Busyness, Love, Hate, Dark, Light

Tuesday, March 1, 2011
11:00PM

Just turned on Regina Spektor on the Pandora radio.
I'm glad tomorrow is Wednesday. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are my hardest days of the week, although I think... from here on out 'til the end of the semester, including spring break, it is going to be pretty much non-stop. It's like I've told those close to me... it's not that I mind the work. I'm a hard worker. The part that bothers me is the need to turn off so many other parts of myself in the meantime. Constantly I have "Ants Marching" playing in my head, and I think of how it's true, and I remember a time when there was so much art and music in my life, when we played that song together. And we were good, and we knew how to use four mallets at one time. And we knew people weren't buying tickets to support the community kids. We were something to see and hear. I listen to classical music as I grade papers. "Please watch your handwriting." "Please follow directions." "Use accent marks when appropriate." "Where is the other half of your assignment?" My hands write these words again and again, but as the pre-recorded sound of a bow pulling across the strings of a violin plays in my ears, my heart gets pulled along that string. I want to write a poem. I want to play the piano. I want to do anything but sit in this fucking office, trying to behave appropriately. I used to sit in Mass, imagine spontaneously jumping out of the pew and turning 1, 2, 10 back handsprings up the aisle to where the priest was consecrating the host. Would they think I was possessed? Would they yell at me or pray for me? Certainly they wouldn't encourage me. How do we decide that we should let the life be choked out of us, that we should choke it out of ourselves? We talked about Las batallas en el desierto hoy en clase. One of my classmates mentioned that the protagonist "unlearned" things. Yes. Unlearned how to love. "El amor es una enfermedad en un mundo donde lo único natural es el odio." We do this to ourselves, too, place limits on our love, how much, whom, how many times before we give up. In the best case scenario, we learn to love with limits, but often we learn hate. I wonder about hate, how we arrive at it. I suppose it's just because we've been told so many times that our own care and desire to reach out are wrong. So we shut ourselves off, and that feels unnatural, creates dissonance. So how do we deal with dissonance? Most of us can't live with it, so we eliminate it, perhaps by coming around to the opposite point of view, learning to hate what we're not allowed to love. By hate here, I don't mean the need to go out and beat someone and scream insults at them. That's better. There are much more creative, more damaging ways to hate.
Anyway...
I sent my docs to Spain today. I nervously await a response. Intuition tells me it won't be, but we'll see, and at least it won't be for lack of trying.
I should be reading. I've read so much today. Over a hundred pages. In Spanish. My head is tired.
Spring is coming, encroaching on winter. Don't we usually say it the other way around? We think, the cold is what we'd resist, not the warmth. But cold cannot come to us. Only heat can move, because heat is energy. Cold is only its absence. Spring is threatening our apathy, and it's time to get up.
I've been thinking about darkness. The Speed of Dark has forever changed my way of thinking about the topic of darkness. Darkness is beautiful, necessary, fast. Dark is there before the light, so if light is fast, darkness is faster. Things grow in darkness, seeds, thoughts, fetuses. I don't know that it's about lightness coming into the darkness so much as it is about one having had sufficient time in darkness, without stimulation, to come back out into the light.
And every day I walk into Hodges, I see the perennials (I think they'll be daffodils or tulips) pushing up further and further through the gravel. Some buds are finally on. I think they'll burst into flowers soon. The warmth encroached on the cold, forced a growth, but these flowers, they've had enough time under ground. They're ready to come into the light.
I think it's important that we honor our darkness, not push ourselves into activity and false joy before we're ready. Sometimes one needs isolation, solitude, to grow alone. Seeds don't grow together. Fetuses don't grow together. External influences encourage growth, but in the end, growth is individual, and we need to stay in the darkness for as long as we want. Go ahead. Draw the blinds. Turn down the lights. Crawl in your bed, and just... wait.