Loose Cans

I mean Whoa. Not like, "Whoa, little dogies!" I'm talking, like, "WHOA." The standing awestruck, senses shortcircuited by the gargantuan sublime.

I am, of course, talking about the sensation resultant of the contemplation of the massiveness of my incompetence with regard to Old English. It's huge. Gi-normous. Humongolous. The biggest thing ever. Jesus, man. Christ, I haven't bombed a test like that since I left 17 answers blank on my chem final in 10th grade. So it was three hours, with two essays to write and three passages to translate. I started with the essays, which had to be good because I knew full well--we were all feeling apocalyptic about this one, and rightly so--that I was not going to be able to get anywhere translating. Apparently, since the translation portion is only 25%, you can still flunk miserably and pass on the strength of your essays. This of course was the intent: pass so I never have to do it again. The essays were good enough, I think. The first was about the battle of Maldon, which I liked enough to care about, and whose main character, the tragic Byrhtnoth, will be made fun of in a paragraph or two. So that one was fairly strong. Then I wrote a stranger, but still well-focused essay on The Wanderer, Shelley's "Ozymandias" (fabulously relevant) and American roots music. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how. But I answered the question in both instances, so it's all good.

But then I had to choose. With a little under an hour to go, and the essays neatly wrapped up, I could either leave, without disgracing myself in the attempt to translate, and join everyone else presently walking out for a pint (those folks, I assume, hadn't even tried the translations. That or they'd memorized the English so well that they'd whipped them right off in ten minutes. Fuckers), or I could stay, try my best, and fail miserably. I opted for the latter.

And fail I did. Ho-lee shit. Whoo ha. Nothing like it, folks, the sense of unmitigated failure. I only even attempted one translation (although I wasn't the only one to do so; if anything, all of us blew it), and somehow shaped a paragraph about a funeral, prompted by what I thought was the word for "bier." Oh, I thought, it's Beowulf. I mean, it's in prose, and it's very very obviously Cynewulf and Cyneheard, but we English majors don't let silly things like evidence trip us up, no sir. It takes something so extravagant as my incompetence to do that.

Regardless, I forged onward, occasionally leaving out words, often despairing and rarely, but sometimes, getting something right, until I reached the end and saw the words "banan folgian noldon." I don't know what that means any more than you do. Okay, that's a lie--Noldon means they would not. But banan and folgian were and are mysteries. So I gave up. I wrote the following:

"...and they would never his banana eat with Folgers instant coffee because in the mornings that is exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to give you indigestion, and I should know, for you may be very sure that it is that what is being felt by me right now."

But it didn't end there. I composed a little note to the lecturer, because I find it extremely unfair that after approximately 28 hours of lessons, only about 10 of which have been devoted to the language itself, I am being asked to translate a quantity of poetry (of significant difficulty--this is fucking poetry!) that, in my level II Greek class, even at the end of the year, would have seemed ludicrously inordinate, and disproportionate to our skills. Furthermore, it's obvious to anyone that success on that portion of the exam is not a matter of familiarity with Old English, but familiarity with the translation into modern English, and the only way anyone studies for the exam is by memorizing that. I did that, too; problem was, my section didn't fucking come up. It's an exercise more suited to an acting class than a literature class. Of course I crossed it out before I got that far. I'm not that stupid. I blacked it out as best I could.

But don't worry: I'm not not-stupid enough not to do at least something good and stupid. So after editing the essays, I had ten minutes left, and you can't leave exams in the first or last half hours. So I wrote a limerick.

A little background before the American premiere of my limerick. In the Battle of Maldon, Byrhtnoth is the leader of the English. The Vikings are attacking, and they outnumber the English. The English are holding off the Vikings, who are trying to cross a causeway, by picking them off as they try to get over. It's going well for the English. The Vikings, ridiculously, complain that that's not cricket. The English, being English, say, Very well then, come on over and we'll fight you on the beaches, streets and dirty movie emporiums. So they allow the Vikings to cross and obviously are summarily slaughtered to a man. All done very heroically of course. Bryhtnoth goes pretty quick. My Maldon essay was all about the chutzpah of Byrhtnoth, and its usefulness. So now this limerick:

Byrhtnoth was bloody chutzpahdic:
He let the Vikings cross the crick,
And then he got stuck--
The meshuggener schmuck!--
With a half-dozen sharp pointy sticks.

Thank you, thank you. I'm on every night till Saturday, folks!

And in case they hadn't gotten the point, I drew a little stick figure at the bottom of the page and a word balloon that said, in big letters, "OY."

I realize that I was a little bitterer than I should have been towards my; I should amend the statements made about them to read that Stephen and Caitriona have been and continue to be fast friends, growing faster by the day, that they have rarely been anything but, and that it is only that perennial thorn in my side, Duncan, by whom I feel myself persecuted. Sadie furthermore is a sliver of silver in gray, and it's a terrible pity she's leaving. Motions are being made to try to pull me back on board for next year, so Halls and friends remain a possibility; the only impediment is Duncan, who for some reason is acting like Nero, wielding veto power over the opinion of what appears, for all intents and purposes, to be a strong majority. It's very strange: unless we're talking about housing, Duncan and I are perfectly friendly. I very much enjoy his company. But as soon as that subject comes up--and as he instigated the acrimony in the first place, by announcing his unwillingness to live with me back in February (which I did not and do not reciprocate), I take no blame for this--everything suddenly disintegrates. He acts like he's auditioning me for a part in his play. Jesus, man, you don't audition friends. You trust them. I don't know whether he's refusing to allow as how he might have made a mistake, or if he's just being spectacularly inconsiderate, or if he imagines I've done him some offense--which I never have, and furthermore, nothing I could do to him would exceed what he has done to me already, which is continually and coldly betray me at every turn--but I'm frankly stumped. We all are. Stephen has said he would have it out with Duncan, but time's ticking down, and he's not apt to want to talk about it during exam time. To which I can only say Tough shit. I'm leaving in a few days, I'm having exams, too, and I think I can safely say this situation is a little more fucking stressful for me, bucko. I don't, incidentally, care if he reads this; if he tries to veto me, he'll be hearing as much and more from me anyhow. If anything, he owes me. I've never been so poorly treated by a friend, never done so little to deserve it, and as I--and the rest of us--see it, he's got a lot of making up to do. And to let me in would do it. It'd heal all wounds and make all things peace. To do otherwise would just be to lose a friend forever. Someone who acts like that doesn't deserve friendship. And if he thinks this is friendship now, then honestly, I am amazed at his notion of the word. Yes, I'm strongarming. I have to; I won't be here soon. It's take me or leave me. His call.

I just want to stress that Stephen, Caitriona (whom some of you will likely meet this summer, as she'll be in the states) and, of course, Sadie, have been great. Misgivings were borne of misunderstandings. These are good people and good friends, I have no intention of losing any of them, and I have have told them all as much.

On another, happier note, I am suddenly elated to be coming home so soon. I just realized today, when I woke up and saw my walls bare, my closet empty, and my bags all but fully packed, with the books to be sold in a stack on my desk, as well as the glasses that we couldn't get into Dom's car safely, and which will have to go with Stephen or Caitriona. Packing is going smoothly. It's sunny and gorgeous, no wind at all, there's Ultimate tonight right down the road from me, my last session with these guys until September, I am utterly fucked for Old English tomorrow, just like everyone else, but so long as I don't fail, I don't give a damn, I have a steak for tonight and tomorrow, the liquor on my windowsill is being assiduously whittled away at--first the sweet vermouth disappeared, then the blue curacao, then the rum, then the brandy, till all I have left is some Beam, Bushmills, dry vermouth and Calvados--I leave in 70 hours and I am in a very, very good mood.

Christ does my room feel empty now. All the posters and pictures are off the wall, so I've neither your smiling faces nor the Blues Brothers' looking down at me. The New York subway and bus maps are gone, and the cabinet is totally empty. Dom and I just loaded all my stuff--winter clothes, duvet, pillows, pair of sheets, an overnight bag full of books, bags of papers and pictures and detergent, a squeezy pig, even my angostura bitters!--into his car, and he drove away into the sunset. What a mensch. I take back all the mean things I said about him.

Everything that doesn't go with Dom goes with Stephen in a few days. That is, the glasses, the pans, the slow cooker, the speakers, and the remaining sheets and blankets. And by a commodious vicus of recirculation--look through the archives; I haven't used that phrase once all year--it begins to end.

It's time to begin the "setdown secular phoenish."

Oy. And the sad thing is, I've totally had time to blog, I just have been too damn lazy to schlep over to this stupid computer room (now with only five computers, some of which, owing to their recent upgrade to Panther, are simply not working) and wait for a chance to get on a machine. Also I plead verbal exhaustion; four three-hour essays in seven subjects in six days is rather a lot; my prose of late has gone from the sober use of the word "quidditas" (it was entirely warranted, and not done to impress. I never use words to impress--I use idiom for that) to a description of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales, who is a greedy, capitalistic son of a bitch who tries to hawk his wares to the pilgrims even after he's told them how bogus they are, as "shillin' like a villain." And you know, I'd really promised myself I wouldn't.

There has been one success story amid the flurry of exams, though: the Poetry, for which I resolutely refused to study (of course, I did the same for Sin and Redemption and Literature and Sexualities, too--I just couldn't be arsed doing it), came off better than well--I figured out why I don't trust poetry. The question was, "All poetry is experimental poetry" (Stevens). Discuss. So I took poetry as Poetry, a an attempted and failed metanarrative (a system that justifies itself by its own internal logic, that is, to borrow from Yeats, "full; spherelike; single"--Law, Science, and Religion are metanarratives), showing its aspiration to and lack of canon, axiom and security--the three things I claim to be natural and integral to the existence of the metanarrative--implying the need to reduce this nebulous shadow of a system down to mini-narratives. To view the text as text, a carefully coordinated coincidence of signs--a more closed text, to be certain, but not a full, spherelike or single one, either.

Poetry we want to be a system, something which eternally refers to itself, but the fact is, it isn't. There is no self to refer back to, simply because Poetry with a capital P doesn't exist. A thing is only defined through syntagmatic and paradigmatic difference. We say what a thing is by saying what it's not. This is the only way to do this because the relationship between signifier (sound-image: "Tree") and signified (mental concept, tree) is wholly arbitrary. This is well-established and not something arguable, that a thing has no organic, stable meaning, and that instead meaning is conferred on it by a code. So anyway, no one can say what Poetry is, because everyone knows no one can say what it isn't. "This isn't Poetry" begets the rejoinder, "Why not?" And there, we're stumped.

Science, Law and Religion all have canon, axiom and security. A metanarrative has canon if the whole of that metanarrative's history is involved in the consideration of a present situation. Law, for instance, is built entirely on precedent. Any and all past cases are applicable. It is fundamentally canonical. Poetry, on the other hand, is not built on canon, but instead creates it to fill what it sees, correctly, as a void in the system. The problem is, the English literary canon is a castle on clouds, pure fancy. It's just dead white males. The literary canon, by casting about for poets to include, necessarily excludes, marginalizes and orientalizes. This is antithetical to the nature of canon, which is all-inclusive. The very existence of the Norton Anthology is enough to deny Poetry any kind of canon. Strike one.

Next, axiom. Any adolescent will tell you that Poetry doesn't have rules. Granted, he's a hack who writes hoary vers libre without any clue what he's doing, but he's right. It doesn't have rules. The problem is, to be a system, which Poetry, if it is to succeed, must necessarily be, Poetry has to have rules. But all our devices, techniques and attempts at definition ("poetry is the most condensed form of expression"--Pound) inevitably trip over their own untied shoelaces. We run into the ludicrous "prose poem," a literary halfway-house, or the visual poem or any of the myriad forms of experimental poetry that are being concocted in labs nowadays. I have said earlier that Poetry does not exist as a system (which means it literally doesn't exist). The proof of this is in the fact that a system, by definition, has axioms. Poetry has none; it exists only insofar as we hope it does, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Strike two.

Finally, security. This was engineered more for the exam, because I had to respond to the thing about experimentation. Also you gotta have to the trinity motif going. It has to do mostly with a scientist in her lab. She is secure because she has proofs and laws. Only human error is possible. Everything else is safe. She has only herself to control, and that is the definition of security. If she blows herself up, it's her own fault. But a poet has got no periodic table to tell him everything about every conceivable element of his poem. He has no system to refer to--but he thinks he does. He still considers Poetry as this great, self-justifying metanarrative, with canon and axiom, and that's why his work is doomed to fail. Poetry is, as said before, a nebulous shadow of a system. Counterfeit and worthless. All art, it is said, is about three things. Sex, death and art. It tries to refer back to itself. The problem is, there's no self to refer to. That's why it falls flat. The artist trusts in the existence of art because he hopes it exists, because he thinks that his work is worthless if the system to whose canon he is adding is all vapors and vacancy in the first place. What good is a poem if Poetry is nothing more than a fantasy? This has been what's kept me from writing all year. I've generated extremely little, and often stopped because I've felt this niggling conviction that art is fundamentally mendacious. Now I understand why. It is mendacious. It's a joke. But what's not a joke is the human ability to synthesize signs into something approximating meaning. This is, I think, what can renew any aspiration I ever had to "artistry." We need to stop seeing Poetry, and by extension, Art, as a metanarrative system, and instead take each text on its own terms. The word "Poetry" needs to be defenestrated, fucked out the window into the prickle bushes, and in its place, leave a void. Instead of metanarratives we need to appreciate the fracturing of modern life into mini-narratives. Nothing full, but fractured. Maybe now I can get some poetry written--oh, sorry, I mean felicitously-assembled signs. Cheers.

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I start packing today, incidentally. Tomorrow evening Dom's driving by after Ultimate so we can ferry my stuff up to the place he shares with his Mom in Whitehall. That's where I'm storing stuff over the summer. Also I have to start shopping for a room for next year. My friends have completely and utterly fucked me over, in an act that constitutes by far the most significant betrayal I have ever enjoyed, by all taking a flat together in Halls for next year (without mentioning to me their collective application--or including me in it--earlier in the year), and none of them have yet had the gumption to come forward to admit it to me, or talk to me about it. Sadie, who is sadly not coming back next year (I am inconsolable, but can't really blame her. I'm just absolutely devastated), had to tell me. I'm still angry. I can't decide whether to let it go and try to preserve whatever sinews of friendship haven't snapped (we still have fun, still get along), or have a big ol' confrontation. I see no real advantage to one or the other. Because I'm really fucking pissed. Plus it's a humongous hassle for next September.

Not to end this on a sorry note, though. I'm coming home on Saturday, meine lieblings, and I miss you all. I have never pined for my country quite so much. I am dying to see eight different kinds of peanut butter. Six more days, dearest Blair, six more days.

One more thing: there's a pickup Ultimate game that's getting started somewhere on the Upper West side, and it's shaping up nicely, but the guy needs people to join up so we can have at least full sevens. Bright Fish, I'm looking in your direction. Anyone who wants to play ultimate this summer (or knows people who do), meet chill new people and generally have a blast, let me know so I can tell this guy we got more coming.