Done is a battell on the dragon blak

Variations on William Dunbar, 3

The black dragon is beaten back
Confronted by our champion Christ
The gates of hell broke with a crack
The triumphal sign of the cross hoist
The devils yammer ugly voiced
But the souls have their papers and can go --
Signed with God's blood, they will suffice:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.

Battered is deadly Lucifer
His cruel serpent's stinger drawn
Fierce old tiger, teeth ajar
That has lain in wait for us so long
Thinking to grip us in strong claws --
The merciful Lord would not have it so,
And made us slip between his paws:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.

For our sake he let himself be slain
And trussed like a lamb for sacrifice;
Now, like a lion, he is up again
Stretched out to a giant's height --
Dawn sprung, radiant and bright,
Gone aloft is the glorious Apollo;
The blissful day is departed from night:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.

The victor has risen again up high
That in our quarrel to the death was wounded;
The sun that went pale now shines out bright
The darkness is cleared, our faith re-founded;
The knell of mercy from heaven is sounded,
The Christians are delivered from their woe,
The Jews and their errors are confounded:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.

The foe is fled, the battle can cease,
The prison is broken -- the jailors retreat;
The war is done, confirmed the peace.
The chains are loosed, the dungeon emptied;
The ransom made, the prisoners freed;
The field is won, overcome the foe,
Despoiled of what he thought to keep:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.

---

The original, John Conlee's edition:

Done is a battell on the dragon blak,
Our campioun Chryst confountit hes his force;
The gettis of Hell ar brokin with a crak,
The signe triumphall rasit is of the Croce,
The divillis trymmillis with hiddous voce,
The saulis ar borrowit and to the blis can go,
Chryst with His blud our ransonis dois indoce:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.

Dungin is the deidly dragon Lucifer,
The crewall serpent with the mortall stang,
The auld kene tegir with his teith on char,
Quhilk in a wait hes lyne for us so lang,
Thinking to grip us in his clowis strang;
The merciful Lord wald nocht that it wer so,
He maid him for to felye of that fang:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.

He for our saik that sufferit to be slane,
And lyk a lamb in sacrifice wes dicht,
Is lyk a lyone rissin up agane,
And as a gyane raxit Him on hicht;
Sprungin is Aurora, radius and bricht,
On loft is gone the glorius Appollo,
The blisfull day depairtit fro the nycht:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.

The grit Victour agane is rissin on hicht
That for our querrell to the deth wes woundit;
The sone that wox all paill now schynis bricht,
And dirknes clerit, our fayth is now refoundit.
The knell of mercy fra the hevin is soundit,
The Cristin ar deliverit of thair wo,
The Jowis and thair errour ar confoundit:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.

The fo is chasit, the battell is done ceis,
The presone brokin, the jevellouris fleit and flemit;
The weir is gon, confermit is the peis,
The fetteris lowsit and the dungeoun temit,
The ransoun maid, the presoneris redemit,
The feild is win, ourcumin is the fo,
Dispulit of the tresur that he yemit:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.

He that hes gold and grit riches

Variations on William Dunbar, 2

He that has plenty of gold and riches
And could be in great happiness
But gladness from himself expells
And lives in stingy wretchedness --
He makes sorrow for himself.

He that could be without storm and strife
And live a joyful pleasant life
And then with marriage has to meddle
And takes up with a no-good wife --
He makes sorrow for himself.

He that has for company
A woman without spot or stain
And then goes plucking at strange shells
And wears himself out with flies of Spain --
He makes sorrow for himself.

And he that with good life and truth
Buys novelty and bad excuse
Forever with a master dwells
Who will have on him no ruth --
He makes sorrow for himself.

Now all this time let us be merry
And set not by this world a cherry;
Now, while there's good wine for sale,
He that on dry bread will worry --
I give him to the devil of hell.

---

The original, from James Kinsley's edition.

He that hes gold and grit riches
And may be into mirrynes,
And dois glaidnes fra him expell
And levis into wrechitnes,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that may be but sturt or stryfe
And leif ane lusty plesand lyfe,
And syne with mariege dois him mell
And bindis him with ane wicket wyfe,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that hes for his awin genyie
Ane plesand prop, but mank or menyie,
And schuttis syne at ane uncow schell,
And is forfairn with the fleis of Spenyie,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

And he that with gud lyfe and trewth,
But varians or uder slewth,
Dois evirmair with ane maister dwell
That nevir of him will haif no rewth,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

Now all this tyme lat us be mirry,
And sett nocht by this warld a chirry,
Now quhill thair is gude wyne to sell;
He that dois on dry breid wirry,
I gif him to the Devill of hell.

Belay On

My father has loaned us money so we can stay in the house this year. I'm so grateful.

And the massage business is picking up. Hooray!

Yet Another War

At Lee's prodding, I'm participating in the blogswarm against the war in Iraq. I do so with some reluctance. Not because the war is, or ever has been, conscionable. But because I refuse to regard it as anything special. It's simply another of the interminable wars, neither especially bad nor especially justified. I can't stop people from conducting them: they've done it all my life, and they will continue doing it for as long as there are human beings, I expect. Each war is presented as a special case. This enemy is uniquely bad, uniquely dangerous; is responsible for uniquely horrible atrocities, presents a uniquely compelling threat. That's how we're persuaded to fight them. And the people who resist the wars usually accept the terms, merely reversing the polarity: this war, they tell us, is uniquely unjustified, uniquely ruinous. It's not. It's just another run of the mill war.

I argued strenuously against beginning this war. I predicted its course with tolerable accuracy. It would be a walkover, I said. (You remember the leftist journalists, such as Alexander Cockburn, who predicted a ferocious war, with hundreds of thousands of casualties? No? Well, I do. People with no knowledge of military realities, reasoning apparently from some notion of the mystical power of third-world righteousness.)

It would be a walkover, I said, followed by years of increasingly bloody and increasingly unpopular occupation. Eventually we'd just leave, and the various people whom we encouraged to stick their necks out would be slaughtered. The Kurds in particular, who, in a lunatic moment, trusted us again, would be betrayed. Again.

That was quite clear to me. I didn't know whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction: that was anyone's guess. But I knew he didn't have the delivery systems. It really didn't matter whether he had the weapons or not. People have extravagant ideas about how militarily useful such weapons are. I was in great anxiety as our troops approached Baghdad -- I was expecting a chemical or biological attack. Not one that would alter the course of the war, but one which would kill tens of thousands of people. Mercifully, it didn't happen.

So now we're at the stage when we decide the war's no fun anymore, and we're going to take our toys and go home. I agree that the Bush administration has botched the occupation so spectacularly that there's no point in staying, but I hardly feel enthusiastic about leaving. We'll be breaking promises and leaving people in the lurch.

We will leave Iraq. And, within ten or fifteen years, we will be at war somewhere else, making similar unkeepable promises, responding, yet again, to a uniquely wicked enemy who presents a uniquely dangerous threat. Forgive me if I fail to show enthusiastic support or indignant outrage. It's business as usual. Great powers have always acted this way. If your nation doesn't fight colonial wars, dear reader, it's not because of its moral superiority -- it's simply because your nation isn't a great power any more.

I can't stop it, or the grief that's in store for the next crop of young people, or the grief in store for the the next country that becomes too much of a nuisance to Washington. But I can, and I do, refuse to regard it as meaningful. It's neither glorious nor tragic: it's simply the continual muddy misery of human confusion, grinding through another cycle.

Half a Century

Fifty years old today. I never thought I'd live this long: I had an intense conviction, in my youth, that I would die young. I still could, of course. One's notion of what "dying young" means is revised upward, as the years go by; and I suppose all of us, in our own private opinions at least, die young.

It's such a strange visit, this human life. We arrive in a stranger's house, and never really feel at home; we painfully learn the customs of our hosts, but they never really make sense; we learn to speak the language well enough to ask the way to the bus station, but not well enough to be able to unburden our hearts. And then, embarrassingly, we become sick, and impose the burden of our care on our unprepared hosts; and finally we leave, abruptly -- for home, maybe, or maybe for a stranger place still, or maybe for nowhere at all. What's the sense in all that?

I woke up longing. It's not yet light. Swinburne's lines came unexpectedly to mind, when I remembered I had a milestone birthday, today:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

I missed Larissa's knitalong, yesterday. I meant to go, but the time slipped away. Maybe someone would have taught me to knit, there. I learned once -- at least, how to continue; I don't think I ever learned how to cast on.

Travell & Simons

w0000000t!!! It's here!

The bible of Trigger Point therapy: two volumes, 1,600 pages of meticulously researched and beautifully presented data, marvelous illustrations. It's expensive. I had to decide between it and a cheap laptop to replace my late lamented Thinkpad. But worth it. And now that I have it, I'm so happy! It's like when I first got the compact OED, long ago; every couple minutes I'm jumping up to look up another thing I've been wondering about for years.

White Falls

You see? There is nothing to say there,
White chalk on white walls,
Chalk dust on white hands. The whiteness.
White tongues
Licking white lips. Because underneath
The teeth are showing. If you look

Deeper or shallower than precisely
Skin deep
You will start to see the whiteness, leaching from
The bones, or leaking from
The bleach of the sky.

And if the love is that much stronger
At the same time the words
Will not settle to their task; they scatter,
Pale fish,
The slow white blood
Of the pale world.

Paper white, birch white, darling,
Snow white; white as the hoarse
Cold water of the falls.

Tag

Ruth tagged me: seven things about myself. I could only come up with three. And I don't tag anymore, so I'm not really doing it right. But this is what came up.

1. At the age of six, or so, I performed in a musical Christmas show. To the tune of "Frosty the Snowman" I and a dozen of my fellow six year olds danced, brandishing brooms. Brooms? Do I remember that right? Are snowmen supposed to carry brooms?

Well, whatever we were carrying, I remember the performance vividly, because before the opening bars were played, my snowman costume had rucked around so that the eyeholes were somewhere over my ears, or possibly at the back of my head, rendering me blind as well as confused, and I blundered forlornly over the stage, occasionally hopping a little and waving my broom, to signal my good intentions, to indicate that if I could have seen I would have tried to dance. I could hear people laughing. I was mortified. No doubt I was adorable.

To this day I can't hear the tune of "Frosty the Snowman" without dread and foreboding descending upon me.


2. Somewhere in British Columbia is a green island, with a empty stone tower on it. To climbers, it was irresistible, straight up and down, yet loaded with good holds. It seemed, with good hand- and foot-holds everywhere, that it would be far easier to climb than some mountain faces we had handled. My Dad went up the stairs to the top and let down a belay rope. I tied the rope around my waist. There's a ritualized protocol for this:

"Belay on!" he called.

"Climbing!" I called back.

"Climb!" he called, and I began to climb up.

But it turns out that mountain faces are not straight up and down, not usually. There are harder places to get up, but there are also more resting places. Halfway up, twenty yards up maybe, my hands began to tremble. "Tension!" I called. The rope tightened.

There's a protocol for this, too. "Falling!" I called

"Really?" came my father's startled voice, and his face peered mildly over the stones. Reverting to protocol, he called, "Fall!" as my hands slipped from the rock.

He caught me, and lowered me steadily. Ten yards below, a couple yards over, was a window onto the stairway inside. I managed, dangling and breathing with difficulty, to make my way to it and scramble over the sill.


3. Spokane Washington. Out on the railroad tracks, three of us young teenage freaks, longhaired, jeanpatched. I wore a jacket but no shirt, and an army helmet. Some of the local kids started to shout and chase us. My two friends ran. I've never been much good at running. So I didn't. Without looking back, I walked grimly, unhurriedly along. The sound of running feet on railbed gravel. I didn't turn.

"It!" said a voice, and tapped me on the helmet. Then they took themselves off. Just counting coup.

House

I woke this morning with a small animal gnawing at my entrails.

We'll have to sell the house. Simply no money anymore for this big old house. We need to find something cheap and little, in a worse neighborhood.

I've loved this house. Christmas, Duncan, Socks and Angel, not to mention Croaker, are buried in the back yard. At night I look up through the skylight to see the vast, ancient maples stirring far above. Out back, the even older apple tree, possibly the last scion of the orchards of Mt Tabor. The vine-tangled trampoline.

Now that we're going to have to leave it, I love everything about it with a startling intensity. And I treated it so carelessly when I had it. That's where the real pain lies, I think. Not in losing the house I love, but in losing the chance ever to love it properly, love it as I should have done from the first.

Stretch

The multifidi and the rotatores are small muscles that move the spinal vertebrae in relation to each other. The dura mater is the tough connective tissue that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

I squat, like the old Vietnamese
men at the bus stops, froglike,
elbows within my knees, my belly
swagging between my thighs.

The faintest click, felt not heard,
in the lumbar vertebrae.
The braided multifidi let go.
The rotatores loose

their grip; the sacrum tilts
infinitesimally. The breath
rises through my spine
like solvent in a crusted lock.

The dura mater sighs; the shoulders
drop, my eyes close
as the pressure behind them eases.
I press my hands together.

Namaste. The air blows through
my bones. I think of you,
my darling, my beautiful
windshaken flower.

Rigor

People with knotted muscles are often -- almost always -- told to stretch and exercise by well-meaning people, including doctors and physical therapists, who don't entirely understand how muscles work. They are also told to relax, using various techniques. This is usually bad advice.

Or rather, it's mistimed advice. Stretching, exercise, and relaxation are wonderful for preventing knots. It's just that they are useless, or worse than useless, for undoing them.

I'm not talking about stiffness, here. We all know how wonderful it is to stretch out when you're stiff. I'm talking about trigger points. Trigger points don't feel wonderful when they're stretched. They hurt and they feel wrong.

It's commonly thought that we hold our muscles tightened, and so it's just common sense to think that if we let go, then they'll relax. It doesn't actually work that way. Once a muscle fiber is contracted, it actually takes an expenditure of energy to release it.

Consider rigor mortis. For several hours the muscles of a dead body clamp down into a tight contraction. They are not doing this because the dead person is worried about making his mortgage payment. And they will not be helped to relax by stretching -- they can't be stretched, they can only be torn. (Whether exercise would help, I don't think we'll ever be able to say.)

No. What happens is that the dead muscle, having been triggered into contraction, is no longer supplied with the energy required to release it. so it just stays contracted, until the whole system deteriorates and it becomes inert matter.

Now when your muscles are knotted, essentially what's happened is that a few strands have gone into rigor. They're not being supplied with sufficient oxygen to relax, so they're stuck in the "on" position. They will send very clear pain signals if you try to contract them further. They know they're in trouble. Forcibly stretching them will probably tear them. Relaxing your mind will indeed reduce the pain, and releasing the tension on the surrounding fibers may help somewhat, but what really has to happen is for oxygen to get to the locked muscle fibers. Presumably the mind of a dead person is as relaxed as a mind ever gets, but that doesn't release his or her rigor. Only the complete death of the tissue does that. Not the solution we're looking for.

Fortunately, moving oxygen into the locked fibers is usually quite easy. First you find the knot -- it will be hard, like a pea or a bit of gravel in the middle of a band of tight muscle. Pressing on it will hurt. A lot. But it will also feel oddly good. Now you squeeze the thing, between your fingers, if that works, but usually by trapping it against a bone. And you just roll over it, as if it were a tiny sponge and you wanted to get all the fluid out of it. Do that seven or eight times, working in the same direction each time. It should hurt good. Seven, on a scale of one to ten, is what the books say; as much pain as you can relax into, but not more.

Then leave it alone for a couple hours. Don't stretch it, don't exercise it. Let it sit. Then repeat. Keep working it, every couple hours, until it doesn't hurt any more.

That's the simple scenario -- a single trigger point, recently acquired. Unfortunately, by the time people do something about it they usually have numerous interrelated trigger points. And often what hurts is not the trigger point itself, but a nearby joint. It takes some knowledge and some investigation to track trigger points down.

If you ask doctors about joint pain, they will almost invariably say it's arthritis, and that there's nothing you can do about it but take pain-killers. If they say this without manipulating the joint, or any of the muscles that move the joint, you'll know that they're simply -- like most physicians -- pig-ignorant about trigger points and myofascial pain. Sure, it could be arthritis. could be lots of things. The doctor's job is to find out, not to guess.

Sparkle

I got on the hotel elevator, and pushed '4'. At '2' a fashionably dressed woman got on, gave me a pleasant brisk smile, and looked away. Obviously not a Portlander; a little too smart. Here on business, perhaps. Now what would that business be?

I met her eyes again. An incredulous look was dawning on her face. Mirrored on mine, I suppose. "Annie?" I ventured.

"Ann," I corrected. That, I knew, was what she went by now.

"Dale!" she said. We hugged. Took a good look at each other. I had last seen her, when? In 1974? She had been a rather dowdy and subfusc teenager then, intense and inturned, her innate luminosity blossoming only at odd moments of self-forgetfulness -- no teenager, alas, has many such moments. Now it had risen to the surface; she was voluble, confident, and stylish. We chattered away as we went on up to the room.

Not such a coincidence to meet, here; I was on my way up to the room she was sharing with Wilbur. But I would have been prepared to see her there. Here the surprise was so deep. Thirty-four years puts some slack in a tie; we reeled it in, talking of who knows what.

We opened the door. New hugs, new startlement: it was Billy. Wilbur, I mean. But it was Billy. The years seemed to have touched him not at all. Ann and I were a generation older, but he was a young man still, eager as ever, beads around his neck, the least disillusioned of the three of us. Ann and I, I think, hope mostly to be able to defer the future until after we, anyway, are safely out of it; but he still looks forward to it. And his enthusiasm swept us along.

High school buddies. We drove about until we found the new trendy neighborhood of Portland, which I, typically, didn't know about, but which they, typically, did, even though I was the native and they were out-of-staters: Mississipi Avenue. I'd never even been there. But we found a lovely cafe and had brunch and talked and talked. They had both fallen in love with Portland.

"Why," said Ann, "is everyone so happy and nice here?"

Well, largely because Ann and Wilbur were so happy and expansive. Wilbur, of course, has always been ready to talk to anyone; and Ann was so happy to be out of her somewhat depressing daily round at home. They stopped to ask people where to eat, and chatted up the waitress when we got there; their verve was irresistable, and I'm not surprised that Portland, a good-natured and friendly, but not very outgoing town, responded to them by flowering, like a shy woman at a party carried away and made bold by meeting a man who can talk.

I had a massage scheduled. As I drove them back to the hotel we made plans for the next evening. "Maybe I can even talk Martha into going out," I said. "Here," said Wilbur gaily, "bribe her with this." He slipped off his glittery rhinestone bracelet and handed it forward from the backseat. "Tell her she has to come."

I drove home from my massage, after dark, along the dark streets of the industrial district along the Columbia; very dark, but punctuated by brilliant streetlights. The bracelet on the dashboard sparkled, blazed, corruscated, every time I drove under one.

My Heid did Yak Yester Nicht

Variations on William Dunbar, I

My head hurt so much all last night
No hope, today, that I will write
This migraine has become my life
Cutting my forehead like a knife
I can barely look at the morning light.

Just now, after NPR,
I thought I had a thought to scrawl
But it was too damn hard to find
In my prickling unslept mind
The words escaped me at a crawl.

In the morning when I rise
Asleep in bed my courage lies
Whatever the music, fun, or play
Noise or dance or disarray
It will not open up its eyes.

---

The original, from James Kinsley's edition. Dunbar was a Scots poet of the 15th and 16th Century, best known for his wonderful "Lament for the Makers," but he wrote a remarkable variety of poems. I've been playing with some of them, translating or modernizing or whatever you call it.

My heid did yak yester nicht
This day to mak that I na micht,
So sair the magryme dois me menyie
Perseing my brow as ony ganyie,
That scant I luik may on the licht.

And now, schir, laitlie eftir mes
To dyt thocht I begowthe to dres
The sentence lay full evill till find;
Unsleipit in my heid behind,
Dullit in dulnes and distres.

Full oft at morrow I upryse,
Quhen that my curage sleipeing lyis;
For mirth, for menstrallie and play,
For din nor danceing nor deray
It will nocht walkin me no wise.

Limbectomy II

I pause in the hallway. Two parallelograms of light splash over the floor. I step to the window and there is the moon, nearly full, and the few stars that can hold their own with her trembling and burning.

Light out of the griefstricken sky: moonlight, sunlight, cloudlight.

When I was a boy I would walk out onto the sunwarmed concrete in my bare feet, and the morning would be still and quiet.

I hope I have made the right choices. Mr Fei, Mr Squander, indeed; I have thrown away and wasted so much. Not much time left, now.

No, but actually there's more time. Finally some inkling of reality has entered into my life, and the contagion of my mother's despair and self-absorption is wearing away. It's just light, plain light, ordinary day. Things that must be done. The grand ideas and the despair at being nobody all belong to that world where nothing ordinary has value, that world of flickering Ahrimanic desperation.

My mother has a lift chair, we got for her. It's planted directly before the television, turned ninety degrees from the sofas. When we visit, we have to choose between sitting on the sofas, where she can't see us unless she cranes her head around (which she rarely does), or perching uncomfortably on the bricks of the fireplace. She's kept this configuration for years. Sun Ho sits in a pull-up chair at her feet, tending her.

She's quite sharp now. Sharp enough to have resumed the impersonation of someone who experiences the outside world. But really there's nothing but the television.

That's my legacy, one of them, at least. It's the legacy I declined when I left the cubicles. Or anyway that I hoped to decline. I haven't escaped it for certain yet.

Thank you for the help and encouragement. I have needed all of it. I'm so grateful. I hope someday I can make some return.

coo bit

in response to the ReadWritePoem prompt, to write an ode to the body.

cubit cubit
duped duped stupid
string an arc for Cupid
build an ark for Stupid
coo bit coo bit
wring the heart of Stupid

Cupid Cupid
stooped to shoot at Stupid
marked his mill and rude hit
milled his mark and rued it
coo bit coo bit
stop it stop it Cupid

cue bid cue bid
sing the part of Stupid
toss him in the stew pit
wring the heart of Cupid
coo bit coo bit
stop it stop it Stupid

Limbectomy

If you excise the limbic portion of the brain of a monkey, I read, he will walk on top of his indignant fellows as if they were not there; he will casually take food out of their hands. He treats them as scenery, not as fellow-creatures.

Well, I thought, no need to do a limbectomy on the researchers.

Drumming

Mixed drumming last night.

A new person. Short hair and a wary, immobile face; dark, dark circles under the eyes. The face of a young woman who has not slept well for days, or weeks.

I thought I'd say something when the talking stick came to me, something about how I used to feel that my love was useless, that I couldn't reach other people, and how I used to perceive all this beauty which I didn't know how to share, but that I took the forty day miracle Buddhist cure and now I felt heart connections all the time. Fortunately, the talking stick has a way of sniffing out the bogus. Yes, something sort of like that did happen. Yes, more often than not now the joy of all that love welling up overwhelms the loneliness. But it's not that simple, and we all know it.

I held the stick in my hand and followed a couple breaths. Then I looked up at those bruised-looking eyes and said, "Thank you for being here." I looked only at her, and then I looked down and passed the stick on to the voluble Ted, who always has a lot to say. I could feel the surprise and the questioning. I didn't look at her again. I didn't want it to be mistaken for flirtation. I didn't look at her again until near the end of the evening, when we were trading conga-drum riffs back and forth, and we grinned at each other.

At my last glimpse of her, as I went out the door, she was talking eagerly, animatedly, to Ted. I would have thought it physically impossible, but the darkness under her eyes had completely vanished.

I love the drumming, the entrainment, attuning to each other. Sometimes I stop drumming and just rest my fingertips lightly on the drumhead; I can feel it pulse as it resonates with the other drums.

Six Things you Didn't Know about me

I'm cheating and responding to a tag from Whirling Dervish at the same time as I answer Totally Optional's request for a mystery.

I am the one who, sitting tailor-fashion,
Carefully coiled your guts and packed them in.
I am the one who braided your veins and arteries,
The one who crocheted the fine net of your nerves.
I am the one who sang you to sleep that night
When your first boyfriend proved unfaithful;
The one who called down storms to delight your eyes
When the world was too small for your breathing heart;
I am the one who lay on the bare floor
Huddled at your feet, last night, and wept.

Carry On

My laptop has ceased breathing, so until I figure out repair or replacement, posts are going to come scarce, if at all. I hadn't realized how dependent upon it I'd become for writing. Try to carry on the internets without me.

The crow gothe to the water

I pray you, have me now in mynde;
I tell you of the mater:
He blew his horne agaynst the wynde;
The crow gothe to the water.

-- 15th Century lyric

Dear Paisley

Dear Paisley. No, it is not enough, and it is not all.
But it is dangerous to talk about God and joy.
The Jealous One is waiting for an indiscretion,
A misstep, to seize and pull us under. If God
Is real, the Devil is too.

People think that shamans work to call spirits,
But mostly they work to keep them away. Keep
The gods asleep. Don't wake the powers. Keep
The dead in their graves. That's their daily work,
Their bread and butter.

This morning, before sunrise, in the metallic dark
Drenched with rain, I watched the light
Pouring from streetlights and headlights like steam,
Huge plumes of light, hanging, like giants' breath,
In the cold air.

Who was breathing there? Don't ask, don't tell;
Keep your head down. How many of the dead
Are waiting to speak to us? Admit that, yes,
You have been introduced, then how many audiences
Must you have?

Evangelicals are a foolhardy lot,
Urging everyone, unprepared, unblessed, unwatched
To open his or her heart to God, to pray,
No matter who might be listening. Open your heart
To Jesus, they say,

And he will come. True enough. But you better be
Damned sure it's Jesus you are calling
And not the casts of envy, pride, or greed.
Any of them will come, if called. It's not just Jesus
At the stand.

Still. Beyond the sodden filthy blanket of the sky
The sun walks in the shining air. Every flaw
Is filled with love, the world aches with its burden
Of divine desire; two slippery hands are not enough
To hold it.

The cup wobbles, and the hot fluid
Runs down the sides, burning, burning, burning
Scalding us with love; we are branded, blistered,
Shocked and wounded, bitten and torn
With the love of God.

Dear Paisley. No, it is not enough, and it is not all.

Suspenders

Or, as the Brits call them, braces. The prompt was to write a villanelle about clothes: I've done my best, but I don't think intricate verse forms will ever be my strong suit.

The wind turns the corner, and the time is gone.
I've refused all my life to wear a belt;
I'm wearing my jeans with suspenders on.

My beard is white. I'm hale and strong,
But the prime of my life has begun to melt.
The wind turns the corner. And the time is gone,

When my hips formed a shelf for a leather thong.
A pot belly is not improved by a welt,
So I'm wearing my jeans with suspenders on.

I could wear a dress, disguised with a sporran
And pretend to be more than a quarter Celt.
But the wind turns the corner, and the time is gone

When I cared if I looked like a Dilbert cartoon --
That Unix guy, pompous, and not at all svelte --
I'm wearing my jeans with suspenders on.

Strapped over the belly, I'd look eighty-one;
Below, like a salesman, egregiously stout.
The wind turns the corner, and the time is gone;
I'm wearing my jeans with suspenders on.

Why We Are Here

in response to this week's totally optional prompt

Because in the dark before time the Lord
Drew the contours of our eyelids, fashioned
The shapes of our toes, designed
Each hair upon our legs with exquisite attention;

Because proteins in the sea were sunburnt,
And fish left stranded in the mud, and thunder
Lizards brought down in their pride
By the dust of Yucatan;

Because since beginningless time
We have suffered and sinned and suffered again,
Lifetime after lifetime in the slow
Unrolling of a thousand monstrous kalpas;

Therefore our task
Might be to discover what God intended,
Or to be ourselves the emerging intention of God,
Or to free all beings from suffering.

But you know as well as I
That we are here to wash the dishes
And kiss our children good night
And worry about money;

That we are here to see the fog
Caught in the branches of the douglas firs
On the hills across the river; that we are here
To fall in love with inappropriate persons;

That we are here to fret and plan and avoid
And be unworthy of ourselves, to lose
Keys and checkbooks and birth certificates,
And to write poems about it all.

Footnote

Tall Girl and rr both objected to my characterization of the psychologizing cosmology (in Subversion, below). I felt that uneasiness, as I wrote it, that indicates falsehood, that little twinge that tells you you're repeating words, rather than really thinking. Or at best, that you're using a private shorthand for something too complex to be laid out in full.

I left out important pieces. What I called the psychologizing cosmology bears no necessary relationship with psychology as practiced today. "The bounded view" is perhaps implied by a therapeutic model that places heavy emphasis on the personality (and its disabilities) having been formed in childhood. But it's not just "the bounded view of human existence," -- the view that consciousness arises as an emergent property of brain, and dies with it, and that in the interval between those two events, it sits locked inside the cranium. (It's worth remembering, even within that view, that the organ of thinking is properly the nervous system, not the brain, and a great many complex perceptions and nervous command decisions are made in places other than inside the skull. We're cosmologically, not scientifically, committed to seeing the head as where consciousness is located. -- But that's another issue.) It's not just that. It's also a sort of naive realism, a belief that the way we perceive the world corresponds exactly -- or even closely -- to the way the world is. It's the combination of these two things that is so suffocating. The former is emblematic of the latter, and so I use it as a shorthand; but it's the latter that's really deadly, regardless of what cosmological views you hold. If you believe in how you imagine things, and you sternly restrict how you imagine things to the bounded view, you create for yourself a very tiny, very cramped world indeed. The world Freud inhabited was a very small, airless world. It's no surprise to me that towards the end of his life he found himself unable to read poetry. He'd convinced himself that all the things that poets -- even Shakespeare, that most worldly of poets -- spoke of were unreal. Nothing was real but anxiety and desire, playing out in a world that was exactly as it appeared.

All this is commonplace enough, and most of us pay lip-service to the idea that the world is not as we perceive it, nowadays. But that's not enough. It's not enough to let the thought cross your mind that the world is larger and more complicated than we see it to be. Because in our heart of hearts -- and especially when the chips are down, which is when it matters most -- we really believe in our perception of the world.

Which is why tantric practices can be so important. It's of only minor importance, if any, that I practice believing (for instance) that I have a thousand arms and a radiant white body and that I am infinitely compassionate. But it's hugely important to have the experience -- the experience, not the thought -- of inhabiting a world that is utterly different, and being a person who is utterly different. I am not "really" Chenrezig. I know that as well as you do. But after having had the experience of being Chenrezig, I know -- in a far deeper way than just having the opinion -- that I am not "really" Dale, either.

Meditation on emptiness, of course, is the other commonly recommended way of undermining naive realism. Most of us find it less embarrassing. More intellectually respectable. But it takes a lot longer, for most people, and there are people who don't take to it easily.

Trigger Point

I've moved this post over to my massage site.

Two stanzas of Hoccleve's Lament for Chaucer, rendered into Modern English

I loved these lines, so full of love his mentor, il miglior fabbro, and so colloquial and to the point (rare virtues, in 15th Century verse!) So I tried my hand at -- what do you call it? -- translation? modernization? Hoccleve's English stands about midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, but it's still old enough, I think, to be difficult for a reader who's never learned Middle English

Death has little more consideration
For the sober man than for the plastered;
No more for a man of kind deliberation,
Than for a consummate and vicious bastard;
In a pile, every man is mastered
By her, the rich and grinding poor the same;
The shrewd and discerning like the stupid and lame.

She might have delayed her vengeance for a while,
Until some man into your equal grew --
Forget that! She knew well enough this isle
Could never produce another man like you;
Like all of us, she had a job to do,
God gave her orders, I hope, for the best;
Oh master, master, God give your soul good rest!

---

Here are Hoccleve's stanzas. The verse form is rhyme royal, which Chaucer used for the best long love poem in English, Troilus and Criseide, as well as for some of the Canterbury Tales.

Deth hath but smal consideracion
Unto the vertuous, I have espyed,
No more, as scheweth the probacion,
Than to a vycyous mayster losel tried.
Among an heep, every man ys maystried
Wyth here, as wel the poore as ys the ryche;
Leered and lewde eek standen al iliche.

Sche myghtte han taried hir vengeance a while
Til that sum man had egal to the be.
Nay, let be that! She knew wel that thys yle
May nevere man forth brenge lyk to the,
And hyre office nedes do moot sche;
God bad hire soo, I truste as for thi beste
O maister, maister, God thy soule reste!

Milk

readwritepoem 10

In the dark kitchen my unseen hand
Lifts a jug from the lighted refrigerator
A dim white sail.

By feel I choose the last tall glass,
Invisible. Then I pour
And in the moonlight

The inside of the glass takes shape
As the fluid fills it, and the moon
Claims her own.

The vesicles tug, and there is a hotness
At the corners of my eyes: She pulls
All flowing things

To her side of the world.

Subversion

The moment comes of a sort of false balance, when the forces of clarity are matched against those of confusion. False, because it must topple one way or the other. This is not homeostasis. It's more of a standoff. But perched up here on the rail, uncomfortable though it may be, I have a pretty good view of the disputed country.

I can see especially, how the two modes of being feed each other. Sitting for half an hour, at four in the morning, rather than getting online -- surely that operates for clarity? Well, yes; but it also wakes up the impulses of confusion. My virtue, I find myself thinking -- doesn't it earn me some indulgence? Is it to be all work and no play?

And of course, it is the indulgence that brings me to grief, and the grief to clarity. And so it rolls along. Sometimes writ large, sometimes small, but it has been the rhythm of my life.

No point in this cycle is unmixed. The closer indulgence gets to love, the more it looks like clarity. The practices of clarity can turn into indulgences (though not so often as those looking for excuses not to practice would have us think.) In a way perhaps prudence is the enemy here, because it slows the rhythm down, and makes the alternating ways of being seem both like forms of sanity. Neither, perhaps, is. The more rapidly I'm flung from one to the other, the more vividly the fundamental insanity of my life appears.

But. A suspicion that the whole thing needs to be dismantled, that a deeper subversion must be fomented. This subversion must happen, not in the heady landscapes of esoteric practice, but at the kitchen sink, the checkbook, and the bedroom. I have been both too patient and not patient enough.

I live in a welter of confusion. I always have. In the physical world, I mean. My home. My bedroom, when I was a child, was always an almost unbelievable chaos. And now my whole house is. My own room, the shrine room cum exercise space cum massage studio, is perhaps the least so -- but only because it is, in a way, the most public space of the house, the space where adults I don't know well come and spend time when they get a massage. So my pride is involved in how it looks, and I tidy it regularly.

"Going into Dad's room is like going into another dimension," said Alan. "It's like it's not even in the same house."

There's another space like that. The gable Martha designed and had added to the house, which she made partly with her hands, and entirely with her mind. It stays orderly, more or less.

---

I wrote the above some time ago. The conviction grows in me that it is all about the house, the space in which I live. I have always camped, not lived, in my houses. Always ready to leave; always more concerned to make sure that there's a path of escape than to make a home.

I could psychologize it: speak of my childhood, of shuttling from one house to the other, after my parents' divorce; of always needing only to stick it out for a determinate amount of time before entering the new dispensation; never putting all my eggs in one basket. If there are discomforts -- well, one need only wait, one isn't staying long. If the persona pinches, well, it's only a temporary one. This is only the face I wear for Dad; I can take it off when I get home to Mom.

But I don't take much stock in psychologizing, with its cosmology of the soul that grows into existence at birth, and vanishes, like a candle going out, at death. If that's true, and if history is the matter of mechanistic determinism that cosmology suggests, then my childhood is of overriding importance, and it would make sense to parse it out in excruciating detail -- in one sense, it would, though if volition and freedom are illusions, it hardly seems worth the time to parse anything.

In the Tibetan cosmology -- which I find equally improbable -- I chose my family to be born into precisely because it was what I was already used to, because it already expressed my propensities; and at death -- if I'm so fortunate as to be reborn a human being -- I'll choose another for the same reasons, and do the whole damn thing again. There's considerably more space, in Tibetan cosmology. The Dalai Lama, visiting Merton's monastery, was deeply struck by the Christian cosmology (the third player here, more improbable still) -- "they have so little time," he said. One life, one chance to get it right, and that's all. No wonder they were so serious and so desperate.

And the psychological cosmology is far more cramped even than that. If you don't get it right by middle age, you might as well give up; there's not much life ahead of you anyway, and it will be largely taken up with managing the disintegration of the body, to no particular purpose but that of stalling the final annihilation.

In any case. Whether my propensities were written by circumstance on the blank slate produced ex nihilo in 1958, or were created out of infinite love and obscure intention by the Lord God at the same time, or have been shaped by the endless rolling of this pebble in the surf of millions of lifetimes, since beginningless time, they're here now, observable now. Hidden in plain sight. I need not inquire of the past. I need only look at the panic that rises in me, when the sky grows light and I'm not yet out the house. I might be caught: caught in the web of others' desires and expectations. I might be held to commitments. I might be confined within the persona that lives at home, that mild-mannered, unambitious soul that vanishes into game and blogland, into endless repetition and gnawing hunger. The idea is intolerable to me. I must, must get out.

What would have to happen for the house to be place I didn't have to escape from in the morning? That's the question I'm turning over in my mind, now.

Two Young Men

...every man wyth one voys cryed that the toure sholde be dylygentely and manly kepte; where afterward the knightes bothe of Latyn tonge and Grekys tonge dyd worshipfully as ever dyd Achylles or Hector. But two yong men soldyers of the sayd toure threwe downe their harnesse in the see to th'entente to be Turkes. And afterward, when thys was knowen, they for their synnes and defawtes were byheded.

That's all John Kaye, in his 15th Century account of the Siege of Rhodes, has to say about them. Two young men, soldiers of the Tower of St Nicholas. "Young" probably meant "very young," by our standards -- not twenty-year-olds, but fourteen-year-olds.

The story is very strange. It haunts me, and I keep trying to piece it together. Were they simply cowards, who despaired of winning the battle? But what good, in that case, was throwing their armor into the sea, unless the Turks saw them do it? And if the Turks, why not anyone else? Why was it only known later? It sounds more as though it were a conversion. Or were they raised as Muslims? Were they returning to their faith? Perhaps to someone better up on the history of the Levant the motives of the young men would be obvious, but to me they are obscure.

We can be confident that it happened. It's not the sort of thing Medieval writers made up.

It brought a vivid picture into my mind: the two young men -- boys -- at night, tipping their shields and swords and breastplates over the walls into the moonlit surf, full of fear, or of unknown devotion. How did it become known? When they were summoned to arms in the morning, and appeared in their shirts?

And I think of all the boys, haled into the adult world and made to start killing each other, over the centuries, by men who were absolutely sure that it was necessary, beautiful, and fitting, that they should do so.

Again

As if through the wrong end of a telescope. Very small figures move in and out of the circle.

It is a life spent chasing shadows.

Michael said, and then you come to the dharma, and it's even worse. Because you discover that, not only are your plans for worldly happiness never going to work, but also that you can't abandon them. Stopping believing in them by no means ends their power over you: they still run your life.

But there's light leaking in everywhere, joy welling in in through the seams. Yes, the ship is going down, but that doesn't mean what we've been taught to think it means.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, said the Christ. Not because Caesar is right, but because Caesar doesn't matter. We have more important things to do.

Voyage to Dulcarnon

I am, til God me bettre minde sende
At dulcarnon, right at my wittis ende.

--Troilus and Creseide

Mr Tate, in a parlous state,
Sailed away one day;
And we who dwell by the Longest Sea
Have never been able to say
Why a man in the prime of his milking time
Should suddenly up and say:
"I must sail away from the Longest shore
And the waters of Longest Bay;
For the sight of my socks, confuddled in flocks
Of blue and black and gray
Is a sight that has become, to me,
More grievous than I can say.

"I have studied the knees of philosophy
And many legs of lamb,
And watched the distant spires of smoke
Rise from the learned ham;
But the knotted locks of my twisted socks
And a softly whispered 'damn!'
Have poisoned the lees of my breakfast cup
Down to the dreariest dram,
Have unraveled the sleeve of all I believe
And tainted my morning jam,
Have shivered the snores of my slumber at dawn
With the dread that perhaps I am

"A laughingstock to the gapes and gawks
In the land of Dulcarnon."
The mermaids, singing for Mr Tate
Hastened his ship along,
Spurring his crew to all they could do
With snatches of amorous song,
And combing the seaweed out of their hair
With a slender ebony prong.
The eventual fate of Mr Tate
Was debated for long and long
By we who dwell by the Longest Sea
Far from Dulcarnon:

For some men say that Tate was fey
And now he will never grow old,
And the fishery women note that for swimming
The waters are deathly cold;
But some contend that the gods will defend
A man who has been so bold,
And they say an ungartered spirit
Will never be bought or sold,
And the moral of the Longest story
Will never cease to be told:
There was a man who stood for socks no more
And now will never grow old.

Refitting

One thing at a time; one thing at a time. The miracle is that she still floats at all.

And I have time. For once in my life, I have time. The very worst thing I could do is stuff it so tight with expectation that I didn't realize I had it till it was gone. I can take this time, this morning time, reflect, grieve a little, think a little.

"This season of repair," I wrote, elsewhere.

I love the accounts, in nautical fiction, of refitting. Limping to an unknown harbor in an uninabited island on the far side of the world, and working to get every sheet and halyard rerove, the fished yards made whole, the shot-holes re-planked, sails renewed or replaced, guns resettled on remade trunnions, shot freshly chipped and new cartridges sewn, stove barrels operated on or cannibalized; a time out from war, everybody laboring to restore their floating world, all that knowledge and skill being put to use, in an in-between time. a bardo, a truce, an interstice.

We make too little of the in-between times, I think. The fact that our culture has forgotten how to grieve is one indication of it: one's lover is hardly a week in his or her grave (or new apartment), and our friends are all urging us to get out and date and forget about it. It's seldom good advice.

There is blue sky today, for the first time in what seems weeks. A pale blue and very distant heaven. There is a gentleness in how people are talking in the cafe today, as though we had all been through a very dark time, and come out the other side. Which we have.

Such a Fucking Useless Saddo

You are such a fucking useless saddo.

It's a good sound line of trochaic pentameter. It has the pleasing property of pentameter that, if you walk in time with it, the lines alternate which foot they begin on. So it feels almost like a waltz rhythm.

You are such a fucking useless saddo, left, you are such a fucking useless saddo, right, you are such a fucking useless saddo, left, you are such a fucking useless saddo, right. In 4/4 time no doubt the mind would at some point get bored; but this rhythm will keep it going for quite a long walk.

An English friend remarked a couple weeks ago that I was a bit of a saddo. I was a little worried that it might mean "sadistic," but it turns out that it simply means pathetic. "Socially-incompetent geekiness as well as general, um, sadness and inadequacy," she explained, when I asked for a definition.

I realized today that I made a stupid error at work, omitted to do something on December 31st, which will have tax consequences for a member of the board. A more stupid and visible error could not well be made. So this little mantra began chanting itself in my brain.

There are several interesting things about this earworm. One is that, in the first flush of anger, my whole person participated in it with a kind of joy. As I got ready for the day, banging doors and slamming drawers, there seemed to be no part of me that wasn't savagely, exultantly chanting it. It wasn't until I was a half-mile down the street, walking under my umbrella in the rain, that mild dissenters began to appear. "Granted," one said, "that you are fucking useless saddo, in what way is that your fault?" Another said, "By repeating this, you're storing up suffering for yourself and others. You know that's true." And a third said, "Shantideva, you know, says: wait."

My friend thought I should want not to be a saddo, as I understood it, because, as a saddo, I was unhappy. I don't know. I usually find discussions of happiness slippery and unsatisfactory. Most of the time, I really don't know what people are talking about. What's the subject of discussion? Happy compared to what? How do I know that my limited capacity for happiness isn't maxed out already? It simply comes and goes, in its own rhythm. The set-points shift according to my circumstances, but over the course of week it all pretty much evens out. I'm going to be happy for a certain amount of time and unhappy for a certain amount of time. That's just how it works: that's the basic design of human consciousness. I can no more alter it than I can sprout a third arm.

There is, maybe, a different kind of happiness, one without set points. People whose discernment I respect think so. There is wordly happiness, they say, and that indeed just rises and falls, in an irregular but inevitable rhythm. But there is also spiritual happiness, which you can view as either negatively, as freeing yourself of the burdens of ego, or postively, as experiencing joyful communion. Well. Maybe so. I have a hard time picturing what wordly unhappiness in the midst of joyful communion would look like, but it's not an obvious impossibility, to me. It might be like the experience I've had, when I've been meditating a lot, of of having the physical sensations of depression without the usual concomitant hamster-wheel of depressed ideation. There's the sense of being borne down upon by a huge weight, the difficulty in initiating movement, the sense of being unable to take a full breath, but the bitterness, the self-blame, the endless rehearsals of bleak futures, are not there. It's okay. The depression is physically present, but I'm not invested in it.

So maybe it's something like that. I'm not ruling it out.

But anyway, I'm going back on the bupropion. The last week has been an experiment in not taking the drugs. It's been interesting, and a little disheartening, to see how much of the past resurfaced. I'm not strong enough, even with work I love and am suited for, even with a regular meditation practice, to get the upper hand of depression without the medicine.

It would have been a hard week anyway, of course, with so little privacy, and the stress of having too much to do at the Foundation, and the holiday slow-down in massage business. But that just made it a good test. If I could have sailed through it, I'd have known for sure that I could do without the meds. But not yet, I guess. I'm not sure how many multi-hour sessions of a voice chanting "you are such a fucking useless saddo" inside my head I could weather, without permanent damage to myself and to those dear to me. If the voice motivated me to change anything, that would be different; but those of you who know depression will be able to verify that it does nothing of the sort. It insists that saddo-hood is my perpetual, inevitable, and richly-deserved condition, for ever and ever, in the sight of God and men, amen.

I hope someday to be able to do without the meds. But if I can't, it's okay. Maybe next life.

Space

We're having our floors refinished. Old fir floors, which were painted when we moved in: apparently the paint is old and too dangerous to sand. We had a crew in first to blowtorch them and scrape them. That was the Mexican crew, not an English-speaker amongst them. Now we have the Anglos in, big strapping guys, twice the size of the Mexicans, with lots of heavy equipment. They've sanded everything down. Today they start putting on the urethane, or verathane, or whatever it is. Three coats, over a week. So we camp in the living room, for now; our bedroom is one of the rooms being done. I woke this morning at five, and sat for half an hour, by the porch light glowing through the front curtains.

It is exhilarating to have empty spaces in the house. Step past the plastic sheeting, and there are bare floors, bare walls -- uncluttered space. I did not know how deeply I was yearning for empty space.

Martha and I are moved by the same impulse. We are selling books and throwing away files. It's time to jettison things. We don't need much for the last stage of the journey. We have some twenty years left, probably. The only books to keep now are the ones I'm sure I'll want to look into again in the next year or two. Old journals, old letters -- they should all go. All this detritus. Why leave it to perplex and oppress our children?

Among my stuff, a file of poetry. I had been dreading it. Most of it dates back to the year I went to Lane Community College, when I was sixteen, and it was mostly, as I expected, awful. But it was so bad that sorting through it was easy. It almost all went easily into the roundfile. Of it all I saved four poems, which I'll post here eventually so I can get rid of that paper too. Here, in fact, is the first of them, in its entirety:

Valerie, O Valerie, I sing one song for you;
This river is a river that one tide could well undo.

Who was Valerie? Well, I have to admit that I'm not quite sure. I tended to fall in love, in those days, with women with oceans of dark hair. Probably she had a great mane of it, and an engaging smile, and let me join her at the cafeteria tables and memorize the way her tresses foamed over her shoulders. But it's not one tide, but thousands, since then. Who knows where in the wide world she is, now, or if she's still with us here at all?

Hopeless

Look, you guys. I'm trying to get rid of stuff, right? Trying to pare things down. Including my blogroll. But I've discovered so many incredible blogs lately, that despite my best efforts, the damn thing is growing rather than shrinking. And my criteria are very strict now. It's not just blogs that I think are great -- those are all over the place now. It's blogs that I can't bear the idea of not visiting again.

So anyway. New additions to the blogroll. If you do the poetry prompt thing, readwrite poem or totally optional prompt, you'll probably already know a couple of these:

Florescence. Jo Hemmant's new digs. Okay, so apparently I have a thing about British ex-journalists. Sue me. Beautiful, disturbing stuff, rooted in the complexity of family life, spinning out in all directions.

Polka Dot Witch. You'll need to get the password to read the poetry. Do it. Terrific stuff.

Old Girl of the North Country. Just take a look at it, at the black and white drawings she's been doing lately. Criminy.

Scorpoiess. Now this one, I'll wager, you've never seen. I was randomly wandering through Portland blogs and hit this. Rough edges and infelicities, sure -- but God, such flashes of poetry. My favorite so far is "Octopus", which for my money knocks Tennyson's "Kraken" right out of the ring.

It is with huge difficulty that I kept it down to just these four. I rather think there's more to come. There is just so much good stuff being done.

Made to be Broken

This is in response to the prompt at readwritepoem

We do not know how to make resolutions,
That is the problem. Not that there is anything wrong
With resolve. But making a resolution
Is not so simple a matter as we think.

Anyone can make a list of what
A better person would do, or would
Refrain from doing. To wish we were not
What we are, is a skill we need not cultivate.
We are all too facile at that.

No: to make a resolution
Properly
Is to build a box of intention. First of all,
The bottom. We must decide exactly what it is.
No vagueness. No "more of this," or "less of that."
Numbers. Three cigarettes a day, or none, but not some.

Then the sides. Every day you must repeat it
Aloud. A resolution spoken or written once is nothing.
It must be said over and over, affirmed again and again.

And then
No
You're wrong
We do not make a top.

We watch for the first time
We do not stay in the box.
If it's a real resolution, one that matters,
We almost certainly will not keep it.

And now, now is our chance.
Now is when the resolution means something
Now is the payoff.

When it's broken, we must look
For the hole in the box.
There is an intention we have not understood
A consequence we have not reckoned on.

And that is what resolutions are for.
Not for keeping: a resolution that can be kept
Need not have been made in the first place.
What a resolution is for is to bring our attention

To what we are driven by
But have not acknowledged.
To what we intend
But will not see.

Asking the Body

I finally found a book about Trager. Not the sort of book I wanted: it's called Trager for Self-Healing, and it follows all the conventions of the self-help book: it's really a short essay larded with exercises, repetitions and anecdotes, and it is, as books in that genre generally are, so sprightly as to be a little irritating. But I was anxious enough to learn about Trager therapy that I bought it.

For all that -- I'm gleaning something from it. The bits about Trager himself fascinate. The story is told that when he and his brother, in youth, were practicing acrobatics, his brother's question was always "who can jump highest?" But his question was always, "who can land softest?"

And the refrain of the book is Trager's set of questions: "how could it be lighter? How could it be softer? How could it be freer?" With the understanding that it's no use asking the questions if you don't listen for the answers. I've been doing bodywork just a short time, but already I'm frustrated by one response I get. "You're carrying your shoulders a little forward," I'll say.

"I know," they'll say, in a sort of desperate, confessional rush. "My mother always told me to pull my shoulders back."

But I have no wish to join a pantheon of scolding elders. There's no use in reiterating something you've already been told. The point is not what I, your mother, or anyone else -- including you -- thinks about how you hold your shoulders. The point is, what does your body think about it? It's doing it for a reason. You have to inquire of it, and listen for its answer.

And the bodywork is not to fix it. Bodywork doesn't usually fix anything: that's not its job. What bodywork does is ask the body questions, and let it try out hypothetical answers. Suppose the pecs lengthened out, and the shoulders settled back here? Or suppose the traps and scalenes let the head roll a little, like this, in response to movement, instead of clamping down -- what then? What would it feel like?

Sitting on the bus, or walking down the street, or working at my desk, I've been asking myself Trager's questions. It's remarkable how often there is, not just an answer, but an obvious answer. Once brought to light the puzzling question is "how could I not have noticed this?" It's analogous to the way meditation makes anxieties and cravings obvious, and makes them workable. There's nothing subtle or abstruse about it; it's not like listening for distant whispers; it's more like discovering that there's a voice at your ear shrieking "I want people to approve of me!" at fifteen second intervals, and that there has been for years. Likewise the way my body clutches and binds, the way my shoulders hunch and my toes curl. It ain't rocket science.

New Year's Day, 2008

A photograph of you, turning from the camera
Pouring your grace on someone
Outside the frame.
Still, severed as I am,
I see you,
And still, there it is, there, still,
The lovely upwelling of the light.

Light around the corners of
Everything.
There it is, still.

The Willamette gleams
Like a flake fallen from the peeling sky,
Like a mirror held between the bridges.
Patterned like a sword blade,
And inlaid with precious lights;
The dimpled water, the whirlpools,
Cold-burning vortices spun by the pylons --

My ankle turns on river rock,
Sickness comes quick into my throat,
Fever crawls over my flinching skin,
To remind me I am old.

Suppose I slowly drew up a coat sleeve
And laid a hand in the water,
Reaching for blessings, reaching for conclusions:
Nothing for me here. You are gone,
And the river is cold in its bed.

You would think it was the end of the story --
Nothing more to say:

But there it is, still, there, still,
The lovely upwelling of the light.

What Matters

before Christmas

A gray and white sky of furled clouds, but to the northwest is a pool of clear silver: in it floats the moon, its blemished surface held within a circle that is breathtakingly pure. A moment later the clouds have curtained it, but it breaks loose once more before the sky closes altogether, and the dawn turns into ordinary day. I close my umbrella and board the bus.

I feel fragile and weak, as if I had been ill for months, rather than days.

I am reading -- nearly finished with -- Barchester Towers, and I am hoping that I do not resemble Bertie Stanhope as much as I think I do. Trollope does an extraordinary job of conveying family culture -- no one but Tolstoy, maybe, does it so well -- and the family I grew up in, after my parents divorced, certainly resembled the Stanhopes more than is comfortable for me: that family that is so good-natured and entertaining that it takes a good while for an acquaintance to realize that they have no hearts.

I do not believe in psychopaths: I do not believe that there are really people without hearts. But certainly there are people who so habitually disregard them as to lose track of them: and clever, rootless people who don't have to work for a living are peculiarly liable to do so. The work of my life has been to recover the heart I misplaced as a child and a teenager. This year it has been bruised and wrung enough for me to be quite sure that I have recovered it.

The last few weeks have been a strange shadow-life: all of my past has risen up to testify against me, and I move easily through the many masks I have worn, never quite sure who I am at the moment, nor which variation of living in hiding is going to sweep me up at any given hour: long-dead temptations arise, spectral and impotent -- fitting Christmas companions, though their power to haunt and compel is injured by their being such a crowd: they jostle and fluster and embarrass each other.

I am held up by the extraordinary kindness of friends. This time, ill-spent and idle as it is, has nevertheless been necessary, and I think that soon I will be through it. Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha. In the Buddha: in the purity of my own heart, which I lost and disbelieved in for so long. In the Dharma: the teachings, from Nagarjuna to Tolkien, from Lao Tzu to Trollope, from the nun who ran the the Gestalt group at the New School to Michael at KCC. In the Sangha: the community of practitioners. Meaning many things, but certainly including all of you. For me, most importantly, including all of you.

Merry Christmas. Happy Solstice. The blessings of Sunreturn. However you celebrate it -- here's to the coming of light after darkness.

after Christmas

I can't say I write because I think it matters. I write for the same reason cats mark their territory, taggers tag, kids carve their names into their desks, and sorcerors pour their souls into their cut-off fingers, and hide them: always, always, the idea is to escape from death, to lodge oneself in something solider and safer than this trembling unstable flesh. And of course always the hope that, in some other, refracted form, I'll be more interesting than I am in -- as we say -- the flesh.

I am tired of it, this itch to be something other than a few decades' flickering pattern of a mammal: it's a stupid waste of time, surely.

(But the sky, the sky, the clouds and the moon and the sun and the stars and the silver dawn pools of brightness. I suppose the name for this feeling is reverence, or awe. It stands directly opposite the marking impulse.)

I am in the flesh, all the time, in this odd ursine frame, short on sleep and sniffling. I see myself in a shop window, say, darkly, and am disturbed by what I see -- an active white-haired man. Square shouldered and round bellied. He looks like nothing I associate with myself. Never has, though. That's nothing new.

I feel almost alive, almost real, when I'm touching someone. Otherwise, not much, not often. Cloud, sky, sun, moon, stars. Otherwise -- it's an artificial, unconvincing life, for the most part: I can't take it very seriously.

Othello's occupation's gone: that's what I'm really responding to here. I built my life around the service of eros, and if that's done with, then -- what am I to be? And more urgently, what am I to do? I can't look at the sky all day.

Well -- just the next thing that serves, I guess.

The grimly interesting thing is how much everything stays the same.

Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
You're still the same old girl you used to be.

For most of my life I've looked to eros to change things. It seldom did. It advertises itself as the way into a new life, and that of course is what it always means in Hollywood; but new lives aren't really entered into that easily.

The wish for a new life is a deep and powerful one, but it's almost -- as it's been configured in me -- a completely self-defeating one. Because with my heart and my attention set on a new life, I relegate this one to a restless idling in the waiting room. I don't fix anything here, I don't settle to anything here, because I'm not -- as I conceive it -- staying here.

But here, of course, is precisely where I live. A few months shy of fifty, and I still camp in my house, rather than living in it.

Having children, of course, contributed to this. Because everything with children is temporary, and there's no un-draconian way of stemming the inwash of useless and unbeautiful stuff into your house, when you have kids. But it has far more to do with the everyday habits of my heart and mind. I lived this way, camping out, long before I had children. I lived this way when I was a child myself. I never invested myself in the the houses I lived in. The work I was doing was never my real work.

It can look like equanimity, like an admirable lack of attachment, but mostly it's just rootlessness.

I have moved. I have moved to a genuinely new place. But it will take all my attention to stay here. I must watch and meet the waiting-room habits of mind, as they arise, where they arise.

This is a struggle partly to be made on the cushion. But even more, in the domos. I must, literally, put my house in order.

Christmas in Texas

This is in response to last week's totally optional prompt, about a roadsign in empty country, which reminded me of our every-other-year journeys through the Southwest to have Christmas with my Dad's family in Texas.

The telephone wires ride their poles, up and down
The saguaros pivot slowly, hauling the car
Down the shimmering highway. We rise and fall
With the land that is no longer Oregon,
Not yet Texas.

Soon we will come to the end
Of the sweet high country of New Mexico.
My Dad will pull over to change his shirt,
And then we will arrive

In El Paso. My grandparents have a miracle,
a grapefruit tree, in their back yard.
My cousins call my uncle "sir,"
As if he were a stranger, not their father.
Dark Mexicans lurk in the parking lots.
We are not quite sure what is wrong about the Mexicans;
No one wants to talk about them.

But we drive across the border one day, so we kids
Can say we have been to Mexico. We are warned:
The Mexicans will try to steal from us and cheat us;
We are not to trust them. So we don't:
But their eyes are kind, dark and kind,
As we trail through the shops.

All the way home, I think about their eyes,
So different from our cold hard blue.

Italian for Christmas

I've been dabbling with Italian. I know not a word -- or didn't, until last week -- but I've been working my way through the Schaum's outline of grammar, the last couple days, with great pleasure. It's a curiously satisfying language, sitting easy in the mouth, requiring none of the pursing and gagging of French or the spitting and coughing of German. Just a mellowed and agreeable form of Latin.

The only thing that continually brings me up short is that a person who grew up with English and German expects 'h' in a consonant cluster to mark palatalization; the Italians, perversely, use it to mark the opposite. So "perche" is pronounced perkay, and "perce" -- if there is such a word -- would be pronounced perchay. No English-speaker, of course, is in any position to criticize other languages' spelling habits, but I wish they'd chosen a less outlandish way to represent hardening than by adding the consonant everyone else uses to represent softening.

I had picked up my Greek grammar, a couple weeks ago, but I didn't want something hard. I'm tired. I wanted something easy, that would make me feel smart. Italian was just the thing. Now I need to find something like an Italian translation of the Chronicles of Narnia, some simple children's text that I've read aloud a million times, to pick up vocabulary and idiom.

Suffering, and So Forth

On the one hand, the conviction that this alone is life, this alone has value, this, this right here, not the new life, not the purged man, not the sainthood to be, but only this, however banal, however ordinary. It is here or nowhere, now or never, it is here in the imprudent third dry oversugared pastry from its plastic tray, in the endlessly repeated computer game, in the procession of increasingly vapid images of appealing unclothed girls. This too, say the theologians of my sect, arises from Buddha-nature. What else is there, after all, for it to arise from?

On the other hand, the sense that drove Mole to the river (and thence to the Wild Wood), that inspired Sendak's dog on her travels -- "there must be more to life." It is as inescapable as the banality, twinned with it somehow. And I want to practice, I want to meditate, not to achieve some higher state of mind or even some lowering of the pitch of anxiety in my life, but just because of the stillness, because of hearing the drops of rain spattering the driveway, because there is a sensual pleasure in knowing that the heater will turn itself off in twenty minutes, back on again in another twenty minutes, even in watching the gentle, twitchy way my mind starts trying to persuade me that this time, this time there must be more than twenty minutes between cycles of the heater, and I could just look at the clock -- as if anyone would know or care!

So I began to expound an opposition but there isn't one, not really, and there is no choice between this and that. There is this immense fragility -- and everything does break -- but Buddha-nature is leaking into reality inevitably, despite, or rather because, of the breakages.

---

The suffering is huge. I have been reading, with impatience, an anthology of 20th Century French poetry. They seem to have the notion that their suffering is unlike everyone else's. Not all of them. But most of them do a remarkable job of cutting the contemplation of suffering off from its normal consequence of compassion. The truth of the matter is far more appalling than they think. If they knew, if they really knew, the whole thick rope of suffering that runs through the center of each human being, they would be stopped in their tracks. Each step we take is through a red trembling mist of desire and every floor is iced over with anxiety, and our bodies are, at the best of times, decaying and weakening and coming to pieces. You flee bourgeois life not to escape respectability and limited horizons, mon frere; you flee it because your little sister has cerebral palsy and and your aunt's spine is fusing into crook and you can't bear to look at them, and you want to run to where the people are all young, and the wounds are all self-inflicted.

We conceal our suffering from each other, and that is perhaps the worst disservice we regularly all do for each other, because it gives an absurdly false picture of "normal" life as pain-free. Clergymen, therapists, and doctors are some of the few people who are in a position to know just how much suffering, how much illness and agony and misfortune, are going on all the time. The rest of us walk around and see what we imagine to be the smug faces of self-satisfaction, rather than the laboriously maintained public expressions of people who are barely managing to get by.

The people who go into massage therapy are mostly young, and healthy. Part of our massage trades for classes was taking each other's health histories. The number of things wrong with these young healthy people was astonishing. Twenty-year-olds taking half a dozen prescription drugs, with chronic disabling back pain, agonising tendonitis, depression, bulimia, migraines, diabetes, frozen shoulders -- you name it. As the months went our histories all became much healthier, because we grew less scrupulous and more tired of listing everything out. My high blood pressure and cholesterol medicine disappeared; I noticed other people's TMJ and sleep apnea and arthritis and depression vanishing. But having glimpsed it all once, I had to look at everyone a little differently. Nothing in my massage practice since has led me to think there's less general suffering than that glimpse revealed.

I belong to a couple of mailing lists: one for my sangha, on which people regularly post requests for prayers for the seriously ill and the dying; another on which we are on such terms of intimacy that we speak of divorces, financial disasters, the serious illnesses ourselves or of our children, the descent of loved younger brothers into addiction , or of aging parents into Alzheimers. After a few years you begin to realize that these things are not -- as they would appear to each of us alone -- remarkable events, but the regular fabric of human life.

Life is suffering, said the Buddha: and of course we are quick to point out, rightly, that "suffering" is a technical term, there, that it includes a plethora of things that we would ordinarily class as pleasures. To someone able to parse it carefully the turbulence of mind involved in, say, eating lunch with a friend, the anxiously preserved and obsessively protected sense of self, the endless yammer of that imagined self for validation, makes the most pleasant lunch date largely an affair of suffering. True enough. But just in an ordinary way, the Buddha's assessment is just. We live, even we fortunate first-worlders far from the wars, in an ocean of pain.

Is this discouraging? Perhaps, to people of a more pollyanna-ish disposition than mine. To me it is profounding encouraging. The mess humankind has made of its own nest is one thing, if you think of it all as having been done by healthy carefree unencumbered people with time to look about them and think about things. It is a different thing if you think of it as having been done by people deep in trouble, worried about their friends and families, and very short on resources. In that case you might think it remarkable that things are not very much worse.

Light

This cold has been threatening to overtake me for months. I have felt it hovering, near or far, since summer at least. I was anxious, in the week or two before my boards; I desperately wanted not to be sick, then, and I stopped riding my bicycle or doing anything strenuous, so as not to give it any opportunity.

"Let me be as sick as anything, after my boards," I said -- to myself? -- "but let me get through them first." I felt a bit under the weather on the day of the exams, but not so much so that I couldn't conceal it.

After that, I threw caution to the winds. I almost wanted to be sick. I felt I had to be really sick, to stop the hovering.

Now, whether this has to do with physical reality, I couldn't say. It's not entirely implausible. But it's as a shadow-play that it's important, of course, and for that purpose it really doesn't matter how true.

I knew it was unwise to bike to Tosi's in the cold, last Tuesday. And to go ahead and do the massage Thursday night (I did warn my client, and offer to reschedule, but she wanted to go ahead.) So in a sense I brought this on myself. But I wanted to get sick and be done with it. Until my body understood this virus intimately, it might hover indefinitely. So I rode my bike and did my massage.

Now it's settled down into my chest. But my body is gradually getting the better of it. I feel marginally better than I did yesterday. It's learning to recognize the virus and coming to grips with it. When I get well, I will be really well.

There are times when prudence is my greatest enemy. It's better to fall and get up again, than to walk too carefully. I can't say even now, as the full suffering implicit in this year becomes plain to me, that I wish it had been different. I don't wish it had been different.

A silver light comes through the windows. A high, white overcast, and a faint luminous mist; light that comes from everywhere and nowhere. My diaphragm, the muscles between my ribs, and the serrati that bind them to the spine are sore from coughing, and my head throbs slightly.

I am intensely grateful for all of it, for this living, breathing, suffering body, for the love beyond imagination or desert.

Honey

But in fact there was honey in the house: a half-inch in the bottom of a plastic bottle with a blue outline of Maine on the label. A gift to my daughter for looking after an African hedgehog for a college classmate. It had sat there a long time. The honey, I mean. The hedgehog had, too, but the hedgehog isn't part of my narrative.

The honey was quite solid. For honey is thixotropic: when cold and still it becomes more solid, but when warm and worked it becomes more fluid. It shares this property with various paints and, according to wikipedia, certain non-Newtonian pseudo-plastics. It also shares it with the connective tissue that accounts for some 20% of the human body, which is why (literally) warming up makes you less prone to injury during exercise.

And so the thixotropic nature of honey reinforces my vague homeopathic belief that it must be good for me, when I have a cold, and another thixotropic substance is make a nuisance of itself in my upper respiratory tract. I would believe this anyway, because Frizzy Rachel said so.

I ran the bottle under hot water and squeezed it. Then I poked a slender spoon in and got a dollop and stirred it into steaming hot water. And now I am drinking it, at 3:00 AM, and presently I may feel restored enough to go back to bed. And I think that "the Non-Newtonian Pseudo-Plastics" would be a good name for a band.

Drums

In the middle of the circle, what my fellow-buddhists would call a shrine: an antlered skull, a candle, and stones arranged in a pattern: four little bear statuettes circled the pattern, one at each point of the compass. Sage burning.

We passed the talking stick, and talked about death, and grandfathers, and being out of work, and being deserted. When each person finished and handed the stick to the next, everyone would say "ah-oo," together -- or some sound like that -- a sound curiously like one of the pronunciations of "om" that I've heard, way down in the throat, the back-vowels coming straight up from the diaphragm.

And then the drums. I probably would not have come, but for the drums. I've never much sought the company of men; in fact, I've avoided it most of my life. But it seemed maybe time to change that. Having lunch with Rob, who invited me to the circle, was part of that.

But a bigger hurdle than the company of men was my distrust of White people doing Indian things. It has a couple components. One is much the same thing as my distrust of people in my sangha who seem too fond of Tibetan stuff, who take Tibetan names and swoon over anyone in a robe. "Spiritual tourists" is the unkind (and often unfair) name I attempt to refrain from applying to them. We have our own sacred traditions, lore, and iconography: why go sniffing after someone else's? -- Well, in my case, because I can't quite accept the bloody, vengeful, and jealous God of my fathers. I take the Tibetan paraphernalia because it comes with taking Michael's teaching and with the community of KCC. Some people, I suspect, take the community and the teaching because it comes with the Tibetan paraphernalia.

But in the Indian case, there's a the further complication of the conquest and occupation, which is not (the way I reckon time) very far in the past. After having practiced haphazard genocide against these people for hundreds of years, and having appropriated their land, going on now to appropriate their sacred rites, as well, seems like the crowning effrontery, the ne plus ultra of imperialism.

Not that I was very sure of whose rites we were appropriating. The leader of the circle, Patrick has some Mingo blood. I had a notion that the drums and sage and talking stick were Plains Indian things -- though most people drum, one way or another. Patrick referred to Black Elk as an authority. I suppose that modern Americans, in any case, must scrape up rites wherever they can find them, whatever their ancestry. When I traveled in rural Greece, people wanted to whether I was from New York, Chicago, or California; I eventually tired of trying to convince them that there were other places in America, and settled for being from California. In more or less the same way, I suppose, native North Americans end up settling for being Sioux or Navajo.

But I digress. The drums. I love drums; always have. I have a small, sweet-toned conga that I play occasionally. But I've almost never drummed in company, though it's always been an attractive idea to me. I've been too shy, or too careful of my dignity.

The drumming began almost casually, little disconnected thumps and rolls, like an orchestra tuning up. Gradually it coalesced into a magnificent music, quite unlike anything I've ever heard. People came in and out of focus, took up different drums and sticks and clangy and chirpy things. Patrick owns a drum-shop, and the wealth of drums to choose from was intoxicating, though I was too timid, that first night, to try any but my own.

Blue Star



More reshpeckobiggle.

Purplescape



Okay, I confess, it's kind of groovy. Like, you know, something I would have put on my wall in 1971 when I was thirteen. But I sure am having fun with Inkscape.

Dear One

Our basement has never been entirely dry. With the recent heavy rains, it's been wet again. And a cardboard box of my old papers, Martha told me, had gotten wet.

So I went down and opened it up. Cold and clammy. On the top was a flimsy manuscript box. I lifted its lid. "Appolonius of Tyre," I read. The title page of my second novel. I flipped through the pages. This wasn't the first time, obviously, it had gotten damp. Black mold spotted the upper left corners of the pages; a noxious dust rose from it. I put it aside, made a little queasy, and not by the dust. Presumably my first novel was in here somewhere too.

Old student evaluations. Papers I wrote at Yale on metrics and metonymy. A paper, God help us, on Lao Tzu, written when I was sixteen and going to Lane Community College in Eugene.

Christ. More manila folders. One fell open and I lifted out a closely filled handwritten card. Who on earth was it to? I couldn't read the salutation. "Dear Orn"? Who on earth was that? I read a little, and got accustomed to the hand. Of course. Mary Pat, from grad school, twenty-some years ago now. "Dear One," it began. She was a southerner, who specialized in 18th Century lit, and used that epistolary language of passionate friendship. It must have been written during the summer after our first year in graduate school.

I found her online -- at least I think it was her; her name is fairly common -- and wrote her an email, a couple years ago. She never replied.

I paused. Hundreds, probably thousands of pages. I could look through them, and savor the melancholy of it all. Obviously I once thought I would want to. Or even that somebody else would want to.

I shut the box up and came back upstairs. "Let's just toss it," I said to Martha.

The cold rain keeps falling, here. Floods up north, and towards the Coast.

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
For the rain it raineth every day.

Autumn

In the morning my breath
smokes in the air; in the evening
the gold crumbled flakes of the maple leaves
are a glittering dust in the ebbing sun,
the breath of the dreaming earth.