That Magic in Various Endearments

Yesterday was good and vibrant. Woke up with news mitigating the disappointment of a grad school rejection: I was nominated the outstanding graduating senior in the Philosophy department. Hooray! A ceremony with free food (and my face on a poster - bletch, that part makes me nervous)! And...both of my parents visiting for the ceremony...also bletch.

Talked - no, typed - with Aaron for a bit on Skype. I made a comment about being indulgent, sometimes hedonistic, without trying to make other people uncomfortable, and it set off a strange conversation. It seemed almost hostile on Aaron's part, probably because it has very powerful historical connotations in his mind, while I was using a technical definition of hedonism when I - very casually - invoked it. I indulge in what I want, and seek it out, without the self-consciousness and moral moaning of my earlier days. Being a lot less concerned with moral stringency and more concerned with enjoying myself and indulging my whims (indulging my wants and ideas, really, is a necessary part of my excitement to be myself in the most banal sense). I've just removed a filter, and so it makes sense that Aaron would say that these are pretty normal expressions of basic urges. I don't think that's wrong. But I think that's what hedonism is: openness to the expression of one's basic urges. But historically, it's a posture, a lifestyle, a philosophy in which pleasure-sating is of the utmost importance. My pleasures just aren't as sexy, as dramatic, as those made famous by Cyrenaics (maybe even earlier, but I'm ignorant of most pre-Socratic philosophy because I'm a lazy person). Mine is more epicurean, more tranquil. It's made incarnate in boring, quieter ways. I only eat my favorite foods - currently having feta, spinach and bacon quiche with a thick whole milk latte and pitted dates. I spend more money on food than the average dollar-conscientious, Ramen-feeding college student, but I'm happier. I dress well, I peacock unabashedly. Besides the blatantly sensual, I love to touch people, and have made it one of my most identifiable qualities; taking hands, holding shoulders, hooking waists while we talk, playing with hair, urging impromptu dance. My favorite people, noticeably, reciprocate. Atticus is the best. He may even have started it. On our first hike alone we walked through the Holly woods. I hurtled myself in circles around a tree, he lifted me up, spun me, my hands in the leaves. He'll pull you into a whirl when his favorite music plays, and since he can't spin without incurring debilitating dizziness, and you'll crash into a warm heap. He'll pull you through the reeds at Cemetery Lake, everything whipping you, enfold your waist, leap with you into the perfect cold. He loves the focus of the physical. We talked yesterday about the acroyoga he's been doing for that class. We'll do it together this summer, which makes me ecstatic. To move someone in the air, in slow arcs and twirls, with your arms and legs, is even better for him than fighting or dancing. The intimacy of it, the continued mobility in close proximity, the jumble of the bodies' parts. In the summer, we wrestle on the floating pontoon in the middle of Green's Lake, leveraging each other, hoisting and pressing and twisting. The minutiae of those movements are amplified and made tender. I need that magic.

Kalil is the best at touching faces. She'll sidle up, trace your nose, bite your earlobe like a cat. Mike's singularly talented; his homosexuality probably has something to do with his ease in touching girls. He can envelop without subsuming. Even David's caught the bug. In a crowded bar, he'll lead you with his hand on your back, give you back your pen and notecards by slipping them into your pocket. Josh is more timid - the only other virgin I work with - but he lets me hug him, and hugs fiercely. All hugs from boys (excluding the conscientious David, whose known enough girls to know) and flat-chested girls hurt my breasts. Do they know this?

My friendship with David is a balm. He's beautiful, he's sexy, and I'm safely taken, and he's mourning the loss of an impressively provocative blond. Yesterday we went to the ice that forms between Little Presque Isle and the shore to explore the temporary caves. The deepest one we found - hopefully I get my camera back from Jack tonight so I can go back and capture it - went about 20 feet into the ice, and at it's deepest, we could stand up. There were two skylights, so the sand and ice glittered. David climbed up onto a ledge and claimed it as his bed. I laid down under a skylight to claim it as my Hey, Arnold! bedroom. We walked out nearer the water (though it was still almost a mile off when we decided to turn to the isle), the levels dropping and dropping with wave-like sweeps. That's where the best caves form. We talked about procreative fears: the man's fear of shards of ice like the ones we stepped over, upward pointing and dangerous; the woman's fear of things that crawl. I learned about the first girl, the dramatic mistake unmade, in Robin. It looks like we all have our resentful, mournful preoccupations. The ice was amazing from the isle. In parts it was transparent, the water underneath black, the only sign of its existence the white threading cracks in shivering, thin lines. There was pure, glowing, bright blue, the kind that never forms on small lakes. There were the rifts, where a crack created warring factions that rose up into the sky - a battle frozen in time. That's what David, the zoology major ever preoccupied with biology and inhuman action, loves best about ice and winter.

"Ice is the moving world at its most immobile." We could see the water pulsing slowly under a fragile upended block. "Energy's back and forth slows and almost stops, and look what happens. Everything looks shattered, but it doesn't break. It stays, like in limbo." He's not a liquid talker, but he's a good one. We circled the island, found the place where you can cliff dive in the late summer, ran into a bunch of hippies around a campfire, talked with them for a bit. At the west side of the island, we could see the miles of flatter and flatter ice, up until its edge. There was dark blue ice where it froze over deep water, devoid of any dirt. Light turned pale purple at the edge. There were occasional gold glitterings at the thickening crests. The water was blue-black and mobile, an uneven, jutting line on the horizon in the wind, which was heavy and pulled my hair all over my face. I wrapped it in my scarf and we raced down the paths, leaping over the humps in the snow piled by winds. My right leg - only that one - kept getting stuck in the deeper drifts. We got coffee and baked goods afterwards, hands very very cold, and he talked about his island. It's a different world, the kind I've never had to put up with. Small, where everybody knows you, where you have to placate thugs so that, when you go away to the north, your mother will be safe there. The stories of his fights are stomach-curdling. Atticus has had plenty of fights, but in them, it was never much doubted that he would win. He's tenacious, stocky, lifts anvils, and isn't afraid of being hurt. David is tough, of course, but he doesn't have Attie's brawn, and the people he's had to deal with are decidedly seedier than the ones who feel like bothering Atticus. Kidnappers, rapists, the sorts of people you don't have to know if you live in a larger community. I felt pity for him; he feels like he has to set aside a portion of his moral integrity to keep the people he cares about safe. It sounds so awful. I'm sure I'd do the same in his shoes if I had to.

Last night was relaxed. Adam and I played with the cats and drank together. His younger cousin is playing Peter Pan for that ballet company, so Adam will get to go to the Paris Opera House to see him this summer. So envious, and so proud of someone I don't know. Watched Red Eye at Lydia's behest, and thought Cillian Murphy's half-threatening, half-protective character intensely attractive. Atticus called after he finished up at Scott's and thanked me, touchingly, for not being like his friend's girlfriends. I miss him so much. He was going to surprise me and come up for Valentine's Day weekend, but Ray needs him for an installation in Chicago. It's too bad, but he'll come up soon, and then I'll be down for spring break, and then he'll be up for his spring break, and he might come up with Lydia for Easter to go to the monks' service in the Keweenaw. For now, I do my work, keep myself entertained, and glue my ear to a phone.

Stuck in my head: