The ground is covered with snow, or, where I currently reside, largely changed to mounds of ice, over which both pedestrian and vehicle must tread with trepidation. The music of these moments is halting, frequent mental invasions, the product of an unsteady mind — yet recovering. There is research to be done, but on what is not yet clear, nor is the path to doctorate, academic career made clear. Nothing is. The professor I met — the best local espresso — tells me today of those scholars who died penniless. Better to be rich, he tells me, only then can you be a scholar in the way you wish. Academic constrictions abound yes, but traversing these old pathways sometimes reveals pebbles not yet uncovered, and I have begun to delight again in these pathways and this uncovering, here and there a new taxon, an additional degree of complexity. No new thread binds perhaps, but one is led to question all past threads, and perhaps it is better to build ground up, one brick at a time, each first baked in the sun. Which was Babel, ground up or down, I wonder, then retreat from the thought, as if further consideration might sign a breach from many-tongued orthodoxy or perhaps the more frightful, a divine-claimed sonnet. Grammar fades. It is reclaimed.
Thus I puzzle over my approach to classical Chinese. I read, haltingly, a textbook on grammatical forms while recognizing that the forms often not apply, unsure of how better to proceed. Immersion is the only way, says the Classicist. Perhaps, but do we assume direct apprehension of the material — and what if descriptions differ, as seems often to be the case? So too with Japanese, which takes its fair share of time, I discover that one must love grammar to have any hope here, which comes, perhaps, at expense of history. These forms multiply, channeled and chiseled, as I am too, the poet between words and without any of his own, or, more often, offering the dribble from the not very deep, impressions without substance.
And yet what is the substantia in a sonnet, some heavenly hymn, some criticism, critique, and all the voices in cacophany, no longer bricks but blistering? Is this a holy house or, better, a strip mall of where word-brocades are sought with which to decorate our hollow frames, cheap and available.
Breath, breath deeply, I tell myself, you must forget these words. ‘Who am I?’ ‘Don’t know,’ the question and answer I ask and tell myself silently as I meditate in the morning, zabuton on the bed, half way to sleep, far from awakening. We are awake, we are here, and yet, never fully present. Oh to see a tree as I once did, warned from Rimbaud yet perhaps better to starve in solitude than accept rubber stamps from a minor functionary, or worse yet, become one of the accoladed.
I return to the legal code. So many pebbles; they should be in better piles.
