Spilling Darkness
What is it that we hold in our hands? We cup the light, and spill darkness.
I walked across the room, lit only by the glow of the city lights. Your still form on the couch. I touched you softly. Your eyes opened, and everything I knew vanished.
This morning I thought, of so many things: I can't rise to this. A careless god of casting has got everything wrong. I'm no lover. I'm no poet. I'm no healer. I'm nothing but a clumsy, feeble, white-haired old man, awkward and shy, living far past his time. I know nothing but nursery rhymes and the jingles of forgotten commercials and old worn-out fantasies.
I lay on the couch last night and waited for Ashley to come out of the room. "Are you asleep?" asked Alan. I was, and I wasn't. But Ashley must have fallen asleep on the table. Finally, after half an hour, I knocked, and went in. She was still on the table, half awake now but a little confused. I turned off the heater and collected a pair of the sweat pants I use for pajamas from the dresser, shut the door softly again, and went upstairs. I don't know when she finally got off the table.
And, last week: a picture of the Karmapa on the mantle. A white dog shifting from bed to bed. The angry scar of an ill-done ostomy under the navel. You could see colors, you said, following my hands; and I felt I was watering a dessicated plant. But the next day you were in great pain.
Or the week before that: deep nurturing, you said. I have become very young. Driving my father's chariot through the heavens. The horses can tell that I'm not really the master here.
I would not have you think that I am unhappy. I am not. I walk in this stolen joy, waiting to hear the police sirens, and thinking: it's worth it, whatever happens next.
Or again. Skywalkers, dakinis. But that's an old, old tune, invented by lecherous old monks trying to drown out the sound of women's music, and trying to pretend that they weren't intent on having it both ways. Alas! We're all intent on it.
Rest, then, in my arms. Just for now. Radiant daughter of light. You know what I would say, if I could.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
On the Ground
When I began riding my bike to Tosi's, I took the same route I took in the van: straight north over the shoulder of Mt Tabor. It was a bit of an incline, but one I barely noticed that when I was driving.
Riding the bike, I discovered, was another matter entirely. It wasn't a bit of an incline. It was steep. I geared down and geared down and finally -- on my first couple rides, anyway -- dismounted and walked the bike up the last half-block, feeling a little silly.
Now I simply swing west a couple blocks and avoid the ridge altogether. Now that I'm riding regularly it's second nature to avoid inclines, either up or down. I learned in my mountain climbing days that elevation is precious: you never wantonly waste it. "Never go down before you go up," my Dad taught me. Bicycles teach the same lesson. Going straight up over the ridge was obviously squandering energy.
A driver of a new hybrid told me that his car has a dashboard gauge that shows the real-time MPG the car is getting, and that he drives radically differently on account of it. Watching that gauge drop down to single digits when he was accelerating uphill on the freeway -- when gas is $3.25 a gallon -- was a sobering sight. Ordinarily, automobiles do their best to conceal the variation from us. That's what we like: feeling that we can swoop anywhere, effortlessly.
But the illusion comes at a price, and not only in gasoline; you pay for it, eventually, with your spatial sense and groundedness. It disturbs me now that, after years of driving over it, I knew so little of the lay of the land around my house. South and west is downhill: I can coast most of the way to Tom's, but I labor back. But I had no idea of that, before I was cycling. I thought it was all flat.
A whole countryful of people who float over the ground like wraiths, with no sense of geography, whether local or international: I can't help thinking that explains a lot about the American sensibility, or -- to be more accurate -- the American insensibility. Our feet don't touch the ground. For a commercial people, we are remarkably resistant to getting down to facts, to reckoning prices, to weighing costs and benefits. Would we have gone to war in Iraq, had the government begun the war by presenting every household in the country with a bill for $5,000 dollars? I doubt it. But we seem to be unable to think like that.
When I began riding my bike to Tosi's, I took the same route I took in the van: straight north over the shoulder of Mt Tabor. It was a bit of an incline, but one I barely noticed that when I was driving.
Riding the bike, I discovered, was another matter entirely. It wasn't a bit of an incline. It was steep. I geared down and geared down and finally -- on my first couple rides, anyway -- dismounted and walked the bike up the last half-block, feeling a little silly.
Now I simply swing west a couple blocks and avoid the ridge altogether. Now that I'm riding regularly it's second nature to avoid inclines, either up or down. I learned in my mountain climbing days that elevation is precious: you never wantonly waste it. "Never go down before you go up," my Dad taught me. Bicycles teach the same lesson. Going straight up over the ridge was obviously squandering energy.
A driver of a new hybrid told me that his car has a dashboard gauge that shows the real-time MPG the car is getting, and that he drives radically differently on account of it. Watching that gauge drop down to single digits when he was accelerating uphill on the freeway -- when gas is $3.25 a gallon -- was a sobering sight. Ordinarily, automobiles do their best to conceal the variation from us. That's what we like: feeling that we can swoop anywhere, effortlessly.
But the illusion comes at a price, and not only in gasoline; you pay for it, eventually, with your spatial sense and groundedness. It disturbs me now that, after years of driving over it, I knew so little of the lay of the land around my house. South and west is downhill: I can coast most of the way to Tom's, but I labor back. But I had no idea of that, before I was cycling. I thought it was all flat.
A whole countryful of people who float over the ground like wraiths, with no sense of geography, whether local or international: I can't help thinking that explains a lot about the American sensibility, or -- to be more accurate -- the American insensibility. Our feet don't touch the ground. For a commercial people, we are remarkably resistant to getting down to facts, to reckoning prices, to weighing costs and benefits. Would we have gone to war in Iraq, had the government begun the war by presenting every household in the country with a bill for $5,000 dollars? I doubt it. But we seem to be unable to think like that.
Monday, October 01, 2007
And Goodbye to All That
At karaoke that night Malin sang "Oh Darling." The Beatles, you know. With her long hair hanging down in her face. (Darling is a British word. It means "dear." Just so you know.) And Jen's brother came, massive and blunt, with a broad grin, a working-class kid from nowhere, and he sang "Boy named Sue," with startling confidence and panache. Tele and I sat there, slumped, leaning on each other's shoulders, And I felt I had arrived at a country I had only ever heard about. And I was wise enough to let it be.
Now it all recedes, and a new thing surfaces in the dark, water running off its gleaming sides.
Oh darling
Please believe me.
It faded into daylight, and the smell of oil on the hands; all gone, gone.
At karaoke that night Malin sang "Oh Darling." The Beatles, you know. With her long hair hanging down in her face. (Darling is a British word. It means "dear." Just so you know.) And Jen's brother came, massive and blunt, with a broad grin, a working-class kid from nowhere, and he sang "Boy named Sue," with startling confidence and panache. Tele and I sat there, slumped, leaning on each other's shoulders, And I felt I had arrived at a country I had only ever heard about. And I was wise enough to let it be.
Now it all recedes, and a new thing surfaces in the dark, water running off its gleaming sides.
Oh darling
Please believe me.
It faded into daylight, and the smell of oil on the hands; all gone, gone.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Friday, September 28, 2007
Mother of Exiles
(This rather formless post has been taking shape, or rather losing shape, for the past couple weeks: I've found that at a certain point it's better to just post these things and let God sort it out.)
The day I was leaving for New York, I realized I had no poetry with me. I stopped in at Powell's, and bought, for six dollars, a book that I would not have been caught dead carrying back when I was in graduate school: Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize. It's the sort of book that academics view with distaste. Popular. Hackneyed. Accessible. A dreadful thing, as if poetry was something that just anyone might read and enjoy. I still remember the crushing snub delivered to a friend of mine, when she said she was writing a paper on Ezra Pound's early poetry. "Ah, yes," said a fellow student. He, of course, was writing about the Cantos. "Well... the early poems are more... accessible." He has since become a distinguished professor, with a slew of books to his name.* My friend has become the sort of obscure one-book professor who wins her college's teaching awards, and whose students actually learn to write.
I found I had already memorized about half of the poems in the book. But the first poem was a sonnet by Elizabeth Bishop, which I'd never read. About poetry, of course:
Oh for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead
"There is a deep love of poetry here," the Velveteen Rabbi once said of mole. And it's true. I wonder when it began? I didn't always love poetry. I used to think it tedious.
My father encouraged us to memorize poetry. He is not at all a literary man, but he has a fine reading voice and a good sense of meter. I remember him reciting "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." And one Christmas, with our Texas relatives -- after the wound of the Vietnam War had healed enough for us to visit them again -- my father and his younger brother astonished us all by reciting, not only "Paul Revere," but a poem spoken in the person of Dawes, who rode with Revere, lamenting that his name was too dull and ordinary to be immortalized in song. They nudged each other on, gradually recalling the stanzas as they went, each remembering different bits that would spark the memory of another couple lines in the other, till they had reassembled the whole poem.
They were the last generation of Americans who memorized poetry, in school and out of it, as a matter of course. Holidays for countless generations must have been marked by recitations of verse, in just this way. A stream that nourished us for millennia has run dry.
We had in our house Louis Untermeyer's Golden Treasury of Poetry, which This Girl recalled to my mind recently. The first poem that I memorized that was longer than a few lines was in that book -- Southey's singsong karmic parable, "The Inchcape Rock." I also memorized Longfellow's "Skeleton in Armor," at some point -- I have a notion my sister and I learned it together: I have a vivid, isolated memory of saying
And with my skates fast bound
Skimmed the half frozen sound
That the poor whimpering hound
Trembled to walk on.
in unison with her.
My sister loved verse, and committed it easily to memory; I remember her coming out with bits of Shakespeare frequently. As she sank under schizophrenia, in the months before her suicide, lines of King Lear, especially of Edgar playing the madman, would surface with horrifying appositeness.
Now a love of poetry has become part of my identity. In explaining who I was going to visit in New York, I found it easiest to say it was a gathering of people who share poetry, and who were putting a book together. The young woman who sat beside me on the flight from Portland to Chicago said: "Oh! Are you a poet?" And my first impulse was to say, "Heavens, no!" I waggled my hand in the Spanish "así así" gesture and muttered, "um, I write poems, sometimes." It was, after all, difficult to know what the question meant. Do I write poetry? Obviously. Am I paid for it? Not a chance. Do I think of it as my vocation? No.
But if people ask me what I do for fun, I sometimes say "I write poetry." I've been invited to participate in a poetry reading, in a couple months. I realized with surprise that there is no one in my life now from whom I would conceal that. I shall invite everyone I work with and everyone I go to school with. I may not be a poet, but I'm someone who writes poems sometimes, and I don't care who knows it.
Poetry ought to be spoken aloud, and it ought to be memorized. I know, I say this over and over, but I'm going to say it again. Poetry ought to be memorized, till it sings in your head of its own accord. Reading a poem silently -- well, there's an off chance that it will be apposite to the moment. But probably not. The deepest function of poetry is to be available when we are in the moment of need or desire. There's no time to lose then. When love or grief or despair are wringing your heart is no time to be rummaging in bookshelves looking for a half-remembered poem.
A memorized poem takes residence with us in a different way. It weaves into our experience, informing it and informed by it. It's a country we can visit at any time.
In New York, Beth read one of my poems aloud. Hearing your own verse on someone else's lips -- especially someone who reads beautifully and who understands it down to the ground -- is a wonderful and diquieting experience. Like Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life.
Bishop again --
There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.
One of the poems in my book, to my surprise, was a sonnet by Emma Lazarus. You may think you don't know this woman's poetry, but -- if you're American, anyway -- you're mistaken about that:
. . . Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .
The sonnet's about the Statue of Liberty. It gave a queer twist to my heart, to see that statue the next day, and to think of when this country was young and fearless, and committed to hospitality.
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
She is no great poet, but poetry doesn't need to be great. It need not be fetishized and kept under glass, perfect and isolate. We give our words to each other because they're what we have to give.
*I am maligning him here: he was also a very kind and conscientious man, and he made wonderful Persian food to sustain us when we first had Tori home from the hospital. I remember him with great affection. But for him, as for many academics, the equation of "difficult to read" with "profound" was a given.
(This rather formless post has been taking shape, or rather losing shape, for the past couple weeks: I've found that at a certain point it's better to just post these things and let God sort it out.)
The day I was leaving for New York, I realized I had no poetry with me. I stopped in at Powell's, and bought, for six dollars, a book that I would not have been caught dead carrying back when I was in graduate school: Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize. It's the sort of book that academics view with distaste. Popular. Hackneyed. Accessible. A dreadful thing, as if poetry was something that just anyone might read and enjoy. I still remember the crushing snub delivered to a friend of mine, when she said she was writing a paper on Ezra Pound's early poetry. "Ah, yes," said a fellow student. He, of course, was writing about the Cantos. "Well... the early poems are more... accessible." He has since become a distinguished professor, with a slew of books to his name.* My friend has become the sort of obscure one-book professor who wins her college's teaching awards, and whose students actually learn to write.
I found I had already memorized about half of the poems in the book. But the first poem was a sonnet by Elizabeth Bishop, which I'd never read. About poetry, of course:
Oh for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead
"There is a deep love of poetry here," the Velveteen Rabbi once said of mole. And it's true. I wonder when it began? I didn't always love poetry. I used to think it tedious.
My father encouraged us to memorize poetry. He is not at all a literary man, but he has a fine reading voice and a good sense of meter. I remember him reciting "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." And one Christmas, with our Texas relatives -- after the wound of the Vietnam War had healed enough for us to visit them again -- my father and his younger brother astonished us all by reciting, not only "Paul Revere," but a poem spoken in the person of Dawes, who rode with Revere, lamenting that his name was too dull and ordinary to be immortalized in song. They nudged each other on, gradually recalling the stanzas as they went, each remembering different bits that would spark the memory of another couple lines in the other, till they had reassembled the whole poem.
They were the last generation of Americans who memorized poetry, in school and out of it, as a matter of course. Holidays for countless generations must have been marked by recitations of verse, in just this way. A stream that nourished us for millennia has run dry.
We had in our house Louis Untermeyer's Golden Treasury of Poetry, which This Girl recalled to my mind recently. The first poem that I memorized that was longer than a few lines was in that book -- Southey's singsong karmic parable, "The Inchcape Rock." I also memorized Longfellow's "Skeleton in Armor," at some point -- I have a notion my sister and I learned it together: I have a vivid, isolated memory of saying
And with my skates fast bound
Skimmed the half frozen sound
That the poor whimpering hound
Trembled to walk on.
in unison with her.
My sister loved verse, and committed it easily to memory; I remember her coming out with bits of Shakespeare frequently. As she sank under schizophrenia, in the months before her suicide, lines of King Lear, especially of Edgar playing the madman, would surface with horrifying appositeness.
Now a love of poetry has become part of my identity. In explaining who I was going to visit in New York, I found it easiest to say it was a gathering of people who share poetry, and who were putting a book together. The young woman who sat beside me on the flight from Portland to Chicago said: "Oh! Are you a poet?" And my first impulse was to say, "Heavens, no!" I waggled my hand in the Spanish "así así" gesture and muttered, "um, I write poems, sometimes." It was, after all, difficult to know what the question meant. Do I write poetry? Obviously. Am I paid for it? Not a chance. Do I think of it as my vocation? No.
But if people ask me what I do for fun, I sometimes say "I write poetry." I've been invited to participate in a poetry reading, in a couple months. I realized with surprise that there is no one in my life now from whom I would conceal that. I shall invite everyone I work with and everyone I go to school with. I may not be a poet, but I'm someone who writes poems sometimes, and I don't care who knows it.
Poetry ought to be spoken aloud, and it ought to be memorized. I know, I say this over and over, but I'm going to say it again. Poetry ought to be memorized, till it sings in your head of its own accord. Reading a poem silently -- well, there's an off chance that it will be apposite to the moment. But probably not. The deepest function of poetry is to be available when we are in the moment of need or desire. There's no time to lose then. When love or grief or despair are wringing your heart is no time to be rummaging in bookshelves looking for a half-remembered poem.
A memorized poem takes residence with us in a different way. It weaves into our experience, informing it and informed by it. It's a country we can visit at any time.
In New York, Beth read one of my poems aloud. Hearing your own verse on someone else's lips -- especially someone who reads beautifully and who understands it down to the ground -- is a wonderful and diquieting experience. Like Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life.
Bishop again --
There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.
One of the poems in my book, to my surprise, was a sonnet by Emma Lazarus. You may think you don't know this woman's poetry, but -- if you're American, anyway -- you're mistaken about that:
. . . Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .
The sonnet's about the Statue of Liberty. It gave a queer twist to my heart, to see that statue the next day, and to think of when this country was young and fearless, and committed to hospitality.
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
She is no great poet, but poetry doesn't need to be great. It need not be fetishized and kept under glass, perfect and isolate. We give our words to each other because they're what we have to give.
*I am maligning him here: he was also a very kind and conscientious man, and he made wonderful Persian food to sustain us when we first had Tori home from the hospital. I remember him with great affection. But for him, as for many academics, the equation of "difficult to read" with "profound" was a given.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Vaux's Swifts
Thousands of swifts. They come in bands of thirty or forty, vaux's swifts, sillhouettes against the mirror-colored twilight sky. The firstcomers attract little notice, but I watch their company floating in. Each bird darts rapidly this way and that, but the band as a whole makes slow, deliberate undulations through the sky.
Every so often a new band arrives, and joins in. They circle the fields for nearly an hour, sometimes right over our heads, sometime so far from us that they're only tiny black grains swirling on the horizon.
There are currents and eddies, but the main flow is a great counterclockwise wheel, with the tall brick chimney of Chapman School as its free axis.
The eye attempts to deal with it in different ways. It follows one particular swift, zigzagging its way -- hunting, I'd suppose, except that they're so far up. Are there insects way up there? Or do they simply move in those rapid darts by habit? I succeed a couple times in following one swift's complete circuit. Its motions are eager. The swifts may be coming to the end of a long working day, but there's no trace of weariness to be seen in them. The overwhelming impression they give is one of joy and exultation. "Airy worlds of delight" -- is that what Blake said?
The eye gives up tracking, but it can't give up tracking, so next it follows a whole moving mass of swifts, the ones making the near turn. They swarm randomly, like bees, but there's a current to them. Behind them the ones making the far turn are distant blurs moving the opposite way. But soon the near ones are the distant ones, and with a drunken lurch the eye's focus involuntarily switches to the ones that are near now; it conveys the deeply disorienting conviction that the revolving sky has abruptly changed directions. A person could get seasick, watching them. Finally the eye relaxes and sees simply a wavering and shimmering in the evening sky.
It seems that each swift, at some point in its circle, ducks inward to make a reconnaissance of the chimney. There's a steady stream of them slowing, dropping down over it, bobbing down for one quick glance, and then climbing back into the great wheel. As evening draws down so do the swifts, tightening the wheel, and the scouting stream grows thicker and slower. I keep thinking they have begun to actually vanish into the chimney, but then I keep looking up at the sky, and there are, if anything, more swifts than before. Are they going in and coming back out? It's impossible to tell.
Eventually it's clear that they are going in. It's not nearly so defined as I had imagined: I'm only really sure because the cloud of birds is clearly diminishing. It's hard to imagine what the interior of the chimney must be like now. It's a huge chimney, but the birds must be packed into its interior shoulder to shoulder, clear down to the bottom. Are there favorite spots? Do they quarrel over them? Are some swifts more equal than other swifts?
All that warmth in the dark, all those tiny rapidly beating hearts. I imagine the outermost ones periodically wriggling down, throughout the night, to get warm, and the inmost ones struggling out to the cool air. Do they speak to each other, or is it all done in dreamy silence?
The nearly-full moon rises over the trees as the last few swifts settle in. There is no defined ending point. Even after we think they're done, a few late-comers are trickling over the brim of the chimney. I'm not sure if they have really stopped, at last, or if it has it simply gotten too dark to see them.
Around us, the crowd gradually disperses, folding their blankets, packing up their wine glasses. The kids, who had been determinedly sledding down the grassy slope on collapsed cardboard boxes, are cold now, snuggling up to their mothers, gleaning the last picnic treats. People are hugging. I'm curious to see if my colleagues will hug goodbye. We're celebrating reaching our four-year fundraising goal, a goal considered quixotically large, four years ago, but which we've reached handily. We toasted ourselves with champagne.
They don't hug, for the most part. Only four, after all, have been working together for more than few months. But the big-gifts person and the grant writer walk with their arms around each other down the hill. They've been working together for years now. I'm happy to see that.
At the bottom of the hill, we reach Faith's bicycle. I hug Faith. She's well bundled up in varied layers of cotton and wool, and wearing a knit hat molded to her head like an aviator's. The whole effect wavers between girlish and old-womanish. I am, as always, terribly fond of her: she evokes an almost painful tenderness in me. She is the analytic person, the tracker, the maker of procedures and policies, the indispensable lieutenant -- innovative and decisive, always cogent, always master of the relevant details, always problem-solving. There is nothing girlish about her, really, so I can't account for why I feel so protective of her. But I do.
I drive the grant writer home and come home myself, alighting in my own chimney. It's the turning of the year. The swifts, I understand, will be on their way to Venezuela soon.
Godspeed. Wayfarers all.
Thousands of swifts. They come in bands of thirty or forty, vaux's swifts, sillhouettes against the mirror-colored twilight sky. The firstcomers attract little notice, but I watch their company floating in. Each bird darts rapidly this way and that, but the band as a whole makes slow, deliberate undulations through the sky.
Every so often a new band arrives, and joins in. They circle the fields for nearly an hour, sometimes right over our heads, sometime so far from us that they're only tiny black grains swirling on the horizon.
There are currents and eddies, but the main flow is a great counterclockwise wheel, with the tall brick chimney of Chapman School as its free axis.
The eye attempts to deal with it in different ways. It follows one particular swift, zigzagging its way -- hunting, I'd suppose, except that they're so far up. Are there insects way up there? Or do they simply move in those rapid darts by habit? I succeed a couple times in following one swift's complete circuit. Its motions are eager. The swifts may be coming to the end of a long working day, but there's no trace of weariness to be seen in them. The overwhelming impression they give is one of joy and exultation. "Airy worlds of delight" -- is that what Blake said?
The eye gives up tracking, but it can't give up tracking, so next it follows a whole moving mass of swifts, the ones making the near turn. They swarm randomly, like bees, but there's a current to them. Behind them the ones making the far turn are distant blurs moving the opposite way. But soon the near ones are the distant ones, and with a drunken lurch the eye's focus involuntarily switches to the ones that are near now; it conveys the deeply disorienting conviction that the revolving sky has abruptly changed directions. A person could get seasick, watching them. Finally the eye relaxes and sees simply a wavering and shimmering in the evening sky.
It seems that each swift, at some point in its circle, ducks inward to make a reconnaissance of the chimney. There's a steady stream of them slowing, dropping down over it, bobbing down for one quick glance, and then climbing back into the great wheel. As evening draws down so do the swifts, tightening the wheel, and the scouting stream grows thicker and slower. I keep thinking they have begun to actually vanish into the chimney, but then I keep looking up at the sky, and there are, if anything, more swifts than before. Are they going in and coming back out? It's impossible to tell.
Eventually it's clear that they are going in. It's not nearly so defined as I had imagined: I'm only really sure because the cloud of birds is clearly diminishing. It's hard to imagine what the interior of the chimney must be like now. It's a huge chimney, but the birds must be packed into its interior shoulder to shoulder, clear down to the bottom. Are there favorite spots? Do they quarrel over them? Are some swifts more equal than other swifts?
All that warmth in the dark, all those tiny rapidly beating hearts. I imagine the outermost ones periodically wriggling down, throughout the night, to get warm, and the inmost ones struggling out to the cool air. Do they speak to each other, or is it all done in dreamy silence?
The nearly-full moon rises over the trees as the last few swifts settle in. There is no defined ending point. Even after we think they're done, a few late-comers are trickling over the brim of the chimney. I'm not sure if they have really stopped, at last, or if it has it simply gotten too dark to see them.
Around us, the crowd gradually disperses, folding their blankets, packing up their wine glasses. The kids, who had been determinedly sledding down the grassy slope on collapsed cardboard boxes, are cold now, snuggling up to their mothers, gleaning the last picnic treats. People are hugging. I'm curious to see if my colleagues will hug goodbye. We're celebrating reaching our four-year fundraising goal, a goal considered quixotically large, four years ago, but which we've reached handily. We toasted ourselves with champagne.
They don't hug, for the most part. Only four, after all, have been working together for more than few months. But the big-gifts person and the grant writer walk with their arms around each other down the hill. They've been working together for years now. I'm happy to see that.
At the bottom of the hill, we reach Faith's bicycle. I hug Faith. She's well bundled up in varied layers of cotton and wool, and wearing a knit hat molded to her head like an aviator's. The whole effect wavers between girlish and old-womanish. I am, as always, terribly fond of her: she evokes an almost painful tenderness in me. She is the analytic person, the tracker, the maker of procedures and policies, the indispensable lieutenant -- innovative and decisive, always cogent, always master of the relevant details, always problem-solving. There is nothing girlish about her, really, so I can't account for why I feel so protective of her. But I do.
I drive the grant writer home and come home myself, alighting in my own chimney. It's the turning of the year. The swifts, I understand, will be on their way to Venezuela soon.
Godspeed. Wayfarers all.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
The End of Summer
Today is the last day of school. It has all gone by in a twinkling: but working in the cubicles is a distant memory, as if I left that world decades ago. Now I have only to pass my national certification exam, and take my state boards, and I'll be a licensed massage therapist. By November, I hope, though there are often exasperating delays in the system. Until then -- when I can legally charge for it -- I'm going to try to do as much free massage as I possibly can, on the theory that most clients come by way of personal referral, and the more people I lay hands on, the better. (So if you're in Portland and want a massage, send me mail! I want to hear from you.)
Last clinic class was last night. I felt very "on," even though my client was ten minutes late, so that we had barely more than half an hour. I love this work. I love listening with my hands, finding what's bound up, and convincing it that it's safe to let go. At the risk of sounding maudlin or self-important -- it's sacred work. The means by which people learn, as Rachel put it recently in a beautiful post, to trust with their bodies.
Feeling extraordinarily fortunate. Thanks, thanks to all of you who encouraged me to do this. Especially Sunim Soen Joon -- always a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is kind of girl -- who sternly told me that I simply had to do it. I'm so grateful.
Today is the last day of school. It has all gone by in a twinkling: but working in the cubicles is a distant memory, as if I left that world decades ago. Now I have only to pass my national certification exam, and take my state boards, and I'll be a licensed massage therapist. By November, I hope, though there are often exasperating delays in the system. Until then -- when I can legally charge for it -- I'm going to try to do as much free massage as I possibly can, on the theory that most clients come by way of personal referral, and the more people I lay hands on, the better. (So if you're in Portland and want a massage, send me mail! I want to hear from you.)
Last clinic class was last night. I felt very "on," even though my client was ten minutes late, so that we had barely more than half an hour. I love this work. I love listening with my hands, finding what's bound up, and convincing it that it's safe to let go. At the risk of sounding maudlin or self-important -- it's sacred work. The means by which people learn, as Rachel put it recently in a beautiful post, to trust with their bodies.
Feeling extraordinarily fortunate. Thanks, thanks to all of you who encouraged me to do this. Especially Sunim Soen Joon -- always a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is kind of girl -- who sternly told me that I simply had to do it. I'm so grateful.
Monday, September 17, 2007
The Woven Sky
Morning. A long weave of hope and anxiety patterns the sky. So much the same. The lurch and stumble towards new things comes to so much less than I think at the time. For good or ill, this is what I have: these hands, this heart.
But that's not quite true, either. There are holes, spaces, openings. Invitations. You make friends with them as you make friends with a wary cat. Slowly. Pretend it's not there. Put a little tuna in a saucer and set it on the ground, as if by hazard, and go about your business. But it's not that the cat has to learn to trust you; it's that you have to learn to trust the cat.
For reasons best known to itself, East-West held its commencement on the weekend before finals. It's an odd ceremony anyway -- nine months doesn't quite merit the formality of speeches and walking across the platform (in this case, to receive a rather aimless piece of paper commending our hard work, for of course they can't actually give us diplomas when we haven't finished the course) -- but too long to let pass without some marker. So the thing feels overelaborate, with some people taking it as a joke, and some taking it quite seriously. Some people dressed to the nines; some, like Clint and I, in old jeans, suspenders, metal-spiked bill-caps.
I love these people. I have been learning, slowly and painfully, to rest quiet with loving people. Not to be tormented by it, not to feel that there's something wrong that needs to be put right, not to hanker after acknowledgement. To welcome it as a good and complete thing, rather than as a hunger and an injury. It's been a difficult road.
Brooklyn. The same thing in spades. Much more than I can say. The immediate aftermath is melancholy and regret. Despite a publicly asserted policy of resisting agglommeration, I did no such thing. I agglomerated. I never had the private conversations I fully intended to have. I never said so many important things.
It was all too much, in a way. And ordinary group dynamics took their relentless way. I talked most with the people I'd already met face to face. One does, especially if one is shy, & my shyness got the better of me, over and over.
I had a wonderful time, don't mistake me. And I finally got to "meet" some people who are very dear to me. & next time, because of that, I will be less shy with them.
Feeling, as I do, so intimately connected with these people -- knowing them so well, and feeling so well-known by them -- I guess I couldn't help expecting that somehow that would make all the ordinary conditions of social interaction -- in which I am generally slow, awkward, and inarticulate -- vanish. Of course it doesn't, though it does mitigate them. And touch. Being able to give a couple chair massages -- and a rug massage -- was wonderfully restorative to me, and sustained me through more continuous social time than I have ever had in my life. I spent no time alone in Brooklyn. None. Extraordinary. I am well-known, in my family, for becoming impossible to be around if I miss even one of my solitary, two-hour, out-of-the-house breakfasts. Martha says that when I was at my worst, in my twenties, she learned never to stand between me and the door in the morning, lest I feel caged.
I don't quite know how to explain why touch should be restorative to me in the same way as solitude. But it is.
All that said -- I loved it. And I miss everyone intensely.
Morning. A long weave of hope and anxiety patterns the sky. So much the same. The lurch and stumble towards new things comes to so much less than I think at the time. For good or ill, this is what I have: these hands, this heart.
But that's not quite true, either. There are holes, spaces, openings. Invitations. You make friends with them as you make friends with a wary cat. Slowly. Pretend it's not there. Put a little tuna in a saucer and set it on the ground, as if by hazard, and go about your business. But it's not that the cat has to learn to trust you; it's that you have to learn to trust the cat.
For reasons best known to itself, East-West held its commencement on the weekend before finals. It's an odd ceremony anyway -- nine months doesn't quite merit the formality of speeches and walking across the platform (in this case, to receive a rather aimless piece of paper commending our hard work, for of course they can't actually give us diplomas when we haven't finished the course) -- but too long to let pass without some marker. So the thing feels overelaborate, with some people taking it as a joke, and some taking it quite seriously. Some people dressed to the nines; some, like Clint and I, in old jeans, suspenders, metal-spiked bill-caps.
I love these people. I have been learning, slowly and painfully, to rest quiet with loving people. Not to be tormented by it, not to feel that there's something wrong that needs to be put right, not to hanker after acknowledgement. To welcome it as a good and complete thing, rather than as a hunger and an injury. It's been a difficult road.
Brooklyn. The same thing in spades. Much more than I can say. The immediate aftermath is melancholy and regret. Despite a publicly asserted policy of resisting agglommeration, I did no such thing. I agglomerated. I never had the private conversations I fully intended to have. I never said so many important things.
It was all too much, in a way. And ordinary group dynamics took their relentless way. I talked most with the people I'd already met face to face. One does, especially if one is shy, & my shyness got the better of me, over and over.
I had a wonderful time, don't mistake me. And I finally got to "meet" some people who are very dear to me. & next time, because of that, I will be less shy with them.
Feeling, as I do, so intimately connected with these people -- knowing them so well, and feeling so well-known by them -- I guess I couldn't help expecting that somehow that would make all the ordinary conditions of social interaction -- in which I am generally slow, awkward, and inarticulate -- vanish. Of course it doesn't, though it does mitigate them. And touch. Being able to give a couple chair massages -- and a rug massage -- was wonderfully restorative to me, and sustained me through more continuous social time than I have ever had in my life. I spent no time alone in Brooklyn. None. Extraordinary. I am well-known, in my family, for becoming impossible to be around if I miss even one of my solitary, two-hour, out-of-the-house breakfasts. Martha says that when I was at my worst, in my twenties, she learned never to stand between me and the door in the morning, lest I feel caged.
I don't quite know how to explain why touch should be restorative to me in the same way as solitude. But it is.
All that said -- I loved it. And I miss everyone intensely.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The wind comes down the long spaces
The wind comes down the long spaces
Questing for my hand, like the muzzle
Of an old blind dog.
In the airport, a boy of five or six
Korean but American-born
Peeks at my screen.
I smile and, emboldened, he reads the words
I have been copying from my book, lines from Auden.
"That doesn't make sense," he announces.
"You're right," I agree.
"How can kisses get lost?" he asks.
The wind comes down the long spaces
Asking for news of the mayors of
Small towns far away long ago
That never amounted to much.
I have never heard of them.
Somewhere in yellow curling newsprint
They smile wanly, no doubt,
At the long-vanished crowd.
The wind comes down the long spaces
Questing for my hand, like the muzzle
Of an old blind dog.
In the airport, a boy of five or six
Korean but American-born
Peeks at my screen.
I smile and, emboldened, he reads the words
I have been copying from my book, lines from Auden.
"That doesn't make sense," he announces.
"You're right," I agree.
"How can kisses get lost?" he asks.
The wind comes down the long spaces
Asking for news of the mayors of
Small towns far away long ago
That never amounted to much.
I have never heard of them.
Somewhere in yellow curling newsprint
They smile wanly, no doubt,
At the long-vanished crowd.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
What I Did on my Summer Vacation
Synecdoche: a forme of metaphorr as when the parte betokeneth the whole.
Pilgrim in Brooklyn
High color, parted lips; bunched shoulders
Under my hands, unwilling to rest: too full
Of eager life, and desire for God
And the love of dear friends --
She burns like a shrine candle whose wick
Suddenly lifts, and the flare
Sends glittering sparks from every bowl,
From every sacred gold and silver surface;
Every curve and point throbbing with fire, every face
Reflecting the brilliance of love.
Synecdoche: a forme of metaphorr as when the parte betokeneth the whole.
Pilgrim in Brooklyn
High color, parted lips; bunched shoulders
Under my hands, unwilling to rest: too full
Of eager life, and desire for God
And the love of dear friends --
She burns like a shrine candle whose wick
Suddenly lifts, and the flare
Sends glittering sparks from every bowl,
From every sacred gold and silver surface;
Every curve and point throbbing with fire, every face
Reflecting the brilliance of love.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Waiting
There is a high singing in my ears;
a ticking of clocks, the spin of a fan.
I am stupid for want of rest,
unwilling, unable to sleep.
To sleep would be to admit it:
It's not going to happen, not today.
All day I have been waiting for your voice.
A wise man never waits. That's what they say.
I remember the pearl of the sun, in an ivory sky.
I remember the skin of your waist
bunching as you leaned, delighted
Over a puppy chance-met in the park.
Now far away, the rattle of the trainyards,
the half-heard concussion of containers
loaded onto frames;
I am wishing, wishing for rain.
There is a high singing in my ears;
a ticking of clocks, the spin of a fan.
I am stupid for want of rest,
unwilling, unable to sleep.
To sleep would be to admit it:
It's not going to happen, not today.
All day I have been waiting for your voice.
A wise man never waits. That's what they say.
I remember the pearl of the sun, in an ivory sky.
I remember the skin of your waist
bunching as you leaned, delighted
Over a puppy chance-met in the park.
Now far away, the rattle of the trainyards,
the half-heard concussion of containers
loaded onto frames;
I am wishing, wishing for rain.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Commas in the Sky
I haven't written about clinic, the practicum, for a couple reasons. For one, I can't write about the massages themselves, without violating both therapeutic ethics and my own sensibilities. I am uneasy sometimes even about writing about trades with fellow-students. For another, I don't feel I've cut a very dashing figure, in clinic, and I've preferred it to remain obscure.
The massages themselves have gone well. Once I lay hands on someone, I know what to do. Addicted to self-doubt though I am, I've never seriously doubted the skill of my hands. No, what's difficult for me is the intake and exit interviews. I have to talk to these strangers. And what's more -- what's always been supremely difficult for me -- I have to talk to them in a scripted way; I have to ask them particular questions and give them particular information. I have to tell them what kind of massage I'm going to give them, for instance. Tell them what sort of draping I'll use, and generally what to expect of the session.
Why is that so difficult for me? Well, for one thing, because I don't know what sort of massage I'm going to give until I've actually laid on hands. I have no idea. The sort of information you get in an intake interview isn't the sort of information that lets you say what you're going to do, or at least it isn't for me. My hands do all that sort of thinking.
But more than that: I don't myself want to know that information, when I'm getting a massage. It feels to me like giving a child a typewritten list of all his gifts, on Christmas morning, before letting him open anything. I have to try hard to think my way into the state of mind of someone who's never had a massage, or only had one or two -- that they might seriously have very little idea of what's going to happen, and want some ordinary information about it. Hard for me to get there, because it's precisely the unmooring, the giving up of my body into someone's hands, that I most love about massage. I don't want to have a known destination. I want to head out into the open sea.
And -- another thing -- they're often questions or statements that someone else, not I, thinks ought to be spoken. I'm asking them because I'll need sound bites to put on my SOAP charts, not because I think they're particularly what needs to be asked or said just now.
But most critically, there's the "engineer's stutter," as I think of it. Certain personality types -- including mine, with a vengeance -- find it nearly impossible to repeat over words they've said before. Intellectually I know that redundancy is crucial to communication, that "men require more often to be reminded than informed," and that any important message should be repeated at least once. And in any case, it's not really repetition if it's spoken to a new person, right?
Wrong. My mind balks, bucks, turns stubborn. I've already said that. Trying to say the same words again sets up a confusing distortion in my head, like feedback from an amplifier. It's not a policy, not some sort of precious, over-fastidious commitment to originality; it's a disability which feels physical. I simply can't say something that I've said before, without becoming confused, without precipitating a disorienting semantic reverberation in my mind. It's one of the reasons -- probably the chief reason -- I gave up on being a teacher.
But it means, anyway, that I was forgetting to say quite simple things. It also means that I was coming into the intake interviews very anxious, and sweating profusely (which established its own nice anxiety feedback loop.)
I've been gradually getting better at it. I was drenched with sweat, my first night. My shirt was sopping. A couple weeks in I decided, the hell with it, I'm only going to ask the questions and say the things that make sense to me, no matter what I'm supposed to ask and say. That helped. I tried making a little checklist of my own, but that just made things worse -- now I just had one more piece of paper and one more set of instructions to confuse me.
The turning point seems to have been week before last. I threw away my checklists. I went into the quiet study room, right beforehand, and sat shamatha for fifteen minutes, and then I went into the interviews holding the intention to think of nothing, and remember nothing -- just to be present with the person, and devil take the rules and the paperwork.
What I actually did and said was not really that different, I think, but it felt different. I did it again last week and it felt even better. Last week was the first week I left thinking, "those are clients who've had an experience they'd come back for." I've never been under the delusion that I could build a practice on terrific massage alone. First impressions are indelible, and last impressions -- what sort of connection you feel with the therapist as you're leaving -- probably have more to do with whether you come back than anything that happens on the table. I've been a massage client often enough; I know how this stuff works.
Of course, in my own practice I'll have SOAPs of my own design, and I'll be beholden to no one else for saying or asking anything. Half of the difficulty will simply go away. But I'm relieved to have worked out an approach -- both an approach that seems to work, and one that fits with how I want to be in the world anyway. Very relieved.
I haven't written about clinic, the practicum, for a couple reasons. For one, I can't write about the massages themselves, without violating both therapeutic ethics and my own sensibilities. I am uneasy sometimes even about writing about trades with fellow-students. For another, I don't feel I've cut a very dashing figure, in clinic, and I've preferred it to remain obscure.
The massages themselves have gone well. Once I lay hands on someone, I know what to do. Addicted to self-doubt though I am, I've never seriously doubted the skill of my hands. No, what's difficult for me is the intake and exit interviews. I have to talk to these strangers. And what's more -- what's always been supremely difficult for me -- I have to talk to them in a scripted way; I have to ask them particular questions and give them particular information. I have to tell them what kind of massage I'm going to give them, for instance. Tell them what sort of draping I'll use, and generally what to expect of the session.
Why is that so difficult for me? Well, for one thing, because I don't know what sort of massage I'm going to give until I've actually laid on hands. I have no idea. The sort of information you get in an intake interview isn't the sort of information that lets you say what you're going to do, or at least it isn't for me. My hands do all that sort of thinking.
But more than that: I don't myself want to know that information, when I'm getting a massage. It feels to me like giving a child a typewritten list of all his gifts, on Christmas morning, before letting him open anything. I have to try hard to think my way into the state of mind of someone who's never had a massage, or only had one or two -- that they might seriously have very little idea of what's going to happen, and want some ordinary information about it. Hard for me to get there, because it's precisely the unmooring, the giving up of my body into someone's hands, that I most love about massage. I don't want to have a known destination. I want to head out into the open sea.
And -- another thing -- they're often questions or statements that someone else, not I, thinks ought to be spoken. I'm asking them because I'll need sound bites to put on my SOAP charts, not because I think they're particularly what needs to be asked or said just now.
But most critically, there's the "engineer's stutter," as I think of it. Certain personality types -- including mine, with a vengeance -- find it nearly impossible to repeat over words they've said before. Intellectually I know that redundancy is crucial to communication, that "men require more often to be reminded than informed," and that any important message should be repeated at least once. And in any case, it's not really repetition if it's spoken to a new person, right?
Wrong. My mind balks, bucks, turns stubborn. I've already said that. Trying to say the same words again sets up a confusing distortion in my head, like feedback from an amplifier. It's not a policy, not some sort of precious, over-fastidious commitment to originality; it's a disability which feels physical. I simply can't say something that I've said before, without becoming confused, without precipitating a disorienting semantic reverberation in my mind. It's one of the reasons -- probably the chief reason -- I gave up on being a teacher.
But it means, anyway, that I was forgetting to say quite simple things. It also means that I was coming into the intake interviews very anxious, and sweating profusely (which established its own nice anxiety feedback loop.)
I've been gradually getting better at it. I was drenched with sweat, my first night. My shirt was sopping. A couple weeks in I decided, the hell with it, I'm only going to ask the questions and say the things that make sense to me, no matter what I'm supposed to ask and say. That helped. I tried making a little checklist of my own, but that just made things worse -- now I just had one more piece of paper and one more set of instructions to confuse me.
The turning point seems to have been week before last. I threw away my checklists. I went into the quiet study room, right beforehand, and sat shamatha for fifteen minutes, and then I went into the interviews holding the intention to think of nothing, and remember nothing -- just to be present with the person, and devil take the rules and the paperwork.
What I actually did and said was not really that different, I think, but it felt different. I did it again last week and it felt even better. Last week was the first week I left thinking, "those are clients who've had an experience they'd come back for." I've never been under the delusion that I could build a practice on terrific massage alone. First impressions are indelible, and last impressions -- what sort of connection you feel with the therapist as you're leaving -- probably have more to do with whether you come back than anything that happens on the table. I've been a massage client often enough; I know how this stuff works.
Of course, in my own practice I'll have SOAPs of my own design, and I'll be beholden to no one else for saying or asking anything. Half of the difficulty will simply go away. But I'm relieved to have worked out an approach -- both an approach that seems to work, and one that fits with how I want to be in the world anyway. Very relieved.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Myofascial Release
Fascia* is the name for the connective-tissue sheeting that wraps up -- well, virtually everything in the body. A subcutaneous layer runs under the skin proper, but it also wraps up every muscle, every bundle of muscle fibers, and every muscle fiber; it wraps up the internal organs as well. Western medicine has tended to view it as so much wrapping-paper, and so traditional Western (Swedish) massage completely ignores it, focusing exclusively on muscles, tendons, and ligaments. But in the late 1920s a German woman, Elizabeth Dicke, developed a therapy called Bindegewebsmassage, "connective tissue massage." And a generation later a number of other therapies followed suit, among them Rolfing and Myofascial Release. ("Myo" being a prefix that means "muscle,"). The idea behind them all is simply that if the wrapping is cramped and adhesive, the body will be distorted and unable to relax.
Gwyn and I traded on Saturday, practicing myofascial release. I was on the table first. It was an extraordinary massage. Gwyn has a real gift for it: she worked very slowly, gently, and deliberately. And most important of all -- I was grateful every time -- she left places slowly. It makes all the difference. I moved easily in and out of sleep, throughout the session -- I don't think I've ever been so comfortable with wandering back and forth across that border. And that night I slept better than I've slept in weeks.
This is the first modality we've done I think that really gives the skin its due, really engages the skin's intelligence. Muscles just aren't that clever. Contract and relax; that's all they know. The skin, on the other hand, is clued into all kinds of things.
I tried hard to emulate Gwyn's work. It's difficult to keep your attention on an area when you're leaving it. It was a real practice, a meditative discipline, to keep my mind on the area I was leaving, and not jump ahead. I succeeded maybe half the time. I found it very useful to unfocus my gaze. I don't remember where I read it -- in the Tao Shiatsu book, maybe -- but I've found it very true that chi tends to follow the gaze, and that intent watching sort of siphons it away from the hands. The loose focus I usually fall into in meditation, a sort of passive wide-angle receptivity, is perfect for this work. Keeps the intention in the hands, where it belongs.
The maxim in our handout -- that the tighter the fascia, the less force is needed to work it -- was also very helpful. The instinct, to push harder if it's not moving, is exactly wrong.
I tried to work with the deep fascia, a couple times, at the shoulders and at the feet -- not sure how well that worked. But it's interesting just to think about muscles that way, to think of working their sheathing rather than their fibers.
There's so much important and overworked fascia in the feet: I tried to think my way through that, but I would love to take a good workshop on myofascial for the feet.
I had no idea I would be interested in myofascial. But I love it.
*"Fascia" from the Latin fascis, means "band," or "bundle," and is the root of the word "fascist" as well -- fascists having been big on unity, and the Italian ones having adopted the bundle of rods with an ax in the middle -- the "fasces" -- as their emblem. It's entertaining to watch the linguistic struggle at East-West college. By the laws of historical linguistics, and by the dictionary, the 'a' in "fascia" is short; it should be pronounced like the word "fashion" with the final 'n' left off. But entertainingly, the customary pronunciation of the word at school is "faw-shuh." Two things seem to be at work; one, an impulse to distinguish the word from "fascist," and two, the American conviction that any foreign looking word should be pronounced with continental vowels. I wonder which pronunciation will win out?
Fascia* is the name for the connective-tissue sheeting that wraps up -- well, virtually everything in the body. A subcutaneous layer runs under the skin proper, but it also wraps up every muscle, every bundle of muscle fibers, and every muscle fiber; it wraps up the internal organs as well. Western medicine has tended to view it as so much wrapping-paper, and so traditional Western (Swedish) massage completely ignores it, focusing exclusively on muscles, tendons, and ligaments. But in the late 1920s a German woman, Elizabeth Dicke, developed a therapy called Bindegewebsmassage, "connective tissue massage." And a generation later a number of other therapies followed suit, among them Rolfing and Myofascial Release. ("Myo" being a prefix that means "muscle,"). The idea behind them all is simply that if the wrapping is cramped and adhesive, the body will be distorted and unable to relax.
Gwyn and I traded on Saturday, practicing myofascial release. I was on the table first. It was an extraordinary massage. Gwyn has a real gift for it: she worked very slowly, gently, and deliberately. And most important of all -- I was grateful every time -- she left places slowly. It makes all the difference. I moved easily in and out of sleep, throughout the session -- I don't think I've ever been so comfortable with wandering back and forth across that border. And that night I slept better than I've slept in weeks.
This is the first modality we've done I think that really gives the skin its due, really engages the skin's intelligence. Muscles just aren't that clever. Contract and relax; that's all they know. The skin, on the other hand, is clued into all kinds of things.
I tried hard to emulate Gwyn's work. It's difficult to keep your attention on an area when you're leaving it. It was a real practice, a meditative discipline, to keep my mind on the area I was leaving, and not jump ahead. I succeeded maybe half the time. I found it very useful to unfocus my gaze. I don't remember where I read it -- in the Tao Shiatsu book, maybe -- but I've found it very true that chi tends to follow the gaze, and that intent watching sort of siphons it away from the hands. The loose focus I usually fall into in meditation, a sort of passive wide-angle receptivity, is perfect for this work. Keeps the intention in the hands, where it belongs.
The maxim in our handout -- that the tighter the fascia, the less force is needed to work it -- was also very helpful. The instinct, to push harder if it's not moving, is exactly wrong.
I tried to work with the deep fascia, a couple times, at the shoulders and at the feet -- not sure how well that worked. But it's interesting just to think about muscles that way, to think of working their sheathing rather than their fibers.
There's so much important and overworked fascia in the feet: I tried to think my way through that, but I would love to take a good workshop on myofascial for the feet.
I had no idea I would be interested in myofascial. But I love it.
*"Fascia" from the Latin fascis, means "band," or "bundle," and is the root of the word "fascist" as well -- fascists having been big on unity, and the Italian ones having adopted the bundle of rods with an ax in the middle -- the "fasces" -- as their emblem. It's entertaining to watch the linguistic struggle at East-West college. By the laws of historical linguistics, and by the dictionary, the 'a' in "fascia" is short; it should be pronounced like the word "fashion" with the final 'n' left off. But entertainingly, the customary pronunciation of the word at school is "faw-shuh." Two things seem to be at work; one, an impulse to distinguish the word from "fascist," and two, the American conviction that any foreign looking word should be pronounced with continental vowels. I wonder which pronunciation will win out?
Friday, August 24, 2007
Southern Sky
The southern sky fell from blue softly into purple, a calyx holding the blossoming moon. I sat on the stone steps of East-West college and did a minute or two of shamatha, then looked at the building to the north: its west-looking windows were exactly the color of the sky, so that it looked like there were empty holes in it: it reached ragged and uncertain arms into the air. It looked like a chance breeze might blow it away.
A young woman from my modalities class came out, and sat down on the steps. Not exactly beside me: one step up and five feet over. I was reminded of the precise way some birds space themselves when settling on a wire. "It's beautiful tonight," I said.
I meant everything, but she took me to mean the moon. "It will be full in about a week, I guess," she said. "At the end of August? Maybe." She furrowed her brow.
"Mm," I agreed.
This was the young woman who had once reported dressing up to stand in line at Powell's, waiting for midnight so she could buy the last Harry Potter book, and who had cried twice while reading it. It seemed important to her now to figure out exactly when the moon would be full, but I couldn't help her -- I didn't know. Maybe it was just important to fill in the silence.
Lana came out the door, in the slightly breathless way she often has. I stood up at once, regretting the faint rudeness. It's become our routine for Lana to give me a ride home, and apparently this wasn't to be one of the nights when she lingered to smoke a cigarette and hang out with the guys, and put off, for a few stolen moments, returning to being the mother of a four-year-old. She was moving briskly tonight, and I fell in step with her, turning to smile at the Harry Potter fan and murmur "g'night."
"Good night," she smiled back, a distant smile; dismissing us with some mixture of amusement and disappointment. Possibly she thinks Lana and I are an item. She reminds me sharply of Tori's partner -- catlike in her singlemindedness, in her devotion to comfort and pleasure, and her directness. There are a lot of people of that ilk in massage -- the Asperger's strain, as I think of it. They're not interested in observing conventions; they're not terribly appropriate; they dress haphazardly in whatever's handy. I feel at home with them. Fellow-geeks.
Lana drove us through the dusk. She stopped abruptly at the crosswalk from the grocery store, on Belmont, for a couple young women walking, not quite in the crosswalk, across the street. Strutting, almost. They didn't turn to look at us. Slender, haughty, dressed to kill; in their early twenties.
"I guess maybe I was like that at that age," said Lana. "You think you own the world. Before I had a kid, you know."
Lana's not yet thirty. I love the way she converses with her four-year-old, when we pick her up on the way home -- it's real conversation, they confide in each other. I know so well, though, the strange dislocation and alienation of having children. Suddenly everyone thinks of you differently. Your time is no longer your own. You find that your availability, as a nonparent, had more to do with all your relations than you thought it did. You're no longer in play; your place is fixed. The rest of the world goes on without you.
I wanted to articulate something of the wistful reassurance that rose up in me, but no words came. And after all, it's a long strange road with an uncertain end, being a parent. I wasn't sure I really had anything to say. "Better to get over it now, instead of twenty years from now -- over the fact that so much of what we thought was our personal charm was just our availability" -- not such a reassuring thing to say. I held my tongue.
The southern sky fell from blue softly into purple, a calyx holding the blossoming moon. I sat on the stone steps of East-West college and did a minute or two of shamatha, then looked at the building to the north: its west-looking windows were exactly the color of the sky, so that it looked like there were empty holes in it: it reached ragged and uncertain arms into the air. It looked like a chance breeze might blow it away.
A young woman from my modalities class came out, and sat down on the steps. Not exactly beside me: one step up and five feet over. I was reminded of the precise way some birds space themselves when settling on a wire. "It's beautiful tonight," I said.
I meant everything, but she took me to mean the moon. "It will be full in about a week, I guess," she said. "At the end of August? Maybe." She furrowed her brow.
"Mm," I agreed.
This was the young woman who had once reported dressing up to stand in line at Powell's, waiting for midnight so she could buy the last Harry Potter book, and who had cried twice while reading it. It seemed important to her now to figure out exactly when the moon would be full, but I couldn't help her -- I didn't know. Maybe it was just important to fill in the silence.
Lana came out the door, in the slightly breathless way she often has. I stood up at once, regretting the faint rudeness. It's become our routine for Lana to give me a ride home, and apparently this wasn't to be one of the nights when she lingered to smoke a cigarette and hang out with the guys, and put off, for a few stolen moments, returning to being the mother of a four-year-old. She was moving briskly tonight, and I fell in step with her, turning to smile at the Harry Potter fan and murmur "g'night."
"Good night," she smiled back, a distant smile; dismissing us with some mixture of amusement and disappointment. Possibly she thinks Lana and I are an item. She reminds me sharply of Tori's partner -- catlike in her singlemindedness, in her devotion to comfort and pleasure, and her directness. There are a lot of people of that ilk in massage -- the Asperger's strain, as I think of it. They're not interested in observing conventions; they're not terribly appropriate; they dress haphazardly in whatever's handy. I feel at home with them. Fellow-geeks.
Lana drove us through the dusk. She stopped abruptly at the crosswalk from the grocery store, on Belmont, for a couple young women walking, not quite in the crosswalk, across the street. Strutting, almost. They didn't turn to look at us. Slender, haughty, dressed to kill; in their early twenties.
"I guess maybe I was like that at that age," said Lana. "You think you own the world. Before I had a kid, you know."
Lana's not yet thirty. I love the way she converses with her four-year-old, when we pick her up on the way home -- it's real conversation, they confide in each other. I know so well, though, the strange dislocation and alienation of having children. Suddenly everyone thinks of you differently. Your time is no longer your own. You find that your availability, as a nonparent, had more to do with all your relations than you thought it did. You're no longer in play; your place is fixed. The rest of the world goes on without you.
I wanted to articulate something of the wistful reassurance that rose up in me, but no words came. And after all, it's a long strange road with an uncertain end, being a parent. I wasn't sure I really had anything to say. "Better to get over it now, instead of twenty years from now -- over the fact that so much of what we thought was our personal charm was just our availability" -- not such a reassuring thing to say. I held my tongue.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sukhasiddhi
A post I began last Spring, and ended today.
Anthony stood up. He's young, a sort of punk cowboy, with Clint Eastwood eyes and a slow drawl, every inch an urban Portlander, of the sort who shaves his head and travels by skateboard. An odd character to be on the Board, but there he is. He looked at Sarah, sitting in the lamas' row, and said, "I was tasked with sayin' thank you. On behalf of the community."
This is ordinarily the stage at which the white silk blessing scarves come out, and someone puts one around someone else's neck, and people bow and namaste each other. But we had no Tibetans here. Or maybe the protocols didn't fit here, for reasons I don't know: I never have learned much about these things.
Anyway, Anthony had no scarf about his person. He went on: "But since I'm bad at that sorta thing... I thought I'd fob it off on someone else. So we're gonna let the kids from the kids program do it."
"Oh," said Sarah. "Don't tell them what I said."
Someone had asked about a life devoted to the Dharma, and having kids -- Sarah being a lama who has raised two -- and Sarah had finished by saying, essentially: "if you want to devote your life to the Dharma, don't have them."
Don't tell them what I said raised a little, uncomfortable laugh. The kids came filing in, picking their way amongst the zafus; the smiling grown-ups pulled up their knees to make room and let them by. The biggest of the kids was carrying a framed picture. He or she (I couldn't tell from where I was) stammered through a few words and handed it to her.
It was a beautiful print, done by a magnificent artist in our sangha. I've admired and coveted it before. Sarah accepted it and made much of it. She's an experienced mother: she knows that you coo when a child gives you something.
That done, she said, "do you know who this is? Do you know the story that goes with this?"
They shook their heads. "This is Sukhasiddhi."
And she told them the story of Sukhasiddhi, an Indian woman who -- against orders -- gave the last rice in the house to a beggar, and was driven from the house by her hungry and impious husband and grown son.
And that -- said Sarah -- was the beginning of the wonderful part of her life. She wandered far from home, and found great teachers, and achieved enlightenment; and her body turned into that of a sixteen year old girl.
Rather desperately, Sarah plunged on, and summed up: she was a good mother, because she was not just a mother to her own children. She was a mother to everybody.
Well, you can imagine how well this played to an audience of children. I was surprised that a teacher as gifted as Sarah had told that story in this place. She must have thought the lesson worth the price.
The children looked distrustfully at the unearthly beauty of Sukhasiddhi, this woman who cared as much for a the hunger of a passing stranger as for the hunger of her own child, this mother who went away: she floated there, perfectly at ease in her lovely, ivory-colored body, looking at us all with kind, faintly mocking eyes.
And Max wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
I wandered away from the Sangha that morning without speaking to Sarah. Her picture still stands on my shrine. I still call myself a Buddhist. But I wonder about that hard and bitter story. Does anyone really ever stop wanting to be where someone loves him best of all? There's a catch, to those lives of the great enlightened beings. They all were people who had followers, followers who loved them best of all. Do we know that they would have been perfectly content if no one had cherished them?
I don't know. It's no business of mine, anyway. It's the sort of question you dream up when you're avoiding sitting -- impossible to verify either way: doubt for doubt's sake, not doubt for the love of truth.
I am coming back to the dharma, cold and worn-out from my time away. Hoping, in spite of all I know, to wake up and find my dinner waiting, still hot.
A post I began last Spring, and ended today.
Anthony stood up. He's young, a sort of punk cowboy, with Clint Eastwood eyes and a slow drawl, every inch an urban Portlander, of the sort who shaves his head and travels by skateboard. An odd character to be on the Board, but there he is. He looked at Sarah, sitting in the lamas' row, and said, "I was tasked with sayin' thank you. On behalf of the community."
This is ordinarily the stage at which the white silk blessing scarves come out, and someone puts one around someone else's neck, and people bow and namaste each other. But we had no Tibetans here. Or maybe the protocols didn't fit here, for reasons I don't know: I never have learned much about these things.
Anyway, Anthony had no scarf about his person. He went on: "But since I'm bad at that sorta thing... I thought I'd fob it off on someone else. So we're gonna let the kids from the kids program do it."
"Oh," said Sarah. "Don't tell them what I said."
Someone had asked about a life devoted to the Dharma, and having kids -- Sarah being a lama who has raised two -- and Sarah had finished by saying, essentially: "if you want to devote your life to the Dharma, don't have them."
Don't tell them what I said raised a little, uncomfortable laugh. The kids came filing in, picking their way amongst the zafus; the smiling grown-ups pulled up their knees to make room and let them by. The biggest of the kids was carrying a framed picture. He or she (I couldn't tell from where I was) stammered through a few words and handed it to her.
It was a beautiful print, done by a magnificent artist in our sangha. I've admired and coveted it before. Sarah accepted it and made much of it. She's an experienced mother: she knows that you coo when a child gives you something.
That done, she said, "do you know who this is? Do you know the story that goes with this?"
They shook their heads. "This is Sukhasiddhi."
And she told them the story of Sukhasiddhi, an Indian woman who -- against orders -- gave the last rice in the house to a beggar, and was driven from the house by her hungry and impious husband and grown son.
And that -- said Sarah -- was the beginning of the wonderful part of her life. She wandered far from home, and found great teachers, and achieved enlightenment; and her body turned into that of a sixteen year old girl.
Rather desperately, Sarah plunged on, and summed up: she was a good mother, because she was not just a mother to her own children. She was a mother to everybody.
Well, you can imagine how well this played to an audience of children. I was surprised that a teacher as gifted as Sarah had told that story in this place. She must have thought the lesson worth the price.
The children looked distrustfully at the unearthly beauty of Sukhasiddhi, this woman who cared as much for a the hunger of a passing stranger as for the hunger of her own child, this mother who went away: she floated there, perfectly at ease in her lovely, ivory-colored body, looking at us all with kind, faintly mocking eyes.
And Max wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
I wandered away from the Sangha that morning without speaking to Sarah. Her picture still stands on my shrine. I still call myself a Buddhist. But I wonder about that hard and bitter story. Does anyone really ever stop wanting to be where someone loves him best of all? There's a catch, to those lives of the great enlightened beings. They all were people who had followers, followers who loved them best of all. Do we know that they would have been perfectly content if no one had cherished them?
I don't know. It's no business of mine, anyway. It's the sort of question you dream up when you're avoiding sitting -- impossible to verify either way: doubt for doubt's sake, not doubt for the love of truth.
I am coming back to the dharma, cold and worn-out from my time away. Hoping, in spite of all I know, to wake up and find my dinner waiting, still hot.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
In Review
I held her shoulder in my left hand, and reached across for the anterior superior iliac spine on the other side -- what I suppose the uninitiated might call the hip-bone -- with my right hand. Supposedly the left hand is negative, drawing energy, and the right hand is positive, giving it. Whatever. That's polarity talk. If I were talking shiatsu, I'd call the left hand the mother hand and the right hand the son hand. The mother hand just rested. With the son hand I rocked her back and forth. In shiatsu, it's the mother hand, the hand that doesn't move, that you pay attention to. It's the listening hand.
Polarity arouses all my skepticism. It's American. It's modern. It's eclectic. It stands to older forms of massage as Mormonism stands to older religions: I can't get over the conviction that someone just like me made this up; it can't be worth anything.
Nevertheless, the little we've learned has infiltrated everything I do on the table. The holding, the rocking, the way I listen with my hands.
"You radiate warmth, care, kindness, and good humor... your presence de-escalates stress and upset, and contributes to an overall sense of happiness and interest here."
I cared about this performance review. I mean, I always care about performance reviews, since they're about a topic of such absorbing interest, i.e., me. But I cared about this one especially. For one thing, I admire Faith more than anyone I've ever worked for. Her good opinion is important to me. For another, I feel like I've let myself be seen, at the Foundation, as I have never let myself be seen in my high-tech jobs: this review was about me, not about a manufactured persona.
Probably I've never been as good at manufacturing a persona as I have fondly imagined. But the point of course is not whether I fooled anybody: the point is whether I intended to.
My reviews in cubicle-land mentioned the same sort of thing. They described me as cheerful and easygoing, a good team member, diplomatic; someone people like to work with. So what was so different about this?
How much it mattered, I guess. It was, really, the central point of the review: that I was kind. What matters most to me, about me, is what matters most to Faith too. It would be hard to exagerate the difference that makes in how I feel about working for her.
This strange, bittersweet year is nearing its close -- to me, always, the end of September, harvest-time, is the real end of the year.
The earth element's season is harvest; its weather is damp, its taste is sweet, its sense-organ is the mouth, its emotion is worry, its body component is the muscles, its sound is singing.
I'm grieving, under the sky. The long shadows and the closing door.
Multnomah County Library has, against all probability, a Kelmscott Chaucer in its collection. I'm going to go spend some time in its company, soon.
Befell that in that season, on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to wend on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, with full devout courage
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty, in a company
Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all.
(I have, by the way, great sympathy for that voice-in-the-wilderness scholar who keeps calling for the use of modernized-spelling editions of Chaucer -- who points out that Chaucer's spelling and Shakespeare's spelling are very similar, and that if we're willing to make Shakespeare accessible by changing it, why not Chaucer? That, above, is word-for-word Chaucer, just spelled as in modern English. The rhythm is ruined, because you can't see some of the syllables that should be pronounced -- but you can read it just as easily as you can read Shakespeare. Why not? We have no compunction, after all, about mangling Shakespeare's rhythm in the same way, if on a smaller scale. So what if someone mistakes Middle English "corage" -- meaning "heart," and pronounced ko-RAH-juh -- for the modern word, restricted to a particular subset of associated virtues? It's mistakes like that that make reading old poetry such a resonant, disorienting, and beautiful experience -- we're always being asked to open our courage a little.)
I am going on my own pilgrimage, in a couple of weeks. To Brooklyn, with full devout courage.
I held her shoulder in my left hand, and reached across for the anterior superior iliac spine on the other side -- what I suppose the uninitiated might call the hip-bone -- with my right hand. Supposedly the left hand is negative, drawing energy, and the right hand is positive, giving it. Whatever. That's polarity talk. If I were talking shiatsu, I'd call the left hand the mother hand and the right hand the son hand. The mother hand just rested. With the son hand I rocked her back and forth. In shiatsu, it's the mother hand, the hand that doesn't move, that you pay attention to. It's the listening hand.
Polarity arouses all my skepticism. It's American. It's modern. It's eclectic. It stands to older forms of massage as Mormonism stands to older religions: I can't get over the conviction that someone just like me made this up; it can't be worth anything.
Nevertheless, the little we've learned has infiltrated everything I do on the table. The holding, the rocking, the way I listen with my hands.
"You radiate warmth, care, kindness, and good humor... your presence de-escalates stress and upset, and contributes to an overall sense of happiness and interest here."
I cared about this performance review. I mean, I always care about performance reviews, since they're about a topic of such absorbing interest, i.e., me. But I cared about this one especially. For one thing, I admire Faith more than anyone I've ever worked for. Her good opinion is important to me. For another, I feel like I've let myself be seen, at the Foundation, as I have never let myself be seen in my high-tech jobs: this review was about me, not about a manufactured persona.
Probably I've never been as good at manufacturing a persona as I have fondly imagined. But the point of course is not whether I fooled anybody: the point is whether I intended to.
My reviews in cubicle-land mentioned the same sort of thing. They described me as cheerful and easygoing, a good team member, diplomatic; someone people like to work with. So what was so different about this?
How much it mattered, I guess. It was, really, the central point of the review: that I was kind. What matters most to me, about me, is what matters most to Faith too. It would be hard to exagerate the difference that makes in how I feel about working for her.
This strange, bittersweet year is nearing its close -- to me, always, the end of September, harvest-time, is the real end of the year.
The earth element's season is harvest; its weather is damp, its taste is sweet, its sense-organ is the mouth, its emotion is worry, its body component is the muscles, its sound is singing.
I'm grieving, under the sky. The long shadows and the closing door.
Multnomah County Library has, against all probability, a Kelmscott Chaucer in its collection. I'm going to go spend some time in its company, soon.
Befell that in that season, on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to wend on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, with full devout courage
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty, in a company
Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all.
(I have, by the way, great sympathy for that voice-in-the-wilderness scholar who keeps calling for the use of modernized-spelling editions of Chaucer -- who points out that Chaucer's spelling and Shakespeare's spelling are very similar, and that if we're willing to make Shakespeare accessible by changing it, why not Chaucer? That, above, is word-for-word Chaucer, just spelled as in modern English. The rhythm is ruined, because you can't see some of the syllables that should be pronounced -- but you can read it just as easily as you can read Shakespeare. Why not? We have no compunction, after all, about mangling Shakespeare's rhythm in the same way, if on a smaller scale. So what if someone mistakes Middle English "corage" -- meaning "heart," and pronounced ko-RAH-juh -- for the modern word, restricted to a particular subset of associated virtues? It's mistakes like that that make reading old poetry such a resonant, disorienting, and beautiful experience -- we're always being asked to open our courage a little.)
I am going on my own pilgrimage, in a couple of weeks. To Brooklyn, with full devout courage.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The Clackamas
Estacada. I wake at five, in an unfamiliar motel room, illuminated only by the green glow of the digital clock. Working mostly by feel, I get a shower -- wondering, as every time I'm in a cheap hotel room, what the reasoning is behind making it impossible to light the bathroom without lighting the rest of the space and waking your partner. I take a certain pleasure in trying to work out the mechanics of taking a shower in a new place without being able to see -- exploring the fittings with my fingers and figuring out how they work -- but surely I'm a little odd, that way? Or maybe it's just odd that I wake up before dawn and immediately want to be up and doing.
It's quiet, as I leave the room. A fine mist gently kisses my face. I walk along the high bank of the Clackamas river -- its water dark, dark green in the half-light -- and listen to the rapid whining whistle of the ospreys. They sound like someone desperately trying to crank over a rusty machine. Much like seagulls, and I wonder briefly if there's something about a steady diet of fish that induces a shrill repetitious whine. Is it accidental that fishwives are proverbial scolds?
Yes, I tell myself sternly. It is.
I can't see the ospreys from here. Last night we watched them fishing on the river and squabbling at their huge, high nest on the opposite bank -- a nest so big that at first we thought it must be an eagle's, on the very top of a lone bare tree. Kingfishers flickered under the bank, occasionally, and two ducks patrolled the river. Apparently ospreys don't mess with ducks, or anyway that's what the ducks think.
The bank was overgrown with ripe blackberries; the scent came to us clearly. "It smells like summer," said Martha, and I knew she was thinking of swimming with her sisters and cousins in the clear green Umpqua, years ago, when the world was young.
Yesterday we took a narrow one-lane road up towards Memaloose Lake. We passed four quarries on the way, and each quarry had a party of target-shooters. The sound of gunshots was never far away. We asked a set of them directions to the lake. "Is there a lake up here?" they said.
I tried, and failed, to imagine waking up on a beautiful summer day and wanting to drive up through a quiet forest in order to reach an ugly barren quarry, littered with soda cans and shell-cases, and make a hellish noise with deadly weapons. It's easy, in the Hawthorne district of Portland, to feel that I actually belong in this country. Out here it's clear that I don't.
As the afternoon drew into evening, we passed the last quarry, coming back down. There was a burst of semiautomatic fire, and we came in sight of an older man watching a teenager turn from the range. The teenager was all in black, with helmet-like protectors over his ears, gangly and hunched. A curl of smoke came from the barrel of his loosely-held gun.
Estacada. I wake at five, in an unfamiliar motel room, illuminated only by the green glow of the digital clock. Working mostly by feel, I get a shower -- wondering, as every time I'm in a cheap hotel room, what the reasoning is behind making it impossible to light the bathroom without lighting the rest of the space and waking your partner. I take a certain pleasure in trying to work out the mechanics of taking a shower in a new place without being able to see -- exploring the fittings with my fingers and figuring out how they work -- but surely I'm a little odd, that way? Or maybe it's just odd that I wake up before dawn and immediately want to be up and doing.
It's quiet, as I leave the room. A fine mist gently kisses my face. I walk along the high bank of the Clackamas river -- its water dark, dark green in the half-light -- and listen to the rapid whining whistle of the ospreys. They sound like someone desperately trying to crank over a rusty machine. Much like seagulls, and I wonder briefly if there's something about a steady diet of fish that induces a shrill repetitious whine. Is it accidental that fishwives are proverbial scolds?
Yes, I tell myself sternly. It is.
I can't see the ospreys from here. Last night we watched them fishing on the river and squabbling at their huge, high nest on the opposite bank -- a nest so big that at first we thought it must be an eagle's, on the very top of a lone bare tree. Kingfishers flickered under the bank, occasionally, and two ducks patrolled the river. Apparently ospreys don't mess with ducks, or anyway that's what the ducks think.
The bank was overgrown with ripe blackberries; the scent came to us clearly. "It smells like summer," said Martha, and I knew she was thinking of swimming with her sisters and cousins in the clear green Umpqua, years ago, when the world was young.
Yesterday we took a narrow one-lane road up towards Memaloose Lake. We passed four quarries on the way, and each quarry had a party of target-shooters. The sound of gunshots was never far away. We asked a set of them directions to the lake. "Is there a lake up here?" they said.
I tried, and failed, to imagine waking up on a beautiful summer day and wanting to drive up through a quiet forest in order to reach an ugly barren quarry, littered with soda cans and shell-cases, and make a hellish noise with deadly weapons. It's easy, in the Hawthorne district of Portland, to feel that I actually belong in this country. Out here it's clear that I don't.
As the afternoon drew into evening, we passed the last quarry, coming back down. There was a burst of semiautomatic fire, and we came in sight of an older man watching a teenager turn from the range. The teenager was all in black, with helmet-like protectors over his ears, gangly and hunched. A curl of smoke came from the barrel of his loosely-held gun.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
All This Sweet Work
Overwhelmed by gratitude. To be able to stand in the kitchen with somebody and just talk -- I'm so grateful. How, I wonder, did I come to this?
Ha. I didn't. I didn't come to this: I've always lived here. Always this hungry, always this uncertain, always overwhelmed by the need to make connection. I needn't go constructing histories about it. I was born this way -- born anxious, isolated, and full of love.
I have lived in this place all my life. So that to have someone want to show me her garden, how it's prospered over the summer, fills me with wonder and delight.
Brocolli reaching skyward, young corn with its green banners hung on its outward walls, herbs hugging the ground. She pulled aside foliage to show me green pepper hidden in a tangle of of stalks and leaves.
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
My mind goes there, of course: the habit of forty years. And driving home, I thought of how it's burdened all my life, not just my intimate relationships. My relationships, in fact, have suffered least from it: I have so much love welling up that having some spill is no disaster. It's my work that's suffered, because I never put my full attention on it. Work can be love too -- it has to be, if it's to be good work -- but I didn't understand that. I kept looking for obvious, indisputable love, the sort of love television and movies teach us to recognize and value -- desire and swooning infatuation. The love of a pepper, growing secretly, the love of getting a spreadsheet formula exactly right, the love of listening for the breath, with my fingers, to be able to time leaning into the ribs with an exhalation, -- for so long I attended to many of those things carelessly, if at all, relying on talent rather than concentration.
Faith uses a lovely, old-fashioned phrase: "honoring the intent of the giver." She uses it, for example, when we're in doubt about exactly which financial bucket a gift is supposed to land it. It's a stock phrase in fundraising finance, no doubt, but to me it sums up my Library Foundation work; it's the beginning and end of what we're about.
When Merris was interviewing me, she asked me, in a rather roundabout way, whether I would be bothered by the tawdriness of plotting and planning just how to hit people up for money. I said no, emphatically. We're opening a space for their generosity, I said. We're helping them see their connection with the community. And that's how I think of it. People want to give; they want to connect. Our job is to honor that and nurture that. Kids who would have grown up illiterate really are learning to read because of the money given us. Old people really are getting books delivered to nursing homes because of it. Those kind of connections are harder to see in the world of mass production, but they're no less there, and no less real, than dropping a bit of meat in a beggar's bowl.
What is all this sweet work worth? Enough. The kisses will look after themselves.
Overwhelmed by gratitude. To be able to stand in the kitchen with somebody and just talk -- I'm so grateful. How, I wonder, did I come to this?
Ha. I didn't. I didn't come to this: I've always lived here. Always this hungry, always this uncertain, always overwhelmed by the need to make connection. I needn't go constructing histories about it. I was born this way -- born anxious, isolated, and full of love.
I have lived in this place all my life. So that to have someone want to show me her garden, how it's prospered over the summer, fills me with wonder and delight.
Brocolli reaching skyward, young corn with its green banners hung on its outward walls, herbs hugging the ground. She pulled aside foliage to show me green pepper hidden in a tangle of of stalks and leaves.
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
My mind goes there, of course: the habit of forty years. And driving home, I thought of how it's burdened all my life, not just my intimate relationships. My relationships, in fact, have suffered least from it: I have so much love welling up that having some spill is no disaster. It's my work that's suffered, because I never put my full attention on it. Work can be love too -- it has to be, if it's to be good work -- but I didn't understand that. I kept looking for obvious, indisputable love, the sort of love television and movies teach us to recognize and value -- desire and swooning infatuation. The love of a pepper, growing secretly, the love of getting a spreadsheet formula exactly right, the love of listening for the breath, with my fingers, to be able to time leaning into the ribs with an exhalation, -- for so long I attended to many of those things carelessly, if at all, relying on talent rather than concentration.
Faith uses a lovely, old-fashioned phrase: "honoring the intent of the giver." She uses it, for example, when we're in doubt about exactly which financial bucket a gift is supposed to land it. It's a stock phrase in fundraising finance, no doubt, but to me it sums up my Library Foundation work; it's the beginning and end of what we're about.
When Merris was interviewing me, she asked me, in a rather roundabout way, whether I would be bothered by the tawdriness of plotting and planning just how to hit people up for money. I said no, emphatically. We're opening a space for their generosity, I said. We're helping them see their connection with the community. And that's how I think of it. People want to give; they want to connect. Our job is to honor that and nurture that. Kids who would have grown up illiterate really are learning to read because of the money given us. Old people really are getting books delivered to nursing homes because of it. Those kind of connections are harder to see in the world of mass production, but they're no less there, and no less real, than dropping a bit of meat in a beggar's bowl.
What is all this sweet work worth? Enough. The kisses will look after themselves.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Portents and Wonders
Yesterday it was possible to see something that has not been seen in public since the early 1980s. It has not appeared in the news at all; I'm not sure why. But yesterday you could have observed your correspondent on the city streets wearing a shirt that was not a polo shirt, trousers that were not jeans, and a belt.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not suspenders. A belt. I have been seen occasionally in trousers other than jeans, and in shirts that were not polo shirts, in the last twenty-five years. But never without suspenders. ("Braces," to you Englanders; although here "braces" refer specifically to non-stretchy suspenders, especially as worn by skinheads.)
It was a very strange experience. I felt quite undressed. It was not until late afternoon that I became confident that my pants really would stay on. I continually had to haul on them and adjust them so that the knees wouldn't overstretch -- when they're more-or-less fixed at the hip you have to pull them up to get slack at the knees.
A queer costume, the belt at the waist. It strikes me as very odd that the national male costume should rely on a feature that only maybe half of my countrymen possess -- to wit, a concavity below the ribs. I have no such concavity. I have a decided convexity. In which case, the only two options are to belt above the stomach -- which would make me look my age with a vengeance, clearly no option at all -- or to wear the belt along the top of the iliac crest, nicely outlining and emphasizing the pot of the belly. I looked around today at how men were wearing their trousers, and they were all doing the same thing -- wearing their belts around their hips. In a culture rather hysterically obsessed with slimness, the choice of a costume that draws attention to these bulges seems downright perverse, the equivalent of people who in conversation compulsively mention exactly what they wish to conceal.
Last year, looking at the wedding pictures of a Nigerian friend, I was greatly struck by the formal male dress -- wonderful garments that emphasized the shoulders and fell gracefully to the mid-thigh. Why don't we wear something like those? A potbelly is practically invisible in them. And you could breathe. I couldn't breathe freely, wearing that belt. I found myself hitching it up to take a deep breath, from time to time.
So I tried. But it's back to suspenders today. If you missed it, you'll have to wait another twenty-five years, I'm afraid.
Yesterday it was possible to see something that has not been seen in public since the early 1980s. It has not appeared in the news at all; I'm not sure why. But yesterday you could have observed your correspondent on the city streets wearing a shirt that was not a polo shirt, trousers that were not jeans, and a belt.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not suspenders. A belt. I have been seen occasionally in trousers other than jeans, and in shirts that were not polo shirts, in the last twenty-five years. But never without suspenders. ("Braces," to you Englanders; although here "braces" refer specifically to non-stretchy suspenders, especially as worn by skinheads.)
It was a very strange experience. I felt quite undressed. It was not until late afternoon that I became confident that my pants really would stay on. I continually had to haul on them and adjust them so that the knees wouldn't overstretch -- when they're more-or-less fixed at the hip you have to pull them up to get slack at the knees.
A queer costume, the belt at the waist. It strikes me as very odd that the national male costume should rely on a feature that only maybe half of my countrymen possess -- to wit, a concavity below the ribs. I have no such concavity. I have a decided convexity. In which case, the only two options are to belt above the stomach -- which would make me look my age with a vengeance, clearly no option at all -- or to wear the belt along the top of the iliac crest, nicely outlining and emphasizing the pot of the belly. I looked around today at how men were wearing their trousers, and they were all doing the same thing -- wearing their belts around their hips. In a culture rather hysterically obsessed with slimness, the choice of a costume that draws attention to these bulges seems downright perverse, the equivalent of people who in conversation compulsively mention exactly what they wish to conceal.
Last year, looking at the wedding pictures of a Nigerian friend, I was greatly struck by the formal male dress -- wonderful garments that emphasized the shoulders and fell gracefully to the mid-thigh. Why don't we wear something like those? A potbelly is practically invisible in them. And you could breathe. I couldn't breathe freely, wearing that belt. I found myself hitching it up to take a deep breath, from time to time.
So I tried. But it's back to suspenders today. If you missed it, you'll have to wait another twenty-five years, I'm afraid.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Harry Potter and the Decline of Literary Civilization
Is Harry Potter Dreadful, and does his popularity signify the end of literary civilization?
Chris Clarke linked to this piece, by Matthew Yglesias, about someone who wrote that people who read Harry Potter never read any real novels, and which -- the Yglesias piece, I mean -- had a long tail of comments. I found it all very odd. You see, the problem, for me, is that I'm far more snobbish and old fashioned than the person who didn't like Harry Potter. I don't think novels are high literature at all. To me the people fretting about Harry displacing real novels are just as off-track as the people who think that Harry Potter is as good as literature ever gets.
I enjoy novels enormously. But the novel is simply not a very important part of literature. It's been hugely, hugely popular for about a century and a half, and for a rather shorter time it's been taken seriously in universities. Of course I like them. For the same reasons you do. Because we share this odd historical moment. But that doesn't make them important.
Some novels are good. Some of them are thoughtful. Some are enthralling. But storytelling, though a fine and venerable craft, is not, to my mind, an art. Poetry is an art. I'm sure people will still be reading poetry five hundred years from now. Will they still be reading novels? I doubt it. Novel-reading is a peculiar activity, taken in a wide historical context, and literary novel-reading is more peculiar still.
I admit that I find "literary" novels -- the ones written since the 1920's or so, in conscious hopes of achieving literary immortality -- ridiculous and unreadable. I haven't read one in years: to me they're a waste of time. Even when they're mercifully short, they're horribly long winded and pompous, portentous and solemn, nervously clutching at a high seriousness that they can't quite keep hold of. Some people enjoy reading them, or do read them anyway, and I wish them godspeed. I'm not going to join them though.
I like the Harry Potter books a lot. I think they're a good series of novels. I don't think they're the modern equivalent of Aeschylus. But then, I don't think Don DeLillo -- or whoever we're supposed to take seriously nowadays; as I've already admitted, I don't read the stuff -- is the modern equivalent of Aeschylus either. I much prefer reading Harry Potter, because Rowling is not under the delusion that she's Aeschylus. She's a storyteller, and she sits comfortably in the storyteller's chair. I think that's nice. I like it.
High literature has, to me, one unmistakeable marker. You would memorize it, if you had the time, and not find it tedious to do so. It has that intensity, that richness of meaning and beauty of sound, that you're willing to etch it into your synapses. Nobody, I hope, is going to memorize the Harry Potter novels. No one is going to memorize Don DeLillo either. They're simply not worth it. Read and reread them, sure. Go to them for comfort and instruction. (I'm sure people do that with DeLillo, even if my imagination can't quite make the leap to picturing it.)
Five hundred years from now, should our species get so far, people are still going to be memorizing Aeschylus, Li Po, and Shakespeare. They will not even be reading Rowling or DeLillo. Or Conrad or Dickens, for that matter, unless they're scholars or antiquarians. Novels are ephemeral.
That doesn't make them worthless. And of course in a larger sense, all literature -- and the one species we know of that produces it -- is ephemeral. That's worth remembering too. So let's not get too het up about it all. Even high literature is not that important.
Well. I don't believe all that. Oh, I believe that the novel is a minor form and that its current vogue will pass. But the "high literature" and "art" stuff? Nah. It's just fun to get up above someone who thinks they've taken the high ground and take a few potshots.
Real novels are, and always have been, popular, longwinded, repetitive, and meandering. It's the genius of the form. I am entirely with C.S. Lewis, who snorted, "who ever bothered about style in a novel, until all else was lost?" Sure, you can write a concise novel with style coming out its ears, and excite critics into using words like "lapidary," and keep pulling the reader up short by leaving out the usual repetitions and redundancy of storytelling. But you haven't written a novel, really -- you've pulled off a party trick.
I like the Harry Potter novels. The theme of them is that it's better to be kind than nasty. It's a perfectly good theme -- it's the theme of most of Dickens's best novels -- and I'm a little bewildered by the dislike they seem to inspire, even in some people that I know to be very kindly. They're not challenging novels, for the most part -- they don't put you through a moral or intellectual wringer, if you're well-read, anyway -- but Rowling has in spades what most modern novelists lack: invention. She's very like Dickens, who was also defiantly lowbrow, stole plots and characters anywhere he could find them, and pandered shamelessly to the crowd. Both of them, you have the feeling, could go on pulling rabbits out of their hats indefinitely. An infinite wealth of throwaway character and incident. It's the sheer abundance that delights. They are, in every best sense of a much-abused word, liberal.
Is Harry Potter Dreadful, and does his popularity signify the end of literary civilization?
Chris Clarke linked to this piece, by Matthew Yglesias, about someone who wrote that people who read Harry Potter never read any real novels, and which -- the Yglesias piece, I mean -- had a long tail of comments. I found it all very odd. You see, the problem, for me, is that I'm far more snobbish and old fashioned than the person who didn't like Harry Potter. I don't think novels are high literature at all. To me the people fretting about Harry displacing real novels are just as off-track as the people who think that Harry Potter is as good as literature ever gets.
I enjoy novels enormously. But the novel is simply not a very important part of literature. It's been hugely, hugely popular for about a century and a half, and for a rather shorter time it's been taken seriously in universities. Of course I like them. For the same reasons you do. Because we share this odd historical moment. But that doesn't make them important.
Some novels are good. Some of them are thoughtful. Some are enthralling. But storytelling, though a fine and venerable craft, is not, to my mind, an art. Poetry is an art. I'm sure people will still be reading poetry five hundred years from now. Will they still be reading novels? I doubt it. Novel-reading is a peculiar activity, taken in a wide historical context, and literary novel-reading is more peculiar still.
I admit that I find "literary" novels -- the ones written since the 1920's or so, in conscious hopes of achieving literary immortality -- ridiculous and unreadable. I haven't read one in years: to me they're a waste of time. Even when they're mercifully short, they're horribly long winded and pompous, portentous and solemn, nervously clutching at a high seriousness that they can't quite keep hold of. Some people enjoy reading them, or do read them anyway, and I wish them godspeed. I'm not going to join them though.
I like the Harry Potter books a lot. I think they're a good series of novels. I don't think they're the modern equivalent of Aeschylus. But then, I don't think Don DeLillo -- or whoever we're supposed to take seriously nowadays; as I've already admitted, I don't read the stuff -- is the modern equivalent of Aeschylus either. I much prefer reading Harry Potter, because Rowling is not under the delusion that she's Aeschylus. She's a storyteller, and she sits comfortably in the storyteller's chair. I think that's nice. I like it.
High literature has, to me, one unmistakeable marker. You would memorize it, if you had the time, and not find it tedious to do so. It has that intensity, that richness of meaning and beauty of sound, that you're willing to etch it into your synapses. Nobody, I hope, is going to memorize the Harry Potter novels. No one is going to memorize Don DeLillo either. They're simply not worth it. Read and reread them, sure. Go to them for comfort and instruction. (I'm sure people do that with DeLillo, even if my imagination can't quite make the leap to picturing it.)
Five hundred years from now, should our species get so far, people are still going to be memorizing Aeschylus, Li Po, and Shakespeare. They will not even be reading Rowling or DeLillo. Or Conrad or Dickens, for that matter, unless they're scholars or antiquarians. Novels are ephemeral.
That doesn't make them worthless. And of course in a larger sense, all literature -- and the one species we know of that produces it -- is ephemeral. That's worth remembering too. So let's not get too het up about it all. Even high literature is not that important.
Well. I don't believe all that. Oh, I believe that the novel is a minor form and that its current vogue will pass. But the "high literature" and "art" stuff? Nah. It's just fun to get up above someone who thinks they've taken the high ground and take a few potshots.
Real novels are, and always have been, popular, longwinded, repetitive, and meandering. It's the genius of the form. I am entirely with C.S. Lewis, who snorted, "who ever bothered about style in a novel, until all else was lost?" Sure, you can write a concise novel with style coming out its ears, and excite critics into using words like "lapidary," and keep pulling the reader up short by leaving out the usual repetitions and redundancy of storytelling. But you haven't written a novel, really -- you've pulled off a party trick.
I like the Harry Potter novels. The theme of them is that it's better to be kind than nasty. It's a perfectly good theme -- it's the theme of most of Dickens's best novels -- and I'm a little bewildered by the dislike they seem to inspire, even in some people that I know to be very kindly. They're not challenging novels, for the most part -- they don't put you through a moral or intellectual wringer, if you're well-read, anyway -- but Rowling has in spades what most modern novelists lack: invention. She's very like Dickens, who was also defiantly lowbrow, stole plots and characters anywhere he could find them, and pandered shamelessly to the crowd. Both of them, you have the feeling, could go on pulling rabbits out of their hats indefinitely. An infinite wealth of throwaway character and incident. It's the sheer abundance that delights. They are, in every best sense of a much-abused word, liberal.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
The Disconsolate Chimaera
The handlebars on my bicycle came loose again. Politely -- they just shifted a bit, giving me plenty of warning. But by the time I got to Tosi's, though, they were moving pretty freely. It's interesting to ride without putting any weight on the handlebars -- the brakes and gearshift are on the bars, so I have to squeeze and turn them, while keeping the vector sum of all the force I apply to the bars at zero. It's entertaining, though it would be more entertaining if I didn't know that an abrupt emergency would certainly make me lose control of the bike. It's fine to ride no-hands; we did it all the time as kids. But dodging, swerving, evading...? No. I think I should take it into the shop and have them bolt the bars (and the seat) where I want them. I know where that is, now. They don't need to be adjustable any more.
I love this bicycle: it's the tangible sign of my freedom. My equivalent of the midlife-crisis crimson sports car.
Yesterday was the one of the first real resurrections of discontent. It should have been the perfect day: a practice session with Lana, trying to incorporate the rudiments of shiatsu and tui na, and then a lovely massage from Tele. But Lana talked the whole time I was working on her, friendly conversation; I wondered toward the end if I were really still working on her, or if it was just a pretense to open up the space for talking. And Tele seemed faintly uncomfortable, and ready to be gone at the end. I was left feeling a little mournful. Though I would have said, a year ago, that this was all I wanted in the world -- this kind of touch, this intimacy, this trust.
They're too young to be entirely easy friends: there's always a problem of translation. The world you inhabit at thirty is different from the world you inhabit at fifty. And coming of age in the nineties left different marks from the marks left by coming of age in the seventies. Vocabularies shift subtly. The dominant preoccupations, with which or against which we framed our identities, were different.
But that's just "the presenting problem," as I believe psychologists call it. The pretext for dissatisfaction. The real problem is that achieving this -- getting what is, supposedly, all I want -- didn't change anything drastically. I still ache, I still want. There's still an empty space that won't be filled. I'm old enough not to have expected that it would be -- consciously -- but unconsciously I did, and I found myself vaguely resentful and petulant. Spiritual longings are not to be satisfied by the pleasures of the world; not even by the pleasures of touch and friendship. But it's so easy to let myself be washed into the current of believing they will be. It runs strong. Lots of people want me to believe it, desperately, because it will help them believe in its possibility too.
Never enough. "Nothing touches the tired spot," as Lincoln said. It's palpable to me sometimes, the desire that you have for me to have achieved a life in which the world makes me content. In which the tired spot is rubbed away by magically good massage. And I know that from time to time I have pandered to that desire, teased it up, suggested or implied that it was so, could be so, was about to be so. I me me mine --
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimaera.
The handlebars on my bicycle came loose again. Politely -- they just shifted a bit, giving me plenty of warning. But by the time I got to Tosi's, though, they were moving pretty freely. It's interesting to ride without putting any weight on the handlebars -- the brakes and gearshift are on the bars, so I have to squeeze and turn them, while keeping the vector sum of all the force I apply to the bars at zero. It's entertaining, though it would be more entertaining if I didn't know that an abrupt emergency would certainly make me lose control of the bike. It's fine to ride no-hands; we did it all the time as kids. But dodging, swerving, evading...? No. I think I should take it into the shop and have them bolt the bars (and the seat) where I want them. I know where that is, now. They don't need to be adjustable any more.
I love this bicycle: it's the tangible sign of my freedom. My equivalent of the midlife-crisis crimson sports car.
Yesterday was the one of the first real resurrections of discontent. It should have been the perfect day: a practice session with Lana, trying to incorporate the rudiments of shiatsu and tui na, and then a lovely massage from Tele. But Lana talked the whole time I was working on her, friendly conversation; I wondered toward the end if I were really still working on her, or if it was just a pretense to open up the space for talking. And Tele seemed faintly uncomfortable, and ready to be gone at the end. I was left feeling a little mournful. Though I would have said, a year ago, that this was all I wanted in the world -- this kind of touch, this intimacy, this trust.
They're too young to be entirely easy friends: there's always a problem of translation. The world you inhabit at thirty is different from the world you inhabit at fifty. And coming of age in the nineties left different marks from the marks left by coming of age in the seventies. Vocabularies shift subtly. The dominant preoccupations, with which or against which we framed our identities, were different.
But that's just "the presenting problem," as I believe psychologists call it. The pretext for dissatisfaction. The real problem is that achieving this -- getting what is, supposedly, all I want -- didn't change anything drastically. I still ache, I still want. There's still an empty space that won't be filled. I'm old enough not to have expected that it would be -- consciously -- but unconsciously I did, and I found myself vaguely resentful and petulant. Spiritual longings are not to be satisfied by the pleasures of the world; not even by the pleasures of touch and friendship. But it's so easy to let myself be washed into the current of believing they will be. It runs strong. Lots of people want me to believe it, desperately, because it will help them believe in its possibility too.
Never enough. "Nothing touches the tired spot," as Lincoln said. It's palpable to me sometimes, the desire that you have for me to have achieved a life in which the world makes me content. In which the tired spot is rubbed away by magically good massage. And I know that from time to time I have pandered to that desire, teased it up, suggested or implied that it was so, could be so, was about to be so. I me me mine --
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimaera.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Posted on the Bathroom Mirror this Morning
"We think of it as a system," said Dr Terence Cloth, of the BMRC at the University of Minnesota. "It's a group dynamic, really. Often you'll have one family member -- you know, supposedly well -- who'll be picking a wet bathmat up of the floor three, four, five times a day. Enabling. It's sad, really -- they think they're helping, but of course they're just perpetuating the cycle."
There is hope, adds Dr Cloth. "At the Bathmat Rehabilitation Center we've had significant results from negative feedback training. What in layman's terms you might call 'whoppin 'em upside the head.'"
Researchers at the Dry Foot Clinic in New York City, however, which also treats the disease, take a different approach. According to Dr Tinea Pedis, "We're finding two lines of research promising. The fundamental theoretical problem of Bathmat Neglect is, why does it happen at all? After all, what could be easier than picking a bathmat off the floor and hanging it up? One line of research suggests that the underlying cause is a fear of completion. The patient doesn't want to admit that he's done getting ready for the day, so he puts off hanging up the mat, and puts it off, and puts it off, until he's late for work and rushes from the room -- leaving the bathmat on the floor, of course. We've developed some excellent mindfulness techniques that seem to help with this.
"The other line of research has to do with perception. Some people, we hypothesize, are so accustomed to having the mat on the floor that they quite literally don't see it. We ran an elegant little experiment in which people leaving the bathroom were interviewed about its contents: a surprising percentage showed no awareness of the bathmat at all." Her colleague, Dr Srinivas Fungal, is experimenting with helmets that force patients' heads forward, so that they look always at the floor. "So far," he admits, "patients don't seem to like to use them."
"We think of it as a system," said Dr Terence Cloth, of the BMRC at the University of Minnesota. "It's a group dynamic, really. Often you'll have one family member -- you know, supposedly well -- who'll be picking a wet bathmat up of the floor three, four, five times a day. Enabling. It's sad, really -- they think they're helping, but of course they're just perpetuating the cycle."
There is hope, adds Dr Cloth. "At the Bathmat Rehabilitation Center we've had significant results from negative feedback training. What in layman's terms you might call 'whoppin 'em upside the head.'"
Researchers at the Dry Foot Clinic in New York City, however, which also treats the disease, take a different approach. According to Dr Tinea Pedis, "We're finding two lines of research promising. The fundamental theoretical problem of Bathmat Neglect is, why does it happen at all? After all, what could be easier than picking a bathmat off the floor and hanging it up? One line of research suggests that the underlying cause is a fear of completion. The patient doesn't want to admit that he's done getting ready for the day, so he puts off hanging up the mat, and puts it off, and puts it off, until he's late for work and rushes from the room -- leaving the bathmat on the floor, of course. We've developed some excellent mindfulness techniques that seem to help with this.
"The other line of research has to do with perception. Some people, we hypothesize, are so accustomed to having the mat on the floor that they quite literally don't see it. We ran an elegant little experiment in which people leaving the bathroom were interviewed about its contents: a surprising percentage showed no awareness of the bathmat at all." Her colleague, Dr Srinivas Fungal, is experimenting with helmets that force patients' heads forward, so that they look always at the floor. "So far," he admits, "patients don't seem to like to use them."
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The Wanderer (complete)
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.
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.
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.
A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.
Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.
I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.
A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.
All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.
So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:
Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast?
Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!
The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.
Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.
So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
for the grace of our Father in heaven.
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.
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.
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.
A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.
Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.
I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.
A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.
All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.
So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:
Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast?
Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!
The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.
Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.
So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
for the grace of our Father in heaven.
The Wanderer (V)
Here is the end of the poem. Spears were made of ash-wood, and ash-trees are emblematic of fate in Germanic mythology; the poet is drawing liberally on both his cultural traditions, both of which emphasize the shortness and fragility of life in this world.
The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.
Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.
So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
For the grace of our Father in heaven.
Here is the end of the poem. Spears were made of ash-wood, and ash-trees are emblematic of fate in Germanic mythology; the poet is drawing liberally on both his cultural traditions, both of which emphasize the shortness and fragility of life in this world.
The warriors have been carried away
By the ash-wood's power,
By death-greedy weapons, by Wyrd in its glory;
And these stone cliffs are beaten by storms.
Frost settles, and grips the ground,
Declaring winter. The dark comes,
The night-shadow darkens; it sends from the North
Raw hail against raised faces.
Everything is earned with pain
In this earth's kingdom; below heaven
It is Wyrd that turns this world.
Brief the time of having, brief the time of home,
Brief the time of family, brief the time of friends.
All the works of this world lose their worth.
So he said to himself, sitting apart in thought:
Well for him who keeps faith, and doesn't uncover too soon
What's deep in his heart, till he knows what to do,
How to mend matters; well for him who looks for mercy --
For our only solid ground --
For the grace of our Father in heaven.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Paris is worth a Mass
For class I'm supposed to write about my responses to learning the theory of Traditional Asian Medicine. They're all over the map.
First of all, I love it, just as a new system to learn -- lots of complicated interlocking parts, a new nomenclature. The same hunger for new intelligibilities that drives me always to be studying new languages and new computer systems eats this right up. And there's the fascination (which it has in common with languages) of feeling my way into a set of cultural assumptions, mental habits, and protocols. Trying to think my way into a mind that feels that concepts as disparate (to me) as wood, fire, and earth have the same taxonomic status. I love that sort of thing.
There's the frustration of having to rely on translators and interpretors, of unknown reliability, which always frustrates me. I spent a year or two studying Chinese, but it completely defeated me; now I remember only a handful of words, a character or two. I won't be learning Chinese in this lifetime. So everything that comes to me is already filtered and shifted by at least one or two -- probably more like a dozen -- Western intermediaries. The little shifts and transformations they've made will be invisible to me.
I find the symmetry and regularity of the system deeply satisfying, but deeply suspicious. Suspicious precisely because it's satisfying: I can't help thinking that some of these elaborate correspondences will have been filled in simply to make the sets complete. Human beings work that way. Our minds leap to perceive patterns, and often enough the patterns they seize upon aren't really there, or aren't as complete and regular as we perceive them to be.
(The meridians, the "energy channels," by the way, are reassuringly quirky and unexpected; nobody trying for an elegant system would invent all these queer jogs and backtracks, oddities like the bifurcation of the Bladder Meridian on the back or the Kidney meridian's little twirl below the ankle. These have the continually surprising shape of reality.)
As a long-time Buddhist I have some philosophical problems with the principles (which I'll sloppily call "Taoist") underlying much of Chinese medicine -- the conceptions of qi, yin, and yang. Taoism views Nature as aligned and balanced, and civilized man as out of whack and unbalanced, which is a dualism, to my mind, just as ill-considered and pernicious as the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. And the emotional equanimity championed by Taoists doesn't satisfy me. I'm after ecstasy, more than tranquility.
I have no problems with the fact that qi is not, for the most part, directly measurable. And my only problem with the conception of the self implicit in this system is the age-old dispute about whether the self, the individual atman, is a permutation of a greater atman (God's) or delusion pure and simple. (I tend to go with delusion.)
The scientific unverifiability of much of this theory (not of much of this practice, which has a good track record) bothers me only because systematic theories that aren't subject to some sort of rigorous verification tend to turn into ratifications of what people already think is true. I don't care whether the verification is scientific, or by way of a rigorous meditative or yogic discipline, but without disciplined verification, what you generally get is wish-fulfillment fantasies. So I view the enthusiasm of some of my fellow-students with some skepticism.
I guess the bottom line for me is experiential. I don't need to believe that the theory is correct. I don't, after all, believe that the scientific materialist theory of reality is correct either, but I use it and its insights all the time. What I know is that someone trained within this framework can give a massage much more powerful and effective than anything I can usually do, at present. I want that. As that Protestant contender for the French throne (Henri of Navarre?) said, on adopting Catholicism, "Paris is worth a mass."
For class I'm supposed to write about my responses to learning the theory of Traditional Asian Medicine. They're all over the map.
First of all, I love it, just as a new system to learn -- lots of complicated interlocking parts, a new nomenclature. The same hunger for new intelligibilities that drives me always to be studying new languages and new computer systems eats this right up. And there's the fascination (which it has in common with languages) of feeling my way into a set of cultural assumptions, mental habits, and protocols. Trying to think my way into a mind that feels that concepts as disparate (to me) as wood, fire, and earth have the same taxonomic status. I love that sort of thing.
There's the frustration of having to rely on translators and interpretors, of unknown reliability, which always frustrates me. I spent a year or two studying Chinese, but it completely defeated me; now I remember only a handful of words, a character or two. I won't be learning Chinese in this lifetime. So everything that comes to me is already filtered and shifted by at least one or two -- probably more like a dozen -- Western intermediaries. The little shifts and transformations they've made will be invisible to me.
I find the symmetry and regularity of the system deeply satisfying, but deeply suspicious. Suspicious precisely because it's satisfying: I can't help thinking that some of these elaborate correspondences will have been filled in simply to make the sets complete. Human beings work that way. Our minds leap to perceive patterns, and often enough the patterns they seize upon aren't really there, or aren't as complete and regular as we perceive them to be.
(The meridians, the "energy channels," by the way, are reassuringly quirky and unexpected; nobody trying for an elegant system would invent all these queer jogs and backtracks, oddities like the bifurcation of the Bladder Meridian on the back or the Kidney meridian's little twirl below the ankle. These have the continually surprising shape of reality.)
As a long-time Buddhist I have some philosophical problems with the principles (which I'll sloppily call "Taoist") underlying much of Chinese medicine -- the conceptions of qi, yin, and yang. Taoism views Nature as aligned and balanced, and civilized man as out of whack and unbalanced, which is a dualism, to my mind, just as ill-considered and pernicious as the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. And the emotional equanimity championed by Taoists doesn't satisfy me. I'm after ecstasy, more than tranquility.
I have no problems with the fact that qi is not, for the most part, directly measurable. And my only problem with the conception of the self implicit in this system is the age-old dispute about whether the self, the individual atman, is a permutation of a greater atman (God's) or delusion pure and simple. (I tend to go with delusion.)
The scientific unverifiability of much of this theory (not of much of this practice, which has a good track record) bothers me only because systematic theories that aren't subject to some sort of rigorous verification tend to turn into ratifications of what people already think is true. I don't care whether the verification is scientific, or by way of a rigorous meditative or yogic discipline, but without disciplined verification, what you generally get is wish-fulfillment fantasies. So I view the enthusiasm of some of my fellow-students with some skepticism.
I guess the bottom line for me is experiential. I don't need to believe that the theory is correct. I don't, after all, believe that the scientific materialist theory of reality is correct either, but I use it and its insights all the time. What I know is that someone trained within this framework can give a massage much more powerful and effective than anything I can usually do, at present. I want that. As that Protestant contender for the French throne (Henri of Navarre?) said, on adopting Catholicism, "Paris is worth a mass."
Friday, July 13, 2007
The Wanderer (IV)
So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:
Here follows the passage that is, rightfully, the most famous ubi sunt in Old English poetry. Tolkien rewrote a version of it, a very good one, as a sample of the poetry of the Riders of Rohan, and thence, altered again, it actually appeared on the lips of Theoden in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movie -- the only bit of Old English poetry, that I know of, ever to have reached a mass audience.
Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast? Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!
Difficulties for the translator abound. First of all: hwaer com mearh? is not exactly "where is the horse?" It is not even "where has the horse gone?" Literally it's "where came horse?" Maybe I'm being too finicky, but it seems to me of great importance that the speaker actually locates himself in the same place as all these lost things -- they haven't gone away from him, they have come to the same place he has -- the place of ruin and loss. I was tempted to try "where has the horse come to?" or even "what has the horse come to?" and I might have gone with it, except that the question is repeated twice, with different subjects, and what is iffy once becomes emphatically ridiculous three times in a row. Tolkien's solution is the neatest and most economical, I think -- dropping the question of coming and going altogether, and saying simply "where is the horse?" (I don't know, by the way, that Tolkien invented this solution, only that he used it. I'm deliberately avoiding other translations till I'm done.)
The other thing that defeated me was the alliteration. All three subjects in the first two lines of the ubi sunt alliterate, in the Old English -- mearh, magu, mathum-giefa -- mare, man, and mathom-giver -- and it's important that they should do so. But I could not for the life of me come up with three plain but suitable words that would alliterate in Modern English, and here of all places the diction needed to be simple, clean, straightforward. So I surrendered, I hope gracefully. The first two lines alliterate, if you can call it that, on nothing but the repetition of "where?"
Then there's "ea-la!" (the "ea" is a diphthong, a long 'a' sliding into 'aw'.) Most people translate it as "alas!" but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It's accurate enough, and etymologically correct, but its associations are disastrous. Love-sick swains, Romeos, and Ophelias say "alas!" -- not hardbitten soldiers. Since it has no real semantic content, I decided it didn't need to be translated at all, that it wouldn't hurt anyone to have to learn the sound, in Old English, of inarticulate grief.
So a man who thinks through it all --
This dark life, this deep-laid wall --
Wise-minded, he remembers
War's slaughter, and speaks these words:
Here follows the passage that is, rightfully, the most famous ubi sunt in Old English poetry. Tolkien rewrote a version of it, a very good one, as a sample of the poetry of the Riders of Rohan, and thence, altered again, it actually appeared on the lips of Theoden in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movie -- the only bit of Old English poetry, that I know of, ever to have reached a mass audience.
Where is the horse? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the places at the feast? Where are the pleasures of the hall?
Ea-la, the bright cup! Ea-la, the burnished warrior!
Ea-la, the prince's glory! How the time departs,
Darkens under the helmet of night, as if it had never been!
Difficulties for the translator abound. First of all: hwaer com mearh? is not exactly "where is the horse?" It is not even "where has the horse gone?" Literally it's "where came horse?" Maybe I'm being too finicky, but it seems to me of great importance that the speaker actually locates himself in the same place as all these lost things -- they haven't gone away from him, they have come to the same place he has -- the place of ruin and loss. I was tempted to try "where has the horse come to?" or even "what has the horse come to?" and I might have gone with it, except that the question is repeated twice, with different subjects, and what is iffy once becomes emphatically ridiculous three times in a row. Tolkien's solution is the neatest and most economical, I think -- dropping the question of coming and going altogether, and saying simply "where is the horse?" (I don't know, by the way, that Tolkien invented this solution, only that he used it. I'm deliberately avoiding other translations till I'm done.)
The other thing that defeated me was the alliteration. All three subjects in the first two lines of the ubi sunt alliterate, in the Old English -- mearh, magu, mathum-giefa -- mare, man, and mathom-giver -- and it's important that they should do so. But I could not for the life of me come up with three plain but suitable words that would alliterate in Modern English, and here of all places the diction needed to be simple, clean, straightforward. So I surrendered, I hope gracefully. The first two lines alliterate, if you can call it that, on nothing but the repetition of "where?"
Then there's "ea-la!" (the "ea" is a diphthong, a long 'a' sliding into 'aw'.) Most people translate it as "alas!" but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It's accurate enough, and etymologically correct, but its associations are disastrous. Love-sick swains, Romeos, and Ophelias say "alas!" -- not hardbitten soldiers. Since it has no real semantic content, I decided it didn't need to be translated at all, that it wouldn't hurt anyone to have to learn the sound, in Old English, of inarticulate grief.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
In the Oven
A cloud cover of remote silver scales, heavy with the impending heat of the day; already there's a dusky shadow in the air. A couple of fat raindrops struck my face as I rode my bike here, but that's all we'll get, I think. It will be another day in the sky's oven. It is not so much that I mind the heat, as that I mind seeing Oregon gasping this way. East Texas is supposed to be like this, not the Willamette Valley.
Dress rehearsal for clinic last night. Next week I'll have my first-ever paying clients. Last year at this time I was still working, or rather not working, in my cubicle in Beaverton. That seems a very very long time ago. Although it also seems like I just started massage school -- that I can't possibly be in my last quarter.
My last class, besides Clinic, is "Survey of Modalities" ("modalities" being the odd and highfalutin, though standard, name for different kinds of massage; I guess "Survey of Sorts" struck someone as falling short of the high dignity of our calling.) It has no prerequisites, so there are some beginning students in it, people who aren't used to whipping the sheets on and off a table and matter-of-factly shedding clothes, and who are still stumbling over "coracoid process," confusing it with "coronoid process," or even coming up with the enchanting "congoloid process," which really ought to be the name of something. I'm so used to feeling like a raw beginner in this that to feel like an old hand is somehow unpleasant -- distancing. I have loved this so deeply, being a student again. A student is what I am, always have been, always will be; I love learning new things. I'm so grateful to have had this chance to be what I am again, for a lovely luminous year.
A cloud cover of remote silver scales, heavy with the impending heat of the day; already there's a dusky shadow in the air. A couple of fat raindrops struck my face as I rode my bike here, but that's all we'll get, I think. It will be another day in the sky's oven. It is not so much that I mind the heat, as that I mind seeing Oregon gasping this way. East Texas is supposed to be like this, not the Willamette Valley.
Dress rehearsal for clinic last night. Next week I'll have my first-ever paying clients. Last year at this time I was still working, or rather not working, in my cubicle in Beaverton. That seems a very very long time ago. Although it also seems like I just started massage school -- that I can't possibly be in my last quarter.
My last class, besides Clinic, is "Survey of Modalities" ("modalities" being the odd and highfalutin, though standard, name for different kinds of massage; I guess "Survey of Sorts" struck someone as falling short of the high dignity of our calling.) It has no prerequisites, so there are some beginning students in it, people who aren't used to whipping the sheets on and off a table and matter-of-factly shedding clothes, and who are still stumbling over "coracoid process," confusing it with "coronoid process," or even coming up with the enchanting "congoloid process," which really ought to be the name of something. I'm so used to feeling like a raw beginner in this that to feel like an old hand is somehow unpleasant -- distancing. I have loved this so deeply, being a student again. A student is what I am, always have been, always will be; I love learning new things. I'm so grateful to have had this chance to be what I am again, for a lovely luminous year.
Monday, July 09, 2007
The Wanderer (III)
A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.
All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.
Giants. What to do with the giants? Giants to us are irresistably fairy-tale and comic -- since we don't believe in them -- and their presence here can only mystify most modern readers, who can't be expected to know that any impressive stonework of forgotten origin was assumed by the Anglo-Saxons to be the work of giants -- a race struck down by God, ages ago, for their pride and presumption. It is not the first time, that is to say, that God has depopulated this place. At first I tried just leaving the giants out, and no doubt if I had been able to settle on a good line about ancient ruins standing empty I would have done so.
I have to confess that the warriors of this deserted place did not really fall proud by the door-posts. They fell proud by the wall -- wlanc be wealle, one of my favorite formulas of Old English verse. Though to tell the truth though I'm not quite sure what falling proud by the wall means -- possibly it connotes last-ditch struggle -- backs against the wall -- fighting to the last man. But anyway, Modern English has no initial 'wl' sound, more's the pity, and it has no word for pride that I could think of that begins even with plain 'w', and there are already too many "walls" in this section of the poem for my taste -- and more to come -- so I made them fall by the door, with posts to alliterate with proud. (Plus I've always loved the compound "door-post" -- I don't know why. If I were a scholar I couldn't do this, but I'm a massage therapist, and I can do whatever I like.)
A man with eyes will understand
How ghostly it will be when the good
Of the world is all laid waste;
As now here and there, throughout this earth,
Walls stand, swept by the wind,
Frost-white, the courts frozen,
The mead-halls crumbling, their masters lying
Far from the feast; all of them fallen
Proud by the door-posts.
All borne away. Some have been taken in war;
Some, scavenger-birds have scattered
Over the high sea; some the pale wolf
Has shared out with death; some, blood-dabbled,
Have been hidden by friends in scrapes of earth.
The One who made the generations of men
Emptied this earthyard, until --
The noise of its townsmen stopped --
Its old giants' work stood idle.
Giants. What to do with the giants? Giants to us are irresistably fairy-tale and comic -- since we don't believe in them -- and their presence here can only mystify most modern readers, who can't be expected to know that any impressive stonework of forgotten origin was assumed by the Anglo-Saxons to be the work of giants -- a race struck down by God, ages ago, for their pride and presumption. It is not the first time, that is to say, that God has depopulated this place. At first I tried just leaving the giants out, and no doubt if I had been able to settle on a good line about ancient ruins standing empty I would have done so.
I have to confess that the warriors of this deserted place did not really fall proud by the door-posts. They fell proud by the wall -- wlanc be wealle, one of my favorite formulas of Old English verse. Though to tell the truth though I'm not quite sure what falling proud by the wall means -- possibly it connotes last-ditch struggle -- backs against the wall -- fighting to the last man. But anyway, Modern English has no initial 'wl' sound, more's the pity, and it has no word for pride that I could think of that begins even with plain 'w', and there are already too many "walls" in this section of the poem for my taste -- and more to come -- so I made them fall by the door, with posts to alliterate with proud. (Plus I've always loved the compound "door-post" -- I don't know why. If I were a scholar I couldn't do this, but I'm a massage therapist, and I can do whatever I like.)
Saturday, July 07, 2007
The Wanderer (II)
A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.
Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.
The lacing waves is the best I can do for wathuma gebind, literally "the binding of the waves." The image is clear to me -- the way that, after staring at the sea for a long time, you see the waves start to form interweaving patterns, to tie knots in the water. But I didn't like "binding," which has for me its chief connotations with ski technology. I like the sound of "lacing," but it loses an important resonance with the overriding images of constriction and imprisonment. I've played with words for tangling and snaring and knitting and knotting and tying, but nothing has quite come together.
I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.
I cheat sometimes with the alliteration. Here are the rules of alliteration, in brief:
The first sounds of stressed syllables are the only candidates for it. In the first half-line one or both of the two most heavily stressed syllables must begin with the same sound; in the second half-line the first heavily stressed syllable must begin with that sound, and the second must not. My rules have been more lax: I have only required that at least one heavily stressed syllable in each half-line alliterate, and I often alliterate on the second stressed syllable of the second half-line.
What is "the same sound"? In old english, 'sp' and 'st' are their own sounds, and can only rhyme with themselves, not with any old initial 's'. Otherwise things are pretty much as you'd expect, except that any initial vowel rhymes with any other initial vowel -- the absence of a consonant, at the start of a stressed syllable, is perceived, you might say, as a particular sound. Hence my lines such as "He is attended by exile, not golden armrings," where the alliteration is on Exile and Armrings. I have extended this un-consonant to include 'h', since the Modern English 'h' has dwindled from its former throat-clearing rasp to a barely-there aspiration; hence "Of other men's hearts," where I mean Other to alliterate with Hearts. I've taken a few other liberties that an Old English poet would not have allowed himself -- in "He imagines he embraces his lord," for instance, I allowed iMagine to alliterate with emBrace, because to my ear the 'b' in embrace, smothered between its 'm' and 'r', is nearly the same sound as the strong 'm' of imagine. And for me 's' alliterates with 'sp' and 'st', if it has to. Cynewulf would shudder.
A man who must long forgo his friend-lord's counsel
When sorrow and sleep
Both together bind him
He imagines he embraces his lord
Holds him and kisses him, lays hands and head
On his knee, as he used to, years of days ago,
When his lord still gave gifts from the throne.
Then the friendless warrior wakes again
Sees before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds swimming and spreading their feathers
Snow and frost, and falling hail.
Then his heart-wounds are the heavier,
Yearning for the beloved. Longing is renewed
When the memory of kinsmen runs through his mind;
He meets with song-staves, eagerly searches for
The faces of hall-friends. They swim far away;
The fleeting spirits will not speak.
Sorrow is renewed when a man often sends
His weary mind over the lacing waves.
The lacing waves is the best I can do for wathuma gebind, literally "the binding of the waves." The image is clear to me -- the way that, after staring at the sea for a long time, you see the waves start to form interweaving patterns, to tie knots in the water. But I didn't like "binding," which has for me its chief connotations with ski technology. I like the sound of "lacing," but it loses an important resonance with the overriding images of constriction and imprisonment. I've played with words for tangling and snaring and knitting and knotting and tying, but nothing has quite come together.
I can't tell why, wandering this world,
My mind does not darken. I think of the lives of men:
How suddenly bold men leave the board;
How this middle earth, every day,
Withers and fails. No man becomes wise
Without a share of winters, in this world's dominion.
A thoughtful man must bide his time: he cannot be
Too hot-hearted or too hasty with words,
Too timid, too rash, too greedy for goods,
Nor too quick to boast, unless he knows best.
Before he promises, let him pause
Until he knows the turn
Of other men's hearts.
I cheat sometimes with the alliteration. Here are the rules of alliteration, in brief:
The first sounds of stressed syllables are the only candidates for it. In the first half-line one or both of the two most heavily stressed syllables must begin with the same sound; in the second half-line the first heavily stressed syllable must begin with that sound, and the second must not. My rules have been more lax: I have only required that at least one heavily stressed syllable in each half-line alliterate, and I often alliterate on the second stressed syllable of the second half-line.
What is "the same sound"? In old english, 'sp' and 'st' are their own sounds, and can only rhyme with themselves, not with any old initial 's'. Otherwise things are pretty much as you'd expect, except that any initial vowel rhymes with any other initial vowel -- the absence of a consonant, at the start of a stressed syllable, is perceived, you might say, as a particular sound. Hence my lines such as "He is attended by exile, not golden armrings," where the alliteration is on Exile and Armrings. I have extended this un-consonant to include 'h', since the Modern English 'h' has dwindled from its former throat-clearing rasp to a barely-there aspiration; hence "Of other men's hearts," where I mean Other to alliterate with Hearts. I've taken a few other liberties that an Old English poet would not have allowed himself -- in "He imagines he embraces his lord," for instance, I allowed iMagine to alliterate with emBrace, because to my ear the 'b' in embrace, smothered between its 'm' and 'r', is nearly the same sound as the strong 'm' of imagine. And for me 's' alliterates with 'sp' and 'st', if it has to. Cynewulf would shudder.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
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...
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...
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