Come, come, I'll go burn some sack; 'tis too late to go to bed now: come, knight.
--Sir Toby Belch
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Went to BB and KM's for a gaming party last night, mostly to see KM, who had retired to bed by the time I showed up on New Year's, and to grab ECG and ask her about her trip to C*l*f*rn**. Played a splendid game called Tigris and Euphrates, which held my attention admirably despite my searing headache and certain, er, distractions. I lost not dishonorably and swept ECG out the door to a coffee shop. There are ... difficulties ... with a certain group of friends from Sw*rthm*r* (with whom ECG is on good terms). Difficulties involving me feeling like an outcast, or like a scapegoat, or else like somebody who left in disgust but wants back in. But there have been no definitive moves on the chessboard, only murmurings of discontent.
These difficulties vex me mightily, since although I have a good idea where I would hang their aetiology, I'm not sure if I have enough perspective on the subject to see it from the other end; I hoped to discern (a) whether there might be some animosity (on their part) at its root and (b) what can be done about it. ECG's answers suggested I might have a totally flawed perception of what's going on -- not, indeed, that I'm needlessly paranoid, but that there's a bigger picture I'm missing and into which I must frame myself more gracefully. You're asking the wrong questions, / you're op'ning the wrong doors / I love you, I can't touch you anymore, as St. Stephin put it. Worse still, I can't quite categorize myself as "hurt" -- not least because that's precisely the sort of feeling which I cannot countenance as doing any good -- and yet I'm pretty unhappy and confused about this particular instance of growing apart. This situation, in particular, seems to coalesce around a nucleus of everything I fear most about money, intellect, gender, sexuality, conformity. Deepest: that people like me will always be extraneous, freakish, and only momentarily-interesting to people like them, and that I shall end up like Lear's fool.
I am like a great coffee (says the P**t's brochure): the lively sparkle on the palate is due to a certain acidity. Unlike coffee, however, I inspire not so much addiction as surfeit, followed by total abstinence. Nevertheless, the very thing that makes me attractive to people (besides my spectacular hair) is what people eventually cite as my worst trait: I am doomed to dissect every warm and human thing I encounter, mock it and question it until it shrivels up, embarrassed, and is unable to function happily. I would rather not trust a thing that I haven't sufficiently examined, you see, and simple, warm, fuzzy things usually bear the straitest agonies: anything superficially pleasant sets off dramatic warning lights in my head. [Honestly: you guys should come 'round my head some night. We'll sit out on the porch in there, sipping lemonade and watching the analysis storms come in over the Blood River, bending the tree-tops of Calloway County.] But, since I've used this tic to explain every problem I've ever had for years and years and it hasn't really helped, I'm tempted to suggest to myself that there's a more complex system at work here.
Well, sorry to make this whingey sort of entry: I felt I owed it to you all to set forth some of the things that have been bothering me, albeit in a slightly veiled way -- some of you are thinking, "er, what the hell happened?", no doubt, but, as I hope I made clear, this is not anxiety about the sorts of things that happen, but about the sorts of weeds that grow up in the interstices, about the sudden, lurching feeling you get when you look back down the mountain and see how far you've come from home.
Current Music: a couple Ella Fitzgerald Song Books on random. God save the CD.
Current Book: I can't tell you how excited I am about Anne Carson's Eros the bittersweet -- maybe the next month's essays will all be reactions to various brilliant things she says in that book. Suffice it to say now that I have a completely different reading of the Phaedrus, and, by extension, all of Plato, thanks to maybe two paragraphs. As a teaser, why not a few lines of her non-fiction poetry, actually from Men in the off-hours, but repeated in worked-out prose later in Eros the bittersweet:
But as you know the cheaf aim of philology
is to reduce all textual delight
to an accident of history.
And I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly
what a poet means to say.
So let's leave the question mark there
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Big, squishy thanks to SW for a signed copy of the Naked civil servant, a family history. Apparently QC was a bit of a signing-whore. Who knew? Also squishiness to CS for my current desktop image, supplanting even a gorgeous shirtless picture of Sid Vicious. However, I'll see your SM and NC and up you an ST. Also to ShW, who baked. ECG: your mix-tape is ready. Everybody psyched by my announcement that the Magnetic Fields would be playing 69LS at Lincoln Center [!!] will be disappointed to note that all tickets have been sold.
