Marking out the Sadnesses

Listen, the blue wall rises above your head
there is no marking out the sadnesses.

Forget the poetry, then, and just struggle with the words in a straight line. A whispery morning of spiderweb.

---

Knox dragged his cannons from Ticonderoga to Boston, a terrific feat, straight over the Berkshires in the dead of winter. I think about that kind of thing. Another way in which I am wrong. I'm not supposed to care about it, but I do. About one percent of the American population died in the six years of what we call the Revolutionary War: it was (proportionally) the most costly war in American history, save the Civil War. I don't quite understand why, or how, it has fallen out of the public consciousness so thoroughly, become so quaint and unfashionable. I'm conscious of the solecism, talking about it on my blog as if it was important. The Civil War, now, it's all right to talk about that. But to even mention the Revolutionary War is to line up with cranks, with tiresome men who button the top button of their polyester shirts and talk too loud and have infallible plans for making a million dollars. It's not that I would even have agreed with the revolutionaries. I would have hunkered down, calling down plagues on both their houses, neither Tory nor Patriot: it takes more than a penny tax on government xeroxes to drive me to start murdering my fellow human beings.

But, of course, they didn't know what I know: they didn't know that you could feel just as dispossessed, just as humiliated, just as lorded over, by a fully representative government: they didn't know that mass democracy would end up looking less like Athens than like late Imperial Rome. They thought they were fighting for their fundamental dignity. So maybe I would have fought on the Patriot side, after all. Few people more thin-skinned about their dignity than I am. I understand that explosion of anger.

I served on an English Department graduate student committee, at Yale. We sponsored some event, for which we bought a deal of wine. The next morning I and another student were summoned by the chair of the department to bring all the empty bottles, so that he could see that we – the committee – weren't squirreling some away on our own account. I was incensed. It was with considerable difficulty that my friends persuaded me not to quit Yale on the spot. They couldn't see why it bothered me: why the casual implication that I would cheat and steal, if not closely watched, should be offensive. The only person who understood my anger was the fellow-student who'd come to us from West Point. Nobody else seemed even to grasp the concept.

---

I marvel at George Washington, at his steadiness and perseverance. It had to do I think with the quality described by that queer, old-fashioned word: honor. It's what's missing from our lives, public and private. We have our Franklins and Jeffersons and Hamiltons: we have worldly cleverness and ideological fervor and vaulting ambition. Plenty of all of those. What we desperately lack is that dogged resolve, that determination to do nothing mean or underhanded, which earns over many years a deep, abiding trust.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Their honor they put last, in the chief place. That was what counted. And you can feel it, when 18th Century men write about their honor, or the horror of being dishonored: it's central to them, a mainspring of their thought and action. For something so central to simply vanish from a culture is astonishing. (I say “men” advisedly. The concept of honor for women was an entirely different and lesser thing: it had to do mostly with sexual fidelity, and it's hard to see it as much more than an instrument of subjection. More about that anon.) Your first guess, of course, would that “honor” hasn't really vanished: it's just going by another name. People do still talk about integrity, about being true to yourself, that sort of thing. And that, certainly, is half of what 18th Century men meant by honor.

But there's a stark difference. Integrity, being true to yourself, is a strictly private affair. It's nobody else's business: it's between you and your conscience, or (if you do God) between you and God. No one can rob you of your integrity. No one can make you be false to yourself.

Someone can, however, rob you of your honor. Honor is not private: it is held by others. In escrow, so to speak.

Not just any others, of course. There were hordes of disgusting chatterers and scribblers in Revolutionary times, just as there are now, gossips and hirelings, people who will assassinate character as readily as they'll eat a scone. It was understood that you simply ignore such people.

I suppose one reason that “honor” dropped out of our consciousness is that we are now supposed to take the mass of human beings seriously. I'm afraid I can't do that. As sentient beings possessed of Buddha-nature, as infinitely precious spiritual equals, certainly. But as judges of my honor? I hardly think so. I don't give a damn what they think of me.

Another reason is the sexism of “honor,” and the value that we now place on the domestic sphere: we hold men to a far higher standard, in their domestic lives, than the 18th Century did. Reading aloud to the kids and doing your share of changing their diapers and being there to hug them when they need it – we value those things, now, as much as we value anything, and rightly so.

Or again, you may bridle – I do – at the honor of gentlemen who signed a document asserting that all men were created equal, and then went home to be served coffee by their slaves.

---

The fascinating thing to me about Washington, what made him so extraordinary, is his absolute certainty that he was doing his best. He was so sure of it that he achieved a humility and mildness that are astonishing. He was the least resentful of men. He was not a typical man, of course: it was widely recognized even at the time that his moral qualities were extraordinary. I'm not the first person to admire them. Just down the street here, almost within sight of Tosi's, is a statue of the man, be-wigged and be-sworded, standing in a frozen swagger: that high-bridged nose, those small unimpressive eyes, gazing off into posterity. Only someone amazingly self-confident can endure being betrayed, abused, and traduced so calmly.

---

“What about your self-respect?” they asked.

“Self-respect? I don't have any of that,” I answered.

“Then I think you'd better get some,” they said, shortly. I suppose they are right: but I don't quite know where, at this late date, one goes shopping for it.

Eruptions from the Past

My sister would have been fifty-five years old, today. It's as difficult to imagine her being fifty-five as it is to imagine John Lennon being seventy. The good die young, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust / Burn to the socket. (If anyone should know, it's you, Mr Wordsworth!)

I grope hesitantly towards a new life. Or more precisely, maybe, I grope towards an old life that I never really lived.

Strange eruptions from the past. People prate about the evils of Facebook, its transcience and inanity – as if all this doodling were not transient and inane – but its real powers are just beginning to reveal themselves, and – to confound all of our knavish tricks – they turn out to be historical powers. The dead past isn't dead, Faulkner insisted; it isn't even past. And nothing proves it like old friends from high school or college surfacing, and tagging you with pictures.

My friends Norman and Marcel, from my hippie free school, had started up a design studio in Seattle. I visited them, and here is a polaroid picture of me examining a polaroid picture there. (Ask your grandparents what a polaroid picture is.)

Notice the luxuriant hair and scanty beard: now the hair is scanty and the beard is – well, at least respectable. That was my favorite shirt. A strange pale green, a color without a common name. A knit turtleneck. I always shoved the sleeves up over my elbow. I imagined, at the time, that it gave me a raffish yet practical look. You roll up your sleeves to drop your pretensions and get to work, right? But to me, this photo is all about pretension. I was in awe of Norman and Marcel. I knew that they understood the world of visual art in a way that I never would. They had passionate responses to design that I never understood, or rather, understood just enough to know that my eye settled for the hackneyed and conventional, while they were stirred to go beyond that to things more complex and more important. No doubt I had been looking at graphic designs all day and pretending to be able appreciate what I was seeing. I was out of my depth, bewildered by the big city and my sophisticated friends: I was just a yokel from Springfield, after all. I longed for the glamour of Seattle, but I knew I wasn't really up to it. I couldn't hold my liquor, I got confused by dark bars with pointy lights that lit nothing up, and I got maybe a third of their jokes, though of course I laughed at all of them. I pretended to be a writer, because that's almost cool like an artist, so long as nobody reads the grandiloquent, hectoring opening chapters of your plotless and unfinishable fantasy novels, and of course there was small danger of that.

So little, so little has changed: I still long to be one of the cool kids, and I still never will be, and I still will cultivate anything but my own garden.

Maybe it's not too late, though. Maybe all this fuss is to some purpose. And I find sometimes, to my surprise, that some of the people from my past remember me with affection, rather than contempt. I walk through dim hallways of memory, searching for doors, searching for clues about how I should have lived my life, how I should live my life now. I think I have to treat that awkward young man more gently, soothe his touchy pride, and coax the real stories from him, the stories he was always too ashamed to tell.

The Timeless Trash of the Sea

Somewhere, the ocean
crashes back and forth
like so much broken glass,
but nothing breaks.
Against itself,
it is quite powerless.

(Chase Twichell, “Inland”)

Later in the same poem, Twichell says,

The timeless trash of the sea
means nothing to me.

She's lying, of course, and so am I; but you can understand the yen to escape altogether from the endless noise and fret, the grind and backwash of all those thoughts: so destructive to everything but themselves. The one thing you can't think your way out of is thinking. “Against itself, it is quite powerless.” Just so.

If I ever have the time, I'd like to try to bushwack my way all the way up the Breitenbush. On the map, it looks like it comes straight down from Mt Jefferson – that most beautiful and difficult of Oregon's mountains. Of course, as Clausewitz will tell you, the map is not the terrain.

Ravens. Oh, ravens. What a reproach to me you are! I've forgotten everything I ever knew that was worth knowing.

Well, well, start again. Easier this time.

Over at One Word, Zhoen wrote: Make the people around you feel loved. If they don't feel it, you're doing it wrong. Now that's a nut with meat inside it. Crack that, if you can.

I'm still subscribed to the KCC mailing lists. I still lurk, and watch the stuff go by: the requests for prayers for failing parents, for the dying children of friends, for aging cats; the building of the Goldendale retreat center, the planning for the new urban center; the news of our exiled lineage in India. The gears spin but the teeth don't catch. I say a few om manis for the kids and the cats. I don't know what I am, or what I'm doing. I'll never be comfortable with costumes and regalia, with pomp and ceremony. All those pieties. If you're going to observe pieties, surely they should be those of your own people? But of course, that's the problem, we have none, we're Americans. But you can't borrow other people's pieties. That's not how it works. The whole point of pieties is that they're not chosen -- they're given. And if you were given nothing, that's just your cross to (not) bear.

Enough! Or too much. Time to do something. Time to make someone feel loved.

Breitenbush, October

The moon just dwindled from the half,
revealing horns, and Draco coiled
on the ridgetop, glittering over the river.
I soak in the sulfuric water till the sweat
prickles in my hair, and I am pregnant
with heat. Then I slide out of the water,
rest my butt on the cold smooth stone. The wind
blows steam from my moonwhite flesh.

Last night, Cassiopeia was where the Dipper is now,
and the Dipper held Cassiopeia's place.
If you watch long enough
you can feel the slow turn of the stars
you can feel them twisting in you, the torque
of all that ancient fire.

The hemlocks and the cedars breathe on me.
The Pleiades drift from one crown to the next.
The Big Dipper's handle stops dragging. It's lifted,
and that means that the sun will be here soon.
An hour perhaps, no more.

The light never seems to come out of the East,
at the beginning of the dawn. It seems to come
from the broken line of the horizon, North and South,
as if a fault had opened in the firmament,
as if the light was oozing through the cracks.

The stars become uncertain. They backpedal.
Suddenly I'm cold, and I slip back in the water,
back into this pore in the skin of the Earth.
I am a germ, a germ of thought, a germ
of discontent, a skin infection
of this great mineral hide.

Only the moon is holding out against
the incoming tide of daylight—the stars are washed
away in the flooding sky—when the ravens begin
to grumble and rattle across the way. In ones
and twos they reconnoiter the colorless air.
Someone forgot to tell them they are not
gregarious birds: they've gathered in the cedars
to mutter together. Some immemorial wrong,
some age-old grudge, is on their minds.

But in the middle of it all, a greater bird
appears, and all go quiet. The largest heron
I have ever seen. His wings
spread from bank to bank
of the narrow river; he flies
straight up the stream, impossibly slow,
each wingbeat a pulse
of this dark country's heart.

Clean and Pretty

It becomes familiar, the taste of a household
being dismantled. All its shifts revealed:
the squalid corners no guest ever sees,
materials for home repairs, knitting projects,
collections, crafts botched and put away;

beads in little vials, paints dried in the tube,
curtains to be hemmed.
They all smell the same at last:
the mildewed paper and the rancid dust,
impotent solvents,
stiff glue, spilled oil, rotting silk.

Death will seize them and show them grinning
to your heirs. They are his trophies, not yours:
your children will flinch away from them.

Oh, throw away your life before you die.
Don't leave it to be groped by estate salers,
to be peeled and sorted by dealers in junk;
don't wait for it to be given
to dirty indifferent fingers to stroke.
Put on fresh underwear, just as your mother said:
go clean and pretty to your early death.

Out of the Light

She came out of the light, out of the wonder.
Wounded. Half blind. Enormously strong.
She came to me for shelter: I did what I could.

I fed her bowls of syrup,
I stroked the clutching muscles of her thighs;
I watched her wings

fill with new blood. Uncrumple.
The web of arteries, arterioles,
the threads of capillaries --

all engorged, until her wings
rose above me like sails.
She bore it, uncomplaining, trembling,

her eyes weeping milk. She nuzzled me
and mewed once, like a kitten
disappearing in a river;

now she's gone,
and the morning has gone with her.

The Two Most Important Crows

Two crows wag their way
side by side across the asphalt,
their thumbs in their waistcoat armholes.
They think they will build a new store here:
sell hamburger wrappers to starlings.
Big plans. For crows, you know,
crows are very important, and these
are the most important of all.

Beyond My Karmic Means

With cars parked on either side, Salmon becomes effectively a one-lane street. I was riding to the right, far closer to the line of cars than I usually do, out of a vague sense that to ride smack in the middle of the street and claim both lanes would be overbearing, when a car door flashed open, right in front of me.

I had time to brake, though not to swerve: I skidded into it, and was suddenly airborne. The next thing I remember is thinking, “time to do a somersault,” and I did. My helmet tapped the street lightly. Then I was standing up. Time, which had accelerated, was now molasses-slow. In slow motion I walked back to my bike, set it upright, and walked it to the sidewalk. I gravely examined it. Remarkably, it looked undamaged.

“Never mind the bike! Are you OK?” The driver, a young woman, had come out of her car. She was agitated.

“I'm fine,” I said. I could have told her that I was moving slowly precisely because I didn't know: I was waiting for all the reports to come in. But that was more complicated than I cared to try to put into words.

“I don't know what to do. I've never hurt a bicyclist before. Are you OK?”

A teachable moment, I thought. I could say something about looking out for bicycles before flinging open your door. But if the experience didn't teach her, I didn't reckon any words of mine would, and besides, she was young and distressed. “I'm fine, really.” I went on checking the bike; the wheels and the brakes and gearing were all in good order.

I rolled my shoulders, stood on one leg and then the other, swayed my hips. I ran my hands over my arms. Rolled my head in a cautious circle. Nothing. No scrapes, no abrasions. I hadn't landed on my hands, my knees, or my elbows. What on earth had I landed on? My upper arm was going to bruise up nicely, between the elbow and the swell of the triceps, but you don't fall on your upper arm.

“That was pretty spectacular,” said a passer-by, holding a baby in her arm. “Are you really all right?”

“I really am,” I said. The driver apologized again, and this time I grinned reassuringly at her. She looked doubtful. I fetched my pack from the street and put it back in the basket I have mounted behind the seat, got back on the bike, and rode on downtown to work.

And today, three days later, I'm still fine. The bruise on my arm is the only mark on me: the only place that hurts is an abdominal muscle – whether I snagged a handlebar with it, or pulled it at some point during my gymnastics, I can't say. It objects to me doing sit-ups, and I reckon it's likely to be forming trigger points soon – muscles usually do, a couple days after trauma: often that's all that “whiplash” consists of. The check-rein muscles of my neck, especially the SCM, are a little sore, of course. But overall my lack of injury is a little mysterious. Something must have taken the impact. I'm inclined to think I must have flipped over the door, landed on my feet, and gone into my somersault from there. Extraordinarily lucky.

But I have always had uncanny luck. It used to make me uneasy, to make me feel that I was living beyond my karmic means: but now I just accept it. Landing on my feet just seems to be what I do.

If This Box

if this box I lie down in
is not what you suppose

if it is a ship
they will push with grieving hands

if it is a fuel
they will light in the dark

I will burn and I will sail
and when the cage

breaks open the stuff inside
will flare briefly

brightly
on the water

The Gathering of the Day

The coffee tastes like woodsmoke,
the waitress is plump as a rumpled pillow,
and the radio mourns, mourns
as she reaches a braceleted hand towards my heart
and pours into my cup.

Spheres of white and black, and glitters of silver:
sparkly things that delighted once
in shops far away in a girlhood
unaccountably lost; and now
babies and strange, hostile,
struggling men. Oh, it is not
what any of us expected my dear, don't weep,

the coffee is sweet and bitter,
and the light is growing around us,
and the radio mourns, mourns
the gathering of the day.

Words and Starlings

I watch a flight of maybe two dozen birds – starlings, I think – rise from a treetop, and take a wide semicircular path to settle in another treetop. They're barely more than specks: I identify them as starlings by the jitteriness and pointiness of the individual dots. But what draws my eye is that, at this distance, the group of birds is obviously not a collection of individuals, but a creature in its own right. You can imagine, if you can't see, the invisible membranes that hold them together, their flexibility and tensile strength; a bird too far from the group is drawn back in, as if tethered by a transparent rubber band. The whole constellation flies with a graceful undulation, far more graceful, and transfixing, than any individual starling: individual starlings being actually rather uncouth and awkward birds. What to make of this creature of flickering points, riding on the sea of the air? How did it decide to move to another treetop, and why?

---

I have never been so deeply aware of how unlike most human beings I am, of how hard I have to work to keep up with the normal world and present acceptable personas to it. I spent much of my thirties and forties berating myself for not making more of my gifts, literary, mathematical, visual, analytical. Now, in my fifties, I am beginning to think, not only that all that judgement is a waste of energy, but that any proper accounting would also have to weigh how well I did, given my disabilities: my crippling shyness, my inability to integrate with the flock, how rapidly social interaction floods my circuits and renders me passive and stupid. I also often simply blank out if asked to switch tasks: I can concentrate on one problem for longer than most people can, but I make silly high-level mistakes. I'm perfectly capable of working intently for fourteen hours on a problem without ever noticing that it actually is irrelevant and doesn't need to be solved. And once shaken out of my problem-solving trance, I'm dopey, automaton-like: it takes a hour and a half of walking about and mental idling before I'm good for anything again. Gifted I may be, moderately, but I am also neurologically – what? Disabled is possibly too strong a word, but it's the aptest one I can find.

I would call this something on the Autism/Asperger's spectrum, but it doesn't fit in two ways. For one, I am intensely, even excessively verbal. I am a slow and awkward speaker, but I'm acutely sensitive to writing, to its shading and nuance, and I produce it with alarming ease. One of my gifts is linguistic. And the other is that I don't usually seem to have any deficit in empathy, any difficulty in reading social and emotional information, in understanding the language of facial expression and gesture. Still though there are strange gaps in my understanding, and my emotional memory is notoriously unreliable. My current emotional state floods back through my past: when I'm unhappy, I imagine that I've always been unhappy, and when I'm happy I imagine that I've always been happy. I recognize this intellectually as distortion, but I find it very difficult to counter, and I have to rely on other people for access to my own emotional past. And I make from time to time emotional mistakes which no one of ordinary intelligence ought to make.

I could blame this on my family history, on my gender, or on my culture (or perhaps on my awkward placement in that culture, half in and half out). Or upon my neurology, as my current immersion in Oliver Sacks' books disposes me. Or simply on my own peculiar weakness of character. But however I play the prologue, the action of the drama is the same.

---

We understood each other better before ever I opened my mouth. I quoted that to Martha, after a difficult conversation recently. (Maturin to Dillon, or Dillon to Maturin, after they finally break silence with each other, in I think the second volume of the shelf of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels.) “I can never say what I mean.”

“But you're so good with words,” she said.

“No. I'm not good with words. Words are good with me, that's it,” I answered.

Words lead me on, plausible, clever, entrancing: endless varied swirls of those 26 letters, those 47 phonemes. Word after word after word, each with its ancient history, crusted with past meanings or shiny with new use, forming brilliant mosaics of sound, of movements of the throat and tongue, of patterns for the eye. I follow where they lead, until they vanish, and leave me in a cold dark unknown street, where all the doors are locked against me. No. I am not good with words.

Achromat

When he lost his color sight he said the world
was made of metal: gray fruit, gray skin;
black tomatoes; a sky of filthy white.

What greater disaster for an artist?
He thought of swallowing a pile
Of dirty grayish pills; hanging himself

With a coil of rope like shining leaden guts.
But life went on, and art went on. He began
to paint in black and white, ferociously:

sunsets made of glare and stabbing jet,
shapes and gleams, insignias, rising forms
against the infinite gradations of the light.

He took to evenings walks, and nightclubs,
where his sight was better than yours or mine,
catching hints and traces that for us

are flooded by the blare of color, and at last,
when some thought they might have a cure, he said
he could not be bothered. He had work to do.

How to get a Bad Massage

I've moved this post over to my massage blog

Long Hard Roads

Apparently there are two ways to make me really angry: one is to suggest that I'm stupid, and the other is to suggest that I'm complacent. I'll swallow a lot – I'm not ordinarily a terribly contentious or insistent fellow – but those will get a rise out of me, every time. You can suggest that I'm selfish, lazy, incompetent, or inconstant, and I'll probably just mildly agree that often enough I am all those things. But suggest that I don't understand, or don't care, and you'll find you've got one ferocious, vindictive Favier on your hands.

Understanding and caring are virtues, of course, but they're not the only ones in the calendar. Why do I clutch them so tight? Why is my ego so heavily invested in them that all my charity and compassion vanish if someone so much as hints that I'm deficient in them?

That may be an idle question. Who knows? I grew up with a father determined to instill understanding, and a mother determined to instill caring . But I have doubts about the historical determinism of psychology, and the usefulness of the historical method of understanding yourself. And anyway, that's not really what I wanted to ask. What I wanted to ask is, what does that tell me? What should I know and watch for, because of it?

Well, that I should loosen my insistence on both of them. That I will be most tempted to do hurtful things in the name of understanding and caring. And that sometimes I should let it alone, let myself appear stupid and complacent.

---

Lama Michael once suggested, as an exercise, dressing up in clothes you would never wear, styling your hair in a way you would never style it, driving a car you would never drive. Anything to interrupt the constant filtering of experience, the constant process of making sure that people we consider our enemies stay alien and hostile, and people we consider our friends stay cosy and friendly. Of course we think the people we identify with are nicer people: we signal them with a thousand signs that we're on their side, that we'll welcome their thoughts and approve of them. Our clothes, our comportment, our cars, our bumper stickers, our dialect, our vocabulary, our makeup, our tattoos – it's all designed to signal to others: I'm one of your kind, expect me to be nice or I'm your enemy, expect me to be hostile. And everyone else obligingly does the same. How could someone costumed as a lefty tree-hugger not go through life thinking that lefty tree-huggers are nicer people? They're the people who smile back, who are supportive, who give you the benefit of the doubt. In just this way, someone who goes about advertising himself as a conservative Christian will find that conservative Christians are nicer people. But suppose you swap your clothes, your makeup, your tats, and your hairstyles? You'll find out soon enough that your own people are not nearly so nice as you supposed. They'll be stony-faced, suspicious, and critical; they'll always assume the worst about you. They're not really such nice people as you thought.

---

Last night, on request, I read the long first chapter of the The Lord of the Rings aloud to Martha, Ashley, and Tori. Forty pages about an elaborate birthday party. (Try to sell a novel that starts like that nowadays!) Outside was the hiss of the waves, the sough of the wind. I was as close to happy as I'm ever likely to be.

---

We look before and after, and pine for what is not
our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught
our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought

They're all long hard roads, even the easiest ones.

Horse and Horseman

Last night the sun
dropped into the ocean without a splash,
and the water went black, went underground,
the line of the sky a faint orange
where it met the intractable dark.

So tell me, when the moon rose,
and the shadows slowly
redrew themselves on the walls,
where were you walking? Your quick bright form
appears, and disappears. The dead outnumber the living.
They always have, and we knew that, but
only gradually have we learned to know it
by the emptiness of hands that once held clay,
by the missing step in a staircase:
we the living are only froth,
riding on waves of the dead.

---

You misunderstand. I do not feel betrayed.
No one has wronged me. But to make this crossing
I must chose horse and horseman carefully.

---

I don't know this whale, gliding
off the point of Devil's Punchbowl.
He's long and pale, no Gray, and
he keeps his flukes to himself.
In diving, he shows his endless back, that's all.
Not a show-off. The flukes remain submerged,
and he pushes with them mightily.
You can see the hill of water that they raise
as he makes for deep water.
Like that. A horse like that. That's what I need.

---

For horseman? I need a boy
with long yellow hair, and a sullen look.
He must be outrageously lucky:
you must take these things on the volley,
if they're to be taken at all.

---

Now rap rap rap! Like a woodpecker
Against a steel chimney. Horse and rider,
Boy and whale, sky and sea:
Now we'll see something worth seeing.

Facts

I have discovered in myself a new response to novels, when I glance at rows of them in the library. It's ridiculously naïve: but this is not real. This is all made up. I used not to mind that; I used to prefer it. Now there seems something dangerous about it. We are already prone enough to make it all up: why encourage each other? I am hungry these days for fact. I read mostly nonfiction. The more facts the better. How many people died of diphtheria in Cairo in 1908? That's the sort of thing I want now. Maybe it's because I am aware now of how hard facts are to come by. When I was a boy it seemed that facts were all over the place. My father was an inexhaustible fund of them. How far away was the moon? How much more likely were smokers to get cancer? What was the real, indisputable, Latin name for St John's Wort? My father knew all those things, and made sure that I did too. My world teemed with authoritative facts.

He meant no harm by this, of course, and in the long run I think it was good for me. I inherited, anyway, his respect for facts, and I learned early that much of “what everybody knows” is dead wrong. But it left me with the impression (which was easy to get anyway, growing up in the sixties) that the fact collection was all under control and proceding splendidly. My help would not be needed.

And what I could see, but it seemed that my father could not, was that all these facts were curiously helpless. My father steered by them, his own idiosyncratic course, but nobody else I knew did. Everyone else steered by stories. Even if they were obviously false stories: the stories in Genesis that my father found so ridiculous, or the New Testament miracles of walking on water, of loaves and fishes – my father, it sometimes seemed, was the only man in the world to whom it mattered that these stories were manifestly false. And I very gradually learned – for I was a voracious and indiscriminate reader – that most of the bedrock stories, the founding of America, the high nobility of the Civil War, and even my father's favorite stories of the religious persecution of science, were mostly false, or at least tendentious. My father, I decided, much as I admired him, had missed the point. What mattered was not whether stories were true: it was whether people wanted them to be true. Or rather needed them to be true. Many people did not at all want a fearsome avenging God: they knew they'd sinned, and that God was going to smite them. But somehow they needed him anyway. And so I wandered away into stories, as the things of real power, the things that really caught people by the throat and made them change their lives.

And I turned – partly I suppose out of sheer rebelliousness against the dominion of fact – to fantasy. It seemed more honest, somehow, to say right up front that you were talking about places that never were just because your heart yearned for them, or about imaginary phantoms just because you dreaded them. Others might mistake the Shire for the kindly England of Tolkien's childhood, but I knew better. Tolkien grew up like any American child, rootless and homeless, a fatherless, Catholic, South African colonial come home to precarious suburbs and a new school every year, a permanent alien and outsider. Tolkien could describe home with such overwhelming feeling, so convincingly, precisely because he had never had one and didn't know anything about what homes were really like. All he knew was what he longed for. I wasn't looking for the Shire to be real. I just wanted to know that someone else missed it, too.

Now that I'm sidling back into science, because I'm on the outskirts of medicine and I really need to know things – such as, does massage assist the metastasis of cancers? – I'm finding that facts are not so easy to come by after all. Good science no longer seems like the juggernaut driving all before it: it seems more like a delicate, fragile lighter-than-air craft, as threatened by its duller-witted partisans as by its enemies. I want to go back to school, or at least get some textbooks, and get a good scientific education. I didn't pay proper attention in the statistics class for my computer science degree: and the fact that I got an A makes me very uneasy about the general state of research. How many people actually know what they're doing out there? I haven't done a lab, nor written a science paper, since the the 8th grade. I read abstracts of papers and get only the vaguest sense of how important their results are: for my own field of massage research I've been relying heavily recently on Paul Ingraham, of SaveYourself.ca, but I have only his word for it that he knows how to evaluate these things. I ought to be able to evaluate them myself.

It used to be thought that massage was not appropriate for cancer patients, because it would push the lymph around, and that might spread the cancer. There was never any evidence that this happened: it was just a plausible hypothesis, and one that nobody wanted to test. (For good reason: “Hey, let's take a group of sixty cancer patients, do massage on thirty of them, and see if their cancer progresses more rapidly!” is a study that's hard to get enthusiastic about.) I read a book about it a couple years ago that emphatically denied massage could do this, and it seemed to be the standard modern book on massage and cancer, but I don't recollect what research it rested on, if any. Even back then my common-sense response to the idea that massage might help metastasis was that if you were relying on your lymph standing still to save your life you were a dead man anyway: but common sense isn't always a very good guide in medical matters.

But you see? An untested hypothesis became a standard medical protocol (“no massage for cancer patients!”) And the scientific basis for my present conviction that massage is fine for cancer per se (though radiation or chemo may contraindicate it) rests on information I no longer remember, derived from research which (if it exists) I couldn't reliably evaluate even if I did read it. And I'm one of the science-minded massage therapists. Oy.

The Terror in my Kitchen

Called in sick to work today. I do have a cold, but really I just needed to punch the reset button. There are times when my mind gets overstuffed with a sense of obligation, of duties impending, ten thousand things that I ought to do all contending for the upper spot, fighting to be the thing that I actually do, like a swarm of beetles climbing over each other. Enough already. No one is going to die if I don't go in to work today.

(I'm very glad, by the way, that I didn't become a doctor. What if I couldn't say that?)

It's interesting that this mental condition afflicts me, not at the times when I'm genuinely too busy, but at slack times. I guess that's when I start thinking about all the things I ought to do, as opposed to the one thing that I must get done if I can.

It's not really dependent on the external world, of course. It's more in response to the internal tides of my mind. Any old duties, real or imagined, can play the roles. It's an old play and they all know the words. If I wasn't so self-indulgent, if I had the right kind of will, if I had a spirit like a clean bright sword instead of like a forgotten egg-whisk, if I had a genuine spiritual practice, if I lived up to my potential, if I was lean instead of fat, quick instead of slow, true instead of false – a long monotonous mumble of self-reproach in multiple voices, telling me about chances missed and resources squandered. As if anything one could actually do, in the real world, could satisfy them all. No. Not if my blog won a Pulitzer and my massage research won the Nobel prize and W. S. Merwin admired my poetry. Not even if I weighed 155 pounds.

A brilliant day. Not yet hot, but it will be. By this afternoon it will be a scorcher. The light is shockingly beautiful, playing over the faces of passersby, making their summer shirts into flaming banners of blue or yellow or white. They go by, stage representations of themselves, their faces a little too big, too real to be true, their eyes squinting into the rising sun. What shall I do with this day?

It doesn't matter. I'll sit shamatha a little while, and clear up odds and ends, do some paperwork. The kitchen is already clean.

I'm ashamed of being proud of the kitchen, but I am. So I'll tell you about it. All my life I've lived with messy kitchens, taking what modern businesses would call a just-in-time approach to cleaning. When you're out of bowls, you wash some. When you need to wash vegetables, you clean the sink. When you have nowhere to put groceries, you clear a counter. What this means, of course, is that when you contemplate preparing food you are contemplating an enormous task, hours of work. Just to put the groceries down you'll need to clear a counter which means you'll need to clear the sink which means you'll need to deal with whatever dubious things have been in there since you don't want to know when, and you'll have to look up which of those containers can be recycled and which can't, and, you know, the food at Burgerville is actually local and fresh and surprisingly good and they never make you wash up. So it's gone on, year after year. Until about a year ago, when I started cleaning the kitchen every morning, first thing in the morning, cleaned it until it was completely clean. Every single morning.

It's sort of miraculous. The house feels utterly different to me. I swear I can feel my pulse slow down when I enter that kitchen, as my heart realizes, it's actually under control here, I don't have to worry. I didn't know I was worrying, but apparently I was.

It meant adopting what was, for me, extreme ruthlessness and cruelty and immorality. A couple days ago Martha brought in a tiny new potato that had grown in our compost, and washed it and put it on the counter. We'd grown a potato! Inadvertently, but we'd done it! Very cool.

Well. Yes, but it was now our solemn duty to cook it and eat it. And I knew, I knew the fate of that potato the moment I saw it glistening on the counter. It was going sit there, and sit there, and sit there, and grow old, and the flesh under its peel would turn green, and it would sprout, and eventually, after having served as evidence of our inadequacy and a trigger for depression for months, it would be thrown back into the compost whence it came.

But you see, it wasn't mine. It was Martha's.

I chucked it into the compost after two days. Yes, it was a perfectly good potato. But I've discovered a startling fact: when you clean the kitchen daily, everything in it belongs to you. When mysterious objects appear on the counter, I wash them or throw them out with reckless disregard of their origins. There's only three things I do with things that appear on my counters now. If I recognize them as things that belong in the kitchen, I wash them or I put them away. If I don't recognize them, I throw them out. I've instituted a reign of terror in my kitchen. And though there is some occasional murmuring, I think everyone is grateful for it.

Not an Accident

I think of Lucy (probably vaingloriously) as a poet more or less like me: someone with a gift for prose who dabbles in verse and sometimes gets lucky. But you don't get a poem like Accident Spot by luck. Go read this one.

and here and there still the pale scarlet
bloodsplash of a poppy.

To Mend a Broken Heart

Split the sternum and open the cage
of the ribs. Scoop out the heart and lay it
in a bed of ice, like some monstrous
meat salad, a dish for the athropophagi.
Now sew in the valve of a cow's heart;
season with a little paprika. Suture well.

Failure Guaranteed

I touch people. I try to give relief to their suffering, solace to their grief, comfort to their loneliness.

But I am not a healer, a doctor or a teacher. Suffering, grief, and loneliness are not pathological conditions. They are not diseases to be cured. They are not caused by bad hygiene or sin or ignorance.

I study, sure. I learn techniques. I have a spiritual practice that I try to follow. But I'm offering nothing from Mt Sinai. Nobody has handed me any tablets. I lay my hands on a client as one suffering, grieving, lonely human being lays hands on another.

Suffering or joyful. I draw radiance from them: I get whispers of love, intimations of plenitude, from their skin. I am profoundly grateful to my clients. Not as in “thank you for your patronage!” As in “thank you for taking me into your home, thank you for traveling these bewildering twisty roads with me, thank you for trusting me with the shrine of your body.”

It does seem to me sacred – holy. The body. I am more in sympathy with Judaism than with Buddhism, in this regard. This body is not disposable container: it's a temple. I have the same sense, at the end of a massage, that I have at the end of a Buddhist meditation practice, of having entered a special place with special rules, a place where humility is the only attitude that makes sense, a place where my quotidian agendas fall away and become meaningless.

Some of my clients see it this way; others don't. Last night I finished a massage and murmured “thank you.”

Her eyes popped open, and she said, “What? Oh. Thank you,” in a flat, ordinary voice. It was a bit startling. Had I gone that journey alone? I don't think so; but I don't think she knew I was with her.

Which is fine. I trust massage to work. It's like meditation in this way as well: failure is guaranteed. Part of massage is, and ought to be, a failure of connection, a missed stairstep. There's always a wistfulness, a heightened sense of distance, a sense of how far we are from real communion. If we were capable of perfect communion, there would be no need for massage, just as – as you always have to tell tyro meditators – if we were capable of perfect meditative stability, there would be no need for meditation. What we are working with, in meditation, is distraction: what we are working with in massage is loneliness.

Monday

the spray of nothing knowing
nothing owing nothing lost
and pulling us the spinnaker of God

George Jackson, Sir

I tell myself, when it gets bad, how hard can it be? I've done all the hard parts. I've raised my kids. I only have twenty years to muddle away, and then I get to die. That's not so bad. Twenty years will fly away in no time. There's really nothing more to trouble about.

It all fades away, and I don't believe in any of it; I fall, slow motion, to a clever little piano tune about rain, all the way down, just a few glancing blows from the rigging. Below me only salt water.

None of it made any difference: all the histrionics, all the wanting, all the learning, all the careful preparation for things that never happened, couldn't have happened. I won't say I wasted my life: you can't say you wasted your life without having some life in mind that you think would have been worth living. Should I have served some other master? That's the only question I find mildly interesting: and it's too late now. And anyway, what other master would have had me?

Some long-forgotten persona pleads: but there was no way to know, when we started. I shrug. How does it matter? I could never have lived an honest life. I fledged in a nest lined with lies. We're all of a piece, and we all went down in the flood together, and good riddance.

My earliest memory is of being two years old, and unable to speak. I knew what language was, but I couldn't master it. I stood there holding on to the arm of a sofa – shoulder height to me – and I longed, I longed to speak. And I learned. I learned so greedily, I learned to read, I learned Spanish and German and French, Latin and Old English and Old Norse, scraps of Greek and Chinese and Tibetan, and I still couldn't speak, and I still can't speak. Still standing there, holding on to the arm of the sofa. I still can't say what I mean, and people come and go in some great world that I can't understand.

Another night of no sleep, another night of uselessness. In the end I was good for nothing, affected nobody. I never did learn to speak. I'm still standing here, still mute: except that now I'm fat and deaf and old, as well.

So who cares? Not you: not me. I might as well shrug it off, and pick some other life out of the closet. I could be a sage on a lacquered box, whose ancient glittering eyes are gay. I could be a kindly old man with a long white beard, gentle and simple, soaking up the sun in some quiet corner. I could vanish from the physical world altogether, and become nothing but a voice, a reminder, and ask the Goddess to cast a glamour about me: I could be Mentor, wrapped in old stories that no one minds but no one can shake off. Ask the old man by the door: he knows all that kind of thing. I could learn to keep a garden. I could get a dog. I could even write poetry. Poets are supposed to be old men.

Zafus and zabutons, knees and sitz-bones, prostrations in front of glittery shrines, forehead to the cool wood floors. I've watched the sunlight move across the floor as the sun moves across the sky. I've sat still while mornings turned into afternoons, while afternoons turned into evenings. There's nothing like looking, if you want to find something, but what you find is not always what you expect.

I am grateful for it all, you know, even if I have squandered it. And even as I write, here, the mood lightens, and the antic recedes, and a real smile replaces the grimace. I look forward to seeing you. At a night sentry-challenge from a member of the feuding families, Huck Finn identifies himself: George Jackson, sir, I'm only a boy. How can anyone blame you for picking up identities where you find them? You find yourself in a dangerous world, and you proffer the story that works: what else does anyone ever do? If you're not given a plausible name, you have to make one up. Please don't shoot me, sir. I'm only a boy.

The Night Elizabeth Bishop Broke Off Our Affair

Your precision terrifies me, and I think
well no wonder you took to drink,
having all that intolerable fact
and no saving, blurring, merciful tact.

Of course I love you I say
And your forearm turns away,
the ulna and radius within untwist
until the shaking supine wrist

lies supplicating, flat,
and you say sharply, what do you mean by that?
I lay my cheek in your palm, on the table
and realize that I am not able

to answer. I can't construe,
not having the facts you do,
not knowing where the lines must fall,
guessing each one smudges all.

the gods on friday

the gods are spelling “your” and “their”
the gods have got no underwear

the gods are whites, the gods are blacks
the gods are doing jumping jacks

the gods fly up, the gods fly down
the gods are wearing long white gowns

the gods come here, the gods go there
the gods have not a thing to wear

Tapotement

Adam was God's drum. He thumped him into life,
made him ring and shiver, word made flesh
and flesh made word made flesh, skin singing
on a shuddering frame of ribs: and ever since
when thunder rolls above you can feel His hands
thud on the marrow, His rain beat on the earth.

---

Tapotement, from French tapoter, to tap or to drum, is the technical term for the use of percussion in massage. It's used extensively in several massage traditions, including Tui Na, the Chinese precursor of Shiatsu, and "Swedish" massage. (By the way, remind me to write about that odd "Swedish" misnomer, sometime.) Tapotement was not much favored at my massage school, nor, as far as I can tell, is it much valued or taught in the profession these days, but I adore it, both as giver and receiver.

A client recently asked me, "why does that feel so good?" The textbook answer is that striking the muscle causes it involuntarily to contract, and then to relax, and perhaps it does: but it doesn't at all feel like that's what's happening. It feels like you're being turned into a great musical instrument, into something that resonates to a higher music.

It requires a skill which most people could acquire, but few do: I fortunately already had it, as player of hand-drums. It boils down to not letting your dominant hand take over, and the easiest way to practice it is to practice drumming in triplets, or waltz rhythm -- ONE two three ONE two three, so that your hands alternate carrying the stress and relinquishing it.

It's Over: We Won

I think that in six centuries we've done a pretty solid job: that English literature is tolerably complete. The canon is built. We don't have to worry about it any more. There is English verse for all occasions: plaintive, soulful, boasting, seductive, spiteful, weary. We have epic, tragedy, satire and romance to fill every corner of the soul. We have the most justly famous playwright in the world. We have enough terrific novels to absorb a thousand beach vacations. The game is over. We won.

This is not to say that there is nothing new to write. Of course there is: there is always something new. And every new generation will have its own cares and concerns. There are still a few odd niches for new works to perch on. And I think there are writers now as good as any in the past. Yes, people as good as Shakespeare. But the thing is, that even if you write a tragedy as good as Macbeth – something I think entirely possible – it won't displace Macbeth, and it shouldn't, because our literary culture is built around Macbeth. I say, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and you automatically say

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

And that's as it should be. To displace Macbeth you would need to write not just something as good: you need to write something significantly better. And I tell you honestly, much as I admire your work, my dear friend, you're not going to do it.

It's not just a function of age. Six centuries is really rather young (I count from Chaucer, as the earliest English most people can read without much linguistic instruction.) But we here in the English-speaking world have been at the center of the global information explosion. The classics of dozens of traditions have long been translated brilliantly into English. Anyone from Rumi to Li Po to Homer to Gabriel García Márquez. It's all here.

Does anyone actually have a hard time finding something to read, in English? Someone who finds herself saying, “man, I'd sure like to read a sonnet, or a novel, or an introspective conversation poem, but there's just nothing out there”? I don't think so.

Now, this is a grand thing. It's not a problem. It's something to celebrate, to delight in. But it means that we live in a different literary world. The canon-building days are over. We are latecomers, and if we are writing, we're writing either ephemera or oddities. There's nothing wrong with that. But it means that, as writers, it's time to stop taking ourselves so seriously, to kick off our solemnities and party a bit. Forget about genius and making a name. That lionized novelist of our generation is not going to be the new Shakespeare, two hundred years from now. He's going to be a footnote. The work has been done: it's time to play, now.

There's one thing that's genuinely new and exciting about our generation: what the internet has done for us. We can watch literature being built in real time. We can watch a brilliant poem or novel or play being born. As writers and readers we can interact and converse – any of us – as only the luckiest of writers and readers could in the past. Ben Jonson paying his penny to see Shakespeare's latest, Coleridge leaping the fence and running to greet Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Pound settling down to edit “Prufrock” -- we're all in that position now, if we care to be. What could be more wonderful?

Take this ode to little rock. I know so much about where it comes from. I don't just have the great privilege of knowing Peter online, having read his book, and knowing something about how deeply the story and meaning of his name resonates for him. I have context reaching every which way. I know the Big Tent prompt he was writing to. I know the koan Dave Bonta set (“is half a stone still a whole stone”?), and have been pondering it myself. I know of Peter's fondness for the radically short lines of Robert Lax. I'm even cursorily acquainted with Braque because of the same posts, even though I don't remember whose posts they were or what they said. It makes my reading of the poem wonderfully alive. It gives the sort of depth that footnotes in classics try to, but can never quite, give.

Horse!

As we turned into the park on Sunday, I saw a signboard announcing that today's free concert featured a band called “Innisfree.”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,

I recited, and surprised myself by going on and saying the whole poem. I didn't know I still knew it.

Tryon Creek State Park, where Martha works now on weekends: I was driving her in to work. It's not old growth, but it's had a generation or two to recover from the logging, and it's pretty and peaceful, if not grand. It's tucked into an elbow-crook between Lewis and Clark College and the uncertain sprawl of southwest Portland. It claims to be the first urban state park. It was slated to be developed in the 1970s, but the neighbors got together and purchased the land instead, and eventually gave it to the State to be kept as a park. The original group, the Friends of Tryon Creek, still exists, and Martha works for them, sharing space with the park rangers in a “Nature Center.”

A stuffed beaver perches in squirrel posture by the back door. He's seen a lot, in his second life, and he's a bit battered now. He's the delight of toddlers. One, perhaps 18 months old, walked up to him, Martha tells me, and stopped, radiant with wonder.

“Horse!” he exclaimed.

---

And I shall have some peace there,
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
To where the cricket sings . . .

Just so, one feels, Yeats walked to the shore to gaze at the lake isle of Innisfree, and exclaimed “Peace!”

---

Doug firs and big leaf maples netting the sunlight, far up above our heads. Below, the quiet green light that sifts down through the leaves, and a few stubborn mosquitoes outstaying their time, floating like dust-motes. I'm fond of mosquitoes, even though they are pests, and have probably inadvertently visited more misery on our species, by way of malaria and yellow fever, than any other creature we've ever lived with. Still, Oregon mosquitoes are harmless, humble and obsequious, politely waiting their turn to suck your blood – lacy, delicate creatures, surprisingly clumsy and surprisingly deft. They mean no harm, and they even take the trouble of injecting you with anesthetic before taking your blood, which is more than your doctor's lab-assistant does. Armed gnats. There is about them something terribly improbable, and rather gallant. I'm a sucker for gallant. They're pitched into a world where their livelihood depends on nose-harpooning a creature far greater to them than leviathan is to us: a creature not only huge, but also wickedly alert and clever, a master of poisons and deceptions, and (to their kind, at least) utterly without mercy.

Anna's Hummingbird, Nesting

When the fledgling lifts his needle bill,
who knows the tenderness in her
tiny drumroll heart? Who knows what pins her
to the flickering air?

God save us from the slow raccoon
God save us from the mocking crow
God save us from the wide-eyed cat
God save us from the fingered apes.

She is the stylus of an etch-a-sketch,
the point of a glitter-pen;
frantically motionless; hanging; the sky's
avian crucifixion.

Neglecting Pieties

“Resolution” is just the first phase of an endless cycle, a four-phase rotation. It goes like this: Resolution → Deprivation → Breakdown → Indulgence → Resolution, and so on and on and on. At the moments of Resolution and Breakdown I am supposed to believe that my true self has been unveiled at last (I am the master of my fate; I am hopelessly weak), and at the moments of Deprivation and Indulgence I pretend not to see that the true self of the former phase is crumbling. I am beginning to find the whole sequence irritating and useless, and I'm inclined to abandon it. I may have to live my own stories, but I don't have to believe them.

---

The tumults of this month have left me a little shaky. Mt Hood, with its canted shoulder, hovers over the foothills, floating free, just temporarily tethered over the sunrise. A sense of failure, of imminent disaster. What have I been doing all this time? The mountain has nothing to say to me, and I have nothing to say to it. Surely there are pieties that I have neglected.

Then I think, and I have to laugh. I'm an American: neglecting pieties is what I do. That's why God put us here -- to be the destroyers of worlds. I'm just doing my job.

Six Billion Great Apes

A soft, gentle, cloudy morning. I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. That kind of morning.

---

I need to go out and get massage from some new people: I'm too settled. I realized last week that, although I'm gifted with vibration – some people have a knack for it and some don't – I have not been using it much. But it makes for a really nice, efficient microstretch after a trigger point release. I wonder if I could train my left hand up to it? I can only do it presently with my right hand. It wears you out pretty quick: you have to be stingy about deploying it. If I could do it left-handed I could do more of it.

---

I've started reading Roy Porter's “medical history of humanity,” The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. He confirms what I suspected: that the advent of herding and agriculture was a medical disaster for our species – it was not a glorious advance so much as a clever but desperate response to having exhausted our hunting and gathering resources. He notes that “neolithic skeletons are typically some inches shorter than their paleolithic precursors.” Famine is characteristic of farming peoples, not of hunter-gatherers with sufficient range; and most of our troubling diseases we picked up either from domesticated animals, or from living in our own shit and multiplying our parasites (or “urbanization,” to use the elegant term.)

---

I love cities. I love Portland. I gaze at her in ecstatic admiration. Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety. She is a living creature of her own, a more complex, more intelligent being than you or I. Coming over the bridge at dawn I always feel as Wordsworth did on Westminster Bridge: “the very houses seem asleep, and all that mighty heart is lying still.” Felix culpa: a happy fall.

---

Still, we will never be happy or healthy on this planet until we return to a sane population. This planet is not designed to sustain six billion great apes, and nothing we can do will change that much. The fundamental, intractable problem is that there are at least a thousand times more of us than the planet can support. If we don't address that problem, nature will address it on her own. I don't think we will like her solutions.

Answer #8

In the last review session before our final exam, our physiology teacher took pity on us. “Look,” she said, “if you don't know the answer to a question, the answer is 'connective tissue.'”

Tendon, ligament, bone, cartilage, fat. And the syrupy “ground matter,” which I always think of as anatomy's version of the astrophysicist's “dark matter.” When schoolkids learn anatomy (if they ever learn anything so old-fashioned), they're given pictures of the body with the connective tissue tidied away, so they can see the real parts: heart, liver, kidneys, brain. The following pages will show you the circulatory system, the nervous system. Of all the varieties of connective tissue, the only one allowed a moment in the spotlight is the bones. Never, never will you see a nice plate of what the connective tissue looks like with all those messy organs and clots of epithelial tubing cleared out of the way. And so we go on: thinking of the body as a brain with its net of nerves, a heart with its net of arteries and veins, a skeleton with its net of muscles, a digestive system, some lungs – and (vaguely wave the hand) some “stuff.” Packing materials. A little sheathing, a little twine, a little lubricant.

So Dave asks me, “viii. What kind of cartilage connects us to the stars?”

What, indeed? Well, I can't tell you, but I can with fair confidence tell you some of its properties:

1) Its apparent disorganization will always cause systematic thinkers to avoid examining it (or sometimes, even seeing it.)

2) It will take an astonishing number of forms and bear extraordinary forces without losing its (difficult-to-define) integrity.

3) Throughout your life, your deepest pleasures and pains will come from the manipulations of this tissue. (To explain them you will make up stories in which suns and moons, brains and hearts, play heroic roles.)

4) Like certain other non-Newtonian fluids (such as silly putty), it is hard and brittle when cold and untouched, flexible and strong when warm and worked.

So if you don't want it to break, you had better stroke and knead and warm it regularly. Given its extraordinary variety, this is not at all difficult to do: hugging people, shaking hands, throwing pots, writing poems, painting in watercolor or oils, writing poetry, giving or receiving massage, bird-watching, playing music or listening to it intently (live is more effective, but the attention is the important thing), cooking, listening to a child describe her dream last night, making love passionately – any of these methods will do. Others will suggest themselves to the reader.

Cold Summer

They lie in the road like maple-litter strands,
their dull, dull stings are sheathed and crumbling knives;

they press the goading screen -- my unstung hands --
too old, too old to wish for other lives.

It doesn't bode well for the black-gold bands.
they stumble, stumble home to their bare hives:

this summer has showed too cold to move by dance,
and the fading, fading sun never arrives.

Summer not Summer

I don't know why this year the bees are coming to us to die. Every morning there is one or two or three motionless on the screen. Tomorrow they will lie curled on the porch, and we'll sweep them away, and one or two or three silent replacements will be on the screen. They've been doing this for days.

Does one go back to the hive, each time, to dance “this is a good place to die”? And do the ones that plan to come tomorrow watch him, gravely, attentively, studying for tomorrow's recital?

Once on the screen they never move, never murmur: protesters holding a silent vigil.

---

The 18th of July, and we have had two summer days. Cold and cloudy this morning. Lovely for me – I do not much like hot days – but eerie.

---

A cluster of bubbles on the surface of my coffee deceives me: I think a pale spider is floating there, its legs curled inward.

---

Either I was early, or my friend was late: I had twenty minutes in her quiet evening office to meditate, perched on the edge of a chair, my eye idly making flowers out of patterns in the carpet, feeling the sky wheeling slowly over my head, my inbreaths and outbreaths barely noticed, coming and going like hospital nurses in a sleeping patient's room.

---

Strange how nervous it still makes me, to stand up in front of people and say things, even my written-down poems. I would say it means nothing to me, I have nothing invested in it, but my shaky hands and quavering voice give me the lie. What do my hands and voice think? That strangers are really listening to me, really trying to see into my heart? Or that if I was good enough I could make them do so despite themselves?

But I did enjoy reading a couple of Sage's poems. It would be fun to do a reading in which you all read each other's poems. I would enjoy that much more than reading my own, both the reading and the listening. I'll never forget Beth in Teju's Brooklyn apartment, reading my poem “Santiago” aloud. – Now that did feel like someone seeing into my heart.

They're wonderful readers: Tiel, Carolee, and Deb. Sage couldn't come, so Tiel and I read some of her poems. And Deb read one of Jill Crammond Wickham's poems, so that all the Big Tent Ringmasters were represented. This is what modern poetry is, to me. Not “fame, that all seek after in their lives,” but rather, a way for friends to slow down and understand each other deeply. No doubt my hands and voice would get all excited about the prospect of being in the Norton Anthology of English Literature in 2046, but I don't. I get excited about hearing Carolee read “Jalopy.”

Box (I)

She only knew the box was hers to keep. “What's in your stupid old box, anyway?” She wouldn't answer; she didn't know; it was locked, it came that way. She wasn't even sure who gave it to her: maybe one of the dead aunts and uncles they still talked about as if she should remember them. Uncle Bill Who had a Way with The Ladies, or Aunt Sarah Who was not Always Wise. She liked the sound of Aunt Sarah.

When her grandpa offered to prise the box open, she reacted with a violence that surprised even him, though she was given to violence, and he of all people should have known why. He let it be: for a miracle, he let it be.

It made a faint jingly rattle when you shook it. Jewelry? Money? No one knew. It was small, smaller than a brick, and she had a dozen hiding places for it. Hide it in the same place over and over, and people would guess the place by watching her go to it. Someone would find the box and try to open it. She knew enough of the world to know that. And either way they would ruin it. Either the contents would be something they really thought valuable and they'd take it away, or they would put names on it that would steal its potency. “Just trinkets,” someone would say, or “Irish pennies and not even old.” No. She wasn't going to risk that.

She grew up awkward, too tall, inclined to be plump, and dangerous, with a cold eye and a hair-trigger temper. “Sullen,” they called her. She carried a purse unfashionably big, so she could stow the box in the bottom of it. People thought she was trying to look feminine and failing. She didn't much care what people thought.

In dreams she went away to the state college, where they read poems that didn't rhyme and had penises in them. They would sit in big classrooms and talk about the poems as if the penises weren't there. She wasn't sure she wanted to go to college, but she knew she wanted to get out. And there was a slender young East Indian man, a man Grandpa would have called a nigger, in her dreams. He stood sideways to her, respectful and silent, and one day she gave him her box to hold while she got her things together. All in the dream, of course. He handed it back with the bare shadow of a smile, nothing pushy or loud, and said, “we know about boxes in India.”

Sometimes he was in the bathroom with her, which never seemed wrong, in the dreams, but which made her blush when she woke. He said the same thing there. He held the box and when he handed it back he said, “we know about boxes in India.”

In one dream she tried to explain that she was not violent because she had red hair, she had red hair because she was violent, and he said no, she had red hair because of the box, because of what was in the box. This made her cross, because how did he know? And he said, “Listen, this is important.” He put something in her hands and folded them over it. His skin was dry and supple like a snake's. And then he vanished, moving gently sideways till he wasn't there anymore.

She woke with her hands folded together, and when she opened them, there was a silver key.

Now: when you open a real box with a dream key, is what you find real or dream? The problem seemed like one of arithmetic principles. Are dreams associative or commutative? Or was it like negative and positive numbers, a dream times a real always made a dream? Or maybe it was the other way around. Did you learn things like that in college? She doubted it. But now she had two things to hide, the box and the key.

Reading Saturday Noon at St Johns Booksellers

St Johns Booksellers
8622 N. Lombard St., Portland, OR 97203

I'll be reading, and so will Tiel Aisha Ansari, Sage Cohen, Deb Scott, and Carolee Sherwood. About ten minutes apiece: no heroic feats of listening endurance required.

These are some of the poets I most admire. They got me started writing poetry and keep me writing poetry. (They can't help that, mind, so don't hold it against them.)

Tiel Aisha Ansari
Sage Cohen
Deb Scott
Carolee Sherwood

Jupiter Tonans



Jupiter riding high in the south, unwinking: a faintly yellowed white, like ivory.

---

I'm still reading Elizabeth Bishop, but I can't drink her by the pint, as I could Oliver. A shot or two at a time is as much as I can handle. In the meantime I read about orangutans and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

---

All these projects seething in my head. Never have I seemed to myself so flighty, changeable, and useless. I wonder and wonder about the pain some of my clients are in. About fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome. About cancer. Am I really doing all I can for people? Why are people's bodies turning on them with such ferocity, these days? I have no sympathy with the desire for purity that drives much of the yen for “natural” and “organic” stuff, but on the other hand it does seem awfully likely that we're all being slowly poisoned.

---

I do trigger point, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Much of this myofascial pain comes, ultimately, of loneliness, of sleep deprivation, of feeling unneeded and useless: of this queer zoo-like combination of isolation and overexposure, unappeasable hunger and constant eating, no exercise and no rest. That's what we have to change. I can ameliorate this pain but I can't fix it.

---

And in the meantime, the clocks all running backward: my own life so full of joy, and the stars spinning slowly away in our wake. Jupiter Tonans has never been my totem, but he seems to have taken me for his own, now.

Worn Almost Away

Of the great apes, we are the only ones that are much good at swimming.

---

The mosquito people must be feeling ill-used this year: it went from too cold for them to too hot for them in about 36 hours. They've worked off their resentment by biting me more times in the last couple days than they did all of last year.

---

Such a beautiful fresh morning. Never been able to understand sleeping through the most beautiful part of the day. Though I'm glad most people want to: it means I can be quietly alone with the sunrise. The light lies on the world like new-fallen snow, and I don't really want it criss-crossed with tracks, yet.

---

I don't know what I've become. Not what I intended, but not what I feared, either. So far from where I started. The only thing I still have, that I started with, is my sense of how beautiful it all is.

Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to endless night.

It's not that I'm never sad, or that I don't miss you. But I'm like a swimmer being pulled into the current of delight. It runs faster and stronger all the time. And why I'm being pulled into this one, instead of the dark one, I have no idea. I've done some things wrong and some right, like everyone else. And willy nilly, I think of death as being completely swept away in that delight. I don't mean I think of it, I don't think of it at all, in the ordinary sense. I'm aware of it like a stage actor's aware of the audience, or a hiker's aware of the sound of a river. Behind everything, holding it up – the real reason for all this – there, you see? The minute you start talking about it you find yourself saying stupid things, false things. Automatic phrases, things you want to be true but you know aren't, quite.

---

And you want to give it to people. It seems so clear and direct. Here, have my joy, what could I possibly do with so much? I'm being washed over with bright oceans of it. And yet I can't do it. I can hold someone in my arms, willing the delight into them, and they can be right there in the dark, in the emptiness, feeling nothing but despair, as thoroughly in the dark as I am in the light. I don't understand how that can be.

---

Rest a while. I am tired: I am exhausted, actually. I feel like a shell worn almost away: translucent, beautiful, fragile.

---

Wishing I could set things right before I go.

Original Sin

Such an article of faith it was, among my people, that it was civilization that had ruined mankind. Like all radicals, we looked back to a golden age – in our case to the golden age that “the gentle Tasaday,” we thought, had never left, and to which we could return by the simple and wonderfully attractive expedient of refusing to do anything we didn't like to do. It's sad but not surprising that the idea of actually taking the Tasaday seriously, and trying to understand how they had achieved a peaceful and egalitarian civilization, never occurred to us. We really had all our prejudices intact. What was there to study? They were natural. They had by definition no civilization: that was what made them good. Our project was not to build, but to dismantle.

It's easy to make fun of this mental substratum now. Less easy to get rid of it. It has been shocking to me, reading about orangutans. Rape was something I associated with civilization: in fact I realize now that it was almost my definition of civilization. Institutionalized rape. To find it common among another species, among the species arguably most like our own, seemed to me both horribly wrong and nightmarishly probable. Like those moments in horror films when it turns out that everything is just as bad as you always thought. So that's why I've always been afraid of this: because it's true.

But things aren't true because we're afraid of them, any more than they're true because we want them to be true.

I love orangutans. Always have. I used to gravitate to them at the zoo: I loved their slow, deliberate movement, their meditative, melancholy aspect, the way their clear brown eyes were wells of sadness. I wanted to sit down beside them and absorb their quietness. I loved the fact that they were so strong: four times as strong as human beings, said one of my books. If an orangutan gets hold of something, good luck getting it back, said another. If it gets hold of your shoe or your camera, you just wait till it's done, and hope it doesn't pull it to pieces. Even a youngster is stronger than we are.

I love their posture, even more slumped and pot-bellied than mine. I love that they think things through. Chimps given a bunch of boxes which, stacked the right way, will allow them to get to a treat, will go to work at once, stacking them every which way, figuring it out by trial and error. An orangutan will sit there and work it out, solving the whole problem before lifting a finger, and then slowly, deliberately, set box on box and climb up to the treat.

To find that they have a bully-wins-all social organization, and a propensity for sexual violence – well, it meant that the Catholics were right all along. Original sin.

That's silly, of course. Orangutans are no more early human beings than the Tasaday are. We don't know where we came from. A couple crates of old bones and chipped stones is all we have to go on. But I think I need to read more about all of the great apes. Anything they all – chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans – have in common, is very likely to be our heritage too.

Orangutans, Whores, and Massage Therapists

Touch me, touch me not. I can't get the subadults out of my head. Orangutans go through the jungle in a grand procession, you see. A dominant male, huge and fully-flanged. (Males keep on growing: they just get bigger and bigger.) A coterie of females with their infants, spread out like a disciplined soccer team. And tagging at the corners, out of reach of the king, the subadult males, hoping for a shot at raping one of the king's consorts.

Subadults, because they're not flanged. But fully capable of siring children. And desperate to fuck. But no female orangutan wants anything but a flanged, full adult. So, among the dimorphic orangutans, even subadult males much bigger than females, that means rape, a lot of it.

(All great apes, I once heard an anthropologist say, are obsessed with sex -- by primate standards, by mammalian standards.)

Subadults. Usually, “adult” means “capable of reproduction.” So it's odd that the name “subadult” should stand. Because, weirdly, there's no telling how long it will be until a subadult flanges. Anecdote says that they won't, as long as they're in the orbit of a flanged adult. It can be as long as 25 years, or half the life-span of an orangutan. Maybe the name stuck before people knew that. Or maybe it sticks because we buy into orangutan culture, because it's so close to our own.

Now, I'm supposed to be indignant because some people call us massage therapists whores? Because we touch people who haven't earned it by status? I glory in it, bucko. Call me a whore. Call us all whores. The 4th of July is when we celebrate the overthrow of kings, remember? Blow out your flanged jowls and hoot all you like. I don't play by your rules: never did, never will. Maybe I can't fix the system, but I'm damned if I'll ratify it, damned if I'll believe in it.

No, but seriously. We're talking about real people here, trying to make a living, the whores and the licensed massage therapists alike. I care about people being able to clear space for doing touch therapy without being molested, being able to offer massage that's clearly not sex. It's what I want to do myself. My calling. But when somebody calls you a nigger, you can get mad for two different reasons: because they're calling you a nigger, and you consider yourself white, or because they're calling anyone a nigger. This is a society that makes prostitution inevitable. We're supposed to despise the prostitutes and the subadults who frequent them, reserving our (scarcely covert) admiration for the dominant males who don't have to pay for multiple partners. I'm just not interested in keeping up the game, frankly. I don't believe in any of the ground rules, I don't believe the virtues are virtuous, I don't believe the vices are vicious. I just want people to stop hurting each other.

The Making of the Grand Salad: an Occasion for Fanaticism

So I'm on my second round, four or five days in, and I have made my second grand salad. This is a critical piece of my regimen – it may, indeed, be the critical piece of my regimen. So I must be fanatical about it. My conviction grows that, in the absence of inifinite oomph, success in changing what I eat is a matter of choosing, very carefully, when to be fanatical and what to be fanatical about.

I need to be fanatical about the salad. I must always have the salad. I make a great big one, and it lasts four or five days. It's good food that is ready to eat immediately, and I eat it a couple times a day. If I don't have that, then I will go off-regimen. And stay off-regimen for a surprisingly long amount of time: almost two months, last time. So on the day I am going to run out, I have to go buy the stuff and make the salad, and I have to do it immediately. The stuff doesn't even go into the fridge. Throughout the two non-regimen months, I bought salad makings two, maybe even three times. They sat in the fridge until they were dubious – could I, should I, still make salad out of them? – and their presence there became a major obstacle to getting back on track. Not only would I have to buy salad stuff and make it – I would have to deal with the dubious produce in the fridge, first. So, rather than getting back on track, I'd indulge for another day. And another. And then two months had passed.

So this is one of those points of leverage. Where it really is worth it to go all steely-eyed and grim-jawed and muscle my way through by sheer will power. When the salad's running out, I make a new one. Even if it's inconvenient for other people, even if I don't feel like it, even if it will make me late for work. Now, this is a good candidate for spending oomph, because it is finite, and because it only comes up every once in a while. I don't have to heroic every day. Once or twice a week, that's all. I can manage that.

I'm wondering, in fact, whether I should measure my time “on-regimen” by salads made, not by days. In which case the last “on regimen” period wasn't nine days, it was two salads.

Where I've Been

I've been scarce. I'm writing a book, backwards. Didn't know if I wanted to post any of it here, but what the heck.

---

Here is a simple set of four points summarizing the prevailing theory of why people get fat:

1) Human beings, having evolved in feast-or-famine conditions, are designed to store excess food as adipose tissue, which their bodies then consume to keep them alive when they don't have enough food.

2) By a simple exertion of will, such as that by which a person can make their bed each morning, a person can simply decide not to eat as much as they want.

3) Some people simply will not make the effort. These people get fat.

4) It doesn't matter what they eat. It's simple arithmetic: if you eat more calories than you expend, you get fatter; if you expend more calories than you eat, you get thinner.

I grew up believing these to be true. They are not abstruse propositions, nor are they particularly difficult to verify or disprove. In fact they are all false, and have been proven to be false: but their hold on the public consciousness is tenacious. Here are some contrary propositions:

1) Human beings don't “bank” calories, or not much. Fat people don't starve much more slowly than skinny people. When the body lays in excessive adipose tissue, it's because the endocrine system is malfunctioning.

2) People have no long-term control over how many calories they consume, just as they have no long-term control over how much oxygen they consume. The cerebral cortex can override the rest of the brain temporarily, but not permanently. The amount we eat is no more under our voluntary control than breathing is. If we found that people were taking in more oxygen than was good for them, we could tell them they ought to breathe less. We'd get results similar to the results we have gotten by telling them to eat less.

3) Some people have vulnerable endocrine systems. The homeostatic processes break down in these people, under certain environmental pressures, and they get fat. Some people do not have this vulnerability, and they do not get fat. There is no observable difference in the amount of will power between the two groups. Normal weight people, of course, think that their conscious decisions determine their weight, for the same reason that normal people confronted with lights that randomly switch on and off, and a switch that is disconnected from these lights, think that their flipping of the switch influences whether the lights come on and off. If there is supposed to be a causal connection between random events, people will perceive it.

4) It is indeed true that if you eat more calories than you expend, you will get fatter, and if you eat fewer, you will get thinner. But since the regulation of calorie intake is not under the long-term control of the cerebral cortex, this is not really useful information for someone who wants to lose weight. Human beings in general cannot, or will not (at the public health level, it doesn't matter which), regulate their calorie intake. If we can't change how much our bodies want to eat, we can't lose weight. We can torment ourselves, and struggle heroically, and lose weight for weeks or even months at a time, but in the end we will be fatter than ever.

I have arrived at these conclusions after a lot of reading and a lot of observation. I believe the second theory fits the observable facts much better than the first theory. The motivation for fat people to lose weight is overwhelming. They are led to believe (far more than is true, actually) that their health, their love lives, their sex lives, their careers – basically, their whole happiness – is at stake. If these motives don't suffice, it's hard to see what motives would. Far the simplest explanation for why people don't restrict their calorie intake, is because they can't.

The tantalizing thing is that diet obviously does affect weight. People can, to some extent, change their eating habits, and they do. They can induce great see-saw swings in the amount of fat they carry. What they can't seem to do is the one thing they want to do: lose fat and keep it off.

Some time ago I read quite a bit about weight loss, and I was startled by how little real science had been done. The real scientists considered the problem solved – people simply had to eat less: if they didn't, that was their own problem, not the scientists'. The field was left largely to hacks, who proposed diet after diet, claimed great success rates, and who rose and fell like the tides.

What the pop diet people understood – the solution they were groping for – was that there might be some kind of diet that would make people less hungry, some way of eating or thinking about eating that would solve the real problem. The real problem being that our bodies think they need more food than they do.

I believe this problem has now been partly solved: the single thing in the diet that most confuses our bodies are refined carbohydrates. Sugar and corn syrup, especially in liquid forms – the obvious and glaring culprits being soft drinks, fruit juices, “sport drinks,” and beer, which deliver incredible amounts of sugars virtually direct to the bloodstream – are the worst. After that come all the starches: the potatoes, and the overrefined grains: white flour, white rice, pasta. Nothing in our evolutionary history prepares us for these foods, and for some people – but not for others – they wreak havoc on the endocrine system.

Exactly how or when this damage is done, we really don't know. Some of it is observably “real time”: when I've been in a phase of eating lots of sugar and carbs, I am hungry virtually all the time, often savagely, ferociously hungry. But some of the damage may be done before birth, or in infancy. Some of it may be irreversible. And some of it may not be dietary at all.

I've done a lot of experimenting with diet and eating: I've become interested both objectively – interested in the science of it – and interested, as someone who practices meditation and introspection, in the mental processes involved. I've been overweight all my life – according to the usual (totally unscientifically arrived at) standards, by thirty to seventy pounds: that is, I tend to waver right around that magic line between “overweight” and “obese.” I have been as motivated as anyone else to lose that weight, and tried as many things as anyone else, and failed as miserably as everyone else. My knowledge of diet and nutrition is not that of an expert, but that of a well-read amateur. Likewise my knowledge of brain science. The only expertise I can claim is that of introspection. I have observed very closely what happens in my consciousness as I overeat, or do not overeat. It's fascinating and humbling to actually watch one's will crumble.

Will. It's an interesting concept, largely unexplored in the West, except among people who have a special interest in it: addicts and contemplatives, who are daily brought up against the fact that it doesn't work at all as advertised. We of all people know that will power is a very finite commodity, which has to be deployed with exquisite care. We can't afford the luxury of believing the cerebral cortex always controls our behavior: we know – by dint of repeated excruciating failure – that it does not.

I am writing this as part of an experiment. I already know that I am incapable of restricting my calorie intake. Whether this “should” be true is a question that I will leave to theologians, or anyone who thinks it is a meaningful question. That it is true, I have discovered empirically by repeated experiment, and I'm not interested in running any more (emotionally painful, if not devastating) experiments on that question.

My present experiment is to see if I can change what I eat (not the amounts, but the kinds of things), permanently. I am hoping, of course, that I can. And I am hoping that if I do, I will lose weight. But really at this point I am motivated more by curiosity and irritation than by hope. I'm ready to be done with this whole sorry business. If I can change what I eat, and maintain that change for six months, I will declare the experiment a success, regardless of whether my weight changes much. If I can't, I'll declare it a failure. This is not an experiment in diet so much as an experiment in will. My hypothesis is that if I deploy my will power carefully, at the points of maximum leverage, I can change my diet from one that makes me obese, to one that makes me merely overweight.