The way they have constructed their sense of human nature and of the world reduces all to discourse. Everything is a kind of talk. Knowing, thus, is analyzing talk. But how to analyze? Does it matter, how? The literary critics coming from derivations of a Hegel whose science is now reduced to talk and talk about, and the what of what it is about has disappeared. The current talk is all about “immediate consciousness,” as if anyone knows what that term means, except what anyone means it to mean.

They wanted to know how reading any particular author or text enters the mentality. Enters the mentality? Huh! Not knowing clearly how to think about mentality makes their thinking and conversation more distant, more vague, more remote. They talk about significance in some pseudo-statistical sense, not sensing what numbers might indicate, or about the contexts in which they occur…or from which they derive.

They are certain that knowledge resides in discourse…they who own discourse must own knowledge. Seeing the world through the grids and veils of how the world’s texts are interpreted, they are far away — far, far away — from anyone’s experience. This probe into (the idea of) experience is justified by stating that all of life has been interpreted through the texts of antiquity; we are its descendents in spite of our selves, whether we read or not. Do they really know that? Are we all really living out a fully packaged, textual life? Why, then, ask anyone to respond to a question: when the answer is already pre-packaged, and the knowers make it all up anyway?

Schemes of meaning, schemes of being, abounding in the ideas of textual revelation, where the only sense of time, of being, of experience is character, reader, and interpreter. The cynical metaphor likens this to some sort of anti-computer which is its own opponent.

No people, no newness, no antiquity: only discourse, talk about talk about talk about…?

Hardened, I, we, to the possibilities of hard times, of accidents, exigencies, sickness, nastiness, loneliness – whatever. Always surprised: never surprised. Each day magnified to an equal portion with all of life, it’s all amazing. Each sadness hurts, still, as we know well how to find the places of hurt within us, and how to milk them for all they may be worth. Also, the happinesses. It all seems fair within the game of life’s chances.

What hurts so deeply, still, and for which there has been…can be, no hardening, no feelings powerful enough to dwell within, are the sicknesses and accidents which overtake our children.

Not prepared; there is no preparation I know or want to know. My…responsibility? No possible justice here. Somehow it is my fault, our fault, that they are here. Their lives should be…easy, unattacked, not their fault? How silly.

I understand, almost adjust to life’s shortenings, accepting the worst in my life’s (im)possibilities. It’s the part that comes afterward; whatever is young, whatever has sustained me thus far, that seems like it should be, should remain simple and clean: parents sicken and die; children live.

Like I somehow own the germs and viruses, have fought them, bought them off. They have tricked me, made my child ill, and there’s nothing I can do beyond helping breathe into them, the breaths of the life I know, and hope it works…still.

We are old, our children young. It seems unfair, horrible, against the very principles of life, that they might be at great risk. And what to do…in case the worst…happens.

I taught how people think about success, and he asked about self-satisfaction; perhaps the only thing which lasts, which serves the psyche more, the outside judges less (or damn them!).

Ooh-h-h! I breathed deeply, the breath expanding, invading all the areas of my body where the edges of hurt reside. Self, I thought, where are you so I can feed you, so I can satisfy you?

My self answered back, that place-in-me which ranges from a rather bitchy aesthetic which prefers the whipping of birch bark on frozen days, on sauna-ed flesh’s excesses, to a gluttonous obesity of countenance whose satiety is reached only at near collapse, that self answered back with some sort of sardonic grin which blinded me and turned-off thinking.

I worried. It worried me. It pushed, bent, I wanted to run into the mirror so its silvered surface would dissolve and welcome me into Lewis Carroll’s domains behind; so I could look out, protected, and glance at my self glancing at its self looking for some satisfaction, pleased…

The mother of the fledgling organist – the student of my partner in music – exclaimed in some musing wonderment: did Bach compose much for the violin, too…she supposed. I giggled, the awed knot inside my deepest self giggled too, and I said, simply, “yes, quite a bit.”

Details, she didn’t want. I supposed she had realized, finally, that in her son’s playing of Bach, something of import might be happening; finally, after many years of experiencing Bach, but not within any realization.

Right now, preparing to perform a Bach Trio (D minor) with flute and organ, I am struggling to discover the whole of the music written-in to that composition. This trio, like the violin-keyboard sonatas, a sort of aberration from what is ordinarily Bach. Each change of string a new voice written in counterpoint to the flute: this sonata, of-a-piece in many ways.

Some 18 years ago a friend wondered if I could play the unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas, and I responded that I thought (was certain: lolling in my unpracticed, pre-humbled days) I could play any Baroque pieces.

What surprise, what ignorance, what pleasure to discover these masterpieces inspired my beginning to restudy the violin. Now, imagining my competency to play some of them (!?); imagining at last performing a few movements, Bach is at once thrilling and tough. The strength, the memory, the knowledge and confidence necessary to play them, makes them good practice for so many other techniques, for hearing chords, for…everything musical.

Maybe that mother will learn, too, to study Bach, to study with Bach, to hear, to feel all the sounds and voices and timbres resonating on this earth, calling out the spirits of our gods of music so we may hear them and they us…

(Currently playing-at the unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas – far, far to go…!)

Training; seduction? Early talent told to do something? Interesting; important?  Poor visualization, no talent for the geometric until seen? A memory of proportion, and ears that loved hearing, what is one to do…in life?

To be new upon this earth, to be the first, to do something, to think something no one else ever had, a new idea, a new, new…

At war in the institutionalized knowledge of this age with the sense that walls and cloisters should cast upon the tomes which exist already, a sense of enduringness, and of an importance which pales…to the mind which wants to be new, new.

What good, old? To certify what is new, what is original, raised to an epic battle between the deities which are already and those waiting to be born.

She pursued a life’s career with savvy and good will.  At one point she became the leader and director and maker of many decisions that affected the people under her.  She was the pipeline to policy and on the end of telephones galore; discussing, deciding, telling, thinking.

After many years, approaching the years of possible wisdom, a time when knowledge might be distilled from knowing, she became somewhat famous. Being known far and wide, she changed tactics, changed her career, became a doer in…in the inner circle…in… in the wider arena.

She had become powerful.

Powerful! The word rang and buzzed in her being, that she was powerful.  She could enter larger arenas, make her world better, even good, within some visions that she worked at; having and being. She discovered within a certain sense of flattery and adulation, that she was powerful, that her fame had propelled her peripherally; that she was operating in a place which had a great deal to do, but could do nothing because it was all honorific there.

And so she bolted, and began to rethink.

The conundrum:  having become powerful she had lost most of her power.

In a world, in a time when the idea of virtue is mostly absent, when the heroic is the sole property of the juvenile in each of us, when winning and losing is expressed only within what we deem “games,” or we worry that we all will lose, then adversity becomes a central test of life and of character.

Here losing is what is normal, obvious and clear, winning is overcoming or rebounding or living in the stoicism of not caring. Adversity becomes the sole measure of morality when virtue is so immature.

The only moral question remains: shall I seek adversity so it may be overcome? Where did everything positive disappear: progress, hope, futurity, or becoming. Life itself was cast chimerically – life…is but a dream; and cast ironically – life’s solutions to its own problems were to make life, itself, appear to be an illusion.

Only adversity is not an illusion. Only adversity is experiential and only its overcoming is real. The search for adversity now becomes the sole vestige of what is real; its overcoming, a necessity to bring it on, again.

What once was moral fiber, resolutely cast in the concretisms of fear and awe, turned now upon its backside, asking to be slapped like a new babe once more, to cry so it may live.

In love with adversity, such that life may test, that fail or pass, we will have lived.

Sometimes, usually, I want my life to be filling in each moment so I will be full. Somehow, often, when I begin to feel that the fullness of my life is near the top, I want to let it all go, so I may be as empty as living will permit, yet go on.

At other times, in other modes and moods, I lose track and want both; to be full, to be empty, in the same, in each, moment. I used to think this seeming paradox was about fatigue: to do, to become tired, to sleep, to become renewed, to do, to…

Now, older: too many fatigues, too difficult to explain as some linear process. Now, older: too many fatigues that told me I would be more empty than I now am.

Full on empty, I remain open to everything that is, that I can hear and feel and see, each day anew. Full on empty, I may yet afford to pander to the curiosities of experience.

Always, always there are limits to my being. Each day they seem to thrust themselves upon me at various points. They tell me who I cannot be; they take me back into the why’s of my own history; they force me, somehow, to reel off a virtual list of self-testing questions as if I am elected to be my own examiner.

Mainly my response is: to hell with you. What good, I ask, derives from these demons of my own imaginings and self-conjurings?

But they never ask: “what can be good,” or how will life get better; and the questioning I, remains witness to such daily debacles. The “what good” parts of me seem always to be seeking some sense of contentment…or relief.

My personal Polyanna, my daily round-maker, tries so hard to merely do the day’s doings, that I usually suspend any criticism of him. Performing the doings of my day, to whatever extent they make that day (i.e., this day), I literally become my doings.

I have discovered only recently a concentration of doings within the limits of my being. Instead of testing limits each day, the pushings beyond the what I am of each day, I seem to try to find new moments within each hour.

I seek new ways of expanding silences, or ways of observing constructively what would have been boring or knawing, previously.

Perhaps these are aspects of what some would call patience.

Perhaps I have merely expanded my concept of any period of time, attempting to find new spaces, and expanded senses of myself.

Tomorrow? – can I collect the pieces of being, today, within its bounds and limits, with yet some sense of hope and some sort-of answers to the “what” and to the “good”?

She died a few months ago, right around her birthday which, she told us, was the 25th of December. She was Jewish, which is just right; and she cared about the salvation of the world in a way which was humble and just, which was  just right. And she was a woman, which became increasingly right as she became older.

A brilliant mind, but a girl, she had bewailed her fate, and had not yet conceived any notion of a destiny. She fought on behalf of freedom, on behalf of children and futurity, once she invented a notion of destiny.

She began, merely a girl, to edit others’ writing, and gradually began to write her own. Some of it quite beautiful and powerful, may yet see days’ light, in a time when memory can reinvent her as she would be. She was abstract. Her love of humanity was conceived through some veil of community or covenant which being Jewish had taught her. Her love of human beings, also abstract, became more and more remote as she became older.

Her strengths, her gifts of the abstract, turned away from people and toward the kind of martyrdom which the concept of destiny provoked within her.

She thought she was a leader of people, but had constructed them within her notion of destiny; they were her followers…already. And they, and we, were not.

She knew in the depths of her being that she had special powers; perhaps like the oracles at Delphi, or the maiden who could never be spoiled; not like the Mother of us all. She thought, more than once, more often than once in a while, that she was whatever the next Messiah would be…should be.

Good journeying, Miriam!

I think he meant it. I, sitting in a liberal Midwestern setting where the people were well disposed to knowledge and ideas and some sense of strength and bravery and just a little cunning, wondered if we weren’t being slicked by the big-town boy with style, coming to bring us the word…the world.

He, sitting perhaps, in an academic setting which had no big outlook, no project of worth, worth doing, saw the necessity to strike big, to proclaim the big job, the Project, something to do, thus arrogance.

To this arrogance he does, however, bring an energy which might support and sustain the arrogance he will need to have, to do what he claims he wants to do. Maybe he can, maybe he will. Sheer arrogance!

The problem in being, in being loving and loveable, is that I must be sufficiently strong, sufficiently myself, so I can be as you, in your own terms and senses, while being still the me, that both of us want and need. To be weak, to be meek, is to yield a sense of self which fades in its own doing. To have given away so much of my self in so-called love, is to have to draw all my strength from you, perhaps strengthening the relationship from necessity, but no longer in-love. To know you, to be and to think in the terms in which you think and are, to give some full measure of my understanding to your being, is to have some reserves, some looking-out from which to draw my self into yours, and yet be the me that I can re-find in each and every moment. To be strong enough, to be able to be hurt without being destroyed, as I take on the hurts from your being as well as my own…to be able to use this to construct my own tomorrow, thus would I be and become.

A dog, so loving in most moments, will forgive me, I know, if I beat him or kick him or scream at him. A dog, so loving, his broad back available to pound upon, his muzzle, fawning eyes, so easy somehow to snuff out in my seeing of them non-reflective in his dog’s being, I can scream at. A dog will neither snap at me nor bite me, nor implore me.

Later, I can forgive him easily for the damage I might have inflicted upon him.

People – scapegoats, the small, the weak, the infirm, it is a little less easy.

If I attack my most time loves, I attack myself and find it difficult to recover that sense of myself which deserves their love.

If I beat upon some others, I seem to lessen them, to blame those persons as if they were some hated – or feared – type or sort of person.

And they? What do they do with my blaming them for something which happened to me? Do they understand? Can they?

In lessening them don’t I diminish my self?

And if I find no other creatures, do I do bad things to my self?
How do I learn to absorb the feelings or lessen them to some point where I can, and not teach myself how not to feel?

How do I direct whatever I may feel to its proper source, nor yet be afraid?

What’s misleading is that so many people live here. It seems like a city. It looks like a city. And there is plenty to do here. There is no great reason to leave, and unless you do, you don’t begin to ask where the next place is.

In any direction, in every direction, in each direction there is land, land, land, not so full of very much. It goes on, so that looking forward does not see any end, any point where there is someplace…else.

Arriving, it is now a pleasure to look back, to see, and think, to contemplate where I was: that it is an island, an urban jewel in the midst of oceans of land.

Never mind that it is frozen tundra much of the year (today, especially). Never mind the jerks, the banality of copyists trying to be not-so-great from too afar. Never mind the eras of too early maturing teenagers now middle aged who thought they were somewhere…in the big times which got older, faded, tired.

Here, looking down upon Ol’ Miss, the Great River, I see city everywhere, bustling through a wind chill which threatens in each moment.

The steams of city rising tell me that I am in the middle of an island, heavily populated, cut-off from the elsewheres of life which grant meaning in the news of today, every day.

Living on an island, trying to image-ine it big enough so its edges create the dialectics of newness.

So its perspectives of the distances of clear vision grant new understanding and do not stifle.

The concept of the nation, of the state contained within some geographical boundaries as thick as the skin of the most hardened of hangover, is riddled with the holes of complex and perplex and muddle. What is this country – where does it end, where does it begin – is not so very clear and becoming murkier.

The world, the concept of the entire globe, enriched by concepts from ecology that we exist, but importantly in relation to almost everything else and every other place, and who knows how to fine-tune anything that it will not rebound upon us and hang, like a boomerang, upon our necks?

The concept of the nation has become a sieve whose mesh responds osmotically to the vicissitudes of day and season and the news that we are all together and not all that different. The temptation, to tie off the boundaries, not admit anyone new in, nor anyone old out, no longer operates. Our tastes, expanded to the fruits and vegetables and seeds of the entire world cooked to our tastes which daily expand, expand the whereness of our lives to the once-was esoteric, which has now joined us and become us.

The spices of life which drove the explorers to find the Indias, to discover the Indians and all there is, we buy today in the neighborhood supermarket…that is the world, right here, for only 49 to the pound.

The nation, alive in laws and traditions and memories and willings, wills us to live well that the world will become us; and we, the world.

The concept of the nation: riddled!

Too much to do; not enough time to do it in. Today; whatever I get done, it will not be sufficient. Tomorrow, too soon, will be here, and bone’s tiredness is at war with mind’s racing to get to some end before it is too late. Myriad strands of thought creep into my day’s working, pulling me to other tasks before this is done. Trying to fend off idle and counter-productive thinking, my eyes scan what I do, wishing, always wishing, it would go faster, that time would slow, that I could hurry more.

Too much to do; too little time. Pressured.

The search for, the wondering of asking Why, always imposes its power over the quest for Where I Am, pushing out, nudging the stay-in-this-day backwards into all-of-times. ‘Why?’

Away, go away silly question. You do me no good. Why do you impinge? Why do you ask, ‘Why?’

Today, house-cleaning, my intellectual vacuum cleaner running at high speed, sucking the dust of my memorized questions, trying to free my mind for what is today, and what I have to do; need to do. ‘Why?’

Cold! Deep cold, satisfying somehow the knowledge that today was colder than ever. A kind of toughness, death-defying we reside here in the North, colder than the freezers which preserve fleshes, that are frozen hard. In it, we wander, dressed in the coats of ducks and geese whose feathers insulate us and reflect the heat of our souls and spirits.

Cold! Cars stuck in the depth of their own oil turned to gunk, impossible to turn through. Some, starting, spew out mountains of smoke and steam and grotesqueries rising to meet the brilliant morning sun whose light has no heat. That light, low-angled, reflecting off the glass of buildings reflecting other buildings which have shells of stone, absorbing light and the life of the city.

The sounds…all is muffled-seeming. The crunch of snow upon walking almost crackling. The tik-clack, tik-clack of a truck carrying a motor to turn-over stalled cars, penetrating both silence and the sense that all should be hushed, turns on high, machine-gun-like to send the burst of voltage to a cold tired battery, unable, unwilling to turn starter motors through oil turned to gunk.

No go!

She wondered about me, about the side of my personality which seemed sensitive; rare, she said, in persons who had “so much going for them.”

“Hum-m-m?” Are there really two sides of my being? Is one the more…real, the other some reflex or reflection?

Am I truly scared, fragile, but cover this up with the spit and polish of old shoes made to look good? Am I truly two, my being a wavering marriage between the one who is strong and the one who appears?

I told her that my life had many humbling aspects, earlier and still, wondering at the same time how things would go in the future, like the possibility of sickness in myself or family or friends; that I would be captivated by my own desires trailing me into some land of never-ever; that I would lose grounding, or be ground-down by the flailing forces of power within which I was another mere cipher.

Maybe, I thought, I love action, and suffering in a firm and graspable present, a way of being which is gripping. Maybe, I thought, I love suffering, and will go to any lengths to pursue its possibilities.

More, I guess, I too have difficulty finding and retaining meaning in my life, and have learnt to search in all the directions which experience and imagination show me, hoping to do well, fearing that it may all go badly.

Sitting here, casting far and wide, searching my innermost mind’s word-generation centers, translated into scratches upon paper – it seems difficult to believe that I often lack words.

Not usually in mornings, but often after a long day’s interactions in intensity, trying to relate the day to spouse or friends or even to myself…I seem to have no words.

Now trying to recall the sense of being word-bereft, I sit here fairly confident, a large orange pen in hand, dictionaries and thesauruses in the next room waiting just in case I need a word.

I am full to brimming with the ordinary, the range of words searching not for words, but for just the right word, the perfect word, that word which says it all.

At other times, though, too intense, too many scenes and persons and interpretations, understandings – feelings flash in and out of mind’s eyes and ears, not stopping to say more than a brief, “Hello,” I cannot seem to find hardly any words at all.

Lacking words, I could not write…and do not try at those times when, lacking words, I have not much to say, nor any way to try.