Märzbaum

This March, everything started blooming early. I was told about La Niña, or El Niño, or both, which I tried to understand. My residential neighborhood in South Brooklyn opened up in magnolias and cherry blossoms.

As I walked every day to the train station, or to the campus where I teach, I often stopped and thought about taking a picture of one of these shocks of pink or white against a gray sky. But as soon as the thought occurred, I remembered how unlike the experience of looking at the actual tree in bloom was the experience of looking at one of these pictures, and how I largely scrolled disappointedly past them in my phone’s photos. With this in mind, I kept my phone in the pocket, ambiently present in the back of my mind but unneeded, and attempted to appreciate the tree for a moment without a plan for capturing the moment for recall later. Still, rather than looking simply and immediately at the tree I found myself wrapped up in wondering whether there were a sort of scarcity mentality that led unconsciously to the desire to capture the tree for later—a first bloom might trigger the photo-impulse more strongly than just one more bloom among so many others. But this sense of saturation with blossoms is temporary—in one month they’ll be gone and I’ll miss them again. Having thus convinced myself that I was taking the blooms for granted, I took a picture anyway, and was of course disappointed with the results.

There is one magnolia in bloom outside the classroom where I teach, and I realized one morning while teaching that I was exactly one floor above the classroom where I had taught exactly one year earlier. I remembered that one year before, when I was teaching the same class I’m currently teaching, an “Intro to Literature” course on the theme of Attention, I once asked my students to come to the window and look at the magnolia which was at that time (from the classroom on the 2^nd floor) blooming just outside the window. I said something at the time about how it was a perfect illustration of our theme of Paying Attention. It was an 8am class, like the one I’m currently teaching, and the students looked at me with eyes full of hate, but obeyed. They stood for a moment at the window without saying much. Some of them took their phones out and took pictures. They went back to their desks without saying much. I realized we were behind on the lesson, so I quickly moved on.

I assumed they hadn’t liked paying attention to the magnolia, but then one week later there was a sudden cold front, later than expected, and the magnolia’s buds and blossoms died. At the start of class, I pointed out the absent blossoms, and they all seemed sad.

I remembered all that this semester when I saw the magnolia blooming again outside the window, as I looked at the students, now another group of students entirely, dutifully journaling in class as I’d asked them to, and I decided against asking them to get out of their desks where they looked so comfortable and asking them to walk to the window to satisfy an overcaffeinated whim of mine that they Pay Attention to the magnolia. Then I wondered whether replicating the experience of teaching the same class in the same place at the same time led me to make changes like this on a whim, just to avoid repetition, out of an attachment to certain ideas of impermanence that were connected loosely to our course’s theme of Paying Attention, and whether it might have been a good idea after all to ask the students to look at the magnolia. Perhaps looking at a magnolia at 8:30 am would have stuck with them longer than the activity of writing for five minutes in a journal at 8:30 am. I thought about the fact that for me, the students are just instantiations in a series of students that contains them, and whose experiences of the class (to me) accrue each year as I teach the same class in the same, or the upstairs, classroom—while in their minds, this will not be the case, this will in fact be the only time they ever take a class on Paying Attention at 8am.

While having these thoughts, I appeared to be looking out the window dreamily at the magnolia, but of course I wasn’t looking at the magnolia. The students went on writing. I thought about taking a picture, and took out my phone—it was dead.

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As usual, here are some things I liked this month:

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Renee Gladman painting series “Narratives of Magnitude” at Artists Space

War & The Iliad – Simone Weil (1939)

Walk-up (2022) – Hong Sang-Soo

93696 - Liturgy (2023)

Good Entertainment – Byung Chul Han (MIT, 2019)

The Longcut – Emily Hall (Dalkey Archive, 2022)

Stonewalling (2022) – Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka

DISASTER, 30 minutes, 1976 - Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen (screening w/ the directors at Woodbine)

Material Exercises – Blanca Varela (trans. Carlos Lara) (1978/2023, Black Sun Lit)

Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) - Yves Tumor (2023)

Alice Notley reading at Mast Books

The slant of light which now hits my window decals at sunset:

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Happy April!