February 4, 2008

Retiring in exhaustion early means rising early in cold indecision, and here I am.

Reading from A Dream of Adonis at Malaprop’s yesterday. I guess it went well. Friendly faces, an attentive front row, who cried "Yes!" when I asked if they wanted to hear the poem with cuss words in it. Of my cast, Stephanie appeared. I think there was a Superbowl party.

I’m in a frenzy about my career, a frenzy which gets worse as time goes on-- or, as I should say, as time diminishes--and yet I seem not to do those things which would further it. I should have gone to AWP, but didn’t. I should be reading in New York, but am not. Wherever I read, I’m widely the best, but that seems not to lead to anything. People don’t remember. "Best" is not what they’re looking for, or something they mistrust because it’s not what they wanted it to be. I haven’t the correct sense to further myself, and no one has ever helped me. Probably I never let anyone think I needed it.

Part of the darkness of the present moment is the fact that I can’t– and I have tried to–get over the betrayals at UNCA. I love my students, but the institution has finally defeated me. W’s once-intimate face become a stone wall, become a mask telling me that nothing can be done, when I know that full justice could be done if anybody wanted it. L’s stupid, art-murdering, energy-squandering face making decisions that affect my life and drifting there above the couch amid its mass of shining hair as if her authority were anything beyond a mass of shining hair. The only thing left is to strike hard and undo what can be undone, but that spirit is not, at the moment, in me. Defeated this morning, and I rose early, so it will be a long morning and a long defeat.

Why can I shrug some things off, and others not? I can shrug those things off which were a hazard, or about which really nothing can be done. Thefts and betrayals I cannot shrug off, especially those which could be redressed and aren’t.

But Kit sends me a book of Irish history.

Music of Anuna on the computer.

Registered to go to Miami with Cantaria this summer. This instead of Cambridge. Miami in July seems madness, but I’m a creature of the heat, so perhaps I’ll find my element.

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon arrives from Dublin.

If some good angel sat me down and said, "All right, then, what exactly is it that you want?" would I be able to tell him?
Yes, I guess I would.

Maud’s fascination with fluid dynamics is profound. If anything is drained, flushed, or run, she is there to watch.