How do we corrupt the youth? To start we give them, when they are teenage boys, George Steiner’s introduction to Kafka:
Intercourse, as we find it pictured in The Trial and The Castle, has the crass ambiguity of rape. It humiliates men more than women. It leaves them irreparably soiled and enfeebled.
And follow it up with “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
And wait, arms folded, to see who will cut a hole through all that to let the air in.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires
Okay, smart guy, what if the infant grows up to be Harvey Weinstein?
Desiring this girl’s art, and that girl’s scope. But the café sound system couldn’t be blunter:
Don’t get any big ideas / They’re not going to happen / You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking
The other night I had my first experience with some guy trying to pick me up off the street. It was confusing because at first, based off past experience, I thought he was asking me for money. It was only the immediacy of his questions—what are you doing right now? what are you up to right now?—that finally clued me into what he was after, his story about moving here from Indiana, home of Michael Jackson, you know Indiana?
What I was doing, I said (going at a clip up the sidewalk, him tailing after), was meeting someone. I’m going to get in a car. Which was true—J. was around the corner. So maybe give me your number, he said, and we could go to the movies?
I’ve never known what to say about the movies. Maybe some other time?
He stopped following. After my back he called: you know I’ll never see you again!
And J. was in the car around in the corner, headlights on.
Auden's lullaby has been killing me this week, in a different way than it used to. Age is part of it, the time and fevers that burn away beauty. But also the nocturne as oasis; outside the room all is not well. “Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love.”
Early spring: rhododendrons in bloom, weeds poking through a pumice wall. More light, like Goethe asked for.
N. says, “The way you look now, it’s like you just took a mask off.” Of course she looks the same way.
I’m neglecting duties. I’ll do worse before we’re through.
Come back, my heart, come back.
What You Will
VIOLA. Then westward-ho! Grace and good disposition
Attend your ladyship!
You’ll nothing, madam, to my lord by me?OLIVIA. Stay:
I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me.VIOLA. That you do think you are not what you are.
OLIVIA. If I think so, I think the same of you.
VIOLA. Then think you right: I am not what I am.
OLIVIA. I would you were as I would have you be!
VIOLA. Would it be better, madam, than I am?
I wish it might, for now I am your fool.OLIVIA. O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful
In the contempt and anger of his lip!
A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid: love’s night is noon.
Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honour, truth and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,
For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause,
But rather reason thus with reason fetter,
Love sought is good, but given unsought better.
Rohatsu 2022. I didn’t stay up all night. Still sleeping a lot, drift.
Due to some misplaced optimism around the insurance company I think we’re now out of money. Globally that’s okay. Circling a zero point you feel some advantage to its tight gravity, the focus.
“Men’s tastes are diverse. Suppose we each manifest ourselves in the form of a hundred maidens.” Saṁyutta Nikāya 4.25
More rain coming.
Chilly day. Sun angled low on the palms, damp in the earth, that’s the native winter I remember. Tamalpais with its head in the clouds. Wildcat Creek at the Aqua Vista trail running low enough to ford by stepstones, with caution for one’s expensive new face. Loop back home through the canyon, mound-shapes of cloud mirroring the hilltops as they go.
I like walking through these suburbs even with everything set up like a well-kept fortress (some badly kept fortresses too). J. was asking about a political theory for this time and place, and I didn’t know, except that everything seems driven by fear: I don’t fear the same things as another, nor act on them in the same way, but the universal affect that I’m not safe, I won’t have enough... after Four Ecologies I read City of Quartz and was most struck by the power of the homeowners, the terrible impulse to stasis. That once you’ve found your own unlikely berth your only move is to pull up the ladder behind. Quiet byways. No traffic but Amazon trucks, corpuscles carrying nutrients.
But it is noteworthy that if we secretly deceived this lover of the beautiful by planting in the ground artificial flowers (which can be manufactured exactly like natural ones), or by placing artificially carved birds on the boughs of trees, and he discovered the deceit, the immediate interest that he previously took in them would disappear at once; though, perhaps, a different interest, viz. the interest of vanity in adorning his chamber with them for the eyes of others, would take its place. This thought then must accompany our intuition and reflection on beauty, viz. that nature has produced it; and on this alone is based the immediate interest that we take in it. Otherwise, there remains a mere judgement of taste, either devoid of all interest, or bound up with a mediate interest, viz. in that it has reference to society; which latter furnishes no certain indications of a morally good disposition.
—Kant, Critique of Judgment §42
A quiet train ride, uphill walk to Union Square chilly and full of life in late afternoon. The giant Christmas tree lit up, skaters doing circuits on the holiday rink. I show my appointment bar code to the bored attendant at the Tiffany’s elevator (yes, it really is the Tiffany’s building), and then up, up among the outliers: half the floor for “wealth management,” half for the clinic I’m going to.
“You ready to get that stuff off your face?” The unwrapping is gentle, alcohol wipes to wet the adhesive and then a slow peel. Patchwork feel of cool air on the sensate parts of my skin. “There it is. Do you want to see?”
It’s only a moment in the hand mirror, I’ll need hours to take it in. A concave emptiness where the old beak had been, that’s a shock. But orient to the eyes as before, the new ratio of brow, cheek, chin... yes. Smile. There she is, she’s smiling.
“The incision line on your forehead is lumpy”—lumpy? it looks like Boris Karloff—“but that will fade in the next month or two. Shall we take some photos?” Pictures snapped, the doctor and I review the before and after at his desk. “We de-schnozzed you, de-foreheaded you... de-everything, really. I’d say wait three months, until the swelling starts to go down, before you have any pictures taken where you want to look good. That’s when you’ll see your result.”
It wasn’t a result I saw in the hand mirror, it was a process. It doesn’t matter. The banged-up woman in the photos came through the portal, survived her passage; it feels like a solved puzzle. I ask how long till I can go cycling again. Give it two months, says the doctor, “but please don’t fall on your face,” and tells the tale of a gymnast patient who somehow kicked herself in the head during a maneuver and shattered what had been an excellent surgical result. I’ll keep that in mind. “Any other magic tricks I can do for you? Sorry, I really only have the one.” Well, let him crow a bit, he’s very good at what he does. Hustled out with my final paperwork, a tasteful gift bag that fails to disguise the transactional nature of the exchange, back into the elevator and out to Post Street.
Still afternoon, still chilly and among the same crowd, but as I start down the sidewalk the little warning loudspeaker of the past two years—check your shoulders, check your hips, how’s your hairline, how’s your mask—is stilled. The glasses that I didn’t need to see, the mask that I didn’t need out of doors, that I wore to scramble the signal: I’m not using them now. I’m breathing the same air as everyone else, watching the same show. Ice skaters and a Christmas tree.
You got your wish. You’re a woman in the United States in 2022. As for what that means—
Autumn dried back out, leaves paper the ground and everything makes so much noise when it moves, me included. Did something happen to my hearing in the portal? Late morning, windless, I stop in the woods behind the Tibetan temple and the wingbeats of finches thump from the canopy like an overhead heart… towhees scratch in the litter, squirrels crash through, a pair of woodpeckers knock angles into mossy bark with the precision of billiard players. When a squirrel climbs too close they mob it, flashing red caps and barred primaries.
A smoky gray cat winds up the path. It’s friendly; I find the collar snug around its neck. You leave everyone else alone, I say, and it pretends to get the joke... I’m not here to give orders.
Portal
Ein Traum, was sonst?
I fell asleep in Portland. “You’re still so young” was the last thing I’d been told on that worst night. Rain in the drainpipes
woke in a bright place. Sounds of machines scrubbing the air. A constraint about the head, my mind shied from it, it might be pain. In motion, a companion under each arm holding me upright. Clean bright floor. Moving
a place of passage. Dimness. No windows no weather. Sound of a running fountain on loop. Beatrice helped me fall upward into the raised bed. How’s your pain? They wanted a number. Patches were stuck to me. Have a sip of water. My hands were enormous, too big to move the cup around my face. A splint on my nose, bumped it, no feeling in the lower lip. It will be like that for a couple months. How’s your pain? Pain was the constraint about my head, I knew it. Do you want to try a pill
ingenious, the rigid ring that held the plastic bag open while I vomited, water ran over my chin, I couldn’t feel it. Virgil was holding me upright. I don’t think that Tramadol was your friend. We’re going to put you on a drip. Here’s your phone if you want it
phone face down, the world was there and I couldn’t look into it. The false fountain ran along my hearing. Beatrice sat at the foot of the bed, Virgil stood at my elbow and fed the IV. This is for pain. This is an antibiotic. This is for nausea. We’re going to keep you on the drip for now, since you had emesis. I was propped against a headrest pillowed with ice packs. It’s like trying to fall asleep on an airplane. They didn’t understand me. I reached for the water cup, sipped, rain soaked the dead planet of my mouth. But I had to keep my mouth open to breathe. I shut my eyes and woke dry. The stitches inside your mouth will dissolve in a few weeks
three things before you’re discharged, you have to walk, you have to urinate, you have to drink water. Can we go for a walk? Long corridor, quiet, Virgil gone and a new Beatrice at my elbow. What time is it? No windows no weather. My gown was coming loose in back, she refastened it for me. Do you want to try using the bathroom? I was left alone with a catchment dish in the toilet bowl. A burn where the catheter had been. I stood and went to the sink, bent my nearsighted gaze to the mirror and saw the splint and plaster cast, tape holding it in place and around it no, wrong
a phrase from Faulkner, a balloon face slick and distended
not human. But if human then a woman. But not human, not here. Don’t look. This is the wrong place to look. Walk and urinate and drink water. I washed my hands with soap, dried them on a paper towel and dropped the towel in the wastebasket, surprised that I could still do these things
back along the corridor. How’s your pain now? The medicines were keeping the door locked against pain, forcing it to wait outside. Virgil was back with more. This is an antibiotic. This is for nausea. Fall upward into bed, headrest and ice packs, rain in the mouth. I shut my eyes and woke dry. Beatrice and Virgil were discussing the nurses’ strikes in low voices, I wanted to say something in solidarity
phone face down with the world inside it, not yet, the running fountain
a balloon face slick and distended
place of passage. I had fallen asleep in Portland
