1

Drought hardened the soil but softened the sand that summer.

The virtual horizon was covered in fires.

An American poet pulled me aside to ask me why I had chosen to title my poetry collection Dor “after a poem published by Nathalie Handel without even acknowledging Handel’s poem . . . ”

Handel is an Arab-American poet who liked the idea of a Romanian word and is now immortalized online as the poet who brought it to the US. Marginality doesn’t prevent poets from making money by laying claim to margins on other pages.

I bit my lip and imagined climbing the stairs of god’s head backwards to keep from crying. There was nothing to say. There was no context and no place in which to begin responding.

2

Franz Schubert was arrested with his guy friends by Austrian police who were trying to cleanse the student body of revolutionary impulses. Schubert got off with a reprimand for his insulting and negative language. I thought about this a teen on the bus stared at automated doors and whispered “alienation.” I heard alien nation. The doors whooshed shut.

3

The man put his hands on my shoulders and advised me to stop worrying. “This is just the third act,” he said. “There is so much more to come, and so much for us to look forward to.”

“Nothingness: this is the world-god yet to be born," wrote Georg Buchner in the fourth act of Danton's Death.

4

"Only a man is capable of enduring this loneliness, and only then when it has been given to him to know the simultaneous torture and madness of being a creator," wrote Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt. Also: "Love transforms the need to thank into fidelity to ourselves and in unconditional belief in the other. …. Why, in loving, we transform ourselves into what we love while remaining forever ourselves." 

And somehow, this quote by Augustine that connects to Arendt and the view of love as seeing fully (the view she used to forgive Heidegger): "If you agree with Augustine that memory creates the self, then this is a book that will interest you, meine liebe-- if, when this war is over, there remains a self to be created."

After translating and notating the lines above from a Romanian copy of Arendt and Heidegger’s correspondence published by Humanitas, one is quite quiet.

5

When I hear storms around the cabin, I think of our ‘storm’.

- Heidegger to Hannah (ibid)

6

I’m sick of all this fuss. Go ahead, you dodos, and condemn me for eating fried octopus, cock sucking, animal worship. I touched the mezuzah, when I was menstruating, put that down. I confess to all your charges. I recommend to all Jewish women semen drunk street or mixed with beef blood. Now feed me to the dogs as your custom. (she lies down in the coffin and invokes the gods of the deep) gorgons, my sisters. Place it on, where are you? Homer, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Joyce, comfort me! I am on fire, Apollo, come!

Susan Taubes, Divorcing

7

The way a word like imperial eats shadows for money.

Imperial—- as in to hire an american reporter to do the feature on orphans in a country they’ve studied objectively on Pinterest. On Pinterest, my heart is a recipe for vampire cupcakes that leak blood at your halloween party. At your party, my heartache is locking the bathroom door in order to read it. To read it until someone knocks because their spouse needs to potty, to laugh politely at the wordplay, to make people feel really funny when drunk. 

Imperiousness—- as in the desire to validate one’s exceptionalist liberal friends who say isn't it brutal what those people did to those kids as they sway before the mirror on the wall, the magazine in your hand, the toothbrush your friend carries to remove any trace of sugar from her laser-bleached teeth and what can you say. You say nothing. Nothing barely matters. Her teeth are the whitest you’ve seen.

8

Thinking about how much I love and value Nathalie Handel’s poetry . . . and the shame that swallows me when I unintentionally imagine her long fingernails leaving marks on my cheeks with that poem I can’t read since the summer of drought. That poem I didn’t know about until the American poet interrogated my book’s relation to it.

9

"I will never forgive her… I will never recover from what she did," Susan Sontag told her son, David Rieff, many years after Susan Taubes’ suicide. Sontag was the one called by the coroner to identify the body.

Where does one begin the end of the story?

A few weeks before drowning, Taubes committed the act to text, prophesying in her own journal. The waiting is palpable as she describes sitting at home, going out, returning: "I come in waiting for time to pass. In about two weeks I will drown myself."

How does one live the final two weeks of a book that one has written to end?

For Susan Taubes, posthumousity was the most enduring present.

10

A series of moments threading the nocturnal existence. A diary entry dated from my fifteenth year of life mentions the fear of “cheating on a book” by reading other books at the same time. An early obsession with not hurting others, not even the dead. A reference to the stack of 5 books beneath my bed. The bad habits began early. The midnights of my youthful infidelities opened the possibility of nothing-I-can-say time.

11

In Sibiu, I realized the reason Ceausescu never got a Che Guevara T-shirt because his face was already too effeminate—- lacking Stalin's firm jawline, it was easier to pass him as the Daddy of the Nation than a War Hero. The aesthetics of dictatorship depends on the facial features of the dictator.

When the pen bumbles and jumps the fence into the aesthetics of dickdom, I set it down. Better to pace the porch than theorize this part of the men.

12

Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka's composure, as despair was Kierkegaard's happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life.

Guy Davenport, “A Kind of Paradox”— in its entirety

13

An asterisk in Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor" caught my eye for the way it approached impurity.

Sexual pollution and romantic contamination mix in the social mouth when Kafka tells his diary, on September 1917: "The infection in your lungs is only a symbol" of an emotional "wound whose inflammation is called F." Referring to Felice, Kafka suggests again the cost of his engagement.

After staring at this asterisk, and then seeking the actual passage in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, I experienced a pleasurable, unproblematic relation to my own speechlessness.