inreaction

I, I still remember
How you looked
That afternoon
There was only you
You said “it’s just like a full moon”
Blood beats faster in our veins
We left our trousers by the canal
And our fingers, they almost touched

You should have asked me for it
I would have been brave
You should have asked me for it
How could I say no?
And our love could have soared
Over playgrounds and rooftops
Every park bench screams your name
I’d have gone whereever you wanted

(I still remember)
(I still remember)

And on that teachers’ training day
We wrote our names on every train
Laughed at the people off to work
So monochrome and so lukewarm
And I could see our days are becoming nights
I could feel your heartbeat across the grass
We should have run
I would go with you anywhere
I should have kissed you by the water

You should have asked me for it
I would have been brave
You should have asked me for it
How could I say no?
And our love could have soared
Over playgrounds and rooftops
Every park bench screams your name
I would let you if you asked me

I still remember

[bloc party]

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde

i guess that’s true. good thing i am not feeling poetic this night.

somewhere between making to do lists RE: call wells to discuss loan rate adjustment, paying thousand dollar bills that leave me with a couple hundred facing fivefold that and listening to Tim Russert’s memorial and family medical woes and elderly relative depression i felt really lost, really too-alive, too feeling for all this. while i feel guilty for typing all that i just did i do hope that seeing friends from home + anna tomorrow will break a bit of the malaise. i just need out. of all this.

i’ve been thinking lately of death. rather, not of death but of endings. it’d be foolish and too “natural” to say that this occured to me out of nowhere, i seem to be surrounded by those nearing death or having died lately and it’s been wearing on me. seems as though if not family members passing then family members being memorialized, and tv is no break. seems as though just yesterday peter jennings passed a few weeks (days?) after raspy-voicing a goodbye. is there any other way we should wish to say goodbye after all?

but of endings. tim russert signals to many another ending, an end to honest broadcast journalism, though such people are always much more lauded posthumously than when among us. with jennings, the retirement of the brokaw’s and the rathers and the cronkites–what are we left with? anderson cooper? this doesn’t seem too sad but i’m speaking of the death of an industry–journalism is blending into entertainment. “the paper” is a dying thing–had i stuck with print journalism i couldn’t imagine having a career past 30 with the way the industry is decaying.

gone too, are other eras of importance. tv and film have firmly replaced literature as culture–even an english professor from times past wouldn’t spare me this truth. it’s why the study of the english language and its literature is really a study of history–contemporary literature is not the mover that it once was. gone are the hardy’s, the yeats’, the wildes. “what made us dream that [they] could comb grey hair?”

it’s odd and slightly ridiculous to say that i feel this sort of lack in the way that i feel the void left by russert’s death. how many more times will we hear “he was a man of princple of the old model” at a funeral before we realize no such men still exist? how many times will an artist be eulogized with allusions to the lore of poets of yore before we realize we have nothing to read anymore?

or have we, and have we realized we do not care? what then, am i to do with my life, and with it’s continued yearning to put pen to paper and narrate the thoughts of this jumbled head with feigned order and eloquence?

For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

though alex’s comment may have taken some steam out of my intentions, i’d have to say that i’ve been anticipating this post for some time. there’s just a few problems with it that i’m not sure i can sort out.

i don’t have much of a burning desire to rehash the year (at least not to any extent as that which characterized my end-of-last-year delirium. i was really sad then, to move home, away from all that a college experience spoils young people with, but writing seemed right. i’m a bit down now, but for mostly different (opposite?) reasons, and writing feels foreign–a sort of double death i don’t really know how to react to (other than to write).

i’m tempted to open the “harpers book of quotations” that i just picked up along with white and strunk’s new, illustrated “elements of style,” but i find that to be a strikingly disingenuous thing to do at the moment. to hide in wilde words, sidney-ian adorations or even hardy nothings would be easy, and yet still quite unproductive.

so let’s just get this over with.

this year was great in many ways. i became much more involved, wrote a column essentially every week of the school year (and some over last summer), diversified my friendships, improved my academics, grew inspired by my major, had better rooming conditions, did laundry regularly, bathed and shaved when i deemed fit, stayed in love, and made my own decisions regarding my summer plans.

but lists can be extremely deceptive, for with each added item to a list, every item contained in said list grows burdened. through increased involvement, i inadvertently distanced myself from some, not catching up from where i left off last year with certain friends until the end of the year, if that. through deciding my own summer plans, i endangered my finances to the extreme and a bit further, and find myself away from many whom i thought i would stay with–or at least didn’t think i would be as far from.

distance is also deceptive–in some ways it’s tantamount to all other causes of concern, in others it’s a welcome sort of sick experiment, a test of all tests. [that is, if one is to imagine one's life as important, warranting of tests.] but as i crossed two county lines in a commute to continued training, distance felt far more visceral than i imagined it. my foot weighed heavy on the pedal, but my mind was thinking of other distances i could not easily cross–african distances, iranian distances. i’ve been pensive with thoughts of identity lately. identity. purpose. hogwash.

it’s different though. is it not? after all, we are halfway through what is to be formative. halfway through the story of an academic pursuit that is becoming more and more of a means than an ends, halfway through surrounding oneself with those we choose, and those who choose us. two times today and we will, after all, be on different paths. just yesterday i expressed my intent to graduate and work in london for a year or two before returning for law school. law school? is that even a return? who do i know that will be at the same law school as me? who won’t be a year into med school, directing cloverfield knockoffs, growing coffee in guatemala, or teaching math/being a civil engineer? maybe i’ll pick up an accent, if only to justify the sense of exclusion and separation that will surely accompany the adventures we will embark upon two years minus two days from this moment.

can you wait?

and yes, it can’t be all that bad.