But fortunately, having hated, twisted guts was a late-breaking development in an otherwise lovely (though cold, cold, pit of hell cold) day.
If you haven't read it yet, take a look at Patrick Süskind's gorgeous Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1986). It consumed my afternoon.
Now I must become the horizontal version of myself, in the hopes that this time tomorrow will find me more fit for these keys.
If you startle the moonlit deer, they will hiss and skitter in the snow. These deer are nocturnal and prefer to sip at the dunes in silence. They will not accept your love, no matter how quietly you profess it, nor with what conciliatory gestures, what craven offerings. If you are fortunate, which is to say if the letters of your name and the hour of your birth align in the proper configuration, and you approach with palms out and eyes averted, they may let you stand apart and watch while their jaws work from side to side in the cold. But if you begin to whisper about domestic apocalypse, or the problems of irregular poetics, they might meet your gaze and all but ask you to change the station. They do not want your confessions. They do not want your witness. These deer have been tracking the yard for years. They know they do not need you. Pass on, in your animalskin coat and boots. Pass on, cold nostrils flaring. Pass on to your dreams of the horn and the hoof, of the touch of that sweet, sleek hide.
I am mostly going to let this picture speak for itself tonight; the ambiguities and dichotomies you see here are mine, too. Support or confine? aggression or comfort? beauty or horror? presence or absence? Yes. The answer is yes, all at once yes.
My thousand words (and then some) will be back tomorrow, deo volante. Tonight I've got a little more shaking out to do.
Sometimes I neither know what to do with it nor expect its return in the first place. Developing two more rolls of film feels like a good plan, though.
The day got away with me. It was worth it.
My younger brother, a genius photographer, has just secured a new job that looks as though it will be congenial in the extreme for his personality and professional goals. Some of you know my brother personally. Others have heard stories about why I like him as much as I do (because in my family, I'll tell you, we don't much believe in automatically liking the people to whom we're related). He is exceptional. I am so pleased.
And I am so proud. That bears repeating: I am so proud. And did I mention lucky? That too.
I might be too impatient to wait here at home for the water to boil to make my lunch, and this is how I go hours and hours without eating and days and days without eating well because the impatience is too great for me to keep up with the traces my living in a house leaves and so it becomes easier to abandon the house day after day, only coming home to sleep and then to drink coffee in the flannelled bed before getting up exactly 32 minutes before I'm due to be in the next place because that's how long it takes to shower and do all those things that stabilize the day before I run off to be three minutes late to whatever I'm going to, only this wasn't the case with photography today because all I was doing was developing yesterday's film (much of which was overexposed) and so now I am home for lunch, which I didn't think I'd have time for before the post office closes and yet I find myself wanting to get up and leave for the post office and for the officehouse where my people are and how am I supposed to feel good about leaving them next year and how am I supposed to feel besides impatient and how am I supposed to get anything done while I feel this way and what does it mean that I seem to want only to read books about beauty and start to want to write one and is this a sign that I should be reading Ruskin and if so should I and if so and when will that water be done boiling and was I ever serene I don't think I was but thank goodness the kitchen is clean and well-lighted and the pasta will boil and I will get up from the tympanic shudder of the porch's screen and will eat in warmth and then move again with increased fortitude and (d.v.) a grace in not-knowing, in remembering (for example) the fine flock that bloomed on yesterday's cold window.
Being separated from this space: the nightmare of artists: nothing holding still long enough to be seen. Or not being able to locate, use, train your medium to enter that space and fix on a thing.... One hopes not only for transportation but accompaniment. Sad moment, when my friend said, "I'm not painting now, but it's ok (he is brave: it wasn't), I'm painting in my head."
In the head? No. That won't do. I mean to be literal here. I mean the actual space between mind and work and how that slows, how that constitutes when one is at work, is working in the space. And I mean, too, the space art clears for us all--that place of density, interiority. I do not intend to be cozy. I do not intend to be abstract. I mean the actual space. I like, as Emerson said, the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary.
After a morning and early afternoon impulsively spent cleaning up my kitchen (who knew it could be this way?), I set out again to take pictures of my county. I was chiefly heading to take a picture of this corpse--which I thought was a squirrel's but now recognize (with some help from my friends) as a groundhog's. But I grew too absorbed in trying to create sequences of going-by barns, and when I pushed the shutter release with the camera aimed at this skin, the whole world grew stubborn. (Meaning, of course, that my thirty-six exposures were gone.)
Fortunately, I had heeded my own advice and carried both cameras with me on this outing. And so--after yet another fellow motorist stopped to ask whether I needed assistance, and then, upon learning that I was taking pictures, engaging me in conversation about photography and dead animals, before saying, "Well, I suppose I'd better let you get to it"--I got to it, with the digital camera, which I'd have pulled out anyway, just to be able to show you what I saw. That picture speaks a lot of what things feel like in mid-Ohio right now. And these, of a farm I pass and a road I take on the way to the grocery store (say, on a night when it's starting to snow and I realize that it would be a good thing to have food in the house after all these weeks) speak of some of the rest.
The very blueness of cold, for instance, if not also the burn.
It may well be that I'm in the process of geeking out--with photography, I mean. (I geeked out in other ways decades ago.)
You may recall that, back when I started taking pictures while driving, my father ordered me a window mount for my camera, in the hopes that it would keep me from doing stupid things. Today, I finally hooked it up--to my Nikon. You can picture it: there I went, rolling through Gambier, with my 35mm camera pointing out the driver's side of the car. I suppose I could have waited until I was on Zion Road, making my way into the countryside, to attach the camera to the window. And yet it was so cold this afternoon that my brain was slower than usual.
My first project for the photography class involves experimenting with shutter speed. Our task is to capture some blurred motion and some frozen motion. After sleeping on this task for several days, I realized that I've actually been preparing for this assignment all year: I just needed to try out the drive-by shooting with the film camera. The problem, of course, is that the little point-and-shoot is much lighter, much easier to swing around without diverting too much attention from the road. In fact, the 35mm--with no monitor and with that pesky problem of film's expense--is not at all a suitable camera for taking pictures while driving.
Unless!
Unless one has a window mount and can set up exposure and shutter speed ahead of time and then just push the shutter release over one's shoulder as one drives along backroads. And in fact that's what I did. I had a bit of a glitch early on when I realized that the camera wasn't sure what to focus on. Shutting off the autofocus (which I'm using because I don't trust my eyesight) solved that particular problem. The real kicker came when, after having used the last of my exposures, I turned a corner and faced this vista--only with the sun shining and chips of blue sky glinting.
And I had no way to document it. I hadn't carried a digital camera--or more film--with me. A quick run home to grab the other camera allowed me to get some semblance of what I'd seen, but I'm disappointed not to have gotten any pictures of the sun glinting off the ice coatings on the snowy hills one passes between this corner and Gambier. Instead, I shot snowy fields, the same ones I shot in April, when the cows were nursing their young and the grasses were greened.
Unfortunately, going home for the other camera and making this backroad pass again made me miss the weekend omelet cutoff at the coffeeshop.
I have now developed three rolls of film, including the one I shot from the car this afternoon. This week, I learn to make contact prints. My fingers start to smell sour like chemicals, though I can't name which ones just yet. I start planning more elaborate things for my projects.
In a closet not far from here, my afternoon's drive hangs to dry.
I heard a tree creak like a loosening board. I saw the snow crack like a ground sea all roiling. A deer ate in the bed until nothing was left. The trees dropped brown stains to the late-month melt. I felt my life breaking like a cold grove on fire.
A bird in the hand is a full-bodied heartbeat. So much a thrumming that you might not know whether you or the bird is more startled that you've just gotten your first lesson in how to hold a captive cardinal. She will not be captive for much longer; you have carried her out into the flurries to photograph and then release her. It's not until later--not until you scroll through the pictures, start showing them to others--that your eye will meet hers and start you wondering: how much the terror of having the whole body enclosed? how much the disdain for the grounded big body? how much the dull blank of inability to comprehend the quiet ssh sshing the inexperienced make to soothe? Your left and right hands will learn what they did together: the left a cradle and a keeper, the right a shooter and a seizer. Looking back over the pictures, you will remember that this bird was in hand for a long time before the moment of this image: the capture, the measuring, the bagging and weighing, the impromptu hand-off when more birds arrived in the nets. You will be glad to remember that this one took wing mere seconds after your shutter flew back.
A bird in the hand will bite, if he can. And little wonder. But what amazes you, as you hover behind the student researcher who invited you to come along and photograph, is the gentle swiftness of her touch, her dexterity and unflappable calm. The way she does everything she can to ease the trauma of capture and carrying. The way she does not complain when the bird beaks her again and again, even though her work began before dawn, even though you follow her everywhere with your cameras. The way she embodies, without effort, the best of the people who surround you: she has chosen good work, and she is doing it well, and she is happy to share, though sharing will not disrupt the intensity of her focus.
When you look at these pictures later, you will realize how much her hands resemble your own. You will have this confirmed when your own mother thinks that the hand in the pictures she has seen was your hand. "You have the same fingernails," she will say. You will already have experienced some difficulty, remembering who was holding which bird. Only the second student's hands will be immediately discernible as hers.
A bird that is not the right bird will stay in the hand only as long as it takes to unnet her.
Unusual suspects will, having blundered in to the net's pockets, remain stiller than still, awaiting release.
This bird in the hand will be the one who fully reveals to you that birds, like the rest of us, have different characters, different distinguishers. A darker brow. A taller crest. A bigger head. A slightly less quiet manner. By the time you hold this one, you will have become eager to take on more birds if necessary. You will have offered to carry this one outside for release, while your student measures and weighs and samples blood from more birds indoors. (You will, even as you type these words, continue to marvel at the straightforwardness of her work. You will start to think about how one might capture poems, watch them forage on the ground and then fall up and into a fine net. Or words. Perhaps biting words. Perhaps a dictionary is a net that stays.)
A bird in the hand will remind you that some things that seem like affection in fact just cause pain. When you watch this biggest of the ladies (as you too are coming to call them) biting your student again and again, as your student tries vainly to coax her to flap her wings for the camera, you will know what each bite feels like. Later, you will not be able to remember which bird it was who bit your middle finger. You will not even be able to remember whether it was a male or a female, though you will start to think that it must have been a male, and that you volunteered for that particular holding, too.
What you will remember best is your student's patience with this bird, who seems to know what the camera is there for--or perhaps to respond to her own reflection in its lens. What you will take home with you is a bite mark, a brag, all these handed birds.
Tomorrow, I'll wing you some words. For now, I offer just image, random shots from my day's adventures, which were considerable indeed.
A comet swings over the southern hemisphere, blazes out where the eye can see it.
Tonight I'm quiet, with so many things on hold, so many things up in the air, some of them quite important, some of them my own sad secrets. Tomorrow morning, a student will take me to see the mistnetting of birds. I will take their pictures, finishing out my second roll of film. Film. Loading my camera last week, I thought of how long it's been since I handled a roll of film. Summer 2001, my research trip abroad. Six rolls: an extravagance. That summer, I priced digital cameras in London, wishing I'd thought to ask my father to loan me his so that I could shoot the ephemeral: hairstyles, funny gestures, the smell of the city from the top of a double-decker bus. Graffiti. Shadows. The strange fadedness of my dormitories. My libraries, so beloved. But instead, I bought ISO 400 film and shot with care, as always. Now I straddle a funny line between film and digital: eight shots (out of thirty-six) fluttered away on my iced trees' second night. An outlandishness born of knowing that sometimes it takes me eight tries to get one thing I like, what with adjustments here, adjustments there, experiments, failures, accidents. Tomorrow afternoon, I learn to develop. "Don't wear anything nice," cautions our lovely professor. I have two professional commitments that require wearing nice things, just before class, and so I will be scrambling to get everything done in its time and in clothes most befitting.
It is possible to become sensitized to darkroom chemicals, to the point where one can't be around them at all. Some people, so sensitized, cannot even walk past a darkroom without suffering respiratory distress.
In hoping not to become such a person, I find myself emulsifying, imagine myself a photographic plate, silver-coated glass, wanting the light, wanting to turn to. A star-catcher, on the long exposure, standing so still in wait for blazes, for comet's catch. Glass distorts less than film, is more stable, reveals what has not been known. Despite fragility. No slight shine, no easy mirror.
source for tonight's image: Robert H. McNaught, via Astronomy Picture of the Day.
It's strange--mystifying, really--that within twelve hours of finding out that I've been given a new, vast tract of one kind of freedom, I found myself musing yet again (ad nauseum, I suppose) on the ways in which that freedom occasionally comes to feel excessive. I think back to my excellent novelist friend's response to that empty fortune cookie, back in March: an empty fortune cookie means freedom. Keep refining your plans, says the horoscope on the weekend. Now I have a free pass: go be as fine as you can be. It's not even slightly that I wish away what I have generously received. I know I've received it for a reason, though I don't know precisely what that reason is, just yet.
But this is not the direction I saw coming, a few months ago. I felt the possibility of new roots, a new rootedness, a different kind of settling that would, for once, be no settling at all. A feathering, a fledging. And now I'm being called once more, possibly away from home this time, just when I'm starting to have a home again: these are different wings than I expected. But when you say, "Give me directions. I'll follow them," you're handing things over to other hands. And if what gets handed back to you is not what you felt coming, well, then, you haven't been paying attention to your own maxim all these years. Be careful what you wish for. It may come true in ways you don't expect.
On the other hand, maybe this sign means that I've started getting too comfortable. Maybe it's come this early in my research leave semester so that I have a maximal amount of time and space within which to take the hint: revise your life: clear out the underbrush: go back up the mountain. My beloved Brooklynite once wrote to me, "You've gone up the mountain for both of us." I wrote back, "You're tending the home fire." Someday, I wonder, will I go up the mountain and find a home fire burning there, waiting for me? How many more times will I fall for the false gleam, the light shining in the window for some other person, some other belief?
Today was the day I gave my students the news, the silver cloud and the dark lining: I may not be here; I will not teach some of you again before you leave us. The outpouring of congratulations and of sadness, all mixed up together, is still flooding back; we are tidal, they and I. One side swings; the other side returns. One side calls; the other side responds.
Tonight, at dinner, madcapitude: strange requests from students for whom days here are numbered, for whom fewer holds are being barred, for whom there's little to lose in asking the outrageous. "When's your birthday?" "Can we borrow your vest for a photo shoot?" The latter question, to my poet friend, so much more bold than the former, to me. And these, I thought as we watched one of the stranger performances I've seen in awhile, these are my familiarities. These are the dares at affection that tell me I'm home. Maybe the call to leave them behind for awhile is coming just in time. But why so counterintuitive?
And so, all day, I walk around with my eyes hollowed out, fatigue and worry lying low and liquid behind the bones of my face, those structures that tell who I am. Listen to your heart and your gut, says my flaming-sworded friend. Even if your heart leads you astray, your gut never will. When they speak together, listen. If you don't want to leave home, don't. But what will others think? I say. Who are these others? she responds. And all the while, my feelers are out anyway, and the plans that are in the making would be exceptional indeed. The foot-dragging: natural, surmountable. The worries are mostly just words, the worrisome things mostly the aftermaths of illusions anyway. And I am not ungrateful. I am a pillar of thankfulness today, just querulous despite myself.
I page around in Pascal--the Pensées apparently among the only books in the bookstore I don't yet own, and so my gift to myself last night--trying my fortunes again, too restless to make my own way, too suspended now in what this future should look like. And thence spring surprises:
It is not good to be too free.What?
It is not good to have all one needs.When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after--as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day--the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?
The heart has its ways of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.
I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses. You have rejected one and kept the other. Is it reason that makes you love yourself?
I'm paying attention. I am. One of the people for whom I was named got wind, late in life, of what she would produce, and she laughed. The rebuke came, severally, and laughter I've always imagined as a little bit snide, in its disbelief, turned to joy. I've learned not to laugh. My eyes are open, and I'm trying to be patient, and I'm going to be brave about it. I am. But loving the universal being: sometimes harder than it sounds. Who put me here? What time and place are being allotted?
Tonight's title is tangentially related to my day's biggest event; it's something funny my father said to me as a follow-up to his asking me whether it's proper for me (as a woman) to be called a Fellow, now that (drumroll) I've just found out that I won a fellowship about which I didn't expect to hear anything for a fairly good while. I love that my father knows that, as a literary critic, I have a gender leg. There's much more to say, and a big foundation that I will thank for the rest of my career, but the Cabinet isn't really the venue for it.
For now, look again at my trees' weirdness. These pictures are from last night's monster batch, and they are unretouched:
It's not often that I pose questions to you, but here's one: if you could go anywhere for a year's work, where would it be? I'm not pulling your leg (gender or otherwise) in asking. My life's not a democracy, but I'm gathering ideas.
And now, I tell you, the real maelstrom can start.
Perhaps you might have planned to walk straight home from the office, do a quick writing, and then climb into bed with The Emperor's Children. But then.
Then there was all that ice coating the trees, and your shaky hands that wouldn't let you capture what you saw, and all the people you saw in the middle of town in the middle of the night, and then once you got to the house and tried again and again to shoot the weird quasitransparency of iced branch tracing lamplight, you remembered that the tripod was right there inside, and so you tried again while something else held the camera, and by the time you shot and shot and shot some more, your toes had gotten cold and wet because you hadn't planned to be standing in the snow at all this evening, and now that you've come in the house, you see that two hours have passed, while you took your hundred huge digital shots, plus the twelve mysteries in the 35mm.
But the picture-making computer now lives in the officehouse, in the interests of your no longer using it in bed, and so the picture you uploaded before leaving for home (a non-snow interlude from the morning's snowshoot) will stand for now. And with only the briefest of greetings to those readers who found their way here this afternoon because of a particular Knox County landmark, you're off: back on the originally scheduled program of getting into bed with that book.
In July 2002, my South Carolinian friend broke up with Ben Affleck. As I listened to her narrate the reasons for her decision (suddenly, he'd become a marriage-breaker; that, she could not abide), I realized that I was being given a gift: mechanisms for both entering and exiting relationships that, for whatever reason, were taking place only in my own mind. Knowing these mechanisms doesn't make them any easier to deploy, of course, particularly if one possesses a delayed-reaction heart. (Perhaps we all have these? How could I ever know?) And so it was that I careened through the rest of that calendar year deeply engrossed in what could only be called an imaginary relationship, despite some trick appearances to the contrary.
But one day in February 2003, I woke up and realized: I needed to break up with him. He needed to be gone from my life. And so I did it. It was 63˚ that day, and so brilliantly sunny, and in the middle of the afternoon, I strode out to downtown Ithaca and bought myself some gerbera daisies. I felt physically light, actually buoyant. I have some pretty clear tendencies, see: I repeatedly fall, hard, for beautiful, brilliant people who can't or won't pay attention to me, and then I do everything I can to try to get them to pay attention to me. I think of it as a flair, a real gift, for the unrequited. Someone asked me, many months ago, about the last time I'd been romanced. And I couldn't come up with an answer. Even after I thought for days I couldn't come up with an answer. It's just not the way love--or anything like it--has ever worked in my life. Every time I do this number on myself, the effort to push through from going unseen to being seen weighs on me, at first little by little, and then lots by lots. And so getting to that breaking point, that moment when I realized that I had taken on something that I didn't deserve and couldn't want, and then shrugging off all that accumulated weight of slight--it all felt so lightening and lovely.
That night, at the venerable Glenwood Pines, a man waiting behind my friends and me said, "One of you smells wonderful." We looked at each other and cocked our eyebrows, trying to keep from laughing out loud at this hammy guy. But secretly, I was pretty sure it was me he smelled, and that what I was radiating was something like relief, and glory.
(Of course, it was later that night that the person I'd just dumped finally got around to asking me out (kind of), thereby reinforcing the wrong part of the lesson I'd just taught myself. Let's leave that aside for now.)
Over the intervening years, I've had a number of imaginary relationships--with a small college (not my current, I should add), with a famous novelist, with a sketch comedian. They've never been particularly serious or difficult to leave. When things are serious, possibly even life-changingly serious, it's harder to deploy the imaginary break-up. But it can be done.
This morning, I woke up to the sound of a car being pounded to death by fraternity brothers in a parking lot near my house; they worked on demolishing that car for the better part of the day. And then I looked up my horoscope. Now, I have a mostly joking relationship to horoscopes--far less serious a one than to bibliomancy, for instance, or to Signs in general--but I will still check them when they're around, and one shows up in my e-mail each morning. Today's (edited very slightly) reads:
It's frustrating to have a vision of what could be, only to have someone veto the whole enterprise. But what can you do? A lot more than you initially realized, it turns out. Keep refining your plans.I thought I understood what this piece was saying, and it was perplexing to the point of real frustration. But suddenly, late in the day, I realized that I'd been reading it inside-out. When the right reading kicked in, I celebrated by putting on my Superhero necklace and going out for saag paneer with my excellent friends, at Mount Vernon's glorious new Indian restaurant. (I could just as easily have put on the silver Rebecca Haas necklace I usually wear. A few times since I bought it for myself as a birthday present last spring, my mother--knowing that my jewelry generally has some kind of significance--has asked me what that silver circle sitting over the pulse in my throat's hollow means. I haven't been able to respond adequately, much less eloquently, on any of these occasions. But here it is, as closely as I can get it: I'm wearing it for openness, generosity, wholeness, and clarity, without which four things I'm not anywhere.) (But tonight, I forewent serious meaning for the glitter of green facets. And while no one told me I smelled wonderful, my excellent friend did say, "You look so nice!" "Laundry night," I told her. I'm not one to tell an untruth.)
Lately, I've been listening to Regina Spektor. It's not often (or ever?) that I send you to YouTube from here, but tonight I will: try her out with "Samson" and "Fidelity," both of which have terrific videos (the latter, in particular, hearkens back to an earlier age of video narrative and joins my list of favorite happy-ending videos). It's "Fidelity" that I'm house-dancing to this evening. "Suppose I never ever saw you," Spektor sings in the second verse. "Suppose you never ever called. Suppose I kept on singing love songs, just to break my own fall." Well, suppose indeed. I'm keeping on with the singing. I've got this voice, see, and you'd better believe I'm refining my plans.
Work proceeds as a series of self-interruptions.
The epitome of wintry mix, just the sort of day when it becomes difficult to remember that we are swinging sunward once more. What is this? we say after dinner, looking up, hands out. Look back, look toward the light: that's shimmer, fine glister, down-dusting: that's snow, even if it's only coming down to dampen the pavement. It's not that we're forgetting. It's that we're out of practice. Maybe snow will make it less grey outside, wishes a student. Brighten the place up a bit. Myself, I think we may be due for some severity.
Today's class revealed to me why I've been having such difficulty with focus: at speeds slower than 1/60 of a second, anyone alive is liable to suffer some degree of camera shake. Oh. So simple? So simple. Get a tripod. Props are allowed. In fact, props are going to be required. Can a window be a mask? Oh, yes, if I have anything to say about it. First up, dream images, and I wonder how creeped out can we get each other with these projects.
Walking from home to the officehouse, I notice branding where I've not seen it, naming this pole with its color but also marking it not-tree. And though I am so blasted short that I can't get it head-on, and though what light there was today is fading, I try this exposure mess again, and it's not as bad as it has been. Strange how much of my frustration has stemmed, yet again, from expectations that all would be smooth, simple, that I could make a seamless transition, graduate painlessly to the next happy thing. Strange how long it takes me to recognize this pattern, familiar though it is.
Days like today, knowledge tends toward the sere, the searing, the hard to get, the impossible to handle. I'm taking what I can get, where I can get it.
Such things she knew how to say when I was still very small:
Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one's self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most of the important information that a person receives. When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness--perhaps new in the world--of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.-- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (1986)