Still Winter

Penetrating cold: we seem too weak to be able to shake off winter. The confusion settles behind my shoulders, in for the long haul.

I hear someone singing, very faintly, far away.

It's one of those strange bardos, a roll-up time. A market adjustment. Things slip, a little. The cargo shifts.

It was still light when I started my massage last night, and the skin as I rubbed in the oil gleamed like wet, dark chocolate. Such a beautiful color. English is still poor in vocabulary for such skin. "Black" and "jet" and "ebony" are simply wrong, not red enough; "brown" is hopelessly vague. "Chestnut" is too light. "Chocolate" comes closest, and conveys some of the richness and delight, but it has no dignity. What we want is the black equivalent of "alabaster." We don't have it, yet. There's a sort of reddish obsidian that has that glow and depth, but when you say "obsidian" people think "jet."

Night fell. She slept, and woke, and slept.

I don't know why people apologize for sleeping. It's rude to fall asleep in the middle of a spoken conversation, but massage doesn't work that way. The conversation goes on, awake or asleep.

I walked slowly, this morning, daunted by the cold and gloom. I seldom understand why people don't like the weather to be cold and dark, but this morning I did. I usually like the cold and the dark because I can feel the torch of my body burning so strongly against it. This morning the flame was feeble and uncertain. I felt I could gutter in the cold, be lost in the dark.

Our German exchange student seems to want to have nothing to do with us: he spends all his time at the host-house of another, pretty and female, exchange student. I daresay we are rather dull. He decisively nixed the idea of going over the mountains to the Warm Springs Reservation. We're a bit baffled by him, and I think he's a bit baffled by us. But anyway, it's only another week. And he liked the Nike outlet store.

Death and his Brother

"I know that death is the final event," said Dick. I wonder what it's like to know that? I can't imagine what knowing that is like, any more. I used to know that -- but back when I used to know it, I didn't ever really think about dying. Not my own death, concretely, I mean.

Not that I'm certain it's not the final event. I even incline, cautiously, to thinking it probably is. But I wonder what it's like to live in a world with such hard edges. Mine is so blurry. I can walk with my own death down to the end -- not being able to clean myself, having people intubate and catheterize me so as to make sure I die more slowly, the edema and the muscle aches, the fluid filling the lungs, the person next to me running the goddamn television so that my last moments on earth will be spent with Oprah or Jerry Springer. I can see all those things vividly. And of course I can imagine death as the end, in a childish kind of way, by imagining silence and blackness and a sense of vertigo. But that's as ridiculous, as a representation of death, as the old man sitting in the clouds is as a representation of God. A final-event death, no experience at all, would be nothing like the experiences of blackness or silence or vertigo.

I can picture death as an awakening -- a slightly more sophisticated picture. Coming to realize that everything I took to be so real was not actually real at all, at least not as I thought it was. Awakening is something we nearly all experience nearly every day; it's a familiar enough experience, though I'm not sure how many people understand its implications. You'd think that having the daily experience of finding that your understanding of reality was, in fact completely bogus, would lead you to think that such turns were in general possible, or even likely, but it doesn't seem to have that effect on most people. The fact that dream experience, which seems real at the time, turns out not to be real, doesn't seem to engender, in most people, a similar suspicion of waking life. I don't know why not. It does in me. I have no confidence at all that I'm not in for a similar turn, at death; I'm not even sure that the waking confidence that dreams have a lesser reality is justified. Who knows where all I go, at night? The fragmentary bits of confused memory I have of it at waking are surely just a tiny fraction of all that I experience. Who do I know, in those other countries? What do they say to me? What pledges have I made to them, and when will I be called upon to fulfill them?

Well. Those are the silly sorts of things I wonder about. The specifics, at any rate are silly; but I don't think it's silly to doubt that the stories my mind makes up out of the pictures my senses present to it during its waking hours correspond very closely to reality. At times, I sure, they don't correspond at all.

As for my imagination of what will happen to the subjective consciousness at death -- something I've never (to my knowledge) experienced before -- well, my confidence in the accuracy of that rests near zero.

The Poem in my Pocket

It's my birth week and I will remind everyone to carry a poem in their pocket this Thursday, and think me a good birthday thought, wrote Deb

It takes some twenty minutes for the forest

To forget you are there. You don't have to hide.
Sit very still: meditate, or dream, and it begins to open
Little shivers and sways; a rustle as
The new red twigs bend sharply under
Hardly any weight.

That part's easy. The hard part is keeping still
As the forest begins to unfold.
You must not turn to look. Everything
That ought to show itself will show itself
In good time.

It's easy to think that the forest is hiding
Because it does not know you.
If only it were true: the forest knows you better
Than you know yourself. It knows how thin
The thread that keeps your silence.

The longer you are quiet the more you realize
How right the forest is. At the first splash of color
You turn your head; a whir of wings
Cocks your predator's head; your jaws
Open ready to snap.

Quieter than that. Stiller than that
And even stiller to write a birthday poem.
You must wait even longer, trust
That what matters will come of its own accord
Into your field of vision.

If your heart is bursting with extravagances
And declarations then it's simply time to wait.
Those who look do not see;
Those who listen do not hear.
The simple tune

Begins softly in the branches above
Happy birthday to you, in a sleepy murmur
Happy birthday to you, from the thicket close by
Happy birthday dear Deb,
Happy birthday to you.

But even now you must be very quiet
Till the last shadows of the song have
Faltered away over the leafbed, and only rise
When your own quotidian business
Calls you away.

desiree

the dogs
are enormous

the biggest lollops up onto the bed
taking up most of it
to keep a bit of an eye on me
from the tie-dye coverlet
but mostly
he naps

my fingers find their way
through the dreads
to the soft shell
of muscle
above the ears

o how i love you
desiree

you were nervous, you said
and i tried to put you at ease but
you know
i'm no good at that until
the laying on of hands

astonished again
at love that wants nothing
that rises
from somewhere else
that uses my hands
and leaves me
inexplicably
content

i who am always wanting
always needing
wanting and needing nothing.

then you curl up on the sofa
like a child
i feel so good
you say

and of course i do not say
how much i love you desiree

because we have no language
in which to say that
without saying also
belong to me
so i say i'm so glad
and join my hands
namaste

and then i let
the slightly less
enormous dog
win our tug of war
for a soggy toy
and i leave
having loved perfectly
and wanting nothing

o how i love you
desiree

Shoot

I am exhausted.

But I did it. Survived my photo shoot. The photographer was marvelous. I'm anxious to see the pictures.

For most of my life, I have hated having my picture taken. There are very few photos of me extant. But I thought my massage website, when it materializes, needed to have photos. So I bit the bullet, and started roaming the web, looking at Portland photographers' sites. I knew what I was looking for. Someone who could do natural light interiors. Someone who could do both portraits and photos of people at work. Someone who photographed what they saw, instead of what they wanted to see -- i.e. whose pictures of different people looked different. I hate the stock soft-porn spa massage photos, pretty girls in soft focus stroking other pretty girls in soft focus. I imagine they work, after their fashion, but it's not what I wanted to convey, and I don't imagine clients brought in by such pictures would be happy with what they got.

I wanted real hands on a real body. And I hoped for some sense of the connection I feel, when I'm listening to someone's body with my hands. A dear friend, and one of my first paying clients, agreed to model, bless her! -- so the connection was there. I hope the pictures turn out!

"Tuck your head, just little there," said Joni, when she was doing the head shots. "Makes you look approachable. No, not that much. That's like 'hey, babe.' Not what we want."

"Definitely not," I said, and we all laughed.

She paused. "You hate this, don't you?" she said, sympathetic, but amused.

"I've always hated having my picture taken," I said. "That's why I wanted you. I saw your photos and I thought, I could deal with that. I could have my picture taken by her."

It's not quite true to say I've always hated having my picture taken. It would have been true a couple years ago. But I know photographers, now, by way of the web. In New York, at the blogswarm last year, I actually liked having my picture taken, for the first time in my life. I trusted the photographers -- people I've known online, whose photos I've loved for a long time. I knew how they looked at things and at people. I was willing to have them look at me and show other people what they saw.

It's not really about wanting to look pretty, or not much. (Richard Burton, when he was having his portrait painted, implored the artist, "Don't make me look ugly, there's a good fellow.") Of course that plays. But it's much more than that. It's a psychological horror of being represented by people who don't understand me, a feeling that by the malign power of the camera I could be turned into what I'm misunderstood to be. "Horror" is really not too strong a word. The people who photographed me in New York have no idea the level of love and trust my permitting them to photograph me, even welcoming it, signified. If they saw ugliness or awkwardness, that was okay. It would be my ugliness and awkwardness, and I'm perfectly willing for the world to see that.

So. I was nervous. But I lived through it. And now I am very tired.

Against Prissy Translation

I'm reading Richard Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights.) I've also read a very entertaining commentary: The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin. This book greatly endeared itself to me by referring to Burton's "barmy erudition." Burton's notes are copious, learned, and eccentric in the extreme: he seizes any excuse to display his extensive, bizarre, and highly unscientific knowledge of foreign sexual habits; and tells us, for example, in far more detail than we want, exactly how various peoples go about blinding or castrating unfortunate superfluous heirs.

But Irwin also attacks Burton's translation, and I don't agree with him about that. The things he accuses Burton of doing, Burton does indeed do. He fetches up archaic English words with abandon (this possibly bothers me less than people who may have to look more of them up, but he has excellent judgement about what words to use: many of them should never have fallen out of usage -- hent, dight, etc.: marvelous pithy words that I'd be glad to see rescued from the linguistic attic.) He also translates the poetry as poetry -- not always as wonderful poetry, and, since I'm innocent of Arabic, I can't say whether that's accuracy or clumsiness. Irwin also takes Burton to task for preserving the "rhymed prose" of his original, and that's what I really want to talk about.

Rhymed prose is something I had never encountered before reading the Nights, and the effect is charming. When the pitch of the narrative is to rise -- for example, when we meet a particularly beautiful lady or particularly fearsome demon -- you'll find the final words of clauses rhyming. Irwin singles out this as a particularly "unattractive passage":

But in the stress and stowre I got sundry grievous wounds and sore; and since that time, I have passed on my back three days without tasting food or sleeping aught, so that my strength is down brought, and the world is become to me as naught.

Now certainly Burton has to work to make the rhymes; to use inversion, and to fetch in quaint words to do so. But why he should not even attempt to translate such an interesting and integral feature of his original as the rhyming prose is beyond me. Also beyond me is why he should not reproduce the archaic language in which the original is, I don't doubt, written. Again, I know no Arabic; but I know something of various oral and semi-oral storytelling traditions, and they all use archaic, quaint words. Why exactly a translation should not reproduce this part of the reading experience baffles me. The argument, if it were explicit, would l suppose be that "accurate" translation trumps "atmosphere," but I don't think that holds water for a moment. There's no way to really separate out the semantic charge of a word from its atmospheric charge -- and anyway, why would we want to do so? Why is conveying the one a legitimate task of translation, and the other not?

Someone who translated, say, Tolkien, without attempting to follow the changes into archaic language, would in my opinion seriously distort him. The fact that many modern people, particularly literary people, roundly dislike dropping into archaic language in order to signal a change in formality, and prefer the boundary between poetry and prose to be clear-cut, does not give the translator carte blanche to simply erase these features and replace them with something the audience likes better. The whole point of translation is to bring something strange and new to readers -- not to convince them that the whole world shares their provincial tastes.

And in this, Burton triumphs. The reader of his Nights enters a different world. And Burton was perfectly fitted for this task by his very defects: he's juvenile in just the same way the composers and audience of his book were juvenile. He loves the bizarre and sensational. His racism and sexism echoes theirs. He is attuned to them. Reading his Nights is not always a pleasant experience, but it is always an illuminating one.

Volition

Once upon a time, under the influence of George Orwell and his ilk, I learned contempt for the passive voice. Orwell, like most political activists, perceived a world of free agents. Evil was caused by wicked greedy people doing bad things. Good was caused by decent selfless people doing altruistic things. Thus reality was accurately described by sentences in the active voice; and only those seeking to conceal their agency would avoid it.

The active voice does make for forceful, vivid writing. But I no longer think it corresponds very well to reality. The fiction of independent agents is good for storytelling. But not for understanding what really happens.

"It's raining," we say. What is raining? What is this "it" which decides to rain? Well, we're told, it's just a way of expressing something our language is not well-suited to describe. "It" is a convenient fiction.

But really this "it" isn't a special case. All active sentences employ, and propagate, the same fiction. "I sat down to meditate," I say. The "I" posited by this sentence is no more real than the "it" that rains. I could have done something different, people will say. Could I have? How do you know?

People who study the brain were pleased, at one point, to be able to identify the part of the brain that makes executive decisions. The only trouble was that they found, upon testing, that this part of the brain became active after the motor control centers, not before. In other words, you reach for a glass of water first, and then you decide to do it.

This will surprise most people, but not many people who meditate. We do first, and then we make up the story that explains the action. Volition itself is not conscious: what's conscious is the subsequent narrative.

Now that is a drastic oversimplification. I readily admit that: but I require of those who claim to make conscious decisions that they admit the same thing. What really happens when people act is at least as much like the concealed, diffuse formation of water droplets in a cooling cloud as it is like the drama of titanic free agents that our language insists upon.

Bell

How I loved the touch of your hands on my flesh
How the thinness of the sheet intoxicated me
How, when you set your knee upon the table,
And put the back of my hand on your thigh
To sink your elbow's point into my palm,
I could have forgotten I am old and you are young.

("What brought you to Portland?" I asked later, and
One of your eyebrows flicked upwards;
Expressionless, you nodded your head
Briefly at the alcove
Where your boyfriend sat, surfing the net;
And I thought,
Oh dear.)

This is not love, though I am fond of you,
Fond, as touching makes one,
If one is me.
This is cathexis; the habit of investing
The young and pretty and female part of the world
With special significance.
I have made you the gatekeepers of heaven
Whether you will or no
And whether I will or no
And though now I no
It is not so easy. I see you now and long to cross
Into the indistinct joy
Remembered from other people's pasts.
I cannot well express
How thoroughly I disbelieve in this paradise,
Nor how deeply I believe.

(I came through the door last night and Jonquil
Jumped up to hug me, and I held her warm young body
And said, "Hi, love,"
Without thinking, not knowing exactly
What I meant.)

Piece by piece I unmake the past:
I must dissolve
All of my life; I must open my hands.
You do not understand; you are thinking in terms
Of of your bloody right and wrong.
I am thinking of God; I am thinking of
The darkened halls of a suffocating gauze,
Of a diaphragm that cannot take a whole breath,
Nor release one.

Listen, think of it otherwise: think of the earliest
Sunrise you remember,
The flickering line segments
Cast by ants' legs
As they pattered in the morning light.
Think of of the last bell
Rung by the umze,
The sound of pure silver
Shining in the shadowed room.

Laptopped Again

Whew. It's good to be laptopped again. With birthday money from my folks, I sprang for this machine: a Thinkpad T-41, refurbished from IBM, $422. Sitting in Tosi's, tip-tapping away. Now I can start typing in what I've scribbled in my notebooks, past couple of weeks. I seem to have written this on Easter:

---

Easter morning. A gentle rain falling. The sky is soft gray, and the light comes up from the wet streets, catching the fluted geranium leaves in the window boxes, and then spreading up in fans of barely visible luminosity, sweeping up, as if, in some esoteric inversion of photosynthesis, the leaves were giving life to the sky.

Christ is risen today.

---

It was all a long time ago, and very far away. Isabel and Sir Richard Burton -- the explorer, you know, and translator of the Arabian Nights, not the actor -- were at sea. He looked at the waves and the sail. "I should like to be buried at sea," he said, suddenly.

His wife, who was Catholic, said quietly, "I don't think I could quite bear that. Is there anything else that would do?"

He reflected on the importance of the body, in her faith. He himself was a Sufi, if he was anything. He could not stand the thought of suffocating the dark earth. He wanted the air and the light.

Oh well. He grinned his wolfish grin. "Then I think I should like to be buried in a tent," he said lightly, and let the matter drop.

Years later, she had a mausoleum made for him, a tent of white translucent marble, so his coffin could lie in the light. When she died she was laid beside him, a little lower, so that once again they were sleeping in a tent together, as they had used to do in Syria and South America.

---

That's how I remember the story, anyway. There's a picture of the tomb in the biography I read. A first-rate biography of the two of them: A Rage to Live, by Mary Lovell.

He loved to make people's flesh creep: to pretend to have coolly murdered a boy in Africa lest he give their party away, to have resorted to cannibalism when a castaway. There was always a juvenile streak in him. He was one of the great adventurers of his time, and still he had to make up stories to impress people. But one of the last acts of his life was rescuing a robin from a cistern, and carefully drying and warming it. Good karma, I should think, for the voyage out.

---

The gears that keep me meshed in the present have been slipping. The other day I got off the bus. I had gotten to the best part of a mystery novel -- not, of course, the revelation of who did it, but the epilogue, in which the detective retells the story from the start, but in such a way that all that had been puzzling is made to seem plain, or even inevitable.

I was eager enough for this that I kept reading, as I walked along. Something I used to do constantly as a boy and a young man, but which I had not done for many years. The street gently rocked under my feet, and the distance between me and boyhood slipped away. Alone under the cloudy sky. The loneliness and self-sufficiency of an inveterate reader swept up around me. So perfectly, so sensitively attuned to the words on the page; so disconnected from the indistinct, flesh-and-blood figures that swirled past me on the sidewalk.

I stopped, as I do, and looked at the sky. I didn't know who to ask. I still don't.

The self-sufficiency has always been a piece of fakery. I dread being alone, just as ordinary people do. I sometimes think my whole life is a fabric of virtues made from necessities. I was alone on Easter, as I arranged to be. Wholly alone, and the pure anxiety of it threatened to eat me up.

I have always presented myself -- and thought of myself -- as someone who was perfectly content with, even eager for, solitude. It is not true. Take away the company of books and images, the pretend-company of my boyhood, and quickly enough I become agitated. Desperate to eat, and craving oblivion. If I had a television I would have turned it on. I had plenty of work I could have done, but without the reassurance of human company I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I'm not sure where this leads. I think: why should I not need company? Surely that is simply what my species does, like crows or baboons. Gathers in company. But I can't do that, either. Company is difficult for me. I never understand; I'm never understood. Socializing is often an ordeal, always tiring, to me.

---

But this is very exciting: the T-41's run for over an hour on the battery, and the battery's registering 75%. I'm wired again!

Not a Sparrow Falls

It's fortuitous that NaPoWriMo should coincide with Crippling Self-Consciousness Awareness Month.

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.