>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: Du muBt dein Leben andern
>>Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001

I've never been particularly fond of Rilke's "Archaic Bust of Apollo" (Archaischer Torso Apollos), but I've never been able to get that final phrase out of my mind, in English or German. I can't even say the second word in German, but it just sticks with me because it comes from absolutely nowhere in the poem and is really very effective. Stephen Mitchell translates the line as "you must change your life." It’s resonating a lot with me lately.

I had the worst night's sleep last night that I've had in awhile. I couldn't stay down for any longer than half an hour, but I was too fucking tired to get up to do something else other than sleep. My body has felt dragged out as hell, and my mind is absolutely flying. I felt like I could spit lightning bolts today because there's this mental energy I have right now that I can almost feel sparking behind my eyes, but I can hardly keep my eyes open. My body is totally exhausted and my mind refuses to go to sleep. It's quite irritating. The night I didn't drink, I needed something, so I went to the grocery store and got some instant coffee packets and drank black coffee all night (and slept well, surprisingly). They've been black coffee sunrises since then. Another chemical...woohoo....

I realized something today that really bothers me about the English department here and English departments in general. I love French, Italian, and German poets, and we will never learn anything about any of them. I bought an anthology of French poetry today with Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valery, Nerval, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Appollinaire, Laforgue and Corbiere, and if I had to associate my own writing with other writers, these would be the ones. The French Symbolist poets are the ones I enjoy reading the most and whose writing mine most resembles, but nowhere in my college career am I ever going to take a class that treats any of these poets for longer than perhaps a day. I had a comparative lit class where the professor couldn't even pronounce Rimbaud's name; she said it rim-bowd. I was so mad I almost had to leave. That's all the academic exposure I'll get to these writers. I'll never study Holderlin, Heine, Rilke or even Goethe in a class. No Petrarch, Dante, or Leopardi...just Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong, they're great poets, but I think Dante is far better than Chaucer or Milton. The French Symbolists were writing quality when the rest of the literary world was churning out high-brow Victorian moralizing bullshit, and I believe Faust is as good as any play Shakespeare ever wrote. I'm on my soapbox again, but every non-English writer I've ever read I read on my own, and that's just a little frustrating.

You were talking about how you've kept a journal since ninth grade, and I think I've told you before about my journal troubles, but I wrote for a lot of the same reasons you did and do. I didn't understand something until I had it written down; it didn't exist until I put it down on paper. But then the reality of it frightened me so much that I didn't want anyone else to see the new thing I had created. I was afraid people would be able to get inside my head if they read the things that came out of it. That's one reason I don't have any extant journals. The other is that I was never satisfied with anything when it did come out. I'd look at what I had made and be disappointed with it and destroy it almost in shame. Now, I don't have anyone I have to hide my head from, and I'm leaving little paper trails that lead into my head for people to find when I'm gone so they can try and poke around up there when I can't feel it anymore. I can't handle people shifting through my mind when I'm still in it. That's why therapy never worked for me, and it’s part of why I'm constantly so surprised with you. I can leave the door open, and it doesn't bother me. That's never happened to me before. My thoughts were always off-limits to other people.

I was just flipping through that French poetry anthology, and I noticed that most of these poets didn't live past forty. Quite a few died in their late twenties: a few by suicide, a few from sickness or circumstance, and a few (like Baudelaire) from sheer depravity. Valery lived to be the oldest at seventy-four (he's about twenty years older than the second oldest, Mallarme) and Laforgue the youngest, at twenty-seven. I thought that was kind of interesting.

I'm going to go and stare into space for a few hours now and try to calm my mind down without over-agitating it and having another Tuesday.

I love you, Perdita.
Belacqua

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>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: Du muBt dein Leben andern
>Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001

Belacqua,

Something is WRONG with me today. Yesterday, too, I guess, as I woke up in the morning with a sudden and atrocious disgust for cigarettes. I didn't smoke at all yesterday, and I didn't feel like it again today, but I bought a pack anyway, and after two cigarettes, I'm disgusted all over again. Where the HELL did this come from? I don't get it. I'm also having severe problems with turning red. I must be getting too many chemicals in my system. I really notice these chemical changes. I guess they're getting too abrupt these days. Ah, who the fuck knows? All I know is that everything is blurry and weird today, like it doesn't really exist. I should just go home. Maybe I will soon.

That seems so odd to me that all you study at your school is English poetry, as I've done so much of so many different languages, what with studying opera and all. I'm a big fan of German Romantic poetry. Well, the poetry in German Romantic MUSIC, anyway. Nineteenth-century German art song is the BEST, and we encountered Heine and Goethe more than anyone else. I love Heine. I've actually been a big Heine fan since tenth grade, when my English teacher (who thought I was a big fuck-up) had us studying a poem with the first line: "My songs you say are poisoned." It just seemed so RIGHT. I wish I could remember the rest of the poem, but that line has just stuck with me for reasons which are probably fairly obvious.

(By the way, "muBt" is just a fancy way of writing "musst," which is pronounced sort of halfway in between the English word "must" and what you would expect an English word spelled "moost" to sound like. It's like the vowel sound in the word "could." Fun stuff.)

Well, I think I'm going home. This fucking sucks. I feel like shit, and I just don't understand why. I think it's time for a nice long evening of staring at the TV (even though it's only three o'clock).

I love you.
Perdita