The Light Tempts

First full week of school's almost over. Did a little bit of running around. Compiled data for Mikhail to take to the artificial membranes workshop in Germany--yes my name is on a poster, and yes it's the first in the list. Applied for research credit for the paper writing I will hopefully be doing. Took the GRE, killed it. Recorded many processed guitar parts for a song that'll probably strike me as crazy tomorrow (Monica said it made her feel like she was tripping on Robitussin). Met this girl at the Den last Saturday at Sam's birthday gathering, talked to and danced with her all evening but got blown off anyway, saw it coming even though I was drunk, didn't care, or convinced myself I didn't, which is about as good. Trivial things are trivial, or so they usually seem.

Taking Basford's poetry class this semester; it's going to be an interesting change of pace, after a year and a half of Williamson. He wants us all to keep a poetic journal, so I suppose I will be writing in this thing more often in more substantial form, if all goes well.

The truth is, I don't feel 100% comfortable in that class, after the first meeting, and not just because he's not Williamson. Just from spending a couple of hours with him, it was clear that Basford took poetry very seriously; his first assignment to us is, quote, a poem "relating being to a divine presence."

That is not the way I'm used to thinking about poetry, or music, or anything else I do. The Writing Sems TAs and professors I've had so far (Jay, Davies, Williamson) all have that writerly nihilism about them--the "yeah, I write, but I don't care about it" shtick, most likely overplayed by now, but familiar nonetheless.

As for myself, I have always been (perhaps "always" is misleading--but at least let's say I have been since two years or so ago) of the perception that nothing one can claim as vocation--art, science, whatever--was greater than the knot of absurdity that is the nucleus of one's being. They are all ways of projecting the sprawling contingent world onto our claustrophobic hearts, and then casting ourselves back out into the world like a stone, or perhaps a baited hook. They are all telescopic windows, portals between reservoirs of chance and uncertainty. Which is to say: there's nothing holy about art, or science, or anything, there's no reason to put any of these things on pedestals, and certainly there is nothing "divine" about inspiration, or execution of inspiration: all they are are channels for the absurdity coming into and out of and through you, they do not change the nature of that absurdity, they are not above that absurdity, and certainly not above the absurd confrontation between the individual and the contingent world (not to mention other individuals).

So much for that "wer wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt" thing, then.

Still, though, there was a time when I was very serious about my writing in an emotional, perhaps even spiritual, way--who hasn't had such a time? Needless to say, I was much less of a writer back in those days then I am right now. What was it Thom Yorke said: "Don't try, because once you try, you're fucked," or something like that. That's the bitter irony of it all, maybe, that the less you care, the better job you might do, but you enjoy it less, because you don't care. And I've done a very good job of--as Paul Banks said--training myself not to care, so good that it ever only catches up with me right before I go to bed at 2AM. Or maybe I'm taking this too far.

Anyway, the point is, maybe there was something from those days that I should've preserved in my mad dash forward. It's not like I even have a reason to go in that direction--I just need to feel I'm going somewhere.

The point is, maybe this forced seriousness will be good for me yet. For quite a while now I've felt like I knew most of the things that were possible to know about myself (there were things outside of those things, but I'd given up on knowing, or controlling them). I crushed everything into a ball and jammed it into a crevice in the shadow of my removed subjectivity, and thus became totally impervious to affection or affectation. I became able to come up with sentences like the last one, because I just didn't let myself care.

The catch was, even without caring, I still get obsessed about things. Like music. I've been working on a song all day, micromanaging the mix, and it's driven me up the wall. When I start becoming obsessive-compulsive to the point of excluding other thoughts, it usually means I need to quit and go to sleep.