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I suppose if there is a reckoning in middle age, it’s a tragic sense that you have been formed by things, and sent hither and thither by those things, and put in a frenzy and made to run around the place, and up and down the house in the service of those things, and they were not real. They were the product of your upbringing or conditioning or gender or social class. And I think there’s a certain point where suddenly the grip of all of that on you loosens. It’s like a stage set beginning to sort of crumble, and you start to see it wobbling, and I think you can get some really startling and frightening perspectives on identity once you start looking at it from there. The thought that you’ve wasted your entire life in the service of things that didn’t really exist—that you were in a prison where the door, in fact, was open, and you’ve sat there all this time . . . A lot of what I was writing in these books was concerned with that.
In 1975 I was a baby; what happened was not my conscious experience. My memories, instead, are of growing up in Michigan, with a strong grandmother and a strong stepmother. The summers were short and the winters went on and on. Icicles lengthened from the eaves and fell like daggers into the snow. My sister and I knew the vague story about our mother in Viet Nam, but ours was a family that preferred silence over questions, especially when there were no simple answers. We lived in a mostly white community that wasn’t happy about a sudden influx of Vietnamese refugees, and our mode of safety was silence. No one talked about the war. It was better to look forward, not back. It was better not to ask and not to know.
Thursday, 17 December.
The cat is sitting by the door. Evidently it wants to go out. I sit by the door also, watching it. It is as if our hostilities (the hostilities of cat and mouse) have already begun. This is a feline that I purchased at a fair. A charismatic man was giving kittens away. You didn’t dare look at him because . . . oh but you looked at him and now he’s calling you over, he’s smiling, he’s touching your arm a bit. He remembers you from somewhere. He’s telling you about kittens and then you’re in the car on the way home and everyone is cooing stupidly and passing the thing around.
When my wife comes home I am still sitting there. The cat is still sitting there. Nothing has changed. At least two hours have passed. I think in some ways I have gained the cat’s respect, although of course the gain in that regard is counterbalanced by my wife’s dismay. What are you doing on the floor? I begin to tell her but think better of it.
the same vibe that i get in kafka, dostoevsky, baudrillard's diaries
Monday, 21 December (Day 10).
My wife encourages me to make a list of the things I want to do before I go. The language that she uses to tell me this is strange and uncharacteristic. Only later, while urinating off the back patio, does it occur to me that she is probably operating from a script. They must have given her a script and she is using it to help me. I am convulsed immediately by the totality of her sacrifice: that in the final moments of our shared life she has somehow abnegated her true heart’s speech. These are the thoughts I think as I zip up my pants.
Perhaps it is because I read that mice do not experience humor, not as such. Joy, yes, sadness, yes, camaraderie, esprit de corps, et cetera, yes, but humor, no. I then began to ask myself, To what degree do humans truly experience humor? To what degree is the experience of laughter real?
Possibly, it seemed to me, at that moment in the night as I lay sleepless beside my dozing wife, possibly humans also do not experience humor. In fact, there is only discomfort at some iniquity or lack-of-fit, and that finds expression in a false-face of joy. And that therefore, since as we know, there is no false-joy, i.e., every smile is a real smile, smile yourself to happiness, et cetera, the false-face of joy becomes joy, and laughter becomes happy. But at its root it was just discomfort.
How then the case of the mouse? Well it seems they simply do not experience discomfort at life’s blunted edges and crooked apertures. Not feeling that discomfort, they have no need to find things funny.
In the notebook by my bed, I made a note to further investigate the subject. I suppose now there is no time. Or to put it differently: soon, all my existence will be an investigation of this very thing. There is no time left for anything else.
There is so much we’ve begun to pile upon you, more
than all the lives we’ve had and have lost. Nothing whatever
burns to ash. Years pass. Days, wisdom, the simple sadness.
A slow-moving ray of sunlight walks me backward
to a past turned magical by the virtue of its emptiness,
this part of myself that never fails to embrace us.
[...] I was just reading and trying to learn how to write from what I read. I wrote like Baraka for a while, I wrote like Creeley for a while, I wrote some Ginsberg poems. I just learned that way. The workshop was useful in that it showed me that people don’t see the poem the same way you do. You then have to arrive at some decision about whether that matters to you, how much it matters to you, and how it matters to you. I’m a sensitive type. I decided that taking a lot of workshops might put too many people in my head. It was good to have feedback, good to have a place to take one’s work, good to have a place to write for, but I could see how a prolonged curriculum of workshops could make you too reliant on outside input.
While Clara’s at the grocery store, Hal cuts her Knock Out roses. He wants to have them in a vase in the kitchen for when she walks in the door. He’s trying to make her happy. She used to scratch his back until he went to sleep. He does not know why she stopped doing that but he’s not going to say anything, either.
The reading group (not book club) had begun meeting in January, two months after the midterm elections that had, as they could not yet know, swept the Democrats out of congressional power for the next almost-decade, and Vivek was treated with the mild deference due to someone who had recently suffered the death of a somewhat important relative, a great-uncle, maybe, or adult cousin. There were no Republicans among them, of course, but there was some range in the degree to which politics was central to their lives, from the socialists associate-editing a newish journal of “literature and ideas” to Thomas, who presumably voted for Democrats, if he voted, but also went to church, exercised regularly, and worked for an international bank. Derek had felt in himself a recent, emerging desire for political commitment (like Larkin in the abandoned church, but for economic justice?), though he hadn’t acted on it. He didn’t enjoy going to protests, and he didn’t want to be in one of the Marxist reading groups whose membership overlapped significantly with this one. Maybe he would ask Vivek if there was anything he could do for 2012, though he feared that would prove less than life-changing. Hope had pulled off the big win once; what could the next election be other than a crowd-pleasing but redundant sequel?
ha
He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. Derek realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beachgoers on the distant shore.
“Huh,” Derek said.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.
respect