my new school

SPLITTINGS

1.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day-

light raining down    each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her    I have been waking off and on

all night to that pain    not simply absence but

the presence of the past    destructive

to living here and now    Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn from pain

even as it grasps us    if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse    to let itself be crushed

in that grasp    it would loosen    Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen    its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak the pain

and pain would have to answer:

                                                          We are older now

we have met before    these are my hands before your eyes

my figure blotting out    all that is not mine

I am the pain of division    creator of divisions

it is I who blot your lover from you

and not the time-zones nor the miles

It is not separation calls me forth    but I

who am separation    And remember

I have no existence    apart from you

2.

I believe I am choosing something new

not to suffer uselessly    yet still to feel

Does the infant memorize the body of the mother

and create her in absence?    or simply cry

primordial loneliness?    does the bed of the stream

once diverted    mourning    remember wetness?

But we, we live so much in these

configurations of the past    I choose

to separate her    from my past we have not shared

I choose not to suffer uselessly

to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me

flashing its bleak torch in my eyes    blotting out

her particular being    the details of her love

I will not be divided    from her or from myself

by myths of separation

while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me

than the smell of eucalyptus cooling burning    on these hills

3.

The world tells me I am its creature

I am raked by eyes    brushed by hands

I want to crawl into her for refuge    lay my head

in the space     between her breast and shoulder

abnegating power for love

as women have done    or hiding

from power in her love    like a man

I refuse these givens    the splitting

between love and action    I am choosing

not to suffer uselessly    and not to use her

I choose to love    this time    for once

with all my intelligence

adrienne rich, 1974

[	mood	|	crazy	]
[	music	|	It Could Be Sweet by Portishead	]

Grad School Applications: Almost done!

Today I have attacked the torturous task of writing personal statements.  These require me to consolidate my many and varied philosophical interests into 500 words or less, often also including information on honors/awards/scholarships from my undergraduate days (Phi Eta Sigma Delta Zeta Theta... How am I supposed to remember which combination of Greek letters made up those completely useless honor societies??), my foreign language training and proficiency, my career plans and goals, and then, as the cherry on the sundae of my conception of myself as a philosopher, why I want to study at this particular program at this particular school in this particular city with these particular professors.  How I am supposed to fit all this into 500 words or less, I simply do not know.  And then there's the question of my philosophical interests.  Am I just supposed to name some philosophers and some schools of thought that I'm interested in?  How much detail am I supposed to give?  When discussing my interest in the intersections between philosophy and literature and philosophy and feminism, I have to resist the itch to launch into three page diatribes on why I think these things are important.  How do I consolidate their importance into five sentences or less and still sound like I know what I'm talking about?

Which raises another question: Do I in fact know what I'm talking about?

Most of the time I feel like I sort of know what I'm talking about, but not really.  I have some vague notions, some shadows in my mind that I guiltily dare to call ideas.  I find myself wondering if the application readers will see through my thin facade of knowledge.  I hope to God that they don't, because this lack of knowledge, this realization that I know so little coupled with my desire to know so much, is what impassions me to study philosophy at the graduate level.  I want to attack each of the questions that keeps me awake at night one by one so that I can start to figure out how it all fits together, conceive a sense of coherence from this tangled mess of questions.

"Discuss Your Choice of Philosophy An Area of Continued Study"

This desire to study philosophy is very physical for me.  I feel it in every ounce of my being.  It emnates from the very core of who I am and spreads into my gut, pulses to the ends of my hands and feet.  Strangely, it's all or nothing.  It has to be my life's work, or else I have to go do something completely different and try to forget that I ever asked myself these questions.

I'm crazy.  I'm crazy about these questions, I'm crazy about this tangled mess of ideas that I'm trying to pull apart and puzzle together.  I want this.  More than (almost) anything.

[	mood	|	amused	]
[	music	|	Blue Train by Coltrane	]

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three- page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases.  It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made... There was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.