It is 6:05 am on September 22. I am sitting on my back deck listening to the closing bars of night's song. A few thousand miles and a few months changes so many things. The weather websites dare to say that it is 72 and feels like 79. Up north I can imagine freezing temperatures, barren trees, and faces beginning to reflect the shorter days. That is not to say that the days are not shrinking here as well, but how can I miss the sun when I can spend hours sitting on the back deck doing my homework, and getting a few rays. Here I am not locked inside my small apartment watching the world go by. here I am a bit awed by the climate, and that awe includes the sense of fear that was once associated with the word.
"The eye sees more than the heart knows." William Blake from the Visions of The Daughters of Albion. I was watching Gandhi, the movie, last night. There is a scene shortly after he returns to India as he is traveling in a luxurious motor car through a poor part of the city. He looks around and sees the poverty and suffering and that line from the beginning of Blake's poem rose in my mind. I like the term motor car, it conveys a different sense than just car. I am having a hard time reconciling Blake in my own mind. I think he was a brilliant visual artist, but his poetry is spotty. he was never fully able to escape the chains set up by Milton, the way Hart Crane managed near the end of his career to break free from Eliot. But I can admire Blake's creative insanity, and his attitude towards his society while at the same time feeling that he is a little petulant for not being accorded the respect he felt was his due. I suspect, without evidence, that he deliberately courted his status as an outsider to allow him to make judgments of his society. I was a bit shocked to hear in the Romantics class that people are not able to decipher Blake, and yet it is all so simple.
I am behind in my composition literature review. It is due in three weeks, and I have not made much progress. My topic is still fuzzy, my question keeps modifying itself, and I keep wondering what value there is in my inquiry. This class is my favorite class this term, even ahead of the poetry workshop. Because of Labor day and my nasty cold I have only attended two workshops, and no feeling of a group has arisen so far. That is not the groups fault, for I think they are nice people, and John is a good workshop leader. Not enough time has passed to create a sense of unity.
My schedule for the weekend is as follows: work on the comp lit review, work on my short paper (five pages) for the Romantics class, think about a longer research project for the Romantics class, read and respond to some of the poems handed out in class last week by my class mates, edit my poems, and work on bringing another one or two into some kind of shape that I can then pass around to the group. Some where in there I need to make a chili and take a long walk.
It is cloudy this morning. That is likely why it is so wonderfully warm here. Unfortunately it also lengthens the darkness. It is after six thirty, and I can just barely see the shape of the leaves. And there is another hour before the sun actually rises. I read in the paper this week that the leaves should begin their transformation this week or next. The drought may reduce the length and variety of color they express. It is still strange to walk around town and see flowers, to walk through the 'woods' and see flowers. I was sitting on the second floor balcony at the Talley Student Center yesterday before class looking north. There is a tree belt that shelters the train tracks from view about a block from where I was sitting that contains a fair number of pine trees. I was wondering as I watched the students move back and forth below me if that green strip will last into the winter.
Is this America?
I was very disappointed to hear that the Canadian dollar was equal to the American peso yesterday. On the upside, our postal service is still far better than the Canadian system. I suppose some day I should sit down and list the differences between Canada and America. That might make a poem.
