200 more pages

Yesterday was graduation: a sunny but crisp mid-May day. It rained the evening before, and the ground was still soft by noon. The trees still had an extra tinge of green from the rain. I walked to the school to spy on graduation. I didn't make it in time. When I got there around 11:40, there was already a green wave of robes and fluttering programs rising toward me. I followed along with the push of the crowd toward the gym. Wash U had tents set up for lunch with servers wearing tuxedos. Parents wore shorts and flip-flops. The graduates just stood around; their penultimate brain cells expired during finals, and their last ones sacrificed the night before. Part of me thought over and over that they didn't appreciate graduating. Not like I would have on that day. Having their friends and families all there. On that day.

Later I took my folding chair outside to read Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. What sticks in my mind? Images of students returning from lunch with their families. "Congratulations!" Still a warm day. Then Heinrich Schliemann’s wife wearing Helen's jewels in Troy. A point about fragmentation, a modernist aesthetic of fragments. A young woman helping an elderly lady walk across our uneven lawn. Pieces of Sappho's texts rescued only because scraps were ripped from her now, long-gone books. Written on Diplomas. No, written on parchment because papyrus disintegrates and someone wanted to keep her words. Although Pound called it "Papyrus." Ice crystals covered in chocolate. "God is concentrated attention" (53). The neighbor who lives above us, with his grandfather. They moved in after we did. Now they'll leave. Pound and he "poiesis of loss" (56). Couches and furniture piled up by the dumpsters. Floral couch. White couch. A bucket of beer cans. Three little birds chirping near me. A tuft of hair on the ground. From a dead animal or the neighbor's dog shedding? "Any object in space is a memory system" (31). Does that include dog hair? Someone checks the meter on the building and steps on my flowers. One of my daffodils is broken. He didn't need to step there. Joycean epiphany. "A lost picture of 18 centuries ago recreated, young persons just dead resurrected and transfigured, eternal doctrine allegorically illuminated (but only for the discerning)" (32). A group of graduates pulls up in the driveway near me. They stand and talk. They don't have anything better to do, such as read for Tuesday. I still have 200 pages to go. I still have 200 pages to go, but not for Tuesday. Discerning is what it is. It's the gold chain around Helen's neck, which she never wore, lost for centuries, then stolen from Berlin, now officially just a photograph. Somehow it still links together Pound and Henry James's never ending sentences, dog hair, Sappho yearning for Atthis, and 2008 graduates. Discerning is not all it's cracked up to be. Hyperaesthesia. Discerning is the great sadness of life. "Fictions in general define words" (35). They will move forward and make money, and buy homes, and have families. Why did we come here? To experience yellow St. Louis fogs? Eliot from "Prufrock." I've touched many of the places Kenner discusses: Idaho (where Pound was born); St. Louis; Troy, Mycenae, sandy Pylos, Crete, Dublin, "the art of attending to radioactive moments" (60). The graduates had a beautiful day. I don't begrudge them their happiness. After all, it was only radioactive for me.