Scribblings with Green Chalk

(Image found here)

I have wanted it for a long time now. Ever since I saw my former advisor’s fridge, covered in magnets from various places, but mostly from Amherst. I want my very own Emily Dickinson fridge magnet, even though I don’t own the fridge in my apartment. I want Emily to guard my cheese, jam, and peanut butter.

This is a note to Gretchen before she goes home for Thanksgiving, so that she knows she’s dealing with an obsession

But first of all, before buying dresses, typing as quietly as I can, not to wake Asia, who does not even know I slipped her into my scribbling. Sneaking in friends’ names is a bit like using charms or pretending to be spiritually related to Frank O’Hara. Or showing off that one has read Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and knows what Flaubert was thinking with the piano or whatever instrument was the bit of unchewed reality. But, above all, showing off that I remember a poem by Denise Duhamel where she says it more neatly.

Once again I find myself object-struck. Not with German milk cartons (which are modestly European in their sizes) but with cheap clothes and cheap Ikea stuff. Our little trip to Ikea with Asia and Dan was slightly epic in its mission of conjuring home in dorm rooms and rented apartments. Among my various purchases there was one I am particularly proud of: the cheap bamboo blinds I had always liked but never had a good reason to get. I put them up today after getting a set of curtain hooks at a big, confusing hardware store, where the assistant couldn’t help me although I put a lot of effort into explaining my intentions towards the curtain rail in German.

To this stream of non sequiturs let me add that I catch myself looking at gray clothes. I even bought a gray coat for my walks in autumn frost.

Sometimes, despite the blissful effect of the early autumn sun, I let slip in conversation a bit of my bitterness. And it goes like a snake in the grass or lead in a lipstick (a haunting factoid Asia scared me with), making me sound like a tragic recluse. As if I were just a step away from announcing how I enjoy to sit by the dead.

Yet since my apartment is in the basement I can neither jump out the window nor send notes to children in a small basket. What I can do is keep Asia’s fashion advice in mind and consider white dresses next time I think of buying another gray sweater. They would certainly go well with Rhine wine and the refrigerator magnet Gretchen promised to get me from Amherst. A homemade Emily Dickinson lurking in suggestions and objects… Because I’m back to Dickinson just like I’m back to drinking coffee.

She never had Rhine wines, but they are there among the buzzing bees. I saw a bumblebee today, like a last speck of dying summer, just when I was thinking of Emily Dickinson as a good excuse for my wine obsession. I have not tried the local wines yet, I was just staring at a vineyard on the other side of the Neckar. Come slowly, Eden.

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender MajestyHer Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see;
For love of her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly of Me

This way, hiding behind Dickinson, I can slowly begin. I imagine I could go on pretending that I don’t really have any observations and that I don’t scribble all the time. I could put my scattered thoughts in a dusty drawer or the dusty back of my mind. It does seem very appealing in its modesty.

And then I could sigh that the world never writes back… But it’s not the nineteenth century, I am not that brilliant recluse who put together fascicles of poems that keep critics awake at nights. When it comes to sewing, I can only patch up socks. Dickinson hid away in her home to conjure imaginary prairies. I haven’t been home in months and, as things are, I won’t be coming back home at least for a while. In fact, words like “home” and “away” have become questionable. If I’mhere — wherever that may be — why should I assume that what makes me what I am is elsewhere? I remember once having this fear that without the mass of quotidian detail that gathered around me during the past few years I would dissolve. I didn’t. What happened is that I went to Vienna and first understood “Questions of Travel.” On one of the chilly autumn mornings I opened Bishop’s Complete Poems and found that this particular one sounded different.

Perhaps we can’t all just stay home and revel in domesticity. Perhaps, at times, we must dream our dreams / and have them, too just because it’s a more honest solution than renunciation. But I don’t think it’s fair to demand that journeys be epiphanies, expand your mind, elevate the soul. They will change you, nevertheless, through the small annoying particulars and the connections you will be tempted to make. So then, like Bishop’s traveler, you will take a notebook to jot them down.

I might not have made any logical connection to the “letter to the world” idea, but I will argue that it exists in my mental notebook. I don’t know about “home” and “away” anymore. I know that there are friends in the places tentatively labeled “here” and “there,” and that letters get easily lost or remain unwritten altogether. There is no inspiration from the muses in my scribbling. This is just a notebook. Just observations. Not gems of thought sewn together by divine logic. Just patched up socks. Please, don’t judge my inflated ego too harshly. But maybe drop a line sometimes.