"The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard is talking about the running water under the bridge she crosses. But I fail to grasp what "the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed" must mean here. I try to imagine Tinker Creek, to set my mind in the natural context. But I cannot. Because in another dimension, under a different light, the moment of being dreamed is more beautiful than the dream itself. 

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

Heraclitus

Paul, Chapter Two

            I was reading Kafka crossed-legged on the bed. It was ten. I knew I had to sleep but he was playing Liszt downstairs. I closed my eyes and counted the notes. I imagined his right foot pedaling. It was two when I woke to the sound of rain. His pillow was soft and cold. I walked out the room holding Kafka, turned the hallways lights on, and stood by the doorway rubbing my eyes. He was coming out of the guest room, I thought. He called my name. Was I all right? I’m okay, I told the wall. He took my Kafka. Something blinded me. It was not the light. It was his hand. Did he wake me? No, I told him. And then he hugged me. I blinked inside his hand. He never took anything from my hands, always was the one to be hugged. He smelled of coffee and he was shivering. I became lost. I must owe him so many apologies. I felt Kafka drop on my foot. I took away his hand to see, but he leaned on the wall, his head on my shoulder, shaking, so that the lights went off. I had not the faintest idea why he was awake at two, or why he had come out of the guestroom where there was nothing except my grandfather’s old rocking chair. I did not know what made him cry. He was saying my name, brokenly and incorrectly. Paul. Did you have a bad dream? I’m here. Please don’t cry. Paul? He was crying aloud. Tears and saliva and perspiration felt warm on my shoulder. I did not know what to do. I wanted to pat his back, but the wall was blocking. I held his hand. He hiccupped. Let’s go sit on the bed, I told him. Kafka felt wet under my bare feet.

            Please don’t cry. I said please like it would stop him from crying altogether. It was a word that became almost obsolete. It was thought as an antiquated symbol of man having to ask for something. But sometimes I would use the word, say things like “Please eat,” although he ate well. I got him a box of Kleenex and touched his ear. I waited, like he has always done with me, until he was done crying. I listened to the rain. I did not say anything. I studied his shirt become polka-dotted, thought of the day we married when I cried in the bathroom because everybody told me I was making a terrible mistake. Except grandfather, of course. He was always on my side. 

Paul

I wondered if ever he was tired of waiting for someone to talk to him first. Because he always waited. In the hallway walking toward him he would not smile nor wave nor say hi unless you smiled or waved or said hi first. I remember in class he never asked questions and never answered them.

            When I met him after college, he was reading the book I was looking for. It was called Jane Eyre, which went out of print and there remained only a handful of copies left. It was a rare luxury to have such a book in your possession.

            After we married, he would tell me about his dreams he dreamt every night. They were all strange and ethereal to me. I became jealous of him whenever in those few words he told me how real everything appeared inside his eyes. As if nothing was real inside this world. I never dream. So listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. There is a reason why I never dream. I am an insomniac and in those sleepless nights I write him letters. Letters about what I would like to dream about and whether he is still waiting.

            Dear Paul,

            It is raining outside and I can hear the raindrops quietly drumming the ceiling. They make me think of your dreams, how it would rain at six in the morning and you would stand in this room, holding a yellow umbrella. “It was raining inside,” you told me. How all the books on our shelf dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink.

            I wish I could dream about you, to understand the parts of you that I fail to understand now and before. To find out why you often sing and only sometimes talk

            And at the end of every letter I would write, Until when will you wait? Then I would quietly place it on the piano next to his dense sheets of music. We never talked about the letters, but I knew he read them and kept them somewhere.

            I think there is something behind or beneath him that he avoids to tell me. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail, about a face or a sound or anything else. I imagine it must be immensely difficult to live a life like that. To carry with you the memories and dreams and times you hardly speak of.

            There is no distinct reason why I decided to marry him. Rather, I wanted to read Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind being together. He liked to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “lovely” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved him also because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to stop him from waiting.  

An elegy haiku for Robert Frost

Who else can take on
Two roads and a pathless wood
For once, than Someone?

George Szell

In music, one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.

George Szell

Even when you're humming. 

I'm Not Afraid of Anything by Jason Robert Brown

The creation of a character's history:

Jennie and Katie and daddy and mama. Me. David.

The question I have to keep asking myself while singing this song is, What am I afraid of? Because Jennie's afraid of water, Katie's afraid of darkness, daddy's afraid of babies, mama's afraid of crying. And David, well, he's afraid of me. (Why is David afraid of me? Why does he have to be afraid of love?) Perhaps I am afraid of love. Perhaps I am afraid of David being afraid to love me. There is a volta in this song; it is the "intense and tight" part that the music becomes an undercurrent of the A2 chord, drumming a million heartbeats in syncopation. And afterwards I keep singing, David loves me, David loves me, David loves me. Do I love David?

By the end of the song, after the volta, why, of course: yes. I am not afraid of anything or anyone because I love David more than he fears loving me. In the end, love prevails.

But going back to my parenthetical questions about David, I want to ask, why are we afraid of love? Are we not brave enough?

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H."

The Integumentary System

There is no magician's mantle to compare with the skin in its diverse roles of waterproof, overcoat, sunshade, suit of armor and refrigerator, sensitive to the touch of a feather, to temperature, and to pain, withstanding the wear and tear of three score years and ten, and executing its own running repairs.

Lockhart, R.D., Hamilton, G.F., Fyfe, F.W., Anatomy: The Human Body, 1965

A wonderful way to explain the epidermis. There is prose, but there is also poetry in the art of medicine. 

The migraineur

So I come back to Priscilla Long's article "My Brain on My Mind"--particularly because I happen to hit a sudden memory of reading about migraines. I had underlined and circled and densely annotated the part about it--for its scientific information and the poetry behind it, how Long also shares this "profound despair" with me.

When we have a migraine, three hundred times the normal amount of blood rushes to the brain in order to fire neurons in the chaotic electrical brainstorm. This firing neurons secrete an excitatory neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which constricts cranial blood vessels. But we migraineurs generally have an insufficient supply of norepinephrine, and when it sadly diminishes, dopamine, which counterbalances norepinephrine, distends blood vessels, activating trigeminal nerves. And alas begins the great and overriding despondency of migraine.

I think there is something else in that hour of excruciating pain besides all this. When I'm not suffering a migraine, I am thinking. I try to do the things I won't be able to do when I'm struck by that mean inconvenience. I am thinking about David--the person I am in love with while I sing JRB's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" although thinking about him might induce a migraine. I can forfeit a fraction of my time for him--because I am trying to find out the history of my character she carries while she sings. Or I think of my own history and my own song I am living.

Prozac for the Planet

Perhaps it comes down to this: In an era of scientific illiteracy, commodity fascism, political shortsightedness, minute attention spans, and hyperactive media, the only overarching narrative about climate change may be, ironically, the weather itself. We may have to wait for truly heinous and bizarre weather to capture public and political attention. The lived, daily experience of global weirding may be what leads to the fraught denouement of geoengineering, which itself will be the beginning of another narrative about who we are, what time is, what the climate means, how nature matters.

Christopher Cokinos, "Prozac for the Planet," The American Scholar

Dr. Cedergren has talked to our AP chemistry class about this viewpoint. That our last resort may lie in that emergency moment of some unexpected and tragic and extraordinary climatic event. Do people really care about the environment? I can almost say, "no." During the summer I volunteered at the Field Museum, a special exhibit called Climate Change opened. It was not popular. Visitors were uninterested and unimpressed. To me it was quite saddening to know this--that perhaps the idea of a greener environment has become trite and palled. 

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo


On the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination:

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

...

I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

(Original text found at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/)

At twenty-one, Rowling was not afraid of poverty. She was afraid of failure. What will I be afraid of when I'm twenty-one? Because right now,  I am already afraid of so many things. I am afraid of jellyfish and trains and insects. I am afraid of forgetting Chris. I am afraid of losing, both in the transitive and intransitive verb. But listening to Rowling, I realize it is my choice to be afraid. I can choose to let go of my fears and just be. 

Robert Frost

"No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading. No surprise in the writing, no surprise in the reading."

Robert Frost

Simply true--even from the man who wrote "Directive," who deliberately confuses his readers inside and beyond his poems. 

Elizabeth Gilbert

I have not read Eat, Pray, Love. I only know of its phenomenal success. Emily did a scene of it for Shakespearean Idol our junior year, and I thought it was absolutely poignant and witty. I do agree with Gilbert--being, and really, succeeding as a writer is not easy. But I think the challenge is worth it. Worth every word you put down, even the scribbled and crossed out ones that end up next to the apple core.

Norman Mailer

"Every one of my books has killed me a little more."

Norman Mailer

How do you live a creative life when it can kill you? 

I think of Franz Kafka, the insomniac who wrote during his sleepless nights. Kafka's creativity actually revived him, I believe, because what other anchor could he have held onto? 

Hemingway / Kafka

 The clock is in the cage with me and though it is the only furniture I have I do not recognize its ticking. The straws are yellow and thin and many, but I never touch them but only sit on them. On days when things went well I would stare into the sky and count how many colors I saw in it. These days things are not going well. There are not as many people as there used to be before and I see more colors in the sky.

            I remember the children when they came and stayed longer than any adult. They held hands with each other with mouths open and eyes wide looking at me as if I were a goat. But children meant that things were going well and after they have gone I felt very good.

            Things are unsuccessful now. I do not know how many days I have been fasting for no one is keeping count. I myself have given up counting. One day I was lying on the straws thinking about the children when the manager came to me and said, “Are you still fasting?”
            “Forgive me,” I told him.

            “Of course.”

            “I always wanted you to admire my fasting.”

            “Certainly we admire it.”

            “But you shouldn’t.”

            “All right, we don’t admire it. But why shouldn’t we?”

            “I can’t help it. I have to fast.”

            “Why can’t you help it?”

            “Because. I couldn’t find the food I liked.”

I saw in the manager the same look the children always had. And then I closed my eyes and he went away but the clock still ticked and the straw felt hard. 

This is my rendering of Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" in Hemingway' s monotony and surface simplicity. I actually like it. I wonder what Kafka or Hemingway might say when they read it. I wonder whether they'll recognize their works imbued in mine. 

The Road "Un-scene"

And afterwards he would dream about the library or what remained of it and in those dreams the books were always wet and ashen. When it rained they dripped of black ink, like some sacred ablution. There remained nothing inside the books for there was nothing left to leave behind. Empty pages. He thought of her books stacked on the piano. Books by authors whose names were long forgotten and meaningless to recall. She wrote in them, he could not read her dense writing but he knew it was profound. In another dream the boy was with him in the dank library. As they walked the pages rustled beneath their feet. There was no floor. Only ripped chapters of a bygone world. The man looked for food and shoes. He did not know why but in a dream there is an otherwise. She will come back from the dark. She will spare the third bullet. The boy bent down and lifted a book. A tome. The smell of burnt candles. He knew what it was but dared not touch it. Only the boy had the sanctity to hold it. What is it? the boy said. He could not say. That it was the beginning and you are holding it. It began to rain and the man woke up. The boy was next to him.

            Did you dream a good dream Papa?

            Almost. 

A scene from McCarthy's The Road that I imagine could have happened. I wanted to write about "the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water." I wanted to write like McCarthy, in his voice and timbre. 

"Prose is coffee. Poetry is espresso."

Mr. Freeman

Had to write this down in class the moment he said it. Coffee and espresso both contain the same substance; only, espresso is more condensed and stronger. 

Heart of Darkness

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

And this is why we work so hard. 

I was reading William Deresiewicz's article "Solitude and Leadership," and there the passage was! It runs parallel with Thoreau's deliberate life in the woods, to place yourself where other people's realities can't bother you. I would like to find my own reality, something me-driven. And in work I want to be happy.

Walden

"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is purpose in life, and Thoreau says it here. But there is also solitude. "To live deliberately" is to live in solitude, without distractions, without that directionless chaos. We all need this kind of lifestyle at some point in our lives, to take our time, to be alone in our thoughts. 

My Brain on my Mind / E

When you remember your grandfather's face, what are your neurons doing?

Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

What are your neurons doing? Other than making a million connections, sending signals along axons, shooting extraordinary starbursts? When I remember my grandfather's face I see inside my head his dented lines on his forehead, his dark skin, his still black hair. Does he have dimples? I cannot recall. And perhaps this is when my neurons are failing to make the marvelous zaps and fireworks.