Kathi could call herself a “JAP,” not I. At her narcissistic best (in our animated disputes), she’d admit she was a “Jewish-American princess,” from Miami. We shared an apartment in Gainesville, FL, grad school days for me, as both of us were obsessed with political philosophy at the height of the Vietnam war, both enamored with a young professor who was the last student of Geörgy Lukács before Lukács died. But she was still an undergrad in Poli. Sci.—so damned smart and angrily immersed in early-era feminism. I marveled at her especially-Jewish ability to verbally joust by turning the other’s words against them. This was years before deconstructionism sought to see every text undermine itself through its own pretenses, which would be “grammatologically” mapped into speech as writing (dissonant trace of a background performed in the cumulative style of one’s narrative). I loved that provocative talent (and later loved a textuality of self partly inspired by Kathi’s influence). But Kathi didn’t need theory. It was her native wit. (In this regard, it’s probably not irrelevant that Derrida was Jewish.) I was awakened to critical potentials sooner than otherwise, thanks to the eros of her.

I think of her when I come across John Ashbery’s translation, in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Tale” from Illuminations, from which Kathi and I read to each other (in the translation we had) while driving somewhat madly to Manhatten, summer of 1972. Life was filled with mad driving in those days—which recalled to me Robert Creeley’s “I know a man”:

I know a man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

How many times I drove from somewhere to Manhatten and back, I haven’t counted. Kathi had a sister acting and singing in an Off-Broadway play (“Godspell”), which wasn’t the point of our trip. Her sister’s apartment was vacant, for some reason I don’t recall, and Kathi wanted to trek to there in the summer (Manhatten is hell in the summer), which means she needed to get out of Florida pretty bad. We got in such a fight, amid all the heat, that I left her there and drove back to Gainesville alone. On my way, she had the power shut off to the apartment. This was after she persuaded me to open a joint checking account with her, then emptied the account buying clothes.

Memories... John Ashbery is 83 now. So, apparently he sees that Rimbaud’s “Tale” deserves a new translation. The old man is apparently entranced by the youth-filled tale. (Rimbaud published Illuminations when he was 20! Much of it must have been written when he was a teen. He died at 37.) I imagine an old man entranced with a youth-filled poem: “A Prince...foresaw amazing revolutions in love....”

I believe Kathi and I read the entire book to each other on the road. I wonder where the forgotten “Tale” was recounted.

He wished to see the truth, the hour of essential desire and satisfaction. Whether or not this was an aberration of piety, he wanted it. He possessed at the very least a rather broad human power.

O, Romanticism.

You’ve somewhere seen an image of the painting of a man on a high rock gazing out at fleecey clouds over an ethereal mountain range. We see the back of him in a black coat, auburn hair tossed by the wind, and holding a walking stick. The trek must have been an easy jaunt for that gent shouldering no supplies. It’a Casper David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer [fog] (1818), an icon of Romanticism, where one would merge with Nature in the heights of inspiration.

That image is the cover of a book I’m looking forward to reading, part of the recent trend of understanding literary psychology in terms of cognitive science: The Neural Sublime: cognitive theories and Romantic texts, by Alan Richardson, 2010

One evening he was galloping fiercely. A Genie appeared, of an ineffable, even unavowable beauty. From his face and bearing sprang the promise of a multiple and complex love! of an unspeakable, even unbearable love! The Prince and the Genie probably disappeared into essential health.

“Essential health”? How odd—until you realize that the late 19th century had no concept of existential thriving or authentic happiness without theocentrism (a keynote of Romanticism: Nature replaces God). Would the Nietzschean conception come to prevail over the Parisian? The English over the German? Anglish over European?

How could they not die of it? So they died together.

But this Prince passed away, in his palace, at a normal age. The Prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince.

Wise music is missing from our desire.

True of youth, whatever the century; and good for an old mind to never forget that a youth may be wise beyond one’s years.