Massage as Treatment
Such a lovely woman. I'm abashed, as I work; altogether too pretty a young woman for me to be laying my hands upon. I've not felt exactly this way before. I'm missing my stride. Distracted by a beauty that doesn't quite add up.
She wanted me to do the trigger-points in her rhomboids, but I wander over her body, lingering at the feet, knowing that this sort of soothing massage is not what she asked for, though I'm convinced it's what she needs. Her unhappiness doesn't live in her upper back or neck. It lives here, in her feet and her ankles. But I don't think she knows that.
Who knows whether I'm right. Possibly she just seems so young and vulnerable that I'm reluctant to hurt her.
I don't like telling a bodyworker where to work on me. It's not as if there's some treasure-hunt going on, as if they need to find the only bit of my body that needs work. It all needs work. I want people working on me to read my body for the first time, and come up with their own interpretation. "Follow your hands," I say. I can work my own rhomboids, if need be. I don't want my own take on my body. I already have that. I want theirs.
I grow daily less satisfied with the treatment model of massage. Soft tissue manipulation helps with some problems, sure. Occasionally it helps spectacularly. But really what will relieve the tension in your neck and shoulders is not a monthly, a weekly, or even a daily massage. What will relieve it is changing the way you work, the way you move, the way you rest. What massage can do is bring your attention to your body, in a loving context. Fixing it is up to you.
People forget. They hold so much tension so long they can't even feel it as tension. They restrict their own motion for so long that they forget some of the ways in which their bodies can move. Our job is not to fix that. Our job to draw their attention to it, so they can fix it.
The other day, in class, I was practicing an intake interview with Andrea. Her traps, scalenes, and levator scap were stiff, especially on the left. "Show me," I said. "Here, this is your desk. Sit at it and show me how you work." She sat in the chair, and to my astonishment, torqued herself halfway around, craned her head to the left, looking up at an imaginary monitor, and stretched her hands down to the right to an imaginary keyboard. It made my neck ache just to look at it.
I had to laugh. She looked a little shamefaced. "I know, I should get them to fix it."
And this is someone who's spent the last six months studying muscles and body mechanics. But I do it myself. It's taken me weeks to realize that there's a very simple explanation for my shoulder trouble. It began when I started my new job, working at a keyboard with no elbow support. Have I fixed it? No. Is my shoulder getting better, with twice-weekly excellent massage? No. And it's not going to, unless I get a chair with arms.
I'm not quite sure where this leaves me as a bodyworker who's going to have to be peddling his services in a few months. People want to believe you can fix their bodies in a pleasant, soothing sixty minutes, and they'll pay you good money for that. But I don't think I can market myself that way. Massage is good for people, in a number of ways. I can rattle off the benefits of improved blood circulation and lymph drainage, the increased seratonin levels and lowered blood pressure, with the best of them. But an hour's exercise is probably better for you than an hour's massage, frankly, for all of those things. The sort of massage I want to practice -- the 90-minute, leave-your-conceptual-mind-behind kind -- is really, as a medical intervention, a pretty poor bargain.
I love massage. When I was a rich programmer, and could afford it, I got it regularly, sometimes as often as once a week. I never questioned whether it was worthwhile, anymore than I question whether eating or sleeping is worthwhile. What I find difficult to understand is how people live without it.
Well, that's fine for someone on the receiving end. You don't need to know any more than that. But for someone on the giving end, understanding it is more urgent. I have some thinking and reading and asking to do.
Monday, May 28, 2007
A Different Place
When I walk in the nearby fields I can see the ancient granite ridges, blue silhouettes in the west against the setting sun. That's Wales, people tell you as a visitor. A different place.
Mary has quietly reappeared, in the borderlands. Which makes me very happy.
When I walk in the nearby fields I can see the ancient granite ridges, blue silhouettes in the west against the setting sun. That's Wales, people tell you as a visitor. A different place.
Mary has quietly reappeared, in the borderlands. Which makes me very happy.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Crossing the River
Across the street, behind the salmon-brown stone of the "Family Health Center," a tree's leaves are trembling, roiling. Its branches shift uncertainly. It draws my eye, over and over.
Sixty-two. A dangerous age, I recall, with some amusement. I am only forty-nine, but that, apparently, is a dangerous age too.
That secret, exulting ferocity has been visiting me again. The certainty that all bets are off, that they've always been off. Something feral uncoils in me.
The leaves draw my eye again. Yeats saw them, just this way. The Madness of King Goll, is it? The intolerable fluttering of the leaves. We see them, as any predator sees a shivering tethered thing. I have been watching a tiny six-week-old kitten play with a mouse-toy. Like that.
What does it all add up to, anyway? Christianity tells us we'll get a grade at the end of term, pass or fail. But there is no grade, and there is no term. There is only the fluttering of the leaves.
Some people drink, to retrieve this state. I used to, myself. But not now. It will not last, and nothing will make it last. Nothing will make it stay away, either.
Strange things begin to happen, when you wind your mind too tight for too long. It can spring suddenly back into forgotten pasts, or forward into unexpected emptinesses. I think of poor old Wordsworth. "Was it for this?" he kept wondering. The leaves trembled, and his eyes went there again. "Was it for this?"
But listen. Listen. And wait until you hear. There is only one thing you can do wrong, really, and that's to stop listening: to decide there's not going to be any answer, and try to make one up. Some things you can fake -- some things you even have to fake -- but this isn't one of them.
There. The tree has gone still. Already it is fading, changing. I am back in the ordinary world, an ordinary man. The lines above read like a coded message. I no longer know what I meant. Epileptics are tired when they come out of a seizure, though they don't know what they've been doing.
I keep trying to make the pieces all fit together. Like Wordsworth, again; poor old Wordsworth. It tails away into repetitions, feebler and feebler echoes. ("I, too, have written some books," murmured Swift, humbly, in the madhouse.)
A shirtless man walks by the window. His eyes are downward; his shoulders canted over. He carries his left arm high, as though it were a rifle and he was crossing a river; the fingers of that lifted hand wriggle and grasp at space.
Across the street, behind the salmon-brown stone of the "Family Health Center," a tree's leaves are trembling, roiling. Its branches shift uncertainly. It draws my eye, over and over.
Sixty-two. A dangerous age, I recall, with some amusement. I am only forty-nine, but that, apparently, is a dangerous age too.
That secret, exulting ferocity has been visiting me again. The certainty that all bets are off, that they've always been off. Something feral uncoils in me.
The leaves draw my eye again. Yeats saw them, just this way. The Madness of King Goll, is it? The intolerable fluttering of the leaves. We see them, as any predator sees a shivering tethered thing. I have been watching a tiny six-week-old kitten play with a mouse-toy. Like that.
What does it all add up to, anyway? Christianity tells us we'll get a grade at the end of term, pass or fail. But there is no grade, and there is no term. There is only the fluttering of the leaves.
Some people drink, to retrieve this state. I used to, myself. But not now. It will not last, and nothing will make it last. Nothing will make it stay away, either.
Strange things begin to happen, when you wind your mind too tight for too long. It can spring suddenly back into forgotten pasts, or forward into unexpected emptinesses. I think of poor old Wordsworth. "Was it for this?" he kept wondering. The leaves trembled, and his eyes went there again. "Was it for this?"
But listen. Listen. And wait until you hear. There is only one thing you can do wrong, really, and that's to stop listening: to decide there's not going to be any answer, and try to make one up. Some things you can fake -- some things you even have to fake -- but this isn't one of them.
There. The tree has gone still. Already it is fading, changing. I am back in the ordinary world, an ordinary man. The lines above read like a coded message. I no longer know what I meant. Epileptics are tired when they come out of a seizure, though they don't know what they've been doing.
I keep trying to make the pieces all fit together. Like Wordsworth, again; poor old Wordsworth. It tails away into repetitions, feebler and feebler echoes. ("I, too, have written some books," murmured Swift, humbly, in the madhouse.)
A shirtless man walks by the window. His eyes are downward; his shoulders canted over. He carries his left arm high, as though it were a rifle and he was crossing a river; the fingers of that lifted hand wriggle and grasp at space.
Public Service Announcement
If you've been dismayed by trying to visit Hoarded Ordinaries and finding a sinister blank white screen, fear not. Try Hoarded Ordinaries. She's still with us.
If you've been dismayed by trying to visit Hoarded Ordinaries and finding a sinister blank white screen, fear not. Try Hoarded Ordinaries. She's still with us.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Circulatory System
I
The heart is actually two pumps, twined together -- one that pumps the blue exhausted blood from the body into the lungs, and one that pumps the fresh red blood from the lungs back into the body. The two have, from a plumbing point of view, little to do with each other: it is simply convenient to run both with the same control apparatus, and to protect both within the same bony cage. The outflow of each will eventually be the inflow of the other, but in a healthy heart the two bloodstreams rush past each other without touching, like trains that are bound in opposite directions, running temporarily on parallel tracks. You can view the whole system as a lopsided figure-eight, with the heart being the crossroads; one loop is the pulmonary circulation, the other the systemic circulation. They meet, but do not mingle, at the heart, where two twined fists of muscle clench together, and relax.
II
In the dead of winter, I sat in my darkened cubicle, looking at photographs taken by night from London buses. I was transfixed. There were long lines of red light like jet trails, and gleaming reflected surfaces, wet sidewalks, blurs and splashes of light. It was a dark world, and one without faces. But the light. There was always light welling up, light moving and flaring, light flickering and swooping.
We like to tell stories. If I were to give our species a name, it certainly would not be the sapient apes. I might call us the storytelling apes -- or maybe the lying apes. We make up stories constantly, compulsively. So don't believe me when I say that was the beginning of the story. When I say that was the light that grew inside me with the Spring, that eventually grew so bright that I left the barren country of cubicles and touched flesh rather than keyboards. Don't believe me when I say that a small song began in me then. Beginnings, middles, and ends; we make them up with fatal readiness. Don't believe me when I say I fell in love then, and my whole life has grown differently because of it. Such things don't have beginnings. They don't have ends, either.
III
The sky unravels, a dirty fraying white blanket. It's preparing, they say, a sunny weekend. I hope not -- I don't particularly like the sun, not beating straight down on the world out of a blue sky. I have very fair skin that burns easily. And I don't like being hot and sweaty.
I'm sitting unshaven and unwashed in Tosi's, after a fitful night, feeling cranky and forlorn: the sort of mood in which you invite sympathy and then snap at someone for offering it.
Last night I was reading an old Agatha Christie. It has a marvellous beginning, playing, as she so often so deftly did, on the conventions of the detective story. At first blush it's the standard Arthur Conan Doyle opening: a young woman in mysterious distress comes to the great detective for help. But she's barely started on her story when she stops, staring at Poirot, and says she doesn't want to be rude, but she had thought -- it just won't work, she doesn't want to be rude, but -- he's too old. And she bolts from his office.
IV
I rise slowly through layers of black water, and break the surface, at last, of the lake. I tread water. I can hear the slow drip from invisible stalactites, the faint hoarse breath of the flowing air. Ripples of cold float over my face, smelling of limestone and forgetfulness. The pulse of warmth leaving my torn shoulder. It's enough, breathing the night air -- it's always night here -- and dreaming of a sun, a sun too powerful to endure. Poor Grendel's had an accident.
Credits:
1. Photograph: Frizzy Logic
2. Agatha Christie: Third Girl
3. John Gardner, Grendel
I
The heart is actually two pumps, twined together -- one that pumps the blue exhausted blood from the body into the lungs, and one that pumps the fresh red blood from the lungs back into the body. The two have, from a plumbing point of view, little to do with each other: it is simply convenient to run both with the same control apparatus, and to protect both within the same bony cage. The outflow of each will eventually be the inflow of the other, but in a healthy heart the two bloodstreams rush past each other without touching, like trains that are bound in opposite directions, running temporarily on parallel tracks. You can view the whole system as a lopsided figure-eight, with the heart being the crossroads; one loop is the pulmonary circulation, the other the systemic circulation. They meet, but do not mingle, at the heart, where two twined fists of muscle clench together, and relax.
II
In the dead of winter, I sat in my darkened cubicle, looking at photographs taken by night from London buses. I was transfixed. There were long lines of red light like jet trails, and gleaming reflected surfaces, wet sidewalks, blurs and splashes of light. It was a dark world, and one without faces. But the light. There was always light welling up, light moving and flaring, light flickering and swooping.
We like to tell stories. If I were to give our species a name, it certainly would not be the sapient apes. I might call us the storytelling apes -- or maybe the lying apes. We make up stories constantly, compulsively. So don't believe me when I say that was the beginning of the story. When I say that was the light that grew inside me with the Spring, that eventually grew so bright that I left the barren country of cubicles and touched flesh rather than keyboards. Don't believe me when I say that a small song began in me then. Beginnings, middles, and ends; we make them up with fatal readiness. Don't believe me when I say I fell in love then, and my whole life has grown differently because of it. Such things don't have beginnings. They don't have ends, either.
III
The sky unravels, a dirty fraying white blanket. It's preparing, they say, a sunny weekend. I hope not -- I don't particularly like the sun, not beating straight down on the world out of a blue sky. I have very fair skin that burns easily. And I don't like being hot and sweaty.
I'm sitting unshaven and unwashed in Tosi's, after a fitful night, feeling cranky and forlorn: the sort of mood in which you invite sympathy and then snap at someone for offering it.
Last night I was reading an old Agatha Christie. It has a marvellous beginning, playing, as she so often so deftly did, on the conventions of the detective story. At first blush it's the standard Arthur Conan Doyle opening: a young woman in mysterious distress comes to the great detective for help. But she's barely started on her story when she stops, staring at Poirot, and says she doesn't want to be rude, but she had thought -- it just won't work, she doesn't want to be rude, but -- he's too old. And she bolts from his office.
IV
I rise slowly through layers of black water, and break the surface, at last, of the lake. I tread water. I can hear the slow drip from invisible stalactites, the faint hoarse breath of the flowing air. Ripples of cold float over my face, smelling of limestone and forgetfulness. The pulse of warmth leaving my torn shoulder. It's enough, breathing the night air -- it's always night here -- and dreaming of a sun, a sun too powerful to endure. Poor Grendel's had an accident.
Credits:
1. Photograph: Frizzy Logic
2. Agatha Christie: Third Girl
3. John Gardner, Grendel
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Ocean
I hopped nimbly out of the car, swinging my pack onto my back, and thanked my ride briefly. I'd gotten here from Eugene in three rides. Not too bad. Five hours, maybe. The second ride had dropped me smack in the middle of nowhere among the enormous hills of the Coast Range. Mountains, most of you would call them, but we always reserved that word for the snow-covered peaks of the Cascades. These were just hills, even if they were a couple thousand feet high.
I'd walked an hour or two along the freshly asphalted road, twenty minutes to descend one sweeping curve, twenty to climb the next; huge featureless swoops of second-growth doug fir. As I'd walked I'd calculated how long I would have to walk if I didn't get another ride. Twelve hours, I reckoned.
But then a salesman stopped for me, all agitation, hugging the steering wheel almost to his chest, fat neck crammed into a tight collar. All kinds of people would stop for you, if you looked clean and harmless, even people from the other side, people who thought Nixon was a great president, and Vietnam was a great war. Young hippies were interesting even to them. I made sure to open my face and smile cheerfully, and stand tall, with my arm fully extended -- crooking your elbow, and jerking your arm, I thought, was sinister. That was how people hitched a ride in the movies, but it wasn't how we did it. I never had to wait all that long.
The salesman let me off at the unmarked pull-off. I trotted down the hobbit trails, tunnels half sand, half salal, and then the roof opened, and I came to the ocean.
The ocean, we always called it, "the sea" being thought highfalutin and literary. It would be twenty years before I would discover that we had that backwards from the rest of the English-speaking world. I still say "the sea" with a little embarassment, knowing but not believing that for most people it's just the ordinary workaday word. To me it sounds like "the vasty deep."
I walked down the empty beach. In those days no one came there. Now there is a regular turnoff, and a highway sign on 101 announcing the Hobbit Trails. It's still a bit far from the bigger towns, though, so it's not crowded. Just not empty anymore. But back then only a handful of people knew about that beach, and used that name
A pearly mist was rolling in over the water. Somewhere my friends would be camping. Lori, who a year later would die of a brain tumor in Belize. Pam and Rhonda, identical twins, daughters of the Methodist minister who, ten years later, would officiate at my wedding. A boy whose name I've forgotten, with dark hair as long as my blond. They would be perched in a hollow low on the cliffs, like seagulls, feeding a little fire whipped by the wind. Naked teenagers at the edge of the world.
The rising of the land, the arches of the sky. I turned sideways and vanished.
I wish you had been with me, then. I would like to vanish with you.
I hopped nimbly out of the car, swinging my pack onto my back, and thanked my ride briefly. I'd gotten here from Eugene in three rides. Not too bad. Five hours, maybe. The second ride had dropped me smack in the middle of nowhere among the enormous hills of the Coast Range. Mountains, most of you would call them, but we always reserved that word for the snow-covered peaks of the Cascades. These were just hills, even if they were a couple thousand feet high.
I'd walked an hour or two along the freshly asphalted road, twenty minutes to descend one sweeping curve, twenty to climb the next; huge featureless swoops of second-growth doug fir. As I'd walked I'd calculated how long I would have to walk if I didn't get another ride. Twelve hours, I reckoned.
But then a salesman stopped for me, all agitation, hugging the steering wheel almost to his chest, fat neck crammed into a tight collar. All kinds of people would stop for you, if you looked clean and harmless, even people from the other side, people who thought Nixon was a great president, and Vietnam was a great war. Young hippies were interesting even to them. I made sure to open my face and smile cheerfully, and stand tall, with my arm fully extended -- crooking your elbow, and jerking your arm, I thought, was sinister. That was how people hitched a ride in the movies, but it wasn't how we did it. I never had to wait all that long.
The salesman let me off at the unmarked pull-off. I trotted down the hobbit trails, tunnels half sand, half salal, and then the roof opened, and I came to the ocean.
The ocean, we always called it, "the sea" being thought highfalutin and literary. It would be twenty years before I would discover that we had that backwards from the rest of the English-speaking world. I still say "the sea" with a little embarassment, knowing but not believing that for most people it's just the ordinary workaday word. To me it sounds like "the vasty deep."
I walked down the empty beach. In those days no one came there. Now there is a regular turnoff, and a highway sign on 101 announcing the Hobbit Trails. It's still a bit far from the bigger towns, though, so it's not crowded. Just not empty anymore. But back then only a handful of people knew about that beach, and used that name
A pearly mist was rolling in over the water. Somewhere my friends would be camping. Lori, who a year later would die of a brain tumor in Belize. Pam and Rhonda, identical twins, daughters of the Methodist minister who, ten years later, would officiate at my wedding. A boy whose name I've forgotten, with dark hair as long as my blond. They would be perched in a hollow low on the cliffs, like seagulls, feeding a little fire whipped by the wind. Naked teenagers at the edge of the world.
The rising of the land, the arches of the sky. I turned sideways and vanished.
I wish you had been with me, then. I would like to vanish with you.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Detritus
Or: some of what I have not been saying for the past couple months.
All that anxiety. Peel back the habits, and there it is, right where we left it. I realize now that it will never go away. When I was younger I might indulge in the fantasy that I'll do something -- find the right lover, exercise, eat right, meditate -- and escape that anxiety. Make it go away. But two thirds of my way through life's journey, it's time to accept that this is simply one of the conditions of this life. I'm dangling over a deep rushing current of anxiety. This is not temporary. It's not circumstantial. It's just life as I know it, life as it's going to be.
So. I'm not going to make it go away. I will never feel the solid ground of confidence under my feet. Which is all right (because it has to be all right.) I will just have to go on without it. Cope with it, as anyone might cope with any disability. Find workarounds, accept assistance; make peace with the fact that some things will be forever beyond my reach. That's all right. An anxious person can still have a life worth living.
I can limit the collateral damage. I can unlearn some of the self-contempt I harbor. I didn't choose to have this condition -- who would choose such a thing? So I needn't feel guilty about it, or think it should be some other way. People who don't have it, of course, think I could make it go away by an act of will, just as people with no weight problem think people with weight problems could make them go away by an act of will, and as intelligent people think stupid people could become smart by an act of will, and so on. We give ourselves moral credit for our abilities, and accept shame for our disabilities. Foolishness. We didn't choose either.
It was, in a way, the last hurrah of the delusion that I might be something else underneath it all. Such an intoxicating fantasy. Something or somebody might strip away the facade, and, in a glittering moment, I'd stand revealed as my true self -- now and forever a different man. Someone I'd admire rather than wince at, cover up for, apologize for.
Love is supposed to do that. It doesn't, of course. But it seems like it will. It starts to. But there are two problems. One is that I really am the person I am. And the other is that I find that person so distasteful.
A strange eruption of wounded pride. Was it for this? To suckle fools and chronicle small beer?
So long as I don't believe it, I suppose I can just wait it out, let it dwindle. Surprising how strong it can still stand, though, even though the scaffolding has all been undone. I don't believe in glory and distinction; I have no business even beginning to step that way, let alone to walk down that path -- liberally reckoning up my deserts and finding fault with their reception. That's the quick way to a bitter life, short but too long: I've seen too much of it to mistake it.
Sure, on imagined fields I can contrive extravagant victories, notable routs, brilliant coups. So can any man. But the work in hand is to set my house in order.
The hardest thing is holding other people to their work. Because I can't do it alone. And that means convincing people that it's in their best interest, getting their commitment to a certain amount of work, and supplying the impetus. None of them things I'm very good at. I've crippled my life, though, by only being willing to do things I'm good at. It's time to spend some time doing things I'm bad at.
All phenomena are empty, I'm told, and I believe it readily of bicycle tires and apricots, pleasure and pain, nations and species; perhaps I always did. But not of habit. Habit is not impermanent. It has an essential nature, a wicked one, and it will still be afflicting me when America is no longer mentioned in history books and cockroaches are extinct.
The trouble is that I am so tired, and only habitual routines promise rest: but it is precisely the habitual routines that render me incapable of rest. And so it runs, over and over, the wheel of exhaustion, my own personal twelve nidanas.
Used to be, I would sometimes believe that something could break the sequence. Requited love. Excercise. Meditation. Yoga. A new career. The Scarsdale diet (yes, my memory stretches back that far!) Something would violently break me free of the wheel, and from then on habitual virtue would establish itself, a self-supporting sequence of overflowing energy and profound rest, just as tenacious as the wheel of exhaustion.
It seems to me now, that -- a few months shy of my fiftieth birthday -- it's time for me to concede that it's not going to happen that way. Not that things never change; of course they do. But even though radical shifts do in fact happen, they are moments of extreme vulnerability; and just-this-once-ness applies not only to brave departures but also to one-time indulgences. The departures never become habitual, somehow, but the indulgences do.
I know. I've said all this before. This, in fact, is a habitual lament, for me. When I listed out for myself habitual wheels I've gotten free of in the past four years, the list was impressive. I have wrenched my myself free of many things that have afflicted me all my life.
But what doesn't change is the sense of being bound to a wheel, of being just one transformation away from having a real life.
I am violently sick of compromise, of just-for-now, of buying vices with virtues in a sort of carbon-emissions program of the heart. The whole thing is wrong.
Or: some of what I have not been saying for the past couple months.
All that anxiety. Peel back the habits, and there it is, right where we left it. I realize now that it will never go away. When I was younger I might indulge in the fantasy that I'll do something -- find the right lover, exercise, eat right, meditate -- and escape that anxiety. Make it go away. But two thirds of my way through life's journey, it's time to accept that this is simply one of the conditions of this life. I'm dangling over a deep rushing current of anxiety. This is not temporary. It's not circumstantial. It's just life as I know it, life as it's going to be.
So. I'm not going to make it go away. I will never feel the solid ground of confidence under my feet. Which is all right (because it has to be all right.) I will just have to go on without it. Cope with it, as anyone might cope with any disability. Find workarounds, accept assistance; make peace with the fact that some things will be forever beyond my reach. That's all right. An anxious person can still have a life worth living.
I can limit the collateral damage. I can unlearn some of the self-contempt I harbor. I didn't choose to have this condition -- who would choose such a thing? So I needn't feel guilty about it, or think it should be some other way. People who don't have it, of course, think I could make it go away by an act of will, just as people with no weight problem think people with weight problems could make them go away by an act of will, and as intelligent people think stupid people could become smart by an act of will, and so on. We give ourselves moral credit for our abilities, and accept shame for our disabilities. Foolishness. We didn't choose either.
It was, in a way, the last hurrah of the delusion that I might be something else underneath it all. Such an intoxicating fantasy. Something or somebody might strip away the facade, and, in a glittering moment, I'd stand revealed as my true self -- now and forever a different man. Someone I'd admire rather than wince at, cover up for, apologize for.
Love is supposed to do that. It doesn't, of course. But it seems like it will. It starts to. But there are two problems. One is that I really am the person I am. And the other is that I find that person so distasteful.
A strange eruption of wounded pride. Was it for this? To suckle fools and chronicle small beer?
So long as I don't believe it, I suppose I can just wait it out, let it dwindle. Surprising how strong it can still stand, though, even though the scaffolding has all been undone. I don't believe in glory and distinction; I have no business even beginning to step that way, let alone to walk down that path -- liberally reckoning up my deserts and finding fault with their reception. That's the quick way to a bitter life, short but too long: I've seen too much of it to mistake it.
Sure, on imagined fields I can contrive extravagant victories, notable routs, brilliant coups. So can any man. But the work in hand is to set my house in order.
The hardest thing is holding other people to their work. Because I can't do it alone. And that means convincing people that it's in their best interest, getting their commitment to a certain amount of work, and supplying the impetus. None of them things I'm very good at. I've crippled my life, though, by only being willing to do things I'm good at. It's time to spend some time doing things I'm bad at.
All phenomena are empty, I'm told, and I believe it readily of bicycle tires and apricots, pleasure and pain, nations and species; perhaps I always did. But not of habit. Habit is not impermanent. It has an essential nature, a wicked one, and it will still be afflicting me when America is no longer mentioned in history books and cockroaches are extinct.
The trouble is that I am so tired, and only habitual routines promise rest: but it is precisely the habitual routines that render me incapable of rest. And so it runs, over and over, the wheel of exhaustion, my own personal twelve nidanas.
Used to be, I would sometimes believe that something could break the sequence. Requited love. Excercise. Meditation. Yoga. A new career. The Scarsdale diet (yes, my memory stretches back that far!) Something would violently break me free of the wheel, and from then on habitual virtue would establish itself, a self-supporting sequence of overflowing energy and profound rest, just as tenacious as the wheel of exhaustion.
It seems to me now, that -- a few months shy of my fiftieth birthday -- it's time for me to concede that it's not going to happen that way. Not that things never change; of course they do. But even though radical shifts do in fact happen, they are moments of extreme vulnerability; and just-this-once-ness applies not only to brave departures but also to one-time indulgences. The departures never become habitual, somehow, but the indulgences do.
I know. I've said all this before. This, in fact, is a habitual lament, for me. When I listed out for myself habitual wheels I've gotten free of in the past four years, the list was impressive. I have wrenched my myself free of many things that have afflicted me all my life.
But what doesn't change is the sense of being bound to a wheel, of being just one transformation away from having a real life.
I am violently sick of compromise, of just-for-now, of buying vices with virtues in a sort of carbon-emissions program of the heart. The whole thing is wrong.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
This Morning
I am asking myself: just what do I think I have, that I am so afraid of losing it?
Sarah is here in Portland. I'll be seeing her at morning puja in less than an hour, if I don't cut and run. I could have gone up to the retreat land and seen her there yesterday. I didn't.
My mother-in-law -- long passed away, now -- once took a painting class, and her teacher told her that water will be the same color as the sky. She used to repeat this bit of painting-class lore to us from time to time, dubiously but obstinately. "They say," she would begin -- "they" being a whole pantheon of authorities whom one had to accept -- "that the water will be the same color as the sky."
Whether we were looking at the gray, brown-veined Columbia under a deep blue sky, or at a green mountain stream under a white overcast, she would cite this oracle. Just one of the many authorities she accepted, and would have defended strenuously, but didn't entirely believe. I've often wondered if that really was exactly what he did say, or exactly what he meant.
Anyway. He would be gloriously vindicated today. The luminous gray of the wet pavement in front of Tosi's is exactly the color of the cloudy sky. Iron and polished steel, edged with tarnish. The weather that means home, to me.
I am asking myself: just what do I think I have, that I am so afraid of losing it?
Sarah is here in Portland. I'll be seeing her at morning puja in less than an hour, if I don't cut and run. I could have gone up to the retreat land and seen her there yesterday. I didn't.
My mother-in-law -- long passed away, now -- once took a painting class, and her teacher told her that water will be the same color as the sky. She used to repeat this bit of painting-class lore to us from time to time, dubiously but obstinately. "They say," she would begin -- "they" being a whole pantheon of authorities whom one had to accept -- "that the water will be the same color as the sky."
Whether we were looking at the gray, brown-veined Columbia under a deep blue sky, or at a green mountain stream under a white overcast, she would cite this oracle. Just one of the many authorities she accepted, and would have defended strenuously, but didn't entirely believe. I've often wondered if that really was exactly what he did say, or exactly what he meant.
Anyway. He would be gloriously vindicated today. The luminous gray of the wet pavement in front of Tosi's is exactly the color of the cloudy sky. Iron and polished steel, edged with tarnish. The weather that means home, to me.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Sunday Morning, Portland Town
The only thing I like about Sundays is the quiet air; the soft rain; the forgetfulness. I walk out in the early morning and I might be the only person alive in the world. Perhaps a plague has killed everyone but me.
I always wanted to journey through a deserted Portland, wandering through people's houses, seeing exactly how they lived before the end. The archeology of Pompeii fascinates me. Ordinary life transected: it's one of the ways to see how strange and poignant the ordinary is, to reveal how heavy a burden we labor under, hour by hour, of desire, habit and anxiety. One convulsion of a mountain can make plain what daily life does its best to conceal from us -- that the future we dread and long for will never actually arrive: that we live most of our lives in a fantasy world. Even if the future comes -- which it might not -- it won't be that one.
I'm not a Sunday man. I am annoyed by shops and cafes opening an hour late, or not at all; by buses running infrequently. What is a person to do with those long hours before seven o'clock? The prime time for writing, for the anonymous sociability of a working breakfast, squandered because people have an unaccountable taste for wasting a perfectly clear, wide-open, brand-new day by sleeping through it.
But there is the soft wet mossy sidewalks, the subdued song of birds made uneasy by the stilled traffic, the endless modulations of silver, gray, and white in the quiet sky. I walk down Hawthorne Boulevard, pausing to look in the windows of the closed-up restaurants, examine their menus, and wonder why I've never gone to the ones I've never gone to. The heavy power and telephone wires swoop up and down the boulevard: it's like walking under the rigging of a ship. Do most people not see this endlessly proliferating spider-web of wires, all over the city? That's my impression. Taut steel supporting cables run from the telephone poles down to the sidewalks: if you lay your hand on them, you can feel them trembling, as if with the weight of all that flowing power and information. As I walk down the street, the wires rise and fall against the sky; the rocking of a ship under sail. They are very ugly, and very beautiful.
Sunday. The buses run on a scarce schedule, so I didn't go to Tosi's. And my bike tire is losing air, so I didn't bike to Tom's. I shouldered my pack, my shoulders protesting at the weight of my old thinkpad, and walked down the boulevard to the Common Grounds coffee house. Not my usual place, though inhabited much more by my own kind: the professional-managerial class, in their jeans or shorts, subdued plaid shirts, and faded cloth jackets, looking rumpled, unkempt and dowdy. (Very few people ever dress for work, in this city, as other cities understand it -- my first impression of Portland, after a long absence, was of a whole city puttering about in its pajamas. "Don't any of these people work, or go out?" I wondered. But you go into their offices and shops, their restaurants and bars, and you realized that they do work and go out; they just don't dress differently to do that than they do to work in their gardens or cook Sunday breakfast.)
"Mocha?" calls a young barrista's voice, sharply; but even at a semi-shout, in the rising inflection so characteristic of their generation. The worried, perplexed generation: every statement comes out a question. The man in the tousled hair and blue plaid shirt shambles back up to the counter to fetch his drink, which is topped with whipped cream. When did grown men in America stop being embarassed about drinking something topped with whipped cream, I wonder? Thirty years ago no man would be caught dead doing such a thing.
Is it just that relentless marketing has succeeded in removing the stigma from self-indulgence? Or is it maybe a sense that the adult world no longer has its own reserved pleasures, so that we have no intention, anymore, of relinquishing the juvenile ones? It is distressing to me that very few of the young people I know look forward to their working lives with anything but dread. It will be the end, they seem to think, of all pleasure, of all leisure, of all fun. Many of them will actually find satisfying, meaningful work. They will be much happier than in the no-man's-land of adolescence. But they don't seem to think so.
How much, how much love rises at times like these. A blond toddler of praeternatural cuteness cruises around the tables, indulged by all the newspaper-readers and laptop-typers. He's happy. His mother follows him. She works hard to keep him happy and quiet, and his father pitches in too, though less skillfully. They look prosperous, successful, competent, and anxious. They aren't here long before his mother, worried about his occasional bleats of joy, takes him out to play on the sidewalk. His father conscientiously buses the table and wipes it down. I wish they looked happier.
The only thing I like about Sundays is the quiet air; the soft rain; the forgetfulness. I walk out in the early morning and I might be the only person alive in the world. Perhaps a plague has killed everyone but me.
I always wanted to journey through a deserted Portland, wandering through people's houses, seeing exactly how they lived before the end. The archeology of Pompeii fascinates me. Ordinary life transected: it's one of the ways to see how strange and poignant the ordinary is, to reveal how heavy a burden we labor under, hour by hour, of desire, habit and anxiety. One convulsion of a mountain can make plain what daily life does its best to conceal from us -- that the future we dread and long for will never actually arrive: that we live most of our lives in a fantasy world. Even if the future comes -- which it might not -- it won't be that one.
I'm not a Sunday man. I am annoyed by shops and cafes opening an hour late, or not at all; by buses running infrequently. What is a person to do with those long hours before seven o'clock? The prime time for writing, for the anonymous sociability of a working breakfast, squandered because people have an unaccountable taste for wasting a perfectly clear, wide-open, brand-new day by sleeping through it.
But there is the soft wet mossy sidewalks, the subdued song of birds made uneasy by the stilled traffic, the endless modulations of silver, gray, and white in the quiet sky. I walk down Hawthorne Boulevard, pausing to look in the windows of the closed-up restaurants, examine their menus, and wonder why I've never gone to the ones I've never gone to. The heavy power and telephone wires swoop up and down the boulevard: it's like walking under the rigging of a ship. Do most people not see this endlessly proliferating spider-web of wires, all over the city? That's my impression. Taut steel supporting cables run from the telephone poles down to the sidewalks: if you lay your hand on them, you can feel them trembling, as if with the weight of all that flowing power and information. As I walk down the street, the wires rise and fall against the sky; the rocking of a ship under sail. They are very ugly, and very beautiful.
Sunday. The buses run on a scarce schedule, so I didn't go to Tosi's. And my bike tire is losing air, so I didn't bike to Tom's. I shouldered my pack, my shoulders protesting at the weight of my old thinkpad, and walked down the boulevard to the Common Grounds coffee house. Not my usual place, though inhabited much more by my own kind: the professional-managerial class, in their jeans or shorts, subdued plaid shirts, and faded cloth jackets, looking rumpled, unkempt and dowdy. (Very few people ever dress for work, in this city, as other cities understand it -- my first impression of Portland, after a long absence, was of a whole city puttering about in its pajamas. "Don't any of these people work, or go out?" I wondered. But you go into their offices and shops, their restaurants and bars, and you realized that they do work and go out; they just don't dress differently to do that than they do to work in their gardens or cook Sunday breakfast.)
"Mocha?" calls a young barrista's voice, sharply; but even at a semi-shout, in the rising inflection so characteristic of their generation. The worried, perplexed generation: every statement comes out a question. The man in the tousled hair and blue plaid shirt shambles back up to the counter to fetch his drink, which is topped with whipped cream. When did grown men in America stop being embarassed about drinking something topped with whipped cream, I wonder? Thirty years ago no man would be caught dead doing such a thing.
Is it just that relentless marketing has succeeded in removing the stigma from self-indulgence? Or is it maybe a sense that the adult world no longer has its own reserved pleasures, so that we have no intention, anymore, of relinquishing the juvenile ones? It is distressing to me that very few of the young people I know look forward to their working lives with anything but dread. It will be the end, they seem to think, of all pleasure, of all leisure, of all fun. Many of them will actually find satisfying, meaningful work. They will be much happier than in the no-man's-land of adolescence. But they don't seem to think so.
How much, how much love rises at times like these. A blond toddler of praeternatural cuteness cruises around the tables, indulged by all the newspaper-readers and laptop-typers. He's happy. His mother follows him. She works hard to keep him happy and quiet, and his father pitches in too, though less skillfully. They look prosperous, successful, competent, and anxious. They aren't here long before his mother, worried about his occasional bleats of joy, takes him out to play on the sidewalk. His father conscientiously buses the table and wipes it down. I wish they looked happier.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Dorr's River
It cannot possibly exist. How could it? But I have felt that river, waking on frozen nights out on the ground at three in the morning.
-- Chris Clarke: The River of Gold
A delicate pattern of legs and wings
Ripples up between the light and the wall;
An outlined angel beats its wings, rises,
And dissolves again.
And now, at the join of the wall and the ceiling
The cranefly clicks against the woodwork
And stumbles against its inversion.
Today I held your face between my palms.
The enormous cool darkness
And the sound of running water
And the pull of the tide, running
Miles beneath the sand.
Dorr's River runs down to the sea.
You dip your hands in the sun
And a shadow falls on the world.
It cannot possibly exist. How could it? But I have felt that river, waking on frozen nights out on the ground at three in the morning.
-- Chris Clarke: The River of Gold
A delicate pattern of legs and wings
Ripples up between the light and the wall;
An outlined angel beats its wings, rises,
And dissolves again.
And now, at the join of the wall and the ceiling
The cranefly clicks against the woodwork
And stumbles against its inversion.
Today I held your face between my palms.
The enormous cool darkness
And the sound of running water
And the pull of the tide, running
Miles beneath the sand.
Dorr's River runs down to the sea.
You dip your hands in the sun
And a shadow falls on the world.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Thank You
A little overwhelmed by the thought of trying to respond to all the comments; I want to answer each of them at length, which is impossible if I'm to pass my massage & pathology classes.
So, in order not invidiously to particularize, here, I will just say: even if mole goes the way of all talpidae, I won't just disappear -- the temptation of having an audience for my writing will never be one I'll be able to resist for long, for one thing, and for another, you all have my email address. And I am very attached to you all. (There are a few of you who generally respond to me by email, not by comment: one of you indicated that you thought this would put you into a different and less important category for me. It doesn't.)
I've thought long and hard about what Lori of Chatoyance said:
If one views these venues as a public form of private practice -- as a place where one does one's arpeggios and riffs, and shares in the community of others doing such -- then perhaps the practice is a bit stale and it will take pushing through.
Mole has been a practice journal, a place for occasional essays, and a stage for amateur poetry and drawing. The practice journal might have to go private -- there are patterns in it that aren't altogether healthy, which are exacerbated by its being public. The rest is bound to surface in one form or another. I have repeatedly said that I don't take my poetry or drawing seriously. There are good reasons for this, but it may be time to drop my (too much protested) amateur status and take one or both seriously. The immediate result of this would be, of course, a conspicuous drop in quality. If I go that way, here or elsewhere, I hope you'll bear with me. Sometimes, like a wasp caught in a sash window, you have to go backwards to go forwards.
A little overwhelmed by the thought of trying to respond to all the comments; I want to answer each of them at length, which is impossible if I'm to pass my massage & pathology classes.
So, in order not invidiously to particularize, here, I will just say: even if mole goes the way of all talpidae, I won't just disappear -- the temptation of having an audience for my writing will never be one I'll be able to resist for long, for one thing, and for another, you all have my email address. And I am very attached to you all. (There are a few of you who generally respond to me by email, not by comment: one of you indicated that you thought this would put you into a different and less important category for me. It doesn't.)
I've thought long and hard about what Lori of Chatoyance said:
If one views these venues as a public form of private practice -- as a place where one does one's arpeggios and riffs, and shares in the community of others doing such -- then perhaps the practice is a bit stale and it will take pushing through.
Mole has been a practice journal, a place for occasional essays, and a stage for amateur poetry and drawing. The practice journal might have to go private -- there are patterns in it that aren't altogether healthy, which are exacerbated by its being public. The rest is bound to surface in one form or another. I have repeatedly said that I don't take my poetry or drawing seriously. There are good reasons for this, but it may be time to drop my (too much protested) amateur status and take one or both seriously. The immediate result of this would be, of course, a conspicuous drop in quality. If I go that way, here or elsewhere, I hope you'll bear with me. Sometimes, like a wasp caught in a sash window, you have to go backwards to go forwards.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
On the Occasion of my Fourth Blogday
Four years ago today I began a blog called "Vajrayana Practice." I was starting a new meditation practice, and I wanted to keep a journal of it, and I was no longer used to writing on paper -- I'd been working in a paperless office for several years. And it was new software to play with.
I at least pretended to myself that I thought no one would want to read it. I distinctly remember my mouse pointer hesitating between the buttons that would make it public or private. I had a pious hope that reading about my practice difficulties might help other meditators, and a not very pious hope, imperfectly submerged, that lots of people would read it, and all of them would find me fascinating and admirable. I clicked public.
When I was a boy we used to go swim at a place we called "the pipeline." A big iron pipe (for natural gas?) crossed over the gorge of a little river. We could clamber out onto the pipe and jump off into the water, some thirty or forty feet below. There was always that last moment, the culmination of recklessness, the moment when it was too late to change my mind, when my feet left the pipe. Clicking "public" reminded me of that. And clicking "publish" still does.
Then, almost at once, my feet would smack the surface, and there would be the shock of cold water. No matter how vertical I held myself, I never plunged straight down. On hitting the water there was a veering, a jackknifing, and I'd find myself rushing at an unexpected tangent in the green sunlit water, disoriented, having to wait a moment to slow down and figure out what had become of "up."
The motto of my blog, back then, was taken from Blake:
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?
One day I posted something that made a friend feel unhappily exposed. I wanted to get rid of the post without drawing attention to the fact, so I pretended its disappearance was part of a general reconstruction, and made some changes I'd been contemplating for a long time. Calling the blog "vajrayana practice," as if I were some sort of authority, had made me uneasy from the start. And anyway, it had stopped being primarily a practice journal. I made a few cosmetic changes, monkeyed with fonts and what-not, and announced my new incarnation as "mole."
I don't know if I fooled anybody, but the name of "mole" seemed to resonate with people, and someone -- Bonta? -- referred to Kenneth Grahame's Mole. It was a persona I was much more comfortable with. I wasn't an earnest, disciplined seeker after enlightenment. I was hapless, easily delighted and bewildered, gratefully overwhelmed by friendship, torn between wanderlust and homesickness, dazzled by a world that was a little more brilliant than nature had equipped me to absorb.
Thank you. Thanks especially to Badger and Water Rat, and to Toad (no link, he seems to have taken one joyride too many; some of you will know who I mean). But I could multiply heartfelt thanks for pages, and still be leaving out someone who said exactly the right thing at the right time, to comfort me or challenge me, pull me up short or send me off looking. You all have been wonderful.
The lifespan of a mole, I learn, is "up to three years." This blog has begun to feel a bit elderly to me. This is not a farewell post, but I do sense that I ought to begin putting my blog affairs in order. All things must pass.
Thank you so much.
Four years ago today I began a blog called "Vajrayana Practice." I was starting a new meditation practice, and I wanted to keep a journal of it, and I was no longer used to writing on paper -- I'd been working in a paperless office for several years. And it was new software to play with.
I at least pretended to myself that I thought no one would want to read it. I distinctly remember my mouse pointer hesitating between the buttons that would make it public or private. I had a pious hope that reading about my practice difficulties might help other meditators, and a not very pious hope, imperfectly submerged, that lots of people would read it, and all of them would find me fascinating and admirable. I clicked public.
When I was a boy we used to go swim at a place we called "the pipeline." A big iron pipe (for natural gas?) crossed over the gorge of a little river. We could clamber out onto the pipe and jump off into the water, some thirty or forty feet below. There was always that last moment, the culmination of recklessness, the moment when it was too late to change my mind, when my feet left the pipe. Clicking "public" reminded me of that. And clicking "publish" still does.
Then, almost at once, my feet would smack the surface, and there would be the shock of cold water. No matter how vertical I held myself, I never plunged straight down. On hitting the water there was a veering, a jackknifing, and I'd find myself rushing at an unexpected tangent in the green sunlit water, disoriented, having to wait a moment to slow down and figure out what had become of "up."
The motto of my blog, back then, was taken from Blake:
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?
One day I posted something that made a friend feel unhappily exposed. I wanted to get rid of the post without drawing attention to the fact, so I pretended its disappearance was part of a general reconstruction, and made some changes I'd been contemplating for a long time. Calling the blog "vajrayana practice," as if I were some sort of authority, had made me uneasy from the start. And anyway, it had stopped being primarily a practice journal. I made a few cosmetic changes, monkeyed with fonts and what-not, and announced my new incarnation as "mole."
I don't know if I fooled anybody, but the name of "mole" seemed to resonate with people, and someone -- Bonta? -- referred to Kenneth Grahame's Mole. It was a persona I was much more comfortable with. I wasn't an earnest, disciplined seeker after enlightenment. I was hapless, easily delighted and bewildered, gratefully overwhelmed by friendship, torn between wanderlust and homesickness, dazzled by a world that was a little more brilliant than nature had equipped me to absorb.
Thank you. Thanks especially to Badger and Water Rat, and to Toad (no link, he seems to have taken one joyride too many; some of you will know who I mean). But I could multiply heartfelt thanks for pages, and still be leaving out someone who said exactly the right thing at the right time, to comfort me or challenge me, pull me up short or send me off looking. You all have been wonderful.
The lifespan of a mole, I learn, is "up to three years." This blog has begun to feel a bit elderly to me. This is not a farewell post, but I do sense that I ought to begin putting my blog affairs in order. All things must pass.
Thank you so much.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Future Perfect
It is only hard, I said to myself, because I have not done it before. Three times I've veered away at the last minute, walked on past, or pretended to be just looking. So I will do it in the future perfect, now, having already done it; I will revisit this place, the place I always went, back in those days when I lived in Portland, and I was going to massage school. And I will look around with nostalgia, slow to respond to the living people, busy greeting the ghosts; the living people will come slowly into focus, and I will order in some distraction, not the distraction of anxiety, which would be ridiculous, but the distraction of the past, which everyone knows is nobly confusing.
So I turned in at the door, into the old place. They had new people behind the counter. I had to explain what I wanted; they didn't already know, as they used to. Times change.
It is only hard, I said to myself, because I have not done it before. Three times I've veered away at the last minute, walked on past, or pretended to be just looking. So I will do it in the future perfect, now, having already done it; I will revisit this place, the place I always went, back in those days when I lived in Portland, and I was going to massage school. And I will look around with nostalgia, slow to respond to the living people, busy greeting the ghosts; the living people will come slowly into focus, and I will order in some distraction, not the distraction of anxiety, which would be ridiculous, but the distraction of the past, which everyone knows is nobly confusing.
So I turned in at the door, into the old place. They had new people behind the counter. I had to explain what I wanted; they didn't already know, as they used to. Times change.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Daughter of Death
for Kristin
O beloved daughter of death, mother of life,
All these things return
To one small turning of the hand, fingers
Hesitating on a doorknob, in the red slant light
Of day's end, in the glow of the apple petals.
Darling, the generations ripple past,
Rings on the water, faster than the years
When I still counted --
We reach into the spaces of the past, wishing
We could return a childhood to those who had none.
But it is delicate, handling the past;
It crumbles under our touch, the grit slides
Between our fingers. Better not to speak.
Love. I will go on saying that word, not
Because it means what I mean, but because
Nothing means what I mean. You see?
Again it rises. You see? There, where
Venus trembles in the west, where the dark hills
Crowd together. That's where it is born;
We go calling it through daybleach and sungloom
But always, it finds our backs.
No one finds it. It finds us.
If I could string together all the beads of this love
I would hang them around your neck
My darling daughter of death, mother of life;
I would bring you a poem to astonish
Tree and stone, water and wheel,
The bloody sunset, the stained petals,
The opening sky, the veins of cloud,
The long shadows and the closing door.
for Kristin
O beloved daughter of death, mother of life,
All these things return
To one small turning of the hand, fingers
Hesitating on a doorknob, in the red slant light
Of day's end, in the glow of the apple petals.
Darling, the generations ripple past,
Rings on the water, faster than the years
When I still counted --
We reach into the spaces of the past, wishing
We could return a childhood to those who had none.
But it is delicate, handling the past;
It crumbles under our touch, the grit slides
Between our fingers. Better not to speak.
Love. I will go on saying that word, not
Because it means what I mean, but because
Nothing means what I mean. You see?
Again it rises. You see? There, where
Venus trembles in the west, where the dark hills
Crowd together. That's where it is born;
We go calling it through daybleach and sungloom
But always, it finds our backs.
No one finds it. It finds us.
If I could string together all the beads of this love
I would hang them around your neck
My darling daughter of death, mother of life;
I would bring you a poem to astonish
Tree and stone, water and wheel,
The bloody sunset, the stained petals,
The opening sky, the veins of cloud,
The long shadows and the closing door.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Space
Everything that rises must diverge
And skies, first blue, become black
And pricked with stars,
And finally empty, measureless;
The dread that when I was young
We called, in defeat, Space.
So we learned in school.
I've never been there
To Space
And neither have you
So you might think it didn't matter
What we thought it was,
A huge, devouring hole, or
The glorious empyrean
Any more than it mattered what nonsense
Ancient cartographers wrote in the margins,
Doodling their fears and desires;
Prester John or Anthropophagi,
Amazons or dragons. But
It matters more,
In fact, than the map of what we know.
It is the landscape of the heart
And it has to do
With what we believe is in the wings, or
Before birth, or beyond the oven
Of the crematorium.
It is what we think we will fall into
If we lose our grip.
So I will tell you what is out there
In Space; if you go to that website
Of the night sky, and click zoom
And zoom, and zoom, and zoom,
Till you're past the sandy stars
Of the furthest nebulae, and the last
Magellanic cloud.
Click again, and the image will gather
Of your dearest friend, reaching
To brush the hair from your face.
Young again, and full of health,
The smile of the last mirth you shared
Still lingering. If you let go, you will fall
Into her arms.
Everything that rises must diverge
And skies, first blue, become black
And pricked with stars,
And finally empty, measureless;
The dread that when I was young
We called, in defeat, Space.
So we learned in school.
I've never been there
To Space
And neither have you
So you might think it didn't matter
What we thought it was,
A huge, devouring hole, or
The glorious empyrean
Any more than it mattered what nonsense
Ancient cartographers wrote in the margins,
Doodling their fears and desires;
Prester John or Anthropophagi,
Amazons or dragons. But
It matters more,
In fact, than the map of what we know.
It is the landscape of the heart
And it has to do
With what we believe is in the wings, or
Before birth, or beyond the oven
Of the crematorium.
It is what we think we will fall into
If we lose our grip.
So I will tell you what is out there
In Space; if you go to that website
Of the night sky, and click zoom
And zoom, and zoom, and zoom,
Till you're past the sandy stars
Of the furthest nebulae, and the last
Magellanic cloud.
Click again, and the image will gather
Of your dearest friend, reaching
To brush the hair from your face.
Young again, and full of health,
The smile of the last mirth you shared
Still lingering. If you let go, you will fall
Into her arms.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
On Being Asked to Show my Tattoos
Chaining the skin to the past. As if I were not already tight enough bound to yesterday's opinions and preferences. Is it not enough that every corner business has a logo? Must my person be branded as well?
I am not a product. I will not be a billboard for myself.
Well, that was my first thought, that I am nobly resisting my objectification; but of course that's a crock. What rises up in me, mostly, is the desire to be seen as someone resisting his objectification. Which is no different, at bottom. A slightly different sort of object, that's all.
I continue to chew on this desire to be seen. It is a complicated one. What is blogging, but another manifestation of that desire? But it is the serpent whych eateth his own tayle. Because what I want is to be seen as I dream myself, as God hinted to me that I might someday be. I want to be seen as I really am, which is not even what I now am, let alone what I appear to be. But as soon as I am seen, I am seen as something, and I know -- late or soon, depending on how honest I am -- that I am not really that something. I am like those silly psychic investigators who try to take pictures and make recordings of spirits. If you can take a picture of something immaterial, then it's not immaterial. The price of getting a clear picture of a spirit is demonstrating beyond question that it's not a spirit.
And yet. Here is the flesh, that is palpably an object. "I am not my body," insists my teacher. Perfectly orthodoxly. That's what Buddhism says. The body may be precious, it may be a temple, but only as the house of a spirit. Does Buddhism make sense, without that ruling concept? Its practices still work -- that's not what I'm questioning, I know that by direct experience. But that doesn't mean its theory is right.
I crave to be seen, and desired, as flesh. It may be what I want most urgently. But does that craving make sense even on its own terms? I'm not sure. It may be one of those phantom desires that can never be fulfilled. Like the itch of an amputated limb. It has all the marks of that sort of desire.
And yet. I don't believe any desire is worthless. No desire is wrong, though any of them may lead to wrong. There is a certain reaching out, characteristic of all desire. And if I think that the body and the spirit are one, then it's not so simple as mistaking one for the other. It is, rather, mistaking the nature of both. Neither one can correctly be considered an object. Maybe seeing and being seen would have to be replaced by communion.
Always the longing. The one constant of my life.
You think too much. That is your problem, says Zorba, in the back of my mind. Thank you, Zhoen, by the way, for nominating Mole as a "thinking blog," (though I'm still trying to work it out and see if it comes round to a compliment :->)
Chaining the skin to the past. As if I were not already tight enough bound to yesterday's opinions and preferences. Is it not enough that every corner business has a logo? Must my person be branded as well?
I am not a product. I will not be a billboard for myself.
Well, that was my first thought, that I am nobly resisting my objectification; but of course that's a crock. What rises up in me, mostly, is the desire to be seen as someone resisting his objectification. Which is no different, at bottom. A slightly different sort of object, that's all.
I continue to chew on this desire to be seen. It is a complicated one. What is blogging, but another manifestation of that desire? But it is the serpent whych eateth his own tayle. Because what I want is to be seen as I dream myself, as God hinted to me that I might someday be. I want to be seen as I really am, which is not even what I now am, let alone what I appear to be. But as soon as I am seen, I am seen as something, and I know -- late or soon, depending on how honest I am -- that I am not really that something. I am like those silly psychic investigators who try to take pictures and make recordings of spirits. If you can take a picture of something immaterial, then it's not immaterial. The price of getting a clear picture of a spirit is demonstrating beyond question that it's not a spirit.
And yet. Here is the flesh, that is palpably an object. "I am not my body," insists my teacher. Perfectly orthodoxly. That's what Buddhism says. The body may be precious, it may be a temple, but only as the house of a spirit. Does Buddhism make sense, without that ruling concept? Its practices still work -- that's not what I'm questioning, I know that by direct experience. But that doesn't mean its theory is right.
I crave to be seen, and desired, as flesh. It may be what I want most urgently. But does that craving make sense even on its own terms? I'm not sure. It may be one of those phantom desires that can never be fulfilled. Like the itch of an amputated limb. It has all the marks of that sort of desire.
And yet. I don't believe any desire is worthless. No desire is wrong, though any of them may lead to wrong. There is a certain reaching out, characteristic of all desire. And if I think that the body and the spirit are one, then it's not so simple as mistaking one for the other. It is, rather, mistaking the nature of both. Neither one can correctly be considered an object. Maybe seeing and being seen would have to be replaced by communion.
Always the longing. The one constant of my life.
You think too much. That is your problem, says Zorba, in the back of my mind. Thank you, Zhoen, by the way, for nominating Mole as a "thinking blog," (though I'm still trying to work it out and see if it comes round to a compliment :->)
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Faith's House
I
As we spoke she laid a hand on
Her small round belly
Holding a secret, or a pain
And I thought of coiled intestines
And how they say that a surgeon's nightmare
Is to try to pack them in, once out;
And I thought of children in secret spaces
Growing in the dark, listening
To the rushing lubb dupp of the heart.
Love moves oddly, as one grows older;
It sidles, slips sideways, and turns;
It no longer washes in like a tide,
And out, leaving ruin behind it.
Instead it pools and eddies,
No longer demanding and requiring,
It inquires and remands. It is a love
Of questions, not of answers.
II
Here belongs a catalog. If all poems,
As one said, are love poems, now I should make note
Of how she listens intently,
Staring hard, with her lips parted,
Like a child's; or how
She gathers a shawl about herself
Prefiguring an old woman
Of an efficient and matter-of-fact sort,
And I would mention a certain black skirt,
And hair brushed forward at the temples.
But all that, though real enough,
Belongs to the tides. It is not
What we are here to celebrate.
We are not even here to celebrate
Ingrained kindness, or care,
Or constancy. We are here
To warm a house.
III
First the Magi bring cinnamon
And Persian spices without names
Ever named in the West;
St Nicholas brings a tea-set
With an intricate silver creamer
And a bowl, and sugar spoons;
Ananda brings lotuses
That blossom on the water,
And a wish-fulfilling jewel.
Milarepa grins and contributes
A nettle pot, before vanishing
(He never stays long, you know),
An elderly poet brings a sword
To keep upstairs, and another brings
A bow of burning gold;
I am gone with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.
IV
The gift of speech was stolen from me
By a malevolent fairy, at my christening
Who doomed me to mumbling;
The gift of appropriate gifts has never been mine.
Decorum is a painful lesson, half learned
And readily forgotten;
But one gift I have always retained,
Overlooked in the general rout, and that
Is the gift of offering blessings. And so:
A blessing on the windows, of seeing,
A blessing on the stove, of warming,
A blessing on the floor, of standing,
A blessing on the door, of opening,
A blessing on the roof, of sheltering,
A blessing on the walls, of holding.
The oldest of pieties is that naming calls;
I name this Faith's House, these four walls.
I
As we spoke she laid a hand on
Her small round belly
Holding a secret, or a pain
And I thought of coiled intestines
And how they say that a surgeon's nightmare
Is to try to pack them in, once out;
And I thought of children in secret spaces
Growing in the dark, listening
To the rushing lubb dupp of the heart.
Love moves oddly, as one grows older;
It sidles, slips sideways, and turns;
It no longer washes in like a tide,
And out, leaving ruin behind it.
Instead it pools and eddies,
No longer demanding and requiring,
It inquires and remands. It is a love
Of questions, not of answers.
II
Here belongs a catalog. If all poems,
As one said, are love poems, now I should make note
Of how she listens intently,
Staring hard, with her lips parted,
Like a child's; or how
She gathers a shawl about herself
Prefiguring an old woman
Of an efficient and matter-of-fact sort,
And I would mention a certain black skirt,
And hair brushed forward at the temples.
But all that, though real enough,
Belongs to the tides. It is not
What we are here to celebrate.
We are not even here to celebrate
Ingrained kindness, or care,
Or constancy. We are here
To warm a house.
III
First the Magi bring cinnamon
And Persian spices without names
Ever named in the West;
St Nicholas brings a tea-set
With an intricate silver creamer
And a bowl, and sugar spoons;
Ananda brings lotuses
That blossom on the water,
And a wish-fulfilling jewel.
Milarepa grins and contributes
A nettle pot, before vanishing
(He never stays long, you know),
An elderly poet brings a sword
To keep upstairs, and another brings
A bow of burning gold;
I am gone with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.
IV
The gift of speech was stolen from me
By a malevolent fairy, at my christening
Who doomed me to mumbling;
The gift of appropriate gifts has never been mine.
Decorum is a painful lesson, half learned
And readily forgotten;
But one gift I have always retained,
Overlooked in the general rout, and that
Is the gift of offering blessings. And so:
A blessing on the windows, of seeing,
A blessing on the stove, of warming,
A blessing on the floor, of standing,
A blessing on the door, of opening,
A blessing on the roof, of sheltering,
A blessing on the walls, of holding.
The oldest of pieties is that naming calls;
I name this Faith's House, these four walls.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Half-Mast
Hail rattles briefly on the windows. Shadows and bronze sunlight hesitate, move on, over the wire-latticed glass. Half a dozen empty tables. At the far side of the room a small, serious young man, sitting up perfectly straight, turns his hand slowly over, his eyes moving between his kinesiology text and his forearm. The room is silent. A couple times a student comes in to check her email, a quick quiet rattle on the keyboards, and goes noiselessly back out.
I doze a little, feeling the pools of light and shadow wander over me, feeling the rain and hail in my sleep. A long slow loneliness sifts down and settles over me. I miss the couple of boisterous students of our classes, who are usually here by now, who stir things up and bring me out of myself. Usually I seek out quiet places and solitude. But today I have been alone all day, and I've had my fill. I'd like some noise and warmth.
No one comes. 6:25. I gather my books and coat and cross the hall to the classroom, expecting to see people sitting on the floor, but no one's there. There's a sign on the door: class has been canceled. Odd. Class yesterday evening -- different teacher -- was also canceled. Is something virulent going around?
I could ask at the office, but instead I go out, walking bareheaded in the rain. Towers of white cloud in a sky that's half bright blue and half dark gray. Squalls catching the sunlight. The world rocks a little, like a ship. I walk down to the convention center and stand under the high glass, waiting for the bus. On a building several blocks away an American flag floats over an Oregonian flag, both at half-mast. I search my memory, but can't think of who's died recently, except for Kurt Vonnegut. I don't suppose it's for him. Maybe it's the Virginia Tech shootings. Or maybe it's been an especially bloody day in Iraq. I don't follow these things: it's no news to me that people are deliberately slaughtering each other. They've been doing it all my life, and I confidently expect them to be doing it long after my death. They think it will change something. They have no idea, no idea how hard it is to change things. They think it's other people who need to be straightened out, or got rid of. If only it were that easy.
It's the twist in the heart that needs to be straightened out. I know that darkness, that hunger, that endless gnawing emptiness. "He was a loner" announce the headlines, gravely. Well, yeah. Me too.
Another shock of hail. A brilliantly white airplane crosses against a black cloud. Sunlight glitters on the green glass of the convention center.
Earlier today an ancient homeless man, with iron-gray hair curling around his ears, wandered up to me on the sidewalk. "Another fifty cents and I can get a sixpack," he muttered. Looking closer at his face, the color and texture of grimy red vinyl diner upholstery, I realized that he was probably exactly my age. I dug change up out of my pocket, a couple bucks' worth, and handed it to him. There was a lightening in his body, as if something heavy had been taken off his shoulders. He straightened up and looked me in the eye for the first time, and said distinctly, "God bless you."
Yeah. I hope he will. I hope he'll bless all of us.
Hail rattles briefly on the windows. Shadows and bronze sunlight hesitate, move on, over the wire-latticed glass. Half a dozen empty tables. At the far side of the room a small, serious young man, sitting up perfectly straight, turns his hand slowly over, his eyes moving between his kinesiology text and his forearm. The room is silent. A couple times a student comes in to check her email, a quick quiet rattle on the keyboards, and goes noiselessly back out.
I doze a little, feeling the pools of light and shadow wander over me, feeling the rain and hail in my sleep. A long slow loneliness sifts down and settles over me. I miss the couple of boisterous students of our classes, who are usually here by now, who stir things up and bring me out of myself. Usually I seek out quiet places and solitude. But today I have been alone all day, and I've had my fill. I'd like some noise and warmth.
No one comes. 6:25. I gather my books and coat and cross the hall to the classroom, expecting to see people sitting on the floor, but no one's there. There's a sign on the door: class has been canceled. Odd. Class yesterday evening -- different teacher -- was also canceled. Is something virulent going around?
I could ask at the office, but instead I go out, walking bareheaded in the rain. Towers of white cloud in a sky that's half bright blue and half dark gray. Squalls catching the sunlight. The world rocks a little, like a ship. I walk down to the convention center and stand under the high glass, waiting for the bus. On a building several blocks away an American flag floats over an Oregonian flag, both at half-mast. I search my memory, but can't think of who's died recently, except for Kurt Vonnegut. I don't suppose it's for him. Maybe it's the Virginia Tech shootings. Or maybe it's been an especially bloody day in Iraq. I don't follow these things: it's no news to me that people are deliberately slaughtering each other. They've been doing it all my life, and I confidently expect them to be doing it long after my death. They think it will change something. They have no idea, no idea how hard it is to change things. They think it's other people who need to be straightened out, or got rid of. If only it were that easy.
It's the twist in the heart that needs to be straightened out. I know that darkness, that hunger, that endless gnawing emptiness. "He was a loner" announce the headlines, gravely. Well, yeah. Me too.
Another shock of hail. A brilliantly white airplane crosses against a black cloud. Sunlight glitters on the green glass of the convention center.
Earlier today an ancient homeless man, with iron-gray hair curling around his ears, wandered up to me on the sidewalk. "Another fifty cents and I can get a sixpack," he muttered. Looking closer at his face, the color and texture of grimy red vinyl diner upholstery, I realized that he was probably exactly my age. I dug change up out of my pocket, a couple bucks' worth, and handed it to him. There was a lightening in his body, as if something heavy had been taken off his shoulders. He straightened up and looked me in the eye for the first time, and said distinctly, "God bless you."
Yeah. I hope he will. I hope he'll bless all of us.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Our Mutual Friend
'As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?' Mr Wegg inquired, musing.
'Would it come dearer?' Mr Boffin asked.
'It would come dearer,' Mr Wegg returned. 'For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.'
Probably my favorite Dickens novel, though it's hard to say: I can't always tell the them apart, and I sometimes find myself wondering which character comes from which novel: Captain Cuttle, now, was that The Old Curiosity Shop? "When found, make a note of," as he himself would say. When a Dickens impulse comes over me, I don't have a hankering to read, say, David Copperfield again; rather, I find myself missing the company of Mr Micawber, and I rummage among my fat, yellowing, disintegrating college paperbacks till I find the one he inhabits.
(When I first left IBM, and took to Massage School, in the cheerful expectation that something would turn up, Martha would occasionally clutch her breast and declare, "I will never desert Mr Micawber!)
Anyway, I'm reading Our Mutual Friend, for the umpteenth time. Improbably, it's gotten better since the last time I read it.
I love the spaciousness of Victorian novels, and of Dickens above all. They have all the time in the world. Their characters aren't always slaving away in the service of a tyrannical plot; there's time for them to wander a little, and for the author to wander with them, or away from them. There's all kinds of openings for the light to leak through.
'As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?' Mr Wegg inquired, musing.
'Would it come dearer?' Mr Boffin asked.
'It would come dearer,' Mr Wegg returned. 'For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.'
Probably my favorite Dickens novel, though it's hard to say: I can't always tell the them apart, and I sometimes find myself wondering which character comes from which novel: Captain Cuttle, now, was that The Old Curiosity Shop? "When found, make a note of," as he himself would say. When a Dickens impulse comes over me, I don't have a hankering to read, say, David Copperfield again; rather, I find myself missing the company of Mr Micawber, and I rummage among my fat, yellowing, disintegrating college paperbacks till I find the one he inhabits.
(When I first left IBM, and took to Massage School, in the cheerful expectation that something would turn up, Martha would occasionally clutch her breast and declare, "I will never desert Mr Micawber!)
Anyway, I'm reading Our Mutual Friend, for the umpteenth time. Improbably, it's gotten better since the last time I read it.
I love the spaciousness of Victorian novels, and of Dickens above all. They have all the time in the world. Their characters aren't always slaving away in the service of a tyrannical plot; there's time for them to wander a little, and for the author to wander with them, or away from them. There's all kinds of openings for the light to leak through.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Easter
The quiet of Easter Sunday beats slowly through the city; the streets can't quite catch their breath, and the sunlight formally, reluctantly, lightens the dull housefronts and soft lawns. If you've ever watched someone with pneumonia sleep, and wondered whether they would wake again, you'll know what I mean.
Every Easter I see Death walking, high and stiff, through empty streets. I guess resurrection doesn't mean to me what it means to most people. Good Friday is not the day of unique sacrifice. Death? We all do it. There's nothing particularly divine about dying in pain. But to be finally done with it, and then come back -- that's the sacrifice. That's what requires a Christ or a Buddha. This is the day of sacrifice.
Rain soaked the muddy mound of loose earth over Christmas's grave, yesterday, and little rivulets of brown water ran down into the grass. The toddler next door loved to come over and give Christmas treats. "I think she's hungry," he'd confide in us. We'd give him a couple treats and he'd feed them to her, and then he'd come back to us again. "I think she's hungry," he'd repeat, meaning he wanted to do it again. We'd give him a couple more, he'd feed her again, and come back again. Urgently, earnestly -- "I think she's hungry."
His mother, who tends to take the easy way out, has decided to tell him that Christmas has "gone on vacation." I guess that means we all have to participate in that fiction, now. Christmas has gone on vacation. It sounds like some sort of riddle, or paradox.
My sister-in-law asked me to rub her shoulders, which were stiff; after I'd done that a while, she noticed with some surprise that she could read the print on a poster across the room, which she hadn't been able to read when I began. If the things are causally related, I'd dearly like to understand the physiology of it. I'm guessing that unstiffening the shoulders had a ripple effect of unstiffening, extending eventually to the muscles responsible for adjusting the shape of the lenses of the eyes. But how exactly does the unstiffening "ripple?" Through the muscle tissue itself, or is it a generalized nervous response? Or is it maybe a matter of blood flow? Would working the jaw and facial muscles have done the same thing quicker, or would working the feet have done just as well? I wonder if anyone's studied eyesight and massage. It would be a fun thing to investigate.
The quiet of Easter Sunday beats slowly through the city; the streets can't quite catch their breath, and the sunlight formally, reluctantly, lightens the dull housefronts and soft lawns. If you've ever watched someone with pneumonia sleep, and wondered whether they would wake again, you'll know what I mean.
Every Easter I see Death walking, high and stiff, through empty streets. I guess resurrection doesn't mean to me what it means to most people. Good Friday is not the day of unique sacrifice. Death? We all do it. There's nothing particularly divine about dying in pain. But to be finally done with it, and then come back -- that's the sacrifice. That's what requires a Christ or a Buddha. This is the day of sacrifice.
Rain soaked the muddy mound of loose earth over Christmas's grave, yesterday, and little rivulets of brown water ran down into the grass. The toddler next door loved to come over and give Christmas treats. "I think she's hungry," he'd confide in us. We'd give him a couple treats and he'd feed them to her, and then he'd come back to us again. "I think she's hungry," he'd repeat, meaning he wanted to do it again. We'd give him a couple more, he'd feed her again, and come back again. Urgently, earnestly -- "I think she's hungry."
His mother, who tends to take the easy way out, has decided to tell him that Christmas has "gone on vacation." I guess that means we all have to participate in that fiction, now. Christmas has gone on vacation. It sounds like some sort of riddle, or paradox.
My sister-in-law asked me to rub her shoulders, which were stiff; after I'd done that a while, she noticed with some surprise that she could read the print on a poster across the room, which she hadn't been able to read when I began. If the things are causally related, I'd dearly like to understand the physiology of it. I'm guessing that unstiffening the shoulders had a ripple effect of unstiffening, extending eventually to the muscles responsible for adjusting the shape of the lenses of the eyes. But how exactly does the unstiffening "ripple?" Through the muscle tissue itself, or is it a generalized nervous response? Or is it maybe a matter of blood flow? Would working the jaw and facial muscles have done the same thing quicker, or would working the feet have done just as well? I wonder if anyone's studied eyesight and massage. It would be a fun thing to investigate.
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