dhalgren

A few of you will remember that I used to write about religion here. I had faith in the radical potential of religion, and added my little bit of talent to arguing for the radicalizing of Christianity. I ran across the following on the Sojourners website a few minutes ago and it speaks to the sort of rhetoric I once voiced:

“Christianity,” he writes, “has taken a giant stride into the absurd. Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them. It’s when the absurd starts to sound reasonable that we should begin to worry.” He goes on to name a few of Christianity’s shocking, absurd assertions: “Blessed are the meek; thou shalt not kill; love your enemies; go, sell all you have and give to the poor.”

The truth is that I have almost totally lost any desire to rescue Christianity from conservatism. I’ve been working too hard, lacking private time to think and write–lacking any interest in sitting in front of a computer following my typical 8-10 hour stint at work, hammering out class outlines on google docs, chatting up students and colleagues. The other half of the story is our (dismal) church situation and the general lack of any serious radical thinking in NW Ohio. Since my Christianity has been solely an intellectual affair for much of the last decade, I desperately require conversation to be at all engaged. To care. And I certainly have not had such a conversation for the last two years. I have been talked at, and that does nothing but objectify me. I’m exactly two steps away from becoming the postmodern English professor whose religiosity is entirely a matter of arid contingency.

So after an hour trip to the “local” Unitarian congregation where we heard a brilliant “sermon” on the religion of Winnie the Pooh (not kidding), we decided to give up and make church work here (the drive and pooh sermon were simply too much). Through my prodding, our stodgy UCC congregation has begun a new initiative to reach out to the college (there are almost no college students in our church). Dawn and I are hosting a group, GOD IN THE GAPS, which could end up doing anything, though I’ve sold the group as a sort of pomo-anarchic-religio-collective. I have my doubts it will be that radical however.

The important thing is that a part of me that has been lost now has the opportunity to be reborn.

We see her several times a week. Often several times a day. This crazy lady.

She is, always, covered neck to toe in sweat shirt and sweats. In 90 degree heat she runs by our house covered in sweat. Her thin 110 pound frame somehow exuding enough sweat to soak fully half of the blue cotton that covers her.

We call her the crazy lady. I’m not sure who started calling her THE CRAZY LADY, but it was inevitable from the standpoint of a house devoted to waffles with (extra) whip cream. Sitting in our “red room” relaxing, listening to Johnny Cash, The Talking Heads, Cannonball Adderley on vinyl, we would casually glance out our picture window to see the tiny ball of energy sweat her way past our lawn.

Two hours later walking through the red room again we see her running. Is she training for a marathon. . . Is she crazy? Some kind of athletic nut?

Maybe. For us, she became simply entertainment. Whenever we see her coming, Dawn and I yell to Elliot, “here comes THE CRAZY LADY!” We all come running to the window. Elliot often stands on the window ledge, smashing his nose into the glass to better see THE LADY.

You might say that TCL was an enigma, a puzzle to us. When Dawn discovered that she lived just a few blocks from us, she immediately relayed the information to me. We savored any detail at all that would break the koan that was THE CRAZY LADY.

As often happens in such situations, the case broke by accident. On my way to campus–a five minute drive–I stopped at a garage sale, one that looked particularly good. I bought the “Official Pictorial Guide” to William Randolph’s personal pleasure dome out in CA. I considered buying a $3 shelf for installation in our garage and left.

And there she was in all of her sweaty glory. Our Crazy Lady was a garage saler like us! I spoke to her and almost immediately told her about our fascination with her athleticism, her sweaty sweat pants, her stamina. But held back. I almost told her that we run around like mad when we see her, yelling, “It’s THE CRAZY LADY. It’s THE CRAZY LADY!”

Somewhat restrained, I said, “Hello. We see you run by our house all of the time.” She politely asked where we live. I said on the other side of the Johnson Circle. When I gave her our address, she knew our house. She knew, you see, the previous owner. She mentioned all of the work that Deena had done on the house. Whereupon I bitched about the five thousand we had spent on the house in the last two years (it is no wonder that we are broke).

I asked her, finally, why she ran so much. I mean, I said, you must run a couple hours each day at least. TCL was blonde under her ball cap. And not young. She told me she was 39, then backtracked, “What am I saying?, I’m 49.” She said her body is not holding up as well as it once did and, yes, she often has to get up at 5 AM to run before class (she is a teacher). And her son is attending my college.

But she explains that she does not run for hours. She will run. Return home for some work. And take another jog around the neighborhood an hour later.

My curiosity somewhat sated, I prepare to leave. She stops me and says, “you know, you are part of my summer story.” I wait, wondering.

“Last week I was running by your house and your blond son was hanging out the door, yelling backwards into the house, ‘it’s THE CRAZY LADY!’”

“And I just knew he was repeating what his parents had been saying.” She said all of this with a smile.

Later, exactly when I pulled into my drive after returning from campus, TCL was jogging by the house again. As I walked away from the car, THE CRAZY LADY jerked around like, well, a Crazy Lady–her arms and legs contorted in strange ways.

Her name is Patti G–. And she is not crazy at all.

It’s been two months now since Lucy’s birth and things have improved greatly–and I say that just not because I get to escape to work in a little more than a week. Elliot is struggling much less with his pottying, and I am fighting much less with him. That’s not to say the days are not long and we don’t get bitchy quite often.

His new bedtime ritual is going particularly well. For the last 8 months, we have always put him to sleep in our “reading and rocking chair.” This sometimes took a long while, but it was almost always enjoyable (honestly, the evening ritual is the best part of the day generally for all of us: it is genuinely fun, structured time). We bought a $15 bed (!) at a garage sale a few weeks ago and have begun moving our reading ritual to his green room. We read and snack, brush his teeth, then read a bit more. Then the music comes on (The Innocence Mission’s Now the Day is Over), and the lights go off. He and I–it is usually just the men nowadays–snuggle under the sheets and he falls asleep by 9 pm.

These are really lovely moments. Sure, during the day we have a nice time wrestling and tickling on the floor, or taking walks at the Independence Dam State Park, or picking tiger lilies for mommy, but by the end of the day we are all tired of such hyperactivity. I am tired of it by 11 am. A good snuggle reassures me that one day our relationship can get past sheer activity for activity’s sake.

We’ve done little else this summer. I wrote 30 pages on Octavia Butler. My dean (boss) recently read the pages for me and with one of those telling grins, began by saying, “Well, you have good ideas…..” Apparently, there is much to do and my deadline is Sept 1. Really–I’ve figured this out finally–these essays take two and three years to write. I can’t expect any essay I write in two months to work as it should. Case in point is this essaywhich I wrote maybe five years ago and which was just published a couple of days ago.

The Fall 2007 semester looks immeasurably better than last fall–a semester in which I was often working six and seven day weeks. While I am (somehow) teaching five courses again, the class sizes are smaller and there is only one completely new prep.

We’re going off to the farmhouse again for a few days of r and r with friends and then I am going to hit the books again hard for a week. If I can get Lord Jim, A Portrait of the Artist, Omeros, and A Grain of Wheat finished before the 28th I should be able to survive until December. Maybe I will even have some time to blog.

“Let’s go pee and see if your salami glows in the dark”

Ask Dawn for clarification.

Here’s a fascinating visual retelling of William Blake’s poem, “Tyger.”

Here’s the poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The film short juxtaposes nature imagery with urban landscapes–or, better, god-made vs. human-made reality. The poem is fascinated by, 1, how terrible and dreadful the tiger is and, 2, how much more terrible and dreadful its maker must be.

The artisan, who or whatever it is, is left out of the film.

But the tyger’s fearful symmetry remains. Nature’s essential might remains. The film suggest that an animal beauty could at any moment returned from whatever place of repression we humans have relegated nature. And redeem our bloody mess.

We postmodern thirty-somethings have this problem: we consume too much, and too quickly. Hayao Miyazaki says in an interview somewhere that his delightful film My Neighbor Totoro should only be viewed once, or once a year at worst. But we postmoderns don’t consume media in that manner. We like something to its death. We watch Totoro, we buy it, we watch it three four times in a month until its delight is extinguished.

Then what is left but a search for another delight to consume, digest, and put aside. It amazes me how many CDs we own and, even more, the number from the early 90’s that I will never be able to listen to again: the Seventy Seven’s Sticks and Stones, Charlie Peacock’s West Coast Diaries, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. I loved those discs once upon a time.

Stephen Frear’s High Fidelity opens with a close-up of a needle in a record groove. A long umbilical cord is strung out from the stereo receiver to Rob’s headphones. Then Rob, addressing the viewer, says something to the affect of, “Which came first? The music or the misery?”

It’s a wonderful image of infantile desire: somehow we are created by media to desire, but desire in such a circular self-defeating fashion. The record goes around and around as do Rob’s infatuations, until he tires of the same old exotic underwear fantasy (they are never worn past the first date).

We appear to need lack. Without lack we have no direction, no purpose, no meaning to project ourselves through time and space. But women (or men) can only be consumed for so long before they also lose their delight. We look around. We make a new tape, if you are Rob, and give it to the next cute girl to walk in Championship Vinyl.

I find this circularity distasteful. I find it too easy. I’m reminded of my other favorite film on relations, My Dinner with Andre, in which Andre points out that we have affairs, we desire, because it is easier. To flirt, hunt, and take prey is ingrained into us. So that what is difficult for us to do as humans is to remain at peace and make a project out of some thing, or some one for the rest of our lives.

When Rob stops his circular, ultimately conservative desiring and chooses to marry, he also chooses to become a record producer–the critic/consumer begins to create. That is one sort of answer.

(There may be a more positive spin on this issue: maybe thinking of life as a tenuous dance of desire in which we give love to others, without pain, and move on to others is another way of being (See Sammie and Rosie Get Laid for a version of this). A hard way, no doubt, that could quickly spiral into simple imperialistic possession of others. A very grounded friend of mine and one-time practitioner of polyamory told me once that one of the biggest problems with multiple partners is time management, finding worthwhile time to be with each of them. Without such time, lovers become just objects).

Here is where many of us in our 30’s find ourselves:

You have the best job you will ever have. You have a house, children, spouse, and one or two cats. You have thirty years ahead of you and you lack nothing. How can you or anyone propel themselves through 30 years with no lack?

Where, in other words, to locate another dream?

Music and movies. I could not spend my life simply watching them. I would throw up my hands with disgust. Most men take up (literal) hunting, or renovate cars. They find hobbies.

My case is not yet dire enough for cars and hunting. I have not reached the end of lack. I lack. I am not bored, yet. My career could go farther. A little farther. So I project myself, get meaning for myself, through pursuing this lack. But where will I be in five years?

It is an ironic fact that family to do not operate as projects in my mind. This is perhaps for the best. Should relationships be considered projects like an essay on Thomas Pynchon or Alan Moore? I hope not. On the other hand, why is it so difficult to inject focus and energy into relations with others? We know self-evidently that what we do in our work is near worthless. Sure, it may further the progress of knowledge a bit. But so very, very little.

Why can’t we refocus this energy to what self-evidently does matter?

Perhaps it is because family is always there. They are so familiar that one cannot have critical distance to see them as project, as things that can and should be improved. Perhaps the very fact that family is there constantly is enough to undermine any focused attention. Is it not impossible to focus on something that is always there in front of one? Rather like glasses which disappear even while they sit very squarely atop one’s nose.

The lesson appears to be that important things recede from consciousness, while things and people which are slightly other to everyday experience attract one’s mind and actions (only to recede to the background when their time comes).

It’s the delineation of a problem, not an answer.

This may be the first time that John Berryman has appeared in a song, a relatively good song. I guess I should not be surprised. The Hold Steady has a penchant for songs about (d)rugs and alcohol and Berryman was one famous boozer if nothing else.

When I wrote poetry–a very long time ago–Berryman was a formative influence for me. Here’s a depressing poem that crossed my mind a few weeks ago when I felt as if I was lacking “inner resources.” The 14th Dream Song:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Damn fine poem that.

I have my summers off…yeah, right.

OK, I’ll be the first to agree that I have it better off than the neighbor factory worker. Still, what I find is that my summers never seem free. What we typically try to do is break the day up so that each of us has some private time. Lately, one of us will go out at 9 am for two hours. The other will then go out at 2 pm. We will try to do a family outing to a pond, a playground, the Independence Dam State Park sometime during the day. After 9 pm Dawn and I are able to squeeze in another 90 minutes or so of personal time. This works much better for me than Dawn now that we have a nursing newborn of course.

And what do we need this personal time for? In large part it is just to de-stress. We live our lives for our children and each other so much that our selves are totally lost. That personal space is important. In my case, my time never quite feels like personal time. I spend all of my time writing or thinking about writing. I’ve written nearly 40 pages this summer on LotR and Octavia Butler (not in the same essay, mind you). That is actually quite a lot of writing for a man with a newborn and a feisty three-year-old.

I could reasonably stop publishing at the teaching school I am at currently and actually have personal time to blog, read left wing radical webzines, or read novels without a pen in hand (gasp). But I like ideas and I like writing critical essays. And I want to further my career with more publications for very obvious reasons. I will say that if I stay at the college permanently, I can’t imagine keeping up this pace. I need some non-work private space desperately–this is part of the reason that my spiritual life (never solid in a conventional sense) is just about to become totally unhinged.

I’m able to write today because Dawn has went to family in Indiana with one of our good friends at the college. After she left yesterday, I spent about four hours on a composition webzine, slept two hours, watched David Fincher’s Seven again (I had only seen it once before, years ago, and was very impressed. there is a lot going on in the film on the level of narrative–Spacey’s character is trying to tell a story after all. I cried at the end like a sentimental jerk), and then returned to my Butler essay for another four hours.

I woke up at 7 am this morning, had an elaborate (for me) breakfast, and plan to spend at least another 10 hours on my essay (my plan is to be done with it by tomorrow). I’ll probably sneak in a viewing of American Psycho along the way (a film I will never get Dawn to watch with me).

I also happen to be finally getting Norah Jones (Come Away). I’m pretty certain that I like Cassandra Wilson better, but at least I am beginning to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s nice to be able to expand into time again. Hell, it’s nice not to have to worry about what will happen if I place the sugar container on the counter, or the hot coffee cup too close to the counter edge. It’s nice not to be forced to think about anyone but myself.

Me, Narcissus–at least for another 36 hours anyway.

This is the same book that I heard Delany read from in 2006 at Clarion. And it looks good. Not Dhalgren, I suppose, but good for what is trying to do. Read the Wash. Post review, “A Poet’s Gaze.”

I’m not a sentimentalist, though I feel tremendous social forces trying to make me one at a time like this:

The worst day of my parenting life was the day that Lucy was born. Not because of Lucy, who has been an exquisite, happy child and with whom I had very little time on the day in question.

After a sleepless night ushering Lucy into the world, I hurried home to spend a long day with Elliot. After the last few weeks, I cannot really tell you specifically what happened that day. I know we went to a PG (code for playground). I know that we went to a model train open house. I also know that apart from these activities, most of the day was hell.

Every time I tried to get Elliot to potty, he fought. I had to drag him to the bathroom. Once in the bathroom, it was a constant tantrum. I lost my temper a number of times and essentially manhandled (read threw) him on the stool and held him down with my hands and screams (”Just sit!” “Why don’t you just sit!”). I felt rage–that’s how bad it felt.

No, I did not backhand him or abuse him in a conventionally violent way, but I was certainly violent.

It is the small things that make you lose it, not the big stuff. Which makes a certain amount of sense: why can’t the little fellow just sit and pee? He’s done it a million times

Dawn has already told you about the relish and the evaporated milk (see Matt’s recent blog as well). She did not mentioned the full can of root beer or milk on the dining room floor, or the time he peed in front of the bathroom toilet and then proceeded to spray the laundry room 30 seconds later. He also hits, bites, kicks, and has been spitting today. He, too, likes to attack our cat. He laughs when he does these things and it is clear that he is trying to get our attention to a large extent in such physical displays.

Elliot is an assertive, active child. There is no doubt about that. We are generally proud that he is so outgoing and active. Ninety-five percent of the time, he is also adorable. It is the 5 percent of the time when you need him to do something, or when he wants attention that tear you apart. And make you wake up in the morning literally dreading the day to come (I have had two days of that sort of dread).

A couple things need to be said: Elliot has good reasons to be angry. We have just imported a total stranger into his family. People keep on telling me that I need to imagine Dawn bringing home a second husband–how would you feel?, one colleague asks. That is the sort of trauma and dislocation that Elliot appears to be working through.

At the time of the birth, I was not really aware of what a big transition this was for children. If I had been told, the words held no reality. And, while I rationally understand this now, I find my mind is gone at those moments that Elliot begins pushing buttons. I react. And I fear at times that the violent reaction is becoming habitual.

Is it possible to be a good parent if you lose it when your kids are not good? I don’t know. But I can honestly say that two of my most basic self-defined traits have taken a beating recently: 1. I have begun to doubt whether I am a good father; 2. I have begun to doubt whether I am a patient person–you have to understand that in a family full of domestic violence, I have always considered myself the calm one, the one who learned from others mistakes. I can honestly say that I have begun to doubt myself on both of these fronts after 12 years of marriage and three years of parenting.

The worst part of all of this is the lack of joy we have had (been allowed to have) about our newborn. Yes, we are happy, but not in the same way as with Elliot. With the firstborn, there is no one but him. There is no sharing. There is no other work, especially for academics in mid June. We have not been able to truly focus on Lucy like we would have liked and that may be the saddest part of this story.

The joy is there, it just has no room to be shared.

You should know that the first week was the worst. Things have improved and I have not felt dread in a number of days. It has been a strange few weeks. At the same time that Elliot has been purposively pissing on the floor, he has begin making regular hard deposits. He has also bee n pottying without us in the room.

Today, he and I had a marvelous hike out at the UAW park earlier today. He held onto my finger and we chatted about sticks, leaves, and poison ivy for an hour. We even hiked down the path to the riverfront together, Elliot gripping my neck for half the distance.

Dawn and I have begun exercising a few new disciplinary tools in the last few days which look to be helping; I feel as if I am calming down a bit, if still a bit low on sleep and too stressed by work and deadlines (I know I am supposed to have the summer off, but…).

I’d like to say that the last few weeks have been wonderful, Elliot and Lucy. They have not, but there is plenty of hope. And that is as sentimental as I can get for the moment.