By admin 
How was your trip to New York?
Well,
we stayed at R’s. He was away. Asked us to not use the sheets—quite reasonably,
he has no laundry and who likes coming home to an unclean
bed?
Instructed to bring sheets, we forgot. But try to sleep slightly
above
the sheets, C with his chronic cough, I my insomnia. Wandering 3 A.M. bedroom
to kitchen I find no teapot, scald myself on the kettle. C still coughing, racked, almost in
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tears. Chronic means no one can help. I blunder about, spilling
things
on the floor. Pick up a book I’d thought to read on the plane.
“Hölderlin’s
Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843,” by Giorgio
Agamben.
It begins with Agamben’s exegesis of Hölderlin’s critique of
Fichte’s
understanding of the sentence “I am I.” All three have much to
say
about this sentence, for “I am I,” with its exhilarating syntax and
salty
relation of subject to object, does not dispel anyone’s tears or
blunder,
yet it makes a sort of refuge. Admittedly, I don’t quite know who
Fichte
is and have to look up Selbstbewusstsein, but still, there is a
staving
off of terribleness. To think. This saving thing. This useless thing.
Night
passes, C finally sleeps, Agamben goes on struggling with Hölderlin’s critique
of Fichte till dawn. My skull sways. “I am I” remains
unclarified.
It occurs to me I’ve spent too much of my life staring at someone else’s sentences
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in a rebar dawn, measuring my insomnia against their
snap-brim
thoughts. Have I proved a worthy struggler with Agamben’s
exegesis
of Hölderlin’s critique of Fichte? Not
really.
My mind is
smallish.
Then again, this book of Agamben’s was sent me by a former
student,
whose life was changed when he read “ . . . in lovely blue . . . ”
(Hölderlin,
fragment of a hymn). So (changed) was mine, years ago, I now recall. And really,
what more can I ask, whoever I am, of a night on a trip to
New York?