Human Beans

O dear, the passage of time. We're approaching the final week of the semester. I can't walk outside without snow falling on my head like starlings shatting on the roof. I also can't bring myself to grade this pile of papers - sometimes retarded and occasionally brilliant brain children about Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Dante, and Boccaccio. Instead, Eddie and I cuddle on the couch and play trivial pursuit.

Bad Romance

When I'm not studying for my comprehensive exams, I'm watching Lady Gaga videos.  I love this one so much it makes my heart hurt.

Or, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.

When I was a wee Meglet, I collected stickers with such tabulating rigor that I would spend hours every week counting each individual sticker on every single sheet.  You can still see records of my weekly tabulations if you flip through my album.

Now that I'm a full grown Meghan, I lie in bed at night adding up the number of pages I need to read, and how many hours/days it will take to read them.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

-T.S. Eliot

 

Back-up plan

I've suddenly realized that I flippin' love Lady Gaga.  If I fail as a literary scholar, I'll become her instead.  I mean, she falls off a balcony and then does a riveting dance number in which she makes elegantly paroxysmal use of broken limbs and crutches!

Battleship Comparative Literature, the Musical

So. I’m in the final stretch of reading for my comprehensive exams. I’ve calculated that I need to read/review 1.2 books a day if I want to feel a bit less shaky for the test. My daily cycle has grown increasingly perverse, meaning I’m now reading until 4 or 5 in the morning, sleeping at least until 11, and work all those waking hours in between. When I can keep at bay the sense of nauseating fakery that accompanies trying to master one hundred texts, I sometimes feel amazingly happy and even high, like I’ve entered some otherworldly textual universe, literally so. Traipsing between lines on the page. And then there are times when doubt consumes me, and I can’t read without thinking about all the other things I should also be reading, or all the things I’ve already read but can’t clearly remember, and then I panic because I just can’t read one hundred books at the same time. My god, is that too much to ask!?!?

There’s this thing that I do when I get anxious about my exams. I picture myself in an Eisenstein montage, something akin to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. My situation parallels quite nicely with this scene. In Potemkin, the good proletariat people gather to stand up for what’s right, and then they’re fucking gunned down by a bunch of imperial bastards; then, there’s me, carefully reading and lovingly penning notes, only to be bushwacked by a wave of doubt. A baby carriage rolls down the steps! My pile of books tumbles off my desk! Close-up shot of pistols aimed at the crowd! Close-up shot of unchecked “to do” list! The bourgeoisie laugh maniacally and stab innocent workers with their parasols! My committee members snarl at my glib and banal answers and tell me to find work in the “real world!” (gah!) Bespectacled man is shot in the flippin eye! Mark’s scorn tears out my heart! A baby falls to her death! David always already eats my brainchildren!

I don’t really have a montage for the good days. I’ve tried to imagine myself reading and taking notes to “Eye of the Tiger” playing in the background, but it’s just too silly, even for me. Plus, hasn’t that been done to death before?

(Honestly, what I really want to do is write a Broadway musical about studying for comprehensive exams in comparative literature. Picture me sitting at my desk, surrounded by piles of books. Notes and schedules taped all over my walls. And then I start to sing, fast and furious tempo: “I’m reading this book, I’m reading this book, in Russian today, I’m reading this book. Sometimes, I read, in EEEEEENGLIIIIIIIISH! Sometimes, I fake my way through FREEEEEEEENCH! I’m reading this book, I’m reading this book …” And so on. The thing is, while this may not be wildly popular among the masses, it’s going to so lovingly appeal to a certain neurotic niche of graduate students, academics, and their ilk that it WILL succeed. I know it.)

Anyway, there have been more good days than bad days. And I have to give Eddie some credit for this, and here’s where this gets all sappy and shit, and if you’re like me normally, you may just want to skip this part. I call him up every day and he listens, enthusiastically even, as I talk to him about my READING! He even lets me read him passages out of books, and then explicate what I like about them. Seriously. Every day he listens to this, and engages in my reading, asking questions and offering up his own thoughts. He is wonderful (and intelligent and funny and handsome and quirky and caring and opinionated and quick-witted). And he’s mine, ha ha!

I hope that in the years from now when I remember what it was like to study for comps, I’ll also remember our daily telephone conversations, and how really good they were.

RIP; or, Golden Slumbers

Indulgent disclaimer: that death grants meaning to life is almost too clichéd a philosophical concept that I find myself mouthing inaudible “Acks!” [a la Alyssa] whenever I begin to ruminate those partially digested morsels of the idea. Nonetheless, these days I scroll the obituary page of the nytimes, precisely to cannibalistically sample those savory souls whose fates have been crystallized by death. Yesterday, read about: “Elinor Gordon, Dealer in Chinese Porcelain, Dies at 91,” “Gerald Gardner, 83, Dies; Bolstered Sex Bias Suit,” “Alan G. Davenport, Noted Wind Engineer, Dies at 76,” “Edna Tarbutton, Girls Basketball Coach, Dies at 87,” and “Lionel Casson, Who Wrote of Ancient Maritime History, Dies at 94.”

I’m reminded of a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”:

The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

Chekhov and Suffering

And then, why stop people dying if death is every man's normal, regular end? Who cares if some huckster or bureaucrat survives an extra five or ten years? And then again, if one sees medicine's function as relieving pain with drugs the question naturally arises why pain should be relieved. Firstly, suffering is said to bring man nearer to perfection. And, secondly, if mankind should really learn to relieve its sufferings with pills and drops it would completely turn its back on religion and philosophy which have hitherto furnished a bulwark against all manner of ills, and have even brought happiness too. Pushkin suffered terribly before he died, and poor Heine lay paralyzed for several years. So why should an Andrew Yefimovich or Matryona Savishna be spared pain when they lead such blank lives: lives that would be utterly void and amoeba-like but for these sufferings?

Depressed by such considerations, Dr. Ragin let things slide and ceased to attend hospital every day.

--Anton Chekhov, "Ward Number Six" (Translated by Ronald Hingley)

Yeah, so want to know what Chekhov does to smarty-pants Dr. Ragin?  He puts his highly romanticized and philosophical ideas to the test, and forces the old doctor to really experience suffering - unrelieved boredom, alienation, imprisonment, poverty, physical pain, madness.  He locks him in a ward for the insane, punches him in the face, forces him to pace back and forth, and then kills him.  And his romantic ideas about suffering?  They give him no comfort at all.

Because isn't there something alluring and soothing about being amoeba-like?  About being oceanic, not even knowing your own borders and moreover not even caring?  What really sickens me is the ways that pain is fetishized or glorified:  no pain no gain; it is better to have loved and lost than have never loved at all; suffering is existence.  Ok, these cliches may ring true, but as Chekhov shows, they crumble away once you're thrown to the dogs.  

Death by Excursion

For Leah.

Example One (Mosfilm):

Our guide, talking through a shoddy microphone that makes her nearly impossible to understand, scurries us through an exhibition of old set designs from various Russian movies so that we can see Mosfilm's so-called prized possession: a wooden carving of a monkey.  She tells us, excitement visible on her face, "Look at this little wooden monkey!  One of our directors carved this himself!  See what talented people work at Mosfilm!"

Example Two (Valaam):

After a long drawn-out summary of nearly the entirety of Russian history, and still far away from the monastery (the main attraction),  she stops in front of a group of stray cats and says, "See what dear cats we have here on Valaam.  They are so sweet.  You may pet them, you may stroke them..."  At this point, Leah and I decide to leave the group and continue on our own.  The only other option is to grab one of those kittens and use their claws to scratch out our eardrums.

Happening Fantasy

Tell me your secrets, she says.  After a quiet pause, he replies you should already know; you've always been my double.  She looks at him and he sees herself.  It's really the most beautiful moment you could ever hope for, one that you would always keep close by but rarely unpack, only on those sacred occasions of visceral, crushing loneliness.

They gaze at each other so very lovingly, and then they realize that they are a Janus-faced dinosaur.  Ta da!

Happening Soundtrack

I'm listening to Berstein's "The Magnificent Seven" as a group of skateboarders descend down the hill toward me. Maybe my music affects them? Do you think they glimpse themselves transposed over cowboys rounding up cattle on the open range?

Another reminder

Literature implicitly tells us that there's a huge amount of fiction in all our experiences, and that we can't understand experience divorced of fictions; it remains skeptical toward its own truth value; it doesn't try to sidestep the illusion that is inherent in all experience and existence.  

Literature doesn't pretend to be true, and this is exactly why it matters.

Catalogue of Gestures

I'm thinking of assigning certain gestures different signs, either in the form of letters or symbols. Putting on sunglasses makes one end of a parenthetical aside; gently setting apples in one's shopping basket traces a Russian "Zh"- Ж; flipping spaghetti in the colander stirs up g-clefs; wrapping one's wet hair in a towel evokes @. I may dub this "gestural mania," although I'm hesitant to do so because the word "gestural" tumbles out of my mouth along a sideways "S," reminiscent of the way I articulate "gastronomical."

Happening Hannaford

While in the grocery store, I turn to you and say, “It’s just like we’re shopping together.”

Happening White Noise

I walk to the aisle with ice cream and other frozen novelties, pick out a pint after half-hearted deliberation, and then shut the freezer door. The overhead speakers begin to play Sinead O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares to You,” and I find myself, almost sleep-walkingly, slowly strolling up and down the aisles so that I can stall my move to the cashier and hear the rest of the song. I barely notice what products are lined up on the shelves around me; instead, as I weave in and out of the aisles, the music’s volume correspondingly getting softer and louder depending on my constantly shifting proximity to the speakers, the products become a blur of colors and shapes and sizes, a sort of kaleidoscopic image, or kitschy mosaic. When the song ends, all those bottles and boxes fall back into their neat rows. I remember the ice cream in my hands and head to the front to pay.

Happening à la Nietzsche

I'm in a room with two strangers.  A masked man comes in, shoots the stranger to my right in the leg, turns and shoots the stranger to my left, then points his gun at me.  I think, this is it, and it's really going to hurt.  He shoots me in the head, then in the stomach.  I fall over and feel the blood pooling out of my head, gushing out of my stomach.  Then, the two strangers with wounded legs pick me up and follow the masked man to a surgical table where together, the three of them take out the bullets and sew me back up.  They sew me up in such a way that all of my senses are magnified:  I can perfectly see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world.

My senses are too perfect that they paralyze me.  I'm crippled by the truth of things, by the countless pigments of brown in the carpet, or the infinite smells that caress my nose.  It's like I'm Funes from Borges's story, or trapped in Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense."  So I tell my surgeons, you must change me back, I can't live like this.  They agree, but warn that the surgery will take two hours.  I wake up.  I look at my clock; it's 6 in the morning.  And I think to myself, No, I must go back to sleep and have this surgery.  I wake up exactly two hours later, my senses restored to there former dull state.