Juvenilia II

I wrote this when McCain first chose Palin. Might as well post it now, since she's in the public eye at the moment. I write about politics sometimes, but almost never post what I write: I don't like the tone I slip into. It's easy, all too easy, to write out of contempt, but not much worth reading usually comes of it.

Insult

I'm trying not to take it as a studied insult, McCain's selection of Palin, but that's what it feels like. It's the nightmare of the last eight years replayed at high speed, and thrown in my face. Americans, it says, are vapid and ignorant. All they want is pretty faces and pretty words. They don't give a damn really about knowledge and hard work and experience and human decency. They're incapable of distinguishing packaging from content.

That's what it says to me. And it only hurts, of course, because I'm afraid that it's true. Perhaps it is, and democracy for America was always a stupid idea. Maybe the mob really is incapable of governing itself.

I felt more than a twinge of this when Obama won his first caucuses. He's won my grudging approval since, by running the smartest, best-organized, best-disciplined presidential campaign that has ever been run by anyone. And of course by having policies that I approve of, or at least don't loathe, and by seeming to be an intelligent and decent man. And above all by his motto for hiring: "no drama queens," he's supposed to have said. I approve down to the bottom of my boots.

But at first it felt much like this: I was just exasperated. This is serious, folks. This is the presidency of the biggest, baddest rogue state of them all that we're talking about, a superpower bristling with nukes, and with an enormous army posted all over the world. This is the economy that's taking down the stability of the global climate. This is not a job for a freshman senator from Illinois. It's not a job for a neophyte governor of Alaska, either.

You want change? Fine. Elect a congress that will enact change. That's where change is supposed to happen. There's only one way a president of the United States will make fundamental changes -- by overthrowing the constitution. Is that what you want? Think, for God's sake, think for a change.

Braid

It's embarrassing just how much gratification figuring out how to reliably reproduce this simple braid pattern gave me. It took at least an hour, and of course it's so simple that once I grasped it I felt that any dunderhead should have been able to figure it out in five minutes. But I also felt the delight of seeing complicated things unfold from simple principles, which is one of my chief pleasures, and the delight of kinship with long-dead Indian and Tibetan and Celtic artists, whoever they were, who first figured these things out. I'm sure they got the same rush of gratification. Once you know how it works, you can make it work anywhere, any time: it's like the pleasure of learning your first arithmetic, and finding that it works everywhere: two plus two is always four, whether it's apples or oranges or noble truths. How cool is that?

---

I'm dutifully reading a biography of William Pitt the Younger, because I don't know anything about him, and that seemed weird, for someone who is as interested in Napoleonic times as I am. I've discovered, though, why it's taken so long for me to learn anything about him: he is the single most boring Important Person who ever lived.

Against "Carrying the Practice"

When I first started going to the Tibetan Buddhist place, KCC, what I mostly went to was a Sunday evening discussion group. We read books by Kalu Rinpoche or Alan Wallace or Pema Chödrön and talked about them. A consistent theme, and one of the reasons I liked the group, was how, as our teacher put it, to "carry the practice" into everyday life. Putting the insights gained through meditation to work. When push came to shove, I felt, this was what mattered. If the practice didn't make me wiser, kinder, calmer, and healthier to be around in my daily life, what good was it? So we talked about how to deal with difficult relatives or unhealthy cravings or exasperating work situations in light of the Dharma. They were good discussions, and I miss them. I couldn't understand why our teacher stopped holding them.

As I've aged in the Dharma, though, I've become more and more skeptical of the usefulness, or even the possibility, of "carrying the practice" as a conscious endeavor. A friend of mine was contemplating suing the people he used to work for, who had treated him abusively (and illegally.) He asked me, did Buddhism have anything to say about how he should proceed? Besides just "concede"?

My answer, basically, was no. It doesn't have anything to say. You can't really run "what would the Buddha do?" scenarios, not very usefully. And to my thinking now, that's not what Buddhism is for. Buddhism is really pretty useless as a guide to daily life. We simply have to do our best, as we did before we met the Dharma, to look out for our own interests and yet to be fair and kind. It's hard and often unsatisfactory. Often there just don't seem to be any good solutions. That's life. Buddhism doesn't change it. Often it doesn't even shed any new light on it.

So what good is it? Why do I still think practice is worthwhile? Why do I still do it?

Buddhist practice changes two things: what we see, and how much space for creative response there is in between seeing it, and our habitual response to it. These are both things that happen before conscious problem-solving even begins. By the time we're contemplating a practical problem, and trying to decide what to do, the parts that Buddhist practice can help us with are mostly already over.

Buddhism, of course, has ethical precepts, just as any religion does, and they're much the same as everyone else's. Ethics is not something that changes a lot. Be kind, follow the reasonable rules of your people, do your share of the work & take only your share of the gain, think how it must be for the other guy. Avoid getting drunk. Try not to lose your temper. Tell the truth. Keep your promises. Give to the poor. That sort of thing. Nothing radical there. A good Buddhist and a good Muslim and a good atheist all look pretty much alike. And all of them find themselves in ethically perplexing situations where the rules aren't much help. You do your best. What else?

In Buddhism we work on familiarizing ourselves with the workings of our own mind. We watch its habitual patterns. We identify what it chooses to pay attention to, and what it prefers to ignore. In meditation, we attempt to stop, for the space of a few minutes, or at most a couple hours, taking our perceptions at face value, and attend instead to the process of perceiving. Instead of contemplating the stupidity of Sarah Palin, we attend to how we seek out only information that makes her look stupid, and avoid information that makes her look thoughtful. We watch ourselves construct her stupidity; we watch how obsessively we return to its construction, how urgently we resist its deconstruction. We begin to understand her stupidity as a property of our own minds, rather than as a property of Palin herself; and we begin to understand how we in fact are violently injuring our own hearts by holding on to our contempt for her.

Do we then vote for the McCain-Palin ticket? Of course not. And there's no reason why a Republican Buddhist should change her mind and vote Obama-Biden. That's not the level of change we're looking for. Buddhists have no more political perspicacity than anyone else, and there's no reason why they should. We shouldn't look for that. What we should look for is a deeper understanding of what our minds are doing.

In particular I distrust a sort of "heroic Buddhism," in which you really try to act as the Buddha would, with no concern whatever for your own well-being, letting everyone else's physical and emotional needs take precedence over your own. Without the Buddha's clarity this is only another variety of attachment, and an invitation to abuse. If Buddhist practice works, then true and effective generosity will grow of its own accord. Buddhist selflessness in practice would not look much like Jewish-mother selflessness. For one thing, the more you understand about the mind the better you understand that, generally, what people regard as the sources of their happiness are actually the sources of their misery, and that "doing what they want" is possibly the least kind thing you could do. A genuine Buddha would be a pain in the butt. The Buddha Shakyamuni's brother-in-law, you'll remember, wanted to kill him, and I bet he wasn't the only one.

In the long run -- yes, this understanding seeps into the practical world. We do become gentler, easier people to be around. We hold our opinions with a slightly less desperate clutch. We see things a little differently. But hard choices and perplexities don't go away. My feeling about practice now, is -- just do it, and leave it on the cushion. In daily life just do your best, as you always have. Don't look to Buddhism to solve your problems and change the externals of your worldly life. That's not what it's for.

Juvenilia

I generally begin the morning, settled in at Tosi's, by opening a wordpad document and naming it with the date. Every so often, after a few dozen of these files has accumulated, I do some housecleaning: open each of the files in turn, give it an intelligible name, and move it to a subfolder named "posted." But some of them haven't been posted, or parts of them haven't been posted. It's always interesting to see what I've censored, and why. I'll be posting a few of the censored posts (suitably cleaned up) over the next few days. Here's the first.

---

I wrote this a couple months ago, when I turned from reading about Cook and other explorers to reading Orhan Pamuk. I have struggled a long time with a prejudice against the Islamic world, which long predates 9/11 and the current idiocies. Somehow Pamuk finally undid that for me, simply with a description of a man coming home to Istanbul in the falling snow.

I put this aside then because of the racism it rises from: and I still have some qualms about posting it. I haven't found the snow that will reveal the Hawaiians' humanity to me, though I know damn well it's there. There's always some people on the periphery who will do to body forth your personal bogey-men (in my case, people who live in eternal blazing sunlight and want nothing but justice). Whether you should allow yourself to post poetry based on it, though, I don't know.

---

Justice

Listen. I know, I know, I know
What they did. Cook brought misery,
Some intended, most not. You could say
He deserved it. You could say
We all deserve it. No doubt we do.

It was the snow
That turned the corner for me. Snow
Falling in Istanbul. Arriving there,
Fresh from the Hawaiian Islands, from

The brutal clubbing of Captain Cook
(Struggling and drowning in two feet of water,
Struck again and again), I realized
That in my mind people who never saw snow
Were not quite human.

If you never pulled off snow crusted boots
With numb hands, well --
What kind of monster would that make you?

But the Turks and the Persians
Of course they had snow. I knew that,
As one knows things that one has not yet met in story,
Idly. But now that I have seen the flakes sifting down
And vanishing in the gloomy Horn, I know
That the Turks were human. They would have
Reasons of the heart, even if they were bad ones,
For drowning Captain Cook.

Just this past week, a friend wrote in praise of a poet
That he sought justice for his people
And my blood ran cold.
Justice, God I hate justice, and I hate peoples
Who require it. To want justice
Is to want to live in the endless sunlight,
On the white sand, endlessly, endlessly
Clubbing a wriggling man in the water.

So I wander the streets of Istanbul
In the falling snow. Give me cruelties
With a beginning and an end. What man
Who knows himself can possibly want justice?
Not me. I want mercy. Have pity
On a worn out sailor far from home. We have done
What we could. Let me raise myself
Onto my knees, just once,
The blood streaming from my face,
And taste the sweet air
Just once.

Wherein You Have Offended

We're also on the cusp of entering the ten days of teshuvah,, wrote Rachel, the ten first days of the month of Tishri during which it's customary to seek forgiveness from anyone one has wronged in order to approach Yom Kippur with a clean slate. If I have offended in the year now ending, please forgive me? (Seriously, if anyone has bones to pick with me, please reach out and let me know so that I can do whatever I am able to make amends.)

You have offended against my vanity,
By loving me despite my faults.

You have offended against my suffering,
By understanding me.

You have offended against my prejudice,
By loving my enemies and your own.

You have offended against my tears,
By drying them.

You have offended against my glibness,
By taking complicated things as they are.

You have offended against my loneliness,
By touching me when I was most outcast.

You have offended against my darkness,
Like a broken hydrant, shedding light;

You have so offended, Rachel, that I doubt
You can ever make amends.

Shadows of Clouds

4:17 am. I fell asleep early, at 10:30, and woke at 1:00. Lay in bed thinking for a couple hours, and finally got up. Now, do I try to nap for a couple hours before driving Tori out to the college to meet up with her car-pool? (I never did quite grasp what the event is. It involves going to Hillsboro, though.)

Maybe I do. I'm very tired now. Tired enough even to sleep a bit, maybe.

Such a strange life. Nothing seems quite real to me. Nothing but the the touch. I'm only really alive when I'm touching somebody. The rest of it is a long slow cinematic pan, a sliding picture-show. Words leave people's mouths and float to my ears. I hear them or I don't: I make my best guess as to what they might mean, either way. Who knows? The speaker might not know what he means either. We're all hard at work producing meanings for each other's consumption, but we seldom achieve much but echoes of what other people meant before.

The trees of the park walk deliberately around me. Kisses are real. You are real. But future and past, wobbling through our talk? I can barely even track them in the conventional sense, let alone believe in them.

The patterned clouds push the trees down to the horizon; their shadows creep over the root-mounds. Great rushes of tenderness, of desire. I'm afraid for you, afraid for all of us.

These fragile bodies. All we have.

Machik's Heart



For Jenny

Machik Labdrön appeared in my Ngöndro visualizations of her own accord, early on, dazzling white, and always dancing. She borrowed her forms from Chenrezig and Sukkasiddhi, I suppose: like most enlightened beings she shifts forms casually. I'm partial to her because she paid her dues as a human being, having married and raised children to adulthood before achieving enlightenment. (I found this image of Machik on the web, by the way, unattributed, which may mean that someone somewhere holds a copyright to it. If so, let me know! I don't want to be thieving.)

A flush along the jawline;
a little catch in the breath.

I listen for all that's not said.
I am so many people in so short a time:
the lover who left, the boyfriend in highschool;
teacher, false confidante, mother,
the little cat that came once and
never came again.

It is not this business of
becoming other people that is risky
It is trying to remain myself.
Let go, let be, remember only
the infinite tenderness of the Buddha,
Milarepa's quizzical smile, and Machik,
dancing, white,
dancing. I hold her heart,

beating, in my hands, not just hers,
but my own, and Machik's, and
the cat's, all one heart, just this one
fleeting evening.

Later I stand in the washroom,
unable quite to catch my breath,
having traveled through an alien,
intimate past, knowing far more
than anyone ever meant for me to know.

Whew

I lived through it! And so many lovely people came to see me through -- I was so grateful to them.

Thanks, thanks everyone.

Small as Ocean

for Christine

I suddenly saw you today
you were twenty-one and
looking in the mirror
and you had no idea, no idea at all
that the world behind you was staggering
in the slipstream of your beauty.

The pupils of my eyes
are very small,
as if the dark spots
were nostrils,
you said.

Now
We watch our sons
recede, and the world shrinks;
the shadows are tall
when the sun is low. No matter
how little we become, the casting
runs over the dusted ground:
We have done
what we could.

I hold your ribs
in my hands, and
each finger finds its warm ledge; and
like the ticking of a clock
I feel the beating of your heart.

Suppose we have gone small
as they have grown:
The fire still rises, and
the haunting of your body
by heart and wicked blood
and the marvelous sky, and
the shadows stride over
the red clay and the forest; and

opening into
the wildest widest open
countries, they are
night skies and torches,
seen at the last drunken
glimpse and dreamed long after.

You had not learned then,
as you have learned now,
that empires and monsters
and small fluttery things
enter at every inbreath;

that to say as small as these
windows into the heartspace
is to say
small as leviathan,
small as ocean.

Thanks!

Wow, thank you all for the encouragement! Thank you so much. Public speaking is a trial for me -- which is why I abandoned teaching -- but this is reading aloud, which is an entirely different and much easier thing. So I'm actually looking forward to it. And I don't think they let you bring rotten fruit into Barnes & Noble, so I should be okay.

Here's my playlist. It's eleven short love poems:

Santiago
Untitled ("I love clumsy women")
Vanity Fair
Argentine
Not True Any More
Love Comes to Portland
The Rain You Sent
The Poor in Spirit
Flute
Pilgrim in Brooklyn
Love Poem (to Jo)

As for recording -- sorry. Beyond my technical skills. I don't think I even own a device that records sound. But I'm glad you want to hear!

Eep!

---

Barnes & Noble Reading Series is delighted to present poets Dale Favier, Dan Raphael, and Maryrose Larkin.

When: September 17, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

Hosted by: Tom Mattox


Dale Favier has taught poetry, chopped vegetables, and written software for a living. Currently he works half-time as a massage therapist and half-time as a database administrator for a non-profit. He is a Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition; he lives with his wife and two nearly grown children in Portland, Oregon. He never wrote much poetry until he began blogging a few years ago, at Mole – http://koshtra.blogspot.com – and fell in with bad companions, with whom he eventually brought out an anthology, Brilliant Coroners. He has an M.Phil. in Medieval English Literature from Yale, and his most recent work has been translations of Old English alliterative verse.

Dan Raphael: All that matters about dan raphael is the poetry, which he performs in places like Wordstock, Bumbershoot, Burning Word, Mountain Writers, Portland Jazz Festival and KBOO. His most recent books are Breath Test and Showing Light a Good Time; he's currently working on his new manuscript City Rain Coincidence. Current poems appear in Stringtown, Otoliths, Knock Journal, Skidrow Penthouse and Refined Savage.

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a freelance researcher. She is the author of Inverse (nine muses books), Whimsy Daybook 2007 (FLASH+CARD), and The Book of Ocean (i.e. press). Maryrose is part of Spare Room, a group of people who organize readings and other events in Portland. She is co-editor, with Sarah Mangold, of FLASH+CARD, a chapbook and ephemera poetry press.


Learn more about the B&N Reading Series

Same

I woke before dawn. Orion was walking in the southern sky, but he was gone when I went out to the car, and there was a lavender sky to the east. Now I'm in Tosi's.

"How are you, Tosh?" asks a customer.

Tosi answers in a single syllable, as he always does, forcefully and finally. "Same," he declares. As if he wants it put out of doubt forever, that his state of health or mind could ever change. And he is, in fact, one of the anchors of my life. Always here, always the same. He looks sixty, maybe, but he's well over seventy. Sixty years ago, as he's fond of recounting, he arrived by ship in America, innocent of English, and was put on a train with a label bearing his destination pinned to his shirt. Went to work for his uncle, (or was it his cousin? I'll have to listen more closely, next time) in Chicago (or Cleveland?), busing tables and washing dishes. He still buses tables, when they're shorthanded: the waitresses fuss at him when he loads the bus tubs too full and lugs them to the kitchen. "Do you think you're a teenager? You're going to wreck your back." Tosi grunts dismissively.

He takes a hand at the line, too, in a pinch, though we rather wish he wouldn't: he doesn't really have the timing of a line cook any more, and the eggs arrive a little hard or a little runny, the toast maybe a little burnt. The waitresses apologize obliquely when he does, murmuring "Tosh is cooking today" when they set down your plate. But it's usually his son Jim cooking, who makes a perfect breakfast, every time. If you like diner food. No one complains about Tosi's cooking, though. I think we all know that the day Tosi lets a job go undone at the restaurant will be the day he decides to die.

He sits at the odd booth beside the door, at slow times, and his old friends come in, and have animated conversations in Greek. They all have wonderful faces. They belong to the last generation that didn't really care about men being handsome, the generation in which a man like Humphrey Bogart, with no physique and no prettiness, could be a film star. And consequently they're much more attractive than the men twenty years younger, who have mostly run to fat and look like they couldn't handle themselves in a fight. Of course, Tosi's friends are Greek, too, and the Greeks are the handsomest people in the world. They just are.

His youngest daughter waited tables here, for a few years. She was astoundingly pretty, and even more astoundingly innocent and attentive. She listened to everything everyone said with round eyes, she loved and admired everyone, she was delighted by the most tired jokes. When she confided to me that she was getting married, I took her hand and said, "Oh, all the blessings!" She was the kind of person you could be maudlin with, without embarrassment.

She's a schoolteacher now, and has kids, and has put on weight, and looks a little worried. I see her here every once in a while. Her face still lights up when she sees you, but only after a small delay. She doesn't live at the surface now: she has to come up from somewhere to respond to you. I grieve for the girl who used to patter happily around the restaurant, pouring coffee.

The cars swish down Sandy Boulevard, now, with their long shadows in front of them. All going to work. I don't have to go to work till noon, now. Time to write almost every morning. I still can't believe my good fortune. Mornings to write, afternoons at the Foundation, massage in the evening: it's the perfect life. I keep expecting someone to snatch it away. Surely you can't live so much the life you want to live, and get away with it? But I won't borrow trouble. It knows where to find me; it has my address; it can look me up if it wants me. I'm not going to go looking for it.

The Elephant Downstairs (Unfinished)

My brother started me on The Lord of the Rings. I suppose I was ten or eleven. He was nearly done with the The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume, and said I should read it when he was done. I picked up the second, The Two Towers, just to look at it. About twenty-four hours later, in which I did nothing but read and sleep, I had finished it, with the gates of Cirith Ungol slammed shut against Sam; my brother in the meantime had finished the Fellowship, so I devoured that, going back in the narrative, as well. I gulped down The Return of the King in another twenty-four hours, up until the destruction of the Ring -- and stopped.

I couldn't bear to finish, to no longer have it in front of me to read for the first time. It was several days before I picked it up again and finished it, very slowly for me -- I was in the habit of wolfing my books, in those days. But this was the last I had: I savored it.

Of course I read them again, over and over: I counted some forty times, before I lost track. I read them aloud to my children, a couple times to each. I learned Spanish, French and German partly by reading translations of The Lord of the Rings into those languages. A long easy text that I knew by heart: it was a perfect way to absorb vocabulary. So it's a peculiarity of my linguistic competences that I know the words for hauberk, baldric, and chalcedony in four languages.

Where was I? Oh yes. I put off finishing. And I thought of that when I thought of the fact that I've tended to leave things by favorite authors unread. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy I read soon after I had first read the Rings: I remember that the very first time I felt carsick, we were on a long journey in southern Oregon, near Mt Thielsen, and I was staring at an ink drawing of the helmeted twin soldiers that pursue Titus in the last volume.

Gormenghast is chilling to read because the author dies under your hands: he had a degenerative illness -- I don't remember what -- that gradually robbed him of his powers of connected thought and of sustained artwork. Titus Alone has strange gaps and discontinuities that increase as the book goes on: but as Peake is so idiosyncratic, laconic and florid by turns, both as a writer and as an artist, you don't realize it for quite a while. He never loses that power of the line, the power that Blake thought was the essence of art: in one swift curve he captures a whole world of imaginative intensity. But as Titus Alone progresses the canvas on which those lines emerge is increasingly blurred confused -- or, simply, and terrifyingly, empty.

So I came to the end of Gormenghast in a sobered and subdued frame of mind. And for years and years I never read anything more of Peake's. There wasn't, after all, a lot more to read, and it wasn't easy in those days to find: everything but Gormenghast was long out of print. But eventually I snapped up Mr Pye, which was not much more than a morsel. And there it lay. I read his wife's biography of him. It is, as some complained, a hagiography, but all the more moving for that: she loved him and missed him desperately. And although I'm sure he had numerous faults, one thing he could clearly do is love: he swept her off her feet, and she stayed swept, ever after.

I felt, reading that biography, that I understood fully for the first time -- though I couldn't quite put it into words -- what I was in the world for. Peake saw things. Beautiful and ugly. And they set up a resonance in him: they made him a wellspring of vividness and intensity. One night, he and his wife-to-be heard odd trampling noises below his studio: on opening a trap door in the floor they found that an circus elephant had been lodged there, whom they fed buns and sugar. I have no idea whether this story is true -- his later biographer presents it as true -- but it certainly feels true: that Peake, by the intensity of his perception, could cause elephants to appear in the middle of London.

And that, I felt, was my own gift, on a far lesser scale; my calling. I have always heard the elephant downstairs. I have always been struck witless by apparitions of beautiful and grotesque things, not all of which can be seen by other people. And I've always had a gnawing, nagging idea that my job was to make a door, or at least of window, of myself, so that these things could come into the world.

Last night, rubbing oil along the humped spine of an old man, the night air came walking in, at intervals; his younger German wife, leaning against the wall, spoke softly, looking aside, as Europeans do. Pools of light and dark, sleeping and waking; a cuckoo clock that spoke unexpectedly; a tiny dog that let me rub his belly but never quite trusted me. I am doing the work I was sent to do. And so what if it breaks my heart?

Too Rich Already

I am too rich already, for my eyes
Mint gold...

--Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake's grotesquerie has been dwelling in my heart, the last couple days. I don't think it has anything to do with horror or revulsion: it has to do with loving things as they are.

It is the real bodies that claim my attention and my devotion, and the extravagances that time puts on them are what I love above all: the crusted, twisted, hammer-toed feet; the marbled muscle-and-fat purses of the inner thighs, the jowls that give you purchase to stretch the facial tissue. What do I want with twenty-year-olds, their perfect bodies, their fluid joints, their bland, uncharactered perfection? Give me bodies that have suffered, that have fought with the world. Give me pouchy, knobbly bellies, hips that lock, arms that can't rise above the shoulder line. Give me scars, mutilations, edemas, hernias, mastectomies. I want a book that's been well read, with scribbles in the margins and tattered pages. I want an old house that has settled, that has yawed and twisted, that has been loved by the uncritical eyes of five-year-olds for generations.

Camassia Preserve

The shallow soils of this rocky plateau support wet meadows, Oregon white oak-madrone woodlands, vernal and permanent ponds, and even a stand of quaking aspen.

Strange skies, peeling
like the bark of a madrone;
poison oak gleaming like
fire reflected in brass;
oak galls nest in
last year's leaves.
Grasshoppers cock
and spring, as I pass;
drawing the straight lines
of a pattern I'm too dull to grasp.

I find my son
at the brink of the dell,
sitting on the bare gray stone.
Below is a firepit,
unsanctioned, no doubt.
For a moment evening
takes my imagination, and I see
the restless teenagers,
the flaring light, the dares;
they know this place is sacred
but no one has taught them
what to do with sacred places.
They can only improvise.

But here in the strong
but failing sun
are only blackened rocks;
my son with his long thick hair,
his steady kindness, his
grace; he is indulging us
by going on this walk, but
he cheerfully
makes a virtue of all necessities.
We leave this to you, all
this beauty and confusion.
We're sorry it could not be more,
that we could not hand you
a confident future.

My dear son
we bequeath to you
an evening habit of video games
a nature preserve or two
and this fading autumn sun.

Dissemination

Let the vultures carry scraps
to the bluffs above the river;
Let the fox leave bits of me in the gravel of the creek.
Let drops of my blood fall in the marsh
to engender dragonflies, and small hunting things
that are furtive in the reeds; things that snap suddenly
with toothless jaws. Let my fingers
burrow into rotten stumps
like grubs, and wait their long winter,
to emerge, glistening, long-legged, wrinkle-winged.

Let the dogs fight over the bones
that are left on the dunes,
filch a rib or two from each other, till the game
turns elsewhere. Then the ants will chew them clean,
and the winter sun will turn them
into white splayed branches where
the blown sand pools.

Smile

. . . it's better not to make gods or demons smile: they don't laugh at the same jokes as us.

-- Jorkens

There's quite a number of facial muscles -- we didn't learn half of them in massage school -- and so far as anyone knows they're all quite useless, except for communicating emotionally with your fellow human beings. Which goes to show how important communicating emotionally is, to us social animals, from a purely cold-blooded, evolutionary point of view. Those who are bad at it tend to not to get to reproduce.

The apologetic email, telling us of our appointments for being photographed, and giving us instructions for how to dress, began "SMILE!" We were to bring a favorite book -- checked out from the library, of course -- to be photographed with.

I had imagined a group photo, but no, these were individual portraits, and the photographer spent the whole day at it. An hour on me alone. I had searched the stacks for a William Blake, but the only copy was a grimy, featureless mustard yellow. So I settled for a rather handsome Yeats.

He took pictures of me with the high library windows marching away behind me. His assistant darted here and there with reflectors. I brandished the book, clutched it, read it. Set a foot on the seat of a chair and rested the book on its back. At one point the photographer said, confounding me utterly, "do things."

Do things? I waved the book, pursed my lips, shrugged. Then I had to laugh, because the perfect line from the book came to my lips, and I recited, "O what am I, that I should not seem / For the song's sake a fool?"

Click. Flash.

After an hour of this, my face was aching. I had a horror, I found, of having the camera look at me and not seeming attentive, and seeming attentive requires quite a bit of exertion by the facial muscles. I tried giving up, breathing through the tension and letting my face relax, but if I succeeded it was only momentarily. The photographer had a whole bag of tricks for eliciting facial expressions from his subject: a sudden calling of my name, quick gestures, nods. I responded to them, willy nilly, even though I knew they were not authentic emotional communications, and I could have resented being played upon, had I not been so interested both in his craft, and in my inability to refrain from responding to it.

So now, of course, I am all curiosity to see such of the photos as I get to see. I don't even know what they're for, but I'm guessing they're for the Foundation's new website; if it's linkable I'll link it.

It is not accidental, I think, that we social mammals are unnerved by animals that are not social. Think of how regularly people remark upon the shark's mirthless smile. We can't help interpreting facial expressions, even when we're dealing with species that don't use them. No shark can smile, whatever muscular apparatus it has around the mouth: to smile you need a limbic brain, the equipment for participating in the emotional experience of another being. But we respond to the smile. It's smiling even though it intends to kill us: what a horrible creature it must be! We are so deeply social that even in danger of our lives, we are almost more outraged by the violation of mammalian emotional decorum than by the fact that we're about to be eaten. If you're going to eat us, we feel, you could at least scowl appropriately! Tigers may be scary (and they are: I'll never forget, at an evening zoo concert, watching a Siberian pace restlessly in the twilight. It gave me gooseflesh. Over millenia, that's been the last sight many a fellow-primate has seen.) But still -- they're just scary, not creepy. A tiger will snarl and bare its teeth as it sinks them into you. That's as it should be. It won't smile.

McCain's Choice Explained

I was puzzled too, but Sydney has a plausible explanation of McCain's choice for Veep.

Lord Dunsany

I have just read the most perfect short story I have ever read, or can imagine ever reading. It's a lighthearted, frivolous tall tale. It has moments of arresting beauty. And it says as much about what it means to have faith in worldly things as any human creature could well bear to hear. It's called "The Charm against Thirst," by Lord Dunsany.

It's in a collection of "Jorkens" stories, from the 1920's. I'd never heard of them before. Jorkens is a world traveler who tells fabulous stories in his club, if you buy him drinks and promise to believe him; he's close kin to the tale-spinning clubmen of Wodehouse. But where Wodehouse was an entertainer, pure and simple (an honorable trade, and one that no one ever practiced better), Dunsany carries the numinous in everything he writes, like a faint electrical charge. I've read five of the Jorkens stories so far, and they've all delighted me. They work perfectly as entertainments, but there's far more than that running below the surface: the ache to be believed, the mournful sense of being stranded in the workaday world, after a sight of wonders that have left you forever unfitted for it, but which you can never return to or properly convey.

Or maybe you're just an old fraud, cadging drinks. Hard to tell.

If you haven't read The King of Elfland's Daughter or The Charwoman's Shadow, and if you have a taste for fantastical tales, you should read those. But don't try them if you don't like that sort of thing. The Jorkens stories, though, won't offend those whose sensibilities are wounded by archaic language, or by magic taken seriously. Jorkens is just a club raconteur. You're not asked to believe him -- the narrator doesn't believe him either. You're just there for a story.

Breakfast at the Utopia Cafe

A little girl's face rises slowly over the table
Like a harvest moon, her eyes magnified
By enormous glasses. She chews with gusto,
Her mouth free and open. Her attention is
Momentarily
Arrested by the old man tip-typing on his laptop
In the corner. He nods gravely at her. She stares,
Athena in bulging-eyed owl shape,
Her floodlight gaze picking out
Every odd distortion that age has laid on him,
Every wrinkle, the queer way pink scalp shows through
His thin white hair: she turns urgently to her mother
To make a request concerning syrup.

Postal Poetry

Check out Postal Poetry, if you haven't yet. They have one of my napkins (in the archive; I forgot to link at first.)

It's a marvelous idea and it's being run by Dana Guthrie Martin and Dave Bonta. Life doesn't get better than that. Or anyway, websites don't.

Last Morning

Dear Friend,

On this, the last morning,
I want to make sure you know
How grateful I am.

Your kindnesses
Have been
Overwhelming

And not, I know
Easy for you.
I have not been

A comfortable friend.
But time drove us together
Made us each believe

The other might supply
The missing end of our lives.
Lives, however

Do not end:
Only stories do.
Feel free to write the end of this one

In whatever way is useful;
Meanwhile
I prepare

For the last day,
For a swerve and
A collision.

Only a presentiment,
You understand,
Not an intention.

But light comes around the corner
And Sage's dog Henry
Settles at the foot of the table;

(He likes to attend massages;
Most dogs do.)

Of all things to be feared
Surely death is the least.
Yeats got it exactly wrong:

Death takes what a man would lose,
And leaves what he would keep.
I can't well say

How little I fear
The sudden impact,
The snap

Of the cervical vertebrae.
It is only a moment
Of fear

A last clutch of all those
Fretful hardworked muscles
Which at last

When the rigor has passed
Will relax. And then,
Leaving them,

On to the next thing: a world
Of light and dark, of shiver and return,
Like this one. If we meet there

I hope I can be as kind
As you deserve of me.
Believe me, dear,

Always your friend,

Dale

Morning

---

No, but listen. Far off
there is a music, intricate
and full of grace. There are people
who have danced until
the sweat soaked their shirts
they are sitting now
shoulder to shoulder, heads
almost touching. They don't need
to say anything; their bodies and the music
have said all there is to say. If I will never
be one of them, is that so bad?

---

Rose
Washes the east

---

You said
you wished we could feel
the way we felt thirty years ago
at the beach, the first time,
running from death and horror
and arriving at what seemed
an anchorage.

---

Is that more than roundabout way
of saying I wish I still loved you?

---

I can't do it myself.
And my friends are busy
far away
and troubled themselves.
There is nothing here
but the faintly caught music
and the rosewash sky.

---

Last night
Arcturus pricked the western sky,
worried, holding
an embarrassment of old old
stories;

---

And as the night turned,
he fell softly
into the mumbling waves:
he is a spring star, too young
for the rigors of winter.

---

In the small hours,
when even the summer stars have set,
the brilliant winter kings rise:
Capella rides, cold
and uncaring, into the empty sky.

---

Not Much to be Done

Sat this morning, in the untimed, ill-disciplined fashion I've taken up, watching the waves crest, run, wobble, collapse; long foam-laced rollers breaking up on the basalt rings below the cape. Supposedly I was making the waves the object of my meditation: but they were too interesting for that. Really I was sitting watching the waves, in the half-light of a cloudy, rainy morning.

Wondering about the shape of the final twenty years or so of my life. What remains to be done? Not a whole lot, really. Maybe, in fact, nothing: nothing, that is, but assimilating the idea that nothing remains to be done.

"If I had only a week to live, I would..."

It's a useful exercise, but people tend to think of particular things they would do. What you would mostly be engaged in though, I think, is not doing new things, but laying aside the old plans -- be they sober or drunken ones -- that have accumulated over a lifetime. What's left, with all those ambitions sliced neatly from the taproot? What would we look like, with only the past and the present to cover our nakedness?

Like not much, I'm thinking. A worm on a leaf, arching inquiringly.

Still. I want what I always wanted. The wind at my back pushes me on, habit moves my feet. I wince at remembrance, but it teaches me nothing.

Same old story, same old act;
One step up and two steps back.

Pieces

I sat shamatha this morning. Felt the long, long sweeps of the shoreline behind my back. So far as I can tell, right around here was Cook's first landfall on his third voyage, when death was marking him. Cape Foulweather, which looms over our apartment, was the first place he named on the northwest coast.

I had often wondered why the exploration along this coast came so late, and was so cursory: how could a navigator like Cook have missed the mouth of the Columbia, Straits of Juan de Fuca, indeed the whole Inside Passage? But now I understand: he was in a hurry. His real business was to find the Northwest Passage, and the summer was already waning. They knew by then that Hudson's Bay, as an entrance for the Passage, was a washout: if a passage was to be found, it was going to be by way of the Arctic Ocean, or Baffin Bay. Way north. Seawater, the science of the day declared, could not freeze: the ice encountered in the north must therefore just accumulations of river ice. The Arctic ocean should be open water. You just had to get there.

So Cook sailed north as fast as he could. No time to nose around river mouths and estuaries. His Russian maps, which showed Alaska as an enormous island, were worse than useless. He cursed them and went on, finding the Bering Straits anyway.

And came, of course, to a wall of ice. Cook saw at once that not the hugest rivers in the world could have produced such an ice pack. Science was no more dependable than Russian mapmakers.

He grimly established there was no way north, and bore away to winter in the Sandwich Islands, where he was to be held down in a couple feet of water and bludgeoned to death: he was a god, sure, but a god in the wrong place, at the wrong time of year. Europeans thought of gods as immortal, but Hawaiians didn't. Theology had failed Cook too.

---

It's simpler now that I'm cast out altogether. I gather scattered pieces of myself. I find odd bits here and there, things I hastily discarded lest they should make me look bad. No one's looking now; I can take them back.

A few of the Hawaiians, at considerable risk, brought some uneaten bits of Cook back to his shipmates. His right hand bore a very distinct scar: they recognized that.

Otter Rock

A bed so soft my back was protesting by midnight. I woke at intervals, all night, did stretches, disturbed Martha. For an hour maybe I tried the floor, but the carpet, though thick, wasn't quite thick enough, so eventually I got back in that ghastly bed. When first light finally came I got up and did my back exercises for a second time, an elaborate version. Sat shamatha for twenty minutes, facing floor-to-ceiling windows that opened on a blank view of fog. The far static of the surf was the only hint of the sea.

---

Yesterday the husband of a client turned out to be someone I knew at Informix, before it was bought by IBM. He was still in the business, working for a software company downtown; he had just come back from a year in London, managing their office there.

"That must have been fun," I said.

He looked at me.

"I mean, being in London," I said.

"Oh, yeah," he said, brightening. "London was great."

I gave my little pocket-history of how I left IBM and became a massage therapist.

His wife turned to him. "Maybe that's what you should do."

He looked at her the way he'd looked at me a few moments before. "Become a massage therapist?"

"Not that, but do something completely new."

He made a noncommital noise, and I changed the subject.

---

It was a hundred degrees in the Valley when we left. Two and a half hours later, we were here at the beach, a ghostly blue sky sometimes visible above the fog: sixty-five degrees, maybe. Gray wraiths twisting around the beach pines; a cool misty breeze lifting the smell of the sea to us.

Broken

The little girl sat down beside me. "You're not thinking hard enough," she announced. "What's happened to you? You used to be the big thinker. People used to come read you because you were thoughtful."

I tried to smile. "Maybe I've had all my thoughts."

"Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe you just got careless. Maybe you started letting other people think for you."

"Maybe I've always let other people think for me."

A piercing stare. "Maybe. But anyway, you were more fun, for a while, there. Now you're not very fun."

"I'm sorry," I said.

She shrugged. "Hell, I don't own you. You don't owe me any fun. You know what? You think too much about what you owe other people. And not enough, at the same time. That's not a paradox." She scowled at me. "I mean in different ways. You think you owe it to people to think their way while you're with them. And then you go away and you think like someone else. But what you don't do is think like yourself. How the hell does anyone know what you really think?"

"For a little girl, you swear a lot," I said.

"That's what you ought to be worrying about. The fact that you owe the truth to people."

"Oh, please," I said. "Didn't I try that a long time ago? Wasn't it idiotic misery for all concerned?"

"I don't know. I don't think you were honest then, either."

"Oh, for God's sake. How's a person to know what's honest, from one minute to the next?"

"Huh. Who's swearing now? You know what's honest."

"Look, honey, I don't know from one minute to the next what my intentions are, or what I think. I'm a mess. Why can't you just accept that? Don't try to improve me, you'll only make me worse. Believe me, this is a small plot of land, and I've built as much character here as it can stand. Build any more and it will all fall over."

"No," she said softly. "Oh no. That's not what I mean, that's not what I mean."

The shadows became stark as the light rose in her. I could not have looked at her, if I dared. "You know what I am," she said. The light began to scorch.

"Do I?" I said bitterly. "Do you know what I am, then?"

"I know enough. I know enough to have come here, in this shape, at this time. What do you want, my dear? I can't know what you won't tell."

"Why have you come, now? Now when I'm broken?" I whispered.

"Because I love you, you idiot. Why did you think? Not because you're particularly prepossessing just now, believe me."

"Mortals are ridiculous. It's not just me."

"Never said it was just you." The laugh purled up and the shadows quivered. "Listen. No, listen: it's simple, dear. Do you think we expect anything else of you? Of course you're broken. You broke so long ago even we can't remember it. But look. I brought you this." She reached up and pulled the tender three quarter moon from its place in the sky. "It's not ripe. But you aren't good at waiting, so take it, now, and keep it with you."

I held out my hand and she put the raw, trembling moon in my palm. "You're not ripe either. It's a perfect match."

The light lessened, the way it does when they're going

"It will remind you," she said. I ventured to look, but she was just barely there, hugging her knees, and then I couldn't see her. But her voice stayed a few moments longer.

"It will remind you," she repeated. "Oh, you poor foolish man, I do love you."

Malvolio

Late at night
Malvolio gazes in the mirror
And touches his smile in wonder.

The Ghost Ships

When the islander sold the corpse of his son
To Mr Banks of the Royal Society, we can only guess
What the transaction meant to him.

Necklaces of polished shell, breastplates scaled
With mother-of-pearl, cloaks of ten thousand scarlet
And indigo feathers (the death of flocks of tiny birds)

Were sold for a shining nail. For the return of
A stolen sextant, four men were taken hostage,
Men who spent a night in irons expecting

These apparitions of demonstrated savagery
And cruelty would slaughter them.
They had seen them do justice on their own people,

Lashing the white skin off their backs.
What would they do to strangers?
But in the morning, the sextant returned,

These pale, stinking, wolfish men were all
Smiles and affability, and seemed surprised
That they should take it hard.

The ships, the strange backward ships
With towering posts in the middle, instead of
At the ends, gliding in with the wind, reeking

Of urine and frying oil; the ships
Gliding in as if downhill, gliding in like the ghosts
Of friends abandoned in war.

Nobody Listening

I wandered, blinded, overwhelmed by work, out onto the street. Tried to walk one way, or another. The decision about which way to walk was too difficult to make. I thought of trying a new restaurant for lunch, but knew I could never muster the courage to walk into a new place. I wasn't sure I had the courage to walk into a place I knew. Hesitantly I walked a few blocks towards the river, then a few blocks north. The sun walked behind me, fingering his club.

Taking another step was more than I could do. I came to a halt. People hurried by me on the sidewalk.

A tall, thin, patched young man, with something of an Amish look, was playing a violin on the corner. He stood stiffly, and he wore clumsy boots. When he broke into a riff he would wiggle a little, the music in his body at war with his native awkwardness.

As I stood there, with the sun beating down on my head, I became aware that he was playing an intricate piece, and playing it with extraordinary virtuosity and passion. No one was listening to him. I don't know that I looked as if I was listening to him. But I closed my eyes and let myself be swamped by the music, filled up with it. It was very beautiful. Merry music, running directly against the grain of of my anxiety. And this young man from nowhere, playing. Just on the chance that someone might hear.

Suddenly I was okay. The weight lifted off me. I straightened up. I could breathe.

I walked over and dropped a five into the violin case open by his feet. "Thanks, man," I mumbled, probably inaudibly, unable to meet his glance. I went to try a new cafe for lunch.

Nous Sommes Trahis

Nous sommes trahis! cried Napoleon's soldiers, when they broke and ran at Waterloo. We are betrayed! It has been, throughout history, a very common thing for running soldiers to shriek.

They had not been betrayed, of course. They had simply lost. But it's much easier on the heart to tell yourself that you would have fought to the last, if only the people you trusted hadn't let you down. And it doesn't take an over-clever Freudian or deconstructionist to guess where the idea of betrayal comes from: they themselves are betraying their people by running. They are, themselves, the people who were trusted not to let their side down. Nous sommes trahis, indeed.

---

The room slowly went dark; the piano became a looming mass on my right, and the crescent moon rose over the marshland below the bluff. I didn't want the massage to end. It was the one entirely right thing in my life.

---

Her husband had chased the kids back up to bed, with ominous threats of not being able to do something or other tomorrow if they didn't stay put. After ten minutes or so I heard a soft creak on the stairs. The six year old had to peek in to see her Mom getting a massage. Perhaps I should have looked stern and forbidding, but I couldn't help grinning at her. She crept down again, at intervals, while the moon rose, and we shared the secret of her disobedience: she stared in wonder, and I in turn wondered what category of experience this would fall into, in a six-year-old's world.

---

A ring of dust where the vase used to be.

---

Jesus, help me be kind. Help me find a way to be a blessing, not a curse, to those around me.

Good News

An old woman I had never seen before came up to my table yesterday and said: "I just wanted to share some good news with you."

I looked up at her and smiled, though my heart sank. How long was she going to keep me from my book? Was she going to tell me about how Jesus had died for me? But no. "I became a great grandmother this morning," she said.

"Oh, congratulations!" I said, giving her hand, which she'd laid on the table, a quick squeeze.

"My granddaughter had -- not one... not two... not three... four babies this morning! Two boys and two girls!"

I was almost, but not quite, sure that she was unhinged, and probably had no children at all, but I couldn't see how it mattered. "Oh, that's wonderful!" I said.

She beamed at me and went on her way, completely untroublesome.

Today it seems to me -- I've spent my whole life doing this, participating in stories I was pretty sure were false, in order to spare the feelings of fragile people, in order to share moments of joy that were nevertheless as real as could be hoped for. I could never in a million years have said, "nonsense, woman, you have no more great grandchildren than I do: you were just desperate for the touch of a hand. Take the touch and welcome, but go away now and let me read!"

People want, more than anything else, that you should believe their stories. I will confess here, as I will never be able to confess to anyone in the flesh: I don't believe any of your stories. Not one. I do love you, though. I wish that was enough.

Yes, a post just disappeared from here. One of those messages you realize, moments after pressing "send," will reach everyone but its intended audience, sowing confusion all along the way.

Friends to this Ground

---

Death came walking up to me, unsteady on his feet.

"Spare any change?" he muttered.

---

I had someone wriggling on my table the other day. Kept apologizing for it. She was happy and getting a lot of benefit from the massage. Where did the convention come from, that it's indecorous and counterproductive to move on the table?

---

Certain topics come up, and they make me restless. I want to speak. I know the answer to this one. I know what needs to be said.

These are almost always topics that are not within my expertise; and it would do no harm if I identified this anxiety to speak as "the sensation of being wrong about something."

---

Some people find it almost impossible not to participate, when you move them. You lift their arm and they lift it too. They usually apologize for this. They often report that some friend or lover has told them it betokens a lack of trust, or an inability to let go. When I offer an alternative explanation -- that their motor reflexes are set at a higher sensitivity -- they're usually surprised. I wish the amateur psychologists would back off a little.

It's true that most people can learn to disable this semi-automatic participation in moving their bodies. It's a motor skill, like wiggling your ears, that most people can learn but many have never had occasion to. But I've never observed any correlation between this involuntary movement and a tendency to distrust, or a tendency generally to hold bodily tension.

---

Dispossessed

Feeling old and shaken, dispossessed. "They act as though no people had ever been conquered and dispossessed, before," wrote some busybody, "when in fact it's the daily experience of mankind. Get over it."

The play of cold water, wet stone, hooded sun: this is the end of all that exhausting march? To have to listen to revisionist histories, to hear myself maligned in the only matter in the world in which I'm blameless?

Yah. Get over it. Since when does any of us get to write his own story, interpret his own life? It doesn't mean what I say it does. It means what other people say it does.

In the quiet dawn I sat down on the front steps and watched the light turn, luff, and fill. Another day under weigh, working to windward under light sail. Rain comes walking down from the north: a little pattering drumbeat, a wandering, crossed rhythm.

Last Tuesday, Tele's little nine-day-old baby lay on the couch, sleeping. Every once in a while she would startle, as babies do, give an odd little croaking whuffle, and reach her hands out of her blanket, the fingers expanding and contracting like sea-fronds. Still asleep. I knelt there with a hand lightly on her wrappings, following the rise and fall of that tiny respiration.

"I massaged you when you were still in your Mom's tummy," I told her. But she was walking in dreams, her eyelids flickering faintly, her thoughts no more accessible now than they were then.

Guerrillas and Armies

I've been reading Esdaile's history of the Peninsular War, Napoleon's attempt to extinguish the Bourbon dynasty and establish his brother on the throne of Spain. It's the conflict that gave English the word guerrilla. Small bands of irregulars would attack French supply lines, and then vanish into the hills and villages; the French had to expend considerable resources coping with them. The Spanish called this the guerrilla -- the "little war." As adopted into English it referred not to the war, but to the people who conducted it (what the Spanish would have called guerrilleros): "guerrilla fighters."

The Spanish, more talented as propagandists, in that century, than as soldiers, created a whole mythology around the guerrillas, one that persists today, and has given glamor to the image of the resistance fighter. These poorly equipped, impromptu civilians-turned-soldiers, so ran the Spanish myth, fought the veteran troops of Imperial France to a standstill. It was a triumph of popular resistance over authoritarian empire.

In fact, the guerrillas never had much more than nuisance value. What saved Spain from French domination was not her guerrilla fighters, but Napoleon's decision to invade Russia. When the French were not overextended they did not have great difficulty putting down these bands, which had little discipline and no training.

What exactly these fighters were has come in for closer scrutiny in the last few decades, and the truth of the matter is rather depressing. They were not mostly patriots. They were mostly bands of robbers, who preyed on the French not out of patriotic fervor, but because the French had something worth taking. They happily plundered their Portuguese and English allies as well when they got the chance, not to mention the cities and villages that they were supposedly defending, and they often proceeded with extraordinary cruelty against all these people.

(To keep things in context, it's true that the regular troops, English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, as was standard in Napoleonic times, also plundered the civilian population. But they were generally less ruthless than the guerrillas.)

Now, we would like it to be true, that popular resistance can overcome military tyranny. It makes a lovely story. Americans treasure their own mythology of the minute-men, a likewise glorified and militarily rather useless bunch. But in fact guerrilla warfare is almost always pointless and ineffective. I can think of only a few cases in which it has succeeded. When it does, it has these characteristics:

1) invulnerable supply lines to a generous outside supply source
2) rugged terrain in which it's difficult for regular troops to move and deploy
3) a level of poverty and misery so severe that the people feel they have nothing to lose, and
4) guerrilla indifference to the suffering of their own people, such that reprisals against the civilian population do not deter them.

In other words, it is not a blessing to have a situation in which guerrilla war may be effective. And when, unusually, a guerrilla war is won, it puts people of singular ruthlessness in control, who have debts to repay to outsiders. These people are seldom a blessing to their country.

But the myth lives on. I was prompted to write this by seeing the photo, on Velveteen Rabbi, of a Palestinian mural of a boy -- obviously heroically, in the view of the artist -- throwing a rock at a tank. Many Palestinians continue in the delusion that a popular resistance can liberate them. In their situation it can't. They have virtually no outside supply sources, and certainly no invulnerable ones. Their terrain is quite practicable: the Israelis can deploy whatever they want wherever they want, within days -- usually hours. And their poverty, while bad enough, is not so bad that most people really have nothing to lose. The only thing that points towards success is the willingness of some of the guerrillas to incur reprisal.

In other words, the Palestinians can resist all they like for the next five hundred years without seriously inconveniencing the Israeli state. Their resistance simply can't win. I have no intention of disputing the rights and wrongs of their situation. I neither have an opinion on that nor want to have an opinion on that. But I do have an opinion about their chance of successfully resisting: it's zero.

If -- as I believe -- regular armies will ultimately determine the fate of any prosperous, gentle country, it behooves us to pay some attention to them, and to make sure their interests coincide with the general public's. People on the left -- partly due to this stupid idea that the will of the people will always triumph, and that guerrilla warfare is a viable option in most situations -- have tended to simply pay no attention to their armies, to wish they would go away, to think of them as tools of reactionaries; something we'll just get rid of someday. We can't afford to go on like that. We need to take armies seriously, and to ensure that our armies are democratic armies. This is why I -- alone among my personal acquaintance -- favor a draft: I would like to see an all-conscript army, with no upper-class exemptions (by which I mean the infamous college education exemptions of the Vietnam era.). Nothing strikes me as more ominous, in the politics of my generation in America, than the development of a huge professional army, drawn largely from the poor and uneducated. We have simply been lucky, so far, that this army has not realized a) that they hold the last resort of power in the land, and b) that their interests aren't the same as civilian interests. Let's hope they don't figure it out before we civilians do.

A Change in the Weather

Cold this morning. A cloudy cover in the middle air. I love this, above all, about the maritime Northwest: a cold day can arrive in late July, just as a comfortable shirtsleeve day can arrive in late January. Nowhere in the world, that I know of, is one less hemmed in by one particular weather. Late winter and late summer in Connecticut were horribly oppressive: whether it was bitter cold or baking hot, it was simply going to stay that way for weeks. There was no appeal from it, no chance of waking up to find yourself at the far end of the weather-calendar.

It's true, it can rain for weeks at a time here, dark and wet beyond the conception or endurance of transcascadian Americans. But -- if you don't infect your mind with weather reports -- you go to bed each night knowing that tomorrow could miraculously be a beautiful Spring day, no matter what month you're in.

I kneel at the foot of the table. Spurt oil into my hand from the bottle at my waist, in a quick movement that has become entirely unconscious for me, and stroke her feet lovingly. Feet inspire a special tenderness in me. They labor in hidden pain or discomfort, bearing the brunt of work days. They're banished from the light and air, crammed into oppressive spaces, made to work but given no chance to stretch and breathe. And yet they have all the sensitivity and beauty of hands. They're so surprised and grateful to find themselves touched and kneaded. Sometimes you can feel the tension of the whole body move down through the feet and depart in a light shuddery gasp of relief.

They're all the more important in late pregnancy, when you're being cautious about the legs and thighs, and this is the only place caudal to the the glutes that you can still do heavy work. If the sadness of the lower limbs is going to find a way out, it will have to find it here.

I'm doing a lot of pregnancy massage these days. Probably my favorite work. It's frustrating, though, dealing with so-called "pelvic instability," the pain associated with the greater play in the pelvic bones. I'm morally certain I know where the trouble is, that it's thigh trigger points shortening the adductors and hamstrings, overwhelming the relatively weak external rotators (which is why, startlingly, it more often afflicts people in good shape, especially the swimmers and cyclers who train those inner thigh muscles extensively, than sedentary people) -- but deep work in the thighs is precisely what we're forbidden to do, until a couple weeks after delivery. All I can do is recommend the stretches and exercises in the book by Cecile Röst, and make sure the glutes and external rotators are as clear as I can make them.

A little light brushing up the extensor tendons on top of the foot. Supposedly it inspires the lymphatic system. It feels right, anyway. She's wandering back and forth across the line into sleep, as pregnant women so often do, but she doesn't seem to startle when she crosses. When I come back to the head of the table, lay a hand on her shoulder, and murmur, "time to roll over," her eyes open and she comes back to this world, visibly but easily. The faintest of smiles lights her face. I unpack the pillows, and she carefully turns, holding her full belly in her hands, and settles again with a sigh. I pack her in again, and in moments she's wandered back into sleep.

Stress

In my twenties and thirties I commonly "pulled my back." My lower back would seize up. The muscles I now know as the QL and lumbar paraspinals would go into very painful spasm, and I could barely walk. I could be out of commission for days. Heat and cold; lying flat on the floor with my knees up; nothing was terribly effective. Finally I went to a chiropractor. I don't recollect his treatment doing me any good, but he handed me a sheet of paper with "back exercises" on it, to take home. Mostly they were a few simple, easy yoga positions. I started doing them. Gingerly, at first. (You become very reluctant to do anything that will set off spasm again, when you have back trouble, which generally compounds the problem, adding immobility to the list of your back's difficulties.) But they felt really good. I had no theory to account for it, in those days, but it soon became apparent to me that they worked. In fact, I rapidly became aware that if I skipped them one day, I would start experiencing warning twinges. If I skipped them two, I was at high risk for "pulling my back" again. If I skipped longer, I was asking for trouble, and usually got it.

So, after a few painful lessons, I almost never skip, and never skip more than one day. Even I respond to as clear-cut a punishment-and-reward training system as that. And I haven't had that sort of serious, debilitating back spasm for fifteen years. I had thought it was simply going to be the way life was: that it happened in response to stress, and the idea that the stress of my life was going to suddenly go away was laughable.

Which brings me to stress. Now, it's true that these seize-ups usually happened at times of high stress. The last one I remember was when I was studying for the final exam in a wickedly difficult computer science class on compilers. I was very wrought up about it. I was studying long hours, and spending a lot of stressed time at the computer. When I thought of why my back seized up, "stress" was the answer that came to me.

I am a great fan of getting stress out of one's life; of tackling it directly, by meditation, and by simply getting out of situations in which one is subject to impossible demands. And the correlation between stress and myofascial pain is beyond doubt. However. There's a certain irreducible amount of stress involved in being alive. And there is considerable stress involved in delightful, even ecstatic events: ask anyone who's ever had a wedding. A life without stress would probably not be worth living. And moreover, as science professors keep forlornly saying (knowing that no one will pay attention to them), "correlation is not causation."

The problem with attributing my back spasms to stress is that "stress" is an amorphous condition, and one that responds slowly to direct attack. Meditation and yoga and so forth do make one much better at letting go of stress -- but they do so slowly, over weeks and months and years, not in days. In general the only way out of overstressful conditions -- bad jobs, bad marriages, financial scrapes -- involves incurring even more stress, for some time. Your back is not going to wait that long.

And fortunately, it doesn't have to wait that long. Getting rid of the stress is an admirable goal, but you can stop abusing your body without getting rid of the stress. In fact, the sequence may work better in reverse: you may have more luck reducing your stress by stopping the abuse of your body, than vice versa. I don't believe worrying about my compiler exam brought my back to spasm. Sitting motionless in a badly designed chair with no lumbar support, under a blasting air conditioner, with my shoulders hunched and my head thrust forward -- that's what brought my back to spasm. Not taking the trouble to ensure a dark, quiet place to get a full night's sleep, and staying up too late, night after night. Going for weeks without aerobic exercise.

None of this is rocket science: and all of it can be dealt with by a stressed person nearly as well as by a relaxed person. The body, fortunately for us, is a physical object, and it responds beautifully to physical interventions.

Stretching II

Okay. Full disclosure: I stretch every morning, religiously, for about twenty minutes. Telling you not to stretch was a something in the way of shock tactics.

But very different activities that can be referred to by "stretching." One is what I was decrying in the post before last: trying to make your body move where you think it ought to be able to move. It's a really good way to injure yourself. Another is gently and attentively moving "as far as it goes," no matter where that is. As my adverbs make plain, that's the kind I approve of.

When you realize that the limits of movement are not the length of the muscle and tendon, but the length of the most tightly "hooked" strands of the muscle, you'll be more understanding and forgiving of the fact that "as far as it goes" may be considerably less today that it was yesterday. This is intricate living tissue we're talking about, not the waistband of a pair of jeans.

What I usually do -- whether I learned this from Anderson or not, I can't remember -- is to move "as far as it goes" -- what I think Anderson calls "finding the stretch" -- and then stay there, breathing into it at least three breaths. I back off immediately if it hurts, or starts to tremble. Generally I do the whole thing two or three times. Usually you go farther each time, but it doesn't matter whether you do or not: what matters is that you take as far as it wants to go, but no farther. Much of what's going on is not in the muscle being "stretched," it's in the other muscles that are finding themselves in different positions, undergoing different stresses. They wake up, become interested. We customarily neglect most of our body; paying attention to parts of it only when they're in pain or delivering exceptional pleasure. Which is a pity, because it has a great deal to tell us. A tremendous amount of information is available to us through the sensations of touch and proprioception, most of which we resolutely ignore. We mostly go through our day with our touch-eyes closed. So we're taken completely by surprise by a stabbing pain in the back, or a spasm in the neck, or a knee locking up. The messengers have been in the anteroom so long that they've forgotten their business; they're playing cards, doodling, dozing in the corner.

Birthday Presents

'After all that's what this party business was all about, really: to give away lots of birthday presents, and somehow make it easier to give it away at the same time. It hasn't made it any easier in the end, but it would be a pity to waste all my preparations. It would quite spoil the joke.'

'Indeed it would take away the only point I ever saw in the affair,' said Gandalf.

'Very well,' said Bilbo, 'it goes to Frodo with all the rest.' He drew a deep breath. 'And now I really must be starting, or somebody else will catch me. I've said good-bye, and I couldn't bear to do it all over again.' He picked up his bag and moved to the door.

'You have still got the ring in your pocket,' said the wizard.

Vergüenza. Shame. Yesterday I threw away a great deal of old stuff. Barely staying on top of tears. I was adored, once, said Andrew Aguecheek. The idea that someone might delight in me.

But that's not what I'm giving away. I mean, it is, but that's not the point. What I need to give away is the shame. It's a strange shame. I listen to other people's shame -- heavy, palpable, self-revulsion -- and nothing resonates. This is a light, shifting, pervasive shame, not heavy at all. It has less to do with anything I do than with what I am. Yesterday a resolve took shape: never to be ashamed again. What else can I do, to honor the love that people have given me? If I don't give away that shame I will be taking away, as Gandalf would say, the only point there ever was in the affair.

What would a life without shame look like? I've asked that question before. I can't even imagine an answer. Which tells you just how inwoven it is. I don't think I will be able to imagine an answer. I can only discover it as I go.

If the imagination of a life without shame fails, though, it is remarkable how precisely and readily the actions such a life would dictate are apparent to me. I have only to ask the question, and the answer appears.

Like most resolutions, it is unlikely to be kept. I will probably fail, repeatedly. Which is fine, so long as I learn from the failures. That's why you make resolutions, after all: to get a close look at what actually prevents you from doing what you want to do.

I will not be ashamed any more. Whatever I need to do in order to be unashamed, that's what I'll do.

The hardest thing will be resting, when I am weary.

I found myself starting to weave it all again, a life of shame, building it all up again, losing all that ground. That would be a piss-poor return. I must not do that.

Forgive the rambly-ness and obscurity of this post. I shouldn't post it at all, but I feel I have to anchor this resolve at as many points as possible.

Bless you, thank you. Be careful. But not too careful.

Another Poem for Tatz

last seen en route from Lumsden

We have been grateful for the smallest kindnesses:
a shelf that holds up books, dry socks.

-- Jan Zwicky

What shall we say of these characters
Typed into one computer, at an idle moment
To appear on another screen, half a world away?
A jumble of spider legs, disassembled
Into ones and zeros, traveling
From one indifferent machine to another;
Typed in Frankfurt, or Wales, or Canberra,
And skittering, disembodied, by wire or wireless
All the way here, to be reconstituted
Into the spider legs we use for letters,
Into the spiders we use for words.
This is love, in one of her guises:
One of the few requirements of love being
Improbability.

---

Sing for me, darling;
Sing for me in Saskatchewan
And I will kiss your hands:
The base of your thumb; the thenar eminence;
Each fingertip.
I want to study your hands
For years. I want to be
A distinguished professor, writing monographs
About the way your ring finger creases
When it's bent so that one's lips
Can brush its knuckle:
I will become the world's foremost authority
On the taste of the webbing between your first
And second finger, on the right.
I will hold your hand
As the sky darkens and the world
Complexifies into destruction,
Tracking each line, each scar, each tiny hair
And counting the time
Well spent.

---

Now light
Pours across the northern prairie,
Too much light for such a shallow saucer,
It spills at the edges, and droplets land
So far south as my upturned face.

---

Darling, try not to worry. You haven't,
But I have seen the string of your heart
Blazing with blue light, coruscating
Like a fuse. There is no time to worry,
Even if there were need.

Stretching

Look. Don't stretch. I know your doctor told you to. Your physical therapist told you to. All your friends tell you to. Every magazine published in America has told you to, in articles richly illustrated with indecently radiant fifteen-year-olds, dressed (sort of) as twenty-year-olds, in graceful yoga poses. The implication being, not that you can stretch this way if you're fifteen, but that if you stretch this way you'll look fifteen.

We'll leave aside for the moment why you'd want to look like you were stuck in the most unhappy, self-absorbed and useless stage of your life. You do: so do I. We're stupid. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about stretching, and why you shouldn't do it.

Here's the story as most people hear it: because you're stressed out, you tense your muscles, which makes them (as we learned in eighth grade science class) short. And in a process vaguely but devoutly believed in, your muscles somehow stick that way. As your mother told you your face would stick that way when you took to making horrible faces. So now you have tight muscles, and they're prone to injury, causing you pain, and making it hard to move.

Presented that way, the solution looks obvious. The muscles are too short: well, we'll just stretch them out. Make them longer. Problem solved. Maybe it will hurt a little, but you deserve to hurt, because you inflicted this tightness on yourself by not being radiantly, serenely fifteen. After you've expiated all that sinful stress, and atoned for this self-abuse, you'll be blessed, your body will be fifteen, everybody will love you, and your body will no longer hurt.

Now, unfortunately, it's precisely people who are prone to abuse themselves to whom this story will sound most convincing, and they will swing with gusto into abusing themselves by stretching out painfully, trying to force their muscles into a relaxed state. And they will injure themselves, over and over.

Let's back off a little and look at what really happens when your muscles are "tight," and why stretching is often the very worst thing you can do when they are.

Muscles are essentially long, parallel microscopic threads, which are arranged in parallel bundles, which are themselves arranged in parallel bundles. We talk of a whole muscle contracting, but that's not usually what happens. Usually a few of the bundles contract at a time. Then they run out of oxygen, and they let go while other bundles step in. It's not often that the whole muscle is working at once -- when it does, it will also become completely exhausted at once, and that's when you can't hold on any longer and fall from Mt Rushmore. It's all about fuel supply. The amount of oxygen the muscle strands can store is suprisingly small. They run out in a few seconds, at most minutes, if they're not spelled by their buddy strands.

So what happens when a muscle is "tight," or "knotted"? Well, one thing we can be sure of -- it's not steadily contracting and burning oxygen. It doesn't have enough fuel stored to do that for five minutes, let alone days. No: something quite different is happening. It is, in fact, "sticking," more or less as your mother warned your face would. When a muscle strand contracts it hooks itself chemically into a shorter strand, in a very ingenious way. Once it's hooked this way, it actually requires no energy at all to stay contracted. In fact it needs more energy to unhook itself. And sometimes, apparently, the strands hook themselves in such as to cut off their own fuel supply. Some of the muscle is contracted and can't let go. Now we've got a real problem. Now we've got those tight muscles you want to stretch out.

Okay, so you conscientiously stretch the muscle out, even though it hurts. What happens? Most of the muscle is nowhere near the limit of its motion. But the contracted fibrils are very close to their limit. What happens is precisely what you would expect: the stuck ones simply snap.

Now, a little of this is fine. Tiny muscle strands snap all the time. The system is built with massive redundancy. But there's a limit, and by the time you're in enough pain, and restricted enough in movement, to notice, you're probably past the limit of reasonable tearing. You're looking at seriously damaging a muscle that's already in trouble. Don't do it.

Your job at this point is to do whatever you can to encourage fluid exchange in the muscle. Fresh, nicely oxygenated blood has to get in there. When it does, those strands of muscle will release all by themselves. That's what they want to do. So you do three things:

1) Relax the whole area as much as you can. Take the stress off the surrounding muscles. Make room there.

2) Alternate cold and heat. Cold causes the blood vessels and capillaries to contract, which forces fluid out; then the heat opens them again, and fresh blood, full of oxygen, rushes in. That's what we want.

3) Squeeze the muscle where it's "knotted," deliberately, so as to push the old fluid out of it.

4) And then move it a few times, gently, as far as it wants to go, but not farther.

Movement is wonderful. Moving is what muscles want to do. They love it. What they don't like is holding without moving. They hate that, in fact. It's not the active people who move around a lot who have serious muscle trouble. It's people who sit still, working at a computer, or reading, or doing fine work with their hands. Muscles aren't designed for that. They hate it.

I was surprised to learn that there is actually nothing to pump blood back to the heart and lungs. I had vaguely thought that the pressure from the heart pushes the blood all the way out and back, but of course it doesn't. It can't: it disperses too widely, down to the single-cell level, before it enters the venous system and heads back. Blood makes its return journey solely under the impetus of gravity and the movement of the skeletal muscles (above all, of the inner calf muscles). There are nifty little valves in the veins that keep the blood from moving backwards, but the forward movement is all up to you. If you don't move, the old, blue, de-oxygenated blood doesn't, either.

So I want you to move. I just don't want you to "stretch," with the intent of lengthening your muscles and tendons. Your muscles and tendons are a fine length. When the body wants them longer it will lengthen them itself, effortlessly; it needs no help from you. What it does need you to do is to move through your whole range of motion. Call it stretching if you like, but it should be easy. It should feel good. "Stretching" that hurts should properly be called "tearing" -- because that's what it is. Travell & Simon use a phrase repeatedly, in describing what they follow trigger-point work with, that I like a lot: "taking up the slack." That's all that needs to be done, and all that should be done.

Fully Implicated

Some of my favorite bloggers post very infrequently. I love Google Reader for making it easy not to lose track of them! Two poems from the seldom-seen have blown me away recently:


Crossing

. . .
And once more I know myself, a being
Fully implicated, known, never alone.
And shining, shining for a future.
. . .


Independence from Chaos

. . .
afraid to open
and greet the star-cracker dawn
rabbit thumping

hum-strumming
dream-drumming
against my chest
. . .

Emily

A light blue summer dress, skimpy enough
To make a man labor to walk on, while he staggers inside
And assimilates a blow to the stomach.
She's coming to see me? Not possible.

---

Afterwards,
Overcome with tenderness, I clasp her hand
"Love you," I say, without thinking, as I might
To my daughter. She blushes faintly.
"I love you too," she says, only a little awkwardly.
I turn quickly away. "I'll see you on the fifteenth,"
I say. Brisk. Matter of fact.

---

"All those years I tried to get women
To take their clothes off, and to touch them,"
I said. "And it turns out all I had to do
Was charge them money for it."

"That's an unworthy thought," said Martha, primly.

---

For thirty-five years
I trained harder than any athlete, any yogi
To find the sex in every thought, every relation,
Every image: sorting, clutching, scanning:
A famished raptor drifting over its shadow
On the yellow grass.
How is it that in the moment of laying on hands
It all goes away?

---

But it's always been that way.
At the moment of touch, everything shifts.
Reconfigures. The kaleidoscope jumbles;
The patterns reform. Reality surfaces,
Like the vast gleaming back
Of a whale; what we thought was empty water
Was warm, breathing, thinking flesh.
Desire dwindles to a triviality
And tenderness is all there is:
The raw heart beats, unmoving;
The blood stands still; and my body
Revolves around it like the Sun.