Critical Lessons

I've been told that a person who quits smoking for good does so, on average, on his sixth attempt to quit. I've mulled over this fact for a while. There's a similar (but less well-attested) fact about losing weight for good: it's really rare for somebody to do it successfully and permanently the first time around. I've seen the number five, but I suspect that's low. Whatever it may be exactly, it suggests to me two things: a) that it's harder than most people expect it will be, and b) people who eventually succeed do so because they accumulate critical lessons from their failures.

Who knows how many times I've tried to lose weight? I was startled, when I read back through my blog entries under the Whupping the Food Thing label, to find a 2013 attempt, which apparently lasted three months, of which I have no memory whatsoever. None.

I was a plump child. I skinnied down for a couple years when I was a teenager, but by the time I was in college my weight was drifting upwards, and it basically drifted upwards whenever I wasn't focusing on losing it. My mother was quite obese and she would predict darkly that my eating habits would lead eventually to me being terribly fat and (of course) miserable. I responded with my usual obstinate cheerfulness. Maybe I would be fat, but I didn't intend to be miserable.

But I took it to heart. In my inmost heart I knew I was going to be fat, and I was going to die early of cardiac disease, just as my maternal grandfather -- whom I strongly resembled, everyone said so -- had. He died at 62. (I have three years left, now, before I hit that ominous number.)

Anyway. I had a complicated relationship with losing weight. It was what my mother was always trying and failing to do. I didn't want to be fat, but I also didn't want to diet: they were both things my mother did. I wanted to be my own person.

But diets did happen. The first I remember distinctly was the Scarsdale diet. This was in the heyday of the vilification of fats and the glorification of grapefruit. One lost three or four pounds per week, if one stuck to it. One did not. One became extraordinarily hungry, and one white-knuckled one's way through for a few days, and finally one broke. So that was my first critical lesson: I was not going to win through this by brute force. Whether my will was peculiarly defective, I didn't know, but it wasn't up to the task I was setting it.

A couple decades later, along came Atkins, the vilification of carbs, and the glorification of meat. I LIKED that. I adore meat, and I love fat with all my heart and soul. Eggs! Hamburger! For quite a while, eating that way worked just as Dr Atkins said it would. I didn't even want to eat too much. I didn't want to binge. I was eating the food that spoke to my soul. I became a big low-carb convert, and swore by Gary Taubes, and regarded sugar as the Devil's own poison. Life was good.

Well, except. As the weeks went on, I got kind of sick of all that fat. I began to dream of carbs. I would fixate on them. They wandered into my daydreams. I knew they were wicked, and I wanted them. But my will held, until the Night of the Pepperoni. 

I wanted something to snack on, and I'd bought some sliced pepperoni (having carefully examined the label to make sure there was no sugar added, of course -- you'd be surprised at all the stuff they inject with sugar, these days!) I love pepperoni, but of course if it had no carbs it would not make me hungrier, and I would not binge on it.

I binged. I ate and ate and ate, voraciously and unstoppably. And miserably realized that it wasn't true, and I had gradually been realizing it wasn't true. I *could* binge on meat, and I would, and my present diet in fact was making me feel real crappy. My skin was breaking out. I was fatigued all the time. The low-carb magic was gone.

That was the end of the low-carb thing, for me. And the end of the Magic Macronutrient thing. Later I read more, and learned that the whole insulin resistance story actually had big holes in it. I didn't believe in the villainy of fats any more, and that was a plus, but I didn't believe in the villainy of carbs either. Maybe the problem was exactly what someone in the 1950s would have identified as the problem: I was eating too much. There was nothing wrong with sugar and fat except that they were calorie-dense and I was too fond of them, particularly when they teamed up, and especially when they were abetted by food scientist flavor-artistes. I read Stephan Guyenet's blog: he was writing about high-reward foods and dopamine signalling and so forth. Maybe my love of certain foods was not addiction -- he sensibly refuses to participate in that particular slugfest -- but it activated a lot of the same pathways and used a lot of the machinery of addiction.

The last thing I tried was probably the smartest, and might actually have worked eventually, if I had had the patience to wait twenty years. Rather than try to fight the demons, I'd try to simply go around them. Learn to make food in my own kitchen, and displace the high-reward foods by crowding them out with plain good foods that weren't so dense in calories and didn't produce such a pleasure-storm. This was probably a necessary step too, because I learned stuff about maintaining a kitchen and preparing food and planning stuff out that I needed to learn. 

But I wasn't losing any weight: in fact that steady upward drift was, if anything, faster. I was getting uneasy about the state of my knees and hips, if I stayed heavy. If walking became really uncomfortable, and I stopped exercising, what would become of me? Well, I knew what would happen. I have plenty of clients who are caught in that predicament -- moving hurts too much, and the only comfort for it is eating, which makes moving even harder, and comfort even more necessary. What happens is that you get really fat, and moving gets really hard, and eventually type 2 diabetes comes along to keep you company.

I really didn't want that.

So I came up with the present program, which has been working for me for the largest weight loss, over the longest time, of any of these attempts. It's convenient. It's simple. It doesn't require fussing. I decided to go public with it, to add the threat of public humiliation to my motivations. And I banished one turn of phrase from my speech. I decided I was not going to say, ever again "I am trying to lose weight." That's what I used to say, if someone offered me something that I wasn't supposed to eat. "Oh," I'd say, apologetically, "I'm afraid I shouldn't, I'm trying to lose weight." 

But I'm not saying that any more. I'm saying, "I'm losing weight." That's all. And I'm not apologizing. I'm doing this thing.

Five and twelve

Arcturus setting last night, over the roof of the garage; the Sickle sweeping endlessly backwards; a mist rising from the streets. Vega so directly overhead that looking up at her, and turning to orient myself to the Summer Triangle, gave me vertigo. The desire for something afar / from the sphere of our sorrow.

All the things that tumble up out of the ground, or out of strollers, and take their improbable places as earthly powers, for a little bit, before they tumble down again.

Leaves going yellow. There will be floods and blockages where there were fires: detritus coming down the rivers, muddy water in the streets. But above the dirty clouds and the ruined air there are still stars.

Every morning I lie on my little Persian carpet on the concrete floor, and lay my hands on my ribs, which are gradually rising, like the basalt circles on the beach when a rough winter comes and the sand is washing away. Like that.

Ribs and hands, sets of little bones in parallel, go instinctively to each other, and play little mathematical games. With five and twelve you can do anything, anything at all.

The Birth of a Right

Al Franken wrote to me this morning—we're tight, like that; he emails me a couple times a week—and he began:

Dale, 

Health care is a right. It's not a privilege.

Now, I've been in favor of universal health care in this country since before a lot of you were born, so I'm happy to see my buddy Al take up the cause. But it was the language that caught my attention. I hear this phrase a lot, these days, and I'm perplexed. Because in my youth, health care was not a right. Not even us leftie commies thought it was a right. It was something we thought everyone could and should have: but that's not quite the same thing. Rights are inalienable. They're intrinsic to being human. They're something—to stick to the ground they grew in—they're something that God intended as part of every human being's humanness.

A lot of people don't live on that ground anymore. I never did, having been raised atheist. So I'm a little cautious of the rhetoric of rights. What exactly are we talking about? Jefferson knew quite precisely. "They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." That's clear enough. But what do I mean, when I say that people have a right to free speech? Do I mean something other than "I think everybody ought to be able to speak freely"?

I think I do. Certainly we produce these assertions, not as our own whims, but gravely, as fundamental laws of human nature: we're not talking about "laws" like laws against jaywalking—our tone implies—but "laws" like the law of gravity. We may know that an ancient Greek would have been totally baffled by the notion that health care could be a right, (and would probably dispute that political rights could ever properly belong to someone who was not the male head of a freehold in the first place.) But we nevertheless hold that rights are—somehow—self-evident. Like my friend Al up there. He doesn't go on to argue it. You don't need to argue things like that. You state it and you're done.

You can see that this is true from the way the Republicans have fumbled the Obamacare repeal. You might expect Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell to say, "What nonsense. Health care is not a right. It's something you buy if you can afford it!" This is clearly what they think. But, as highly evolved political beings, they know, they can tell by its scent in the air, that to say so would be be political death. So they tie themselves in knots.

And at that point, when even the guys on the other side of the fence feel they can't deny it out loud, I think that we have to say—yes, health care has in fact become a right. Whatever rights may be, access to health care is one of them. So my question, dear reader, is—how did this happen? It's a sea change. A new right has been born in our very presence. Did you see it being born? Do you understand how it happened?

Or was I simply wrong, and has it been a right all along? Just because I was there to observe the waning years of the 20th Century, doesn't make me an expert on them.

I would love to know what you think! This one puzzles me.

Halfway

The halfway mark: I've lost 21 pounds, and I have 21 more to lose to get to 180, which is where I change things again. That landfall is scheduled for March 1st: at present I'm far enough under the blue line that it might happen as early as mid-February. At a pound a week, these things take some time: I've been four months under this regimen and I've got at least four to go. 

I chose 180 because it tended to be the upper limit of the "healthy weight" ranges given by various tables. I'm really not sure where I want my weight to settle, and I don't want to fix my attention on some particular number -- say, the 160 that the same tables tend to mark as the healthy midpoint -- in case it turns out that, for instance, 170 is fairly easy to maintain but 160 is hellish hungry all the time. I just won't know till I get there. But I'm pretty sure I want to get at least to 180. I'm a mesomorph, I lay on muscle pretty easily, but I'm no bodybuilder. There's no reason I ought to be way off the norms.

So at 180 I enter the "maintenance" phase, in which I'm basically eating as I intend to eat for the rest of my life. Here's how it goes, in theory: whatever my daily dole at that point -- I cut out the last of my breakfast toast, last week, and I expect I'll need to cut out something more before I hit 180 -- I get to keep. I just go on as I was when I hit 180. But I'll get to add some 300 calories daily: my notion at the moment is that I will take that largely in bananas (which I find myself craving!) and undressed potatoes. But basically it will still be the Tom's-and-Burgerville diet.

Should I cross back above the 180 line, I'll ditch the new stuff and revert to the regimen that originally got me there, till I get a weekly average of 180 again. But what I expect is that I'll still be running a slight deficit, and my weight will drift down a bit and hit whatever level it likes. That number -- whatever it may be -- will be my genuine maintenance weight, the one to stay within a couple pounds of.

So, is it Burgerville for good? Well, I hope not. Gradually I'll substitute other calorie-equivalent meals for the Tillamook-cheeseburger-and-half-a-small-milkshake, taking extravagant care with my measuring. But the Burgerville dinner will be there as my fallback. 

That's the plan, as it stands now. I have no reason to think that my appetite will ever function normally. I will never -- I've fully accepted this now -- I will never eat ad libitum again. Which is not such a dreadful thing. It's just food. There are liberties that are more important to me.

Lifesaving Writers

It's been a long time since anyone helped me live. Time was, writers arrived regularly to save my life: Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, CS Lewis; then William Butler Yeats and TS Eliot and William Blake, then Tolstoy and George Eliot. Then they stopped. Oh, writers came along to amuse me. Charles Dickens. Patrick O'Brian. PG Wodehouse. Terry Pratchett. I enjoy them, I appreciate them. But no one is saving my life, nowadays. I've grimly taken my own path. I don't believe much of anything, anymore. So perhaps I've removed myself from the game. I find it hard to get far in novels now. I get impatient. "Yeah, yeah," I say, "you're just making this up: you'll find the world as it really is a harder row to hoe." And I toss it aside.

Modern poetry is a different matter. Lifesaving is not part of its agenda (or when it is, I find it tiresome.) It's observing, savoring, appreciating, paying attention. I like that. That helps.

Maybe it's that I don't believe in lifesaving any more. Or maybe it's that the song has gone out of me. Or maybe it's just that I'm not so impressed by literature's devotees anymore, even if they have read Milton and Shakespeare and all those other highfalutin Greeks. They're all interested in understanding life: but the point, as Herr Marx would have said, is to change it. And how long do you think we have, anyway? It takes hours to read a novel. Meanwhile the boats are drifting down the river, and the surf is getting ugly by the bar.

Triste

Still smoky -- Mt Tabor a ghostly silhouette, and the West Hills simply not there. The sun a baleful red disk, when she shows at all: I think there's a thin overcast above the smoke. But the air doesn't stink so much, now, and the feeling now is less apocalyptic than resigned. Triste.

A new sprinkling of ash on the car, which swirls as I open the door; absurdly, I try to shoo the ash back out as I get in. 

The temperate rain forests burn, from time to time. The scars of the Tillamook burn, out in the Coast Range, are still plain to see, and that was in 1933. So global warming does not necessarily have much to do with it. This was the driest summer I have ever known, in the maritime Northwest, and I suspect climate change, but I can't convict it. But in any case the weather has changed: the cloud-shapes are different. The state I grew up in has vanished.

What happens now depends on the weather. September is often -- was often -- a pretty dry month. A couple good soaks would stop the fires now and probably leave some of the beautiful places more or less intact, or in shape to recover in a few years. But if it stays dry, and the wind chases the fire back and forth, up and down the gorge, for weeks, that's a different story. So we won't know for a while. I dread the time when we finally go up to have a look, whether it's two weeks or two months from now.

The Oregonian is already posting sad stories about how much people will miss the Gorge, which does not land well with me. We don't know yet how much we've lost, or how much we'll miss it. And in any case, I've got plenty of time: I'll be sad for the rest of my life. I'm in no particular hurry to start.

Almost Black

After a long time quiet on the table you suddenly ask:
"what color am I tonight?" The question falls
like a weighted plume. It strikes, and I say,
"Oh! -- let me check" -- stalling for time -- but I know
I am bound to tell the truth: "you are purple,
deep purple. Very deep." I don't say "almost black."
You know. I'd mention the midnight sky or raven sheen,
but a lie that plain sticks in my throat:
I can invent a color, if I'm quick enough,
but I can't lie about one, once told.
"Not a usual color for you," is the best I can do.
As I pull your arm over your head, stretching the lats,
your hand comes to rest on my ribs: a touch
you sometimes allow yourself on nights
when you are purple, deep purple,
almost black.

The Two Secrets of my Success

The secrets of my diet success? Well, there's two, and they're interrelated.

The first is, I AM NOT DOING MY OWN MEASURING. I don't trust myself. Now, I am an exemplary measurer. For a long time in fact I was a professional measurer. I'm comfortable with measurement. I understand that a big apple, which looks half again as big as a small apple, may well have four times the volume. It easy when estimating by volume, to be off by 400%, even when you're not biased. But I still don't trust myself. 

Estimating by weight? Better. (Are you really going to weigh every thing you eat, every time? I'm not.)

No hungry person who's measuring the food they are about to eat is unbiased. It's simple as that. Add several 400% errors together, or even 50% errors, all leaning one direction, and the fact of the matter is that you don't know within a factor of 2 or 3, how much you're eating. You don't have a clue. Your numbers will be garbage. And research on self-reporting confirms this. You think you're an exception? You're not. So the answer is simple: don't measure your own food. Have someone else do it.

Calories in / calories out is a reliable principle. (No, not because of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, which applies only to closed systems and has no plausible application to the open system -- of staggering complexity -- which is the human gut and fat-storage system. It's reliable simply because it has been rigorously and repeatedly tested.) It works great if the calories are measured accurately. It's pretty useless if they're not.

If we really wanted to measure calories, we'd be in a fix, really. It's just too hard. But we don't actually care about the absolute numbers. We just want a deficit. Fewer calories going in than are coming out, by roughly 500 per day. We'll figure out if we're getting that deficit by measuring something else -- our body weight.

So I don't have a clue, no idea at all, how many calories are in my breakfast, and I don't need to. I don't know whether the guys in the kitchen actually put two eggs or four into my omelet. I don't know how much sour cream is in the little plastic cup the server brings. I don't know how big the two slices of toast she brings me are: all I know is that I only eat one of them. 

Do all these things vary? Of course they do. But I'm not in control of the variation. So they vary randomly. All the errors don't fall one way.

So now we come to the other secret of my success: MY PROCESS IS SELF-CORRECTING. I weigh myself carefully every morning -- actually I weigh myself three times and average the results, every morning. Then Wednesday morning I take the average the last seven days' weights. Now I have a number that I actually have some confidence in. 

I compare it to the previous week's number. If it's not a pound lower, I drop something out of the breakfast. Permanently, for good. A couple weeks in I dropped half the hash browns. A few weeks after that I drop the rest of them. Then I dropped half the toast. How many calories was I dropping each time? I have no idea, I'll never know, and I don't care.

(Actually it's a little more complicated than that. I only chop something out if I'm not a pound down *and* if I'm "over the blue line." But it would work either way.)

So I don't have to guess about anything, or know any absolute calorie values. If my calorie expenditure drops because my metabolism shifts, or because I'm twenty pounds lighter, or if my calorie intake increases when the guys in the kitchen start buttering my toast more heavily, the scale will know about it within a week, and the diet will change accordingly. I don't have to guess, or think, or worry, or compensate. It's all taken care of. It's out of my hands.

And so when I eat -- I just eat. I love my food: I don't know if I've ever enjoyed eating so much, as I have in the past three months. And I know my diet will work, because it fixes itself if it doesn't. I'm home free.

The Fat Weird Guy Talks About It

May 11th to August 26th

The weight loss goes on apace, one pound per week (a pound per week is the blue line, in the chart above: my personal idiom for "on track" has become "below the blue line," as in "well anyway, I'm below the blue line on that, so I don't need to sweat it.")

I'm a mass of conflicted feeling about sharing this. On the one hand, it's the main thing I'm doing right now. On the other hand, it's something I should have fixed and been done with forty years ago.

Back to the first hand: being fat has been a plague and a distress to me all my adult life, bearing false information about my self-control (which is actually average-to-good) and creating a default self-image as being the fat weird guy no one takes seriously. But back to the second hand: you don't get away from being the fat weird guy by talking about it. You get away from it by pretending it was never there. That must have been some other guy.

First: it's actually working. Well over three months and it's still working, and it's not even hard. Second: well of course it's working. All diets work. Losing the weight isn't the hard part (though it's damn hard enough): it's keeping it off that's hard. Don't crow till you have something to crow about.

First: I'm just excited about it. It's so cool that I've found a way that works for me.
Second: yeah, but it's stupid and expensive and self-indulgent. Restaurant food twice a day, every day? 

First: it comes of actually learning a bit about obesity science, and getting past a bunch of stupid popular notions about how weight loss works, and relying on what's actually known about it. We know a lot more than we used to, and I've kept up with it. It comes in the category of "fixing life problems by actually understanding how things work." 
Second: so then what if it all collapses tomorrow? You don't actually know any of this is working, and you won't know, in any meaningful way, until 2022. If we even get to 2022. Speaking of which, shouldn't you be focusing on maybe ensuring that there is a 2022, rather than on weighing 160 pounds when (if) we get there?

First: there was that weird experience of seeing that a ridge of visceral fat was actually pushing up between the right and left rectus abdominus, shoving through from the abdominal cavity because there was no more room in there. And various interesting results of there now being room again. Increased bladder capacity. Recovery of libido. 
Second: man, are you trying to drive away readers?

First: but people should know about this! Eating the same thing every day. And eating the stuff you really like, just cut back to where you're running a slight calorie deficit. Focusing on satiety and brain chemistry and reward psychology, rather than on fairy tales about macronutrients and insulin. This is hot stuff! 
Second: like us fat people never have anyone telling us that there's some new way to lose weight, championed by someone three months into a new diet? All diets work. You bring nothing to the table but the old misery wrapped in a new cloth. Shut your trap until 2022. Then you can tell people all about it.

First: it's my blog and I'll do as I damn well please.
Second: well, don't say I didn't warn you, that's all.

* * *

There's plenty more, but you get the gist. Anyway. That's where we are now. Estimated arrival time of 180 lbs, which is the end-point of the current phase, is March 1st, 2018. ETA of a 40-inch waist, my most eagerly awaited milestone, is January 1st. Stay tuned. If First Hand wins the day, there will be updates.

A Quick Quiet Fish

But it is good to shake free, and to think clearly, to run the numbers, to make sober projections. To be still and quiet and take stock.

I have always been good at pretending not to care what other people think. It was a survival skill, in middle school, and sometimes it serves me still. Learning to really not care what (most) other people think is a much more advanced skill.

Cutting loose of what other people think altogether is probably a bogus enterprise: it wouldn't mean not caring what other people think, it would mean only caring about what the shadow audience my mind invents thinks. It would take away the only value of social anxiety (gathering in and using the judgement of others) and replace it with smugness. The alpha male of one's parents' basement. It's a common enough solution, but it's not the one I want.

So no, not altogether. But. My little brushes with being a public person have made me quite clear: I do not want to be a public person.

And the whole dream of "being a writer" -- what does that mean, but craving an imbalance, wanting to be in conversation with a large number of people, but still have only your own opinion be important? That's what being a writer is. Being able to talk to a crowd, say your piece, and walk away. Never to have to engage. Never to have to change your mind.

No: I think I'm done with that notion. I don't actually want to be in relationships like that. I actually want to know. I want to understand. I want to end my day with a larger understanding, not a smaller one.

Unless what I really want is to disappear altogether. I think of that sometimes. I tire of being myself, of shoring up the fragments of my ruins, of the fret and busyness. I want to strip off these bulky stiff canvas clothes, and dive into the lake, a quick quiet fish, where the sunlight comes dim and strange in the water. What is all the rest of this for?

I don't know: I really don't know.

Climbing

I must read and write again -- that's the long and and short of it. 

The other stuff, the diet & exercise, the languages, the frugality & investment, keeping up with the political news & carefully fashioning political opinions, maintaining a social media presence -- all these were all meant to be ancillary to a literary life, a life of reading things that are beautiful and dangerous, and writing as close to the truth as I can. But I've let tending the scaffolding replace tending the building.

No. The real reading and writing have to be there, or all the rest is useless.

Last night I pulled The Mezentian Gate off the shelf, and had a good look at its cover, which, as a teenager, I thought was the last word in hauntingly beautiful art. Now I find it extravagant and crudely colored, vague where it should be precise, and precise where it should be vague -- much like Eddison's book. But that's not the point. The point is that at the time, Eddison bowled me over and took me somewhere else, and so did this cover artist. (Barbara Remington, I find: the same as made the Tolkien paperback covers that so entranced my teenage self. And so exasperated Tolkien: "what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs?" he demanded. Very rightly. What the hell is it?)

It's good to become aware that the extraordinary literary and artistic experiences I had were, in my mature view, experiences of stuff that was second-rate. It's not the quality of the stuff that matters, in the end; it's the quality of the experience. At fourteen Eddison was as steep a mountain as I could climb.

But anyway -- I have not done much climbing lately, though I have much better equipment and a lot of experience. So it's time to climb again. Read things that require all my attention, and write in answer to them. Even if it all turns out to be second-rate. If I'm here for anything, if I've trained all my life for anything, this is it: so I had better do it.

Solvencia

The fact of the matter is that last fall I went into the ditch, and I'm only now climbing out of it.

In November, the presidential election. I was following it closely and I knew exactly what it meant: the end of democracy and social progress in the United States for the rest of my life. 

In December, my mother died. My failure as a son was complete and beyond remedy.

So. I've spent a while walking in despair. It's an interesting country.

People who express a lot of despair actually don't live there: they're teasing themselves with it, playing tag with it. They don't really believe it. When you believe it, it stops being a thing. It's not an alternate route: it's your own road, and it's the only road, and it's actually a pretty good place to have a good think. It's quiet there.

So I learned some things: one, that although I would have said I didn't have much hope for America, I would have been lying. Losing all hope for my country meant losing a lot, for me. It woke me up to how much I loved it and valued it: how basic a part of me it was. 

Of course, it's always been a painful relationship. So there's some relief in ending it. I still live here, but my alienation is absolute, now. I'm a foreigner. An expat with no pat to be ex of.

I don't want anyone else to despair: I'm not writing this to urge anyone else to despair, or to stir up anyone to confute me. Not interested. 

Losing my mom was another thing, more complicated, more difficult. It was a relief, first of all: I never expected her to die without having ruined me financially and emotionally, so to wake in a new bleak world, still solvent and still capable of love, was a surprise and a bitter-tasting pleasure. 

It marked the end of all joyless obligation. Obligation is a good thing, and I am happy with all my remaining obligations: they are all based on love. That's a luxury that I've just begun to understand.

So I'm starting my life over, just waking up. I have everything to do over again.

Before My Coronation

It was in the mid 1980s that I tossed my battered edition of the Canterbury Tales into my briefcase, gave a brief smile to my students, and walked out the door. I walked down a dim hallway and then out into the thin Connecticut sunlight and headed for the train station. I was done with academia forever, though I didn't know it at the time: I would never wear a tweed jacket again.

You don't leave academia just like that. It stays with you for a long time. It's a self-contained world, and its tumults can seem very important. One professor's scandal, another's missed tenure, are huge events. The cliques are as formidable as in high school; the rivalries as bitter; the betrayals are felt deeply.

And there is beautiful, difficult work being done. People make fun of academics -- they're easy targets -- because universities are mature institutions and the low-hanging fruit in most fields was gone centuries ago. The work still to be done is harder to explain. It takes some expertise to understand why it matters. But it does matter. Not all of it, of course. But at Yale I learned tremendous admiration for the careful, painstaking work that added up to, say, really knowing what the Beowulf-Poet meant by a particular image or turn of phrase. I will not laugh at the work these people do. I realized I was not up to it -- I was too slapdash and quicksilver. My work, when I finally found it, would be different: but not better. Just different.

There's a lasting regret in not being part of that secret ministry. But I hope I learned from them a rugged skepticism, a devotion to the verified fact, a respect for the second (third, fourth) opinion. I never heft an edition of some old poet -- an edition full of glosses and footnotes and erudite introductions -- without a surge of gratitude. I have been rescued from so many mistakes and misinterpretations: I have been handed the clean, beating hearts of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson. I'm grateful.

Nevertheless, I'm grateful too to have walked away from it. There's a culture of despair and depression that cobwebs academia -- especially now, when the promises of tenure and respect have proven mirages, and the remuneration dwindles while the work mounts. It's not, generally, a happy place. Much of the conversation, as I remember it, was savoring the hopelessness of the world, and counting over the number of ways in which we have decayed and the number of things we stand to lose.

I am myself in deep social and political despair, but I don't want to dwell on it or share it. Such solutions as come will come by addressing what can be addressed, and trusting in the mutability of things. I was on a retreat one time with my favorite Buddhist teacher: he had come down with a nasty flu. He sat on a bench, pale, miserable, panting slightly. I asked if he was feeling any better, and that drawn face was suddenly transformed by his characteristic impish grin. "Well, sometimes," he said, "impermanence is on our side."

So it is. And, at the same time, the beauty keeps coming, the sweetnesses of summer and skin, of cold water and blue sky, and my own incongruous, inexplicable good fortune.

So. I find myself gravitating to people who love to solve problems and fix things, and who plan for things no larger than their own households and their children's lifetimes. Cheery straightforward optimists. I simply want to work on things that I understand pretty well, and help people I know can be helped, and solve problems within my scope.

And it helps to remember that I've been a singularly crappy prophet. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager, I knew -- knew for a certainty -- that in twenty years we would have had a least one nuclear war, and that even without one, overpopulation would have made the world an uninhabitable hell-hole. Maybe I was right then, and just had the timing off by a couple decades. But maybe I was totally wrong. And maybe I'm totally wrong now in my gloomy expectations.

In any case, I have not noticed anyone anxious to make me emperor of the world: so spending a lot of time figuring out what I will do after my coronation is probably not a good use of my time. There are many other things to do. My neighborhood is full of joys to be made and sufferings to relieve.

Looking Forward

I don't want to spend all that much time looking forward to the next phase of getting my eating under control. There are too many variables in play, and it still seems surreal to me that I'm chugging along dropping a pound a week while feeling totally undeprived, feeling in fact self-indulgent. Any day now my body may realize that it's dropping weight, and some alert guard down in the hypothalamus, or wherever, will see the needle drifting down to the red and throw the "Starvation!" breaker. Then I will be thinking about food all the time, and refraining from eating will absorb all my mental energy. And then, inevitably, even in the little paradise I've made for myself in my little cottage in Portland, I'll need mental energy for something else instead, 300 million years of evolution will kick in, and I will have eaten both sides of the menu and three aisles of the grocery store before I entirely know what is happening. I know how this works. I'm an old hand.

I have emergency plans in place. But I'm hoping that if I do this very cleverly, that breaker will never get thrown. I have a hypothesis that the explosions of self-indulgent pleasure, morning and evening, may keep that guard drowsing. That keeping the weight loss to about a pound a week will make it gradual enough that the needle never really drops to the red. But for now, I just keep my eye on the ball, make my lunch soups well in advance, plan my life carefully so that I stick to the clear water. 10 pounds down, 32 to go. Even supposing all goes well, all the way through the Christmas holidays, it's March before even this phase, the drive to 180, is done. 

That will be a dangerous time. I'll still be twenty pounds above where the standard tables say I ought to be. It will be tempting at that point to try to drive to the finish line of 160, just to prove I can. But I think what I should do at 180 -- always supposing I get there -- is deliberately level off, by adding more veggies and plain potatoes -- i.e. bulk, and high-satiety-per-calorie foods -- and just see what being there is like, for at least a few months. I may find a sweet spot somewhere in the neighborhood of 180. If so, I'd be happy to just stay there, and maybe play with swapping in some different foods for my high-reward ones.

Because part of the stealth plan, here, is to make my high-reward foods so familiar that they're a little tiresome, so that I don't mind swapping them out sometimes for stuff that's less calorie-dense. I'm hoping to gradually switch them out till my diet is a bit less of a nutritionist's nightmare. I'm fully aware that the full British breakfast and a hamburger-and-milkshake dinner is not a diet that makes a centenarian. But being sixty pounds overweight doesn't make a centenarian either. You work with what you've got: I've got an appetite habituated since childhood to high-reward foods. It's not going to vanish overnight. But it may be malleable. Things do change.

To Tirzah

When I first read William Blake, as a teenager, the connection was immediate and visceral. This was my man: the only god in the literary pantheon (I took the dignity of the canon much more seriously back then than I do now) who understood the world as I did, and who saw himself as the forerunner of a new people, just as I did. My heart was full of revolutionary nonsense and mystical passion: I loved a lot of writers I subsequently came to think silly.

I never came to think Blake silly. He is not silly. His absolute rejection of cruelty and paltering resonates with me as strongly as ever, as does his commitment to the clear and boldly drawn line. Hier stehe Ich, Ich kann nicht anders.

But there was one poem that came always as a slap in the face. It was "To Tirzah," and it was strangely out of keeping with the other Songs, a throwback to the sort of Christianity he otherwise rejected, the Christianity of Old Nobodaddy who hated the body, hated women, hated reproduction:

Thou, mother of my mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving tears
Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears, 

Didst close my tongue in senseless clay,
And me to mortal life betray.
The death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?

There must be some hidden message, some history I didn't know, I thought. I read it carefully -- I read everything carefully in those days, when the world was young, alas! -- and then steered around it. I have probably every other poem from the Songs by heart: but I had to go and look up the text of Tirzah, just now.

It has a reputation, says Wikipedia, as a difficult poem. It's not a difficult poem at all: it's just a poem that most of us would rather not hear. It's a categorical, contemptuous dismissal of his mother.

I can't help but think, at this distance, that it was precisely this poem -- though I consciously rejected it -- that sealed my intimacy with William. I too found myself helplessly bound to a person whose love threatened to choke and silence me, who seemed determined to bind me to the low horizons of worldly desire. Her heart's desire was to see me pluming myself in an expensive suit: was this what I had been born for? No. No, there had to be something beyond that.

I hate the poem. All the more in this time, when America is wracked by a childish tantrum of over-mothered, over-schooled boys who never got their time playing in the mud. It's dangerous, wrong, ungrateful, stupid. It cannot nor it will not come to good.

Nevertheless. There it is: manifestly wrong, self-contradictory, irreconcilable; and an indelible inheritance.

Making Room

The gift of men, Tolkien's immortal elves call it: death. 

The one thing that can make people finally clean out the utility drawer, give away an impossible accumulation of sewing materials, and get rid of the 1967 - 1973 Scientific American magazines. 

The thing that finally breaks all wedding vows. The thing that clears the way for creatures that are young, clean-limbed, and fresh to imagine (in their turn) that they will always be so. The thing that makes room.

My mother died last winter. Ours was a relationship of deep mutual disappointment and bright superficial cheer: we managed to wound each other and fail each other remarkably often, for people who saw each other so little. The one thing we each wanted of the other was the one thing we could not give: a respectful understanding. 

No parent-child relationship is ever actually over, I suppose, but the death of one party marks it, like a visa stamp on a passport.

I am free to travel, now. I'm sorry. I'll carry my failure forever: but it will be localized now: a dead zone in an otherwise living sea.

And maybe I will even clear out a few boxes and throw a few things away, ahead of time. She would approve of that.

What You Can Hear

It's no good listening for a pindrop now,
with the freeway surge and the rattle of leaves,
and the neighbor shouting (whatever he shouts).

No. listen early. They collect 
where the dew fall is heavy; they lift their queer snouts
to glitter in the sun. They drink quietly,

piercing the water's skin with a seamstress dream
of superfine proboscides: you can't hear that
either, nor the stitch of their silvery beating hearts.

But they fall, at awkoddward times. Say they lose
their grip and they fall -- whirl and twirl --
bounce on the turbulent air --
and a love of speed sets off a fear of space.

They ring when they meet the uprushing ground,
or collide with each other in flight: and that
you can sometimes hear.

A Navigable Channel

Stephan Guyenet is an obesity researcher. I'd been following his blog for a couple years: but it wasn't till I read his new book that I realized -- seeing it all there in one place -- how much I've learned from him. I have no idea whether he would think my current enterprise a sensible one! But his information has been critical to how I think about this stuff.

I had thought -- after the collapse of my low-carb hopes -- that I was done with diets. I'm  a little surprised to find myself doing one again, and I can't actually reconstruct exactly how I came to be doing it. The document where I track everything begins after the resolution was taken, and gives no clues about its origin. But anyway, here I am, eight weeks in, determined to lose a pound a week until I'm down either to 180 lbs or to a 40 inch waist. At which point I'll sit down and have a good think about what comes next.

I am not, actually, much of a fan of diets. My former plan of action was to just keep adding in wholesome foods until they crowded out the high-reward stuff, and let my weight do whatever it was going to do. But I was getting fat enough that it was making me really unhappy. And I was also getting dubious about whether I would ever really arrive at a habit of cooking every day and eating the stuff I thought I should eat, on any timetable that was useful to me. I might finally achieve my food goals, and begin losing weight, at age 95 or so: but that was a bit longer than I was willing to wait.

So I backed up and started over. Suppose I just started where I was -- took a baseline right here and now, with the absurdly huge high-reward* breakfast and the high-reward fast-food dinner, and my lunch and/or snack budget at a bowl of soup, a veggie, and a couple pieces of fruit? I could track what happened to my weight over the course of a week, and then just start hacking pieces of the high-reward meals out, until I'd reached a pound-a-week deficit. When the weight loss leveled out (as I knew perfectly well, from experience, it would) I'd hack out another piece. I would lose the weight and I would gradually be lowering the proportion of high-reward foods in my diet.

There was lots to hack: the hash browns and toast, to begin with -- foods I didn't think I should be eating at all -- and then the sour cream and the cream in my coffee, and the half milkshake from the Burgerville dinner, foods that really should be treats rather than staples... there was lots to cut. And by eating exactly the same high-reward meals every day, I would actually know, for certain sure, that (for instance) the hash browns I was forgoing were the equivalent of a pound a week. There was a pleasing concreteness to the enterprise. I need never count a calorie.

All the other diets I had undertaken -- with the single exception of the most successful one, the Atkins-y low carb one -- had begun by carefully removing all the the high-reward foods from my diet. They generally went a week or two and then crashed spectacularly, with binges and self-reproach: the combination of serious hunger -- and when you lose a lot of weight the body has hormonal responses that are very serious indeed: your endocrine system does not take starvation lightly -- the combination of serious hunger and the enticements of readily available high-reward foods was one that I was not, in a life with any ordinary ups and downs in it, going to resist. I understand that people like to believe they can control themselves, and I like to believe that too. It's a useful illusion in many endeavors. But in this one, it won't do. If I am seriously hungry, and high-reward foods are within reach -- as they are, 24 hours a day, in any supermarket in the land -- it's only a matter of time before I eat them. Pretending this is not true will not help me.

So what I'm trying to do, here, is maintain a weight loss quick enough to keep my interest and my motivation high, without kicking off starvation responses and without eliminating the high-reward ecstasies my environment has taught me to equate with "having enough to eat." So far -- and eight pounds is not very far, in a forty-two pound enterprise -- I've been surprised to find that there is in fact a navigable channel in front of me. Whether it's open all the way to the 180-lbs-or-40-inches-re-evaluation remains to be seen.

*food reward is a technical term. See Guyenet.

Good Morning: Good Luck

A quiet morning: the ship barely rocking, the water a glassy gray.

I've given up the chase. Let them go wherever they're going, in the wide world. I'm done.

I eat my breakfast, and feel the relief and the restorations going on, in a thousand microscopic construction sites throughout my body. Repairing, refitting, renewing.

The empire will have to look after itself, for a while. I could wish people were happier, and less frantic, and more thoughtful, but there's not a lot I can do about it.

Lean on the rail, and watch the hills sharpen and define themselves as the light grows, and the birdsong increases. People wake in their little houses, run a hand through their hair, and think of coffee.

Good morning. Good luck.

Six Weeks In: Variety

So the diet rolls along, a bit more difficult now, as I knew it would be: the weariness of restriction is cumulative. But still entirely doable. Dropping a pound a week. 

Variety. "Eat a variety of foods," say the USDA guidelines earnestly, and everyone says the same; and yet there's no science to back that up. And research shows plainly that variety leads to overeating, for rats as well as for human beings.

What the advice is trying to prevent, of course, is deficiencies in vitamins and minerals. Now that I am eating so much the same thing every day, for the first time I have to take account of that: though a diet as full of eggs and meat and fresh fruit and vegetables as this is very unlikely to be missing anything. Still I'm going to do some reading.

I tend to eat the same thing every day anyway. A waitress at Tom's used to make fun of me for it, in a rather aggressive way, as though the fact that I ate the same thing every morning affronted her. I never quite understood why that might be, but I just went on with it. Why would I eat anything but what I liked most?

So rather than correct these defects in myself -- habitually eating breakfast out and always eating the same thing -- I thought I'd harness them. So far, so good.

The really nice thing about this regimen is that I actually know. There's no guesswork to it. I don't depend on calorie measurements or food processors' labeling. I simply eat the same stuff every day, and if it doesn't amount to a deficit of a pound a week, I chop another piece out. I chopped out half the hash browns a couple weeks ago, and half the toast last week. The rest of the hash browns are about to go, I think.

In previous diets the uncertainty, the guesswork, interacted very badly with the hunger hormones. I don't much trust myself to measure and estimate properly when a large part of my brain is intent on subverting me. I'm less apt to fool myself than many people -- than most people, I flatter myself -- but I don't trust myself to be able to outwatch my lizard-brain when it thinks I should be eating. And once uncertainty was introduced -- did I really measure that properly? Did I really note that down? Was that frozen dinner label really accurate? -- it gnawed away at my resolve. Was there really a point in depriving myself if I had already screwed up? 

No. Other people do the measuring. I just do the eating. 

If you follow the study of obesity, you'll know that most of it has relied on self-reported consumption, and that we've discovered recently that people are spectacularly bad at self-reporting consumption -- to the point that some researchers have suggested simply throwing out all the research that depends on it. That's how bad we are. I have no reason to think I'm uniquely gifted at self-reporting, or immune to self-deception. So I'm outsourcing as much of it as I can. 

Diet

So -- I am on a diet, have been for the past month. I've lost five pounds, which is exactly the rate I'm aiming for.

It's an absurd diet, but it's working for me. I have not yet found it irksome. I am rarely hungry. It is not healthy -- though it's considerably healthier than my free-range diet -- and it's expensive. But I could eat this way the rest of my life.

It goes like this:

Breakfast: a Spanish omelet at Tom's, with sour cream and hash browns and toast, and coffee with cream, and everything.

A bowl of soup, broccoli, romaine salad, and a couple pieces of fruit for whenever. Usually lunch, but sometimes in the evening. These things are all optional. I eat most of them most days.

A cheeseburger and half a small vanilla milkshake from Burgerville for dinner.

That's it. That's the diet. I write everything down, and weigh and measure myself every morning. Wednesday morning I take the average of my weight the last seven days. If it's not a pound under the previous week's weight, I chop something out of breakfast or dinner. So far I've chopped once: I leave half the hash browns, now. I expect to have to chop out all the hash browns, the sour cream, and the toast, before I hit the end of the road, but I'm hoping I get to keep the cream. And hoping I get to keep the half milkshake.

It's weird to be this in control, and this unobsessive, and yet to be steadily losing weight. It's weird to be eating the stuff I most like, and yet to be "on program." 

The end of the road? That's a little hazy. Beginning this, my waist was fifty inches: I want to get it down to forty at most. That's probably some fifty pounds I want to lose. In theory I'm sixty pounds overweight -- I'm about 220 -- but I can't see myself at 160. Seems too small. We'll see, of course. That's a long way to look ahead: a full year. Bound to be bumps and turns in that amount of time.

What makes this doable is that twice a day, breakfast and dinner, I get to wolf down food that gives me an ecstatic rush. It seems that I can't, or anyway won't, live without that. But with an ecstatic rush in prospect tonight -- or tomorrow morning -- forbearance of other stuff takes no will power at all. I don't feel it as deprivation. In fact, I feel that I'm indulging myself outrageously (which, of course, I am, by any reasonable standard: but reasonable standards and I parted company long, long ago, in re food.) 

And the other thing that makes it doable is that I don't have to do a lot of food prep, which may -- let's face it -- never be something I'm motivated to do. Other people do the cooking: other people do the portion control. I don't have to think about it. I just show up.

The Aliens, and Alice Munro

I long for aliens.

I want the barbarity of a language wholly unlike ours. I long for intelligence unconstrained by the local obsessions of high-strung social mammals: from time to time I tire of monkeys.

I long for senses unknown to us, and for the faltering reach of metaphor and analogy to try to capture and convey experiences that we can never have, but that we that we will know exist.

Aliens! They would test the limits of our tolerance and understanding in ways we can't even imagine.

There are people who long for aliens because they think they will arrive and tell everyone else that they were right all along.

That is not what is going to happen.

I took to reading, when I was a boy, not because I was a literary type with any special affinity for words, but because I wanted aliens. I read science fiction out of a deep hunger for otherness. (Otherness was not, otherwise, very easy to come by in Springfield, Oregon in the 1960s.)

At first the mere appearance of otherness sufficed. Tentacles, clustered eyes, and so forth. But I soon caught on to the fact that most of the writers had just fitted put their standard human heroes or villains with ornamental limbs and mandibles. Only a few, only a few, gave me real aliens that were windows into otherness. There was a short story by... Isaac Asimov? About some military experiment that converted human beings -- or loaded their minds, or something -- into the native species of Jupiter. (Human beings, obviously, could not begin to survive on Jupiter, regardless of technological enhancements.) But for some reason the experiment just didn't seem to work: their explorers seemed to arrive, but never to report back. The narrator was their last try before closing up shop.

What he discovered was that being this new creature was so wonderful, the experience so rich, the sheer physicality so joyful, that he had no intention of ever going back to being a human being. Like his predecessors, he deserted his species at once and lit out for the Jovian territories.

There! Now that was a real alien: that was the sort of alien experience I was after. And then there was Ursula Le Guin, with her pregnant king (did Left Hand of Darkness really come that early?) and a few others. But I came to the end of them quick: science fiction was still mostly a comics-and-pulp hack genre, back then. That was lucky for me, because as I came to the end of it, still hungry for more, I groped my way back to H. G. Wells and Jules Verne: the classics of the genre, such as they were. And then, a funny thing happened. The aliens of these writers were not especially gripping -- sometimes they were in fact ludicrous -- but the writers themselves were alien. The 19th Century was a different place. Their language was different; their presuppositions and preoccupations were slightly but distinctly other. 

I had found another way to travel to other worlds, and meet alien minds, and I never looked back: I became a voracious reader of literature from long ago and far away. Though I still tire of monkeys.

Why do I think of this now? Because I'm a dozen pages into a book of Alice Munro's short stories, and I'm having that experience more powerfully than ever: I am in hands of an alien, more intelligent and tough-minded than me, who is going to show me things I never dreamed of and make me understand things I never understood. 

Thank God for aliens. You never know when they're going to show up.

Greed

A slight shudder of pleasure as I drink in the vanilla milkshake. I am intent on taking on calories: totally focused on these few moments, when I have enough. The taste fills my mouth. My nervous system lights up like a Christmas tree. Martha starts reading me something aloud from her book, and I pay no attention, except for a quick spurt of anger: can she not leave me alone for the thirty seconds when life comes into focus, and is no longer a meaningless jumble of cross-purposes and baffled will?

But I'm an old hand at this. I let the anger slide away, as quick as it came. She doesn't know, can't know, won't know, and I'm not going to tell her, or anybody. This is between me and the milkshake.

Twice a day, I eat to satiety. Anyone would laugh at what constitutes a "diet" for me. I laugh at it myself. And this is still more the control group than the experiment: I'm just holding things steady, measuring, establishing my baseline. I expect to have to bring it down, to cut things out. For now, a week into this project, I am not even trying to make progress. I'm just trying to discover where I am.

Still, any restriction at all makes me panicky, resentful, sly. I become juvenile. Greedy. Cunning. I would steal this milkshake from anyone, no matter how needy or vulnerable, if I had no other way to get it. Without a second thought. It's queer thing to know about oneself. Keep me supplied with milkshakes, I'm a model citizen; otherwise, lock your doors.

Half a small vanilla milkshake, and a cheeseburger. It isn't really a huge meal, not like the breakfast, but it's enough to light the tree, enough to make life worth living. I can be hungry at other times, as long as this is in prospect.

Greed. Pure greed, nothing else. I do pretty well handling the more spiritual and intellectual sins. Pride and wrath I'll take on, best two out of three, any time. Sloth and avarice? They heel like obedient dogs. Envy? Who cares? Why bother?

But the simple supposedly lesser sins of the flesh, those, I am powerless against. I want what I want when I want it, with the shamelessness of a two year old. It's always been this way. And now I'm fat, and want not to be, so I have to to engage with this greed -- understand it -- fool it, or tame it. To be this old, and be so undignified, so squalid!

Still: towers of cloud against sudden piercing blue, and rain batters the windshield, and then the Gorge opens to show squalls at either end, with the river glistening in a sudden moment of spring in between; and clouds of forget-me-nots appear on the banks, resolve into flowers, and vanish again as we make the curves. This too.

Sacristan

One of the privileges of being a massage therapist is that I'm no longer afraid of getting old, and dying. Oh, I don't want to, of course. There's always that instinctive flinch away from death: no sentient creature is without it. But I mean the particular fear that comes of growing up in a world in which old bodies are carefully concealed and well-wrapped, even when they're allowed to appear at all. People really just don't know what their bodies are going to be like, when they're seventy, eighty, ninety. Except me. I know exactly what they're going to be like: the textures and tensions of skin and flesh, where the skeleton is going to loosen and stiffen; and so of course I know what mine is going to be like too. I know what deterioration can be mitigated and what can't. I'm not subject to the fantasy that I will somehow be the only person to hit 80 years of age without looking old; nor am I subject to vague exaggerated horror about that transformation. It's real, ordinary, everyday. I, too, should I make it to 95, will probably wear a diaper of sorts when I climb laboriously onto a massage table. But I'll enjoy my massage as much as ever.

---

Bodies remain wonderful, magical. The Jewish conception of the body as a temple, a sacred space, has always resonated with me. Years of daily familiarity have heightened that sense, rather than diminishing it. This body, here, now, under my hands, these forms that are like and unlike any other body that has been on my table, that are like and unlike those of any other mammal, any other vertebrate, any other sentient creature. This is a house of God, if anything is: and it's one that we are uniquely suited to understand and venerate.

---

My status, as a massage therapist, is low: somewhere in the range of hairdressers and housekeepers, even if it sometimes ranges as high as that of physical therapists or as low as that of prostitutes. One is "a treasure," of course, but one is never taken quite seriously. Which I'm happy about. If I were a less privileged person it might rankle, I guess: but these days I don't really want to be taken seriously: I don't want my feet to sink that deep in the sand. I'm traveling light: I have a long journey to make and I'm not planning on building any houses on the way. 

I think, always, of the dipper: that comical little bird, "usually seen bobbing up and down on a rock in mid-stream," otherwise modest and nondescript. It is a shaman, a traveler in two worlds: it will vanish into a stream or a waterfall's splash pool, and you'll glimpse it, if you're lucky, swimming under the water, with as much ease and speed as it flies through the air. It doesn't need respect, on either side of the mirror. It has its own business to mind.

Falconry

Let the longing settle 
onto the back of your hand,
like a butterfly -- 
the faint snick of alien toes 
that grip your surface with care 
and oblivious precision --
like that. As a lepidotperan
one learns respect 
for open country 
like the human skin, 
and for the winds 
that blow across it. 
Let the longing settle
like that. Just long enough
for the wings to pulse
once, twice, three times, 
and the full strangeness
to begin to register: 
of warm skin; the scent -- 
for their feet are olfactory -- 
of an omnivore: 
the dire ape of legend. 
It will take to the air before 
it has quite understood
more than a general threat 
and a wild unease:
let it go, then, 
haphazard on the breeze.

A Quieter Return

They say that if there was air between here and the Sun -- I know, I know, the physics of that are impossible, but play along -- if there was air to conduct sound, we would hear the huge roar of the Sun's furnace, all the time. That's how loud, how fierce the ongoing explosion.

Maybe my tinnitus is the sound of the stars burning, then. Different ones coming into focus at different times.

Already I can feel those giant fingers gently plucking at me, loosening my hold on the earth. All these new celebrities: time was, I would look at a tabloid and think, oh yes, that name! I'm supposed to know that name, she's famous for something. But now I look and think, look, a name: I've never seen it before, and if I ever see it again, I won't remember having seen it now. And everything is like that. A truer sight than before, really. But is it really truth we're hankering after?

No, I don't think so. The glimmer, maybe. A homecoming and a coronation. Not such a lucky thing for the fatted calf, was it? Or for Odysseus's maids: those hapless girls, who just wanted fun. Why do we go on with this, blaming this man's art, condemning that man's scope? What do we think we'll arrive at, when justice is fully dealt? An empty house that rocks in the wind.

No, I'm looking for a quieter return. No havoc, no retribution, no edging aside of more plodding dutiful sons. I think maybe the fantasy is to go home knowing what I know now, just to look with the eyes I have now.

But it's all gone. Houses, parking lots, even the streets are gone. There's no going back to any of that. My world has been erased behind me.

For a long time, I've declared it my intention to efface all signs of myself. Like a Cheshire cat licking its substance away, till it's only a tongue, a disembodied grooming. So this is a good thing, right?

Maybe so. Maybe so. God bless all who are abroad, in the wide sky, on the shifting sea. I'll lift my old head, when you come into the courtyard. Oh yes, I'll recognize you. Some loves and delights do last.

And trust, and even an odd kind of faith.

Travel safely. And come home soon, huh? We miss you here.