The Wanderer (I)

At the beach I got maybe halfway through translating The Wanderer, an Old English poem from the 10th Century or thereabouts. Since I reckon most people would prefer to get it in bite-size pieces, if at all, I'll post as I go along, with comments as I please. It's about five pages long. Below is first installment.

Translating Old English alliterative poetry into Modern English alliterative poetry is relatively easy. Sometimes the alliteration can be lifted wholesale from the original: vowels shift around a lot more than consonants, over the centuries, and usually one or more of the heavily-stressed, alliterating words that carry the heaviest charge of meaning in a line has a direct descendant to build a Modern English line around. Alliteration in any case is far easier than rhyme in any Germanic language.

The difficulty is in capturing the rhythm. Modern English, having lost most of its inflections, is afflicted with a swelling rash of articles and prepositions, little unstressed words that we can't do without -- and keep a remotely natural-sounding diction -- but which wreck the pattern of Old English sound. The usual rhythm of Old English goes BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom BOM bom; the usual rhythm of Modern English is more like bom BOM bom bom BOM bom bom BOM bom. The brilliant effects of iambic pentameter are founded on the interplay between the theoretical five stressed syllables of a line and the actual two or three that Modern English supplies. I have found it difficult to break the pentameter habit, but it seems critical to me, to catch even a ghost of the Old English, to have two strong stresses in each half-line, with a strong caesura in between. The problem is that this bloats the line. I've switched back and forth several times between breaking my "long alliterative line" into two lines -- which feels a little juvenile and jerky -- and keeping lines that feel a little too long. (The solution that immediately occurred to me, of course, was to adopt William Blake's magnificent fourteeners; but this was a disaster. Its rhythm is even further away from that of Old English verse, very Miltonic, very latinate. No go.)

What I found myself doing was occasionally falling into a "hypometric" couplet or two -- lines with only two major stresses -- but keeping for the most part the basic form of "four stresses with a hole in the middle" that Seamus Heaney used for his translation of Beowulf. I have a feeble excuse for this variation: something like it occurs, if not very often, in Old English poetry -- isolated so-called "half-lines," with double alliteration. More common are "hypermetric" lines -- in which each half-line has three heavy stresses, rather than two -- when it wants to slow down and become graver: the last five lines of The Wanderer are in "hypermetric" verse. That's not really a valid precedent. Really I'm just following George Orwell's rhetorical dictum, that one should break any rule rather than say something downright barbarous.

The real rhythm of Old English verse is simply not reproducible in Modern English: it has to do with how two long, stressed syllables crowd each other or back away from each other within the half-line. Maybe I'll take Rachel's suggestion and try to produce an audio file of The Wanderer in the original, so you can hear it. I know of nothing like it in the modern poetry of romance or germanic languages.

Here is the beginning of The Wanderer:

Often a friendless man must wait it out for favor,
The Measurer's mercy, although, troubled in mind,
He must for a long while, over the water,
Stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
Wander in exile: Wyrd has all been spoken.

Metod, "the Measurer," is the old Pagan name for personified Fate (Old English "Wyrd"), adopted easily, here, into an epithet for the Christian God. Anglo-Saxon England was remarkable for the smoothness of its transition to Christianity -- it was fortunate in its missionaries, who were broadminded, tactful men, more inclined to assimilate Pagan thought and practice than to challenge it. Early scholars of Old English, who were eager to reconstruct a Pagan past, and who had a Protestant prejudice against the medieval Church, tended to see, in poems such as this one, Pagans pretending to be Christian. In the last generation or two a more sophisticated understanding has developed, which sees this Christianity as deep and sincere, though certainly colored by the Pagan understanding of fate.

So said the earth-stepper, remembering hardships,
And the fall of his family
In savage slaughter.

Often I have told my trouble to the dawn;
There is no living creature now
That I can talk to freely. I know for a fact
It is a better habit to keep your heart's cage locked --
To keep your mind's wallet closed -- think what you will.
A worn out heart cannot withstand Wyrd
And a disordered mind mends nothing.
Someone who wants to be thought well of
Binds his unhappiness up tight in his breast.

The shift from third person into first person is as unexpected in the original as it looks here. Translators sometimes deal with it by putting quotation marks at the beginning of the poem, but then you have to decide where they end, and where they begin again, and so on; the first person speaker seems to come in and out of focus throughout the poem. The effect to me is dreamlike and satisfying; I feel no particular need to sort out narrators and tidily assign speeches to them.

So I have hidden my heart-spirit
Miserable with care, cut off from home,
Far from my family, bound in fetters;
Since I wrapped my gold-friend, years ago,
In the darkness of earth, and I, abject,
Went from there, winter-troubled,
Over the lacing waves, looking, hall-sick,
For where I might find, far or near,
A master in a mead hall
Who knew of me and mine,
Or who would comfort a man of no kindred,
Welcome him warmly. Wise men know
How cruel a companion sorrow is
For a man meager in patrons.
He is attended by exile, not golden armrings;
A frozen heart-cage, not the flowering earth.
He remembers hall-friends and receiving treasure;
How in his young days his gold-friend
Accustomed him to feasting: all joy fails.

"Gold-friend" means king, liege-lord -- an Anglo-Saxon king traditionally rewarded his thanes according to their bravery in battle, typically with gold arm-rings (though it might be anything -- horses, land, anything valuable). The relationship between lord and thane was an intense one, even a passionate one. Becoming lordless is generally the worst calamity an Old English poet can imagine.

More anon...

Whales

Gone to the beach. Back next week. xoxoxo

Uncluttering

Back on the cushion this morning, after a long hiatus -- my meditation has been a perfunctory five minutes here or there, once or twice a week, for a couple months. When I come back, out of practice, I find at first that meditation is a little dry, a little thin. It's not actually a quality of the meditation, of course; it's a quality of my mind. I attribute it to the meditation, because it's in meditation that I first notice it. Without stretching and exercise the mind's circulation gets sluggish. Its perceptions get duller, its activity more repetitive. In a word, it ages.

Morning. Overcast sky, like a gentle, rumpled gray quilt drawn up over the sleeping world.

A couple weeks ago the neighbors across the street cut down their willow tree. I understand: willows are not easy to live with. Messy trees, strewing mower-choking twigs over the lawn at all seasons, and strong greedy ones, seeking out water pipes and tearing them up. I would never plant one in my own yard. But still, it was a beautiful tree, and I will miss it.

A busy week at work. Our fiscal year ends June 30th, and there are lots of unexpected little tasks associated with that, things that have to be done to wrap up the year's data neatly and put it to bed. Housekeeping. I feel that I am only now beginning to learn the rudiments of housekeeping. Long ago, I was struck by something William Morris once wrote: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. The words of a man who didn't have to look after children, of course, but still, they're important words. I ran across a summary of Feng Shui principles somewhere, recently -- something I've never paid any attention to -- and I was arrested by the same sentiment, differently expressed: of clutter, it said that things that occupied your space that you no longer use or enjoy siphon off energy. That strikes me immediately as true, importantly true. I spent a while this morning, after I sat, working to unclutter my massage/meditation/exercise room. Uncluttering the whole house will be a life's work, I am afraid -- even uncluttering the massage room will take months -- but fortunately, working toward uncluttering is its own reward, has its own effect of clearing my mind, slowing me down, drawing me away from busy repetition and toward spaciousness and creativity. The thing about clutter is that it represents things that I am done with but haven't let go of. The notes from pathology weren't filed, because, although I had de facto decided not to review them again, I hadn't quite accepted that I wasn't going to. Filing them meant turning that from a decision-by-default into a conscious choice.

Cry willow, willow, willow
My life, my life, my life.

Desdemona's plaintive song. Some things are harder to let go of than others. But in time what we will not let go of is pulled out of our hands anyway.

Standeth nu on laste leofre duguthe
Weall wundrum heah, wyrm-licum fag.

Now where my dear companions walked
Stands a high wall, worked with dragons.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: I'm saving The Wanderer for when I'm at the beach this weekend. Good morning, dear friends. I'm thinking of you.

Deor

Several things recently have conspired to send me back to this Old English poem. Yesterday I dusted off my old Pope edition, and read it again; and today I tried to render it in Modern English in the same form of verse that Seamus Heaney used for Beowulf (though without those caesuras I so dislike). Whether the poem makes sense, without lots of notes explaining the legends it refers to, I don't know. It might help to know that Weland was a famous artificer, in the Daedalus line, and that Nithhad was an evil king who cut his hamstrings so as to keep him captive; part of Weland's revenge was raping Nithhad's daughter, Beaduhild. Time presents ironies to layer on top of the poem's -- no one knows now who Theodric was, or where the city of the Maerings might have been, where his "well-known" reign took place. You can find a text, with someone else's translation, here

Weland, limping, learned the rack of exile;
A one-minded man, he endured hardship;
He had as his friends fear and longing,
Cold winter and want.
He found out miseries: Nithhad laid on him
Supple fetters, sinew-bonds.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Her brothers' deaths were not so great a burden
On Beaduhild's spirit as her own business --
She perceived quickly that she was pregnant
But she could not resolve on a way around it.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

We are given to know that the grieving of Maethilde,
Dear to Yayot, became endlessly deeper;
Separated from sleep by her love's sorrow.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Theodric mastered the city of the Maerings
For thirty winters, as is well known.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

And we have heard of Eormanric's
Wolfish thoughts; he ruled a wide
Land of the Goths, a bloody lord:
Many men sat bound in sorrow
Wishing his power were overcome.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

When a man is cast down, cut off from delight,
His mind darkens, and he thinks his measure
Of affliction will be endless.
Let him think then that a lord who knows
Turns his way often through this world
Showing gentleness to some, and flowering joy,
As well as, to some, their share of woe.

I will say so much of myself --
I held the post of the Hedenings poet,
And was dear to their lord. My name was Deor.
I composed, many winters, for a kind master;
But a song-skilled newcomer now enjoys the estate
The guardian of men once gave to me.
That is over and done with; this may be too.

Photos of the Dead

Dark pregnant belly of a sky, in the north. Westward a jagged light blue streak, lined with improbable white, like the bars on a junco's wings.

Someone posted a photo of me on the New School site. From the New School reunion, at Michael G's house in Seattle. Circa 1990, I suppose. Just a couple years after that party in New Haven. I keep pausing over it. Partly just vanity: I didn't know I ever looked that good. But mostly it's the strangeness. I don't know that man. Who is he, and what does he have to do with me? All my pasts have a hallucinatory quality to them now: vivid, but unbelievable. Should I live another seventeen years, and see a picture of myself at my present age of forty-nine, I'll probably have the same response: who is that? What does he have to do with me?



After all the life's work of constructing myself, and examining myself, it seems unfair that a camera should look up briefly and see an entirely different and unknown person. Where is the anxiety, the hunger, the need? The question of "what does this person have to do with me?" is gradually subsumed into a larger question: "what does this person have to do with anything?"

The frightening thing about death, said some 19th Century American (Melville? Hawthorne?) is not how great a rent it tears in the fabric of others' lives, but how small a rent, and how easily mended. This man has vanished, and no one misses him, least of all me. He was as real as I am, once, flesh and bone, blood and sweat, struggling with fear and desire, as I am, like a fish on a line. And just gone, now, with only this carelessly-kept photo as a memorial.

Lost time. Wasted effort. Why did he work so hard, fear so much, want so desperately? So that I could be here, stout and nearly fifty, look at him quizzically, and repudiate him?

There's a photo I don't have, a photo of the death mask my artist-friend, whom I haven't met yet, will make a couple decades from now. She will keep it, at first partly because of her connection with me, but mostly, and increasingly, because of her connection with her work, because of the artistic intention with which she oiled my cold face and spread the plaster over it.

Looking it over carefully, I see the exagerations and softenings of death, how the jowls are thickened by the slackened muscles, how the subsiding eyes have lost their Germanic protrusion, how the nose -- larger, as old men's noses are -- is slightly flattened down.

Was it at that very reunion that someone told Michael G. that your nose and your ears keep growing all your life? Michael, who was very handsome and a little vain of it, was horrified by the thought. He needn't have worried. Within five years AIDS had carried him home, the delicate proportions of his nose and ears quite intact.

Alone

We slept in our clothes in the daytime, a dreary exhausted sleep, and I woke feeling old and impotent. Nothing seemed quite to match or meet up. When I went to tie my shoe, one end of the laces was longer than the other, and I sat staring at them stupidly, sure this betokened some disaster, but unable to think what it was, or to imagine a remedy.

My heart did not entirely work. Its gears were stripped, and nothing could catch. I wondered if I'd ever really be awake again. Or had I ever been awake?

At the far edges of the sky, white silver marbling showed itself under the heavy gray. A small lightening of the spirit. But the heaviness and grief of loss still threatened to swamp me and bring me under. There's nothing wrong, I told myself. It's just sleeping in the daytime, it does this to you, wait and it will pass.

At Tosi's this morning, the waitress said, "So-and-so asked how you were doing." Except she used your American name, not your Tibetan one, and I didn't know who she was talking about, for a long second. We haven't spoken for months. "Oh. Oh." I finally said, and nodded. "When do you get done with school?" she asked. I said September. "She said we should all get a free massage from you."

I smiled, I'm sure; I always smile, but in the distance, a little rattling drum started up, like the patter when you use stiff fingertips on a conga. All these sidesteps, half-lights, mutterings. All I want is one clean, bright, still thing. A mark to steer by. Some way to make a resolve. Some way to clear the heaviness and confusion.

Begin to think of making something new of me, Lord. I am dry and crusted like old clay. It's near time to be thrown back into the kneading trough. Bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

Cargo

Gold dangles from her ears; jeweled fish slither over her shoulders as she rises. "Thank you. I haff had a very nice time," she says, and shakes my hand. Cool, crisp, and businesslike. Slender deliberate fingers. The moon blinks slowly in her wide eyes. The room rocks slightly.

"Es freut mich sehr, dass du kommen konntest" I say, stubbornly clinging to German. It is, after all, my only distinction.

Suddenly all the talk of the party is a roar in my ears, and I can see the floor rippling in time to the music. It will all come to pieces when she leaves.

"Could we have lunch sometime?" I suddenly ask, abandoning German.

"Oh, you see," she says regretfully, "I am so busy these days."

"Of course. A very full time," I quickly agree.

She leaves. I pour myself a shot of vodka and drink it down. It burns with a lovely, sustaining heat. A cloud of it rises from my throat, and I breathe it gratefully. I attach myself to the clever comp lit students. David, ever voluble, who gave a talk this afternoon titled "How to Do Things with Sir Walter Scott," is holding his antic court. Ian, a Scot himself, is standing his ground though, insisting that Waverly is a tremendously important book, the beginning of Modernism, if I'm following him. I've read Waverly, but I can't for the life of me remember anything about it. My mind's eye follows Heike through the night. And I remember her birthday party, when Ed and Agnes gave her black stockings, and she put them then and there, sitting happily on the floor, her short skirt hiked up. Ow.

"What?" How has the conversation come round to me? Oh, of course, I'm the Old English and metrics wizard, and there's an exam in Old English scansion tomorrow. "Find the alliteration, and then work backwards through the half-line," I advise them. "the debris is all at the beginning of the half-lines, you'll just get confused if you try to work forwards." Jahan has a question about Chaucer scansion; I bask in knowing something. Where does the stress fall in "tragedie," in the Monk's Tale? He's been told the second syllable. Nonsense. "TRAH juh DEE uh," I say firmly. I feel very learned, but of course it's Jahan who's giving a paper on the Monk's Tale tomorrow, not me. Even though he's all wrong about the Monk's Tale, and doesn't know jack about Middle English. He's confident and handsome, with a powerful voice; he's sure to get a job, and then to get tenure. He's the sort that does.

Later that evening, or rather that morning, Donna and I dance to the Cars in the living room. She's wearing a transparent blouse and nothing beneath, which contrasts piquantly with her understated, buttoned-up Canadian manner. I forget all about Heike. We talk about Emily Dickinson. Everything she says is very sensible and shrewd. I wish I had things to say, but I don't.

At last the party breaks up. Last to go are Ian and his Turkish partner, Ayse. I'm drunk, and swearing freely. "Good night," I say to Ayse. "Fucking wonderful to have you here. Don't let that damned Scot keep you in purdah!" I smile winningly, as I think -- no doubt leering drunkenly -- and Ian and Ayse, tolerant and courtly always, say good night and thank us.

Quiet comes, like a sudden snowfall. The smell of the smoke and wine becomes old and sad. It would be the last good party we would give in New Haven. The social fabric -- a thing that always seems so solid at the time, but in retrospect looks always so fragile -- was already unraveling, disintegrating. We put on soft, melancholic music, wipe up a few spills, empty a few ashtrays. The lamplight picks up green and brown glints, glows through the rings of wine left in the bottles. I murmur lines from Beowulf. Scyld's body is drifting away on the burning funeral ship:

men ne cunnon,
secgan to sothe,
sele-raedende,
haeleth under heofonum,
hwa thaem hlaste onfeng.

Men do not know,
truth to tell --
councillors in the hall
or heroes under heaven --
who received that cargo.

Fume

Reading up on the history of massage for a quiz: the usual mindless bashing of the Middle Ages and glorification of the Renaissance. The Middle Ages has no massage texts, we're told darkly, and massage was considered a satanic art (what??!! evidence, please?), whereas in the Renaissance all of a sudden people discovered that they had bodies and wanted them to be healthy. (Apparently in the Middle Ages no one knew they had a body, and everyone wanted to be sick.) My book insists on this wonderful putative resurgence of interest in massage, despite the fact that they can't find a single text dealing with massage from the Renaissance, any more than they can from the Middle Ages. Christ on a crutch. And of course, no recognition at all that the only reason we have all those classical texts that were "rediscovered" by the Renaissance is that for centuries medieval monks laboriously and conscientiously copied and recopied them. I wouldn't dispute that by and large the Middle Ages were hard times, but to my mind they at least had their priorities straight -- if you don't have resources to support much, then at the least you should try to make contemplative life possible. Which they did, better than we do, for all our bloody wealth and science.

Out of Place

A young woman walking down the street at twilight, cradling something protectively in her arms. A kitten? She raises it to her face, as if to kiss it, and I can see that it's a cell phone.

---

A couple months ago I saw a raccoon, at midmorning, investigating the trash set out for the garbageman. I slowed my bike. The raccoon looked up at me briefly, and went back to the much more interesting business of checking out the trash. "You're supposed to be nocturnal, you know," I said. The raccoon shrugged.

Last week, Martha surprised one in the basement, eating the food we'd put out there for one of our foster-cats. She clapped her hands. The raccoon gave her a look, as if to say "do you mind? I'm eating, here." So she banged an old pot, to make a racket, and the raccoon, with a put-upon air, but no hurry, climbed deliberately back out the cat door.

---

My flight back from Montreal last Spring had a layover in Detroit. The people, compared to what I had become accustomed to in Montreal, were hugely fat -- more of them were obese than were not -- and they carried bucket-sized paper cups of soda with them at all times; you had the sense that being separated from their sugar supply might send them into a panic. Visualizing all that sugar swirling in their bloodstreams made me feel a little ill. I'm the last person with any business criticizing people for eating unhealthily, but this didn't seem like indulgence, and my response wasn't moral: it seemed like disease, pure and simple. A whole nation with a disordered glucose metabolism.

It wasn't that long after 9/11. Every ten minutes the loudspeakers would urge us to view our fellow passengers, and their bags, with suspicion.

In the tunnel between concourses, riding the whatever-you-call-thems, the horizontal escalators, there was a spectacular light show, and pounding rock music. It was quite beautiful: washes of color over the high, arched ceiling, shifting, turning, and throbbing with the music. But it felt very odd to me, to be entertained while in the midst of doing something -- moving rapidly from one place to another -- quite active and absorbing in itself. When I got to my concourse I tried to position myself where I couldn't see or hear a television, without success. Entertainment wasn't optional, in the Detroit airport. It was mandatory.

I wanted to buttonhole the Europeans and Asians and Africans bustling by, and tell them that this wasn't really America. But I don't know if it would have been the truth. Maybe it really is America, and what I live in is an artificial preserve, the equivalent of a "colonial Williamsburg" where they dress up in frilled caps or leathern pantaloons, and pretend to be living a simple life, to amuse the tourists.

Une Vie Inconnue

Que nous croyions qu´un être participe à une vie inconnue où son amour nous ferait pénétrer, c´est, de tout ce qu´exige l´amour pour naître, ce à quoi il tient le plus, et qui lui fait faire bon marché du reste.

If Proust is right, and we fall in love because we are seeking admission to an unknown world -- well, then it's hardly surprising I would fall in love so often, I who have been haunted all my life by unknown worlds, always looking for doors into places governed by an alien sky, where the rules would all be different. Maybe it is only that I am so clearly unfit for this one, that makes me dream of others.

When people denigrated his books as escape, Tolkien shrugged and asked, what class of persons would most disapprove of escape? And answered himself -- jailers, of course. He didn't much mind being disapproved of by jailers.

Freedom, oh freedom, that's just some people talkin'... I was passionate about freedom once. Political freedom. But I thought the question was simpler then. Now I hear people talk about freedom and most often I can't quite grasp what they're talking about. Free to do what? To forge our very own manacles, the ones that fit our minds most comfortably?

In all the science fiction and fantasy I read as a child, which rotted my brain to such an extent that I still, at this sober age, just a year younger than Bilbo when he went on his adventures, dream about the white spaces at the edges of maps -- in all those books, the moment that held me spellbound was that very first step through the wardrobe door. Everything new. Everything possible. I loved a story as much as anyone, but there was something I loved even more: the moment in which every story, any story, was possible, when maybe one image had appeared -- a snowy forest at evening, say -- but any person or creature might appear, bearing any history, which would sweep us away in an alien current. That wonder. Not precisely wonder at the story. Wonder at the possibility of a story. At the possibility of something new.

The irony is not lost on me that I have been, in this world, one of the most timid and hidebound stay-at-homes that ever lived. Mole, indeed. But maybe it's a tribute to the power of stories of another world, that I seem gradually to be changing places with all those people who would do and dare. The people who were bold seem less so, now, and I seem more so. Or maybe I was never as timid as I think myself. I was shocked, when I came in contact with people from my old highschool last year, by the impression they had of me, which seems to have been one of virility, bordering on machismo. One of them distinctly remembers that I used to wander about in the snow, shirtless, in my bare feet. I don't remember that at all. That's a life so long ago -- before I had closed up the world and decided who I was, I guess. I have a dim memory of being cocksure. But I know there was always a deep timidity in me. as well.

Idle thoughts. I don't believe in character, anyway. There's only one person, really; we're six billion refractions of one image, playing one part today, and another tomorrow. Nothing really holds me in place. There's nothing to prevent my taking the wheel as Mr Toad tomorrow. All that holds me is the story and the habit.

Une vie inconnue. It's foolish to go looking for admission to one. I already have one. I wake up every morning in the white spaces at the edge of the map. Any story can happen; I might be any character, with any history.

All it takes is to stop. Stop choking myself by spinning out threads of stale stories, fine sticky filaments that gather into a suffocating shroud, and shrink, and harden into a masklike carapace. I can only think I know this life by wrapping myself up tightly in my own narrative. I don't know it at all.

Ice Fishing

I was a little surprised when Debbie said, at the start, "I don't like really aggressive work, or really deep work." Maybe it's something she says at the start of every student massage; I hope so; I really don't want to be projecting the sort of energy that would prompt someone to say that. Anyway, it was with some chagrin that I got the feedback at the end that she had the feeling I was pulling my punches a little, holding back from what she called "deep contact." "Well of course I was," I didn't quite say, "that's what you told me to do!"

But it's part of something that I've been learning all this quarter: to trust my instincts, and not to let what my client says override what my hands are telling me. "Rely on the chief witness," as the Tong Len aphorism has it. Meaning oneself.

But I know I gave a very competent massage, and she fell asleep a couple times; since what she'd asked for was relaxation, that's pretty good evidence that she got what she asked for. It wasn't however -- obviously -- what she really wanted.

I highlight the only dissatisfaction I had. It was a lovely experience. I have had a close rapport with Debbie since the day last August when -- supposedly to get my documentary proof that I had had a professional massage, but really as part of researching the teachers at East-West -- I got a massage from her. She gave me a warm hug at the door, as I left, then. (Something I gallantly forebore to disclose when a couple months later, in her Massage I class, she told us one shouldn't do that.) A few days later I walked out the door of IBM for the last time. I was done with cubicle-land. I wanted to touch people.

That time, the massage was excellent but not -- in Debbie's words -- "memorable"; this time she gave me a kick-ass massage. I think she was showing off a bit; certainly she was demonstrating what she meant by deep contact. I went in feeling pretty stoked about all I'd learned since Massage I, and I left feeling like I didn't know a damn thing. But inspired. My body had been torn down and completely rebuilt. By God, I thought, I'm going to learn how to do work like that.

I love her office. Earth tones and orange and red -- the padma colors, the heart-Buddha colors. That's what I mean to have too. It's interesting that the Medicine Buddha is blue -- if I were going to do physical therapy, or massage that leaned in that direction, I'd go for blue. Ratna. But that's not what I'm aiming for. I'm all about padma. Connection. Detachment is not my path.

She has a little fountain that gives the sound of trickling water. Can't quite decide whether I think that's sublime or a bit artificial and over the top. And music. I've got to get my music act down. People are going to want it, by and large. I liked the heated table, which surprised me, since I'm often too warm (especially after doing massage!) But it was fine.

She said my abdominal massage was fabulous, which delighted me. She also, like Tele, was completely fine with me reaching under both sides at once to work around the iliac crest from beneath.

She spoke of how she uses accupressure points. "It's like ice-fishing," she said. "Ways in." A whole new set of terminology and locations to learn. But obviously worth it. Several times she used them, to tremendous effect: where I would have laboriously worked over a whole muscle with deep compression and petrissage, she went straight to one spot, and melted the whole muscle from there. She did what I take five minutes to do in one. No wonder I always want to take two hours; it's because I'm so slow. It's good that I want to do a complete massage, but the clock-time required to do that may be a lot less than I've always thought.

Why there is Love

It's very quiet. The swallows flash over the still lake, climb high, topple, and swoop down in stairsteps to skim the surface again. Twilight.

I wander by the huge rough blocks of stone. Just behind me, if I were to turn around, is all the grief of the world. I don't turn around. I walk slowly.

Somewhere, faintly, windchimes.

Why? And to what end? She asked. And so I came here, to the ruins, where I always come in perplexity.

I don't know. Why love? An odd, but characteristic question. It demands a story. Children ask questions like that, and you bring out the oldest, most treasured, most intractable stories of your race in answer.

Once upon a time, there was a flower, and it was all alone.

But my mind goes blank when I try to imagine the void that preceded love. Like trying to imagine the shape of the waters before the Lord divided them with the firmament.

The sun is a small, pale circle beyond the cloud. Perhaps it was the sun, not a flower:

Once upon a time there was the sun, and she was all alone.

You can't even begin a story until there are two characters. Perhaps the real difficulty I have with monotheism is a narrative one.

The sun walked by herself in the fields of the sky, gathering a garland of stars, and as she walked she wept.

Till finally the swallows took pity on her, and wove the moon out of the tears she had dropped, and stretched him like a net in the night sky.

And the net was called the Moon, and he grew in secret, and he was cold, and stars caught in his twining cords. And he wept and starved where he had been splayed, and he dwindled and lessened for fourteen days.

Until the Sun lifted her eyes and was astonished and she said, "who are you? And where do you come from?"

And the Moon was ashamed, because he didn't know, but he was suffused with light and warmth, and for fourteen days he grew.

That's why there is love.

The faint disk of the sun fades into the cloudbank. The swallows have left the water. The last light drains from the rock.

To what end? That, we still don't know.

Massage as Treatment

Such a lovely woman. I'm abashed, as I work; altogether too pretty a young woman for me to be laying my hands upon. I've not felt exactly this way before. I'm missing my stride. Distracted by a beauty that doesn't quite add up.

She wanted me to do the trigger-points in her rhomboids, but I wander over her body, lingering at the feet, knowing that this sort of soothing massage is not what she asked for, though I'm convinced it's what she needs. Her unhappiness doesn't live in her upper back or neck. It lives here, in her feet and her ankles. But I don't think she knows that.

Who knows whether I'm right. Possibly she just seems so young and vulnerable that I'm reluctant to hurt her.

I don't like telling a bodyworker where to work on me. It's not as if there's some treasure-hunt going on, as if they need to find the only bit of my body that needs work. It all needs work. I want people working on me to read my body for the first time, and come up with their own interpretation. "Follow your hands," I say. I can work my own rhomboids, if need be. I don't want my own take on my body. I already have that. I want theirs.

I grow daily less satisfied with the treatment model of massage. Soft tissue manipulation helps with some problems, sure. Occasionally it helps spectacularly. But really what will relieve the tension in your neck and shoulders is not a monthly, a weekly, or even a daily massage. What will relieve it is changing the way you work, the way you move, the way you rest. What massage can do is bring your attention to your body, in a loving context. Fixing it is up to you.

People forget. They hold so much tension so long they can't even feel it as tension. They restrict their own motion for so long that they forget some of the ways in which their bodies can move. Our job is not to fix that. Our job to draw their attention to it, so they can fix it.

The other day, in class, I was practicing an intake interview with Andrea. Her traps, scalenes, and levator scap were stiff, especially on the left. "Show me," I said. "Here, this is your desk. Sit at it and show me how you work." She sat in the chair, and to my astonishment, torqued herself halfway around, craned her head to the left, looking up at an imaginary monitor, and stretched her hands down to the right to an imaginary keyboard. It made my neck ache just to look at it.

I had to laugh. She looked a little shamefaced. "I know, I should get them to fix it."

And this is someone who's spent the last six months studying muscles and body mechanics. But I do it myself. It's taken me weeks to realize that there's a very simple explanation for my shoulder trouble. It began when I started my new job, working at a keyboard with no elbow support. Have I fixed it? No. Is my shoulder getting better, with twice-weekly excellent massage? No. And it's not going to, unless I get a chair with arms.

I'm not quite sure where this leaves me as a bodyworker who's going to have to be peddling his services in a few months. People want to believe you can fix their bodies in a pleasant, soothing sixty minutes, and they'll pay you good money for that. But I don't think I can market myself that way. Massage is good for people, in a number of ways. I can rattle off the benefits of improved blood circulation and lymph drainage, the increased seratonin levels and lowered blood pressure, with the best of them. But an hour's exercise is probably better for you than an hour's massage, frankly, for all of those things. The sort of massage I want to practice -- the 90-minute, leave-your-conceptual-mind-behind kind -- is really, as a medical intervention, a pretty poor bargain.

I love massage. When I was a rich programmer, and could afford it, I got it regularly, sometimes as often as once a week. I never questioned whether it was worthwhile, anymore than I question whether eating or sleeping is worthwhile. What I find difficult to understand is how people live without it.

Well, that's fine for someone on the receiving end. You don't need to know any more than that. But for someone on the giving end, understanding it is more urgent. I have some thinking and reading and asking to do.

A Different Place

When I walk in the nearby fields I can see the ancient granite ridges, blue silhouettes in the west against the setting sun. That's Wales, people tell you as a visitor. A different place.

Mary has quietly reappeared, in the borderlands. Which makes me very happy.

Crossing the River

Across the street, behind the salmon-brown stone of the "Family Health Center," a tree's leaves are trembling, roiling. Its branches shift uncertainly. It draws my eye, over and over.

Sixty-two. A dangerous age, I recall, with some amusement. I am only forty-nine, but that, apparently, is a dangerous age too.

That secret, exulting ferocity has been visiting me again. The certainty that all bets are off, that they've always been off. Something feral uncoils in me.

The leaves draw my eye again. Yeats saw them, just this way. The Madness of King Goll, is it? The intolerable fluttering of the leaves. We see them, as any predator sees a shivering tethered thing. I have been watching a tiny six-week-old kitten play with a mouse-toy. Like that.

What does it all add up to, anyway? Christianity tells us we'll get a grade at the end of term, pass or fail. But there is no grade, and there is no term. There is only the fluttering of the leaves.

Some people drink, to retrieve this state. I used to, myself. But not now. It will not last, and nothing will make it last. Nothing will make it stay away, either.

Strange things begin to happen, when you wind your mind too tight for too long. It can spring suddenly back into forgotten pasts, or forward into unexpected emptinesses. I think of poor old Wordsworth. "Was it for this?" he kept wondering. The leaves trembled, and his eyes went there again. "Was it for this?"

But listen. Listen. And wait until you hear. There is only one thing you can do wrong, really, and that's to stop listening: to decide there's not going to be any answer, and try to make one up. Some things you can fake -- some things you even have to fake -- but this isn't one of them.

There. The tree has gone still. Already it is fading, changing. I am back in the ordinary world, an ordinary man. The lines above read like a coded message. I no longer know what I meant. Epileptics are tired when they come out of a seizure, though they don't know what they've been doing.

I keep trying to make the pieces all fit together. Like Wordsworth, again; poor old Wordsworth. It tails away into repetitions, feebler and feebler echoes. ("I, too, have written some books," murmured Swift, humbly, in the madhouse.)

A shirtless man walks by the window. His eyes are downward; his shoulders canted over. He carries his left arm high, as though it were a rifle and he was crossing a river; the fingers of that lifted hand wriggle and grasp at space.

Public Service Announcement

If you've been dismayed by trying to visit Hoarded Ordinaries and finding a sinister blank white screen, fear not. Try Hoarded Ordinaries. She's still with us.

The Circulatory System

I

The heart is actually two pumps, twined together -- one that pumps the blue exhausted blood from the body into the lungs, and one that pumps the fresh red blood from the lungs back into the body. The two have, from a plumbing point of view, little to do with each other: it is simply convenient to run both with the same control apparatus, and to protect both within the same bony cage. The outflow of each will eventually be the inflow of the other, but in a healthy heart the two bloodstreams rush past each other without touching, like trains that are bound in opposite directions, running temporarily on parallel tracks. You can view the whole system as a lopsided figure-eight, with the heart being the crossroads; one loop is the pulmonary circulation, the other the systemic circulation. They meet, but do not mingle, at the heart, where two twined fists of muscle clench together, and relax.


II



In the dead of winter, I sat in my darkened cubicle, looking at photographs taken by night from London buses. I was transfixed. There were long lines of red light like jet trails, and gleaming reflected surfaces, wet sidewalks, blurs and splashes of light. It was a dark world, and one without faces. But the light. There was always light welling up, light moving and flaring, light flickering and swooping.

We like to tell stories. If I were to give our species a name, it certainly would not be the sapient apes. I might call us the storytelling apes -- or maybe the lying apes. We make up stories constantly, compulsively. So don't believe me when I say that was the beginning of the story. When I say that was the light that grew inside me with the Spring, that eventually grew so bright that I left the barren country of cubicles and touched flesh rather than keyboards. Don't believe me when I say that a small song began in me then. Beginnings, middles, and ends; we make them up with fatal readiness. Don't believe me when I say I fell in love then, and my whole life has grown differently because of it. Such things don't have beginnings. They don't have ends, either.


III

The sky unravels, a dirty fraying white blanket. It's preparing, they say, a sunny weekend. I hope not -- I don't particularly like the sun, not beating straight down on the world out of a blue sky. I have very fair skin that burns easily. And I don't like being hot and sweaty.

I'm sitting unshaven and unwashed in Tosi's, after a fitful night, feeling cranky and forlorn: the sort of mood in which you invite sympathy and then snap at someone for offering it.

Last night I was reading an old Agatha Christie. It has a marvellous beginning, playing, as she so often so deftly did, on the conventions of the detective story. At first blush it's the standard Arthur Conan Doyle opening: a young woman in mysterious distress comes to the great detective for help. But she's barely started on her story when she stops, staring at Poirot, and says she doesn't want to be rude, but she had thought -- it just won't work, she doesn't want to be rude, but -- he's too old. And she bolts from his office.


IV

I rise slowly through layers of black water, and break the surface, at last, of the lake. I tread water. I can hear the slow drip from invisible stalactites, the faint hoarse breath of the flowing air. Ripples of cold float over my face, smelling of limestone and forgetfulness. The pulse of warmth leaving my torn shoulder. It's enough, breathing the night air -- it's always night here -- and dreaming of a sun, a sun too powerful to endure. Poor Grendel's had an accident.

---

Credits:

1. Photograph: Frizzy Logic
2. Agatha Christie: Third Girl
3. John Gardner, Grendel

Ocean

I hopped nimbly out of the car, swinging my pack onto my back, and thanked my ride briefly. I'd gotten here from Eugene in three rides. Not too bad. Five hours, maybe. The second ride had dropped me smack in the middle of nowhere among the enormous hills of the Coast Range. Mountains, most of you would call them, but we always reserved that word for the snow-covered peaks of the Cascades. These were just hills, even if they were a couple thousand feet high.

I'd walked an hour or two along the freshly asphalted road, twenty minutes to descend one sweeping curve, twenty to climb the next; huge featureless swoops of second-growth doug fir. As I'd walked I'd calculated how long I would have to walk if I didn't get another ride. Twelve hours, I reckoned.

But then a salesman stopped for me, all agitation, hugging the steering wheel almost to his chest, fat neck crammed into a tight collar. All kinds of people would stop for you, if you looked clean and harmless, even people from the other side, people who thought Nixon was a great president, and Vietnam was a great war. Young hippies were interesting even to them. I made sure to open my face and smile cheerfully, and stand tall, with my arm fully extended -- crooking your elbow, and jerking your arm, I thought, was sinister. That was how people hitched a ride in the movies, but it wasn't how we did it. I never had to wait all that long.

The salesman let me off at the unmarked pull-off. I trotted down the hobbit trails, tunnels half sand, half salal, and then the roof opened, and I came to the ocean.

The ocean, we always called it, "the sea" being thought highfalutin and literary. It would be twenty years before I would discover that we had that backwards from the rest of the English-speaking world. I still say "the sea" with a little embarassment, knowing but not believing that for most people it's just the ordinary workaday word. To me it sounds like "the vasty deep."

I walked down the empty beach. In those days no one came there. Now there is a regular turnoff, and a highway sign on 101 announcing the Hobbit Trails. It's still a bit far from the bigger towns, though, so it's not crowded. Just not empty anymore. But back then only a handful of people knew about that beach, and used that name

A pearly mist was rolling in over the water. Somewhere my friends would be camping. Lori, who a year later would die of a brain tumor in Belize. Pam and Rhonda, identical twins, daughters of the Methodist minister who, ten years later, would officiate at my wedding. A boy whose name I've forgotten, with dark hair as long as my blond. They would be perched in a hollow low on the cliffs, like seagulls, feeding a little fire whipped by the wind. Naked teenagers at the edge of the world.

The rising of the land, the arches of the sky. I turned sideways and vanished.

I wish you had been with me, then. I would like to vanish with you.

Detritus

Or: some of what I have not been saying for the past couple months.

---

All that anxiety. Peel back the habits, and there it is, right where we left it. I realize now that it will never go away. When I was younger I might indulge in the fantasy that I'll do something -- find the right lover, exercise, eat right, meditate -- and escape that anxiety. Make it go away. But two thirds of my way through life's journey, it's time to accept that this is simply one of the conditions of this life. I'm dangling over a deep rushing current of anxiety. This is not temporary. It's not circumstantial. It's just life as I know it, life as it's going to be.

So. I'm not going to make it go away. I will never feel the solid ground of confidence under my feet. Which is all right (because it has to be all right.) I will just have to go on without it. Cope with it, as anyone might cope with any disability. Find workarounds, accept assistance; make peace with the fact that some things will be forever beyond my reach. That's all right. An anxious person can still have a life worth living.

I can limit the collateral damage. I can unlearn some of the self-contempt I harbor. I didn't choose to have this condition -- who would choose such a thing? So I needn't feel guilty about it, or think it should be some other way. People who don't have it, of course, think I could make it go away by an act of will, just as people with no weight problem think people with weight problems could make them go away by an act of will, and as intelligent people think stupid people could become smart by an act of will, and so on. We give ourselves moral credit for our abilities, and accept shame for our disabilities. Foolishness. We didn't choose either.

---

It was, in a way, the last hurrah of the delusion that I might be something else underneath it all. Such an intoxicating fantasy. Something or somebody might strip away the facade, and, in a glittering moment, I'd stand revealed as my true self -- now and forever a different man. Someone I'd admire rather than wince at, cover up for, apologize for.

Love is supposed to do that. It doesn't, of course. But it seems like it will. It starts to. But there are two problems. One is that I really am the person I am. And the other is that I find that person so distasteful.

---

A strange eruption of wounded pride. Was it for this? To suckle fools and chronicle small beer?

So long as I don't believe it, I suppose I can just wait it out, let it dwindle. Surprising how strong it can still stand, though, even though the scaffolding has all been undone. I don't believe in glory and distinction; I have no business even beginning to step that way, let alone to walk down that path -- liberally reckoning up my deserts and finding fault with their reception. That's the quick way to a bitter life, short but too long: I've seen too much of it to mistake it.

Sure, on imagined fields I can contrive extravagant victories, notable routs, brilliant coups. So can any man. But the work in hand is to set my house in order.

The hardest thing is holding other people to their work. Because I can't do it alone. And that means convincing people that it's in their best interest, getting their commitment to a certain amount of work, and supplying the impetus. None of them things I'm very good at. I've crippled my life, though, by only being willing to do things I'm good at. It's time to spend some time doing things I'm bad at.

---

All phenomena are empty, I'm told, and I believe it readily of bicycle tires and apricots, pleasure and pain, nations and species; perhaps I always did. But not of habit. Habit is not impermanent. It has an essential nature, a wicked one, and it will still be afflicting me when America is no longer mentioned in history books and cockroaches are extinct.

The trouble is that I am so tired, and only habitual routines promise rest: but it is precisely the habitual routines that render me incapable of rest. And so it runs, over and over, the wheel of exhaustion, my own personal twelve nidanas.

Used to be, I would sometimes believe that something could break the sequence. Requited love. Excercise. Meditation. Yoga. A new career. The Scarsdale diet (yes, my memory stretches back that far!) Something would violently break me free of the wheel, and from then on habitual virtue would establish itself, a self-supporting sequence of overflowing energy and profound rest, just as tenacious as the wheel of exhaustion.

It seems to me now, that -- a few months shy of my fiftieth birthday -- it's time for me to concede that it's not going to happen that way. Not that things never change; of course they do. But even though radical shifts do in fact happen, they are moments of extreme vulnerability; and just-this-once-ness applies not only to brave departures but also to one-time indulgences. The departures never become habitual, somehow, but the indulgences do.

I know. I've said all this before. This, in fact, is a habitual lament, for me. When I listed out for myself habitual wheels I've gotten free of in the past four years, the list was impressive. I have wrenched my myself free of many things that have afflicted me all my life.

But what doesn't change is the sense of being bound to a wheel, of being just one transformation away from having a real life.

I am violently sick of compromise, of just-for-now, of buying vices with virtues in a sort of carbon-emissions program of the heart. The whole thing is wrong.

This Morning

I am asking myself: just what do I think I have, that I am so afraid of losing it?

Sarah is here in Portland. I'll be seeing her at morning puja in less than an hour, if I don't cut and run. I could have gone up to the retreat land and seen her there yesterday. I didn't.

---

My mother-in-law -- long passed away, now -- once took a painting class, and her teacher told her that water will be the same color as the sky. She used to repeat this bit of painting-class lore to us from time to time, dubiously but obstinately. "They say," she would begin -- "they" being a whole pantheon of authorities whom one had to accept -- "that the water will be the same color as the sky."

Whether we were looking at the gray, brown-veined Columbia under a deep blue sky, or at a green mountain stream under a white overcast, she would cite this oracle. Just one of the many authorities she accepted, and would have defended strenuously, but didn't entirely believe. I've often wondered if that really was exactly what he did say, or exactly what he meant.

Anyway. He would be gloriously vindicated today. The luminous gray of the wet pavement in front of Tosi's is exactly the color of the cloudy sky. Iron and polished steel, edged with tarnish. The weather that means home, to me.

Sunday Morning, Portland Town

The only thing I like about Sundays is the quiet air; the soft rain; the forgetfulness. I walk out in the early morning and I might be the only person alive in the world. Perhaps a plague has killed everyone but me.

I always wanted to journey through a deserted Portland, wandering through people's houses, seeing exactly how they lived before the end. The archeology of Pompeii fascinates me. Ordinary life transected: it's one of the ways to see how strange and poignant the ordinary is, to reveal how heavy a burden we labor under, hour by hour, of desire, habit and anxiety. One convulsion of a mountain can make plain what daily life does its best to conceal from us -- that the future we dread and long for will never actually arrive: that we live most of our lives in a fantasy world. Even if the future comes -- which it might not -- it won't be that one.

I'm not a Sunday man. I am annoyed by shops and cafes opening an hour late, or not at all; by buses running infrequently. What is a person to do with those long hours before seven o'clock? The prime time for writing, for the anonymous sociability of a working breakfast, squandered because people have an unaccountable taste for wasting a perfectly clear, wide-open, brand-new day by sleeping through it.

But there is the soft wet mossy sidewalks, the subdued song of birds made uneasy by the stilled traffic, the endless modulations of silver, gray, and white in the quiet sky. I walk down Hawthorne Boulevard, pausing to look in the windows of the closed-up restaurants, examine their menus, and wonder why I've never gone to the ones I've never gone to. The heavy power and telephone wires swoop up and down the boulevard: it's like walking under the rigging of a ship. Do most people not see this endlessly proliferating spider-web of wires, all over the city? That's my impression. Taut steel supporting cables run from the telephone poles down to the sidewalks: if you lay your hand on them, you can feel them trembling, as if with the weight of all that flowing power and information. As I walk down the street, the wires rise and fall against the sky; the rocking of a ship under sail. They are very ugly, and very beautiful.

Sunday. The buses run on a scarce schedule, so I didn't go to Tosi's. And my bike tire is losing air, so I didn't bike to Tom's. I shouldered my pack, my shoulders protesting at the weight of my old thinkpad, and walked down the boulevard to the Common Grounds coffee house. Not my usual place, though inhabited much more by my own kind: the professional-managerial class, in their jeans or shorts, subdued plaid shirts, and faded cloth jackets, looking rumpled, unkempt and dowdy. (Very few people ever dress for work, in this city, as other cities understand it -- my first impression of Portland, after a long absence, was of a whole city puttering about in its pajamas. "Don't any of these people work, or go out?" I wondered. But you go into their offices and shops, their restaurants and bars, and you realized that they do work and go out; they just don't dress differently to do that than they do to work in their gardens or cook Sunday breakfast.)

"Mocha?" calls a young barrista's voice, sharply; but even at a semi-shout, in the rising inflection so characteristic of their generation. The worried, perplexed generation: every statement comes out a question. The man in the tousled hair and blue plaid shirt shambles back up to the counter to fetch his drink, which is topped with whipped cream. When did grown men in America stop being embarassed about drinking something topped with whipped cream, I wonder? Thirty years ago no man would be caught dead doing such a thing.

Is it just that relentless marketing has succeeded in removing the stigma from self-indulgence? Or is it maybe a sense that the adult world no longer has its own reserved pleasures, so that we have no intention, anymore, of relinquishing the juvenile ones? It is distressing to me that very few of the young people I know look forward to their working lives with anything but dread. It will be the end, they seem to think, of all pleasure, of all leisure, of all fun. Many of them will actually find satisfying, meaningful work. They will be much happier than in the no-man's-land of adolescence. But they don't seem to think so.

How much, how much love rises at times like these. A blond toddler of praeternatural cuteness cruises around the tables, indulged by all the newspaper-readers and laptop-typers. He's happy. His mother follows him. She works hard to keep him happy and quiet, and his father pitches in too, though less skillfully. They look prosperous, successful, competent, and anxious. They aren't here long before his mother, worried about his occasional bleats of joy, takes him out to play on the sidewalk. His father conscientiously buses the table and wipes it down. I wish they looked happier.

Dorr's River

It cannot possibly exist. How could it? But I have felt that river, waking on frozen nights out on the ground at three in the morning.
-- Chris Clarke: The River of Gold

A delicate pattern of legs and wings
Ripples up between the light and the wall;
An outlined angel beats its wings, rises,
And dissolves again.
And now, at the join of the wall and the ceiling
The cranefly clicks against the woodwork
And stumbles against its inversion.

Today I held your face between my palms.

The enormous cool darkness
And the sound of running water
And the pull of the tide, running
Miles beneath the sand.
Dorr's River runs down to the sea.

You dip your hands in the sun
And a shadow falls on the world.

Thank You

A little overwhelmed by the thought of trying to respond to all the comments; I want to answer each of them at length, which is impossible if I'm to pass my massage & pathology classes.

So, in order not invidiously to particularize, here, I will just say: even if mole goes the way of all talpidae, I won't just disappear -- the temptation of having an audience for my writing will never be one I'll be able to resist for long, for one thing, and for another, you all have my email address. And I am very attached to you all. (There are a few of you who generally respond to me by email, not by comment: one of you indicated that you thought this would put you into a different and less important category for me. It doesn't.)

I've thought long and hard about what Lori of Chatoyance said:

If one views these venues as a public form of private practice -- as a place where one does one's arpeggios and riffs, and shares in the community of others doing such -- then perhaps the practice is a bit stale and it will take pushing through.

Mole has been a practice journal, a place for occasional essays, and a stage for amateur poetry and drawing. The practice journal might have to go private -- there are patterns in it that aren't altogether healthy, which are exacerbated by its being public. The rest is bound to surface in one form or another. I have repeatedly said that I don't take my poetry or drawing seriously. There are good reasons for this, but it may be time to drop my (too much protested) amateur status and take one or both seriously. The immediate result of this would be, of course, a conspicuous drop in quality. If I go that way, here or elsewhere, I hope you'll bear with me. Sometimes, like a wasp caught in a sash window, you have to go backwards to go forwards.

On the Occasion of my Fourth Blogday

Four years ago today I began a blog called "Vajrayana Practice." I was starting a new meditation practice, and I wanted to keep a journal of it, and I was no longer used to writing on paper -- I'd been working in a paperless office for several years. And it was new software to play with.

I at least pretended to myself that I thought no one would want to read it. I distinctly remember my mouse pointer hesitating between the buttons that would make it public or private. I had a pious hope that reading about my practice difficulties might help other meditators, and a not very pious hope, imperfectly submerged, that lots of people would read it, and all of them would find me fascinating and admirable. I clicked public.

When I was a boy we used to go swim at a place we called "the pipeline." A big iron pipe (for natural gas?) crossed over the gorge of a little river. We could clamber out onto the pipe and jump off into the water, some thirty or forty feet below. There was always that last moment, the culmination of recklessness, the moment when it was too late to change my mind, when my feet left the pipe. Clicking "public" reminded me of that. And clicking "publish" still does.

Then, almost at once, my feet would smack the surface, and there would be the shock of cold water. No matter how vertical I held myself, I never plunged straight down. On hitting the water there was a veering, a jackknifing, and I'd find myself rushing at an unexpected tangent in the green sunlit water, disoriented, having to wait a moment to slow down and figure out what had become of "up."

The motto of my blog, back then, was taken from Blake:

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or Love in a golden bowl?

One day I posted something that made a friend feel unhappily exposed. I wanted to get rid of the post without drawing attention to the fact, so I pretended its disappearance was part of a general reconstruction, and made some changes I'd been contemplating for a long time. Calling the blog "vajrayana practice," as if I were some sort of authority, had made me uneasy from the start. And anyway, it had stopped being primarily a practice journal. I made a few cosmetic changes, monkeyed with fonts and what-not, and announced my new incarnation as "mole."

I don't know if I fooled anybody, but the name of "mole" seemed to resonate with people, and someone -- Bonta? -- referred to Kenneth Grahame's Mole. It was a persona I was much more comfortable with. I wasn't an earnest, disciplined seeker after enlightenment. I was hapless, easily delighted and bewildered, gratefully overwhelmed by friendship, torn between wanderlust and homesickness, dazzled by a world that was a little more brilliant than nature had equipped me to absorb.

Thank you. Thanks especially to Badger and Water Rat, and to Toad (no link, he seems to have taken one joyride too many; some of you will know who I mean). But I could multiply heartfelt thanks for pages, and still be leaving out someone who said exactly the right thing at the right time, to comfort me or challenge me, pull me up short or send me off looking. You all have been wonderful.

The lifespan of a mole, I learn, is "up to three years." This blog has begun to feel a bit elderly to me. This is not a farewell post, but I do sense that I ought to begin putting my blog affairs in order. All things must pass.

Thank you so much.

Future Perfect

It is only hard, I said to myself, because I have not done it before. Three times I've veered away at the last minute, walked on past, or pretended to be just looking. So I will do it in the future perfect, now, having already done it; I will revisit this place, the place I always went, back in those days when I lived in Portland, and I was going to massage school. And I will look around with nostalgia, slow to respond to the living people, busy greeting the ghosts; the living people will come slowly into focus, and I will order in some distraction, not the distraction of anxiety, which would be ridiculous, but the distraction of the past, which everyone knows is nobly confusing.

So I turned in at the door, into the old place. They had new people behind the counter. I had to explain what I wanted; they didn't already know, as they used to. Times change.

Daughter of Death

for Kristin

O beloved daughter of death, mother of life,
All these things return
To one small turning of the hand, fingers
Hesitating on a doorknob, in the red slant light
Of day's end, in the glow of the apple petals.

Darling, the generations ripple past,
Rings on the water, faster than the years
When I still counted --

We reach into the spaces of the past, wishing
We could return a childhood to those who had none.
But it is delicate, handling the past;
It crumbles under our touch, the grit slides
Between our fingers. Better not to speak.

Love. I will go on saying that word, not
Because it means what I mean, but because
Nothing means what I mean. You see?

Again it rises. You see? There, where
Venus trembles in the west, where the dark hills
Crowd together. That's where it is born;
We go calling it through daybleach and sungloom
But always, it finds our backs.

No one finds it. It finds us.

If I could string together all the beads of this love
I would hang them around your neck
My darling daughter of death, mother of life;
I would bring you a poem to astonish

Tree and stone, water and wheel,
The bloody sunset, the stained petals,
The opening sky, the veins of cloud,
The long shadows and the closing door.

Space

Everything that rises must diverge
And skies, first blue, become black
And pricked with stars,
And finally empty, measureless;
The dread that when I was young
We called, in defeat, Space.
So we learned in school.

I've never been there
To Space
And neither have you
So you might think it didn't matter
What we thought it was,
A huge, devouring hole, or
The glorious empyrean

Any more than it mattered what nonsense
Ancient cartographers wrote in the margins,
Doodling their fears and desires;
Prester John or Anthropophagi,
Amazons or dragons. But
It matters more,
In fact, than the map of what we know.

It is the landscape of the heart
And it has to do
With what we believe is in the wings, or
Before birth, or beyond the oven
Of the crematorium.
It is what we think we will fall into
If we lose our grip.

So I will tell you what is out there
In Space; if you go to that website
Of the night sky, and click zoom
And zoom, and zoom, and zoom,
Till you're past the sandy stars
Of the furthest nebulae, and the last
Magellanic cloud.

Click again, and the image will gather
Of your dearest friend, reaching
To brush the hair from your face.
Young again, and full of health,
The smile of the last mirth you shared
Still lingering. If you let go, you will fall
Into her arms.

On Being Asked to Show my Tattoos

Chaining the skin to the past. As if I were not already tight enough bound to yesterday's opinions and preferences. Is it not enough that every corner business has a logo? Must my person be branded as well?

I am not a product. I will not be a billboard for myself.

Well, that was my first thought, that I am nobly resisting my objectification; but of course that's a crock. What rises up in me, mostly, is the desire to be seen as someone resisting his objectification. Which is no different, at bottom. A slightly different sort of object, that's all.

I continue to chew on this desire to be seen. It is a complicated one. What is blogging, but another manifestation of that desire? But it is the serpent whych eateth his own tayle. Because what I want is to be seen as I dream myself, as God hinted to me that I might someday be. I want to be seen as I really am, which is not even what I now am, let alone what I appear to be. But as soon as I am seen, I am seen as something, and I know -- late or soon, depending on how honest I am -- that I am not really that something. I am like those silly psychic investigators who try to take pictures and make recordings of spirits. If you can take a picture of something immaterial, then it's not immaterial. The price of getting a clear picture of a spirit is demonstrating beyond question that it's not a spirit.

And yet. Here is the flesh, that is palpably an object. "I am not my body," insists my teacher. Perfectly orthodoxly. That's what Buddhism says. The body may be precious, it may be a temple, but only as the house of a spirit. Does Buddhism make sense, without that ruling concept? Its practices still work -- that's not what I'm questioning, I know that by direct experience. But that doesn't mean its theory is right.

I crave to be seen, and desired, as flesh. It may be what I want most urgently. But does that craving make sense even on its own terms? I'm not sure. It may be one of those phantom desires that can never be fulfilled. Like the itch of an amputated limb. It has all the marks of that sort of desire.

And yet. I don't believe any desire is worthless. No desire is wrong, though any of them may lead to wrong. There is a certain reaching out, characteristic of all desire. And if I think that the body and the spirit are one, then it's not so simple as mistaking one for the other. It is, rather, mistaking the nature of both. Neither one can correctly be considered an object. Maybe seeing and being seen would have to be replaced by communion.

Always the longing. The one constant of my life.

You think too much. That is your problem, says Zorba, in the back of my mind. Thank you, Zhoen, by the way, for nominating Mole as a "thinking blog," (though I'm still trying to work it out and see if it comes round to a compliment :->)

Faith's House

I

As we spoke she laid a hand on
Her small round belly
Holding a secret, or a pain

And I thought of coiled intestines
And how they say that a surgeon's nightmare
Is to try to pack them in, once out;

And I thought of children in secret spaces
Growing in the dark, listening
To the rushing lubb dupp of the heart.

Love moves oddly, as one grows older;
It sidles, slips sideways, and turns;
It no longer washes in like a tide,

And out, leaving ruin behind it.
Instead it pools and eddies,
No longer demanding and requiring,

It inquires and remands. It is a love
Of questions, not of answers.


II

Here belongs a catalog. If all poems,
As one said, are love poems, now I should make note
Of how she listens intently,

Staring hard, with her lips parted,
Like a child's; or how
She gathers a shawl about herself

Prefiguring an old woman
Of an efficient and matter-of-fact sort,
And I would mention a certain black skirt,

And hair brushed forward at the temples.
But all that, though real enough,
Belongs to the tides. It is not

What we are here to celebrate.
We are not even here to celebrate
Ingrained kindness, or care,

Or constancy. We are here
To warm a house.


III

First the Magi bring cinnamon
And Persian spices without names
Ever named in the West;

St Nicholas brings a tea-set
With an intricate silver creamer
And a bowl, and sugar spoons;

Ananda brings lotuses
That blossom on the water,
And a wish-fulfilling jewel.

Milarepa grins and contributes
A nettle pot, before vanishing
(He never stays long, you know),

An elderly poet brings a sword
To keep upstairs, and another brings
A bow of burning gold;

I am gone with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.


IV

The gift of speech was stolen from me
By a malevolent fairy, at my christening
Who doomed me to mumbling;

The gift of appropriate gifts has never been mine.
Decorum is a painful lesson, half learned
And readily forgotten;

But one gift I have always retained,
Overlooked in the general rout, and that
Is the gift of offering blessings. And so:

A blessing on the windows, of seeing,
A blessing on the stove, of warming,
A blessing on the floor, of standing,

A blessing on the door, of opening,
A blessing on the roof, of sheltering,
A blessing on the walls, of holding.

The oldest of pieties is that naming calls;
I name this Faith's House, these four walls.

Half-Mast

Hail rattles briefly on the windows. Shadows and bronze sunlight hesitate, move on, over the wire-latticed glass. Half a dozen empty tables. At the far side of the room a small, serious young man, sitting up perfectly straight, turns his hand slowly over, his eyes moving between his kinesiology text and his forearm. The room is silent. A couple times a student comes in to check her email, a quick quiet rattle on the keyboards, and goes noiselessly back out.

I doze a little, feeling the pools of light and shadow wander over me, feeling the rain and hail in my sleep. A long slow loneliness sifts down and settles over me. I miss the couple of boisterous students of our classes, who are usually here by now, who stir things up and bring me out of myself. Usually I seek out quiet places and solitude. But today I have been alone all day, and I've had my fill. I'd like some noise and warmth.

No one comes. 6:25. I gather my books and coat and cross the hall to the classroom, expecting to see people sitting on the floor, but no one's there. There's a sign on the door: class has been canceled. Odd. Class yesterday evening -- different teacher -- was also canceled. Is something virulent going around?

I could ask at the office, but instead I go out, walking bareheaded in the rain. Towers of white cloud in a sky that's half bright blue and half dark gray. Squalls catching the sunlight. The world rocks a little, like a ship. I walk down to the convention center and stand under the high glass, waiting for the bus. On a building several blocks away an American flag floats over an Oregonian flag, both at half-mast. I search my memory, but can't think of who's died recently, except for Kurt Vonnegut. I don't suppose it's for him. Maybe it's the Virginia Tech shootings. Or maybe it's been an especially bloody day in Iraq. I don't follow these things: it's no news to me that people are deliberately slaughtering each other. They've been doing it all my life, and I confidently expect them to be doing it long after my death. They think it will change something. They have no idea, no idea how hard it is to change things. They think it's other people who need to be straightened out, or got rid of. If only it were that easy.

It's the twist in the heart that needs to be straightened out. I know that darkness, that hunger, that endless gnawing emptiness. "He was a loner" announce the headlines, gravely. Well, yeah. Me too.

Another shock of hail. A brilliantly white airplane crosses against a black cloud. Sunlight glitters on the green glass of the convention center.

Earlier today an ancient homeless man, with iron-gray hair curling around his ears, wandered up to me on the sidewalk. "Another fifty cents and I can get a sixpack," he muttered. Looking closer at his face, the color and texture of grimy red vinyl diner upholstery, I realized that he was probably exactly my age. I dug change up out of my pocket, a couple bucks' worth, and handed it to him. There was a lightening in his body, as if something heavy had been taken off his shoulders. He straightened up and looked me in the eye for the first time, and said distinctly, "God bless you."

Yeah. I hope he will. I hope he'll bless all of us.

Our Mutual Friend

'As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?' Mr Wegg inquired, musing.

'Would it come dearer?' Mr Boffin asked.

'It would come dearer,' Mr Wegg returned. 'For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.'

Probably my favorite Dickens novel, though it's hard to say: I can't always tell the them apart, and I sometimes find myself wondering which character comes from which novel: Captain Cuttle, now, was that The Old Curiosity Shop? "When found, make a note of," as he himself would say. When a Dickens impulse comes over me, I don't have a hankering to read, say, David Copperfield again; rather, I find myself missing the company of Mr Micawber, and I rummage among my fat, yellowing, disintegrating college paperbacks till I find the one he inhabits.

(When I first left IBM, and took to Massage School, in the cheerful expectation that something would turn up, Martha would occasionally clutch her breast and declare, "I will never desert Mr Micawber!)

Anyway, I'm reading Our Mutual Friend, for the umpteenth time. Improbably, it's gotten better since the last time I read it.

I love the spaciousness of Victorian novels, and of Dickens above all. They have all the time in the world. Their characters aren't always slaving away in the service of a tyrannical plot; there's time for them to wander a little, and for the author to wander with them, or away from them. There's all kinds of openings for the light to leak through.

Easter

The quiet of Easter Sunday beats slowly through the city; the streets can't quite catch their breath, and the sunlight formally, reluctantly, lightens the dull housefronts and soft lawns. If you've ever watched someone with pneumonia sleep, and wondered whether they would wake again, you'll know what I mean.

Every Easter I see Death walking, high and stiff, through empty streets. I guess resurrection doesn't mean to me what it means to most people. Good Friday is not the day of unique sacrifice. Death? We all do it. There's nothing particularly divine about dying in pain. But to be finally done with it, and then come back -- that's the sacrifice. That's what requires a Christ or a Buddha. This is the day of sacrifice.

---

Rain soaked the muddy mound of loose earth over Christmas's grave, yesterday, and little rivulets of brown water ran down into the grass. The toddler next door loved to come over and give Christmas treats. "I think she's hungry," he'd confide in us. We'd give him a couple treats and he'd feed them to her, and then he'd come back to us again. "I think she's hungry," he'd repeat, meaning he wanted to do it again. We'd give him a couple more, he'd feed her again, and come back again. Urgently, earnestly -- "I think she's hungry."

His mother, who tends to take the easy way out, has decided to tell him that Christmas has "gone on vacation." I guess that means we all have to participate in that fiction, now. Christmas has gone on vacation. It sounds like some sort of riddle, or paradox.

---

My sister-in-law asked me to rub her shoulders, which were stiff; after I'd done that a while, she noticed with some surprise that she could read the print on a poster across the room, which she hadn't been able to read when I began. If the things are causally related, I'd dearly like to understand the physiology of it. I'm guessing that unstiffening the shoulders had a ripple effect of unstiffening, extending eventually to the muscles responsible for adjusting the shape of the lenses of the eyes. But how exactly does the unstiffening "ripple?" Through the muscle tissue itself, or is it a generalized nervous response? Or is it maybe a matter of blood flow? Would working the jaw and facial muscles have done the same thing quicker, or would working the feet have done just as well? I wonder if anyone's studied eyesight and massage. It would be a fun thing to investigate.

A Fluttering of Paper

Listen. It won't work. I've walked long enough in that half world. I've stopped by your bed and kissed you as you slept. It all vanishes. No one ever remembers, not really.

That's why we write it down, so we can remember; but that's even worse, because what we remember when we read them is just the words we wrote, just the infection of loss. We want to move backwards, to the place before the words, but do we even have a way of knowing there was a place before the words? Did I ever kiss you, or did I just read about a kiss, and write it down again, one of a long long line of conspirators in the fiction of kisses, setting the next generation up for the same fall?

I kneel down, careful not to wake you, and kiss your cheek, there where the color is high and your skin is so warm, so warm that it warms even my hungry-ghost mouth, making me think of a child's hot chocolate under the ski-lift housing, or of the grateful first sip of whiskey, or of blue smoke blown back over the lips, still warm from the match. This is as close as we get. What made us think there was anything else?

What we asked for, what we've known, is only a fluttering of paper in the gutter. Our dreams have become transparent, indistinct, unreal. In the end we are just looking for a corner where we can be alone.

This, by the way, so far as it relates to real life, relates to the break-up of a friend of mine, and not to me or mine.

Bound Flow

Long ago, in the dark backward and abysm of time, I and Martha took a six week Modern Dance workshop, an "intensive," as they called it. This was some twenty-five years ago, and I don't remember a lot about it, except that it was fun and I was not very good at it. But one thing I do remember is how we were taught to divide up space and classify movement, according to the system of someone named -- I think -- Laban. I remember it because it involved a number of exercises for identifying the space around ourselves that we habitually used and avoided using. The variation was surprisingly wide -- different people had very different spaces that they "inhabited." I lived in a small space directly in front of my chest, about where you'd hold a book to read it, and in order to attend to something, or manipulate it, I would always try to move it into that space. And my body had grown huddled around that space, my head bowed forward and my shoulders moving forward around it. Exercises that made me put my attention in other spaces, and to move into them -- especially into the space behind and above my head -- were disturbing. Liberating, but disorienting and dangerous-feeling.

Movement was likewise broken down into different categories, which I remember less well; but I remember that form I was most comfortable with was called "bound flow" -- movement against one's own resistance. Some people found this very difficult. It's characteristic of various kinds of detail-work -- writing, painting, and so forth. Muscles and their antagonists fire at the same time. Mime slowly lifting a dumbbell, with your biceps pulling and your triceps resisting the pull, and you'll get the idea. This motion came naturally to me. What did not come naturally to me was letting my limbs swing free, with no resistance whatever. Again liberating, disorienting, dangerous-feeling.

Well. Twenty-five years passed, without my doing much to disturb either of these habits, beyond maybe forcing myself to learn and practice the backstroke. But always in the back of my mind I thought that my most frustrating limitations -- my inability think on my feet, or to speak freely under stress -- might be eased by practicing moving my attention out of that little box in front of my chest, and learning to move freely into all that space around me that I habitually deemed too dangerous to occupy.

And now I've taken up yoga. I'm going very slowly, with a book (of course, what else?). I'm doing a total of six asanas right now, which are supposed to be very basic and easy. Poses like standing up straight, or kneeling and lifting my arns over my head. The effort to do these, mental and physical, is embarrassing. But illuminating. Just to stand and straighten my spine in the way described for ten breaths requires continuous attention and astonishing exertion by my back muscles -- the erectors, either side of the spine, and also various accessory breathing muscles; virtually every muscle that attaches to my ribs has to scramble to keep up. They all object to this outlandish activity.

But they love it, too; they're grateful to me. And I to them. It's an odd business, inhabiting a body.

People remark often about how hard I am on myself. I'm always a little baffled by this. I don't quite know what they mean. I wonder if partly they're responding to the habitual "bound flow" of my mind -- I'm usually resisting myself, one way or another. It's a way of doing mental detail-work, I suppose. But I don't do it out of self-dislike. I do it mostly out of interest in fine distinction. The free flow of my mind is not usually very interesting to me; it's not till it's pushing against some resistance that interesting things happen.

But it is a habit, and it's always worth turning over habits to see what's growing underneath them.

Sabbaticals, Hit Men, Titanic Will

Tele wrote last week about the radical sabbatical she's embarked upon. She's quit her job, and is taking six months to figure out how to live a daily life less implicated and enmeshed in "the countless pathologies" of modern life (and committing -- this is an oddly prevalent theme in my corner of the blogosphere -- acts of subversive knitting). I printed out this post and have carried it around with me. In fact I began writing this as a comment on her post, but it's grown alarmingly. The post resonated with me in many different ways. In a way I too feel that I'm on a radical sabbatical. And I feel similarly that it's a radical act to care properly for my body -- without buying anything -- or to meditate -- without buying anything. "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers," said Wordsworth. He was right even then, I'm sure. But he had no idea of how advanced capitalism would manage to turn every conceivable need, wish or yen into getting and spending.

There is nothing easy or trivial about housewifery or househusbandry. The idea that technology has turned it into something that can be done properly in a few hours a week -- which radical feminists, alas, had some hand in propagating -- is absurd. Just becoming educated enough to resist the proliferation of household poisons -- to resist the convenience of toxic food -- to resist an endless spiral of drug dependence under the rubric of medicine -- to understand the economic and environmental ramifications of "inexpensive" goods -- is a life's work. The only household tasks that have really gotten easier in the last hundred years are washing clothes, washing dishes, and keeping floors clean. The complexities of managing a household have not diminished. They've multiplied.

But I have some uneasiness about taking it too individually. These aren't really problems that can be solved by "being the change" -- because most people don't have the resources (financial, psychological, spiritual) for a sabbatical. "Being the change" is more a spiritual practice than a solution.

As such, it's as important -- more important, I think, though I know that's a minority view -- than finding a solution. But there's the danger, as always with spiritual practices, of evaluating it in terms of worldly results. And the obverse danger of scanting the political (using that word in a very broad sense), because it's already being addressed on a personal level.

But saying that makes me uneasy too. Because there's only so much anyone can do, and -- frankly -- a lot of these activities, personal and political, are unrewarding in the extreme. A life spent in resistance is no life at all.

And I'm further uneasy in that I've failed abjectly in so many of these resistances, which I started out so hopefully in. What business do I have even talking about it? The life I'd hoped to have, the household I'd hoped for, has never materialized. For me, I think you'd probably have say that the forces of evil are ahead, on points. I draw my chief consolation from being able occasionally to get off the ropes. I remember with some rueful amusement that Martha and I seriously considered, before Tori's birth, purging the house of all advertisements. Having all our medicines and foodstuffs in plain jars and bins, getting rid of all labels, so as to raise a child who actually thought in terms of oatmeal and aspirin and soup rather than in terms of Quaker Oats and Bayer's and Campbell's. It was a charming idea, and so obviously the idea of a childless couple that I grin every time I remember it. We had no idea how strong the current was, before we stepped into that river. No idea that for the next two decades we'd be living on fast food, frozen food, & canned food, and ingesting really terrifying amounts of over-the-counter drugs, psychotropics, statins, & blood-pressure medicine.

The only line we really held was resisting television, and making our chief entertainment reading aloud. And computer games and internet have made something of an end run around that. My kids spend hours on World of Warcraft, slaughtering wicked monsters, and strategizing and chatting with their online comrades. I console myself that at least it's more active and social, at least as they play it, than just sitting watching a television screen. (And the trolls dance, at their virtual parties, really entrancingly.)

It is not, remotely, life as I ever envisioned it. When I walked out the door of IBM last fall, I imagined changing it all. Not much has changed, in the household. We've acquired two extra housemates, in the form of our kids' significant others, so now we have six people in the house, no two of whom like to eat the same things. Food continues to arrive in the house and be consumed in expensive and toxic individual packages. Processed sugars flow into the house from all sides. The gods of the hearth are the computers clustered together on the dining room table.

Keeping the kitchen clean and the clothes washed is often more than we manage. There's always something that needs taking care of more than the daily tasks: Christmas's bedding needs to be changed or an elderly parent needs help dealing with arcane drug insurance or the leaking shingles on the roof need to be fixed or the ice in Martha's cryopack for her arthroscoped knee needs to be changed or Jonquil needs to be taken to her GED program or Alan needs to be chivvied into doing his homework. And when time does open up, I'm desperate for time to write, or exercise, or meditate, or -- above all -- time to vegetate, clicking away myself at Civ 3 or computer Go. So this is life as we know it.

It seems to me that only a titanic effort of will could really change all this, or even much of it. And if there's one commodity I am not rich in, it's titanic will. In graduate school we used to speculate about pooling our money to hire a hit man who would come around to each of us and force us to write our term papers at gunpoint. Maybe we could hire someone like that to force us to shop and cook and clean. Come up with a menu for the week in half an hour, or it's the left kneecap. March the kids two by two into the kitchen to wash dishes, or lose a finger. Someone with titanic will, I suppose (and armed), would simply have taken Christmas out back and shot her two months ago.

This, and not just early morning cafe-writing, massage trades, & working at the Foundation, is my life. I have not often allowed myself to look that in the face. It is, I suppose, the Next Big Thing. Does one ever run out, I wonder, of Next Big Things?