Gadzooks, it's obvious now, the significance of the fishing pole disassembled. The lines of verse are the pole and the meaning is the fishingline held taut by the reel of the deferring of the hand to the mind in its discernment. Not assembling it because of the reluctance to get the line entangled with the tree along the river bank is indicative of my reluctance to write verse which does not come up to my critical standards.

WCW's dash, hyphen, I recently confided to my neighbor who is a poet, was confounding me--how he uses it, to what purpose, WCW's variable foot, whatever that is. WCW keeps breaking the line, his Perpetuum Mobile: City is a case in point, as if he is extending his line out out out down the page and the reader puts it together (to gather in the mind of the reader) in her mind.

Still reading Derrida's Freud and the Writing Scene and amazed at its insights. Jung is popular because the bourgeoisie wants to have a more interesting life by coming up with his symbols in her dreams.

I had a dream about Sammy Davis Junior just a few days before he died. Someone had told me he had died and then I remembered the dream. The collective pop. culture unconscious!

Finding Derrida extremely interesting, intriguing beyond words, esp. in Freud and the Writing Pad in Writing and Difference. A colleague pooh-poohed Freud as pass-say, as if he had been outdated, so he chose to teach the Reading & Comp. students Jung, that hare-brained German, in some respects, according to Walter Kaufmann's assesssment of his personality.

As if we humans have progressed, a childish prejudice of the belief in human betterment and evolution. Olson in Max. poems says it is just the preservation of the human species that is the case.

I taught Freud to my the girls in a theater classroom last year, and it was challenging to present Freud's ideas, esp. the Psi-system and the mental apparatus (another prejudice I suppose Olson would call it, as if the mind were a machine)--to girls, some of whom, wrapped up in the black bags, showed avid interest especially when I had them speak on dream interpretation in Emirati culture. Teeth, for ex. being symbolic of certain relatives' deaths depending on the position of the tooth in the mouth. One girl, not covered up, kind of strident, not the usual demur feminine, spoke about how prayer and dream are conjoined in Islam with the time of night before that pre-dawn call to prayer--that, if you have the dream right before that call-to-prayer, then if you pray, the dream will come about, used to get an A on an exam.

Recently was having dreams in which I was at the bank of a stream or river and fishing. I had the pole detached into many segments with the line running through the eyelets and kept taut as is proper to transport a pole unless one is too lazy to detach them. But it was too many parts detached such that I could not put them assemble them together to make the pole. A tree near the bank interferring as well with extending the pole to its whole length.

Reminiscent of that almost pre-historic, post-Diluvian scene in WCW's Paterson where the town is out on the mud flats of a drained lake and wrestling with the huge fish and eels. Reminds me that in Lake Erie there used to be huge fish.

namaste

why I can't remember to say 'what is your name' in Hindi when I memorized it yesterday and can remember siapa nyama nya? from years ago in Jakarta living on jalan Cikajang and teaching English I don't know

that Brit husband of Madonna may have something to say about keeping the Alzheimer at bay when allegedly he referred to her as if cuddling her was like chewing gristle

I'd say that's not all that bad and not really an insult as the press and allegedly Madonna had it especially when you have to taste the red meat before you get to the gristle

Bihara my laundryman held my hand longer than usual when I saw him in his hole-in-the wall establishment called 'al arabi laundry' last night because the other day I greeted him with namaste

last night I was at pains to get him to tell me how to say 'I am American' after I asked ap hindustani hai but didn't succeed

my god his hand was rough as sandpaper from wielding that iron all day not like a lightweight housewifey one made mostly of plastic. He has a piece of marble to set it on when not using it

my wife says I didn't succeed because I did not speak to him in the broken Arabic he's used to that lingua franca of taxi swaags and it's largely not Arabic but a hodge-podge of Urdu and Arabic. I tried my modern standard Arabic on him and raised my volume a notch but he still didn't understand all the while he was gazing with wonder into my eyes. Finally he said dili with those hard Hindi d's

I didn't realize until talking with B. that he took me literally when I asked him if he was Hindustani. Of course he's not, he's from Delhi!