I Was Dressed For Success

We must love one another or die.

-W. H. Auden, "1 September 1939," 1940

That's a damned lie! We must die anyway.

-W. H. Auden re: the above, 1964

Besides his impeccable control, this is another reason why Auden is one of my favorite poets: his contradictions. It comes through in lines like "Life remains a blessing/Although you cannot bless" and "There is no such thing as the State/And no one exists alone"; I swear, at times his poetry seems almost dialectical. Personally, reading his poetry often feels like an affirmation of sorts. Really, what have I said in this space that hasn't already been said better, 60 years ago? Story goes that he changed the line to, "We must love one another and die," before renouncing the stanza, and then the entire poem, and then reluctantly revived it at the request of his readers. I suspect that might have preferred, "We must love one another though we die," though I don't suppose the world will ever know, and either way, it probably wouldn't scan.

Lately I've been alternating between Caribou's Andorra in the daytime and Portishead's Third (likely unmastered and very much pirated) at night. Some days I feel guilty for listening to music. Sentimental content aside, at the end of the day it is still consumption, insofar as it does not necessarily lead to the creation of anything new. That is why I can't take those indie hipsters with RSS feeds from mp3 blogs wired into their brains very seriously; I refuse to believe something that doesn't create anything is worthy of so much investment of time, thought, and energy. It's the same reason as why I find it so hard to spend money on anything except instruments.

Sunday night was the Johns Hopkins Class of 2008's senior dinner. I've been blanking out on all these graduation festivities since I've been so preoccupied with figuring out what I'll be doing after graduation, but I went to this since, like most mortal college students, I can be baited with the promise of free food, especially free food more elaborate than things I cook for myself. The deans were waiting at the entryway to the ad-hoc banquet hall (basketball court) to shake our hands and congratulate us as we passed under a no doubt symbolic archway with the alumni association's banner painted on it. It was surreal: the shadowy puppet-masters, known to us throughout the last four years as little more than signatures on watermarked stationery, suddenly in the flesh and all smiles, and me in a thrift-store shirt and my dad's decades-old tweed jacket feeling very undeserving of any congratulations indeed.

The student council had solicited from us photographs from the past four years; I did not send any, personally, and I suspect that those who did did not expect they would be projected as a slideshow onto a 20'x20' screen on the gymnasium wall, judging from the nature of a few of those photographs. Looking at the slideshow and the people around, I felt like I had been living in an alternate universe the past four years. I realized just how off the record everything my friends and I had devoted our time to over the past four years had been, and that the official history of things was going to be written by those classmates of mine whose names and faces I had never even known, and our own struck from even the footnotes. Not too different from Lawrenceville, actually. But years in Baltimore have taught me the art of secret histories; I suppose blogging is good for something after all.

Spring is here. My radiator's finally turned off, and I'm allergic to everything. Spring always makes me feel like I ought to be doing something, something. I'm slowly trying to reconstruct a sense of peace of mind. I found some yesterday, briefly; it was the first day I'd been able to take a break in a couple of weeks, what with trying to handle immigration papers and exams, and I wandered down to the Den to see Joe's friend Julia (one of several Writing Seminars bloggers I found through Joe's own Língua Não Identificada) give a poetry reading. She read poems about her father, Toys 'R Us parking lots, childhood, museums, with plenty of nautical navigation imagery; the place brimmed with note-taking freshman IFP students, and the evening's last sun came through the windows into that little sweat- and breath-hazed box of artificial dark and colored us all ghost-blue. Then I took off before the next reader (couldn't take that long of a break, alas) and set out across Charles Village for the supermarket. I stopped by the creek in the ravine to skip some stones--poorly, I'd been lacking practice--near the bridge while the day's last lights receded. Then I made it to Giant and bought some milk and orange juice, as well as a couple of reusable grocery bags. Freaking good idea, that last one; not only will it slow the accumulation of plastic bags in my kitchen cabinet, they don't dig into my hands as badly as the regular disposable bags, and I won't have to wreck my messenger bag carrying bottles back from farmer's market anymore.

Further examples. The Ladyfest (feminist festival) dance party at the Metro Gallery Jess and I went to last Friday, where the DJ barely hacked it, but everyone who showed up was so very respectful of personal space, and where I got to wear Pat's bunny ears for a few minutes while he went to Club Charles to grab some beers that I still have to pay him back for. Or that party at Sarah's and Kamau's apartments, with all the biophysics and biochemistry grad students, Diamond and I went to a couple weeks ago. They had a pirate theme (if you don't think a black and white striped pirate sundress can be flattering, you'd be surprised) and much delicious homemade food, including homebrewed beer and the always-legendary Sarah M. desserts. Lighting was low and we played the new R.E.M. album in the living room, and I felt warm and comforted in a way that recalled, of all things, those long-lost (actually barely a year ago) nights drinking nice beers and playing childish games with the Woodcliffe crew.

Despite my monomaniacal obsession with progress, these moments of ease seem to inexplicably occur precisely when I'm doing the least thinking about going anywhere at all. Still, that doesn't allay my fear that these subtleties, these little moves and small moments, will save none of us in the end, that to answer the questions we have we must become something other than what we are right now. On days like this--the good ones, that is--I know to love and to be loved, whether with someone or simply with the tint of the sun through smudged windowpanes, and even to be generous about it, but I wonder whether that will suffice, or whether we must still be driven to seek our own, lonely completions, even if that drive forces us from all momentary warmths and affections, though they be sublime, though they be all we could ever hope to attain.

So goes my own dialectic, I suppose.

This afternoon I lay on the grass outside and read Erica Dawson's poetry.