May 17, 2016

Defiantly went to Jesse Israel and bought huge tubs of lotus, set up water gardens in the back (don’t think the actual pond has enough sunlight), staggering about with my hands on my knees, but getting the job done. I realized I couldn’t carry the tubs more than a few feet, so I drove out onto the back lawn to get them proximate to the garden. Doctor afterward, who prescribed iron pills and a few other things, a medicine I could have been taking myself if I had but thought of it, and I might have thought of it, for I remember having this same problem (less acutely) when I was at Syracuse. I remember the floaty dim way I went around for a while, and the regimen of black pills that must have gotten me out of it. Hicks wants me to have a procedure to look for what’s bleeding inside. I go through with these things even when I know they will be unprofitable, so that I will be, at least, not to blame. When I woke I expected everything to be well, but it isn’t, after a single pill. It may be a little worse. Had to nap after a trip to the gym. Had to nap after a trip to see a loft that I wasn’t going to rent. What I regret is going through the end of the semester and all of The Winter’s Tale sleep-walking.

Beyonce’s new project Lemonade discussed on the radio as if it were Paradise Lost. I like her and wish her well, but the issue– for an academic or a person who has given his life to the arts– is that whatever revelations she has achieved are elementary and partial and jejune compared to the work of every poet and thinker turning over words in their lofts and dorm rooms, to the work of my students handed in hastily and smeared at the end of any given semester. It’s like someone turning away from Barishnikov to watch their little neighbor toe-dance. I don’t know what to do about this beyond shrugging my shoulders. I could line up one hundred black female poets and have them shout in chorus, “But we told you this twenty years ago!” Our weakest insight trumps her best. If we looked like that, would we rule the world?
   
Saw the production line up for next year at the Magnetic. I’m not on it. Again, what to do but shrug?