quietude at school

It's so quiet in the halls at school today, and only one student comes to my office hours to drop off a paper b/c he can't be in class. I feel like Bernardo Soares, turning my institutional humdrum hell into an imagintive heaven on an hourly basis. The HOWL reading accomplished that in a loud and vibrant, public way; daily my blog and whatever little writing i do about the slice of sun across the top of the brick buildings accomplishes this on the inside, quietly but life-sustainingly. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be a subtle thing, not the clash of agon only. It's so quiet at school today, because it's Thanksgiving week and lots of the students are already out of here, though it's only Monday; it's also so quiet because Friday night's HOWL was so raucous. As Susan Hamerski wrote to me in an email, "What a sound; what a music." It's so quiet in the halls at school today because this is the hum of daily existence, the hum of the computer and the fluorescent (flowering?) lights, like at home the hum of the refrigerator and occasionally the dehumidifier in the basement can be heard even upstairs...and the labored breathing of the cat. It's so quiet and in a minute or so i've got to go teach, finish up Kaddish and Ginsberg and then on to Bernadette Mayer before Thanksgiving Day. So much to be grateful for: for words, for language, for the relationship between the fingers that type and the intellect that composes, for everything that has to work correctly in the neurological kingdom and every other kingdom as well.