Alzheimer's and Aliens

I rediscovered this essay recently, which speaks to links between "illegal aliens" and "demented persons." This essay says almost everything I wanted to put in a book about writing Alzheimer's, so I'll put it up again here: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/13/ka_mate13_schultz.asp

I delivered it as a paper in Auckland several years back.

The young disabilities scholar

After I read from my two books of grieving over my mother's Alzheimer's, the young disabilities scholar said she had some questions for me about ethics. She asked if I had permission from my mother to write about her. (No, my mother could not give her permission.) Had I published any of the work while my mother was still alive? (Yes, one volume.) Why did I use the names of people in the Alzheimer's home? (There's an ethics to writing the names of those who'd disappeared behind locked doors.) Did I ask the family's permission? (Aside from a cousin in Ohio, whom I never see, there is no family.)

Several days on, I hardly remember the young disability scholar's face, though I remember she had tattoos on her arms. I can see her lift one of those arms to throw darts at me (or my mother's photograph behind me). I feel I am too sensitive to her questions. They are good questions, real questions, questions one asks writers. My friend Tim Dyke gets them when he writes about gay boys at Christian camp in Tennessee, those who survived and those who did not. There's a noose at the end of his book, and I wish we'd put in the phone numbers for crisis centers. Suicide hotlines. It would have been the ethical thing to do.

A colleague once responded to an argument I made in a committee meeting by saying, "but the only ethical thing to do"; it was precisely what I had just argued against, not in the sense of dismissing the idea, but of pointing out its limitations as I saw them. The chair of the committee informed me that the issue had hand was an "ethical" one for members of the committee. I said my position was ethical, too, but that didn't resonate for him. (I grieve for him now, too.)

"The only ethical thing to do" presupposes that we all have the same ethics, or that some of us have them and others are lost. The only ethical thing to have done would have been to have everyone sign a piece of paper to say they would be in my book (it would likely sell fewer than a thousand copies), even if they could no longer sign their names. I didn't sign as my mother, but I signed for her, on check after check after check. I was my mother's keeper.

Is there a singular ethics of grieving? Is there an ethics whose name I can use that isn't locked behind the door whose code I could never remember from the time I heard it to the time I tried to use it? Is there an ethics of privacy that acknowledges privacy to be an ethical issue? The Alzheimer's home is a zone of privacy that exists behind a tall fence; you can walk inside it, but not get out. To wander is to break such privacy. To wander is to endanger yourself and others.

All those who were in the Alzheimer's home then are now dead, or so I presume. Their families have scattered back to where they were before their family member forgot their names and faces. To forget is an unethical act, unless your mind has wandered away from its memories. No memory box can contain them. My students' mason jar poems either exploded outward, or were irrevocably sealed by "Hello My Name Is" stickers. We who love to be contained.

Being Mortal: Atul Gawande, a moped death, and my mother's Alzheimer's

[Photo taken on 11/1/16]

When I embarked on teaching Atul Gawande's Being Mortal in my Honors Research class for freshmen, I thought perhaps it was a stretch. The thesis of the course is that we are often driven by our experiences to do particular kinds of research. So we're reading a series of memoirs by people who do research. Among them we've read Timothy Denevi's HYPER, the autobiography of his ADHD, along with a history of the condition; Ta-Nahisi Coates's Between the World and Me, which combines journalism about black men killed by the police with a memoir of his growing up in Baltimore; and Hope Jahren's Lab Girl, which is about everything, including being a woman scientist with bipolar disorder who studies the inner lives of trees. These are all beautifully written, accessible books, but they are also difficult. 

When I started lobbying my university's administration two years ago to communicate transparently about deaths of students, faculty and staff, I was told in several meetings that such information would prove "disturbing," "cause prurient interest," "would wear students out," and so forth. Report of a suicide, they claimed, would inevitably cause contagion. As I became an inadvertent expert in the ways that colleges and universities handle deaths, I realized how many universities have comprehensive death protocols (with places to report deaths on-line), and how many of them have adopted a "best practice" of Student Intervention Teams or even, as they do at the University of Arizona, a place for students to go who are worried about a friend: http://friend2friend.health.arizona.edu/  The University of Northern Iowa (I choose them because they come up first on google) launched their Intervention Team in 2006: https://www.uni.edu/deanofstudents/sit  The mission of this team, according to their website, is to "promote students' physical and mental wellness, a safer campus community, and the retention of students who can be successful when treatable issues and behaviors are addressed and managed."

My father died 24 years ago, almost to this day (November 4, 1992). He was a religious man who had kept his faith to himself, because my mother was an aggressive agnostic. As he was dying, he began to talk about God and his own practice of prayer again (if that is the word for what he seemed to do for the first time in my knowing him). He died in the hospital surrounded by neighbors, my mother and me. After he died, I suggested putting an obituary in the newspaper. My mother said no. I asked about a service. She refused. I screamed at her. My father’s sister came from Michigan with a first cousin of mine I hardly knew. My mother would not speak to them. I performed an awkward translation. The neighbors had a lunch for us. My mother did not attend. We went to Arlington National Cemetery to put his ashes in the columbarium (that had been another fight between her and me—I won that one). My mother did not come. She went only years later when my husband, who never met my dad, insisted that we all go. She started to break down and then turned and walked away. She was unable to grieve. I half believe her Alzheimer’s emerged out of this trauma at being unable to release my father or any other of her losses (there were many in her childhood). My fury was that she would not let me grieve either, or his friends, some of whom began calling the hospital when they heard he was dying. She controlled the information and, so long as no one else knew, she was somehow someway still holding things together.

I had no experience with death as a child or a young adult. I had no experience with old age, save what my parents provided me as they grew older. I lived in a world of the young or the less old and, until my father passed, I had never witnessed a death. What a luxury that might seem to reside exclusively with the living. But also what a handicap. My mother’s refusal to grieve came back to me as I talked to this or that administrator who said that reporting on deaths would only cause more trouble. So what a surprise to find, when I began to teach Gawande’s book about end of life issues, that my honors students (18 years olds, almost all of them) were prepared. This is Hawai’i, after all, where extended families retain coherence even in this fractured time. My students have grandparents, either alive or recently deceased. In addition, two of them took a course a Iolani School on hospice; one of them works at an assisted living facility; another volunteers at a hospice; yet another works in a nursing facility that treats the dying. Many of them had already filled out Advance Health Directives as exercises for classes in high school. They were more prepared—by far—for our discussions of death and dying than they were for those on ADHD or on being black in America or on being a woman scientist.

Yesterday, I asked my students to talk about differences between individualism and communitarianism. They are community-oriented, like most local students in Hawai’i. So is Gawande, who presents Josiah Royce’s 1908 argument against individualism in a positive light. Here’s Royce: “The selfish we had always with us. But the divine right to be selfish was never more ingeniously defended.” Here’s Gawande: “Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die. If self-interest were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from the face of the earth.” (126-7). So Gawande argues that, “The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society” (127). He overstates his argument here, as his examples of community builders, namely Karen Wilson and Bill Thomas, are both individualists, capable of seeing past culture’s myriad inertias. “Culture strangles innovation in the crib,” Thomas tells Gawande (120). What is culture if not community? What is the breaking of that culture other than the act of an individualist? So Thomas, thought to have oppositional disorder as a child, is the one to figure out who to make life more meaningful for his nursing home charges. He fills the home with animals and plants.

My mother increasingly lost focus after my father died. She was certainly anxious—she had always been anxious—and depressed. And then, ten years on, she started to confuse herself with me, my husband with hers, and to refuse to tell the stories she had loved to tell. She was probably forgetting them, my husband suggested later. She began to wander. Once in the middle of the night she knocked on the neighbors’ door to inform them that the sun had not come up that day. The extent to which her wandering can be seen as an embodiment of grief is probably not great; after all, she was losing her brain, not simply her mind. But I wonder, as I look back, how much of her distress came out of her inability to deal with the suffering she’d experienced as the child of a broken, alcoholic family who had had to cut herself off from her past (she thought) in order to create a future worth living in. She created that, but then it fell away from her under the stresses of the past. Gawande uses Ronald Dworkin to argue that, even if we lack independence near the end, we can hold onto some measure of autonomy. That autonomy amounts to self-authorship, the authority we retain to write our own narratives: “All we ask,” writes Gawande, “is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.” Obsessed with independence from age five until she descended into Alzheimer’s in her 80s, my mother lost her authority to that disease. The marvelous story-teller lost her sentences, then her words, then her voice. There’s something horrible about that, because it suggests that she lost meaning. But there’s also something better about it; she survived so long that she even survived herself.

One week ago, there was a fatal moped accident on Dole Street, which runs through the University’s campus, cutting between the Law and Engineering Schools. It’s the road on which students trudge back and forth to the dorms, if they live in dorms. The cross-walk is very close to the bus stop where I stand at least once a week to catch my first of two buses home. It’s a very public place. Two hours after the accident, members of the community received an email from the Department of Public Safety that Dole was closed due to an accident. Hours after that, we were informed that the road was again open. Never were we told by the administration that the accident had been fatal to the 22-year old moped driver (who turned out not to be a student, but who knew?), or that counseling was available to anyone who witnessed the event. A student newspaper reporter I know told a colleague of mine that he had come upon the accident while the young man still lay on the road. The students in my Honors class are writing in their blog posts about the young man who died. I wrote to the President of UH, who is also currently the interim Chancellor of Manoa, to ask that he communicate with us; I was not the only one to do so. I wrote to two members of the Board of Regents, and then submitted a version of that email to the local newspaper. Here is what they printed:

UH should speak out about campus deaths

If you drive down Dole Street, you will see a memorial to the young man who died on a moped on Tuesday (“1 dead after mopeds crash near UH Manoa,” Star-Advertiser, Oct. 26).

That memorial was made by the young man’s friends.

While the story has been covered by the media, the University of Hawaii at Manoa has not uttered a syllable, except to say that Dole was closed and later re-opened.

Nothing about how students may have witnessed a fatal accident, nothing to express condolences over the loss of life on our campus.

This is not unusual. UH-Manoa never says anything about deaths on campus; it leaves that to the rumor mill. Students should know they can find counseling if they were traumatized by events like this one. They should know someone in administration cares enough to send an email.

The morning after the accident, we got an email telling us that a moped had been stolen at one of the dorms.

Susan M. Schultz

Professor of English

University of Hawai’i-Manoa

Silences. I wrote a book of literary criticism about them. It began as a book about poets who got writer’s block, and ended as a book about poets who wrote through the cultural constraints that threatened to silence them. It also led me into considerations of silence as a spiritual state, one healthier than the silences that squash. These silences are those that we experience when we grieve. A friend says her mother termed the year after her second husband’s death to be the most exciting of her life. Grief is like that; it’s difficult, but it’s also an invitation to think about what we find meaningful in this life. If we can’t grieve, or are not permitted to grieve, we cannot find meaning. A colleague in another department told me that she’d been unable to grieve over someone she knew (not well, but she knew her) who had died on campus because the death was kept quiet. What protects some people cuts others to shreds. The silences I experience while meditating can sometimes be difficult, but they are never meaningless. Perhaps I hold too closely to meaning to be a “good Buddhist,” whatever that means, but that is my soul’s nutrition. As Gawande makes clear, death is the not the real problem; it’s our unwillingness to acknowledge it. In his Epilogue he writes: “We [in medicine] think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive” (259). Yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air, Kerry Egan, who has just written a memoir of her life as a hospice chaplain, spoke to the happiness she feels among the dying. Paradoxical, perhaps, but as she said, death is part of life, and life can be joyful, as well as difficult.

My mother, before she got Alzheimer’s, was a big talker. She told stories, and she waxed philosophical about life issues. She also brought sometimes savage silences along with her; when angry, she wouldn’t speak to me, sometimes for days. Clearly, there were things she couldn’t say to herself, either. She couldn’t say that she hurt, or that she grieved, or that others could do what she could not, if she could help it. It’s the talking quietly that matters more to me now. To listen while speaking one’s grief, and to send information that is tethered to compassion, can be (write it!) the work of institutions. We need to hear others' words, and we need to speak our own.

NOTES:

Thank you to Ian Lind for writing this blog post about the latest death on the UHM campus: http://www.ilind.net/2016/10/31/uh-silent-on-dole-st-fatality-condolences-seem-to-be-in-order/comment-page-1/#comment-216382

Books referred to, however obliquely, in the text:

Kerry Egan, On Living, New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters at the End, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.

Susan M. Schultz, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005.

---.  Dementia Blog, San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2008.

---. "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Vol. 2, Singing Horse Press, 2013.

Against Revision

"What is the longest it's taken you to write a poem?" (Tom Gammarino)

"17 years." (Tim Dyke)

--Hawai'i Book and Music Festival Q&A

 a. To look or read carefully over (written or printed matter), with a view to improvement or correction; to improve or alter (text) as a result of examination or re-examination. Also intr.with object implied.

 b. To examine or re-examine (something, esp. a law, code, plan, or the like) for the purpose of improvement or amendment; to alter so as to make more efficient, apposite, or effective.

--Oxford English Dictionary

This exchange between Tom and Tim was the second such that I heard during the Book & Music Festival this Spring. The first, at a Bamboo Ridge panel, featured writers praising revision as the most important part of the writing process. I had begun to get ornery, so I spoke up during the Tinfish event, defending (my own) lack of revision. Tim's remark is truer, perhaps, insofar as it takes a lifetime to write any of our lines of poetry and prose.

Now, this isn't to say I never revise; when I write an essay I approach, avoid, return, and rewrite often. When I write a poem, I intervene, adjust, erase, and then await the ending. If revision is a kind of thought, then it's not to be dismissed utterly. But when I write a poem, I want to inhabit the moment of writing the poem as the poem. To revise is to alter, and what I want is the unalterable moment, insofar as such a thing exists. This is the fruit of my meditation practice, but also of my years of observing my mother in her Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is a disease that cannot be revised, let alone cured. It is the nearly pure de-construction of a life. To revise one's record of that process of losing--memory, speech, the ability to walk and take care of oneself--is to suggest it can be altered. The person with Alzheimer's is being altered, but not revised. The writer, if anything, is being revised, but her words remain faithful to the process (or unraveling of), however horrible it seems.

And so I wrote what I saw into my blog. When I prepared the blog posts for publication as books, I did a lot of editing. Editing is certainly a part of revision, but less complete. As I noted when I was editing my manuscripts, grieving seems to be a form of editing, and vice versa. I took out what I thought was not of interest to potential readers. I fixed sentences so that they scanned better (yes, prose needs to scan, too). I tried for an absolute economy of thought and feeling. But I did not ever add anything to the blog posts. Nor did I re-arrange their elements. To add or re-arrange would have been to suggest that alteration was possible, that the moment was not complete in and of itself. To add would have been to create a narrative (probably), one that works toward making sense. What I wanted to do was to record non-sense, not to make a false front.

In the memory cards that have preceded and followed the two books on Alzheimer's I've tried to be true to the process of making sense of the world, without fixing it in place. Hence, each day I write an entry is a day in which I arrive at--or stumble onto--meaning. Meaning is not edifice but mandala, or sand castle. To revise is to hold onto meaning, try to make it permanent, accessible to others as container not as hourglass.

John Ashbery says that he learned to revise as he wrote. Write long enough and you know what moves to make (which is why I still encourage my young poets to revise), which will work and which not. You know which serves to spin and which to hit flat. Which balls to hit to right and which to left field. When to dunk and when to lay-up. How to change key at the right moment to keep the improvisation conversational, rather than petroglyphic (though the unreadability of the petroglyph re-introduces interpretation as a kind of improv into the equation).

So yes, on the level of the sentence, you revise, even if the computer allows you to erase the memory of those shifts and tacks across the page. The ability to move back and forth in a document on the computer means a constant forgetting exists at the center of the memory cards I write. That's part of it, perhaps what joins my obsession with memory with my obsession about forgetting. To revise inside the poem/meditation/memory card, however, is not to alter the moment, but usually to replace it with another one, more apt for the occasion (and its quick flickering away). It is not to create a "good poem," though one hopes they're good enough, like many mothers. It is to make sure that the record of the moment works. Not a question of efficiency, but of haphazard stumbling into a meaning that will cohere, even as it's let go. The shifting ground of questions and answers, of difficulties and temporary solutions. Burke's situation strategy without a clear situation or strategy.

But more important to me is the sentence I wrote just up the page from here: "The writer . . . is being revised." That old visionary company of love might have tanked in the 19th century, along with the sublime ambitions of poetry. But a re-visionary company comes after Objectivism (in a poetic sense) and after disappointment, brutality, and age in the "real life" sense. When I write, I do not re-shape the world under the tremendous power of my pixellated thoughts; rather, I am re-shaped by it. As my experiences wear away at my expectations and ambitions and desire to alter the text that is my life, my writing records the process. And this may be why I find myself writing more and more lately. As my ambition to write poems wears down, my delight in recording the process of being lived (if I can put it that way) increases. Robert Frost's adage about form, that without it you're playing tennis without a net, transposes for me into a sense that without writing my life would have no form. No net to catch me. I can mend a net, but I cannot re-vise it. It alters me. Where alteration finds.

Lynn Young's _Where's My Rispick?_ is out from Tinfish Press

 
This beautiful, and beautifully hand-made, chapbook comes in a limited edition of 100 copies. "Ritspick" is Alzheimer's English for "lipstick." Please see here for more details, and a button to push to purchase the book for the very low price of $16:
http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=wheres-my-ritspick

Conversations with John Gallaher's _In a Landscape_

I'm not sure why I bought John Galleher's new book, though it was probably because we've been neighbors in Facebook comment boxes (little boxes!) on such topics as adoption--he's adopted, I have adopted children. He lives in Missouri, which was intriguing to me until I found out that he clearly, obstinately, doesn't know about the Cardinals. So I bought his book from BOA Editions, In a Landscape: A Poem. It's got 71 sections--LXXI, rather--constituting a discursive meditation on his own mid-American middle-aged daily life. It's a masculine Midwinter's Day, perhaps, though when I wrote to tell him I liked the book, I said it reminded me of Douglas Crase. He responded by saying he hadn't thought of Crase in a long time. There was that book in the 1980s, right? Yes, The Revisionist, 1981. Was that his only book? I looked Crase up, found an official website. Yes, that was the only book of poems, but then there's been a daybook and a co-biography since, along with a book of essays about American literature. No mention of "real" work, the kind that pays the bills. How does he live such a life? John wondered. So I went prowling and found a New York Times wedding announcement from 2011 for Crase and his partner Frank Polach. By this time, I'd veered away from my comment on John's book and into a wild goose chase after Douglas Crase's finances, which seemed odd. Then I remembered that Crase had written me a couple of times, but stopped after I suggested (as I recall) that he write more poems. (Was that why he stopped?) I just now (later) took The Revisionist down from my office shelf. Inside it, I find a note in an envelope dated March 17, 1992. It's in response to review I wrote of a book I no longer remember reading, though I do remember his poems, not exactly what was in them, but their density, their careful thoughtfulness, like Ashbery poems that were more linear than Ashbery poems, more deliberate.

I started sending John brief messages in response to his book and began to think that this was one way to read the book, talking back to it as I flip through it, sometimes forward, sometimes back. It started with funny stuff. Like a rumination on numbers and porn. I'd just talked about this in class when we started the Dover edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with the old numerals we no longer learn in school, and then saw this--



XXXI:

Whenever I see the roman numeral XXX
I think of pornography.

For a few months the site meter for this Tinfish Editor's blog recorded repeated attempts to find pornography. Searches like "XXX stories for my husband" came in from Arkansas, which might not have been Arkansas because I remember using blogger in Los Angeles and seeing it logged as Arkansas. When the tickle became an itch of curiosity, I investigated. The search landed curious yellows at a post that included discussion of Shakespeare's sonnet XXX. Sad pornographees. I'd forgotten that the post included my mother, ended with a photo of her in her Alzheimer's. Forgetting can be a kind of grace.


XLII

I changed my mind. I was going to stop writing this poem, but now
I'm not, because I heard someone say, in the hallway earlier,
that she had changed her mind, and it seemed a lovely idea, the way
it struck me to "change one's mind." I'd like to do that. Presto
Change-O.

When we adopted our daughter, Radhika, at age three, she spoke trillingly in Nepali. The difference in our languages mattered far less than I had feared. She conveyed her needs, and we provided them. But as soon as she started learning English, she discovered words to say and repeat. The first was "TRAFFICS," which she would yell from the back seat of the car as we drove home from my job and her first day care person. (My daughter is not a patient person, I remember thinking.) Then came the brief era of "change mind!" She'd walk around the house calling out, "change mind! change mind!" There was a beautiful constancy to her announcement of inconstancy. "Inconstant stay," in sonnet XV, can be read quickly as "inconstancy." I think it was Garrett Stewart who taught me that.


XXVIII

"It changes you," they say about a lot of different things,
but what they don't say is that most people
change right back.

We had a chat about "change," John and I. My week has been like carrying a pile of dirty nickels in my purse. I can't even reach them to spend. He liked the mention of "spare change." Brother can you spare a dime? Pair one?


XXVI

What does it mean to be useful? To be a useful person? My son's
watching Thomas the Tank Engine, where the goal is ever
to be useful.

When Bryant, Sangha and I were in London, during autumn 2002, Sangha (then 3) spent hours watching Thomas the Tank Engine videos, the ones that featured English accents. Ringo Starr! This was also the era of Bob the Builder. That December we even had a Bob the Builder advent calendar with chocolates behind each pair of shutters. We traveled a bit, once to Essex, and another time to Ireland. When he got tired in his stroller, Sangha started singing at the top of his lungs, usually "Bob the Builda." Through the cathedral square of Essex he sang; and, on the tube from Heathrow after an exhilarating and exhausting trip to Ireland, he belted out the tune as tube riders stared. Children are utterly useless sometimes. That's why we love them. Like poems.

LX

That probably doesn't connect to anything, I'm thinking
right now, a few hours later. But Bob the Builder is playing
on the TV, and my son's watching it, and he's named
Eliot with the E-L-I-O-T" spelling. Bob has just dropped
his construction helmet . . . 


John Cage keeps coming up in these poems, which are not acrostics, or especially quiet, unless you mean written in a steady even tone. They're not quiet, or random, even if they take some chances. Somewhere Gallaher refers to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. I went to hear this at the Honolulu Art Academy with Bryant when we first started dating. A woman sat at the piano and prepared to play. You could tell who was in or not in on the joke. There were the coughers, the whisperers. She got up once to look inside the piano, then sat down again, which felt a bit like cheating, because she was doing something. I once played the Frank Zappa version of 4'33" to a freshman composition class. One football player started pounding on his desk, another got up and danced. Only one student said she enjoyed the time to herself.


LV

When I was young, I lived in Orange County and ended up
going to Disneyland thirty-five times. I was trapped at "Yo ho,
yo ho, a pirate's life for me" once, for about forty-five minutes."


When I first moved to Hawai`i, I had a colleague named Alan who was in his late 30s. That was back before air-conditioning and stark ideologies, when we drifted between our offices and chatted. His office was on the same corridor as Joe's who died of AIDS. Alan was a storyteller, but he kept telling the same one. Soon, he was teaching less and less, and his students complained about him. Then--and this was beautiful--his friends (three or four or five of them) took over his classes until he had 10 years vested in the system, first while he was still in his apartment, then in a home. They would shop for him, do his taxes. And then he was gone to California, where his older sister had died of early onset Alzheimer's, like their father. Alan had never made commitments to people, because he knew his DNA. But I bring this up because Alan was once trapped in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland for a very long time. Whenever he and his friends were on an academic panel together, one or the other of them would slip "it's a small world" into their talks. Even now, years after Alan's death, his friends wear funny ties on his birthday, go out to lunch. So, when John asks in

LIV

Where's the line between what constitutes repetition
and what constitutes change? Right now I'm thinking forgetfulness
is just as good as careful planning . . .

I think of Alan, for whom forgetting was repetition, and repetition of forgetting a story told over and again in my doorway on the 6th floor of Kuykendall. I'm no longer there--I moved to the 2nd floor years ago--and that's a kind of change I can count. 4 floors. How many years now?

Alan was adopted by his friends, and then relinquished into "care."

LXVII

His mother
was the sister of my father, until years later, when we were adopted
and became brothers. Our mother now, back then, was the daughter
of the brother of my birth grandmother. We scratch our heads about it
now and then, how every family has these stories, these little
     shufflings,
somewhere.

When our daughter came home with us from Nepal, people would ask if she and Sangha were siblings. I'd say yes, or "they are now," knowing precisely what they were getting at. Now, when I say we're going to visit the kids' sister, friends look confused. Isn't she Radhika's sister? And the mother of my daughter's sister is what to me? There are not enough names for us, or there are too many, usually fractions, like half- or step-. Before I adopted my children I had the same odd way of apportioning relation, of who was what to whom. A woman stopped me in a park where I went with Sangha; she had a son his age. She wondered if she could love someone not related to her by blood. Her son was conceived in vitro. She really wanted me to answer her question.

Are poets related genetically? Or are they made by way of similar strands of DNA, and then adopt each other? The torque of synapse from direct address to punch line suggests yes. The poetry gene is clearly recessive, popping up at random chance moments in the larger population, causing no small amount of distress (existential and otherwise) to its carriers. We are the kids who don't know about each other until there's an odd early a.m. call or facebook post that suggests we might share a parent. Maybe that parent is assigned us by Harold Bloom, but most likely we can't understand each other (misprision, baby!) because we didn't share four walls and an Oldsmobile. But there's no statute of limitations on this recognition scene, with all its joys and disappointments, its promise of getting out of time, only to fall back into it. Our cousin ended up choosing her late-birth-father's wife over her half!! biological sisters. It's like that with families, the choices forced upon us by politics. Or the way institutions bind us together as parents, siblings, and kids over the space of decades until we don't need to go to meetings, because everything we would say is there in the room already, hanging not as possibility but as what simply would be. When I meditate, my brain starts off that way, full of conversations remaining from 3 a.m. wake-up-to-pee time, a choreography of sounds more chaotic than those in "Truck Stop," where Glenn Gould goes to a diner, and overhears voices as if they were part of a Bach Fugue. I often wish there had been more fugue states in my life; at least then, there's focus amid all the remembering and forgetting and counterpoint of voices. Once I walked miles in New Haven in one--some guy had made me angry--and only later did I realize that had been it. So unlike Bach. Bach was what soothed me as a teenager, because he was complicated but still made sense. States render everything into static.

Somewhere in the book there's a discussion of nothing, probably related to Cage and his silences, and I'm thinking that the most difficult course requirement I gave my students this semester is to spend 10 minutes a day doing nothing. One said she'd never done nothing before, another that he just kept thinking, and was that ok? One woman said she kept thinking about how many pages of her reading she could do. So I suggested that she take her 10 minutes out of Facebook times and she confessed. The woman who said she'd never done nothing before disappeared from the class, as did the woman who might have been the man arrested for prostitution in 2003. Why are you so nosy, my daughter asked, looking everyone up on the computer, so I point out that she's being nosy when she asks. It's true, I like the way the internet imitates thought, but not the way its creativity erases ours, all those links following each other like flash metaphors without the synapses that might hatch them. Not the nada who art in nada. There's more there than that. But soft purple flower cheeks at the pond that spill into the olive green water, then sink. Radhika gets on the elevator with me and smiles at the colleague I don't like. "He talked to you because I was there," she said once in her crazy wise way. And I've acknowledged him ever since.

LIII

When I was young, we moved every three years. You
could set your watch to it. It's been mostly convenient.

We made one big move when I was a kid that shook me more than I realized then. Looking back, it was like a boundary fence beyond which things got more confusing and full of strange and violent melancholy. At the time, I only remember I wanted to say I did not want to move but did not allow myself to say so. Not that it would have mattered. This section of John's poem asks the question, "Have you had a good life?" one he returns to over and again, reframing it only slightly. Sometimes it's called "happiness." One of my students last semester wrote about how his parents want him to be happy in the life he chooses. I asked him how he defines "happiness" and he looked at me like I was nuts. But really, I asked. There are researchers who study this! What do we mean when we say the word "happy"? When my daughter scored a goal in soccer once, I got up on the sideline and started singing "I'm happy!" (Pharrell Williams-style). Afterwards, she gave me stink-eye. "Mom, NEVER EVER sing like that again." But I was happy, just then, without knowing how to define it. Just was.

I wonder if Douglas Crase has moved since he sent me that kind note in the 1990s. Should I write him back now? Should I send him this blog post and say we were talking about you and that book of poems you wrote that we all remember, but so little after. "What we bring back is the sense of the size of it," he writes in "Blue Poles." It's the length of his lines and Galleher's that made me think of that genetic connection between them, the discursive moving toward something--an idea, a shaped sensation--the brain's foraging in what's left of Stevens's dump. The the.