with the studying.)

Yesterday afternoon I spent about four hours translating selections of Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory, and now I have a few pages of Walter Benjamin to tackle, conquer, capitulate to by my next class Monday. Benjamin and Celan are the main reasons I’m here in the first place learning the unlearnable with the unlearned, but I guess I’m not the first to blame my misery on G-d’s chosen.

Now I have five days all to myself. The others—those people—are heading off to the great Benelux conundrum, but I, because of UNRESOLVED ISSUES stemming from the GREAT UNPLEASANTNESS cannot fathom venturing near that part of the planet at this time. Instead, I’ll be visiting some of the cities nearby, exploring the offerings of Dokumenta in Kassel, the sculpture exhibit in Münster, and the great Civilized City of Köln. To further prove just how useless my German is, I will be tackling each new city purely in my native tongue. Halleluja! Hosanna hosanna! Pray that the train union strikes do not keep me in Marburg….