I don’t know if this has ever consciously happened, but earlier this week I wrote a poem that now has me on an internal and philosophical line of inquiry. The poem is called No Future, after Lee Edelman’s scathing tract about futurism as embodied by the specter of the baby, and also driven by Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber” from 1925. The poem is littered with physical stuff, a tremendous accumulation of it. And it incorporates text from a book I am reading that equates a cluttered physical environment with a emotionally and mentally cluttered environment. The speaker, who is speaking to a purveyor of said stuff, is listing it and refusing, refusing, refusing it. There is no future in it, the narrator says. I do not want your stuff. Can you please stop sending these skulls, this Wedgwood tea service, this Star Wars paraphernalia? Though I could easily substitute preconceptions about family, fidelity, the trajectory of human relationships, heavier and more inarticulate stuff. I have been thinking and thinking and thinking about this, all week. How the repetitive thoughts and the relentless scrutinizing of all the ways I have failed, or failed to measure up, are just clutter. I don’t want to think that thought anymore, or that one. There’s no future in it. What does an empty mind feel like? What sensations and emotions and new experiences are earned by a mind and a pair of eyes that do not constantly apply a constellation of filters? What would happen if the prerequisite of every day was not a barrage of sensation and experience, if there were periods of absolute quiet and stillness? The poem did this to me.
Translation Theory is going to be an intense class. In the 2.5 hours we ranged freely from Dryden to Sappho to the Victorians to Native American Myths to Homer and of course, through the Bible. When I got out my mind was buzzing terribly, my body like a plucked guitar string, vibrating that way. I met with A at My Favorite Bar and we had a lively debate about the legacy of colonialism upon language, history, myth, story, narrative, art–and then we parted ways, slightly buzzed, shaking our heads.
I’m tired now, and happy. I read two books today and worked in the office and had a phenomenal class and a long dog walk and fantastic drinks and all the things. I had all the things. I sort of just want to smoke a little and watch Ab Fab now, turn it all off and turn myself over to silence and night time and negative space. Alone is not lonely at all.
