Too Big to Miss. Autumn. Why I Hate the Republican Party.

Tosi's. Across the street from me is a billboard of a jaunty young woman, hands on her hips, staring up at a giant cock, with Too big to miss! lettered in italics above her. It's an ad for the Oregon State Fair. What's the world coming to?

To be fair, I guess it could be a giant hen. All you can see is its legs.

---

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

Autumn, heavy with nostalgia. We don't usually have a Fall, here in western Oregon, the way you understand Fall in other parts of the country. Deciduous trees are a minority here. The fruit's mostly been picked. This is not so much a season of its own as a transition between the two real seasons we have, the dry season (July through September) and the wet season (October through June.) Any western Oregonian can feel it: the huge weather systems building out over the Pacific somewhere. Maybe next week, maybe next month: but soon, anyway, they'll come rolling up over the Coast Range, every week or two, each one bringing a couple days of dark cloud and pouring rain, easing off to a few days of showers and drizzle, and then maybe a bright day or two, possibly even sunshine, before the next one roars over us. It's like the breakers coming in: breakers of cold wet air crashing over the West Coast, one after another, all winter long. This is a quiet, in-between time, waiting for the first wave. We pretend it's not here. We don't want to jinx it. If we talk about weather, we talk about how the dark and the rain will be here soon.

It's the dark that most distresses outlanders. The rain, they've all heard of, and they come braced for it. But for weeks at a time the sky can be dark, dark gray: you go to sleep to the sound of rain and wake to the sound of rain. If you're going to read, even at noon, you turn on the lights. If you're used to the bright days of a continental winter, sun on white snow, it's enervating and demoralizing. I love it, myself: the gray layers of cloud pulled up over our heads like bedclothes. We're held and cradled by the sky. The long dreamtime. And then, you never know when a bright day will come. November, January, March: at any time the clouds can all roll back. The sun reappears, the weather is a soft, mild sixty degrees, and everyone walks out on the gleaming wet streets as if woken out of a deep sleep, staring at the new world.

---

Yah. Health care. I've been deeply disappointed by the whole asinine debate, and the bills shaping up in the house and the senate bid fair to do more harm than good. A weak gesture towards covering the uninsured, one real stride forward -- forcing the insurance companies not to discriminate against pre-existing conditions -- and then a dozen provisions that entrench the current stupidities of the system, digging us even deeper into absurdity. The somewhat more intelligent bill -- Wyden's, bless his heart -- is of course being ignored.

The debate and the bills under consideration have basically nothing to do with each other. It's surreal. To hear the arguments, you'd think universal coverage was under discussion, and some huge government health plan was being proposed. There's nothing of the sort even on the table. Instead, it's business as usual: "insurance" for normal health care -- which is ridiculous: "insurance" is for things like house fires, things you can reasonably hope won't happen, not for annual check-ups, dental work, setting your kids' broken limbs, and nursing care when you're old, which no one can reasonably hope to avoid. And this "insurance" is tied to employment, which may have been less stupid back when people stayed in jobs for more than a few years at a time, but now is deeply, deeply stupid, a huge burden on employers, and a nightmare for the unemployed. There's simply no reason for "insurance" to be our model for health care at all. People act as if there's some God-given reason why there should be third party in the health business between the consumers and the providers. The fact that everyone hates that third party, mostly passionately, should clue you in to the reality: there is no value added, none whatever, by the insurance industry. They're a completely parasitical growth. They need to be surgically excised, now, before they twist themselves even deeper into the healthy tissue.

So anyway. Here I am again, an unhappy but helpless Democrat. I hate what they're doing, but the alternative is even worse. As long as wealth is distributed this way, I have to vote Democratic, out of sheer commonplace humanity, so that people don't die for lack of food and insulin. The damned no-tax Republicans are forcing me to support a centralized bureaucracy that I hate every bit as much as they do. Thanks, guys.

Up Against the Wall

It's clear at least that my troubles with food will never be resolved until they have the highest priority in my life. And it's embarrassing, because it's such a trivial matter, of importance only to myself. To make it the ruling concern of my life is, indisputably, to become a trivial, self-absorbed person. At least for a while. I can hope it will be temporary, but I don't know that.

But I am so tired of it that I'm going to do it anyway. It keeps rising up anyway, dominating my consciousness. I feel horrible, physically and mentally, when I eat badly, and I eat badly a lot. If it were possible to solve the problem simply by never eating again, I would gladly simply shut down the digestive system and do without it. I loathe food, much of the time, and I loathe being under its dominion. Often enough, I hate everything about it. Even as I'm wolfing it.

One nice thing, about having come to this pass, in my fifties, is that I can accept that my relationship with food will never be different. I will never have a normal relationship with it. If I'm to eat in a reasonably healthy way, I'm going to have to have abnormal, draconian, arbitrary rules about it, and follow them like some pathetic fanatic. As if I thought it was important. Which it isn't. It's just food, for God's sake. It's not as if it was a moral issue, or something that involved the well-being of my friends and family. But if I can't walk away from it -- and it's clear now that I can't -- then I must try to solve it.

So some things to remember, in no particular order:

1) If I'm ever tired or hungry and don't have the food I should eat immediately to hand, I have already failed, whether I then eat badly or not. I should never, ever find myself in that situation. I shouldn't beat myself up about eating badly, if that happens. I should beat myself up about having let it happen. I should always know what my next meal is going to be, and how I'm going to obtain it.

2) Never: refined sugar / corn syrup / fructose, white flour, potatoes, white rice, corn, pasta, fruit juice, salt meats.

3) Always have on hand, ready to eat: fresh meat and vegetables and nuts. I can eat as much of these as I like. Also unsaturated or monosaturated oils: no problem.

4) Repeat after me: carbohydrates are not a basic food group. Carbohydrates are not a basic food group. Carbohydrates are not a basic food group. They are emergency rations, like freeze-dried hiking food. They're handy, and they keep forever, because they're not real food. On any given day I can have either a slice of whole-wheat bread, or a little cheese, or as much whole grain as sits comfortably in the palm of my hand, or a piece of fruit. (Okay, I know, I know, technically fruit is real food, and you'll find wild primates feasting on it all over the place. If I eat it, my blood sugar goes whoosh! and then plummets, wham! and soon I'm gnawing on chair legs and eating the couch cushions. Don't tell me about how healthy it is. I'm not listening to you. Can't hear you! La la la la la!)

5) One hour of prime time per day is allocated to food procurement and preparation, and all its collaterals, such as keeping the kitchen clean. This is more important than writing, than keeping my job, than maintaining my family relationships. It's even more important than studying Chinese.

6) No eating after 7:30 at night. Except, twice a week, a piece of good chocolate half the size of a business card. (Yes, I read about that study too. Go, science!)

Night

Drawing down, down into a narrow circle, my thoughts flickering around my own heart like a moth around a porch light. Sometimes it takes all I've got just to sit still and talk with myself. Not much energy for the rest of the world. Out there, unseen beyond the blank reflecting windows, the surf soars and pounds in the dark. All that cold, restless weight battering the rocks.

Still, you know: no way out but through. "I have set my life upon a cast, and I must stand the hazard of the die." You asked if I ever thought about turning back, and I said, honestly enough, no: I never have.

Gently, now. Lay me down to sleep and wait for dawn. In the quiet, I do think about you all. I feel your wings brush past me, or the wind of them. It helps.

Good night.

Found

But I found she said talking carefully
as though explaining something
almost beyond understanding
I found I could not live without love.

And this was the full explanation, all
I was going to get. I found I could not live --
and the question was: what were we doing,
but living? And yet

You see it is complicated
almost beyond finding, and if I care
fully say I cannot live
without love, the repetition makes

it more of an explanation and less
because I too, we all, none of us can
live without love. What are you saying?
I found I could not live without love,

it is a sentence that wanders
through hallways, looking for doors.
I found I could not live without love:
I found I could not live without love.

Vacation

I tether my bike at the street sign behind Tosi's, and wipe the wind-tears from my face. It occurs to me, as I'm walking away, that I have been locking my bike to it four or five times a week, all summer, and I have no idea what the sign says. I turn to look, but it's faced away from me. I still don't know what it says.

One more day in Portland, to get things finished at work and put the house in order. The kids, maybe, will go on ahead of us.

I'm looking forward to being at the beach, but I will be glad when this vacation is over. I have nearly, but not quite, made my peace with summer. It still is a deep interruption in the flow of life, an exasperating time of absences and makeshifts. All holidays irritate me. I've built a daily life that makes me happy and productive, and I don't like it to be impinged upon. I am a boring person, I'm sure, but I find my delight in a typical working Wednesday. I've put considerable effort into making my days a lovely mix of different kinds of work, people who delight me, changes of wonderful place. The morning writing or studying over breakfast and coffee, the afternoon coaxing the data elephants to dance at the Foundation (broken by a long reading lunch in the endlessly entertaining phantasmagoria of downtown Portland), the evening doing massage. Each transition marked by a bicycle ride, up hill and down hill through tree-lined streets rich with gardens. My life is perfect: why would I welcome interruptions?

After a white morning, blue fields are appearing in the sky behind the doug firs. The day will be hot, eventually. But not yet.

I cradle my death in both hands, lay myself out in my roomy coffin. Glad did I live and gladly die. I feel, as Stevenson did, that to hold your death at arms-length, and spend much time fending it off, is to hold your life at arms-length. It is, sure, an irritating interruption. But to see the sea again, the thrash of the waves on black basalt! It's good, after all, that someone with more sense than us forces us to take a vacation from time to time.

Hauntings

So one of the many ways to frame the question is: is it possible to write out of love and plenitude, rather than out of loneliness and wanting?

It is a strange thing to do, to set the bounds and say, joy lives that side, and seeing lives this side, and I am now in the space devoted to seeing.

But maybe much of my unhappiness in the last thirty years has come of not doing that. If you always cross over, joy becomes the enemy of seeing. And not long after that it becomes the enemy of joy.

But turn to the past, the past that has been so much with me recently. Isn't this the choice that I've always been haunted by? -- I can have love, or I can have myself, but I can't have both.

What does "have myself" mean? Not in the psychological sense, of trundling about an enormous ego with me and servicing it all the time, like some hapless Republican with a lemon Hummer. No, it just means resting with what I see as long as it takes to really see it. Not replacing what I see with what anyone else sees. Which means holding on to my solitude, at least, if not to my loneliness.

To change the metaphor, understanding needs a quiet protected space in which to grow. I've always known that. But only in the last few years have I had reason to think that maybe others know that too, and that maybe I don't need to lead a Jeckyll-and-Hyde existence. And if I don't need that, then maybe I can rid my life of its heavy insulating layer of compulsive repetition. Maybe. That's a queer thought, if taken seriously. The exposure of that thought exceeds the exposure of this little experiment. What if I no longer needed to hide?

I'm not sure I can even think much about that, yet.

---

So tomorrow we go to the beach, to Otter Crest. Gray water and soft light. We'll run backwards through time. We've spent a week there every summer since 1975: every summer leaves a tree ring, or a pond ripple, there. It's a haunted place now, haunted by our own happiness and unhappiness; our kids' happiness and unhappiness. There have been times when the haunting was too intense, and we had to leave. Most memorably, on our honeymoon. It was too hard to share that time of distress and grief with the ghost of our old happiness, and we fled inland, fled to Ashland.

There's no putting the pieces back together again. Every year we make something new, and something old vanishes. I wonder what it's like to be people who go to new places for vacation? I can't imagine. Maybe someday we'll go someplace new: but it will only be if we have to, I think.

Stevenson

It was Robert Louis Stevenson, who also wrote:

I am a kind of farthing dip
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;
A blue-behinded ape, I skip
Upon the trees of Paradise.

At mankind's feast, I take my place
In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace
While I defile the dinner plate . . .

(A "farthing dip," by the way, is a cheap grease candle, which smokes and sputters.)

I greatly admire Stevenson. He wrote a lot -- good, bad, and indifferent -- in his short life. For all his devotion to "boys' stories" he is astonishingly adult. That's not always a good thing, for someone's writing -- when Wordsworth grew up he could no longer write real poems -- but the reasonable voice of an adult is always there, which is probably why his stories have been so long-lived. Simple rollicking adventures, but there is a reassuring presence behind them, which says that everything, at some level, is under control. He's got Long John Silver under his eye, and he will never let the villain in him be too much admired or the hero in him be passed over unacknowledged. All that's taken care of: we can just follow the story.

And he wrote some wonderful stanzas, and even a few great poems. In my opinion, "Where Go the Boats" is one of the great poems in English. It's nostalgic and sentimental, sure. So is the Bible and Shakespeare. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating--
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

A Proposition of Geometry

Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical . . . Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate . . . A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

There! There is my manifesto, the most concise expression of my notion of art that I've ever met. Indulge me by guessing who wrote that passage. (No googling now!)

Hint: there are not many writers of English who would grasp that the opposite of "poignant" is "emasculate." And not many that could hammer prose that fine without breaking it.

The Lobster in August


As I ride up tree-lined 53rd, a single leaf falls from a tree. I glance up. Still green. Just trying it on.

---

I haven't dared to meditate for weeks. Not now, now while I'm negotiating a new contract with the world.

---

(Silly way of putting it. The world doesn't make contracts and doesn't honor them.)

---

Struggling to think my way through to a new way of being. Which is not very smart. You don't think your way to a new way of being. Act your way, maybe. Meditate your way. Suffer your way. But thinking doesn't do much. Still, it seems always to be a part of it. Maybe it's just a formality that needs to be gone through. A new way of being has to be presented to the cerebral cortex. Like being presented to a Hanoverian monarch: it's done with much pomp and ceremony, but it's the hasty whispered conversation with the prime minister that's going to actually get something done. So I have to think my way through, try to keep my sword from getting awkwardly stuck between my legs, remember not to turn my back on the king.

---

Nerval, leading his lobster on a blue ribbon through the Paris gardens. You want to be careful of lobsters, said Holmes's friend: they have spent too long under the sea. (Read Richard Holmes' Footsteps, if you ever get the chance. It's a book that propels you outwards, in an unguessable direction. Like one of those whirly things in the park, you make it spin faster and faster and faster and finally you can't hang on any more and go flying off -- in some direction: you can't tell in which, until you're tumbling on the grass.)

---

I wonder what the Chinese for "lobster" is. The French is "homard," which sounds to me as if it ought to mean "something that likes to try out being a man."

---

Bluegreen. The Chinese have a single word, qing, that covers the whole color field we divide so sharply into blue and green. Useful for going under the sea with the lobsters, where everything is some shade of blue or green.

---

Suppose you do crawl up out of the ocean, like the lobster on the tarot card: does that make you a hero or a monster? Out here in the thin cold air, the dizzying open space, where possibility seems so much wider, but where the currents only kiss you, never push you? "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea."

---

Eliot didn't write very much good poetry. Enough to fill a nice chapbook, maybe. Prufrock, some of The Waste Land, the Four Quartets. The rest, as Udge observed, is really not worth reading. Except maybe the cat poems.

---

But. "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea": he was thinking of Nerval, perhaps. "A pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Lobsters again. They're everywhere, if you start to look.

The Hills

And now I'm thinking about the hills, the hills I grew up with. In Eugene, the long line of the Coburg Hills, many of them bare, yellow in summer, green in winter, garnished with radio towers. And to the south, symmetrical Spencer's Butte, dark with doug firs, surrounded by his commitatus of lesser hills. In Springfield, The Hill, with its park and stone 'S' obelisk on top. My stepfather's house was the highest, the first one below that. It was a little hill, but it stood into the flow of Springfield like a rock in a watercourse.

My stepfather, Lou, was an engineer, and he had built the house with his own hands. He and his adopted sons. Poured the concrete for the swimming pool himself. He was a good man, according to his lights, so far as I know: his only fault was heavy drinking. But he grew up in a time that didn't disapprove of that much. Remember that? When drunk driving was a matter of comedy, and "holding your liquor" was considered a sort of moral achievement? No, many of you won't. That slips quietly into the stream of time, and runs away like the McKenzie.

I was desperately unhappy, much of that time. But I had books. Wonderful books. Science fiction, my first love. Books of myths and legends. And then fantasy, all those writers with initials instead of first names: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, E.R. Eddison. And later Mervyn Peake and Ursula Le Guin. And Joy Davidson, was that her name? It distressed me greatly when "fantasy" became a genre and flooded the market. It was mostly, of course, horrible stuff, hack stuff. There was a time -- or at least there was a time in my imagination -- when you picked up a book of "imaginative fiction" and you could bet it would be good, because it was such an unpopular and derided kind of fiction that you knew the writer would only have written it because he was driven to it, because he had other worlds in his head that would not leave him in peace. I lived in those books, wandering in those other worlds. And of course made up worlds of my own. I taped together sheets of typing paper and made enormous detailed maps, five by eight feet, maybe, covered with little inverted 'v's for mountains, chevrons for forests, inverted 'u's for hills. Always a Great River running through it all. But I knew, even then, that I was just copy-catting. I didn't really have the gift: it wasn't given me to be, as Tolkien put it, a sub-creator. That is really maybe what I've most minded, in my life: not having that gift. I wanted that more than even I wanted to be an astronaut: to make worlds as Tolkien or Le Guin did, worlds you could vanish into. Not my gift.

Here in Portland: Mt Tabor, of course. And across the river, the West Hills. And if you climb over to the other side of Mt Tabor, you can see Mt Hood, a real mountain. I remember how perplexed I was when I first encountered people who would refer to ordinary hills, ones with no snow on them in the summer, as mountains. Didn't they know? Hills are just hills. Mountains are sacred.

It was a long time before I realized that my love of other worlds was a religious impulse. My father had taught me to regard religion as superstition, and of course, if you're not inside one of the great traditions, or living by some lucky accident in the neighborhood of a saint, you only meet the stupid religious people, who make you feel smugly confident. The Mormon missionaries and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Hare Krishnas. Stupid, uneducated, credulous, superstitious: clearly using their religion to feed their egotism. Easy to dismiss.

There's a scene at the beginning of one of Eddison's books. The narrator goes to a little church, and sees there a man who impresses him greatly, intelligent and able-looking. He catches up to him after the service, and starts chattering to him: was he, too a sort of tourist, seeking out the quaint? What was he doing, at the church?

"Praying," says the man, shortly, and goes on his way, leaving the narrator, and the reader -- especially if he's a know-it-all science teacher's kid -- at a loss.

The shapes of hills on the horizon are embossed on the insides of my eyes. When I draw idly, on napkins, I always draw some variant of the Coburg Hills, rising abruptly out of the flat, rich farmland of the Willamette Valley. Sometimes there's a river in front. Sometimes there are mountains behind. But there are always hills, rising ground, leading the eye into the distance, ramifying and implicating as they fade.

The Faviers on the Hill

On reading a memoir about my sister.

You said you must have written the story badly, because everyone who read it felt sorry for you, and that wasn't the point.

But the thing is, you told the story brilliantly. It just doesn't mean exactly what you think it meant. The better you tell a story, the less it belongs to you. The story isn't actually the story of a messed-up kid in love with a wonderful girl. The story's actually about a wonderful kid in love with a messed-up girl. Or about two messed-up kids, both wonderful, both roughly handled by the world, who gave each other what they could.

It's kind of amazing that any of us got out of there alive, actually.

As for the Faviers? You're right, I spoke too harshly when I called us a family without hearts. But you'd be hard put to find a single instance of us actually inconveniencing ourselves on someone else's behalf, during the years you knew us. The family project was of self-actualization, and given our resources, it was a spectacular failure.

Maybe if the world had given us something worth doing we would have risen to it. Who knows? But I look back on those years with horror. Idle, uprooted, charming, heartless people, living on unearned money, determined to do anything in order to be admired. Anything, that is, but something actually admirable. It would have been difficult to find a higher concentration of wasted talent and ability anywhere, I think, than in our family when we lived on the Hill.

On the two hills, really. The Hill -- I never knew any other name for it, it was The Hill, just as in The Hobbit -- in Springfield, and then Hendricks Butte in Eugene. Always the house on the hill. The house with the swimming pool. The house with the sauna. Where the brilliant and unpredictable Faviers lived. Brilliant, well, except that we never actually produced anything.

Remember the Beatles song?

Baby you can drive my car
Yes I'm gonna be a star...

I got no car and it's breaking my heart
But I got a driver and that's a start.

That's what I think of. We were always generously offering people positions as chauffeurs for our non-existent cars. If you actually got tangled up with us, well, you found that we were too busy trying to impress somebody new to actually have much time for you. But we were happy to keep you on a string.

Money. The money in our family was sheer poison. It would have done us so much good, to have been thinking "I'll need to make some money to keep the family afloat" instead of "I'll need to find the path to stardom and universal admiration" when we were teenagers and young adults. But we didn't need to make money. Or anyway we didn't think we did. We were wrong, actually. We were going to run out before we knew it. But at the time money simply seemed to float in the windows and dump itself in our laps.

I know, you were in love with my sister. I don't want to sully that. Or to dispute that she had wonderful qualities. She held herself to her own idiosyncratic standards, as I held myself to mine: they just weren't standards that ordinarily did anyone else much good.

Or maybe they did. You say we saved your life, and maybe we did. For all our faults. We did have a family knack for seeing around corners and into hearts. Alex, I think, saw the pilgrim soul in you. I'm thinking now maybe that was the great accomplishment of her life, to see that and to reflect some of it back, so you could glimpse it too. Maybe there was a little more to those Faviers on the Hill than I've been used to believing.

Send Word

My skin scores easily, so
you can write notes with your fingernails.
(Messages are supposed to be more discreet than that,
writing more disguised.)

Buy milk scratched onto my chest, and
don't forget doc appt 11 wed on my thigh.

A great squashed sun spurts light across the sky.
Fish dart for cover. Shadows slide on pavement.
My shoulders hunch, anticipating.

Sky building on sky, blue hollows,
dirty snow and white snow
I stop on the sidewalk and can't start again
under that towering ark. Two of everything but me.
The high buildings rock gently
against its jumbled hull.

Slack water. Air trickles through the canyon
of Broadway, turns, runs weakly down Tenth,
stirring the syrupy leaves. I must go on, but above me
is that huge moored disaster of a vessel
hanging like the memory of manslaughter,
and at my feet small crawling things
I must not step on. If I lift a foot
I'll never be able to set it down again.

Send word I will not make it home with the milk.
Cancel the doctor. I've come as far as I can.

Heart

Was man Herz nennt, liegt weit tiefer als der vierte Westenknopf.

--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

What they call "heart" lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.

On the Street Today

In a rubble-strewn gutter, the detached bucket of a power shovel, big enough for me to crouch in, crusted with pale dirt. Like a severed hand. You feel someone should report it to the police.

---

Propped on a stout street girl's thighs, as she sits cross-legged, is a sheet of cardboard. Scrawled on it in black felt pen:

begging sucks
but compassion doesn't

Her head droops: I can't tell if she's asleep or awake.

---

By a light rail stop is a pack, a patched sleeping bag, and some other well-worn road gear. I'm puzzled to find the owner, for a moment, but then I spot him in front of the glossy brass nameplate of a store. He's iron haired, dirty, and cadaverous. He's using the reflection, anxiously examining a pimple on his cheek.

Nightmare

I woke slowly from the nightmare, not recognizing it as such at first, its breath heavy on me for a long time after. We had thrown off the covers in the evening heat, but at four in the morning I was chilled. The dread lingers.

A hot springs, hot water and cold water, acquaintances and strangers, on the verge of trust that never materialized. Nothing happened in this dream, you understand. Finally my clothes were off, and everyone else's were back on, and I was ridiculous. And I had always been ridiculous, have always been ridiculous, a laughingstock, trying to make communities where no communities could exist, reaching for intimacies with people who wanted no part of me, hoping that utopia would resolve the problem. Doubly ridiculous, because the problem is what makes utopia impossible in the first place. Like baboons, we move restlessly, and squabble endlessly, until the hierarchy is clear. All I want. All I want is everything. All I want is for everyone, without exception, to recognize that I am the most important person in the world.

A nightmare of wanting: all that happened was that the dream stubbornly refused to resolve into an erotic one. Everyone had hesitations, and the night was dwindling, and the heat was going out of the water, and what had looked like it was going to be acceptance vanished. And I, stranded in the flesh, a great naked whale on the beach, suffocating under my own weight. Hundred-pound lungs unable to fill. Hard sand grinding into my flesh.

Well. It's only a dream, only a dream. But I am truly defeated, stranded, defenseless. I am too huge and naked for this world. I don't belong here. I'm not wanted here.

But I linger on. Why? My huge heart keeps beating, the blood keeps rushing. At each clutch of the chamber my blood spurts out to Asia and Africa. My blood is the world's circulation: the planet throbs with my heartbeat. I'm necessary in ways I can't imagine, perhaps. The folly is in supposing my necessity and my desires have anything to do with each other.

Still I'm shaken, old, feeble, chilled. I wish it was all over. I'm ready for a new dream.

Offerings

The God of Acceptable Risk looms
on his folding chair throne, his great belly gleaming
between t-shirt and running shorts;
the Goddess of Insurance pouts at his feet,
heavily made-up, throwing dice;
the Cherub of Mild Erotic Interest flutters
at his shoulder, trying to stay airborne,
cheating from time to time
by resting an elbow on his head.

We leave it on the chubby knees
of such gods as these, and we wonder
if our offerings are acceptable.
We have slaughtered a perfect summer
in their honor, cut off our fingers one by one
to garnish a tasteful salad of ears;
laid the tongues of our children on the grill,
fat and sputtering. We've given no eyes,
which makes us uneasy. They notice
when you're withholding. They don't like that.
On impulse we open a can of cat food
And throw it on the fire too: you can't be
Too careful.

Dale Favier, Poet

I don't want to think of myself as a poet.
Don't want to be anxiously scanning my thoughts
looking for ones that might become poems.
Don't want to write as poems things that ought to be prose
because I am a poet. Don't want
to have a business card that says
Dale Favier, Poet
on it, because
well, one,
most of my poems are not very good,
and, two,
I don't want to lease out my brain or my spirit
to anyone, no matter how good a tenant
he might be. I live here.
So I will continue to write
mostly bad poems, and I will continue to post
things that aren't finished, and probably
aren't worth finishing, because
simply
I need a place to live.

I am a poet. Okay. That means
I'm allowed to have affairs and mishandle money:
It means I'm more equal than people who write prose
and even more equal than people who write nothing.
I am a poet, and that means Li Bai and Shakespeare
will drink with me in the Elysian fields, surrounded
by houris and dakinis.

That sounds nice. But there's such a thing
as being too big for your britches.
Really I am the halfbreed
Eugene-Springfield mix,
son of the paper mill and the university,
both sides of the river, which runs away forever
with trees on either hand, the green river that,
riddling and laughing, pulls down bridges
as it goes; sucking poison from the fields
and spitting it into the sea; the river, really
I am the river, I am nothing else. The rain
all empties into my throat, and I piss it all
into old Ocean. There's such a thing
as being too big for your bridges.

More Resistance, Less Force

I have a new article up at Writing the Life Poetic.

Also, if you haven't checked out the new Read Write Poem yet, you should. They're doing a bang-up job over there.

Shoes

The more I hammer on these letters
the more they twist. "I love you" spelled in iron
beaten horseshoes: who knows what they say now?
They gained their meaning when the horses walked on them
a long time ago.

Summer, Mt Tabor

Stairs in warm shade
your arm on my thigh
a single leaf falls softly
from the pooling sky.

Cowardice

It makes me realize how very temporary a life I've always lived. Everything has been just for now. I've played daily life with my left hand, and with left over scraps of attention.

I am old in my habits now, or at least middle-aged. Could I change? Would I even want to, really?

I could change, anyway, the lie behind the habits. I could make an effort to believe that there is no utopia around the corner that will render this life void. This life, this ramshackle hit-or-miss life, this country of anxieties and petty subterfuges, with its suddenly divulged -- and abruptly lost -- deep waterfalls of beauty and love, this country, this country is where I live for the rest of my life. Even if I only wander and camp here, this is home, as much home as I'll ever know. I can try to pound that into my thick skull.

---

It is a wonderful life, an absurdly fortunate life. It may be unsustainable: in which case I hope I will take to harder conditions with a good grace. It's all been worth it. Life has been so much better than it promised. When I was a miserable all-in-black teenager, of the sort that shows up in the nightly news as having gone on a shooting spree, I had no conception of how good things would turn out, how beautiful life would be. Maybe that's when I established the habit of camping, of living for a remote future, of paying only sporadic attention to the here and now. I hated school with a passion I didn't really recognize for a long time. I didn't recognize it because they managed to convince me, in the manner of any totalitarian organization, that there was nothing else possible. I thought I was hating reality. No. I was hating a stupid antiseptic regime of paved playgrounds and chain link fences, where touching other people and thinking for yourself and privacy and establishing your own community was absolutely forbidden. I hated it then, and I hate it now, with a pure white passion. I hate prisons the same way. I don't care what people have done: nobody has done anything so bad as to deserve that. Cut off their heads, brand them, hack off a limb or two if you really must vent your anger on them. But don't lock them up. I shake when I walk by the county courthouse and see the blind buses pulled up, the band of armed, green-uniformed sheriffs waiting for the orange-suited prisoners to shuffle out of the steel pillboxes on the sidewalks -- elevator-heads, I presume, which bring them up from the basement of the courthouse -- and make their five or six steps in the free air before disappearing into the buses, disappearing into prison, some of them forever. My knees tremble and I know my cowardice. I should be fighting this. I should be helping them. And I only don't because I'm afraid, deathly afraid, of being one of them. I have as much physical courage as the next person, I hope, but I have no courage at all in the face of that threat. I escaped from the world of airless corridors and cafeterias and bullies and dull-witted sanctimonious authority when I was thirteen. I will never, ever go back to it. It takes me to the very limits of what I can stand to bicycle past a public schoolyard, or to go and visit someone in the hospital. Malls, chain restaurants, and big-box stores have the same smell. Dead air, spilled cola, alternating stinks of AC, antiseptic, and fine dust: and people dying everywhere, dying on their feet, rotting inside their blotchy skins. Not the most garish Boschian nightmare of Hell could frighten me more.

Recognizance

The recognizance on which I have been released
is not my own. What, exactly, do they recognize?
What has their reconnaissance found? What
do they reckon is in my heart? I reek of bad faith,
I wreak havoc, I recall
what should never have been called. Reckless,
foolhardy, wanton: I am the wreckage
of a human soul.

Wandering

The end of July. As hot as I've ever known it in western Oregon. I sit in Tosi's, the sweat from my bike ride prickling on my forehead and running down the back of my neck, at 8:00 in the morning. I knew if I didn't get some exercise in this part of the day, I wouldn't get any at all.

Weather like this forms its own bardo, its own in-between time. There's a sense that nothing really counts, until the weather breaks. We're on hold.

I've spent a lot of my life in these dream times. It's a blessing and a curse, to slip so easily from one world to the next, to be so unrooted in any one reality. It keeps me from building in any of them. Just passing through: no need to fix anything or establish anything. According to some versions of reality, I've squandered my talents by wandering. But I believe in those less and less, as time goes by. Insofar as people are meant to do things, I was meant to wander. There are ivy-shrouded doors glimpsed in stone walls, painted-shut windows in old factory buildings, ladders vanishing into sewers. And you don't really know where they lead: you only know that they are elsewhere, and that the people who built them and used them originally thought differently about them.

Harold Bloom once wrote that he read for consolation. I found that statement astonishing. At first I didn't believe it: I had to return to it over and over. Finally, I managed to believe him. And I realized, after that illumination, that people read for all kinds of reasons. But I read, really, for just one reason: to pass through doors that are ordinarily shut, to enter hidden worlds, to walk in vanished places. In some ways, the harder and more alien the text, the more deeply it calls to me. One reason I've never become a real scholar of any of the languages I've trifled with is that I don't want to master any of these places. I don't want them to become completely known. I want them to be lonely, half-lit places, empty ruined halls. The last thing I want is to string up floodlights in a deserted cathedral.

bed before bright moon shines
think be frost on floor
raise head gaze bright moon
lower head think old home.

or more Englished,

The moonlight beside my bed
Is bright as frost on the floor.
Raise my head and look at the moon:
Lower my head and think of home.

-- Li Po, or Li Bai, if you prefer: Thoughts on a Still Night. The nice thing about real poetry is that it's never completely known. You can study it forever and it's still half lit. And when you write a poem to a living person, and read theirs in return, you can even have companions in those dreamspaces. I used to think you could only visit them alone, or with the dead: but it's not true, though the company is, in some senses, not real.

--How do you know that your sister's story is not true?

--Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time.

--Are they?

And Peter didn't know quite what to say.

The senses in which the company is not real, I think, are none of them very important ones. How real are all these relationships in the real world that we take so seriously? We're all precariously perched in life, a careless step away from violent death, a heartbeat away from a stroke that will make us wordless and motionless. It's really not so real, here in reality. Not so real at all.

Free Climb

The rope snaps
with a burst of dust like pollen
and slithers down the rock.
You catch yourself
in time.

We watch it glide away
falling in graceful loops
raising powder as it goes:
smoking, dragging
small stones along

that click
and chatter down the slope
bounding from ledge
to ledge
setting the whole

field of scree far below
in motion, raising
clouds in the still air:
until the silence
under it all

rises to the surface.
We never trusted that rope.
And it's better now:
just hard clean stone
under our fingers.

Whether we make it down
or not there is
relief
in having the problem
simplified.

On the Other Side

A few nights ago I was scheduled to do heart surgery, and it was very difficult to arrange everything. Everyone assumed I knew what to do, but I kept having to check on things and ask about things. At first I was okay with it. It was sort of like being an airline pilot, I told myself. So much is automated, and you have so many assistants.

"I'd open up the third rib, go in that way," someone said. The third rib? That didn't sound right. Too high. I'd sort of been picturing open heart surgery, splitting the chest open and taking the heart right out, putting it on ice. But I couldn't get a clear picture of what was even wrong. Stents, maybe I should put stents in the arteries? Events marched on, relentless. They were prepping my patient.

I don't even know where the damn coronary arteries are, I thought. I can't just slice all around the heart till I find them. This is crazy.

And gradually a new consciousness crept in, a capacity for thinking at a remove. And with it came a sudden resolve.

"I'm not doing this," I announced. "You'll have to get someone else. I'm not trained for this."

They clucked at me, the way people clucked when I announced I wasn't going to look for teaching jobs: just nerves, they said. You'll settle into it. Look at some of the chuckleheads already doing it. Everybody gets nervous right before surgery.

"I'm not doing this." I said again, stubbornly.

I entered the bardo, the space between sleeping and waking, still carrying my resolve to quit. Slowly I adjusted -- as your eyes slowly adjust, when you enter a darkened room -- to the fact that I was now in a world in which no one wanted me to start carving open anyone's chest.

"I'm not doing this," I muttered again, on behalf of that poor man on the receding side of the bardo, still surrounded by people who wanted him to be things he couldn't be, and do things he couldn't do. But it was too late. I was in the waking world, and he was on his own.

Nibbling in the Agora

Unexpectedly, a chill white day in the middle of July. It happens, here. Clouded over as I rode, this morning, before the sun was up, and the expected heat hasn't materialized. Not yet, anyway.

It was fun to read my poems aloud. It's always different, depending on the audience: different people respond to different things.

I love Tiel's poem about the glass people on the dark side of the moon.

Perhaps rashly, I've ridden my bike to Tosi's. My back is a little twinge-y. I promise it I'll lie down flat on my back as soon as I get home.

A little lost, a little forlorn. Sometimes looking at my old poetry, I feel like an ignorant peasant wandering in ruins. Supposedly it's the work of his own people, but it's nothing they could do now. Or would want to. More than just the poetry: ruins of all sorts of projects surround me. Chinese, Eating Properly, Getting Travell & Simon Down Cold, Reading Modern Poets, Getting a Grip on the 18th Century, Learning to Listen to Real Music, Marketing Massage. I pasture my sheep in the old agora, and look around me uneasily, at the moss-covered blocks of marble, the crumbling faces of forgotten gods, the undecipherable inscriptions.

Just do the next thing, Dale.

Reading Tomorrow Evening

Tomorrow evening I'll be reading with Tiel Aisha Ansari -- the marvelous Sufi poet who blogs at Knocking from Inside -- at the Rockwood Branch of Multnomah County Library. 7:00. I've picked out some of my poems with more Tibetan-Buddhist imagery to read. It should be fun. Come by!

What Pulling Your Back Gives You

1) The opportunity to learn new skills, e.g. crawling to the bathroom and peeing, on all fours, into a Breyer's ice cream bucket. This is a new, valuable life skill with many potential applications, all of which I am hoping to avoid.

2) A better understanding of what your clients with "back trouble" are experiencing.

3) A chance to find those trigger points in the gluteus medius and the external hip rotators on yourself. Yes, they are there, and yes, they do hurt.

4) Gratitude for the meds left over from Martha's surgery two years ago.

5) A new understanding of the meaning of "happiness." Happiness, as it turns out, is quite simple: it's what happens when your back is not in spasm.

I stood up just a little bit ago, with no ill consequences. I have informed God that I will never, ever neglect my daily back exercises or short myself on sleep again. He was not impressed. "Oh, I've heard that before," he said.

Tithonus

I paused on the stair landing this morning, and looking out the south-facing window, saw Venus blazing alone in the soft sky.

Tithonus, I thought, though I couldn't quite bring the Tennyson poem to mind: I felt old beyond mortal years. Tithonus lying still while the heavens wheeled over him again and again. When his lover, the Goddess of Dawn, asked eternal life for him, she forgot to stipulate eternal youth. Oops.

And yet, I thought -- as Tithonus must often have thought -- and yet I have lain with the Goddess. I have had all I ever wanted.

And I thought of those wretched people whose bodies ossify, soft tissue turning to bone, and of other misfortunes: Ovidian transformations in our daily lives, the cancers and tumors, our bodies growing into other things than we expected. I've always been a partisan for feminist issues (out of self-interest, as much as any sense of fairness), but slogans about owning one's own body seem ridiculous to me. We don't own them, we can't control them, we can't even insist they stay human, if they decide otherwise. Let's leave the language of ownership where it belongs, in the realm of money and other such fictions. Bone and blood are too real for that.

Still. Joy runs over me, lambent and irresistible. My skin is on fire with it. Breakers of delight crest and crash on every shore of my body. I'm so light that little shifts of wind cartwheel me down the streets and blow me up into the sky. I settle momentarily in the crowns of apple trees, on the creosoted tops of telephone poles, and caw with all my heart, full of primal lust and delight in mischief. My feathers are glossy and iridescent in the sun. I am irrepressible.

Here's my myth: the gods took pity on Tithonus, though he deserved none, having received already favors no mortal should aspire to, and they turned him into a crow. He ruckuses and quarrels like any other crow now, and tumbles on the breeze. But every once in a while you can see a stillness come over him, when he remembers. Not for long: what crow is still for long? But he does remember.

The Realization of Cats

Cats are regarded as low on the Buddhist scale of realization, because they are so carnivorous, so lacking in apparent compassion, and so subject to their desires. One Pure-Land tradition at least holds that the cat, alone among animals, doesn't get to appear in the pure lands.

But cats don't need to cultivate detachment from their desires: they are their desires. If any creature has achieved one-pointed attention, it's a hunting cat.

Possibly you're reborn as a cat if your realization of emptiness outstrips your accomplishment of compassion by too much: I have known, I think, highly accomplished meditators who are going to be toying with mice in their next lives, and snapping little mouse necks with relish.

The Word Made Flesh

Reading, writing, sex, contemplation – one looks for the one in the two and, finding it or something like it, becomes herself again, maybe for the first time again.

Nearly five o'clock: the sky hasn't lightened yet, but it will soon. The time in-between. Bardo. The cloud cover, seen through the window by night, is complete and featureless. The sun will slowly fill it up with soft light, will find the thin spots in the overcast and pool there. The first birds will begin to tune up.

But now, only the tick of the clock, and the glow of the screen on my hands. About to unmoor and give myself to the day.

Love.

The Companions

They lie in scattered tumuli
from Samarkand to Kyushu:
the Prince's true friends who died with him
at the last extremity, clad in
the gorgeous silks and the silver amulets
he gave them.
They sleep uneasily, reaching
an occasional hand to pat the horses
and the dogs that are buried with them.

In their group barrows they sigh, and shift;
the weight of their golden armbands
reassures them.
Shall we call it love? They did.
They swore to share their Prince's death,
to fall in battle with him or to stand
for loving execution, with their dogs and horses,
to follow him into the next world. Loyalty,

they thought, was not a thing just of today.
It was forever, and, faithful, they wait
to rise from sleep and follow the man
who was to them what you are to your dog:
always right, always kind: to be kicked
or accidentally stepped on was a better gift
from him than any ordinary man's caress.

We think we know more of love than they did.
I wonder if when we stir in our narrow coffins,
no dog or horse to greet us, no Prince to take our hand,
I wonder, then, if we will be so sure.

Invasive Species

Dark clouds: the sky is weighing the pros and cons of really storming. Heaven gave us beautiful weather for the 4th of July weekend. But now it's thinking of other things.

Stopped at Latourell Falls Sunday. A concave swoop of basalt, like a great overhang built out of gray legos, and water spilling slowly over its top edge. Four turkey vultures turned slowly in the sky at the top. A Spanish boy, maybe ten years old, capered and mugged for the camera in the wind from the splash pool, his shirt fluttering madly. A family group of Japanese walked solemnly up the path that leads under the old highway bridge, acknowledging us by just barely ducking their heads. In the parking lot I caught the complicated consonants of a Slavic language, the sing-song of some dialect of Chinese. Time ran up to the crest of a hill, hesitated near the top, and then ran backwards to the bottom again.

I don't know how to begin to say how precious all this is to me, how anxiously I view all the threats to it: the English ivy, the Himalayan blackberry, the grubbers who want to privatize and develop. And just the endless, endless inrush of people. Our unemployment in Oregon rivals that of Michigan, but still they keep coming. Good people, most of them. Individually I'm glad to have them. They mostly come for the right reasons. But these places are gasping under their collective weight. People who asked me where I was from, at IBM, used to be incredulous when I said I was from Oregon. Waitresses and pizza-delivery guys might be natives, but programmers? Was that allowed?

I'm only second-generation Oregonian, but Martha, who's been looking for work for months, was born in the house her grandfather built in northeast Portland.

"So I'm in this meeting about rooting out invasive species," she remarked the other day, "and I look around the circle: he's from New York, she's from California, he's from Chicago, she's from Pennsylvania..."

The Unified Command

Often I come smack up against what is probably my deepest ideological difference with most people: which is -- to simplify a bit -- that I don't believe people can control their actions. If you don't believe that, then you can find the bulky apparatus of praise and blame that everyone is trundling about with them a little exasperating. And it becomes difficult to participate in most casual conversation, which is, to a remarkable degree, about apportioning praise and blame. Michael Jackson was or wasn't to blame for whatever he did or didn't do with the children at Neverland. The Governor of South Carolina is less culpable or more culpable because he viewed his Argentinian lover as his soulmate. Whatever. To someone who views human action as I do, all this busy scuffling to scribble in the book of judgment is a little tedious. I prefer to leave that job to the angels, who presumably have the data and the skills to do it properly.

It's tedious because I can't even get into the conversation. Everyone thinks I'm saying that pederasty and adultery are fine (since I must be either approving or blaming, and I'm not blaming, then I must be approving.) Well, no. I don't think pederasty and adultery are fine. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if you want to prevent these things, it's not enough to get everyone to recite the same catechism. Probably Michael Jackson thought pederasty was wrong. Certainly Governor Sanford thinks adultery is wrong. That's not enough.

Freud had an inkling of this, but he didn't have the brain science to back it up. He proposed a model of mental life which was (for Western science) revolutionary, and mostly wrong, but it got one crucial piece right: that there is no unity of command in the human brain. The brain has (again to way oversimplify) several layers, and all of them have at various times access to sensory processing and motor control. The mechanisms by which one layer or another takes precedence are extremely obscure. But if you want to understand why Governor Sanford, who wholeheartedly believes -- with some of the circuitry of his frontal cortex, anyway -- that adultery is wrong, engages in adultery, those are the mechanisms you want to investigate.

Or you can just say that he's bad. If you like. If you feel like that gets you anywhere. I don't.

I've been eating badly, again, and I'm completely fascinated by that process. I watched myself getting ice cream out of the freezer, and spooning it into a bowl. The part of my brain that intended to eat ice cream was in firm control. I could hear the part that thought I shouldn't do it. It wasn't completely shut out. The "still, small voice" the Bible talks about was there, saying I shouldn't eat it, I'd be sorry, the gratification would be fleeting, etc., etc. But it had no access to motor control. Something else was running the show. For simplicity's sake, I'll call it the hypothalamus, but I'm sure that's a very crude and inaccurate name for something that I imagine is really, insofar as it's an entity, a "software" entity, not a "hardware" entity.

Now, the hypothalamus doesn't do words. I couldn't have told you why I intended to eat that ice cream. I couldn't have given you a justification for it. I couldn't have given you an argument in favor of it. The arguments -- squeaking away in the background -- were all against it. They simply made no difference.

Perhaps I'm a bad person, and that's why I eat ice cream when I shouldn't. Or perhaps I'm weak-willed (though I must say that no one who knows me well has ever thought that about me: I am considered by my nearest and dearest to be one of the most stubborn human beings alive.) But that's not very helpful. If I'm bad because I want to be bad, what hope is there for me? If my will is defective, then -- how do I repair it? By an act of will?

The fact that the hypothalamus doesn't do words puts it at a disadvantage in the world of books and discussion. It always comes up the loser in a seminar, or a convention of theologians. To hear us talk, you'd think it didn't stand a chance. But somehow, in real life, it manages to get hold of a lot of ice cream and Argentinian mistresses.

But suppose we give up, once and for all, the delusion of the unified command. Suppose we recognize that there are multiple entities running the show. Suppose we even go so far as to grant that there may be very good reasons why the argument-generating part of our brains gets excluded from motor control from time to time. St Augustine's mother had the wacko theory that depriving her children of water would improve their willpower and make them better people. St Augustine thought she was right, of course. Mom is always right. He drank water anyway. If he hadn't, we probably wouldn't ever have gotten to read the Confessions: little Augustine wouldn't have made it out of childhood.

The thing is, the cerebral cortex is always coming up with wacko theories. It really can't be trusted to carry out the fundamental bits of survival: eating and drinking and sleeping and procreating. So it simply gets shunted aside from time to time. You can hold your breath until you fall unconscious, but you can't hold your breath until you die. Another piece of the brain cuts in and says, "enough, already!" and starts breathing again. It's not because you're bad. It's not because your will is faulty. It's simply the way the nervous system works.

If we accept that the moralizing, theorizing part of our brains is just one constituent among many, rather than the lord and master of all it surveys, I think we will be both happier and better at regulating our actions. I think, for instance, that the reason so many priests have abused children is that they see the problem as being that they're not trying hard enough to fight down temptation. If they simply took it as read that there were temptations they couldn't fight, the actions to be taken would be obvious: get the hell out of the priesthood. Stay away from children. Tell the people close to you that you're not to be trusted with them. Instead of engaging in titanic struggles at the point of temptation, structure your life so as to avoid the temptations altogether. But of course they can't do that: they can't enlist the help of others because that would be admitting, in effect, that they are so bad they won't even try to be good. If you hew to the theory of the unified command, there's no other way to think about it.

---

I don't believe that things are this simple. I don't believe the entities I refer to as the hypothalamus and the cortex are the only two players. I don't believe they're even distinct. I think they, and others, reconfigure wildly on the fly. I think the variety of things we airily call "will power" probably do have tangential influences, here and there: enought to keep the mythology going, anyway. But one thing I'm dead sure of: that if the schema I've proposed here is oversimplified, the "unified command" schema is even more so. It doesn't even begin to save the appearances.

Why I don't Celebrate the 4th of July

The 4th of July! The day that a group of wealthy slaveholders got together and declared that all light-skinned people with penises and a certain amount of money in the bank were created equal, and solemnly concluded that this made it their duty to refuse to contribute a modest amount towards paying their war debts, and to start a bloody five years of civil war and devastation. Hurray!

That was part of a comment I posted and unposted last night, in response to someone encouraging me to write about the 4th of July. As you can see, I'm unsuited for celebrating revolution. I'm a conservative down to my finger bones. I loathe war, disorders, and mobs. My suspicion of fresh starts is limitless. Taking large groups of angry people shouting together to be the ultimate fount of wisdom strikes me as lunatic.

I understand why the colonists objected to the Stamp Act. I would have objected to it too. But all we had to do, really, was wait. Parliament was going to backpedal soon anyway, when they learned that the thing was unenforceable. That government was remarkably thick-skulled and ham-handed, but some governments are: you dig in your heels, make your objections known, and wait for them to run themselves into the ground. We're hardly talking about a totalitarian regime, here. Important parliamentary figures were making eloquent and impassioned speeches in our favor. Demography was, slowly but inexorably, on our side. If we had waited a few years we would have gotten nearly everything we wanted.

I don't give a damn about self-determination. There's no such thing. There's only one ruling class or another, and all of them treat some minority or other badly. The only question is how badly. If it's bad enough, sure, you take up arms. But even if you succeed, you only replace one ruling class with another. If some minorities are relieved from oppression, others will, I guarantee, have it worse under the new regime. Ask the Indians of the Ohio valley how great a step forward for human rights the new American government was. If you can find any.

So no. I don't celebrate the 4th of July, any more than I celebrate the Confederate Secession. I don't like revolution. I don't like civil war. I don't believe the tree of liberty is refreshed by the blood of patriots: what is usually refreshed by it is the tree of oppression.

Almost July

Almost July. A fallen cherry
clings to the burning hood of my car,
its skin dark as a plum's, vein-purple,
its oozing flesh blood-red, and
the stone showing bone-pale
in the compound fracture of its heart.

Glory

In the middle of taking a Facebook quiz
(which damned soul are you? Everyone hopes for
Il Miglior Fabbro, of course) I pause to
pull the curtain aside.

Light pours from the white wall opposite.
Light pours from the top of the window, where the sun
finds flaws in the glass and rushes through,
overwhelming the silica levies; light rises
from the blinding sill, light courses
through my phantom, fading skin and makes my bones
burn like white phosphor.

At night, among the old yellow headlights,
a pair of new ones, blue-white as Vega, rise,
blasting my night vision, turning me sightless,
making me old in a splintered second.

And when I fumble
into the refuge of the darkroom
I find the floor has gone, the tiles fallen away:
and below me is only the endless glory
of uncountable clustering stars.

Friday Quotidiana

The romance is back.

Yesterday I got my bike back from the shop. Maybe you remember me complaining about it a month or two ago? With the vague idea in my mind that it was a year, maybe two years, old, I was unhappy about how many things seemed to be going wrong with it. A new bike shouldn't have only half its gear range viable, a chain that slips, brakes that won't hold tension.

Searching back here, I found that it was actually three and half years old, with no maintenance beyond my clumsy attempts to adjust the brakes. So I took it into the nearby bike shop -- the Bicycle Repair Collective -- for a tune-up. And my miraculous flying machine is back. My noiseless, weightless brother of the wind.

Yes, I know bicycle maintenance is not rocket science. I know I could learn to do it properly myself. I also know I'm not going to. For the price of one of my massages (the basic unit of exchange, in my mental economic picture) I got my wings back. Walked to the shop, picked up the bike, and flew downtown to work. It's true that coming back up home from the river is not quite flying, even on my little blue Trek, but it still beats riding the bus by a wide, wide margin. And it takes about the same amount of time.

Actually it cost two massages, because I had managed to destroy the wheels by riding so long with bad brake pads. I will treat it lovingly from now on. The guys at the repair collective are going to be my best friends.

Still to figure out is how to ride in the rain, so I can keep doing it in the Fall. I suspect that the best solution, here in the maritime Northwest where it's so seldom really cold, is just to accept getting wet, and to bring dry clothes to have at the other end.

---

The blogroll. I really must do something about it. Blogrolling.com was taken over by pod people, who, after a long incubation, during which you couldn't update your blogroll at all, re-emerged and put ads on top of the blogs linked to, without consulting their subscribers. Not cool. They've completely forfeited my alliegance. So I need to fiddle with my template. Blogger has some kind of blogroll infrastructure now, I think, which I can probably use. I just need to get around to it. It's rather like fixing the bike. And after all, my template's been broken for ages. The corners of my border outlines went all funky years ago (no, it's not intended to look like that.) But this is probably like getting my bike fixed up: expect action in three or four years. Though I am anxious to get links up to some of my newer favorite blogs. Where There are no Chickadees. 20th Century Woman. Tejana Poet. Box Elder. (Box Elder isn't even new: she's been a favorite read forever. Why she's not on my blogroll is a mystery to me. I think the gremlins who get into bicycle brakes get into blogrolls, too.) Now that I use Google Reader, the blogroll has become a poor cousin, but it's still an important element of the blogosphere. I know that people sometimes click dead links over there. Sorry.

---

I have a backlog of five or six drafted posts which I hesitate to publish. This happens to me, every once in a while. The posts just seem wrong to me, and I can't figure out why. Is it that I'm afraid people won't like them? It is it because there's something genuinely wrong with them? Is it that my brain has gone the way of my bike and my blogroll, and I will never write good posts again? How could I know, and why should I care? It's none of my business.

Health Histories

I take health histories, which often turn out to be mostly mental health histories. The stories pour forth in neat connected narratives: this trauma which caused that bodily deficiency; a whole history of pains and debilities, in perfectly formed, self-contained fables; episodes in the epic of the realized soul. I know I'm listening with grave kindness, startled and grieved as I always am by the long story of pain, pain suffered, pain inflicted, pain held. I am astonished that anyone keeps it together and manages to present as normal, in this life. Heroes, all of you, struggling agains the rising of entropy, which eats all things anyone ever loved. It rises not least in ourselves, as various cancers of the body, as various dementias of the mind.

I listen with kindness and understanding and respect, I hope. I resist the impulse to lay a hand on your forearm and say, "but you don't believe any of these stories, do you?"

Because I know that you have no choice. Of course you believe all these stories. And who am I to doubt them? To think that the stories themselves are the worst of the debilities, and the greatest of the pains, you suffer? Physician, heal thyself.

Fortunately, I am not a doctor, or a counselor. I have no authority to inject myself into this stream of narrative and impose my own counternarratives, diagnoses from my own little black bag of anecdotes. Depend upon it, if I were so empowered, I would do it, and then I would believe my own stories; and where they diverged from yours, we would wound each other and feel betrayed. But fortunately I am a massage therapist, and my powerlessness is my freedom. I don't have to have a story. I catch bright little bits of hard information, here and there. What you fear and what you hope for. Enough to know that I can hardly be too gentle, that I must be scrupulous of boundaries even by my own standards.

As always, once the hands are on the back, once the slow rhythm begins, once we start talking the language of skin and heat, resistance and relaxation, the conversation changes utterly. Suddenly communications are charged with a full load of meaning. Feedback is rapid, accurate, uninterpreted. I'm in. Past the membrane of all those toxic stories. Finally we can start to really talk.

And of course, we talk about only two things: pain and love. What else is there to talk about?

It's all broken glass in there, you tell me. I go gentler, and gentler still. Just a whisper with the hands. And finally, when I'm moving away, you ask me to just lay my hands, unmoving, on your chest, and you weep. Just for a little bit. And then you're done, and we move on.

Murakami

Reading Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, on Christine's recommendation. I'm enjoying it greatly. I read very few novels anymore -- it takes so long to read a novel! -- so this is a special treat. I'm struck, whenever I read a novel nowadays, by how my generation is now in the ascendent. I notice the same thing in crossword puzzles. The cultural references are to things I know about: the Beatles, Nixon, the Berlin Wall. It's not necessarily that the writers and puzzle composers are my age: it's just that these things are the common coin. In ten years, more and more things will be cropping up that I'm too old to have a feel for; in another decade or two I'll be groping, as I used to in my twenties, when I had to strain to catch echoes and guess what Fred Astaire meant or what the given name of Charlie Chaplin's wife might be; except that then the problem will be that the people referred to are too young.

Right now, I'm in the sweet spot, convinced that all of human life was lived specifically for my benefit. (Enjoy it while you got it, bucko!)

I suppose we have Garcia Marquez & his ilk to thank for the liberation of incident. Serious novels were so godawfully stuffy for a while: nothing actually interesting or diverting could happen, because that wouldn't be literary. God! Those agonizingly realistic novels, Irving and Roth and Fowles and Malamud and Bellows and so forth: dreary self-absorbed characters having dreary half-hearted affairs and shuffling sullenly along to their dreary suburban deaths. No wonder I stopped reading novels. It was supposed to be realism, but it was completely foreign to the real world as I experience it, which is rich, throbbing, brightly colored, absolutely improbable and absorbing, full of beauty and terror and wistfully funny. Murakami's world, now, like Garcia Marquez's, is like the one I inhabit. I don't even want to visit the world of those older novelists.

Thank you Christine!

Missing

I have not a single answer: not one.

Some years ago I had to work to divest myself of opinions. Not anymore. Oh, I have them, of course: they come flickering up at moments of irritation or self-congratulation. But they flutter on their way again. Thank God. What a stupid weight to carry. The pronunciamentos of the Grand Junta of Official Daledom, Duly Assembled. I used to take the proceedings of that body dead seriously. Only gradually did I discover that nobody -- least of all me -- paid the slightest attention to its proclamations, strictures, and sanctions. That rather silly and pathetic governor of South Carolina is discovering that just now. But no doubt he'll figure out a way to save his personal Junta, at whatever cost to his career, his family, his spiritual yearnings, his lover, and his common sense.

It's easy to confuse the love of wisdom with the love of having opinions. The two things can look exactly alike. But sooner or later one will kill the other. They can't live in the same house.

---

The Sun Gone Missing

At the solstice
splashes of light, the size
and color of apricots, made their way
through the slatted blinds. They glowed
on your skin, on your hair; they set
shadows that hooded your eyes.

Now on the vacant pillow
the cold light is silvered
like the back of an empty mirror.
Nothing hidden. Nothing shows.

The tastes of chocolate, of almond,
of cherry -- mixed on your tongue --
try to come back, but can't.
They are waiting for you, caught
behind shutters, lost like the sun.
Nothing will be right till it returns.

---

A sough of cooler air stirs the twisted cords that hang down by the window, makes them rock slightly. Unless the world is rocking, and the cords are still.

---

Two old men from the bible club keep talking in the parking lot, unable to leave an audience, however imperfect: they gesture with their books, they swell with vehemence, become congested with conviction. Their faces redden. They strain as if on the toilet. Not for the first time, I wonder how this bluster ever became associated with anything sacred or holy. The pale meek monks and saints of medieval iconography, humbly dressed, with their hands fluttering and their eyes cast upwards, are silly representations of holiness, but at least you can see what the artists are driving at; you can follow the associations. No chain of any length connects my ideas of holiness with these portraits of constipated outrage.

Sun

I have entered yet another new world: one in which all doors open to me. I'm not quite sure how this happened. Like all the most important turns of my life, I didn't know I was making it. I only glimpse it in the rearview mirror, disappearing, and I know suddenly I'm in a new country.

I've wandered a long way from Springfield. With a pang I remember a ring, set with cheap blue glass, scrabbled from the dust by the reservoir. You had to climb a chain link fence to get in, but the barb-wiring at the top was perfunctory, and you had all the time in the world to get over it: nobody ever checked on it. And then you could climb the steel ladder of the water tower, and look out over the northward slopes to yet other hidden worlds.

Just one of many empty places I cat-burglared my way into. Of course, I wanted to be able to go into inhabited places: but they were all closed to me, I knew that. So I found my way into deserted barns, fenced reservoirs. Some other kids' abandoned treehouse, with their moldering stash of girly magazines. I was as wary of human beings as a fox, and likewise as cocky: there weren't many places I couldn't get into. It takes only patience, and a gift for silence. I had both.

It would have taken only slight twist of destiny, at one point, to have set me on a life of burglary. I had all the skills and I would have enjoyed the challenge, the combination of patient research and sudden risk, the pleasure of entering places supposed to be private and protected. I loved to climb, to hide, and to observe. I knew just how invisible a still person is, how the direction of the light shows you up or conceals you. I knew how deeply habit-ridden most people are. They do the same things over and over, and their attention is predictable. It would have taken only a slight twist some other direction to have made me a hunter. Or maybe not. I've always hated hurting things. I don't think I could happily have despoiled people of their property either. Maybe not such slight twists. Maybe destiny wears heavier shoes than that.

But anyway -- my point is that now, suddenly, I am an insider, trusted with keys and secrets, with more invitations proffered me than I could possibly accept. I'm nonplussed. I never thought I could be a person on the inside and I don't quite know how to hold it.

The day promises fair. I'm flooded with tenderness, with a yen to make offerings at untended shrines. The sun is climbing up the eastern roads. I don't know who I am anymore, which I have to think is a good thing. Yesterday I looked at all the glittering suns bobbing in the dimpled river, worked out why they appeared in an elongated oval instead of in a circle. It's simple geometry. Pythagoras would have grasped it at once.

You recover from a swerve, having nearly tumbled from your bike, you glide easily along: you look the same as before, just as insouciant, but the adrenalin is coursing through your veins. You know, for a moment, just how precarious it all is. The sun is not quite as solid in the sky as you thought.

Consequences 11

This is the 11th post in a game of Consequences. Post number 10 is here. Post 12 will appear here. The sequence begins here, and will continue soon here.

This one's for you, sister. It's been so long.

We were the same person. We were both oversexed and overworded. Both impatient of restraint. Susceptible to flattery, alcohol, and touch. We felt the expectations of the world were intolerable. We craved its approval, and we got it, but never enough of it. Never enough that it counted.

The lama said I should talk to you: people who kill themselves always have unfinished business. So I invited you, and you came. But you wouldn't speak. You sat cross-legged facing me, like we used to sit on the bed: eating cinnamon toast and scheming to rule our little empires, making up code words and phrases we could use to coordinate our efforts in a world we didn't trust a bit.

Crosslegged, with your guitar on your lap, your long straight blond hair hanging down, like Joni Mitchell's. Or like the blonde on the Mod Squad. You know. It was the 70s. But you wouldn't speak.

Your face was broken out where you touched it, and touched it, and touched it. As if any minute it might go missing.

Mom tried to train you out of it, in those last few weeks. "You're touching your face," she'd say lightly. And an agony of revulsion would run through you, revulsion at her, at yourself, at living with other human beings.

"Don't," I'd whisper to Mom. But not out loud. I knew that you were leaving. Already you were leaving us.

Move

I've explored hundreds of of bodies with my hands, now. The bodies under my hands have gestated, given birth, recovered; breasts have filled and emptied. They have had strokes and recovered from them, or not recovered from them. They have nerve damage, diabetes, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, Reynaud's, HIV. Innumerable pulled backs, twisted knees, turned ankles.

What stands out to me, over and over, is how plastic the body is, how rapidly it changes. It wastes away alarmingly when confined to bed, and recovers tone incredibly fast when it becomes active again. People who move a lot are flexible, toned, and young: sedentary people are stiff, flaccid, and old. Blindfold me and give me sixty seconds to knead someone's shoulders, and I won't be able to tell you how old they are, but I'll be able to tell you with fair accuracy how much they move every day. People who do yoga, or varied physical work, have bodies that are twenty years younger than people who mostly sit. They move easily, relax readily. There aren't the glitches -- skips -- snags -- that you get in sedentary bodies.

I don't ask people much about how they eat, but of course people tell you things. I don't notice that eating properly makes a lot of difference, not compared to moving around. People who eat dreadfully can be in great shape, and people who eat well can be a mess. Fat doesn't make much difference either: people can have a hundred extra pounds of adipose tissue and have lovely, flexible, toned muscles, and a body that serves them well. The common equivalence drawn between skinny and healthy is not something my hands confirm. Some lean bodies feel healthy and some don't: some fat bodies feel healthy and some don't. But no sedentary bodies feel healthy.

I can tell if people are sick. I don't know how: or rather, I don't know how you'd pick up what I perceive on mechanical instruments. I'm pretty sure it could be done. The imagery in which my brain registers it is all of currents, flowing air or water: people feeling the same things I feel in ancient China thought of them as air, and called them "winds," in medieval Europe they thought of them as fluids, and called them "humors." Anyway, you lay your hands on someone and you feel them running through their body, whatever they are. Like you can take hold of a bit of plumbing and feel the water running through it. It can be rapid, sluggish, strong, weak; it can pulse regularly or irregularly. It can be warm or cold; it can be different colors. In someone who's sick with a virus it's sticky and erratic, dim and yellowish. Sort of staticky.

I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again: if you want to be young and healthy, move. Work out, or run, or swim, if you like those things. Or just wriggle and roll around. Improvised movement probably gives you more bang for the buck than repetitive movement. But whatever. Just move. Take five minutes to just inhabit your flesh and feel it breathing and pulsing, brewing and percolating. If you check in -- right now -- you'll find there's something it really really wants to do. The legs want to stretch, or the shoulders want to stretch, or the face wants to grimace. Just do that. It won't take a moment.

The Past, the House of Skype, Chinese Etymology, and the Hudson Valley

You turn increasingly to the past, as you age, because it's your own: as the witnesses drop away, it becomes more and more your private preserve. Fewer and fewer people can dispute your version of it. Or care to.

Of course, the more exclusively yours that country becomes, the lonelier it becomes. Nobody new can really go there with you, however polite and obliging they may be.

No. I'm not going to linger in the past. Not a winning game.

---

It is terribly frustrating, not being able to express myself in the spoken word. I hate it. I'm so stupid. I was on the phone with a stranger, discussing poems, and in fifteen minutes I couldn't express a single sophisticated thought. Approximations, little grunts of approval or disapproval, a tiny tiny repertoire of sentences and phrases. I drop to the level of a kindergartner. What is that?

A plague on the house of Skype. I hate them. Destroying the world in which I can communicate, in which I'm fluent, even.

Oh well. It was a nice moment. I'm glad I was here for it.

---

Chinese, of all languages, must teem with false etymologies. Every time you write a new word down, you have to guess at its etymology, by choosing among the hundreds of written characters that can represent those syllables. So you'll pick something plausible, and almost certainly wrong, and at once a new semantic history is grafted onto the word. I can't imagine how historical linguists try to do their stuff, with Chinese. Every literate Chinese for thirty centuries has been industriously laying false trails for them.

---

There comes a moment, when you've left New Haven, and you've been driving west a few hours -- driving through the rolling bumps of New England: little hillocks, which the natives inexplicably call "mountains," and which are every bit as claustrophobia-inducing as the buildings of the cities, because they're all about the same size, and you can never get up, never get your head above the water and get a look at the lay of the land -- there comes a moment when you come up to a ridge over the Hudson Valley, and you can see the great river spread out below you. A vista. And your heart leaps up, because suddenly, suddenly you think it might really be possible that somewhere there is still open country, wild land, places nobody owns or fences. Maybe Oregon is still there. Maybe you can go home.

Pennies Again

At the end, at the end it comes down to pennies, so why not begin there?

Pennies as they used to be in England, fat wide copper coins, not these poor zinc shadows.

"A penny for luck," no, it wasn't one of these. These pennies have no luck. Somebody just clever enough to make bad decisions decided Americans wouldn't need luck any more: they had democracy. That would see them through. So now we have these scrawny, gasping, skint coins, barely big enough to print an ugly face on. Poor old Abraham Lincoln, one of the seven American presidents who had a soul. (Bad luck on him: good luck on us. It runs that way.)

Oh you'll see, you'll see what it costs in the long run, to decide you can dispense with luck.

Still

Still what feels like an ulcer on my right tonsil, still an ache in the muscles that V around the adams's apple, the SCMs (I've been stupid about sitting semi-recumbent, holding my head up: that ache has far less to do with illness than with bad posture.) Still a pounding headache if I stand up too fast. But I'm nearly better. I walk at a normal pace from room to room, rather than at a slow hesitant shuffle. And I've washed and shaved, which feels wonderful. I wonder whether this was the swine flu? Who knows. Today is a quiet white day, a new day. I take a deep breath and it feels good.

Still. The leaves are motionless on the trees. We're at the bottom of a deep well of air. The occasional car going by is distinct, coughing and hushing its way to the stop sign at the corner. The clock ticks, and I can hear the refrigerator motor from the other side of the house. Pretty soon I should decide if I'm calling in sick to work again. Probably so. Give it one more day.

Nothing to say: only the blind impulse to reach out and touch. Thinking of the long-ago and far away: the encounter group in Bethel Maine; girls with long straight hair, the sunshine, the world according to John Lennon; discovering other people who loved Tolkien, back when not that many people did. Somehow being ill always draws me back to that pivotal age, thirteen and fourteen, when my life broke into pieces and was painstakingly reassembled into what is recognizably the Spring of my life, now, the same one sailing into early Autumn.

As always, I have only one wish, when I think about the past. I wish I had been kinder. Everything else, all the other ambitions and desires, fall away, but that one remains active. I did my best. I don't think I ever wanted to hurt people. But I was so wrapped up in trying to make myself into a person, trying to find some solid ground to stand on, that I know I hurt people along the way. I'm sorry about that. I don't know that it was possible then to do anything but what I did. But still.

Pennies from Heaven

Bow my head and listen to the rain
The rain sweeps up over the hills from the sea.
Green hills, long hills, vineyard and grassfield;
The rain sweeps up over the hills from the sea.

Give me a penny for luck; give me
Two pennies to lay on my eyes.
Three pennies, and I'd buy you a present
If I only knew where to look.

Give me a penny for look: lift your face:
Listen to the rain. It sweeps up
Over the hills; it brings remembrance
(Green hills, long hills, vineyard and grassfield),

If I only knew where to look. Raise my head,
And the pennies fall, splashing my face;
The pennies run down my cheeks; the pennies
Glisten in the grit of the sidewalk, glisten

In the wet of the rain. Ringle dingle jangle
And the falling water and home.

Climate Change

Pollen-crusted twigs and blossoms litter the sidewalks this morning, torn loose by the warning.

Yesterday from the cafe windows opposite Powell's I watched the sunlight disappear, the darkness hurry up from somewhere under the street, and an abrupt violent wind, a stranger here, pick up shingles and wallpostings and fling them into the sky. Raging.

This is Texas, I thought to myself. I've seen this before, these sudden freaks. But not here. This is Texas. This is the end.

Girls hurried by holding their skirts down. I hoped their dresses would blow up around their heads; I hoped the rain would turn their thin summer dresses into clinging transparencies. I wondered how old in the dharma I would have to be before my compassion was stronger my wish to see them exposed, than that enjoyment of vulnerability. That's Texas too, that old wound, that deformation of eros. I am a stranger here too.

I walked to the bus stop in the rain. I was soaking wet in minutes. The air was still warm, but the rain was cold. On the bus I wiped the water from my face. Someone behind me was coughing, a hopeless, weak, bronchial cough. Must be someone old, homeless, uninsured. The sort of detritus you get on the bus.

In a lull I stole a glance. The only person behind me was a strong teenaged boy, nicely dressed, with long glossy hair.

You don't know anything, Dale, I told myself. You think you know everything, but you don't know anything.

And this morning?

This morning I am catching minnows in my hands, hunting shadows. Sunlight flickers and nods through green leaves. Rhymes tickle me. I have a gumbie cat in mind; her name is Jennyanydots.

I wish you were here. I wish things were simple. I wish I could back out of this old, worn-out life, leave my crumpled snakeskin here, on the sidewalk, along with the twigs, and start fresh.

But I will never be well. Maybe that was me, coughing on the bus. Maybe that was me, holding my skirt down while the wind came down from Texas. My whole body is laced with illness. My arteries are hardening, my blood pressure is rising. I become puffy, red-faced, impotent. I saw a man on the street the other day, red faced and neckless, hair white like mine, his whole body a congestive disaster. That's me, too.

Or. There's the man who rode his bike to Tosi's this morning, hale and sound, and put his helmet on the table. Read poetry, studied Chinese. Who's that?

Outside, the cars toil down Sandy Boulevard, most with their lights on. It's a dark morning and doesn't promise to get much brighter. The rain's begun again. All those people going downtown to work, driving down to fill up the parking garages, car after car crossing the bridges, and then spiraling up into the concrete shells. It's in-between time, they think. An interstice. But really it's their whole lives. They kill the engines and sit in their cars, downtown, and fall asleep, and dream about going to work, and then they wake up and drive home, and in their driveways they fall asleep again and dream that they're at home, until morning. They never actually leave the cars. All of them, all of them convinced that they're actually leading two other lives, one at work and one at home. I'd tell them, but think how embarrassed they'd be. Better to leave it alone.

Bridal Veil

We went to Bridal Veil last weekend. The Falls the old and lame people go to: close to Portland, a half mile walk, easy trail.

A mother dipper (or water ouzel) was there, and three young birds, just babies, I think, although they were nearly the size of the mother. She industriously flew back and forth from the steep sides of the fall, to bring the babies treats. They got very shrill and excited, as baby birds will at feeding time, opening their beaks very wide and peeping over the roar of the water.

Dippers bob, rather than standing still. We wondered whether it might actually be a form of camouflage: if you can't be motionless, maybe the next best thing is to move like a bit of flotsam by the waterside. I had always thought the name "dipper" came from their habit of dropping under the water and swimming there, but after watching these I wondered it actually came from the bobbing: it's quite arresting. Every two seconds, that bob.

---

Here follows a long post, which I'm not posting, about food: about my bitterness about being misled by authorities about it, about how beleaguered and unsupported I feel at home. At one point I said: "Everything I do about food wounds somebody. I mean that. Everything I do about food wounds somebody."

Which is true. Every single thing I do about food wounds somebody. Additionally, everything I say about food wounds somebody. I'm not sure how it came to this pass; or -- since really I suppose everything we do and say wounds somebody, if we only brought sufficient awareness to see it -- why food is the nexus where so much pain and guilt comes to rest. But it is.

I won't post it, the bitterness and the easy vituperation: there's enough of all that on the web. Enough already.

The next thing is not to try to eat what I presently conceive of as good food: the next thing is getting the kitchen clean, its work spaces clear, and a cubic foot or two of space in the fridge to hold my food. No point in expending precious oomph until that's done. I don't have so much oomph that I can afford to squander any.