Advice to Myself
by Jane Hirshfield

The computer file
of which
I have no recollection
is labeled "advice to myself''

I click it open
look
scroll further down

the screen
stays backlit and empty

thus I meet myself again
hopeful and useless

a mystery

precisely as I must
have done
on August 19, 2010, 11:08 a.m.


From LEDGER: Poems by Jane Hirshfield, to be published on March 10, 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Jane Hirshfield.(buy now)

It's the birthday of the philosopher and critic Judith Butler, (books by this author) born on this day in Cleveland, Ohio (1956). When she was a teenager, she went down in her basement to smoke cigarettes, and one day she found her mother's college textbooks — books by Benedict de Spinoza and Søren Kierkegaard — and she was fascinated. Then she started reading Jewish philosophy, because she had such bad behavior problems that she was forced to take a private tutorial with her rabbi, who introduced her to Jewish thinkers. So when she went to college, she chose to study philosophy, and from there moved into fields like queer theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. And she went on to write many books, including the popular Gender Trouble (1990), where she argued that we "perform" our gender.

She wrote, "Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact."

It is the birthday of the poet Weldon Kees, (books by this author) born in Beatrice, Nebraska (1914). He went to college, then tried to make it as a movie star, a librarian, and a fiction writer. But he wasn't happy. He wrote to a friend, "I'm not doing what I want to do; is anyone?"

But then he started writing poems, and that was exactly what he wanted to do. He published a popular book of poetry, The Last Man (1943). He moved to New York, but he didn't like it, so he headed to San Francisco.

And there, on July 18, 1955, Weldon Kees called two women. The first woman was too busy to talk; he said that things were pretty bad and he was thinking about moving to Mexico. The second woman he called was the film critic Pauline Kael, whom he'd met on a local radio show about the movies. He asked her, "What keeps you going?" The next day his car was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, with the keys in the ignition. There was no suicide note at his house, just his cat and a pair of red socks in the sink. His sleeping bag and savings account book were missing.

Weldon Kees' body was never found. A woman who knew him when she was a kid said that she saw him in New Orleans in 1962. The writer Pete Hamill said he had a drink with Kees in the late '50s in Mexico. His Collected Poems came out in 1960.

It's the birthday of Wilhelm Karl Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1786). He and Jacob, his older brother, published Grimm's Fairy Tales (buy now) (1812), the first collection of folklore in modern publishing history. The Grimms enlisted the help of acquaintances to find stories, and one of their best collectors was a pretty young woman named Dortchen Wild, and she and Wilhelm got married.

It's the birthday of Jane Hirshfield, (books by this author) born in New York City (1953). When she was in first grade, she wrote, "I want to be a writer when I grow up." She went to Princeton, worked on a farm for a year, and then spent the next few years studying Buddhism at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in northern California. She didn't write at all while she was there, almost eight years, but since then she has published many books of poetry, including Of Gravity & Angels (1988), Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), and Come, Thief: Poems (2013). She has a new book coming out in a few weeks: Ledger, from Alfred A. Knopf.

She said, “The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life,” she says. “To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go to graduate school. You cannot write until you know how to inhabit your own experience.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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