Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have manage to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

-- Billy Collins

Musings

I have forced myself to begin writing again, after an entire semester of---nothing. People are always trying to encourage me in writing by telling me how sure they are that I'll be a great writer someday, etc etc, even my mom, which is weird because my mom hasn't read anything I've written since the poem I wrote for my dad's funeral cards (which now that I look back on it is painfully juvenile, but hey, I was 14 and wrote it in like half an hour), but then I just have these long periods where nothing comes. I remember greg saying he used to make himself write something every day, no matter what, and I've considered that, but then so much of what emerges is just junk. It's like DNA--great swathes of useless jumbles of letters, and then here and there the precise combinations that make life really go BOOM. I don't like writing junk, or at least keeping it around.

I was simply in a poetry mood the last few days. The weather and the beautiful sunsets are part of it, definitely; I just wanted to lie somewhere and read from Billy Collins while the sky was splashed with the most gorgeous array of colors. I read his books over and over again till the poems are like old gloves that I slip on with ease, cool and soft to the touch. Sometimes he slips too into the mundane for my taste, but on the whole, no one has ever spoken to me like his poetry has before.

Sonnet


All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here wile we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

--Billy Collins

March 30

As it turns out, my dad shares his birthday with Van Gogh; the only way I discovered this was seeing the van gogh-esque look that Google has on today, and then looking it up. Hm. The things you find out--not that my dad would have cared, naturally. Today, as every year, begins the count-down to his anniversary, which then causes me to of course spend a great deal of time contemplating how long it's been, how things have changed, how they could have been, etc etc. Happens every year. Five years is a sort of big one, though, it's the first real marker on the road that will stretch the entirety of my life.

The day after, however, I'm going to Providence with Sean--he to visit Quinn, me to see Sara, and both of us to watch "Brigadoon"--who could forget the NWC performance of that our senior year, with Heather as the vivacious little town tramp? Lol. I'm really glad I'm going, since I didn't get to see Sara, or the other girls, at all over Easter due to my crazy traveling. It was, however, very enjoyable to be with both Sean and Carla. She proved to be a most excellent "substitute girlfriend" or "wife number 2". We even took him to the mall to look at jewelry stores! Except we had to let him sit the last three or four out--the poor child looked utterly drained. We will build his stamina in due time.

Speaking of stamina and other things that could be put in a sexual light......guess who resigned from the Vteam at long last! Yes, many kudos to you, Rae B.C., and also to the young man who, as I had rae inform him, is now actually a man, thanks to her. So now when we congregate at the S-Lo house, there will be only TWO people on the "virgin couch". So ha. No more ostracizing the scarlet woman!

Carla keeps reminding me how little time we have left in the year. Bah. Six weeks is so short--great for Sean, yes, because he can finally escape the hellhole that is UMass, but sad for me. I almost teared up to day when Carla told me how much she's going to miss me over the summer--almost, but not quite. I will indeed miss my dear muffin....I really have been extremely lucky in terms of roommates. God likes me. He better, after certain events *eyes calendar* which make the longevity of whatever husband I choose extremely suspect. I'll have to warn the poor guy-- "Um, not to ruin the wedding day and all, but men reeeeally don't last long in this family. If we have kids, your days are pretty much numbered." Oh boy, can't wait!

Grey Day

Last night TJ, Mike, and Carla all took the relationship quiz that Sean and I had taken. Mike and Carla both came out as "sex-bombs", which kinda explains why they're both so frustrated and, in my cupcake's case, repressed. TJ was some sort of outdoorsy woodcutter guy. I forget.

Rae and AJ's three year anniversary is in two days. Go you, go....go....now go have sex, dammit! It' been long enough already.

Carla, muffin, your time will come, someday. I believe in you!

Richard Dawkins

I had completely forgotten that there was a livechat scheduled with him today at 4pm. Luckily I checked my email when I got in and saw a reminder, so I caught the second half. It was held on the site faithless.org, which is a community of people who don't believe in any religion and believe that religion's hold on society needs to be shaken off by intelligent people. Dawkins, ps, is an evolutionary biologist who's written several really great books on evolution and genetics, including "The Selfish Gene" and my current read, "The Ancestor's Tale". He is most definitely an atheist. Ironically, as I'm watching this chat, I was doing my reading for Catholicism class, and it just became even more apparent, looking at the crap I was supposed to be reading about the "ecclesiology of the early Church", that I just have no faith in it whatsoever. Why have so many amazing minds bent their efforts to the study of such unconsequential matters?

I can't go so far as to say I don't believe in God, because I still do, even though I recognize that none of my arguments would withstand a vigorous debate. Some can even be used by both sides; creation obviously can be shown to have produced through natural selection, but what about the universe at large? The big bang didn't "select" to happen, something had to cause it.

And yet, even if creation occurred due to an intelligent designer, and then the laws of nature and evolution caused humans to become what we call human, why would that give us any special standing in God's eyes? we're just another species in the creation, 6 billion rats on a wheel.

I suppose I might almost count myself a kind of Deist--they believe in an intelligent creator who set everything up and then retired; Thomas Paine and other American founding fathers subscribed to this notion. This is where the Masons get their idea of the "Master Architect" of the universe. Of course this brings the question--how does this affect our understanding of the soul? If God does not act in the world and did not specifically intend for our race to develop, how are we any different than the animals?

I suppose there's still room in the Deist camp to suggest both a life after death and a general presence of God in the world. Of course, if we are no more special than animals, having been created by natural selection, then why do we deserve a life after death? Unless all creatures also go to this life after death? You could side with the pope and say that at some point, God acted and "inserted" a soul into the 'first' two humans. However, as evolutionary biologists will point out, there is no such thing as the first homo sapiens. The argument goes like this: for there to have been a "first" homo sapiens, there would have had to been a time when there were two parents of one species, and a child of a brand new species. That simply could not happen; every child of every generation will be biologically capable of breeding with its parent generation, and therefore cannot be of a different species. How then do we arrive at a different species? Because of transitional individuals, individuals with genetic changes that slowly bridged the gap between what we know as homo sapiens and the homo ergaster or homo erectus that came before. The child, though slightly different than the parent, is still enough of its species to mate with the parent (don't get too grossed out, happens in nature); however, the child of THAT child will not be able to mate with its grandparent, because the biological change will have been too great. When it has a child of its own, it can mate with that child, but the child will not be able to mate either with its grandparent or great grandparent, since the genetic differences are growing even greater. Thus eventually the descendants seem indistinguishable from the ancestors, cannot mate, and are obviously different species. So if that's how we came about, how would a soul occur? It could not happen by degrees as the transition to human-ness did, that's pretty ludicrous. And yet, I cannot shake my belief in a soul making us different from animals, and I cannot shake my belief in a benevolent being who exists in the world, even if he does not act in the world.

Dawkins would tell me that this reflects my inculcation in a religious society and that I'm not thinking for myself. He, like Marx, compared dependence on religion to dependence on narcotics. It seems true that simpler people tend to have very fervent belief in religion, a degree of belief that seems to wane the higher you progress along the educational spectrum. Dawkins pointed out how few scientists and doctors retain their faith, of any kind. Naturally, the egoistic side of me resented being lumped in with the intellectually stunted, simply for retaining a faith. I do think that religion is too often an opiate, and unquestioned by the people who subscribe to it. I also feel it is too controlling an influence in American society, and has been in the world for years. Yet, religion will never go away, because the masses will always need their opiates, no matter how hard you try to educate them. We can try to make it better (teaching evolution as a solid scientific theory instead of letting the wacko creationists run rampant, damned southerners!), but its influence will always be felt.

This is such just a tough subject to wrap the mind around. It's not experimentally verifiable and that's one reason to distrust the existence of god. You could argue that love is not verifiable either, (indeed, a cold evolutionary biologist could argue that the only reason to protect and raise your children is so that your genetic material can be passed on to further generations) yet no one denies it exists. It's just a tough nut to crack.

Someone asked "Why don't we worship philosophers like Socrates the way we worship Christ?" Dawkins replied "Let's not worship anyone. Except our lovers." I like that.

Hello Again

I had a pretty good spring break...as much as I would have loved to have been luxuriating on a cruise ship to some exotic locale, it was nice to loiter about the house in my pjs, watching movies and reading books till indecent hours of the morning. And of course Sean visited for several days, which was nice. However, it was also delicious to return here to my little blonde cupcake, laden with cookies, banana bread, and other assorted wonders from my stay in NoCo. The rest of the year is going to be good, I can feel it.

I did not, unfortunately, get into the Bucknell Seminar this summer, which I pretty much expected due to its competitiveness. That's ok. Despite the nebulous and uncertain status of my religious beliefs, I am a firm subscriber to the maxim that all things happen for a reason (see father's death, not getting into harvard, etc), and therefore it's probably for the best that I'm not spending three weeks in Pennsylvania come June. This way at least I'll be able to get the Harry Potter book right when it comes out! WHOOT!!

Reading an excellent book right now called "The Ancestor's Tale: A Journey Backwards into Evolution" by Richard Dawkins. It's (obviously) going backwards in time along the trail of human/mammalian/vertebrate/bacterial lineage, with each section in the form of a particular ancestors' "Tale", like in Chaucer. Wonderfully done, I must say. How I wish I could have studied evolution, and traveled the world looking at fossilized trilobites and examining the evolutionary adaptions of this or that fish and fowl...ah.

Also, we got Townhouse 121, just like the girls wanted. It's an end house, meaning it's slightly bigger. Excellent!

Spring is almost here, and I am wearing my yellow coat everywhere.

Another POV

Here's what Sean scored on the same Relationship Test I took:


eXpressive: 6/10
Practical: 5/10
Physical: 3/10
Giver: 2/10


You are a XPIT--Expressive Practical Intellectual Taker. This makes you a Manager.

You are cool, thoughtful and intelligent. Your approach and your sense of humor are under-the-radar, your charm is undeniable. You keep everything under control. You have distinctive vocal mannerisms. You may not have much interest in approaching strangers, but when you do, you are successful.

You will probably end up with someone beautiful, fascinating and off-balance. While your partner may steal the limelight, it's you that keeps things running smoothly and provides stability in your relationship. If you are with someone as contemplative and hard-headed as you, you can have a tough time.

Your greatest asset is that you tackle conflict as it rises -- you don't ignore it and let it brew. If you have a partner that *does* let it brew, it will make you crazy! You can find yourself fighting for two -- trying to anticipate your partner's needs and draw their feelings out -- which is exhausting and, well, not your job.

You would never cheat. You would make an excellent spouse. When your spouse's friends met you, they would think, "Crap, why couldn't I get that one?"

Hm. Interesting, very interesting...

Hmm

You are a RSIG--Reserved Sentimental Intellectual Giver. This makes you a People-Pleaser.

Oh, RSIG! You are the most complicated and dynamic of any type. You are brilliant, tender, romantic and a joy to be with. You're the favorite of many of your friends. It's just not a party until you get there. You are bursting with feeling and sentiment and insight but you very rarely express it -- it's not how you want to present yourself to the world. Although you are always studying your non-romantic relationships -- you turn a blind eye to romantic relationships.

You're highly adaptable, and you conform to your circumstances (maybe you're a youngest child?). You would probably be content with almost anyone, and almost anyone would be blissfully happy to have you. But just because you're content doesn't mean you're happy. Don't settle!

You'd rather ignore your problems than rock the boat by creating conflict. Please understand that in the long run ignoring conflict will make you unhappy and your partner exhausted. Try picking a fight just to see how it goes. You'll find out that solving problems is so satisfying for you that it makes conflict worth it.

Your sex life could be fantastic if you could stop worrying about everything so much (did I wash my hands? how do I look? what do I need to do tomorrow?). You need a sweet, expressive lover who makes you feel at ease and never puts pressure on you. If you feel secure with your partner outside the bedroom, it will make all the difference.

You cry at movies. A lot.

Of the 205278 people who have taken this quiz, 5.6 % are this type.

20 Questions to a Better Relationship

Of all of this, I will simply say, I don't cry at movies...often.

Spring Break

I'm so glad to be home. Even if my cats are pretending not to know who I am and all the posters fell off the walls in my room, and even if my mom has the cleaning abilities of a woodchuck when Jen and I aren't home. Ah.

I just read Heather's journal about how she feels like her life isn't quite fulfilling right now, that she's not quite as into Theatre as she should be, "et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!" (sorry, we watched The King and I last night. lol.) That happens to me sometimes too, especially in terms of Art. Sometimes I'm like man, what the hell am I doing? English and Art History? What is THAT? And sometimes I'll be sitting in art class, staring at some Roman portrait bust of yet another dead emperor and I'll think, is this really that important? Am I really doing something valuable?

The same goes for my writing. I haven't written anything since last December, which is kind of natural, since I'll go through these phases when I never write anything. But I worry a lot about writing...I know I'm a good writer, I have a lot of poetry that has real quality to it, but I wonder if I'll ever actually be a really good poet, if I should bother sending my stuff out to publishing houses, or if it will always just be something I do for myself. I'll never stop writing, it's too much a part of me, but will it ever be anything more? I don't know. I'll find out soon if I qualified for the Bucknell Seminar. I really want it, more than I've wanted anything in a long time, but I just can't get my hopes up. Bridgford emailed me yesterday about sending in some poems for a special edition of the Sound, which is really nice of her. It helps to know that a writer like her thinks I have talent; I mean, she's been in the running for a Pulitzer with her poetry. She knows her shit.

As for my life being in order, well, a lot of things are going really well. Housing seems to have worked out, I'm making plans for going abroad next semester, I'll be planning my merit scholar proposal to take advantage of that thousand dollars. Sean, of course, is a huge part of the "life is going well" list. I quit debate, because it just wasn't doing anything for me anymore. What I miss from high school, the way Heather misses choir and theater, is Voices and Art Club. I miss getting together with friends and critiquing each others' work and eating good food, and I miss going to art museums with Sara, Rae, and Mr. Woodford in that stupid school van and eating pizza afterward. I'm glad I work in the slide library, because then I feel at least a little more connected to my major, even if I'm just organizing slides or doing something else really random.

I guess the only thing that I feel is out of order is myself, but that's just the usual quibbles with my own image that I and every other woman have had since time immemorial. I promise myself again and again, I'll either work on it or ignore it, but you know, it's not that easy to do either.

You know, I didn't have my mom buy me this Poet's Market book for nothing. Over break, I'm going to get some stuff together that Bridgford has already edited and send it out. It's time to start doing SOMETHING.