Lepidoptera

Once again I feel as though I've come further but that nothing is any more than it was before. How to say– ? I just mean that I'm still rather lost, my head feels wet and green, the land is like the sea, I circle around the light, a windblown seed in the aural canal, displaced equilibrium.

A fragment from Chris Marker's Sans soleil that has stayed in my head:

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its inner lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

Some time ago, thinking of someone, I felt a sense of what it is to grow old– I felt that it is simply the accumulation of sensations. In my head I felt my past, pieces of my past, fragments of miscellaneous remembered sensations: a moment of looking at the wet green face of a mountain, dark descending, a purple dusk, speaking on a dirt path with a girl I knew, sitting on a levy at dusk looking at graffiti, the beds I’ve slept in, the classrooms in which I’ve whiled time away, music, and so on; I felt these in my head and limbs. And I had the thought that one’s lining (head, limbs, blood) slowly thickens and lengthens, that this is what it is. Trees bend, rains fall, and each time I feel more rain, more bend. One sees things more clearly but not by much. This is okay, this is what it is.

I don’t know about that philosophy and poetry thing. It makes me tired. I make up some laws, some halflaws, open my hand, hold it in front of me–the abstraction flutters out, I touch its wings, it falls slowly, pulled about by currents of air, to the ground. (I’m thinking of Nabokov, lepidopterist, bender of wings into words, namegiver.) The divide is impossible to name and easily transgressed.

Pragmatism. I like it but I haven’t read enough of it. And it isn’t the right word. Every movement is an expedient, provisional, experimental, and that's okay.

Gender. I bend in and out of genders. The divide is impossible to name and easily transgressed, especially in San Francisco.

I very much like Stevens. I don’t like Stein. I love Frost. I have to research Howe some more. And everyone should read Joyce, Nabokov, and Carson please.

Reading. I do that sometimes. I move through things or they move through me or we move together or something. Sometimes I look at things more closely and they come a little clearer. But there are divides everywhere that are impossible to transgress because I am me and nothing else. The desire to transgress them is what I have and it’s the best I’ve got. Desire which lifts the wings into the hermeneutic motion. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to grasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). That’s from Pale Fire.

Sometimes I really dislike saying things. I open my hands and they fly away from me. I don’t really remember what else we talked about. Maybe someone remind me and I'll write a little more later? Right now I’m pretty hungry. I want some bread, some freshbaked bread. A dark bread, maybe limpa.

We’ve had some really great discussions and I thank you all, especially, of course, Professor Case. Have good summers.

And it's spring. The tree out my window is starting to green. They called him Huizkol, that means Looks Good in Spring.