Making

Sometimes I think, as the headless snuffling crake would have me think, that splitting my attention four ways means that I will never get anything done. “Specialize, specialize!” it croaks. But when I think soberly I know it's wrong. For better and worse, I will never settle to one thing.

Of my four occupations, I give my writing the least respect. I would never refer to myself as a poet or a writer, unless jibingly, and I seldom hear someone else refer to me that way without wincing. I respond to other people's attempts to publicize me gingerly. And yet I know that the days of a neat divide between writers and publicizers is nearly over. In the early days of the American republic it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign in their own behalf: other people campaigned for them. Those days seem quaint, now, and soon writers of any name who don't tirelessly popularize their own stuff will seem just as quaint. No one is less suited than me, by temperament or talent, for self-promotion. So probably I have reached the pinnacle of my fame, here: twenty or thirty regular readers, including many writers that I admire very much. I could go farther and do worse.

Partly, as I've said before, I don't believe the old literary models can stand. I don't believe there is a scarcity of great writing any more, and publishing is dirt cheap – I have published all my work on Mole , for six years, for a total outlay (mostly on peripheral software of dubious value) of maybe $20. I could have done it free. There are tens of millions of educated literate people who are writing and publishing for free; and the machinery of “Literature” does not, as we say in software, scale very well. A system that worked reasonably well when there were a few hundred or a few thousand potential writers – although everyone involved, so far as I can tell, has always complained about it bitterly – breaks down completely in the face of a thousand or ten thousand times that. It's overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

(There is, on the other hand, a real scarcity of journalism, carefully researched writing. There are very few of these for-free writers who check their sources and investigate backgrounds and examine competing claims impartially. There are some kinds of writing that are better done by people who have no dogs in the fight; and people will only do that if they're paid for it. We're going to have to do something to support that kind of writing. But that's another subject. I'm talking about literature.)

When I was young I wanted to be a Great Writer. I haunted used bookstores and read introduction after introduction to classic works. I read the classics, too, but I have to admit that I read nothing with greater attention than those introductions. I wanted to be the subject of them. I yearned to have people think I was so important that they would write biographical sketches of me and argue about the profundities of my message. I wanted to have a single name that meant me, only me, and one so common that it developed an adjectival form. (It irked me that my name didn't lend itself to that. Favierian? Favieresque? Not likely.) I longed for my life to be attended to, examined, as a thing of great importance. Somehow being at loose ends and dithering and worrying was transmuted, in these introductions, into something glorious. So hard and huge a task it was, to birth a literary greatness.

Well, naturally, when I reluctantly began to be an adult (sometime late in my thirties), I began to find all this fuss about my thoroughly implicit, unexpressed greatness comical. And when I had spent some years with a regular meditation practice, my attitude of genial self-contempt shifted to one of compassion, as I began to walk this yen for greatness back to its origins, and realize that it was not harmless at all, but a poison at the heart of my life. No real-scale respect or liking, of the sort that might content ordinary people, would do for me. I needed devotion. I needed the whole world, or anyway the part of the literary world I admired, to adore me. And the reason I needed so much filler was that the hole was so huge. I was desperate to be seen, acknowledged, attended to: and I had at the same time a baleful conviction that only a few people in the world deserved this. The Great people. If I wasn't one of them, I was nothing. The conviction of my worthlessness and unloveability gnawed at me constantly.

As I unwound all this, I understood finally that the hole could never be filled. Nobody ever got so great that their greatness was beyond question. I was playing a sucker's game. There was no way anyone ever won it. I overheard half a phone conversation once, at Yale. An acknowledged Great Poet – you probably know his name -- talking to a friend, and talking just like I always talked to myself: he had done nothing, accomplished nothing, everything was hollow, his work was no good. He was close to tears. Even at the top – maybe even especially at the top, because then all your eggs are in that one teetering basket -- you lose the game.

The solution was plain: walk away from it. Stop playing. So I did.

But when I walked away from it, I walked away from something else, as I am gradually recognizing: I walked away from the fact that I am a maker. I delight in crafting things. I need to make beautiful things, and to show them to people, not because the beautiful things are in me, but precisely because they are not. The reason I could not make beautiful things in all that time I was trying to be great, was that I was looking for them in the one place they were not to be found: in myself. In my little-self, as Buddhists would call it: that haphazard collection of favierian or favieresque bric-a-brac that for one reason or another I identify as Me.

Turn it all inside out. Make an art of service, make a service of art. The paradox of losing to find, so familiar in both Christianity and Buddhism, began to operate at once. Making things in this way actually did begin to fill that hole.

The tricky thing, which I am still negotiating, is to treat the making seriously without slipping back into the habit of drinking poison with my morning coffee: without slipping into thinking that maybe I will make an end run and become famous despite myself. I post carelessly, and spend too little time rewriting, because of my dread that taking my work seriously will kill it. It's a sensible fear, but one that I want to get past, eventually. Maybe I want to spend only a quarter of my life on this, but I want to spend it well. I want to make the best stuff I can for you. I want to be able to share this wonder, this delight, this leap and buck of awareness. I want to make perfect paper boats, and send them down the stream.

A Dangerous Age

I curl up to sleep under the table
at staff meetings, and no one dares to wake me:
they don't know where the buzzing
rattle comes from, when they step too near,
but they damn well know what it means.

Nothing of me is safe.
My heart beats like a son of a bitch;
my blood foams, boils over. Never
have I been so ferocious, so glad to live.
I climb the sky with the Sun. Where I bite
I leave marks. I sharpen my claws on mountains
and tear them to shreds.

It is a dangerous age, they say.
Hah. They have no idea.

The Elements

You used to find them with your fingers in the electric blanket. The elements, some adult said, preposterously. You knew what the elements were. They lived in the cup of the periodic table, sloshed up on either side. Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon. They were very important, and if you were very good and learned their names you could hold them in your mind's hand, like plus or minus, times or divide, and pre-empt the physical world, and everyone would admire you, would smile at each other over your head, would be amazed at your precocity. The elements. They were the letters the world was written with. You knew them.

But these, these forbidden lines of warmth, these were something else again. You found them with your fingers. They were in the physical world, in the world itself, and they were nameless.

And later you would find them again. They might run from the nipples to the hollows where shoulder, pec, and collarbone converge. They might run down the inner arm from armpit to elbow crease, and on down to the wrist, where they would multiply and blossom, running every which way in the hands. They might run from the tenderest flesh of the genitals, deep under the inguinal ligament, and surface again where the pevic bones give way to the softness of the belly. Different on everyone. Running fast or slow, loud or quiet, warm or cool, following different courses. And colors might spark and flicker, depending on how your own encountered them.

Something analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty applied to them, you thought. You eyed the meridian charts of Chinese medicine skeptically: it seemed to you that you could either chart them, or feel where they were, but you couldn't do both.

It's easy to get lost. It's always easy to get lost. In the forest paths seem to appear and then vanish. It's like that. But you can always come back to the hands and the feet and pick up the trail. The trail, or another one: it doesn't matter. And if your heart gets lost, as it does, you just hold still a bit until the anxiety, and the wish to prove something, bubbles up and away. You come back -- like coming back to the breath, in shamatha – you come back to the touch, to your hands on their skin. It's always there. You just forget to attend.

Only The Sun Makes Sense

Nothing that they told us was true.
You can't even begin to add up
the sidelong looks, the gestures of eye and hand,
the sudden intakes of breath. And why?
We worried and worried but in the end
The light was so intense
that none of us could have seen the others,
even if we had been thinking of anything but light.

The buttery taste of saffron, the yellowness
compounding --
The shadows of leaves,
the shapes incised on the wall --
a listening --
Still this longing,
Still this longing.

Lets get naked you said, and we got naked
because naked is what we do, it's the language
we spoke in the old country.
Listen, we try to listen, and the train whistles
red-shift into the distance. All those galaxies
fleeing from us.

I wanted to write manuscripts
illuminated, interlaced, fretted and twined
with letters ornamented so intricately that
you couldn't help but read them beautifully;

And as a ten year old I carved with a ballpoint pen
“remember me” into the soft wood of my bunk bed
imagining the dislocated floaty feeling of the person
assigned to getting rid of the words. Somebody,
somewhere, sometime, would have
to erase me intentionally.
Not a large victory, but I took what I could get.

And again. Nipples like gumdrops
or like new flowers,
warm flesh, eyes
bright with tears:
Where can we think to, that we have not already been?
None of us makes sense
None of us makes sense
Only the sun makes sense.

The Age of Wonder


I am reading with delight and admiration Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, subtitled “How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.”

I am thinking that he discovered how to write this kind of book by a happy accident. He made his name as a biographer: he wrote wonderful biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, which is how I come to know of him. These are full set-piece biographies, massive books that are both narratives and reference works for literary scholars. Need to know what Coleridge was reading, who was in his social circle, and where he was living at age 34? Look it up in Holmes.

Having read these vast tomes – excellent of their kind – I went on to pick up whatever I could find by Holmes. This is basically how I read: I find someone I think is worth reading, and then I just read everything they've written, no matter what it's about. I fashioned my undergraduate education in precisely the same way – found teachers I admired and then just took all their classes – and I've never regretted the method. What I found next was a very odd book. It was called Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. You might think it was simply the scraps of writing he couldn't make into books, a hodge-podge of short biographical narratives stitched together by his own experience of biographical writing. He's quite clear that some of the research and writing in it is gleaned from failed book projects. But something wonderful and exciting is happening, which will culminate eventually in The Age of Wonder. He liberates biography from the plodding year by year sort of Anglo-Saxon chronicle. These are and aren't biographies. They're good-parts biographies.

If you read a lot of biographies, as I do, you'll know that there's almost always a lot of dull plodding reading in them, along with some dazzling nuggets of information and insight. What Holmes began to do is simply drop the plodding parts, and string the stories together according to a theme. The result is uncommonly rich and illuminating.

So The Age of Wonder is a set of biographies: in it is everything you would remember after reading full biographies of Joseph Banks (the pioneering ethnographer of Tahiti), William and Caroline Herschell (the brother and sister team that gave us “deep space,” and the realization that at night we see the light of stars that burned out thousands of years ago), and Humphry Davy (the brilliant young chemist and poet), along with fascinating accounts of the early “aeronauts” of ballooning, Mungo Parks' exploration of Africa, the controversy about Vitalism and how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written as a response to it and an exploration of it, and a number of other fascinating byways. It is a strangely constructed book. Banks weaves through it – as President of the Royal Society, he is pivotal at several points in all these narratives – and Holmes' love of the Romantic poets, and sympathy for their aims, weaves through it all as well. The result is illuminating in both directions. The scientists emerge as wonderfully engaging people – themselves very much contributors to Romantic literature and ideas – and the Romantic poets come off as considerably more complex and nuanced in their responses to science than a parroting of Wordsworth's “we murder to dissect” would lead you to believe. What Holmes finally does, brilliantly, is demonstrate that this the scientists and poets of this generation were at work on the same project, had the same appetite for exploration and the same faith in experiment.

Tintagel



On the clifftop, The Western Sea
sings softly like a girl working
home alone, folding laundry;

the pools of last night's rain
are brilliant in this morning's sun.
They've drowned the green

green grass; my shoes
are soaked; glassy water
flames around my feet.

I am a morsel for the world's maw.
What business does an old and fat man have
to talk of the love at the world's end?

Still cradled by the halo
of the unseen growing sun
the song comes again,

the drops burn on my fingertips,
old stories turn young, and
The blades of greening cut the light

in splinters, spinning
in the rush of clear water. Below me
the sea goes on,

folding waves to put away
on shelves of level sand,
humming gently to itself.

Once upon a morning, bright as this
before the stones had fallen, the
sea wilder maybe, he came

gleaming in his armor,
His hair as yellow in the wind as
grass is green, his smile

young and wondering;
and the old king foolishly, foolishly
opened the gates and let him in.

Shove

This is bogus too: this poetry, this
posturing. And so is love, and so is
holding love at bay; and so
is that violent hammering,
the inquiry of science.

Break it to bits
and get to the smallest bit. Look far enough
and look to the beginning of time.
Nonsense. There is no smallest bit, and
there is no beginning. Superstition. Poor
giddy lovesick trembling ape. The truth is
you have vanished already in the effulgence of doubt.

All you want is not to die; not knowing
that you're already dead. You dread nothing more
than losing what you never had. But suppose I die?
asks the rotting corpse. What if I get old?
frets the mummy. Let us whisper in their ears:
listen, dear, you're swarming with maggots already.
Your wrinkles are so old they've turned to paper dust.
What do you think you have to worry about?
What more do you imagine will happen?

This already is the disaster. The worst
has come to the worst, push has come to shove;
You are death dreaming from the coffin:
you are suspended in dissolution.

The clouds rise and topple, breaking slowly
over vanishing shores of air. This is it. This
is what being buried alive feels like:
like the green savannahs opening up
when we shivered at the edge of the trees.

In Between

His nightcap is baby blue, sitting a little crooked on his head, and his jaw hangs open. He's perfectly still. I check, just in case. Yes, his thin chest rises a little, and falls. Still with us.

I squeeze between the back of the chair and the stair-rail, and gently rub his shoulders. The little muscle left pools in the crannies of the bone like a soft enameling; my fingertips move gently, gently into it. Whether he's really aware of me, with the topmost layer of consciousness, I couldn't say. Martha said later that his face changed, while I was massaging him. His body knew I was there, anyway. You can tell. That topmost layer hardly ever engages now, anyway, and just as well: it would be awkward for him, being massaged by his son in law, if he knew it was happening.

I do the thin sheeting of the pecs, laid over the tines of the ribs. Reach behind to the lower back. All very slow, and very tender. It's hard for some people to understand how little pressure is needed or wanted for someone this old and this close to death. It's more a laying on of hands than anything like kneading. You always need to let go of the urge to do something, in massage, but never more than with the very old. You don't press; you don't rub. You just let your hands settle and sink.

His wife fusses. Such a favor I'm doing! It's not a favor, of course. I'm far happier doing this than “visiting.” I'm good at this. Touching people is what I do. Making conversation, that I do as a favor.

In any case, I owe him. I took his favorite daughter away, when she was 19, and didn't even marry her, for six long years. He never said anything, but it made him unhappy. At the wedding, my own father tells me, when he said something about being glad Martha and I were marrying, Ernie muttered “Well, it's about time.”

That was nearly thirty years ago. We used to go out on the river on his little motorboat: down the Columbia to the Willamette or upriver to Tomahawk Island. Very gentle and unambitious. Picknicking, really. Very unlike my own father's expeditions, where the first order of business was to get entirely away from any trace of humankind, into the wilderness, and then to scale some particular peak, find some particular cave. Ernie liked humankind, and all its works. He loved watching the ships and barges move slowly on the river. The odd riverbank detritus: bits of wreckage, odd-shaped bolts. We didn't try to get anywhere or do anything, in particular. Just pottered about. The point was just to be uncrowded, out in the open, in the free air.

Now he mostly sits in the dim room, watching the television at whiles, but most of the time sleeping, or gliding like this in the in-between spaces of consciousness, not in this world and not in the next. Hovering.

Martha opens the curtains and the sliding glass door. Cool air and light comes into the dim, overheated room. Ernie finally wakes a little, reaches for her hand, and she sits quiet with him a while.

When we go, we close the door and the curtain again. He doesn't like the light and outside air, now. Not for very long at a time.

Sonnet: Mr Banks Grieves for his Lady.

I took my Lady to the coral sand,
beloved of all. The oiled bodies nesting --
the bloody-headed grief -- we understand
nothing now. If we try to explain the testing
and the dalliance in English words
it goes astray: it was neither love nor whoring
but something in between. The brilliant birds'
feathers in the young men's hair, girls snoring
at noon and waking to stretch like tabby cats;
the brisk trade, a shining nail for a fuck;
the easy unrolling of the tapa mats:
all gone. We turned for home and lost our luck:
Our crew halved by fever; my good hound
Lady dead, in sight of English ground.

Uncials


I have loved uncial letters from the moment I saw them. Clear, easy to write and to read, each one beautiful in itself and nestling beautifully with each other. To me one of the great mysteries of history is how such a lovely alphabet gave way to ugly, clotted, gothic lettering, which is tedious to write and even more tedious to read: who can have thought that this was an improvement? It's like the mystery of American domestic architecture. In 1913, when my house was built, they knew how to make beautiful houses. But a generation later, they had stopped, and were building hideous things, everywhere, all the time, even though people had become much more prosperous, and could better have afforded beautiful houses. A demon of ugliness seems to have possessed the whole nation. What causes such mass lapses of taste?

I think beauty is universal, and that when one person thinks a thing is beautiful, and another thinks the same thing ugly, one of them is wrong. The tail-sting here is that people are almost never looking at the same thing. I don't know what framed the vision of the people who loved gothic lettering, but whatever it was, it made that script beautiful. Likewise, there was something that made a 1960's split-level ranch house beautiful to people, which I never learned to see, even though I was alive then. There was some context, some sequence of images, that made up for the blank spaces and awkward proportions, the bare cold corners and unframed windows. I think, as I must, that my vision is truer, but I also must bear in mind that I am missing something. It's difficult, when it's something I care this much about. I am tempted to sink into the contemptuous attitude of James Howard Kunstler. But that attitude is a deeper mistake than the mistakes it responds to: it forgets that beauty derives its power and importance from love, and not the other way around.

Easter, 2010

This morning the son of God opened his eyes,
stiff and sore, his eyes gummed with clotted tears,
and stumbled to the door of the queer low room,
where the stone was rolled away.

Morning, sun washing roof and garden.
He looked a while, the horror fading,
listening to the birdsong. “I never get used to it,”
he thought, and ruefully smiled at the grave-wrappings
dangling from his wrists. The air was fresh.

He thought of you and grinned, at some
quick secret joke. “It's worth it, after all,” he thought.
“Now I wonder where a son of man gets coffee,
and this a holiday? And where shall I wash up?”

Gabriel and Christina



Across the way a blue umbrella fishes in and out of the new green leaves.

Three girls run in out of the rain, awkwardly, thighs turned in and heels flying out; but happy for all that, laughing at each other.

I think of Christina, the other Rossetti, turning her thighs in, tending her father, curbing her temper.

She should have been the best of the Victorian poets. Perhaps she was anyway: but broken by the stupidities that also, backwards, broke her brother.

Gabriel buried his poems with his young wife, when he was going to be a great painter. The grief was real enough: but later, when he decided he was going to be a great poet instead, he had her dug up, the sheaf of poems exhumed. The poems were soaked through with something. But he thought he could restore the poems, maybe; and he wandered through chloral nightmares ever after. And not a great poet anyway, after all that. He was a painter if he was anything. He might have been saved by what broke his sister: a sense of proportion, of duty, of unimportance. But he had to be a great something. A great artist, a great poet, a great lover. Hence his titanic love affair with Mrs Morris, which dwindled gradually away to something even he felt to be ridiculous.

We have paid some attention, if not enough, to women being ruined by the expectation of service; but we have not paid nearly enough attention to men being ruined by the expectation of greatness.

I've done my damnedest to raise ordinary children, neither servants nor leaders, who will take their turns serving or leading as occasion demands.

Human beings, like cats, are incorrigibly but flexibly hierarchical. Dogs establish hierarchies once and for all, and are happiest being alphas or betas ever after, whichever it may be. We're not like that. We're never quite happy in our places. Never secure in power, never happy in service. Laying rigid gender roles on top of that makes it worse. We need above all to be able to renegotiate, according to the stresses and demands of our lives, if we are to work, or love, fruitfully and happily.

I have said before that I don't have a liberal bone in my body. I don't believe in equality, not for a moment: I think one of the deepest urges of human beings is to place themselves in hierarchies, to find their place, to have heros and mentors, disciples and adorers. What makes me look and behave rather like a Liberal is my conviction that these places have to be lightly held and easily abandoned. The yen for power and the yen to serve easily become pathological, when they become formalized. To me an equilibrium of equality is not something to be aimed at in human relationships, social, political, or erotic: what's healthy is precisely the seesaw of power, the alternation of roles. There's nothing wrong with being a master or a servant. What's wrong is being stuck as the master or the servant.

April WTLP Zine

April's WTLP Zine, an all-poems edition, is out. My poem "Indigo" is in it. (Also not to be missed is Sage's puff of my massage skills, at the very bottom.)

The World's Cursor

I am followed by trails of light:
Every motion cuts lines in the air.

Even a cursory glance discovers
the divine waitress pouring

slack-jawed while our cup
runs over with trouble.

I am a cursive script. Every
maddening letter of my life

must join with the next: and though
I solemnly swear or affirm

that I will not tell the whole truth,
after years of coursing

they still have not found
a cure for candor.

Fragility

Maybe it's like practicing for a sort of death. A way to pretend at fragility, to inhabit, for however brief a time, sheer breakability, to enter the underworld and prepare yourself for what it will feel like to be helpless.

When I grow up and become a real blogger with a Wordpress blog and quick-draw html prowess, I'm going to have smorgasblog like Bonta. Till then I'll just keep on occasionally, arbitrarily and inconsistently linking to things like this amazing post of Kristen McHenry's, about the childhood doll she saved up for 14 months to buy.

Good Morning

Now this is Spring: the deep dark and the long steady rain.

No hint of morning yet: somewhere above the clouds the sky must be changing color, but no sign of it here below. The rain is soft but persistent; the parking lot of Tosi's glimmers, shimmies. Each raindrop, as it strikes, is a vanishing pixel, catching streetlight or traffic light or headlight: the whole surface wavers like an old tv screen. Beyond, the cars kick up wakes of spray behind, and cast beams of lighted droplets forward.

In the cafe, people talk quietly. It's slow: Jimmy comes out from the kitchen and perches at the booth of the old-timers by the window. The radio plays softly, some old song about longing to go out dancing.

As I've been writing, the sky has imperceptibly lightened. At least I suppose so: the doug firs have darkened -- their black sillouettes are clear now against the sky.

And now a tide of blue-gray light is slowly washing in, from everywhere and nowhere. Morning. The rain patters on, the parking lot gleams as before, but you can sense that somewhere the gods are waking, that restless intelligences are abroad now. Intention is washing into the world with the light. People have plans, ambitions, agendas. All over the city they're jolting awake with alarm clocks, launching themselves out of bed, shaving, applying makeup, running over their daily list of fears and hopes for the day, reminding themselves of appointments, tasks undone, disputes unsettled.

I say I'm a morning person, but it's not this moment of the morning that I belong to. It's the moment before this one, when the doug firs first pick themselves out against the paling sky. I have nothing to do with the frantic preparation of faces, and I want nothing to do with it. Let them go and fight their battles. There's nothing I want out there. I want the touch of your hand, the slow sleepy bright smile, the pools of lamplight, the gradual wash of cloudlight.

Good morning. Good morning, dear.

Making Sense of Things

Morning. The trees peering sleepily into their mirrors to see how they look in their new leaves.

There are six ways to order three different objects; twenty-four ways to order four. I had forgotten how to figure that out – I came late to that branch of mathematics, and it doesn't stick very well – but I was able to think my way to the algorithm, using my old programmer habits (start with the simple cases, and look for the patterns) and visualizing the objects as a row of buttons. I still can't remember the names for these things. But the formula is enchantingly simple. The number of ways to order 3 things is 3 x 2; the number of ways to order four objects is 4 x 3x 2, five is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2, etc. The solution came to me so easily that I must have remembered something about it. I wonder what. Those ghostly memories fascinate me. Did I remember only that the solution was simple and easy to remember? Did I remember an image of a row of buttons? Or did I only remember that the problem had a solution, that I once knew? That would be enough to keep me confidently gnawing at it till I got it.

This is how I thought about it. Two buttons – lets call them Fred and George – can only be ordered two ways: either Fred comes first or George comes first. So now we're going to introduce a third button. Call her Amy. Say Fred and George are standing like this:

(Fred) (George)

Button Amy has three different places she can stand: before Fred, in between Fred and George, or after George.

(Amy?) (Fred) (Amy?) (George) (Amy?)

So there are three possible orders with Fred and George standing this way. But Fred and George could also stand the other way around, with George first. In that case Amy would, again, have three different choices about where to stand, making six possible orders (3 x 2) in all. And whenever you're going to add a button, it will be just the same. If you have a 20 buttons, there will be 21 slots the new button can take, so the formula for the number of orders of 21 buttons can take will be 21 x (however many orders the other 20 can take.)

Easy to fill in the parenthesis. You'd figure out 20 buttons the same way: 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take): so it's 21 x 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take.)

And you figure out 19 the same way, of course. 19 x (however many the other 18 can take), which gives us 21 x 20 x 19 x (however many the other 18 can take). At this point of course the pattern is obvious. And now you've solved the problem for any number of buttons, be it billions, or trillions, or even a large number, such as the number of pennies in the national debt. Lovely!

I didn't learn this stuff until I was in my thirties – I have a rather odd educational history – so I remember clearly my delight in it when I first came across it. And the counter-intuitive knack, which you use all the time in calculus, of deferring the working out of the actual solution until after you've understood the pattern. The pattern is (the number of slots) times (the number of orders of the rest). Once you understand that clearly, the only problem you actually have to solve, at the end of the series, is: how many orders can two objects take? And even my soggy old over-fifty brain can do that by dead reckoning. It's Fred first and then George, or George first and then Fred. No other option. Two different orders.

This all started because I was walking down the street and saw a business logo – four squares arranged in a big square, with one letter in each square – and I wondered which way you were supposed to read them: right to left and then top to bottom? Or top to bottom and then right to left? And then my eye started playing with different paths, and that brought me to wondering: how many different paths through these letters are possible? How many orders are there, anyway?

I frowned, thinking, I know I knew this once. So I set to work to recover the knowledge, and after walking a couple blocks I had it back.

My mind does this sort of thing all the time. It's always ferreting about for intelligibility, playing with patterns. Letters and numbers magnetize me, fascinate me. There are few pleasures more intense to me than that of figuring out a simple solution to something apparently confusing and complex. Knowing enough of Old English, Old Norman French, and the laws of phonetic change that English spelling actually makes sense is a daily gratification. I find the sort of mind that can rest easy with a spelling such as “knight” baffling. How can you accept such a thing? How can your mind not ache? How can it not ask: what 'k'? why is the 'i' long? what are that 'g' and 'h' doing there? How can this have seemed like the right way to spell this word to somebody?

Even more baffling to me: how can you be proud of knowing how to spell the damn word, without understanding why it's spelled that way? How can you lord it over someone who tries to spell it in a way that actually makes sense? Someone who writes “nite” is at least using systematic rules, is bringing his or her intelligence to bear on the problem. Every day I read people sneering at examples “illiteracy” which seem to me far more admirable than the obedient memorization of a set of opaque facts.

I don't want to just know the right answers. I want to understand the answers.

It all comes down a respect and tenderness for other human beings. An Anglo-Norman monk sat in his English scriptorium, on a day when the new leaves were just coming out, faced with an impossible task. He was keeping legal records, depositions: he was supposed to write down, for the sake of our Lord Christ, the noises the Saxons made in saying their word for the seigneur -- that click at the beginning of the word, the cat-like hiss in the middle. What to do? Well, 'k' would do for the click, but what about that horrible throat-clearing sound? 'g' at least put it at the back of the throat. Throw in an 'h' to suggest the hissing. What else can you do? He dipped his pen in the ink and carefully began to write.

The man did his best with what he had. A few centuries later the click and the hiss were gone, worn away with the rub of the years: the only sign of them left was the lengthening of the 'i' into a diphthong – what we call “long 'i'” – to compensate for the lost hiss. But the nonsensical spelling was enshrined in writing now. It was “correct,” and everybody had to use it, other people just as hapless, children sitting in schoolrooms on days when the new leaves were just coming out, and they ached to be outside playing.

It's not the rules, not the rules that count. It's not the correctness. It's trying to make sense of things. And the new leaves. Those are what count.

Portland

Cloud staining cloud;
silver seeping through white screens;
tarnish soaking through cotton.

Forget love, forget the writing of poems.
Come with me. Walk on moss crusted sidewalks:
tell stories about five year olds

and the deeds of long dead cats.
Ask riddles you learned when you were small.
Tell your favorite color.

Walk the curb like a balance beam;
pool your change with me
to buy a Three Musketeers.

We'll watch the sky change
and the rain sweep down from the hills
until the gutters run clear as glass.

Helium Head Revisited

Carolee made a poem out of my "Helium Head" post. I'm so delighted!

Four Stations: Sun and Moon

Then, the lighted doorway: new leaves glimmering;
the waxing moon
losing her footing on turbulent clouds.
Softness of breast under sweater. Goodbye:
always goodbye.

---

Now morning, half light, hunched shoulders,
sorting through versions of the day, deciding
on the next press release, my own handler.
What the President meant to say --
What the President was trying to convey --
Hush. No one is listening.

---

This evening
I will drive through a concrete tunnel and up a hill
to where the sunset country gleams,
too bright to look at. Over the West Hills,
into the land of promise. No one can see:
The traffic will slow
and grope. An orange and violet diffusion,
the sky wearing garish lipstick, the road paint
glitttering. Sun
will hold my head in the vice of her hands:
an unwelcome aunt determined on a kiss.

---

Listen. This is all I have.
Don't think that there's more concealed,
better to come, delights yet
undisclosed. I love you like
a mother mouse loves the squirming skin
jellybeans of her litter;
I love you like a stag in rut
loves any doe that crosses his path.
I love you like a wolf loves
his loping packmates,
like a swan loves the glide of his wife,
like the moon loves the clouds that stumble her.

Helium Head

Yet another confession: I am a helium head. That's what I understand they call them in the Air Force, anyway: people who are obsessed with lighter-than-air flight. Airplanes, forcing their way through the air with props or jet engines, do almost nothing to satisfy my craving for flight. What good is flying if you can't feel the wind in your hair, and can't hear the silence of the sky? I want to sail in the sky, not to motor in it. I dream of vast ships, constructed of high-tech filament and membrane, using the wind the same way a sailing ship does. They'd be transparent, barely there, like the jellyfish I've seen in Oregon Coast Aquarium, barely distinguishable from the water, using the water, not fighting it. My ships would use the air, the same way. Airplanes are capsules for transiting a hostile environment. They're for land beasts that really don't trust the sky. Like so much of modern industrial culture, they're essentially hostile to the natural world, wanting to conquer it, to tame it, rather than to understand it and work with it.

I've read that one reason German pilots were the most accomplished, early in the second world war, was that they nearly all trained as glider pilots first. They understood the air as an environment more sensitively than pilots accustomed to bulling their way through it from the start.

The ships would have to be huge. Forget jet packs and angel wings: they're for people who've never really thought about the physics of flight. A condor weighs 20 lbs and has a wing span of 10 feet; by plain arithmetic proportion a human being with a little gear would need a wing span of maybe 100 feet These are idle numbers – the progressions aren't arithmetic. Rigid airship builders reckoned that helium ships “broke even” at about eighty feet. To sail in the air you'd need to accept these proportions: you would be like those little dots, the nuclei of jellyfish, not like a superhero. If you wanted to carry other people, or freight, the proportions would of course be even greater. Most people I think lose visceral interest at this point. What good would flying be if you weren't the center of attention? But if you really play boldly with the scales, you realize that at really large sizes, the penny-per-mile cost of bulk freight could be astonishingly low. Grain to Russia? Bulldozers to Peru? Easy. Go straight there. Forget all the railroads and sealanes, the port costs. Pick it up wherever it is, take it wherever they want it.

I don't imagine my ships would ever land; possibly they'd never even anchor. You'd be winched up and down, maybe. You'd ascend through the gossamer sails and faintly prismatic wings, under the soap-bubble helium membranes, to find your place, check a few things, reef a sail or two there, extend a rudder membrane there, and set a spinnaker floating a couple hundred feet out to catch a thermal, and you'd be off to – anywhere at all.

Face Cradle Frame and Heated Fleece

I stopped by Robert Hunter's shop last week and bought an adjustable face cradle – or rather an adjustable frame for the face cradle. It's been ten years since I bought my table from him. The table looks practically new, ten years later, and Hunter looks much the same too, except that his hair is quite white now.

His tables are legendary, in Portland. I set up to do a massage for a fellow therapist, and she says, “is that a Hunter table?” Like a violinist asking “is that a Strad?”

The table is dark green – hunter green, come to think of it – and it's two or three inches wider than standard: I'd always disliked having to tuck my hands to keep my arms from dropping off the table. I didn't know at the time that I'd be working as a therapist, and that I'd be setting up and taking down the table ten times a week: it was just good luck that I got a table that could stand such use. A factory-made table would have come to bits in my first year of practice.

But after splurging on the table, I got cheap about the face cradle frame, and bought an inexpensive, rigid one. It's been okay for most of my regulars, but it's not quite comfortable for one or two, and not really ideal for any of them – usually it's better for the cradle to slant down a little, so as to open the back of the neck. So, business being good, I finally went back and got an adjustable frame.

Hunter pulled a frame out of a pile of them, and glued a couple velcro strips on as we talked. I thought of how odd it is, now, to have contact like this with a craftsman: to buy something that's not packaged, and have it hand-tweaked in the shop, while talking of this and that. He gave me a couple pointers about using it – he's a massage therapist himself, and his Reiki certification hangs on the wall – and I walked out with just the frame, and stuck it in the basket of my bike, and rode on to work, feeling that I'd wandered back into some pre-industrial Shire, and liking the feeling a lot.

But I continued my buying spree in a thoroughly 21st Century fashion, by buying a heated fleece on E-Bay from someone in Florida. It left Hodgson, Illinois, according to the UPS tracker, two days ago, so it should be here any time.

I always tell people to crank up the heat before I come, but they seldom do it enough, and if they do, then of course I'm too warm. There's a ten degree gap between the comfortable temperature for giving massage and the comfortable temperature for receiving it – a perenniel problem. Many spas have a running battle about the temperature of their massage rooms: spa owners insisting on the high 70s and the pink-faced, sweating therapists longing for the high 60s. So I've been meaning to get one of these pads for a long time. It introduces some complexity (where do I plug in?) and some bulk to my travel kit, but I think it will be worth it. One of the very first things I learned, doing massage, is that a client who gets cold on the table is never, ever going to call you back. And this is the worst time of the year: people are so anxious for it to be Spring and so excited to see the sun that they fling open the windows and entirely fail to notice that it's still 50 degrees in the shade. After an hour on the table they notice, all right, but by then it's too late.

Lines Too Early for Easter

for the nicks and snags of battered hearts, and livers that like oysters
are helplessly gathering poisons in their red and rusty cloisters;

for the ribs that close and open like the fronded beards of mussels
and lungs that sweetly blossom in the dirty air that rustles

in the trachea, and whispers past the thyroid, dries the throat,
and catches in the nostrils like an old and dusty coat.

Person-Permanence

As I start to speak, I watch her face go blank. Her face has grown more expressive, more revealing, with age. She used to be able to keep an expression of bright interest through several of my sentences. Now it goes dull at once. I finish speaking as quick as I decently can, and normal conversation resumes. But anyway, I've done my duty; I've been sociable. If I say one or two more things in the course of the evening everyone can say it's been a good time. She has never actually wanted to hear anything I say, of course, but it does make me a little melancholy, having it made so obvious.

I'm the wrong son for her. Slow, inarticulate, and unexpected. Sometimes when I get in the car and turn on the radio, I find that I've left it on the classical station: I listen to that when I feel up to a challenge. But if I'm tired and seeking comfort, hearing those slow tempos and unpredictable sounds come on makes me almost savage. I want the familiar, comfort-sound. Old rock-n-roll. I think that's what it's like for my mother when I begin to speak. I'm always difficult, a quarter-tone off, unnecessarily complicated, agonizingly slow. No wonder her face goes slack and her eyes wander slightly out of focus when she hears my voice. She follows what other people say with interest, most of the time, anyway; though gaps have become apparent with them too. Always her attention has had a way of snapping off suddenly and completely. Like a light going out. And if you're a child, dependent on her for your sense of self, it's like the whole world goes suddenly, utterly, and inexplicably pitch dark.

I read a book once, ill-written and not very smart, but passionate, about growing up as the child of a narcissist. I didn't find much about it that was illuminating, but I recognized at once the shared experience. It's like living in a theater: either you're under the floodlight of intense attention, or you're forgotten, and there's no transition between the two states. You're either the most important thing in the world, or nothing. Onstage or offstage.

It gradually becomes less confusing as you learn that the light and dark have nothing to do with you; they're coming on and off according to the internal needs of the parent, and that they are useless as navigational aids. You also come to learn that there are people who aren't that way, people for whom you don't disappear as soon as you leave their field of vision.

The worst of it is that you yourself are prone, and will all your life be prone, to narcissistic habits of thought. Dewey makes a great deal of infants learning object-permanence: what the child of a narcissist needs to learn is person-permanence. They're still there, even after your attention leaves them.

Maybe this psychological damage is part of why the Buddhist conception of multiple lives and permanent relationships has been so important to me. Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing as a temporary person, no such thing as a one-off connection. Sure, bodies and personalities are impermanent, but persons are not. Karma, the unfolding of the consequences, is inexorable. The web of connections has no loose threads. Every single relationship you have ever had will have to be worked out, healed, made good, eventually. It is the exact opposite of the narcissistic world-view, in which phantom people float into view out of a vast nothingness and abruptly vanish back into it.

Is the Buddhist view true? Probably not. But the narcissist view is not either. The conception of other persons is probably the most complex and most human thing our brains do, it is at the very limit of what human consciousness can achieve, and we no doubt are very bad at it. Having confidence that I really understand what – for instance – my mother sees when she looks at me would be silly. Exactly how and why we exist for each other is a dizzyingly complex problem, and whatever conceptual scaffolding we set up to work on it, we had better recognize it at once as flimsy and inadequate.

All we can ask of a view of reality is that it give us some traction. What we are really dealing with is probably beyond our understanding. But anyone can tell the difference between having something solid in their hands, and grasping at air. The permanence of persons gives me something to work with. I'm still working blind, but there is real stuff under my fingers, which responds to my touch. That's good enough for me.

The Winter Thing

After the CPR class we hand in the dummies
we have been kissing through plastic
sanitary barriers. Just heads and torsos, all male;
and then the babies. A closetful of baby-dolls.

The old fireman stacks them with indifference
but I noticed how he cradled his, when he taught us
what to do with choking infants, even though
it wasn't on the syllabus for adult CPR;
he was used to having a baby on his arm.

All night the stacked men and babies will wait.
They won't move a muscle, breathless,
waiting for kisses through plastic again.

---

Sometimes the Winter Thing returns in March
And carefully fits her mouth
(or whatever that is) over your own
and breathes the air you were hoping for;

or again she will extrude her stomach
and kiss you with her whole reversible body,
and you're inside, dissolving,
without knowing you've been eaten.

Better to wait quiet in the closet, in the dark,
and listen to the air come on and off;
hear the hum of the electric clock, and
take such signs of love as come to you.

I Knew This Would Happen...
... if I read too much about William Morris. It's not a real pen, real ink, or real paper yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Writing, Blogging, and Online Community

Some time ago I wrote that a surprising amount of my intellectual, spiritual, and emotional life takes place here, in the writing of this blog. It only does so because of the community of readers and writers which supports it. An online community is a strange thing. The ties between us are light and ephemeral, in a way; though at this point in my life, several of my blogging friendships have outlived many of my supposedly more grounded and durable “real life” friendships. Events that rock or destroy “real life” friendships – moving to the other side of the country, illness, taking to drink, marrying – can leave these supposedly lesser relationships quite undisturbed. People drift away – or vanish abruptly -- and return unpredictably: but the conversation goes on, and it deepens year by year, as the context grows richer.

Plus you can do something with online relationships that you can't do with real ones: you can go back in time. It's not something any of us does very often, but can be strangely illuminating, sometimes, to go back in your own or someone else's archives and revisit conversations from five years ago. It's never exactly what you thought it was. Some blogs of course disappear over the years, and accidents befall digital records just as they do paper records. Things disappear. But I don't think there has been anything in the world, not even in the copious letter-writing 19th Century, quite like the preserved conversations we have in the comment-threads to our blogs and the archives of our yahoo groups.

I love the quirkiness of what people write in the comments. You get to see your audience, in a way that writers have seldom been able to see them, except in the rather stilted and often agenda-ridden context of formal readings. You get to see them squirm and object; you get to see them admire fulsomely. You get to know that some of them will just be happy whenever a certain sentiment gets expressed, no matter how un-apt or clumsily worded it may be. You come to learn that some bonnets are always going to buzz the same way no matter what you bat them with. And you get a few of those invaluable readers who can tell exactly what you're driving at and will tell you baldly either that you got there, or that your car is in the ditch and you better haul it out.

And if you're very fortunate in your readers, as I have been, you'll find that they're up for anything, that there's nothing too risky, too pathetic, too strenuous, too boring, too complicated for them. My imagined audience, I have found, is much more narrow-minded and censorious than my real one. I find that when I take risks in my writing there is always some reader willing to see my bet and raise me -- to dare me to risk even more. You find that some things you'd always thought of as weaknesses are in the opinion of your readers strengths, and vice versa. My writing has become in many ways much more disciplined, but in other ways much more extravagant, than it was before I had this wonderful audience. I will write things now in my blog that I would not have dared to write even in my private journals ten years ago.

Why I am a Socialist

I am Socialist. Except I'm not. It's queer how the identifications we arrived at so painfully as we became adults haunt us, ever after. It's been a long time since revolutionary political theory held much charm for me, and I don't think revolutionary action ever held any charm any for me: I loathe mobs. When masses of people get all stirred up, for any reason, I get away as fast as I can. And being in a room with people who are all agreeing makes me feel like I can't breathe.

But this comes up because of reading a biography of William Morris: the biographer is at some pains to demonstrate that Morris remained a committed Socialist all his life, even if he became less active in his later years. The biographer is right: it is important to understand that he never “got over” Socialism, never repudiated it. But I suspect he remained a Socialist much as I have remained a Socialist. Not because he supported any particular plan of action, certainly not out of any yen for violence. When I say I'm a Socialist, now, really I mean only one thing: I mean to say no.

No, I don't agree that this is the best we can do. No, I don't agree that it's tolerable for one person to have at his personal disposal everything of value that ten thousand other people make, no matter what his virtues or their vices. No, I don't accept the justice of a market that drives people into meaningless repetitive jobs, into kowtowing to stupid, mildly or venemously abusive bosses, into watching their creativity and energy wither, their bodies stiffen and fatten, their minds grow brittle and resentful, their spirits starve, as the prime of their lives dribbles away. I don't accept it: I will never accept it. This is not how human beings are supposed to live, not how they are supposed to work.

More. I am a Socialist because, as Morris so succinctly put it, fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death. Because I am my brother's keeper, and he is mine.

I'm perfectly willing to entertain arguments against any proposal of any Socialist group -- or against all of them -- on grounds that they will make things worse instead of better. Often enough they have. But what I will not entertain, ever, is the idea that what we have now is acceptable. It's not.

Strangers and Dead People

But it's also partly that the words of strangers and dead people don't often have much for me now. Time was they could slap me across the face and make me change my life. But now they're more often white noise, even the classics: I use them to keep myself from thinking, not to think. I have spent too much time with them. It's living people I need now: it's your warm breast under my palms, your blog post, your voice on the phone, your email, the light of your eyes.

I come out of Central Library and the light falls, as it does in early Spring, crossways; there are shadowed canyons and bright pools of sky, beggars and county officials, women with lined faces, sherrifs painfully shaved, patient dogs tied to backpacks. The inarticulate love rises and makes my throat contract. There will never be words for this. But I know that the same sun is rising in Chennai, and that you are seeing the colors as painfully as I am. And I know that tonight my hand will rest lightly on the crown of your head, and the hair will be so soft that it will seem to move of its own accord. And you will send me email about something trivial that will make me realize, suddenly and completely -- as Tolstoy used to do -- I have to change my life: that the snow on your side of the continent is telling me things that I need urgently to know.

It's you, now, that hammer me, mark me, shape me.

Soon I'll have a birthday, and I'll have as many years as there are cards in deck. Imagine that!
Who would have guessed I would get so far? Or have such luck as to know so many brilliant and wonderful people? Some scientists speculate that the universe is tending, not to ever-increasing uniformity, but to ever-increasing improbability. I wouldn't know, but I know that has been the pattern of my life. It becomes less predictable, less known, less knowable, with each passing year.

Spring

My blood drips like burning gold;
my teeth are sharp; my politesse
can't conceal my ferocity. I'll eat you all,
hook, barb, line: I'll grind your ribs
between my molars.

The strength is coming
back into my hands, and the warmth is coming
back into the soil. Strange rooted things exult
and push into the air; tendrils
cinch on bricks and tear the mortar.

Your houses are falling. Your cars
are sliding sideways down the drives;
Your marriages split like melons
dropped from a grocery bag.
I'm back. As if I'd never gone.

Now the Books

Now the books crowd around me, hissing,
and all the words crawl frantically: the letter-
feelers waving and groping, and all
looking for consummations I can't deliver,
for the honey sweet of perfect understanding.

I do not know how I ever loved
bookstores and libraries; I think it was only
that I didn't understand that all those books
were written by people like me, desperate
for connection. No price
of lies or misdirection
too high to pay; only
listen to me! they plead, and
make me special, just this once!
You may be the last
who ever will pick up this book.

I am: I am the very last,
and it is too much to bear.
I can't read you all. I am a feckless tourist
who gives a few rupees and then runs,
pursued by beggars, and stumbles on the steps
of his hotel. I have no more to give.

The Children of God

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form:
poor in spirit is comforted,
and blessed are they that mourn.

Slender finger bones, sun-white, clean and
tumbled by wind on the sand;

blessed are they that hunger
and thirst after emptiness,
for they shall be filled.

Therefore the wise man's branches
are useless and gnarled,

therefore he does not act.
Blessed are the meek, for the forester
passes them by.

Blessed are the peacemakers
for they shall be

blown out like a candle,
and the end of desire is the end of suffering
and they shall be called the children of God.

---

Inspired by Qarrtsiluni's next theme, New Classics.

NumberFest

My friend Murali's Number Puzzle Site:

Number Puzzles and Mind Exercises for All Ages!

We worked together in the high and palmy days of Informix. He has an extraordinary gift for getting to the simple heart of apparently complex problems. Enjoy!

Quick, Slow

One of the things I like about bicycling is that you don't have to be a fast, rangy ectomorph to do it. I'm an endomorph – stocky, slow, heavily muscled. When we were running in Phys Ed, at school, I always straggled in with the last few guys, half a lap behind. I was hopeless as a baseball and basketball player: but I surprised people by being able to swarm up ropes or pegboards with ease. I had plenty of slow-twitch muscle, even if I couldn't run or hit a ball to save my soul.

When riding a bicycle, I can use all that muscle. I have a twenty-one gear bike, 3 by 7, and I just never use the bottom 14 gears. Other people will be pumping rapidly away, while I grind slowly along in the highest gears, keeping pace even though my legs are moving much more slowly. I will never be fast at anything, but I can make a bike go fast.

Part of what has made this phase of my life so rewarding is that I am no longer trying to be things I'm not, physically, as well as mentally. I will never be rangy and quick. Stocky and slow is what I am, for better or worse. I have never thought well on my feet. I'm easily flustered by dealing with more than one thing: no one will ever call me a good multitasker. I am cautious, slow, and meticulous. I hate hurrying, and for good reason: when I hurry I make mistakes, ludicrous mistakes, mistakes that quicker-witted people would never make no matter what the rush.

The only thing I've ever been quick at is written tests and pattern-matching games. I've always been the sort of person who aces tests; I'm usually done before anyone else, and can't imagine what they're lingering over. This is immensely useful in the modern world, which depends so heavily on testing and certification, but I've always been a little embarrassed by it. People who are far more capable than I, and who study much harder than I do, come out worse on tests. I'm unhappily aware of the unfairness of that.

---

I've been thinking about quickness and slowness because I secretly lost my temper last night. I was riding home from work, and came to a four way stop. A car came to the intersection from the left, and arrived a little before me. I came to a full stop, and waited for it, but the driver waved for me to go on through, so I did.

This infuriated me. I arrived home in a bad temper, and it took me half an hour to recover my equanimity.

I know: I can see the blank look on your faces. What's there to be angry about? She was just being nice, right?

Yes, I know that. But you're thinking like a quick person, not a slow person. Imagine what this is like for me. I'm operating at the far end of my comfort zone already, dealing with more than one moving object. I have a set of rules for evaluating whether things are safe, and for what I do next. This is not easy for me. I have to do a lot of my processing ahead of time. And suddenly, for no reason, somebody plunges me into a hasty re-evaluation of the whole situation, and demands a quick decision of me. This is what I am worst at. This is the sort of situation in which I make disastrous mistakes. I rushed into the intersection, my feet slipping on the pedals, just hoping that her evaluation was correct, and that it was actually safe for me to go. I didn't know whether it was or not. It would have taken me twenty seconds to figure that out and verify it. I don't think fast on my feet. I mean that. I'm not making it up or exaggerating it.

There were a couple subsidiary responses. I felt infantilized by her waving me through. Just because I'm on a bicycle, that doesn't make me a six year old. I don't need any favors: I just need people to follow the rules of the road. And since I knew I'd travel through the intersection more slowly than she would, it was simply stupid, objectively, to send us through in that order: the total time expended by us both would end up being greater. But of course that's just the kind of ideation that being angry sparks: I could have come up twenty other justifications for being angry. What really made me angry was being made to hurry, being made aware of my incompetence, being forced to do something I was bad at, and at her bland assumption that I ought to be happy to use her judgment rather than my own. I know, my judgment is slow and ponderous; but I prefer to use it anyway. What do I know about a stranger's judgment? For all I knew, she could be waving me into the path of of a truck.

I don't think she was wrong to wave me through. I don't think she should have done otherwise. I just want all of you quick people out there to understand that we slow people may not respond the way you expect us to. In another mood, I might have stubbornly stayed put, and motioned you to go first. Not because you're wrong, but just because my capacities are different from yours: and I need to use mine, not yours.

Faces Hanging in the Air

Morning light coming almost horizontal through the windows: the sort of light favored by trackers, because it outlines little shifts in elevation with shadows. If I turn my fingers right I can see, quite clearly, the involuted ridges and valleys that make fingerprinting possible.

Across the street, pink blossoms on the trees in the Rite-Aid parking lot. There are also tall trees, of the aspen or poplar sort, standing leafless with their branches pointing straight up at the sky; the victims of an arboreal hold-up. They don't believe this Spring-in-February nonsense.

A TriMet bus rumbles to a stop, interrupting the sunlight. Briefly I see a blond high school student's face; I think of Ezra Pound's “petals on a wet, black bough.” Then it rumbles on again, the sun comes again, and I have to peer against the glare to type: my reflection on the netbook screen, my beard gleaming silver and gold, the rims of my reading glasses sparkling, the chiaroscuro transforming my features into a strange intricate shoreline. I try to see past all this to what I ought to be writing about, but the sun is too much for me. I shouldn't have taken this seat by the window.

But I always take window seats if I can get them. I love to be inside looking out. I like old-fashioned houses with little windows. Windows for looking out of, not for displaying yourself in. There's a deep misunderstanding behind all these huge modern windows, the same misunderstanding that played out in literature last century as Realism: the idea that if you only made the window big enough and transparent enough you could erase the difference between inside and outside -- the failure to recognize that it's precisely the frame, the narrowness of the aperture, that makes the glimpse of the other world so compelling. If we wanted to be outside we could simply throw on a coat and go outdoors. If we wanted real life we could slap shut the book and call a friend. It's something else that we want, more complicated than that. We want to be both here and there, both safe and exposed. Nothing irritates me more than windows without molding: there's a whole totalitarian ethos embodied in that style of window, in the refusal to accept the mediation between inside and outside, the refusal to accept that people must be able to hide in order to be fully human. You see it again in modern coin design, where the faces spill right off the coin. No borders, no boundaries. No inside and outside allowed. I don't need or want to know what Jefferson looked like. Jefferson is dead. I need to know how we are holding his memory, what locket we're placing him in. The frame is really far more important than the face, and when you refuse the frame you refuse to enter into the conversation that makes Jefferson meaningful to us now. Where do we gather to look at him? What do we look through to see him? That's the question. Refusing to ask it is itself an answer: it says, we don't gather. We each look and see our own personal Jefferson. There is no table to gather around: there are only glaring disembodied faces of dead men hanging in the air.

Sliver

I got it out of your finger at last,
a long wicked stinger of wood.
The paper towels spotted with blood;
the sky outside spotted with stars.

---

This tremendous sprawling ruined body;
the spraddled limbs, like ships;
my lips gasping in winds to fill

some new Aeolus's bag;
each convulsive clutch of my heart
sending a surge of blood, a tidal bore,

up the rivers as far as little fishing towns
where the trout jump.
No one knows where they found me,

no one knows what to do with me:
a behemoth, an engine of appetites,
with ears spiraling up to heaven, and heels

punching muddy holes for cattle
to drown unwary in the Spring;
my belly swags and whales roll

end over end in its wake;
As I step seismographs
flinch, all over the globe.

---

We will go to New Zealand to see the Cross;
we will go to Alaska to see the Lights;
we will go to Montana, where the stars are closest;
we will take a tour of the sky, you said.

And all that while
The sliver lay dimly under the skin
like a twig dreaming under the ice.

---

First the needle, tracing the entry,
widening the wound. You gasp with pain. Smile unevenly.
Then the tweezers, nosing the wood, breaking a bit.
Again, and several tries, till finally
“is it out?” I ask, unbelieving.
“It's out!” you say.
And there it is, a little bloody barb
on the spotted paper towel, a tiny thing.
Great flowering mammals like us,
brought to cringing by a filament of wood
no bigger than a beetle's leg.

Not Napkin Art



The days of napkin art, alas, are over: Tosi has starting buying soft, patterned napkins that ballpoint simply shreds. But here's a bit of spiral notebook art.

A Beautiful House


William Morris, who was a master of many trades, from poetry to wallpaper design, was once asked what the highest product of artistic endeavor would be: he said, without a moment of hesitation, “a beautiful house.”

He did not mean a comfortable house. When someone complained that the furniture he designed was not comfortable, he said shortly, “if you want to be comfortable, go to bed.”

There were few people more aware of the ubiquity of suffering than Morris. Beauty was, to him, what you raised up against suffering: not to alleviate it – not to become comfortable – but almost you might say to justify it. He hated modern civilization not because it made the poor so poor, but because it gave them no opportunity to create something beautiful in recompense. It was one thing peasants to toil in the shadow of a magnificent cathedral that they and their forebears had built and decorated with their own hands over centuries, and quite another for the poor to grind out their days in a factory producing shoe-black, having raised nothing by all their work but monuments to ugliness. Just as poor, and just as much in servitude: but Morris thought the one life was worth living, and the other not.

There's often a breathtaking effrontery in Victorian radicals – in all radicals, I suppose. How the hell does one man know what makes another man's life worth living? And yet we all make our judgements about that, whether we acknowledge them or not, and they inform our politics and our family lives, our pastimes and our art.

I've lost confidence in much of my radicalism over the years, but I believe more strongly than ever that modern economies inevitably – because of their structure and not because of the wickedness of the people locked inside them – ruin the natural world, ensure that the artificial world will be hideous, and corrode human love and loyalty. I don't know how to change them – their ruthless abstraction and dehumanization. I know I participate in it daily, further it. I know that the demands of an economy that genuinely respected the natural world, made beautiful towns possible, and nourished human love and loyalty, would overwhelm me. I'm not up to it. I'm a weak, slack addict of convenience: I use things and people once, and throw them away. I want to be comfortable. I am myself one of the things the modern world has ruined: how (I whine) can I be expected to put it right?

And yet – and yet – despite all my wriggling, despite all my concessions, despite having made comfort the ruling priority of my life – somehow, even so, I just can't get quite comfortable. Neither can you.

Valentine's Day

She has beautiful face, like that of a pre-Raphaelite's model, a long jawline and strong eyes: I fell in love with her at once, in the abstract way that an artist falls in love with the perfect model. Never has there been the slightest twinge of the erotic between us. But she's beautiful, beautiful in repose, beautiful in motion.

And sad, grief-stricken, yesterday. I hugged her three times, twice more than I ought to have, wanting so much to make it better. I made it worse, if anything, pulling her attention back to the hurt. It's hard, if you're constructed as I am, to leave grief alone. The streak of vanity in me is always roused by it. Surely you can't be sad in the full sunlight of my affection and admiration? Not my affection and admiration, oh no, surely not!

But she was as sad when I left as when I came, in that desolate February house. She's usually happy, quick to laugh, energetic. She stood back from the doorway, impatient for me to be gone and leave her alone with her grief, her hair rucked up, her shirt askew. I longed to comb and tuck and pat everything tidy.

Well. Nothing to be done. Load the table into the car, toss the bag and the portable heater onto the seat, drive away under the cold white sky.

I used to feel useless and de trop so often. Now it's an unfamiliar feeling, an unpleasant reminder of unhappier days. At home I put my hands together, murmur a few “om manis,” and watch raindrops descend the windshield in erratic swithbacks. May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering. Right.

Exasperated with the Buddha and all his kind, not because they're wrong but because they're right. The suffering runs even deeper than we think, much deeper than the unkindnesses, infidelities, and disappointments that ostensibly cause it. Those are only the thin places, where we suddenly fall through into that underground river of misery. The river's running all the time, eating everything away underneath us. In the same way that the joy is always there in the sky. None of it ever goes away. We're churned between the two of them like pebbles in an agate-polisher: we tumble endlessly against each other, chipping and scraping, rolled over and over by the push of the river and the shove of the sky.

Spring

The daphne in our front yard is in full blossom, smelling sweet in the soft, cool, wet dawn. And the maple trees are littering sidewalk, street, and car hoods with, well, whatever it is that maples drop at this time of year. Millions of little wads of dark brown stuff. I suppose it's blossom – surely anything so copiously proposterous must have to do with reproduction – but it looks more like rabbit pellets than like flowers. “Maple turds” is not very genteel. Maybe I'll settle on “maple trash,” or “maple litter.”

It's as difficult to imagine people shoveling snow in Pennsylvania, right now, as it is to imagine the dog days in Australia. There's only so much reality you can wedge into your mind at any one time. It's early for Spring, here, but it sure feels like it. Frost is still possible, even snow, but the crocuses have already placed their bets and are blooming recklessly all across the city. I reckon they know as much about the weather as anyone. I think it's Spring.

I close my eyes and feel the soreness, feel my sinuses bulge like overpacked bags at the airport. I keep waking at three or four, and not being able to get back to sleep. This cold that I should have shaken off last week is keeping up with me, loping along patiently like a wolf marking a herd, waiting for stragglers. If I drank a beer right now, I'd be too sick for work tomorrow. But if I eat right and exercise just enough, but not too much, I might get a full night's sleep and get the better of it.

Soft, soft: this morning, this light. I got a lovely valentine from Sage, a wonderful poem printed deep into thick paper. As Leigh Hunt said,

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

I walked around the house this morning muttering “it's all right, Dale. It's all right.” It's comforting to hear someone say that, even someone with no sense. It's what the crocuses are saying, too.

Hurrying and Waiting

And if she's coming back this way
I'm not that hard to find;
Tell her she can look me up
If she's got the time.

The timing of departures is always wrong. We begin traveling by either rushing or waiting: no wonder we never really end up where we want to go.

We ought to ride formally to the crest of the hill with our household knights around us, the banners snapping in the wind, and begin with a surge like a long slow bright wave breaking on the North Shore. That would be traveling. We might get somewhere, if we began like that.

Or like the morning in Delphi, when I rose before the sun and, finding the gate inexplicably open, sat in the broken temple of Athena and watched the dawn. The goat bells clinked below, and the sun was very large and very red. That would be a beginning worth making, too: a different kind of journey, but also a journey to a new place.

I don't remember who the teacher was who said, never hurry and never wait. Or maybe it wasn't a teacher: maybe it was me, making a note to myself. Maybe it's just that it's like the advice of a teacher, in that a) it makes deep, viscerally-felt sense, and b) it is clearly impossible to follow. Not advice as we understand it -- "this is the correct thing to do! -- but a pointing-out: "if you were enlightened, this is one of the things that would flow from it." To wit, you would never hurry and you would never wait.

Which is not to say I would never move rapidly and never hold still. But hurrying is what I do when I don't have enough time, and waiting is what I do when I have too much, and it's obvious that I can't really have too little or too much time: I don't have time at all. It's a drastic confusion of categories to even begin to think that way. If there's any ownership involved, it's time that has me.

And what use is that? Well, not much, except that when I find myself hurrying or waiting, I can look for the self-deception behind it, the way in which I'm trying to bend reality to fit what I expected of it. If I track honestly, it's astonishing just how often, on some thread or other of my life, I'm hurrying or waiting. Almost always, really.

Short of Courage

The problem has always been that I'm just plain short of courage, the sort of courage that you need to pick up the phone and make a call, the kind of courage it takes to admit that you don't know enough even to know what question to ask, the kind of courage it takes to do something new instead of doing what you've always done.

I asked Neva how she'd learned so much about insurance billing, and she said, “trial and error,” without missing a beat. I tried to imagine having the courage to make all those mistakes, right where people could see you do it. I know that the people who have that kind of courage don't think of it as something particularly admirable or special. Well, it is. It is admirable and special.

Once, years ago, I showed an aquaintance a love poem I'd written her, making clear, I hope, that it was not any kind of request or invitation. She said, “you're really brave.” I laughed and said, “no, I just don't have any sense.” But it wasn't that. I just knew: who really minds having a love poem written to them, if it doesn't entail awkwardness or pressure? Pretty much everyone wants to be adored.

I do things from time to time that look brave from the outside. I've never minded looking funny, for one thing. Never in my life having been in the running for the Cool Stakes, I never acquired the habit of minding looking dorky and nerdish. I don't mind fishing out my reading glasses; I carry around a backpack full of books and happily spread my dictionaries and flash cards out on restaurant table. I know I look silly in all my bike gear. So what? You could piddle your whole life away trying not to look silly. It's not worth troubling about.

And I can speak forcefully and cogently in a few kinds of public situations. Classrooms, seminars, professional meetings. I speak my mind. I'm seldom – unfortunately – really in doubt as to the value of my own opinions.

This might lead you to expect that I could phone an insurance company and ask them a few questions about their billing process. Well, I can, sometimes: after counting my breath for a few moments to keep my heart from racing, I can dial really quickly, so that I'm in the conversation before I can back out, and it's less awkward to ask questions than not to. Modern phones are wonderful for me, because you can enter the numbers ahead of time. Then when you think you might be brave enough to make a call, you can quick quick quick don't think don't plan don't rehearse push the single button, push it now! And you're over the hurdle and in the conversation, and you've done it, you've really done it, you've made a phone call.

Though of course if they say something I don't understand, I can't just ask them to explain it. I have to end the conversation and go look it up on the web. Or ask Neva. Or try to deduce what the answer must be. (Call them back? You're kidding, right?)

I'm getting so much better at using the phone. There are even rare occasions now when I can make a phone call just like a normal person – think, “I'd like to know that, I'll call and ask” -- and just make the call, just like that. With practice, I get better. And I've learned not to rehearse; for me rehearsing makes it harder, not easier. I already have too many moving objects to track when I make a phone call, without adding a script into the mix.

But anyway, that's not what I really wanted to say, none of it. The failures of courage are far deeper than that. To eat as I think I ought to, to love as I think I ought to, to live as I think I ought to; or else -- even scarier! – to change my mind about how I ought to do those things: that's what I don't have the courage to do. The cowardice, the cowardice runs so deep. It's in the marrow bone, a deep reddish-brown stain all the way through me. I will never be free of it, never.

But turn again. Remember, Dale, you thought you would never be brave enough to work as you ought to. And you did it. You did it. And you did it young: you're only fifty-one. Precocious little bastard. Who knows what you might not pull off when you're all grown up?

It's Only a Bloody Song

one day... John was grumbling about the expense of his burgeoning empire to Neil Aspinall. "Imagine no possessions, John," Neil reminded him. "It's only a bloody song," he retorted.

-- John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman

My eyes sore from lack of sleep, my stomach in consternation at the half pound of peanut M&Ms, my mouth raw from chips and salsa. Spent the afternoon yesterday in bed reading the 5th Harry Potter book, while a rare Spring day graced February, barely glimpsed through the skylight. Hard to believe in snowstorms in Virginia. Hard to believe in anything, for that matter. Last night stars blazed above the trees, and I didn't believe a word of them.

Never so lonesome, never so stranded-feeling. Thank God for JK Rowling and simple stories.

A lovely massage last night though. Today perhaps will be better. It can't easily be worse.

Technical Difficulties

Dawn again. Forgot my reading glasses when I rode down here to Tosi's, so I've cranked up the font to 18. I can kind of read what I'm typing, if I lean back. Good for my posture: keeps me from hunching forward.

Working on my little netbook, which means I have to pause whenever I come to an apostrophe, because it's down on the space key row, and I haven't been able to train my fingers to find it there: I have to stop and look and take my hand out of position to type it. I also haven't quite identified what I do that occasionally jumps the cursor way down or way up, Being used to the Thinkpad nubbin-mice, I find this touch pad stuff both unwieldy and skittish: I feel like a small child trying to control a crayon. Damn cursor wanders all over the place, as I try to get it back. In some Heinlein novel the protagonist protests that he can't draw, and his father says, “Nonsense. The pencil goes where you push it.” Both voices are in my head as I try to master writing on this little thing.

Because the advantages are enormous. It's dirt cheap ($225 total), about the size and weight of a hardback book, and its batteries last for hours. And it's Linux, which means I've escaped from the Dark Side and dwell now in the blessed realms of open source. You can hear Lennon crooning, “imagine no possessions...” as you type away on your freeware word processing and spreadsheet apps. (Actually, most of these apps have perfectly good Windows versions – I was partial to Abiword and Gnumeric, on Windows. Now I'm using Open Office, just because it came preloaded on this machine, and it works fine too. But so much open source code was developed on Linux and/or UNIX, and everything tends to run better on its native operating system.)

((Further parenthetical: I'll never forget my boss's look of horror when I proposed that we might save some money by abandoning MS Office and going to freeware. Microsoft has done an amazingly good job of convincing people that its behemoth apps are the only respectable tools for office work. They're fine tools, but they're enormous and expensive and the free ones work just as well, have generally better support, and can usually produce perfectly compatible .doc and .xls files, if you need them. But Microsoft software is what IBM hardware used to be: so dominant and standard that it's no-risk for a purchaser. No matter how badly it may work, no one ever gets fired for having purchased MS Office.))

Technical problems at home. Qwest upgraded our DSL for free – cool! -- except that now our elderly router is nonplussed, and drops connections periodically, which can mean rebooting it every couple minutes, especially if Alan and I are both online at the same time. Maddening. So I've been tending more and more to go to Tom's – Tom is Tosi's brother, & runs another cafe of roughly the same ilk – which has free wireless. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that none of my online interactions have the ease and readiness they did a couple months ago. I'm emailing, blogging, and blog-reading less. And I've been so busy with work that I haven't had time to address any of these things.

Soon, though, I'll be back to sauntering about the cyberhood, dawdling and chatting.

Odes to Tools


I received a chapbook in the mail yesterday: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools. Beautifully done. I thought I'd glance through, find a couple of my favorites, quote a few good lines. What's easier than writing a review of a good little book? It practically writes itself.

Well, first I'd find my favorites. I remembered some of them, and went right to them. “Ode to a Compass”:

...what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?

* * *

The compass is a crutch.
Restore its missing leg
so it can return to
its first life as
a gnomon:
stationary,
circled by the sun.

Yep. Still there. Better than I remembered: “a seed for a stone,” was that line in it when I read it on Via Negativa? So I'd just leaf through now to the “Ode to a Shovel,” quote a few more lines, and I'd be...

Wait a minute. “Ode to a Coping Saw”? I don't remember that. I laugh aloud at the end of it:

somehow
it copes.

And then, the “Ode to a Hive Tool”:

You need a key for entering where there is no door.
You are too much full of your mammal self
to fit through the always-open entryway
& in any case would have no idea
how to execute a waggle dance,
which looks like sun-drugged madness to you,
looming over the brood box with your angry halo.

Another one I'd missed, somehow. Oh, but here's the Scissors! “We are rich. We have three pairs of scissors.”

I got lost, on my way to the Shovel, discovering, rediscovering. How can you get lost, in a thirty page book? But I did. All these poems have edges, teeth. It's a brilliant collection.

I realized along the way that there's nothing more difficult than writing a review of a good little book: a review that did it justice would be longer than the book, a patent absurdity.

We are rich. I'm so happy to have this little book. Why on earth would you read a review of it? Just get it.

Clear Water

Dreamed of clear water running over green grass again: a dream of the purity of cold streams, running impossibly on clifftops, soaking my shoes; the drowned grass glowing like fire in the pulse of the sunlight. I've been here before: this is Jenny's poem for the Spring, but can I write it?

Tosi's. Headlights on Sandy Boulevard and on 62nd Avenue. The amber lights of the bus flashing as people climb on board. The red and green of the traffic lights. Behind all that, the morning slowly gathering, a power of light to make all these laughable. But not yet. Ahriman still keeps his trembling grip, for a few more moments. He makes the lottery machines in the corner flash and buzz and yammer, hoping for another sacrifice or two before he drops, helpless and resentful, for another day of prowling in basement apartments, lurking in cheap computers and writhing in dvd players, spitting bits of green and red and amber from warning lights and control panels. The daytime is always hard for him: but the daytime conquests are the most complete, his proudest trophies. I used to walk by the taverns in Spokane, doing a brisk business at 7:00 a.m., their doors open to let some of the stale, stale air stumble out onto the sidewalk, and think: now there's victory. Who says the Devil has nothing to show for all his work?

Even as I write the light grows more and more, the blue-gray light of dawn rising from the wet streets, reflecting back and forth from the wet clouds above, gleaming blue even from the dark wood windowsills. Streetlights discretely vanish. Across the street the headlights of a pickup at Ken's automotive wink out. Ahriman glares, panics, and disappears. Daylight. The light has gone silver. Everything white glows: light is resonating everywhere, spilling from everything with a soft prodigality far beyond Ahriman's imagination. Bedridden people lift their hands to twitch aside the curtains and let the light fall on their faces. Children stir in their beds. Dogs wake suddenly. A single crow flies across the sky.

No nearer to a solution than ever. When you don't know what to do, stop doing. Watch and listen instead. Easier said than done, but I'll try.

A Monthless Period

Cold this morning. I stepped out onto the porch to see if the paper's come yet. My bare feet ached. Nothing. Back again to the house. Feeling defeated, in a new way. Surely this is what I wanted? But life blocks the light, like a leaf against the sun, and shadows run every which way like minnows. I'm becoming stupider and less forceful with every year.

"Do you ever feel like your body isn't your own?" you asked, and seemed relieved when I said yes. My question was more urgent -- "do you ever feel like it is your own?" -- but I left it unasked.

Waiting for the sunwash, waiting for the summer and the slow pulse of warmth. I have become cold and frail and ghostlike. I long for an end to winter, but it's only the beginning of February.

January and February were the last two months to be added to the Roman calendar, since the Romans originally considered winter a monthless period, says Wikipedia. Not such fools as they looked, those Romans. Best not even to count.