since feeling is first
e.e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
It saddens me enormously when I feel, as I have all this semester, that I don’t have time to process my learning in a truly deep and thoughtful way; namely, by writing through and about the ideas that I encounter. I don’t mean essay writing so much as personal freewrites, a diary of the mind. Without writing like this — formulating thoughts in my own words, positioning myself in relation to them, arguing or conversing with them — I tend only to engage in the most shallow of ways, skimming the fingertips of my mind along the surface of a text as I conduct a time-pressured dash whose only goal is to finish and gather a sentence or two for classroom discussion. This, one of the great sorrows of being a student in academia! — to feel the mind alight with curiosity at the multitude of paths and questions contained within a book — and, never losing this awareness, to pass them by without pursuit.
There are not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week, not enough weeks in the month, not enough months in the year, and not enough years in my life to satisfy the hunger of my curiosity. And I hate when I allow this truth, and its accompanying panicky awareness of running out of time, to keep me from even trying.
“The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.” — Martin Heidegger
For Heidegger, as far as I can understand, thinking is a way of touching — or perhaps opening oneself up for exposure to — that which is larger than us . For him this is Being. Your (and my) interpretation of what that “something larger” is may be different, which is something that I do like about him: the number of different belief systems that can be fitted into his essential framework, schema, approach (a shallow statement which he would hate, probably, and disagree with). This approach is, by the way, absolutely maddening to me, but which has also been revealing glimmerings of intense beauty. It strikes me as incredibly gorgeous, the concept that that which is most essential to ourselves is something that can never be looked at directly — to look directly at Being, to pin it into the violence of definitions, is to kill it, and so it must be tip-toed around, described through negation and sideways glances and peripheries. It’s like some sort of unicorn hunt, or perhaps search for a white whale, that takes place entirely on a level of delicate abstraction.
I think my heart softened and my understanding peaked when I realized how extremely mystical Heidegger can be (or perhaps just late Heidegger — we must make distinctions, and I’m not, after all, reading Being and Time). Which tempts me to ramble on my ever-complicating relationship towards God in Words, but not right now (wrist!); I’ll just say that I have an inexplicably intense sympathy for mysticism these days. Reading Heidegger as religious (saintly) ecstasy transposed into a philosophical framework makes me as open-hearted and partial towards him as I am towards John of the Cross or St. Theresa of Avila. There’s just something mad-eyed and glorious to it all, and it calls to me.
Appeal to the Grammarians
by Paul Violi
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we’re ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back,
the flat tire at journey’s outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it — here and now
As I sit outside the Caffè Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”
Yesterday I fell. I have very poor balance at best, and walked like a drunken pirate long before Johnny Depp ever internationalized the gait, but the thing about being a dizzy person is that you get very good at catching yourself. Though I trip and stumble almost every time I move, I rarely fall. But yesterday I did, and I am worried that I might have done considerable damage to my wrists. They were pained to begin with — tendinitis, one of the common hazards of studentship — but now — O, there is no comparison. My right wrist is definitely sprained, and I am doing paranoid internet research about breaks.
I’ll need an amanuensis if it isn’t better tomorrow or the next day! I have papers to write (one to do now) and this post, my typing test, has proven the activity unbearable.
1. Tautology. Rhetorical, not logical. The implied circularity of meaning that it carries with it. When my philosophy professor says “Being qua Being” with dramatic handflourishes. False, surface tautologies that may or may not have greater meaning: “The being appears as a being in light of Being” (Heidegger qtd. in Habermas). Just the word itself — tautology, tautological. Tautology qua tautology.
2. Writing down phrases completely out of context in the margins of unrelated books or homework handouts: “Marriage + wolves,” “sadness is exsanguious,” “GAPING YAWPS,” “Freud + teeth = periodontitis”
3. The neighbourhood friendly cat, Black Jack. Except when he gets so excited to see me that he mobs my feet and I fall over and skin my hands and knees while trying not to step on him.
4. The idea of whales. Metaphorical whales that can be stubbornly twisted into applying to any subject under the sun. The whale skeletons that I drew and hung on my wall.
5. The Brothers Karamazov!!!!
6. “I should like to be quit of all this: am more & more dissatisfied with modern lit: & the criticism thereof; envy painters, yet suspect that I must grate myself upon people to get my sense of ‘words’ dried up. … I think I shall read Chaucer: & En[glis]h poetry concurrently with French prose. But I’m word haunted. … Words words & now roast beef & apple tart. An evening alone.” –V. 5, October 30 1938
I mean: contradictory coexistence of dissatisfaction and love. Or maybe just love. Love & ampersands.
I just skipped my jewish women’s literature class (auditing, so not as awful as this sounds) to do a madcap scramble catchup session on philosophy. It was a good decision — I feel positive about my new understanding of Heidegger, which isn’t an understanding so much as an epiphany on why exactly I do not understand him. But I am sad about missing class, so so sad, because I actually loved a lot of the poetry we were to have read for the day — yiddish women poets, all new to me. My favourite is Malka Heifetz Tussman. Here are two poems of hers:
With Teeth in the Earth
My cheek upon the earth
and I know mercy.
With lips to the earth
I know love.
My nose in the earth
and I know thievery.
With teeth in the earth
I know murder.
And I know why those
who dig their teeth into the earth
and why those
who tear themselves away from the earth
must always weep over themselves.
In the Beginning
In the beginning,
there was lust.
Out of lust, God
emerged in flames.
Lust
is God’s nature.
Everything God creates
is in God’s nature.
Whoever gets more
of God’s nature –
a teardrop more –
becomes an artist, a poet.
One more drop –
a murderer.
Both translated by Marcia Falk. Not all are as dark as these, but I think these two in particular might say interesting things about Jewishness — the religion and the holocaust — but I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t in class to find out.
So, I missed yesterday. I can totally and validly blame daylight savings for that. Oh well.
It’s getting warmer and hasn’t rained much in like a month in these parts, which heralds spider season, aka months of doom and distress. I’m squeamish about buggy things at the best of times, but spiders are fucking terrifying to me. I have some sort of deep primal fear bound up in their very image — the legs are so threatening, somehow. This evening I saw two within twenty minutes both crawling on the same picnic bench I was attempting to study on. One was black and squat and hairy, the other was white and long-legged and sinister, and I couldn’t decide which arachnid physique is more frightening. After the first sighting, I tried to explain my leaping and skittering response to the friend I was with, who commented that Freud, or maybe someone else, she couldn’t remember, said that fear of spiders was linked to fear of sex. We then conducted thoughtful psychosexual analysis of Little Miss Muffet and the Itsy Bitsy Spider and for a little while I was distracted, and thus just fine with the idea of a scary huge spider in my vicinity. Then I saw the second and it was all over — I had to retreat to the marginally safer indoors.
There was another in my bathtub just now and I was paralyzed for almost twenty minutes as I tried to figure out a way to deal with it. One thing I can give spiders credit for is that they really have a way of throwing me into deep almost moral dilemmas which I go through quite creative somersaults to resolve. You see, frightened as I am of the awful beasties, I hate to kill them. Part of this is simply the dislike of being the direct agent of any creature’s death, even one that I intensely dislike. The other half of this reluctance is tied to the fear: I can look at a spider just fine without hysterics, but if it gets close to touching me? Boneshivers. Killing a spider with my own hands demands far too much proximity, which comes with the logical possibility that it will evade the descending tissue or shoe and jump on me in its escape attempt. At my parents house I would usually sic my cats on any spiders, and in the dorm I would sometimes knock on a friend’s door and get them to wield the instrument of death, but even then I was sometimes forced into creating elaborate death traps. The most famous incident, which my parents and certain circles of friends love to bring up from time to time, involved multiple hours of stalking and plotting and trying not to blink, and culminated in me knocking the spider into the bowl of my floorlamp and then pouring a glass of water into the (plugged in, turned on) lamp. I intended to drown the spider — which was just a daddy long leg, not even as awful as some! — but the bulb exploded and it was electrocuted before it had a chance to meet a watery death. I stand by my actions that night as perfectly logical under the irrationalizing pressure of fear. Drowning spiders is really the way to go — you don’t have to come near touching them or deal with the sickening, guilt-inciting crunch of their little bodies beneath your fingers. In this sense, shower spiders are actually the easiest — they can be dealt with by just turning the hot water faucet on full blast. So the last (I hope) spider of the day wasn’t nearly the trauma it could have been, though I did have some trouble knocking it down from the side of the tub into the fatal torrents. But still, three in one day? Is it an omen, or just a taste of what my life will be like for the next indefinite period of time — constant vigilance and the eternal sense of spider legs tickling at my scalp?
I do exaggerate, a bit. My arachnophobia could be much worse. I once read a magazine article written by a woman who was so afraid of spiders that she actually once turned a blowtorch on one even though she was indoors. Set her house on fire, I think. So long as I don’t feel compelled to buy a shotgun just to deal with the arachnids, I feel I remain within the boundaries of a (paradoxical, I know) rational phobia. Perhaps I should consider mastering the slingshot, though. That would be a handy way of dealing with the little bastard who has set up permanent residence in the top left corner of my room.
My roommate is back tonight from a week on an island somewhere. On one hand it is nice to have her back — I was looking after the dogs, and was continually having to rush home or not go out at all because they had to be fed or walked or let out to pee — but at the same time her return brings with it an immediate sense of physical stifling. I am a horrifically self-conscious sort of person; some days I think I cannot bear to even be looked at, and so I lurk in my room trying to breath quietly, pretending not to be home. How nice it was to stay in last weekend and not feel as if I were silently being judged lazy! I go out a lot these days, more than I ever have in my life, seeking solitude in crowds because it is so scarce in this house…
I long to move to a place of my own but cannot afford it. If only I had some sense of direction for post-graduation — alas, I can’t imagine how I could possibly manage to at once pay rent and save money if I were living alone.
I need to start thinking about what sort of job I’ll take.
…
In other news, am reading The Brothers Karamazov with relish and awe. It is the best Dostoevsky, I think; I cannot wait to see where it takes me.
Here is a removed chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Roald Dahl classic whose movie version (the old one, not the new) has totally eclipsed the book in my mind even though I know I read it multiple times. Even though I only remember the movie by this point, it’s pleasant to come across this chapter. It features one Miranda Piker, who is, from what I can gather, an obsessive student type. Fantastic! It’s too bad Dahl didn’t leave her in; maybe then I would have escaped all those teasing childhood comparisons to Veruca Salt.
Objectively speaking, neither the character nor her fate are as disgustingly wonderful as Veruca’s or Violet’s or Augustus’. But!
“Come on then, Father!” cried Miranda. “Let’s go down into the cellar and smash the machine that makes this dreadful stuff!”
God, I wish I had an excuse to say things like that.
I am fascinated by Dmitri Nabokov’s (several-month old; I think there’s been more news on it but don’t have time to find and read it yet) dilemma over whether or not to burn the manuscript of his father’s last book, as per V.N.’s request. Nabokov is by far one of my favourite authors, as I am fairly sure I’ve mentioned before. Lolita was my first, of course, but I have since branched out enough to consider myself quite devoted to his work. Pale Fire is a masterpiece, Invitation to a Beheading was one of the best books I read in 07, and I reread Pnin with clockwork regularity. So on one hand the idea of a Nabokov novel from beyond the grave, even an unfinished one, makes my brain salivate. What breathtaking gems of prose may lie within that swiss vault! The heartrate doubles at the possibility of it!
And yet I can completely understand Dmitri Nabokov’s dilemma. I myself am greatly superstitious about the dead and the wishes of the dying. And yet, as everyone on the internet keeps saying in response to this, what about Kafka? What if he had been obeyed? Just think of the loss! Think of all of the other great works of literature that have been destroyed and mourned for centuries — the rest of Gogol’s Dead Souls, for example, or Bruno Schultz’s famously lost The Messiah (I mention these as the two most recent lost or destroyed texts I have personally longed for in the past week — I’m sure there are others) — do we really want Nabokov’s Laura to join their ghostly ranks?
Familial obligation and devotion are pitted against the demands of history and scholarship. Clearly, logically, the latter should win — this book should be preserved, at least, if not published — I quite like the compromising idea that has been mentioned of giving the index cards over to some archive or another rather than publishing them — after all, this is not some third-rung temporarily popular author we’re talking about, one whose work has no greater significance or artistic merit and whose reputation will vanish beneath the weight of newly written words. Nabokov is — and I challenge anyone to seriously argue against this — one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. True, not all of his books are as transcendent as others, but even a poor example of a Nabokov novel is better than the huge percentage of shit that’s published and sold these days. Therefore it would be just as criminal to destroy his work as it would be to disobey his orders and preserve it — but the latter would simply offend a ghost of a memory of a man, whereas the former affects — well, not millions, but a significant enough amount of people for the choice to seem slightly weighted in favour of the hungry living, I think.
Maybe I’m just arguing against burning because I would love to read this book. Selfish.
I started doing that thing, you know the one, the reason all of my posts have numbers that correspond with the dates up there at the top, for the month to: a) write every day, anything, anything at all, even if it is a transcription of someone else’s words with a sentence of my own; and b) attempt something easy, succeed in it, and therefore restore my faith in my ability to commit and complete without fucking it up. Because school? Hasn’t been going so well. It’s my last semester, and I know that I just need to suffer through and do the bare minimum, but I overloaded myself terribly. Massive amounts of work + extreme burnout = crisis.
I don’t want to talk at length about the various sinister ways in which my own mind has been crippling my ability to get through this semester because I’m trying to move into a more positive mindframe, one that will allow me to reverse some of the damage I have done to my academic standing and intellectual identity. But I do want to note — publicly and with great remorse and horror — that I have spent the past few weeks metaphorically shooting myself in both of my feet when it comes to school. I should possibly continue therapy again because I’d really love to understand and unravel this tendency I have towards self-sabotage. My friends don’t get it, my teachers are frustrated, my parents are angry, and I am baffled and empty-handed of explanations. There is absolutely no reason for me to be doing so extravagantly awfully at something that, it is generally acknowledged, I am actually pretty good at.
Fear of failure so intense that it has transmogrified into fear of success? Out of control unattainability of the standards I set for myself? The inherent cruelty of spring? Sheer exhaustion and disillusionment stemming from more or less six straight years of undergraduate work? Laziness, craziness, self-loathing, anxiety? Stress and exhaustion? D, all of the above?
…but this George Eliot passage, from a letter to a friend, must be preserved somewhere where I won’t lose it until I can find my quote notebook and write it down:
“Alas for the fate of poor mortals which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only an evening before utterly gone– the hard angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose. It is so in all the stages of life–the poetry of girlhood goes–the poetry of love and marriage–the poetry of maternity–and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season and we see ourselves and all about us as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms–poor tentative efforts of the Nature Principle to mould a personality. This is the state of prostration—the self-abnegation through which the soul must go, and to which perhaps it must again and again return, that its poetry or religion, which is the same thing, may be a real ever-flowing river fresh from the windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep–not an artificial basin with grotto work and gold fish.” –George Eliot
I am desperate to get my hands on her collected letters. Soon, very soon, I will dissect this new mania that I’ve got for the journals and letters of famous dead authors. It’s a bit voyeuristic and perverse, really. Not that thinking that is stopping me.
In an attempt to offset the crushing depression that is Theodor Adorno, I’ve been sprinkling my days with stolen hours spent reading children’s books, all of the ones that I remember liking enormously when I was young. Saturday was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, yesterday was A High Wind in Jamaica (which I read as a young teenager and not a child, but did not remember and it was the only thing I had on my shelf that looked quick), today, Harriet the Spy. It is at once satisfying and enormously strange to revisit the very first books that ever made an impression on you. The things one forgets, the things one remembers! All these years I thought Wolves took place solely in secret passages and trains, when actually those are only a chapter each.
I long to find this series that I remember only very vaguely from before I learned to read myself, several books by the same author that my mother read to me when I was really little, before even, I think, we did Anne of Green Gables. I remember them being very victorian-esque, set in a large mansion by a river that had ghosts. Or … something. Children interacting with ghosts that might not actually be ghosts at all in a house on a river…? Hardly enough to go on, and my mother doesn’t remember them either, but I would love to find and reread them. Besides picture books and fairy tales, they are probably the very first books I remember.
Today’s Virginia — Wednesday the 28th of November, 1928, from V. 4 — is very lengthy and very incredible and I long to type it all. It has reflections on her relationship with her father, discussion of how awful and awkward and yet strangely pleasing it is when a dear friend writes a bad book, meditation on life, and a long glorious rhapsody on her relationship with her own writing — in short, everything one could ask of Virginia from a diary entry.
“So the days pass, & I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; & whether this is living. Its very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands & feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy. & so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards & forwards.”
“As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. … The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry — by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel[ist]s — that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. I think I must read Ibsen & Shakespeare & Racine.”
The Moths must be a working title, perhaps for The Waves? I don’t know; the internet is failing me. I have The Waves, have been saving it for a really bad day. I should try to find out if this is the book she is talking about here, because I am so curious whether she managed to “saturate” while still making it “transparent.”
A monumental evening: for the first time since I moved in to this house a full half year ago I managed to turn on the heater myself. Usually I depend on my roommate to light it, and when she goes out of town, as she has this week, I just pile on double layers of socks, gloves, and jackets. But tonight I took my life into my hands and leaned into the pit in the living room with a blazing torch of slender bamboo and — miracle of miracles! — it caught! And I did not gas myself! At this moment I am hunched over the grate, admiring the distant flame, basking in the warmth, feeling about 2.5% more like a functioning adultlike person than I did two hours ago.
Today’s Virginia is from V. 5 of the diaries, June 22 1937:
“I wd. like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence … & the solitude. I cant though. But shant I, one of these days, indulge myself in some short releases into the world? Short now for ever. No more long grinds: only sudden intensities. If I cd. think out another adventure.”
I know she’s talking about writing and not life, but damn. She’s better than the Bible for divination, or rather for moment-clarification.
Lately I am tired of words. I can’t even remember anymore why I loved them so much, why I considered myself such a reader, why I wanted to be a writer. I blame school, of course, because it is the easy and obvious cause — to be so forcefully inundated, so sucked dry of sentences all day every day for the larger proportion of the last six years! — but I am not convinced that this is correct. Maybe my love for them was always too entwined with childish innocence and faith-for-the-sake-of-faith to have survived growing up? Or, at least, to survive growing up in the direction that I have done, in fits and starts of ever-increasing cynicism and doubt.
(To speak of doubt and faith perhaps rings hyperbolic. It is not. Books are, have been, my cathedrals; to disbelieve in their power is to disbelieve in a god.)
Whatever the reason, my relationship with them has grown awkward, stilted, and, worst, bitter, resentful, fraught. I can’t seem to make them work with me in truce, much less manage to master them for my own articulation. I have hardly written a word for myself throughout the past month, nor have I wanted to; I have been reading with the same fuzzy, bored inattention that I watch trash TV with, and for the same reason — as filler, distraction.
I am not yet apathetic enough to be unconcerned and accepting of this disenchantment, not yet willing to let it be and move on in search of something new. I’ve amassed most of the volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries over the past few months, almost everything by Annie Dillard, and all but one of Cynthia Ozick’s essay collections. I have a long shelf half full of Faulkner and Nabokov. All old favourites, proven wordsmiths. The task: every day, read a passage randomly chosen from a book of someone who I used to love passionately, disregarding context, excusing myself from the pressure of needing to finish or follow a plot. Read slowly. Think. Wait for emotions to be kindled.
Tonight, The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, V. 2. Excerpted from Thursday, August 18 1921:
“No one in the whole of Sussex is so miserable as I am; or so conscious of an infinite capacity of enjoyment horded in me, could I use it. The sun streams (no: never streams floods rather) down upon all the yellow fields & the long low barns; & what wouldn’t I give to be coming through Firle woods, dusty & hot, with my nose turned home, every muscle tired, & the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane & cool, & ripe for the morrows task. How I should notice everything — the phrase for it coming the moment after & fitting like a glove; & then on the dusty road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling itself; & then the sun would be down, & home, & some bout of poetry after dinner, half read, half lived, as if the flesh were dissolved & through it the flowers burst red & white.
There! I’ve written out half my irritation.”
“I feel like a treasure hunter — tapping the prose walls of this book with my ears strained, listening for hollow spots, undiscovered chambers.”
“Beautiful. I can supply you with a headlamp.”
“How about a stethoscope?”
(seven hours later)
“How is it?”
“The only hidden chambers I’ve found are in the labyrinths of my own self doubt.”
“The longer I’m in school the worse I get at paperwriting & classtalking & timemanaging. How can this be? Is school actually making me stupider? crazier? lazier?”
(fin)
My fish died sometime today. He was alive this morning, looking livelier and happier than he had in several months, but now he is dead, pinned to the bottom of the tank by Thelma/Sisyphus (the snail), who is making a feast of his corpse. This is the first time that I have ever regretted keeping a snail in the tank. It makes the unexpected demise that much more difficult. How to detach the live snail from the dead fish so that I can deal with this? And what to do with the body if and when I do manage that?
I am rather ridiculously sad. Sure, he was a fish, just about as nonsentient and noninteractive a companion a girl can have, but he was also a good little guy, a hardy and hearty fellow. He traveled with me on five long road trips, thousands of miles in all, and came through with cheer and panache despite the clear hardship of being a fish in a jar in a car hurtling through the sierra nevadas at 80 miles per hour. It was on those trips that my parents and my friend E. truly came to appreciate his beauty — inevitably there was moment when, driving and unable to look for myself, I demanded that the person beside me pull his jar out from its nest of pillows and check on him. A poetic instant every time — the sunlight would catch his fins as he flourished in tiny circles, and our breath would catch at the sight. “Oh,” my father or mother or friend would say. “Oh, he is beautiful.”
And he was.
Time to write a poem, I guess, and attempt sleep. Snail extraction and burial will have to wait for morning.
Life in Words: A Dramatic Monologue
I shall begin, as always, with a lie: I am not a writer. It is a falsehood told with such earnestnesss, such wide-eyed and fervent credulity, that you have no choice but to believe me. Go on, accept it – let us all nod in unison for good measure, to cement it. There. That’s done, recognized. Now we can move on.
Let us talk instead about a more genial subject, of an identity that I will stake out in whole as my own: that of the reader. I read. It is a statement so obvious as to be superfluous, a state of being that I expect manifests somehow on my face, as visible to the world as the colour of my eyes or the curl in my hair. I read, I have always read, I will always read. Perhaps it is genetic, perhaps conditioned, perhaps simply obsessive. Having said it I turn blank, as if those two words are enough – a manifesto, succinctly spanning all that you might want to know about the subject. What more is there to add?
Maybe, my fond audience, you will prompt me with the obvious next questions. What do I read, and why? Having already touched upon the latter, let us linger upon it for a longer moment. It is genetic, I tell you, or conditioned, and I say these things seriously, for I am the firstborn child of an English professor and a librarian. Go on, smile if you want to – it explains a lot, I know – but I do find the explanation insufficient in its biographical ease. I prefer to think of my reading as a manifestation of a great abstract human characteristic, a facet of the human condition that I just happen to feel more acutely than many: the hunger for stories.
It is a strain that runs through the most apathetic of us, this taste for the narrative, and if we are not sating ourselves on other peoples’ experiences we are attempting to express our own to family, friends, strangers on the bus or the BART or the grocery line or behind the coffee counter; to the cat or the dog or the unhearing walls; to the trees, to the skies, to the stars, to the gods. Look to psychology for explanation of the human soul, if you must, or to sociology or anthropology or any science; I maintain that the truth of our existence is heard loudest in fiction, for we are fundamentally creatures of stories.
I read, then, for knowledge of myself and others, to learn about the world. There are other reasons, of course; the always-glittering and often profound Annie Dillard has a list: “You may read fiction to enjoy the multiplicity and dazzle of the vivid objects it presents to the imagination; to hear its verbal splendor and admire its nimble narrative…to feel, on one hand, the solemn stasis and immutability of the work as enclosed art object—beginning and ending the same way every time you read it, as though a novel were a diagram inscribed forever under the vault of heaven—and to feel, on the other hand, the plunging force of time compressed in its passage, and that compressed passage like a river’s pitch crowded with scenes and scenery and actions and characters enlarged and rushing headlong down together.”
You may indeed. I do. And as a result the list of what I read is voluminous and eclectic, with dozens of thematic threads that resist being braided or knotted into a cohesive whole. Easier, maybe, if I drew you a map, for, as I have said, I am not a writer; words fail me when I attempt to capture and cage in language the impossibility of multiplicity, the pantheon of my interests. A map might suffice, or a multi-paged list of all the books I have read within the past few years. Or maybe a list of the things I am not interested in, just to narrow the field a bit. I’m sure, if I tried, I could think of some subject somewhere, anywhere, which I cannot in any circumstances conjure at least a passing interest in. Actually—no, no, I cannot. For, like most of us, I require absolutely everything to be happy, and reading is no different. I demand my knowledge to come in legions, in multiplicity. Nothing less will do.
I will end where I began – no, not in more lies, but with explanation of my lie, out of guilt or courtesy. Reading and writing are inextricably linked; I feel safe in hypothesizing that every great reader secretly wants to be a writer. But if reading is consumption, then writing is unsafe, dangerous, an offering up of your self as sacrifice to the masses, a sort of cannibalism of the soul. Safer to be on the other end of that, wouldn’t you say? For reading is like eating, it is like breathing; it is something that I do naturally, without effort or intent, nothing more than just one of the many natural bodily functions that sustain my survival. Writing takes effort, it is something that one must do. But reading – reading simply is.
–I love my friends. Do you love yours? You should. Let’s all have a moment of silent appreciation for our friends.
–Internet scrabble for the win. Who wants to play with me? Comment! I’ve been operating via Facebook, but am on the verge of moving to www.scrabulous.com itself in order to milk as much enjoyment as possible from its existence before Matel shuts it down for copyright infringement.
–Looming thesis = dread and anxiety. What do I write about???? More on this later.
–Travel vertigo of the soul: which city do I live in again?
–I have not done laundry in weeks (which means I have actually been wearing my neglected skirts and dresses instead of the lazy student uniform of jeans, chucks, black shirts and sweaters — sort of nice and makes me want to go spend lots of money on more more more skirts that will probably moulder with the rest when I actually work up the volition to go buy detergent). There is a three week old apple slowly mummifying on my bookshelf in front of my three different copies of The Sound and the Fury. My “food” situation consists of a bottle of five dollar saki, a half-empty carton of milk that will go bad at any moment, and a box of safeway-brand cornflakes. These seemingly unrelated observations are intended to illustrate the State of Soul, or, why I have ceased to exist online. Alternate excuse for this, as well as explanation for all of the above: travel.
–Current books that I am really intrigued by but cannot quite justify spending the money on: The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada (fascination sparked by this review), Umberto Eco’s matched pair History of Beauty and On Ugliness (I long for a teacher to assign them to me so I can justify the purchase), and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (see the New Yorker’s “In the Mourning Store,” which I have not yet read because I just ten minutes ago pulled the magazine from my mailbox, but which excites me beyond words because I am not-so-secretly obsessed with the Civil War).
I might take the time to actually say something journally or thoughtful or revealing, but I have to try to dress a little more warmly so I can go to Telegraph avenue and spend obscene amounts of money on school books before catching whatever’s showing tonight at the Pacific Film Archive.
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