The blank brain with which I have been inflicted continues…. I’ve tried, mustering what few meager grey cells apparently remain to me, to figure out when… and how… and when.
I know that class on Wednesday night was difficult. I, who have taught high school English for years, found myself absolutely confounded by my professor’s opening lecture on the distinctions between symbol and allegory, distinctions I thought I knew well enough. But heave those two ideas into the intellectually athletic minds of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and…. Let’s just say that I Didn’t Get It, but followed, as best I could, my professor’s repeated definitions and examples with an increasingly rumpled brow and brain.
At the end of class a friend remarked, “You were quiet this evening, Rebecca,” and I realized I hadn’t spoken a word throughout, so thoroughly muddled was I. I had a comment, at one point, about a significant conversation between the main character and a fellow by the name of Chevalley, but the pace of classroom discourse was too much for me; I was unable to inject anything at all into the volley.
And since then, what? Well, homeschooling, as usual, accompanied, when I have time to think about it, with the harrowing awareness of how Very Difficult it is to meet the various academic needs of three children of, for now, drastically different ages. We never hit geography at all today, and I don’t remember getting to it yesterday, either.
Meanwhile we enjoyed, for a brief less-than-twenty-four-hour period, the company of our friends Peter and Paul, slam poet and guitarist, respectively, whose excellent performance (it is never not excellent, and you can learn about them here) I enjoyed after class on Wednesday night. We took them to Duke Gardens yesterday afternoon and enjoyed the wisteria, which is blooming Absolutely Out of All Reason, and this fact alone should inspire Something in me, one would think…. But I was fighting allergies, too, and that can cloud the thinking.
Is that what this brain malaise is, then? Allergies?
After Peter and Paul left last night, I had nothing left: no energy to do any cleaning of any kind, that was certain; no zeal to iron; no interest in reading or writing curriculum. I didn’t want to do laundry, I didn’t care to write anything, and I didn’t want to haul myself to bed.
What, pray tell, is the answer to that?
Television.
So Bill and I watched (on d.v.d., thank you, Jeff) an episode of the Best Television Show Ever: Northern Exposure.
And wouldn’t you know it, one of the characters on this particular episode articulated for me what I absolutely could not, haunted, as am I, by a kind of mental blankness. For him, it was his dreams that were lacking; his words, however, are indeed my experience. And so I post them here, if not for your pleasure, then for my comfort:
“I used to have really vivid dreams– dreams that Van Gogh would envy. Lush, florid, stirring dreams. Not anymore…. Something’s missing. It’s like my brain has been stripped clean– denuded. The rainforest of my psyche has been sprayed with defoliant.”
And so once again I am going to bed, and hoping for better things tomorrow.
