Now

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

The imaginal. Not imagination in the sense of the made-up, but Ibn Arabi’s alam al-khayāl, the realm Corbin insisted we mistranslate every time we reach for the word “imaginary.” I stayed up over the two examples Ibn Arabi returns to: the mirror and the dream.

Where, exactly, is the image in a mirror? Not in the glass, not quite in the eye, and yet undeniably there, present and ungraspable at once. That is the signature of the barzakh, the isthmus where the two seas meet, the one place a thing is permitted to be neither existent nor non-existent. What kept me up was the consequence: that my imagination is not the imaginal realm but my window onto it, the eye of the heart, which is why writing has always felt like it comes from elsewhere.

What are you preparing for?

The fall, still, and something I did not expect to be preparing for: my own body. I start teaching French in August, and the first real test came this month. I built a café activity for the teen center where I volunteer and ran it, and the kids read words they had never seen, mispronounced them, laughed, and tried again, which is the whole of what I want a classroom to be. That went well.

What are you building or fixing?

For half the month I was building to keep from feeling.

I submitted an academic article I had circled for a year, on fascist and colonial radio in interwar Tunisia; I took this website to a full build; I recovered nearly two thousand old book reviews I had given up as lost, a whole reading life handed back through a service I thought I had deleted; and I wired my home systems together. All of it good work.

What I still cannot fix is rest. I “rest” by doing something on a screen, and my body reads it as low-grade stress and tells me so. I do not yet know what real rest looks like.

What surprised you?

What helped me was the body and, of all people, my father. He told me he had seen as early as junior high that I was wired differently, and hearing my own childhood handed back to me in a truer shape did something no argument could.

And then it was physical, all of it: two hours of yard work that left my arms shaking and felt good; a haircut; teaching a room, which turns out to be as much body as mind; a walk in a forest preserve where two owls called across the woods in the middle of the day and one flew from its tree as I passed; a beach on Lake Michigan where I mistook the far smokestacks of Gary for a Mediterranean hill.