when suddenly

thinking about the need to move.
more to the point: needing to move.
moving.
in what direction?
moving on? from what?
maybe needing to move on from some things
dancing?
the new poems i'm working on are moving in/out/around (me?)



talked at length tonight with another classmate from hybrid id's. basically summarized my semester as exhausting...emotionally draining with these recurring instances of trying to talk/write (on? through?) race, identity, personal history, local/national/global histories. how some of my personal relationships are greatly affected. (i'm being intentionally vague bc this space is less a personal journal than an ongoing sharing/creating project...though of course personal contexts are necessary.)

also stumbled onto this cavafy poem:

The God Abandons Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive--don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen--your final delectation--to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

[Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard translation again]

and i didn't say in conversation how this semester i've been really afraid of change. going back & forth, between wanting some familiar ground to stand on...and realizing how that familiar ground is paralyzing, stifling, too limiting...how i want to move, take off, launch into something new (which is often, paradoxically, about the past...and i suppose i have this great need to think/write the past in new ways).

cavafy isn't getting at precisely the same thing here, but what i see with "The God Abandons Antony" is...well, there's this crucial reminder to listen. listen to the leaving, the moving away, the moving on. and to find some joy in that. "poetry is sweet," polina said. which doesn't mean that all poetry is happy or celebratory. but it's another one of those paradoxes i come back to again and again (border Sisyphus!)--that to write poetry is to love language (and it can be a love of very simple language, as is often the case with cavafy), even when the subject of poetry is painful.

that antony in cavafy's piece is meeting his downfall reminds me of the ending of camus' L'Etranger. greeting those cries of hate...though maybe that's a more masochistic pleasure? or a final, crazy accepting of the universe's alienation? O Meursault. what kinds of responses should one have, in the face of losing (one's pride, one's city, one's life, one's sense of self)? what kinds of responses can one have?

what if i need to break down and cry?
what if i need to tell myself to tough it up?

today in chinese class i learned the words for "natural disaster" [自然灾害] and the main lyric of a pop song, "你伤害了我，一笑而过" [you hurt me, but one laugh and i'm over it].

plus:
~leonard cohen transforms cavafy's poem into a song about losing a lover named alexandra. though i think "alexandria" can mean many different things, including lost love; cohen taps into this particular interpretation. listen to it: here.

~a karaoke-friendly MV of '一笑而过' for all you heartbroken fools out there (the 汉字 are 繁体字 btw, which i have some trouble reading since i grew up on & continue to learn 简体字...but i kinda like the 'traditional' set more, and find some of them easier to remember because they have 'show' more meaning).

~and how could i not think of lily allen's 'smile' too? HOW COULD I NOT.

At first when I see you cry
Yeah, it makes me smile.
Yeah, it makes me smile.
At worst I feel bad for awhile
But then I just smile.
I go ahead and smile.