Americana

Tonight, when finishing up Pamela's latest musings, a line popped into my head:

". . . I'm just a child playing cops and robbers forever."

I want to comment, but my own take is so unseasoned that I could only deal in shoulds.

"I want [. . .] to have conversations about art and Aristotle and poetry and physics and gardening and God and fairy tales and frescoes and geography and goldfish . . ."

This isn't something that people do near me.  I don't think this is typical anywhere.  When I'm out with people, we talk about politics and sports and work and houses and kids and relationships.  We blame others for our political, financial and employment problems and bang our heads against the mysteries that are our respective significant others.

Other, other.  Less whimsy.

A young poet I know recently posted the following quote to Facebook:

There is no place for grief in a house which serves the muse.

– Sappho

And I can't help but disagree. And I'm hoping that something was lost in translation (which I suspect). 

For me grief and sadness (and starkness) are defining to my favorite poetics. Unlike regret and anger, grief and sadness seem driven out of compassion and I don't think, per intuition, that they can be thought of as "bad". Maybe I would characterize a kind of compassionate, altruistic attachment as opposed to a possessive, entitled attachment that is the differentiation.

I do wish to dismiss my anger and regret, because it's destructive, counterproductive, combustible.  Ideally, I don't wish to dismiss my grief and sadness, because it's laced with loved things, ardor, nostalgia.  But I can wish to dismiss my grief and sadness if it's too much at one time or too difficult.

There is no place for despair, resentment, hate, regret, denial, perhaps.  Ideally.  But then, maybe it's more like "This bar is no place for a woman like you."  One can still be there, but disaster is portended.

And poets are no strangers to disaster.

Anyway, Elizabeth Bishop has started on this before, but played off grief.

10K Erg: 44:35.8

Distance: 10,000 m
Time: 44:35.8
Avg/500m: 2:13.7
Stroke Rate: 17 s/m
Heart Rate: 157
Notes: Felt like poop.

Recent Best: 41:15.5 on Oct. 4

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

It's literally been a few years since I've been involved in the blogosphere--for several real-life reasons. . . .

But I'm trying to return more to myself lately and return to activity. I have a few trips coming up this winter to that end and I'd like to share them here. Am thinking about using this space as a personal dashboard for my progress and status on these things that are important to me that I've been neglecting. Of course, this'll probably be less philosophically juicy than the old online incarnation--but it may be the case that I'm less philosophically juicy.

All of this amounts to discipline, of course. It's so easy to slip into the daily routine (thanks, Rilke) dictated by others' expectations and needs. It's so easy to find oneself one day characterized as unremarkable by another and think, "Crap, when did that happen? I used to at least be an interesting mess." I think, for me, the key lately has been finding the discipline to maintain oneself when so much is asked of and placed upon you.

So, I want to quantify my self-denial or self-actualization. I want to examine where I've been compromising and losing and flittering out.

I've read a lot to the end of "letting go" being a desirable skill. Maybe that's the counterpoint. That we should be so malleable as to be able to let anything go as far as expectations for what we will be able to do with our time and our lives, and as far as any expectations for what will make us happy, even with the theater of past experience playing in front of us.

Then there is the other. And that's where it gets really tricky.