A Stack of Diaries, Lorna Simpson, 1993.
Dear Diary,
Today I feel very pale; I checked, yes, of course, and no, the mirror reports I am no paler than usual. I thought maybe it started when I got out of bed and decided that breathing like this, through 10 feet of dense felt, could be improved by albuterol. I dearly love albuterol! I wonder often, do people know about this stuff?? Why isn't it dealt out of the trunks of cars in back alleys? But, it may have started in the night, when I awoke with the old tiresome series of dreams that have me missing classes, whole days, important social clues, waiting in long lines for the restroom only to be let into a changing room, with just a mirror and a thin curtain. Or, yet further back, yesterday, when I sat in the cold wind, because the diner had closed, and I listened to a friend enumerate her sadnesses. Or, maybe it is the change in the weather from a storm that rages to the north and will arrive in a day or two....
Or maybe this paleness erupted after a spate of anger I felt in recounting another lunchtime listening; two older women, who break my heart with their intense longing to be younger and striving physically to push back aging and death, toiling at their gyms and their gratitude journals. I am horrified by their Sisyphean efforts, and yes, yes, of course this makes me a monster, a nihilist, and cynic, a lazybones, a quitter, a quivering jelly. I have thought it all through a thousand times, but I still say we, our culture, has made a pariah of aging- an inevitable failure of cellular tissue is a failure now of will and faith. Still, I say, no good can come from force. Or, maybe it is more accurate to say that there will be consequences- the 'push' down, back, away, at this locus will erupt in another.
But, no, this pale feeling may have come when I read the words "denk dir;" in Yoko Tawada's Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, which I could have been wholly satisfied with by only the title; it could have found a place in the revered top of the bookshelf, with the favorite books, some dozen or so, that live side by side, in reading only the beautiful, evocative title. What more can a writer do if they have already accomplished so much in just the title? Denk dir, denk dir- the book says it comes from a Celan poem; that it means "think to yourself," or "imagine." Thinking to yourself is imagining. Oh my, yes, it makes me pale, quail, to think it again. Think to yourself. Imagine.
Think to yourself, imagine.
Imagine! Think to yourself!
Think to; yourself.
Imagine.
