Fuzzed and fuschia and furling.

They are big like Christmas tree lights, fat and ready to pop into brightness, and when the whole tree bursts I will be transfixed, stuck to the spot and staring.

And a postscript, as I sit here with the earliest birds. (Please forgive that I do not know how to make tabs and such things, so you'll just have to figure out how long each of Whitman's ten long lines goes on.)

To a Stranger

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

-- Walt Whitman

Today, I am to wait; I am to see to it that I do not lose that dawn birdsong; I will hear it for you, too, while you are safely sleeping, dreaming perhaps of a cat on a porch in the sun who is dreaming perhaps of a bird in a tree singing a song about a person asleep. Today I am the one sitting alone, waking at night alone, thinking of you. It comes to me as of a dream. (And of course, now you know that today is no longer yesterday, that I am transgressing temporal bounds. As so often, in fact.)

A window and a wall.

I hate it, but after the long, so long and so busy but also so gratifying day I've had (so gratifying: tonight I read aloud, to an embodied audience I could see while I was reading, the first offline prose piece this Cabinet has yielded; later, after our seminar's break, my students gave each other a signal and then started singing happy birthday--to which my excited response: "Wait! Whose birthday are we singing for?!"--then produced the homemade cupcakes they had made for me), here's all I can do for you tonight. Think of these images as placeholders until I can write again.

They lost my luggage; they're not making me lose a Sunday post, too.

My day was so lovely for so long that I'm just trying to leave Dulles to one side, along with the fact that I, and probably many of the twenty other people from my flight who didn't get their luggage, had to buy a new toothbrush on the way home from the airport. "You looked like you were on a mission," said the cashier at the Kroger's; I suppose I had rushed in at an even more precipitous pace than usual.

And so, the lovely middle of the day:

and even

The accretion of silliness that awaited me in Columbus got me so cranked up by the time I drove my car out of the parking lot that not only was I almost not able even to calm myself down by thinking about the sun and the cheery puttery crowds and the flowers, so many flowers, in the market in Ottawa and the stagger of bright-lit planes lined up to land at Dulles after dark (seven, little mobile planets). I also nearly, nearly missed noticing that the trees in the medians near the airport have burst into tiny profuse blossoms. Coming home in the dark, I found myself believing, really believing, that things even smell different, earthier, springier, five days since I was last here. My own magnolia tree is pushing toward spring revelation; I pulled a branch down to check, when I finally reached home.

Rose-coloured glasses.

In the painting one of my blogfriends loves best, Marc Chagall's "The Eiffel Tower" (1934), the sun always shines, and an angel always hangs and watches it.

A lot of today felt like being this angel, borne on by some clarity of heat and vision. I did look for grit, you my urban friends, but I don't think I have the eye for it. Instead, I kept finding urban flowers:

But then I also saw a ghost.

Now here's the punchline: One of the things I forgot to tell you about the National Gallery when I wrote about it the other day is that one of its paintings looks like a ghost. It's Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Colonel Charles Churchill, from about 1755. Churchill's face is chalky white because when he executed the portrait, Reynolds was experimenting with the fugitive color carmine. Apparently, Churchill wasn't the only of Reynolds's sitters who saw his painted face losing its color; the museum's wall plaque reports that when clients worried or complained, they were assured (by whom, the plaque doesn't say) that any painting by Reynolds--even a faded one--would be the best thing they could have. He was 32 when he painted Churchill's portrait.

The concept of the fugitive image has long been a favorite of mine. In the decade before Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot (in France and England, respectively) figured out the correct fixative treatments, they were able to take photographs but couldn't keep them. These images are known as fugitives; they flee in the light. When you come across an early photograph in a museum exhibition and it's covered by a heavy dark cloth, it's a semi-fugitive image, one that, with too much more exposure, would simply disappear.

Those early images also had incredibly long exposure times; the first image historically recognized as a photograph, taken from Joseph Nicephore-Niépce's studio window, took eight hours to produce. My favorite photographic image of all time, Daguerre's 1839 picture of a Paris boulevard, didn't take eight hours, but it did take long enough to vacate a city street.

The only people who survived the passing of time here, thereby making it into the historical record, are the ones who were not themselves passing on to somewhere else while Daguerre let the sun do its work: a man having his boots cleaned and the man doing the cleaning, there on the corner. When an exposure time is this long, those who move swiftly enough simply disappear, become fugitive. Traversing a city alone feels like that for me: I start to seem insubstantial, to become an embodiment of the act of looking itself.

There's more to say; that could be my life's motto. More about Norval Morrisseau, for instance. And more about the experience of walking alone by a river just at the point where late afternoon becomes early evening--and especially about that experience for one who is still and always missing her beloved lake. But now it is time to sleep. Not having my hot milk here is one of many things that have thrown me off during this trip.

Transaction and transformation.

Today was a day of low greyness and near-constant rain. My response was visceral (though it was, no doubt, as much about the past two weeks as about anything else): I wanted to be by myself as much as I could (which turned out to be quite a lot), and I wanted to be mostly silent, simply looking around.

I'm not a particularly great tourist, as I started to explain the other night as I wrote about postcards. My curiosity tends to get focused swiftly and intensely and then to stay trained on whatever it is that has grabbed me. Case in point: today I wandered back to the excellent bookstore I'd discovered yesterday (Nicholas Hoare on Sussex) and browsed about there for a good long time (long enough to see the long-haired dark grey store cat again; we played peekaboo at one another for awhile before he was whisked off to have eye goop removed by one of the people running the store) and then picked my way through the street puddles to get back to the National Gallery. Today, I spent my time there prowling the museum store. Tomorrow, I'm going to stare at Norval Morrisseau's paintings, now up in a show called "Norval Morrisseau, Shaman Artist."

My glimpses of Morrisseau's art over the past couple of days have been tantalizing, and the characterizations I'm reading of his work are no less so:

The show documents Morriseau’s progression as an artist, charting the creative and spiritual journey that would contribute to his unique style of painting known as “Woodland” or “Legend” painting, now called Anishnaabe, of which he is the originator. In works that evoke ancient symbolic etchings of sacred birchbark scrolls and pictographic renderings of spiritual creatures, Morrisseau “reveals” the souls of humans and animals through his unique “x-ray” style of imaging: Sinewy black “spirit” lines emanate, surround, and link the figures. Skeletal elements and internal organs are visible within the figures’ delineated segments. Saturated with startling, often contrasting colours, such paintings appear to vibrate under the viewer’s gaze.

One of Morrisseau's goals has been to create art that can communicate the integrity of native culture to both native and non-native viewers. In other words, for the half-century he's been painting, Morrisseau has been attempting to make his artworks function as translators. This idea--I'd go so far as to call it an ethical project--coincides beautifully with a terrific and provocative talk I heard this morning, focused on the ethics of reading. I have long wanted to delineate for myself (and for my students) an idea of how reading can be a fundamental ethical act: how good reading might lead to good being, in other words, or at least to a striving and thirsting for goodness and justice. And so it was excellent to start my day by listening to a discussion of how reading creates the possibility of reflecting on ethics (I just typed "ethical reflection," but I have my fears that too much reflection might actually run counter to "the ethical," if we can even posit that abstraction). (I tend to get nervous when I start to use terms like "ethical"; I worry that a philosopher is going to come round the corner and tell me I'm misusing the term, that I don't know all of its ramifications, that I would need to read for years in order to speak the language correctly. It would be an ironic thing to get called out on, to my mind, since my motivation is entirely the opposite of self-aggrandizement or turf-stealing--is entirely an attempt to figure out the way to do something good.)

Our speaker encouraged us to consider the ethical possibilities of a process of reading considered as "transactional"--as fundamentally focused on a process of giving and receiving, a meeting of two minds, an "indeterminate sharing." In reading, she suggested (with reference to a range of current theorists), we can become vulnerable to beliefs that are not our own; we can move beyond our set, known personae by making ourselves open to others' ways of being (or even to the existence of otherness itself, or of alterity--simply a way to name all that is not our selves and world as we know them, all that is familiar). In fully present acts of reading, in other words, we test our boundaries. Sometimes, we test them only to find that (because the alterity we're encountering is simply unthinkable, for some reason) the test has strengthened our confidence and belief in what was already there. Sometimes, though, our tests reveal to us the fissures and faultlines in our habits and orientations (whether physical or intellectual or emotional). And what these possibilities mean is that reading should never simply be about escape or entertainment, though it certainly is those things as well (and either escape or entertainment could well have profound ethical ramifications).

I'm hoping for an experience of indeterminate sharing at the art museum tomorrow afternoon.

source for tonight's images: Both "Merging Elements" (1983) and "Traveling to Another Plane" (1994) come from the Kinsman Robinson Galleries, Morrisseau's principal dealer.

Who paints a mountain pink?

In and amongst the traveling and the checking into hotels and the dressing up in a suit and high heels and the giving of papers and the eating of Indian food with other conference-goers, I've had a day of refreshing my sight. Ottawa is beautiful in a graceful, stately way, full of water and wide streets and striking governmental buildings whose architectural style I cannot name with certainty (though if your life depended on it, I'd call them good ol' Victorian Gothic Revival).

Even before I was out of Ohio's airspace last night, though, I got a head-start on the clearing of my vision. Here, for those of you who've never been to mid-Ohio, is where I'm writing from (when I'm at home, that is). Note the blocks and borders: fields. Note the dark streaks and patches within the blocks: water, gone underground. Gambier would be somewhere near the top of this image; we weren't far from Columbus yet when I took it. It was also a little later than I'd have liked, because we had some mildly worrying weight restriction problems on the ground in Columbus; these problems necessitated the ground crew's packing much of our gate-checked luggage into a closet in the front of the plane, because there wasn't enough weight in the cargo hold to balance out what had been put in the back.

In mid-journey last night, a realization of how I'd romanticized flying: landing at Dulles's Terminal G means walking into the airport through a semi-lit, semi-outdoor hallway--a touch which for me only adds to the romance of arriving at a strange airport at night on a jet from which you descend down roll-up stairs. But landing at G also means finding that there are no monitors between the entry and the place where one gets picked up by the shuttle for the rest of the airport. Only by some mysterious power of grace did I find a monitor and then catch a shuttle bus, all without running someone over with my luggage or becoming outraged enough (however senselessly) by the thoughtless behavior of large, slow men talking to earpieces and thumbing messages to the far-away to have spat or kicked. Dulles: not an airport I'll be choosing to connect through, in the future.

Arriving in a new city after dark has its charms, particularly if the airport is on the far rural outskirts of the city. I used to have this experience when returning to Ithaca on the last flight in, which arrived anywhere between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. Because the Ithaca airport is north of the city, in the middle of mostly wooded land, there aren't lots of ground lights, which means that on certain approaches, you know you're nearing the ground more by the feel of the plane than by anything you can see out the window. The same thing held true last night.

Before we dropped down through the cloud layer, I looked out the window and saw--of course--not just the waxing moon, waxing me out of my twenties, but also Orion, walking me to Ottawa. As I watched and we dropped, the clouds were flashbright and sparkle, sprayed by our wings.

This afternoon, after spending most of my day in a room with a tantalizing view of the Parliament buildings and the lovely cool weather, I was finally able to go for a walk. So:

a door

a cathedral, unexpected and gleaming, I tell you, gleaming as the day is long

relief: apprently, civilization is somewhere in Ottawa, perhaps near the river

language lessons (now you know, in case you ever need to know)

cette Maman n'est pas belle comme ma mère

The afternoon's great revelation lay just beyond this giant bronze spider (Louise Bourgeois's "Maman"). Canada's National Gallery is a veritable cathedral of art. I kid you not. Here's the view of the glass ceiling and walls of one side of the gallery's main atrium. My brain swam with the cerulean geometry of it, and the white flags sailing, translucent. I thought of my startling high school math teacher, the man full of quiet nervous joy who would proclaim beauty when we solved difficult problems and proofs, who once stood on his head because we all made dodecahedrons during a long weekend.

As my friend and I ambled about, lingering and lounging around the works we liked best, we discovered that we have completely different tastes. I was a little surprised, as I always am, to find that the things to which I felt myself drawn were often things that left my friend feeling something best approximated by "ennh," were she a dismissive person, which she's not. But we did rapidly reach a point where she could call what I was going to like even before I'd stepped into a gallery. I'm pretty predictable: bright primary (but not neon) colors, the boldness of the unexpected, the breath-catch of a painstakingly meticulous easy detail. In front of a Derain, trying to explain why I loved it so much, I said, "Who paints a mountain pink? Who does that?" Turning to a Prendergast, the woman in yellow snared me, with no eyes at all:

But the paintings of Venice were the ones where we surprised each other, each exclaiming over what the other beheld with joy. It was here that I finally asked the guard shyly whether I could take pictures. He seemed unconcerned. The people my eye loved in the paintings turned out to be the people standing in pairs, lingering and lounging, chatting, contemplating. These figures are tiny, inches tall on canvases five feet high. Their shadows are impeccable.

The quality of vision needed to see these people's details through to oil and canvas--to care for the details enough to realize them for the world--is one I'm glad I get to return to now that my crunch has eased again.

My head is thrumming up a throb, angry that I won't stop and go to sleep.

If you don't know about Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, you should seek them out, if only because Thomson was able to produce images like this (not one, alas, that I got to see today, though the National Gallery has rooms and rooms of the Group's work):

(I should add that I did learn things about narrative today, too.)

source for tonight's last image: The Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery's site.

Airport time.

Because when I fly I'm generally travelling for work, running off to a conference or a convention (or, a couple of years ago, a job visit), I'm generally under some gun or another until I arrive at the airport. Today has been no real exception; I spent the morning teaching and then writing, the afternoon making a handout, packing, and driving down to the airport. Because there's so much running about involved in getting out of my village and down to the airport, it's always a little surprise to me when check-in takes three minutes (a swipe of the passport and I'm good to go) and security is over in five. And then there's the waiting.

I am in love with airport time, even when everyone around me is walking around muttering into a cell phone--or here, where there's free wireless access, muttering on a cell phone and using a computer at the same time. What I love is the stoppedness of time in the airport--the fact that there's nowhere to go, no specific thing to do. This stopped time has often led me to surprisingly good pedagogical thinking; I have dreamt up whole new syllabi in boarding areas, reconstructed essay assignments in airport cafés, graded piles of papers while waiting for the announcing and the scrambling to begin.

Tonight, I fly one of my favorite planes on the first leg of this trip.

Geese and other assorted birds fly past the concorse windows, two by two. A United jet pulls in, just beyond my peripheral vision, heavy and grey, looking like the picture of a whale in a children's book. I managed to scratch up my lip just before I left home, and I keep wanting to find a way to soothe it but have none.

The first people I saw when I walked into the airport, an hour from home, were six students from my college who are also traveling to a conference, though not my conference. "You get the better trip," they said. "But we might get the better weather."

The fields between Gambier and the Columbus suburbs are startling in their new greenness, the rows of their planting fine and narrow, visible only in the passing. The tin roofs of barns gleamed silver, up and down the counties between home and here. My favorite cows, the ones who live just outside Homer, were lolling and lying about in the golding afternoon sun, in their great largeness. And an old wreck of a beautiful house that's been falling apart swiftly and surely in downtown Brandon is suddenly getting new windows where it's had only plastic sheeting, new paint where it's had only strips and chips and remnants for years. The newness is heartening.

Postcard days.

Today was a postcard day in lovely Gambier--still is, in fact, since the sun (glorious sun! glorious daylight saving time!) hasn't yet gone down, which means that even out the east-facing front of my house, the light is good and interesting, while out the west-facing back of the house, I can see the sun still glittering behind the woods, throwing the thin tall trees into black relief. And it is nearly 7:30. Tomorrow, says my weather site, will be 2 minutes and 38 seconds longer. And this time tomorrow, barring disaster (the art of losing isn't hard to master), I'll be buckled into a plane, taxiing down a runway, on the first leg of a late-evening trip to a late-week conference in Canada.

I'm thinking a lot about postcards and traveling today, not least because I have miles to go before I sleep, and not least because in my afternoon class today, we discussed Mary Kingsley's unexpectedly delightful Travels in West Africa (1897), the narrative of Kinglsey's arduous, adventurous, sometimes utterly foolish, sometimes bottomlessly problematic, always splendidly enthralling expedition by foot and canoe through western Africa (Gabon, to be specific, then called the Congo Français) in 1895, when she was 33. She had been to Africa once already, in 1892, shortly after her parents died and she suddenly found herself relatively free from responsibility. (Not entirely free, because she still had a brother to worry about. But relatively free.) She decided to expend her energy on learning the tropics. Because she could not afford to go all the way to Malaysia, she went to Africa. She was looking for fish and fetish. She was looking to describe what she found on this (to her) unfamiliar continent, not what she thought it should be or what its deficiencies were, in comparison with her dreams. She eschewed most stereotypically European or English ways of behaving on the continent--did not ask to be carried around; taught herself to paddle a canoe over rapids; dutifully and even a little gleefully took her turn finding fords through swamps, when one person had to venture in ahead of the others so that they all wouldn't end up in over their heads. But the unanimous winner of our collective favorite moment of the day's reading occurs when Kingsley sings the praises of one trapping of European propriety she didn't eschew: her skirt. Because Kingsley moved more slowly than the Fang people with whom she was traveling (as the only European and the only woman), while they rested, she would walk on ahead, and then they would catch up with her. At one point, this routine became thorny indeed:

About five o’clock I was off ahead and noticed a path which I had been told I should meet with, and, when met with, I must follow. The path was slightly indistinct, but by keeping my eye on it I could see it. Presently I came to a place where it went out, but appeared again on the other side of a clump of underbush fairly distinctly. I made a short cut for it and the next news was I was in a heap, on a lot of spikes, some fifteen feet or so below ground level, at the bottom of a bag-shaped game pit.

It is at these times you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt. Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England, who ought to have known better, and did not do it themselves, and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for. Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fulness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.

Now, I love having class meetings where some large proportion of the people at my table exclaim, "I loved that." And this passage brought down the house.

I realize that I still haven't told you what I mean by calling today a postcard day.

You will recall that yesterday began (for me, late riser) with a sunny flourish; I missed the first round of rain and awoke to a clear gleaming wetness and clouds that kept flying. But you will also recall that yesterday ended in wind and cold (and, by the time it was all over but the shouting, moon and starshine--so, no wholehearted complaints). Today, we had gusty wind again, all day long, and the temperature didn't climb all that high, but the aesthetics of the day were just splendid: rich, hueful, saturated blue, clear and constantly changefully beauteous. The grass is greening extravagantly from all this rain and all this sun, and the overall result is not unlike a John Hinde postcard, such as the one at the top of this writing.

I fell in love with John Hinde postcards during the year I lived in England, a decade ago. I chased them throughout the United Kingdom, always looking out for their brilliantly artificial and luridly lovely colors, their improbably prosaic foreground details (often at monumental places), their occasional descent into utter bourgeois banality. Somehow, despite my looking for them constantly, I came home at the end of the year with only a few. I've picked up a few more on research trips over the years, and once I even received one in the mail from Ireland. That one, in fact, is perhaps my favorite--enough so that I'm scanning it in for you.

I mean, come on. You have to love that--who puts a rowboat full of people right in the middle of a souvenir image of an Irish abbey? And then endows it (and especially them) with some of the brightest colors in the image? John Hinde Studios, that's who. And if you want to know much more about John Hinde than I'm prepared to tell you here and now, visit the British website "I Like" and check out the page dedicated to his work. Be sure to search out the Butlins images, which are simply fantastic.

You know who else loved picture postcards, or who was at least drawn to working with them? Roland Penrose, the surrealist artist. He did a number of works that used multiples of the same card to create strange and wonderful effects. The image on the main page of the Roland Penrose website is currently one of those postcard collages.

I'm not so good at sending postcards, myself. I've wondered about this many times. I can remember being good at writing postcards; the summer I studied in Greece, I sent postcards to everyone I knew, sometimes more than once. I remember, in particular, sitting with friends at a café near the water in Xania, on Crete, and writing postcards. We were all writing postcards. I was working on a postcard to my grandfather, and I was trying to write in handwriting larger than my usual tight and tiny postcard scrawl, trying to make sure that he would be able to read it when it arrived, and that he would enjoy it. My grandmother had died nearly a year earlier. I was certain (and I'm certain I was correct) that my grandfather was terribly lonely, alone in his house, in a city rapidly become inhospitable.

When I was about to leave for my year in England, a few months later, he sat me down with the National Geographic Atlas of the World--the same atlas I inherited at his death, the same atlas that now holds my advanced degree diplomas--and, after I'd shown him where I'd be living and studying, demanded that I stay away from Northern Ireland, no matter what. By the time I'd been in England for two months, he was the one who had had his life nearly ended, in a terrible car accident in Detroit. Because I was in England, preoccupied with all that it meant for me to be living in England, I didn't grasp the magnitude of what was happening until I flew home for a surprise visit at Christmas. My grandfather was still in the hospital, his head in a halo and his body in traction, his mind leaving us for a place from which he'd only send back the briefest, most poignant of dispatches, at moments when we least expected them. The first time I saw him after the accident, he called me my old childhood nickname, the one he called me when we hadn't yet attacked my always-unruly hair with the white rattail comb and clear-handled hairbrush my grandmother kept in the downstairs bathroom. "Subtlekopf," he called me, for the first time in fifteen years. We still don't know how that nickname translates, literally. I know that "kopf" is "head" in German (which he'd grown up speaking, up on the farm in Bad Axe), so I imagine that "subtle" has some meaning that leaves the whole nickname signifying "Messy head." In the absence of any more solid definition--in the absence, that is, of an answer likely never to come, just as I'm likely never to get back the Polish lullaby my great-grandmother sang to me, only a couple of years before I'd read to her from the Louis Pasteur book, our favorite among the batch of books my grandmother kept on hand for her grandchild, voracious for words above most other things--I prefer to think of it as his early prognostication of what I'd come to value, what I'd aspire to embody, as I grew.

Funny how this writing wanders, how the unanticipated signpost appears to signal a scenic route, how I'm always willing to follow, knowing I'll be hushed and humbled by what is found there.

Near the end of his life, my grandfather sent back one of his most wrenching postcards from Alzheimer's. One evening, my mother had just arrived at his nursing home, where she fed him dinner every night and lunch every weekend day from the time she and my father moved him to Indiana a year after his accident. "How was your day, Papa?" she asked him.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I wasn't here."

sources for tonight's images: 1) The Airliner Showroom Sale of Airline and Airport Postcards (I didn't go searching through these; I'll be there are some in this batch that would rival the stuff in Boring Postcards...); 2) a brief biography of Mary Kingsley.

In Ohio seasons are theatrical.

It helps, when one is teaching Beloved and reaches the line that is today's title, to be able to gesture over one's right shoulder, out the window, to the gathering clouds and the rising gusts--to be able to say, "And within five minutes the sky is going to open up and we'll get to remember that spring is fighting its way in," to have their groans met by the first slapping of rain against the windowpane's ripply weathered glass, to have a sunspotted walk to class bookended by a slower stroll home through rainsmell and windhush, aftereffects of a swift-flying storm.

Some of our setting, yesterday and today:

Honestly, I thought I had more images than this to give you. You'll have to imagine: clouds roiling across the sky, heavy and grey where this morning they were light and curling, spiraling against brightest blue; heavy branches and trunks bowing and dipping at stately paces while their finer extensions trace and scratch and shake; the last of last autumn's brown oak leaves cycloned up from the ever-greener lawn, to hang and circle in mid-air like birds riding thermals; the quieter, wetted hesitance of birds singing out after downpours. The living steel of it all. The entirely ungentle pushing out of one season by the next. April, cruellest, making room for itself, no matter the damage.

Yesterday evening, pileated woodpeckers in the ravine: you can tell them from crows, even if you can't see their red heads, by looking out for the white undersides their wings flash in flight.

And now, later: the reason for the force and fierceness at midday becomes clear the second I step out the door of the officehouse at 4 p.m. to go give myself motion sickness with the microfilm machine (I'm afraid that not enough people saw the travesty that was Possession to have appreciated my microfiche joke from before, so I've swapped it out). The temperature has dropped twenty degrees--from 62 to 42--since noon. Suddenly socklessness is a terrible decision; suddenly having shawled before office hours is a stroke of brilliance. The wind keeps pushing and shoving, the old season attempting a reconquest. The best picture I could offer of the afternoon's aftermath would be my wind-hit cheeks or my chapped knuckles. But instead, the haphazard of first leaf-furl, fighting with late winter wind (the crooked horizon is actually the roof of the library; because of the way the wind was blowing, I was happy to get anything focused at all):

Graffiti are fun.

Tonight's post is dually inspired and will be more pictorial than anything. As you know, if you pay attention to what I tell you, I'm particularly fond of a particular blogfriend's way of seeing her world, and a couple of weeks ago, she shared her secret: look down! and sometimes, look up! Now, being more of a look around! person, myself, I've been trying out her advice. And it's funny: I've lived in small towns most of my life, and I really don't cop to the idea that there's nothing much going on in small towns. But there have been times, in the past couple of weeks, when I've wondered whether there's just that much to see if I look up and down on my usual half-mile walk to school.

Well.

Today, no more than ten minutes after I posted my writing for "yesterday," I realized that I'd never taken the time to look at a couple of utility covers that I pass every day. They're a little bit up a hill from the street, so I stepped up the hill, and lo and behold, look what I saw. (Keep in mind what "yesterday"'s post was about.)

Now, that's what I call synergy. Or something.

As I made my way home from the library a little while later (for last-minute research work is ongoing: I am at that stage of a particular project where I am sure that little things are going to make me great; I've been fighting to keep myself in my house for the past hour, because my irrational researcher is simply certain that a handful of pieces from the London Times and Scribner's from late 1928 and early 1929 are going to be crucial; my rational researcher suspects that they will be useful, but not right this second), I took some time to keep photographing trees in various stages of tiny flowering. But I also started picking up a theme I hadn't expected: words and images in unexpected places. For some (fairly obvious) reasons, people have graffitied the backs of a couple of signs leading out of Gambier. These graffiti strike me as simultaneously whimsical and utterly sinister:

The reason I was seeing these graffiti in the first place is that I decided to take a different route home than usual, which in turn led me up to the doors of one of Kenyon's art buildings. I've always loved this building, and one big reason for that love is that the art students have made this stately old brick building, which was originally an Episcopal seminary, into something of an artwork itself. The stairwells are often full of graffiti; student art is everywhere in two upper floors of studio and lab space; the building feels open and available in useful, provocative ways. (I don't mean to romanticize; I know that artists and art professors here are longing for a new building, and I can understand that desire as well.)

So this evening I stepped into Bexley Hall to take a look around and see what's new. And one thing that's new is that the amount of graffiti seems to have plummeted. One of the only legible pieces I saw was in the eastern stairwell (the imperative descends the stairs):

(I don't just love it because it reminds me of those lines from the Beastie Boys' song "Crawlspace": "You better think twice / before you start flossin' / I've been in your bathroom often." But listen when I tell you, dog, that association's not a drawback.)

And on the wall right beside it was this piece:

Now, I have to say that I heart this image a lot. I love that we have at least one kid on campus who would correct a piece of graffiti in the art building--who'd not only recognize the subject/verb agreement error but point it out to others. Yeah, I'll admit it's a little pedantic, but I love it anyway. And I also love that it made me come home (much later) and look up "graffiti" in the dictionary. Indeed, "graffiti" is plural for "graffito" (a word I know from one of the subjects of my dissertation, who described his arousal at seeing an obscene graffito on a wall in London in the 1860s). And graffito, in turn, comes from the Italian "graffio," for "a scratch." (Eventually, I suspect, it all goes back to the Greek verb "graphein," "to write.") Turns out "graffiti" and "graffito" don't enter the English language until the 1850s, and they seem to come into the language as a way to describe scribblings on ancient walls, in particular--scribblings and drawings of the sort that were being turned up in Pompeii and in Rome.

One of my aspirations, when I was studying abroad, was to go through Greece and find all the places where Byron had graffitied his name in the 1810s and 1820s. I know that at least one such place is the Temple of Poseidon, at Sounion (not so far from Athens), and that another is the famous cave on Antiparos, one of the islands that make up the Cyclades. I've not made it to either of those places, and I've never seen where Byron carved his name. But I did get to see terrific graffiti while I was studying in Greece, all the same. Both of these images (which are significantly sharper in the original, by the way) are from the Temple of Hephaestus in the Athenian Agora (just northeast of the Acropolis):

I've always loved the one with the little guy, in particular--probably because those shadow-columns make me feel all over again how blindingly bright the Athenian sun is in July, how deeply bronzed I was when I returned home. But I think I also like the idea that the Greeks--however ancient they were, the ones who carved these things--were also looking up, looking down, trying to catch images of what they saw themselves passing.

A pandemonium of thrown fish.

The April fool's joke here, of course, is that this post didn't go up on April 1 at all. But I'm putting it up as if it had gone up yesterday not only because I was actually planning to do it yesterday (but then ended up not coming home from the furry beasties' house to write it out) but also because I don't want my April archives to be missing a day right off the bat. I have to say, though: I waited for the March 31 / April 1 changeover, wondering whether we'd go out of March like a lion or like a lamb. I was hoping that the end of the month would shed some light on how to interpret its beginning. But we came into March in a pretty middling way, and we've gone out of it in a fairly middling way as well--some flowers blooming, some cool breezes, some misty rain. My feet are still cold in the shower, mornings, even if I can go outside without a coat now. So, what I've concluded is that this year, that old adage applies not so much to meteorology in my world as to workload and emotional state. March came in with a stretch of (relatively) peaceful workdays, days when I could get some high-quality emotional reflection and prose-crafting done in the evenings--which was necessary, since March also came in with some high-quality emotional drama, as you may recall even though you only heard it obliquely. But though March went out with a lowered degree of emotional tension (recall that it was exactly a month ago that I railed my way back into embracing my solitude), it also left in its wake an unprecedentedly high level of professional overload, about which I think I'll say no more here, chiefly because I have what I think are more interesting things to talk about.

Namely, personal ads.

Those of you who have been with me since the beginning of this Cabinetry, or who have valiantly read your way through all the archives (whose extent surprises me no less than you, I'll add), will recall the utterly inspired graffiti that I discovered on the village mailbox, back in August. Just in case you don't recall it, though, here it is again. I'm happy to offer it a second time because I love this image so much.

Back on that December afternoon, I showed you this picture with a semi-secret frisson of hopeful joy because I was about to go on my first date with someone I'd met through my first foray into online personal ads, with which I rapidly became obsessed at the end of last semester because they're such a strange genre of self-representation. And yeah, okay, because I thought maybe I'd find love that way. Even though I felt mighty silly and not a little skeptical about trying to encapsulate myself in a series of answers to a series of strange and not-so-strange questions ("The celebrity I most resemble..." was one I skipped, just for instance, having decided that ignoring the question was a better way to belittle it than to do what so many people do, which is to write "What a stupid question"), I'm also enough of a romantic and enough of a narrative scholar to appreciate a well-turned story's arc. Part of me still falls for the narrative trajectory of fated love every time it rears its head. And this is, in large part, why I've started thinking of this narrative arc as a "girl meets blog" story; I entered into the personals game thinking I'd find a somebody. Instead, it turns out that my writing was out there waiting for me to show some interest in it again, and now I'd say we're in a pretty mutually enriching relationship.

But I'm focusing on the self-representation part of personals today. And alas, this writing, like so much of what I'm doing these days, is going to be more attenuated than I'd like. (So much for my confident claims of mutual enrichment. Right now, I am someone distressed by having to spend so much time away from a lover she's just gotten a chance to start getting to know. Everything is still bright and possible, but I have to sequester myself away for most of every day. We'll see whether we get sick of each other when I have more quiet and settled time to work myself into a writerly ferment... Maybe I'll get to have some tantrum-laden fights with my own words. Wouldn't be the first time.)

One of my colleagues recently hooked me up with a one-year subscription to the London Review of Books, a periodical I'm overjoyed to be receiving not because of its essays and poems (though, you know, those can be kind of useful and interesting too) but because of its personal ads. When I first moved back to Gambier, one of my favorite ways to try and repay my marvelous friends for feeding me great dinners while I was settling in was to do dramatic readings from the LRB personal ads. It's a game that to my mind never gets old. One night, another couple of friends were dining with us, and I mentioned how much I love the LRB ads and how much they make me want to make an outlandish one up and submit it, just to see if anyone would respond. (Keep in mind that this was a good eighteen months before I actually capitulated and tried a personals venue myself.) "Do you actually think that most of those ads haven't been submitted for exactly that reason?" the husband of this couple said to me. I'd never thought of it that way before, of course, because I prefer to believe that my funny or bright ideas have never occurred to anyone else. But now when I do the readings (mostly to myself), I approach them with a greater kind of readerly tension; I'm suspended between a couple of possibilities for thinking about what they might mean. (And no, I don't think I'm reading too much into these. They're obviously made to be read into. Follow along.) Here are my favorite three from the 23 March issue:

I like several things in these ads, which come from the same positioning on the page as the last three that I gave you, back on the Ides of March (when, fortunately, there was not much need to beware). For one thing, the person seeking love in the top ad in both of these groups is done with loons. For another, the person in this week's top ad notes an important (though not always fixed) distinction between courting and writing: "she wants romance, not a pen pal." I love that the guy in the middle kicks off his ad with what (as a result of some quickie iTunes-based research) I think is an allusion to the song "This Wheel's on Fire," which was recorded by The Band (with and without Bob Dylan) (which in turn leads me down an entirely different road of knowledge I don't possess). But what I hear in my head when I read "This wheel is on fire" is the beginning of the James song "Laid": "This bed is on fire / with passionate love." This James song, in turn, could lead to an entirely different road of reflection on romantic obsession, but we'll perhaps go there another time when, for instance, there's more time for it.

And I super-love the woman at the end (who lets us know she's female by means of that great declaration "I am a woman"), whose "Now you" conclusion really brings to a head the several tasks she's already laid down for me, not least of which is to look up "peristerophobia." Peristerophobia, it turns out, is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. (If I sent it in for them as a possible word for the third edition, which is still underway, would I give them this personal ad as its 2006 source? Would they use it?) But "peristeromorph" is in the dictionary and lets me know that the ancient Greek word for pigeon was (transliterated, of course) "peristera." Peristerophobia is a fear of pigeons, something I can kind of understand, having had my food menaced by flocks of impertinence on several occasions. I also love that this woman's ad makes me remember the Halloween party I attended in graduate school where a younger student dressed up as Jean Genet (prison garb was involved). When I asked him who he was, he slurred "Zhanzhenay" at me. I asked him to repeat it. He slurred it again. I gave up, figuring that my brain would make syntactic sense out of those sounds later on, which it did.

Basically, then, what I'm saying is that I love these ads for the way their details mirror me and my mind's motions back to myself . But I also love the way each of these people has managed to make a little image of him or herself. Bachelor #1 is using that age-old fake-out of speaking about her "friend" in order to talk about herself and a series of frustrations she's had in the past with pervy loons who like to list their medical conditions and thus (and maybe in some other ways, too) do not qualify as strong or sorted, and my guess is that she's maybe had a bad or at least frustrating experience with long-distance relationships. Bachelor #2 is a scientist HTM (hoping to meet--see how I can talk the lingo?) a woman who's maybe also a scientist, and he's OK with someone a little older than he is, possibly because he has subordinates at work and doesn't need another subordinate in his love life (that latter is just my guess, based on the idea of the underpaid assistant's being on fire). In fact, he maybe is looking for someone older who will start straightening him out from past mistakes, because he is (note the pun, which is pretty good) a "perennial misfiring love jerk." Bachelor #3 wants you to know that she's a woman who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to let you know it--right down to the fact that she tells you she'll tell you ten things you should know about her but then tells you eleven. And she wants you to know that she knows her shit: she loves the "aphrodisiac" M&Ms best; she smokes the toughest cigarettes. And she wants you to be monied, though she might feel wistfully that she wants to add you to her collection even if you make under £80,000 a year.

Yesterday, when I went into the village to get my mail, I stopped by the bookstore and discovered a new pile of junk on the clearance table in the back of the store. In one of the plastic baskets back there were a bunch of packages of tape flags reading "RUSH." I imagine all of these personal ads as being invisibly tagged "RUSH."

On the other hand--and this is where the readerly tension comes in--I also imagine them as competing for the other prize to be gotten from advertising in the LRB:

Which, it should be noted, Bachelor #3 won.

Meanwhile, reading the champagne-prize announcement copy has made me revise my LRB personals aspirations in a way that feels perfectly apropos. Now, I no longer want to make up an ad and see who answers it. Instead, I want to get a job as the Classified Manager in Charge of Personals. In my head, I hear Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind saying "Someone has that job," even as the skeptic in me voices Joel's doubt that anyone could. I'm sure that running the LRB classifieds is a job that often sucks a lot. But surely, processing each issue's personals must be something to look forward to--even figuring in the pain of having a piece of your soul collected by Satan when advertisers slack off.

I made it about four months on the personals site, myself, before the epiphany that revealed to me the fundamental error of my ways. By the end, I was having the opposite reaction to that which I desired. Rather than feeling relief that there were so many single people in central Ohio--since here in my village home, we're a pretty big and sometimes aggrieved minority--I started feeling staggering overload.

Remember that Marvelettes song "Too Many Fish in the Sea"? I learned that song from the soundtrack to The Big Chill when I was about ten. There's a lot of good anti-mediocrity / anti-settling sentiment in it, particularly in its conclusion: "I don't want nobody that don't want me / (Cause there's too many fish in the sea) / Ain't gonna love nobody that don't love me / (Cause there's too many fish in the sea) / I don't need nobody that don't need me..." "Bait your hook and keep on trying," these women urge us. But the personals pool started feeling a lot more like a story that a friend told me over lunch on Friday. He was in Brooklyn early in March and went to a fishmarket with his son and his son's girlfriend. The fish vendors would, as fish vendors seem to do all over the place (which makes me wonder even more ruefully how it is I've never managed to see this spectacle), throw customers' chosen fish over to someone else, who would gut and package the fish and then throw it back. "It was a pandemonium of fish!" he said to me. I love that.

I tell you, the personals site had become a pandemonium of thrown fish. And so, for now, I'm more than happy to sit back and watch how others bait their hooks.

There's gonna be a whole lot of testifying.

I saw a play tonight, and all I can say is what I said to a student of mine who ended up sitting near me: that playwright is no George Eliot. At least we got a good laugh out of the proceedings. Tonight's title comes from one of the more ridiculous sequences through which I sat--though not from the sequence wherein everyone in the audience giggled and then howled at everything, even though (I think) the scene was supposed to be dramatic, not comic. It really, really wasn't the actors. It was just the material, which was mostly ridiculous.

My writing has been painfully spare of late, in part because of some happy duties to which I'm attending this weekend, caring for others' furry beasties. But here is some of today's quiet riot of Ohioan early spring.

This morning, walking along, singing to the dogs I was walking (I chant them their names as we click along), I heard a tree in the wind sound like a creaking floorboard. (I'm cheating a little. This picture is from the end of the day, but by then the trees were swaying and rushing and creaking again.)

One of my dearest friends was so overjoyed by the blooming of these little blue and white flowers that during lunch he kept thanking another friend for them, since she supplies him with them every year (they don't grow in his lawn).

Once again today, I spent much of my time staring up into trees not unlike this one, trying to stay patient long enough to see a singing bird. (Do you see him?) (Here's a hint: if you click the picture, you'll get its full, enormous version, and you'll have better luck.)

For much of the day, walking the roads was like stepping amongst ancient mirrors, stalking a rippling sky.

I've been wanting to photograph this roofline for days, and from my office this afternoon I could see these buds' cumulative red. I suspect that you may not be able to see the red even in the enlarged version of this image, because of the gathering and overcast dusk.

And today not only the local daffodils but also the local forsythia began blooming in full force. A cardinal landed in this bush with the sound of a deck of cards shuffling, just as I was bending backwards to catch this image. I had high hopes of capturing the contrast of yellow and red, but the bird riffled and plunged off through the dusk, red streaking over green in grey half-light, before I was even able to point, much less shoot. (Quel horreur! My brain edited "goldenrod" in for "forsythia" last night. Do not be misled by my amateur botanical discoursing. This bush is forsythia, something that I do know, have known.)

A day of sun and birdsong.

If your day was as beautiful as our day here--the sun brilliant from start to stop, the starling singing the songs of six birds in the top of the tree (its chest puffing and ruffling to make both the sweetest of sharp notes and the most peculiar of titterytapping sounds), the tiniest daffodils you've ever seen blooming everywhere while the full-sized flowers follow suit--then you should take the time you would have spent reading what I'm not going to write, and you should use that time to remember what you saw.

Today was so lovely that I didn't carry the camera, didn't even want to punctuate the sense of all things by capturing single slices. May I awake in bright light again tomorrow with my arms sprawled on either side of my head and dogs drowsing in the living room, sun-swoozled. This morning, we were all like the babies in sweet pictures.

A slower answer, in four times.

Yesterday, caught:
"I'd like to ask you a slow question," she says to him, making space for something careful, thoughtful, with a gesture generous and wise. And something about the phrase--a slow question--catches in my mind, slips a switch, crawls around a corner and gets to work. The rest of what happens in that room becomes mere murmur and patter, echoing the rain on the roof, backing up swift pen-scratch. And what I've scratched, because of what I've been listening to, what she and others are still asking about (but what I've started drifting away from), is water. Water because of Monday's writing and the memory of being pushed and held, beaten and cradled by a savage and lovely sea. Water because my world has gone wetly grey in the rain, heavier with more weighty greys than I can remember seeing. He has described dark not as absence but as saturation, and I am finding myself saturated with the gathering darkness of water.

Later, dried:
But I'm also saturated with the gathering darkness of absence, absence of energy, of time, of space for stretching and floating to the degree I've now come to expect. I have not had to prioritize around this writing yet, or at least not to prioritize it out of production. But suddenly I am putting up the three images that somehow, though they are neither of water nor about wetness (nor even, for that matter, about slowness or darkness or absence or rain), line up out of Sunday's walks home and request a showing, and I am thinking, I'll fill in the gaps sometime later. But it's midnight. I am saturated with desire, and my desire is for rest. And the bird, over the roof, over the sign: this triptych I can live with. This grouping can slouch out and be slow, demand slowness.

Today, hanging:
To fantasize water, first dream islands. Conjure backward to empty expanse, saturate with everything. The notes age a day, start becoming artifacts. Woolf comes to the rescue--when does she (wise) not rescue?--with Mrs. Ramsay's solitary musings: "beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by." Woolf herself a fish, not unlike Vardaman's mother: the autobiographical sketch shows it (I do not believe life-writing always to be factual, but I do believe it generally to be true). "The person is evidently immensely complicated," she tells us in A Sketch of the Past, written in 1939-40 under threat of German bombs, and part of the complication she means is temporal, is time itself, is the nature of time that leaves her swaying and slipping and silvery: "I could collect a great many more floating incidents.... I dream; I make up pictures of a summer's afternoon.... I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream." I hang. I can do nothing but hang, thought deflected and held in place. I can describe neither myself as fish nor the stream. The notes desiccate.

Tonight, tossed back:
Thomas Hardy mysteriously copies from Ralph Waldo Emerson--why? from where?--in August 1924: "The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual." To love water, to sing praises to water, to immerse, be immersed, sink in to soak up: these are not unusual. I may well have nothing new to say. That has never stopped the word-flow before. But it is possible I'll need to recur to Woolf yet again, this time to A Room of One's Own. (If you knew how I'd spent my day, her ubiquity tonight would not surprise.) Woolf's narrator in that lively treatise about women and fiction, about economics and creativity, is musing at (fictional) Oxbridge. She has named herself "Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or...any name you please." She is thinking by a river:

Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

You know the little tug. Well, I do. This thought of mine is no larger than the biting fish whose sharp-toothed jaw my father gave me when I was small. It is not so big as the monstrosity fish (so beloved) in the tanks at the restaurant where we went some Friday nights, early in Indiana. When I was a baby, my mother couldn't keep me from putting my face under the faucet in the bath. But now, now I am tired again: now I see the waters to write about (a fully dressed woman walked out of the water in my morning class): now I cannot face them: now I must sleep until the conglomeration comes again, this time fattened, to feed.

You should know by now not to come here for answers (not quick ones, anyway) is the answer to the question, whether or not it was slow, whether or not this is slower. Be wise enough to love the spread feathers, the slate shingles, the invitation sans serif. They are the usual. They are the wonder.

A slow question.

She tires, writes of water.

You know that my usual practice on Mondays is to give you an image and call it a night. Tonight, I couldn't get images to upload for a little while and decided to give you a wee word picture. And then the images started working again. So now you get both.

When I was ten, we went on a company vacation to the Gulf coast of Alabama. I actually remember feeling surprised to learn that Alabama had a Gulf coast. I'd seen the Atlantic, once that I could remember. The Gulf of Mexico is an entirely different thing. My favorite thing to do, that first summer (we went back for many more), was to put on our cheap swim mask and swim about in the shallows with tiny fish; I have always loved swimming in goggles and masks, because water somehow goes a long way toward helping correct my vision, and so though I was already in steadily thickening glasses by that point, I could see the fish clearly. My other favorite thing to do was to catch the little waves and ride them on my stomach. Occasionally, I mistimed, started up a half-second too late. And then those little waves turned out not to be so little, so gentle. Then, water would pull me under, push me down, hold me there, immobilized. Then, it was too dark, and the sand was too near, and all was too furiously silent, sound rushed away with light, with air, with strength. The water pushing over met the water pulling back; I hung in suspension without the grace of the fishes. And then I could struggle again. And then I could stand again. And then I could see, once again, that I was only ten feet from shore, that the water was only knee-deep. And then I could turn towards putting myself at the waves' perilous mercy again. I was no thrill-seeker, still am no thrill-seeker, and foolhardiness has never been my strong suit either. I suspect that even at ten I knew these were minor league dangers. And that summer, my notions of water's dangers were blissfully, willfully naïve. That summer, it didn't matter to me that I couldn't see my feet when we swam.

And no one can talk to a horse of course.

After an intense week (and with my work-intense weekend still going on for at least another hour or two), tonight I'm going to give you a break--a bit of what we'll call comic relief. A soon-to-be-Kentuckian friend of mine mentioned in passing this morning that she's planning to take up riding again once she's in her new home, in the heart of bluegrass country. And one of my Brooklyn blogfriends (I love that I have two!) has written movingly about caring for old horses in her youth, about the "dark, decrepit old stable full of geriatric, honorable horses" she eventually left behind.

Myself, I've only had one experience on an actual horse (as opposed to a pony in a ring). It was in Memphis, back in spring 1994, toward the tail end of the only spring break road-trip I ever took (which also involved the only time I ever saw New Orleans). The motley crew with whom I was traveling had stopped off for a few days in Memphis to visit the family of the woman who would become my roommate the next year. She had grown up riding, and so we all piled off to a park where we could hire horses to ride for part of the afternoon. My feelings about this outing were not unlike the feelings I've always harbored for roller coasters. A roller coaster always seems like an excellent idea, in the abstract, and I make a good, determined show of psyching myself up for riding them, but in the face of the thing itself, with all its possibilities of falling (which, you'll recall, is my greatest fear), I panic. Where roller coasters are concerned, this panic has always meant that I've ended up standing at the base of a coaster's huge support pillars, peering up into summer skies to see my friends screaming along, their hands held high or their legs hanging down (depending on the fanciness of the coaster). But where these horses were concerned, I toughed it out--probably because I didn't know how nervous I'd actually be, once I was on my horse. Also, perhaps, because while riding a horse, one doesn't generally go hundreds of feet up in the air and hang upside down and then plunge hundreds of feet down through the air.

We reached the park late in the afternoon, and the horses seemed pretty tired. I don't know from horses, but thinking back on these horses' behavior, I see a lot of myself at the end of a Thursday afternoon in the way they submitted to our mounting them and learning the rudiments of encouraging a horse to walk around. When my horse had me just about as far out as we were going to go, she decided it was time to quit what was supposedly her duty and to start eating whatever was within reach (I do this almost every Thursday at about 5:30 p.m.). We stopped stone still, and she dropped her neck and began munching the high grass and yellowed weeds around us. Her bending forward meant, of course, that I was pitched forward as well. I clung to the pommel and tried to encourage her to start walking again, but to no avail. Eventually, I decided that I probably wasn't going to fall forward over the horse's neck, and so I calmed down and just looked around at the lowering late afternoon light while she ate. And eventually, she had eaten her fill, and off we went again. By the time I returned her to the stables, I had gotten the hang of riding, a little bit, but I haven't done it since then. I do think that horses are beautiful, and I get a thrill when I happen upon horses running through a field, when I'm traveling somewhere. As I left town for Thanksgiving this year, I got very lucky and very thrilled indeed: about fifteen minutes into the trip, I passed a field where a horse had dropped onto her back and was rolling about, scratching. It was an utterly graceless, utterly lovely spectacle.

Those anecdotes aren't the funny part of what I have to tell you.

When my family relocated to Indiana in 1983, we moved into a house on the outskirts of town. The house was sited on the middle (mostly cleared) acre of a six-acre wooded property. There was an old red shed on the property; it had been the horse's home, when the daughter of the couple who had built the house had a horse. Our neighbor still had a horse, if I remember correctly, when we moved in. I think I remember walking over through the woods to visit the horse periodically--though, probably because I didn't have the girl-love of horses of which my Brooklyn blogfriend writes (despite my having loved it when Mrs. Whatsit became a centaur in A Wrinkle in Time [1962]), I didn't go every day or anything.

And the linoleum tiles of our kitchen floor had hoofprints in them. Deep, tile-crashed prints, scattered over much of the floor. My parents asked the real estate agent--as you do--how the floor had been damaged. She told them that the people who had built the house had had a daughter who had a horse; this horse was the one who lived in the red shed in the back three acres of the property. One weekend, her parents were out of town, and she was worried that the horse was lonely. And so, when the television show Fury was ready to come on the air, she led the horse into the kitchen so that he could watch it with her. The horse proceeded to stomp up the floor.

"That's not all that horse did in that kitchen," my great-grandmother commented wryly when my mother called her up to tell this story.

The story was a family staple for a couple of years, until we had those tiles taken out and put down a new floor. In the past few years, I've kicked myself for not having had the foresight to take pictures of the prints before they weren't there anymore. Of course, I was no more than nine or ten when we changed floors, which means we were still firmly in the time of the Kodak disc camera. Things are a little different now that I'm pushing thirty and shooting digital. (Do you remember those disc cameras? I liked the sinuous coiled metal wrist-chain.)

The horses I always loved best were on carousels (though I was also a huge fan of the KMart mechanical horse when I was a small child, and I also loved riding my spring-loaded rocking horse). On my first trip to New York City in the blazingly hot July of 1999, I rode the carousel in Central Park with my Knoxville friend. Because we're sometimes just this way, we had decided to wear crazy flowered minidresses all over the city that day, but we clambered up onto the horses anyway, and around and around we went. We might have been the only people on that carousel; it was really that hot outside. When we were done with our ride, we walked over to the Frick, and then to the Met. It was that kind of day.

I suppose that it was always the measured motion I loved, on those inanimate horses, never the wildness of what they shadowed gaudily.

Ironically, it turns out that the original Central Park Carousel, in operation from 1871-1908, was powered by a blind horse and mule.

sources for tonight's images: 1) The Happy Trails Highway (witness Trigger, with Roy Rogers, setting his prints in concrete at Mann's Chinese Theater in April 1949); 2) a Fury Brave Stallion trivia and memorabilia site; 3) a WiredNewYork Forum.

One whose task is joyfully to see.

Though tonight feels like a night for writing, I seem simultaneously scattered and blocked up. I am having the most peculiar conversation with Middlemarch today, teetering as I am somewhere between Dorothea (with her "mind struggling towards an ideal life," her nature "altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent," her "exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life") and Casaubon (who freely admits "I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world"). To my mind, one mark of an exceptional story is that I always hope against hope that it will turn out differently. And so, all evening I've been reading my way toward the cataclysm of Dorothea Brooke's young life, knowing that in my fifth reading of the novel, she will still commit the same folly, still not recognize the irony of having told her sister, within a day of having become disastrously affianced, "I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken." Nothing I learn ever helps Dorothea; it is one of the lingering sadnesses of my life.

Bundled into the day with Middlemarch has come the chance, after several days, to read Calvin Trillin's essay about his wife Alice (who died in September 2001 of heart failure brought on by a decades-long battle with cancer) in this week's New Yorker. I'm meditating on marital subjectivity and memory these days, chiefly for work-related reasons, so "Alice, Off the Page" has come as a great boon. The essay isn't available online, but if you're not a subscriber, you should shell out the $3.99 at your local newsstand (or what have you), just to read pages 44-57 in the March 27 issue. If Middlemarch ultimately turns out to be about the dark side of how "[m]arriage is so unlike everything else," how "[t]here is something even awful in the nearness it brings," then Trillin's tribute to his wife is about the loveliness of that unparalleled, awe-striking nearness. It is the second such tribute I've had my heart broken by in the past six months; the first was Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which came out late last year and deserved all the acclaim it received, and then some more.

Yet somehow, despite the proximity of all these texts to one another, the best I can do for you this evening is not to thread words of my own together into thought (and, I hope, some degree of beauty) but rather to offer you a poem. I thought about giving you one by the poet who surprised my week so quietly and intensely and thoroughly, but instead, I'm diving back into my personal archives for a poem one of my dearest, oldest friends sent me back in the summer of 1999. It's a little early in the year for this one, particularly on a day that's seen everything from pelting sleet to cold, heavy rain, but everything else about it is right for now, for me. (Click the poem for an enlarged and more easily readable version.)

The New Yorker (June 14, 1999)

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Yes, when I was a college freshman, I was winnable with cummings poems. I felt quite deeply about them at the time; I might still, had I not been won temporarily by them all those years ago, in a relationship that was otherwise fairly disastrous, in a disaster-of-the-banal kind of way. Somehow, I don't think that my freshman boyfriend ever read or recited "i carry your heart with me," which is why somehow it seems exempt from the aura of disdain that I have to battle back from "somewhere i have never traveled" and a host of other lovely but, for me, marred poems.

With my youngest students, this morning, I had one of those classes that keeps me charged up and knowing I'm in the right line of work. The week's unexpected concatenation has left me reflecting on what it feels like to have literature move me--what it is that makes a work something to which I'll return, again and again, even when it's not on a syllabus, even when I'm not making my living by helping students understand it. The poems I've been loving my way through this week are in that class now. The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins have been there for some time; the first time I read them and had to discuss them at a seminar table, I found myself on the brink of an outburst because I couldn't stand the clinical, purely intellectual way we were dissecting the gorgeousness of his fear and his exultation. How is it possible to read a poem like this one and then talk only of rhythm, only of how the sonnet form has been handled here?

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

It seems obvious to me that you don't read this poem and never talk about its form; Hopkins, as a poet, was devoted to form and made the forms he had inherited do intricate, strangely beautiful things. For an example, look at the first two lines of this poem--

but no, see, that's the wrong way to start. Reread the poem first, and read it aloud. You, sitting there at your table, sitting at your desk, thinking, "But I don't like poetry," just try it. Try it, I tell you, and imagine what it is that he's asking you to see. This poet is writing, in 1877 (and revising possibly until 1879), to convey the feeling of heart-soaring he feels while watching a bird winging a breeze. His heart is in hiding but stirs for this bird. That's all you really need to know, in order to read the poem aloud, tasting it on your tongue, in your mouth, in your person. Read it aloud slowly, stumblingly if you need to, and don't worry if you don't know what the words mean. Know what they sound like, and you'll find that that's enough to get you started.

And then if you look back at the first two lines, you'll see the strangeness of Hopkins's having broken the word "kingdom" in two, having pushed "dom" ahead to the second line, so that the first line makes the bird a king, and also so that the idea of "kingdom" itself gets broken up, gets made into something different than you might have expected. This kingdom isn't one of places or dominions or buildings or earthly power. It turns out to be a kingdom of daylight--the bird is the dauphin, the prince, of this kingdom of daylight--and that kingdom is diffuse, is everywhere. (Now is the time for me to tell you that Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, dedicated this poem to Christ.) And now, if you look at the poem as a whole--skipping over a lot of other things that you should do to really savor each of those lines--you'll see that all the lines in the first stanza rhyme. Not some of them, not every other one, not pairs. All of them are -ing words. That's an innovation; sonnets generally have had very regular rhyme schemes, but not uniform rhymes. And pair a uniform rhyme with Hopkins's flights of diction, his soaring of words and dissolution of expectations for even grammar itself, and you have a sense of what Hopkins does with form.

But you don't get anywhere with this poem, I'd argue, if you stop with those kinds of points--if you don't see and say aloud that this poem's rush and tumble of syllables and sounds all adds up to his thrill, his utter ecstasy at having seen this bird, in all its beautiful majesty. You miss it all if you don't reckon with what it means for Hopkins to write, "My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!" (7-8).

Now, there's much more to be said about Hopkins's "The Windhover," but I'm going to leave it for now and let you explore it on your own. (If you haven't read it aloud by now, I'll just tell you straight out that you are perversely denying yourself an aesthetic experience from which you would benefit, whoever you are. Are you embarrassed to read the poem aloud? Don't be. Be embarrassed if your embarrassment stops you. If people around you want to know why you're speaking, invite them to listen. Gift them the poem, or even just a word from the poem. I'd suggest "dapple-dawn-drawn," the perfect word when you need an adjective to describe a thing traced by the day's checkery early light. Not that I, personally, would know much about what that's like. I believe that I've made clear that I have been one acquainted with the night.)

We hit a moment about two-thirds of the way through class this morning when I realized that, unexpectedly, we were walking along in plain view of a vista of contemplation that was too good for me not to stop and point my students toward. Why is it that we don't talk more often about what it might mean to be moved by a poem, or a novel? My guess, the guess I spun for them from the head of the table, is that it's too intimate an endeavor, that it's ripe with possibilities for embarrassment or over-sharing or exposure. And so I went first, and I didn't demand that they pipe up just yet with the things that they love. I told them a short and discreet version of what has shaken me this week; I prepped them for what I hope will shake them as we take our first steps into Toni Morrison's Beloved next week; I gave them the two other titles upon which I can rely for a reading experience that never gets old, never goes stale--in fact, that grows and changes as I grow and change. (Those two titles are Middlemarch and To the Lighthouse.) After about ten minutes of my talking, I stopped and took a deep breath. Some eyes had widened around the table, but some pens had also come out and written down titles; some voices had asked for the titles of the poems I'd loved this week. "I feel as though I've just slipped open my chest and offered you my heart," I said, miming the act. We all laughed. I don't think the laugh undercut the point I'd made; after class, three or four students stopped by my end of the table to recommend books that have moved them, things that have served them as touchstones this far.

This kind of moment makes its way into nearly all of my classrooms at least once in a semester. I can't plan it; the right day for it to pay a visit generally becomes clear with only a few minutes of advance warning. But I feel it as one of the important things that happen in my classrooms: such moments of non-confessional self-revelation, of laying something vital on the line without placing inappropriate demands on my relationship with my students, are among the best ways I know to show them why I care about what we're endeavoring to do together. They are my ways of telling my students, I love that you're learning to love to learn; I want to do all I can to ensure that you're learning love itself. I can't teach them love itself, I know, but I teach in my field because literature is where I find and feel my humanity most clearly and keenly, and I teach because my heart is too big for me not to do this work, not to carry fifty or sixty hearts in my heart each semester, hoping to do my part to keep and care for them like the incubator in which we hatched chicks and ducklings (how fragile, how small, how stumbling and inquisitive) when I was in kindergarten. I can't actually sing them a love song; they wouldn't understand. But while I'm teaching them about narrative voice and temporality, about strategies and sentence structures, about rhyme schemes and rhythms, I'm also always hoping that they're learning a greater underlying lesson about the achieve of, the mastery of the thing--about the fire that can break from them then, a billion times told lovelier, and gash gold-vermillion.

source for tonight's images: First-to-Fly's history of the Wright brothers (two of Ohio's most famous sons). The top two images are dated 1902; the last one is 1908.

The clandestine order and meaning of all signs.

All of my rings have meanings; they speak in a silence of silver, a more significant version of strings tied to fingers, pressing particular memories and mantras into the flesh of my hands. Because my life and livelihood revolve around my fingers moving over keyboards, my hands are the best place to wear my reminders. On a first date, an old somebody asked me, "What do your rings mean?" I overinterpreted him; I thought his question was a sign that attention would be paid, that he had decided to speak my life's language. I am frequently guilty of overinterpreting. My father has recently coined a new noun, colliding my name with a habit he's warned me out of for decades.

Nearly a year ago, I traded in the silver band I'd been wearing on my right hand's middle finger, traded it in for a ring shaped like a tiny crown. My Lexington friend has the other half of this almost-matched set (hers is simply a band), and we wear them in solidarity against all the things we guard and guide each other through, and in hope of all the things we envision for ourselves and one another. Since our exchange, marking our turning 29, I have only rarely not worn my half of the pair. But today was one of those days.

The band I'd been wearing until last April is slim and silver, pressed with stars and a single moon. When I wear it, all three of my rings are from the same store and the same jewelry artist in Ithaca. The fat band on my left hand is for courage. The slim band on my right ring finger is for commitment; it is my doctoral ring, silver for now; I take it off for sleeping and doing dishes only. The star band was for solitude and hope. I bought it the week after having left the person to whom I'd thought I'd be married; I wore it to remind myself I'd chosen generously for myself, that bigger things were in store.

Today I wanted to wear the stars, and what I wanted turned out to be prescient. Today the richest things that happened to me were so strange and ambiguous and impossible that I cannot even write them, cannot put them in public, can only hint and sketch and puzzle them out even in my own startled and rattled mind. The right modifiers haven't debuted; the shape of the thing is still shaping itself; I laugh at myself in my skepticism, laugh at the revelation I felt and the reminder I've gotten and the knowledge I hold that what was least expected need not even be confirmed, need not even have happened, in order to have been what it was and to have done what it did. What I feel, more than anything, is gratitude.

Today I relearned why words always win me, why my life has been called this way, how its bounds are shifting and unsettling, how I'll soon be unintelligible perhaps even to myself if the epiphanies don't stop, if the exultation doesn't calm and sustain until indulgence is safe. Or safer. Safety seems unlikely, and I would likely flee it anyway.

"Reckon the haste of one wall burning," our visiting poet began, in the poem from which today's title comes and which you too should read. At the end of the day, his lines having rattled and rooted around in my mind since morning, I found myself facing the burning bush outside my building, watching it sit, seemingly so still, but knowing (we both know, the bush and I) that it's building up for the burst into blaze, the budding the leafing the greening, so soon. "A prayer for a new image, yes." "I will be the world, for a little while. As such waiting." I have no one reading that will account for these lines, no way yet to make their meaning to me knowable or known.

The poem that met me, startled me, on Tuesday turns out barely to have escaped being burnt.