The date, Diogenes, and the dog

I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement. It’s what you’ve been writing about for the past couple decades (and me too, but you more so); or, not writing about it, writing within it.”

That’s how I approach her poetry, from The Dementia Blogs (2008) through I Want to Write an Honest Sentence (2019) to Lilith Walks (2022)and Meditations (2023). Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest? “I want to write an honest sentence,” but how can it be written?

And how can it be read? This essay is part of an ongoing project of “Naive and Sentimental Poetics,” my riff on Schiller’s attempt to imagine a “natural” (i.e. “naive”) poetry in a modern, self-reflective (i.e. “sentimental”) age. How can one read poetry directly, un-theoretically? How can one encounter a text as in Williams’ language, entering “the new world [text!] naked, cold, uncertain of all save that [we] enter”? It’s impossible, of course. You bring what you bring, and you understand as well as you can, given your experience and ability to think beyond your experience (to imagine). But, as Schiller said, the impulse to approach poetry without mediation remains, impossible though it is. We’re here; we’re not somewhere else: in this place, on this day.

The Date.

July 29, 2024. This is the date on which I’m writing. I notice that every piece of Schultz’s writing is marked with a date. All writing, of course, is written on a particular day, and not some other day, and in a place. Later, these facts are edited, homogenized. The writing may be historical, able to be historicized, but it is not relevant, really (not considered relevant) what day exactly it was written. The writer must step outside of the writing, after it is written; she then will shape the writing, over the course of a number of dates. This is normal, is the norm. Later, a biographer or literary historian may want to reconstruct the timeline of exactly when each piece of writing was written and when each was revised, and thus how the final, completed work came at last to have the shape it has. Sometimes, a writer will indicate, in the preface or acknowledgments section, when and where a manuscript was completed. New Haven, July 2022, for instance. The date and location constitute a kind of seal: the book is finished now, nothing more can be added.

All of Schultz’s books date their entries: The Dementia Blog (both volumes), the Memory Card books, Lilith Walks, Meditations. Things are happening as she writes — actual things; her thoughts are actual, occurring in time. Part of her writing process is paying attention; one pays attention in the present, though one may direct one’s attention also to the past and future. But there you are. Is it not important that, on that day, you are there and not somewhere else; that you are there on that day and not some other day? And yet, she is not simply keeping a “diary.”

Or is she? Are these literary diaries? Day by day, blog by blog, dated entry by dated entry? Yes, maybe. Except they’re not. How do I know they’re not? Well, no, maybe they are. What is their relation to time? The crunching force of events and sensations and ideas in time creates a literary — and political and emotional (political-emotional-intellectual) — opening and imperative for writing. It’s important to Susan that she, the poet, be inside, shaping the text from inside the times of their composition — not later, not from a later perspective. So, is this “free writing”? “Spontaneous writing”? Or is the writing less free, more constrained — that is, constrained by the events, sensations, and ideas that are present to her at the times of writing? If we are thinking in terms of form or lack of form, is time the constraint that makes possible the form? Susan knows, in broad terms, where the focus of the writing is going to be. She is, after all, alive in that same world — thinking, feeling, perceiving — throughout the days and nights, and when she sits down to write, on that day (inscribing its date), she is not blank. The world does not suddenly fill her at that moment; she is already there. But she is there,andit is important, to the form, that there and then is where she is.

Just as, in all my confusion and attempts at ordering or thinking through, putting Susan Schultz’s work in the contexts of all I know (about poetry, about our political moment, about Susan herself, about the influxes and expulsions of “being”), I’m writing this now, in another time of social-political madness, amnesia, incoherence. There are words for this; there are always words. Is it “positionality”? Is it “situatedness”? Derrida, I recall, somewhere wrote about “the date.” I just checked. It’s in his essay on Paul Celan, “Shibboleth.” When one speaks of “positionality,” one speaks of experience as abstraction, of subjectivity as somehow objective. “Positionality” is presumed to be a universal feature. Everyone has it; it is a quality to be “had.” And yet, to posit it this way — as feature, as quality, as universal, as something that can indeed be posited from an exterior position — is to undo and deny the experience that the term refers to. Terminologies must take great care that (in their abstraction) they not cut the ties to their actual places of reference. A theorist says “positionality” and presumes to speak from a position of knowledge that transcends that position. Theory is always the problem of the Archimedean point.

But does that mean there can be no “theory”? All words are generalities. If we wish for precision in reference, what are we to say? The beauty and value of Derrida’s quirkish writing, for me, lies in his extreme tenuousness and sensitivity in making claims for his terminologies. The “date” in the essay on Celan both closes the poem and opens it. The “date” restricts the poem to the tightest subjective limit, binding the testimony to an inner chamber of personal language and experience; but at the same time, the “date” is the point of public access. The “date” allows the poem to be shared, to be read. And all poems, Derrida suggests, carry their dates even if they don’t formally inscribe them, which are their inaugural entries into the shared world of language, even the most obscure. They are the marks of witnessing. They must then also be the marks of dissemination — the text’s going forth outside of authorial intent and control. Both anchors and sails.

Schultz writes, “My daily prayer will be, deliver us from this madness. But first I have to google today’s date” (Meditations 138; 6-30-20). 

Diogenes and Walking the Dog (Lilith)

Diogenes was the Greek philosopher (404–323 BCE) who is said to have paced the streets of Athens or Corinth carrying a lamp in broad daylight (I can’t recall whether he did this naked) saying that he was looking for an honest man. He needed the lamp because the sun alone was not illuminating enough to direct him, and the case was urgent. Only a source of light made by humans could reveal human virtue, human honesty. For virtue and honesty, like the light of the lamp, are qualities that we make. Unlike sunlight, these qualities are not simply given to us. The search for honesty must have form, ritual, and rigor. Each day he went out. Now I see a painting of him, by Castiglione (ca 1650). He’s not naked. He encounters only red, bloated, obscene, vermin-infested examples of the human. Not promising; somewhat reminiscent of Trumpist America.

Susan Schultz may be the Diogenes of American poets. The honest sentence, and her search for it, would be her lamp — the mode of illumination and the object of illumination. There is so much to see, to sift through, the details become hard to differentiate. “Nothing seems trivial, or all,” she writes (13 August 2018) in I Want to Write an Honest Sentence. Three days later she writes a page long entry of three sentences. The first, of course, is “I want to write an honest sentence.” The second is a nearly page-long sentence itemizing all the things you cannot believe in — your children, your spouse, your students, the intelligence agencies, God, tariffs, yourself, poetry, Miles Davis … and for each item, there is a reason why you can’t believe in it: “because she’s dead,” “because he was improvising,” “because he’s so last millennium,” “because they’re too short,” “because he wants a tip,” “because he’s a lying narcissist,” “because they need ratings …” All the things you can’t believe. I can imagine Diogenes writing this poem. (Or Lou Reed; cf. “Busload of Faith”). Then the last sentence breaks the pattern. “I climbed the stairs with the dog yesterday to see an old man in a cap drag one bad leg, while in his right hand he clutched red roses in clear plastic” (16 August 2018). A little too romantic? Too “imagist”? Are the red roses in clear plastic our red wheelbarrow? Are we to believe in the old man? I don’t know. I don’t think I do. But there he is; I can believe that. But what I really believe in is the dog.

Her dog comes in and out of this book — maybe half a dozen mentions. In fact, the book ends with the dog. “Walking to the car I see the man beside the bicycle who’d been talking loudly about dog sleds. The blizzard is coming, he’d said on a hot day when the trades had stopped. There’s a golf cart beside him now. My dog sleeps under her blanket on days like this. When I put my cereal bowl down, she comes out to drink” (2 October 2018).

Diogenes was known as the cynic, and founded a philosophical school known as the Cynics. Cynic is a word deriving from the Greek word for “dog” or “doglike” or “churlish,” though I don’t think of dogs as churlish. But these would be growling, bad tempered dogs, these cynical philosophers who could find no honesty in the plain sunlight.

We never learn Susan’s dog’s name in Honest Sentence, but her next book has the dog’s name in its title — Lilith — and it is a book about walking the dog: Lilith Walks. Diogenes reincarnated — as “Lilith”!, so factor that hybrid into your thinking. The philosopher has detached himself from the poet and entered the dog, and the goddess, estranged wife of the first man. I assume, though, that Lilith the dog was named with some sense of humor. Lilith Walks overlaps in time with Honest Sentence, going from 9/10/17 till 11/12/21. Thus, it walks through several years of Trump, the worst period of COVID, the George Floyd murder and aftermath, the election, and January 6, 2021. It conveys much of the same horrific poisonous politics, the same incoherence and sense of helplessness, the same deep wish for something other than what is as we saw in Honest Sentence. It confronts and inhabits the same madness. Thus, it could be another book of anger and disjunction. But it’s not. It’s something very different. It could be another volume of the same. Why should it not be? The conditions are the same. The place is the same, and the time, and the person writing, and the still urgent need for the honest sentence.

I Want to Write an Honest Sentence was shaped formally by the repetition of that sentence to begin every section. Lilith Walks is shaped by Susan taking Lilith for a walk in every entry. That activity makes this book — whose concerns, anxieties, angers are the same as those in the previous book — an altogether different book. In Honest Sentence, in its Diogenes-like search, the poet, with her sentences (her lamp), searched alone for what she could not find. The book is ultimately solitary. The voice reaches readers, but later, in other places; however, no one in the book appears to hear each other’s voices or the voices of the author. The marvel of walking with Lilith is that it makes this book social. In fact, it makes the book utopian!

The book is utopian because when you take your dog for a walk each day, you encounter other people, some of them (quite a few) walking their own dogs, others doing other things. You get into conversations with a far wider range of people than whom you’d otherwise encounter; i.e. family, people at work. You encounter people of different ages, classes, races, political orientations. And yet, for the most part, this diversity of encounter does not result in conflict. This is due partly to conventional courtesy and resistance to prying. But mainly it’s because you are walking the dog! You meet different people because you are walking the dog; and you do not quarrel because you are walking the dog. The dog is the walking principle of cohesion.

“Lilith Scores a Pomelo”

(6/2/20) Lilith and I crossed paths with an old man, white hair pulled back in a pony tail of sorts, who was walking an unidentifiable hound. My guess is that he was Hawaiian Chinese. He started to cross the road, stopped, asked if my dog were male or female. I said female and he came back to our side of the street. Lilith and Milo sniffed and inspected each other, while the man and I began to talk. (56).

The man talks about how he found his dog, about his three cats’ domestic politics, about his career and travels (he’d been a high school teacher and coach). The man grimaced, though, when Susan said she taught English. “Oh, local boys and grammar,” he said, to which Susan responded, “Language is much more than grammar.” He notices her Cardinals cap and thinks it referred to the football team (which left St. Louis in 1988!), and she corrects him. “You remember Stan Musial?” he asks. Not really, she says, “but Gibson, Flood, Brock, I do.” “Oh, the generation after — great team!” The scene ends when the man, Paul, goes to his SUV and comes out with a piece of fruit. “It’s a pomelo. Like grapefruit, but better. Don’t eat it if you take heart medicine.” Paul drives off, and Susan and Lilith walk home (56-57). This is a lovely and hopeful scene — its bonding over animals, teaching, baseball, and local fruit. I love the man’s concerned warning about pomelo and heart medicine. And, as an aging baseball fan myself, I know what it means to remember the Cardinals of the mid-late 1960s, that team of Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood and their mates. “Great team!” is right! There’s a perfection in this anecdote. It shows some fullness of human life, even in the incomplete and momentary relation. There is much to be shared and bonded through: the Cardinals, Susan’s Obama tee shirt, the dogs. But there is also the threat of discord. Paul asks if Susan’s dog is male or female, and I infer that if Lilith is male, Paul will not take Milo back to encounter her. I infer that he’s afraid that Milo will fight with another male. The threat of violence is present. In this encounter, everything works out. They share a politics, a love and understanding of baseball, and their dogs make friends. For one walk at least, we inhabit a healed world.

But this is not always the case. The book starts (9/10/17, p. 11) with Susan serving divorce papers for a stranger she meets on a walk. Lilith had just pooped for the fourth time. Susan scooped it into the green plastic bag. A woman asks her to take divorce papers to her husband. “‘He’s nice to other people,’ she said.” Susan does as requested, hands the papers to the husband. “‘Don’t ask me how I got involved in this,’ I said.” And the book is underway. Too much poop, a favor for a stranger, a divorce. Something ordinary, something momentous — and that disorientation of immersion. No matter what one does, it seems, one in “involved.” One could choose not to be; one could refuse the request. That would still be involvement, just a different form. Is there some Rilkean torso always in front of us, in which “there is no place that does not see you”? But it’s not art, it’s the world that always measures your actions.

There’s the white man with the one-eyed dog named Rosie who appears several times in the book. Lilith and Rosie are friends. The man thinks “‘Hilary was the corrupt one’” (8/3/19, p. 22). The man becomes furious at drivers who run stop signs. Road rage is sublimated political rage: “‘That’s a stop sign! JACKASS!’” (8/8/19, p. 23). But who doesn’t feel this? Another conversation, 1/6/20 (that’s a year before the more significant 1/6), after a brief exchange of Happy New Years, the man tells Susan, “‘They’re ignorant, the rag-heads or whatever you call them. They hate us because [of what, sic?] we are’” (p. 32). Susan: “I told him he’s a racist and turned to continue my walk with Lilith.”

Then there are the two young guys who work at the cemetery, also recurring characters–friendly, considerate, and completely immersed in MAGA reality. They tell Susan that hospitals put COVID patients on ventilators to get more money. Susan: “‘THEY PUT PEOPLE ON VENTILATORS BECAUSE THEY ARE DYING,’ I heard myself yelling” (5/2/20, p. 50). The guys tell her they’ve done their “research,” and Susan restrains herself from yelling, “‘I’VE GOT A FUCKING PH.D; I KNOW HOW TO DO RESEARCH,’” not succumbing “to my own elitism.” She then stomps off, “an angry older white woman in a red cap walking her dog in the cemetery on a beautifully sunny, windy day in Hawai’i Nei” (p. 51). Anger has the extraordinary capacity of objectifying the one who feels and expresses it. She looks at herself and it’s … that person. You see yourself in perfect detail, what you do and say and what you don’t do and don’t say. You see yourself do it as you’re doing it. It would be you, if you were “it.” And yet you are.

A couple of weeks later, though, Susan and Lilith are back at the cemetery when Lilith is stung by a bee on her left front paw. She leaps around in a lot of pain and can’t stand on that paw. The cemetery guys lean out of their booth and tell Susan she needs to check the paw and make sure the stinger is out. Susan does, and brushes off what seems to be the stinger. Lilith’s pain lessens, and they continue their walk. There seems to be a profound politics here, again the dog-centered utopian politics. The shared concern for the dog unites people of irreconcilable political views. The reconciliation is real, for the shared concern is real. But the division remains. Which, ultimately, will have more strength? How can the quotidian commonality of love and concern overcome the gap in ideology and understanding at scale? The disagreement between the liberal, educated, reality-based community and the world of MAGA seems centered on how to understand the greater national and global systems that, through complicated channels, inform and — in some measure, not entirely discernable — control our lives. It is abstract but also real. The division arises out of genuine and concrete problems and resentments. Love for dogs cannot amend it. And yet, that love does accomplish something real. Doesn’t it? This book would have us believe. Dog-walking and the human conversations the walks make possible are (or may be) crucial to our political healing. This book would have us believe, or at least imagine as possible.

And yet, the divisions remain mysterious, and impenetrable. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies, Susan tells two neighbors — the wife has always been friendly, the husband not. The husband snaps, “‘I don’t want you ever to talk to me again … If your tiny brain doesn’t know why, I’m not going to tell you.’ His voice was full of rage. ‘NOW!’ he shouted’” (9/19/20, p. 67). And after the election, another encounter with the cemetery guys. One keeps telling her that it will go to the Supreme Court, that it’s by no means over (11/8/20, p.73). A month later, the guy tells her, “‘Just wait until January! Everything’s going to be crazy’” (12/16/20, p. 81). And then, after Jan. 6, which is alluded to, not described, not even in retrospect, she returned to the central imperative, to “one of those articles about how we need to talk with them, understand them better, engage rather than condemn.” She wants to talk with the cemetery guys about the insurrection. But she’s not sure, and the brief conversation seems almost dreamlike. “‘I guess it got wild,’” she says. And the guy replies, “through a half smile ‘I guess we did.’ (I can’t vouch for that sentence, though the pronoun did leap out at me.) I looked at him and said, ‘that was disgusting,’ and kept going …” (1/9/21, p. 85).

So, what can be done? Should Susan dial it back, buy the guys some coffee, say, okay, let’s sit down — I’m going to keep hold of my temper. Tell me how you see things. Tell me how you got to be who you are. What’s been your journey? And then, what would it take for us to truly understand each other? How do we learn to truly see each other? Is that possible? A few days later, she encounters a guy (the person of Lilith’s favorite dog) who, (a) voted for Biden, but, (b) voted in 2012 for Mickey Mouse instead of Obama and, (c) complains that Biden wants to favor minority small businesses over white ones. Susan walks away. Later the guy texts her saying he was just expressing his opinion. She replies that her children are not white, and that her fear is not that “they’ll get unfair perks, but that they’ll be harmed by white supremacists.” The guy apologizes, “saying he hadn’t thought of it that way.”

What is one to make of this? Even the relatively sane are mad. No one’s mind or motives are remotely comprehensible. Susan ends the section, “We’re all at our wit’s end” (1/15/21, p.86). We may as well be back in The Dementia Blogs. And yet, there’s something ameliorative here. We all seek fairness, but how can fairness be discerned through the hazes of our prejudice and misconception? (“I want to write an honest sentence...”).

Throughout it all, Lilith the dog carries her lantern, which in her case is her nose, as she goes about her own business. This is part of the beauty and possibility of dogs and the human interactions they make possible. On 1/22/21:

‘It’s a new day!’ I said, my arms raised in secular benediction. ‘Not for long,’ answered the Trump supporter at the cemetery gate. ‘But congratulations!’ He smiled. ‘Give ‘em a chance,’ I replied. Lilith was more interested in the spot by the trash can where she sometimes finds animal bones. (p. 87).

This comes near the end of the book, so here I’ll suspend my thinking on what I consider one of the profoundest political texts of these times of medical, political, and psychic crisis. But here’s a last question: what does it mean that so much of this book takes place in a cemetery? Is it just coincidence? Has she planned it? Is it symbolic? Did it really happen? Is it metonymy? The book is about a time of death and madness, and it takes place in a cemetery! What are the odds?!

All the wrong questions. The answer to all of them, of course, is, yes; except for the last one, which is, pretty much even up.