For Perspective

                                                                                                February 22, 2007 7:00 p.m.

So much happens so quickly.  7:00 p.m. exactly and the train pulls out of the station.  Nothing like that feeling.  I dare you to find another like it.  Those first moments trying to decide if it’s your train or a train near you moving.  Physicists call that a frame reference, all I know is that the motion of a train is something unique, pulling out of its subterranean tunnel, let’s leave Freud out of it for once as we pass by the skyscrapers of Chicago.  My how Freud does get around.  I cry reading Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode.”  Since I am memorizing it for a final it means I’m doing a lot crying.  And as I write this, that same feeling wells up inside me again.   The tension in the throat, those tingling feelings in the eyes as the train passes over a river, the lights on the shore reflecting in the water, so many moons.  It feels so strange somehow not to be writing for an assignment.  I never write unless I’m miserable…a bad English major.  Reading Joyce I want to create.  To string together words and turn the world on its head.  Too much Joyce however, and even the Old Church Slavonic grammar begins to look appealing.  In case you’ve never read OCS trust me, it’s hard to make it look appealing.  Word doesn’t like my sentences, guilt for every contraction I use “informal style”.  I leave for Athens on the 22nd of March.  This weekend my last sojourn to St. Louis until August.  I’ve never seen a train this empty.  The way I feel now I might enjoy conversation.  My phone battery is dead, no outlet (forgive the pun).  Discovering Regina Spector—I’ve been playing her songs in endless lovely succession.  I should work, but I may sleep.  The little pencil at the bottom of the screen rushing back and forth, distracting.  And when I pause it reminds me about all of my errors with a red X.  Perhaps that’s why I don’t stop; it’s so much easier to avoid that red X as long as you keep going.  But no one knows what is coming (a present active participle in OCS—languages without a future tense make me think), why should I be different.  I do know that my life will never be the same.  6 months in Europe, and graduate school?  I thought I was done with forms and personal statements but they begin to loom again.  The advent of free time…what is that like?  Hopefully I’ll be able to write in Athens, and I promise pictures.  Listening to music I stole from an ex.  I submitted that poem to our school’s literary magazine, you’d be amazed how awful some of the poems submitted were, and this the U of C.  I need to grow up, but I want to stop growing older.  The nostalgia of the poetic image—de Man.  Approaching the ontological status of the object.  Am I too young to be nostalgic?  It might be time to start me work, but I will probably sleep. 

                                                                                                February 25, 2007 4:35 a.m.

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (“Ode” 202-206)

By night the train slinks slowly out of the city.  I watch my hands type quickly reflected in the window.  A beautiful black night illuminated by so many points of light.

When I return to leave again I will be ready.