Darning Loose Threads

Got to lose this skin
I’m imprisoned in
-The Clash

time to undream
-Michael Palmer

an unraveling like a sweater
we cocooned in over winter
not so much an escape
into a reasoned day
as a move, a shift,
like a hermit crab
jumping shell to shell
before scuttling off
unconcerned down the beach

and yet what’s left behind
remains with us, traces
like cobwebs or palimpsests
reinscribing another line,
another letter, carved into another
meaning measured in memory’s
capacity to reconceptualize in metaphor
yet another way to reweave, reconnect
the frayed fabric of our life

"Save the First for another Day"

I withdrew from the Graduate school at UT Friday. I had been debating whether or not to continue for at least a year now, coming to a decision then changing my mind repeatedly. Thursday my ninety year old mother went into the hospital after she fell. I left her with my sister in the emergency room so I could go to my Thursday night class. I sat there listening to the prof explain his class in Enlightenment Rhetoric, watching the graduate English majors being urbane, and I felt the onset of the stress I have lived with since I started this program. As I walked back to my car I decided that perhaps I should refocus what I wanted to do with my life, and being a grad student was not one of the things that came up. I will miss it. I truely enjoyed the readings, and the discusssions that grew out of the readings with my classmates and professors. I have grown as a teacher and as a human as a result of my classwork. But I have to move on, look more at he “res” of the world rather than the “verba.”

I was consumed by the amount of time I was devoting to everything for “just the course work.” I cannot stop working in the public schools to gain “academic experience,” because of the economic realities of having three children and living in the suburbs in a fairly secure middle class life. I cannot, being a slave to my responsibilities, choose to be poor again in order to become an academic. My oldest child starts college next year. The colleges he will get into are not cheap. I have two more following quickly on his heels.


I think I overestimated my abilities to do it all (work, school, family, health) and underestimated what was involved. I think I have been selfish in my desires and ambitions. I think I should accept where I am and use that position to make a space for myself for where I want to be: old, fat and happy.

Over the last semester, and through many of the other classes, I have just become more frustrated and angry about the current state and direction of public education. While I enjoyed and have gained much through the classes, I don’t want to be angry all the time. I have felt a tremendous sense of relief after I decided to stop my pursuit of another advanced degree. It might not be forever, but "knowing how way leads onto way . . ."

I have started reading poetry again, which is always a good thing.


Thursday
by William Carlos Williams

I have had my dream - - like others--
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky--
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose - - and decide to dream no more.

A New Year, Same Obsessions

I write to define myself - -an act of self creation - -part of process of becoming - - in a dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers

Because it gives me pleasure (an ‘activity’)

I’m not sure what purpose my work serves

Personal salvation - -Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’
Susan Sontag 9 Dec, 1961

From Sunday New York Times Magazine p. 55 September 10, 2006


I am not sure of the difference between self-definition and personal salvation. Of course one wants to write oneself as the hero of one’s own story. Salvation and redemption coming at the end before death like Beowulf against the dragon, an old story, but then originality is an illusion, and a creation of a consumer society where the new is the desired. I wonder how much of the idea of the self is simply a remnant of the romantic movement, the enlightenment bifurcation of the individual from the whole. We are communal animals, perhaps the enlightenment was an aberration. What was the reaction from the church toward the enlightenment? What was underneath the religious objections to Voltaire and others? Was it just about power, or was there a fundamental reworking of ontology? Or is ontology based on power: epistemes determined by the dominant social group. See things my way or be suppressed.