downtown aquarium

hello dear hearts,

i feel a little too tired to really write, but i guess it's more than my turn in the line-up. so, what i thought about optimism was this depressing ferris wheel in houston - the aquarium in houston is a for-profit aquarium restaurant theme park by the highway. a ferris wheel attached to the aquarium also stands right by the highway. on the upward rotation the passenger overlooks all the cars and their exhaust, which i imagine would stink, and on the downward rotation the passenger overlooks the houston bayou, which smells "like gasoline and vomit" says tony when asked for a description. the optimistic part is that i've never seen a single passenger on the ferris wheel - ha - but really it's odd. a picture (blue and big) no one wants to be part of.

i'm not sure where to go with more general feelings on optimism. jared, it's funny that you quoted the creeley thing on being useful - i've always had an odd thing for the idea of being useful - i mean by 'thing' i guess a strong emotional reaction to it - considering that i'm not a particularly handy or active person. there's that herbert poem 'employment' that has some of the most moving lines to me - "O that I were an Orange-tree,/That busy plant!/Then should I ever laden be,/And never want/Some fruit for him that dressed me." (The stanza before that has the lines "Life is a business, not good cheer;/ever in wars".) this interests me, being in this state of longing to be a generous, productive optimist. but feeling curtailed or constrained but some sort of knowledge that would make the optimism excessively willed, put-on (the 'life is a business, not good cheer' caveat, the 'o that i were' mood). because why can't you be the orange tree, really? that's why i was saying i like lyn hejinian so much. i feel like her writing has this large calm that the real optimist in dark times would have - a large capacity to know and to be generous but without 'settling-for'.

but, me, i don't have calm...much more the 'o that i were' kind of mode. i think that's what i like about dugan. he makes something (very small maybe, but a thing) out of that mode. and that's what i like about a certain type of stevens optimism, too, when stevens is not booming and throwing colors. in that dugan poem you quote, it's like he's paring down hope to a hair, but that hair holds ("if it didn't hold, i guess i wouldn't be standing on it" seems to be his argument). i like that. it's like this argument that hair-splitting is meaningful. which obviously i like because of the way i am. henry james makes this kind of funny argument, too, when i think about it. when you get into a really desperate situation, just become more and more sensitive to the tiniest and most atomic of your options. and weighing and choosing, in a gestural and syllable-by-syllable kind of way, is your hope for changing the world in the tiniest way and squeaking yourself out of the dead end. usually the people don't succeed but in _the golden bowl_ the heroine actually does succeed in changing the plot that way. so maybe if the optimism is small enough to be believable, you just have to make the world small enough that the optimism can act as a lever in it. below is the latter 2/3rds of "long and sluggish lines". i think this is amazing - the fun logic that because the sad trees look like they're contradicting something, that there must be a happy thing out there that they're contradicting. probably the comic infanta fly. i love you, stevens! and then there's the ending. i don't quite know how he gets there but it's amazing. i'm gushing now but it does make me feel optimistic. how can we not be optimistic when none of us are even born yet? but it's a sad, cool optimism.

"...The trees have a look as if they bore sad names
And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,
Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side
Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these - escent- issant pre-presonae: first fly,
A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,
The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

...Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep."

jared, i know you're not so into stevens, so i'm typing in some goethe for you - he agrees with you about seasons and poems, apparently. i'm wondering if because i write this you're going to protest that you actually are into stevens. such is the curiosity of friendship and late-night incomprehensible typing. miss you both - xo - lauren

Sobald ein frisches Kelchlein blueht,
Es fordert neue Lieder;
Und wenn die Zeit verrauschend flieht,
Jahrszeiten kommen wieder.