ABlog

January 22: “…a pattern called a war.”—Amy Lowell

January 24: planetary drift.

a photograph of people
some in tank tops, running, fleeing
down a narrow street
past a corpse (Cité Soleil)

“sorrows without end
and they’re not yours”

January 28: I have a new identity: polyp-former.

She kept slapping my wrist to provoke a vein.

Could it be that narrative is the truly lesbian part of me?

With new union contracts at both of my jobs, it feels like I’ve hit the slots. Money is pouring out—nickels and dimes, maybe, but it’s pouring.

January 31: [No Florence Nightingale] No I said to D. in the park I’m not coming to the meeting. I didn’t want to do it anymore—get in on the hand wringing.

Why won’t I throw my body into the gears?

I’m enraged at the idea—legacy of a distant Methodism, I guess—or maybe just being a certain kind of female—that I have to fix it and fix it. Not that I don’t think I’m part of the problem too. But still this rage at the world for being so wounded. And I’m supposed to bind up the wounds.

February 4: BBG—so gray rain—witch hazel blazing in it—cardinals—pussy willows—daffodils poking up, ridiculous, Feb. 4—guy walks by alone in completely deserted drenched garden gabbing on cell—“I’m with some people now, can we talk about this later?” Dry patches on one side of the birch trunks.

February 9: Lead story in Times this morning about Guantánamo hunger strikers being force fed. I feel in a political limbo—completely unwilling to attend [peace group] meetings, not doing anything else, absolutely no time or inclination to do anything else. When I went for my tax appointment yesterday, Susan was talking about a program on Dietrich Bonhoffer—how he went back to Germany in the late 30’s. When is the point when fascism can no longer be defeated from within? was her question.

February 12: W. thinks the Republicans may be getting ready to sponsor legislation to amend FISA so the surveillance that some have started objecting to will become legal.

I don’t know how to describe my posture in the face of all this. There is no further note of outrage or dismay to strike—so it feels to me now, though I’m sure that statement will be proven false whenever the Next Dreadful Thing comes to jolt me out of my comfortable numbness. Even Susan L. is saying, “What the fuck to do we do?” I’ve stopped saying it.

So, so quiet. I walked around the park at 4—snow just stopping—great sticky lines of it adhering to every branch and twig. The park was an intensely social experience—packed with (mostly white) revelers—people grinning at each other, pleased as if they’d invented the snow themselves. Is it partly b/c of global warming?—people are happy that Old Man Winter can still get it up to this extent.

February 14: [In BBG] Saw a Hasidic child-minder with a great troop of really little boys, five years old maybe, crying, “Out, boys—all boys come out,” rousting the kids out of the garden. He seemed gruff but loving. And the espaliered witch hazel. The compost bins sitting under great snow caps.

Every so often—well, really very infrequently—a big chunk of snow crashes off the roof.

I’m so miserable at the thought of a possible attack on Iran—next month says Ray McGovern. “Our world in stupor lies.” I feel so desolate for the world. Why can’t we protect it? John Pilger says the reason for the aggressive posture is Iran’s move to trade oil outside of the dollar economy. But it has also crossed my mind that the penetration of a small metal fragment close to the heart of a 78-year-old attorney may increase the likelihood…..Terribly, it would be just like history…for Iran to be bombed partly to get Dick Cheney’s hunting accident off the front pages.

February 16: In Western Beef, an old woman, bent and energetic—boiling with energy—hauls huge packs of toilet paper up onto the counter. “That’s only with a $40 purchase,” says the pretty, “thick” young cashier. The old woman is quick—she has over $40, no problem. “You got everything organized, Mami,” says the cashier with a smile. She takes a long time helping the woman pack her cart so everything fits down inside and she can balance the two packages of paper goods on top. Cashiers in a supermarket with a white clientele would never be so gracious to a demanding, time-consuming customer. Among other things, the customers waiting in line wouldn’t stand for it.

February 21: It hit me: this word “incompetence” that’s being flung around, so tepidly and cravenly, by the leading lights of NY Times Op-Ed liberalism—Krugman, Sarah Vowell—they mean it as the cross and clove of garlic before the vampire. They are hoping that a “non-ideological” criticism—one that appears to be outside politics—will prove more deflating. (Probably secretly, though, they’re afraid of more than just not hitting the target. Suddenly I smell fear all around; even though it’s really my own fear, my own being the only fear close enough to produce such a sharp, sudden sensation; I extrapolate to others.)

The fear comes from watching everything proceed “as normal” and feeling underneath the normal a scary difference, a profound abnormality.

February 25: I’m not sure why I feel so much more upbeat this weekend than last. Could it be just because the light is lasting longer? Surely not that! Or not only…I feel more capable of effectual exertion—I don’t mean in the big things necessarily—but just: surprise. I feel capable of being surprised, and sure that surprises will offer themselves.

Mostly I’m feeling that the world is wide; even the dreadful is various. I’m feeling that the evil people are puny as well as powerful—they are powerful in a puny way—I am feeling that horrors are much more likely to emerge from Chaos than from Plan—

March 4: John reminiscing about getting robbed 6 times in the 70’s. Once was in a Chinese restaurant in Harlem; there was a crowd of tourists from Westchester; one robber stood by the door while someone else went from table to table collecting money and jewelry. Afterwards, the proprietor tried to get them to pay for the meal….

Clichés of resistance. X, a very nice young mother, said at the last peace group meeting I attended that she wanted to get re-involved in antiwar work b/c she had started wondering what she will tell her children when they ask: what did you during the war? Today I read a NYFA application, set in a progressive community upstate, that had something very similar as a punch line. I couldn’t tell if it was meant to be ironic or not—the notion that the protagonist has done something (ineffectual) in order to be able to tell his grandchildren that he stood up….

I'm in a blaze of finishing up the NYFA apps. It’s very interesting to read so much bad writing—as well as some that’s mixed and some that’s excellent. One sees how many ways there are to create tension in a narrative: whether b/c of the particular moment when the action unfolds (plot); b/c of the “confession” a character, whether 1st or 3rd person, has to make (character), or b/c of the surprise of the language, the way of seeing promised by the prose. The tension can even be the result of the writer’s conviction that every moment is sacred. But it must be there. How one grows to resent the imposition of the author who has no “news” to impart but insists on putting pen to paper anyway.

W. upstairs, looking at the Internet, singing, “I waded through deep water trying to get home….”

March 6: I feel so tired, discouraged. Why? My hour a day of writing seems totally inadequate. I feel like a monk nodding off during an all-night meditation session. I need someone to give me a wake-up whack….

I saw K. on her bike while I was walking in park under high clouds in quickening spring dusk. (How I love that silver hour when the pavement is bright underfoot—so much brighter than the air or trees.) She told me how much she hates her new neighborhood, Midwood….”I used to love Coney Island Avenue before I lived there. Now I think I could stand to be there on a 2-year field placement, maybe. The atmosphere is like a little village in Turkey.”

The blast-blare of March light. Some days you feel how it’s going to be hot soon even while it’s cold.

March 17: What are the axes of ease
in a blaze that could savage us all?

March 22: The botched job of the self.

[Driving]: It was a landscape entirely devoted to the practice of mechanical haste.

Destroying the earth our home, I felt relatively godlike.

velo
city
atro
city
compli
city