Okay, I confess, it's kind of groovy. Like, you know, something I would have put on my wall in 1971 when I was thirteen. But I sure am having fun with Inkscape.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Dear One
Our basement has never been entirely dry. With the recent heavy rains, it's been wet again. And a cardboard box of my old papers, Martha told me, had gotten wet.
So I went down and opened it up. Cold and clammy. On the top was a flimsy manuscript box. I lifted its lid. "Appolonius of Tyre," I read. The title page of my second novel. I flipped through the pages. This wasn't the first time, obviously, it had gotten damp. Black mold spotted the upper left corners of the pages; a noxious dust rose from it. I put it aside, made a little queasy, and not by the dust. Presumably my first novel was in here somewhere too.
Old student evaluations. Papers I wrote at Yale on metrics and metonymy. A paper, God help us, on Lao Tzu, written when I was sixteen and going to Lane Community College in Eugene.
Christ. More manila folders. One fell open and I lifted out a closely filled handwritten card. Who on earth was it to? I couldn't read the salutation. "Dear Orn"? Who on earth was that? I read a little, and got accustomed to the hand. Of course. Mary Pat, from grad school, twenty-some years ago now. "Dear One," it began. She was a southerner, who specialized in 18th Century lit, and used that epistolary language of passionate friendship. It must have been written during the summer after our first year in graduate school.
I found her online -- at least I think it was her; her name is fairly common -- and wrote her an email, a couple years ago. She never replied.
I paused. Hundreds, probably thousands of pages. I could look through them, and savor the melancholy of it all. Obviously I once thought I would want to. Or even that somebody else would want to.
I shut the box up and came back upstairs. "Let's just toss it," I said to Martha.
The cold rain keeps falling, here. Floods up north, and towards the Coast.
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day.
Our basement has never been entirely dry. With the recent heavy rains, it's been wet again. And a cardboard box of my old papers, Martha told me, had gotten wet.
So I went down and opened it up. Cold and clammy. On the top was a flimsy manuscript box. I lifted its lid. "Appolonius of Tyre," I read. The title page of my second novel. I flipped through the pages. This wasn't the first time, obviously, it had gotten damp. Black mold spotted the upper left corners of the pages; a noxious dust rose from it. I put it aside, made a little queasy, and not by the dust. Presumably my first novel was in here somewhere too.
Old student evaluations. Papers I wrote at Yale on metrics and metonymy. A paper, God help us, on Lao Tzu, written when I was sixteen and going to Lane Community College in Eugene.
Christ. More manila folders. One fell open and I lifted out a closely filled handwritten card. Who on earth was it to? I couldn't read the salutation. "Dear Orn"? Who on earth was that? I read a little, and got accustomed to the hand. Of course. Mary Pat, from grad school, twenty-some years ago now. "Dear One," it began. She was a southerner, who specialized in 18th Century lit, and used that epistolary language of passionate friendship. It must have been written during the summer after our first year in graduate school.
I found her online -- at least I think it was her; her name is fairly common -- and wrote her an email, a couple years ago. She never replied.
I paused. Hundreds, probably thousands of pages. I could look through them, and savor the melancholy of it all. Obviously I once thought I would want to. Or even that somebody else would want to.
I shut the box up and came back upstairs. "Let's just toss it," I said to Martha.
The cold rain keeps falling, here. Floods up north, and towards the Coast.
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Held by the Forest
I was eleven years old, maybe. I was running pell-mell down a steep path, on the far side of the Hill. Bounding, flying, down the slope.
Abruptly I found myself in empty space. A dirt road cut deeply, unseen, across the path. A moment later I struck the ground with both feet, cartwheeled, and slammed against the leafy floor.
It was suddenly very quiet. The breath was not quite knocked out of me: I could take little sips of air. I lay on my back, quite still. I felt no pain. Both my ankles were quietly reporting zero functionality.
I felt I was floating, as I lay there. Unmoored. Calmly I thought it through. I was about a mile from home. I could crawl that far, if need be. Was anyone home? I couldn't remember. It didn't matter. Someone would be, eventually. The worst-case scenario wasn't so bad. If my back was okay, anyway.
In the meantime, the forest held me. High up, a broken twig rocked against the sky. Every so often a leaf came loose and batted its way down to the ground, with a soft sound like the rustle of a dress.
After a few hours, as it seemed -- I expect it was a couple of minutes -- I could take full breaths. I began cautiously moving my head, my arms, my legs. Taking inventory. Was my back really all right? Apparently so.
My ankles were numb. But I could move my feet. Did that mean they weren't broken? I wasn't sure. But a mile was a long way to crawl.
So I stood up. I had very little sensation in my feet, and it was hard to balance on them: I was standing on numb, useless stubs. But I could walk, with care, with a motion more like wading than walking. Climbing back the way I'd come was out of the question. This road ran south: it had to meet with the back loop eventually. I moved slowly along it.
Sure enough. I found myself in the back loop. A fairly level, fairly straight shot to home. Pins and needles in my ankles now. My feet could tell me a little, now, about the surfaces they encountered.
By the time I had limped home, full sensation was back. Oddly, I don't remember that it ever hurt, then or later.
No one was home. I never told anyone about it. It had been stupid, galloping down an unknown path. I didn't care for anyone to know how foolish I'd been. And my freedom to wander was precious to me. Best not to give anyone the idea that I might come to grief out there.
And anyway, I had been held, held by the forest.
I was eleven years old, maybe. I was running pell-mell down a steep path, on the far side of the Hill. Bounding, flying, down the slope.
Abruptly I found myself in empty space. A dirt road cut deeply, unseen, across the path. A moment later I struck the ground with both feet, cartwheeled, and slammed against the leafy floor.
It was suddenly very quiet. The breath was not quite knocked out of me: I could take little sips of air. I lay on my back, quite still. I felt no pain. Both my ankles were quietly reporting zero functionality.
I felt I was floating, as I lay there. Unmoored. Calmly I thought it through. I was about a mile from home. I could crawl that far, if need be. Was anyone home? I couldn't remember. It didn't matter. Someone would be, eventually. The worst-case scenario wasn't so bad. If my back was okay, anyway.
In the meantime, the forest held me. High up, a broken twig rocked against the sky. Every so often a leaf came loose and batted its way down to the ground, with a soft sound like the rustle of a dress.
After a few hours, as it seemed -- I expect it was a couple of minutes -- I could take full breaths. I began cautiously moving my head, my arms, my legs. Taking inventory. Was my back really all right? Apparently so.
My ankles were numb. But I could move my feet. Did that mean they weren't broken? I wasn't sure. But a mile was a long way to crawl.
So I stood up. I had very little sensation in my feet, and it was hard to balance on them: I was standing on numb, useless stubs. But I could walk, with care, with a motion more like wading than walking. Climbing back the way I'd come was out of the question. This road ran south: it had to meet with the back loop eventually. I moved slowly along it.
Sure enough. I found myself in the back loop. A fairly level, fairly straight shot to home. Pins and needles in my ankles now. My feet could tell me a little, now, about the surfaces they encountered.
By the time I had limped home, full sensation was back. Oddly, I don't remember that it ever hurt, then or later.
No one was home. I never told anyone about it. It had been stupid, galloping down an unknown path. I didn't care for anyone to know how foolish I'd been. And my freedom to wander was precious to me. Best not to give anyone the idea that I might come to grief out there.
And anyway, I had been held, held by the forest.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Gold
The first full sleep after many broken nights. I woke for an hour, and watched the moon climb carefully, twig by twig, over the maple tree. But I slept again. Diminished as I am, a small knot of mammalian warmth in that immensity of cold November air.
The white, deaf, dull-witted cat that fled from our neighbor's when her baby grew into a toddler old enough to catch it, and took up residence in our basement, is moving very slowly. Something bit him under the ear a couple days ago. The abscess burst last nights, and a trail of bloody lymph soaked his white neck, and spotted our quilt. He's skin and bones, under that white winter coat, and it seems impossible that he should live much longer.
The waning year. Already Christmas zealots have put up their lights. More is always better. Why just a Christmas day? Why not a Christmas month? That fatal American reasoning. Oh yes. I am every inch an American.
In the light fog, this morning, everything is soft, gentle, and sad. Tree trunks and telephone poles glow faintly through the shadows of leaf and shrub. Cars wash by on Sandy Boulevard, making a sound very like the sea; the tide of people going to work.
Gold is in my mind this morning: soft gold worked in intricate Celtic designs. I feel not just old, but ancient: something half-remembered from a medieval ballad, or the enigmatic mention of a lost back-story in an epic. A scholar comes upon a list of names in a language attested nowhere else, and he murmurs them over to himself, obscurely moved. I feel like one of those names: a last, faded glyph. A fragment of lost meaning.
The first full sleep after many broken nights. I woke for an hour, and watched the moon climb carefully, twig by twig, over the maple tree. But I slept again. Diminished as I am, a small knot of mammalian warmth in that immensity of cold November air.
The white, deaf, dull-witted cat that fled from our neighbor's when her baby grew into a toddler old enough to catch it, and took up residence in our basement, is moving very slowly. Something bit him under the ear a couple days ago. The abscess burst last nights, and a trail of bloody lymph soaked his white neck, and spotted our quilt. He's skin and bones, under that white winter coat, and it seems impossible that he should live much longer.
The waning year. Already Christmas zealots have put up their lights. More is always better. Why just a Christmas day? Why not a Christmas month? That fatal American reasoning. Oh yes. I am every inch an American.
In the light fog, this morning, everything is soft, gentle, and sad. Tree trunks and telephone poles glow faintly through the shadows of leaf and shrub. Cars wash by on Sandy Boulevard, making a sound very like the sea; the tide of people going to work.
Gold is in my mind this morning: soft gold worked in intricate Celtic designs. I feel not just old, but ancient: something half-remembered from a medieval ballad, or the enigmatic mention of a lost back-story in an epic. A scholar comes upon a list of names in a language attested nowhere else, and he murmurs them over to himself, obscurely moved. I feel like one of those names: a last, faded glyph. A fragment of lost meaning.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
New Leaves
I wonder, would it be too weird for a male bodyworker to specialize in pregnancy massage?
I massaged a couple pregnant women last week. The energy of a pregnant body is intoxicating. Everything's at a high burn. The tissues are fierce and exultant, like the new leaves of Spring: my fingertips start tingling six inches away from the skin. The body's not living for itself anymore. It's doing the most fundamental and necessary thing it ever does, biologically speaking, and every other consideration goes to the wall. It's painfully awake; just being near it wakes me up too.
Meanwhile the mechanical structure of the body is changing radically. The center of gravity is shifting. Ligaments are loosening, and at the same time carrying unaccustomed loads; muscles are working with stresses and at angles they've never handled before. Bodywork is clearly called for. My friend Lekshe tells me that in Nepal pregnant women get massage daily, as a matter of course. Seems ordinary common sense to me. There's not just the discomfort and knotting inevitable with unusual muscular exertion. All the body's proprioception has to be rewired: it literally doesn't know exactly where it is anymore. Massage is exactly what it needs.
I always feel grateful, when I get to do a massage. But especially so, in this case. The body is always a mystery, in the religious sense. Just a little more vividly so, when it's pregnant.
I wonder, would it be too weird for a male bodyworker to specialize in pregnancy massage?
I massaged a couple pregnant women last week. The energy of a pregnant body is intoxicating. Everything's at a high burn. The tissues are fierce and exultant, like the new leaves of Spring: my fingertips start tingling six inches away from the skin. The body's not living for itself anymore. It's doing the most fundamental and necessary thing it ever does, biologically speaking, and every other consideration goes to the wall. It's painfully awake; just being near it wakes me up too.
Meanwhile the mechanical structure of the body is changing radically. The center of gravity is shifting. Ligaments are loosening, and at the same time carrying unaccustomed loads; muscles are working with stresses and at angles they've never handled before. Bodywork is clearly called for. My friend Lekshe tells me that in Nepal pregnant women get massage daily, as a matter of course. Seems ordinary common sense to me. There's not just the discomfort and knotting inevitable with unusual muscular exertion. All the body's proprioception has to be rewired: it literally doesn't know exactly where it is anymore. Massage is exactly what it needs.
I always feel grateful, when I get to do a massage. But especially so, in this case. The body is always a mystery, in the religious sense. Just a little more vividly so, when it's pregnant.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Objects of Delight
Full moon westering; Venus burning brilliantly, evenly, high in the east. I ride past frost-covered cars, my magnet-driven lights winking as I pedal.
I love these lights inordinately. A clever Englishman invented them: a light sits on each axle, and two magnets fixed to the spokes of each wheel drive a little generator as they swoop past it. Hey presto! Lights. No batteries to run down, or to buy, or to forget to buy. There has to be a certain amount of drag; but it's so slight that I can't perceive it. Lift the bike and spin a wheel, and it revolves with just as much apparent freedom as before. A capacitor keeps the lights still blinking for a few minutes after the wheels stop. I did the arithmetic and realized that these fifty-dollar lights would pay for themselves, just in the cost of batteries, within a few months. But the real savings, of course, is just in botheration.
I have been spending carefully, this year, and it gives me a new appreciation for objects. I bought a Sigg water bottle a few weeks ago. It is red, deep red, the reddest and most gorgeous red imaginable. It feels delightful on the mouth as you drink. I adore it.
And then there's the scarf knitted for me by a friend, of the most lovely varicolored wool. It's around my neck as I type now at Tosi's, soft, giving an overall impression of muted and subtle color, but, more carefully examined, glowing with vivid blues and greens and ochres and violets. I wear it as I ride, in this frosty weather. At my destination I will gradually shed gloves, hat, and jacket, as I potter about, but the scarf is always the last to come off, if it comes off at all.
I got my copy of Brilliant Coroners yesterday. It's a beautiful book. Last night I reread, slowly, the first three of its seventeen poets. And today I have been getting Rachel Barenblat's "Psalm for Tuesday" by heart:
It is easy to offer praises
when all the world is green
and gold, when the thrush
trills off and on, at ease
for long sweet minutes...
I have five poems in this book, including what I think are my two best ever ("Fall" and "Santiago.") I've seen my words in books before, but never with so much pleasure. Another object of delight.
I am no end of chuffed to have a place in this book. I am not a real poet. I do my best, but if I have a gift, it's for prose. But there are real poets in this book, poets I've admired for years now: Dave Bonta, Maria Benet, Rachel Barenblat. And poets I've learned to love more recently: Tom Montag, Dick Jones, Ivy Alvarez.
But to me the deepest delight of this book is to find collected the poetry of writers I don't ordinarily think of as poets: Anne-Mieke Swart, Peter Stephens, Rachel Rawlins, Jean Morris, Leslee Masten, Alison Kent, Natalie d'Arbeloff, Elizabeth Adams. And also the elusive, or downright unfindable, Teju Cole and B. E. Wing. They all have startlingly distinctive and mature poetic voices.
What do they all have in common? Well, they are nearly all in my circle of daily blog reads. But the book has, I think, a real unity, which consists of a shared sense that poetry is a form of service, or observance.
...But if I forget the losses
of my friends in the places
we call home and holy
May my poems dry up
Like an empty creekbed.
Noticeably absent is any whiff of the hothouse. These aren't poems written by people because they're trying to be poets; they're poems written by people because they had something to say.
Full moon westering; Venus burning brilliantly, evenly, high in the east. I ride past frost-covered cars, my magnet-driven lights winking as I pedal.
I love these lights inordinately. A clever Englishman invented them: a light sits on each axle, and two magnets fixed to the spokes of each wheel drive a little generator as they swoop past it. Hey presto! Lights. No batteries to run down, or to buy, or to forget to buy. There has to be a certain amount of drag; but it's so slight that I can't perceive it. Lift the bike and spin a wheel, and it revolves with just as much apparent freedom as before. A capacitor keeps the lights still blinking for a few minutes after the wheels stop. I did the arithmetic and realized that these fifty-dollar lights would pay for themselves, just in the cost of batteries, within a few months. But the real savings, of course, is just in botheration.
I have been spending carefully, this year, and it gives me a new appreciation for objects. I bought a Sigg water bottle a few weeks ago. It is red, deep red, the reddest and most gorgeous red imaginable. It feels delightful on the mouth as you drink. I adore it.
And then there's the scarf knitted for me by a friend, of the most lovely varicolored wool. It's around my neck as I type now at Tosi's, soft, giving an overall impression of muted and subtle color, but, more carefully examined, glowing with vivid blues and greens and ochres and violets. I wear it as I ride, in this frosty weather. At my destination I will gradually shed gloves, hat, and jacket, as I potter about, but the scarf is always the last to come off, if it comes off at all.
I got my copy of Brilliant Coroners yesterday. It's a beautiful book. Last night I reread, slowly, the first three of its seventeen poets. And today I have been getting Rachel Barenblat's "Psalm for Tuesday" by heart:
It is easy to offer praises
when all the world is green
and gold, when the thrush
trills off and on, at ease
for long sweet minutes...
I have five poems in this book, including what I think are my two best ever ("Fall" and "Santiago.") I've seen my words in books before, but never with so much pleasure. Another object of delight.
I am no end of chuffed to have a place in this book. I am not a real poet. I do my best, but if I have a gift, it's for prose. But there are real poets in this book, poets I've admired for years now: Dave Bonta, Maria Benet, Rachel Barenblat. And poets I've learned to love more recently: Tom Montag, Dick Jones, Ivy Alvarez.
But to me the deepest delight of this book is to find collected the poetry of writers I don't ordinarily think of as poets: Anne-Mieke Swart, Peter Stephens, Rachel Rawlins, Jean Morris, Leslee Masten, Alison Kent, Natalie d'Arbeloff, Elizabeth Adams. And also the elusive, or downright unfindable, Teju Cole and B. E. Wing. They all have startlingly distinctive and mature poetic voices.
What do they all have in common? Well, they are nearly all in my circle of daily blog reads. But the book has, I think, a real unity, which consists of a shared sense that poetry is a form of service, or observance.
...But if I forget the losses
of my friends in the places
we call home and holy
May my poems dry up
Like an empty creekbed.
Noticeably absent is any whiff of the hothouse. These aren't poems written by people because they're trying to be poets; they're poems written by people because they had something to say.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Inkscapes
Inkscape. It's free, and it's really cool. A vector drawing tool. These are the results of a few minutes' idle doodling with the "star shape" tool.
Inkscape. It's free, and it's really cool. A vector drawing tool. These are the results of a few minutes' idle doodling with the "star shape" tool.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
All of a Piece
Well. Grieving. But I suppose I can, I suppose I must, take this as a gift. And the only way to do that is to take it as the invitation to make my life all of a piece.
A life with no hidden parts. With no reservations. No secret clauses in its treaties. No escape hatches. To be only and completely what I appear to be.
It will not be easy. I can feel already the stirrings of the temptations to seek out a new secret life. At present -- in the clarity offered by grief -- I can see them vividly, in all their grotesquerie. But the grief will fade, and so will the clarity. I must seal it with practice.
I don't think I could live through this again. I really don't. I'm too old. The stress of holding two loves was going to break me.
I will deny nothing, close no door, repudiate no one. We do the best we can, and we love who we love.
Well. Grieving. But I suppose I can, I suppose I must, take this as a gift. And the only way to do that is to take it as the invitation to make my life all of a piece.
A life with no hidden parts. With no reservations. No secret clauses in its treaties. No escape hatches. To be only and completely what I appear to be.
It will not be easy. I can feel already the stirrings of the temptations to seek out a new secret life. At present -- in the clarity offered by grief -- I can see them vividly, in all their grotesquerie. But the grief will fade, and so will the clarity. I must seal it with practice.
I don't think I could live through this again. I really don't. I'm too old. The stress of holding two loves was going to break me.
I will deny nothing, close no door, repudiate no one. We do the best we can, and we love who we love.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Exit Interview
"You're not really a doppelgänger though," I said, at length. "I mean no one could mistake you for me. You're blue."
"I am blue, it's true." He looked sadly at his lurid skin. "There's a red one too, you know. Have you seen him?"
"I've heard of him. I expect he'll be along."
He nodded. He ran his hand through his blue-tinged silver hair, and sighed. He was slumped there on the couch, almost horizontal. "So you're really sending me away."
I was trying to be patient with him, but he always was kind of a sad sack. Why women liked him so much, I couldn't say: I mostly found him irritating.
"Well, you know," I said, "there's really only resources for one of us."
"Only one of us. I suppose so." His eyes filled with tears. Oh, God. He was going to cry. "I gave you the best years of my life," he said.
"Oh, for Christ's sake," I snapped. "You mean you took the best years of your life. From me. When did you really ever give anything to anyone?"
He sighed again. "I meant to," he said, lugubriously. "Grant me that. I meant to."
"Well, you promised to, anyway. That's not quite the same thing."
He was stung and offended. "Hey, 'I told no lies, and all of the truth I could.' I mean, give me that, at least."
"You told a weird amount of truth, anyway. Just enough to make everyone uncomfortable." He looked so miserable that I softened a little. "Okay, look. I don't think we're going to agree on the honesty thing or the giving thing. But I do know the love was real. All too real. Let's just settle accounts with that."
"Love. That's the weird thing. But it's true, you know. It's all that's kept me going. And it kept you going too." He shot a shrewd, wicked look at me.
"I'm not denying it. And before you oh-so-innocently ask – no, I don't know how I'm going to live without you. That's just one of the things we'll have to find out, isn't it?"
Those long, pained silences of his. Those were something I wasn't going to miss at all.
"Isn't it?" I repeated. But the silence had gone flat. I looked up sharply. The couch was empty.
"Oh, Christ," I said, and burst into tears.
"You're not really a doppelgänger though," I said, at length. "I mean no one could mistake you for me. You're blue."
"I am blue, it's true." He looked sadly at his lurid skin. "There's a red one too, you know. Have you seen him?"
"I've heard of him. I expect he'll be along."
He nodded. He ran his hand through his blue-tinged silver hair, and sighed. He was slumped there on the couch, almost horizontal. "So you're really sending me away."
I was trying to be patient with him, but he always was kind of a sad sack. Why women liked him so much, I couldn't say: I mostly found him irritating.
"Well, you know," I said, "there's really only resources for one of us."
"Only one of us. I suppose so." His eyes filled with tears. Oh, God. He was going to cry. "I gave you the best years of my life," he said.
"Oh, for Christ's sake," I snapped. "You mean you took the best years of your life. From me. When did you really ever give anything to anyone?"
He sighed again. "I meant to," he said, lugubriously. "Grant me that. I meant to."
"Well, you promised to, anyway. That's not quite the same thing."
He was stung and offended. "Hey, 'I told no lies, and all of the truth I could.' I mean, give me that, at least."
"You told a weird amount of truth, anyway. Just enough to make everyone uncomfortable." He looked so miserable that I softened a little. "Okay, look. I don't think we're going to agree on the honesty thing or the giving thing. But I do know the love was real. All too real. Let's just settle accounts with that."
"Love. That's the weird thing. But it's true, you know. It's all that's kept me going. And it kept you going too." He shot a shrewd, wicked look at me.
"I'm not denying it. And before you oh-so-innocently ask – no, I don't know how I'm going to live without you. That's just one of the things we'll have to find out, isn't it?"
Those long, pained silences of his. Those were something I wasn't going to miss at all.
"Isn't it?" I repeated. But the silence had gone flat. I looked up sharply. The couch was empty.
"Oh, Christ," I said, and burst into tears.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Red Inside
Yah. I'm tired of poetry. Enough already.
Strange echoes of time, frames shifting. It all changes, and it all remains the same.
The aide slid a needle into my arm, this morning, and fresh bright red blood bubbled into a tube. How odd, that we're carrying this beautiful rich shade of red inside our arteries all the time, hidden out of the light.
The beauty inside. To learn to see it: to shine a light and see that redness, that brightness, filling the body and the mind. The spirit falters, in the darkness and dullness and lethargy of surfaces. I start to believe the surfaces are real, or at least more real than the insides. But the insides are at least as real. The outsides can't subsist for a moment without them.
I am so easily frightened and distracted by surfaces. And I hear the chariot at my back. I have to hold very still, sometimes. The mind, like a nervous greyhound, straining at the leash.
I sat at the table last night, eating a marvelous soup, and wonderful bread, in a beautiful house, with a brilliant poet. And I couldn't reach to the insides. It's baffling sometimes. What stands between? What is getting in our light? I couldn't remember a single poem to ask about. And there was so much I had wanted to ask.
What's getting in our light? I am. And that's why I have to go on retreat. It's not rocket science: I'm getting in our light, that's all. So anxious to make things happen that they can't happen. I need some days of prayer and meditation.
Some things you can't see, if you look straight at them. Among them, people. For the very good reason that to see a person you have to look with their eyes, not your own. So it works better if you're both looking at something else.
I do love the laying on of hands. For its own sake, and for the end-run it makes around my anxiety and diffidence. But it's no substitute for practice.
Yah. I'm tired of poetry. Enough already.
Strange echoes of time, frames shifting. It all changes, and it all remains the same.
The aide slid a needle into my arm, this morning, and fresh bright red blood bubbled into a tube. How odd, that we're carrying this beautiful rich shade of red inside our arteries all the time, hidden out of the light.
The beauty inside. To learn to see it: to shine a light and see that redness, that brightness, filling the body and the mind. The spirit falters, in the darkness and dullness and lethargy of surfaces. I start to believe the surfaces are real, or at least more real than the insides. But the insides are at least as real. The outsides can't subsist for a moment without them.
I am so easily frightened and distracted by surfaces. And I hear the chariot at my back. I have to hold very still, sometimes. The mind, like a nervous greyhound, straining at the leash.
I sat at the table last night, eating a marvelous soup, and wonderful bread, in a beautiful house, with a brilliant poet. And I couldn't reach to the insides. It's baffling sometimes. What stands between? What is getting in our light? I couldn't remember a single poem to ask about. And there was so much I had wanted to ask.
What's getting in our light? I am. And that's why I have to go on retreat. It's not rocket science: I'm getting in our light, that's all. So anxious to make things happen that they can't happen. I need some days of prayer and meditation.
Some things you can't see, if you look straight at them. Among them, people. For the very good reason that to see a person you have to look with their eyes, not your own. So it works better if you're both looking at something else.
I do love the laying on of hands. For its own sake, and for the end-run it makes around my anxiety and diffidence. But it's no substitute for practice.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Four Things Meme
This girl tagged me with a poetry advice meme. Now, of course, I'm eager to give advice about writing poetry, because I'm not very good at it, and I haven't been doing it very long; it's always neophytes who are most eager to tell other people how to do things. (I won't tag anyone: I don't do tagging any more.) Have a look at my blogroll: there's a lot of people there whose advice would be much more valuable than mine. But here it is, four things to attend to and four to avoid in writing poetry.
What to Attend to
1) Read old poetry. We write within a tradition, whether we know it or not. Know it. If you're going to echo Shakespeare -- and you are -- then echo Shakespeare himself, not a second-, third-, or fourth-rate imitation of him.
2) Memorize poetry. I say this all the time. I'm saying it again. Memorized poetry lives with you, gets under your skin, in a way that read-and-half-forgotten poetry just never does. And don't give me that stuff about not being able to memorize things. Memorization is a skill that anyone can learn. It's absurd that in a culture that's downright hagridden by qualifying exams we don't teach memorization in school, but we ordinarily don't, so you have to learn it by yourself. Fortunately it's not that hard to learn, and it's an immensely useful skill in many endeavors.
3) Learn a language, or two, or three.You don't have to be fluent. You don't even have to be any good with it. Take classes for a year or two in a language -- preferably, one you just take a shine to and which will be perfectly useless to you forever -- and get to the point where you can understand its basic grammar, read its nursery rhymes, and have a glimpse of what the Germans call its Sprachgefühl, its "speechfeel." Languages have characteristic cadences and habits of sound and meaning. Liberate yourself from the delusion that your native language is "just the way it is." It isn't. It's far more wonderful than "just the way it is": it's a magnificent piece of collaborative art. But you can't see it as such without being able to stand outside it.
4) Play. Be silly, maudlin, obscene, vicious, petty, overwrought, oversimple. If it's bad you can throw it away later. But write it first, and decide how good it is later. Most of it will be bad. So what?
What to avoid
a) Advice. Like this.
b) Words that aren't natural to you. There's a temptation to reach for impressive, rarely-used words, even though you're not really at home with them. The words you use should be supple and well-worn, comfortable in your mind and heart. I'm all for learning new words. But don't use them in poetry right away. That's like marrying someone you just met last night. You'll regret it. Trust me.
c) Violent, garish imagery, unless it really does precisely what you want it to. Vivid is good, but only if it's also accurate. Don't carpet-bomb the reader with gripping images because one of the incidental effects of one of the images is one that you want. Most readers don't like random assault. They want to know that if you're seizing their attention, it's for a good reason.
d) Silent writing. Say it. Aloud. "Poetry must always sing," said Yeats. If you can't make it sing with your voice, readers won't be able to make it sing in their heads. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that it sounds fine if you only read it silently. Read it aloud.
This girl tagged me with a poetry advice meme. Now, of course, I'm eager to give advice about writing poetry, because I'm not very good at it, and I haven't been doing it very long; it's always neophytes who are most eager to tell other people how to do things. (I won't tag anyone: I don't do tagging any more.) Have a look at my blogroll: there's a lot of people there whose advice would be much more valuable than mine. But here it is, four things to attend to and four to avoid in writing poetry.
What to Attend to
1) Read old poetry. We write within a tradition, whether we know it or not. Know it. If you're going to echo Shakespeare -- and you are -- then echo Shakespeare himself, not a second-, third-, or fourth-rate imitation of him.
2) Memorize poetry. I say this all the time. I'm saying it again. Memorized poetry lives with you, gets under your skin, in a way that read-and-half-forgotten poetry just never does. And don't give me that stuff about not being able to memorize things. Memorization is a skill that anyone can learn. It's absurd that in a culture that's downright hagridden by qualifying exams we don't teach memorization in school, but we ordinarily don't, so you have to learn it by yourself. Fortunately it's not that hard to learn, and it's an immensely useful skill in many endeavors.
3) Learn a language, or two, or three.You don't have to be fluent. You don't even have to be any good with it. Take classes for a year or two in a language -- preferably, one you just take a shine to and which will be perfectly useless to you forever -- and get to the point where you can understand its basic grammar, read its nursery rhymes, and have a glimpse of what the Germans call its Sprachgefühl, its "speechfeel." Languages have characteristic cadences and habits of sound and meaning. Liberate yourself from the delusion that your native language is "just the way it is." It isn't. It's far more wonderful than "just the way it is": it's a magnificent piece of collaborative art. But you can't see it as such without being able to stand outside it.
4) Play. Be silly, maudlin, obscene, vicious, petty, overwrought, oversimple. If it's bad you can throw it away later. But write it first, and decide how good it is later. Most of it will be bad. So what?
What to avoid
a) Advice. Like this.
b) Words that aren't natural to you. There's a temptation to reach for impressive, rarely-used words, even though you're not really at home with them. The words you use should be supple and well-worn, comfortable in your mind and heart. I'm all for learning new words. But don't use them in poetry right away. That's like marrying someone you just met last night. You'll regret it. Trust me.
c) Violent, garish imagery, unless it really does precisely what you want it to. Vivid is good, but only if it's also accurate. Don't carpet-bomb the reader with gripping images because one of the incidental effects of one of the images is one that you want. Most readers don't like random assault. They want to know that if you're seizing their attention, it's for a good reason.
d) Silent writing. Say it. Aloud. "Poetry must always sing," said Yeats. If you can't make it sing with your voice, readers won't be able to make it sing in their heads. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that it sounds fine if you only read it silently. Read it aloud.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Under the Wing
The wind tears at the trees,
The leaves weep, the branches shake.
All the days of mourning,
The long regress of mornings, the soft
Fall of light, collapsing perspectives, all the truth
And falsehood crowded together in my head
Like a crowd pushing at the inward-opening doors
Of a burning theater. I cannot speak. Or see.
Take the pieces of the heart and carefully fit them together.
Archeologists do this, all the time, with pots
And take for granted that some pieces will be missing.
That's how it is, they say, under the wing of time.
The wind tears at the trees,
The leaves weep, the branches shake.
All the days of mourning,
The long regress of mornings, the soft
Fall of light, collapsing perspectives, all the truth
And falsehood crowded together in my head
Like a crowd pushing at the inward-opening doors
Of a burning theater. I cannot speak. Or see.
Take the pieces of the heart and carefully fit them together.
Archeologists do this, all the time, with pots
And take for granted that some pieces will be missing.
That's how it is, they say, under the wing of time.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Spattered City
My response to this week's Totally Optional Prompt, specifically the Celan poem
Turn to the burning of the palaces, the melted gold
Trickling down into the cracks of the stones;
Turn to the glancing, feathering fire.
Turn to the history of this, our spattered
Endless city.
Turn to the skies, stitched all across with tracers
Turn to the wet blood still drawing lines like
A child learning to make his letters
On the wide walls of home.
Turn to the morning: there will be no morning.
No sun would dare to look at this. Tomorrow
There will be no tomorrow.
All we have caught up, all the nightmares we dreamed --
The darkest, earliest home of our
Accursed fathers -- plague after plague --
Could not soften our stiff necks. Psalms are useless here.
Fire from the airplanes, fire from the derricks, fire
From the mouth of Satan. This land,
Like a cracked earthen plate
Broken in the firing.
My response to this week's Totally Optional Prompt, specifically the Celan poem
Turn to the burning of the palaces, the melted gold
Trickling down into the cracks of the stones;
Turn to the glancing, feathering fire.
Turn to the history of this, our spattered
Endless city.
Turn to the skies, stitched all across with tracers
Turn to the wet blood still drawing lines like
A child learning to make his letters
On the wide walls of home.
Turn to the morning: there will be no morning.
No sun would dare to look at this. Tomorrow
There will be no tomorrow.
All we have caught up, all the nightmares we dreamed --
The darkest, earliest home of our
Accursed fathers -- plague after plague --
Could not soften our stiff necks. Psalms are useless here.
Fire from the airplanes, fire from the derricks, fire
From the mouth of Satan. This land,
Like a cracked earthen plate
Broken in the firing.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Lay-Up
I began this post after I had taken the boards, but before I knew I had passed them. (When, in fact I was quite sure I'd failed them.) It goes with the poem about having misery and humiliation for house-guests.
It's the humiliation of the body that makes it worst. Every grade-school humiliation -- every missed easy fly ball to right field, every basket I missed, every race I came in next-to-last -- in short, everything that made me decide, in the course of my nine years in public school, that my body was a lost cause, and that I was going to ignore it, and use my brain -- it all comes back, remarkably vividly. This humiliation comes from that same deep pool of misery. Nothing separates me from that slow, awkward, pudgy, easily flustered boy.
The tempting thing, of course, is to wait. To call this a time that doesn't count. To ignore my reactions, as best I can, and fill my time up with sudoku and hexwar and eating halloween chocolate. To wait until I get my results, and real life starts up again. After all, it's only thirty days.
But this is the thing. It's actually this, right now, that is real life. I am the less deceived right now than I will be when I know how I did, and am either studying to take the test over, or scrambling to get all the accommodations and paraphernalia of a massage practice together. It's no accident or aberration that makes this sinking sensation so familiar. The fact is that the jury is always out. In one way or another, I spend most my life waiting for judgements that will never be rendered. I will never know, in the end, whether I was worthy of respect or of ridicule. There is no epilogue to this novel. There are no answers at the back of this book. There will never really be any more basis for answering the question than there is now.
And there's a reason for that. It's because the question actually makes no sense. It's intrinsically meaningless, in the same way that asking "how red is lopsidedness?" is meaningless. Gathering more information about lopsidedness or about red is not going to help us answer that question. The predicate simply doesn't apply to the subject.
So the conviction that this question must be answered before I go forward -- that I'm just kicking my heels in the waiting room until it is -- that is what needs to be dismantled. Really it matters so little whether I passed or failed. What matters is seeing this whole structure of suffering exactly as it is.
That's why I'm welcomed my house-guests. Not because I enjoy suffering. But because they can tell me how this thing works, what it's made of, what keeps it running. And because I'm old enough to know that misery and humiliation will stay as long as they damn well please; no amount of shooing them away or attempting to distract myself will hasten their departure.
So I listen to them.
They tell me a story, over and over, about a boy playing basketball. His team was losing, they were spending all their time on the home side of the court, fending off attempted baskets. He managed to steal the ball and break loose, and pelted across the court. No one ahead of him. No one even next to him. He ran in his ridiculous duck-footed way, but he ran as hard as he could. There was a roar of approval from the stands -- a sound he had never heard, for himself, before. It was an easy lay-up. Anyone else on the team could have made it.
He missed it, of course. Flung the ball up wildly. Not even a respectable miss; it barely hit the backboard. There was a groan from the crowd. That was it: his day in the sun, as a basketball player. The other team snagged the rebound. Everyone pounded back to the home side. We all went back to trying to fend off the attacks on our own basket.
But listen, listen to the story. There are two points that bear contemplation.
One is the duckfootedness. There is a valuable somatic understanding there. That exagerated external rotation of the hips -- it goes with the exagerated lordotic lumbar curve and the slump of the shoulders. It's an attitude of defeat, of unwillingness to leave the ground. I could barely jump at all -- no one can, in that posture.
But the second point is the more important. The hinge of the story, the reason it still makes my insides crawl, is that the shot was an easy one. For other people. The fact is that lay-ups were nearly impossible for me. I was terrible at them in practice, too. My legs and arms seemed to run on entirely differently neurological circuits: I could control the arms or control the legs, but not both. And switching between them confused me so much that I could control neither: I would run up under the basket and make a convulsive little hop, like a hooked fish, and the ball would float up into the air in a random trajectory. That was what always happened with lay-ups, for me. But in the moment when people were cheering for me, I thought -- if one thing that had never happened to me before was happening, why not another? Why not that effortless leap, followed by a cavalier one-handed tip to the backboard, and the ball falling sweetly through the net?
The story suddenly comes clear. I held my inability to do layups to be a moral failure, a curse bothing causing and caused by my unpopularity. I didn't think of it as something that was simply physically difficult for me, a problem in coordination and posture and timing, which a person could analyze and address. I never practiced them if I wasn't made to. At home, I practiced free-throws, which I was really quite good at. One more galling thing about that failed lay-up was that if I had stopped at the head of the key and simply taken a free throw, I would probably have made the shot.
The sting of the story all rests in the shot being an easy one. If the shot hadn't been an easy one, then the whole thing would unwind to an unremarkable, unmemorable, unhumiliating event. Something I would have forgotten thirty-five years ago, as everyone else on that court has forgotten it. (If they even remembered it the next day.) It should have been easy.
Likewise, I shouldn't be flustered by practical tests. That's the conviction that fuels this emotion, that makes me miserable and humilated rather than ordinarily anxious to see if I passed. If I could learn to hold that as a simple fact, just a morally neutral characteristic, like having blue eyes or short arms -- which is surely a more intelligent and accurate way to think of it -- the misery and humiliation would have no place to sit down. They'd get tired of standing about and just leave.
Well. Easier said than done, convictions like that have the tenacity of old blackberry brambles, steel hard, rooted deep under the ground. Hacking away at the surface is a start, but only a start.
I began this post after I had taken the boards, but before I knew I had passed them. (When, in fact I was quite sure I'd failed them.) It goes with the poem about having misery and humiliation for house-guests.
It's the humiliation of the body that makes it worst. Every grade-school humiliation -- every missed easy fly ball to right field, every basket I missed, every race I came in next-to-last -- in short, everything that made me decide, in the course of my nine years in public school, that my body was a lost cause, and that I was going to ignore it, and use my brain -- it all comes back, remarkably vividly. This humiliation comes from that same deep pool of misery. Nothing separates me from that slow, awkward, pudgy, easily flustered boy.
The tempting thing, of course, is to wait. To call this a time that doesn't count. To ignore my reactions, as best I can, and fill my time up with sudoku and hexwar and eating halloween chocolate. To wait until I get my results, and real life starts up again. After all, it's only thirty days.
But this is the thing. It's actually this, right now, that is real life. I am the less deceived right now than I will be when I know how I did, and am either studying to take the test over, or scrambling to get all the accommodations and paraphernalia of a massage practice together. It's no accident or aberration that makes this sinking sensation so familiar. The fact is that the jury is always out. In one way or another, I spend most my life waiting for judgements that will never be rendered. I will never know, in the end, whether I was worthy of respect or of ridicule. There is no epilogue to this novel. There are no answers at the back of this book. There will never really be any more basis for answering the question than there is now.
And there's a reason for that. It's because the question actually makes no sense. It's intrinsically meaningless, in the same way that asking "how red is lopsidedness?" is meaningless. Gathering more information about lopsidedness or about red is not going to help us answer that question. The predicate simply doesn't apply to the subject.
So the conviction that this question must be answered before I go forward -- that I'm just kicking my heels in the waiting room until it is -- that is what needs to be dismantled. Really it matters so little whether I passed or failed. What matters is seeing this whole structure of suffering exactly as it is.
That's why I'm welcomed my house-guests. Not because I enjoy suffering. But because they can tell me how this thing works, what it's made of, what keeps it running. And because I'm old enough to know that misery and humiliation will stay as long as they damn well please; no amount of shooing them away or attempting to distract myself will hasten their departure.
So I listen to them.
They tell me a story, over and over, about a boy playing basketball. His team was losing, they were spending all their time on the home side of the court, fending off attempted baskets. He managed to steal the ball and break loose, and pelted across the court. No one ahead of him. No one even next to him. He ran in his ridiculous duck-footed way, but he ran as hard as he could. There was a roar of approval from the stands -- a sound he had never heard, for himself, before. It was an easy lay-up. Anyone else on the team could have made it.
He missed it, of course. Flung the ball up wildly. Not even a respectable miss; it barely hit the backboard. There was a groan from the crowd. That was it: his day in the sun, as a basketball player. The other team snagged the rebound. Everyone pounded back to the home side. We all went back to trying to fend off the attacks on our own basket.
But listen, listen to the story. There are two points that bear contemplation.
One is the duckfootedness. There is a valuable somatic understanding there. That exagerated external rotation of the hips -- it goes with the exagerated lordotic lumbar curve and the slump of the shoulders. It's an attitude of defeat, of unwillingness to leave the ground. I could barely jump at all -- no one can, in that posture.
But the second point is the more important. The hinge of the story, the reason it still makes my insides crawl, is that the shot was an easy one. For other people. The fact is that lay-ups were nearly impossible for me. I was terrible at them in practice, too. My legs and arms seemed to run on entirely differently neurological circuits: I could control the arms or control the legs, but not both. And switching between them confused me so much that I could control neither: I would run up under the basket and make a convulsive little hop, like a hooked fish, and the ball would float up into the air in a random trajectory. That was what always happened with lay-ups, for me. But in the moment when people were cheering for me, I thought -- if one thing that had never happened to me before was happening, why not another? Why not that effortless leap, followed by a cavalier one-handed tip to the backboard, and the ball falling sweetly through the net?
The story suddenly comes clear. I held my inability to do layups to be a moral failure, a curse bothing causing and caused by my unpopularity. I didn't think of it as something that was simply physically difficult for me, a problem in coordination and posture and timing, which a person could analyze and address. I never practiced them if I wasn't made to. At home, I practiced free-throws, which I was really quite good at. One more galling thing about that failed lay-up was that if I had stopped at the head of the key and simply taken a free throw, I would probably have made the shot.
The sting of the story all rests in the shot being an easy one. If the shot hadn't been an easy one, then the whole thing would unwind to an unremarkable, unmemorable, unhumiliating event. Something I would have forgotten thirty-five years ago, as everyone else on that court has forgotten it. (If they even remembered it the next day.) It should have been easy.
Likewise, I shouldn't be flustered by practical tests. That's the conviction that fuels this emotion, that makes me miserable and humilated rather than ordinarily anxious to see if I passed. If I could learn to hold that as a simple fact, just a morally neutral characteristic, like having blue eyes or short arms -- which is surely a more intelligent and accurate way to think of it -- the misery and humiliation would have no place to sit down. They'd get tired of standing about and just leave.
Well. Easier said than done, convictions like that have the tenacity of old blackberry brambles, steel hard, rooted deep under the ground. Hacking away at the surface is a start, but only a start.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Friday, November 02, 2007
The Beginnings of Conversations
Sage Cohen's new book of poetry, Like the Heart, the World, is out. I've been carrying it about, reading it at lunch, reading it on the bus.
As I tried to write about Sage's poems, I became more and more interested in the way I read them. I am ordinarily a disciplined reader. I begin at the beginning, just Alice's King advises, and go on till I come to the end; then stop. But I don't do that with Sage's poems. I slither down through them, like a man slipping on a hillside, till I come up short on something. There is usually at least one hard bright stopping place, a foothold in the slope. A quotable quote. Sage is a very quotable poet. Take these lines:
("I Make You a River.") They're gnomic, epigrammatic. I instantly wanted to write a book, just so I could put those lines on the frontispiece.
But when I return to the top of the slope, confident now that I have the key to the poem, I find I have nothing of the sort. It's not the capstone of the poem. It doesn't sum it up. The poem moves away in all directions. It's still slidey, unstable. The epigram isn't an anchor, either; it slides with the slope.
("Algorithm.")
("Quantum.")
("Retrospective.")
Each of these is so forceful and precise that I guess that I know what each of these poems will be about. But I am half wrong -- at least -- in every case.
In a comment on her blog, when I first read the book in its entirety, I said:
With so many of your poems, I want to sit down with you and say, "so -- tell me about this one." They aren't obscure in a guessing-game way -- I know what they're about more-or-less; you always give enough information, and they're always rich and fascinating. But they also almost always feel like there's so much behind them, like these particular words are just the outermost layer. They're usually like the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.
Sage's poetry is thinking poetry, analytic poetry. It strives for precision, makes deductions, lays out arguments. But unlike most thinking poetry, it opens things, rather than closing them.
It is also very beautiful:
("Exfoliation.")
("As the Mountain Stands.")
Sage Cohen's new book of poetry, Like the Heart, the World, is out. I've been carrying it about, reading it at lunch, reading it on the bus.
As I tried to write about Sage's poems, I became more and more interested in the way I read them. I am ordinarily a disciplined reader. I begin at the beginning, just Alice's King advises, and go on till I come to the end; then stop. But I don't do that with Sage's poems. I slither down through them, like a man slipping on a hillside, till I come up short on something. There is usually at least one hard bright stopping place, a foothold in the slope. A quotable quote. Sage is a very quotable poet. Take these lines:
I make you a river,
So my love has somewhere to go.
("I Make You a River.") They're gnomic, epigrammatic. I instantly wanted to write a book, just so I could put those lines on the frontispiece.
But when I return to the top of the slope, confident now that I have the key to the poem, I find I have nothing of the sort. It's not the capstone of the poem. It doesn't sum it up. The poem moves away in all directions. It's still slidey, unstable. The epigram isn't an anchor, either; it slides with the slope.
Names the place markers
of what was last believed possible.
("Algorithm.")
The waitress asks me Just one?
as if I were not enough. And yet
the room can barely contain me.
("Quantum.")
It is too soon for clarity,
too late for truth."
("Retrospective.")
Each of these is so forceful and precise that I guess that I know what each of these poems will be about. But I am half wrong -- at least -- in every case.
In a comment on her blog, when I first read the book in its entirety, I said:
With so many of your poems, I want to sit down with you and say, "so -- tell me about this one." They aren't obscure in a guessing-game way -- I know what they're about more-or-less; you always give enough information, and they're always rich and fascinating. But they also almost always feel like there's so much behind them, like these particular words are just the outermost layer. They're usually like the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.
Sage's poetry is thinking poetry, analytic poetry. It strives for precision, makes deductions, lays out arguments. But unlike most thinking poetry, it opens things, rather than closing them.
It is also very beautiful:
But now it is fall and the statues are serious.
A copper horse, back arched, bites her tail.
She is green in her deep places.
("Exfoliation.")
as writing weights the hand
but the word is free, we taste
all that was sacrificed
to the clean break
we can hear it in the singing
we can see it in the sheen of things.
("As the Mountain Stands.")
Self-Esteem
My self is inestimable. Why should I esteem it?
Who is waiting for the valuation? Where do I find
a buyer?
No. I want to have self-esteem so poor
it has to beg for crusts at the corner
and scrabble for pennies in the gutter loam;
so poor that it laughs at the rich men hurrying to work,
while it sits idle in the sun.
My self is inestimable. Why should I esteem it?
Who is waiting for the valuation? Where do I find
a buyer?
No. I want to have self-esteem so poor
it has to beg for crusts at the corner
and scrabble for pennies in the gutter loam;
so poor that it laughs at the rich men hurrying to work,
while it sits idle in the sun.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Japan
The moon is not full, this morning. It is
frayed at the bottom, as if from dragging itself
over the hills; a moon tired of traveling,
Ready to quit. It leans on the pale sky
of a Fall morning.
My heart
searches for you, like a tongue searching
for a pulled tooth. Tender there.
I am going to the beach this morning,
to walk along the wrong shore;
Japan is closer than you are.
The moon is not full, this morning. It is
frayed at the bottom, as if from dragging itself
over the hills; a moon tired of traveling,
Ready to quit. It leans on the pale sky
of a Fall morning.
My heart
searches for you, like a tongue searching
for a pulled tooth. Tender there.
I am going to the beach this morning,
to walk along the wrong shore;
Japan is closer than you are.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Final Exam
I view my upcoming Oregon Massage Board exam with a sort of anticipatory nostalgia. It is to be last, probably, of the exams that have loomed so large in my life, the make-or-break exams after weeks of study: the GRE; my orals in grad school; the finals in the course on compilers that were the dread of Computer Science students at PSU. I have always had a gift for exams. I'm a clutch hitter, and I have the kind of peripheral psychological vision that tells me what sorts of answers will be welcome, even when I have no knowledge to go on.
At my orals, John Hollander followed up a question about the Romantic poets with a question about their sources. The answer, I knew, had to do with Gray, but I also knew I didn't know it. "I'm aware of my ignorance of the Pre-Romantics," I said stiffly. Technically, the Pre-Romantics weren't to be part of the exam: we chose nine out of fifteen possible topics to be examined on, and the 18th Century wasn't one of mine. But really Hollander was quite within his rights: knowing sources is fundamental to understanding any poetry, and Gray is hardly obscure. My Romantic poet, whichever he was, would almost certainly have learned Gray's poems by heart in school. But I knew that a) Hollander really wanted to know if I knew what sort of knowledge would supply the answer to his question, more than he wanted the specific answer, b) that he was sensitive about being thought of as an overbearing academic -- he was the sort of professor who wants his students to like him -- and c) that admitting ignorance of something I wasn't to be tested on wasn't going to be damaging, and d) a spirited answer of any sort was going to do me more good with the examining board than a meek one. Hollander backed off at once, with a mumbled apology. I passed my orals.
There was a brilliant girl in the same year who failed. She was slight and nervous, the sort of girl who touches her face a lot and seems always to be apologizing for occupying even the small space she takes up, who makes her smallness seem smaller by always wearing dark clothes. You usually had the impression that if she could have disappeared altogether, she would gladly have done so. Confronted with seven august professors sitting around the table, at her orals, she froze. The rumor was that she had managed to speak maybe two or three sentences during the whole hour and a half. They had no choice but to fail her, though every one of them knew she had more intelligent things to say about most of the topics than any of them did.
There was a certain sense to it, cruel though it seemed, and still seems, to me. It was difficult to imagine her teaching, at least teaching in America, which requires a lot of improvisation in front of a class (as opposed to reading written-out lectures and doing tutorials.) But she worked so hard, and thought so well. I suppose it's a species of survivor-guilt that I feel, about the people I know who have failed exams out of anxiety, or because they were just not very good at guessing what sort of thing was wanted. So many of them were better thinkers and harder workers than I ever was.
But anyway -- to return -- this is probably it. The last time I do such a thing. Oh, I imagine I'll take exams from time to time, in reality as we shape it here in the first world, exams are a fact of life; but not exams I'll need to be anxious about. All these exams, of course, were supposed to be initiations -- the only initiation rituals we still know how to do -- but I'm not entirely sure I'll know how to live without one in the offing. The thought that I may have exhausted all my delaying tactics, and finally have to be an adult, is a spooky one. So it's appropriate, maybe, that it should be scheduled for the eve of the All Hallow's Eve.
I view my upcoming Oregon Massage Board exam with a sort of anticipatory nostalgia. It is to be last, probably, of the exams that have loomed so large in my life, the make-or-break exams after weeks of study: the GRE; my orals in grad school; the finals in the course on compilers that were the dread of Computer Science students at PSU. I have always had a gift for exams. I'm a clutch hitter, and I have the kind of peripheral psychological vision that tells me what sorts of answers will be welcome, even when I have no knowledge to go on.
At my orals, John Hollander followed up a question about the Romantic poets with a question about their sources. The answer, I knew, had to do with Gray, but I also knew I didn't know it. "I'm aware of my ignorance of the Pre-Romantics," I said stiffly. Technically, the Pre-Romantics weren't to be part of the exam: we chose nine out of fifteen possible topics to be examined on, and the 18th Century wasn't one of mine. But really Hollander was quite within his rights: knowing sources is fundamental to understanding any poetry, and Gray is hardly obscure. My Romantic poet, whichever he was, would almost certainly have learned Gray's poems by heart in school. But I knew that a) Hollander really wanted to know if I knew what sort of knowledge would supply the answer to his question, more than he wanted the specific answer, b) that he was sensitive about being thought of as an overbearing academic -- he was the sort of professor who wants his students to like him -- and c) that admitting ignorance of something I wasn't to be tested on wasn't going to be damaging, and d) a spirited answer of any sort was going to do me more good with the examining board than a meek one. Hollander backed off at once, with a mumbled apology. I passed my orals.
There was a brilliant girl in the same year who failed. She was slight and nervous, the sort of girl who touches her face a lot and seems always to be apologizing for occupying even the small space she takes up, who makes her smallness seem smaller by always wearing dark clothes. You usually had the impression that if she could have disappeared altogether, she would gladly have done so. Confronted with seven august professors sitting around the table, at her orals, she froze. The rumor was that she had managed to speak maybe two or three sentences during the whole hour and a half. They had no choice but to fail her, though every one of them knew she had more intelligent things to say about most of the topics than any of them did.
There was a certain sense to it, cruel though it seemed, and still seems, to me. It was difficult to imagine her teaching, at least teaching in America, which requires a lot of improvisation in front of a class (as opposed to reading written-out lectures and doing tutorials.) But she worked so hard, and thought so well. I suppose it's a species of survivor-guilt that I feel, about the people I know who have failed exams out of anxiety, or because they were just not very good at guessing what sort of thing was wanted. So many of them were better thinkers and harder workers than I ever was.
But anyway -- to return -- this is probably it. The last time I do such a thing. Oh, I imagine I'll take exams from time to time, in reality as we shape it here in the first world, exams are a fact of life; but not exams I'll need to be anxious about. All these exams, of course, were supposed to be initiations -- the only initiation rituals we still know how to do -- but I'm not entirely sure I'll know how to live without one in the offing. The thought that I may have exhausted all my delaying tactics, and finally have to be an adult, is a spooky one. So it's appropriate, maybe, that it should be scheduled for the eve of the All Hallow's Eve.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Bottom's Dream
In response to this week's totally optional prompt
I wondered metrically, at first, why it was so satisfying:
A four beat line followed by two three beat lines, and
A four beat line followed by two three beat lines. This Horse.
And I knew I did not know horses, so I couldn't write about horses
As horses.
But a clever lad doesn't need to know horses, of course
To write about horses. He only needs words. The horses
Of Achilles. Or the horse they rolled into Troy, on a day
I have always pictured cloudy and dim, with rain threatening,
And all those Greeks stuffed into its belly, like bits of walnut
In a thanksgiving turkey. Stick to what you know? Well,
I know words.
But the head of Kooser's horse kept obtruding
Bony, with accusing eyes, and telling me what I do not want to hear
And have never wanted to hear -- it pushed its nose into my room
And told me that words are not enough. It told me that I must
Know horses.
I told it I was writing an essay on just that topic. Hold your --
Well, never mind, but, anyway, the question of knowing --
But the tickling about the ears became
unbearable.
In response to this week's totally optional prompt
I wondered metrically, at first, why it was so satisfying:
A four beat line followed by two three beat lines, and
A four beat line followed by two three beat lines. This Horse.
And I knew I did not know horses, so I couldn't write about horses
As horses.
But a clever lad doesn't need to know horses, of course
To write about horses. He only needs words. The horses
Of Achilles. Or the horse they rolled into Troy, on a day
I have always pictured cloudy and dim, with rain threatening,
And all those Greeks stuffed into its belly, like bits of walnut
In a thanksgiving turkey. Stick to what you know? Well,
I know words.
But the head of Kooser's horse kept obtruding
Bony, with accusing eyes, and telling me what I do not want to hear
And have never wanted to hear -- it pushed its nose into my room
And told me that words are not enough. It told me that I must
Know horses.
I told it I was writing an essay on just that topic. Hold your --
Well, never mind, but, anyway, the question of knowing --
But the tickling about the ears became
unbearable.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Literary Professionals
I have been doing a lot of finishing old half-finished essays lately (no, I will not identify which they are, you will have to guess.) This post began life as a response to a post by Beth at Cassandra Pages many months ago.
The professional literary writer sustained by a public is a product of the cheap-only-if-centralized print industry. It didn't exist before the printing press, and I don't think it will survive it. Which doesn't trouble me: I don't know that it was an especially desirable phenomenon. It's not at all clear to me that trying to please a wide public, or more precisely, trying to please editors who are trying to please both a wide public and a publishing company, tends to produce good writing.
If we have settled for living in a Capitalist society, then we shouldn't fuss about the market shifting to adapt to different technologies. I don't see why I should be more distressed about professional writers being out of work than I am about, say, loggers being out of work here in Oregon. If they're not needed, they've just got to learn to do something else. That's the society we've chosen to live in.
The fact is, there aren't just a few people with something valuable to say. There also aren't just a few people (though fewer, I concede) who can say it well. Professionalizing writing may have given a few people full-time jobs, but it also ensured that only a few of the people worth reading were read.
Many of us who write would like -- or think we would like -- to spend all of our time writing, and not have to do anything else. But is that really good for writing? Think of the writers you most admire -- how many of them simply wrote, and did nothing else? Writing is a reflective activity, a yin activity. Making it a yang activity, the main activity of life, violates its nature. It's no wonder that Hemingway blew his brains out. No one bought more heavily into the idea of the full-time writer than Hemingway (and his handlers: he was a very deliberately produced public figure). But you can watch him becoming increasingly desperate with the fact that making writing the central activity of your life leaves you with nothing to write about. It was not so much that he lied, as that there was no more truth to tell. He viewed it as an existential crisis and a psychological failure. May it not have been simply an untenable life-project?
It was my ambition, all through high school and college, to be a writer of fiction. (Which is odd, because I had no talent for it whatsoever; but it was what Great American Writers wrote, so by God I was going to write it too.) After college, I spent a year -- my family being at the time well off enough for me to do so -- just writing. The dream life, yes?
It was probably the worst year of my life: the loneliest and the least productive. At a wrenching psychological cost I produced, by dint of grim grinding determination, a couple uninspired short stories and a couple essays. In the course of an idle year, that's all I produced. I made half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts at publishing them, and gave up. While in college, on the other hand, I had written two short novels -- not effortlessly, but handily enough. I probably wrote less, in my year of Being a Writer, than any year before or since. And I still bear the scars of that horrible time, of day after day after day of trying to wring stuff out of my head that simply wasn't there.
In retrospect it's not at all mysterious to me. I didn't have anything to say because I didn't have a life. I wasn't doing anything in the world, and, unsurprisingly, when I tried to reflect, all I had to reflect upon was trying to reflect. There are people who have made careers of just that, but even at the tender age of twenty-one I knew that wasn't the career I wanted. Or the life I wanted.
So I find myself unmoved by the endangered-species status of the professional literateur. The species can vanish, as far as I'm concerned, as rapidly as it appeared, and no one will be much the worse for it. We may in fact be the better for it.
I have been doing a lot of finishing old half-finished essays lately (no, I will not identify which they are, you will have to guess.) This post began life as a response to a post by Beth at Cassandra Pages many months ago.
The professional literary writer sustained by a public is a product of the cheap-only-if-centralized print industry. It didn't exist before the printing press, and I don't think it will survive it. Which doesn't trouble me: I don't know that it was an especially desirable phenomenon. It's not at all clear to me that trying to please a wide public, or more precisely, trying to please editors who are trying to please both a wide public and a publishing company, tends to produce good writing.
If we have settled for living in a Capitalist society, then we shouldn't fuss about the market shifting to adapt to different technologies. I don't see why I should be more distressed about professional writers being out of work than I am about, say, loggers being out of work here in Oregon. If they're not needed, they've just got to learn to do something else. That's the society we've chosen to live in.
The fact is, there aren't just a few people with something valuable to say. There also aren't just a few people (though fewer, I concede) who can say it well. Professionalizing writing may have given a few people full-time jobs, but it also ensured that only a few of the people worth reading were read.
Many of us who write would like -- or think we would like -- to spend all of our time writing, and not have to do anything else. But is that really good for writing? Think of the writers you most admire -- how many of them simply wrote, and did nothing else? Writing is a reflective activity, a yin activity. Making it a yang activity, the main activity of life, violates its nature. It's no wonder that Hemingway blew his brains out. No one bought more heavily into the idea of the full-time writer than Hemingway (and his handlers: he was a very deliberately produced public figure). But you can watch him becoming increasingly desperate with the fact that making writing the central activity of your life leaves you with nothing to write about. It was not so much that he lied, as that there was no more truth to tell. He viewed it as an existential crisis and a psychological failure. May it not have been simply an untenable life-project?
It was my ambition, all through high school and college, to be a writer of fiction. (Which is odd, because I had no talent for it whatsoever; but it was what Great American Writers wrote, so by God I was going to write it too.) After college, I spent a year -- my family being at the time well off enough for me to do so -- just writing. The dream life, yes?
It was probably the worst year of my life: the loneliest and the least productive. At a wrenching psychological cost I produced, by dint of grim grinding determination, a couple uninspired short stories and a couple essays. In the course of an idle year, that's all I produced. I made half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts at publishing them, and gave up. While in college, on the other hand, I had written two short novels -- not effortlessly, but handily enough. I probably wrote less, in my year of Being a Writer, than any year before or since. And I still bear the scars of that horrible time, of day after day after day of trying to wring stuff out of my head that simply wasn't there.
In retrospect it's not at all mysterious to me. I didn't have anything to say because I didn't have a life. I wasn't doing anything in the world, and, unsurprisingly, when I tried to reflect, all I had to reflect upon was trying to reflect. There are people who have made careers of just that, but even at the tender age of twenty-one I knew that wasn't the career I wanted. Or the life I wanted.
So I find myself unmoved by the endangered-species status of the professional literateur. The species can vanish, as far as I'm concerned, as rapidly as it appeared, and no one will be much the worse for it. We may in fact be the better for it.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Circles
One of those quick eddies that are the thing I love most about blogging: Dave Bonta wrote something that spurred me to write my last post, and both of those spurred Dick Jones to write an incredible poem, which in turn spurred a beautiful meditation by Dave.
This sort of thing happens in the paper print world, of course, but you have to piece it together afterwards, like an archaeologist with crumbly bits of a pot. Here you get to see the wet clay on the wheel. I love it.
One of those quick eddies that are the thing I love most about blogging: Dave Bonta wrote something that spurred me to write my last post, and both of those spurred Dick Jones to write an incredible poem, which in turn spurred a beautiful meditation by Dave.
This sort of thing happens in the paper print world, of course, but you have to piece it together afterwards, like an archaeologist with crumbly bits of a pot. Here you get to see the wet clay on the wheel. I love it.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Make Believe
"One of my base assumptions," wrote Dave, "is that if some doctrine or dogma makes me feel good, it can’t possibly be true." That's my knee-jerk response as well. Of course how I feel about a doctrine doesn't have anything to do with whether it's true. If making me feel good disposed me to fool myself into believing something, then I would rightly be suspicious of my belief; but since actually it disposes me to doubt it, maybe I should ballast the other way, if I want to balance the boat.
That is, if anyone were trying to get me to believe anything. I can't honestly say that in my -- what, ten years now? -- of hanging out with the Tibetans, that anyone's shown any interest in getting me to believe anything. I've been so long away from faith traditions that I have a hard time understanding what people are asking when they ask me what Tibetan Buddhists "believe"; it's clear to me that none of my answers are going to match any of their questions.
There is, of course, a sort of spiritual pornography rife among Buddhists which I don't think much of. The extravagant claims for total enlightenment. The insistence on holding people to be "fully realized beings" -- a phrase that I loathe -- when you know that you don't know them well enough to have any reason to think they're even particularly wise or kind. There, you can see the desire to believe something that makes us feel good. Of course, it runs in the same course with the impulse of devotion, which is, I think, one of the things which people will simply wither and die without. If their devotion isn't to lamas, it will be to musicians, or demagogues, or unrequitable loves. I've never known anyone who doesn't do it with somebody. Perhaps psychopaths, if there are such things, don't do it.
But anyway, that's possibly different from the pornography: the fantasy that we'll just click in, and so radically transform that all our kleshas will vanish. That's not going to happen. Oh, transformations happen; I have myself been transformed beyond recognition -- beyond my own recognition, anyway -- by Buddhist practice. But it only reveals how much more I would have to change to become a buddha. The idea of that happening any lifetime soon is absurd. Although it's plain to see the evolutionary advantage of the fantasies; it's how religions reproduce, by making ridiculous promises and extravagant claims. Would I be a Buddhist now if I hadn't been enticed by them? Probably not.
Anyway. All this keeps leaning away from the main point, which is my relationship with Buddhism, and with KCC, nowadays. I've gone to puja the last couple Sundays. I plan to go again tomorrow morning. I feel, oddly, more at home and more integrated there now that I've acknowledged to myself that I don't believe anyone ever gets enlightened. I used to get myself stuck in impossible positions, trying to believe things I didn't really believe, or trying to make believe that whether I believed them didn't make any difference. Of course it makes a difference. And at the same time, I have also to bring myself face to face with things that are true in the other direction, even though no doctrinal scaffolding I accept supports them -- the fact that practicing ngondro, for example, worked so powerfully against my compulsiveness. If I'm to be empirical, I have to be empirical all the way. The suffering I want to escape will be impossible to escape without transformation, and the only transformations I've been offered, since I was a teenager, have been the results of Buddhist practice. Ignoring that would be as deeply stupid as ignoring the fact that I don't think people get "fully realized."
It's a strange feeling, being back at the sangha, with this new attitude. I love them more than ever. I feel I belong there. Somehow, now, I can belong to them without needing to make believe.
"One of my base assumptions," wrote Dave, "is that if some doctrine or dogma makes me feel good, it can’t possibly be true." That's my knee-jerk response as well. Of course how I feel about a doctrine doesn't have anything to do with whether it's true. If making me feel good disposed me to fool myself into believing something, then I would rightly be suspicious of my belief; but since actually it disposes me to doubt it, maybe I should ballast the other way, if I want to balance the boat.
That is, if anyone were trying to get me to believe anything. I can't honestly say that in my -- what, ten years now? -- of hanging out with the Tibetans, that anyone's shown any interest in getting me to believe anything. I've been so long away from faith traditions that I have a hard time understanding what people are asking when they ask me what Tibetan Buddhists "believe"; it's clear to me that none of my answers are going to match any of their questions.
There is, of course, a sort of spiritual pornography rife among Buddhists which I don't think much of. The extravagant claims for total enlightenment. The insistence on holding people to be "fully realized beings" -- a phrase that I loathe -- when you know that you don't know them well enough to have any reason to think they're even particularly wise or kind. There, you can see the desire to believe something that makes us feel good. Of course, it runs in the same course with the impulse of devotion, which is, I think, one of the things which people will simply wither and die without. If their devotion isn't to lamas, it will be to musicians, or demagogues, or unrequitable loves. I've never known anyone who doesn't do it with somebody. Perhaps psychopaths, if there are such things, don't do it.
But anyway, that's possibly different from the pornography: the fantasy that we'll just click in, and so radically transform that all our kleshas will vanish. That's not going to happen. Oh, transformations happen; I have myself been transformed beyond recognition -- beyond my own recognition, anyway -- by Buddhist practice. But it only reveals how much more I would have to change to become a buddha. The idea of that happening any lifetime soon is absurd. Although it's plain to see the evolutionary advantage of the fantasies; it's how religions reproduce, by making ridiculous promises and extravagant claims. Would I be a Buddhist now if I hadn't been enticed by them? Probably not.
Anyway. All this keeps leaning away from the main point, which is my relationship with Buddhism, and with KCC, nowadays. I've gone to puja the last couple Sundays. I plan to go again tomorrow morning. I feel, oddly, more at home and more integrated there now that I've acknowledged to myself that I don't believe anyone ever gets enlightened. I used to get myself stuck in impossible positions, trying to believe things I didn't really believe, or trying to make believe that whether I believed them didn't make any difference. Of course it makes a difference. And at the same time, I have also to bring myself face to face with things that are true in the other direction, even though no doctrinal scaffolding I accept supports them -- the fact that practicing ngondro, for example, worked so powerfully against my compulsiveness. If I'm to be empirical, I have to be empirical all the way. The suffering I want to escape will be impossible to escape without transformation, and the only transformations I've been offered, since I was a teenager, have been the results of Buddhist practice. Ignoring that would be as deeply stupid as ignoring the fact that I don't think people get "fully realized."
It's a strange feeling, being back at the sangha, with this new attitude. I love them more than ever. I feel I belong there. Somehow, now, I can belong to them without needing to make believe.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Whew
I passed the first of the two exams I need for my massage license, this afternoon. This was the written, the "national certification," as it calls itself, though it's only required in about half of the states, and doesn't really certify anything except that you passed a written exam about massage.
Driving home afterwards, in the rain, the sun came out, and there was a brilliant rainbow off to the East.
The practical, the state exam, is Tuesday after next. It's the one I'm worried about. (I have been saying that I wasn't worried about the national certification, but obviously, given how relieved I am right now, I have been lying through my teeth :->)
I passed the first of the two exams I need for my massage license, this afternoon. This was the written, the "national certification," as it calls itself, though it's only required in about half of the states, and doesn't really certify anything except that you passed a written exam about massage.
Driving home afterwards, in the rain, the sun came out, and there was a brilliant rainbow off to the East.
The practical, the state exam, is Tuesday after next. It's the one I'm worried about. (I have been saying that I wasn't worried about the national certification, but obviously, given how relieved I am right now, I have been lying through my teeth :->)
Candles for the King
something stale in Denmark
darkening the tale
they stagger in the park
and belch up honey ale
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
falter there and stumble
fumble without traction
hesitate and crumple
and lose the aim of faction
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
a party for the Jack
jabbing at the part
writ down down for a fact
as the short way to the heart
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
something stale in Denmark
darkening the tale
they stagger in the park
and belch up honey ale
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
falter there and stumble
fumble without traction
hesitate and crumple
and lose the aim of faction
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
a party for the Jack
jabbing at the part
writ down down for a fact
as the short way to the heart
candles for the king
kindling for the cat
and trickling down the wick
tallow for the rat
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Transference and Plenitude
The little I've read about transference, in the therapeutic relationship, discusses it as a hazard of the trade. Something that might happen to you to interrupt the smooth running of your practice, like the water-main to your office breaking: your clients might imagine that they're falling in love with you. How annoying. We borrow the term from psychiatry, of course, and it brings its baggage from there: the ideal of the lofty, unmoved scientist bringing superior understanding, and hence healing, to the ignorant. For the patient, the therapist becomes, for instance, a stand-in for the father who would never love them as they craved. And the therapist's job is to let this happen without participating in it; so the patients works out their issues with their fathers -- the real issues -- through an unreal and imaginary relationship with their therapist. At the resolution, the cured patient understands that the therapist was just a stand-in, and leaves, with gratitude to the unmoved mover. Who rides slow and lonely into the sunset, to find another town that needs a hired gun.
Well. It's a crock, of course, from beginning to end. There's no such thing as imagining that you're falling in love. That's where falling in love happens, in the imagination; or, as you could also say, in the heart. There isn't any other kind. And therapists get into the business precisely because they crave adoration. Oh, they have other reasons, of course. But by and large that's what drives them.
Only one book I've read is imprudent enough to say plainly what the other kind of love looks like. That love isn't based on need, and doesn't resonate with the love of the father or the first lost love; it's a love that comes of plenitude rather than of wanting. The words get shriller and shriller, less and less convincing, till they dry up. They have the marks of fantasy all over them. Get over it, kids. All love is transference. All love is need. All love in the fallen world has far more to do with what we feel we lack than with disinterested admiration.
The fact is that transference, far from being an incidental hazard, is our stock-in-trade. The sooner we admit it the better. Boundaries are important not because they clarify the relationship, but because they misrepresent it. Without the fiction of the therapeutic distance, the whole thing would come down around our ears. It still does, often enough.
You showed a reluctance to cut to the chase and get on the table. We chatted easily. You paused a moment, and said, "you look good in green."
Well, I hope so; that's why I wear it. "Thanks," I said carelessly, and rapidly changed the subject, and got up and bustled about with the linens.
Later I used my forearms on your back. Not the elbow or the edge of the ulna, as we learn in class, to save our hands when we want to apply deep pressure. You can't handle deep pressure. I turned the edge of the ulna outwards and used the soft anterior forearm. I was just giving as much skin contact as I could, and still maintain the therapeutic fiction. You wanted touch. I was giving it to you. I wanted touch too; I was taking it.
At such moments only two things can keep me from going over the edge and crossing the boundary: sublime ignorance, or acute awareness. I must either believe that what's happening is entirely emotionally neutral, or understand exactly how involved I am in my own emotional need, and your emotional need, and my emotional need for your emotional need. But what I can't afford is vagueness or fuzziness.
This is the time to go for refuge, to recall the pure motivation disguised as need. I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme assembly of the Sangha. The source of it all, of the need and the compassion, of the desire and of the connection, is pure Buddha-nature. I need to touch that. I need all the help of my practice tradition. Not to escape the need and the desire -- fat chance of that! But to go through it, to see past the apparent lack to the real plenitude. Not the plenitude of a healthy individual -- that will-o'-the-wisp -- but the plenitude of the Buddha.
The little I've read about transference, in the therapeutic relationship, discusses it as a hazard of the trade. Something that might happen to you to interrupt the smooth running of your practice, like the water-main to your office breaking: your clients might imagine that they're falling in love with you. How annoying. We borrow the term from psychiatry, of course, and it brings its baggage from there: the ideal of the lofty, unmoved scientist bringing superior understanding, and hence healing, to the ignorant. For the patient, the therapist becomes, for instance, a stand-in for the father who would never love them as they craved. And the therapist's job is to let this happen without participating in it; so the patients works out their issues with their fathers -- the real issues -- through an unreal and imaginary relationship with their therapist. At the resolution, the cured patient understands that the therapist was just a stand-in, and leaves, with gratitude to the unmoved mover. Who rides slow and lonely into the sunset, to find another town that needs a hired gun.
Well. It's a crock, of course, from beginning to end. There's no such thing as imagining that you're falling in love. That's where falling in love happens, in the imagination; or, as you could also say, in the heart. There isn't any other kind. And therapists get into the business precisely because they crave adoration. Oh, they have other reasons, of course. But by and large that's what drives them.
Only one book I've read is imprudent enough to say plainly what the other kind of love looks like. That love isn't based on need, and doesn't resonate with the love of the father or the first lost love; it's a love that comes of plenitude rather than of wanting. The words get shriller and shriller, less and less convincing, till they dry up. They have the marks of fantasy all over them. Get over it, kids. All love is transference. All love is need. All love in the fallen world has far more to do with what we feel we lack than with disinterested admiration.
The fact is that transference, far from being an incidental hazard, is our stock-in-trade. The sooner we admit it the better. Boundaries are important not because they clarify the relationship, but because they misrepresent it. Without the fiction of the therapeutic distance, the whole thing would come down around our ears. It still does, often enough.
You showed a reluctance to cut to the chase and get on the table. We chatted easily. You paused a moment, and said, "you look good in green."
Well, I hope so; that's why I wear it. "Thanks," I said carelessly, and rapidly changed the subject, and got up and bustled about with the linens.
Later I used my forearms on your back. Not the elbow or the edge of the ulna, as we learn in class, to save our hands when we want to apply deep pressure. You can't handle deep pressure. I turned the edge of the ulna outwards and used the soft anterior forearm. I was just giving as much skin contact as I could, and still maintain the therapeutic fiction. You wanted touch. I was giving it to you. I wanted touch too; I was taking it.
At such moments only two things can keep me from going over the edge and crossing the boundary: sublime ignorance, or acute awareness. I must either believe that what's happening is entirely emotionally neutral, or understand exactly how involved I am in my own emotional need, and your emotional need, and my emotional need for your emotional need. But what I can't afford is vagueness or fuzziness.
This is the time to go for refuge, to recall the pure motivation disguised as need. I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme assembly of the Sangha. The source of it all, of the need and the compassion, of the desire and of the connection, is pure Buddha-nature. I need to touch that. I need all the help of my practice tradition. Not to escape the need and the desire -- fat chance of that! But to go through it, to see past the apparent lack to the real plenitude. Not the plenitude of a healthy individual -- that will-o'-the-wisp -- but the plenitude of the Buddha.
Monday, October 15, 2007
To Carmen
of Overmatter
It occurred to me that you might not know how often,
Reading your words, minute enclaves of joy
Form in my heart and keep it from sinking. You are
An ordinary daylight falling across the page,
A northern window, the scent of cookies in the kitchen,
The ring of kind laughter in the next room, the comfort
Of a well-used prayer: the blessing of every day.
of Overmatter
It occurred to me that you might not know how often,
Reading your words, minute enclaves of joy
Form in my heart and keep it from sinking. You are
An ordinary daylight falling across the page,
A northern window, the scent of cookies in the kitchen,
The ring of kind laughter in the next room, the comfort
Of a well-used prayer: the blessing of every day.
Foliations
Two lovely foliations: Amanda on the sticking power of poetry; Tiel on the difference between oil and salt.
Two lovely foliations: Amanda on the sticking power of poetry; Tiel on the difference between oil and salt.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Four Directions
Life comes gently to the southern people
That there are
Women who undress in a single gesture
Locking eyes before the gown has quite finished
Crumpling to the floor
That there are
Griefs that run a course of tears and are done
And anger that flares once like a match, blown out
With laughter
That there are
Chances of disaster reckoned too small
To bother with, and abandoned,
Leaving no trace
Life comes harshly to the northern people
That there are
Loyalties that never waver, promises made in the morning
That hold until evening, and wreaths laid on memorial day
for a Normandy soldier
That there are
Plans laid for next year's crops, wills carefully drawn up
And hedged with codicils, and no disaster so unlikely
That it goes unanguished
That there are
Well kept houses bequeathed to prodigal sons
Unfaltering care for wayward husbands, and cancers
Kept secret out of love
Life comes in sequence to the western people
That there is
One king one god one law, that things are
Exactly as they appear to be, and there are cameras
That do not lie
That there is
A reason for everything and everything in its reason
And light that does not curve, and irreducible
Particles
That there is
A way to take everything to bits and a way
To put it back together just as it was, only
Understood this time
Life comes obliquely to the eastern people
That there are
Consequences too many to be numbered
The stumbling weariness of ten thousand lives
Bound to the wheel
That there are
Defeats more precious than victories, jewels
Hidden in the mud, drunken saints slumped
In the whorehouses
That there are
Kindnesses beyond reason and more grist
Than can ever be milled; and that there is at last
A stillness
Life comes gently to the southern people
That there are
Women who undress in a single gesture
Locking eyes before the gown has quite finished
Crumpling to the floor
That there are
Griefs that run a course of tears and are done
And anger that flares once like a match, blown out
With laughter
That there are
Chances of disaster reckoned too small
To bother with, and abandoned,
Leaving no trace
Life comes harshly to the northern people
That there are
Loyalties that never waver, promises made in the morning
That hold until evening, and wreaths laid on memorial day
for a Normandy soldier
That there are
Plans laid for next year's crops, wills carefully drawn up
And hedged with codicils, and no disaster so unlikely
That it goes unanguished
That there are
Well kept houses bequeathed to prodigal sons
Unfaltering care for wayward husbands, and cancers
Kept secret out of love
Life comes in sequence to the western people
That there is
One king one god one law, that things are
Exactly as they appear to be, and there are cameras
That do not lie
That there is
A reason for everything and everything in its reason
And light that does not curve, and irreducible
Particles
That there is
A way to take everything to bits and a way
To put it back together just as it was, only
Understood this time
Life comes obliquely to the eastern people
That there are
Consequences too many to be numbered
The stumbling weariness of ten thousand lives
Bound to the wheel
That there are
Defeats more precious than victories, jewels
Hidden in the mud, drunken saints slumped
In the whorehouses
That there are
Kindnesses beyond reason and more grist
Than can ever be milled; and that there is at last
A stillness
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Noble Poverty and Cheap Cars
I never had doubts that I knew of that I could finish a massage program, so it's a little odd that I should feel such relief at being done. I was worried about clinic, I guess, and I came through that -- with an A, even, having scraped through with 91%, despite my deep lack of connection with the teacher. (An odd experience for me: I usually connect with teachers. But somehow Linda and I just weren't from the same planet.)
The relief is odd too because I loved massage school. I have been as happy this year as I've ever been in my life. But anyway I am relieved. And excited to go on to the next step. The first of my two exams is scheduled for Saturday after next; I'm still waiting to hear back from the Oregon board about when my second, the practical, will be.
Zhoen warned about the inevitable disappointment. But I am temperamentally so given to expecting disappointment that I don't think I need prepare for it. Of course there have been times when connection doesn't happen, when massage is just a chore. But I think that if I continue to hold it as a vocation, and to approach it with reverence, it will continue to feel this important, and this sustaining. The only really discouraging scenario I can imagine is just not getting the clients.
Of course, at some point being relatively poor may begin to rankle. The pinch has not yet come. And it's been interesting gradually assimilating my external status in the world. Here on the West Coast, and particularly in the People's Republic of Multnomah,* a good proportion of people hold massage to be a healing art, worthy of respect; but a good proportion also -- and a considerably higher proportion, in the rest of the country -- view it as somewhere on the continuum between prostitute and cosmetician: the sort of work that no-good cousins drift into because they can't do anything else.** I don't think you ever get the full impact of such changes in status until you're fully in them. I still remember the shock of the change that being married brought about. I was taken more seriously in some ways, and less seriously in others. It's not until you meet strangers, and it's among the first facts they know about you, that you really get it. And for the first time in many years I have no brand name to depend on. Yale and IBM guaranteed a certain amount of respect. Everyone's heard of them; everyone knows they're exclusive clubs. But an independent massage therapist could be any kind of gormless fool or untrustworthy scammer -- there's just no telling.
One consequence of this is that, for the first time in my life, I am embarrassed by the car I drive. My father-in-law, as his sight deteriorated, gave up driving, and so, very generously, gave us his car, a white Ford Taurus station wagon.
I have to confess that I loathe this car. It has so little headroom that if I've pushed my reading glasses to the top of my head -- as I generally do, nowadays -- I don't fit; the glasses scrape the roof and I have to snatch them off and toss them onto the passenger seat. Everything about it feels cheap, awkward, and shoddy. Our 1984 Honda handles far better, and feels much roomier, despite being a smaller car.and having three times the mileage on it. But I have to use the Taurus sometimes. My massage table fits comfortably in the back. So when I'm doing outcall I use it.
What I really hate about the Taurus, though -- I blush to admit it -- is that it's a loser car. The Honda may be ancient, and indicate noble poverty, but it was a good quality car to start with. It shows taste and discernment. The Taurus began life as bad value even for cheap.*** It indicates stupid poverty. And with neither the IBM nor the Yale brand backing me up, to belie the impression, it galls me to pull up somewhere in that ugly, ill-proportioned, ill-made car. I feel like the no-good cousin. There will be more things like this, as the reality of living on a third of my former income sinks in.
* The People's Republic of Multnomah. Note for foreigners: The city of Portland occupies much of Multnomah County, and its radicalism (much exaggerated by friend and foe alike) has gained it this moniker in Oregon.
** With apologies to any prostitutes or cosmeticians among my readers. But you know, better than I, how people think of these occupations.
*** This is not to say that my father-in-law is a loser. The man had driven Ford and Chevrolets since the days when you used to order them and then take a bus halfway across the country to Detroit to pick them up. That's different.
I never had doubts that I knew of that I could finish a massage program, so it's a little odd that I should feel such relief at being done. I was worried about clinic, I guess, and I came through that -- with an A, even, having scraped through with 91%, despite my deep lack of connection with the teacher. (An odd experience for me: I usually connect with teachers. But somehow Linda and I just weren't from the same planet.)
The relief is odd too because I loved massage school. I have been as happy this year as I've ever been in my life. But anyway I am relieved. And excited to go on to the next step. The first of my two exams is scheduled for Saturday after next; I'm still waiting to hear back from the Oregon board about when my second, the practical, will be.
Zhoen warned about the inevitable disappointment. But I am temperamentally so given to expecting disappointment that I don't think I need prepare for it. Of course there have been times when connection doesn't happen, when massage is just a chore. But I think that if I continue to hold it as a vocation, and to approach it with reverence, it will continue to feel this important, and this sustaining. The only really discouraging scenario I can imagine is just not getting the clients.
Of course, at some point being relatively poor may begin to rankle. The pinch has not yet come. And it's been interesting gradually assimilating my external status in the world. Here on the West Coast, and particularly in the People's Republic of Multnomah,* a good proportion of people hold massage to be a healing art, worthy of respect; but a good proportion also -- and a considerably higher proportion, in the rest of the country -- view it as somewhere on the continuum between prostitute and cosmetician: the sort of work that no-good cousins drift into because they can't do anything else.** I don't think you ever get the full impact of such changes in status until you're fully in them. I still remember the shock of the change that being married brought about. I was taken more seriously in some ways, and less seriously in others. It's not until you meet strangers, and it's among the first facts they know about you, that you really get it. And for the first time in many years I have no brand name to depend on. Yale and IBM guaranteed a certain amount of respect. Everyone's heard of them; everyone knows they're exclusive clubs. But an independent massage therapist could be any kind of gormless fool or untrustworthy scammer -- there's just no telling.
One consequence of this is that, for the first time in my life, I am embarrassed by the car I drive. My father-in-law, as his sight deteriorated, gave up driving, and so, very generously, gave us his car, a white Ford Taurus station wagon.
I have to confess that I loathe this car. It has so little headroom that if I've pushed my reading glasses to the top of my head -- as I generally do, nowadays -- I don't fit; the glasses scrape the roof and I have to snatch them off and toss them onto the passenger seat. Everything about it feels cheap, awkward, and shoddy. Our 1984 Honda handles far better, and feels much roomier, despite being a smaller car.and having three times the mileage on it. But I have to use the Taurus sometimes. My massage table fits comfortably in the back. So when I'm doing outcall I use it.
What I really hate about the Taurus, though -- I blush to admit it -- is that it's a loser car. The Honda may be ancient, and indicate noble poverty, but it was a good quality car to start with. It shows taste and discernment. The Taurus began life as bad value even for cheap.*** It indicates stupid poverty. And with neither the IBM nor the Yale brand backing me up, to belie the impression, it galls me to pull up somewhere in that ugly, ill-proportioned, ill-made car. I feel like the no-good cousin. There will be more things like this, as the reality of living on a third of my former income sinks in.
* The People's Republic of Multnomah. Note for foreigners: The city of Portland occupies much of Multnomah County, and its radicalism (much exaggerated by friend and foe alike) has gained it this moniker in Oregon.
** With apologies to any prostitutes or cosmeticians among my readers. But you know, better than I, how people think of these occupations.
*** This is not to say that my father-in-law is a loser. The man had driven Ford and Chevrolets since the days when you used to order them and then take a bus halfway across the country to Detroit to pick them up. That's different.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Taking on Energy
One of our instructors at massage school gave out a short piece she'd written about how not to take on negative energy. I don't have it to hand, but among its suggestions as I remember them was a ritual hand-washing, and saying aloud "I will not take on anything that is not mine." It's not the first time I've met this view. The idea is that someone who works with energy, as bodyworkers inevitable do, whether they do energy work or not, are peculiarly vulnerable to being swamped with the negative energy -- the anger, resentment, or despair -- of their clients. And the solution is to affirm the boundary between us and them, and refuse to allow their energy entry.
I disagreed with this violently. To be ask a Mahayana Buddhist to reject someone else's energy is rather like asking a Fundamentalist to worship the Devil. One of my Buddhist teachers once told me that there is only one way to really break the Bodhisattva vow -- the vow to work in the suffering world until all beings are enlightened, which is really the heart of the Mahayana -- and that is to give up on someone, to deny our connection to him or her. And that is precisely what this little piece was advising us to do.
Now, the risk she's addressing is real. Absorbing negative energy is dangerous. I don't think it's more dangerous to energy workers than to anyone else, but energy workers are bound to be particularly aware of it, and need to be particularly skillful in dealing with it. So what should be done?
To answer that requires a little more precision than we usually use in talking about energy. What do we actually mean by "negative energy," and what happens when we "take it on?"
In a misguided attempt to please people who pride themselves on rationalism, we have tended to talk about "energy" as if it were a kind of electricity, or something like heat: and we have gotten tangled up in our own metaphors. Electricity and heat are actually tranferrable. They can leave one place and go to another. The process of warming up one thing cools off another -- the warmth going into the ice cubes actually leaves the lemonade; that's why the lemonade gets cooler, and why the ice cubes melt. The ice cubes are taking on the lemonade's thermal energy, in a quite concrete and measurable fashion.
But this is not what happens when I take on negative energy from a client. And there's no need to get abstruse and mystical about it, here; we can take commonplace examples. When someone gets angry at me, and I "take it on" -- get angry back -- their anger does not ordinarily go away. It hasn't left them in order to enter me; ordinarily it escalates in both of us. Likewise, if someone is expressing their despair and hopelessness to me, and I become despairing and hopeless too, that doesn't ordinarily cheer them up. Ordinarily it makes them even more depressed. So negative energy is not exactly transferrable, like heat. It's more contagious, like a disease.
Now, what is the medium of the contagion? How does it spread? It spreads by perception. As soon as I perceive it, I resonate with it.
Here's the heart of the problem. As an energy worker -- or as a compassionate human being, for that matter -- I have to resonate with it. I can't just avoid it, because to work with it, I have to perceive it. And once I've perceived it, it's too late. The transfer, or the contagion, is already done. It's not their energy anymore; it's mine. I can try to reject it, sure. But any experienced meditator knows that attempting to reject an experience is actually a way of holding on to it. The harder I try to make it go away, the more stubbornly it will stay.
Stating the problem this way makes its solution obvious. We already know, as a meditators, how to deal with "negative energy." We just let it come, and let it go. It doesn't matter whose energy it is. And after all, wherever did this idea of energy belonging to people, of its being mine or yours, come from? Energy isn't monogrammed. It's no more mine or yours than the sky is mine or yours. The problem is not that we might pick up foreign, alien energy. The problem is the same problem we have, every day, with everything: we clutch at our experience or we try to escape it. If the problem were that the energy is not ours, then we ought to view alien joy or contentment with just as much apprehension; but somehow you don't see people ritually washing their hands of other people's joy and contentment and worrying about it invading their soul.
Milarepa found that the only way to get rid of the demons infesting his cave was to welcome them, and invite them to stay as long as they liked. The only way to avoid taking on negative energy is to welcome it. It's just passing through. We need not, and we must not, try to shove it out the door.
The sort of rituals my instructor proposed can still be useful. There is nothing wrong with recognizing that we are resonating with negativity and need to release it, and there's nothing wrong with using a ritual and reciting a formula to do so -- they're age-old and effective techniques: I imagine that healing traditions of all stripes use something of the sort. But an affirmation of our impermeable, inviolable self, and a rejection of other people, is the last thing we need to include in them.
One of our instructors at massage school gave out a short piece she'd written about how not to take on negative energy. I don't have it to hand, but among its suggestions as I remember them was a ritual hand-washing, and saying aloud "I will not take on anything that is not mine." It's not the first time I've met this view. The idea is that someone who works with energy, as bodyworkers inevitable do, whether they do energy work or not, are peculiarly vulnerable to being swamped with the negative energy -- the anger, resentment, or despair -- of their clients. And the solution is to affirm the boundary between us and them, and refuse to allow their energy entry.
I disagreed with this violently. To be ask a Mahayana Buddhist to reject someone else's energy is rather like asking a Fundamentalist to worship the Devil. One of my Buddhist teachers once told me that there is only one way to really break the Bodhisattva vow -- the vow to work in the suffering world until all beings are enlightened, which is really the heart of the Mahayana -- and that is to give up on someone, to deny our connection to him or her. And that is precisely what this little piece was advising us to do.
Now, the risk she's addressing is real. Absorbing negative energy is dangerous. I don't think it's more dangerous to energy workers than to anyone else, but energy workers are bound to be particularly aware of it, and need to be particularly skillful in dealing with it. So what should be done?
To answer that requires a little more precision than we usually use in talking about energy. What do we actually mean by "negative energy," and what happens when we "take it on?"
In a misguided attempt to please people who pride themselves on rationalism, we have tended to talk about "energy" as if it were a kind of electricity, or something like heat: and we have gotten tangled up in our own metaphors. Electricity and heat are actually tranferrable. They can leave one place and go to another. The process of warming up one thing cools off another -- the warmth going into the ice cubes actually leaves the lemonade; that's why the lemonade gets cooler, and why the ice cubes melt. The ice cubes are taking on the lemonade's thermal energy, in a quite concrete and measurable fashion.
But this is not what happens when I take on negative energy from a client. And there's no need to get abstruse and mystical about it, here; we can take commonplace examples. When someone gets angry at me, and I "take it on" -- get angry back -- their anger does not ordinarily go away. It hasn't left them in order to enter me; ordinarily it escalates in both of us. Likewise, if someone is expressing their despair and hopelessness to me, and I become despairing and hopeless too, that doesn't ordinarily cheer them up. Ordinarily it makes them even more depressed. So negative energy is not exactly transferrable, like heat. It's more contagious, like a disease.
Now, what is the medium of the contagion? How does it spread? It spreads by perception. As soon as I perceive it, I resonate with it.
Here's the heart of the problem. As an energy worker -- or as a compassionate human being, for that matter -- I have to resonate with it. I can't just avoid it, because to work with it, I have to perceive it. And once I've perceived it, it's too late. The transfer, or the contagion, is already done. It's not their energy anymore; it's mine. I can try to reject it, sure. But any experienced meditator knows that attempting to reject an experience is actually a way of holding on to it. The harder I try to make it go away, the more stubbornly it will stay.
Stating the problem this way makes its solution obvious. We already know, as a meditators, how to deal with "negative energy." We just let it come, and let it go. It doesn't matter whose energy it is. And after all, wherever did this idea of energy belonging to people, of its being mine or yours, come from? Energy isn't monogrammed. It's no more mine or yours than the sky is mine or yours. The problem is not that we might pick up foreign, alien energy. The problem is the same problem we have, every day, with everything: we clutch at our experience or we try to escape it. If the problem were that the energy is not ours, then we ought to view alien joy or contentment with just as much apprehension; but somehow you don't see people ritually washing their hands of other people's joy and contentment and worrying about it invading their soul.
Milarepa found that the only way to get rid of the demons infesting his cave was to welcome them, and invite them to stay as long as they liked. The only way to avoid taking on negative energy is to welcome it. It's just passing through. We need not, and we must not, try to shove it out the door.
The sort of rituals my instructor proposed can still be useful. There is nothing wrong with recognizing that we are resonating with negativity and need to release it, and there's nothing wrong with using a ritual and reciting a formula to do so -- they're age-old and effective techniques: I imagine that healing traditions of all stripes use something of the sort. But an affirmation of our impermeable, inviolable self, and a rejection of other people, is the last thing we need to include in them.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Home Improvements
So, bowing to popular demand, I have added a "home" link, over on the right, and a link to (I hope and believe) my RSS feed. Since I don't really understand the RSS feed thingy, let me know if it's not what was wanted, and I'll learn how to do it right.
You'll also see that the links to individual posts now call themselves "Link," on a new line below, rather than the cryptic ":::" before the "posted by" line, which has been missed by nearly everyone.
So, bowing to popular demand, I have added a "home" link, over on the right, and a link to (I hope and believe) my RSS feed. Since I don't really understand the RSS feed thingy, let me know if it's not what was wanted, and I'll learn how to do it right.
You'll also see that the links to individual posts now call themselves "Link," on a new line below, rather than the cryptic ":::" before the "posted by" line, which has been missed by nearly everyone.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
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.
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.
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