elsewhere

http://parkingcars.tumblr.com
Quasi-relocation -- let's see where this goes.

yesterday

I graduated from college yesterday, after four years of everything from terrible misery to eternal bliss. This felt like something important that one should make note of, which I am doing here of all places, for some reason. What a strange feeling. What next?

Perhaps now is the time to begin writing.

für alina

This feels perfect.

like two people whose paths seem to cross

What I think is most intriguing about Arvo Pärt’s music is how honest and clear it is. How is it possible that so few notes can make one’s heart tremble?

“It could be like a break in the radio. Such signals sometimes sound as if they lasted an entire life. Or future, or past, outside time. Like I said: a blade of grass has the status of a flower. To see in this tiny phrase, something more than just the black and white key...”

variations on

My galley chargèd with forgetfulness
Thorough sharp seas, in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness,
And every oar a thought in readiness,
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forcèd sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the wearied cords great hinderance;
Wreathèd with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drownèd is reason that should me consort,
And I remain despairing of the port.

- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)


Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire, 1947


TO THE HARBORMASTER

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

- Frank O'Hara, 1954

I wish I wrote it

A certain violinist had a beautiful violin
But before he had had time to play her long and listen
To her tones as such, he was compelled to renounce music
And sell her, and go on a far journey, and leave his violin
in the hands of the violin case.

What was there to do? It is said You cannot live life in quarter tones.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life in silence.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life playing scales.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life listening to the Americans.

What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life in your room and not go out.
What was there to do? It is said music disobeys
and reaches the prince's courtyard ever farther than smell and grits its
notes like teeth and gives us food and drink.
And orders a fire to be lighted, famished silk to hang over it and repetitions to be sharpened.

What was there to do? It is said it is the violinists who do not sleep.
What was there to do? It is said we think and don't think; we are asleep.
What was there to do? It is said music sinks into the mire up to its neck,
wants to crawl out, but cannot.
What was there to do? It is said the violin was a swan, seized the boy, falling
upwards to some height above the earth.

"Falling Upwards," David Shapiro
from A Burning Interior

I hope, David, should you run into this you wouldn't have a problem with it being here and all (not that too many folks probably run into this place anyway), but it just rang far too well with my sentiments this evening. I couldn't resist.

Regards,
MP

college angst

This is what happens to one who spends a lot of time in libraries late at night, spending half the time merely wasting time, the other half of it attempting to write papers about how miserable T.S. Eliot was and doing problem sets about Cepheid stars and other astronomical terms you actually know nothing about. Not to be discounted, there is also the portion of time where you start looking up symptoms of various psychological disorders on the internet, wondering what your problem is.

Today in my body's fatigued misery I slept for about 7 hours in the middle of the day. I am so over this feeling that not even an aimless spring break could fix. Second thoughts, I guess I'm full of them these days. Admittedly, I probably brought most of this upon myself, which doesn't necessarily make it feel any better. Part of me is over this feeling, the other part of me lives in an optimistic fear (if there is such a thing) of what comes next.

I don't even like T.S. Eliot. At least, I don't like him much this morning. I've met at least one professor who doesn't like him either, which I always thought was a rarity. This is probably blasphemy in the world of literary academia. On the other hand, my advisor told me that he kind of goes in patterns with the poet, which I could probably relate to -- sometimes there are days when you just don't care much for the long-winded booming voice and this supposed sheer brilliance that exists in poems like "The Waste Land" with Dante-this and Shanti-Shanti-that, and on other days you realize that he was probably just as confused about himself as anyone.

Today I don't like him much, tomorrow I'll be more sympathetic. If I could have it my way, my thoughts would be more composed than for it to be as simple as that. Then, perhaps it would makes sense to you.

what brings me to tears every time

Christian Ferras plays Sibelius Violin Concerto: 2nd movement - Adagio di molto.

Three years later, since the first time I heard this, my ears and my mind still, oh my God.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdum must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- "Musee des Beaux Arts," W. H. Auden

suddenly this becomes a diary again

What had you been thinking about

the face studiously bloodied

heaven blotted region

I go on loving you like water but

there is a terrible breath in the way all of this

You were not elected president, yet won the race

All the way through fog and drizzle

When you read it was sincere the coasts

stammered with unintentional villages the

horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .

I worry
. . .

from "The Tennis Court Oath," John Ashbery

----------

The tulips started blooming sometime around mid-November. What are they doing here? I am convinced it is the confusion of being a mere foot away from the heater and sitting on the windowsill in the sunlight all day, as though it were actually springtime but it's merely a trick to them. Imagine their disappointment when they all grow up and it won't even be April yet.

It's 3:45 in the morning and while preoccupations over a German exam linger over my brain and a pair of essays to follow I am writing in here instead, for the first time in over two months. This may well be the first personal thing I have written since then. At near 4 AM, 5 hours away from an exam. This must be important. What to say? I suppose I'm at a loss for words and merely trying to scrounge something up for the sake of preserving the one thing in life that I've had the least struggle with. I still struggle with it all the time. What should I tell you? I've been reading Orhan Pamuk, Snow, over the last few months but I haven't finished it yet because I haven't the time, but it moves me and makes me wish that snow also reminded me of God. What else? I am constantly in good company but so many times I feel alone and a little useless but I suppose this is just another one of those feelings that most human beings experience. Or am I wrong? It must be nice to be someone who doesn't ever worry about isolation; in the subway today a pair of us talked about self-reliance. I wish I were less so sometimes, but I feel like it's beaten into me. "...A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles..."

I feel like my self-reliance is turning me into a robot; it doesn't feel so transcendental, but maybe I read the whole thing wrong to begin with. And I feel so convoluted inside about this. Am I becoming duller by the day? Is it strange to I used to fear failure more than anything but now I think my fears have changed into becoming dull. I've heard the argument in my suite once that individualism is a false hope, everyone wants to be interesting or beautiful in some way but the truth is that everyone is boring and more or less the same. The mechanics of this city and the masses of people within it get to the mind I think. And I think this is because I feel so lonely and sometimes wish there were someone to pull some sort of lost spark out of me, and when someone does for awhile I get hopeful and suddenly am disappointed and forgotten and a little lost all over again. And sure I can laugh and smile and crack jokes (sometimes even dirty ones) in company but my heart keeps to itself -- not intentionally, it just prefers to not expand and explode.

I suppose that all my solace is in books and walking around in museums filled with strange artifacts that are not even my own, and I don't even know how much music does for me anymore; I feel like so much of it has been taken away and conversations about sonatas and quartets depress me after awhile but I can't escape the company that indulges in it, it seems, so that's no good. Sometimes I wish I had the nerve to quit. In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror John Ashbery wrote a poem called "Märchenbilder," a name borrowed from a piece for viola and piano by Robert Schumann -- I am bewildered by the schizophrenia of the poem because it's just so appropriate. I like Ashbery in his earlier days because he can make his sentences as disjunct and as seemingly non-sequitur as he wants and no one seems to mind. I like the brokenness because it makes so much damn sense to me; do you know how hard and unnatural it is to think and write coherently and still feel like a genuine human being?

Seasonal depression? Perhaps, but maybe it's far milder than it seems. Sometimes things seem excessively emotional when written on paper. I wouldn't mind tulips blossoming in December, really, and I suppose this is all I wish to say to you tonight.