August 7, 2014

In terms of the fever phantasmagoria in my mind, last night was the worst ever. Pain and heat tossed my body. I was surrounded by objects full of infection, infected tables and pins and cloths that all had to be flushed free of the disease before I could be. Closets and bureaus were full of things that had brought on the disease before. I pulled those out, investigating them, trying to discover what it was and who was trying to hurt me so terribly. Someone was in the room with me. He had been sick like that in the past, and he was trying to talk me through the process of cleansing the objects. I rose at midnight and drove to the store to get grape juice, because I felt my bowels were blocked and grape juice always helps with that. I believe that really happened. Fitful, fantastical sleep. . . then waking into a room where there was nothing like what I had wrestled with all night. I looked for the objects which were so vivid. . . . which had such histories in my brain. In four hours I am supposed to be on a flight to New York. Can I do it? The delusions might be gone, but the sickness isn’t, and I can feel the fever rolling off of me. Now, as ever, the Almighty is a piece of work. One bird singing in the dark.

August 6, 2014

The infection came on me late last night. Since it doesn’t attack my legs exclusively anymore, I don’t always know that it’s coming, but come it has. It’s feverish and disorienting and soporific and achy rather than agonizing, so I am grateful for that.  It presents as a urinary tract infection; I don’t know how accurate self-diagnosis is, but it sure is fast. Praying for recovery by tomorrow so I can make it to New York without staggering around there in a daze. Called to the optometrist despite my ailment, where my “new” glasses were delivered to me, this time, so far as I can tell, right. Sleep overcomes all desires.

August 5, 2014

Odd, when you come to a file of writing of which you have no recollection. You must have written it. It sort of sounds like you, but you can’t remember ever setting these particular words together. You read it over and over trying to understand why it was abandoned.

Rose in the utter dark of morning, before birds, starless, moonless, the sky a low lead ceiling.

Thinking of the fish pond in the graveyard you could get to by crossing the Cuyahoga at my old Nature Day Camp. Thinking of our part of the river. Do all those kids remember it? Me? I thought I remembered lying on one of the rocks in the river having sex, but then I knew it had been a fantasy, grown, if anything, more vivid with the passing of time. The Indians had split a great oak into three, to tell them where to portage their canoes.

Bought tickets for Theater Row on 42nd: one for a musical about the Manhattan Project, one for Naked Boys Singing. I got a front row seat for the latter, so the full horror might descend upon me.

August 4, 2014

Woke to dreams which I recognize as the longing for travel.

Community meal last night, featuring community dread of totally voluntary tasks looming ahead. What is it that we really want? I know what I really want, and other things, however pleasant on their own, are a distraction or an irritation. Fate is passive-aggressive, offering what it knows is not required and then recoiling with a hurt expression when the gift is not fully appreciated.

Copper and brazen sky. Much rain was promised, and some fell to the south, but none fell here.

In the lines I just typed there were 19 errors that I had to go back and edit, 19 typos. I say there is a ghost in the machine.

Worked some at the All Souls Crafts Fair yesterday. Pleasant just to sit on the shady porch. I bought an iron butterfly to hover over my garden. Zach and Karen brought their baby to church.  In Thomas’ sermon, he said that God needs us to fight him, as Jacob did. If so, this is my salvation.

August 3, 2014

Without having intended to, doubled the size of the front garden yesterday. I woke from a nap in the mood for digging, I guess, but the impetus was that I have ordered four important roses, and the roses in the backyard–where I meant to put them–are not doing well. Some fungus might be in the soil. Brother mockingbird came to gobble up the grubs as I tossed them from the edge of my spade.

I was feeling great this morning. But an email from Will that his mother-in-law has broken her leg and “thrown family plans into question” chills the future of 62. I feared that things were going too smoothly. The one request I had–in a field hazed and thronged by his requests– that we sign the agreement in a timely manner, would have cut the panic of this moment. I am trying to keep despair to one side.

As I dug the garden I was, curiously, thinking hard about the university, and my current disappointment with its course, at least the course of the Humanities program. As we fought dumbing-down at our level, we forget that it was being casually enforced everywhere beneath us, so we are now hiring a crop of academics who were never taught the difference between taste and judgment, who were allowed to think that the fragment was equal to the whole if we loved it enough. To say to some of my younger colleagues “X or Y is necessary for a responsible education” is to be met by a blank stare or an insolent smirk. The idea that one thing is more important or prior or more useful than another is a sort heresy. Thus, time is lavished on confetti and ornament (or the minuscule issue we wrote our dissertation on) while the structure is ignored– the idea of structure or priority being, of course, patriarchal. But what I was mostly thinking about was why this makes me angry. What is my anger about? If it’s about the insolence of certain popinjays in the program, I’d best let it go now. If it’s about the truth of the academic enterprise– well, is that served by anger? I do fear for the fate of the young people put in our charge, that we are reinforcing rather than parrying the deficiencies of our time. We are serving self-indulgence rather than correcting it, serving narrow and inward vision rather than correcting it, serving solipsism rather than correcting it, serving abbreviated attention span rather than enlarging it, honoring the obsession with the small, personal, and immediate rather than opening doors into a wider world. We lie and misrepresent in order to sound up-to-date. We mouth the shibboleths and the truisms of the moment without turning on them the critical thought we pretend to espouse. Like our students, we would rather take the easy way than the right way. They have no one to show them a higher path, and to obscure our indolence, we insist that “higher” does not exist.

There, I am angry again. I will listen to the catbird crying in my bamboo thicket.

August 2, 2014

Watering, when din in the air made me look up. A peregrine falcon brought a starling down in the yard. She spread her striped wings and fought the bird while other starlings mobbed the scene. Finally she let go, and the lucky starling zoomed past my head into the hollies. Then the falcon went above the great pine, circling and circling, majestic even if hungry.

Mary Grant is our new chancellor. Her photo from her old job is pretty. Other than that, it means nothing to me yet.

Curious, rather dark dreams, all of which seemed to have done with concealing or destroying documents, with trying not to be found out. My waking conscience is clear; I must have done something seamy in the unconscious.

Thought from time to time in the night of the falcon slumbering wild-eyed in my pine tree.

August 1, 2014

Talked briefly with my house cleaner yesterday. She cancelled last week and moved it to this week because “something came up.” I was going to fire her, but in the end I was too inert and said nothing. Find out that her son got a sudden lucky appointment with an autism specialist. He has Asberger’s. Prayed thanks that, this time, I did not make an ass of myself. Watched a DVD that began with a girl getting drunk and wiping out an entire family in a car accident. Prayed thanks never to have done that, too. Always something to be grateful for.

Did some nervous planting yesterday: that is, gardening I had not planned but needed to fill in a space that might otherwise have been given over to anxiety. Tubs with ferns in them, like in the garden magazines.

The front of 62 looks sensational, I must admit, after Will cleaned the retaining wall.

T is writing country songs on the basis of emotions he does not have and experiences that are as foreign to him as the man in the moon, aiming at what “sells.” I try to reason him out of it, but can hardly base my authority on my own success.

DJ is the first reader of The Lexington Tract. Claims to like it.

Ventured a comment on the current Palestinian crisis. Many of the responses were reasoned and informative. Some of the responses were emotional and declarative. Realized during the reading that it was a matter of character, that some will be evidence-driven and others emotion-driven always and no matter what.