Religious

Our conversation had touched on metaphysical topics, and he asked, casually, "Are you religious, Dale?"

"Yes," I said.

He sat bolt upright. "You're shittin' me!" he exclaimed.

"I've been a Buddhist for ten years," I said.

"Oh. Oh. Well, Buddhism," he said, relieved, "that's more like a philosophy than a religion." He sat back again.

For some people it's a philosophy. For me "religion" is more accurate. I didn't say that, though: I felt I'd alarmed him enough for one evening. And it's difficult to convey both the distinction, and my sense of its importance, to people who have no vocabulary for them. He belonged to the group of people for whom the opposite of "religious" is "rational." With such people it's difficult to know even where to begin. Really what he was asking was "are you a dangerous lunatic with no respect for evidence or truth?" By that definition, I hope don't qualify as "religious." I respect reason and evidence as much as the next person -- often, it seems to me considerably more than the next person.

The same question is often phrased, "Do you believe in God?" And that's a question I find similarly difficult to answer, because it's inlaid with assumptions I don't accept: that religion is primarily about a person named God, and that what one is supposed to do with this person is believe in him or deny him. Atheists and fundamentalists alike make this assumption: and it's difficult to know how to answer, since "yes" and "no" both imply that you accept the premises.

As I've said before, the answer I really have to whether I believe in God has to be, "well, tell me what you mean by 'God,' and I'll tell you if I believe in it at the moment."

But the whole conversation is steered, by this assumption, into shallow waters that I find both dangerous and boring. I don't understand this business of "believing in" things. Don't you have to believe what you think is true, whether you like it or not? It's not a moral decision. If you don't think something is true, affirming it won't make it so. It will just give you a mental crick in the neck.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in their mainstream forms, all place a heavy emphasis on subscribing to a set of propositions about reality. They have such sway in the world that the question "what is your religion" is to most people virtually the same as "to which list of propositions about reality do you subscribe?"

But there are very few religions outside of those three that care much about subscribing to propositions. There are many thousands of religions: almost none of them care about what you "believe" in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sense. I'm often asked if I "believe in" reincarnation, as if that's what being a Buddhist would be all about. My answer is "sometimes, kind of. Not usually." Believing in reincarnation is not central to being a Buddhist. (And anyway it was not something that Buddhism invented: it was simply the standard science of the day. The Buddha Shakyamuni "believed in" reincarnation for the same reason I "believe in" gravitation: because the people who are supposed to know about these things say that's how it is.)

So at this point I'm probably sounding reassuringly rational to people like my alarmed friend, hardly religious at all, possibly even harmless. So why do I insist on Buddhism being my religion, rather than my philosophy?

Well, for one thing, it gives me a way of thinking and talking about things I would do anyway, but which a materialist outlook insists that I ignore. I talk to dead people, for instance. And I'm aware of unbodied, non-human intelligences coming and going. I don't "believe" that this is in my head. I don't "believe" it's outside my head either. I don't particularly care where it is in relation to my head. It's a basic human faculty, which most peoples have exercised in one form or another throughout history. Perhaps I'm tapping regions of my own unconscious. I'm fine with that. Perhaps I'm really interacting with ghosts and sendings. I'm fine with that too. I don't see how a person could confidently know, and anyway I don't feel my own claims to be "real" are all that impressive either. What I do know is that I value these interactions highly. To me they're a fundamental part of the human kit, and I have no intention of abandoning them.

Or again, I bow to statues and I say prayers to them and give them gifts. I do not do this under the misapprehension that they are living beings with the same ontological status as, say, you, or my cat. But neither am I willing to forgo the benefits of the relationships I have with these pieces of wood and metal. There are, likewise, places in the wilderness that strike me as obviously sacred. I worship in them, and I would object strenuously to their destruction. I know as well as my friend that there's no instrument that will give me a reliable numinosity reading on a particular grove. But I'm not willing on that account to simply abandon my responses, and the opportunities those responses create.

And again. I may or may not be reincarnating, life after life. I may or may not be in complex, ongoing, and intimate relationships with every single sentient being I encounter. I don't know, and neither do you. But I know that if I approach people (and animals) that way, as if each was precious to me, as if there was no such thing as a stranger, no such thing as a one-off, meaningless encounter, my interactions with them are much richer, stranger, fuller, more rewarding.

So that's why I regard myself as religious, why Buddhism is not just a philosophy to me. Although to say "just a philosophy" actually is to participate in the de-spiritualization of philosophy that's been underway since the Renaissance. To Socrates, philosophy wasn't just thinking up opinions and arguing about them. It was a way of living. It was supposed to change you, to work moral and spiritual changes in you. It was a way of understanding and participating in a larger world.

If I were a scientific materialist of the most common sort, I would still experience these things -- relationships with the dead, with presences, with statues and groves, with strangers who are not strangers -- but I would feel morally obliged to ignore them, to resolutely set them aside and treat them as inadmissable, as system malfunctions, as noise. Since they include the greater part of my experiential life, the richest and most interesting of my experiences, and since they form the basis of my most intense and satisfying relationships, adopting scientific materialism as a creed seems to me -- since I see no compelling reasons to believe in it -- like willful self-impoverishment.

An Essay on Human Understanding: Chapters 1 through 4


Chapter 1

Among the imperfections of my life are
These two, equal and opposite. One: the longing for one
Stillness, to do the same thing with the same attention
Every day until rightness buds along every twig of my fingers
And I sway in the soft wind of gray mornings;
And two: the yearning of quick animal desire, biting
Your shoulder, pulling your hips to mine,
spattering the world with what smells like me,
And you, and me, and you, and nothing else forever.


Chapter 2

Catch the quick impulse up, the rapid swallow, the eye blink.
What am I not saying? What am I saying that isn't, quite, true?
Turn and turn again, like Chaucer's fish, wallowing in sauce:
There are the things you don't say because you are holding back
And the things you don't say because you don't know them yet
And the things you don't say because they can't be said.


Chapter 3

I can live this way. I can. Day by day I inquire at the desk:
Am I overdrawn? Are there fines I have to pay?
And the affable clerk, inscrutably amused, waves me away.
"No, no. Enjoy yourself! We'll bill you when it's time." As if
That will make me less nervous. When will it be time?


Chapter 4

But your hands, and mine, smell of almonds, almost of coffee:
They twine in each other, fingers tangled, questing blindly,
Slippery with oil. The brightness of your eyes
Burns a pathway through the air, and I follow you,
Like the servant of Good King Wenceslaus.
None of my questions have been answered.
(See Chapter 1.) But I don't think we are here
To answer questions. We are here to work and to love.

In January I wrote a poem for Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, in which I said,

There are no words to help the women who see
the mute sacrifice of a bloody napkin. No one offers
a ram instead. No one explains. No one promises
a glorious kingdom. You can try again. That's all.

It's not as true now.

Tatters

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress

So, Yeats. I listen to the click of the raindrops, like a dog's toenails on a polished floor, coming in and out of focus. 5:00 a.m. Dark, still, even with the officious pulling of the clocks' noses they do this time of year.

Somewhere up above the cloud and rain the stars are out. They write me postcards: Having a great time in heaven. Wish you were here.

Walking Emily

Camus and Sartre are the names of his saints: their torments were in his behalf, and his are in theirs. The only thing he believes in, he said, is the blackness. It's the only thing he's afraid of.

She said that the spark, the thing that made him uniquely himself, would go on. He didn't answer that. We sat in the dark and watched the lights wink on the far shore of the Columbia.

I left her side to sit in front of his chair and rub his feet, feeling an immense and helpless pity. He feared annihilation so much, and he believed in it so desperately.

Later, when I came out from washing up, he had gone to walk Emily. Somewhere out in the wide empty night, a big, shambly, loving dog, walking with her suffering master.

Little enough that words can do even in the right season. I could have said that my nihilism was more extreme than his: he thought the thing that made him uniquely himself would be blown out like a candle, but I thought it was never there at all.

We're not the candles, we're the wind, I might have said. Nothing ever blows out the wind. But Emily would probably say it better.

Spine

My dear friend Beth, who blogs at Cassandra Pages, was giving me a terrific standing massage, as I leaned back against the refrigerator; opening up my ribs, releasing ages-old tension. She came to the bottom of my sternum and paused uncertainly.

"Oh, that's the xiphoid process," I told her. "That tab of bone at the bottom of the breastbone? It's kind of fragile, and I must have broken mine at some point without knowing it. So it points off to the right instead of straight down." I think that when I was fatter, the constant pressure of my belly against it weakened it, and it just snapped at some point, to get out of the way.

Beth probed it delicately, and I became aware that there were two tabs of bone, one much longer than the other. It was actually a wishbone. I'd made chicken carcass soup the day before, and I recognized the structure at once. It's for stiffening the wings against each other in flight, specific to birds: how odd that I should have such an atavistic bone formation in my body, and never have noticed it!

She pulled gently, and the whole thing came loose. With a rush, even more came loose, and I felt a great weight drop down through the central channel of my body. "God, thank you so much!" I said. "That's wonderful!"

I'm a little confused about what happened next. Beth was gone, and I was holding my spine. It looked very like a larger version of the chicken necks in my soup, dark red, with it's double-curve, little bits of cartilege and muscle dangling from it, about three feet long and surprisingly light. I'd always been under the impression that the spine was a necessary part of the body. One more story that had been palmed off on me. I was fine, I was walking around fine, feeling light and lithe. Who needs a spine?

But then I worried a bit. Maybe it really was necessary? Perhaps I should get it put back in before it dried out. So I went to the emergency room of the hospital down the street, still holding my spine. "Could you put this back in?" I said to the nurse.

"I'm busy," she snapped. You'll get your turn. Sit down and wait."

I waited but I got impatient. I went up and spoke to her again, but she wouldn't answer me. Finally, exasperated, I reached out and snapped a finger against her forehead.

"That wasn't very nice," she said.

"It's not very nice not to have a spine!" I retorted. The thing was drying out: I was really worried now about whether they'd be able to get it back in.

There was a thud and a jingling crash, a whine of machinery. What on earth were they doing back there? But I recognized the sound. It was the sound of the recycling truck. I opened my eyes. Light was coming through the skylight. Where had I put my spine? Why were there recyclers in the emergency room?

Oh.

The morning sky was quiet and white, crisscrossed with bare maple twigs.

I lay there a long time, looking at the sky.

Bummed

Well, I'm bummed. Got my bloodwork results back and, except for a big drop in my triglycerides -- which were already fine -- everything's right where it was three months ago (and this, you understand, is with statins.)

I do think cholesterol is a bit of a bugbear -- most people who get heart attacks, after all, have normal cholesterol -- but I was really expecting it to drop, since I've lost thirty pounds or so. I was hoping I'd just hit the sweet spot with my diet, but I think I now have to do the delicate work of replacing most of my saturated fat intake with vegetables and unrefined carbs (maybe even a little fruit, who knows? Live wild!)

Delicate because I have to do it without kicking off the insulin roller-coaster. It takes a lot more discipline and attention to eat some of things (bread, for instance) than to just do without them.

I read The South Beach Diet yesterday afternoon -- yes, all of it, except for the anecdotes and the recipes -- and I'm a little baffled by its popularity. It's just Atkins without saturated fat, and there's actually very little book there, without the anecdotes and recipes. I think he's basically right, because Atkins was basically right -- that overeating is caused by a disordered insulin metabolism, and you can fix it by a couple weeks of carbohydrate fasting, and then staying away from "white stuff."

One thing I'm not going to do is start eating artificial foods. I'm not going to put things such as non-fat cream (?!?!?!) or something called "I can't believe it's not butter" into my body. If I can't eat something real, fine, I'll eat something else real.

The other piece of getting my blood lipids where I want them is exercise, of course. For various reasons I've been getting very little of it.

Hey ho. Discouraging. But anyway, I've lost about half the weight I wanted to lose, and I've learned to cook fresh food several times a week. That's a lot of the groundwork done.

The Filberts

Three men squat gnarly and naked in rain,
wicked old lovers of dirt. Their straggly heads wag
as they slurp soil milkshakes through rootstraws:
dig deeper - suck harder - glossy and wet -
while dingles of filberts swell in their beards.

Under the Swarshum

Where the collymoffle dinges,
and the mawking cranes dare;
where the licking lash swinges,
and the moths refuse to care --

there along the poddleway
I caught the scent of your unendum,
they lifted up the throttle, way
past the third addendum.

Tickle me under the swarshum;
kiss me around the block;
toast me black as a marshum-
hello, and make me talk.

Meteoric

What does it feel like, I wonder, to be travelling so fast that the rush of wind burns you? The air must slam you, when you hit a little gradation from thinner to denser air, cross one of those cloud-edge boundaries: it must strike as heavily as train strikes a car marooned on the tracks. It hits you hard enough to tear you to pieces. And each piece bursts into flame from the mere friction of the air.

Watching the wisps of water falling, from Elowah, Wahclella, Multnomah. Wraiths of spray diverge from the fall, and drop, slower than the main plunge of water, fifty feet, a hundred, a hundred and fifty -- and vanish, like the meteors, before they hit the ground.

Stand at the bottom of one of the great falls. They generate their own wind, wet and cold even at high summer: an endless tumult of air and water, imperfectly mixed, blowing slantways from the splash pools.

We're all falling, even if the thunder of it is inaudible most of the time. We come to the falls because we can hear it and see it here, for a little while, remind ourselves briefly of a reality we can't bear to hold in our minds, but which we need to touch, every once in a while. It would be impossible to live in the constant awareness of falling. But it would be even more impossible to live without ever glimpsing it.

Currency

I felt my irritation lessen, replaced by pity. Like wax replaced by enamel.

So leave: leave under the gun-metal sky at dawn, walk down the gutterways, with the pulsing aureolae of the streetlights marking where the gravity slurs. Share a cigarette with the homeless guy in the park. Take the change out of my pocket and plant the pennies with him, so they'll grow into money trees.

Someone gave me two Martin Van Buren dollars as change, yesterday. They weren't gold colored exactly. They were a joyful color I'd never quite seen before: paler and brighter than gold. Ah, this, I thought -- now this, this was currency.

---

Blood Draw, Thursday, 8:45 AM

Look at the sky blue of the elastic band, leaping
in the flourescent light. Look at the pinkness
of your morning face. Look at the needle's end,
fucking my skin, looking for a warm arteriole
to open and accept it. Look at the scarlet
spilling into the tube!

(And later look at the one red dot
on the white gauze, a Japanese banner:
look at the purple bruising, like river silt,
upriver from the mouth.)

This blood, flowing from dark to light,
flowed from my mother to me, in the womb;
hers from her mother's, and hers from
the first blue-eyed freak, and hers
from the mother of us all in Kenya,
one stream of blood, only one,
in all those millennia, one river of blood,
yours and mine.

Don't stop that tube now, in the light.
Strip off your latex gloves. Pour my blood
over your face, let it stain your blouse,
rub it into your chest and hair, shake like a wet dog
and spatter drops over all the walls: my blood,
your blood, the blood of us all:
this one river of delight, this one
ache of living.

A Farewell to Pasta

For many years I took a middling twice-daily dose of bupropion (a.k.a. wellbutrin or zyban) to moderate depression and anxiety. This December I tailed off, and finally quit altogether.

It was a good drug for me, arrived at after a fair amount of experimentation and observation by a terrific nurse-practitioner, who understood that antidepressant prescription is a fiddly incremental process, requiring experimentation and observation. We ran through a number of drugs, in different combinations and dosages, to arrive at it.

I didn't ordinarily so much notice the drug's effect as notice its absence if I forgot to take it. If I forgot it in the morning, by noon I could feel my anxiety levels rising; I could feel depression starting to stalk me, looming behind me, weighing his club. But the short-term effect that was a dead give-away, which happened even before that, was that I became angry, and found myself obsessing on some trivial irritation. Crankiness is one of the few vices I don't have, so if I found myself composing vituperative letters to the editor, or imagining domestic showdowns and ultimatums over, say, putting away the hairbrush in the same place every day, I'd check my pillbox. Sure enough. Forgot them this morning. (This sort of monitoring of my own emotional state, by the way, and being able to back off from it and evaluate it, is something I attribute directly to meditation: it's something I learned on the cushion, and it's been immensely useful.)

I've always hated taking the meds. They're scary drugs, and nobody really knows what happens when you take them long-term. Over the years I'd experimented several times with dropping my bupropion dosages. (You should do this very carefully, by the way, with any antidepressant, especially the SSRI's: it's easy to precipitate a psychotic episode by stopping them abruptly.) After the initial uncharacteristic crankiness, I could sail along all right for a few days. But pretty soon anxiety and depression would be disabling me again. Back to the meds.

This time, though, it worked. No depression. No anxiety. No crankiness even. I've been on an even keel for months now, without meds. Until last week.

On thursday morning I went into the kitchen to find a considerable mess, dirty pots and pans, sink full of dishes, half-empty cat food cans, the stovetop obscured by the pancake griddle (dirty.) I was furious. That was it. "If you don't want to clean up after yourself, you can find someplace else to live," I told the perpetrators (in my head.) I told them all about their delusions of privilege, and how their assumption that I was their servant was actually mistaken, thank you very much, and how I'd supported their useless parasitic lives for long enough, and this was my house, and if they wanted to keep living there, etc., etc. At that point, the monitor gently intervened, with his habitual question: "uh, half a moment, Dale. Have you by any chance forgotten your meds?"

Well, no, I hadn't, because I wasn't taking them any more. But this was clearly, clearly brain chemistry run amok. What was going on?

And in a moment of illumination, I knew, I knew both why I was cranky that morning, and why I hadn't been needing the antidepressants for the past few months. I knew what was different. I had bowed gracefully to the anxiety of these launches by telling myself (as I did over Christmas time) that for these three days I was dealing with enough, and I didn't need to pressure myself about my eating as well. Forget the carb restriction. Eat whatever you want, Dale. We'll get back to it when we're done with the scary stuff.

So the night before I had eaten an enormous bowl of pasta, and feasted on corn chips after that. And a few chocolate chips to round it off. A huge hit of high-glycemic carbohydrates. I could feel it, now that my awareness was on it: that desperate hunger, the insulin backswing. It was no accident that what made me so angry was an obstacle on my way to getting food. I would need to clean to stove before making my eggs. Breakfast would be five minutes later than I thought. Absolutely intolerable.

I was so delighted by this discovery that my anger began to ebb. I cleaned the stove and made my eggs. And after eating them, I no longer wanted to order people out of my house. I was able to formulate the thought that perhaps asking them to clean up would be a more proportionate and reasonable response. I was able also to note that I had actually generated a good third of the mess myself, something that had been completely invisible to me before.

The weight-loss has been interesting. I dropped twenty-some pounds right away when I started this, but then I levelled off at a shade over 200 lbs. I'm not sure whether I'm losing any more weight or not. The variations since then have been within my measurement margin of error. I'm guessing not: that if I eat "white stuff" (white flour, sugar, corn syrup, white rice, potatoes, pasta) my weight will tend to hover at 235, and that if I don't it will hover around 200. I'd love to be lean, but I have no intention of inflicting a restricted-calorie diet (what Gary Taubes accurately designates "a semi-starvation diet") on myself. If my hypothalamus wants me to weigh 200 lbs., 200 lbs. it is. I'm a big stocky Norwegian with a lot of muscle: 200 lbs. doesn't look that bad on me.

So this is it, I think. A farewell to white stuff. Pasta, adieu!

Candle

I am the only person
who doesn't understand love.

Other people seem to know
where love comes from, what they want

and why; they know that partners
measure up to industry standards

or don't. They are orderly. One
at a time. But love trips me from behind

every time, totally unexpected,
wholly unknown. I've never even seen

his face. All I know
is that as I lose my balance,

falling forward, toppling into
an immense radiance,

unable to catch my breath,
blown out like a candle

by the wind of your eyes,
is that nothing else

has the slightest importance.

Launches and Chance-Met Cats

I know, I've been scarce. The unread blog posts are piling up in Google Reader: pretty soon I'll have to repudiate my blogging debts by taking the drastic measure of clicking the "mark all as read" button.

I've been busy. I'm signed up as a "preferred vendor" with the concierge services at three apartment/condo complexes. Which meant that I had to come up with a brochure in a hurry, and deal with obscure liability insurance issues, and also meant, last night, attending a "concierge services launch" -- standing for a couple hours in a lobby with pet groomers, maids, dog walkers, girl fridays, the zip car people, and my fellow massage therapist, so the quality could come by and have a look at us: we stood behind tables with our brochures and flyers spread out in front of us. There was wine and finger food.

Well, it's not the sort of thing I shine at. I smiled amiably at the residents, who were astonishingly young. As it got more party-like and the noise level increased I could distinguish absolutely nothing that anyone said, except the girl friday on my left, who had one of those clear, bell-like voices that I love. As the ineptness of the rest of us became evident she took on more and more of the burden of marketing us all. I have always deeply admired people who have social skills with strangers. It proceeds, it seems to me, from a fundamental trust in their goodness, which, as a Buddhist, I applaud, but which, as someone who grew up a shy, weird kid in American public schools, I've never managed to emulate. I just know that strangers are waiting to tape a "kick me" sign to my back, and snap their towels at me in the locker room.

So I have two more of these events to attend, tonight and tomorrow night. After that I should be around the cyberhood more.

A lovely, lovely massage last night, after the "launch," with one of my oldest clients: you learn so much more about someone's body every time you work with them, and you get so can recognize new issues and head them off before they settle in -- that tightness around the knee that would be trouble in a week or two if we didn't get it unwound; that little hesitation in turning the head that bids fair to become a snarl of lev scap trigger points if it's not worked hard. And you just find out what works and what doesn't. The same way you learn how your cat likes to be petted, that she loves smoothing back the whiskers, say, but doesn't care for the tummy rub. I treasure my steady clients. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I adore them. I spend a fair amount of time mulling over what I should do next time; where I should focus, and what sequencing will work best.

It's such a simple relationship, so uncluttered with words or status, a purely private compact, which has no social implications or expectations beyond the space of the session. One of my favorite interactions has always been that of an unplanned love-fest with a chance-met cat, when I'm out on a walk. Certain gregarious cats -- or is it just any cat, in a particular mood? -- will run out to greet you, especially on a chilly day, and you can squat on the sidewalk and have a glorious petting feast, purring and stroking in a perfect orgy of mutual appreciation. And then, just as abruptly, the cat's had enough: that's all, done for now! And walks off with its tail in the air. The relationship's over, but there's no recrimination, no disappointed hopes, no implicit contract broken. It might happen again on this street. Might not. No problem, either way.

Now, this is not the way I want my family- and love-life to be. Human love inevitably ramifies into the past and the future, expectations and history tangle and implicate, and I wouldn't want it any other way. But massages, and chance-met cats, are wonderfully restorative. I would find life without them very difficult.

Outside the Insurance Office

Outside the insurance office, the office where
the Japanese agent wears her bleached
blond hair like a teased lampshade,
and where they pipe
inexplicably
music onto the sidewalk (Is it
insurance music?) there is
concrete curbing, the leavings of some
landscape ambition never realized, and
being my father's son
I can't see such a thing without suffering
an Ovidian transformation.
My big toes harden into half-hoofs
The four little toes merge into
the other hoof-halves on each side.
My eyes grow bright and beady. My head cocks.
I am no longer nice: I am
all lechery and mockery. I give a little bleat,
and skip up onto the curbing,
four inches wide, plenty for my goat self:
I walk the tightrope across the office front.
Their gum-chewing pauses in there.
They want to see if I'll fall. I never do.
At the street I drop lightly to the pavement,
and assume the guise of a kindly, white-haired man
walking home from the bus stop. You never know.

A Time with a New Lover

There comes a time with a new lover
when you have to tie your shoes
in front of her, and she will see
how slow you are, how clumsy, how

the ends don't match up and the loops
have always slipped and it's so hard
to make the knot cinch where you think
it ought to cinch and you know, while

your face turns red, because you are
too fat, that just as in Mrs Murdoch's
first grade class, in the end, in the end,
you will have untie the mess you have made

and start all over again, and go even
slower because you are flustered, and
she realizes you are stout and old, and
it will always take this long to go for a walk.

Hood

All the details are from Shelby Foote's history. I suspect this is a very bad poem, but I liked some bits of it, and I missed you all so I wanted to post something. I hated these kids in school: handsome strong boys whose grandpas had moved to Oregon from Arkansas because there weren't any niggers here, who had something better to do than school. I see it differently now. These are the kids who get sent to Iraq and get limbs blown off, who have minimum wage jobs to look forward to, if any. We're happy enough to use them as cannon fodder, and they're happy enough to go, at first: they believe what they're told. And afterwards, well, nobody listens to them anyway, so it doesn't matter.

His beard was gleaming gold and curly.
He couldn't find a comfortable way
to set the stump of his leg on the saddle;
by the end of the day he slid down
gasping with pain, and his adjutant
handed him his crutch.

Indomitable, they called him, the sort of boy
who never cries uncle, no matter how his face
Is ground into the dirt. One arm useless,
one leg gone, the Confederate sky falling
in lazy gray flakes on the long mud road:
John Bell Hood of Texas
who wasn't much good at school.

Joe Johnston wouldn't fight, because
he knew he'd lose; he fell back brilliantly
mountain by mountain. Sherman couldn't catch him:
the blue troops swept up to the breastworks
and found them empty, again and again.
Joe had slipped away.

But surely he'd fight for Atlanta? Alarmed
telegraphs tried to tell. Johnston wouldn't say:
He never liked to tip his hand. In Richmond
the anxiety grew. Lincoln would be re-elected
if Atlanta fell. That would be the end.

Hood, well, Hood
might not be the sharpest tool in the shed
but everyone knew he'd fight. The telegram
Finally came. Joe relieved of command:
John Bell Hood of Texas
had the Army of Tennessee.

In Joe's tent, Hood begged him
to put the order aside. At least until
the battle for Atlanta was fought. My God,
he didn't even know, said Hood,
where all the divisions were. "I'm a soldier,"
Johnston said. "What a soldier does

is obey." But he softened before Hood's anxiety.
He promised to stay and help a day or two.
He lied. He didn't mean to. But that night he did
what Joe always did best: he slipped away,
and John Bell Hood of Texas
had the Army of Tennessee.

He fought, all right: it was what he knew how to do,
What he'd done in the Valley, when the world was young;
savage attacks that had driven the green Union boys
and sent them running for home. Stonewall had been
His stern but loving father then. He gave the orders
and Hood obeyed. Now Hood was on his own. And

Sherman's men were different stuff. Ungallant,
impossible to catch in the open, building earthworks
everywhere they paused, burrowing like chiggers
in the flesh of the South. They knew when to fight
and when to run. Sherman exulted in the favor
The Rebs did him when they put Hood in command.

A month later, a soldier came at night
to ask for furlough. What was left of the last
marching army of the South was in tatters there.
He was sick and wounded and wanted to go
where his people were starving, and
starve at least at home. He wrote about it afterwards,

how the tears ran into the golden beard
the whole time. Hood signed his furlough and sent
him home. The tears never stopped, dripping
like diamonds in the light
of the burning kerosene, and he never spoke:
John Bell Hood of Texas weeping in his tent.

Not as it Appears

The other day Martha came back into the house. "I'm going to need to take the Honda instead! The Ford has a low tire," she called to me. "Okay!" I called back. I was taking the bus to work anyway.

On my way out I looked at the Ford's tires. They looked fine to me. I walked all around. Sighted down to see if the curves looked different. Nothing. They were the same.

That night when I got home, I said, "so one of the Ford's tires is low? Which one?"

"The front, on the passenger side," she said, promptly.

Now, I've known Martha a long time. If she says something's so, it's so. I went back out, armed with my new knowledge of which tire was supposed to look lower. Went around the car looking at the tires.

Back inside. "You're sure about the tire being low? I believe you," I added hastily, "but I just can't see it."

"If you believe me, why are you asking again?" she laughed.

We found the tire gauge. I went out and measured the air pressure. The left front tire was fine, but the right front tire, sure enough, was six pounds low. I still couldn't see the difference.

I drove it to a gas station and filled the right front back up to 36 lbs. All the while I chewed over the fact that, although I had accepted the fact, and was acting on it, I still didn't really believe there was a visible difference to the tires. There must have been. But I was finding it impossible to believe that while I couldn't see it, Martha could. I use reading glasses now, sure, but Martha does too, and this wasn't a matter of fine print, it was a matter of proportions and shapes. Not, in other words, a matter of the eye: a matter of the brain's visual processing. I have learned to accept, though grudgingly, that other people can see and hear things I can't. I often have to fish out my reading glasses to read fine print that my kids read with ease; I've long accepted that other people can hear sounds in a certain range -- say, the base line of a song on a radio next door -- when I can't hear a thing. But this was different. This wasn't my eyes or my ears. This was my brain not being able to detect something.

It bothered me like having a beetle dropped down the neck of my shirt. The fact was simple enough; the evidence was overwhelming; but I kept groping for another answer. The Honda must have a warning light that I didn't know about. Martha must have unconsciously noticed the car handling differently yesterday. She must have checked the tires and be teasing me by pretending to have detected it by sight.

Preposterous, all of them. She could see it and I couldn't, that was all.

This, I thought, was the simplest and easiest case. A discrete physical fact that could be established by measurement. But it's just one of countless things that I can't see and other people can. And likewise there are countless things that I can see and other people can't see at all. When we get to complex things that are impossible to measure -- the good faith of a White House spokesman, say -- the perceptions are just as sharp and just as firmly believed. Many of them are dead wrong. Many of mine, many of yours. But making ourselves understand that intellectually is a huge effort. Making ourselves understand it viscerally is even harder. When we already distrust the people who see something different from what we see, hostility blossoms. We know they really see what we see. They're just pretending not to, out of malice or greed or sheer stubbornness. They must see what we see.

I don't think human beings will ever stop deliberately harming each other until they understand, viscerally, that other people don't see what we see. And I don't think that will ever happen. It's simply too difficult to achieve. Yogis spend lifetimes trying to reach this understanding: it's part of what a Buddhist means by "wisdom" or "understanding emptiness." Getting that the world is really not as it appears -- feeling the play of appearance wash over you as a phantasmagoria of self-generated perception. It's like feeling the wind blow through your body. Which of course the cosmic wind actually does: subatomic particles go whistling right through the space our bodies occupy without turning a hair. We are truly insubstantial.

There's no big practical value to learning to perceive it. There's no worldly reason to spend the hard frustrating work of meditation that is supposed to help in the process. I won't earn more money or impress the girls or escape death. There's no reason but this: it's the deepest bliss and the greatest relief I know. I've known it only for a few moments at a time, now and then, moments of grace. I don't even know for sure that meditation makes it happen more often. But rare as it is, and impossible as living there seems to be, having experienced it transforms everything. Just to have seen it once cracks open the carapace. A little light leaks in. It's really not as it appears. Thank God.

The Bits Cut Loose

The hug I gave to Ann last week, for instance: could I conceivably say that it is not part of me? And can I say it's dead, because it happened in the past? Of course it's not dead, while I remember it and while Ann remembers it. But more than that. It's not dead because it's colored everything we both have done in the week since. It spreads like a tint in water. Impossible to kill, impossible to isolate. And yet if anything is me, it is that warm and lovely hug, after a massage, in the Sunday dusk. I have been leaving bits of me behind all my life: and by now the bits that have lost all contact with my body and my present stream of consciousness are far, far bigger and more important than any bits that are still to come. Why should I mind about dying, about this particular lump of tissue becoming inert? It has never had much importance, even just in relation to the other bits of me cut loose and swimming in the universe, and each day I get closer to my death it has proportionally less. This part of me, though it carries the brand-name and logo -- Dale Favier in the Flesh! -- is not the most important part of me. It's not a very important part of me at all, actually.

Quiet gray dawn. Out my window I see the leafless, tangled, silvery twigs of the neighbor's dogwood tree, and its darker, mossy branches. Their lines arrange themselves in concentric circles for my eye. And behind, the the dark green of the doug firs boughs, wavering. Just barely, at the range of my hearing, birds peeping. Or am I imagining it? I can't tell.

Loving you this morning intensely, missing your bright eyes, missing your laughter. Last night the waxing moon rode in a surf of wispy clouds, running fast before the wind. I thought of the warmth of your chest, of how I love to listen to your heartbeat.

The light has grown while I write. Almost the plain light of day now. I love you. Take such good care today. And tonight, God willing, I will hold you, in one of your incarnations. And we will send more bits of ourselves out on the water.

Unearned Blessings

A recent comment on my last post asked if I thought my meditation practice helped me to be in the moment, and to fully experience such mundane pleasures as that of making breakfast. It was flattering and kindly meant, but red flags blossomed immediately. Don't go there, said some inner monitor.

The reaction was strong and immediate, and I've been mulling over its origins. There are a couple parts to it. One is that if it's true, it's only weakly true. Much more important are other "causes and conditions," as we Buddhists like to say: my family leaves me alone in the early mornings; my work schedule leaves me free to savor them; and my ship has glided into unexpectedly happy, calm water of late. All these have much more to do with being able to gaze wonderingly at the violet-green beads of coffee bubbles than my haphazard meditation practice.

Another comment, from Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi mourned being unable just now to access such "a state of appreciation and gratitude." Case in point. Anyone who thinks my spiritual practice more advanced than Rachel's needs their head examined, or at least needs to spend a few hours reading VR. Yet I get the blessing just now and she doesn't.

You can see where this tends to go. Immediately the thought of the blessing as something I have earned comes up, it starts burrowing grublike into the rich soil of egotism, waiting to hatch all kinds of suffering. The day will come soon enough when I'll be in a hurry and the damn coffee will take forever and its grounds will look like mud with an oil slick on top and remind me of construction sites and environmental disaster rather than gems in black sand and I'll hate being poor and wasting my time on this stuff, cooking like a drudge while other people are writing brilliant things. Shall I add to that the conviction that my unhappiness shows the poverty of my spiritual practice, and the knowledge that actually I'm a cheap charlatan who only talks the talk?

No, I think it's better to take blessings as wholly unearned and undeserved, free gifts of God (Buddha-Nature, Allah, Nature, whatever you like to call it.)

Still. On the other hand. What other motivation do we really have for practice? If we're too austere about it, we're at risk of falling into the sort of determinism that undoes our practice altogether. If it doesn't do anything for us, why do it? Why did we ever start, except from a conviction that our spiritual life was a shambles, and our suffering could somehow be mitigated, and we could grope our way towards those blessings that worldly amibitions and pleasures kept promising but signally failing to deliver?

I think it best to abandon thoughts of having earned blessings, when we're feeling blessed. (This fortunately is fairly easy to do: everything's easy to do when we're feeling blessed.) And when we're not feeling blessed, the most fruitful attitude is -- not to heroically try to manufacture a feeling of gratitude that we don't have, but to fall into the most abject and selfish attitude of petition. Please, God, help me now. Show me what to do. Help me. Traditions like mine have special deities that you can go to in this state, gods and goddesses of compassion such as Chenrezig or Green Tara, more or less equivalent to Mary in the Catholic tradition or the suffering human Jesus in some Protestant traditions. When you're miserable somehow the embodied gods that you can see, the ones who remind you of the people who have been kind to you, work better than the serene untroubled Buddhas and God-the-Fathers who appear as gems in the coffee filter.

Reporting Live from the Breakfast Table

It must have started in Olympia, when I was eighteen, in college. I would wake up at five or so (I am an extreme morning person) hungry and lonesome. Martha (an extreme non-morning person) wasn't going to wake until nine or ten. What to do? Well, get out and walk. And eventually, walk the couple miles downtown. And there in downtown Olympia was a cafe, called The Spar. What Easterners call a diner. And, having at that time plenty of money, I'd go in for breakfast. It turned out to be a grand place to study. Bright lights, no music, a skillful waitress always somewhere entertaining on the continuum from irrascible to cheerful. Bang, down came the cup of hot coffee. Bang, down came the eggs and hash browns. I spent hours there, which they didn't seem to mind, so long as I tipped well: there were plenty of tables, even as the morning drew on and people with more normal metabolisms showed up. It was marvelous. I wasn't alone, but I didn't have to interact. I'd spend an hour on my Spanish, then an hour reading books for class, then an hour writing. The coffee magically stayed there, hot, while I read and wrote. It was my favorite time of day. Still is.

It was a pleasant indulgence. Pleasant indulgences become habits, and habits become necessities: breakfast out has been a necessity for thirty years. Family members are perplexed, even alarmed, if I'm home in the morning. What's wrong?

It's a habit I can no longer afford, though. Not daily. So I'm working my way into new habits. I'm sitting here in my massage room at a card table. The coffee at my elbow is mysteriously defective. It gets cold and runs out. My water glass also, when it empties out, just sits there stubbornly. My breakfast was good, but it was a bother to make (no eggs! had to run out to the store.) And it refused to wash up after itself.

This is hardly the stuff of tragedy. But --

Excuse me. I've got to make myself another cup of coffee.

---

I wrote that some weeks ago. Making breakfast has become usual for me, now. One thing I had not at all anticipated was that I would come to love the process itself. Cracking open the lustrous brown-shelled eggs, and whisking their contents into a smooth mass A dollop of milk. Dropping bits of cheddar into the pan, splotches of warm orange in the warm yellow. The smell of coffee beans when I open the bag. Watching the grounds emerge, like glistening black sand, as the last of the coffee drains from the filter into the cup. Seeing a few iridescent bubbles form in the hollows: tiny violet-green beads gleam against the rich black, and then vanish again. The warmth of the stove touching me now and then, carelessly, like an old accustomed lover. And then washing everything up so that it's all clean and ready for tomorrow morning, the fry pan and the spatula drying on the drainboard, everything orderly and complete. Eating is only one of pleasures of breakfast, now.

Now the River

---

Oh, but listen: down the far side the scrunch
of soldiers' feet in scree. Here is all the quiet
that a heaving chest can manage. Here
for five minutes, the war is over.

---

Listen again:
here and there. Fingertips pulled over
soft warm flesh.

---

Soft, pulsed nursing
At that little hooded nub of flesh,
Rose red in the dusk: trembling, ticking over
like a tiny bird
in a thicket at sundown.

---

Swans rear up indignantly, bugling
and sparring; beyond them the river runs away;
the cars on the bridge open their eyes wide
and bring on the night they are trying to dispel.
The rust-red steel clenches both banks, darkening
to old, clotted blood.

---

Unstranded, unbuckled, unworded
Love-sucked, undone, unmade, unmanned.
A husk in the starlight, turned backwards at the ends;
My hair falls loosely, as the wind blows it
here and there.

---

Completing the Blessing

Sunim Soen Joon sent me a card from Korea year before last, congratulating me on passing my massage exams. Dangling from one corner of it by a narrow bit of yarn was a silver mylar cut-out of a bird in flight. The size of a nickel, maybe.

It's been my bookmark ever since. The card goes in the book, and the bird dangles outside. It picks up the light wherever it is: it looks, in fact, like a little flake of bright sky fallen to earth. Its tail has a kink in it now, and the yarn is badly frayed. It won't last forever. I'm thinking of it as Tibetans think of blessing cords and prayer flags: when it finally frays completely, and the bird is (as we say) lost, the blessing will be complete.

It's how I'm thinking about death, as well: as the completion of the blessing. "For a word to be spoken, there must be silence," says Ursula Le Guin's wizard. "Before, and after."

Groceries

Going to the grocery store on Sunday afternoon is not efficient. The store is full of the indecisive, the poor planners, the amateur shoppers. They run aground with their shopping carts, mouths agape, in the middle of the aisles, flummoxed by the choice between thin spaghetti and vermicelli. They back slowly away from shelves, murmuring to themselves, unaware that they're backing into you, and then even when they become aware, reacting groggily, their reflexes dimmed. It's clearly, for many people, a stressful and difficult thing. Most people have their shoulders hunched and their heads down.

I love grocery shopping. All of it. I love the food, the prodigality of an American supermarket, all that produce and meat, all the color and the bright lights and the cleanliness. I love the soaring ceilings. I love being able to look at people, all the people jumbled together. There are always at least a few people of surreal, intense beauty. And a few people who are looking about them, joyfully alive.

Food is miraculous to me these days. I'm cooking more than I ever have, and discovering a delight that many people learn young, but which I missed: that I can make all those things that I usually buy ready-made -- make them cheaper, and better, than restaurants and packaged food. The fact that I can make something as simple as chicken soup fills me with wonder. And the whole store is full of secret ingredients for such things.

The checker is a stout, goggle-eyed woman with faded blond hair, an eastern European, stolid and inexpressive. She dutifully asks me if I found everything I was looking for.

"I did," I say happily. She looks up at me, curious. And a light seems to blossom there. She's not smiling, exactly, but we've become aware of each other. In some other lifetime we knew each other. We were children together, once, and balanced on the railing over a brook, dropping leaves into the water. Even farther back, lives before, we were lovers. One of us buried the other, but it's so long ago we no longer remember which was which.

She hands me my receipt. I thank her. I want to take her hand and say, "I remember, too!" Except of course I don't, I don't really remember. I'm just making it up.

Still. Outside the store the sky goes up and up. The early winter twilight. Pale blue, and dark trees. All the light is being gathered into the air.

Lose Six Inches in a Week!

I lost six inches around the waist last week. What a terrific diet!

Well, strictly speaking it wasn't the diet. And the inches were virtual. After the two rapid inches I lost, I seem to have stalled out at waist measurement between 44" and 45". Which is fine, so far; I'm still on schedule. What's changed is my goal. Remembering that I used to wear levis with a 32" waist, long long ago, I was thinking that I was looking to lose 15" total from the 47" I started with. Which is a lot.

But last week I realized that my 45" waist is now fitting comfortably into my supposedly 38" Levis. Which means that the "waist size" of the jeans and the sizing of my waist are not the same thing at all. If that proportion (45/38) holds, I really have only 7 inches to go. Which makes more sense all round, so to speak. I couldn't really picture where all those fifteen inches were going to come from. So the official goal of my diet has become a waistline of 38", not 32". At any rate, when I get there I'll see what I see. Which should be considerably less than I see now.

How I Will End the War

I will catch a rocket in the air and fly with it
into the sky. I will be a tracer, a beautiful line;
Between my thighs the chemical witchery

will burn, burn for vengeance. But I will soar
up and still up. I will be the glow, the memory
of dates eaten in a violet twilight back when love

seemed a power to reckon with. In my hands
the fuse will glitter like a sparkler drawing patterns
against the summer dark. Remember?

I will not drop. I will go so high that the sky
will darken and the stars will lift their startled heads
and the beautiful blaze of anger will surge through

my fingers and my nipples and still higher and higher
while the fountain of sparks runs for the touchhole;
and when we explode into tatters

The quiet evening will be marked by lovely
falling stars that are little pieces of me, and children
will point at them, at the tiny dropping fires winking out.

Craving

Scholars sometimes talk -- seriously, so far as I can tell -- about a fabulous beast they call The General Reader. The non-scholarly reader who reads the books put out by the university presses. When you're writing your book about the adoption of Dantean tropes into 13th Century Lithuanian liturgical exegesis, your editor may tell you, you want to bear in mind The General Reader, who may not know all the works of Philenius the Younger, and may need to be reminded of the exact wording of the riparian statutes of Basil IX.

This harmless fantasy of a mass readership is one of the more endearing foibles of academics, whom I find an appealing lot, for the most part. But I bring it up as an introduction to our own variant of The General Reader, The Non-Blogging Blog Reader. I have one. (I had two, at one point, but I convinced one of them to start blogging, so now I have only one.) My prize possession. He signs himself "Bill." (No, no link. Haven't you been listening? He doesn't have a blog!)

Bill commented, Annihilation is my sharpest craving. Certainty that the next moment will be just like the last is something I can't abide. "Coffee, deliver me!"

And this led me to think again about craving, and to wonder whether all craving is not a craving for annihilation. I don't remember Freud's late work on thanatos and eros very well (if I ever read it: maybe I just heard the cool kids talking about it.) But in a certain frame of mind the only convincing alternative to endless continuity is death, and the hunger for change becomes the hunger for death. That death. A large death that is very like the Little Death. A gathering of all frustration and desire into one flowering: and then -- unimaginable, but deeply desired, peace.

As one gets older, one of the terms alters, and a new fear creeps into the equation. What if your frustration and desire is not great enough to flower? What if you are unable to die that death? What if the only death available is the long, slow ebb, draining away into triviality, irritability, and whining?

I used to go to strip bars and get drunk. I thought of it then as running away from death. The whole point of the dancers was that they were young and fearless, and had no part of age or death. With the help of a few beers I too could become fearless. And there we all were, having escaped from death together. I could buy them drinks and we could build towers of tavern matchbooks and tell each other stories, and I would live forever. They were lovely and they didn't give a damn and they didn't plan a thing, and I loved that about them.

That was a long time ago. I still think of them fondly. But to return to craving and death: I didn't actually want them, not to have them. I wanted to desire them, that's all. I wanted to stir desire up to its highest pitch -- and then walk away from it. Why?

After I quit drinking, I went a few times to the bars and had a club soda, but I found that without the alcohol the transaction became just weird and pointless. What on earth was I doing there? These people didn't particularly like me; I didn't particularly like them, we had nothing to talk about. I wandered away, and have not really been tempted in that direction since. The alcohol, which I had thought of as incidental to the whole experience, was in fact central to it.

I think what the alcohol did was disable my awareness that I was not, in fact, going to die that night. That I could not actually escape continuity. That this experience itself was a continuation, more of the same, just another in a series of unsuccessful debauches. (Any debauch that you live to the other side of is unsuccessful, really.) Without drinking I could not escape my own history.

Now, as a Buddhist, I have to wonder: was I closer to a true perception drunk or sober? Buddhism holds that continuity is a delusion. The world actually is new every moment. We are actually, whether we see it or not, radically free, now and always: we only imagine ourselves at 8:20.20 AM to be the same person we were at 8:20:19 AM.

I wonder if the real intention of Buddhist meditation is not to get really, truly, roaring drunk, and stay that way.

Buds

Today a horrible deadness came over me, in the afternoon. It was all sun glare and freezing weather, and I craved sugar and annihilation in a way I have not craved them for many weeks. I wrote:

Strange buds have grown in my throat, until they stick out my mouth; inarticulate fronds, nodding wisely, dumbly. I have only nonsense and failure. Sometimes the loneliness is so cold. There is nothing to do but nothing. Wait. Wait for another turn.

This evening Tori called from the hospital to say they were okay, but that she and her partner had had an accident on the freeway this afternoon. Getting on the freeway, she had veered to the shoulder, apparently, hit gravel and lost all traction: the car hit the divider on the right, spun across the three lanes, hit the divider on the left, and came to rest in the left lane. Collided with nothing else. They're fine now, though of course they'll be sore tomorrow.

I can't help connecting the distress I was in with the accident, which must have been happening at about that time. I don't believe in that sort of thing, particularly. But it certainly was an overwhelming fit of -- something.

Anyway. Grateful to have my daughter & her partner still in this world. But a little shaky.

Late-Breaking News

Well, what do you know. Memphis is in Tennessee, just as Chuck Berry claimed. In the southwest corner of it, on the Mississippi. And what's more -- late-breaking news! -- the state of Tennessee extends all the way to the Mississippi! and it sits square on top of the states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, like a lintel.

(How, how can I have looked at maps of the US over and over and not really seen this? It's seeming downright spooky to me, now.)

And Columbia is, in fact, the state capitol of South Carolina, plumb in the center of the state. It sounds like a lovely little city. Memphis, to tell the truth, sounds like something of a hell-hole. But my responses to the South are all tinged with my horror of hot, humid weather. So are my responses to the East Coast, for that matter. I moved to Connecticut in late August, some 25 years ago, and could not believe that human beings voluntarily lived in such a climate. It was clearly simply uninhabitable. I was appalled to find that it did not get cooler at night. I had never lived in place that didn't cool down at night, and it gave me the horrors. It was as if the laws of physics didn't work there. In the daytime you moved through a miasma of hot, thick, soupy air, full of weird brown stuff. And if you opened a window at 3:00 AM and took a deep breath, you took a deep breath of -- hot, thick, soupy air, full of weird brown stuff. God. I still shudder to think of it.

(One good thing about it is, that I vowed that upon my return to a civilized climate I would never complain about hot weather again; and since I moved back to western Oregon, twenty years ago, I never have. There is no such thing as hot weather here. Weather that once would have made me fretful and cranky now leaves me placid and smiling. I know that I have only to wait till 3:00 AM to draw a breath of cool, pleasant air. Life is good.)

This Louche Transaction

I have always chafed at the phrase "believe in God." It sets up such a dualism: me here, God there, and between us this louche transaction of belief.

Clumps and Voids

The contemporary poets I read are mostly bloggers, and mostly, like me, they're in rebellion against overly precious, obscure poetry. Our unwritten credo might be: if this would make boring impenetrable nonsense written out as prose, chopping it into lines will not make it good poetry, no matter how many clever effects you build into it and how much verbal riffing you do.

We don't have a lot of patience with poetry that yields its surface meaning reluctantly. Too often it does so because there isn't much meaning there in the first place, and it has to make what there is last.

I say all this, not to argue that our poetry is better than theirs ("our" poetry is always better than "theirs," and who cares?) but by way of urging you to read a poet who doesn't at first look like one of us. Her poems do yield their surface meaning with reluctance. But there's more and more and more in them. And if you read them aloud, which I urge you to do, their music will astonish you, and the words will keep resonating in your head for days Her use of rhyme and alliteration is magnificent, and her meter is the most skilled and disciplined of any poet I read (with the possible exception of Dick Jones'). Say these stanzas over to yourself a few times:

glass spice-vials
chromatophores
of curry/ cumin/ turmeric

or

Tintinnabulary
processions of jars
glink-glink reassurances

The poet is Julia Martin, of Clumps and Voids. She is also, not coincidentally, a brilliant aphorist; check out the sidebar, "herr keppler's notebook," for such asides as:

Professionalism is not saying "asshole" until you hang up.

or

Mammograms are S&M without a safe word.

The appearance of Clumps and Voids has been one of the delights for me of 2008.

Slant Water: Meditation at the Half Moon

Sitting shamatha, my eyes unfocused;
following my breath as it leaves my body,
and appears at once again unbidden
in my pale lungs. It leaves again,
returns.

The world leans east, and the hanging sun
is edged from the window: the shadows slide away,
like clothes on the deck of a heeling clipper ship;

say some China merchant, reckoning on a killing
in tea and opium, racing for a Middle Kingdom
he can't begin to imagine.

If you think you're making no progress,
said my teacher, you're probably going backwards.

The world leans harder. The ship
labors uphill now: the sea gets steeper
by the minute. We claw for a grip on the water.

At last we can go no further, splash down
gasping in a trough of thin black fluid,
the backwash of the tilted sea, but
calm in defeat, and rocking softly, awake
at last, we look up:

Stitched loosely to a faded blue silk sky
is the broken button of the moon.

The South, Wrapped in Darkness

My brother and sister and I as children used to play, with great enthusiasm, "the map game" with my father. He had a world map, and a box of file cards with the names of countries, cities, rivers, islands, mountain ranges, lakes and oceans -- color coded, so which knew when he drew a card whether we'd be looking for a mountain range (yellow) or a body of water (blue). We each had a pointer, made from slender sticks that had once held the balloons they used to give away at Pietro's Pizza. He would draw a card -- we'd all note its color -- and then he'd announce, in his careful teacher's diction: "Atlas Mountains," or "Caspian Sea," or "Czechoslovakia." The first of us three to point to the place on the map won an M & M. We each of us had specialties: I specialized in mountains, so my heart leapt each time I saw a yellow-bordered card come out of the box.

In high school and college I played the marvelous historical games created in those days by Avalon Hill and SPI, played on beautifully rendered maps with superimposed grids. I was as familiar with the military problems and opportunities presented by the Pripyat Marshes of the Soviet Union as I was with the local bus routes.

But there are fuzzy areas in my geography. the places that have changed significantly are murky to me. It's hard for me to believe in the countries created in eastern Europe by the collapse of the Soviet Union: learning their boundaries and capitals seems to be beyond me. And then there's my ignorance of what by many standards is the heartland of humanity. China and India are simply huge blocks of land, to me. I know almost nothing of their provinces and geography. It's ludicrous that I know the exact shape of Idaho, with its handful of people, and nothing about the most populous lands in the world.

Prejudice creeps in. An inability to take people seriously results in an inability to learn their geography, and vice versa. I know the outlines of the states of western Europe by heart: given time I could draw them freehand with fair accuracy. Africa? Not a chance. I don't believe in the African nations, at some deep level. I think of them as made-up. It's partly a legacy of colonialism. As nation-states most of them were, of course, in some ways, made up. But the places are real enough, and so are the people who live there. I decided recently to force myself to learn the places. There's a certain circularity to this sort of insidious prejudice. If you don't know exactly where the place is, when you read about it in the paper, you take it less seriously. And then you're less likely to learn exactly where it is, because you don't take it seriously. And so on. I need to make Africa, eastern Europe, and the interiors of India and China real.

But what got me thinking about geography was reading about the Civil War, and realizing how sketchy my geography of the American South is. The rest of the country I know pretty well, but not the South. It's not an accident. The South made me deeply uneasy, as a child. I knew we'd fought a war with the South to destroy slavery. That stood clear in the light. But what had come after that was in pitch darkness. There was something that made the South impossible to speak about. I recognize it now, of course. Guilt. There were two pieces of it: one is that we held the South against its will. We were, or at least had been, an imperial power there: which called in question everything that America was supposed to stand for. And the other piece was that we had failed the slaves. Set them free and abandoned them. As the civil rights movement grew, that gradually came into focus. Light began to leak in. Memphis and Selma erupted into the news. But -- not so far as to illuminate the map. I didn't go to find them in an atlas. They were different. Not places that I wanted to exist.

So my geographical knowledge of the South remains stubbornly bad. I've tolerated a vagueness about it that I would never have tolerated about the rest of the country. I do not, for example, know which state Memphis is in, though the refrain of an old song comes to mind ("something something something, in Memphis Tennessee") which suggests it's a lot further north than I thought. There's a city of Columbia (unless it's Columbus), which is the capital of some southern state -- I think -- but I don't know which. All I know is that Sherman either burned it or tried to prevent it burning, depending on who you ask.

Of course, there are many people whose geography of everywhere is vague. My ignorance of these places only signifies because I have loved maps and pored over them all my life. And I have read detailed histories of the Civil War, complete with maps, and I still can't hold the places in my mind's eye.

So it's time to get some file cards, and drill myself a bit. By this time next week, I solemnly swear, I will know whether Columbus is actually Columbia, and what it's the capital of. And I will know where Memphis is.

Sacrifice

It is only a clearer example of the strangeness
of a God who creates us, and a few decades later
destroys us. We who make it alive out of the womb
may muddy the issue with guilt: we shouldn't have eaten
so much red meat. We shouldn't have smoked cigarettes.
Sure. However, that small heart that formed,
but never began to beat: nobody will lay the blame
on anyone but God. That strange and willful God.

He told Abraham to sacrifice his son, and wrapped
it in words, made it part of the covenant. A one-time deal
in the linear world of the fated kingdoms.
There are no words to help the women who see
the mute sacrifice of a bloody napkin. No one offers
a ram instead. No one explains. No one promises
a glorious kingdom. You can try again. That's all.

We walk to the water, listening,
all the world's women:
we listen for the slantwise words
of books written by men
whose sacrificial altars are
outside their bodies, who think
the Bible is talking about somebody else.

Lincoln


After his first narrow defeat, running for a senate seat in Illinois, Lincoln was tentatively offered the position of Governor of the Oregon Territory. I wonder what would have happened, if he had taken it? We would have suited each other down to the ground, I think. We've never been much for pomp and ceremony. The shiftless get-rich-quick settlers were mostly siphoned off to the California goldrush, and good riddance: California's been saddled with that inheritance of greed and goofiness ever since. People here expected to work for a living. Lincoln's homely, shirtsleeve style would have played well here.

It's impossible to see Lincoln as a villain. Shelby Foote says, justly enough: "He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic -- which he was -- but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not." The Emancipation Proclamation, frankly, is a miserable document, "freeing" slaves in the Confederacy (which of course it had at that time no power to do) and leaving them in servitude in the border states (where it could actually have affected them.) Lincoln, as always, was taking the practical course. He was a politician in the mold of Bill Clinton, possibly a little too quick to compromise, a little too responsive to the shifting political breezes. Fortunately for us, he was also a deeply humane and humble man. He wanted to save the Union, and he did save it, by taking on unconstitutional powers and wielding a despotism America had never seen before. In some ways the American Caesar, remarked Dave Bonta, and that's true enough: he marks the turning from the Republic to the Empire. The fact that we took as little harm from it as we did, though, was due I think largely to Lincoln's humanity. He never wanted to be a despot, and every unprejudiced person could see that. To him the issue of the Civil War was never slavery, but whether democracy could really work. He saw clearly enough that if the country split apart every time a really difficult dispute arose, a few generations would see the ruin of the whole experiment.

I have always loved and admired Lincoln. I wrote a report on him in school, in the fourth grade, I think, for which I read a simple and short biography. It's a book I'd like to see again, in the light of what I know now. Whatever it may have done with the facts, it conveyed the man.

I wish he'd come here, and never meddled in national politics again. We wouldn't have shot him. We would have given him a modest, unvisited mossy tombstone down in Salem, Oregon (marked "died 1892," say) instead of an outsize marble chair in Washington, D.C. Maybe Mary Todd would have settled down a bit here -- she would have liked being the first lady of the Territory, I think -- and his home life would have been happier. I like to think of him, old and content, wearing his slippers, reading Shakespeare by the fire. He would have done right by us, and we would have done right by him.

Sky

Fog this morning. Last night was clear: as I walked to the bus stop the full moon ghosted between the building tops.

Wrung and worn with love. In the last three years I've exhausted as many lifetimes: I am older than the earth. And yet younger than I have ever been. My leaves, if you could see them, are tender and Spring green. I've stopped trying to understand it.

Death is always with me. I look around Tosi's and see all the customers as they'll be in their coffins, slack-faced and shrunken; I talk with people at work and see their skeletons gently working apart, their bones nestling into the soil. There's nothing gruesome or terrible about it. But it makes it difficult to take the troubles of the workday or the discontents of the hearth all that seriously.

The days flicker by. I find myself looking more and more at the sky. Every time I go outside I have to contemplate it, puzzle over it. It has nothing to tell me, nothing that will pay the mortgage or fix the roof. But every day it sets the question over again: why, it asks, am I so heartrendingly beautiful? Until you understand that you don't understand anything.

Why a Non-Liberal Votes Democrat

It's funny that I almost always end up voting a liberal ticket, because I don't have a liberal bone in my body. I'm neither secular nor humanist. I want a small government. I don't want to improve people. I don't want to educate them so they're more like me: I don't even like government-run schools. I don't want government health-care (although I'd prefer a single-payer system to what we have now.) All this ought to put me in with the loony far right. So why did I again vote for a bunch of Democrats?

Well, because there's four non-negotiable issues, for me, and the Democrats fairly consistently take my side on all four.

One is a foreign policy that recognizes that as a general rule war is a spectacular waste of money, a crude and clumsy instrument of diplomacy, environmentally disastrous even on a small scale, and likely, on a large scale, to end humankind.

Two is an understanding of the gravity of the environmental crises (plural intended). The market is not going to solve this: it requires massive regulation and intervention. This is one of my few big-government positions.

Three is a commitment to civil rights. I take my first amendment seriously.

Four is a commitment to helping the poor. Your run of the mill Americans give maybe one percent of their income to any sort of charity. That's not enough to make even a dent. So, willy nilly, even though I find the Democrats' approach distasteful, paternalistic, expensive, and overbearing -- I vote for them. Because they propose to make sure everyone gets housed and fed.

Now, there are a couple of alternatives open to me, that still take in my four non-negotiables. One is the Green Party, and the other is the various incarnations of American socialist parties. (Nader wanders somewhere in these fields, angry and impotent.) I would vote for them before I voted for any party that stood against any of my four issues, let alone, as the Republican Party ordinarily does, against all of them. But -- leaving aside the realities of who has a shot at winning elections -- in both of them I find everything I dislike about the Democrats, only more so. Distasteful, paternalistic, expensive, and overbearing applies to them in spades. Their conviction of moral superiority reeks to heaven. You can't picture them deciding that something is too expensive to burden taxpayers with, or considering that opposition to them could proceed from anything but greed and malice. They do have a keen understanding of how deeply the Republicans and Democrats are beholden to big money, but I somehow think that if they gained a foothold and actually got some of that big money themselves, their scruples would mysteriously vanish. I don't know how to reduce big money's lamentable influence on our politics, but I don't think voting Green or Socialist will do it.

The libertarians are sometimes (though not always) with me on civil rights: I like Ron Paul, but -- they're an environmental disaster. They really just don't get it.

So that's why, although I'm not a liberal, I vote liberal, election after election. Notice to competing parties: I'm ripe for the picking. Give me something else to vote for, and I'm your man. Until then, I'm going to grimace, and sigh, and color in the little (Dem) ovals on the ballot.

Men without Weakness



"No. Shoot them all. I do not wish them to be brave."

Stonewall Jackson, responding to a Confederate colonel's regret at having killed so many young men of a particularly gallant Union cavalry force.

The cold blue eyes look down history, finding us with contempt. He gave up drinking whiskey when he found that he liked the taste of it; he gave up reading the newspapers when they started to praise him. He did take pride in winning battles, but he knew it was a sin: the victories belonged to God, not to him. In winning a battle he found spiritual ecstasy: it was, maybe, the only token of God's love he would ever believe. He exemplifies the hard cold center of the Confederate dream, as far removed from chivalry, in his direction, as Sherman of the Union was in the other. Between the two of them what was sentimental and humane in America would be ground to nothing. There was to be nothing but a wasteland, from now on, between the cold fanaticism of Jackson and the materialist imperialism of Sherman. In that devastated countryside men like Twain and Whitman would try to scrape a desolate spiritual living. It was a hardscrabble life.

Jackson was notoriously intolerant of weakness, and shot deserters without compunction. After his brilliant victories in the Shenandoah Valley -- achieved partly by marching his men so hard that they covered a phenomenal amount of ground, and began to be referred to as "foot cavalry" -- he was brought down to join the defense of Richmond. Driving himself even harder than he drove his troops, he rode all the way down to consult with Lee and rode all the way back to join his army and march down with them. He got some ten hours' sleep in four days.

What happened thereafter, in the Battle of Seven Days, perplexes many students of the war, but I don't think it would perplex many students of sleep deprivation. What Jackson mostly did during the Seven Days was fall asleep. Lee barely pulled a victory out of the fire anyway, but Jackson's veteran army, probably the best troops in the Confederacy at that point, took almost no part in it.

He loved his wife with surprising, even astonishing, tenderness.

I am rereading Shelby Foote's three volume history of the Civil War. Last month I read a biography of Grant, and I'm also in the midst of Sherman's Memoirs. I'm confirmed in the opinion I once gave, that if I were to give a foreigner one book to explain America, it would be Foote's Civil War. The Civil War is what made us what we are: it's when America hardened and set, when the dream of a New World empire triumphed over the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of independent farmers and artisans minding their own business.

People who think that it was World War I that destroyed the old order tend to forget that on this continent we had already fought a total war, a war of trenches, railroads and machine guns, a war of economic devastation, a horrible four year maelstrom that undid American civil liberties and destroyed the economy of the American South. It destroyed slavery as well, and thank God. But once a nation has practiced mass conscription, systematically eliminated its dissident press, and disappeared hundreds of its citizens, it will never, ever, be the same again.


Reading William Tecumseh Sherman's Memoirs, things began to fall into place. Why the South fought the Civil War is clear enough. But why did the North fight? "The mystic idea of the Union," explained Shelby Foote, and I thought: what the hell? What does he mean? But reading Sherman, I get it. "Union" is code for "Empire." It's all about expansion, the romance of the Reich. Sherman is high-strung and lyrical, and what excites him most deeply is the expansion of America. The dream of conquest. He began his career hunting Indians in the swamps of Florida, to make room for settlers; and after the war he hunted Indians again as the head of the U.S. army, protecting the railroads west by waging his trademark ruinous total war. That's why he couldn't bear to see the South depart. Nor can the South claim any moral high ground, here: they wanted to devour Mexico and Cuba as well. They wanted an empire in the image of Virginia, that's all, not in the image Massachusetts. An empire of planters rather than of manufacturers.

The two impulses weave throughout American history, from its earliest days. Two responses to the New World. One is: here is a place where we can finally be let alone, and put our own house in order. And the other is: here is where we shall found the new Rome, and make an empire to overawe the world.

We only want to be let alone, said Jefferson Davis. But one of the reasons the North fought was because Northerners felt there would sooner or later be a showdown anyway: why not now? Someone was going to master the continent, and then the world -- was it going to be a slave-owning planter aristocracy or honest egalitarian hardworking ingenious yankees?

But we are still here, too. The people who genuinely only want to be let alone. We want no part of war and empire. We want no corporations, no billionaires, no get-rich-quick. We don't want an enormous standing army posted all over the world. We want to tend our own garden in peace. I would appeal to the rest of the world: we've been overshadowed and our voices drowned out by the hectoring, bullying imperialists and frantically greedy capitalists, but we are still here, and our American dream is not dead either. Don't count us out. Men without weakness have their weaknesses, nevertheless, and weak men have their strengths.

Dance

Look at this. You're not going to find anything more beautiful & true today.

. . . the fourth dull day of breathing greyly here amid the landscape drained of all warmth and colour, you start seeing sparks through your lowered eyelids . . .

Bringing us Home Safe

Since I've been writing about the difficult part of having parents lately, I thought I'd repost this, which I wrote a couple years ago. There's a lot that's wonderful too.

On the ride home Sunday evening, in the pitch dark, our skis back on the rack on top of the station wagon, I would sit in the back seat, longing for the warm air to make its slow way to the back seat. It would take me half an hour, sometimes, to undertake getting my ski boots off. First I had to lift the heavy left boot, still cold and wet, with snow-ice wedged between the laces, onto my right knee, which had only just gotten warm: always the cold water soaked the knee of my ski pants. Then I took my numb fingers and began working on the knots. There was all the time in the world. Another hour to home. Sometimes I'd take fifteen minutes, worrying at the knot for awhile, then holding my hands under my thighs to warm them back up for a while, then going back to it, and worrying some more. Eventually the laces would come untied, and I'd unwind them from their hooks (little slivers of snow-ice dropping onto the floor, onto the seat, onto me).

Finally I'd ease my foot out. Numb and stiff. Pull off the sock. Cradle my foot, as cold to the touch as the snow at first, in my hand. Such pleasure, to feel the warmth slowly come back, to be able to wriggle my toes. It hurt a little too. I'd stare out the window, watching the snowflakes appear in the headlights, gleam once, and streak over the windshield, back into the dark. Eventually I would lift the heavy right boot onto my left knee, and begin worrying that knot.

We never went into the lodge. We skied all day. That was what we were there for, after all. I had hot chocolate in a thermos. It wasn't very hot by the middle of the day, but it tasted wonderful. We kids discovered that we could climb down the snow-drifts and duck under the walls of the chairlift housing. There, in a secret, dark, hangar-like space, unheated but out of the wind, I would drink my cocoa. Except we always called it "hot chocolate" -- there was something vaguely self-indulgent about the world "cocoa." It was the kind of word people would use who would come up to go skiing and then hang about in the lodge with warm feet. Not for us.

(Not that my father cared about dignity. In town he held hands with us and skipped down the sidewalk. He would try to climb anything, appropriate or inappropriate -- bridges, fences, trees in someone's yard. He skipped stones across rivers with us; carried us piggy-back, as we called it; built sand-castles with us; taught us to yodel.)

All day is a long time to ski, when you're six years old. I was terribly proud, though. I skied with my legs shoulder-width apart, maybe, but the skis were parallel -- no snow-plowing for me. And by the time I was eight I took the chairlift clear up, and skied the most challenging slopes. People would remark on how little I was and how well I skied. (It never occurred to me that they were letting me hear them say that on purpose. And I would never look at them or show any sign that I had heard. But I would lift my chin and stand very straight.) And I was terribly proud of my father, in his huge baggy grey pants that fluttered madly as he swooped down the slopes. He skied beautifully. He always wore those absurd grey pants, and an ancient beat-up coat and silly bright-patterned hats with tassels, and his skis were unfashionably long and unfashionably wooden. (Short, fiberglass skis -- shorter than the people who wore them, for heaven's sake! were just becoming standard. I was crestfallen when he finally gave in and got a pair.) He was dowdy and ridiculous looking, maybe, standing still at the bottom of a slope. But no one would have thought that, watching him ski. Grace; confidence; sprezzatura, even.

Finally nightfall, and the long drive home. My Dad, no longer the dazzling skier, but now the cautious, slow-but-sure driver. Absolutely safe. He was the safest thing, the solidest, most reliable thing in the world. My confidence in him was boundless. Being his son might mean having achingly cold feet on Sunday nights, but it also meant that I knew I was safe. I didn't know, at the time, that I was lucky. I thought all fathers were basically safe. But my Dad was extra safe. He did mountain rescue and ski patrol. He did scuba-diving and spelunking. He could go anywhere, and take us anywhere, and bring us home safe. I spent my seventh birthday at the bottom of the grand canyon, having hiked all the way down. By the time I was eleven, I had written my name in the mazama registers at the peaks of half a dozen Oregon mountains, and rapelled down into the lava tube of little Belknap, and into Frog Cave, and into one cave we found once but could never locate again, on the far side of the mountains -- just an inconspicuous hole in the flat ponderosa chaparral, but it dropped into a big cavern, with tunnels snaking away in three directions. We explored them all. I gained a physical confidence that I see, with a pang, that my own city-bred kids have never acquired. I belonged in the wilderness. I belonged on cliffs, in the water, under the ground, on the ice. I might loathe and dread human beings, but nothing in the natural world scared me.

It sounds reckless, taking children into such places, but actually my father took his risks very carefully. He was endlessly patient. However long it took to get the belay just right, that was how long he took. He drilled us in what we had to know. How to fall down a snow slope. What to do if we got lost. How to make a fire. He never rushed anything. I remember vividly, still, watching him climb. He was deliberate, one-pointed. He tested every hold before he used it, and abandoned it at once if it didn't turn out as secure as he liked. There was always another route to try. There was always all the time in the world.

The contrast between the recklessness of the endeavor and its patient, deliberate, meticulous execution thrilled me, then. It still does, really. I've never left off admiring him. I still want to be him when I grow up.

The Year of White Roses

for Michelle

It is the year of white roses, whose common theme

is death of fathers. I can't be clever today. No sleep comes.
Oh, give me your hand. Walk away with me to someplace

cold and simple. I am heavy with kisses, pregnant with love,
wanting to give what I know only time gives,

wanting to take what can't be mine. Forgive me. It is still
love, as I know it, and the only thing I know.

Listen to the meltwater, old snow dripping from the eaves.
July is under January: in Joburg you can tell

because the layers are reversed, and the light
is hot on thin cotton. Today is perihelion,

our closest approach to the sun: but plainly
what matters is not how close we are but how

we are inclined. Death came to hold our hands awhile
but he is saying goodbye, and we must let him go.

Ice hesitates here in the shadows
of northern walls, but the snowmelt is already

on its way, by cloud, to Africa.

Another Country

III

Strange, to come to the drenched hills
webbed with fog; the low, single-storied
houses, hidden under the trees, snubbed
between laurels and rhododendrons.
I was born here, and spent my childhood
yearning for space. For heights and vistas.

The raincloud broods, huge and dovelike, over
the nest of the city. Nothing ever hatches here.
Creatures eat the yolk and die in the shell.

My mother bought a grave for me,
a rectangle of putting green grass.
Eighty-four inches of wet soil waiting for me,
and a place beside her always. I'm not going
to come. Take what you can use: a cornea, a liver,
a kidney or two, and give the rest to the fire.
I'm never coming back. I'm going to the sky.

Subdued

Dark wet morning: cold rain, gray sky, leafless trees. In a subdued mood. Thinking of those I used to know, and no longer do. Thinking of how, at the grave age of fifty, I still can't visit my parents without feeling that I'm in danger of suffocating in alien expectations, in danger of my perceptions being overridden by theirs, in danger of losing my self and my way. It's none of their doing -- they can't help having their own perceptions of the world and of me, no more or less accurate than anyone's perceptions of anything, and they are very kind. But I limp away from the holidays feeling obscurely violated and lonely, at once overexposed and unseen.

And so. Hardly in the resolution-making frame of mind. More inclined to take to the hills, and find some hole under the soft dry duff in which to hide and heal up.

I'm glad of the rain and the thick drapery of clouds. I don't feel I could meet the stars on equal terms, just now.

I was so grateful to have a massage scheduled when I got home, which I did by the glow of a gas fire and christmas tree lights. A new life inside a pregnant belly. (Much is expected, little one: but you'll find your way, as we all do. And soon you'll be expecting things yourself, and you'll fondly believe these expectations are your own.)

It anchors me as few other things can, laying hands on a full abdomen, and feeling the baby move. The dream time, the long dark warmth, the mother's heartbeat like the constant sound of surf on a beach. Distant sounds. Shifts and turns. Soft walls to push against.

Maybe that's the real life, and this interregnum of separate personhood is only a necessary adjunct, an elaborate, farfetched way for the fully human dyads to blossom. We wouldn't be the only living things to flower only once in a generation.

No doubt the maple helicopters think they are starting a brave new life when they fall from the tree, whirling and swooping in the wind, and respond with horror when the flight ends and they're buried and trodden underground. They must wonder what it all was for. No way to tell them.