life now and then: a meditation in two parts

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
-- William Wordsworth

I went to Philadelphia on Friday and it provided much food for thought in two arenas: sociability and history.

To wit: the lack of one and an abundance of the other.

Part 1

Let us begin with the first. At one point on Friday evening, I was prompted to try to taste a particular piece of sushi from someone whose gifts have proven invaluable in ensuring my current situation. Because of this individual's judgment, I was inclined to listen to her encouragement, but in the end declined because I simply cannot abide the consumption of a creature which swims or crawls with a shell upon its back. They're delicious, but something about their flavor just ...

Forgive the digression. I merely wished to say that I found myself declining her vehemence with the following statement: "Look, I already do everything else you tell me to." At her incredulous expostulation, I continued, "I write my resumes the way you tell me to, I apply for the jobs you tell me to, I correspond with people the way you tell me to, you are generally the person who shows me how to be an actual human being. Once in a while, though, I really should grow some balls and think for myself, and I have chosen this occasion to do so."

This sentiment's expression was largely unintentional. Still, the more I think about it, the more I find it to be true. I do require some off-stage prompting with the right lines, the right stance, the right mannerism. I do, in other words, need some help in being some species of actual person.

This I find interesting. It's not a matter of concern because I strongly believe that I do have the right to exist as the kind of person I am. I'm asocial by nature; I enjoy solitude. The roots of this trait may run too deeply to trace -- in spite of previous attempts to do just that -- but the scent of its flowering permeates my life.

I often run across near-satiric paeans to the love of solitude, where asocial behavior is supposedly taken as an indicator of genius; the popular opinion is that the need for time alone serves the desire to perform great works with the utmost of concentration. I draw and I paint and I write, and I do none of these very well. I can't solve the world's problems; that is strictly the province of greater minds than I. Still, I cherish my seclusion. I can think my private thoughts and do my private things and create my private art (such as it is; lately what little I can do has been co-opted by my mother for family needs) and find my private fulfillment on my own terms.

Wordsworth expresses this sentiment beautifully in the poem included at the beginning of this missive. It's too well-known to bother going into any serious analysis, but I want to point out his line about "the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude," which allows him, in quiet moments, to reflect on the beauty he sees throughout his life and derive an intangible gratification from a single image. This, I think, is a significant portion of the value of reclusiveness.

This stands in stark contrast to my host, whose gregariousness is still a wonder to behold after some years of acquaintance. She's a born charmer. Everywhere we went, she knew someone -- and this was not because this was a planned expedition. For instance, she knew the fellow behind the counter at the Mütter Museum, which hadn't even been considered as a potential destination until I happened to see a magnet emblazoned with its logo on her refrigerator that morning. Or the man who lived next door to her new apartment, whom she accosted by coincidence and involved in deep conversation for several minutes. Or the individual she knew at the Comcast Center who could have taken us to the top of the building, the tallest in Philadelphia -- but didn't because of the lobby show.

The general point is, of course, that there are just some people who were made for others and some people who were made for themselves.

I could go off into a long-winded examination of my phrasing in the previous sentence -- what does it indicate about my beliefs that I choose to refer to people as being "made"? -- but instead I shall end by giving you notice: The lobby show should be considered a segue into Part 2, coming your way tomorrow.

the walls were as of jasper

My first week as a librarian is over.

Librarian. That's me. Two years of grad school and another year of suffering through newspaper archiving (which had very little relevance to what I learned in grad school other than the overall mission), and I can finally call myself a Librarian. I won't be Questing for the Spear or Returning to King Solomon's Mines or being Cursed by the Judas Chalice (coming your way on TNT on December 7 at 8:00 p.m., 7:00 central), but the general gist is, I think, clear.

The strangest part is the return to deaf life.

I've described my complicated relationship with deafness on this blog before. I'm not quite certain how to describe my current situation. In one sense, it's tremendously comfortable -- everyone signs. In another, it's intimidating -- I had realized that I was given less responsibility in my previous job because of my deafness, but it didn't really hit home until I got here and truly understood how much authority I was being given, and how much I had truly lacked.

It sort of re-emphasizes the real wall against the world. I finally understand the sense of empowerment sought by so many deaf people, and which can be most easily found within the deaf community. It's at the same time very nice and very alarming; it seems easy to grow complacent and envision a future in the same place. There is a prevailing atmosphere of concern over the aging staff at the library, which encourages a lengthy stay.

I saw my future as one of peregrination; a year here, a couple years there, roaming the country before I hit my 30s and grow relict. I still hold to that, but it may be a few years further away. There's certainly a major compensation: Washington itself. That's without considering the monumental task of relocating once again, viewed through the lens of last week's effort.

The job itself certainly isn't terrible by any means. I am selecting for three of my favorite types of reading material, the fellow librarians seem neat and appropriately idiosyncratic, and the library itself is fairly large. From the outside, it looks like a small brick alien spaceship, but it's one of the most deceptive privately-owned buildings in the metro area. None of the walls meet at right angles, there are squiggly halls and doors everywhere -- sometimes just to connect one hall to another. The archives themselves take up two vaults, an enormous room, and at least six smaller ones devoted mostly to processing and photo storage--none of which is actually adjacent to each other or even in the same area. The deaf collection takes up most of the first floor and the general collection takes up most of the open space on the basement floor, which is shared by the archives (3 people, 4 student assistants) and the Academic Technology department (31 people, God knows how many student assistants, a couple of TV studios, at least one computer lab, and a bunch of video-editing suites). Really, the basement is the largest floor of the three and extends for over an acre underneath the two floors above ground level. Or possibly less; the twists and turns would upset a surveyor.

The students are also kind of interesting in their own right, although I'm not so interested in fraternizing (see how professional I am). All sorts of weird requests and it's oddly comforting to see such normalcy that I can actually eavesdrop on.

The city where I live is also fairly interesting. I live a couple blocks out of the "Downtown," which is an area infested with chains, movie theaters, parking garages, and teenagers, although I'm in a part of town blanketed with Ethiopian, Jamaican, Thai, Indian, Chinese and "world" shops, cafes, and restaurants. I live on the 15th story of a building that affords me wonderful views of what pass for high-rises here, as well as the Discovery Communications building a couple blocks away and the Metro trains next to that. I went to Borders (forgive me) this morning, then Fuddruckers for lunch. There was a Thanksgiving parade going on and I watched a group of people in support of building a new library next door to my building attempt to deflate a 20-foot-tall penguin.

Also, it is frigid outside and I keep seeing little flakes of snow here and there and I left my Vaseline at work. I could go and get it, but am not in the mood. My lips will simply have to chap freely. It's not the most annoying thing in the world; what is is the sheer proliferation of static electricity in cold weather when you walk across the carpet in socks. I could power this building with the sheer voltage I seem to discharge every time I touch something made of metal.

Zzzzap.

sinking in

I have moments inside myself, like crystals in a geode.

In the darkness enclosed by my skin, I contain precise matrices of different places, times of day, and certain turns of feeling (the emotional equivalent of turns of phrase). None of them are memories; rather, they are plans for the future. The basic elements are a specific kind of place, a particular time of day, and varying circumstances that engender an exact emotion paired with an essentially singular schema. They are all, to a one, open-ended dates with deja-vu.

One of the most long-lived moments is being alone in a dark room at night with a city outside my window, and feeling as though I were in a shell, nestling alone within multiplicity, gazing out across endless vistas while feeling extremely conscious of my corporeality. It's a cozy sense of isolation within dense population, of ownership of my own little corner to curl up in, of being able to observe the vibrant life of the outside world without being a part of it. Key to this sensation is a realization of the distance between me, the means of access, and everyone else.

I get this feeling every night in my new bedroom, which is the room furthest from the front door. As I prepare for bed, I shut the bedroom door, turn the light off, and open the blinds as far as they'll go, and drink in the light and the life and the night and the walls and the window and the ceiling and the floor and think I am here.

It's not something to which I readily admit, truthfully. It sounds odd and most likely will be perceived as though it were some sort of a psychological problem, the pleasure taken in utterly shutting myself off while still keeping an eye on everyone else.

The more I've thought about it since moving in last week, though, the more I realize that the crystalline futures I have hoarded within myself depend wholly upon an understanding of space. Vast spaces or close places, they nevertheless involve both a widening of my world and a constriction of my personal space to the area circumscribed by my feet.

I found a similar feeling the first time I took the Metro into the District. I only stopped at Union Station and Dupont Circle, but it was a feeling of liberation and also of myself among many. It happened again the second time, when I took it to the Mall and found myself at a loss for choice. Museums all around me. I wound up spending three hours strolling around the Museum of Natural History, in no hurry to get anywhere, knowing home was only two train rides away. It's a city. A world-class city. And it's mine to explore, to carve out niches, favorite places, that I can go to again and again and sort of snuggle myself into. It's a new home I can appropriate. Like taking the reins of a new horse and finding its rhythm, learning how to lean just here and just there to make it go just so.

Unfortunately, work prevents me from really settling into the city properly just yet. Fortunately, I have a four-day weekend coming up, an eleven-day holiday at the end of December, and another four-day weekend a couple weeks after that. It's almost as though I'm a parasite who just found a new host body, as sort of human-shaped Toxoplasma Gondii who is attempting to make a city more interested in the cat-urine of my comfort.

Or something. Either way, that moment which I've held inside myself for many years has now achieved its final actualization, so the move has become a sort of liberation in another, quite unexpected, sense.