I've decided that, if my current costume doesn't pan out, that I'll dress up as Valerie Plame. I thought this was painfully clever before I realized that a good 70% of the nation has likely forgotten who she is.
This afternoon, I also went for a run, which helped me realize how terribly I've prioritized my health in the last few months.
Intended for my Halloween costume, which now I am realizing won't come together in time unless I make a damn skirt, which I very well might do, depending on how willful I feel
Or else I will dress up as something else entirely; I'm not very certain at this point, but I love Halloween and am determined to observe it with some sort of costume
"Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich
I'm writing about the ways Satan projects his image onto the female forms of Eve and Sin in Paradise Lost and it's not very uplifting. Compiling this post was a worthy distraction, albeit a fairly underwhelming one for you, reader. Sorry about that.
This afternoon I walked into a low-hanging branch by the lake. Hard. I don't know how I didn't see it coming, and whether anyone else has smacked their face on the same branch.
At least the weather is beautiful, in every sense of the word. I am eager for winter and snow and stillness, but the process of getting there is pretty nice too.
I am determined to survive this semester through optimism, good time management, and caffeine. The reward for all of this was going to be a Red Sox game sometime before October, but that's not going to happen now. A good night's sleep and break from Wellesley will be more than enough, at this point. I'm prepared to only take three classes next semester and to drop (nearly) every obligation I have and to enjoy my senior year.
...Maintaining a blog is really, really hard. Doing anything consistently is tough work.
I've been reading a lot recently: Paradise Lost is way jucier than I ever gave it credit for and Life on Mars by Tracy Smith is maybe the best poetry collection I've picked up in a long time.
While I certainly encourage everyone to find a copy and read it right now, I realize that life is happening and that people are busy. Therefore, I share the single poem "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" from Life on Mars. The title is from "Sound and Vision" by David Bowie, and this book incorporates tidbits from sources as vast as 2001: A Space Odessey and interviews about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.
"Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?"
1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure
That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?
Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired
And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
2.
He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours
Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.
3.
Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.
I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions
When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.
- from Life on Mars (2011) by Tracy K. Smith
...And for good measure:
- "Sound and Vision" by David Bowie, from Low (1977)
The Head of the Charles, which is one of the world's biggest rowing regattas, took place this weekend. I went to cheer on the Wellesley boat with a few of my very good friends, and it was the kind of Sunday I think I needed to have.
Now I'm writing fellowship applications and doing astronomy homework to the soundtrack of Unknown Pleasures. It never ends...
I spent today making art with other people, which really just meant laying in a field for two hours and then buying $60 worth of bells at Jo-Ann. There's this collective residency project going on here, which means that students and faculty and visiting artists get to hang out and collaborate on art together. I think I'm supposed to be writing on the blog for this project (if I do, I will share links because I'm a self-promoter like that). We're having a show next weekend, but before that I have to write fellowship applications and plan English events and do schoolwork and find time to sleep.
"Just show up to the class and I'll pass you" "We're out of mayo" "Faculty drink for free at the pub tonight, so you should definitely come meet some drunk professors" "So your realization of your own mortality is the reason why you're so overextended" "Pragmatic mysticism" "For you, there's always coffee"
One of my classes also walked around the lake and read poems. Essentially, it was a typically collegiate day.
As it turns out, trying to write a chapbook is pretty hard.
If you're interested in learning more about Nikolai Vavilov, this article is a pretty handy introduction. I'd like to mention, however, that my family's origins are in Lithuania, a country which was treated terribly under Soviet rule, and that this poem is by no means a work of non-fiction. My grandfather was, as far as I'm aware, never present in the Siege of Leningrad.
Here it is.
"Inheritance"
The full-blown golden cheer
of bursting sunflowers and corn
the dark smell of dirty earth
tilled soft beneath our toes,
the sparkle of fertile fields
through a sixteen-hour sun,
all connect us to this summer land
the way only farming can.
Planting seeds in the ground,
a revision of Babylonian botany:
their hanging gardens lushly green
and overwhelmed—
we’re much less decadent here,
our gardens grounded in the earth.
Do you, sweet brother, recall our grandfather’s past
our tangled Russian roots?
How, throughout the siege
he protected Nikolai’s irreplaceable, edible seeds
to see them survive nine-hundred days
of hunger, cold and pain?
I stand with you to look in the waning light,
twin silhouettes against the horizon,
tall, frenzy-haired with arms akimbo
though you always looked more like him.
I bit off far more than I can chew this semester, but I'm too easily distracted to focus more on anything or do any of it well.
The last two months have been something of a whirlwind, but I am so excited to be exactly where I am. The mystery of the upcoming year is a little unnerving (mostly in comparing myself to the hard-working and deservedly accomplished people around me). But I could go anywhere, or do anything, and that's intoxicating.
I have been instructed by my thesis advisor to compile twelve poems which are meaningful to me as a sort of compass for my project. So far I have two. This is not one of them, but it's from one of my favorite collections and maybe that counts for something.
"On the Beach at Night Alone"
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
- by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (originally published in 1855; final edition in 1891)
