September 6, 2007

Woke yesterday with a tight chest and odd breathing, which I assumed would evolve into a heart attack. Of course it didn’t. It was purely anxiety, which loosened and dissolved in the first few hours of the day. It would be nice to know anxiety over what. With home repairs and going to Ireland, money is an issue, but the response in this case seems much greater than the stimulus. Perhaps my nerves know something that my conscious mind does not. Perhaps my nerves are stupider than my mind, and fear a road which it sees clear and navigable.

Heavy labor in the garden, in any case, resolved and lingering heart attack questions. The overgrown state of things looks more daunting than it really is once you’ve dug in. Emerging from the tangle of squash whose life the drought abbreviated, the eggplants are alive, but exactly the size they were when I planted them this spring. Bonsai eggplant for the urban garden.

Michael Ackley invited me to his apartment for poetry night. Michael has been so tempestuously in love with poetry–outdoing even myself at his age–that I thought I must accept the invitation. There were six of us, Michael, blond Brian, Pan-resembling Owen, Sam (a girl who seemed to be married to someone who wasn’t there), handsome John who was in one of my classes for a week-- and remembered it without too much rancor-- and myself. They were all smokers and the clouds of nicotine made me leave before I otherwise might. This surprised me. I’d thought the tides of public feeling especially among the "elite" had gone against this particular addiction. That aside, and that noted as proof that nothing will ever be perfect, I must say it was a wonderful evening. They had me read "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and then we each wrote a poem in response to it. Van Morrision, who is a sort of god to the group, sang softly in the background. The poems were nothing like Shelley, and all very various and idiosyncratic. Owen was the best poet, with a lilting love of play and a sparkling diction he claims he did not derive from Keats. The others wrote very deep and needful-of-hard-listening revelations of their inmost feelings. I wrote of my morning glories. The seriousness and yet the lightness of the task was evident. There was no judgment, no hurry, no expectation, just the wide door of opportunity open. They were using this to ignite themselves as poets. They all had the bodies of sylphs and the minds of Ariels, and I was afraid I’d feel like a lumbering buffalo among them, but their courtesy was perfect, and I felt at home and joyful. Brian was talking of how the task is to kick Derrida and Foucault behind us and write again as though meaning were possible, write again with the conviction that some things are holy. Had I composed the speech it could not have captured my own belief better, nor would it have been so eloquent. To know that such evenings occur–perhaps nightly all around the city, invisible to see–makes this career as a teacher seem like it has come to something after all.