I can’t resist. I know I promised myself that I wasn’t going to make this blog about my own poetry (such as it is), but this morning’s post and the comments on it made me go back and look through some of my old poems and I can’t resist sharing this one.

They never get it right.

Real joy is dark and a little bitter
Like a kettle whistling in the heart.

Thin like a song
It can burn your lips,
Scald your tongue,
Get into your head
And make you ache
With its smell.

That’s why you’ve got to be careful,
Not drink too much.

It isn’t everyone who can make it, though.

Real joy must have the colour
Of partings on black water,
It must have the light of moons
Remembered through smoke
And words like sediment
At the bottom of a white goodbye.

It must have regret
And no sugar.

– from ‘Espresso Joy’, May 2003.

I finally did it. I finally went and bought myself a coffee maker [1]. And not just any old coffee maker but one of those ones where you can pre-program it to brew at a certain time, so that I woke up this morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee filling my room (now there’s an alarm clock I could live with), the day dripping slowly into my consciousness.

I just love the smell of coffee. There’s something acute and finely balanced about it, something witty and almost ironic. Like the smell were smirking at you. It doesn’t perk me up – it sharpens me as though I were a pencil, bringing my alertness to that fine, thin point where I’m ready to take on the world again. Instant coffee doesn’t smell this way – it has a sterile, almost plastic smell – the smell of machinery and processing. Freshly brewed coffee, on the other hand, has a fragrance like polished metal, like smelling the grease on the railway tracks after the train has just passed.

Of course, this also means that despite myself I’ve ended up with one more possession to take care of. Worse, with the coffee maker in place I’m actually considering abandoning my all styrofoam policy and actually buying something non-disposable to drink out of. Like a mug (see picture above – it’s a real mug shot. Heh). Next thing you know I’ll be wanting to own land. Or sofas. Sigh.

[1] Technically I bought the thing a week ago on the Internet – it just got delivered yesterday. This meant that I spent most of last week suffering withdrawal pangs from not drinking the coffee from the coffee maker I hadn’t got yet. It’s such a wonderful feeling when the world finally catches up with you.

Tidylation n. Feeling of excessive happiness that immediately follows the clearing / tidying up of something, often accompanied by rash resolutions to maintain unrealistic standards of neatness. Notoriously short-lived.

Have you ever had one of those days when you finally get tired of all the clutter that’s been lying on your desk for decades and clear it all up in a burst of adrenaline? Or where you decide that for once you’re going to be organised about things and so you arrange all your papers properly, complete with three-ring binders and seperators and stuff?

And you know how you sit there, looking at how everything around you looks human and is all in its proper place (which, for some 84% of the stuff on your desk is the trash can), and there’s this queer glow of pride running through you, and you sit there thinking: ‘Aaah! so this is why my mother was always tidying up my room so I could never find anything in it. It’s all starting to make sense’. And you smirk at all the suckers who still have last month’s doughnuts lying on their desk or are carrying all their papers around all jumbled up in a plastic bag and you think – I used to be like them, but I’m not anymore. I’m an organised person now. I’ve got my life together. It’s the first day of the rest of my life, etc, etc. (Is there a Messy Person’s Anonymous? “Hi. I’m Falstaff. I used to be a Messy Person. Then one day I left my girlfriend on my desk and couldn’t find her afterwards. That was the day I realised I had to change my entire way of life. Now it’s been two months since I last threw junk mail on my table and I have a file where I keep all my latest bills, neatly indexed with the due dates marked in different colour inks on my table calendar” Sound of applause. A couple of people at the back are crying. I feel like I’m among my own.)

Of course, all this euphoria doesn’t last. No matter how much you tell yourself that from now on you’re going to pick everything off the floor the minute it drops and not just let it lie there till the next time you vacuum or the next ice age (whichever comes first – after all there’s no point hoovering if some stupid glacier is going to come along in a million years or so and leave its muddy tracks all over your carpet, now is there?), but there’s always that critical moment where you’re just too tired / too lazy. You think: ‘It’s just one little piece of string, for god’s sake, no one’s even going to notice. I’ll pick it up some other time’.

Or take junk mail. You’ll always tell yourself that you should throw it away as soon as it comes. And for a while you will. Then there’ll be the day you’ll think ‘I don’t have the time to sort through this now. Why don’t I just leave it out here in the open so I’ll remember ‘. Or: ‘Hmmm. I’m not sure. Let me just leave it here and I’ll decide tomorrow’. Then by the time the next one comes along, you’re thinking ‘hey! I haven’t even cleared the last one. Why don’t I add this one to the pile so I’ll remember to do both together’. By the third one it’s ‘Oh good! I can just put this where I put my other junk mail. I bet no one who looked at this mess on my desk would be able to figure out that I have such a wonderful system’ By the time the fourth one comes along your desk is this impenetrable jungle of paper. You have enough unopened mail there to design the next NASA space shuttle using back of the envelope calculations (i.e. >5). It hardly seems worthwhile trying to be neat with this new thing, does it?

Anyway, I just had one of those days. My papers have all been organised into (neatly labelled) folders. Every redundant scrap of mail has been thrown away. Books have been put back in their shelves, CDs returned to their rightful covers. My table is so clean you could eat off it (oh, wait!). I feel lifted and glorious. I feel the way God must have felt at the end of the fourth day after he’d got this Eden thing all set up and before all these birds and beast and fowl and apple munching humans showed up to mess the place up (I’ve always thought of God as a sort of fussy housewife – try talking to her about something important and meaningful, and she looks kind of spaced and nods along vaguely; but get a little spot on her tablecloth, or show up one minute late for dinner when the food is on the table and you’ve had it). I feel like going out and finding myself a broken column somewhere and waiting for the sunlight.

I know it won’t last of course – that already the forces of messiness are gathering against me, that the empire of the ordered will go the way of all empires, crumbling into the dust of the centuries until another historic moment (or a feather duster) comes along. What was it Auden said: “Beauty, midnight, vision dies: / Let the wind of dawn that blow / Softly round your dreaming head / Such a day of welcome show / Eye and knocking heart may bless, / Find our mortal world enough”.

I’d better take a picture of my desk while it’s still this neat.

Interesting article by George Friedman in the current issue of the New York Review of Books about the potential fall-out from the Katrina disaster. Friedman essentially compares Katrina to a nuclear strike on New Orleans, arguing that the economic impact of the disaster could be pretty much the same. His argument is basically that the New Orleans Port is critical for the US economy, as it is a important and unique shipping point, both for foodstuff going out of the country and for raw material coming in. While the basic shipping infrastructure seems more or less unharmed, Friedman’s point is that without a city to support it this infrastructure may not be able to run – with catastrophic results for the US Economy.

While I think the overall article is interesting, especially in the way it focusses on the strategic and economic significance of New Orleans rather than its cultural significance, I think there are several flaws in the argument. To begin with, the comparison to a nuclear strike is fairly ridiculous. Friedman writes: “It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone.” Most people would consider that a fairly important difference.

Second, while Friedman begins by painting a cataclysmic scenario – he’s soon forced to backtrack. As he acknowledges, the port facilities in New Orleans seem reasonably intact, and one could argue that if there really is so much economic value to shipping from New Orleans then the city (or at least the port) will be revived quickly. Friedman seems to believe that no one will ever come back to New Orleans – I’m not entirely convinced of this – one would think the employment opportunities would draw people back. Basically the free market would operate to create incentives that equilibriate the supply of these services with their value.

Which brings me to the third question – how valuable is New Orleans as a port? a) Is the stuff shipped up the river really that critical to the US economy? and b) surely there are other ports that could be scaled up and used. I don’t know the answers to this, but I’m sceptical about the sort of doomsday pronouncements Friedman seems to make. It’s interesting that Friedman provides no real figures / projections to back up his case.

Altogether, I thought the article lacked both depth and perspective. It felt like Friedman was so desperate to find something new to say about New Orleans that he picked an off-center topic and just tried to make it stick.

From a NY Times article about Little Chef restaurants:

“Little Chef is still living in the past, evoking memories of a time when no one went to a British restaurant expecting to eat well, when food was universally overcooked, canned, covered with fat and bread crumbs or drowning in a floury, glutinous sauce.”

Hey, they said it, not me. No wonder the British were the most successful colonists – they had to go as far as possible to escape their own home cooking.

Do read the full article, btw – it makes you realise how close the Onion is to being true.

A Mystery

People say, ‘What are you doing these days? What are you working on?’
I think for a moment or two.

But tomorrow someone will ask me, ‘What are you up to these days? What are you working on?’
And still I won’t know.

- Wendy Cope

One of the chief pitfalls of being a doctoral student is that everyone and their aunt feel they have the right to question you about your thesis. Complete strangers (most of whom think a dissertation is a french word for the pastry cart) have no hesitation asking you what the topic of your thesis is and how it’s going.

What is it with these people? To begin with, asking someone about progress with their thesis is roughly like asking someone how things are with their spouse in bed. It’s not just that it’s as intensely personal, it’s also that the chances of touching off a sore nerve are equally high. And I mean, look, I’m going to spend YEARS of my life writing the damn thing. Do you really think I want to spend my social life talking about it as well? James Bond doesn’t have to deal with this sort of stuff. People don’t come up to him in parties and say, “007, old chap, how’s the new assignment going? M giving you a hard time? What’s it about, anyway?” and expect him to explain this to them.

Of course, the fact that I don’t actually have a thesis topic yet makes this even more difficult. (This is entirely NORMAL, btw, so you lot can just wipe that pitying look off your face). Every time I try to explain this to people they will always manage to produce some relative / friend / neighbour’s hairdresser who is also doing his / her PhD and does have a thesis topic – has apparently always had it, was undoubtably born with a research question in his / her mouth. At this point you either launch into a long-ish explanation of how the academic system works in the US (which no one’s going to believe anyway), or you break off the conversation and head for the bathroom.

Academics themselves, are, of course, the most vicious of the lot. How else do you explain the fact that the polite “how do you do?” line has been replaced, in academic circles, by the far more direct “what are your research interests?”. The trouble is that everyone else seems to have a pat answer for this. Most people, asked this question, will say something like “I’m studying paradigmatic changes in value chain economies among tertiary service providers from a metaphysical perspective” in a clear, ringing voice. I, on the other hand, will answer it in my choicest mumble – muttering vapid generalities while desperately trying to find a way to change the subject. Admitting that you haven’t actually defined a research area for yourself yet is roughly like confessing your virginity in the locker room of a pro-football game.

But lack of overall direction in life can still be lived with (by arguing that you’re open to experiences, and you’re just going to take things as they come, for instance). What really ruins me is the question “What did you do today?”. I have fantasies where I actually have something interesting to say to this question – like I robbed a bank, or I finished my 30,000 line epic poem in iambic pentameter (called Ajax Agonistes), or I collected money for Arctic wildlife preservation, or I made mad passionate love to Charlize Theron. None of this ever happens, though (in case you were wondering). Instead I always end up saying something like “oh, nothing really.” Is it possible for all these nothings to add up to a meaningful life, I wonder, like the weightlessness of raindrops adding together to make a deluge?

Enough said. Must get back to work. Whatever that is.

P.S. Reading Cope. What an amazingly light-hearted treat!

Imagine that the Earth had not one, but four suns. Imagine that these suns were so arranged that at any given time at least one of them was in the sky, so that mankind lived its entire life in brightness. The deepest darkness men would ever have known would be the greyish twilight of an overcast day. There would be no night and day, no stars (since the stars would never be visible), no real concept of darkness at all (except perhaps that tiny blackness that rests behind each man’s eyelids).

Then suppose that one day a man from such a world stumbled upon a cave and discovered what true darkness was. How would he react to this? How would he explain it to his fellow men? Explaining a greater presence (of light, for instance) is hard enough, but how does one describe a greater absence; how does one explain, in fact, the complete inability to see (for men who have lived their entire life in light, this would be like not being able to breathe). And even if they believed him somehow, even if they came with him to the cave, would it not frighten them, the emptiness. Would they, who would have no night vision at all, not panic at being thus suddenly blinded? Would they not turn against him then, shut him away in his cave like Merlin, blocking the way out with a great stone, making, ironically, his darkness complete?

If there were no darkness, how long could we live in the glare of the truth?

He was still talking when she put the phone down. The sound of the receiver slamming home sounded as loud as a gunshot. The silence surprised her. It had been only ten minutes since he had called, but she had forgotten, somehow, that the silence was there as well. Waiting. Now that it reasserted itself, she didn’t know what to do with it. She fingered it absently, the way one fingers a tablecloth when one is thinking. She kept her eyes shut for a minute, then it occured to her that he might call back and she opened them suddenly, stared at the phone. Watching it carefully the way one watches a freshly killed animal for signs of life, afraid that it will leap out at us, attack.

She realised she was trembling. Her breathing was quick and shallow, like the breathing of someone who has just climbed a steep cliff and stands panting at the top, too exhausted to take in the view. Why did she do this to herself, she wondered. Why did she keep trying to speak to him when it always ended like this, with her at once humiliated and guilty, standing in a room made peaceful by contrast, staring at the phone. Even this thought was not original, she recognised, it was the same thought she had after every phone call, but she still kept on making them, still kept answering when his number flashed on the ID screen. Why? Didn’t she know how it would turn out?

The pattern was unvarying now. Five minutes of polite platitudes, then a few fumbling attempts to be genuinely kind, efforts (on her part mostly) to be grown up about this; and then the accusations would start. They were always the same accusations – that is to say, the specifics were different each time, but the tone of desperate belligerence was always the same. And the main message never changed – she was too demanding, she had too many issues, she didn’t understand him, she wanted too much – it was all HER fault. In her lighter moods, thinking back on these conversations, she would imagine them as a game for children, a sort of pin the blame on the donkey. She had a mental vision of him, blindfolded, holding a long paper tail (with the legend “Your Fault”) in his hand, trying to make it stick to a wall size picture of her.

Why did she keep calling him back then? Did she really believe that one day, one of these conversations, she would say the magic word and he would be instantly transformed into the person he used to be – that kind, generous, sensitive friend she once treasured enough to fall in love with? Or was it precisely the ghost of that friend she was trying to banish through these phone calls, using them to remind herself (when memory failed her and the old longings began to return) that the man she used to know was dead, and in his place she was left with this snivelling, self-righteous impostor?

Why does one go to visit the grave of a loved one?

The silence was becoming oppressive now. It had been ten minutes since she slammed the phone down. Surely he wouldn’t call back now. She forced herself to relax a little. Music! That’s what I need, she thought. Something to calm my nerves. She opened her cassette drawer, pulled out a tape at random. She was already starting to take the cassette out when she saw the handwriting. She almost thrust it back in the drawer. Then she thought: No, I am not going to do this. I am not going to let this sinking wreck of a relationship take all my (our) other favourites down with it. I am not going to let him ruin the music I love for me. He isn’t worth it.

She flipped the tape into the stereo, pushed play. Ah! Joni Mitchell. “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling / Looking for something to set me free”. She let the music wash over her, drown her. She shut her eyes for a moment and when she opened them again she was in a sort of underwater world, a world made liquid by the sound of that voice, by its aching honesty, its calm, unflinching loneliness, its unspoken promise of being forgiven. She felt cleansed and pierced at the same time, she felt as if she was soaring, not sinking, into the blue depths of her own feelings. She listened to the words and it was as if the song were reading her mind, as if the song were saying all the things she meant to say to him, to herself, to the world.

Halfway through the tape she noticed a note stuck into the flap of the cassette cover. She didn’t remember that being there before. She took it out. It was his handwriting, all right. She steeled herself and began to read.

“You,

By the time you read this, you will hate me. You will be upset, you will cry (or at least so I flatter myself to believe). It is ironic that having spent years protecting you from the world, I shall find myself unable, when you most need it, to protect you from the worst enemy of all – myself.

By the time you read this I shall probably regret having protected you, regret having being there for you. I may even hate you a little myself. But old habits die hard, and there is a part of me that still wants to be there for you in the crisis that I know, now, is bound to come. That is why I am leaving you this tape – in the hope that Joni will find a way to comfort you when I cannot. People cannot be trusted. Hearts and minds are traitors, flesh is frail and will turn against you. But things, objects last and the song will always be faithful.

I do not expect this to excuse what is, by now, my recent behaviour. (By the time you read this, I will no longer need, or want, your forgiveness). I would like you to think well of me, but I have no real hope of that. By the time you read this it is already too late to try to regain either your love or your trust (or to give you back mine). But trust Joni, trust her music, believe in her words. They are the one true thing that I leave you.

Love (no longer)

Me.”

As she put the note down, she realised that she was crying, and the realisation made her tears come faster. She sat on the carpet, letting her tears fall onto the paper, watching the blue ink of the note dissolve and start to run. Ink is nostalgia, she thought, and my tears, seemingly so pure, are salt with indignation now.

“I wish I had a river
I could skate away on”

By the time she finished crying, the note, that critical piece of evidence, had been completely erased.

Was attending a session on effective teaching the other day (don’t ask – god knows what the university will think up next), where the instructor informed us that it was no longer appropriate to use the term ’stage fright’. Apparently some wag pointed out that it wasn’t technically stage fright if you were applying it to classrooms / meeting rooms. The de rigueur term to use, apparently, is ‘performance anxiety’.

This may be more literally accurate, but personally I think it’s a change for the worse. Stage fright was something you could unashamedly admit to – and be sure of receiving almost universal sympathy. But let word that you suffer from performance anxiety start spreading, and where are you? Probably back home practising next day’s lecture in front of a mirror because you’re never, ever, going to get a date again.

Also, does anyone else see the irony in getting anxious about what you call a particular type of anxiety?

The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there?
–Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.
I smell your grief.
–I sent my grief away. I cannot care
forever. With them all again & again I died
and cried, and I have to live.

–Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.
That is our ’pointed task. Love & die.
–Yes; that makes sense.
But what makes sense between, then? What if I
roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and
just sat on the fence?

–I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.
–It’s fool’s gold. But I go in for that.
The boy & the bear
looked at each other. Man all is tossed
& lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat.
William Faulkner’s where?

(Frost being still around.)

– John Berryman, Dream Song # 36

Yesterday’s post reminded me of an old, old, favourite – John Berryman’s Dream Songs. Playful and sublime, witty and profound, Berryman’s Dream Songs are, in my opinion, one of the foremost poetic achievements of the last century (ranking up there with such masterpieces as Hughes’ Crow or Wallace Steven’s Man with a Blue Guitar). Berryman marries street-smart speech patterns (“I’m scared a lonely. // I’m scared a only one thing, which is me / from othering I don’t take nothin’ see / for any hound dog’s sake”) to a rhythm that is pure Hopkins, combining it with a density of thought that Donne would have been proud of. These poems are sinewy and complex, and demand to be read again and again till every nuance is grasped, but they possess also an incredible singing quality (it’s Dream Songs, remember), that raises them above the merely clever into the breathtakingly true. The dialogue between Henry and Mr. Bones becomes a metaphor for the way the poems engage you (“He stared ruin in the face. Ruin stared back”), demanding satisfaction, forcing you to match your poor wit to theirs, and exulting in their eventual victory over you. Read them. Read them all. This is an idiom, a voice, that you will never find anywhere else.