At 2:45 p.m. EST tomorrow, I will be done with my college career. Kind of.
I feel vaguely numb about the whole thing, and kind of bitter. I don’t know if this is normal. I would like to feel jubilant! excited! thrilled! But that is not who I am. I feel as though I still have not finished anything. I don’t think I made a significant enough difference. I spent too much time trying to fit myself in between all these other people trying to make a difference. I am sometimes too concerned about others, and sometimes not concerned enough. This has proven problematic for me in many ways.
I keep remembering this moment, last year, as mackie and I were cleaning out the death hole of our apartment. After having boxed all the utensils and pots and pans and thrown out everything in the fridge, we stood in the kitchen holding the only things that had been there all year: an untouched jar of grape jelly, an unopened bag of pretzels– these two things and us are the only things that have lasted in this apartment all year, the only things unwanted– we couldn’t stop laughing– the only things left behind. It was unbearably funny.
I don’t think this year was nearly as funny or traumatic as last year. I don’t know if any year of my life will ever be as funny or traumatic as last year, and even though I went crazy with self-doubt and shame all the time on account of certain people’s passive aggression, at least I wasn’t bored. I am deathly afraid of becoming bored and not realizing it and dying at the ripe age of 87 wondering where all the time went. College, when I think about it, was kind of boring to me. I wish someone had warned me that classes aren’t really all that interesting, and to get to the interesting ones takes years and years, and by the time you get there you’re going to be so fed up with classes in general that you won’t even appreciate them except in the slightest way. The things you actually learn you could have learned in high school if only you hadn’t been so studious, so intent on escaping your small town to get to a city where people are just as uninteresting as they were when you knew them the year before. It’s kind of disheartening.
But I am oh so excited to go someplace new.
Also, I cut all my hair off on Friday. I am a happier person with short hair. After it happened (a lovely lady named Katy did it) I looked in the mirror and recognized myself for the first time in a long time. And I can’t remember when my hair was last this short, high school? Early eleventh grade? But I feel like I am myself again.
I feel like tomorrow is going to be incredibly strange.
I am trying to write an essay on Derek Walcott. It is not going well. It was due a week ago, I have never done this before. I have all sorts of excuses in my mind, in my mind it is justified, but in reality I have been reading too much Derrida again and doubting my faith in language, meaning, the whole construction of the linguistic dream.
I am also reading a blog about aprosodia, the condition in which one is unable to recognize/produce/comprehend language. But they understand every other kind of expression beneath the words. This condition is juxtaposed against those with tonal agnosia: people who can only understand the exact literal meaning of words, and nothing else. So poems have to operate on both fronts, for both critics, in order to be in full working order. The conclusion reached is that to go undeceived you must be brain damaged. Basically, we’re all liars being lied to.
Anyway, I was just trying to understand. And my problem is that I am always trying to understand, especially when things cannot be understood. Or made sense of. You have to walk away and say there is no way to fix this, and you have to let it go. I have trouble not fixing things. So this essay has about five works cited so far, I’ve read so much on Walcott that I feel I could draw you up his whole family history and ethos of verse, and still this essay is not done. Still I’m sitting in the library thinking about poetics and not finishing what it is that is necessary for my survival, for my pending graduation. You’re such a little sister, Raphael said to me once, you wait for everyone to fix things for you.
I think this is true to an extent. I like to think it’s more about humility than it is about being lazy and/or spoiled. It usually just comes off as arrogance, ironically, that I mull everything over for weeks before ever saying anything. If i ever say anything, which is rare. I learned silence though. I learned that sometimes it’s no use to say anything. You’re not changing anybody. I know this is a dangerous space to occupy, it only encourages the lack of a dialogue, letting only idiots voice their opinions. I’m afraid that this is how the world works anyway, that the people with the strongest will to be heard are operating mostly on their arrogance, the inflation of their egos, their personal will to power and nothing else. They just want to change things for the sake of being known, and nothing else. Outwardly they want to do good. Inwardly, they are just selfish.
I have been ignoring everyone lately. And still nothing seems to be getting done. I saw Rachel Getting Married last night again. I think it’s a beautiful movie. I’m also intrigued by anything that attempts to paint a properly psychological portrait of the american family.
So this paper is about caribbean poetry. The problem is that I cannot make it relevant. Sophie and I were talking about our loss of motivation. She told me about how her presentation went terribly sour, and how she and sarah just sat there and laughed about it afterward. That was horrible, they said, laughing. This is our problem. I am standing here, looking at all these things I have done and not done and thinking about how it just doesn’t matter. We are clutching our sides and giggling, and thinking about how we just dropped everything, but what can you do? It’s all over, it’s all happened already, we can just shake our heads and think it’s hilarious. I think things get to the point where you realize you neither have tears left nor do you have the time to lament, so you move on because you have to. And it may have been your fault, or it may not have been, but it’s over now and you’re still alive and that’s what matters.
The Back Bay Review is finally here. Published, printed, ready for distribution. And we’re starting all over again. So maybe it’s November, but really, who’s counting?
Filed under: academia, rants | Tags: being shy, poetry, romanticism, rosanna warren
I realized today that I am not entirely cut out for school. In the sense that I really enjoy being patted on the head and told how good I am, it is great, but over the course of the last few years my concept of good has gradually changed to mean something entirely different from what it used to mean. The problem with school is that it is forcing me to divert my natural attentions to things that are boring and alien to me, and while it is good to get out of my head and into someone else’s for a while, four years is a long time to spend poking at someone else’s brain. I have grown to resent the university for not contributing to my own arrogant ideologies and instead forcing me to praise someone else’s carefully constructed canon. I think I’m coming to terms with gratitude, however, because someone really needed to kick me in the head.
I identify too much with poets. Rosanna Warren said to our class, I never wanted to write, I just couldn’t make sense of the world without it. And this to me seems unbearably true, and tragic, and upon explaining it to people I feel silly and pretentious. Well, if you don’t want it then why are you doing it? Because I have to, I don’t have a choice. I have been writing since I was ten, it is the only way I can wade through the things that happen, the things I do that I should not do, the things that I wish I had done. I think it might be because I know I could almost never put to words what I am thinking, and thus am supplied with an endless amount of attempts to figure it out. The journey is endless. This is an embarrassing amount of words that are not rooted in concrete things or happenings, I am just trying to study for British Literature and am entirely frustrated by the fact that nothing can make me care about these dull old men with nothing to do but pat their own arrogant backs on their ingenuity.
I think Keats was tragic enough to make me care about him. I think Wordsworth is responsible for changing the world, so I guess I can allow him my venerations. I don’t understand why we aren’t all always concerned with “renewing the universe,” when did people stop meditating on everyday occurrences? Have they? What are we thinking about anyway? As a collective? This is why I need you to help me, why I need everyone back here, in their right minds, ready to defend the art of poetry: we need to communicate. Writers think they are beyond communication with each other because they communicate with the world at large, but really, it is diminishing my faith in people. I want to believe that there are people who care deeply about making meaning meaningful. I think Jeffrey McDaniel was right and we should limit everyone’s word count to 150 – 200 words a day. I think there should be more silence. These are the reasons why I like you, and the reasons why I don’t. I have been too busy to be thinking about love, but it nudges its sleepy little head in even when I’m doped up on chocolate and caffeine trying to study romanticism.
I am terribly introverted and shyness is, to me, like a disease I might die from. The problem was I concerned myself with ghosts thinking they could cure me and explain things to other people for me, but this is entirely not true. I was in love with an extroverted Mormon boy for a long long time and only recently did I realize I just loved him because I thought he embodied the things I would never know. This isn’t true, and it’s naive to think that one person can complete another. There was too much violence between us: our meeting again might end in one of our deaths; how could you reconcile yourself with the other so completely that you become one person? This is why he fascinated me, and I still love him, but I am sure he doesn’t have any interest in the sort of violence between us that is inevitable, so I am moving on. I say this often, at least four or five times a year, and this time I am not promising he is out of my life forever. I am just saying that some people ask to be left behind and it is our responsibility to respect that wish, regardless of how much they cry when you turn them away.
The boy on the other side of my cubicle will not stop poking his pointy little head above our divider, and this is making me anxious about the type of noises I must be making to provoke such regular check ups.
Sometimes I wish my mind were linear, like an arrow. But then I guess I wouldn’t be as much fun.
love
It’s quarter to five, at least I’m not tired. I kind of like doing this to myself, mostly because I am a masochist, mostly because I can’t help it. I like pressing my face against the universe and asking it to hit me, I don’t know why. I do it all the time. Every time I have a paper I think, I will never do this again. And by this, I mean stay up all night the night before pulling out my eyelashes and writing till dawn. But I will do it again. I will do it every time, because how else could you make writing a paper exciting? Why else would I do it except if I absolutely had to? I can only bring myself to do these things when my life love and survival depend upon them. And they do right now, even if it’s not really for real.
I talked to my friend Harry last night, and he never fails to make me feel better and still a hundred times worse. I often feel like I’m not doing enough here, or enough of the things I’m supposed to be doing, and he always asks me about photography and I hate telling him that I’ve hardly taken a decent photo since high school. I feel like I’m blind here. Maybe it’s just a different way of seeing. I think it’s getting better.
I really came here to write down this quote, because you know, I’m trying to educate myself while also write this paper:
“In reading Keats one feels that man is rediscovering his body; and in reading Crabbe one feels as if man is rediscovering his social world.”
George Crabbe is one of the most boring poets and yet there is so much written on him, so little I can find substantially on Blake. Weird right? I guess it’s more that boring poets are easier for academics to relate to, and free radicals such as Blake are often only worshiped by pot smoking english teachers who feel for him. And I wanted to remember that quote about Keats, because I haven’t really learned anything about Keats yet and it is my intention to do so as soon as possible.
Also, I lost my right big toenail last week. My toe doesn’t really look as ghastly as I thought it would, or as anyone would think it would, but maybe I’ve just gotten used to its general ugliness. I can’t stop listening to third eye blind, and lover, you should have come over by Jeff Buckley. I don’t know why some things never get old. I think Third Eye Blind is just quintessential college rock that I can’t help but listen to at this point in my life. The problem with them is that they never really grew up, so I can listen to them on repeat until I graduate and probably for a while thereafter, but there will be a point in my life where I will say I can’t feel them anymore in my bones, and I’ll have to hang up my headphones. I’m wasting precious morning hours posting on Keats and Third Eye Blind, and I just sent poems out to strangers. It’s kind of terrifying, kind of exciting. I wish it were easier for me to speak. Especially when everyone is awake, and listening. I’d rather just pretend that no one hears me, sometimes.
I like writing papers. It’s so rare that I feel like I’m learning something.
I’m trying to write a paper on Adele H. I think my problem is that I want to encompass everything, I want to have a coherent photocopy of the film in my head and I want to re-represent it on the page with an all-consuming thesis that will allow everybody to see the film as I saw it, clearly, in my own convoluted mind. You’re not supposed to identify with her, exactly, and yet I did, which is horrifying.
The story of Adele H. is about Victory Hugo’s youngest daughter. He was never sure she was his daughter, and always resented her a little, setting her up for a lifetime of unrequited love since she was always looking for the love of her father, which she’d never truly gotten. Her story is drawn out and ultimately tragic; a tale of self-consuming love that wears her away like an eating disorder. Her logic is twisted, yet undeniable: the clearest path, in her mind, to the truest life is death. This inevitably provides her with myriad insolvable problems: her unrequited love for a jerkface british soldier; dreams of drowning; writing in code; spending her life in an insane asylum. She is not unlike Mallarmé’s Hérodiade who chose to waste away, like some cold jewel that is ruined by use and best left to be admired. Adele’s loneliness is palpable. Her story is circular, she always ends up getting nowhere, because what she’s looking for is to ultimately not exist. It’s painful to watch her deteriorate, you want to tell her to change, but her love is anorexic: she wants to embody the image of love but has no way to build it constructively. What she builds, instead, is an homage to hunger. The love-object of her mind is a black hole: the lieutenant of her dreams is, in reality, a jerk who wants nothing to do with her. She builds a shrine to him, as if this will bring him to her. What happens is he marries someone else, a woman who has no voice or distinctive features, and Adele wanders the streets of Barbados looking for him, or something like him, because she could never recognize herself.
Who wants to identify with that? With a character of such ultimate misunderstanding? Her life was one of self-negation, built on water, not stone, and it pulled her under as if she was drowning though she was alive the whole time. She’s admirable, she exists as her own planet. She’s terrifying, because she remains completely alone and seems to prefer her isolation to the degradation that a real marriage would offer her. Only a hundred years later would her work be excavated from its coded secrecy, and made into film.
So, in the end, I’m just trying to say I get it. And this paper is going to be OK, I’m not saying wonderful. My blood is mostly coffee by now and this library is freezing so it’s frozen: we’ve been nothing for a week by now and I still feel nothing. The problem is I see all the warning signs and everybody tells me to turn back, but I never stop going forward with my eyes closed, telling everyone I’m sure I’ll be just fine even when I’m not.
Every month or so I have to listen to Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine on repeat for a day or two to get me back on track. And I play all twelve songs over and over again trying to find something wrong with them, but all I ever think is man, she got it all just right.
