Hank Williams

Lord I think I'll get to ramblin'
Got to leave this lonesome town
This old place is way too lonesome
Since my sweet love ain't around.

Why did I take this writing class? People have said things way more poignantly than me. Maybe I should write about something I don't know about completely. A kid in my class says that contemporary writers write as though modernism never happened because of their emphasis on the confessional and their lack of radical experimentation. I would say that they've developed the runoff of the Beat/confessional aesthetic that could only have happened with modernism. It now has its own parameters (not capitalizing shit, free verse, incomplete sentences, attempts at LANGUAGE poetry...) things that aren't said but clearly known in poetry classes. The ruts of the literary world like the freaky ruts of the academic world. "God is dead." Okay. Helene Cixous, deconstruction, postcolonial theory with its references devolving into meaninglessness, the idea that truth is not possible without social context which ultimately empties out language, fear and focus on language in philosophy, multiculturalism and the attempt to look at history from several perspectives at the same time, attempts to resurface the "suppressed narratives" of women's, black, and minority history, all of which are juxtaposed against the demonized imperialising 19th century dead white man Enlightenment rationality bourgeois point of view. Before vs. the now that is better. A simplification that aims at dualism, something that theories that absolute truth or parameters of human nature are impossible spit on. Balzac vs. modernism which is better and truer vs. postmodernism which is better and truer. There is a blanket term for what deconstruction and ideas of multiple truths are aiming for, an abstract term for various things that human reason can't apply itself to, chaos. But I'm ignorant of various philosophical arguments and the stuff I try to diss. But it freaks me out to my very core. The professors that teach literary theory and contemporary philosophy come home to kiss their children and eat breakfast, the kids who are into it will still talk about boys. I trust that the lives we lead and the thoughts we have while doing daily shit often diverge from our theories. Oh well. I bitch and moan about this all the time.

People sometimes write very beautiful blogs, stories, memoirs, based on their experience and a genre that seems to be about small, keen powers of observation and sensation. I always think it's in the style of William Carlos Williams' "This is Just To Say." Really, I just get the same feeling from them. They kind of chill my skin. And they make me see things, even a girl playing footsy with a boy in a diner (a short story someone wrote in my high school), differently than I did before. Plus, it makes me ashamed that I haven't experienced life in this way. My sense of reality is so permeable. I decided I'm living under a bell jar. But it's more like yellow goop. There are many things I could do to change it. Like do my work. When I sort of get down into the feeling, I get a yellow emptiness in which there is nothing to say. There are many things I could be doing right. Using my time wisely, aka organizing my daily life. Saturn in Virgo style. Instead I talk my head off about trivial things and new feelings. For instance, now I can identify the feeling of missing someone from the pit of your stomach and wanting to share all types of activities with them. I talk the things I feel into the ground until they are entirely divorced from reality. As usual, my mind, body, heart, which are all connected, are all freaking out. My mind is mad that I don't do my work, trying to prove its own intelligence, yet is ignorant/not book smart, my heart is doing various things, and my body needs exercise. My mind has various grievances like the stuff above, but I don't know about any of it so I can't argue. I really am sick, sick of my own perspective, I thought I was lovesick (a novelty that I'm now throwing around insincerely), and I'm physically sick. I'll sit down to read and go do something else. Many people don't understand what I'm up to or how I manage to waste all of my time. The seniors smell like business and are never around, studying, hanging out with friends, doing the right things, and somehow are in solidarity with each other though I don't know about it. Asking them what they've been doing and whining to them about what I've been doing doesn't help. I need to find a way to catch up. Otherwise I'll be swimming in my feelings like I do in my poetry all the time, searching for something that can be good. I can't turn to anything I don't know, either, or even make it look like the poem isn't about me (write something about a guy in New Mexico, a witty poem about an orange, read Du Fu and imitate him). Of course I could read more, good poetry, good fiction, but then it would change my perspective and as usual, shame me that I haven't seen a thing like that before. And then I'll start to imitate it. Maybe I need to go away for a while. But that won't help either.

I just read over some of my high school poetry. I was so much clearer then. So much more idealistic.