Alteration

"Things alter."

"Things, what things are these?"

Try again then. "It alters."

"What does?"

No. Still no good. And you can't say : "Alteration," full stop. Because no one knows what the hell you're talking about. It's not a sentence. English demands a subject, some busy officious ego to go do all this altering. "Everything alters," then. Better. But it makes it sound as if what I want to talk about is the universality of impermanence, which is almost what I want to talk about, but not quite. Maybe something doesn't alter, who knows? Some Buddhist doctrines say that there are things that don't change: emptiness itself, and mind itself, for starters. How would I know? Why would I care?

Look. The sun glowed through the clouds in Old Girl's photo. It will never ever do that again, not that exact way. And what we hold is the photo, not the sun. It never does to forget that.

Oh, dear. I am getting old. And my hair is getting long. Cut one tiny thread and I could spin backwards to the age of thirteen, when I stopped cutting my hair. It was beautiful hair then, thick and blond and fine-threaded. A couple years later I had the sort of head of hair that women would cluck over and murmur "such a waste!" Meaning that gorgeous hair was wasted on a boy. I didn't think it was a waste. I was vain of it, and I liked the way it flew wild. When Monique first saw me, at sixteen, tearing down drywall, shirtless, it was my hair that made the conquest. Something wild and masculine and free. She thought she'd like that. Not so much, maybe, as it turned out: and the bits she would have liked best were the bits that turned out to be bogus. Too bad, so sad: everything alters. Remember?

Yellow-white as the sun. It darkened over time. In the photos from Yale it's dark, almost brown. There's my favorite photo -- I wonder what became of it? I'm crouched down in my coal-and-snowflake overcoat, conversing earnestly with one of Tori's two-year-old play dates, a little Chinese girl. We're in perfect accord about something. Ah, it's the photo, though, not me and the little Chinese girl. And now that even the photo's gone, what is it, would you say, that I have?

Not much. That's what I'd say. It won't do to try to keep that sort of thing. I've never been much for keepsake photos.

I'll tell you a secret: I stopped cutting my hair less because I was wild and free than because I was living on my own and was too timid to walk into a strange barbershop full of grown men. But now: even if my hair is mostly white and thin on top; even if when it gets long I look more like a skid road derelict than like the blond emanation of Jim Morrison -- the love I have is deeper than any I had then, than any I could possibly have had then.

I'm taking no photos of this sun. Couldn't if I wanted to.

(But a poem, now, a poem isn't a photo. A poem about the sun doesn't pretend to be the sun. This lanthorn doth present the moon. No, of course it dothn't.)

(And the point? Oh dear, oh dear, you've known me all this time, love, and you still expect a point? What a waste.)

Bad Measure

There's a lot of resistance to measurement. Legitimate resistance, because it's so often done badly, or in bad faith. The census is one example. It's stupid to go out and try to count all the noses, one by one. It's not the best way to get an accurate count: any scientist who counts populations of anything knows that.

Or take the testing of kids in public schools. I'm all for measuring how well schools are doing. It's something that's critically important to know. My objection is not to the measurement, but to the clumsy and intrusive measurement being done. There's simply no reason to test everyone repeatedly. It's like the census, only worse: it's not only inefficient, it's also interferes significantly with process we're trying to measure, and it demoralizes both teachers and students. Not only that, but it violates a cardinal rule of measurement: the people doing the measurement should not have a vested interest in how the measurements turn out. Having teachers assess their own efficacy is bad metrics.

This testing collects a huge amount of data, at a heavy cost, that we actually already have. We already know that our kids aren't learning the factual content we'd like them to learn, that they leave high school well behind European and Japanese kids. That's not in doubt. It's worth monitoring, because we hope it will change, but for policy decisions we already know what we need to know: our education system isn't good enough.

And there are other things we want to know. How good are students at problem-solving? How much initiative and entrepreneurial spirit do they have? How good are they at working in teams? How kind and responsible are they? These are things that to my mind are more important than the date of Gettysburg, or how not to dangle a participle, or the chief exports of Korea.

These things are all quite measurable, and we need to know them urgently. Our future depends on our schools getting these things right, or at least not getting them terribly wrong. If we improve the factual content scores by five percent, but do it by turning out kids that are half as kind and responsible, we have not made progress. We've gone backwards. I'm worried by the fact that a high school graduate in Singapore is more likely to know the year of Gettysburg than a high school graduate in America. But I'm far more worried about the fact that so many American kids feel that cheating on tests is okay. If you need to know the date of Gettysburg, you can look it up. But if you need a moral compass, where will you find that? And how will you even know you need it?

My point, again, is that measurement is a good thing. It ought to be in the fundamental tool-kit of every adult. But not dim-witted, test-every-kid, count-every-nose measurement. Thoughtful measurement, measurement that's designed to find out the things you really need to know.

Good Measure

I had a professional interest in metrics, when I worked in software, and I maintain a vivid amateur interest in the subject. I measure lots of things: my exercise, my food intake, my moods. How long it takes to get places. How long it takes to do chores. The rate at which I'm learning Chinese characters, and the rate at which I'm forgetting them.

I like measuring things because it brings to light misunderstandings. Human beings excel at detecting pattern and form. We are not so good at quantity and scale, and the mistakes we make there can cause a lot of difficulty.

Martha and I once made a list of all the projects we wanted to do around the house. We then estimated, independently, how many hours each project would take. The results were illuminating. My estimates were usually three or four times greater than hers. As we talked through our estimates, we learned a great deal about how we think of work and time.

I would count in things such as, "we probably won't be able to find the right stuff at the hardware store. We'll have to come back and plan it over, and go to the store again when we know what's there. So that's another two hours." Or, "something will get screwed up at this point, and we'll have to do some of it over, so I added another day for that."

"What will get screwed up?" Martha would ask.

"I don't know. Doesn't something always get screwed up?" I'd say.

Then we tracked, for a while, how long these things actually took. The time usually fell in between our estimates. Martha generously conceded that they were usually closer to mine than to hers. But when mine were off, they were sometimes wildly off. I would allocate days to a half hour job.

It was good to get a better sense of how long things would take. But what was even more valuable was getting some insight into how our expectations diverged. Why was Martha willing to take on things we didn't have time for? Why was I so miserly about time, so unwilling to commit a few minutes? Well, because we had different projects in our minds' eyes.

And we had different senses of what "counted." I would double-count store trips; Martha would fold them together. "We'll be going to the store anyway. We can get that on the way."

True enough. But Martha allocated no time for mistakes, backtracks, do-overs. I habitually added half again for "the things that will go wrong."

"But what could go wrong?"

"Something always goes wrong," I'd say. But actually that's not true. Sometimes everything works. I have a really unreasonable dread of overcommitting my time: I'm nervous if time-commitments don't have an hour or two of insulation between them. Sometimes it's not very important to be exactly on time. Allocating an extra half hour in order to be completely sure of not being five minutes late to a casual lunch date is not, actually, good planning.

Anyway, my point is that this is the sort of thing you learn by actually measuring things. The process of measuring is, itself, a process of discovery, a way of investigating your assumptions and expectations.

Voices

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off an annointed king.

She said it proudly, fiercely, her head thrown back, daunting for a moment the rebellious courtiers, who believed it as much as she did. And as much as we did, the tiny audience in a tiny theater. Disaster was coming to England if they pulled down this sacred king.

It was a performance (still running, see it, if you get a chance!) of Richard II with an all-female cast. Paige Jones was playing Richard, playing him with verve and passion. It took all of thirty seconds to forget the fact that the players were the wrong gender, and to sink straight into the play. They weren't playing in drag: they weren't pretending to be male actors doing Shakespeare. They were female actors doing Shakespeare, and doing an incredible job of it.

They made nothing of their femaleness, but it informed everything about the play. Strange sidelights and illuminations. Of course, Aumerle was in love with Richard II: why had I never understood that before? And Bolingbroke's relentless masculine insensibility, which everyone was so anxious to put on the throne, was going to drag England to ruin as surely as Richard's capriciousness.


Richard II (Paige Jones) consoling Aumerle (Brooke Fletcher). Photo by Rio of the NWCTC.

It made me think of all the great poetry that has been written by men in the voices of women. All the female parts in Shakespeare, of course, were written by a man to be spoken by a male actor -- women weren't permitted on the boards in those days. Which made the reversal of the genders in the NWCTC performance exact. Chaucer wrote much of his best poetry in women's voices: The Wife of Bath, of course, but also the Legend of Good Women, which is what he was famous for in his own time. When men wanted to explore pathos, they had to give the mask of conventional manhood the slip, and speak in a female voice. It's no accident that the great exception to that is Chaucer himself, who wrote the greatest narrative love poem in English, about Prince Troilus being abandoned by his lover Criseide. He found the voice for that in his early poetry, spoken by women.

We still turn to women's voices for our great popular songs of betrayal in love, of desertion and loneliness. Men still don't get to talk about that much in their own voices. A gruff allusion in a Johnny Cash growl is as much as we get.

So I resolved to write my next poems in a female voice. Not to think of any particular subject matter, or to try to make any particular point: just to walk into the role, as Paige Jones walks into Richard II, and to see what happens when I open my mouth.

10th Avenue

The new leaves are half grown, so that the lunch kiosks on 10th Avenue flicker under a dappling canopy. People stand, all slanted to each other: to stand in straight lines would be too formal. Or it would make them look too eager for their turn. Or it would obstruct their view. Whatever the reason, they arrange themselves off kilter to each other, and to the booths, and I negotiate through the loose crowd, noting that I'm aware of each person's field of view, and each person's claim to personal space, as I thread my way through. This is the sort of thing it's very difficult to program, a problem of genuine complexity: I don't think anyone can yet make a robot that could make its way gracefully through a crowd. It would either bump egregiously or simply halt, overwhelmed by the shifting choices and priorities. Yet this is the sort of problem-solving that we scorn, because any human being can do it: whereas something like medical diagnosis, which machines are actually better at than people, we raise to a mystical status. It's a ritual we allow only our most prestigious shamans to perform. No one would want to just plug their data into a mere machine and get their diagnosis, even though the machines do have a better track record, and it could be done for pennies per consultation.

Well. The clouds loom up in jumbled towers. This spring, this rising of sap and blood: it makes me feel a little old, old and tired. The gears still catch: I still know which spring this is, I still see the women shedding clothes with pleasure, I still hear the birdsong with wonder. But I can picture the time when the teeth will no longer mesh, and the wheel will spin free, and I won't know know which spring it is. Then it will be time to die. For now, spring strikes me as a subdued amazement. Another one has been granted to me. They come much more frequently than they used to, but they're all that much more precious: I don't know how many I have left, but I know I've seen more than half that I'll ever see.

For now, I will enjoy this extraordinary gift I have, of being able to thread my way through flocks of my kind without ruffling their feathers. Faces striking for beauty, or shrewdness, or stupidity, flash by me, each one landing a body blow. The wind stirs the leaves, and everything trembles. I can't begin to tell you how much I love you, and how grateful I am for this gift, for all the gifts. But when you want me, I'll be ready to go.

Opening the World

Jo and Christine have rolled out the website for Pindrop Press, with three titles for next year: collections of poetry by Michelle McGrane and Joyce Ellen Davis, and a chapbook by me.

I'm delighted and abashed to be in this company. If you haven't read McGrane or Davis, you should do so, and you'll immediately see why.

I'm acutely aware that I haven't paid my dues as a poet: I should have a bulging file folder of rejections before even thinking about a chapbook. All my life I've had this kind of extraordinary luck, and it feels a bit uncanny.

A puzzled friend asked me about the chapbook: "are these some of the Santiago poems?" These are in fact the Santiago poems. Last year I decided to collect together some of my poems and self-publish them: I was going to name the collection Santiago, after the poem that's now up on the Pindrop site. I sent the poems to several friends, who were wonderfully generous with their time in reading and commenting on it. Two of them, independently, suggested renaming the collection after a different poem, "Opening the World."

I liked that idea, and it made deep sense, because these are poems I wrote during the Years of Upheaval -- from 2004 to 2007, roughly -- when my meditation practice suddenly flowered, I found a new community of writers, I quit IBM to go to massage school, and I took to poetry. A world that had shrunk to a dark cell broke open.

Mole blinking in the sunlight, I wrote then, in the air, over Montana. It still feels that way.

The Beach

At sunset the shadow of the railing was perfectly horizontal. All too perfect. It left me laboring, trying to understand: and as the sun fell into the last bank of cloud, you told me about the Northern Lights you'd seen as a girl. "The whole sky," you said. "the whole sky was shifting and glowing and moving."

The bar across the bedroom wall faded, and returned, as the sun made one last bid.

"The dance of the spirits," The Cree called it. Roger Ascham wrote, long long ago, about watching the snow fall, swirling in patterns, and realizing that what he was seeing was not the snow, but simply the air: the snow made it visible. The air was swirling and making patterns, intricate and beautiful, all the time. We see it, once, and think: oh! Snow! How beautiful and rare!" But we're wrong. It's the air, and it's dancing all the time. So is the solar wind above us, rippling, twirling, draping its curtains. When conditions are just right we see the Northern Lights, and we think it a special event. No. It's nothing in particular. It's just a chance to see what's there all the time.

Those are the ones we know about. A little tilt, a little shift in the conditions, and we can see what we're ordinarily blind to. There must be more that we've never learned to see. Hundreds, thousands more.

The light faded from the room, high up above the sea, just as it had come. Perched as we are on this little whirling rock, the sun climbing up one side and down the other, climbing up red over the hill and falling down red into the sea, and all the beauty sequestered in that high room condensing to a single horizontal bar of shadow. All these things are as improbable as they can well be.

I am ill today. The pulse in my head knocks with little painful surges against the top of my skull, against my sinuses. My eyes are sore as if I had watched the sun all day. Now the evening is cool and dark. Most of me is still in the wind, rippling under the night sky. Vultures were everywhere, on the drive back, spinning slowly on the updrafts, sideslipping, their small red heads, penile and crooked, so oddly at variance with their grace.

"We're still alive!" we pointedly said, and mimed doing jumping jacks to convince them. But vultures have no sense of humor. They nodded slowly, wobbled on their vast wings, and spun away on other hills of air. Some other time, then, they might have said. If they remembered us that long.

Bitten Again



Yes, I've been bitten by the China bug again. Every few years an overwhelming desire to be able to read and write Chinese characters comes over me, and I learn a couple hundred Chinese words, and drill myself endlessly on a couple hundred characters. Then I realize that I'm never going to be proficient in Chinese in this life and give it up, and move on to scrape the rust off one of the languages that I actually do know well enough to read reasonably easily. But Chinese continues to tease and haunt. The characters are so wonderful. The poetry is so old, and so good. Or so I hear. You never really know, with translation, do you? But the dream of being able to read Tu Fu and Li Po in Chinese never really dies.

I love Chinese characters in spite of myself. There's a lot of mystical nonsense still batted around about Chinese, and the nature of the writing system is often badly misrepresented, even by people who ought to know better. People put about the idea that there's a character for every word, which is nonsense. Such a writing system would be beyond most people's capacity to learn in a lifetime. Learn 50,000 symbols, or even 10,000? Even people who have a bump for that sort of thing would find that a tall order. Chinese writing is actually a diffuse, inefficient, and redundant syllabary, with semantic or phonetic hints jumbled in at random. Characters represent syllables, not words. (Except, of course, that some syllables are words. In Chinese, which doesn't have a lot of syllables, most syllables are also words: but of course, most words are not -- and don't let anyone convince you that they are -- single-syllable.) It would have been much better for Chinese literacy if the language radicals had won out, in the 1950s, and an alphabet, or a logical syllabary (in which one syllable gets one and only one representation) had been adopted at the time of the revolution. But I'm selfishly glad they didn't. I love Chinese writing: it's baroque and illogical and inefficient and supremely un-modern.

I expect I'll spin out on it eventually, again, and be ignominiously driven from the field again. But I'm having a great time.

(No, I haven't abandoned the 18th Century and classical music. More on that anon.)

How We Rise

We rise like November creeks
In the hard fast rain;
We spill over banks -- muddy,
Impenitent, flowing over
Drowned grass, washing new ways,
Spillways, spurling down culverts,
Swirling down rushways, and still --
Rain, beating hard, beating fast.

Or we rise like single bubbles,
Loosened indistinct from a pebble-side;
Slow, stately dirigibles of air,
Closer to the surface, closer to bursting.

Or we rise like stars before dawn
At the summer solstice, announcing
The radiance of the sun; stars
Awash in the morning light,
Overtaken by the sun, still shining,
Always shining, vanishing
Into brightness.

Third Tape, or, Virtue Rewarded

Went in at six this morning to swap in a 3rd backup tape. I take a childish delight in being at work at odd times, and using the security fob -- which never fails to make me think of Get Smart -- to open the building doors and make the elevator respond. Up to the tenth floor. The strange early morning light makes the workspaces soft and tender. I avoid turning on lights, and go through the empty, twilight offices. In the window beyond Juli's desk Mt Hood hovers above the clouds, across the river; soon the sun will rise behind it.

Working by feel, I open the safe and find the third tape. In the server room -- a closet really -- which has no windows, I yield and turn on a light, joggle the mouse so as to wake up the monitor, pull out the old tape. Yep, the backup is still running, having filled up this tape since I swapped it in last night, at ten o'clock, stopping downtown after my last massage. The IT guy and I are perplexed about why the backups are suddenly so much bigger. We used to be able to fit a full backup on one tape. We both have guesses, but we're old enough in this game not to believe in them. Nontechnical people get to believe in their guesses; tech people learn not to. I swap in the third, and I hope last, tape. It takes a minute or two, and I sit perfectly still, breathing evenly, till the byte counter starts to increment again. Forty-five gig and counting. What the hell is taking all that space?

The elevators take me back down. You don't need a fob to make them go down. You also don't need a fob to get out: you just have to touch a metal plate from the inside. Not like Gringott's.

So out onto the rainwashed streets. Dawn in Portland. Asian women are hard at work readying their coffee shops for the day. It's all brown people downtown in the early morning: Asian shopkeepers, Latino cleaning staff. The white and black people are all still asleep. Easy to remember where I parked: across the street from the Greek Cusina's huge purple octopus. So. Virtue rewarded: now I get to drive up to Tosi's, have eggs and bacon, and write a rambly morning blog post.

Trees are beginning to leaf: pointillist clouds of buds hover at every street corner, their brilliant spring greens alternating with the pink, or white, thicker-clotted clouds of fruit blossom.

---

After several months of having a hold on Mark Doty's collection, Fire to Fire, at the library, I finally got it -- they were caught on the hop, I guess, by the book winning the National Book Award, and had a long line of people waiting for it: they bought five more copies, then, but it took forever to get them. The publishers caught on the hop, too, no doubt. It's nice to know that there are enough people waiting for a prize poetry collection in Portland to make the library scramble for five more copies of it.

Worth the wait. My favorite so far, in the section of new poems at the start, is a poem about a beauty parlor in his neighborhood, the House of Beauty, burning down:

If beauty is burning, what could you save?
The house of beauty is a house of flames.

Also not to be missed is one about the grackles' evening jam in Houston:

Now one's doing the Really Creaky Hinge,
making it last a long time;
now Drop the Tin Can, glissando,
then Limping Siren...

---

Also reading The Brain that Changes Itself, a fascinating and readable account of brain plasticity -- of the research that established that some blind people could learn to see, by way of cameras relaying patterns of electrical impulses to their tongues; and that some stroke victims, given proper stimulus, could recover sensation & motor control by colonizing other parts of the brain to replace the damaged areas. The brain is not, apparently, nearly so hardwired as was long thought.

That was some comfort to me as I was doing massage in a nursing home, last week, on a woman who had lost all function on her left side. She was learning to feel again, on that side: she could feel me rubbing her left foot, and knew which one it was. That was progress, big progress. Her husband of 63 years told me eagerly of how much progress she'd made. They were casually but deeply tender with each other.

"That hurts?" I said

"Oh, my lower back has always hurt," she said.

"She'd wake up and walk around hunched over like this for an hour or two," he said, standing up and demonstrating. And then added ruefully, "We thought that was bad, didn't we?"

On Never Having Written a Poem

What we have sought, what we have strained after, lean dogs on leashes;
Sky folding in on sky folding in on sky, and nothing to hold;

Long backwards, tilting, tumbling, shifting of the past: lights falling, sparks
Winking out as they touch the smooth skin of the river.

Wet grass, deep earth, pooling water. Words mulling in wells of thought: but
You should be able to dig your fingers into poetry and feel its bones.

Invitation

Death rides to the edge of the meadow
to look on. Checks his horse. All the apocalypses
obediently stop as well. For all their pyrotechnics,
he is still in command, here. He still calls the shots.

Ostentatiously he pulls out his watch and notes
the time. "One more!" he calls out. "If you hurry!"
He turns for a quiet jest with Famine.
Plague strains to hear. War jostles for a place.

It is only the fabrication, manufacture,
and export of love products; it is only what
your fingers can clutch in a three minute scramble
for the treats raining from a burst piñata.

It is only what we live for and cannot imagine
doing without. It is only a secret indulgence,
a commercial disaster, a moral failing,
a literary excess. What can we say more?

Yes, well, hold your horses. We're not done here yet.
Death himself says there is time. There are
wild roses and meadowlarks and a few
early mosquitos. Sit down with me and eat.

Jumonville

The North American wilderness, 1754

Tu n'est pas encore mort, mon père,
said the Half King. "Thou art not yet dead, my father."
And while the young and awkward tall Virginian,
in his first command, looked on, stupefied,
the Half King took his tomahawk, opened that living head,
and washed his hands in the Frenchman's brains.

They had surprised the French at dawn,
a couple dozen, not yet dressed, stumbling out
of their tents. It was over quickly. Before he quite
understood, his Indian allies began
to kill the wounded; too late, he formed his troop
around the remaining prisoners, to protect them.

He never did like Indians, after that. He went on
to have a street named after him in every town
three thousand miles west of there;
the Half King succeeded all too well
in bringing the English and French to blows, and drowned
his people in a war he thought they could surf.

Ensign Jumonville, aged thirty-five,
what of him? Nothing. Nothing of him.
His fame is that his skull served as a washbasin,
what more do you need than that? And
the solemn young Virginian became my father,
haunting two bits with his toothache ever since.

Well, it was long ago, and far away.
What is it to us, if an Indian repudiated
his French father, and took an English one?
The lesson is only this, that no father's writ runs
farther than his son's red arm; Jumonville
sleeps there as well as anywhere.

Gorgeously Beshrifted

Tosi's. Rode my bike here for the first time since it broke down last fall. It's not right yet: the rear brakes don't grip, despite all my adjustments, and in the lowest gears the chain starts to slip, though it doesn't come off. I suppose I'll either have to learn to fix it properly or pay someone to do so. Both are larger expenditures of time than I'm happy with. But things do take time. At least it's on the road again. And I can always go around the north ridge of Mt Tabor, rather than over it.

Still, some of the shine has gone off the bike. It wasn't actually the right bicycle for me, though I had no way of knowing that, really, when I bought it. What I want now is one of those big Dutch cruisers that you sit up straight on. My wrists are valuable to me now, and the slight airfoil advantage (to a slow rider) of being bent over is not worth the ergonomic disaster of making the wrists serve as secondary ankles. I don't want to set speed records: I just want to get places.

But it will be a while before I have that sort of discretionary income again. So I'll make do.

Feeling haunted by a lack of time. It's good to have my life so full of good opportunities that I don't have time to do them all: but Not Having Enough Time is not a mental state I want to allow myself to settle into. It becomes habitual, and it does horrible things to body and mind if it's entrenched. I have clients I'm convinced are being incrementally poisoned by it. I can even tell you where it accumulates in the body: in the upper, inner thighs and in the fleshy back of the neck.

I'm embarked on this food project, which takes considerable time. And March was a remarkably busy massage month for me. I've had a lot to do at the Foundation: I've been working some on the weekends there. So I've been feeling short on this time: the time when I'm beholden to nobody, the time I use to write poetry or dull quotidian blog entries such as this: time to back off, slow down, take stock. Small additional commitments, such as writing a monthly column (more about that anon), start to loom and oppress.

So the only way I know to stop Not Having Enough Time is to stop playing by its rules. To deliberately squander some time. To stop trying to do more, and deliberately do less. I'm not writing a poem right now. I'm not writing a column. I'm not writing something inspiring and spiritual. I'm wasting my time, and yours, quite intentionally. This is proof: we have time to kick back and chat at Tosi's. The rest of the world will get by somehow without us.

Such lovely advice I got in comments about the 18th Century, and about music! I listened to the sarabande Jean linked to three times. It's lovely, lonely, poignant. I realized midway through the second time that I've heard cello music all my life and assumed I was listening to a string quartet: I had no idea one instrument could make all those sounds. (More anon, as I follow more of the delicious links given me!)

I think Lucy was right that denigrating the 18th Century thing is an anglophone disorder. I remember being surprised, in taking a history of German literature, to find how rich the 18th Century was and how seriously it was taken. And I note that Lucas (welcome!) refers to a lot of French music and writing. I've come late to an appreciation of France and things French. It's not surprising, I suppose, that we English speakers should revel in our Elizabethans and give short shrift to a century in which German and French music and literature were in their glory.

So what is shrift, I wonder? I guess you could say my aim at the moment is to give ample shrift to all things. To be prodigal in shrift. I'm picturing shrift as a sort of fancy fabric: let's wear long flowing ornate robes of it, slashed and decorated, layered and laced. Let's live gorgeously beshrifted. We have all the time in the world.

A Hick from Springfield

Christine commented: Dale, do you ascribe to the idea that we avoid what we most need? I wonder what lesson from the 18th century you will apply toward your life. Curious, I am.

I started answering in the comments, but it got so long it was more like a post. I hadn't really made it explicit in my mind, but I guess I think that any culture, any time, ought to have something to enrich my understanding and capture my heart. The European 18th Century is several (if closely interrelated) sophisticated cultures, and a long period of time: the fact that it feels so barren to me suggests that there's a resistance in me that prevents me from responding fully, that there's some way that I'm closing my heart against them.

It may be, as some of you suggested, that it's time for me to really learn how to listen to old music: maybe that's what the 18th Century is waiting to give me. I enjoy Mozart and Bach, in a casual way, but I've never felt that I really get them. With all but a few favorite kinds of music (the Rock of my youth, traditional Celtic) -- and especially with classical music, I have the deep sense that I'm just a hick from Springfield, Oregon, too stupid and crude to ever really respond to it properly.

It's funny: I've seen this often enough my poetry classes. Students who are convinced that they just can't read it, due to some genetic or environmental flaw too deep to be mended. Some of them are frustrated enough to say so, and to ask how it's done -- as if there was some secret poetry-reading protocol that prep school kids are initiated into the third grade, that the rest of us have to guess at. The answer, of course, unwelcome as it is, is simply: you have to read it. You can't just glance at it. That's why I used to make my students memorize a lot of poetry: because it's really very difficult to memorize a poem without reading it, whether you want to or not. Whereas it's easy to skim a poem, get frustrated, and put the book away, under the impression that you've "done the reading," but that you're too stupid to understand it.

Probably the same rule obtains here. What I'm going to need to do is actually listen. Where, I wonder, should I start? It probably doesn't matter, really.

The 18th Century

There's a span of time, between the Elizabethans and the Romantics, which I loosely call the 18th Century, although it slops over on each side, especially the early side. It's a sort of no-man's land to me. None of my favorite literature hails from it, except possibly Jane Austen's novels. For 150 years the world goes opaque to me. Nothing, from the powdered wigs, to the sterile, correct verse, to the weirdly realistic yet sanitized painting, engages my heart. I don't understand these people. They're engaged in empire and the pursuit of national (not personal) glory. They worship power. They make a religious faith -- they have no other -- of their nationality. It's the beginning of the age of the professional military: the commanders of the 18th Century armies wrote no poems and courted no ladies. Their job was to kill people and appropriate territory: that's all they did, and all they wanted to do.

Now, I've long known that this is a caricature. I know that when I have this impulse to denigrate, it means there's something that I have to learn. The 18th Century has something that it's waiting to teach me: waiting until I'm mature enough to hear it.

My response to the 18th Century has of course something to do with growing up a disaffected American, ashamed of my country, during the Vietnam years. For an American, the 18th Century is first of all the American Revolution. It's the unsmiling George Washington: it's slaveholders and Indian-fighters and chauvinists making declarations about the Rights of Man. The Right appropriated all those powder-wigged, thin-lipped men, just as they appropriated the flag. They got history: we got the future. It wasn't, maybe, as good a deal as it seemed at the time.

So it's time for me to enter into the 18th Century: time for me to actually try to understand these people. I started nibbling at the edges of this when I began reading about Cook and other explorers. It's actually a fascinating time: it's when Europe really met the rest of the world for good and earnest. So I'm going to plunge in and actually do the 18th Century, at last. Wish me luck.

The New Biz: A Year and a Half In

I've had three appointments this week that came from a year ago. A gift certificate I gave in payment for services, which was given to someone else, last April. A person I knew in massage school who called for a massage. And a repeat client whose last appointment was a year ago, in March.

Massage is a chancy business, if you want to be your own boss: it's a little like opening a restaurant. Lots of people go out of business. Not, usually, because they're bad therapists. Most often it's simply -- as with restaurants -- cash flow. Everything takes longer than you expect it to. I'm just now getting results from marketing I did a year ago. Potential clients that I exchanged email with months ago, but never quite clinched an appointment with, suddenly resume the conversation, quite unaware that the hiatus was more than a couple days long. Being the sort of person who keeps things in spreadsheets and graphs them, I can see that my business growth has been quite good, year over year. I'm now getting about two thirds the number of appointments I'd like to have, even though recently I raised my prices by 20%. Next year I should be full. The economy doesn't seem to have cut into my business at all. Au contraire: one thing the country has in abundance, just now, is stress.

The rule of thumb is that it takes three or four years to build a good massage business. My experience is bearing that out. Most of it is, that you need to find the people you have a deep heart-connection with. Those are going to be your regulars. And it's a chemistry as mysterious as the chemistry of love. They're not necessarily people I'd choose as friends. They're not necessarily people I'm attracted to sexually. They're people whose body rhythms seem to synchronize with mine. I find myself breathing along with them: I know when to lean down on their ribs with the outbreath because it's my outbreath too. Their bodies are peculiarly legible, to me. I love it, of course, if people tell me I'm a gifted, marvelous therapist, but that's not what it is. My technical skills are getting better all the time -- I work hard at it -- but they're just middling, still. The gift isn't in me: it's in the connection. I could spoil it, by failing to listen with my hands, but I can't create it. I'm not the right therapist for everyone. That doesn't trouble me. I'm the right therapist for some people, which makes me deeply happy.

I worried, back when I was first contemplating this career change, that I might tire of it, that I just wanted something new. "Hospital patients wishing to change their beds," that sort of thing. Nope. I love it more than ever. It's becoming more satisfying, not less. I end each session -- usually resting my hands on the shoulders, or the forehead -- by saying "thank you." It's a formal part of some modalities, thanking the client at the end, but for me it's generally the most heartfelt "thank you" of the day. I'm so grateful to be let in, this way.

I've always been peculiarly attuned to touch. I want to touch everything. I see a painting in a museum and I have some difficulty not reaching to explore the stipples and curves with my fingers. I reach down to touch the water in sidewalk puddles. I have to touch base with my favorite trees by resting my fingertips against their bark, feeling the light swooping through them. I want to touch people the same way a baby wants to pop things in its mouth: because I want to know them.

For most of my life, I've been distressed by wanting to touch, and not being able to. Something that has always been wrong, in my life, is now wonderfully, radiantly right.

Yes but

I posted my last uneasily. It makes it sound like I spend all my spare time in visions of angelic hosts, or in warm conversation with notable ghosts, flitting from grove to grove worshiping elusive numinosities or bowing before golden Buddhas. Whereas mostly, really, I eat and read.

It's not that I want to unsay anything. But it was all done in crude primary colors and major chords. "I talk to dead people," I said. Well, sort of. But dead people don't shout. They whisper. You have to be listening, and it's very easy to mistake them. They're usually gone before you're quite aware that they were ever there; you're always listening after echoes, wondering how much of it you've made up. Maybe all of it. Or they come in dreams, mixed up with all the detritus of the day's recollections. It's not usually easy to tell. And they don't often come in the shapes you expect: they'll come as animals, as birds, as clouds.

When I did a lot of stargazing I picked up the knack of not looking directly at something very faint. Your peripheral vision is actually better, for perceiving black and white: the center of your retina has more of the color receptors and they crowd the black and white receptors out to the edges. So if you want to see a very faint nebula, you learn to look, not straight at it, but off to one side a little. It's difficult to learn to do at first: counterintuitive. Listening for ghosts and presences is like that. Attend to them directly and they disappear. But if you don't attend to them at all, they disappear too.

So when people in the rationalist camp tell me that they don't see ghosts or talk to dead people or sense presences (although you will usually find, if they're in a trusting mood, that they've had an unsettling experience or two that they can't quite explain) I'm not in the least surprised. Ordinary casual observers don't see a lot of nebulae either, when they glance at the night sky. You mostly see what you're looking for, and what you expect to see.

These experiences are very delicate. It's difficult -- it's nearly impossible -- not to start overwriting them as soon as you recall them or recount them. I'm sure you've had the experience of telling someone about a dream, and finding suddenly that you're making some of it up. Without any intention of deception: it's just that the storytelling part of the brain fills in the empty places, the same way the visual perception fills in the hole in your field of vision. (There's a blind spot, where the optic nerve exits the back of the eye, but we never see it, because our brains obligingly paper over the hole with their best guess about what ought to be there.) So there again, directly attending tends to obliterate the perception. There are certain visionaries -- Margery Kemp springs to mind -- that I don't trust at all. Oh, I'm sure they had visions: but what they recount hangs together too well, has too much immediate point, conduces to their self-satisfaction too much, to be real. The hallmark of a real vision is that it is unexpected, uncomfortable, incoherent, and hard to understand. The typical reports of Victorian seances, of loved ones showing up in expected form and saying how happy they are on the other side, are almost certainly thoroughgoing revisions (when they're not simply hoaxes.) I find most of the Biblical visions, on the other hand, to be wholly convincing. They're bizarre and disturbing. The people who have them didn't really want to have them, and they receive messages they didn't want to get.

One of the values of a religious tradition, if it's a good one, is that it teaches how to receive this sort of information, and gives you a healthy respect for it. The Hebrew prophets took their job seriously. They were supposed to report back. Their services as an editor weren't required. They knew a great deal both about how to attend and how not to attend. As a result (and a cause) they were valuable to their communities. Your typical cult leaders, on the other hand, are a plague and a nuisance. Not because they aren't genuine visionaries. I'm betting most of them are. But because they don't have the skills, the the humility, and the restraint afforded by a tradition. I'm as uneasy about religious hierarchy and authority as anybody, but the alternative makes me at least as uneasy. Visionaries aren't going to go away. And they're valuable. We need them. But they're almost all terrible administrators, and rotten community leaders. A healthy community should have a place for them, but that place shouldn't be a throne.

(I have a feeling this post veers around and doesn't get where it's trying to go. I might try to spruce it up tomorrow. I might not.)

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.