Table
The light of a row of candles in a tray; a twist of fabric through the curtain rod, leading the eye in a parabola up to the ceiling and down again. I've never known a person so young who knew so much about making a place. I'm often a little wary when I get a young client: so often they won't trouble to make themselves comfortable. Low lights, warm room, empty bladder, phone ringers off, kids and animals settled -- older people will see to all those things. Younger people often won't. I've become a lot more assertive about the ordinary comforts. I don't have magic hands. I'm an ordinary massage therapist, and if you aren't comfortable, you're not going to call me back. But anyway -- no need for assertiveness tonight.
Marvelous tattoos. That's one thing I like about young clients. You never know what art work you're going to find.
The flesh firm and dense. It always takes a while to calibrate. What's hypertonic, in this body? What's the range? The fascia here is all tight, but I'm not sure what that means. I close my eyes and stop thinking about it. Let my hands think instead.
No grief, here. I've had a series of grief-stricken clients, and it's taken a bit of a toll. But there's a lot of happiness here. There's been grief, plenty of it, and recently; but she's flickering now like a trout in a sunny stream. I hope she's happily in love, or happily caught up in her work. It feels like that.
I hear things, when I do massage. Little moans of pleasure or worried intakes of breath. They're not real: that is, they're not real sounds that you could tape. It's some tactile or energetic information that my brain delivers to me by converting it into sounds. A sort of synesthesia, I suppose. When it first started happening I thought they were real sounds, and I'd try to listen more closely, and then they'd go away, of course.
Full of tenderness. I sit at the head of the table and work the masseters, the jaw muscles, with my fingers, and then I lay both thumbs beside the nose and drag down to the jawline. Those of us who feel obliged to smile at people all the time get jammed up there. I always love that particular move: it says this is for you, and you don't have to produce anything for me in return, not even a smile. Especially not a smile.
My hands come to rest, and I breathe, and listen for your breath through my fingertips. "Thank you so much," I say. Since I can't say "I love you, dear" to someone I met two hours ago.
I go off to the bathroom to wash my hands, and to give her time to get off the table and get dressed. Wait till I hear her moving around the room, and come out to pack up. Sheets, face cradle cover, pillowcase, and sweatband into the the laundry bag. I tip the table on its side. The face cradle itself comes into two pieces and fits inside the table. The table folds in half and buckles closed.
I love the paraphernalia of my work. I think you can tell what a person feels about their work by how they feel about its tools and apparatus. I remember being faintly annoyed, when I was a programmer, by the periodic bother of IBM replacing my work computer with a newer, faster, better one. For almost all practical purposes, one machine was as good as another for me, since I wasn't doing performance tuning or testing. But the people who loved programming were delighted with their new machines, petted them, took them for spins, tried this and that, chattered excitedly about how fast they could run a TPCH, speculated about changing the cache parameters. Me? "Seems to work fine," I'd say.
But I'm delighted that way with my table, my linens, my cushions and bolsters. Cleaning the table is never a chore for me, even though I do it before every massage; I delight in opening up the table, wiping it down, looking it over, oiling the lock-bolts. I even love doing the laundry and folding the sheets. I love them the same way I love looking over pens and notebooks and fine papers at the stationers.
The table is old, now. I bought it years ago, back when doing massage was an idle fantasy I knew I'd never pursue, when for years at a time I had the application papers for massage schools tucked away in my top drawer, a guilty secret, tucked under my socks. I'll need to replace it at some point. And I really need to get an adjustable face cradle. I have a certain reluctance for changing anything at all, right now, because I can't believe it's really true, that I really get to do this. I'm afraid if I change anything it will all vanish, that the dream will vanish and I'll wake up to another day stranded in an arid cubicle in the industrial burbs, looking wistfully out at the sky.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Abject
Oh, hell. I've been clumsy and stupid and offensive and hurt people's feelings, and I'm really really sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just running off at the mouth, as I do sometimes. All right, most of the time. Please forgive me, and know that I value you far more than I value any stupid opinions I might hold. (Or might have held, since I seldom think the same thing two hours in a row.)
Oh, hell. I've been clumsy and stupid and offensive and hurt people's feelings, and I'm really really sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just running off at the mouth, as I do sometimes. All right, most of the time. Please forgive me, and know that I value you far more than I value any stupid opinions I might hold. (Or might have held, since I seldom think the same thing two hours in a row.)
Taking and Sending
Crescent moon, high above the fog. Streetlights make spines of light that poke through the leaves.
A huge young woman, one buttock for each of the two seats she occupied, reading on the bus. She was swaddled in witchy velvet, a hooded cape. Black cloth bags were perched about her person. I was practicing taking and sending, trying to take on that mass, to take on the chafing of those bulky thighs against each other, the humiliation of being very fat in a country that has a hysterical aversion to fat. Knowing that any mistake I make will not be an ordinary person's mistake, the passing result of inattention, but evidence of a fat woman's expected stupidity; knowing that I'm a death's head to women who are desperately afraid of getting fat, knowing that many men won't risk their status by being seen with me. I breathe all that in. Breathe out -- what? That's easy: the certainty of being loved. The daily touch, the physical affirmation of work, family, friends; the easy cuddling. The laying on of hands. Give that all away.
As I feel the witchy cape settle around me, I notice all the shiny dangly things, the earings, the necklaces, gleaming and twinkling. Two buttons draw my gaze, jet disks, like little pools of wet black oil. What can they be? Is that a pouch, a purse, nestled there where her breasts jut over her belly?
The buttons blink. The pouch resolves into a tiny dog, staring intently at me. I slide into his consciousness easily, as you will sometimes, when you're taking and sending. I am made of nothing but devotion, loving this woman with my whole heart, perched on this belly, nestled by this breast, the best, most loving, most wonderful woman, a woman of extraordinary abilities and extraordinary tenderness, loving me beyond desert or imagining. Her fingers gently cradle my ribs. I adore her. I bask in her love.
The polarities reverse, and I'm breathing in the assurance of love I was trying to send. It's not at all uncommon, with taking and sending, to realize, when you allow yourself to slide all the way into your fantasy of other people's suffering, that you're simply, completely, stupidly wrong. I should have such daylong tenderness, such love, such pleasure in the touch of hand or paw.
Crescent moon, high above the fog. Streetlights make spines of light that poke through the leaves.
A huge young woman, one buttock for each of the two seats she occupied, reading on the bus. She was swaddled in witchy velvet, a hooded cape. Black cloth bags were perched about her person. I was practicing taking and sending, trying to take on that mass, to take on the chafing of those bulky thighs against each other, the humiliation of being very fat in a country that has a hysterical aversion to fat. Knowing that any mistake I make will not be an ordinary person's mistake, the passing result of inattention, but evidence of a fat woman's expected stupidity; knowing that I'm a death's head to women who are desperately afraid of getting fat, knowing that many men won't risk their status by being seen with me. I breathe all that in. Breathe out -- what? That's easy: the certainty of being loved. The daily touch, the physical affirmation of work, family, friends; the easy cuddling. The laying on of hands. Give that all away.
As I feel the witchy cape settle around me, I notice all the shiny dangly things, the earings, the necklaces, gleaming and twinkling. Two buttons draw my gaze, jet disks, like little pools of wet black oil. What can they be? Is that a pouch, a purse, nestled there where her breasts jut over her belly?
The buttons blink. The pouch resolves into a tiny dog, staring intently at me. I slide into his consciousness easily, as you will sometimes, when you're taking and sending. I am made of nothing but devotion, loving this woman with my whole heart, perched on this belly, nestled by this breast, the best, most loving, most wonderful woman, a woman of extraordinary abilities and extraordinary tenderness, loving me beyond desert or imagining. Her fingers gently cradle my ribs. I adore her. I bask in her love.
The polarities reverse, and I'm breathing in the assurance of love I was trying to send. It's not at all uncommon, with taking and sending, to realize, when you allow yourself to slide all the way into your fantasy of other people's suffering, that you're simply, completely, stupidly wrong. I should have such daylong tenderness, such love, such pleasure in the touch of hand or paw.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Responsibility of Poets
There's a poll up at Read Write Poem, asking "what is your responsibility as a poet?"
I guess I don't understand why you'd even want to talk about it. It seems odd to me, to talk about the responsibility of poets. As so often, nowadays, I feel like I've missed some critical piece of the conversation to date.
Why introduce the notion of responsibility? If you have a responsibility to do something, you do it whether you like it or not. Did any single poet in the history of the world ever write a good poem that she didn't like writing? Do you really want to browbeat poets who want to write about the gleam of black tulips into writing odes to Senator Gordon Smith's voting record? It makes no sense to me. I find it difficult to believe we're talking about anything, frankly. Poets are going to write about whatever they're going to write about, no matter what we say they ought to do.
Lets keep responsibility in the sphere of being a human being, and not staple it to particular avocations. If you care about the poor -- as Jesus, for one, emphatically instructed you to -- it will be in your poetry somewhere. Or -- even better -- the roots of that caring, beyond day to day political squabbling, will be in your poetry.
I understand wanting to refute the people who say poetry is effete, idle self-indulgence. I understand resenting that, and wanting to say: no. This is important. This is the most important thing I can do. And I believe that in fact is true. There is nothing more important to a poet than writing poetry, and that's as it should be. But to me "responsibility" lumbers into this conversation like a bull elephant, drunk on fermented apples, wandering into a glassware shop. When the heart wants to sing, it must sing, and it will sing. What good can it do to say that it has a responsibility to sing?
My motto is H.D.'s , who wrote:
I go to the things I love
With no thought of duty or pity.
I don't think poetry has much influence on day to day politics, which is probably a good thing, because poets tend to be political imbeciles. A poet as wonderful, subtle, beautiful, and perceptive as Ezra Pound could be a sucker for Mussolini's drivel. There's no guarantee that poets will have any political sense, and in fact there's a strong prima facie case for expecting them to have none.
Here's what I think is the sum total of poets' responsibility: 1) to try to see clearly, 2) to love, and 3) to cultivate their gifts & do the best work they can. It's no different from other human beings' responsibility. If your eyes and your heart are open, your poetry will do the right thing. Don't pester it.
There's a poll up at Read Write Poem, asking "what is your responsibility as a poet?"
I guess I don't understand why you'd even want to talk about it. It seems odd to me, to talk about the responsibility of poets. As so often, nowadays, I feel like I've missed some critical piece of the conversation to date.
Why introduce the notion of responsibility? If you have a responsibility to do something, you do it whether you like it or not. Did any single poet in the history of the world ever write a good poem that she didn't like writing? Do you really want to browbeat poets who want to write about the gleam of black tulips into writing odes to Senator Gordon Smith's voting record? It makes no sense to me. I find it difficult to believe we're talking about anything, frankly. Poets are going to write about whatever they're going to write about, no matter what we say they ought to do.
Lets keep responsibility in the sphere of being a human being, and not staple it to particular avocations. If you care about the poor -- as Jesus, for one, emphatically instructed you to -- it will be in your poetry somewhere. Or -- even better -- the roots of that caring, beyond day to day political squabbling, will be in your poetry.
I understand wanting to refute the people who say poetry is effete, idle self-indulgence. I understand resenting that, and wanting to say: no. This is important. This is the most important thing I can do. And I believe that in fact is true. There is nothing more important to a poet than writing poetry, and that's as it should be. But to me "responsibility" lumbers into this conversation like a bull elephant, drunk on fermented apples, wandering into a glassware shop. When the heart wants to sing, it must sing, and it will sing. What good can it do to say that it has a responsibility to sing?
My motto is H.D.'s , who wrote:
I go to the things I love
With no thought of duty or pity.
I don't think poetry has much influence on day to day politics, which is probably a good thing, because poets tend to be political imbeciles. A poet as wonderful, subtle, beautiful, and perceptive as Ezra Pound could be a sucker for Mussolini's drivel. There's no guarantee that poets will have any political sense, and in fact there's a strong prima facie case for expecting them to have none.
Here's what I think is the sum total of poets' responsibility: 1) to try to see clearly, 2) to love, and 3) to cultivate their gifts & do the best work they can. It's no different from other human beings' responsibility. If your eyes and your heart are open, your poetry will do the right thing. Don't pester it.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Sunset
You are old, Father William.
Bits of poems surface.
Because I am mad about women,
I am mad about the hills,
Said the wild old wicked man,
who travels where God wills
There lives not three good men unhanged in England,
And one of them is fat, and grows old.
What shall I do with this absurdity,
Heart, O troubled heart
This old age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold:
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang
But I don't feel old. I feel in my prime, full of piss and vinegar, spoiling for a fight, hungry for flesh, full of love and discontent. Last night I got off the bus and walked slowly home through a shifting hall of subtle colors, sunset blushing the turning trees into magenta clouds, gold phantoms in their chains, glints of green. White flowers glowed in surprisingly wet, deep, dark corners. I had to stop at the flowers, stupefied, and just watch a while. Like Geoffrey Chaucer lying on the grass to watch the daisies open in a May dawn six hundred years ago. He really did that, you know. One man, one place, one time. No doubt his leggings were stained with grass and wet with dew, but he didn't give a damn, and neither do I, standing like a halfwit, gaping at the flowers, beads of late sunset condensing on my beard. A woman came by, walking a Great Dane so tall that his head came to my ribs. An affable and good-natured creature. She smiled at me, askance, pulling the Dane's head away lest he lick the sundrops off my face.
At the corner, the unruly sage bush, well past its prime, but you can still grasp the remains of the flowers and come away with your hand smelling like a dream of the Mohave. Beyond the massive trees there were lavender pools in the sky, eddies of pink and violet, sprays of silver. And behind it all, behind it all, night gathering, a vast catlike creature huddled on its four legs, crouching low, intent and alive and utterly silent.
You are old, Father William.
Bits of poems surface.
Because I am mad about women,
I am mad about the hills,
Said the wild old wicked man,
who travels where God wills
There lives not three good men unhanged in England,
And one of them is fat, and grows old.
What shall I do with this absurdity,
Heart, O troubled heart
This old age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold:
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang
But I don't feel old. I feel in my prime, full of piss and vinegar, spoiling for a fight, hungry for flesh, full of love and discontent. Last night I got off the bus and walked slowly home through a shifting hall of subtle colors, sunset blushing the turning trees into magenta clouds, gold phantoms in their chains, glints of green. White flowers glowed in surprisingly wet, deep, dark corners. I had to stop at the flowers, stupefied, and just watch a while. Like Geoffrey Chaucer lying on the grass to watch the daisies open in a May dawn six hundred years ago. He really did that, you know. One man, one place, one time. No doubt his leggings were stained with grass and wet with dew, but he didn't give a damn, and neither do I, standing like a halfwit, gaping at the flowers, beads of late sunset condensing on my beard. A woman came by, walking a Great Dane so tall that his head came to my ribs. An affable and good-natured creature. She smiled at me, askance, pulling the Dane's head away lest he lick the sundrops off my face.
At the corner, the unruly sage bush, well past its prime, but you can still grasp the remains of the flowers and come away with your hand smelling like a dream of the Mohave. Beyond the massive trees there were lavender pools in the sky, eddies of pink and violet, sprays of silver. And behind it all, behind it all, night gathering, a vast catlike creature huddled on its four legs, crouching low, intent and alive and utterly silent.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Without Rest
I drive carefully in the pre-dawn fog. Her headlights are a little out of true, the left a little higher than the right. They don't quite intersect, half a block ahead. Dear little cross-eyed Honda. I flip through the radio channels. That engaging but vapid new Nickleback song. Then "I got the rockin' pneumonia, and the boogie woogie blues." Fun, but over almost at once, and succeeded by one of those brassy energetic 60's pop bands -- not Chicago, but of that ilk, can it be Weather Report? -- that I've disliked so long that I don't remember why I dislike them. I reflect that I can't even hear them any more, I've only listened to my dislike of them for so long. I wonder what they sound like?
I listen a moment. "God, I hate this," I note, still not sure whether I've heard them, or just forty-odd years of accumulated dislike. Still, I punch the "seek" button.
Ah. George Harrison. "... 'cause it takes so long my Lord. My sweet Lord." That carries me the rest of the way to Tosi's. I sit in the parking lot till the last of the steel guitar fades away.
I'm on the run, I know I am. Doing my best not to think about things. But I can only do that so long.
The bland fog lightens. Ghosts of the doug firs across the street appear. Everything is gentling down into an ordinary day. The cars sweep by, endlessly, people on their way to work. At five they'll all drive back. And tomorrow I'll be sitting here watching them drive to work again.
I drink my coffee with deep appreciation. You know, the quality of the coffee beans doesn't matter a bit. Any bean will do, so long as its not old or moldy. What matters is whether the coffeemakers and pots are quite clean. Yesterday I paid four times this much for an indifferent pot of bitter coffee, in a gleaming silver vessel that I know, in my heart, was cursorily rinsed in the kitchen. You could taste the tang of days of old coffee grime.
I look back over what I've written, noting the snark. I check: yes, I am feeling a little sick. This cold has hung on for weeks, possibly months. It's actually unlikely to be a cold virus, which, as we all know, tends to last for two weeks (or fourteen days, if you take rose hips and echinacea.) I wonder what it is? I'm tired of it.
It's of a piece: one of the things I'm not thinking about.
Now the fog is phosphorescent with dawn: the whole sky is impregnated with silver light. A sense of intelligences pulsing above, light handing off to light. Thousands at his bidding speed, and post o'er land and ocean without rest.
I close my eyes, and the burning lessens. Sit up straight and ease my shoulders, let them hang. The upper traps and the lev scaps eye me suspiciously. They're not about to let go: they know this is a momentary shift of posture, and that I don't really mean it.
Last night, the young nervous collie, jealous of me, wanting my approval, took it out on various imaginary intruders. Barked at the fire. Growled at the couch. Industriously licked my arm as I worked on your upper traps and lev scaps. Physician, heal thyself. I know.
They also serve who only stand and wait. Ah, but that's not "sit and wait." You have to stand. You can't be on the run. And it's silly to run, anyway. God has my address. He has my social security number. He knows how to get hold of me.
Three long breaths, my shoulders hanging, again. This time I mean it. This time they start unwinding, strand by strand. I love you so much, so much. My sweet Lord.
I drive carefully in the pre-dawn fog. Her headlights are a little out of true, the left a little higher than the right. They don't quite intersect, half a block ahead. Dear little cross-eyed Honda. I flip through the radio channels. That engaging but vapid new Nickleback song. Then "I got the rockin' pneumonia, and the boogie woogie blues." Fun, but over almost at once, and succeeded by one of those brassy energetic 60's pop bands -- not Chicago, but of that ilk, can it be Weather Report? -- that I've disliked so long that I don't remember why I dislike them. I reflect that I can't even hear them any more, I've only listened to my dislike of them for so long. I wonder what they sound like?
I listen a moment. "God, I hate this," I note, still not sure whether I've heard them, or just forty-odd years of accumulated dislike. Still, I punch the "seek" button.
Ah. George Harrison. "... 'cause it takes so long my Lord. My sweet Lord." That carries me the rest of the way to Tosi's. I sit in the parking lot till the last of the steel guitar fades away.
I'm on the run, I know I am. Doing my best not to think about things. But I can only do that so long.
The bland fog lightens. Ghosts of the doug firs across the street appear. Everything is gentling down into an ordinary day. The cars sweep by, endlessly, people on their way to work. At five they'll all drive back. And tomorrow I'll be sitting here watching them drive to work again.
I drink my coffee with deep appreciation. You know, the quality of the coffee beans doesn't matter a bit. Any bean will do, so long as its not old or moldy. What matters is whether the coffeemakers and pots are quite clean. Yesterday I paid four times this much for an indifferent pot of bitter coffee, in a gleaming silver vessel that I know, in my heart, was cursorily rinsed in the kitchen. You could taste the tang of days of old coffee grime.
I look back over what I've written, noting the snark. I check: yes, I am feeling a little sick. This cold has hung on for weeks, possibly months. It's actually unlikely to be a cold virus, which, as we all know, tends to last for two weeks (or fourteen days, if you take rose hips and echinacea.) I wonder what it is? I'm tired of it.
It's of a piece: one of the things I'm not thinking about.
Now the fog is phosphorescent with dawn: the whole sky is impregnated with silver light. A sense of intelligences pulsing above, light handing off to light. Thousands at his bidding speed, and post o'er land and ocean without rest.
I close my eyes, and the burning lessens. Sit up straight and ease my shoulders, let them hang. The upper traps and the lev scaps eye me suspiciously. They're not about to let go: they know this is a momentary shift of posture, and that I don't really mean it.
Last night, the young nervous collie, jealous of me, wanting my approval, took it out on various imaginary intruders. Barked at the fire. Growled at the couch. Industriously licked my arm as I worked on your upper traps and lev scaps. Physician, heal thyself. I know.
They also serve who only stand and wait. Ah, but that's not "sit and wait." You have to stand. You can't be on the run. And it's silly to run, anyway. God has my address. He has my social security number. He knows how to get hold of me.
Three long breaths, my shoulders hanging, again. This time I mean it. This time they start unwinding, strand by strand. I love you so much, so much. My sweet Lord.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
American Sentences
Okay, help me here. All the cool kids are writing these things called American Sentences. If I understand it right, this is a poetic form invented by Allen Ginsberg, and it's a single seventeen-syllable line. And I don't get it.
This is a humiliating confession for me. I pride myself on getting poetry. There are some forms I like less than other forms, but for the most part I feel like I understand what they're getting at. The way that the ballad form goes for repetition and undeniable closure with with every quatrain, say. I may like it or not, I may think it's suitable for some particular poem or not. But at least I get it.
Not so with American sentences. First of all, the line. One line is the same as none. Isn't it? I mean, a line only comes into effect by being divided from other lines. What lines make are pauses, where you draw breath, or lift your eye. A single line isn't a line, it's an absence of lines.
Okay. And now syllables. First of all, the American language is a heavily stressed language. Its rhythms aren't made by patterns of syllables, they're made by patterns of stresses. From day one, no one's really minded if you have a few too many unaccented syllables, or a few too few. Who's counting? Not Americans. Now, if you have a language with syllabic quantity, like Latin or Greek, where syllables are actually long or short -- I mean, long or short in the amount of time it consumes to say them, where a long 'a' is (more or less) twice as long as a short 'a' -- counting syllables makes sense. You can make patterns out of them. And some languages, such as French, are severely handicapped, having neither stress nor quantity, and they have to count syllables to make poetry. What else can they do?
So. In an American Sentence we have seventeen syllables. Why? Why seventeen? Why not eleven, or twenty-one? Most verse forms spin off rhythms or patterns of daily speech, exaggerating tendencies that are already there. A line is more or less what you can say before taking another breath. Iambic pentameter is more or less the rhythm of English speech. Jingly rhymes come naturally to children, and rhyme-schemes spin off of that.
But seventeen syllables? It's artificial. It's arbitrary. It has nothing to do with natural American speech. There's no one who just always pauses on his seventeenth syllable. No one even knows when he or she's come to the seventeenth syllable. The only way you can figure out if you have seventeen syllables is by counting them out on your fingers. You can't figure it out by singing, or chanting, because there's no American song that has a seventeen-syllable line.
So I don't get it. I like some of the American Sentences people write. But not as poems, just as sentences. And I can't see why they'd be any better, or any worse, if they were sixteen or eighteen syllables long. I simply can't see it as a poetic form.
So help me out, here. What does an American Sentence feel like? It must touch some chord for you all, or you wouldn't keep reading and writing them. It must have some source in speech or song that's hidden from me. What is it?
Okay, help me here. All the cool kids are writing these things called American Sentences. If I understand it right, this is a poetic form invented by Allen Ginsberg, and it's a single seventeen-syllable line. And I don't get it.
This is a humiliating confession for me. I pride myself on getting poetry. There are some forms I like less than other forms, but for the most part I feel like I understand what they're getting at. The way that the ballad form goes for repetition and undeniable closure with with every quatrain, say. I may like it or not, I may think it's suitable for some particular poem or not. But at least I get it.
Not so with American sentences. First of all, the line. One line is the same as none. Isn't it? I mean, a line only comes into effect by being divided from other lines. What lines make are pauses, where you draw breath, or lift your eye. A single line isn't a line, it's an absence of lines.
Okay. And now syllables. First of all, the American language is a heavily stressed language. Its rhythms aren't made by patterns of syllables, they're made by patterns of stresses. From day one, no one's really minded if you have a few too many unaccented syllables, or a few too few. Who's counting? Not Americans. Now, if you have a language with syllabic quantity, like Latin or Greek, where syllables are actually long or short -- I mean, long or short in the amount of time it consumes to say them, where a long 'a' is (more or less) twice as long as a short 'a' -- counting syllables makes sense. You can make patterns out of them. And some languages, such as French, are severely handicapped, having neither stress nor quantity, and they have to count syllables to make poetry. What else can they do?
So. In an American Sentence we have seventeen syllables. Why? Why seventeen? Why not eleven, or twenty-one? Most verse forms spin off rhythms or patterns of daily speech, exaggerating tendencies that are already there. A line is more or less what you can say before taking another breath. Iambic pentameter is more or less the rhythm of English speech. Jingly rhymes come naturally to children, and rhyme-schemes spin off of that.
But seventeen syllables? It's artificial. It's arbitrary. It has nothing to do with natural American speech. There's no one who just always pauses on his seventeenth syllable. No one even knows when he or she's come to the seventeenth syllable. The only way you can figure out if you have seventeen syllables is by counting them out on your fingers. You can't figure it out by singing, or chanting, because there's no American song that has a seventeen-syllable line.
So I don't get it. I like some of the American Sentences people write. But not as poems, just as sentences. And I can't see why they'd be any better, or any worse, if they were sixteen or eighteen syllables long. I simply can't see it as a poetic form.
So help me out, here. What does an American Sentence feel like? It must touch some chord for you all, or you wouldn't keep reading and writing them. It must have some source in speech or song that's hidden from me. What is it?
Monday, October 13, 2008
Before Winter
for read write word #1
God's cocked hand
Is full of rain, broken levies, dirty water, and
Cholera: but unaccountably
He misses the beat
And does not throw.
Stubborn incandescence, the anapest
Of the year: warm wind in cool shadow,
The science of sidewalk-splits,
Fingers of frost in the Earth's warm belly.
You turn to me at the flood wall,
Hooded eyes laughing, making
Whispers into a tingle of ouzo
On the sides of my cold tongue.
for read write word #1
God's cocked hand
Is full of rain, broken levies, dirty water, and
Cholera: but unaccountably
He misses the beat
And does not throw.
Stubborn incandescence, the anapest
Of the year: warm wind in cool shadow,
The science of sidewalk-splits,
Fingers of frost in the Earth's warm belly.
You turn to me at the flood wall,
Hooded eyes laughing, making
Whispers into a tingle of ouzo
On the sides of my cold tongue.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Mountain Ash
A flash of light from the outlet, when I plug in the laptop: piercing blue at the center, yellow at the edges. I see, suddenly, all the wiring of the city, snaking through all those walls; the substations, the brooding gigantism of Bonneville dam, millions upon millions of lights burning, lights burning just to make a room cheerful, lights left on thoughtlessly. Motors running: kitchen appliances, clocks, stoves. I walk through the house with the lights out, and see tiny eyes glowing in every room, a dozen little red or green indicator lights on various gadgets that aren't even doing anything, but which feel the need to say that they're alive. Microwaves that want to tell me the time. Smoke alarms displaying vigilance. The machine equivalent of blogging.
Your pale face held an unearthly beauty yesterday, a beauty I wanted to reach through to, but am old enough to know can't be touched. Like reflections in a pool: the moment you touch, they vanish. Instead I turn your head and grasp the back of your neck and give the whole thing a soft wringing-out. "Like a cat picking up a kitten," someone said, an image that is inaccurate, but which always recurs. Then, putting a little traction on the skull with a thumb and forefinger in the suboccipitals, the other hand cradling the occiput, I rotate the head, slowly, barely perceptibly, like the wheel of the stars at night. I speculate that you must do yoga, and then realize that you, in your twenties, can probably take this range of motion quite for granted. All the way from the rising of Vega to the setting of Arcturus. I could turn even further, if I liked. Young owl.
Later you talk eagerly, glowing, sitting on the bed. I stand a little awkwardly -- I'm not willing to claim the intimacy of sitting on the bed or on the floor, and there's no other seat to be had -- and I feel again how oddly my age sits on me. But no. Really my age suits me, I think. I have always been this old, and now I've grown into it. The thing out of place is the way I thought of people my age when I was young, or maybe, to be more accurate, how I didn't think of people my age. In a just world you'd ignore me completely, tit for tat, as paper cut-out rather than as a person. Fortunately, fortunately, it's not a just world.
Sun on the mountain ash, its fruit a glowing rust-color, the even-set leaflets rippling in the breeze.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
A flash of light from the outlet, when I plug in the laptop: piercing blue at the center, yellow at the edges. I see, suddenly, all the wiring of the city, snaking through all those walls; the substations, the brooding gigantism of Bonneville dam, millions upon millions of lights burning, lights burning just to make a room cheerful, lights left on thoughtlessly. Motors running: kitchen appliances, clocks, stoves. I walk through the house with the lights out, and see tiny eyes glowing in every room, a dozen little red or green indicator lights on various gadgets that aren't even doing anything, but which feel the need to say that they're alive. Microwaves that want to tell me the time. Smoke alarms displaying vigilance. The machine equivalent of blogging.
Your pale face held an unearthly beauty yesterday, a beauty I wanted to reach through to, but am old enough to know can't be touched. Like reflections in a pool: the moment you touch, they vanish. Instead I turn your head and grasp the back of your neck and give the whole thing a soft wringing-out. "Like a cat picking up a kitten," someone said, an image that is inaccurate, but which always recurs. Then, putting a little traction on the skull with a thumb and forefinger in the suboccipitals, the other hand cradling the occiput, I rotate the head, slowly, barely perceptibly, like the wheel of the stars at night. I speculate that you must do yoga, and then realize that you, in your twenties, can probably take this range of motion quite for granted. All the way from the rising of Vega to the setting of Arcturus. I could turn even further, if I liked. Young owl.
Later you talk eagerly, glowing, sitting on the bed. I stand a little awkwardly -- I'm not willing to claim the intimacy of sitting on the bed or on the floor, and there's no other seat to be had -- and I feel again how oddly my age sits on me. But no. Really my age suits me, I think. I have always been this old, and now I've grown into it. The thing out of place is the way I thought of people my age when I was young, or maybe, to be more accurate, how I didn't think of people my age. In a just world you'd ignore me completely, tit for tat, as paper cut-out rather than as a person. Fortunately, fortunately, it's not a just world.
Sun on the mountain ash, its fruit a glowing rust-color, the even-set leaflets rippling in the breeze.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Time to Walk
Dawn just beginning to break. No hint yet of birds. Kiki comes to delicately inquire about breakfast. I'm not the usual person to feed her, but I'm sitting here at Martha's place. Perhaps?
But no. I'm tip-tapping away at a keyboard, as usual. After an expectant pause, there is the sound of crunching behind me. A little dry cat food. Then she vanishes, off to make her early morning rounds, whatever they may be.
No sound of birds yet. Put my coffee back in the microwave. So many habits I'll have to establish, if I'm to eat breakfast at home.
Thoughts crowd me, that never crowd me at Tosi's. I should clean the kitchen. I really should establish a weekly routine, everyone cleaning the kitchen once a day, and make it happen. I should have done it fifteen years ago, for that matter, rather than have vanished from the squalor every day. I need to get those SOAPs off to that insurance company. I ought to get my room set up for writing. I should paint it, too. And speaking of painting, both porches, front and back, really need to be not just painted, but rebuilt. What would that cost, I wonder? A lot of money we don't have. Will the economy improve if we elect Obama, or is it too late? Probably too late, I reflect. Several good years of recession, no matter what. We should never have incurred this debt on the house. Why did I let that happen? I used to make good money.
Well. So that's why I always eat breakfast out, so that I'll have lofty thoughts about Buddhism and literature in the morning, rather than this long depressing mumble about the home front, laced with recrimination. Let Martha do the long depressing mumble.
No. Not content with that any more. The changes I invoked, I have to deal with.
There is a lightening in the sky, just enough to make the silhouette of the neighbor's dogwood visible. I open the door to breathe the free air a second, and to see what the sky looks like out of the direct glare of the kitchen lights. It's quite light out there, really, and the air is as fresh as if it had wandered straight here off the Pacific.
I turn off the kitchen lights. Now I can see the sky, mottled gray-blue and iron; the trees are still just black cut-outs against it. I'm reminded of the tattoo across a client's shoulders. "The trees were dark, but the sky was still blue." Proust. And leaves, just like these. What a marvelous thing to discover, on turning down the sheet. It seemed unprofessional to remark on it. It seems unprofessional to mention it on my blog. But I mean. So wonderful.
Tori comes in. "You can turn on the lights, if you like," I say, but she gets her cereal in dark, without speaking, and goes into the living room, where Ashley has been sitting quietly at her computer, all this time. It's nearly seven, though. I can't expect to have the kitchen to myself forever, not even on Sunday morning. The urge to get out is mounting, becoming irresistable. The air is calling. Three crows fly silently over the dogwood. What do I do, if I'm not going to Tosi's? Walk up & around the reservoir up on Mt Tabor?
Now the first bird, or the first one I can hear. Scrub jay. They don't usual weigh in this early. Are the other birds really silent, still? I open the door again. Someone else is peeping faintly. At the turn of the weather, though, I don't really know what to expect. In summer, when it was this light, the full chorus was going. The birds are disconcerted too, having to change their habits. They want someone to refill their coffee; they want the clink of dishes from the diner kitchen, the smell of bacon. Only the jay is awake enough to complain about it though.
The sky is almost white, now. Time to walk.
Dawn just beginning to break. No hint yet of birds. Kiki comes to delicately inquire about breakfast. I'm not the usual person to feed her, but I'm sitting here at Martha's place. Perhaps?
But no. I'm tip-tapping away at a keyboard, as usual. After an expectant pause, there is the sound of crunching behind me. A little dry cat food. Then she vanishes, off to make her early morning rounds, whatever they may be.
No sound of birds yet. Put my coffee back in the microwave. So many habits I'll have to establish, if I'm to eat breakfast at home.
Thoughts crowd me, that never crowd me at Tosi's. I should clean the kitchen. I really should establish a weekly routine, everyone cleaning the kitchen once a day, and make it happen. I should have done it fifteen years ago, for that matter, rather than have vanished from the squalor every day. I need to get those SOAPs off to that insurance company. I ought to get my room set up for writing. I should paint it, too. And speaking of painting, both porches, front and back, really need to be not just painted, but rebuilt. What would that cost, I wonder? A lot of money we don't have. Will the economy improve if we elect Obama, or is it too late? Probably too late, I reflect. Several good years of recession, no matter what. We should never have incurred this debt on the house. Why did I let that happen? I used to make good money.
Well. So that's why I always eat breakfast out, so that I'll have lofty thoughts about Buddhism and literature in the morning, rather than this long depressing mumble about the home front, laced with recrimination. Let Martha do the long depressing mumble.
No. Not content with that any more. The changes I invoked, I have to deal with.
There is a lightening in the sky, just enough to make the silhouette of the neighbor's dogwood visible. I open the door to breathe the free air a second, and to see what the sky looks like out of the direct glare of the kitchen lights. It's quite light out there, really, and the air is as fresh as if it had wandered straight here off the Pacific.
I turn off the kitchen lights. Now I can see the sky, mottled gray-blue and iron; the trees are still just black cut-outs against it. I'm reminded of the tattoo across a client's shoulders. "The trees were dark, but the sky was still blue." Proust. And leaves, just like these. What a marvelous thing to discover, on turning down the sheet. It seemed unprofessional to remark on it. It seems unprofessional to mention it on my blog. But I mean. So wonderful.
Tori comes in. "You can turn on the lights, if you like," I say, but she gets her cereal in dark, without speaking, and goes into the living room, where Ashley has been sitting quietly at her computer, all this time. It's nearly seven, though. I can't expect to have the kitchen to myself forever, not even on Sunday morning. The urge to get out is mounting, becoming irresistable. The air is calling. Three crows fly silently over the dogwood. What do I do, if I'm not going to Tosi's? Walk up & around the reservoir up on Mt Tabor?
Now the first bird, or the first one I can hear. Scrub jay. They don't usual weigh in this early. Are the other birds really silent, still? I open the door again. Someone else is peeping faintly. At the turn of the weather, though, I don't really know what to expect. In summer, when it was this light, the full chorus was going. The birds are disconcerted too, having to change their habits. They want someone to refill their coffee; they want the clink of dishes from the diner kitchen, the smell of bacon. Only the jay is awake enough to complain about it though.
The sky is almost white, now. Time to walk.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Juvenilia IV
These two have been in the oven a long time.
Tenure
That old wall-eyed professor, he approves of everyone;
Thinks anyone is worth the time of day.
What can he know? No, find the
Razor-tongued, vitriolic man,
Whose students run in tears from his office,
And try to please him. Be sure not to smile
At anything cute. Don't laugh unless you see
The corners of his mouth begin to move.
Look for the greed in every generosity.
Obtain the dental records of that horse's sires
To the third and fourth generation. It's tricky
You have to look like you don't want his approval
Or he's sure to withhold it. Show how every action
Defeats its avowed end. How the sentimental
Is laced with cruelty. Set yourself ready to sneer
Because you never know
When an opportunity might arise, and then
You might sneer at the same thing
And find yourselves comrades.
The blessing! So suppose you do that,
Your reward will be someday
To run in tears from that office yourself
With cruelties tailored expressly for you:
And armed with those, and the skills you have learned,
One day you may have an office of your own.
Some One Time
Rose-white; the track of a thrush,
A dotted line against the clouds:
The softness of your vulva
In my fingers.
Folding the sky into
An origami of moisture;
The sweetness of your wetness,
The curved lines of pubic hairs
Barely felt, like the lines on the back
Of a drawn-on napkin; a braille
Of wanting. You came
Forever.
The hard lozenges under my tongue
Of nipples that have woken
After long slumber. It is painful
And so folded in
With suffering past and to come,
That grief overcomes even delight,
And suddenly I go slack, and bury my head
In your shoulder.
"It's okay," you say,
Using my own words against me.
And you are right. The sky
Is stitched, and unstitched,
Day and night, the clouds fold
And unfold; the labia kiss my fingertips;
If nothing is forever, it is only so that
Some one thing can be in some one time.
Damn Nagarjuna,
And all his tribe:
Your sweet-and-sour taste
Lingers on my lips.
The thrush comes to
A momentary halt: its thin branch
Sways once, black,
Against the white sky.
These two have been in the oven a long time.
Tenure
That old wall-eyed professor, he approves of everyone;
Thinks anyone is worth the time of day.
What can he know? No, find the
Razor-tongued, vitriolic man,
Whose students run in tears from his office,
And try to please him. Be sure not to smile
At anything cute. Don't laugh unless you see
The corners of his mouth begin to move.
Look for the greed in every generosity.
Obtain the dental records of that horse's sires
To the third and fourth generation. It's tricky
You have to look like you don't want his approval
Or he's sure to withhold it. Show how every action
Defeats its avowed end. How the sentimental
Is laced with cruelty. Set yourself ready to sneer
Because you never know
When an opportunity might arise, and then
You might sneer at the same thing
And find yourselves comrades.
The blessing! So suppose you do that,
Your reward will be someday
To run in tears from that office yourself
With cruelties tailored expressly for you:
And armed with those, and the skills you have learned,
One day you may have an office of your own.
Some One Time
Rose-white; the track of a thrush,
A dotted line against the clouds:
The softness of your vulva
In my fingers.
Folding the sky into
An origami of moisture;
The sweetness of your wetness,
The curved lines of pubic hairs
Barely felt, like the lines on the back
Of a drawn-on napkin; a braille
Of wanting. You came
Forever.
The hard lozenges under my tongue
Of nipples that have woken
After long slumber. It is painful
And so folded in
With suffering past and to come,
That grief overcomes even delight,
And suddenly I go slack, and bury my head
In your shoulder.
"It's okay," you say,
Using my own words against me.
And you are right. The sky
Is stitched, and unstitched,
Day and night, the clouds fold
And unfold; the labia kiss my fingertips;
If nothing is forever, it is only so that
Some one thing can be in some one time.
Damn Nagarjuna,
And all his tribe:
Your sweet-and-sour taste
Lingers on my lips.
The thrush comes to
A momentary halt: its thin branch
Sways once, black,
Against the white sky.
Juvenilia III
I don't remember why I didn't post this. Possibly because I backslid for a day or two before I fully recovered. It must have been written in July.
Sugar
So I knew I'd been gradually gaining weight back. But not that much, I thought. And I was feeling good, in my body, strong from massage, fit from bicycling. I don't have a great ambition to have the same waist I had when I was seventeen. I may not be svelte, but I'm in much better shape, at fifty, than I was at seventeen. I stand straighter and move easier and it takes a lot longer to tire me out. I take a malicious delight in the fact that a lot of the athletic jocks who made my life a misery in junior high school can barely waddle back and forth between the house and the SUV now; I float past them on my lovely blue and silver Trek in ungenerous exultation.
Then came the last couple weeks: all hell broke loose in a number of ways. Business mysteriously tanked. Was it the weather? High holiday season? All I know is that the phone went silent.
The weather was sultry. Some people have less of an urge to eat in that kind of weather: not me. Any discomfort makes me want to eat. And someone brought home a half-gallon of limeade.
I love limes, and limeade, with the sort of fervor that hobbits have for mushrooms. A tall glass full of ice, refilled with limeade, and refilled again. In no time the half-gallon was gone. I got some more. I haven't tried to reckon just how much sugar I consumed: I don't think I want to know.
It was interesting to watch, since I have a clue about the mechanics of it now. From that point on, I was riding the isulin roller-coaster. For years I've given up putting sugar in my coffee. Now, in some bemusement, I could watch my hands reach for the sugar in the morning. "I don't take sugar in my coffee any more," I would tell them. They would nod agreeably, and tilt a couple tablespoons into the cup.
And suddenly I was hungry all the time. All the time. Hungry even when I was stuffed, when no human being could possibly be hungry. Desperately hungry, the way you'd feel if you'd starved for days. At any idle moment I started thinking of what I would eat next. Nothing was going to stop me from eating. And meanwhile, a totally unexpected emotional bomb had burst beneath me, lofting me completely free of any self-control I might have tried to bring to bear on it.
Yesterday I was finally able to call a halt. I pulled out a measuring tape. 47 inches. Mein lieber Gott! At my most expansive I was still under 49. I must weigh something like 225, then.
Thank God for Atkins. There's only one way I know of to break the power of those blood-sugar swings, and that's to go completely cold turkey on the carbs for a couple days. Doesn't matter what the hell you eat, so long as it's not carbs. No sugar, no corn syrup, no flour, no rice, no potatos. No fruit. Eggs, bacon, butter, hamburger, hot dogs are fine. Just no ketchup, no barbeque sauce, no juice, no flavored-corn-syrup salad dressings: none of those thinly disguised mainline sugar hypodermics. We're not aiming at nutrition, the first couple of days. We're just aiming to stop the blood-sugar levels from swinging wildly.
I quit at noon yesterday. I ate a vast salad drenched in oil (the carbs in vegetables apparently metabolize so slowly they're not a problem) for lunch and some hot dogs for dinner. At breakfast today I find it hard even to remember the desperation of that urge to put sugar in my coffee. Here's my coffee, there's the sugar. "I don't have sugar with my coffee," I say. "All right!" say my hands brightly, demurely pretending they always do whatever I say.
I can't say what a relief it is to be free of that sugar-compulsion. It infects everything. There's a subtle current of desperation running under every other emotion, when it holds sway.
I don't remember why I didn't post this. Possibly because I backslid for a day or two before I fully recovered. It must have been written in July.
Sugar
So I knew I'd been gradually gaining weight back. But not that much, I thought. And I was feeling good, in my body, strong from massage, fit from bicycling. I don't have a great ambition to have the same waist I had when I was seventeen. I may not be svelte, but I'm in much better shape, at fifty, than I was at seventeen. I stand straighter and move easier and it takes a lot longer to tire me out. I take a malicious delight in the fact that a lot of the athletic jocks who made my life a misery in junior high school can barely waddle back and forth between the house and the SUV now; I float past them on my lovely blue and silver Trek in ungenerous exultation.
Then came the last couple weeks: all hell broke loose in a number of ways. Business mysteriously tanked. Was it the weather? High holiday season? All I know is that the phone went silent.
The weather was sultry. Some people have less of an urge to eat in that kind of weather: not me. Any discomfort makes me want to eat. And someone brought home a half-gallon of limeade.
I love limes, and limeade, with the sort of fervor that hobbits have for mushrooms. A tall glass full of ice, refilled with limeade, and refilled again. In no time the half-gallon was gone. I got some more. I haven't tried to reckon just how much sugar I consumed: I don't think I want to know.
It was interesting to watch, since I have a clue about the mechanics of it now. From that point on, I was riding the isulin roller-coaster. For years I've given up putting sugar in my coffee. Now, in some bemusement, I could watch my hands reach for the sugar in the morning. "I don't take sugar in my coffee any more," I would tell them. They would nod agreeably, and tilt a couple tablespoons into the cup.
And suddenly I was hungry all the time. All the time. Hungry even when I was stuffed, when no human being could possibly be hungry. Desperately hungry, the way you'd feel if you'd starved for days. At any idle moment I started thinking of what I would eat next. Nothing was going to stop me from eating. And meanwhile, a totally unexpected emotional bomb had burst beneath me, lofting me completely free of any self-control I might have tried to bring to bear on it.
Yesterday I was finally able to call a halt. I pulled out a measuring tape. 47 inches. Mein lieber Gott! At my most expansive I was still under 49. I must weigh something like 225, then.
Thank God for Atkins. There's only one way I know of to break the power of those blood-sugar swings, and that's to go completely cold turkey on the carbs for a couple days. Doesn't matter what the hell you eat, so long as it's not carbs. No sugar, no corn syrup, no flour, no rice, no potatos. No fruit. Eggs, bacon, butter, hamburger, hot dogs are fine. Just no ketchup, no barbeque sauce, no juice, no flavored-corn-syrup salad dressings: none of those thinly disguised mainline sugar hypodermics. We're not aiming at nutrition, the first couple of days. We're just aiming to stop the blood-sugar levels from swinging wildly.
I quit at noon yesterday. I ate a vast salad drenched in oil (the carbs in vegetables apparently metabolize so slowly they're not a problem) for lunch and some hot dogs for dinner. At breakfast today I find it hard even to remember the desperation of that urge to put sugar in my coffee. Here's my coffee, there's the sugar. "I don't have sugar with my coffee," I say. "All right!" say my hands brightly, demurely pretending they always do whatever I say.
I can't say what a relief it is to be free of that sugar-compulsion. It infects everything. There's a subtle current of desperation running under every other emotion, when it holds sway.
Friday, October 03, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
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.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 29, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 15, 2008
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:
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!
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!
Friday, September 12, 2008
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
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.
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.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
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?
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?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 08, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
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.
. . . 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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
McCain's Choice Explained
I was puzzled too, but Sydney has a plausible explanation of McCain's choice for Veep.
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.
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.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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
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
Saturday, August 23, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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."
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."
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, August 01, 2008
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.
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.
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