Goodnight to James Salter, who said 'Let's get back to business, you and I.'

Lahiri said he taught her to insist upon the right words. Some of his passages had wings fluttering in my aching throat. I don't have much to add; others of my friends knew him far better. But I loved his writing, and so I loved him. And I hope if there's anything that comes after, in any form, that it is as beautiful as his sentences.

'We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, they disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for the winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.' --from the opening to Light Years, and to which I know I will return my whole life

Some notes on pain

I was born with a predisposition, maybe. The recipe for it carried like a stowaway in the secret, destructive chemistry of my brain. When I was sick, I beat a retreat from the world. Coming back, even partway, has been hard. It's been easier to live in the body's pain than the mind's--than the world's.

How much should a person walk their interior or travel society's prism of triggers. Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory says we lay down proteins every time we revisit a memory, building it and making it stronger. So with each new remembered and revisited thought, a different future emerges based on how, in the present, we remember the past.

Anyhow, below is some of what struck a deep chord within me today, what I revisited, and what is becoming now part of my physiology:

• I watched Montage of Heck twice. I took notes. Novoselic talking about Cobain's sensitivity to humiliation. Love modifying, in terms of romance, how sensitive he was to betrayal. I took notes on Morgen's interviews and talks. On the reviews and comment threads.

• 'And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.' (from Sylvia Plath's  unabridged diaries)

• 'If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world as one is driven by loneliness and and silence from the habitable world.' (from Virginia Woolf's diary)

• ' [. . .] it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning [ . . . ] its skies and space, its own planetary system, without thinking that one may become homeless in the world, and bankrupt, abandoned [ . . .]' (from Janet Frame's 3-part autobiography)

I took a call from my father earlier. He said: 'Plumb the depths of your despondency and despair. There's a floor; you just haven't found it yet. You're elastic. When you do, you'll come back.'

I'm afraid there's no floor. ('One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got 'em is there ain't no bottom, there ain't no end,' sings Emmylou Harris.) It's a vast and bottomless sea. And no amount of elasticity, of pull or determination, can get you back when you've gone too far.

There's one more, from David Foster Wallace, below.

What destinies we could have, if everyone were kinder to one another, to themselves.

Kurt Cobain

via Rolling Stone

Sylvia Plath

Virginia Woolf

Janet Frame

DFW

via Patrick Arden

• The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” (DFW)

Up late with John Yau's Borrowed Love Poems

My mind is restless and sluggish as this slow-moving storm. I've been trying to edit an essay, turning over and over a line Woolf jotted down in her diary. Pacing inside that one sentence for over a week, I realized I had misunderstood it. But I need time to fix my mistake, so I'm sleepless, listening to the rain, the tree limbs fall, the transformers blow, and smashing myself against these lines. Read them yourself and feel the flutter of your fragile heart.

Borrowed Love Poems

1.

What can I do, I have dreamed of you so much

What can I do, lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that all

the doors and windows are open

I will whisper this in your ear

as if it were a rough draft

something I have scribbled on a napkin

I have dreamed of you so much

there is no time left to write

no time left on the sundial

for my shadow to fall back to the earth

lost as I am in the sky

2.

What can I do all the years that we talked

and I was afraid to want more

What can I do, now that these hours

belong neither to you nor me

Lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that I cannot find

the words I need

when your hair is mine

now that there is no time to sleep

now that your name is not enough

3.

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth

and the color of robbery is in the air

Now that I dream of you so much

my lips are like clouds

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep

Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

What can I do, if one of us is lying on earth

and the other is lost in the sky

4.

What can I do, lost as I am in the wind

and lightning that surrounds you

What can I do, now that my tears

are rising toward the sky

only to fall back

into the sea again

What can I do, now that the sky

has shut its iron door

and bolted clouds

to the back of the moon

now that the wind

has diverted the ocean's attention

now thata red meteor

has plunged into the lake

now that I am awake

now that you have closed the book

6.

Now that the sky is green

and the air is red with rain

I never stood in

the shadow of the pyramids

I never walked from village to village

in search of fragments

that had fallen to earth in another age

What can I do, now that we have collided

on a cloudless night

and sparks rise

from the bottom of a thousand lakes

7.

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach

teeming with words

and the clouds are growing thick

with sour milk

What can I do, now that the fat black sea

is seething

Now that I have refused to return

my borrowed dust to the butterflies

their wings full of yellow flour

8.

What can I do, I never believed happiness

could be premeditated

What can I do, now that I have sent you

a necklace full of dead dried bees

and now that I want to

be like the necklace

and turn flowers into red candles

pouring from the sun

9.

What can I do, now that I have spent my life

studying the physics of good-bye

every velocity and particle in all the waves

undulating through the relapse of a moment's fission

now that I must surrender this violin

to the sea's foaming black tongue

now that January is almost here

and I have started celebrating a completely different life

10.

Now that the seven wonders of the night

have been stolen by history

Now that the sky is lost and the stars

have slipped into a book

Now that the moon is boiling

like the blood where it swims

Now that there are no blossoms left

to glue to the sky

What can I do,

I who never invented anything

and who dreamed of you so much

I was amazed to discover

the claw marks of those

who preceded us across this burning floor

*John Yau's collection by the same name (Borrowed Love Poems) can and should be purchased. We are all found in every line.

After Sarah Messer

The first writer to talk extensively with me about literary constraints, particularly those derived of the French OuLiPo movement, was the exquisite poet Sarah Messer. Before she left academia to become a cheese maker in Ann Arbor, Sarah was my professor. And mentor. And dear, dear friend.

In the past week, I've had two groups of students work with lipograms. First in a Master Class for the Southern Humanities Review in Alabama, and then with my undergraduates back home in North Carolina. I wish it were possible to present you with the results from that class in Auburn, especially since the only text I had with me was my novella (which, torn up, gave everyone in the room something to recast), and especially because so many of their lipograms were startlingly beautiful--far more interesting and lyric than my original sentences.

What I do happily have, however, is the result of a recent exercise wherein a group of brilliant undergraduates divvied up the lines of Sarah's "Prayer from a Mouse" and rewrote them under the constraints of a classic lipogram. Which is to say that students were to rewrite their assigned lines with language that did not include a single use of the letter 'e.'

Below is Sarah's "Prayer from a Mouse," which I happen to reread every week. Beside it is the version my students created on the fly. With great thanks to Sarah for teaching me, so I could teach them.

“Prayer from a Mouse

Dimensionless One, can you hear me?
Me with the moon ears, caught
in ice branches?

Beneath the sky’s long house,
beneath the old snake tree,
I pray to see even a fragment
of you—
whiskers ticking

a deserted street,
a staircase leading
to the balcony
of your collarbone.

Beloved King of Stars, I cannot
contain my animal movements.

For you I stay like a mountain.
For you I stay like a straight pin.

But in the end, the body leaves us
its empty building.

Midnight petulant
as a root cellar. Wasps crawling
in sleeves. I sleep

with my tail over
my face, enflamed.

Oh Great Cataloguer
of Snow Leaves, I pray
that you may appear
and carry every piece
of my fur in your hands.”

“Worship from a Timid, Gray Thing

You of Unworldly Body, can this all find you?
I with small, round radars, caught
in cracking limbs?

A cloudy roof on top,
and a winding poison plant,
I pray if to look upon only parts
of you—
fur ticking

a lost highway,
a stairway guiding
us to a balcony
of your collar’s cliffs.

Darling King of Stars, I cannot
contain my animal actions.

For you I, as a mountain.
For you I, as a straight pin.

But in finishing, our body gifts us
its worn out building.

Midnight childish
as a root in ground. Wasps crawling
in hulls. I nap

with my tail masking
my shy snout, burning.

Oh Amazing God
of Snow Buds, I pray
that you may abound
and carry all locks
of my fur in your hands.”

My Gift to You

John Jeremiah Sullivan was the first to tell me about Bolaño. John said, 'The Savage Detectives, go get it.' Later that afternoon, I was told by a dozen bookstores that no such title existed, which is the problem with having friends who get ARCs of everything. 

I had lunch with John and our friend Joel the other day. Joel made soup; John made biscuits. The light was fine and white and wintry. I owe my career to John, a fact of which I was reminded sitting there in his immaculate kitchen.

Afterwards, I came home and looked up this poem, knowing I wouldn't be aware of its author, nor of a certain slant on its reading, without my friend.

'My Gift to You'

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
if only just a little.

--Roberto Bolaño