Registered for Fall, nearing the end of the semester. Ready to get back to my own work. Whatever that even looks like anymore—research for The End of the Island, wrapping up The Intimate Register, moving toward an orals list and dissertation prospectus.
April 29 2020
Though the dates don’t quite line up, this might be the most precise conjunction so far: registration for the next semester’s courses took place today.
Of course, the other big event today was getting my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
And also of course, the date of that entry is the date of Monk’s birthday. A full third of her birthdays have now happened in pandemic. Sigh. We try to make things special but really when it comes to the party, my parents are going to have to bring it. We’re out.
Things are in proportion: it’s hard to care, exactly, about some class one will take in four months when so much can change within just a day (as we all learned two Tuesdays ago when Tune’s class shut down because of one positive test in it). It’s hard to really make sense of the world as it’s coming at you the way the world comes at you during COVID. The spin on the ball is unreadable.
I wonder if that’s why in the critical project I seem to be working towards I’m drawn to works that are, generally, not created very close to the moment being narrated. Jane Eyre, The Spark, Fruit of the Tree, El Deafo, Angels in America, Lost Notes: 1980, For a Decent Living, “Out with the Old.” All those are retrospective and all narrating a distant narrative present. But for every one of those, there’s something that processes the present: Persuasion, Cassandra, the Bourne archive, Preservation of Sign Language, On Being Ill, Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, and probably a lot of the digital video in ASL you’re going to look at (though some of it, like “Evolution of Communication,” is kind of first person retrospective).
The live question for me as I turn to narrating real events of my own life is how I do that accurately but in a way that also engages and has a cohesive emotional sense. I think of that line from Amy Hempel, about the fear of flying class. “What’s your greatest fear?” the instructor asks the narrator. “That I will finish this class and I will still be afraid.”
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