It's a Spring morning, as we know Spring mornings here: Spring shuffles into the Northwest casually, all but unnoticed, rumpled and sleepy: a few crocuses here, a fruit tree trying out some buds over there. Not a big fuss. Sure it's green, but it's green in January too.
I dream of the days when everything will cohere and make sense: I'm scattered and confused. One thing at a time. We won't be settled in our hearts until we're settled in a new house, and have accomplished everything that it will take to get from here to there. The biggest difficulty, as always, will be negotiating all the changes in family and social relationships that it will entail. We are such intensely social creatures, and so much of our sense of belonging and hierarchy is wrapped up in place. Moving house puts everything into play: who really belongs? How much territory do they get to mark, how much do they freely traverse?
The life of dogs is so enviable. They need to belong so much that the dog rule is simply everybody belongs: just find your place and stay there. So you establish dominance and submission once and for all, and from then on you just roll with it. But cats and human beings never really settle. Who's boss right now? Who belongs at the moment? No dog ever asks those questions, but cats and people ask them all the time. Forget tool-using and language: the really distinctive human trait is a constant social uneasiness. (Yes, I understand that I've just defined cats as human. That's because they are.)
I can't find the quotation from Samuel Johnson, but he once said something like -- no two people can be together for an hour without one establishing a clear superiority over the other. This is nonsense, of course, but it's fruitful nonsense. There are dozens of overlapping spheres of capability, each having its own importance at its own time: at one time we may be painfully aware that someone is physically stronger and quicker than we are, at another we may silently congratulate ourselves on being emotionally hardier than someone else: at a public meeting a person who can speak forcefully and cogently suddenly becomes a person to be reckoned with, despite his incompetence with a hammer.
We are fascinated by combat and contests: those who don't go in for football are likely enough to be fascinated by academic disputation or political contention. We follow these things avidly even when they're of no real concern to us. I have no conceivable stake in the Green Bay Packers winning the Superbowl, and I have far less stake in the outcome of the political races I follow than justifies the eagerness with which I follow them. (Ireland shall get her freedom, says Yeats' Parnell to a laborer, and you still break stone.) No: it's the drama of winning and losing itself that is perennially gripping. Our ache for winning and our dread of losing attaches itself to any passing conflict. Some time ago there was some spam-ish ad that invited you to vote for Coke or Pepsi: some clever person correctly perceived that a preference as trivial as that for one flavor of sugar water over another would engage people's competitive instincts and get them to click something.
Moving house will be such a visible marker of dropping in class, that I'm abnormally sensitized to class and status just now. My friend Teju Cole has hit the big time with his novel Open City -- rave reviews in the New Yorker and all that sort of thing -- and I doggedly, rebelliously, have not read it yet. There's envy mixed in to that refusal, I'm afraid, but mostly its stubbornness. Several of my friends have books just out, or books I'm reading in draft, and I'm resolutely keeping Open City in its place in the queue. Famous or not, one friend's book has the same importance to me as another's. But I can feel the undertow, the impulse to let it jump the queue because it's more important, and the impulse to drop his name. It's a deeply unpleasant feeling to me, and its resonance with the house-downsizing is more unpleasant still. I feel mutinous, and my socialist convictions have re-engaged. These days, the image of subadult orangutans, jealously tagging after the patriarch orangutans and their multiple wives, keeps coming to me, unbidden. It's not a comfortable image, and it doesn't bring comfortable thoughts.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Calf
Above the beardline
I stroke the half inch of stubble on my cheek,
and below, the loosening flesh of my throat
is all prickle and fuzz:
half emery board, half peach.
I am an overripe and jowly kiwi fruit,
An incipient but failed Tolstoy, a patriarch
shorn, domesticate, yet run to seed.
No news from the mountain here.
And anyway, I'm Aaron, not Moses.
The one who stayed behind, the one
who looked after the little ones
and tried to make everyone happy.
Well, sure, I said, I can make you
a calf, if you're sure that's what you want.
And so I made it as beautifully as I knew how,
and put the love of real calves in it,
Their awkward plunging for the teat,
Their great dark worried eyes.
And I said to them, “Israel, this is your God,
which brought you out of the land of Egypt.”
Not because it was, you understand.
It was their earrings and bracelets:
they knew that as well as I. But
it was what they wanted me to say.
Ah, well, you know the story.
My brother came home in a temper,
and I told a wicked lie and said
that when I threw the gold in the fire
it just came out that way: a calf. He
burnt it and ground it to a powder
and mixed it up with water --
he was kind of nuts --
and made everybody drink some.
My sin, the way he tells it,
was in representing God at all, and
in letting the people pray to it,
letting them make offerings.
Well. It's a long time ago;
least said soonest mended.
But that's not what I asked forgiveness for
when I prayed in my own tent.
I stroke the half inch of stubble on my cheek,
and below, the loosening flesh of my throat
is all prickle and fuzz:
half emery board, half peach.
I am an overripe and jowly kiwi fruit,
An incipient but failed Tolstoy, a patriarch
shorn, domesticate, yet run to seed.
No news from the mountain here.
And anyway, I'm Aaron, not Moses.
The one who stayed behind, the one
who looked after the little ones
and tried to make everyone happy.
Well, sure, I said, I can make you
a calf, if you're sure that's what you want.
And so I made it as beautifully as I knew how,
and put the love of real calves in it,
Their awkward plunging for the teat,
Their great dark worried eyes.
And I said to them, “Israel, this is your God,
which brought you out of the land of Egypt.”
Not because it was, you understand.
It was their earrings and bracelets:
they knew that as well as I. But
it was what they wanted me to say.
Ah, well, you know the story.
My brother came home in a temper,
and I told a wicked lie and said
that when I threw the gold in the fire
it just came out that way: a calf. He
burnt it and ground it to a powder
and mixed it up with water --
he was kind of nuts --
and made everybody drink some.
My sin, the way he tells it,
was in representing God at all, and
in letting the people pray to it,
letting them make offerings.
Well. It's a long time ago;
least said soonest mended.
But that's not what I asked forgiveness for
when I prayed in my own tent.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Tundra
In response to this Morning Porch entry
As Spring begins to fill the cup of Summer
and everyone else rejoices, I feel
the longing and the loss of Winter,
the craving
for a truer North and
a more lonely tundra
where grooming swans bite their feathers
and pools of meltwater sway
the black strands of last year’s grass.
As Spring begins to fill the cup of Summer
and everyone else rejoices, I feel
the longing and the loss of Winter,
the craving
for a truer North and
a more lonely tundra
where grooming swans bite their feathers
and pools of meltwater sway
the black strands of last year’s grass.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Whiteness
Whiteness, sheets washing out with the tide,
rain sweeping windows with light,
the swash of white headlights below in the streets,
white coiled within white like a shell
just turning to blush. And
a flush begins at your throat, and slowly runs
over your collarbone: angelfood
breathing what seeps from
slices of strawberry,
or the last light of a clouded sky
rising on white walls farther away
than the chance of seeing you ever ever again.
rain sweeping windows with light,
the swash of white headlights below in the streets,
white coiled within white like a shell
just turning to blush. And
a flush begins at your throat, and slowly runs
over your collarbone: angelfood
breathing what seeps from
slices of strawberry,
or the last light of a clouded sky
rising on white walls farther away
than the chance of seeing you ever ever again.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Not Looking at March
never make love at sunset never
leave strands of hair behind in your comb
always avert your eyes when march
that gawky teen on olympus
fumbles trying blue eye shadow
for the first time splotchy unskilled
we try so hard but not hard enough
to stay out of trouble with the gods
Thanks to Uma for Better off Unborn and Jean for Trying to be March.
leave strands of hair behind in your comb
always avert your eyes when march
that gawky teen on olympus
fumbles trying blue eye shadow
for the first time splotchy unskilled
we try so hard but not hard enough
to stay out of trouble with the gods
Thanks to Uma for Better off Unborn and Jean for Trying to be March.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Thatch and Penfish
A French chaumière, it turns out, is a hut or cabin, specifically a thatched cottage, from chaume, thatch, deriving ultimately from Greek kalamos, reed. (Yes, the same kalamos that becomes Latin calamus, pen, extant in English as “lapsus calami”: a slip of the pen, a typo.) The riddle, then, is “why is a thatched hut like a typo?”
I'm not sure why the pleasure of such simple excursions into etymology is so intense for me. I meet the word chaumière (new to me) and until I can connect it with the words I already know I feel a lack, a yearning. Everything, I feel, should go back to words as simple as “reed” if you follow them back far enough. I think the reason I stalled out on Chinese and Tibetan was that there was no way to trace them back to common ancestors of my own language. It was turtles all the way down, and tonal turtles at that. At the end of the road was not a picture of a shrewd Greek sitting by the riverbank inventing a pen by slicing a reed on the bias: it was a faceless bing, or mao, sung in a tone utterly strange to me. At the lowest stratum, it all dissolved into the chirping of alien birds. Perhaps for some people all foreign languages are like that.
And yes, calamus is related to calamari, because the squid, or by some accounts the squid's beak, reminded some Italian body of a pen -- and of course it squirts ink -- and so he called the squid a “calamaro,” a penfish. And if this doesn't make you wriggle with delight I don't know what I can do for you.
Fourth day back on regimen. As before, one of the first things I'm struck by, when I get my eating under control again, is that I sleep longer and more deeply: I didn't wake till nearly seven this morning. I wonder if the steadier blood sugar accounts for it, or if it's the fact that I only manage to get my eating under control when the other stresses of my life have moderated? Or for some other reason? Whatever the reason, I'm paying off a long-standing sleep deficit, and it feels good, although, as always when I sleep this much, I feel as though the air has thickened and my reflexes have slowed. It's a sensation I don't much like, although it does seem wholesome and restorative: I feel I've temporarily lost my edge. I wonder how people who live this way all the time survive it? Being pitched straight from sleep into the demands of the waking world, I mean. I'd go mad in short order.
I'm not sure why the pleasure of such simple excursions into etymology is so intense for me. I meet the word chaumière (new to me) and until I can connect it with the words I already know I feel a lack, a yearning. Everything, I feel, should go back to words as simple as “reed” if you follow them back far enough. I think the reason I stalled out on Chinese and Tibetan was that there was no way to trace them back to common ancestors of my own language. It was turtles all the way down, and tonal turtles at that. At the end of the road was not a picture of a shrewd Greek sitting by the riverbank inventing a pen by slicing a reed on the bias: it was a faceless bing, or mao, sung in a tone utterly strange to me. At the lowest stratum, it all dissolved into the chirping of alien birds. Perhaps for some people all foreign languages are like that.
And yes, calamus is related to calamari, because the squid, or by some accounts the squid's beak, reminded some Italian body of a pen -- and of course it squirts ink -- and so he called the squid a “calamaro,” a penfish. And if this doesn't make you wriggle with delight I don't know what I can do for you.
Fourth day back on regimen. As before, one of the first things I'm struck by, when I get my eating under control again, is that I sleep longer and more deeply: I didn't wake till nearly seven this morning. I wonder if the steadier blood sugar accounts for it, or if it's the fact that I only manage to get my eating under control when the other stresses of my life have moderated? Or for some other reason? Whatever the reason, I'm paying off a long-standing sleep deficit, and it feels good, although, as always when I sleep this much, I feel as though the air has thickened and my reflexes have slowed. It's a sensation I don't much like, although it does seem wholesome and restorative: I feel I've temporarily lost my edge. I wonder how people who live this way all the time survive it? Being pitched straight from sleep into the demands of the waking world, I mean. I'd go mad in short order.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
In The Game
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod
Or love in a golden bowl?
A long, long time ago, the colors blurred, the voices unsteady, and yet, little in the present can compete with it. What are we playing for, here? The ante alone could break us. You know what they say: if you've been playing for twenty minutes and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Walk naked down the long cool halls, the polished butter-yellow fir wood warm under your feet, the light bending around corners, slanting across your thighs, motes rippling away from your turned hands. What did they tell us? Oh, story after story, none of them true. The bedclothes still rucked up and smelling of sweetness and almonds and sex. If one still smoked afterwards, this would be the time for it.
We thought, if all the stories were lies, we'd get to make up our own stories: but it doesn't work that way either. The stories run the show, true or false: they set the ante. They make the rules.
The part you really loved was rolling the cigarettes afterwards. Thin brown nimble fingers, and the smell of unlit tobacco. Then the spurt of a match, and the faint blue spiral rising up, climbing up through the bars of the the sunlight, until your breath catches it and it's all confusion and turbulence, light and smoke tumbling together like dancers, like lovers.
Well. You can't wish love never happened. You pay the debts you can, you rub sweaty hands over your hair, you hope for rain, and you walk, walk right out of the past into the future, where the colors are even more fragile
So far, here in the future, the imagination collapses as soon as it tries to rise. But we're still in. They ante for you, in this house: you're in the game whether you mean to be or not.
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod
Or love in a golden bowl?
A long, long time ago, the colors blurred, the voices unsteady, and yet, little in the present can compete with it. What are we playing for, here? The ante alone could break us. You know what they say: if you've been playing for twenty minutes and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Walk naked down the long cool halls, the polished butter-yellow fir wood warm under your feet, the light bending around corners, slanting across your thighs, motes rippling away from your turned hands. What did they tell us? Oh, story after story, none of them true. The bedclothes still rucked up and smelling of sweetness and almonds and sex. If one still smoked afterwards, this would be the time for it.
We thought, if all the stories were lies, we'd get to make up our own stories: but it doesn't work that way either. The stories run the show, true or false: they set the ante. They make the rules.
The part you really loved was rolling the cigarettes afterwards. Thin brown nimble fingers, and the smell of unlit tobacco. Then the spurt of a match, and the faint blue spiral rising up, climbing up through the bars of the the sunlight, until your breath catches it and it's all confusion and turbulence, light and smoke tumbling together like dancers, like lovers.
Well. You can't wish love never happened. You pay the debts you can, you rub sweaty hands over your hair, you hope for rain, and you walk, walk right out of the past into the future, where the colors are even more fragile
So far, here in the future, the imagination collapses as soon as it tries to rise. But we're still in. They ante for you, in this house: you're in the game whether you mean to be or not.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
The Moon at Anchor
If I sewed two little connected flannel bags, each the size of the circle I can make with my thumb and forefinger (the 'O' of the “OK” gesture), and filled them with steel shot or small ball bearings, that might work. Little velcro-shut bags. I want something small and heavy, that will sit right on top of the eyes to block the light, but will stay put, so that I can do supine neck and shoulder work, and even scalp and TMJ work, without having to fuss with it. I have a client now who simply pulls the covers right over her head when I turn her over onto her back. But of course I have to pull them back down when I do what I usually save for last, the serious neck & shoulder & scalp & face work, and she grimaces a little, involuntarily, when I do. Every thing I've seen so far is a little light, or not properly washable, or drapes over the forehead and temples.
I could empty the balls into a dish, wipe them with bleach, and wash the little bags with the sheets. Or if a regular wanted one of their own they could just keep one, that would be easy. The metal balls would start cold on cold days, though. I'd have to smuggle the eye pillow onto a corner of the table warmer, so it would be nice and warmed up before I turned my client over.
I'm at the door, with all my kit packed up. Her daughter loms onto her, for a hug, and I ruffle the girl's hair. She flashes a smile at me. She likes me. I didn't give her away when first I spotted her, years ago, creeping down to get a glimpse of her Mom getting a massage, when she was supposed to be in bed. We have been secret sharers, ever since. “Now let me give Dale a hug before he goes,” laughs her Mom. The girl yields the floor with dignity, like a veteran senator. A warm terrycloth hug, and I'm out the door, into a cold night with flying clouds and the moon riding restlessly at its sea-anchor over the housetops. This part of my life, anyway, is right. I've found my work.
If I sewed two little connected flannel bags, each the size of the circle I can make with my thumb and forefinger (the 'O' of the “OK” gesture), and filled them with steel shot or small ball bearings, that might work. Little velcro-shut bags. I want something small and heavy, that will sit right on top of the eyes to block the light, but will stay put, so that I can do supine neck and shoulder work, and even scalp and TMJ work, without having to fuss with it. I have a client now who simply pulls the covers right over her head when I turn her over onto her back. But of course I have to pull them back down when I do what I usually save for last, the serious neck & shoulder & scalp & face work, and she grimaces a little, involuntarily, when I do. Every thing I've seen so far is a little light, or not properly washable, or drapes over the forehead and temples.
I could empty the balls into a dish, wipe them with bleach, and wash the little bags with the sheets. Or if a regular wanted one of their own they could just keep one, that would be easy. The metal balls would start cold on cold days, though. I'd have to smuggle the eye pillow onto a corner of the table warmer, so it would be nice and warmed up before I turned my client over.
I'm at the door, with all my kit packed up. Her daughter loms onto her, for a hug, and I ruffle the girl's hair. She flashes a smile at me. She likes me. I didn't give her away when first I spotted her, years ago, creeping down to get a glimpse of her Mom getting a massage, when she was supposed to be in bed. We have been secret sharers, ever since. “Now let me give Dale a hug before he goes,” laughs her Mom. The girl yields the floor with dignity, like a veteran senator. A warm terrycloth hug, and I'm out the door, into a cold night with flying clouds and the moon riding restlessly at its sea-anchor over the housetops. This part of my life, anyway, is right. I've found my work.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Red House
Always surprised by the pure bright crimson when they take the blood out of my arm: the life that can feel so feeble and dull, at times, is pulsing there, brilliant red, all the time. All the work that goes into making that fluid: spleen and liver preparing and purifying it, the lungs carefully oxygenating it to come up with that red -- the characteristic hue of oxygen working its Shiva changes: the rust red of corroding iron, the brilliant red of the radical blood -- it goes on all the time, under my drab pale skin, whatever the weather, whatever the mood.
We live in many houses, built and natural: we're so many intersecting series of hyperdimensional Russian dolls. Oh, but we believe specially in this house, the house of the red blood! Never mind that a clever researcher can convince you with ease that you've sprouted a third arm, one that you can feel and move just like your others. Still you believe the others are real, real as the cold pounding rain, indisputable. And we call this being hard-headed and realistic. Yah.
When we wriggle out of this carapace, in sleep, and wander into our other houses? Then we're dreaming. “It's only a dream,” we say. We could say that of many things.
A crow flies in the rain, cold, waterlogged, and resolute. I follow him and travel backwards into the houses of the past. I open my mouth and my teeth roll out like pearls, or like the pomegranate seeds of the fairy tale. (Find them all, before the Djinn comes!) I linger in the little red house of my childhood.
We tell a funny story about why our present house, the one we're selling, is red. One day when we were nearly finished painting, I came down the steps to look at the progress with Webb, our carpenter. “It looks pretty good,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I wasn't too sure about this red, but I think I like how it's turning out.”
Martha gave me a look. “You're the one who wanted this color,” she said.
I looked back at her in astonishment. “I thought you wanted this color,” I said.
Webb was not much given to laughing out loud, but this made him do it. He regained his composure, turned grave as turnip, and surveyed the two storeys of fresh paint. “Still time to change your mind,” he said.
I chose the color? Martha doesn't make mistakes about this sort of thing. I must have chosen the color. And I chose the color of my childhood house, though I didn't realize that till just now. What color should a house be? Why, red, of course: a good sober but powerful red.
My massage sheets? Red, blood-red: not the color they call blood red, which is the shade of blood that's darkened five minutes in the air, but real blood-red, the red you see spurting through the needle into the clear plastic vials. Chinese red.
To the Chinese, red is not the color of wrath. It's the color of luck, and the color of wealth: what we would call a golden opportunity, they would call a red one. I often wonder how much of the Western dread of Chinese Communism came, not from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and so forth, but simply from a failure to translate fully. “The Golden Army” -- how much less sinister that sounds, to Western ears, than “The Red Army!”
Out through the sleet, the traffic lights on 62nd Ave burn bright red, and the neon of Ken's automotive picks it up. Everything else is rain-dimmed and indistinct: but that glow goes to my heart and lifts it up.
Always surprised by the pure bright crimson when they take the blood out of my arm: the life that can feel so feeble and dull, at times, is pulsing there, brilliant red, all the time. All the work that goes into making that fluid: spleen and liver preparing and purifying it, the lungs carefully oxygenating it to come up with that red -- the characteristic hue of oxygen working its Shiva changes: the rust red of corroding iron, the brilliant red of the radical blood -- it goes on all the time, under my drab pale skin, whatever the weather, whatever the mood.
We live in many houses, built and natural: we're so many intersecting series of hyperdimensional Russian dolls. Oh, but we believe specially in this house, the house of the red blood! Never mind that a clever researcher can convince you with ease that you've sprouted a third arm, one that you can feel and move just like your others. Still you believe the others are real, real as the cold pounding rain, indisputable. And we call this being hard-headed and realistic. Yah.
When we wriggle out of this carapace, in sleep, and wander into our other houses? Then we're dreaming. “It's only a dream,” we say. We could say that of many things.
A crow flies in the rain, cold, waterlogged, and resolute. I follow him and travel backwards into the houses of the past. I open my mouth and my teeth roll out like pearls, or like the pomegranate seeds of the fairy tale. (Find them all, before the Djinn comes!) I linger in the little red house of my childhood.
We tell a funny story about why our present house, the one we're selling, is red. One day when we were nearly finished painting, I came down the steps to look at the progress with Webb, our carpenter. “It looks pretty good,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I wasn't too sure about this red, but I think I like how it's turning out.”
Martha gave me a look. “You're the one who wanted this color,” she said.
I looked back at her in astonishment. “I thought you wanted this color,” I said.
Webb was not much given to laughing out loud, but this made him do it. He regained his composure, turned grave as turnip, and surveyed the two storeys of fresh paint. “Still time to change your mind,” he said.
I chose the color? Martha doesn't make mistakes about this sort of thing. I must have chosen the color. And I chose the color of my childhood house, though I didn't realize that till just now. What color should a house be? Why, red, of course: a good sober but powerful red.
My massage sheets? Red, blood-red: not the color they call blood red, which is the shade of blood that's darkened five minutes in the air, but real blood-red, the red you see spurting through the needle into the clear plastic vials. Chinese red.
To the Chinese, red is not the color of wrath. It's the color of luck, and the color of wealth: what we would call a golden opportunity, they would call a red one. I often wonder how much of the Western dread of Chinese Communism came, not from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and so forth, but simply from a failure to translate fully. “The Golden Army” -- how much less sinister that sounds, to Western ears, than “The Red Army!”
Out through the sleet, the traffic lights on 62nd Ave burn bright red, and the neon of Ken's automotive picks it up. Everything else is rain-dimmed and indistinct: but that glow goes to my heart and lifts it up.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
The Suitable Girl in Portland, Oregon
In Tom's, a local reads The Suitable Girl. Rumor has it he's on the eleventh Way with Figs.
In Tom's, a local reads The Suitable Girl. Rumor has it he's on the eleventh Way with Figs.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Four Reasons to be Nice to People
1) Something horrible may have just happened to them. Even lucky people have devastating events in their lives. The deaths of people close to them, for instance. A deep betrayal by a friend or lover. The suicide of even a distant acquaintance. Having to move away from a loved home. Losing a job or an opportunity that seemed like it was going to make a better life. Being personally affected, even tangentially, by a disaster of great scale or a crime of great cruelty. The worst of these devastate people for months, even years: and most people are going to have at least half a dozen of them in their lives. If you do some rough and ready math with this, you can reckon that probably several of the people you encounter today are going to be walking around in a state of emotional devastation. Of course they're not going to be chipper and accommodating and on the ball.
2) They may be ill or in pain. A lot of people are: as a massage therapist I've discovered that the number of people in serious chronic pain -- who usually successfully disguise it from coworkers and even family -- is very high. These people don't wear signs around their necks, announcing “I'm in excruciating pain!” or “if I bend over to pick up that folder, I may faint!” And if we can trust the popular statistics, a quarter of the people we meet are suffering from some diagnosable mental illness. The amount of suffering out there is immense.
3) Then there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow -- I learned this young and I've never seen any reason to doubt it -- people don't move on to higher-level things, such as creative work, real hard thinking, abandoning prejudices, etc. -- until their needs for love and esteem are met. Someone who feels unloved or un-valued is going to gravitate to a place where they can get love and esteem, at almost any price. Until they get it, you've got no hope of engaging them at the higher levels. It's just not going to happen. So if you want people ever to rise above themselves, your best starting place is to love them and value them. You don't have to be deceitful: you just have to find things to love and admire about them. If you look, you'll find them.
4) People are wonderful when you're nice to them. They're unexpected and madcap and delightful when they know they're loved and esteemed. So it's a self-reinforcing project. If you want people to be beautiful, then your best bet is to look for their beauty, not only because it's there -- it is -- but also because looking for it cultivates it and nurtures it. So ultimately, if you look at it this way -- I don't usually, but one could -- it makes pure greedy, self-aggrandizing sense to be nice to people. I'm surrounded by delightful people, and the main reason for that is not only because I am outrageously lucky in my friends and family -- though that's true too -- but also because I love them and value them and let them know it.
1) Something horrible may have just happened to them. Even lucky people have devastating events in their lives. The deaths of people close to them, for instance. A deep betrayal by a friend or lover. The suicide of even a distant acquaintance. Having to move away from a loved home. Losing a job or an opportunity that seemed like it was going to make a better life. Being personally affected, even tangentially, by a disaster of great scale or a crime of great cruelty. The worst of these devastate people for months, even years: and most people are going to have at least half a dozen of them in their lives. If you do some rough and ready math with this, you can reckon that probably several of the people you encounter today are going to be walking around in a state of emotional devastation. Of course they're not going to be chipper and accommodating and on the ball.
2) They may be ill or in pain. A lot of people are: as a massage therapist I've discovered that the number of people in serious chronic pain -- who usually successfully disguise it from coworkers and even family -- is very high. These people don't wear signs around their necks, announcing “I'm in excruciating pain!” or “if I bend over to pick up that folder, I may faint!” And if we can trust the popular statistics, a quarter of the people we meet are suffering from some diagnosable mental illness. The amount of suffering out there is immense.
3) Then there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow -- I learned this young and I've never seen any reason to doubt it -- people don't move on to higher-level things, such as creative work, real hard thinking, abandoning prejudices, etc. -- until their needs for love and esteem are met. Someone who feels unloved or un-valued is going to gravitate to a place where they can get love and esteem, at almost any price. Until they get it, you've got no hope of engaging them at the higher levels. It's just not going to happen. So if you want people ever to rise above themselves, your best starting place is to love them and value them. You don't have to be deceitful: you just have to find things to love and admire about them. If you look, you'll find them.
4) People are wonderful when you're nice to them. They're unexpected and madcap and delightful when they know they're loved and esteemed. So it's a self-reinforcing project. If you want people to be beautiful, then your best bet is to look for their beauty, not only because it's there -- it is -- but also because looking for it cultivates it and nurtures it. So ultimately, if you look at it this way -- I don't usually, but one could -- it makes pure greedy, self-aggrandizing sense to be nice to people. I'm surrounded by delightful people, and the main reason for that is not only because I am outrageously lucky in my friends and family -- though that's true too -- but also because I love them and value them and let them know it.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Purely Local
I pause at the landing and lift the window curtain to look at the dawn. Half moon due south: a pale blue sky, a dim rash of yesterday's snow on our neighbor's roof. The chances of getting more snow have dropped, but it's truly cold now.
On the street I glide, motionless, standing on the left pedal, the air burning my bare right calf. Sometimes the cold takes me this way, makes me want to be perfectly still. I will only really feel it if I move. And the faint downward grade of this street keeps me in motion: I stand still while the street threads past. It rolls by me like a film set. Scene: prosperous suburban neighborhood, early morning.
The moon tangles in the nets of bare twigs, struggles free, tangles again. The bicycle slows and I suddenly rediscover my will, as the cold ratchets up. Damn. It really is cold. I turn the corner onto Lincoln street and pedal hard: I'll have to get colder to get warmer.
But the distance to Tom's is short enough that I don't have time to get the internal fires really stoked. My gloved fingers fumble with the bike lock. The “Tom's” sign is not yet lit, but I glimpse Robin darting in the side door -- a few minutes late -- and before I have my lights turned off and my pants-leg rolled back down, the white and pink lights are running round and round the sign. The door is unlocked.
I sit down, still in my gloves and coat. In fact, still in my bike helmet, which is distinctly silly. I take it off, but the gloves I'm going to keep on till I have a full hot coffee cup to hold.
It's not all that cold, but after all these years back in Oregon, I'm not longer used to real cold. And I have no clothes for it, for one thing; I'm in jeans, a t-shirt, and a light jacket -- the same thing I wear year-round, except for those rare summer dawns when it's already warm, when I'd dispense with the jacket. I have gear for the rain, but not for the cold.
Martha makes fun of me for not dressing for the weather, but usually, who cares? When you live someplace where the lows are only 40° F away from the highs, it hardly makes much difference. It isn't worth the bother of having lots of different kinds of clothes. I wear jeans and t-shirts, or polo shirts. Simple and easy.
I'm fortunate to live in Portland, where lots of people go to work dressed this way. It's a rumpled and dumpy town, sartorially speaking. Kindly but unsophisticated.
Hot coffee, now. Bliss. And sun streams in through the east windows. Still a chill in the air, though. Everyone's keeping their coat on. As cars go by on Division, or or 39th Avenue, wild reflections and diffractions of sunlight whirl through the cafe.
Excuse me: not 39th Avenue. César E. Chávez Boulevard. The city council, in fit of political correctness, renamed the avenue, something that caused a certain amount of ill feeling, since -- for reasons best known to themselves -- they didn't follow their own procedures and railroaded it through without consulting the locals. It was a typical Portland city government move, these days: they've gotten a bit high-handed. This was a gesture of inclusion to the Hispanic community, which in principle I approve of, though I do wonder how many young Hispanics have the faintest idea who Chávez was, or why he's a hero to the aging WASP counter-culture heros who run this town. There's also the fact that 39th Avenue is not Hispanic territory, particularly: it's mostly poor Anglos here, and they resented having the outlandish name of a labor organizer they'd never liked foisted on their street. This resentment of course was declared racist by the proponents of the name change, and no doubt some of it was: but it was also generated by the knowledge that, this being a politically powerless part of the city, the council could do whatever they liked without stepping on any toes they minded stepping on.
I dislike changing names for correctness' sake in the first place, and I dislike top-down impositions like this. It made me want to grab some trendy part of town, NW 23rd Avenue, maybe, and agitate for renaming it Ronald Reagan Boulevard, or Dick Cheney Way. How do you like having your home streets named for your political enemies? There's the added irony that, in making this gesture of inclusion, they used a name that almost all Anglos, even those with a smattering of Spanish, mispronounce. “Go up and turn right on Sieze 'er Shavézz,” the locals will say, leaving Spanish speakers completely at sea.
Oh well. I'm a great admirer of Chávez, and, as his son reportedly said, he wouldn't have given a damn about a street name either way: what he cared about was people having decent lives.
I pause at the landing and lift the window curtain to look at the dawn. Half moon due south: a pale blue sky, a dim rash of yesterday's snow on our neighbor's roof. The chances of getting more snow have dropped, but it's truly cold now.
On the street I glide, motionless, standing on the left pedal, the air burning my bare right calf. Sometimes the cold takes me this way, makes me want to be perfectly still. I will only really feel it if I move. And the faint downward grade of this street keeps me in motion: I stand still while the street threads past. It rolls by me like a film set. Scene: prosperous suburban neighborhood, early morning.
The moon tangles in the nets of bare twigs, struggles free, tangles again. The bicycle slows and I suddenly rediscover my will, as the cold ratchets up. Damn. It really is cold. I turn the corner onto Lincoln street and pedal hard: I'll have to get colder to get warmer.
But the distance to Tom's is short enough that I don't have time to get the internal fires really stoked. My gloved fingers fumble with the bike lock. The “Tom's” sign is not yet lit, but I glimpse Robin darting in the side door -- a few minutes late -- and before I have my lights turned off and my pants-leg rolled back down, the white and pink lights are running round and round the sign. The door is unlocked.
I sit down, still in my gloves and coat. In fact, still in my bike helmet, which is distinctly silly. I take it off, but the gloves I'm going to keep on till I have a full hot coffee cup to hold.
It's not all that cold, but after all these years back in Oregon, I'm not longer used to real cold. And I have no clothes for it, for one thing; I'm in jeans, a t-shirt, and a light jacket -- the same thing I wear year-round, except for those rare summer dawns when it's already warm, when I'd dispense with the jacket. I have gear for the rain, but not for the cold.
Martha makes fun of me for not dressing for the weather, but usually, who cares? When you live someplace where the lows are only 40° F away from the highs, it hardly makes much difference. It isn't worth the bother of having lots of different kinds of clothes. I wear jeans and t-shirts, or polo shirts. Simple and easy.
I'm fortunate to live in Portland, where lots of people go to work dressed this way. It's a rumpled and dumpy town, sartorially speaking. Kindly but unsophisticated.
Hot coffee, now. Bliss. And sun streams in through the east windows. Still a chill in the air, though. Everyone's keeping their coat on. As cars go by on Division, or or 39th Avenue, wild reflections and diffractions of sunlight whirl through the cafe.
Excuse me: not 39th Avenue. César E. Chávez Boulevard. The city council, in fit of political correctness, renamed the avenue, something that caused a certain amount of ill feeling, since -- for reasons best known to themselves -- they didn't follow their own procedures and railroaded it through without consulting the locals. It was a typical Portland city government move, these days: they've gotten a bit high-handed. This was a gesture of inclusion to the Hispanic community, which in principle I approve of, though I do wonder how many young Hispanics have the faintest idea who Chávez was, or why he's a hero to the aging WASP counter-culture heros who run this town. There's also the fact that 39th Avenue is not Hispanic territory, particularly: it's mostly poor Anglos here, and they resented having the outlandish name of a labor organizer they'd never liked foisted on their street. This resentment of course was declared racist by the proponents of the name change, and no doubt some of it was: but it was also generated by the knowledge that, this being a politically powerless part of the city, the council could do whatever they liked without stepping on any toes they minded stepping on.
I dislike changing names for correctness' sake in the first place, and I dislike top-down impositions like this. It made me want to grab some trendy part of town, NW 23rd Avenue, maybe, and agitate for renaming it Ronald Reagan Boulevard, or Dick Cheney Way. How do you like having your home streets named for your political enemies? There's the added irony that, in making this gesture of inclusion, they used a name that almost all Anglos, even those with a smattering of Spanish, mispronounce. “Go up and turn right on Sieze 'er Shavézz,” the locals will say, leaving Spanish speakers completely at sea.
Oh well. I'm a great admirer of Chávez, and, as his son reportedly said, he wouldn't have given a damn about a street name either way: what he cared about was people having decent lives.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
A Brief Snow in Portland
A response to Dave's Morning Porch for today
Portland pretends to snow — very pretty!
but it’s frosting and frippery.
A single crow calls for company, her low cough rising
to a shrill confident shriek.
The byways are already black, the eaves already running,
a whisper of water gushes in gutters:
the hard hot pulse of Portland
will not pause for a moment.
A response to Dave's Morning Porch for today
Portland pretends to snow — very pretty!
but it’s frosting and frippery.
A single crow calls for company, her low cough rising
to a shrill confident shriek.
The byways are already black, the eaves already running,
a whisper of water gushes in gutters:
the hard hot pulse of Portland
will not pause for a moment.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Palimpsests
In my building downtown, a man gets on the elevator and behaves very peculiarly: he does not immediately take out and check his cell phone. Is he dangerous? Should I call the police?
We sit in the Les Schwab store, inhaling the scent of new tires, listening to classic rock. Behind us a fountain tinkles. Not a little one, either. An image of Les Schwab in his ten gallon hat, gazing off over the brushland of eastern Washington, rises easily to my mind, burned in as it was by hundreds of repeated television commercials when my brain was young and growing. “Look for the sign you're in Les Schwab country...”
I'll be able to sing it on my death bed: that, and the theme to Gilligan's Isle. The fountain, and the spotless display room, jostle the cowboy uneasily. I am, like Miss Clavell in the night, seized with the conviction that something is not right. Is it the tire store, or is it me?
Alan tore down the back porch, mostly with his bare hands, in less than an hour. Now we have a small back deck, and stairs that go down to the driveway instead of to our neighbor's yard. It really looks pretty damn good. But strange, very strange. We should have some little ceremony for disturbing the balance of the world this way, a precautionary apology to the genii loci.
In the rubble under the porch we found a little white glass pot with a white glass lid: inside the lid, in raised letters, was written “Professor Hubert's Malvinas Cream.” It looks like it might have been buried there when the house was built, in 1913. The freckles it was bought to efface have been effaced in earnest, now.
In my building downtown, a man gets on the elevator and behaves very peculiarly: he does not immediately take out and check his cell phone. Is he dangerous? Should I call the police?
We sit in the Les Schwab store, inhaling the scent of new tires, listening to classic rock. Behind us a fountain tinkles. Not a little one, either. An image of Les Schwab in his ten gallon hat, gazing off over the brushland of eastern Washington, rises easily to my mind, burned in as it was by hundreds of repeated television commercials when my brain was young and growing. “Look for the sign you're in Les Schwab country...”
I'll be able to sing it on my death bed: that, and the theme to Gilligan's Isle. The fountain, and the spotless display room, jostle the cowboy uneasily. I am, like Miss Clavell in the night, seized with the conviction that something is not right. Is it the tire store, or is it me?
Alan tore down the back porch, mostly with his bare hands, in less than an hour. Now we have a small back deck, and stairs that go down to the driveway instead of to our neighbor's yard. It really looks pretty damn good. But strange, very strange. We should have some little ceremony for disturbing the balance of the world this way, a precautionary apology to the genii loci.
In the rubble under the porch we found a little white glass pot with a white glass lid: inside the lid, in raised letters, was written “Professor Hubert's Malvinas Cream.” It looks like it might have been buried there when the house was built, in 1913. The freckles it was bought to efface have been effaced in earnest, now.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Non Credo
Because I'm afraid, I start to write by saying “I don't believe” -- oh, there are so many things I don't believe! -- but the point is, I don't want to construct an identity out of a laundry list of things I don't believe, it's just the reverse of the medal, it's no different than pounding your chest and bellowing “I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” and thinking that's going to get you a little Jesus juju to curse your enemies with, and finally get the girls to eye you with a bit of respect. No, sir. Bellowing believers, bellowing unbelievers alike, you hurry by them on the sidewalk and avoid their eyes. Subadult orangutans, that's what they are, and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to mate with them.
Which brings me neatly to the first thing I don't believe, which is anybody's story about love. The other day a Facebook Friend (not someone I know at all well), the mother of a one year old, announced in a single sentence that she was now a single mother, because she'd found out her husband was cheating on her. People responded with a bit of shock and jaw-dropping, but mostly by furious imprecations and extravagant personal denunciations of her husband. This was from a wide enough collection of people that you could be reasonably sure that some among their number were adulterers. What stories had they made up for themselves? How did justify themselves? How might they have responded to being pilloried? And then a bit later my Friend posted a semi-retraction saying maybe this was only a flirtation after all. Which made for a somewhat awkward pause.
An odd thing to post about, surely, and I don't think I'd handle it that way myself -- not out of goodness, but out of vanity -- but I don't blame anyone for doing anything, really, under the stress of that sort of revelation. That's not my point. My point is that, for a large circle round about, everyone went nuts. I'm interested in when, and how, people go nuts like that. It signals cracks in the structure, weaknesses, places where people aren't really sure that what they purport to believe is in fact what they believe, or else places where they're determined to believe something no matter what evidence may arise: the weaker the shriller.
Now, when I say I don't believe anybody, that's exactly what I mean. I have never heard a story about sex and love that appears to me to “save the appearances,” to account for the variety of phenomena it produces. It's an absorbing topic to me, so I've read a great deal “about it and about,” as Omar says, and every book I've read seems to run inevitably to some central point at which I find myself bristling, shaking my head, muttering, “that's just not the way it is, though. That's just not the way it is.” There's that swerve where people start talking about what love should be, and they describe some wholly admirable frame of mind, some exquisitely laudable kind of relationship, something that makes deep and perfect sense, which is very nice, except that the question you come to after that is, why don't any of these relationships exist? And why is it that, if you're a betting man, you'd lay odds on precisely the people who present as if they were in these ideal relationships to be posting on Facebook next week that they've achieved single parenthood?
And then there are the various reducers: love is really only this, or only that, it's not so important, our culture magnifies it absurdly, erotic love was regarded as simply a joke among (whatever culture the speaker is not very well-versed in), it's actually friendship that matters, or Buddhist compassion, or Christian agape, and I bristle even more, because it doesn't really work that way, either. Not here and now in this culture, not in my heart. Love is the only thing that's real, to me. If I have a path to God, it runs exactly as Dante's did, right through Eros. Nothing else matters, not really.
I'm not saying this is good. I don't think it is. I think the Buddhist compassion and Christian agape people have the right of it, we should value that love most highly, and all the other loves should be subservient to that, which is, really, the love of God. I think the arguments are knockdown, water tight. That's how it should be.
But it's not how it is. I can't cram my heart into that jar. And I'm not sure how useful a theory is, if it accounts for everything but the facts. Useful if you need to trot out mottoes and slogans, yes. But what if you want to live a human life?
Because I'm afraid, I start to write by saying “I don't believe” -- oh, there are so many things I don't believe! -- but the point is, I don't want to construct an identity out of a laundry list of things I don't believe, it's just the reverse of the medal, it's no different than pounding your chest and bellowing “I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” and thinking that's going to get you a little Jesus juju to curse your enemies with, and finally get the girls to eye you with a bit of respect. No, sir. Bellowing believers, bellowing unbelievers alike, you hurry by them on the sidewalk and avoid their eyes. Subadult orangutans, that's what they are, and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to mate with them.
Which brings me neatly to the first thing I don't believe, which is anybody's story about love. The other day a Facebook Friend (not someone I know at all well), the mother of a one year old, announced in a single sentence that she was now a single mother, because she'd found out her husband was cheating on her. People responded with a bit of shock and jaw-dropping, but mostly by furious imprecations and extravagant personal denunciations of her husband. This was from a wide enough collection of people that you could be reasonably sure that some among their number were adulterers. What stories had they made up for themselves? How did justify themselves? How might they have responded to being pilloried? And then a bit later my Friend posted a semi-retraction saying maybe this was only a flirtation after all. Which made for a somewhat awkward pause.
An odd thing to post about, surely, and I don't think I'd handle it that way myself -- not out of goodness, but out of vanity -- but I don't blame anyone for doing anything, really, under the stress of that sort of revelation. That's not my point. My point is that, for a large circle round about, everyone went nuts. I'm interested in when, and how, people go nuts like that. It signals cracks in the structure, weaknesses, places where people aren't really sure that what they purport to believe is in fact what they believe, or else places where they're determined to believe something no matter what evidence may arise: the weaker the shriller.
Now, when I say I don't believe anybody, that's exactly what I mean. I have never heard a story about sex and love that appears to me to “save the appearances,” to account for the variety of phenomena it produces. It's an absorbing topic to me, so I've read a great deal “about it and about,” as Omar says, and every book I've read seems to run inevitably to some central point at which I find myself bristling, shaking my head, muttering, “that's just not the way it is, though. That's just not the way it is.” There's that swerve where people start talking about what love should be, and they describe some wholly admirable frame of mind, some exquisitely laudable kind of relationship, something that makes deep and perfect sense, which is very nice, except that the question you come to after that is, why don't any of these relationships exist? And why is it that, if you're a betting man, you'd lay odds on precisely the people who present as if they were in these ideal relationships to be posting on Facebook next week that they've achieved single parenthood?
And then there are the various reducers: love is really only this, or only that, it's not so important, our culture magnifies it absurdly, erotic love was regarded as simply a joke among (whatever culture the speaker is not very well-versed in), it's actually friendship that matters, or Buddhist compassion, or Christian agape, and I bristle even more, because it doesn't really work that way, either. Not here and now in this culture, not in my heart. Love is the only thing that's real, to me. If I have a path to God, it runs exactly as Dante's did, right through Eros. Nothing else matters, not really.
I'm not saying this is good. I don't think it is. I think the Buddhist compassion and Christian agape people have the right of it, we should value that love most highly, and all the other loves should be subservient to that, which is, really, the love of God. I think the arguments are knockdown, water tight. That's how it should be.
But it's not how it is. I can't cram my heart into that jar. And I'm not sure how useful a theory is, if it accounts for everything but the facts. Useful if you need to trot out mottoes and slogans, yes. But what if you want to live a human life?
Sunday, February 20, 2011
How much Time the Moon Loses, and what Math is for
The moon is higher, setting later, this morning. She loses time, of course. Every day she rises and sets later -- I don't remember how much, exactly: 45 minutes? Hang on a sec, I'll work it out.
I forget, sometimes, that the sky is not so legible to everyone, that many people don't even have clear in their minds the path of the zodiac -- difficult though it is for me to understand. It's the same path the sun and the moon walk, higher in summer, lower in winter: how can you live in the world, day after day, and not realize that the the sun and the moon appear only in a certain swath of the sky?
I know that learning the names and appearance of the planets is something only a few of us do -- and that only a few of us learn the patterns of the stars well enough to say certainly, that has to be a planet, it can't be a star, because there is no star there! -- but everyone knows the sun and moon. Except, apparently, they don't. It seems that at every full moon, I hear someone marveling over the coincidence that this moon happened to be rising right around sunset! or setting right around sunrise!
Um, yes. That's what a full moon is, it's the moon standing (vis a vis us) opposite to the sun. It's not a rare coincidence. It's been happening, every 28-and-some days, since our species was sniffing about on all fours.
Anyway, since the moon has to slip back to the same spot in the sky in roughly 28 days, she's got to slip 28 times through the 24 hour clock of the sky, meaning she has to slip about 24 28ths of an hour each time. 24/28 = x/60 -- let's say 51 minutes? Close enough.
This is what math is for. So you don't have to be helpless and look it up, if you don't remember something like how much the moon slips every night. It's not rocket science; it's simple arithmetic. They taught you this in third grade so that you wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it: you can do it yourself.
Don't let anyone push you around: keep your math skills up to snuff. Work little problems like this every day, take the extra couple minutes and satisfy yourself that you're right. It's a magnificently empowering feeling. And you can surprise and amaze your friends by telling them exactly when they're going to see the moon rise tomorrow night. This stuff works. It's real. You can bet your life on it, in fact, we all do, every day, because this the way the engineers who built your cars and roads and bridges figured out how much they could take. Simple physics, simple arithmetic, for the most part.
It's our birthright, as human beings: it's our inheritance. It maddens me when people turn away from math and science as disempowering. This is empowerment. It's when you don't know your math and science that people can lead you around by the nose and hoodwink you. You don't like your math teacher? He's a condescending sexist oaf with the aesthetic sensitivities of a roundworm? Fine. Hate him. But take what he has on offer anyway, because this, this is genuine power, this is the real stuff. This is one of the fundamental ways you get a grip on the world.
Don't give it up because you're sensitive aesthetic person. So am I. I'm a poet and a massage therapist, for God's sake, the very model of a pansy aesthete, and you'll take my math away when you pry it out of my cold dead brain.
The moon is higher, setting later, this morning. She loses time, of course. Every day she rises and sets later -- I don't remember how much, exactly: 45 minutes? Hang on a sec, I'll work it out.
I forget, sometimes, that the sky is not so legible to everyone, that many people don't even have clear in their minds the path of the zodiac -- difficult though it is for me to understand. It's the same path the sun and the moon walk, higher in summer, lower in winter: how can you live in the world, day after day, and not realize that the the sun and the moon appear only in a certain swath of the sky?
I know that learning the names and appearance of the planets is something only a few of us do -- and that only a few of us learn the patterns of the stars well enough to say certainly, that has to be a planet, it can't be a star, because there is no star there! -- but everyone knows the sun and moon. Except, apparently, they don't. It seems that at every full moon, I hear someone marveling over the coincidence that this moon happened to be rising right around sunset! or setting right around sunrise!
Um, yes. That's what a full moon is, it's the moon standing (vis a vis us) opposite to the sun. It's not a rare coincidence. It's been happening, every 28-and-some days, since our species was sniffing about on all fours.
Anyway, since the moon has to slip back to the same spot in the sky in roughly 28 days, she's got to slip 28 times through the 24 hour clock of the sky, meaning she has to slip about 24 28ths of an hour each time. 24/28 = x/60 -- let's say 51 minutes? Close enough.
This is what math is for. So you don't have to be helpless and look it up, if you don't remember something like how much the moon slips every night. It's not rocket science; it's simple arithmetic. They taught you this in third grade so that you wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it: you can do it yourself.
Don't let anyone push you around: keep your math skills up to snuff. Work little problems like this every day, take the extra couple minutes and satisfy yourself that you're right. It's a magnificently empowering feeling. And you can surprise and amaze your friends by telling them exactly when they're going to see the moon rise tomorrow night. This stuff works. It's real. You can bet your life on it, in fact, we all do, every day, because this the way the engineers who built your cars and roads and bridges figured out how much they could take. Simple physics, simple arithmetic, for the most part.
It's our birthright, as human beings: it's our inheritance. It maddens me when people turn away from math and science as disempowering. This is empowerment. It's when you don't know your math and science that people can lead you around by the nose and hoodwink you. You don't like your math teacher? He's a condescending sexist oaf with the aesthetic sensitivities of a roundworm? Fine. Hate him. But take what he has on offer anyway, because this, this is genuine power, this is the real stuff. This is one of the fundamental ways you get a grip on the world.
Don't give it up because you're sensitive aesthetic person. So am I. I'm a poet and a massage therapist, for God's sake, the very model of a pansy aesthete, and you'll take my math away when you pry it out of my cold dead brain.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Aubade
Black ice makes a pattern on the pavement
of negric circles reaching out to circles:
tatters of white frost hold them isolate.
As I come up over the rise an alien sphere
glides into view, startling the treetops:
an incongruous face
floating in the fresh untroubled blue;
an unshaven drunk on a dewy park bench,
bringing a reek of taverns into the day.
O, thou moon of misdemeanors,
outliving truth and trust,
why here, why now?
The real poets are all asleep,
and I only have escaped to see you
wandering along the West Hills
full of drunken song and imprecations,
ready to stumble into the river with Li Po,
oh! Drowning in your cleverness.
You will have set
by the time the real poets wake,
with their memories
of the chaste and solemn orb
that shot the shores of night with silver,
and glimmered and gleamed on the river.
And no one will ever believe me,
that I saw you shrieking here at dawn
with a musk of hops and malt around you.
Black ice makes a pattern on the pavement
of negric circles reaching out to circles:
tatters of white frost hold them isolate.
As I come up over the rise an alien sphere
glides into view, startling the treetops:
an incongruous face
floating in the fresh untroubled blue;
an unshaven drunk on a dewy park bench,
bringing a reek of taverns into the day.
O, thou moon of misdemeanors,
outliving truth and trust,
why here, why now?
The real poets are all asleep,
and I only have escaped to see you
wandering along the West Hills
full of drunken song and imprecations,
ready to stumble into the river with Li Po,
oh! Drowning in your cleverness.
You will have set
by the time the real poets wake,
with their memories
of the chaste and solemn orb
that shot the shores of night with silver,
and glimmered and gleamed on the river.
And no one will ever believe me,
that I saw you shrieking here at dawn
with a musk of hops and malt around you.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Morning Porch Poems
If you haven't been following the extraordinary poetry flowering over at Dave Bonta's Morning Porch, you're missing something pretty wonderful. Luisa Igloria has been writing amazing poems, day after day, in response to Dave's tweet-length posts there. And there have been a few dances with other poets, too, including me. I've never been a good responder to formal prompts, but the prompting of the Morning Porch posts, and sometimes spotting a clever way to navigate between both Dave and Luisa's words, seems to work for me. Not that I'm in the Bonta or Igloria league: but anyone can play. They're very gracious. This morning I wrote a poem there titled Snowmelt at Tryon Creek.
If you haven't been following the extraordinary poetry flowering over at Dave Bonta's Morning Porch, you're missing something pretty wonderful. Luisa Igloria has been writing amazing poems, day after day, in response to Dave's tweet-length posts there. And there have been a few dances with other poets, too, including me. I've never been a good responder to formal prompts, but the prompting of the Morning Porch posts, and sometimes spotting a clever way to navigate between both Dave and Luisa's words, seems to work for me. Not that I'm in the Bonta or Igloria league: but anyone can play. They're very gracious. This morning I wrote a poem there titled Snowmelt at Tryon Creek.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
The Survivors of the Wedding
I stand uncertain in the aisle, while
impatient brides brush past me,
giddy with power, anxious to make a promise
that even Jesus didn't dare.
Oh, they go off like bombs!
and the wedding guests drink desperately
in hopes of being a little less flammable
when the conflagration, congregation
begins. But wait. A solemn girl of nine
chooses me to dance with her.
She alone holds out her hands: understands
that this moment is all about clothes
and a measured twirling. It's you, who think
it's about love and family, who
have it wrong. You
have it backwards. I lack words --
I am glad for the first time today
that my shoes are polished. We dance
gravely, the girl and I: my bow
and her courtesy
are maybe the only things
that will survive this day intact.
I stand uncertain in the aisle, while
impatient brides brush past me,
giddy with power, anxious to make a promise
that even Jesus didn't dare.
Oh, they go off like bombs!
and the wedding guests drink desperately
in hopes of being a little less flammable
when the conflagration, congregation
begins. But wait. A solemn girl of nine
chooses me to dance with her.
She alone holds out her hands: understands
that this moment is all about clothes
and a measured twirling. It's you, who think
it's about love and family, who
have it wrong. You
have it backwards. I lack words --
I am glad for the first time today
that my shoes are polished. We dance
gravely, the girl and I: my bow
and her courtesy
are maybe the only things
that will survive this day intact.
Monday, February 14, 2011
After These Words
. . .
Actually the conversation was between God
and Avraham: God said take your son
Avraham asked, which one? God tried your only son
but Avraham said one is Sarah's, one is Hagar's.
Whom you love, God said, and Avraham said
so help me, I love them both.
When it was all over God said
I never meant for you to kill him,
I only wanted you to raise him up.
But Avraham had forgotten
how to hear God's voice
and he never replied.
Rachel Barenblat, “After these words,” 70 faces
Sometimes you wonder why you ever wanted to hear God, such horrible things He says, but what else is there to listen to? The human voices patter all day long, it's like when I drive to Salem and the only radio stations are the deep dull valley stations playing country music that sounds like rock (without rebellion), or rock music that sounds like country (without conscience), and you begin to think of human voices as the cawing of so many crows, quarreling over carrion on the road. If there was truth to be found in human voices, don't you think we'd have found it by now? We know you can't get what you want and every cowboy is sad. We knew that before the exit to Woodburn. The question is, what now?
Well, once past the little knot of the Ankeny Hills, you'll be in the broad flatlands of the Willamette Valley, some of the best farm land in the world, and at some point there will rise from the fields a murmuration of starlings like a glittering dust, twirling and falling, cascades of reckless and grieving birds. And you can pull off on the shoulder to watch their strange whirling, a cloud of beating hearts following God knows what passion. Now that's a voice that has new things to say: even if it tells you, as it will, things you never never wanted to hear.
. . .
Actually the conversation was between God
and Avraham: God said take your son
Avraham asked, which one? God tried your only son
but Avraham said one is Sarah's, one is Hagar's.
Whom you love, God said, and Avraham said
so help me, I love them both.
When it was all over God said
I never meant for you to kill him,
I only wanted you to raise him up.
But Avraham had forgotten
how to hear God's voice
and he never replied.
Rachel Barenblat, “After these words,” 70 faces
Sometimes you wonder why you ever wanted to hear God, such horrible things He says, but what else is there to listen to? The human voices patter all day long, it's like when I drive to Salem and the only radio stations are the deep dull valley stations playing country music that sounds like rock (without rebellion), or rock music that sounds like country (without conscience), and you begin to think of human voices as the cawing of so many crows, quarreling over carrion on the road. If there was truth to be found in human voices, don't you think we'd have found it by now? We know you can't get what you want and every cowboy is sad. We knew that before the exit to Woodburn. The question is, what now?
Well, once past the little knot of the Ankeny Hills, you'll be in the broad flatlands of the Willamette Valley, some of the best farm land in the world, and at some point there will rise from the fields a murmuration of starlings like a glittering dust, twirling and falling, cascades of reckless and grieving birds. And you can pull off on the shoulder to watch their strange whirling, a cloud of beating hearts following God knows what passion. Now that's a voice that has new things to say: even if it tells you, as it will, things you never never wanted to hear.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Hearing
But listen, I want to tell you all about
the crustacean stubbornness, the
antennae that can grip like ropes, the mouth parts
working unceasingly: an Edisonian dream
of perpetual motion, a mother's dream
of careful chewing. I was always a good boy.
And listen: I want to tell you how the blue sky
came and said that stealing wasn't bad,
not when the sun is high;
that candy wants to be stolen,
that God made the tongue to
curl around theft in a special way.
When they cried “stop thief!” I was sure
they wanted my autograph, or maybe
a cure for the king's evil. I ran like the wind:
but that was just the delight of my heart.
And here, where the dark polished wood of the railing
matches exactly the police batons, where
jurors sit on uncomfortably pleated underwear,
not daring to shift, and the lights buzz
and wail like a distant Indian singer,
here I still remember the joyful lift of my heels
when I flew ahead of you all, and none of you,
none of you could catch me.
But listen, I want to tell you all about
the crustacean stubbornness, the
antennae that can grip like ropes, the mouth parts
working unceasingly: an Edisonian dream
of perpetual motion, a mother's dream
of careful chewing. I was always a good boy.
And listen: I want to tell you how the blue sky
came and said that stealing wasn't bad,
not when the sun is high;
that candy wants to be stolen,
that God made the tongue to
curl around theft in a special way.
When they cried “stop thief!” I was sure
they wanted my autograph, or maybe
a cure for the king's evil. I ran like the wind:
but that was just the delight of my heart.
And here, where the dark polished wood of the railing
matches exactly the police batons, where
jurors sit on uncomfortably pleated underwear,
not daring to shift, and the lights buzz
and wail like a distant Indian singer,
here I still remember the joyful lift of my heels
when I flew ahead of you all, and none of you,
none of you could catch me.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sounding It Out
I feel about democracy the way that people felt about monarchy a hundred years ago: it has a certain quaint charm, but its chances of surviving in the modern world are minimal. I watch people express delight about the Egyptian unrest with incredulity. Have they never read a history book, or even a newspaper? It ain't over, buckos, till the fat army colonel sings.
The rifle, the saying was, made all men tall. It was the musket and rifle that ushered in the age of revolution. Cutting edge military technology in 1776 was a cheap weapon that could be wielded by a single person with minimal training. How many people do you know who keep an Apache attack helicopter parked in their back yard, ready at a minute's notice take off and defend their freedom? I see people pour into the streets, as at Tiananmen, as in Egypt, and I think of stock gathering at a slaughterhouse.
The communications, that so delight a certain kind of optimist -- the twitter-revolt in Iran, say, which, as you may have noticed, led immediately to everyone feeling free to exercise complete freedom of speech and assembly in Iran -- actually serve the purposes of counter-insurgency far, far better. Have you noticed that not a single major terrorist event has happened in the US since 9/11? And it is not, believe me, for lack of animus, planning, or funds. The fact is that the technology now in the hands of counter-insurgents is far better than it's ever been. Their job is easy now. If Thomas Hutchinson had had information technology like this, the American Revolution would have ended at the Tea Party. Even without helicopters.
The odd historical quirk we have lived through, of military power being subordinated to civil authority, is nearly over. No doubt the forms of democracy will persist for a while. Britain, after all, still purports to be a monarchy. But the conditions that made democracy possible, and even probable, have disappeared. Military and information technology is now much as it was in medieval times -- way beyond the means of an ordinary citizen, requiring years of training and specialization to master. We can expect political reality to catch slowly up to to the changed material conditions.
That's the writing on the wall, as I sound it out. I could be wrong; I often am. And I want to be wrong. I'm an old, old fashioned Bobbie Burns style democrat: I don't in believe all this meritocracy and plutocracy claptrap. A man's a man for a' that, a woman's a woman for a' that, and as far as God and I are concerned one is worth as much as another, whatever marketable skills they may have and whatever they've got in the bank.
Still, I would be unhappier about my prediction if I felt that revolution and democracy had always yielded great results. But revolution gave us not just George Washington, but also Robespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Democracy gave us Lincoln, sure, but it also gave us Hitler and Mussolini. And Hosni Mubarak, for that matter. The record is decidedly mixed. It's not the end of the world, nor the end of human dignity, nor the end of lives worth living, if revolution and democracy disappear.
I feel about democracy the way that people felt about monarchy a hundred years ago: it has a certain quaint charm, but its chances of surviving in the modern world are minimal. I watch people express delight about the Egyptian unrest with incredulity. Have they never read a history book, or even a newspaper? It ain't over, buckos, till the fat army colonel sings.
The rifle, the saying was, made all men tall. It was the musket and rifle that ushered in the age of revolution. Cutting edge military technology in 1776 was a cheap weapon that could be wielded by a single person with minimal training. How many people do you know who keep an Apache attack helicopter parked in their back yard, ready at a minute's notice take off and defend their freedom? I see people pour into the streets, as at Tiananmen, as in Egypt, and I think of stock gathering at a slaughterhouse.
The communications, that so delight a certain kind of optimist -- the twitter-revolt in Iran, say, which, as you may have noticed, led immediately to everyone feeling free to exercise complete freedom of speech and assembly in Iran -- actually serve the purposes of counter-insurgency far, far better. Have you noticed that not a single major terrorist event has happened in the US since 9/11? And it is not, believe me, for lack of animus, planning, or funds. The fact is that the technology now in the hands of counter-insurgents is far better than it's ever been. Their job is easy now. If Thomas Hutchinson had had information technology like this, the American Revolution would have ended at the Tea Party. Even without helicopters.
The odd historical quirk we have lived through, of military power being subordinated to civil authority, is nearly over. No doubt the forms of democracy will persist for a while. Britain, after all, still purports to be a monarchy. But the conditions that made democracy possible, and even probable, have disappeared. Military and information technology is now much as it was in medieval times -- way beyond the means of an ordinary citizen, requiring years of training and specialization to master. We can expect political reality to catch slowly up to to the changed material conditions.
That's the writing on the wall, as I sound it out. I could be wrong; I often am. And I want to be wrong. I'm an old, old fashioned Bobbie Burns style democrat: I don't in believe all this meritocracy and plutocracy claptrap. A man's a man for a' that, a woman's a woman for a' that, and as far as God and I are concerned one is worth as much as another, whatever marketable skills they may have and whatever they've got in the bank.
Still, I would be unhappier about my prediction if I felt that revolution and democracy had always yielded great results. But revolution gave us not just George Washington, but also Robespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Democracy gave us Lincoln, sure, but it also gave us Hitler and Mussolini. And Hosni Mubarak, for that matter. The record is decidedly mixed. It's not the end of the world, nor the end of human dignity, nor the end of lives worth living, if revolution and democracy disappear.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Submitting to be Shaped
No more fingering,
pinching, pruning, bleeding,
every branch and twig wired,
brown and flexible, bent to the shape
of his fingers and thumbs.
Michelle McGrane, “Bonsai,” The Suitable Girl
How much do we want to be adored? Too much. And what are we willing to pay for it? Everything. But it's not a one-time deal: we renegotiate over and over, and get a worse bargain every time. And by the end of it, the price we have paid may have ruined us.
But. The know-it-alls (whose private lives appear to be just as disastrous as our own) talk as if you could refrain from selling. The truth is that if you don't go to market, the market will come to you. “Free” and “market” are two words that should never be used in the same sentence. All markets are slave markets.
So, what then?
when you raise the partitions
you'll run like new watercolor
offer yourself on the altar of stone
beneath the varicolored sky.
Rachel Barenblat, “integration,” 70 faces
Well! There is not much advice to be given, except to pay attention to the trend of payments: and if you're going to be refashioned better go straight to the top.
To Bleed at the Edges
I am old, older than the hills, older than the rain:
my fingers are stiff and nobbly in the morning,
and my knees carry scars of five decades.
I watch the veins on the backs of my hands
slowly rise to the surface,
coming like whales to breathe:
I watch the lines deepen in my forehead,
till I can make faces like a puzzled gorilla.
It's good to bleed at the edges,
to bark and screech and flutter. They say that Adam
gave names to the animals, but of course
that's the Pravda version: what really happened
is that they taught him to speak.
No more fingering,
pinching, pruning, bleeding,
every branch and twig wired,
brown and flexible, bent to the shape
of his fingers and thumbs.
Michelle McGrane, “Bonsai,” The Suitable Girl
How much do we want to be adored? Too much. And what are we willing to pay for it? Everything. But it's not a one-time deal: we renegotiate over and over, and get a worse bargain every time. And by the end of it, the price we have paid may have ruined us.
But. The know-it-alls (whose private lives appear to be just as disastrous as our own) talk as if you could refrain from selling. The truth is that if you don't go to market, the market will come to you. “Free” and “market” are two words that should never be used in the same sentence. All markets are slave markets.
So, what then?
when you raise the partitions
you'll run like new watercolor
offer yourself on the altar of stone
beneath the varicolored sky.
Rachel Barenblat, “integration,” 70 faces
Well! There is not much advice to be given, except to pay attention to the trend of payments: and if you're going to be refashioned better go straight to the top.
To Bleed at the Edges
I am old, older than the hills, older than the rain:
my fingers are stiff and nobbly in the morning,
and my knees carry scars of five decades.
I watch the veins on the backs of my hands
slowly rise to the surface,
coming like whales to breathe:
I watch the lines deepen in my forehead,
till I can make faces like a puzzled gorilla.
It's good to bleed at the edges,
to bark and screech and flutter. They say that Adam
gave names to the animals, but of course
that's the Pravda version: what really happened
is that they taught him to speak.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
The Right Shop
After six months of being in a bad mood, it's probably time to consider the possibility that what I have here is not a mood to be shaken off, but a new mode of being. At any rate, any time I hear myself saying impatiently, “just get over it, Dale!” I can be confident that I'm trying not to see something that's plain before my face.
Night before last, unable to sleep, I sat up in the bed, murmured my refuge prayers, and meditated twenty minutes. The covers before me lay in a long pale question mark. At the corner of my left eye was the green spark of the clock on my side; at the corner of my right eye was the amber spark of the clock on Martha's side. Time's wingéd chariot. Not just drawing near: signaling to overtake.
. . .
Could the whole project be a wash?
In God's heart, regret bloomed hot
and a tempest of sorrow rained down
Still, some simple sweetness in us
roused divine compassion like milk
found favor in God's tired eyes.
Rachel Barenblat, “Postpartum,” 70 faces
In our end is our beginning. It is too easy to say such things, to forget the rancid backwash of the flood, forget the children terrified, terrified now and terrified forever, the certainties -- that houses stand still, that clean water comes out of the tap -- never to be regained, not on this earth, not in this life. Still, pick your way along the ruined levee, through the sodden heaps of mildewed clothes, barbed with flakes of broken china and glass. Of course God has a temper. Artists are like that. So are fathers. The wind comes again, gently this time, carrying morning.
. . .
Now,
the quickening breath,
the rapid heartbeat
as blood blossoms through the body.
How one woman
might turn to another
and with untried muscles, smile
before straightening her shoulders
and moving forward, slowly,
to enter the strange, mercurial light.
Michelle McGrane, “The Art of Awakening,” The Suitable Girl
Once again, a soiled and tired gray dawn, but the sky lightening at the horizons, pouring silver through the black ribwork of the firs. Smoke from chimneys draws the light down over wet asphalt roofs, and spray from the passing cars draws it up into the laurel hedges. There's no escaping the light: even at a whisper, it echoes and rebounds from street to wall, sings under the car tires, and worms its way under my fingernails.
If you're looking for anarchy, brother, you've come to the right shop.
After six months of being in a bad mood, it's probably time to consider the possibility that what I have here is not a mood to be shaken off, but a new mode of being. At any rate, any time I hear myself saying impatiently, “just get over it, Dale!” I can be confident that I'm trying not to see something that's plain before my face.
Night before last, unable to sleep, I sat up in the bed, murmured my refuge prayers, and meditated twenty minutes. The covers before me lay in a long pale question mark. At the corner of my left eye was the green spark of the clock on my side; at the corner of my right eye was the amber spark of the clock on Martha's side. Time's wingéd chariot. Not just drawing near: signaling to overtake.
. . .
Could the whole project be a wash?
In God's heart, regret bloomed hot
and a tempest of sorrow rained down
Still, some simple sweetness in us
roused divine compassion like milk
found favor in God's tired eyes.
Rachel Barenblat, “Postpartum,” 70 faces
In our end is our beginning. It is too easy to say such things, to forget the rancid backwash of the flood, forget the children terrified, terrified now and terrified forever, the certainties -- that houses stand still, that clean water comes out of the tap -- never to be regained, not on this earth, not in this life. Still, pick your way along the ruined levee, through the sodden heaps of mildewed clothes, barbed with flakes of broken china and glass. Of course God has a temper. Artists are like that. So are fathers. The wind comes again, gently this time, carrying morning.
. . .
Now,
the quickening breath,
the rapid heartbeat
as blood blossoms through the body.
How one woman
might turn to another
and with untried muscles, smile
before straightening her shoulders
and moving forward, slowly,
to enter the strange, mercurial light.
Michelle McGrane, “The Art of Awakening,” The Suitable Girl
Once again, a soiled and tired gray dawn, but the sky lightening at the horizons, pouring silver through the black ribwork of the firs. Smoke from chimneys draws the light down over wet asphalt roofs, and spray from the passing cars draws it up into the laurel hedges. There's no escaping the light: even at a whisper, it echoes and rebounds from street to wall, sings under the car tires, and worms its way under my fingernails.
If you're looking for anarchy, brother, you've come to the right shop.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Memorizing Poetry
This post began life as the beginning of my latest “Minding Words” column for the WTLP Zine. It ended up being way too long, so I chopped out the column for Sage (which became simply “How to Memorize a Poem.” and forgot about the rest. But a recent wonderful discussion on Voice Alpha -- Read or Recite? -- and the arrival of the WTLP Zine in my inbox reminded me of it. I am fascinated by various ways of intervening in mind and memory, and a bit baffled by people who aren't interested in doing it. I have similar difficulty understanding people who don't want to try unfamiliar cuisines: even if it turns out you don't like them, they're so intriguing, so ramifyingly suggestive, that it's always worth the venture. Even -- especially? -- something repulsive is interesting.
I started memorizing poetry because I panicked. I was in graduate school, working towards a doctorate in English, my oral exams were only two months away, and I couldn't remember a damn thing. I'd been reading for hours and hours every day: Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, you name it. And I couldn't even remember what I'd read last night. I couldn't tell you the name of the poet or the title of the poem. I was doomed. The panel of professors would ask me a few questions, ascertain that I knew nothing, and sadly (for they were all kind people) flunk me. They'd have no choice.
It was time for desperate measures. I took half the time I had for reading and used it for memorizing instead. I put together a program of memorization for myself. I'd pick a poem, or a passage of ten or fifteen lines, and every day I'd say it over and over to myself. After a couple days I'd have it down pat, and I'd move on to memorize something else. But I'd keep coming back to what I'd memorized before. By the time my exams came, my memorization time was mostly spent saying over things I'd already memorized. I was determined that nothing I'd taken so much trouble to engrave on my mind was going to wear away before the exams. That was the whole idea.
I now know, of course, that it didn't matter. They would have passed me no matter what; the blankness of my mind was an imaginary condition, the quite predictable result of anxiously trying to respond to every imaginable question about every poem, story, or novel ever written in English, all at once. When faced with a perfectly ordinary question about, say, Pride and Prejudice, I muddled along with a perfectly acceptable answer. Only once did I get to show off my memorization. I was asked something about Yeats, and found myself saying lines from “Lapis Lazuli”:
. . . their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.”
So memorization is probably not a very good way of studying for exams, at least not for exams of that sort. (Although as a method of allaying test anxiety it's not bad.) But the real benefits of memorization only became clear to me gradually, over time. My relationship with the verse I memorized changed profoundly. The poetry I memorized remained clear as time went by, while the poetry I didn't became indistinct, or vanished altogether. I reached for it and it was there. It was the difference between a marriage and a one night stand.
They were not always happy marriages. Byron was glib but untrustworthy. Wordsworth wouldn't leave well enough alone. Shelley, for someone who insisted so often on clearness and transparency, was irritatingly vague and gauzy. Whitman didn't know when he'd worn out his welcome.
But some of the relationships became far deeper. I had never taken Christina Rossetti or S.T. Coleridge entirely seriously: they both had, on first acquaintance, irritating affectations. But the better I knew them the less that mattered, and they both drew me into regions of thought and imagination that my apparently more suitable spouses had never dreamed of.
Often the way people who don't memorize much (or at all) speak of memorization puzzles me. It seems that they think memorization freezes a portion of the brain, or freezes your response to a poem. It does neither. Memorized poetry does not become inert. It becomes more vivid and more active in your brain, not less; it argues and couples with levels of your consciousness that once-scanned poems will never even touch. It invades your dreams and your daydreams; it rises at all kinds of times, opportune and inopportune.
It's true that, like marriage, it can't be undone. It is -- again like marriage -- a rash commitment, whose consequences are unforseeable. Don't expect a memorized poem to behave itself. It won't.
This post began life as the beginning of my latest “Minding Words” column for the WTLP Zine. It ended up being way too long, so I chopped out the column for Sage (which became simply “How to Memorize a Poem.” and forgot about the rest. But a recent wonderful discussion on Voice Alpha -- Read or Recite? -- and the arrival of the WTLP Zine in my inbox reminded me of it. I am fascinated by various ways of intervening in mind and memory, and a bit baffled by people who aren't interested in doing it. I have similar difficulty understanding people who don't want to try unfamiliar cuisines: even if it turns out you don't like them, they're so intriguing, so ramifyingly suggestive, that it's always worth the venture. Even -- especially? -- something repulsive is interesting.
I started memorizing poetry because I panicked. I was in graduate school, working towards a doctorate in English, my oral exams were only two months away, and I couldn't remember a damn thing. I'd been reading for hours and hours every day: Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, you name it. And I couldn't even remember what I'd read last night. I couldn't tell you the name of the poet or the title of the poem. I was doomed. The panel of professors would ask me a few questions, ascertain that I knew nothing, and sadly (for they were all kind people) flunk me. They'd have no choice.
It was time for desperate measures. I took half the time I had for reading and used it for memorizing instead. I put together a program of memorization for myself. I'd pick a poem, or a passage of ten or fifteen lines, and every day I'd say it over and over to myself. After a couple days I'd have it down pat, and I'd move on to memorize something else. But I'd keep coming back to what I'd memorized before. By the time my exams came, my memorization time was mostly spent saying over things I'd already memorized. I was determined that nothing I'd taken so much trouble to engrave on my mind was going to wear away before the exams. That was the whole idea.
I now know, of course, that it didn't matter. They would have passed me no matter what; the blankness of my mind was an imaginary condition, the quite predictable result of anxiously trying to respond to every imaginable question about every poem, story, or novel ever written in English, all at once. When faced with a perfectly ordinary question about, say, Pride and Prejudice, I muddled along with a perfectly acceptable answer. Only once did I get to show off my memorization. I was asked something about Yeats, and found myself saying lines from “Lapis Lazuli”:
. . . their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.”
So memorization is probably not a very good way of studying for exams, at least not for exams of that sort. (Although as a method of allaying test anxiety it's not bad.) But the real benefits of memorization only became clear to me gradually, over time. My relationship with the verse I memorized changed profoundly. The poetry I memorized remained clear as time went by, while the poetry I didn't became indistinct, or vanished altogether. I reached for it and it was there. It was the difference between a marriage and a one night stand.
They were not always happy marriages. Byron was glib but untrustworthy. Wordsworth wouldn't leave well enough alone. Shelley, for someone who insisted so often on clearness and transparency, was irritatingly vague and gauzy. Whitman didn't know when he'd worn out his welcome.
But some of the relationships became far deeper. I had never taken Christina Rossetti or S.T. Coleridge entirely seriously: they both had, on first acquaintance, irritating affectations. But the better I knew them the less that mattered, and they both drew me into regions of thought and imagination that my apparently more suitable spouses had never dreamed of.
Often the way people who don't memorize much (or at all) speak of memorization puzzles me. It seems that they think memorization freezes a portion of the brain, or freezes your response to a poem. It does neither. Memorized poetry does not become inert. It becomes more vivid and more active in your brain, not less; it argues and couples with levels of your consciousness that once-scanned poems will never even touch. It invades your dreams and your daydreams; it rises at all kinds of times, opportune and inopportune.
It's true that, like marriage, it can't be undone. It is -- again like marriage -- a rash commitment, whose consequences are unforseeable. Don't expect a memorized poem to behave itself. It won't.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Not Going Anywhere
Back in September last year, Jupiter was suddenly in the news. It was coming close to Earth! Wouldn't be this close again until 2022! Newscasters told you how to look for it, and breathlessly told you that at present it was the brightest object in the sky, except for the moon! And maybe the sky would be clear tonight, and you'd be able to observe it!
This was all very entertaining to the sort of person who knows Jupiter by name and pals around with him nightly. Because while all this was technically true, it was quite silly. In the first place, Jupiter didn't look much brighter on September 17th than it ever does. It's often the brightest object in the night sky: only the Moon and Venus are brighter (well, and very occasionally Mars.) But the really amusing thing was the sense of urgency, as if Jupiter might suddenly dart away again: as if you might miss it, as you might miss, say, the Perseid meteor shower. Jupiter is very big and very far away, and from our viewpoint here on Earth, it doesn't move very quickly at all. In fact, it's been in roughly the same part of the sky ever since September, and when I began writing this post this morning I could still see it through the window at Tom's, blazing away in the pale blue dawn, off to the southeast. Your chances of missing it were very small indeed.
This animation by Brad Goodspeed is terrific for showing how big Jupiter is: he tried to give you a sense for how big different planets would appear to us if they were as close as the moon. Of course, if Jupiter were this close, our little Earth would drop -- plop! -- into it, like a pebble into a pond, and that would be the end of government health care, and Mubarak's presidency, and a number of other things.
Back in September last year, Jupiter was suddenly in the news. It was coming close to Earth! Wouldn't be this close again until 2022! Newscasters told you how to look for it, and breathlessly told you that at present it was the brightest object in the sky, except for the moon! And maybe the sky would be clear tonight, and you'd be able to observe it!
This was all very entertaining to the sort of person who knows Jupiter by name and pals around with him nightly. Because while all this was technically true, it was quite silly. In the first place, Jupiter didn't look much brighter on September 17th than it ever does. It's often the brightest object in the night sky: only the Moon and Venus are brighter (well, and very occasionally Mars.) But the really amusing thing was the sense of urgency, as if Jupiter might suddenly dart away again: as if you might miss it, as you might miss, say, the Perseid meteor shower. Jupiter is very big and very far away, and from our viewpoint here on Earth, it doesn't move very quickly at all. In fact, it's been in roughly the same part of the sky ever since September, and when I began writing this post this morning I could still see it through the window at Tom's, blazing away in the pale blue dawn, off to the southeast. Your chances of missing it were very small indeed.
This animation by Brad Goodspeed is terrific for showing how big Jupiter is: he tried to give you a sense for how big different planets would appear to us if they were as close as the moon. Of course, if Jupiter were this close, our little Earth would drop -- plop! -- into it, like a pebble into a pond, and that would be the end of government health care, and Mubarak's presidency, and a number of other things.
Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.
Monday, January 31, 2011
This Ghosty Mansion
but what a relief it it is
to realize that other people inhabit
this ghosty mansion of a body
that's just fred
who locked himself in the attic
over that girl and still howls from time to time
and that's emily who
turns down dinner invitations
with such precision
gordon who gazes with
surprising and unremitting greed
at vapid spotty girls chewing gum
and phillip augustus
who rarely descends from his second floor room
book in hand trying
to understand
that business in the netherlands
and russell
who is a county extension agent
in Illinois and sells patent seed corn
on the side
you never know who
will pad downstairs to the door
and peer out of my eyes
when someone knocks and
the sighing and the rattling of chains
might be anyone
but what a relief it it is
to realize that other people inhabit
this ghosty mansion of a body
that's just fred
who locked himself in the attic
over that girl and still howls from time to time
and that's emily who
turns down dinner invitations
with such precision
gordon who gazes with
surprising and unremitting greed
at vapid spotty girls chewing gum
and phillip augustus
who rarely descends from his second floor room
book in hand trying
to understand
that business in the netherlands
and russell
who is a county extension agent
in Illinois and sells patent seed corn
on the side
you never know who
will pad downstairs to the door
and peer out of my eyes
when someone knocks and
the sighing and the rattling of chains
might be anyone
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Imagine
Imagine all the bluster gone:
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.
Sublimation: when something evaporates
without ever melting. I can't go forward
and I can't go back. But just below freezing,
if the vapor pressure is high enough
a solid can vanish into the air. Dry ice does it.
We're not without hope.
Hands that won't grip, that won't hold a water glass.
Eyes that won't focus, a wandering tongue
that won't settle to a single language.
I mutter imprecations in Russian and Malay.
Which day, which year is this? I go
to date a check and think,
it can't be 1978. It's January. It must be 1979.
She winces when I take the upper traps
gently between my fingers. A little roll of muscle
slender as a tinker toy, but it carries
all the misery of the world. Once again at the hoku,
where the thumb joins the hand, and
at the wrist extensors way up by the elbows.
I multiply by six billion, maybe seven,
to arrive at the human grief throbbing
through the body of the world,
meridians of pain, traceries of fear.
I carefully tie a medicine pouch
full of pollen, fill a syringe with the cowpox,
sing a quavery song in a forgotten tongue,
draw a battered staghorn beetle
from the sweating girl's side, to show her
that the evil has come out. Or I tell her
How I get purchase on the demon,
seize him by the trigger points,
and cast him from her body. All the same.
But imagine all the bluster gone
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.
Imagine all the bluster gone:
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.
Sublimation: when something evaporates
without ever melting. I can't go forward
and I can't go back. But just below freezing,
if the vapor pressure is high enough
a solid can vanish into the air. Dry ice does it.
We're not without hope.
Hands that won't grip, that won't hold a water glass.
Eyes that won't focus, a wandering tongue
that won't settle to a single language.
I mutter imprecations in Russian and Malay.
Which day, which year is this? I go
to date a check and think,
it can't be 1978. It's January. It must be 1979.
She winces when I take the upper traps
gently between my fingers. A little roll of muscle
slender as a tinker toy, but it carries
all the misery of the world. Once again at the hoku,
where the thumb joins the hand, and
at the wrist extensors way up by the elbows.
I multiply by six billion, maybe seven,
to arrive at the human grief throbbing
through the body of the world,
meridians of pain, traceries of fear.
I carefully tie a medicine pouch
full of pollen, fill a syringe with the cowpox,
sing a quavery song in a forgotten tongue,
draw a battered staghorn beetle
from the sweating girl's side, to show her
that the evil has come out. Or I tell her
How I get purchase on the demon,
seize him by the trigger points,
and cast him from her body. All the same.
But imagine all the bluster gone
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Stuff
I've been steadily working through my stuff, purging and filing, working out my variation on David Allen's Getting Things Done system. I have boxes of stuff -- old letters, game designs, school papers -- I never unpacked from our 1983 move from Olympia to New Haven. And after that will come the great book purge: I plan to get rid of thousands of books. That is a rather daunting project too. But with the landmark of my 53rd year coming up -- a prime number, you know -- and with the recent experience of going through my father-in-law's stuff -- and with the kids grown -- well, this is end game, as far as stuff goes. A couple years ago I realized the name of the game was no longer acquiring stuff, and I consciously stopped doing it; I stopped buying books, for example. Now I'm committed to getting rid of it.
Or, more accurately, simply knowing what it is and whether it has any claim on me. I want no more surprises in my life. I want the edges of my commitments, particularly of my commitments to myself, to be sharp-edged and clear. The projects that aren't clearly to be done, or not to be done, must at least be clearly, and with an awake mind, put into a plainly marked “deferred” pile, and periodically reviewed to see whether they haven't slid over to the growing “not in this lifetime” pile.
I have never given Stuff its due, I think. Painfully, painfully, over the last few years, I've learned to clean the kitchen daily, and to keep my office / massage room in order. But I was a messy, disorganized kid and I've been a messy, disorganized adult. All my adult life I've had at least one room devoted to Stuff. At the old Milroy house in Olympia we called it “the Id”: it was the laundry room, but it was also where we threw stuff we didn't want to deal with. At our present house it's the basement. Don't know where it goes? Well, put it in the basement for now. “For now!” I want that phrase to vanish from my vocabulary. It means, I'm not willing to deal with it, but I'm not willing to let go of it. It means, it drops into the vague anxiety stratum, that noisome bilgewater under the planking of my mind, breeding pestilence.
Doesn't mean I have to deal with everything right away. Of course not: that's impossible. But it means knowing when I am going to deal with it. The Glomph is going into the basement? Fine. But it goes clearly labelled “Glomph,” and with calendar entry saying, “decide what to do about the Glomph in the basement.”
The thing is, every time you put a Glomph in the basement, you're making a half-hearted commitment to deal with it sometime later, and that commitment weighs on your spirit. That's David Allen's contention, a sort of 21st Century version of Feng Shui, and I think he's absolutely right. Stuff that is vaguely and indeterminately held is Stuff that eats at you, pilfers your energy.
But the present experience, although it feels liberating, is also deeply painful. What I'm doing, basically, is digging through a whole substrate of vague ambitions and half-hearted commitments, and renouncing them. Forty years' worth of them.
I've been steadily working through my stuff, purging and filing, working out my variation on David Allen's Getting Things Done system. I have boxes of stuff -- old letters, game designs, school papers -- I never unpacked from our 1983 move from Olympia to New Haven. And after that will come the great book purge: I plan to get rid of thousands of books. That is a rather daunting project too. But with the landmark of my 53rd year coming up -- a prime number, you know -- and with the recent experience of going through my father-in-law's stuff -- and with the kids grown -- well, this is end game, as far as stuff goes. A couple years ago I realized the name of the game was no longer acquiring stuff, and I consciously stopped doing it; I stopped buying books, for example. Now I'm committed to getting rid of it.
Or, more accurately, simply knowing what it is and whether it has any claim on me. I want no more surprises in my life. I want the edges of my commitments, particularly of my commitments to myself, to be sharp-edged and clear. The projects that aren't clearly to be done, or not to be done, must at least be clearly, and with an awake mind, put into a plainly marked “deferred” pile, and periodically reviewed to see whether they haven't slid over to the growing “not in this lifetime” pile.
I have never given Stuff its due, I think. Painfully, painfully, over the last few years, I've learned to clean the kitchen daily, and to keep my office / massage room in order. But I was a messy, disorganized kid and I've been a messy, disorganized adult. All my adult life I've had at least one room devoted to Stuff. At the old Milroy house in Olympia we called it “the Id”: it was the laundry room, but it was also where we threw stuff we didn't want to deal with. At our present house it's the basement. Don't know where it goes? Well, put it in the basement for now. “For now!” I want that phrase to vanish from my vocabulary. It means, I'm not willing to deal with it, but I'm not willing to let go of it. It means, it drops into the vague anxiety stratum, that noisome bilgewater under the planking of my mind, breeding pestilence.
Doesn't mean I have to deal with everything right away. Of course not: that's impossible. But it means knowing when I am going to deal with it. The Glomph is going into the basement? Fine. But it goes clearly labelled “Glomph,” and with calendar entry saying, “decide what to do about the Glomph in the basement.”
The thing is, every time you put a Glomph in the basement, you're making a half-hearted commitment to deal with it sometime later, and that commitment weighs on your spirit. That's David Allen's contention, a sort of 21st Century version of Feng Shui, and I think he's absolutely right. Stuff that is vaguely and indeterminately held is Stuff that eats at you, pilfers your energy.
But the present experience, although it feels liberating, is also deeply painful. What I'm doing, basically, is digging through a whole substrate of vague ambitions and half-hearted commitments, and renouncing them. Forty years' worth of them.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Boy
Out of the blue, I'm sent another memoir in which I figure. A flattering portrait of me as an undergraduate, which I'm glad of, but which I barely recognize.
At the same time, taking heavy blows to my self-esteem. The truth of the matter is, I have no idea who I am. And of course, it doesn't matter in the slightest. No matter who I am, I have to do everything a great ape does. I don't believe in personhood anyway. But God, how it matters to us, this fiction! I hung on every word about myself, just as if I had any more significant connection to that young twenty-year old than with any other who wandered the world in in 1978. We really believe all this stuff, that origin is identity, and that what others see will make something real about us.
No. If it wasn't real before, it's not real now.
I got a request from a lawyer for the SOAP notes from a couple massages I did, and I don't have them. I never billed insurance for the massages, and so I never wrote up the SOAPs, and the notes are long gone. I feel horribly, horribly unprofessional, on so many levels. It's a lot easier for me to disregard the memoirist's picture of me than it is to disregard the picture of me that phone call formed in my mind, of a complete flake of a therapist. It was a bad period of time for me, and I was dropping lots of balls back then, but dropping balls in your personal life is one thing: dropping them in your professional life is another.
There's basically nothing to be done, but to confess I don't have the notes (which I did on the phone), and to write down what I remember, though I can't imagine it will be of any use to them.
Oh, young Dale is not happy with himself, no, Precious: not happy at all.
Out of the blue, I'm sent another memoir in which I figure. A flattering portrait of me as an undergraduate, which I'm glad of, but which I barely recognize.
At the same time, taking heavy blows to my self-esteem. The truth of the matter is, I have no idea who I am. And of course, it doesn't matter in the slightest. No matter who I am, I have to do everything a great ape does. I don't believe in personhood anyway. But God, how it matters to us, this fiction! I hung on every word about myself, just as if I had any more significant connection to that young twenty-year old than with any other who wandered the world in in 1978. We really believe all this stuff, that origin is identity, and that what others see will make something real about us.
No. If it wasn't real before, it's not real now.
I got a request from a lawyer for the SOAP notes from a couple massages I did, and I don't have them. I never billed insurance for the massages, and so I never wrote up the SOAPs, and the notes are long gone. I feel horribly, horribly unprofessional, on so many levels. It's a lot easier for me to disregard the memoirist's picture of me than it is to disregard the picture of me that phone call formed in my mind, of a complete flake of a therapist. It was a bad period of time for me, and I was dropping lots of balls back then, but dropping balls in your personal life is one thing: dropping them in your professional life is another.
There's basically nothing to be done, but to confess I don't have the notes (which I did on the phone), and to write down what I remember, though I can't imagine it will be of any use to them.
Oh, young Dale is not happy with himself, no, Precious: not happy at all.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Up
I was struck by a statement in a resistance-training book: if someone hit a point in training where they couldn't make any progress, it said, you couldn't just leave them doing the same thing this week as they did last week, because they would lose ground. There's no such thing as maintenance. If you're not gettting stronger, you're getting weaker.
“Maintaining” is just a tottery place where the forces in one direction temporarily equal the forces in the other. You don't get onto some plateau, where the forces of inertia are finally on your side. You're either going up or going down. Lama Michael once said precisely the same thing: “if you think you're not making progress in your meditation -- you're probably going backwards.”
I wanted to go to the sidelines and wait it out. I can't do that. Everything is a decision, forward or back. There's no neutral, no idle. What presents as a choice of three ways is actually only a choice of two ways. Up or down.
Which is not to say that there's no rest. There is. There's rest, there's sleep. But there's no limbo, no space between, no time out. There's no “good enough.”
I don't know how far I will fall, or what I will hit on my way down.
But it's better to be clear on this.
The glass is gone, and thank God! We've escaped the display room, for good an all. Now it's a long blind climb, the spelunking adventure of a lifetime. It may go underwater. But I'm not going to look for level passages any more. If it doesn't hold the promise of going up, I'm not interested.
Listen. If you listen, you can hear the air and the water moving, the respiration of the cavern. There's nothing dead or still here. This is the body of the earth.
I renounce all alliegances, close out all promises, cancel all debts. I'm going to climb to where I can feel the wind in my face and see the stars above the fir trees.
And falling, strangely enough, is the same as climbing: it's just climbing without traction. What matters is the intention. Falling will happen, it happens all the time. Falling is okay.
That's it. Nothing else.
I was struck by a statement in a resistance-training book: if someone hit a point in training where they couldn't make any progress, it said, you couldn't just leave them doing the same thing this week as they did last week, because they would lose ground. There's no such thing as maintenance. If you're not gettting stronger, you're getting weaker.
“Maintaining” is just a tottery place where the forces in one direction temporarily equal the forces in the other. You don't get onto some plateau, where the forces of inertia are finally on your side. You're either going up or going down. Lama Michael once said precisely the same thing: “if you think you're not making progress in your meditation -- you're probably going backwards.”
I wanted to go to the sidelines and wait it out. I can't do that. Everything is a decision, forward or back. There's no neutral, no idle. What presents as a choice of three ways is actually only a choice of two ways. Up or down.
Which is not to say that there's no rest. There is. There's rest, there's sleep. But there's no limbo, no space between, no time out. There's no “good enough.”
I don't know how far I will fall, or what I will hit on my way down.
But it's better to be clear on this.
The glass is gone, and thank God! We've escaped the display room, for good an all. Now it's a long blind climb, the spelunking adventure of a lifetime. It may go underwater. But I'm not going to look for level passages any more. If it doesn't hold the promise of going up, I'm not interested.
Listen. If you listen, you can hear the air and the water moving, the respiration of the cavern. There's nothing dead or still here. This is the body of the earth.
I renounce all alliegances, close out all promises, cancel all debts. I'm going to climb to where I can feel the wind in my face and see the stars above the fir trees.
And falling, strangely enough, is the same as climbing: it's just climbing without traction. What matters is the intention. Falling will happen, it happens all the time. Falling is okay.
That's it. Nothing else.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Condensation Polymers
Quotations in italics are from the Wikipedia article on Carothers, the inventor of Nylon and Neoprene.
Wallace Carothers kept a capsule
of cyanide on his watch chain: you can't
be too careful. He went to work
at Purity Hall for DuPont
though he conscientiously told them
that he suffered from neurotic spells
of diminished capacity, which might constitute
a much more serious handicap there than here.
(Here being university, where incapacitation
from periodic gloom is the done thing.)
Purity Hall, where they did basic research
with a free hand, supposedly. Not really.
And weeks before his new substance
came to the public as the stuff of stockings
and the parachutes that would win Normandy
He put his skills to practical use,
dissolving his capsule in lemon juice, knowing
that the ingestion of cyanide in an acidic solution
would greatly intensify the speed and effect
of the poison. No note was found.
He strokes the thighs of indifferent women now
and forever in the chains of consequence,
in the endless complex of condensation,
in the polymers of the afterlife.
Quotations in italics are from the Wikipedia article on Carothers, the inventor of Nylon and Neoprene.
Wallace Carothers kept a capsule
of cyanide on his watch chain: you can't
be too careful. He went to work
at Purity Hall for DuPont
though he conscientiously told them
that he suffered from neurotic spells
of diminished capacity, which might constitute
a much more serious handicap there than here.
(Here being university, where incapacitation
from periodic gloom is the done thing.)
Purity Hall, where they did basic research
with a free hand, supposedly. Not really.
And weeks before his new substance
came to the public as the stuff of stockings
and the parachutes that would win Normandy
He put his skills to practical use,
dissolving his capsule in lemon juice, knowing
that the ingestion of cyanide in an acidic solution
would greatly intensify the speed and effect
of the poison. No note was found.
He strokes the thighs of indifferent women now
and forever in the chains of consequence,
in the endless complex of condensation,
in the polymers of the afterlife.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Company on the Road
Paula wrote:
I cling to Graham Greene's image in Brighton Rock of the homeless, toothless crone saying the rosary in a wintry alley, glimpsed by the long lapsed Catholic anti-hero of the story, a young murderous punk who is strangely unsettled by the sight. I posit her against hierarchies of brocaded clerics, obsessively defended liturgies and the salvific claims of various personal pieties and devotions ( Morning and evening prayer from the 1979 prayer book ? I prefer the pre-Conciliar Breviarum Romanum. In Latin, of course. ). I posit her, even, against the trans-religious contemplative claims -- that union with God, that enlightenment, that realization is reserved for the handful who master all the practices, who make it through all the gates and who play by all the rules. That's simply a sophisticated version of the Rapture.
I take some deep breaths, and resolve to resume meditating and go back to my sangha -- or some meditating community -- once a week. It's been a long time, and I'm glad I stepped away from it. I had a lot to try and to settle. But it's time to go back. And these moments -- these pause-at-the-diving-board-ladder moments -- are a good time to review what the hell you think you are doing.
One thing I am not doing is seeking enlightenment, that “sophisticated version of the Rapture.” I don't believe the process of meditation has, or should have, an endpoint, and I think Paula's point is well-taken: there's a smug elitist streak in institutional Buddhism (as in all human endeavors), and it reaches its highest concentration in the notion of enlightenment and perfect masters. And while I've always been grateful for Buddhism's calm, practical recognition that a well-ordered state and a working economy make religious life easier -- that's why so many prayers express gratitude for not having been born in a border country, where life is nasty, brutish, and short -- the flip side of that is a hopeless structural confusion of secular and spiritual ambitions. If you get extraordinarily lucky, someone like the present Dalai Lama appears at the top, which could give you the impression that this whole system is guaranteed to work. It is not, and I don't endorse it. Of course I'm devoted to the Dalai Lama: who wouldn't be? But I'm not devoted to the office, nor to the structure that supports it. My Protestant background, with its radical democratic ethos, its distrust of of authority, its conviction that a lot of smug people are going to be pretty damned surprised on judgment day, won't let me be any more than a fellow-traveller with Tibetan Buddhism.
But if they're willing to have me, I'm happy to put my Canterbury pony alongside theirs, and jog along, sharing stories on the road. I could go find one of those radical Vipassana outfits, who eschew story and ritual, the modern-day puritans of Buddhist practice, and be more intellectually at ease. But intellectual ease is not what I'm looking for: I'm looking for a practice that lessens my suffering and increases my clarity. And for company on the road.
Paula wrote:
I cling to Graham Greene's image in Brighton Rock of the homeless, toothless crone saying the rosary in a wintry alley, glimpsed by the long lapsed Catholic anti-hero of the story, a young murderous punk who is strangely unsettled by the sight. I posit her against hierarchies of brocaded clerics, obsessively defended liturgies and the salvific claims of various personal pieties and devotions ( Morning and evening prayer from the 1979 prayer book ? I prefer the pre-Conciliar Breviarum Romanum. In Latin, of course. ). I posit her, even, against the trans-religious contemplative claims -- that union with God, that enlightenment, that realization is reserved for the handful who master all the practices, who make it through all the gates and who play by all the rules. That's simply a sophisticated version of the Rapture.
I take some deep breaths, and resolve to resume meditating and go back to my sangha -- or some meditating community -- once a week. It's been a long time, and I'm glad I stepped away from it. I had a lot to try and to settle. But it's time to go back. And these moments -- these pause-at-the-diving-board-ladder moments -- are a good time to review what the hell you think you are doing.
One thing I am not doing is seeking enlightenment, that “sophisticated version of the Rapture.” I don't believe the process of meditation has, or should have, an endpoint, and I think Paula's point is well-taken: there's a smug elitist streak in institutional Buddhism (as in all human endeavors), and it reaches its highest concentration in the notion of enlightenment and perfect masters. And while I've always been grateful for Buddhism's calm, practical recognition that a well-ordered state and a working economy make religious life easier -- that's why so many prayers express gratitude for not having been born in a border country, where life is nasty, brutish, and short -- the flip side of that is a hopeless structural confusion of secular and spiritual ambitions. If you get extraordinarily lucky, someone like the present Dalai Lama appears at the top, which could give you the impression that this whole system is guaranteed to work. It is not, and I don't endorse it. Of course I'm devoted to the Dalai Lama: who wouldn't be? But I'm not devoted to the office, nor to the structure that supports it. My Protestant background, with its radical democratic ethos, its distrust of of authority, its conviction that a lot of smug people are going to be pretty damned surprised on judgment day, won't let me be any more than a fellow-traveller with Tibetan Buddhism.
But if they're willing to have me, I'm happy to put my Canterbury pony alongside theirs, and jog along, sharing stories on the road. I could go find one of those radical Vipassana outfits, who eschew story and ritual, the modern-day puritans of Buddhist practice, and be more intellectually at ease. But intellectual ease is not what I'm looking for: I'm looking for a practice that lessens my suffering and increases my clarity. And for company on the road.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Creatures as Buddha Found Them
We are the creatures
as Buddha found them:
unshaking, unshoken,
unwaking, unwoken.
We are the sleepers
as Ahriman bound them:
unleaking, unloken,
unspeaking, unspoken.
Deb Scott's 17th stone for A River of Stones
Yesterday evening I rode my bike under a night sky still blue, with the moon circled in a rusty ring, and a long haunted shore of white cloud to the east, above Mt Tabor. Deb Scott, across the river in the West Hills, made a memorable stone of it. At the Powell's on Hawthorne Sage read from her new book and fielded questions with wonderful grace -- the more wonderful and endearing, now that I know her well enough to be able to see how nervous being at the podium makes her. I saw Tom Mattox and Shanna Germain there, but was too shy to introduce myself to them. Mary Marsh delighted and confounded me by hugging me and saying she loved my poems. Portland seemed like a magical place, last night. Winter meant nothing: we could have lit a campfire on Hawthorne Boulevard and roasted marshmallows over it, in perfect comfort, and sung songs all night until the moon went to rest beyond Deb's house.
Now it's morning, and we're soon to take ship. More on that anon. Go gently, sleepers.
We are the creatures
as Buddha found them:
unshaking, unshoken,
unwaking, unwoken.
We are the sleepers
as Ahriman bound them:
unleaking, unloken,
unspeaking, unspoken.
Deb Scott's 17th stone for A River of Stones
Yesterday evening I rode my bike under a night sky still blue, with the moon circled in a rusty ring, and a long haunted shore of white cloud to the east, above Mt Tabor. Deb Scott, across the river in the West Hills, made a memorable stone of it. At the Powell's on Hawthorne Sage read from her new book and fielded questions with wonderful grace -- the more wonderful and endearing, now that I know her well enough to be able to see how nervous being at the podium makes her. I saw Tom Mattox and Shanna Germain there, but was too shy to introduce myself to them. Mary Marsh delighted and confounded me by hugging me and saying she loved my poems. Portland seemed like a magical place, last night. Winter meant nothing: we could have lit a campfire on Hawthorne Boulevard and roasted marshmallows over it, in perfect comfort, and sung songs all night until the moon went to rest beyond Deb's house.
Now it's morning, and we're soon to take ship. More on that anon. Go gently, sleepers.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Witness
I don't know the way forward from here. I've lost not only my meditation practice, but my far older habit of talking to myself, of hammering things out. I don't want to hammer things out, now. I'm afraid if I hammer on something it will collapse.
Well, it's just a surge of thoughts and feelings. It will be on its way in a moment. Meanwhile the dawn is coming. Even if I can't see it yet, in this brightly-lit kitchen, I can feel it, the same restlessness that gets the first birds piping in the pitch dark. Not light, but the seeds of light, beginning to germinate in the rain-soaked ground.
The German-made dishwasher works quietly. Kiki cracks a few dry kibbles ostentatiously, to let me know what my delay in opening a can of cat food has reduced her to. Floating on the air behind those sounds is only the faint silvery buzz my ears always produce nowadays -- an innocuous form of tinnitus, I suppose.
My mind wanders off for a few moments, wondering if Travell was right about SCM trigger points and tinnitus. Nothing intrinsically improbable about it, but I've never seen it work. I should experiment on myself. Maybe what's really wrong with me these days is that I can no longer hear the silence behind everything.
No. That silvery buzz is silence, now, for me -- it just sounds different, that's all.
6:30. Staff meeting this morning: I had better get going soon. Back exercises, shave, shower. I have an absurd impulse these days to document my morning routine, to photograph myself shaving, write poems about washing my hair, describe in detail how I tend my feet. A sense that without a witness all these things will be lost? A suspicion that I don't really exist? I'm not sure what that impulse is. I want to film my hand reaching for the razor, the water going down the shower drain. I want to make line drawings to document my sequence of back exercises, which magically keep low back pain, my old enemy, at bay. Odd that my fear of mortality should attach itself to this. All my writing, all my massage work, all the ideas I've argued about so passionately: all that can go away. Good riddance! But I'd be sad if the world never knew exactly how I shaved.
I don't know the way forward from here. I've lost not only my meditation practice, but my far older habit of talking to myself, of hammering things out. I don't want to hammer things out, now. I'm afraid if I hammer on something it will collapse.
Well, it's just a surge of thoughts and feelings. It will be on its way in a moment. Meanwhile the dawn is coming. Even if I can't see it yet, in this brightly-lit kitchen, I can feel it, the same restlessness that gets the first birds piping in the pitch dark. Not light, but the seeds of light, beginning to germinate in the rain-soaked ground.
The German-made dishwasher works quietly. Kiki cracks a few dry kibbles ostentatiously, to let me know what my delay in opening a can of cat food has reduced her to. Floating on the air behind those sounds is only the faint silvery buzz my ears always produce nowadays -- an innocuous form of tinnitus, I suppose.
My mind wanders off for a few moments, wondering if Travell was right about SCM trigger points and tinnitus. Nothing intrinsically improbable about it, but I've never seen it work. I should experiment on myself. Maybe what's really wrong with me these days is that I can no longer hear the silence behind everything.
No. That silvery buzz is silence, now, for me -- it just sounds different, that's all.
6:30. Staff meeting this morning: I had better get going soon. Back exercises, shave, shower. I have an absurd impulse these days to document my morning routine, to photograph myself shaving, write poems about washing my hair, describe in detail how I tend my feet. A sense that without a witness all these things will be lost? A suspicion that I don't really exist? I'm not sure what that impulse is. I want to film my hand reaching for the razor, the water going down the shower drain. I want to make line drawings to document my sequence of back exercises, which magically keep low back pain, my old enemy, at bay. Odd that my fear of mortality should attach itself to this. All my writing, all my massage work, all the ideas I've argued about so passionately: all that can go away. Good riddance! But I'd be sad if the world never knew exactly how I shaved.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Byah Byah Byah
Steady rain, a medley of cheerful conversations, a baby enthusiastically practicing “byah byah byah” at various speeds and pitches behind me. Sunday morning at Tom's. Every once in a while a new family member takes a stab at hushing or distracting the baby, but he's pretty determined. He's getting this “byah byah byah” thing down. No time for games or chit-chat.
Through the window, the crimson of the ConocoPhillips station glows against the gray rain clouds and dark juniper borders. What we used to call a Phillips '76 station -- is it a false memory, or did they used to call themselves Union '76 stations? -- All the single-name gas stations of my youth have amalgamated, it seems. Soon we'll have only ArcoMobilExxonConocoPhillips stations, and perhaps the company will simplify its name to “Gas.” That would be a novelty. Have you noticed that gas stations no longer tell you that they sell gas? When I was a kid, you'd see signs on the filling stations: “Gas” would flash in red neon. Now they don't have time to tell you what they actually sell. Getting the brand out is far more important: no marketer worth his salt would waste signage telling you what the product is. Keep practicing, little guy! Your “byah byah byah” skills are going to be in demand.
The head of a local environmental non-profit, the other day, a man raised in New York City, was enthusing about his strategy meeting with a regional consortium of environmental groups. They were rebranding the Northwest wilderness. Very exciting.
How I do love the internets! My friend and wonderful massage therapist, Neva Winter, drew my attention (on Facebook) to a mysterious new kind of joint motion: “innominate rotation,” mentioned to her by a doctor. What the hell? External and internal rotation, lateral and medial rotation, those we knew about, but innominate rotation? My Latin was good enough to recognize the meaning: “nameless rotation.” Now that was something I could not possibly leave alone. What was "nameless rotation?" It sounded like it should be one of the 99 names of God.
Google got me a ways. “Innominate rotation” was just “rotation at the innominate bone” -- not a kind of rotation, but just rotation at one particular joint. (Though due to the oddities of the configuration of the hip, it is an especially tricky and interesting example.) But the mystery had just shifted ground. Why was the hip bone called the “nameless bone”? Was it a euphemism, like calling the vulva the pudendum, the “thing to be ashamed of”? Somehow that didn't seem quite in the style of early skeletal anatomists. Google again.
I did find an etymology offered, in an early Nineteenth Century text on midwifery. The innominate bone, this text genially explained, was so called because it didn't resemble anything else, so there was nothing to call it. Hence “the nameless bone.”
I have a pretty good nose for false eytmology, and this reeked. Of course the hip-bone looks like things, it looks like all kinds of things. From one side, like an elephant's ear; from the other, like a brooding vulture. That was just silly.
The question had got beyond my research skills, so I put it in the hands of a higher power: I asked about it in a long (and utterly unrelated) comment thread at Language Hat, about the Lithuanian treatment of Polish 'w's. Within a few hours I had my answer, complete with quotations from the Greek and Latin, and further linguistic questions far beyond my competence. I summarized in my last comment there:
Ah, y'all are magnificent! Now this is an etymology I can believe in. Galen [2nd Century “Father of Anatomy”] threw up his hands and said "you know, the whatsit bones, everyone calls them something different!" and centuries of dutiful students solemnly wrote down "Whatsit Bones."
Before the internet it would have take me days of work to get to that answer. Fun work, sure: but I'm a massage therapist and a poet and a house hunter. My time is limited.
And finally, yet another reason to love the internets. Peter Stephens, the last of the Whigs: The old battles are the only battles worth fighting, the ones that never get won: Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Jackson vs. Clay, Douglas vs. Lincoln. You get clarity today only if you can see a political fight in those lights.
Steady rain, a medley of cheerful conversations, a baby enthusiastically practicing “byah byah byah” at various speeds and pitches behind me. Sunday morning at Tom's. Every once in a while a new family member takes a stab at hushing or distracting the baby, but he's pretty determined. He's getting this “byah byah byah” thing down. No time for games or chit-chat.
Through the window, the crimson of the ConocoPhillips station glows against the gray rain clouds and dark juniper borders. What we used to call a Phillips '76 station -- is it a false memory, or did they used to call themselves Union '76 stations? -- All the single-name gas stations of my youth have amalgamated, it seems. Soon we'll have only ArcoMobilExxonConocoPhillips stations, and perhaps the company will simplify its name to “Gas.” That would be a novelty. Have you noticed that gas stations no longer tell you that they sell gas? When I was a kid, you'd see signs on the filling stations: “Gas” would flash in red neon. Now they don't have time to tell you what they actually sell. Getting the brand out is far more important: no marketer worth his salt would waste signage telling you what the product is. Keep practicing, little guy! Your “byah byah byah” skills are going to be in demand.
The head of a local environmental non-profit, the other day, a man raised in New York City, was enthusing about his strategy meeting with a regional consortium of environmental groups. They were rebranding the Northwest wilderness. Very exciting.
How I do love the internets! My friend and wonderful massage therapist, Neva Winter, drew my attention (on Facebook) to a mysterious new kind of joint motion: “innominate rotation,” mentioned to her by a doctor. What the hell? External and internal rotation, lateral and medial rotation, those we knew about, but innominate rotation? My Latin was good enough to recognize the meaning: “nameless rotation.” Now that was something I could not possibly leave alone. What was "nameless rotation?" It sounded like it should be one of the 99 names of God.
Google got me a ways. “Innominate rotation” was just “rotation at the innominate bone” -- not a kind of rotation, but just rotation at one particular joint. (Though due to the oddities of the configuration of the hip, it is an especially tricky and interesting example.) But the mystery had just shifted ground. Why was the hip bone called the “nameless bone”? Was it a euphemism, like calling the vulva the pudendum, the “thing to be ashamed of”? Somehow that didn't seem quite in the style of early skeletal anatomists. Google again.
I did find an etymology offered, in an early Nineteenth Century text on midwifery. The innominate bone, this text genially explained, was so called because it didn't resemble anything else, so there was nothing to call it. Hence “the nameless bone.”
I have a pretty good nose for false eytmology, and this reeked. Of course the hip-bone looks like things, it looks like all kinds of things. From one side, like an elephant's ear; from the other, like a brooding vulture. That was just silly.
The question had got beyond my research skills, so I put it in the hands of a higher power: I asked about it in a long (and utterly unrelated) comment thread at Language Hat, about the Lithuanian treatment of Polish 'w's. Within a few hours I had my answer, complete with quotations from the Greek and Latin, and further linguistic questions far beyond my competence. I summarized in my last comment there:
Ah, y'all are magnificent! Now this is an etymology I can believe in. Galen [2nd Century “Father of Anatomy”] threw up his hands and said "you know, the whatsit bones, everyone calls them something different!" and centuries of dutiful students solemnly wrote down "Whatsit Bones."
Before the internet it would have take me days of work to get to that answer. Fun work, sure: but I'm a massage therapist and a poet and a house hunter. My time is limited.
And finally, yet another reason to love the internets. Peter Stephens, the last of the Whigs: The old battles are the only battles worth fighting, the ones that never get won: Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Jackson vs. Clay, Douglas vs. Lincoln. You get clarity today only if you can see a political fight in those lights.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Spaces after a Period
All my life, I'd been a two spaces after the period guy. That's what I was taught in my typing class in 1974. Not as a recommendation, or as a best practice: simply as The Truth. A period was followed by two spaces. After God types a period, his right thumb goes duh-dum on the space bar. Everyone knows that.
But I work for a typographically savvy organization, and a couple years ago they established a house standard of a single space after a period. After more than thirty years of ending every sentence with a thumb-stutter flourish this was very difficult for me. I still end many of my sentences by typing two spaces, and then a backspace, and probably will to the end of my days. But I've changed over. I've converted. I'm a one-space man now.
I've long been curious about this change, so I was happy to see this article in Slate by Farhad Manjoo. According to him, the double-space rule was codified during the reign of the manual typewriter. It was making the best of a bad job: in monotype every character takes up the same width on the paper, regardless of whether it's a big fat 'm' or a tiny period, and you have a problem with periods (and colons, which are just as narrow: everything I'm saying here pertains to colons as well as periods.) They float way out there on their own, in a sea of white space. In order to ensure that your period works like a typeset period, so that it looks like it belongs to the sentence it ends, and has nothing to do with the next sentence, you have to exaggerate the space that follows it. And since we're in monotype land, space-and-a-half is not an option. You have to take two full spaces. And so a rule is born, and taught to a generation of typists, not as a best-of-a-bad-job rule, but as God's Own Truth. There are two spaces after a period. (This is in a nutshell the life-history of most rules, actually: kluge → standard → holy writ → shibboleth.)
I was surprised by a couple of things. One was how outraged I was by being required to do something that directly contradicted what I had grown up believing, and had conscientiously enforced as a teacher for several years myself. I was amused by the reaction -- since I have never been able to bring myself to see it as an important matter -- but that didn't mitigate it. A single space, my heart told me, was simply wrong, and no good could come of it. My heart sank every time I sent out a thank-you letter from the Foundation full of this awful error. I knew that people just like me were picking up their thank you letter, sighing at the solecism, and murmuring, “can't you expect literacy even from the Library these days?”
But I was relieved to find that actually, after I'd produced the letter, I couldn't really see a difference. So the next surprise was that while most of the time I couldn't see it, the person who reviews my letters could. For several weeks after the change, I would get letters back to do over, with an extra space circled in red. She was always right, I learned. Often I could only tell how many spaces there were by opening the document up and arrowing over the white space. One space or two, which to my eye was nearly invisible, was to her quite obvious and unmistakable. It's one of those moments, which I prize, in which I am forced to accept that what I see and what other people see are not the same thing. I used to think I had a good eye for that sort of thing, because I've always excelled at pattern recognition. But actually that works against me in this case. Some murky substratum of my visual processing believes, with all its heart and soul, that a single space and a double space are the same thing. I'm like a Japanese man, learning English, trying to persuade his voice and ear that 'r' and 'l' are not the same consonant. It's heavy going, and I don't think it will ever be second-nature.
It's wonderfully warm out, in the fifties if not sixties, and after a couple days of freezing temperatures that feels like summer. The moist air carries a multitude of scents: the world is alive and breathing again. I like ice and snow as a novelty, but its charm wears off fast. I am entirely a creature of the temperate Northwest coastal zone: freezing temperatures put me out of my reckoning. During this last cold snap I actually contemplated purchasing wool socks, which I haven't possessed (or felt the lack of) since skiing and climbing as a child. Perceiving my feet as cold, and thinking of that as remediable, was as foreign to me as seeing two spaces after a period. There was only a vague sense of discomfort, a nagging impression that something was wrong. I discovered they were cold only by finding myself persistently endeavoring to sit with one foot under the other knee, the only footwarming habit familiar to me. “Hey, I know what this is,” I thought. “This is my feet being cold! People wear wool socks to address this!” I felt a sudden kinship with all those heretofore inexplicable wool sock wearers. My brothers and sisters, after all!
All my life, I'd been a two spaces after the period guy. That's what I was taught in my typing class in 1974. Not as a recommendation, or as a best practice: simply as The Truth. A period was followed by two spaces. After God types a period, his right thumb goes duh-dum on the space bar. Everyone knows that.
But I work for a typographically savvy organization, and a couple years ago they established a house standard of a single space after a period. After more than thirty years of ending every sentence with a thumb-stutter flourish this was very difficult for me. I still end many of my sentences by typing two spaces, and then a backspace, and probably will to the end of my days. But I've changed over. I've converted. I'm a one-space man now.
I've long been curious about this change, so I was happy to see this article in Slate by Farhad Manjoo. According to him, the double-space rule was codified during the reign of the manual typewriter. It was making the best of a bad job: in monotype every character takes up the same width on the paper, regardless of whether it's a big fat 'm' or a tiny period, and you have a problem with periods (and colons, which are just as narrow: everything I'm saying here pertains to colons as well as periods.) They float way out there on their own, in a sea of white space. In order to ensure that your period works like a typeset period, so that it looks like it belongs to the sentence it ends, and has nothing to do with the next sentence, you have to exaggerate the space that follows it. And since we're in monotype land, space-and-a-half is not an option. You have to take two full spaces. And so a rule is born, and taught to a generation of typists, not as a best-of-a-bad-job rule, but as God's Own Truth. There are two spaces after a period. (This is in a nutshell the life-history of most rules, actually: kluge → standard → holy writ → shibboleth.)
I was surprised by a couple of things. One was how outraged I was by being required to do something that directly contradicted what I had grown up believing, and had conscientiously enforced as a teacher for several years myself. I was amused by the reaction -- since I have never been able to bring myself to see it as an important matter -- but that didn't mitigate it. A single space, my heart told me, was simply wrong, and no good could come of it. My heart sank every time I sent out a thank-you letter from the Foundation full of this awful error. I knew that people just like me were picking up their thank you letter, sighing at the solecism, and murmuring, “can't you expect literacy even from the Library these days?”
But I was relieved to find that actually, after I'd produced the letter, I couldn't really see a difference. So the next surprise was that while most of the time I couldn't see it, the person who reviews my letters could. For several weeks after the change, I would get letters back to do over, with an extra space circled in red. She was always right, I learned. Often I could only tell how many spaces there were by opening the document up and arrowing over the white space. One space or two, which to my eye was nearly invisible, was to her quite obvious and unmistakable. It's one of those moments, which I prize, in which I am forced to accept that what I see and what other people see are not the same thing. I used to think I had a good eye for that sort of thing, because I've always excelled at pattern recognition. But actually that works against me in this case. Some murky substratum of my visual processing believes, with all its heart and soul, that a single space and a double space are the same thing. I'm like a Japanese man, learning English, trying to persuade his voice and ear that 'r' and 'l' are not the same consonant. It's heavy going, and I don't think it will ever be second-nature.
It's wonderfully warm out, in the fifties if not sixties, and after a couple days of freezing temperatures that feels like summer. The moist air carries a multitude of scents: the world is alive and breathing again. I like ice and snow as a novelty, but its charm wears off fast. I am entirely a creature of the temperate Northwest coastal zone: freezing temperatures put me out of my reckoning. During this last cold snap I actually contemplated purchasing wool socks, which I haven't possessed (or felt the lack of) since skiing and climbing as a child. Perceiving my feet as cold, and thinking of that as remediable, was as foreign to me as seeing two spaces after a period. There was only a vague sense of discomfort, a nagging impression that something was wrong. I discovered they were cold only by finding myself persistently endeavoring to sit with one foot under the other knee, the only footwarming habit familiar to me. “Hey, I know what this is,” I thought. “This is my feet being cold! People wear wool socks to address this!” I felt a sudden kinship with all those heretofore inexplicable wool sock wearers. My brothers and sisters, after all!
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Tell Me
Tell me
stories about the last time
you wore your shirt inside out and
tell me again
that there was never an interregnum
never
a time when the lights went out;
that even then, the whales pulled
their oars in deep places
tell me the wind
drops in little bays even
where the headlands lean out
over the fretting sea.
Tell me
stories about the last time
you wore your shirt inside out and
tell me again
that there was never an interregnum
never
a time when the lights went out;
that even then, the whales pulled
their oars in deep places
tell me the wind
drops in little bays even
where the headlands lean out
over the fretting sea.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Under Auriga
The arms of the firs struggle
in the wind, prayer flags waver and snap,
scraps of paper cartwheel
over the white-lined grass.
Let my memory be blown
out of your mind: let this winter
be the end of me.
Lyra will come
in Spring evenings scented with daphne,
Vega will burn in the calm mild air;
may no trace of me trouble the season.
May your purity of mind and strength of limb
rise from the first hot bath
of the turning year:
may you stand in clouds of steam
under stars that have never heard of me.
The arms of the firs struggle
in the wind, prayer flags waver and snap,
scraps of paper cartwheel
over the white-lined grass.
Let my memory be blown
out of your mind: let this winter
be the end of me.
Lyra will come
in Spring evenings scented with daphne,
Vega will burn in the calm mild air;
may no trace of me trouble the season.
May your purity of mind and strength of limb
rise from the first hot bath
of the turning year:
may you stand in clouds of steam
under stars that have never heard of me.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Quicksilver
Silver sky, and a silver vehicle parked by the cafe window: some modern cross between a van and a station wagon, enormous, twice the size of the station wagons I grew up with. But precisely the color of the clouded sky, in this cold dawn. It gleams in the same way, its blankness full of light, every shadow hinting of tarnish. It is a dark morning, but full of light. Reflections of the lamps that hang from the ceilings of Tosi's march out across the sky, phantom lights against the phantom sky. Everything is gleam and reflection. The morning light pools and beads and skitters like drops of mercury; the tops of the firs are mixed up with the low clouds. Their heads are smoky and indistinct: maybe it's their breath fogging the cold air.
I'm reading a wonderful mystery novel aloud to Martha: Three Bags Full, by a young German named Leonie Swann. It's the story of sheep investigating the murder of their shepherd. They are sheep to the life: easily spooked, in constant need of the reassurance of the flock, given to the obscure impulses of communal remorse and shame that drive herd animals, and fitting everything else in around the central business of life, which is grazing. They are a bit muddled and out of their depth with human beings, but some things they have down cold. Voices suddenly drop, at one point, and the sheep nearby become attentive: “human beings rarely bothered to be quiet, and when they did it always meant something.”
On hearing the news of Pearl Harbor Hitler raced to tell it to Jodl and Keitel, exulting that 'Now it is impossible for us to lose the war: we now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.' (Churchill, on hearing the same news, came to an identical but contrary conclusion: 'So we had won after all.')
Reading John Keegan's Second World War for the . . . third? fourth? time. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that fascists do eventually self-destruct. I have nothing to say about Giffords' assassination, which opens old wounds, except this: people have mistaken the fortitude and determination of American democracy before, and have paid dearly for it. If you want a fight, you'll get one.
Silver sky, and a silver vehicle parked by the cafe window: some modern cross between a van and a station wagon, enormous, twice the size of the station wagons I grew up with. But precisely the color of the clouded sky, in this cold dawn. It gleams in the same way, its blankness full of light, every shadow hinting of tarnish. It is a dark morning, but full of light. Reflections of the lamps that hang from the ceilings of Tosi's march out across the sky, phantom lights against the phantom sky. Everything is gleam and reflection. The morning light pools and beads and skitters like drops of mercury; the tops of the firs are mixed up with the low clouds. Their heads are smoky and indistinct: maybe it's their breath fogging the cold air.
I'm reading a wonderful mystery novel aloud to Martha: Three Bags Full, by a young German named Leonie Swann. It's the story of sheep investigating the murder of their shepherd. They are sheep to the life: easily spooked, in constant need of the reassurance of the flock, given to the obscure impulses of communal remorse and shame that drive herd animals, and fitting everything else in around the central business of life, which is grazing. They are a bit muddled and out of their depth with human beings, but some things they have down cold. Voices suddenly drop, at one point, and the sheep nearby become attentive: “human beings rarely bothered to be quiet, and when they did it always meant something.”
On hearing the news of Pearl Harbor Hitler raced to tell it to Jodl and Keitel, exulting that 'Now it is impossible for us to lose the war: we now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.' (Churchill, on hearing the same news, came to an identical but contrary conclusion: 'So we had won after all.')
Reading John Keegan's Second World War for the . . . third? fourth? time. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that fascists do eventually self-destruct. I have nothing to say about Giffords' assassination, which opens old wounds, except this: people have mistaken the fortitude and determination of American democracy before, and have paid dearly for it. If you want a fight, you'll get one.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Metablogical
Reading Sage Cohen's Productive Writer -- I promised a review of it, which I've been (yes, I'm aware of the irony) slow in producing. It's interesting to read something like this now, when my writing and my relationship with it are in their maturity: the last time I read this sort of “How to Write” book I must have been in my early twenties. Many of the issues she brings up (and deftly deals with) are so long vanished from my life that I have to look at them a while to dredge up the memories of them. Not being able to write? Not knowing what to write? Never happens to me any more. If some morning I open my laptop and find I have nothing to say, I think, “huh! Nothing to say today,” and go on to do something else. The idea that the fountain of inspiration has run dry never occurs to me. Not writing would be much harder for me than writing is, nowadays. It's just what I do.
There was a time when I would wrestle and struggle and try to figure out what I should write. It was because I'd taken on board somehow the daft idea that I should be a novelist, and so I was trying to excrete a novel from my brain by main force. It was a deeply unpleasant experience, and I don't recommend it to anyone. I eventually concluded that a person should only write a novel -- or anything else literary -- because they must: because the thing grows up in their dreams and daydreams and demands to be written. All my best writing happens because it has to.
I neither have nor want the novelist's skill of holding a steady viewpoint or two, and of organizing things into long narratives. That's not my gift. I'm not a literary infantryman; I'm a light skirmisher. Take a few pot shots and scamper away. Marching in uniform is just not my thing. If I ever do write a long narrative, it wouldn't be a conventional one -- not because I have anything against conventional novels; I adore them; but just because I wander off the track so easily. It would have to be something in the Brautigan line, if it was anything.
But I'm finding Sage's book very useful, because it does kick me in the seat of the pants and get me to thinking about questions that have gathered dust for a while. I have no desire to make money from my writing -- that seems like a dreary way to wring a little bit of money from a great deal of effort, and likely to spoil both my writing and my joy in it -- but I do have some modest goals for this blog, and I've neglected them. For one thing, I want to promote and showcase some of the bloggers I most admire -- to do something like Dave Bonta's Smorgasblog -- and I seldom get around even to linking people. And since blogrolling.com was apparently hacked, and has become unsafe, I've even stripped my blogroll from Mole. This is not acceptable: I don't want Mole to look like anything but what it is -- one cell in a complicated literary organism.
For another thing, the comment software that took over from Haloscan won't do. I'd rather have flat, non-threaded comments, which I think generates a more genuine and inclusive conversation: but the real problem is that its log-in protocol is over-rich. It feels pushy: one more player trying to horn in on the “social network” space. It's just the comments, for God's sake. I find myself logged in variously as “Koshtra,” “Dale”, or “Dale Favier,” with various avatars, depending on where I've been lately. Or not logged in at all, and appearing as “Guest.”The difficulty is that they have seven years of my comments in their system as hostages, and I treasure my comments. I'm very reluctant to abandon them; equally reluctant to take on trying to import them into some other system.
And last, I have to disentangle this blog from my massage website. That site, I think, has to become its own Wordpress site, and stop being poor cousin to Mole: I have to give serious thought to where I draw the line between writing suitable for my massage clients and writing suitable for Mole. There is a line, and I need to draw it, even if it's hard. No reason why someone shouldn't read the blog content of both sites: but they shouldn't have to.
So. I'm not much given to resolutions, but I'll commit to resolving all three of these issues this year. And I'll write that review for you, Sage. Honest.
Reading Sage Cohen's Productive Writer -- I promised a review of it, which I've been (yes, I'm aware of the irony) slow in producing. It's interesting to read something like this now, when my writing and my relationship with it are in their maturity: the last time I read this sort of “How to Write” book I must have been in my early twenties. Many of the issues she brings up (and deftly deals with) are so long vanished from my life that I have to look at them a while to dredge up the memories of them. Not being able to write? Not knowing what to write? Never happens to me any more. If some morning I open my laptop and find I have nothing to say, I think, “huh! Nothing to say today,” and go on to do something else. The idea that the fountain of inspiration has run dry never occurs to me. Not writing would be much harder for me than writing is, nowadays. It's just what I do.
There was a time when I would wrestle and struggle and try to figure out what I should write. It was because I'd taken on board somehow the daft idea that I should be a novelist, and so I was trying to excrete a novel from my brain by main force. It was a deeply unpleasant experience, and I don't recommend it to anyone. I eventually concluded that a person should only write a novel -- or anything else literary -- because they must: because the thing grows up in their dreams and daydreams and demands to be written. All my best writing happens because it has to.
I neither have nor want the novelist's skill of holding a steady viewpoint or two, and of organizing things into long narratives. That's not my gift. I'm not a literary infantryman; I'm a light skirmisher. Take a few pot shots and scamper away. Marching in uniform is just not my thing. If I ever do write a long narrative, it wouldn't be a conventional one -- not because I have anything against conventional novels; I adore them; but just because I wander off the track so easily. It would have to be something in the Brautigan line, if it was anything.
But I'm finding Sage's book very useful, because it does kick me in the seat of the pants and get me to thinking about questions that have gathered dust for a while. I have no desire to make money from my writing -- that seems like a dreary way to wring a little bit of money from a great deal of effort, and likely to spoil both my writing and my joy in it -- but I do have some modest goals for this blog, and I've neglected them. For one thing, I want to promote and showcase some of the bloggers I most admire -- to do something like Dave Bonta's Smorgasblog -- and I seldom get around even to linking people. And since blogrolling.com was apparently hacked, and has become unsafe, I've even stripped my blogroll from Mole. This is not acceptable: I don't want Mole to look like anything but what it is -- one cell in a complicated literary organism.
For another thing, the comment software that took over from Haloscan won't do. I'd rather have flat, non-threaded comments, which I think generates a more genuine and inclusive conversation: but the real problem is that its log-in protocol is over-rich. It feels pushy: one more player trying to horn in on the “social network” space. It's just the comments, for God's sake. I find myself logged in variously as “Koshtra,” “Dale”, or “Dale Favier,” with various avatars, depending on where I've been lately. Or not logged in at all, and appearing as “Guest.”The difficulty is that they have seven years of my comments in their system as hostages, and I treasure my comments. I'm very reluctant to abandon them; equally reluctant to take on trying to import them into some other system.
And last, I have to disentangle this blog from my massage website. That site, I think, has to become its own Wordpress site, and stop being poor cousin to Mole: I have to give serious thought to where I draw the line between writing suitable for my massage clients and writing suitable for Mole. There is a line, and I need to draw it, even if it's hard. No reason why someone shouldn't read the blog content of both sites: but they shouldn't have to.
So. I'm not much given to resolutions, but I'll commit to resolving all three of these issues this year. And I'll write that review for you, Sage. Honest.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Scabs and Scales
Two of the toes of my left foot, the second and fifth, had been badly bashed, and their nails had become thick and crumbly: it took me a long time to realized that somehow getting bashed had rendered them susceptible to fungus, and that they were never going to recover on their own. I read around on the net a little and tried, improbable as it sounded, Ointment of camphor, eucalyptus, & menthol and “aggressive debridement” -- filing them down. After a few days, the the nails had gone dark, and then sloughed off altogether, which was fascinating, if a little alarming. They grew back in, not quite right, but much better.
The smell of menthol always reminds me of things forbidden. In my early teens I found discarded pack of menthol cigarettes, and I smoked a couple of them -- cautiously, and, like Bill Clinton, not inhaling. It was a strange feeling: deeply attractive, deeply disturbing. The wickedness of the tobacco companies was a common theme in my nonsmoking household, as I was growing up. But the menthol put a strange twist to it all. It felt so refreshing, so much the opposite of smoking, like a mouthwash. And the nicotine, like caffeine, fizzed in your synapses and made you smarter, livelier. And then for days afterward I could taste the hint of tobacco, lingering on my tongue, in the soft tissue of the insides of my cheeks and in my soft palate.
I knew the stuff was mortal. I threw the rest away. Still the memory of the menthol tugged at me, and whispered to me of different lives, lives in which you didn't count the cost of things, in which a moment's rush was worth what it seemed to be worth. I eyed the mothers of my friends who smoked, their yellowed fingertips, the stale tavern odor that hung about their clothes, and wondered what women who valued the rush so highly did all day, and what their fingers would taste like.
Bloody linens unrolled across the sky: a wounded morning, seeping through its bandages. I suppose there's always this urge to pick away at the scabs and scales. I always wonder what new tenderness is there; I always wonder if the new life beneath is being protected or smothered by its shell.
You could say, with St Vincent Millay, Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to death? Or with Yeats, Those that I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love. Or you could walk on the rust red cinder paths of the Cascade passes, with the broken brick dust of the whirring grasshoppers at the corners of your mouth and eyes, and the silence of the mountains pressing on your ears and making them sing like mosquitoes.
If I hold your face in my hands, and tilt your face to the light, what do I see? Still something oblique, something that always escapes the camera and the poem. We played truth or dare when we were kids because we thought the hidden thing was something you could say in words. Now we know better: but the ache of that curiosity never goes away.
Two of the toes of my left foot, the second and fifth, had been badly bashed, and their nails had become thick and crumbly: it took me a long time to realized that somehow getting bashed had rendered them susceptible to fungus, and that they were never going to recover on their own. I read around on the net a little and tried, improbable as it sounded, Ointment of camphor, eucalyptus, & menthol and “aggressive debridement” -- filing them down. After a few days, the the nails had gone dark, and then sloughed off altogether, which was fascinating, if a little alarming. They grew back in, not quite right, but much better.
The smell of menthol always reminds me of things forbidden. In my early teens I found discarded pack of menthol cigarettes, and I smoked a couple of them -- cautiously, and, like Bill Clinton, not inhaling. It was a strange feeling: deeply attractive, deeply disturbing. The wickedness of the tobacco companies was a common theme in my nonsmoking household, as I was growing up. But the menthol put a strange twist to it all. It felt so refreshing, so much the opposite of smoking, like a mouthwash. And the nicotine, like caffeine, fizzed in your synapses and made you smarter, livelier. And then for days afterward I could taste the hint of tobacco, lingering on my tongue, in the soft tissue of the insides of my cheeks and in my soft palate.
I knew the stuff was mortal. I threw the rest away. Still the memory of the menthol tugged at me, and whispered to me of different lives, lives in which you didn't count the cost of things, in which a moment's rush was worth what it seemed to be worth. I eyed the mothers of my friends who smoked, their yellowed fingertips, the stale tavern odor that hung about their clothes, and wondered what women who valued the rush so highly did all day, and what their fingers would taste like.
Bloody linens unrolled across the sky: a wounded morning, seeping through its bandages. I suppose there's always this urge to pick away at the scabs and scales. I always wonder what new tenderness is there; I always wonder if the new life beneath is being protected or smothered by its shell.
You could say, with St Vincent Millay, Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to death? Or with Yeats, Those that I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love. Or you could walk on the rust red cinder paths of the Cascade passes, with the broken brick dust of the whirring grasshoppers at the corners of your mouth and eyes, and the silence of the mountains pressing on your ears and making them sing like mosquitoes.
If I hold your face in my hands, and tilt your face to the light, what do I see? Still something oblique, something that always escapes the camera and the poem. We played truth or dare when we were kids because we thought the hidden thing was something you could say in words. Now we know better: but the ache of that curiosity never goes away.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Next Christmas
I take a deep breath, and feel the QL cautiously release a bit, the paraspinals ease, the curve of my lower back open a little. The extra pounds I put on over the holidays are pushing against the tenth and eleventh ribs, at my sides above my hips, and against the xiphoid process (that tip of bone at the bottom of the sternum). Sometimes I get back to a more human way of eating right after Christmas, but this year I kept eating like a mall-dweller, clear through till now, the official final day of the holidays.
Our counselor recently asked me to give him a physical description of my holiday anxiety, and seemed a little surprised, possibly a little disappointed, when I could give him a quite precise one, right off the bat. Hey, this is my territory: the body and the visualization of emotional states. It's a stiffness of the whole chest and abdominal cavity, knotted together by the abdominals and the QL, a turgid, steel blue mass, slightly colder than body temperature. As if an alien insect had laid its eggs in my thorax, midway between the xiphoid and the navel, and the egg sac was pushing everything outwards, and in the meantime all the muscles of the spine and abdomen were poisoned and ossifying, growing ever stiffer, weaker, and less serviceable.
I had played with the idea of radical withdrawal, of declaring unilaterally that I do not celebrate Christmas or any of its trumped up simulacra (Kwanzaa, Hannukah-on-Steroids, whatever.) And if I thought it would solve the problem, and give me back the last month of every year, I'd do it. But in fact it is my holiday, my ethnic tradition, for better and worse, and I'd be throwing out the baby with the bath. Whether the holiday is foisted on me, as a Buddhist, is a meaningless question. There's no such thing as a culture without festival times. The trouble is not the holiday -- commercialized and coercive and full of bizarre superstitions though it may be -- the problem is that I go limp and play possum in its presence, hoping that it will just nose me about a bit and then wander off, rather than deciding to eat me. I need to decide how I celebrate Christmas, and celebrate it that way, and the hell with everyone else.
I realized, as we celebrated what we call “our little Christmas” on December 26th -- “little” because it's what we do with “our little family,” rather than our extended family -- that I actually like the gift-giving, on a reasonable scale, and without the sense of obligation. It's the industrialized Christmas, with the extravagant feast and thousands of dollars of shoddy products changing hands in a feverish potlatch of mutual disappointment, that I hate. That, and having allowed “our little Christmas” to be marginalized. Our little Christmas shouldn't be the little one. It's the big one, and it ought to be the center of our celebration.
I've thought along these lines before -- a couple years ago I even went so far as to send out Christmas cards, for the first time in thirty-some years -- but I've never been so aware of it, and never so determined to change it. To make it happen, of course, I'm going to have to start preparing well beforehand, making my plans apparent to everyone before anyone else starts planning -- in August, say. And I'll have to make a strict list of the people I'm giving gifts, and figure something out for everyone, which will take sustained effort, and will require admitting to myself, long before December, that Christmas is coming and that I am going to celebrate it. Celebrate it. Not weather it.
I take a deep breath, and feel the QL cautiously release a bit, the paraspinals ease, the curve of my lower back open a little. The extra pounds I put on over the holidays are pushing against the tenth and eleventh ribs, at my sides above my hips, and against the xiphoid process (that tip of bone at the bottom of the sternum). Sometimes I get back to a more human way of eating right after Christmas, but this year I kept eating like a mall-dweller, clear through till now, the official final day of the holidays.
Our counselor recently asked me to give him a physical description of my holiday anxiety, and seemed a little surprised, possibly a little disappointed, when I could give him a quite precise one, right off the bat. Hey, this is my territory: the body and the visualization of emotional states. It's a stiffness of the whole chest and abdominal cavity, knotted together by the abdominals and the QL, a turgid, steel blue mass, slightly colder than body temperature. As if an alien insect had laid its eggs in my thorax, midway between the xiphoid and the navel, and the egg sac was pushing everything outwards, and in the meantime all the muscles of the spine and abdomen were poisoned and ossifying, growing ever stiffer, weaker, and less serviceable.
I had played with the idea of radical withdrawal, of declaring unilaterally that I do not celebrate Christmas or any of its trumped up simulacra (Kwanzaa, Hannukah-on-Steroids, whatever.) And if I thought it would solve the problem, and give me back the last month of every year, I'd do it. But in fact it is my holiday, my ethnic tradition, for better and worse, and I'd be throwing out the baby with the bath. Whether the holiday is foisted on me, as a Buddhist, is a meaningless question. There's no such thing as a culture without festival times. The trouble is not the holiday -- commercialized and coercive and full of bizarre superstitions though it may be -- the problem is that I go limp and play possum in its presence, hoping that it will just nose me about a bit and then wander off, rather than deciding to eat me. I need to decide how I celebrate Christmas, and celebrate it that way, and the hell with everyone else.
I realized, as we celebrated what we call “our little Christmas” on December 26th -- “little” because it's what we do with “our little family,” rather than our extended family -- that I actually like the gift-giving, on a reasonable scale, and without the sense of obligation. It's the industrialized Christmas, with the extravagant feast and thousands of dollars of shoddy products changing hands in a feverish potlatch of mutual disappointment, that I hate. That, and having allowed “our little Christmas” to be marginalized. Our little Christmas shouldn't be the little one. It's the big one, and it ought to be the center of our celebration.
I've thought along these lines before -- a couple years ago I even went so far as to send out Christmas cards, for the first time in thirty-some years -- but I've never been so aware of it, and never so determined to change it. To make it happen, of course, I'm going to have to start preparing well beforehand, making my plans apparent to everyone before anyone else starts planning -- in August, say. And I'll have to make a strict list of the people I'm giving gifts, and figure something out for everyone, which will take sustained effort, and will require admitting to myself, long before December, that Christmas is coming and that I am going to celebrate it. Celebrate it. Not weather it.
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