Morning

Phew. Difficult time in Eugene: I didn’t know Dad knew so little about Mary’s suicide. We were so bad at communicating in those days, and so wrapped up in ourselves. I spent most of my time with my head down nursing dreams of grandeur, to be played out in distant lands far from my family, among the houris of paradise, where none of this would matter. Maybe I’m unfair (I’m certainly unfair), but I don’t miss the young man I used to be. And to be trying to communicate now, with my broken voice and my deaf ears, what I didn’t even know well fifty years ago! Christ.

Still a new day comes. A fresh cool morning. I climbed the ladder by the garage and popped my head up to look over the roofs and the tree crowns at the wind dancing, and that was a thing worth doing.

If I could hold in my mind just for a moment how fast this planet is really spinning, and how fast it’s whirling around its star, my hubris might be torn off in the wind of its passage. Or loosened, anyway. So I like to imagine.

Piggie-Wig

Glittering leaves: high summer: sheets rigged to keep the sun off the windows: watering the trees. In this tender semi-rainforest we stand a heat wave as if it was a seige of nomads: surely they’ll go home soon? They can’t live here.

I mostly keep my counsel. My thoughts are deep undersea, moving in the guck of the sea bottom. I had thought I must review God’s resume and curriculum vitae before doing anything so outlandish as praying: but of course that’s backwards, stupid evangelical stuff. Why would I accept him without knowing him, and how could I know him but by listening to him? So I try from time to time to listen to him. Or “pray,” in the queer Christian terminology. I don’t particularly want anything from him, at the moment. I want to know what this thing is, that I am part of – liegeman of – perhaps the ears and eyes of. Asking favors strikes me as presumptuous and premature. And if I were to ask, it would only be that I learn better to how to listen; and I doubt there’s an reply other than “listen more carefully; listen more often.”

So. It’s been a long time, longer even than it seems.

An old man – a man my age, I mean – stopped by my table at Tom’s, and laid a hand on my arm. “I just wanted to tell you how happy it makes me,” he said, “to see you praying and studying your Bible in the morning.”

I do say a brief prayer over my breakfast when it comes, but it’s a Buddhist prayer, because those are the only ones I know. I suppose he thinks that any Greek must be the Bible; actually the passage I was working on was a dumbed down paragraph from Herodotus. But he had gone off again before I had really come all the way up from my study-trance. And anyway, correcting him seemed idle, or even churlish. Do I know that he was wrong?

Last night, Ellowyn having become fretful, I picked her up and danced with her under the enthralling ceiling fan, and sang The Owl and the Pussycat to an improvised tune:

They sailed away for a year and a day
To the land where the bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a piggie-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose!

She always likes the advent of the piggie-wig.

This, and That

But my question, the linchpin question, is, "will I come through for myself?" Am I actually on my own side? Can I rely on myself to defend myself and protect myself? Because there is a Gollum portion of me that believes that it can hide, and survive in the wretched dark on cold fish, and by throttling the occasional goblin imp. I have betrayed myself, at critical moments of my life. I can see my way to doing it one last time, and I very much do not want to end my story this way.

You see, this is why the Food Thing has been so important to me: it has been the most basic and chronic betrayal of myself. When in stress and doubt I would hide, and let myself down. Let the Dale of the Sun fend for himself, let him be fat and ridiculous! I was going to hide in the dark, and eat, eat until my mouth was raw, eat until my belly was swollen, eat whatever ever I wanted and never stop, not for him, not for anyone.

But we are not two different people. We are one person, in the light or in the dark. That's why the food thing is important. And though the solution may look like simply thwarting and oppressing Gollum, it must not actually be any such thing. It has to be bringing him gently into the light, reminding him of flowers and grass and sunlight, reminding him of when he too had a family, and listened to wonderful tales out of the South. 

We are not equals. I must be the master. Because I can see him clearly, but he can't see me clearly. Because I can say, "this is enough: this is due proportion." When I let him misbehave I am letting him down, as well as myself. He can't look after himself, not really, though he doesn't understand that. 

---

"There is one God, and his name is Allah," one of them said; and the old man answered, "maybe there is only one Kindred, but there are many people." The roses came back and gave me their scent, yesterday. White roses. If there's not room for them, what is there room for?

But anyway my time for disputation has come and gone. One God or many, my life is His, or theirs. Little noises come piping from our mouths, for a little while, and a wind bends the roses. It's not my part now to quarrel with anyone. And anyway, I only ever quarreled in my head: I taunted my phantasmal enemies, while I grovelled in front of anyone real. It's time to admit that courage has never been my strong suit. Nor do I think I would have done much good, if I had had it. The first struggle is to see things clearly; swinging wildly at shapes in the dark was not going to help anyone.

The Dalai Lama said it was best to stay within your own tradition, "if you could": I used to take that to mean I should be a Christian, if I could, but of course the tradition I was raised in was not Christianity, it was Nothing, the religion of furtively snatched treats, and my god was the Self I was going to be someday but somehow never quite got around to being. Heya! Enough of that. Square One is a fine place to be, if you don't fool yourself into thinking you're somewhere else. Times of collapse are times of beginning.

I used to think that I would figure the world out, and establish a solution, and then impose it -- by force of my brilliance, I guess; that part was always a little hazy -- and the stupidity and hubris of that idea, the revolutionary's idea, has been late in appearing to me. The thing to do was to talk to people, and to come to a common understanding of what was wrong and what needed to be done. That would actually be a political life. Issuing manifestos and marching in shows of ritual (or real) violence is actually about as apolitical as you can get. Politics is talk. It's talking with people you don't understand, and people you don't agree with. It's listening. It's making yourself vulnerable to your neighbors. It's something I can't do. Heya! Enough of that.

So what now, you little rootless last-gasper? Do you go to that little Orthodox church, where the people are so benighted as still to think that a church should be beautiful and services should be reverent? Do you go to that Episcopalian church, where awkward people are actually trying to be nice (in a clumsy and ineffective fashion) to the unfortunate? Do you go to that Zen temple up the street where they take silly Japanese names and dress in weird overalls and take it from the top, all bald heads and rationality? Do you walk under such stars as still can be seen through the city glare, and chant heya? Hah! You don't know. You're hopeless. Go home.

Aubade

 Have I mentioned that a wind blowing up my nose
inflated me to gigantesquerie, and flew me, uprose,
(rows encolumnated, hedgerows overthrown), and gave
to every cipher just the meaning it could hold?

Have I said already (I have already said) that one
dog's cold nose could turn the world to ice, and
a cat's tongue warm it all, in the space between 
the first line and the third? Well, it's left undone, then,

and the sun lays rude and violent hands on me,
shakes me awake and tells me all the things still left to do.
All right. The first on my to-do list was to love you,
and that's done, that's never done, to do.

Names for Things

 If I ask myself why I do certain, in some sense altruistic, things, the answer that seems most apt is "because I don't want to live in a world where..." I don't want to live in a world where no "rational" person voted, or made efforts to conserve energy, just because their contribution made no significant difference; I don't want to live in a world where we turn our backs on the weak, the suffering and the needy, because they are not productive; I don't want to live in a world where we always counted the cost before engaging in acts of helping others. This acknowledges the fact that every decision we make is not just a response to a known and certain world, but is part of co-creating that world for what it is. 

 -- Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, p 1144

As I slowly reread both Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home, and Iain McGilchrists' The Matter With Things, I find myself continually seeing McGilchrist's book as an immensely long footnote: giving in expository form what Le Guin has distilled into vision and story. Just in case you thought it couldn't be made into exposition, that it couldn't be rationally laid out end to end in a single argument: here it is. For those so crippled by the shoes of the modern world as not to be able to walk so far on their own.

I know that in fact McGilchrist read and admired Le Guin, so the fancy maybe isn't so farfetched.

The joy, the pure joy, of having names for things at last. All these gifts. And so little to give back, and that so uncertain, in these troubled times! But no matter. We go on, as we always have, co-creating the world: it's not as if we could stop.

Lots of love, dear ones.

Autistic Kid

"One, two, three, ONE; one, two three, TWO; one, two three THREE..."

We were supposed to chant aloud as we did our calisthenics, in gym class. If an exercise had four sub-moves to it, we counted like that: rather than saying "four" on the last move we inserted the number of full exercises completed. 

I found this bewildering: in fact, I couldn't do it, and when I tried to do it, I couldn't move my body. So typically when performing these sorts of calisthenics, I slowed, moved spasmodically, and ground to halt. Following the two sequences felt deeply wrong. In what world does "three" follow "three"? What is the relationship between the murmured "three" and the bellowed "three"? The further the count went the more confusing it got: my brain worked desperately to establish a mathematical relationship between the sequences: there really wasn't one. but I couldn't help looking for it. 

From the outside, of course: here was that weird kid slacking off again, not even trying to look like he was doing the exercises. Not paying attention, not willing to to try. I can hardly blame my gym teachers for being exasperated with me. Explaining my internal experience was beyond my capacity, even if they had had time to listen, which they didn't. 

It was the more galling, because I prided myself on my mathematics. Numbers were my friend. I could solve quadratic equations in my head. I was in math classes with these kids: some of them found adding 1/2 and 1/3 insuperable. Yet here they were, chanting enthusiastically, tracking two numeric sequences AND moving their bodies. It was a total mystery. How did they do it? And how was I to fake it?

I faked it by trying to ignore the numbers, moving my mouth randomly, and trying to do what the others were doing. It didn't fool anybody. They may have had trouble with fractions, but my classmates had no trouble distinguishing my awkward counterfeits from their own fluid, well-grounded movements. I was the weird kid, and I always would be. 

I pretended not to care about gym class. I aspired to the position of "absent-minded professor," at school: it was not the same thing as a full-fledged person, but it was a role; it qualified you for a spot on Gilligan's Island. I got by. I was bullied a little, but not too much. I had a way with words and a deep fund of malice -- I might land you with a nickname you'd have trouble getting rid of -- and there were easier targets. 

---

Long ago, long ago: why bother with it? I've gotten by, sidling through the world, finding dusty corners to live in, like a wary spider in an untidy house. The weird kid had a will, and a brain. He did all right. Burned out spectacularly twice; threw away two promising careers, but he had a nice family; he ended his working days comfortably doing part time data entry and part time massage: and he had time enough to spend on meditation, prayer, history, literature, and philosophy to actually understand some things. To write some essays and poetry. More than most people ever get. Far more than that kid under the florescent lights of the gymnasium, bewildered by the rhythmic bellowing of the neurotypicals, dared to hope for.

Still the mind goes back, and gnaws on things; misspoken words return, the scent of chalk dust and gym ropes. The painfully obviously developmentally disabled kid I should have befriended, and did not. God's going to ask about him, at our debriefing, and I'm not looking forward to that conversation. His name was Martin -- as if he didn't enough troubles already -- and he was even more duck-footed and awkward than I was, even more easily confused. I didn't participate in tormenting him, and that's as much as I can say for myself. You don't have to run faster than the bear.

---

The physical awkwardness went away completely: I think of myself now as fluid and deft in my movements. Maybe it's just because I'm no longer required to do unfamiliar things at unfamiliar tempos, while receiving a firehose-stream of nonsensical verbiage. Maybe it's some delayed developmental thing. Maybe it was dance class and contact improv in college; maybe it was as late as massage school; maybe it was reading and writing poetry. Anyway I live comfortably in my body now, which has been one of the great, unexpected blessings of adulthood.

---

In the morning the light gleams on a rectangle of copper foil, as I let my spine extend, and the Copper Buddha appears in a circle of radiance. Sometimes it's the sun blazing through a circle of wet twigs. Sometimes it's neither, but only a feeble, elderly reaching of the mind for things half remembered and half made up. If you push for resolution on these things, all they'll do is collapse and shrivel. You take what you get, gratefully; and when there's nothing offered, you take that gratefully too.

Vulture

When this poem germinated I was thinking only of vultures, of their long patient deliberations in the sky: the math teacher walked into it and surprised me. He was an ancient man who taught me calculus -- an amazement that still amazes.

A math teacher stooped in his pulpit walk:
as he turns he lifts one dull black tine
(a primary feather, like a sprig of chalk)
and slowly underscores the horizon line.

He is deliberate, hooded, ugly, sincere.
There is a beat (stroke of pen, sweep of oar)
in his blood-naked head only he can hear:
this is what it means for an old man to soar.