synchronicity plays more than nice

First: it must be acknowledged that the flowers are out of control. The lilacs on C.’s block that we tour –and flower bunches we huff- at night (because the bushes are in the neighbors yard); they have peaked. the azelas in the front yard. They are feeling it. the bees.the hover. the notion. the flower. they are photogenic in kitchen light at sunset. you’d be at risk of falling in love with whomever happens to be in the same room, and for only that alone.

before I was lying when I said it was spring. now I’m for sure on it. like for authenticated real.


kurt knows the water like a pig knows pork

… .... ..... ...... ......... .........

and Flashback:
After my post about interesting jobs and the job search quite some time ago, Maggie wrote to me, in complete agreement about the conundrum of the hum-drum of the particular worry that goes into believing you might get an academic job, much less one that actually suits you. She knew well the game of it, it was like commenting on a basketball playoff we’d both been watching on TV the night before. yeah man, the job search sucks eggs.

that was the beginning of months of obsessing over cover letters, teaching statements, and whatever of the rest. and then some trips. some interviews. a lot of questions, a lot of smiling from the joy of curiosity. a lot of smiling other times because it is the Right Thing to Do. we all want to be friendly. sometimes moreso if they are considering hiring you (though sometimes, and conspicuously, not)

and for all that I can tell you this: I am moving to the Third Coast.
the Windy City. the kielbasa capital of the US of A.

... ...
Last Thursday at 3:15 pm exactly, Maggie was to come by the house. and then to a Gamalen concert in Chapel Hill. Why gamelan? because it is like listening to the voice of god in the your cupped hand. because it’s thin bronze and wooden tones make any reasonable person want to be unreasonable. all reasons are shot to hell. your ears are filled with the narcotic singing of Indonesian xylophones.



at exactly 3:15 I was half-way through a long week of thinking I might know something, while in fact knowing nothing. People were supposed to get back to me with Information. About if they thought I taught about apoptosis well, or made ants seem charming, and all of those sort of things.

at 3:15 my phone rings. the ring that tells me I have a message. and it is B. and she says: “we want to offer you a job!” and I flip my little lid. it is even one of those zip-lock kinds, but it doesn’t matter. this is good. and then Maggie steps to the porch, and wondering what kind of strange oracle-life she’s acting out, delivering on the air of her arrival very good news.

that I got the very work I wanted. that I had waited 7 months to hear about. and no one could understand more that meant than she, I’m thinking.

I’m also thinking about synchronicity, and this kind of it. about how it tastes at moments like an olive in your mouth- kind of slippery and pungent, and making you want to bite down. I will get to teach artists about biology. and how does that rock?

it completely rocks. it’s like a big, shiny pile of rubble, all fossils and jade.

and we went to gamelan. and had a beer on Franklin St. A margarita too. all those spacey sounds ping-ponged through our heads. mint on the tongue. blue-green on the eyes. a warm egg in your chest.
the good moments are better than best.

p o l l e n g a m e s

everything is now covered in a fine yellow skin.
the rain washed a lot away, but that only means the pollen is piling in the corners of drain paths, creating strange paisleys at the corner of your eye.

I saw one of the one-in-a-billion pollen grains that will contribute its DNA to the next generation of lovely and tall southern pine. it was on the go, flowing through the air, things to do.

And one thing you could do is assiduously collect pollen every spring for years on end. and then use it as a kind of bright and vibrating paint, like a certain German named Wolfgang.

Most of my friends do what may make the most sense, and simply sneeze.
it is just that kind of season.

now as then

sea kayaking. a visit with C. to Nim & Phillip on the coast. ping-pong is a religious duty. longboards that let you carve skate-wheel lines to the liquor store at night. and the Atlantic coast, it just wakes you up from oversleeping.





this is all two weeks ago now. and is it not a matter of Great Wonder that jet fuel is the magic carpet of our century \\ to carry you from Carolina sea-salt to the middle of the desert by the day next? it is no exaggerating to say the air is full of grapefruit in Arizona.

There, the flowers are almost neon,



and the neon, well its almost something else altogether.



Talking, smiling, seeing if the desert is a place you could work and live. and also by chance the chance to see friends after two years time. B. lives here. and yes, ants are everywhere, but if you are committed to your trade, you do experiments in your extra bedroom like B. And how incredible is that.



dear Ehab happened to just be down from Canada and in the desert the very same days as me. those things happen by happenstance, but about as often as never.



…
A few days after that, and jet fuel can make a visit to Chicago for the third and fourth times in a month a matter of reality . By now I can walk through O’Hare with eyes closed and ears plugged and still find my way to the CTA station, Blue line. The light is still playing funny inside the tight crowds of building, and the lake water turns kinds of blue that you’ve considered in dreams you’ve forgotten. but only dreams, and only what you can’t find it in yourself to remember.



<<<>>>

B.w. sent me some Franz Wright poems the other day, the last part of one which quietly read (and in a very small font):

but how
How does one go about dying?
Who on earth is going to teach me
The world is filled with people
who have never died.

And who is going to teach me how to die? What a hard, and perfect, poem kind of question. I think it only underscores the fact that everything we do is always //and in every instance\\ for the First Time. Any thought that it is otherwise is a gross but convenient untruth.

Because I can’t see but that we are just really just these fancy analogy machines, fitting one idea of one time to the new-another ... and all at the risk of obscuring the fact that This has actually never ever happened before, even though it seems really déjà-vu-ishly the reminiscent. In our “been there, done that” kind of culture, it is an easy mistake, but no less worse for its easiness. And so I am suspicious over whether learning from mistakes, learning from your peers, or learning from history are all in fact notions that do any useful work but to mislead.




..
We thought we were somewhere before, but we weren’t. I thought I was in Chicago four times in the last month. but if I could manage to be a more honest person, or more attentive, I could tell you really it was in fact a different place every time. what’s done not re-done, a city of versions rather than addresses.

I read a line in a book the next day, and it felt as if I were eating a meal from the same plate of thoughts, the page saying:

everything we hold true is a trick we play on ourselves, a redemption on past experience for the purpose of trusting the present

and I will admit, I have the hardest of times trusting the present to its ways. as a Good Scientist I’d simply and efficiently call this whole thing the issue of "induction," of reasoning from past and repeated instances of experience, to generalizations that cover our beliefs of all cases – future included. But even Hume had a problem with this promise of Knowledge from Experience, rather than Speculation. and he wasn’t even a poet either/even/still. so really, I can’t see how the Trick We Play on Ourselves isn't anything but evident.



and I wonder if the redemption on past experience enough to save us from an uncertain future. Is it like my mother says, that I constitutionally really hate surprises? Then I’d have to hate everything about this moment, and its uncertainties. and maybe, sometimes, I completely do. but it is the worst sort of thing to admit to. pity if induction was really a matter of taking things for granted; the New! simply taken for the old, for the déjà viewed.

<<<>>>

I can’t take for granted Ehab happened to be in Tempe when I was. If I believed in sin, it would be one to do such a thing. if I believed in ESP, I would have known beforehand and otherwise; if I believed in telekinesis, I would have simply floated into and out of that moment.

But I believe in none of that. I trust instead in things like cousin S. driving through the night 11 hours to visit for this weekend on a whim. for Phillip and Nim to be in town again. and so to playing Life-Size chess at the botanic garden on Saturday,



To shimmying and jumping through spinning hula-hoops in the evening,





and then: Taking the First Quarry Swim of the season this next day Sunday afternoon.





(this moment was mistaken for the one before)

A question:
Was there any way to guess a pair of Canadian geese were nesting there at the quarry’s edge?

No, there just wasn’t.

and she had a nest of her own feathers, sitting on five eggs, each its own color. each the size of a mango.



and I assure you -
none of this has ever happened before.

it is a short life --all firsts and lasts -- packed like gunpowder in a firecracker

!*!

so keep the matches handy.

......