… spring.

I post something on this blog every day, most often of course something related to universities. But here I am, 5:50 PM, just starting in on today’s writing, and I’m posting that I’m not posting.

Not posting something about plagiarism, athletics, conflict of interest. Not posting about poetry.

I think, as the song I link to up there goes, that I have spring fever. I mean, spring fever’s part of it, part of the restlessness, the difficulty concentrating, the tendency to wander to the garden and do something – anything – to stay outside on a cool sunny day in the Arboretum And Bird Central Station which is Garrett Park Maryland. The Solomon’s Seal is out, the fallen cherry at the top of the hill puts out white flowers. The white-flowering dogwood that shelters the topiary bulls has been hammered by heavy snow the last few winters, but its lost limbs have allowed it to clarify itself, and it’s more beautiful, more Japanese – in my green and white garden – than ever.

So I wander about, feeling that it would be madness not to be wandering about.

As always, in these supercharged settings, I’m thinking mainly of the dead world-lovers for whom I’m taking up the task of loving the world. Gillian Rose, Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Monette can’t be here – neither, for that matter, can George Orwell and Albert Camus – and I take seriously my role as proxy world-lover for them. Their writing taught me why I should love existence, and now I’m parading my gratitude.

The restlessness is more than that, though. Now that my fear for my sister-in-law is over – she lives in Watertown, and was hunkered down, alone, during the shootouts – I have time to think about what it must have been like for her, and for her neighbors. Relief and sadness come at me at the same time. Also some crazy sort of pity for the depraved little fucker in the boat, bleeding, trembling, trying to do himself in but too weak … Hiding out in the neighbor’s yard like some sick kid’s game…

We sent Joanna an assortment of Beacon Hill chocolates – survivor’s chocolates, we called them in our jokey note… All part of conjuring the event as farce rather than tragedy, and why not.

It’s what the song says. I feel so gay, in a melancholy way.