"Funny You Should Ask" by Anne Carson

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK

How was your trip to New York?

Well,

we stayed at R’s. He was away. Asked us to not use the sheets—quite 

reasonably,

he has no laundry and who likes coming home to an unclean

bed?

Instructed to bring sheets, we forgot. But try to sleep slightly

above

the sheets, C with his chronic cough, I my insomnia. Wandering 3 a.m. 

bedroom

to kitchen I find no teapot, scald myself on the kettle. C still coughing, 

racked, almost in

tears. Chronic means no one can help. I blunder about, spilling

things

on the floor. Pick up a book I’d thought to read on the plane.

“Hölderlin’s

Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843,” by Giorgio

Agamben.

It begins with Agamben’s exegesis of Hölderlin’s critique of

Fichte’s

understanding of the sentence “I am I.” All three have much to

say

about this sentence, for “I am I,” with its exhilarating syntax and

salty

relation of subject to object, does not dispel anyone’s tears or

blunder,

yet it makes a sort of refuge. Admittedly, I don’t quite know who

Fichte

is and have to look up Selbstbewusstsein, but still, there is a

staving

off of terribleness. To think. This saving thing. This useless thing.

Night

passes, C finally sleeps, Agamben goes on struggling with Hölderlin’s 

critique

of Fichte till dawn. My skull sways. “I am I” remains

unclarified.

It occurs to me I’ve spent too much of my life staring at someone else’s 

sentences

in a rebar dawn, measuring my insomnia against their

snap-brim

thoughts. Have I proved a worthy struggler with Agamben’s

exegesis

of Hölderlin’s critique of Fichte? Not

really.

My mind is

smallish.

Then again, this book of Agamben’s was sent me by a former

student,

whose life was changed when he read “ . . . in lovely blue . . . ”

(Hölderlin,

fragment of a hymn). So (changed) was mine, years ago, I now recall. And 

really,

what more can I ask, whoever I am, of a night on a trip to

New York?

Source of the text - The New Yorker, December 11, 2023, pages 46-47.

TJB: Answering the 1st line’s question, the poet wrestles with the same philosophical sentence—I am I—as her subject’s subject’s subject. I had to gts.