Unready

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

A neat house in old suburban northeast Portland. I wasn't sure I was in the right place -- there were none of the "alternative" markers that, in varying degrees of subtlety, tend to mark of the houses of people I visit. No prayer flags on the porch. No beans growing in the front yard. No "save Tibet" or "We are Everywhere" or "Live Simply" bumper stickers on the cars parked in the street.

But it was the right place. I entered, and added my shoes to the dozen beside the door. There was lemonade, grainy chips of some kind, fresh-made guacamole and salsa, sliced apples, chunks of dark chocolate. Tea in the kitchen. And more food that we didn't even find out about till afterwards. If you want to eat well, all you need to do is hang out with American Buddhists: three quarters of them are great cooks, and they tend to turn all of their events into potlucks. This was just an evening discussion group, Gender and Dharma, but we could have lived well on the yield for a week.

L. rang a bell, and we sat shamatha for a space. Very still. I could hear the cat washing himself. Someone farted quietly, at intervals. I was amused at how much that filled my mind -- guessing who it was, imagining their embarassment, trying to think of how to lightly banter the embarassment away when we're done -- oh, that's right, back to the breath. Was it farting at all, could it be, at such regular intervals? More amusement, to think of the whole castle I'd built, complete with relationships and strategies, on a sound that might after all just be something mechanical -- oh, that's right, back to the breath. What else could the sound be? Was there any smell to tip me off? No, just the smell of cinnamon and -- what? nutmeg? from the someone's tea -- oh, that's right. Back to the breath.

My vision rested on the glass of lemonade on the glass coffee-table. As my eyes crossed and uncrossed, the gold dakini on the cover of our book travelled slowly across the lemonade. Two yellow tulip shapes exchanging places. The pattern of relections and shadows was entrancing. I wonder if I could photograph something like that? So many bloggers I read are blossoming photographers. Oh. That's right. Back to the breath.

It's always awkward, sitting shamatha on furniture that's not meant for it. I tried to sit up straight, but I was tilting on the couch like a tower of Pisa. Falling onto J. would be decidedly uncool. Though I had to admit that I liked the idea.

Oh. That's right.

L. rang the bell again. What was that, fifteen minutes? Longer than I'd expected, anyway. A moment of awkwardness -- no one knew, were we going to bow? Dedicate the merit? Would Lynn ring the bell three more times, as at a formal sit at the center?

Someone put their hands together and bowed. I did too, to keep them company.

I had felt like I ought to come, since J. and I started this group, and I'd missed two meetings now, having gone only to the first. But I was a little bored. I hadn't much liked the essay and I wasn't much liking the discussion. The emptiness of self, the self that Buddhism denies and the self it doesn't. Ho hum. When I was first learning about Buddhism, I had a large appetite for this kind of talk. Now it strikes me as a bit ludicrous. I wondered why on earth we were talking. We had two hours. We could have sat shamatha the whole time. Much better use of our time.

Though of course, if I hadn't come tonight, I wouldn't be sitting, I'd be playing computer games.

J. a couple times asked me what I thought about things. Was I obviously withdrawn? I tried. As I spoke my voice sounded thick and syrupy to me. I was awkward. There was no flow to what I said. It made no particular sense to me. I've never been a fluent speaker, and without practice, I've gotten worse. "Conference maketh a ready man," said Francis Bacon. Full and exact I may be. Ready I am not.

Finishing up. Establishing the next meeting place, choosing the next essay. Should we switch over to meeting monthly rather than every three weeks? It takes an absurd amount of time to decide.

We put our hands together and dedicate the merit, all murmuring together: "By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings without exception in that state." Prosy, unbeautiful Sanskrit rhetoric, abstract and prolix. But it makes a difference. No matter how little merit I may feel I've acquired, and God knows it's little enough tonight, there is something about giving it away that changes everything. It's different, if I've been doing it for all sentient beings. I have to think about its successes and failures a little differently.

Unready. An old Anglo-Saxon king was called that, though not, I imagine, to his face. Ethelred the Unready. Ethelred meaning, of course, "Noble Counsel." Damn Sir Francis Bacon. I've always disliked the man.

That About Covers It

I wanted to set these two Mother's Day posts next to each other.

"Where are your kids?"
My inquisitor is blond and braided. She favors pink, and likes to dance. She turned five last week and is sorry that I missed her party. "It was a princess party," she tells me in conspiratorial tones. "I don't have kids, "I tell her. She will forget, though and ask me again a few hours later. "But why not?" she asks.

-- The Ice Floe

Six in the morning will come quick and still her voice bangs about in my head, her tears sticking to me like guilt.

"I was so hurt by how she spoke to me," the sixty-five year-old mother said, dabbing the folded and refolded tissue to her reddened eyes, her long hair disappearing way beneath the edge of the table. "Why does she do that?"

-- Adriana Bliss

Death

For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose

On a list I belong to we were talking about death, because the mother of one of our company is dying. One person said suffering is opaque and unredeemable, because we die. But another quoted a story of a wave fearing its death, only because it thought it was a wave; it didn't know it that really it was water. A third, whose father died recently, said simply, and with by far the most authority, "Death sucks."

I wrote a long blowhard response of my own, of course. But while I still do believe what I said -- it too was in the wave-and-water line -- its emotional tenor was all wrong. It sounded like I was saying it was fine that people die. And maybe it should be fine, maybe it is for buddhas. It's not for me.

But. This is what I wanted to say: for me death is not something strange and unexpected erupting in our midst. It's only the most obvious of a series of dissolutions and losses. The friends I no longer have, by circumstance or stupidity. They're dead to me. Every moment of love that passes, every endearment forgotten, is a little death. We're dying to each other every day, becoming inaccessible in a multitude of ways. An acquaintance who was friendly to me yesterday is impatient with me today. Death of an infant friendship. Could be. I don't know yet. I may never know. Hundreds of deaths took place around me today, which won't be revealed as such for weeks, months, years. Lifetimes.

The only thing that's special about real death is that everyone agrees on it. It's an obvious turning in that road. Take the first left, you can't miss it. It's an event with a name, that's all. It's when it's publicly acceptable to grieve for all the accumulated losses of a shared life that has been disappearing into darkness all along.

Or into light. We don't know. I love you now. How strange it is, that we live in this little window of the present, this little glimmer of visible light.

I love you now. The incense-ash falls, all at once, at a breath. Where is the stick of incense, now? In the past? In my mind? The feebleness of the answers tells us that we're asking the wrong question. But it also tells us that our answer to the same question, twenty minutes ago, was just as feeble. We thought we knew then; we think we don't know now. Both wrong.

I love you now. Death is the right question, and that's the right answer. I love you now.

Three Portlanders

Sage Cohen

The weight of the world's diamonds can count on me today to hold everything while carrying nothing. I am that possible.

As of yesterday, when I happened across "Sage Said So," one of my favorite bloggers. She's a gifted poet but at the moment I prefer her prose, which is wilder, & throws runners out every which way.


Tiel Aisha Ansari

Like a lost letter
a lone note goes wandering
looking for a tune.

What she's doing looks simple at first. The longer you look the more complicated it gets. She's got the guts to rhyme, and to stumble in her meter if she has to.


Elizabeth Domike

Who better, I think,
to question the nature of reality
than someone who doesn't exist.

Sometime there's going to be a long appreciation of her recent chapbook, "Disenchantment," here. I have to stop being staggered by it, though, which may not happen soon.

Note

My dearest love. You remember, when we were young, how we went out searching for love, as though the problem was that we couldn't find it? When the problem, of course, was that we couldn't get away from it.

The sunshine has a strange tarnish to it today, a metallic darkness. I'm like a thief who's run from the police for hours, finally letting up, and finding himself in utterly strange streets, walking slowly, wondering how to find my way home.

I know; this is the point at which you worry, "what does he want from me?" But all I want now, really, is to stop wanting things from people. That was always the wrong end of the stick. I'm old enough now to take the gifts given to me and be grateful.

I wish I could go down to the scouring sea, today, hear the mutter of the surf and see its heart beating among the rocks.

Not today, though. But soon. Come with me.

Koshtra's Retraction

Okay. Time for me to eat crow. I'm as far as Beowulf's arrival at Heorot, in Seamus Heaney's translation. I'm blown away. This is a magnificent translation. Read it. He gets Beowulf. No other translator has ever succeeded so well, particularly in capturing the Beowulf-Poet's tone, his modulations from formality to pathos, his passion and his sly, straight-faced humor.

Read it. But be aware that it does not (as some of the rave reviews imply) reproduce the Old English verse-form. This is not a "modernization" -- as some translations of Chaucer or Shakespeare, for instance, are. The words and syntax and verse form are quite different. Which is as it should be. (At this point I'm going to get technical; if you're not interested in metrics, it's probably time to move on. Just get Heaney's translation and enjoy the ride.)

In Old English manuscripts poetry is not broken into lines: it is usually "pointed," looking something like this:

there at the pier stood . the ringed prow . icy and out-eager . a prince's vessel . they laid . their dear king . giver of rings . on the ship's bosom . famous by the mast . there were many treasures . from far ways . ornaments loaded . I never heard of a comelier . keel furnished . with battle weapons . and war dress . swords and hauberks . on his breast lay . many treasures . to go with him . into the tide's sway .

(I've tried to be very literal here, but I've added a sprinkling of articles -- "a" and "the" -- that already vitiate the strength of the original.)

Some of the very earliest editors of Old English verse treated the "points" as line-breaks, printing it thus:

There at the pier stood
The ringed prow
Icy and out-eager
A prince's vessel

(The lines are bound into "couplets" by alliteration: both heavily stressed syllables in line one would alliterate with the first heavily stressed syllable of line two.)

Others -- whose practice prevailed -- borrowed the lineation of the later Middle English alliterative tradition, which printed both "half-lines" (as they came to be called) as a single line with a space, a caesura, in between, thus:

There at the pier stoodsssthe ringed prow,
Icy and out-eager,sssa prince's vessel.

All of Old English verse is now printed this way, in a form that no Old English poet ever saw. Translators, to a man, ape this format, which saves space and "looks like poetry" to people trained in pentameter. But usually they dump even the caesura, destroying the last remaining indication of half of the line-breaks in the poem. Thus Heaney has:

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

Now this is a beautiful rendering, and it alliterates (as my own does not), though on different words than the original. But notice what's happened. The alliteration has stopped being functional. It no longer ties two lines together; it just decorates one line, and it seems like possibly a bit too much of a good thing, even though Heaney sensibly drops one of the alliterations from each first "half-line." The other thing that has happened is that the verse has sped up. It's verse to be spoken, not chanted, now.

Another thing that is injured -- Heaney is sensitive to this, but it can't be helped -- is that the Beowulf-poet alliterates on the words that are most important to him. There is a deep sense to what alliterates. In the first line, or couplet if you like, the words that alliterate in the Old English are "pier" and "ring"; in the second it's "icy," "out-eager," and "prince." Compare that with Heaney's "ring" and "rode," and "clad" and "craft." The Old English alliterations emphasize the meaning of the verse; Heaney's just ornaments it. This example is maybe a little unfair on Heaney, who is very aware of this property of alliteration and tries to reproduce it, often with brilliant success. But even he loses more of this than he manages to save.

The details of Old Germanic metrics are too complicated for me to get into here. It's far more complex and satisfying than "a four-beat line" (or two-beat, depending on how you count.) It simply can't be reproduced in modern English, which usually has only two (not three) degrees of stress and no variation in vowel "quantity" (a "long a" is not a longer version of a "short a," in modern English -- it's just a completely different vowel.) Suffice it to say that Heaney has not, and would never claim to have, reproduced the Old English meter. He's translated it into a variation on its nearest cousin, the Middle English alliterative line, which is simpler and more forgiving.

Three Reasons Why You Should Not Read Beowulf

Patry Francis recently listed Beowulf under the heading of Great Books that I Personally Hated. I flinched when I read that, and it immediately launched this diatribe (aimed at the creators of Surveys of English Literature) in my head -- which boils down, basically, to three reasons why you should not read the poem at all.

1. People say you should read it because it is the beginning of English Literature. This is not true. It has nothing to do with the formation of English Literature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton never heard of it. After its rediscovery and translation in the 19th Century it had some minor influence on English poetry. Not much. There'd be a much better case for reading Virgil at the beginning of an English syllabus than for reading Beowulf.

2. People say you should read it because it tells you about the Old Germanic peoples that the English arose from. Well, sure. So does Old High German. So does Old Frisian. So does Old Norse. Why pick this one difficult, idiosyncratic poem -- which exists in only one manuscript, and is referred to by no other medieval writer -- and pretend it's the national epic of the English? I'll tell you why. Because the English dearly wanted to have a national epic, in the 19th Century, when nationalism was trendy, so they made one up. It will teach you precisely nothing about the English nation (whatever that is.)

3. People say it's a great poem. Well, it is, but it translates horribly. Its metrics are foreign and complicated, its images violently compressed, its stock of metaphors is alien to us. Its literary, legendary, and historical allusions are almost all to things we don't know about. Either you flatten it into dreadful broken-backed prose, or wrench it completely away from its poetic roots and stick it in a pot of blank verse or (even worse!) rhymed quatrains or heroic couplets, where it will die a ghastly death, or you create a brand new modern English verse-form that no one but a few scholars will have any idea how to pronounce.

Actually, of course, these are not reasons not to read Beowulf. They are just reasons not to read Beowulf in translation. If you have the time to learn Old English and find your bearings in Old Germanic culture -- it is one of the most beautiful long poems ever written. You'll be just a hop skip & jump also, then from being able to read Old Norse poetry, which is wonderful stuff too. But don't read it as English Literature. Read it as the most beautiful, intricately-wrought artifact of a dead civilization. Which is what it is. If you don't have time to learn old English, don't insult the poem by reading a translation. Just pick up a recording of it, in Old English, by someone who understands Old English metrics, and listen to the music of the words. It's like listening to the sea.

A May Day Contemplation, in Seven Easy Steps

(1) Stop. Look around, at every single made thing in your field of vision, and think: who labored to make this?

(2) Stop again. For every person who labored, think: who labored to make their labor possible?

(3) Stop again. For every person who labored to make their labor possible, who labored to make their labor possible?

(4) If you haven't yet reached an uncountable number of people, you're not thinking very hard, but go ahead and do another round. Now you've got an uncountable number.

(5) Now, imagine that every one of those people worked solely out of love for you.

(6) Notice how you immediately balk at incurring such a debt of gratitude, and object that they only did it in pursuit of their own interests.

(7) Ask yourself how you know.

Shrine

for Beth, with love

This quiet space in the gathering fury of the world,
This philosopher's tower with old lace curtains,
Where words of uncertain meaning but certain significance
Linger on the walls, among the paints and easels --

Pause here. There is the small oak desk
She had when she was a child; she is not one
Who abandons old friends. Moving into exile
She will take the memory of this room with her,

And this room will carry the memory of her.
No doubt the curtains will come down, the heat
Will be updated. New fixtures will appear on the wall
Or on the ceiling. But at day's end, a certain slant of light

Will fall on the face of a puzzling New Englander,
A touch on the hand, a shared joy in the garden, though
No one, supposedly, is there. "It's a calm room,"
She'll say, uncertainly, knowing

There's more to it than that; a pebble dropped
Into the pool of thought, widening circles of light --
No place where God has been made welcome
Ever forgets Her.

I know there's something I want to say, but my thoughts are a tangled string. I can't find either end, can't begin to make them straight enough to write down. Lisa's hands above my heart, Marcel crying for forty-eight hours, Johnny in Lisbon and Jean in London, Elizabeth's verse, Jonquil at the drug store -- there is no beginning to this thread. It was dark when I sat down here. The morning light is strong now, and still I haven't written anything. Picture me, muddled, in the gift-shop of the soul, trying to find the right present, but shy, unclear on the occasion or the person, only knowing I want to give something. Must give something.

I give water to the Buddhas, in this perplexity. Let this gift stand for the appropriate one, which has yet to be found. Or at least, yet to be understood.

Open Sky

So I was starting to sink into it (starting? I spent the whole morning in it.) But I pushed back from my desk at 1:30. Watch the dread. One long breath. Watch the breath.

So I drove to lunch, and talked to myself, saying, "Look, the point is not to replace this ghost of my self with a more appealing ghost. The point is to exorcize the whole damn lot of them. They're all made up; they're all stories. It doesn't matter. It never mattered. There's nothing to be afraid of.

"I just want to get out under the open sky," I said. The trick is, that the habits run so strong, so strong. Not because the ghosts are real. More because they're not. You really think you want to be out under the open sky? (I was sitting at a formica table at the time. "Sky" was a blue rectangle of light, safely behind plate-glass.)

Blood drummed in my temples. But I drove back and began to work. I'm terrified. Have I always been this afraid?

I think so, really. It comes and goes, of course. There's pride and vanity, which take their turns too. But they're made of the same stuff, woven out of the same terror. It's at times like this I wish I were a Christian. They're cleverer really about terror than we are. The heaven of childhood, a punishing father, a mother who intercedes -- that's the imagery appropriate to my condition. Buddhists pretend to be adults all the time.

Drums. The rattle and moan of huge drums. The thunder of the blue sky. Phantoms in the hills.

"I just want to get out under the open sky," I said, but that was when I was picturing the sky as empty. Now it's full of presences. It's always that way; there's terrors behind the terrors. As in a really clever horror movie. The way out turns into the trap.

But. I've run away long enough. I know where running takes me. Nowhere. It's not that I'm going to take a brave stand. I'm simply out of room to run.

That's one way of putting it, shrill and panicky. I can also shrug, and the waves rush away from my mountainous shoulders and sweep the land clean -- phantoms and spirits go tumbling in the surge; the solid ground shivers; stars are jarred from the sky, and fall like snow. That happens too. It can even happen at the same time.

These are more ghosts, of course. Time to go outside again, under that strange sky. Does it ever end?

Money for Coffee

Lo! swich a lucre is in this lusty game,
A mannes myrthe it wol turne unto grame
-- The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Lusting did I live and lusting died
And I laid me down discontent.

Whatever we have told each other
Turns, with the turning of the world, to lies;
Promises slide into habits, habits harden

Into days. God is surely great, but we no longer know
What we mean when we say he is good.

Howl at the moon, grief and rage,
Howl at the sun, it is always the same.
I want in my youth and I want in my age,
Curling and burning with grief and grame.

She wanted to borrow money for coffee.
It is lucky perhaps she doesn't know how little
I could refuse her. But morning runs into night

And night into morning, I go to my room
But my trousers hang in the upstairs bathroom,
Where I left them yesterday, when I went unto woman.

So up the stairs, and back down,
Questing in my wallet. What does coffee cost?
Better give her five. She gives me a brief hug,

Warm but distracted. The youth she has her eye on,
Long-limbed, good-humored, says a careless goodbye.

Eyen Greye as Glas

Medieval poets loved that phrase -- "eyes as gray as glass." They use it where we might say something like "eyes as blue as the sea."

You have to understand that glass was not the stuff of cheap trinkets and mass-produced perfect windows, then. Glass was expensive stuff, and it was thought to be beautiful. I still think it's beautiful. Not modern glass, which aims to be invisible, and succeeds in being insipid. But the sort of glass that a few of the oldest windows in my old house have -- wavy, ripply glass that catches odd glimmers and offers prismatic refractions of slanting light. It is beautiful stuff. Medieval people didn't think glass was just something to see through. It was also something to be seen.

I found myself standing in six inches of water this morning, water gray as glass. The sky was soft and luminous, the clouds drenched with light. Green grass played in the water. My car was gone. Why? I have no idea. It had broken down. Or just gone away. I walked in the pouring rain, the pouring light. Quite cold, but I didn't mind. just now. I was a little worried about how I would get out of this solitude, but not very worried. Everything was very bright, and the grass rippled and shone. I stepped from high place to high place.

I came to an edge, and there, thirty yards below, was the water again. I was bewildered. How could the water be both up here and down there? Why didn't it run down from here to there? A marsh can't sit up on a headland. Can it?
I wondered if I was dreaming. When that thought comes to me in a dream, it usually comes at the brink of waking. But I didn't wake. I kept walking and puzzling.

Finally I stopped. "I must be asleep," I thought. "There's no other explanation."

I made as if to jump into the sky, and cried "Awake!"

I thought maybe I was going to fly. Maybe this was the turning. Maybe this was the door. Buddhists have an ancient image of enlightenment, a fish jumping up into the air. In those pictures the fish blaze with a dozen colors. I thought of those rainbow fish.

My body jerked. My heart pounded. The light ran away into a sleepy darkness. My arms were wrapped loosely around a pillow. Across the room the numbers on the clock glowed green, but I couldn't read them -- my eyes wouldn't focus yet.

If I thought glass was just to see through, I would have been disappointed in that moment. But I wasn't. Not then, not now. A moment of vertigo and confusion, but that's all. I'm still marvelling at the water. Eyen greye as glas.

Pilaf

I scooped a little bag of wild rice, and a bigger bag of basmati rice, yesterday. Off-black and off-white, they rest on the kitchen counter, today, quarreling.

"He'll never cook us," says the wild rice. "You wait. He'll put us in the cupboard, and go to Burgerville, and get pizza, and go out for Chinese, and we'll sit there in the dark till the moths or the mildew get us. You wait. You'll see."

"Well, now, we don't know that," says the Basmati, reasonably. "He thought about us yesterday, and imagined the whole thing in detail. Almonds to sliver, olive oil, garlic. He bought another steamer-insert just a few weeks ago. That's the life he really wants -- a life in which he can cook. He thought it all out."

"Yeah, right," says the wild rice. "There's a drawer right underneath us. You want to take bets on how old the brown rice and couscous and quinoa -- quinoa, for Christ's sake! -- how old they are? He doesn't know himself, I bet."

"What are you so anxious to be cooked for, anyway? What difference does it make to us? At least he thinks we're beautiful. 'Off-black and off-white,' that was kind of poetic, wasn't it?"

"Oh, God, spare me. That's what he always does. Goes limp and aesthetic. All he's got to do is pop us into a pot, and what is he doing? He's admiring our looks and composing blog posts. And meanwhile his family lives on fried food and ice cream, and regrets being stout. I mean? Gimme a break. I'd rather be Rice-Crispies. Snap, crackle, pop."

"Oh, come on. You're not a rice really, you know, you're a grass. Too hard to harvest, too pricey to make Rice-Crispies out of. They wouldn't even make Rice-Crispies out of me."

"Well that's what I mean! Seven bucks a pound, I am. For this I pose on the kitchen counter for a couple days? I was meant to be savored! And any sugared bleached wheat-product floozy has a better chance of really getting his attention than I do."

"Well, look, don't talk that way where he can hear you, okay? If he start's feeling guilty, then we're really screwed. That's what that brown rice and couscous and quinoa all have in common, you know. They stared at him reproachfully for a few days, and now they're in that drawer for good, so he doesn't have to look at them. So buck up! Look friendly and inviting! He loves food really, you know. He actually can cook. Make him think of that!"

"What is this, your lovey-dovey Hindu stuff? Look, Basmati, I'm from Montana. We don't do this feel-good, I'm-OK-you're-OK stuff. We say, shit or get off the pot, cowboy. You want to cook, cook! You don't want to cook, don't buy little bags of rice. How hard is that?"

"You're just making it worse, man. Just making it worse."

I think I'll put them in the cupboard. Just for now.

Before the Season

I've got a poem, Before the Season, up on Qarrtsiluni.

A Battered Homely Thing

A good discussion of the death of languages over on Cassandra Pages. When has a language changed so much that it's ruined?

Languages have souls, I think. Vocabulary isn't much of the core of it -- grammar and syntax are closer to the heart -- but the bedrock couple hundred words may be. If English speakers suddenly started replacing words such as hand, wind, love, or bone, I would be greatly distressed.

In one sense English is already dead. The form of English I love best was destroyed by the Normans nearly a thousand years ago. Half the vocabulary was lost then; a great poetic tradition was forgotten; the spelling was made into the ludicrous mess it remains today. A couple centuries later a strange disease we now call "the great vowel shift" mangled the language still farther, lifting the pitch of all the vowels, making it the most constricted and squeaky of the European languages, and dragging the spelling even farther away from its pronunciation. Onto this mutilated trunk were clumsily grafted branches of French, Latin, and Greek. To someone with a historical linguistic sensitivity Modern English feels inauthentic -- it's a pastiche. My Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero.

But I don't think English has lost its soul, even now. Sky, root, heart, hold. It's had a long hard life; it's a battered, homely thing now, but it's still ours.

Jericho

In the space, he said. In the space between the ripening of karma and our reaction to it, between (as we might say) the arising of an emotion and the construction of a storyline about it, there is a hairsbreadth of space, that's where you have a choice. Too small to see for most people most of the time. Meditate, watch closely, sometimes you can see it.

She said: you call that a choice, but that seems wrong. I'm not aware of any choice there. It seems like the choice must be somewhere else. (Tears, tears etched into the face, but dignity beyond the human -- she frightens me sometimes.)

Choice is the wrong word, he agreed. It carries too much baggage. Call it freedom.

But it is possible to act out of that space, he said.

And I realized just what an impossible wacko cult I belong to. Forget amulets and prophets and reincarnation and glittering deities -- those are sober science and ordinary daily experience, compared to claiming that someone could act out of that stillness. (Later he lifted the bell and the vajra, visual aids, making a simple point about wisdom and skillful means. The world rocked. Was I the only one that noticed?)

It's no wilder than our workaday delusion of a sovereign self, which, unswayed by cicumstances, says I choose this or I choose that. He justly compared that to a man jumping out of an airplane and thinking, "hmm, shall I choose to fall up or fall down?" We are hagridden by our self-conception, mercilessly driven by our sifted, censored image of reality. Never are we less free, never more predictable, never more chained to the past, than when we make what we fondly call "choices."

And yet. Something like freedom must be, or there could be no consciousness at all. We would be frozen solid. There would be no need for awareness and no opportunity for it. Nagarjuna demonstrated many centuries ago that If things had inherent existence, change would be impossible. As a corollary -- if we had no freedom, the question of whether we had freedom would never arise.

What good is freedom, you might say, if it lives in such a narrow space?

But I don't think that anyone who's ever experienced the power of that half-second of liberty could ever ask that question.

This is the beginning of the end. Late or soon, the tower will fall. This is what you see first: a few grains of sand trickling from the stressed foundations. It means though that the whole fortress is collapsing. Maybe not today, maybe not this lifetime, or the next, or the next eon, or the next kalpa, or the next cycle of the big bang. Doesn't matter. The trumpet's been blown. The thing's coming down.

Forty Questions

For some reason this one really charms me. Udge did one and so did Beth. I'm tagging you, Dear Reader.

1) Who is the last person you high-fived? -- Hmm... I don't know. I'd guess my teenaged friend Jonquil.

2) If you were drafted into a war, would you survive. -- Odds are pretty good. I wouldn't expect my odds to be much different from anyone else's, which I think is what the question is driving at.

3) Do you sleep with the TV on? -- Nope. Only TV in the house receives two channels and is on for two hours Saturday mornings. & it's in my son's room.

4) Have you ever drunk milk straight out of the carton? -- Sure. Last night, in fact.

5) Have you ever won a spelling bee -- I must have, in grade school. I was pretty insufferable that way.

6) Have you ever been stung by a bee -- maybe once. Half a dozen times by yellow-jackets. They get mean, late in the Fall.

7) How fast can you type -- pretty fast, but my accuracy's not all that good. I spend a lot of time backspacing.

8) Are you afraid of the dark? -- I LOVE the dark.

9) Eye color -- sky blue.

10) Have you ever made out at a drive-in? -- Oh. Yes. Yes, definitely. Yes.

11) When is the last time you chose a bath over a shower? -- a couple months ago?

12) Do you knock on wood? -- oh yeah. I have a little piece of wood I brought into the office especially for the purpose, since there's no real wood here in cubicle land. More often though I say "knock on wood!" and rap on my skull.

13) Do you floss daily? -- I seem to do it daily for a month or two, and then forget it for a week or two, and then do it daily for a month or two, and so on.

15) Can you hula hoop? -- Nope. Can't make the things stay up at ALL. Bugs me.

16) Are you good at keeping secrets? -- Yes.

17) What do you want for Christmas? -- I deeply, devoutly, wholeheartedly want the damn holiday to go away. I hate it.

18) Do you know the Muffin Man? -- No, which I think is too bad.

19) Do you talk in your sleep? -- Not often.

20) Who wrote the book of love? -- Emily Bronte wrote one of them. Charlotte wrote the other.

21) Have you ever flown a kite? -- Sure. I even sold them once, on the beach near Astoria.

22) Do you wish on your fallen lashes? -- Never heard of it. Too old to start now.

23) Do you consider yourself successful? -- Huh. I don't know.

24) How many people are on your contact list of your cell? -- You get me a cell, I'll tell you how many contacts I put on it.

25) Have you ever asked for a pony? Nope.

26) Plans for tomorrow? Figure out why my damn tests run on Mr Gates' operating systems in the US, but not in Canada.

27) Can you juggle? -- Yes, but only three objects at a time.

28) Missing someone now? -- Yes.

29) when was the last time you told someone I Love You? -- This morning.

30) And truly meant it? -- Of course!

31) how often do you drink -- Almost never.

32) How are you feeling today? -- Delighted.

33) what do you say too much? -- "Oh, anything's fine with me."

34) Have you ever been suspended or expelled from school? -- Hmm. I don't think so.... but I could have been.

35) What are you looking forward to? -- Visiting Montreal.

36) Have you ever crawled through a window? -- Oh yes, many times. Mostly for fine upstanding reasons like being locked out.

37) Have you ever eaten dog food? -- not that I remember.

38) Can you handle the truth? -- Well, better than I can handle lies, anyway.

39) Do you like green eggs and ham? -- Sure. What's not to like?

40) Any cool scars? -- Oh yeah. I have one shaped like the orange mark on a Black Widow's belly on the back of my left thumb. I think it's really cool.

Ordinary

I think this is good. But I'm not sure.

I've been working pretty hard -- putting in five times as much real work, probably, as I had been during my slump. I'm pulling myself out of habitual grooves over and over.

It's exhausting. I keep finding that the question "am I doing this the best and smartest way I can think of?" turns up the answer: "no." Not that it's any easier or more rewarding to do the work in a substandard way. On the contrary, it's harder and less rewarding. But I've habitually chosen the way of least exposure. Do it the laborious way rather than ask somebody's help. Spending half an hour trying to make sense of blurry documentation rather than phoning someone who's sure to know, and could tell me in two minutes.

But every time I ask for help or make a phone call, it takes its toll. And I end the workday completely spent.

It's easy to imagine I"ve transcended something when in fact I haven't risen to it yet. I used to plume myself on how I put my work aside at the end of the day, and came home to be fully with my family. Not like those drones who worked themselves into a stupor and came home unavailable.

But really, I had just solved the problem by hiding out at work. I could come home and be present, because I'd had a whole day of being absent. I hadn't balanced anything.

I'm trusting that at some point this will become less hard. Because I can't keep this up much longer.

Beyond this -- well beyond this -- is the question of whether I actually want to be doing this work. I'm more than ever convinced that I was right when I decided that I would never be able to determine that, unless I knew what it being committed to the work was like.

I feel diminished and ordinary, though. This was what I have been protecting myself against, all these years -- against this sense of myself as just a person like any other person, subject to the same discontents, laboring under the same conditions. And that's exhausting too. I hadn't realized just how heavily I leaned on a sense that I had something special about me, something in reserve that would dazzle people if they only knew -- how much I depended on that. If this is really all I am (and what else could a person be, than what they are? There's a lot of teeth in that; come back to it) -- if this is really all I am, then all the motivation I've drawn from glittering futures has to be replaced. Replaced with ordinary pleasures. And that's not just a morning's work, either; that's another task, as hard for me as lifting the telephone.

Memory

Yesterday my highschool roommate said he had seen me slap my girlfriend, once. I believe him, but I don't remember it, and there was a cold constriction behind my breastbone all day. This is well over thirty years ago; any connection I have to that overwrought teenager is tenuous, but it distressed me, and it still distresses me.

That I'd done it -- if I could remember it -- would be forgiveable. I was fifteen and terribly unstable. But that I could do it and forget it, that's what frightened me. What else have I forgotten? Just how much editing has gone into making this persona?

I had to ask Martha, last night. "Have I ever hit you?"

Her blank perplexity was reassuring. I told her why I was asking. "No, you've never hit me," she said.

So that was a relief, anyway.

I still don't remember it. But a couple hours after he had said that, a picture formed in my mind: a dark hallway, and she standing a couple yards away, on her high-colored face an expression of mixed anger and triumph. The expression said, "I knew that was what you really were." There's no movement to this picture. Nothing leads up to it or away from it.

My memory works like that. Disconnected pictures, charged with emotion. There are no stories in my memory, no narratives. I'm always astonished by people with narrative memories. Martha has the whole history of our lives in stories. Start her anywhere, with any memory, and she catches the thread of the story, and soon the narrative unfolds, complete with characters and motives. She even remembers other peoples' stories.

But my memory is little vivid pictures framed by a huge darkness. I remember things I've seen and things I've felt. There's M, having just stepped back from me, the stairs tumbling away to my right, an unlighted doorway behind her; and the picture is suffused with dread. But that's all there is.

Sweet Delight

Down from the Carolina shore
The Yankee sails tonight
Carrying soldiers guns and more
Down below
Down below
The Yankee sails tonight.

The loom of the wind over the shoulder of the hill; Antares wrecked in the surf of Scorpio; late summer, and the grass thick and wet with dew.

An anxious scrabbling underneath the split concrete of the 'S' for Springfield, a teenage hand thrust under the waistband of tight jeans, reaching as far as a soft nest of pubic hair, and then stopping. Further than it had ever got before, and that was enough. No idea what to do beyond that point, anyway. But too tightly wedged in the jeans to withdraw.

Impass, till she abruptly wriggles free, with an unaccustomed mobility of hip, and reaches for the Gallo jug again.

Splintered brown-gold glass, glittering in the far reflected gleam of a streetlight, old cigarette packs, cheap wine. A place where old idols cluster for revenge.

But that's not this story. Except that it's always the same story. "If it's not one damn thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over."

Oh she sails with the wind it's a bloody end
She has for the rebels' fight
When there's money in the banks there'll be hoodlums in the ranks
Down below
Down below
The Yankee sails tonight.

But no, it's not greed and it's not desire that we have to fear. It's the plowshare of habit, digging one gash of a furrow, over, and over, and over, till all of life is one muddy line. That one Cyclopic tooth. Our one bite, like the sting of a honey-bee.

Hard unaffectionate kisses, the sour taste of Gallo, and a disaster of clouds gathering up the valley. This night will never end. Not till they all end.

Lake Water

I don't remember what lake it was -- Waldo Lake? Triangle Lake? -- or why we were there. It was not a real lake -- Oregon doesn't run much to natural lakes, being so geologically young -- but a reservoir, a drowned river valley. We didn't ordinarily go to such lakes, my Dad having an aversion to man-meddled landscapes, so I wonder that we were there. Wild rivers and mountains were more in his line.

But I remember just this -- seeing the wrecks of trees below me, dark green shadows, like a dim nightmare of giant pick-up-sticks. Sinking into the cool, hazy water, sunlight filtering through uncertainly. My feet touched the cold water underneath, and recoiled. It was icy down there with the corpses of the trees. "Not yet," I thought.

Today the sadness surrounds me, just like that. The light of the dharma weakly illuminating it. There is a different world up above, and a different one again down below. But for now I'm held up, held down by the sadness. Suspended.

(Love, which made all things -- ah well, it made this, at least.)

The cherries are already blossoming.

Here, where winter never really takes hold, and never really leaves.

"You should believe in reincarnation," my teacher's teacher said to him. "You should believe in reincarnation."

"Why?" he said

"Because believing that will push out all the other stupid things you believe."

Sometimes the loneliness and longing are so intense, that it feels like an intoxication. I am poisoned with it, drunk with it. I become reckless. Sometimes there is a really dangerous moment or two -- but then I just become weak, weak and sick.

But listen, enough of that.

Oh penny, brown penny, brown penny
One cannot begin it too soon.

Angel

She was hideous when I first saw her -- head half shaved, criss-crossed with wicked rows of black stitches, one ear in shreds, and half her side shaved and stiched too. She'd apparently lost a fight with a racoon. The stiches looked like zippers against her pink flesh and white fur.

It was Martha, of course, who found her, under a bush. Her owner was away, so Martha took her to the vet. It was a good chunk of money to patch her up. Her owner, when she came back, said "oh -- I would have just had her put her down." So since we were willing to shell out, and to nurse her, we got a cat.

She was a tiny thing, and she'd been living hard even before that -- she weighed only a few pounds.. She lay flat on the bed like a dirty white child's sock. But when I found an undamaged bit of her to pet, she purred.

"She did that at the vet," said Martha, ruefully. "we were looking her over, deciding whether we should even try to put her back together, and I stroked her, and she started purring. I couldn't believe it Well, after that --"

She was embarassed, as she always is about spending money on animals. I always say to think about all the much stupider things people spend much more money on -- luxury automobiles, for example, or fancy clothes, or jewellery. If they're not embarassed about that, why we should be embarassed about spending money patching up cats?

Even patched up, she suffered from heart trouble and asthma. Her purchase on life was tenuous. But she doubled her weight over the next few weeks, and within a couple weeks had blossomed into a beatiful little white cat, with arresting dark eyes, fluffy and dainty, a perfect old lady's cat. With an old lady's cat's name: Angel. I was a little ashamed of the name, and always made a point of telling people we hadn't named her. But in fact it was a good name for her: she was ethereal and light as a feather. A visitor in this world.

That was a year or two ago. After living with us for couple months, she suddenly found her voice. She'd barely made a sound, up till then; we weren't even sure she could meow. But it seemed she'd finally built up enough confidence to ask for dinner. And pretty soon she'd built up enough to insist on dinner, like any other cat.

This morning I heard an odd sound, like a brief moan of overstressed machinery. Couldn't tell where it was coming from. I sat down at the computer & did a bit of work. There was the sound again.

I got up and found her half-under the easy chair, twisted around as if she had been fighting with it, her claws fixed in the upholstery. My first thought was that somehow she had gotten trapped under it. Her eyes were all pupil, staring hard. She was perfectly still.

I gently unhooked her claws. She wasn't trapped. But she wasn't okay either. She writhed in slow motion once, with her forelegs held out stiff in front of her. Made that queer noise again. I think she was trying to stand, but her body wasn't following instructions. I stroked her, looking for injuries, though I didn't really expect to find any. I know neurological damage when I see it. Poison, or a stroke, was my guess.

She calmed a little as I stroked her. Closed her eyes, and began to purr.

I woke Martha, and she took Angel to the veterinary clinic, while I took Alan to school and went on to work. She called me here at work, not long ago. Angel had purred while she was holding her after the final injection, too. "I cried and cried," admitted Martha.

Clutch

I loved the swings, when I was in grade school. I was slow, as a rule -- one of those pudgy kids who always trailed at the back of the pack when running laps in gym class. My big athletic ambitions then were a) not to be the very last, and b) not to get "lapped" -- overtaken from behind by the boys in the lead. That was humiliating.

But slow as I was, I always got to the swings in time to claim one. I don't remember, but I suspect I somehow crept out of class a minute or two early in order to do so. (I wasn't fast, but I was good at getting places unseen and unheard.) I loved everything about the swings. The tall steel A-frame of cold steel posts, rock-solid and well-made, standing out as sharp-focused objects in that vague haze of shoddy public property. The flexible black seats, made of some mysterious material I've never been able to identify, half canvas, half tire-rubber, corded with strong fibers. The big-linked chains by which those seats hung from the crosspieces.

I would pump and pump, higher and higher, diving and swooping and diving and swooping. I often did this for the full recess period. I did it for so long that when it was time to go back inside, it was difficult to release my clutch; I had held so tight and so long that my hands had frozen onto the chains. I had to pull them loose, and I would walk back to class gingerly prying my fingers open. It was deliciously painful. The prints of the chain links, a pattern in red and white, were vivid on my finger and palms.

I was reading Noko's diary yesterday, She wrote of finally giving up on "the two things that were the most important, the driving force and cause of so much suffering over the last ten years or so" -- the hopes for an ideal love and the hope for poetic recognition.

-- and I thought of that sensation, the painful but, deeply gratifying sensation of loosening a long-held clutch. You don't know how hard you were holding till you let go.

Passport

I dug out my old passport, circa 1980, a few days ago. The photo showed a strapping clean-shaven blond youth with large blunt scandinavian features, my hair in a ponytail, a cheerful, eager-to-please smile on my face. I was startled to see that I still signed my name in cursive then -- a jerky back-and-forth scrawl with a few awkward swoops. Not long after that I took to signing my name, as I still do, in flowing printed capitals. The whole thing used to be legible. Nowadays there's just "DALE A. ~~~~~~~~" -- it tails off into a wavy line. I signed my county taxes that way, this morning.

I lingered over the picture. I was not happy then. It was in fact one of the low points of my life. I was grinding out an uninspired novel by sheer will power, well-intentioned people having assured me that real writers just crank away regardless of inspiration. I knew what I was writing was worthless, but my ego was clamped desperately onto Being a Writer. It was a miserable time. So why did I look at the picture with nostalgia? I'm much happier now.

Nostalgia is a queer emotion, a collection of emotions really, I guess. There's always dramatic irony in looking at old photographs. I know how the story's going to turn out, but that pony-tailed young man doesn't. I catch the backwash of his anxious hope. The one thing I could tell him that would really appall him, is that I won't be much different in twenty-five years. I'll still be fretting mostly about the same things -- trying to figure out if there's a place for me in the world, falling in love with unattainable people, imagining utopias, squandering time on compulsive pattern-filling. I could tell him that the only thing he's begun that will really have any lasting impact on anyone is his relationship with Martha. I don't think he'd want to hear any of those things. And then of course there's the premonition that twenty-five years from now, I may be pausing again over a twenty-five-year-old passport. The dramatic irony doesn't stop here.

Hakluyt's Voyages

Ships of green wood, ill-carpentered, a velvet scum uncovered
By broaching the water barrels, and men of uncertain alliegance.
Six weeks since sight of land. A birdless sky, and rebellious winds,
Old wounds opening and teeth coming out of young men's jaws,
The telltale pause before following orders, the flicker of mutinous eyes,
We have seen all this before. We know what all this means.
Clouds chasing clouds out of a creaking shuddering unquiet sea;
A kiss from the cold wave, a splatter from its breast.

Holding by a withered linen tape, muttering, I go
And sailors scramble to avoid my eye. One bloody star
In the darkening gloom, Mars rising from our wake and burning
Like a reflection of the sunset in the Goddess's stern eye.
If she will not speak to me, then I must split my mouth to her.
"Lady," I say, "I did not think that you would serve me so,
After all I have done for you." Thunder moans astern, the sky
Shatters along a jagged blazing line.

She reminds me of her gifts. Two days the black-skinned people
Feasted us, and danced with us. On the third we took them slaves,
Sold them to the king of skulls. That was a fortunate start.
Then the Portuguese hoard of silver betrayed into our hands;
We nailed them to their doors, enemies and judases alike,
And fired the town. The Lady was kind to us that day, it's true,
The smoke of men burning, oily and thick, is in my nostrils yet.
"Shall I say more?" She whispers. The taffrail heaves.

"You promised me more," I say. "You know you promised me more."
Another levenflash. The men behind me groan, unless
It is the bones of this rotting ship. "You promised me happiness!"
I shriek, and she laughs, and drapes her hair across my beard,
And murmurs in my ear, "My precious fool, my little toy,
You're thinking of some other god. Happiness? What's that?
I promised you your heart's desire, that's all." A blackness opens.
Her leg is cold on my thigh. Her tongue is cold in my mouth.

A Quiet Generation

Still I can hear your heartbeat when you lean over my shoulder.

The former owners of this house, they say, died in it. After living here a quiet generation, their kids all grown and moved out, one year much like the next. And now we are moving toward being the old couple in the old house. Moss grows on the roof. An old carousel-horse is so buried under long matted grass, by the back-yard fence, that it can be neither seen nor easily removed. Once our kids played on it.

Your breasts rest lightly against my shoulder and the nape of my neck, as you reach past me to lift a bowl from the table.

The neighbors' youngest son -- the one who visits home occasionally from college now -- asked you, not long after we moved in, with wide eight-year-old eyes, if it wasn't spooky to live in a house someone had died in. You laughed and said no. Most old houses, you said, someone has died in, at some point. You grew up in the house your grandparents died in.

You didn't say, but you could have, that what's spooky is a house that no one's died in, no proper house but a campsite. What's spooky is a people who can't hold still long enough to bury their dead.

I lean my head back against the softness, and listen. The distant, resonant beat.

Resolution

So an odd thing has happened. For over a week I have been full of resolution and combativeness, determined to retrieve my reputation at work, and wholly free from defeatism.

I can identify some reasons. A couple weeks ago I doubled my dose of antidepressants, back up to the middling dosage prescribed for me a few years ago. I got a frankly bad performance review at work. I've been reading books that showcase resolution and gallantry. And I resumed my Ngondro practice. I'm inclined to give that, sporadic as it's been, most of the credit.

With this change, some things have come into focus. How much the psychological center of my life has been a desire for approval in the real world, and a conviction that it's unavailable. I've grown very skeptical about the existence of this world, over the years, let alone its claims to superior reality, but that hasn't stopped it from cowing me. I have fled from it at every opportunity, seeking distinction in all sorts of alternative worlds, but hoping only to avert disaster in the real one. Now that a minor disaster -- that of losing a job I have not much liked for the past five years -- looms, it has suddenly lost its terrors. I don't really care. What I do care about is freeing myself of this incubus of self-doubt. I am determined to fail honestly, if I do fail -- to fail because the work is beyond my capacity, and not because of procrastination and diffidence. Failing that way would be a victory anyway.

I don't for a moment suppose that my struggle with self-doubt is over, any more than my struggle with my eating habits was ended by my apparent triumph over them last year (the last time, incidentally, that I was regularly doing my Ngondro practice.) But -- as with the eating habits -- knowing that this self-doubt can be defeated makes a great difference.

Blogdom being one of those alternative worlds in which I've sought distinction in order to avoid struggling for what I want, and believe I can't obtain, in the real world, I will probably be reading and posting less often. But when I'm here it will be because I want to be here, and not because I'm escaping from somewhere else.

Qarrtsiluni

Things have been a bit quiet here, but you should all go read Maria Benet's new poem at Qarrtsiluni. It's terrific.

...Again you write:
nothing to declare,
nothing worth currency.

The Intolerable Fluttering of the Leaves

The tidal rush of anxiety, and its foam of anger. Then the ebb, and all that's left on the beach is loneliness. Lost confidence, lost connection.

At first, of course, I try to recover it, Whatever "it" is -- it's not something I know I have when I have it. It only announces itself by absence. Confidence -- clarity -- equanimity -- something like that. At this point, how would I know? But having sat with it twenty minutes, now, I can maybe turn a little bit from clutching at the recovery, and wonder what its absence has to bring me. If nothing else, compassion and understanding. I'm not the only person who has lost it.

The solution is to give it away. I'm sure of that. To take such shreds of it as remain to me, and offer them someone, anyone. To leave it "free to all finders." I can find my bearings quite exactly by my fear. Let it blindly spin me to the direction it chooses. Then open my eyes, turn 180 degrees, and start walking.

This is, after all, the place from which I can take refuge, maybe the only place from which I can really take refuge.

The fluttering, the intolerable fluttering of the leaves. Presence, absence, presence, absence -- do you start to see? That's why I have to practice it over and over, not because I will succeed, but precisely and only because I will fail.

The six bright pennies that I chose to be the counters for my ngondro practice are the color of dark molasses, now. But they're still there.

Okay. Thank you for walking with me. I can go on from here alone.

THE FOUR THINGS MEME

I've been tagged by Pronoia!

Four Jobs I've Had

1) Bucking hay in Yelm, Washington. It was hot. The diabetic farmer lost it and yelled at us a lot, especially toward mealtimes. The first day I managed to hook myself in the chin with my baling hook. Hint: a bale of alfalfa is MUCH heavier than a bale of hay.

2) Teaching Chaucer in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I took the train into Bridgeport and wondered every day if I was going to get mugged on the way to the university. Bridgeport is a scary town. Hint: play up the sex in the Canterbury Tales and sell Chaucer as a jolly old humanist. Chaucer as sad moralist is a drug on the market.

3) Doing restaurant kitchen prep in Portland, Oregon. My favorite job ever. I love chopping vegetables and I love the frantic warmth of a kitchen when the staff is jammin and the wait-staff is literally running. Hint: don't be alarmed by the tantrums of the chef. Within minutes all will be well again.

4) Programming in varied suburbs of Portland. What can I say? It's a living. Hint: you will never be a hotshot like the PhD's from MIT. Get over it.


Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

Ooh. This will be hard. I seldom watch movies. Mostly it's videos with the kids.

1) The Muppets' Treasure Island. My all-time favorite movie. (No, I am not sophisticated. Never claimed to be.)

2) GalaxyQuest. (See?)

3) Monty Python & the Holy Grail (you notice the theme of parodied adventure quest being hit pretty heavily along here?)

4) The African Queen (and here too. All four of them. Heavens.)


Four Places I've Lived

1) Eugene, Oregon

2) Olympia, Washington

3) New Haven, Connecticut

4) Portland, Oregon. (& that's it, really. I haven't moved around much.)


Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

Oh. Um, I haven't watched a TV show voluntarily for over twenty years. We have to go back to my youth, here.

1) Star Trek

2) Get Smart

3) Mash

4) That show Dean Martin did, with the girls who danced sexy. (Hey, I was twelve years old! The hormones were raging. And internet porn hadn't been invented yet.)


Four Places I've Been on Vacation

1) Mexico (the Pacific Coast, somewhere or other)

2) Greece (mostly by water)

3) Scotland (by tour bus. A lot of sheep and stone walls, up there)

4) Otter Rock, on the Oregon Coast. (every year for 29 years)


Four Blogs You Visit Daily

(Just four??? Sorry. Can't do this one. No way I can get my list down to four.)


Four of Your Favorite Foods

1) Twice-Cooked Pork

2) Chocolate-Hazelnut milkshakes, as made by Burgerville (eat your hearts out, non-Northwesterners!)

3) Thai peanut anything

4)
(Those with tender sensibilities want to skip now)
(Really)
(Okay, I warned you!)
barbecue potato chips.


Four Places You'd Rather Be

1) The Well at the World's End

2) Koshtra Pivrarcha

3) The Last Sea

4) Antarctica


Four Albums You Can't Live Without

This is getting way too revealing. It's possible that I don't keep up with the times very well.

1) Laura Nyro, Eli & the 13th Confession

2) Crosby, Stills, & Nash

3) Simon & Garfunkle, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme

4) The Who, Who's Next


Four vehicles I've owned

1) A blue Honda Accord, one of their earliest models.

2) A grey Honda Accord, twenty years old. Still have it. Still runs.

3) White Plymouth Voyager van, '95. Getting a bit rickety.

4) That's it. I guess I don't go through cars very fast.


Four Tagees

Oh yeah, I forgot this part. I knew there was a reason I didn't do these. Choosing tagees is always so hard. Here goes!

1) Savtadotty

2) Lioness (this is a low trick, but you never know, it might work.)

3) Carmen

4) Zhoen

Evening

She was loitering anxiously by the stage door. When she saw us, she lit up, and ran to meet us. She flung her arms around me, and cried "you came!"

Martha held up her hand and backed cautiously away. "My back's not so good," she warned. Jonquil's embraces can be on the violent side. Jonquil hugged her carefully. She was dressed for her servant-girl role in The Crucible.

It was time for the play to begin, but a number of the actors were still milling about the sidewalk, teenagers in knee-breeches and high collars, or black dresses and white bonnets. Nervous, disjointed hilarity and banter. They began to drift into the building. A skinny, grizzled, bespectacled bicyclist arrived and slowly dismounted, looking around him with slightly unfocused, apprehensive eyes.

"You shouldn't do that to me!" snapped Jonquil. "I thought you weren't coming!" He muttered something.

We filed into the auditorium, and wound up sitting down near him. He was troubled with a quiet cough, and couldn't seem to get quite comfortable.

Halfway through the performance, I glanced his way. He was gone.

Lies and Hiding

The next Qarrtsiluni theme is "Lies and Hiding." The editorial team is especially brilliant this time, so submit your best stuff.

Homeward

Lights. A snake of white and red twisting out of Beaverton, over the West Hills. Not quite night yet -- the gun-metal sky gleams blue here and there, indifferent to the lights below.

It seems something more of the natural than of the human world, these lines of cars making homeward. Watching from a distance you would wonder how they knew it was time to flock, what impulse brings them all out at once, like crows gathering for the night. It displays nothing of the supposed human monopoly on planning and deliberation. Did I mean to get in my car and drive home? Often I just find myself on the road, with no clear idea of how I got there. If I had to explain my intent, I would be at a loss for a few moments, and when I did produce one I'd have no confidence in it. Like the crows, we gather at evening -- there's a restlessness, a sense that to linger would be to invite disaster.

Light thickens, and the crow makes homeward to the rooky wood.

As usual, the traffic slows almost to a halt as it approaches the tunnel. I don't believe, again, that there's a rational reason for this; we just balk at going into the ground, we hesitate, and only the press of cars behind us keeps us going at all. I peer into the cars around me. I can't really see any people. In the cab of a pickup, a woman's lined, expressionless face is lit momentarily by a flaring match. The face vanishes, and only a glowing cigarette-end is visible.

A surge of light and noise as we plunge into the tunnel. It's brightly-lit. I could look at faces now, but, like everyone, I drive with tense concentration, with no eye for anything but the road and the cars. The real increase in danger is probably tiny, but the unnatural confinement, and sense of being on a lit stage, makes us all uneasy. We're all anxious to be out of the tunnel.

We emerge, and suddenly we are out of the country of freeways and housing developments and industrial parks. The exit lane ends at an ordinary downtown traffic light. This is Portland, "the city that works," as it smugly but truthfully proclaims itself. There are people on the sidewalks, and plenty of open shops. Everything has become human-scale again. Crows must feel just this way when they reach their roosting-grounds. All the irritations of social and family life lie before them, the bickering and crowding and posturing, but they've escaped the dread of some powerful, unknown, silent owl falling on them from behind.

I drive slowly through downtown, slowing to give people trying to exit parking-garages a chance to get out. Now that I'm free of the suburbs, I'm in no hurry to get home. I watch the people crowding the bus stops, the people working out in the gym at the Hilton, the people crossing the streets, the stately bicyclists in business dress and the hell-for-leather bicyclists in spandex. I float happily over iron gratings of the Hawthorne bridge, clustered also with bikes and pedestrians. The river glitters below us.

Now it's just a straight shot down Hawthorne Boulevard, an uncertainly trendy arterial. Past the Baghdad Cafe and the Fred Meyer. Clear down to Mt Tabor, which is neither a mountain nor tabor-shaped, but a small round volcanic hill, complete with cinder-cone and crater, smack in the middle of the city. We live nestled under its shoulder.

I pull in, under the huge maple trees in front of our house. Clouds roll over the moon. The stillness when I kill the engine is deep. I close my eyes and take a long breath. Home.

Teju Cole is not going to be here much longer. Get it while you can.

I cannot leave until I'm really here.

The Sky at the End of the World

1980. Early one Sunday morning, I walked into town as usual, down the road above Puget Sound. The Spar, in downtown Olympia, was the only cafe that opened early enough for me, and I walked the two miles down there from my tiny house, of a morning, to sit by the windows and write my great American novel, or my college papers; or to banter with the iconic waitresses, who had grown old with the cafe, having started as teenagers in the 1940s. It was now more a haunt of college students and state workers than of loggers, but it still served the sort of breakfast that keeps a man on his feet to set choke and fell trees all day, or puts a pot belly on a college student. Eggs and hash browns and sausage. Hot, watery coffee slapped down at my favorite booth before I even sat down. It was the first cafe I loved, taking no more notice of holidays than I ever did, opening at five every morning, a place where I could write for three hours, plied unobtrusively with coffee, while the sun rose and the rest of the world caught up with us.

It was a strange, dim, yellow morning. I'd never seen a sky quite like it, a dingy, gray sky, old and tired. The sky at the end of the world, I thought. Skies in Olympia were gray far more often than not, but it was always a fresh gray, mist and cloud rolling in from the ocean, darker and bluer when it was carrying extra rain, but always new. This parchment-yellow was odd and unsettling.

My steps slowed a little as I crossed the stone-balustraded bridge over the southern tip of the inlet, into the little downtown. The morning was growing darker, not lighter, and yellower. A fine drizzle began, That was entirely to be expected, here at the pivot of the Olympic Penninsula. But this drizzle wasn't cold on my face. It was dry and gritty. It seemed almost like snow; but it almost never snowed here, and certainly never in May. Little particles were landing on my coat sleeves, and they neither melted nor evaporated. It was drizzling fine, beige particles of sand.

I hurried on to the Spar, where they no doubt would know what was going on. A forest fire, possibly. But I knew what the ash of forest fires was like, and I knew the smell. This was nothing like that. It had no smell, unless maybe the dusty smell of an ancient, untended house. Maybe some port installation had caught fire?

Downtown was empty. No cars on the streets. For once I regretted being unplugged, having no TV or radio or daily paper. Other people clearly knew something I didn't. I arrived at the Spar, anxious for bright lights and human fellowship.

The Spar was empty and dark. Scrawled in felt pen on a piece of cardboard, stuck on the glass of the door, was the single word: "CLOSED."

I turned around and hurried home. By the time I got there, the oily dust had gathered, like a fine snowfall, on every flat surface. I was coughing, and my eyes were watering.

It was days later that the weather cleared enough to be able to see, off to the southeast, the new shape of Mt St Helens. It had been the most elegantly symmetrical of the great, free-standing peaks of the Cascade Mountains. Now it looked, for all the world, as though a giant had stooped down and bitten off its head. It was no longer white: it was a dirty grayish yellow -- a low, ugly, lopsided stump against the sky.

Astronomy


First of All

The sky opened up today, after much rain.
It said to me, "Be kind, oh, be kind;
There is so much you don't know."


I

Shadows of my old words
Obliterate the present. Why
Should I make new ones,
To block my view tomorrow?


II

God sent me on a ticklish mission
Today. He wants me to find out
What he wants. I got out of it neatly.
"I know what you want, sir," I said.
"You want me to find out what you want."


III

An astronomer, said the radio,
Has discovered that "the cosmic constant
Is not constant." This is news to them,
I guess. But I could have told them that.

Room

It's quite a big room. Several families of refugees could be put up in it, without a fuss. The ping-pong table could be set to one side, and sleeping-bags laid out on the beige-carpeted floor. Machines along one wall supply soda-pop -- a dollar for 20 ounces -- and candy bars or jerky or corn nuts. With enough change you could live here for a long time.

The lights would be irritating. Flourescent lights, motion-activated. Everytime a sleeper rolled over the lights would come on, and everyone would grump. Also, the TV plays continually, though I've never seen anyone watch it. It plays the company channel, interviews with vice presidents and company commercials. But the sound is off, at least. It loops along doing its own thing with admirable indifference. But otherwise not much would trouble you. The room is almost always empty, unless someone like me wanders in to get a snack.

No refugees will ever be put up here. It reaches its maximum population once or twice a year, when ping-pong tournaments are arranged by zealously team-building middle-managers. Otherwise it's a quiet place, refrigerators humming, TV flickering, lights buzzing faintly, day and night.

The nicest thing about the room are the big windows. The whole south wall is windows, from thigh-height to the ceiling. Half-open blinds hang over them, so everything is glimpsed in long narrow horizontal bands between the slats. Your field of vision is mostly occupied by the parking lot and a vast box of dull yellow, some place of light industry, I suppose, across from it. But while that building, as a building, is breathtakingly boring, its roof -- visible, because we're on the second floor here -- is a labyrinth of fantastic coiled piping and stacks and ventilators, and mum steel boxes corded with power lines, which rise from the tarpaper and make queer sillhouettes against the horizon.

That horizon, and what's beyond it, is what I really come to this room to see. I buy an Almond Joy and walk over to the little alcove between the last snack machine and the windows. I raise the blind so I can see without stripes.

Beyond the dinosaur shapes of the neighbor's roof is a low, somber green ridge of fourth-growth doug fir; beyond that again a misty blue ridge only a little higher. Beyond that is the sky.

I have tried to understand why the skyscapes from this room are so compelling. Is it just that I gaze at them from my captivity? Possibly. Or is it because they're half-screened by the blinds, and framed below by the dinosaur-roof? Whatever the reason, the sky here always fascinates me. It's deeper here, more detailed and elaborate, wilder but more coherent. The sun sets through a pounding surf of cloud; landscapes emerge and vanish; towers of mist crumble into gray ruin; sudden hopes of light gleam through the tattered robe of the sky. I'm so still sometimes that the lights decide no one's here, and wink out.

I chew the sickly-sweet candy -- it begins cloying almost at once -- and stare at the sky.

I look a long time. Finally I lift my hand to let the blinds down again. The site managers have asked us to leave them down; otherwise the south side of the building gets too warm. The lights respond to my movement at once, winking back on in apologetic haste. ("You should have said you were here!") I crumple the wrapper and toss it into the wastepaper basket. The door closes behind me. Five minutes from now, when I'm sitting in my cubicle again, they will wink back off. But the noiseless TV will play on, in the empty room.

Yes

Yes, I do owe you email. I owe everyone email. And yes, I'm hopelessly behind on reading even the blogs I usually follow avidly. But no, I don't have anything to post.

You're in luck, however, because now you can read Ruth's essay, An Indian Scale, on Qarrtsiluni instead. Which you should do forthwith.

The Closing of the Year

So we come to the closing of the year. A small lift of light, as the sun begins to return. A slant gleam at five o'clock. No more than that. We are still in the dark of winter.

It has been an important year for me in several ways, none of them very amenable to summation. But you might render it down just to this: that for the first time I have nothing to record. The end of this year is just like the end of last year, except -- except -- that I see it and welcome it this time.

I can, when I'm tired, lean my head against death and find a moment's peace. Ride on my anxiety as a boat rocks on dark water.

Nothing is going to happen. Except that the leafless birches are going to stir the air with a fine netting of gray twigs, fractal lines of dark gray against a light gray sky, and the rain will kiss my face. People will come and go, happy and sad, pleased and angry. It doesn't add up to anything, and it never has. Not that that kept me from frantically doing sums and running projections.

Something new happened this year. I got Christmas cards from people that moved me. I have occasionally gotten a Christmas card from someone far away which touched me. Never more than one or two in one season, though. I got three from bloggers this year. I felt abashed and grateful, and I found it hard to believe that anyone would go to all that trouble, let alone three people. Ours has been a still and isolated life, I guess; I had come to think of Christmas cards as something that came from dentists and veterinarians, conscientiously tending their practices. I've never sent them myself. It occurs to me that I actually could, that I have people to send them to now.

The closing of the year. I like the idea of a year closing, as a shop or a flower closes, the valuable vulnerable things put away safe, everything folded down quiet and dark.

Bless you all, and thank you. May the opening light of the new year be good to you.

Night

Dark leaves fluttering on a midnight sky,
A sky bleeding patterned stars,
Blue as the gleam of a crow's feather,
Blue as the sheen of a black cat's fur.

A heartbeat of drums in the black trees
I want I want I want I want
Vajradhara leans forward, his eyes
Intolerably bright.

Fools and children, they feasted upon the cattle of Helios
And he who walks all day through the heavens
Took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
What made you think you could fool the night?

Even the barren sky of daylight
Expects its due and enforces its law;
Did you the think the night, with every eye
A seeping wound, would ask for less?

Dark leaves fluttering on a midnight sky,
A sky bleeding patterned stars;
White as the ice of a sudden blow,
White as the sparks of a welding torch.

Compassion howls in the trembling hills
Compassion marks down the weak and the old
Compassion hunts from dusk to dawn,
Ruthless and implacable.

Somebody Else

I keep reading about Churchill, who fascinates me, and identifying with him, knowing full well I am a character much more in the Chamberlain line. Not defeatist, exactly, but so anxious to cut my losses that sometimes I start cutting them before they are incurred.

I wonder about the usefulness of all this. When I was younger I plumed myself on this ability of mine to see my faults and imagine different modes of being, but the usefulness of such an ability depends on actually being able to change. If I can't change, then imagining different modes of being only amounts to more uncertainty and indecisiveness. I don't remember who the teacher was, but some confident, expansive, dynamic rinpoche was once asked by a student if diligent meditation practice would make him (the student) as outgoing and enterprising as he (Rinpoche) was. Had meditation made him that way? "Oh no, no," answered Rinpoche, laughing. "I was born this way."

It is true in my observation, as in Lorianne's, that meditation tends to make extroverts more introverted and introverts more extroverted. But still, we're not talking Chamberlain-to-Churchill, here. I've felt the shift myself, but it's such a gradual shift that even if I'm given forty more years, the continent's not going to drift all that far. Which is not to say that it's not worth doing. There are wider contexts than just this life. But I'm not sure that just waiting until Oregon's coast is snuggled up to Honshu is the best plan.

At issue here I suppose is the assumption -- of which I'm becoming more conscious -- that I can only do whatever life-work I'm called to do, if I'm somebody else. And so I've spent a great deal of my life's energy in trying to become this other person who can get the work done, and in recrimination because I haven't succeeded. Maybe it's better to leave self-transformation as something to incubate by way of meditation -- the only even moderately successful of all the methods I've tried -- and to look for a life-work within my immediate compass, a life-work that a shy, hesitant person might accomplish. It needn't be glorious. It need only be useful.

Home

An new essay of mine is up on Qarrtsiluni.

Drawing Down

What the inchworm really measures
with its green prostrations.

A flustered woman would clutch her housecoat. "What do you want?" she would ask anxiously.

Sgt Friday's face would twist into a faint grimace. "Just the facts, ma'am."

Drawing down to the solstice. Eight o'clock, and the sun has not yet risen. To the northwest, set in a sky that washes from lavender to violet, is a brilliant white moon. Full -- or nearly full -- it is startlingly far north, this time of year. Yes, Virginia, the Earth does tilt.

And it spins as well. In two hours will be the Hundredth Day Sit -- 6:00 pm Greenwich Mean Time. I've never been more aware of the spinning globe. Soen Joon's temple in Korea is still asleep. I'm just getting my breakfast. Brenda's been at her temp job in Toronto for hours already. Across the Atlantic, Jean is coming to the end of her working day. I try to hold all these facts in my mind at once, and fail, defeated by the hugeness of the world and the the intimacy that can so easily circle it. Empty, luminous, and unimpeded. When I first heard Kalu Rinpoche's often-repeated description of mind, I listened making indulgent allowances for Tibetan mysticism. Now it strikes me as hardheaded, unsentimental observation. Just the facts, ma'am.

This and That

If you notice that sort of thing, you may have noticed me restlessly twiddling my template. I went on a bit of an html purist binge. I removed a lot of formatting which was, I decided, an illegitimate attempt to wrest control over the appearance of my text from the reader, who may well have limitations and demands of his or her own. The whole point of html is to let the client computer figure out how to produce the page.

But at the default size for at least three different machines I've been on, my favored Garamond font looks cramped and gunky. So I think I'm going to return to bumping it to 120% -- which doesn't really violate html purity, I guess. At least it's relative. There are still plenty of other ways in which I violate the rules -- I knew nothing about html when I started blogging, so I just filched a template I liked. It turns out to be a very overbearing one, full of a very American confidence that it knows what's best for everyone (whether it knows anything about them or not). All kinds of things are sized in absolute rather than relative terms. It's the kind of template George Bush would have created.

So anyway, if anything I've done has been a change for the worse, please let me know.

In other news -- links have changed. I've added P and Lekmo and Not So Perfect to my blogroll. You've known the latter two in other incarnations. (P, another of the wonderful German bloggers, did an audio of my Asperger's post, which makes it sound beautiful. Thank you!)

With great sadness I've taken down my link to Michelle, who's given up blogging. For very good and sufficient reasons, but I will miss her very much.

Socks

Midnight, Thanksgiving day. The five of us stood around the formica counter; the fair-haired young vet, a little flustered maybe at having so large an audience, nevertheless moved quickly and capably. The catheter was already in Socks's foreleg, wrapped in that green webby stuff they use nowadays. Three syringes of sedatives -- all different, I think, but adding up to a whopping overdose -- he administered one after another. In a very short time, thirty seconds, it seemed, he said, "he's gone."

It was just couple weeks ago that we had noticed him getting fat. "His body is perfectly spherical; he weareth a runcible hat," I had quoted to him. "Socks, we're going to have to get you a runcible hat." This had happened before -- we had taken him to the vet, and the vet had said "Your cat is fat." So we didn't pay it much mind, so much else was going on. Socks, anyway, had always looked after himself. He was a rogue, or possibly "thug" is a more accurate word; he always walked with a bit of a swagger, and he never backed down from anything. One of his favorite things to do was to sit calmly at the edge of the sidewalk while people walked their leashed dogs by. Socks wouldn't budge, while the dogs barked and lunged at him, held back with difficulty by their owners. He'd just gaze at the dogs with an unblinking Clint Eastwood insouciance. "So you put up with a leash?"

I used to say that Socks was sent to us to show us another way of being. When he showed up, a slim arrogant teenager, our reigning cat, the large and regal but tremendously neurotic pitch-black Duncan, hitherto lord of the house, abdicated at once without a struggle, and retreated to the back bedroom. Socks would thrust his head at our dog's muzzle and demand to have his ears licked. Our dog always obliged, anxious to please -- if she didn't do it fast enough or thoroughly enough, Socks would cuff her, good-naturedly but imperatively, until she got it right.

Up there on the counter, as we all stroked him, I could see that his face had become gaunt. The tumor had been taking its toll. If any of us had taken a good look at him in the last week or so, we would have figured out sooner that he was ill. Not that I imagine it would have done any good. The cancer was extremely aggressive, moving in on his stomach and kidneys. But Socks hadn't complained. He never did. The night before Thanksgiving he threw up some, but, as for many cats, that was just matter of course for Socks -- he did it so often that we always laid carpet-samples over his favorite pieces of furniture, to make the cleaning-up easier. But when we came back from Thanksgiving dinner he'd thrown up all over the place, not the usual innocuous piles of kibbles that seemed barely to have seen the inside of a cat at all, but a noisome, ominous fluid. And he was moving very, very slowly.

Our cat-carrier was loaned out, so we put him in a cardboard box. He didn't object when we closed him in, which was when I knew for certain he was very ill. I held the box on my lap. On the way he vomited, and the fluid soaked the bottom of the box, and the lap of my jeans; a warm stinking drench. "'tsokay, socks," I crooned. I already knew it wasn't.

Later we murmurred "om mani"s as we petted him, and he receded from this life. It's supposed to be propitious for a good rebirth. Who knows. An assistant came in to ask about our disposal plans, pattering through their options. "We just need a box, I think," we said. "We'll bury him in the back yard." We're Victorian sentimentalists, really -- we want our mourning ceremonies. We were all wet-eyed.

"We could put him near Duncan..." mused Martha. Then she smiled a little. "... who he didn't get along with. Or near Croker, who he always wanted to eat."

A Line

I bought a bicycle yesterday. I had never till yesterday ridden a modern bike -- the last bike I owned was probably made in the 1970's. This bike was as light and nimble as a mountain-goat. I suppose I couldn't really have ridden it over fences and up the sides of houses, but it felt like I could. It will be ready for me Wednesday. It's blue. I love it.

I'm reading a biography of Churchill. As a young cornet of hussars he pulled every possible string -- & the young scion of a ducal house has access to a lot of strings -- to get posted to wherever the fighting was going to be; be it the Sudan or South Africa. If there was a war on, he wangled his way into it. To post-World-War-One eyes this behavior appears maybe surreally innocent -- maybe demented. I think to his contemporaries it appeared high-spirited and gallant.

I would like to be high-spirited and gallant. So I bought a bike.

I wrote an essay for blogging racism day, and one about the death of my cat. I thinking I probably won't post either of them. Much of my prose lately feels to me mis-timed and awkward. Either labored or glib. Sometimes both. I'm just waiting for the proper phase of the moon, now. But I thought I'd drop you a line.

P.S. -- Oh, and Petra, if you're a real person, as opposed to a diabolically clever phisher, send me another email :-)