Inouk Touzin

"Un reve d'un Canada ou tout le monde parlent au moins trois langues..." et d'autres pensées a propos de la francophonie canadienne

My life lacks what, in lacking you

Discovered Gjertrud Schnackenberg, thanks to, what else, Poetry Foundation.  Here, an excerpt from "Sonata" though the whole thing ought to be read.

Development

I dreamed that an encyclopedia

Opened before my eyes and there I found   

Analogies to sort of stack around

My what-is-life-without-you-here idea:

Like nous detached from Anaxagoras,   

Like cosmic fire glimmering without   

A Heraclitus there to find it out,

Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras,   

Like One-ness riven from Parmenides,   

Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it,   

Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it,   

Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles,   

Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took   

The furniture’s Eternal Forms away,   

Objects abandoned by Reality

Still look the same, but look the way things look   

When I behold my life without you in it:   

A screwy room where chairs and tables lack   

Dimension from the front, the side, the back,   

Like finity without the infinite,

Where tea parties are held without the Hatter,   

It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space,   

It’s like a physicist who cannot trace   

The ultimate constituents of matter—

There is no evidence Matter exists.

Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two.   

And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true:   

The physical eludes the physicists.

They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings   

Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there.   

It seems that they can’t find it anywhere.   

They stalk imaginary floating things

Like amateurish lepidopterists

Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls.   

Their net strings map out squares of empty holes.   

Behold them snatching something in their fists:   

Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight   

Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand.   

But then I’m prejudiced, you understand.   

Not everyone on earth believes I’m right.   

But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse,   

I went to hear a Lecture just last year

About some things which I hold very dear:   

The smallest pieces of the universe.

The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks.   

He seemed impervious to the mystery   

Surrounding their invisibility.

I asked, when he concluded his remarks,   

“But are Quarks physical?”

                                        You’d think that he

Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said   

Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed.

He took his glasses off and blinked at me.

Were I John Milton, I would now destroy   

This moment of high drama and deploy   

A thirty-line Homeric simile.

But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be.   

He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.”

Now, I may be the south end of a horse,   

But logically and analogically,

And physically, and metaphysically,

And, if it gets to that, religiously,

And absolutely scientifically,

I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test   

Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental,

Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental,   

And since in mental matters East or West   

I need you for this dream’s interpretation—

Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined,   

With these two themes uncomfortably combined,   

It’s time now for the Recapitulation.

Restless

All I should care about today is fact that I haven't really cleaned the apartment in 11 days and it is currently covered in a layer of cat hair and my own ridiculous hair.

Unfortuantely, the last few hours have been drinking coffee & reading La vie aux aguets (William Boyd's Restless translated) in bed. Until I reach the end of the book, I don't forsee any changes to the situation.

Fur covered laundry and floors will always rank behind stories about lady spies.

Departures & Futures

Blond's last night in town started as a low-key late night drink while doing laundry/packing/watching The Walking Dead affair. Suddenly it was 5 am and 4 people had drunk two bottles of rum.

A hungover day of obligations & last minute errands until one last mid-afternoon nap, listening to The Irrepressibles.  You & me, ever changing, moving on now, moving fast.  Then the airport, coffee & killing time & kissing. Stoic until he was past security, then sudden sobbing that left me disoriented & hiccupping.

Four months to go. Airport coffeeshop lazy discussing plans for the summer, when I'm back, gardening & cooking & gigs lined up.  The future is uncertain, but the future could be nice. Until then, plans for tonight are binging on frozen mini-eclairs and episodes of The Tudors. Most of my sadness can be cured by pastry & history.  Throwing myself into work, studying, staying social, pilates, poetry.  Soon the weather will be warm, soon I can go running. Soon the weather will be warm, soon it will be July.

March

Very blessed that the last night was

• sitting in a beautiful church with beautiful friends from wonderful job
• listening to amazing music by friend's husband & my Blond
• walking through warm winter with friends & musicians
• drinking & eating & laughing loudly & talking heatedly late into the night

Wants vs Needs

Needs: iPhone cases from society6.com, which became a need last weekend after a year of not putting a case on the fragile baby of a phone. My feelings for seahorses and elephants have been well documented on other internet locations.

Wants: The new Nico Muhly album Drones (Drones & Piano, Drones & Viola, Drones & Violin). My feelings for Nico Muhly can also be found all over the internet. I would also like him to compile the best of his Twitter account into a book with accompanying illustrations. I would also like to be his best friend. I feel like we should be constantly going to the orchestras and shopping and cooking and mixing drinks while gossiping about people and visiting Iceland together. But for reals, drones, pianos, and violins are my favourite things.

Needs: Identity & the Museum Visitor Experience. Also the time to fully read it and the time to implement everything you learn from it. My plans for the holidays are to immerse myself in this. And some Tove Jansson novels.

Wants/Needs: the Northern Adventure cruise on the Cunard line's Queen Victoria. Copenhagen! Gothenburg! The pianist currently on the Queen Victoria! That I cannot sleep when he is not here or I haven't had a 3 hour Skype session. Acceptable substitutions: Time travel to February when his contract is done; Skype improving call quality to fully dimensional corporeal holograms that also smell and taste and feel like the person you are talking to. But also I have a lot of feelings about the Scandinavian lands. Just not as many as I do about Blond Pianists.

Also: I have failed terribly at all my resolutions for sickness. Except for watching Game of Thrones. But supposedly my red blood cell count is increasing so, hurray!

The Hollow Crown

Words cannot convey my excitement. June 30.

Blessed & Purified

"It was her life, and bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life"

Mrs. Dalloway

Two Years

Exhausted but well. Downton Abbey marathons, ceramics legend's receptions and seeing a beloved pal one last time. Working hard and playing hard, compared to infinite flu fatigue weeks. Today working ridiculous hours but leaving work in time for a "Do you need a drink? I need a drink" outing with lovely coworker where we commiserated about stressful lives. In an art gallery. Who knew two years ago that the federal government was a lovely holiday compared to a non-profit arts organization? No regrets, though. No regrets as long as the day is capped by kir royales, mussels and pizza with rioting laughter and pride in the cause of the job.

Art Matters. Mussels are Wonderful. Stay Away From Musicians and Sound Artists. Gallery Gals and Library Ladies Make the Best Pals. Maybe You are Drunk. Art Matters.

Drawings from the Hive

Aganetha Dyck Drawing of a Bee After Dr. E. Assmuss (from the series Drawings from the Hive) 2002 Courtesy Michael Gibson Gallery

Believer/Apocryphia

27. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever.

28. To mercy I leave whatever.

On repeat: the new(ish) John Maus. Infinite reread: Peter Gizzi's "Apocryphia" from the newest issue of Poetry. Never ending: exhaustion sore bones mild flu.

The Hour

Good heavens! McNulty! Dying Keats! Romola Garai! In a 1956 newsroom!

"In Love With You" Kenneth Koch

Poetry Foundation posted this as one of thier Twitter bits today. There is nothing I love more than a New York School poem. Actually I love a great many things equally and more, but I am listening to the recording thus I am speaking from a state of bliss & hyperbole.

I

O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,
Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,
It is beautiful, when October
Is over, and February is over,
To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet
Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then
Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.”
Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?
Aren’t my eyes bigger than love?
Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!
Is love what we are,
Or has happiness come to me in a private car
That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?

2

We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider
Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.
I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love
I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.

3

Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s
Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood
Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s
Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s
Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill,
I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets
Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing
Appear and reapper—electricity! I’d love to be how
You are, as if
The world were new, and the selves were blue
Which we don
Until it’s dawn,
Until evening puts on
The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . .
Water! your tear-colored nail polish
Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new
As a calm
On the sea, where, like pigeons,
I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—
Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

"The Sun is a Hot Monster"

Pal's birthday. Strolls down shady streets trying to catch a breeze, popsicles, soaking our feet while sunning at the city hall fountain, Dunlop, successful cookies.