I do not like ordering books online but I really should make an exception for Siken. Here’s another, with the formatting tragically stripped because I am all sorts of inept when it comes to these things.

Visible World
by Richard Siken
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
flat on the wall.
The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
pummeling you in a stream of fists.
You raised your hand to your face as if
to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
as if you were the small room closed in glass
with every speck of dust illuminated.
The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
from passing through.

Well, I’m graduated. The period of stunned disbelief is slightly wearing off, though I still can’t shake the guilt I get on days when I don’t do reading or work that resembles study. It’s terrible, how ingrained the impulse to study is by this point. I feel like a lesser human being if I don’t read Derrida or literary criticism or Very Weighty Canonical Literature every single day…

I would probably better be able to snap out of this strange academic hangover if I had a job, but I haven’t found one yet, and, antisocial, I know no way to fill time but by study. I find I am shockingly unqualified for most work considering that I got my degree from a swanky, mad expensive, generally well regarded private school where I was considered a top student and a teacher favourite. I know english literature isn’t exactly the most employable major, but I’m smart, personable enough, highly literate, a quick learner, and I write well — shouldn’t these qualities make it, if not easy, at least not difficult to find employment? Maybe the problem is that I’m not looking for a career of any sort, and that I shy away from secretary and office work, which is what my job history most qualifies me for. I’d be perfectly happy making coffee at this point (at least I’d get to talk to people all day long), but I don’t know how to work an espresso machine or a cash register, and who the hell is going to take the time to teach me? They all want at least a year of experience.

I’m seriously thinking of selling my body to science. Take my kidneys, urine, blood, lung tissue! Seems like a fair enough exchange for a few hundred and a place to go during the day.

(Does anyone know of any job opportunities in the bay area?)

Every other day my friend L. calls me. Before I even say hello I answer her question, “Not yet. Not done yet.” Then we talk for two minutes in which I chatter about what I am doing and promise to call her the instant I send in my last paper.

If she called right now the interaction would be exactly the same. Not yet.

I stopped counting how many pages I produced last week after I finished my 23-page thesis and then immediately wrote a 17 page paper (that was only supposed to be 10). Still to do: minimum 14 pages? In 24 hours? No matter; I am a paper-writing machine. My confidence might just be delirium from sleeplessness and too much caffeine.

Here are some of my titles:

• The Interior Jungle: Articulation of Identity in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding
• Of Parents and Portraits: The Moribund Identity of Aurora Leigh
• Deconstruction as Negative Theology: Mystical Undertones in Derrida (epigraph: “I pray God to rid me of God.” — Meister Eckhart)
• The Monologism of Madness (working title. clearly needs at least one colon & possibly an epigraph.)

In case you’re wondering, then yes, I did write almost solely about construction of identity this semester. Psychoanalysis, anyone?

Which one I believe changes pretty much from day to day. Words and I have a very complicated relationship.

I do not think the first is a very good poem, but I have always really liked certain lines in it, particularly the ending. The second I have just discovered and need to read outloud and write down before I can decide what I think. But the counterpart of them struck me.

“Words”
by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

“One Star Fell and Another”
by Conrad Aiken

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said–
–How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,–
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet–?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough–!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,–a night of frost? . . .
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

I have some latent dubiety about Robert Bly as both a translator and a poet, but this poem — specifically this poem declaimed in his voice on the radio (turned up very very high so that he almost shouted) as I drove too fast down the 580 late to meeting a friend, nervous jittery chainsmoking, drinking a quadruple-shot coffee — made me very happy for a few minutes, was a glorious beginning to a tough day.

Stealing Sugar From the Castle - by Robert Bly

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

I don’t know, I can’t tell. Maybe it’s only good in his voice. If you want, you too can experience the poem in his voice, if you wish–not quite as good in terms of force and movement as the one I caught, as he digresses a lot, but his comments are really delightful–here. I’d love to see him read…

I must keep up with the reading of her; she is so good for my soul. This is from October 11, 1929, Vol. 3 of the Diaries:

“Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained & surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ’seeing’ people … No; it is not physical silence; it is some inner loneliness–interesting to analyse if one could. To give an example–I was walking up Bedford Place is it–the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon, & I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer, & no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died–alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, & now nothing. And when I come indoors, it is all so silent–I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head–Yet I am writing–oh & we are very successful–& there is–what I most love–change ahead. … And it is autumn; & the lights are going up & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street–in a great misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates & glasses on the floor,–& the Press is booming–& this celebrity business is quite chronic–& I am richer than I have ever been–& bought a pair of earrings today–& for all this, there is vacancy & silence somewhere in the machine.

On the whole, I do not much mind; because, what I like is to flash & dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains–of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort–I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money & so on, to do anything. … I daresay I shan’t. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life; is genuine–Does any of this convey what I want to say?–But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all.”

Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden

A year before his death, Vladimir Nabokov responded to a Book Review survey which asked authors for comments on their three most enjoyed books of the year. The last book that he mentioned was his own, the controversial and never-published manuscript Laura. It seems as if the book will be published after all, a turn that has me torn between !!!! and regret. The scale has been tipped a bit towards !!!! by the last paragraph of the NYT blog linked to above, which quotes Nabokov’s comments on The Original of Laura:

“The third, as he wrote, is ‘The Original of Laura. The not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.’”

Lovely, lovely Nabokov! I want that book despite myself.

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem
Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

I used to smoke in the stairwell of my dorm, breaking all sorts of California laws and school rules. It was technically indoors, but was really more like an outdoor passageway with a roof. I sat directly in front of this window and watched it at every gradation of day and light imaginable. It reminded me of something from an ascetic nunnery or saint’s hovel with its stone and cracked, moldy plaster and barred windows with gorgeous sky and flowers beyond. This photo is probably almost exactly a year old now, and it has me awash with nostalgia. Miss those stairs, miss this view.

• How many reviews/pieces of lit crit/essays/books/&c. begin by quoting my darling Keats’ maxim about Beauty=Truth/Truth=Beauty? If I were at all statistically minded, this is exactly the sort of question I would set out to answer, but I don’t really need the numbers to reach my conclusion: too goddamn many. Despite this annoyance, I am intrigued by the NYT review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, a book, as the title suggests, about particularly transcendent instances of beauty in the search for scientific truth. I do love a pop-science book every now and again, so long as it is well-written. I should go iron out my library fines and see if anyone’s got it. If the author is appealing, it’s possible that he could be a gem of amusement for weeks to come.

• Robert Falcon Scott’s journals of the lost Scott Expedition are online and free at Gutenberg! I am very excited to have discovered this, can’t wait to read them, & must remember to look for Shackleton as well, as I have been flirting the edges of an obsession with polar exploration ever since January, when I began to have dreams of wandering through Antarctic landscapes. In my dream my fingers fell off every time I removed my mittens, but always seemed to regenerate. I refused to throw them away, and carried them with me in my pack. The dreams were pervaded by a great sense of looking for something, though I didn’t know what, and would spend days after I had one pondering, trying to remember, eventually resorting to playing unsuccessful divination with Freud in hopes of interpretation. I gave up after a bit, accepted them, and decided that rather than it being any very significant subconscious event it was probably just Annie Dillard saturating my mind. I was deeply affected by her essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Religion! the Absolute! Antarctica! history! poetry! all in one gorgeous essay! O, she is a sublime synthesis:

“I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone.’ I have a taste for solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate conditions?

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.” –Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”

• Sometimes I like to perambulate the entire circumference of my school’s library with the posture of a monarch surveying her domain: head up, spine straight, arms crossed loosely behind the back. I often pause to kiss the books like babies — Nabokov, 100-year-old copies of Keats and Shelley, misshelved french philosophers. At other times, when I have been studying for hours and just want to weep, I lie on my back in the poetry section and cover my face with an open book, not even someone who I love, just a pretty book with a pungent comforting library smell.

• I dream of living nearer to the lake so as to become well acquainted with the ducks and the geese. Observing them has been my central delight this week, though I have to be careful about my propensity to make meaningful eye contact with the geese, as it makes them react with aggression. It’s just that I want to approach the world from now on with a strict policy of meaningful eye contact in all interactions. But geese are not people even if their yoga poses might fool you into thinking they are!