Not as it Appears

The other day Martha came back into the house. "I'm going to need to take the Honda instead! The Ford has a low tire," she called to me. "Okay!" I called back. I was taking the bus to work anyway.

On my way out I looked at the Ford's tires. They looked fine to me. I walked all around. Sighted down to see if the curves looked different. Nothing. They were the same.

That night when I got home, I said, "so one of the Ford's tires is low? Which one?"

"The front, on the passenger side," she said, promptly.

Now, I've known Martha a long time. If she says something's so, it's so. I went back out, armed with my new knowledge of which tire was supposed to look lower. Went around the car looking at the tires.

Back inside. "You're sure about the tire being low? I believe you," I added hastily, "but I just can't see it."

"If you believe me, why are you asking again?" she laughed.

We found the tire gauge. I went out and measured the air pressure. The left front tire was fine, but the right front tire, sure enough, was six pounds low. I still couldn't see the difference.

I drove it to a gas station and filled the right front back up to 36 lbs. All the while I chewed over the fact that, although I had accepted the fact, and was acting on it, I still didn't really believe there was a visible difference to the tires. There must have been. But I was finding it impossible to believe that while I couldn't see it, Martha could. I use reading glasses now, sure, but Martha does too, and this wasn't a matter of fine print, it was a matter of proportions and shapes. Not, in other words, a matter of the eye: a matter of the brain's visual processing. I have learned to accept, though grudgingly, that other people can see and hear things I can't. I often have to fish out my reading glasses to read fine print that my kids read with ease; I've long accepted that other people can hear sounds in a certain range -- say, the base line of a song on a radio next door -- when I can't hear a thing. But this was different. This wasn't my eyes or my ears. This was my brain not being able to detect something.

It bothered me like having a beetle dropped down the neck of my shirt. The fact was simple enough; the evidence was overwhelming; but I kept groping for another answer. The Honda must have a warning light that I didn't know about. Martha must have unconsciously noticed the car handling differently yesterday. She must have checked the tires and be teasing me by pretending to have detected it by sight.

Preposterous, all of them. She could see it and I couldn't, that was all.

This, I thought, was the simplest and easiest case. A discrete physical fact that could be established by measurement. But it's just one of countless things that I can't see and other people can. And likewise there are countless things that I can see and other people can't see at all. When we get to complex things that are impossible to measure -- the good faith of a White House spokesman, say -- the perceptions are just as sharp and just as firmly believed. Many of them are dead wrong. Many of mine, many of yours. But making ourselves understand that intellectually is a huge effort. Making ourselves understand it viscerally is even harder. When we already distrust the people who see something different from what we see, hostility blossoms. We know they really see what we see. They're just pretending not to, out of malice or greed or sheer stubbornness. They must see what we see.

I don't think human beings will ever stop deliberately harming each other until they understand, viscerally, that other people don't see what we see. And I don't think that will ever happen. It's simply too difficult to achieve. Yogis spend lifetimes trying to reach this understanding: it's part of what a Buddhist means by "wisdom" or "understanding emptiness." Getting that the world is really not as it appears -- feeling the play of appearance wash over you as a phantasmagoria of self-generated perception. It's like feeling the wind blow through your body. Which of course the cosmic wind actually does: subatomic particles go whistling right through the space our bodies occupy without turning a hair. We are truly insubstantial.

There's no big practical value to learning to perceive it. There's no worldly reason to spend the hard frustrating work of meditation that is supposed to help in the process. I won't earn more money or impress the girls or escape death. There's no reason but this: it's the deepest bliss and the greatest relief I know. I've known it only for a few moments at a time, now and then, moments of grace. I don't even know for sure that meditation makes it happen more often. But rare as it is, and impossible as living there seems to be, having experienced it transforms everything. Just to have seen it once cracks open the carapace. A little light leaks in. It's really not as it appears. Thank God.

The Bits Cut Loose

The hug I gave to Ann last week, for instance: could I conceivably say that it is not part of me? And can I say it's dead, because it happened in the past? Of course it's not dead, while I remember it and while Ann remembers it. But more than that. It's not dead because it's colored everything we both have done in the week since. It spreads like a tint in water. Impossible to kill, impossible to isolate. And yet if anything is me, it is that warm and lovely hug, after a massage, in the Sunday dusk. I have been leaving bits of me behind all my life: and by now the bits that have lost all contact with my body and my present stream of consciousness are far, far bigger and more important than any bits that are still to come. Why should I mind about dying, about this particular lump of tissue becoming inert? It has never had much importance, even just in relation to the other bits of me cut loose and swimming in the universe, and each day I get closer to my death it has proportionally less. This part of me, though it carries the brand-name and logo -- Dale Favier in the Flesh! -- is not the most important part of me. It's not a very important part of me at all, actually.

Quiet gray dawn. Out my window I see the leafless, tangled, silvery twigs of the neighbor's dogwood tree, and its darker, mossy branches. Their lines arrange themselves in concentric circles for my eye. And behind, the the dark green of the doug firs boughs, wavering. Just barely, at the range of my hearing, birds peeping. Or am I imagining it? I can't tell.

Loving you this morning intensely, missing your bright eyes, missing your laughter. Last night the waxing moon rode in a surf of wispy clouds, running fast before the wind. I thought of the warmth of your chest, of how I love to listen to your heartbeat.

The light has grown while I write. Almost the plain light of day now. I love you. Take such good care today. And tonight, God willing, I will hold you, in one of your incarnations. And we will send more bits of ourselves out on the water.

Unearned Blessings

A recent comment on my last post asked if I thought my meditation practice helped me to be in the moment, and to fully experience such mundane pleasures as that of making breakfast. It was flattering and kindly meant, but red flags blossomed immediately. Don't go there, said some inner monitor.

The reaction was strong and immediate, and I've been mulling over its origins. There are a couple parts to it. One is that if it's true, it's only weakly true. Much more important are other "causes and conditions," as we Buddhists like to say: my family leaves me alone in the early mornings; my work schedule leaves me free to savor them; and my ship has glided into unexpectedly happy, calm water of late. All these have much more to do with being able to gaze wonderingly at the violet-green beads of coffee bubbles than my haphazard meditation practice.

Another comment, from Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi mourned being unable just now to access such "a state of appreciation and gratitude." Case in point. Anyone who thinks my spiritual practice more advanced than Rachel's needs their head examined, or at least needs to spend a few hours reading VR. Yet I get the blessing just now and she doesn't.

You can see where this tends to go. Immediately the thought of the blessing as something I have earned comes up, it starts burrowing grublike into the rich soil of egotism, waiting to hatch all kinds of suffering. The day will come soon enough when I'll be in a hurry and the damn coffee will take forever and its grounds will look like mud with an oil slick on top and remind me of construction sites and environmental disaster rather than gems in black sand and I'll hate being poor and wasting my time on this stuff, cooking like a drudge while other people are writing brilliant things. Shall I add to that the conviction that my unhappiness shows the poverty of my spiritual practice, and the knowledge that actually I'm a cheap charlatan who only talks the talk?

No, I think it's better to take blessings as wholly unearned and undeserved, free gifts of God (Buddha-Nature, Allah, Nature, whatever you like to call it.)

Still. On the other hand. What other motivation do we really have for practice? If we're too austere about it, we're at risk of falling into the sort of determinism that undoes our practice altogether. If it doesn't do anything for us, why do it? Why did we ever start, except from a conviction that our spiritual life was a shambles, and our suffering could somehow be mitigated, and we could grope our way towards those blessings that worldly amibitions and pleasures kept promising but signally failing to deliver?

I think it best to abandon thoughts of having earned blessings, when we're feeling blessed. (This fortunately is fairly easy to do: everything's easy to do when we're feeling blessed.) And when we're not feeling blessed, the most fruitful attitude is -- not to heroically try to manufacture a feeling of gratitude that we don't have, but to fall into the most abject and selfish attitude of petition. Please, God, help me now. Show me what to do. Help me. Traditions like mine have special deities that you can go to in this state, gods and goddesses of compassion such as Chenrezig or Green Tara, more or less equivalent to Mary in the Catholic tradition or the suffering human Jesus in some Protestant traditions. When you're miserable somehow the embodied gods that you can see, the ones who remind you of the people who have been kind to you, work better than the serene untroubled Buddhas and God-the-Fathers who appear as gems in the coffee filter.

Reporting Live from the Breakfast Table

It must have started in Olympia, when I was eighteen, in college. I would wake up at five or so (I am an extreme morning person) hungry and lonesome. Martha (an extreme non-morning person) wasn't going to wake until nine or ten. What to do? Well, get out and walk. And eventually, walk the couple miles downtown. And there in downtown Olympia was a cafe, called The Spar. What Easterners call a diner. And, having at that time plenty of money, I'd go in for breakfast. It turned out to be a grand place to study. Bright lights, no music, a skillful waitress always somewhere entertaining on the continuum from irrascible to cheerful. Bang, down came the cup of hot coffee. Bang, down came the eggs and hash browns. I spent hours there, which they didn't seem to mind, so long as I tipped well: there were plenty of tables, even as the morning drew on and people with more normal metabolisms showed up. It was marvelous. I wasn't alone, but I didn't have to interact. I'd spend an hour on my Spanish, then an hour reading books for class, then an hour writing. The coffee magically stayed there, hot, while I read and wrote. It was my favorite time of day. Still is.

It was a pleasant indulgence. Pleasant indulgences become habits, and habits become necessities: breakfast out has been a necessity for thirty years. Family members are perplexed, even alarmed, if I'm home in the morning. What's wrong?

It's a habit I can no longer afford, though. Not daily. So I'm working my way into new habits. I'm sitting here in my massage room at a card table. The coffee at my elbow is mysteriously defective. It gets cold and runs out. My water glass also, when it empties out, just sits there stubbornly. My breakfast was good, but it was a bother to make (no eggs! had to run out to the store.) And it refused to wash up after itself.

This is hardly the stuff of tragedy. But --

Excuse me. I've got to make myself another cup of coffee.

---

I wrote that some weeks ago. Making breakfast has become usual for me, now. One thing I had not at all anticipated was that I would come to love the process itself. Cracking open the lustrous brown-shelled eggs, and whisking their contents into a smooth mass A dollop of milk. Dropping bits of cheddar into the pan, splotches of warm orange in the warm yellow. The smell of coffee beans when I open the bag. Watching the grounds emerge, like glistening black sand, as the last of the coffee drains from the filter into the cup. Seeing a few iridescent bubbles form in the hollows: tiny violet-green beads gleam against the rich black, and then vanish again. The warmth of the stove touching me now and then, carelessly, like an old accustomed lover. And then washing everything up so that it's all clean and ready for tomorrow morning, the fry pan and the spatula drying on the drainboard, everything orderly and complete. Eating is only one of pleasures of breakfast, now.

Now the River

---

Oh, but listen: down the far side the scrunch
of soldiers' feet in scree. Here is all the quiet
that a heaving chest can manage. Here
for five minutes, the war is over.

---

Listen again:
here and there. Fingertips pulled over
soft warm flesh.

---

Soft, pulsed nursing
At that little hooded nub of flesh,
Rose red in the dusk: trembling, ticking over
like a tiny bird
in a thicket at sundown.

---

Swans rear up indignantly, bugling
and sparring; beyond them the river runs away;
the cars on the bridge open their eyes wide
and bring on the night they are trying to dispel.
The rust-red steel clenches both banks, darkening
to old, clotted blood.

---

Unstranded, unbuckled, unworded
Love-sucked, undone, unmade, unmanned.
A husk in the starlight, turned backwards at the ends;
My hair falls loosely, as the wind blows it
here and there.

---

Completing the Blessing

Sunim Soen Joon sent me a card from Korea year before last, congratulating me on passing my massage exams. Dangling from one corner of it by a narrow bit of yarn was a silver mylar cut-out of a bird in flight. The size of a nickel, maybe.

It's been my bookmark ever since. The card goes in the book, and the bird dangles outside. It picks up the light wherever it is: it looks, in fact, like a little flake of bright sky fallen to earth. Its tail has a kink in it now, and the yarn is badly frayed. It won't last forever. I'm thinking of it as Tibetans think of blessing cords and prayer flags: when it finally frays completely, and the bird is (as we say) lost, the blessing will be complete.

It's how I'm thinking about death, as well: as the completion of the blessing. "For a word to be spoken, there must be silence," says Ursula Le Guin's wizard. "Before, and after."

Groceries

Going to the grocery store on Sunday afternoon is not efficient. The store is full of the indecisive, the poor planners, the amateur shoppers. They run aground with their shopping carts, mouths agape, in the middle of the aisles, flummoxed by the choice between thin spaghetti and vermicelli. They back slowly away from shelves, murmuring to themselves, unaware that they're backing into you, and then even when they become aware, reacting groggily, their reflexes dimmed. It's clearly, for many people, a stressful and difficult thing. Most people have their shoulders hunched and their heads down.

I love grocery shopping. All of it. I love the food, the prodigality of an American supermarket, all that produce and meat, all the color and the bright lights and the cleanliness. I love the soaring ceilings. I love being able to look at people, all the people jumbled together. There are always at least a few people of surreal, intense beauty. And a few people who are looking about them, joyfully alive.

Food is miraculous to me these days. I'm cooking more than I ever have, and discovering a delight that many people learn young, but which I missed: that I can make all those things that I usually buy ready-made -- make them cheaper, and better, than restaurants and packaged food. The fact that I can make something as simple as chicken soup fills me with wonder. And the whole store is full of secret ingredients for such things.

The checker is a stout, goggle-eyed woman with faded blond hair, an eastern European, stolid and inexpressive. She dutifully asks me if I found everything I was looking for.

"I did," I say happily. She looks up at me, curious. And a light seems to blossom there. She's not smiling, exactly, but we've become aware of each other. In some other lifetime we knew each other. We were children together, once, and balanced on the railing over a brook, dropping leaves into the water. Even farther back, lives before, we were lovers. One of us buried the other, but it's so long ago we no longer remember which was which.

She hands me my receipt. I thank her. I want to take her hand and say, "I remember, too!" Except of course I don't, I don't really remember. I'm just making it up.

Still. Outside the store the sky goes up and up. The early winter twilight. Pale blue, and dark trees. All the light is being gathered into the air.

Lose Six Inches in a Week!

I lost six inches around the waist last week. What a terrific diet!

Well, strictly speaking it wasn't the diet. And the inches were virtual. After the two rapid inches I lost, I seem to have stalled out at waist measurement between 44" and 45". Which is fine, so far; I'm still on schedule. What's changed is my goal. Remembering that I used to wear levis with a 32" waist, long long ago, I was thinking that I was looking to lose 15" total from the 47" I started with. Which is a lot.

But last week I realized that my 45" waist is now fitting comfortably into my supposedly 38" Levis. Which means that the "waist size" of the jeans and the sizing of my waist are not the same thing at all. If that proportion (45/38) holds, I really have only 7 inches to go. Which makes more sense all round, so to speak. I couldn't really picture where all those fifteen inches were going to come from. So the official goal of my diet has become a waistline of 38", not 32". At any rate, when I get there I'll see what I see. Which should be considerably less than I see now.

How I Will End the War

I will catch a rocket in the air and fly with it
into the sky. I will be a tracer, a beautiful line;
Between my thighs the chemical witchery

will burn, burn for vengeance. But I will soar
up and still up. I will be the glow, the memory
of dates eaten in a violet twilight back when love

seemed a power to reckon with. In my hands
the fuse will glitter like a sparkler drawing patterns
against the summer dark. Remember?

I will not drop. I will go so high that the sky
will darken and the stars will lift their startled heads
and the beautiful blaze of anger will surge through

my fingers and my nipples and still higher and higher
while the fountain of sparks runs for the touchhole;
and when we explode into tatters

The quiet evening will be marked by lovely
falling stars that are little pieces of me, and children
will point at them, at the tiny dropping fires winking out.

Craving

Scholars sometimes talk -- seriously, so far as I can tell -- about a fabulous beast they call The General Reader. The non-scholarly reader who reads the books put out by the university presses. When you're writing your book about the adoption of Dantean tropes into 13th Century Lithuanian liturgical exegesis, your editor may tell you, you want to bear in mind The General Reader, who may not know all the works of Philenius the Younger, and may need to be reminded of the exact wording of the riparian statutes of Basil IX.

This harmless fantasy of a mass readership is one of the more endearing foibles of academics, whom I find an appealing lot, for the most part. But I bring it up as an introduction to our own variant of The General Reader, The Non-Blogging Blog Reader. I have one. (I had two, at one point, but I convinced one of them to start blogging, so now I have only one.) My prize possession. He signs himself "Bill." (No, no link. Haven't you been listening? He doesn't have a blog!)

Bill commented, Annihilation is my sharpest craving. Certainty that the next moment will be just like the last is something I can't abide. "Coffee, deliver me!"

And this led me to think again about craving, and to wonder whether all craving is not a craving for annihilation. I don't remember Freud's late work on thanatos and eros very well (if I ever read it: maybe I just heard the cool kids talking about it.) But in a certain frame of mind the only convincing alternative to endless continuity is death, and the hunger for change becomes the hunger for death. That death. A large death that is very like the Little Death. A gathering of all frustration and desire into one flowering: and then -- unimaginable, but deeply desired, peace.

As one gets older, one of the terms alters, and a new fear creeps into the equation. What if your frustration and desire is not great enough to flower? What if you are unable to die that death? What if the only death available is the long, slow ebb, draining away into triviality, irritability, and whining?

I used to go to strip bars and get drunk. I thought of it then as running away from death. The whole point of the dancers was that they were young and fearless, and had no part of age or death. With the help of a few beers I too could become fearless. And there we all were, having escaped from death together. I could buy them drinks and we could build towers of tavern matchbooks and tell each other stories, and I would live forever. They were lovely and they didn't give a damn and they didn't plan a thing, and I loved that about them.

That was a long time ago. I still think of them fondly. But to return to craving and death: I didn't actually want them, not to have them. I wanted to desire them, that's all. I wanted to stir desire up to its highest pitch -- and then walk away from it. Why?

After I quit drinking, I went a few times to the bars and had a club soda, but I found that without the alcohol the transaction became just weird and pointless. What on earth was I doing there? These people didn't particularly like me; I didn't particularly like them, we had nothing to talk about. I wandered away, and have not really been tempted in that direction since. The alcohol, which I had thought of as incidental to the whole experience, was in fact central to it.

I think what the alcohol did was disable my awareness that I was not, in fact, going to die that night. That I could not actually escape continuity. That this experience itself was a continuation, more of the same, just another in a series of unsuccessful debauches. (Any debauch that you live to the other side of is unsuccessful, really.) Without drinking I could not escape my own history.

Now, as a Buddhist, I have to wonder: was I closer to a true perception drunk or sober? Buddhism holds that continuity is a delusion. The world actually is new every moment. We are actually, whether we see it or not, radically free, now and always: we only imagine ourselves at 8:20.20 AM to be the same person we were at 8:20:19 AM.

I wonder if the real intention of Buddhist meditation is not to get really, truly, roaring drunk, and stay that way.

Buds

Today a horrible deadness came over me, in the afternoon. It was all sun glare and freezing weather, and I craved sugar and annihilation in a way I have not craved them for many weeks. I wrote:

Strange buds have grown in my throat, until they stick out my mouth; inarticulate fronds, nodding wisely, dumbly. I have only nonsense and failure. Sometimes the loneliness is so cold. There is nothing to do but nothing. Wait. Wait for another turn.

This evening Tori called from the hospital to say they were okay, but that she and her partner had had an accident on the freeway this afternoon. Getting on the freeway, she had veered to the shoulder, apparently, hit gravel and lost all traction: the car hit the divider on the right, spun across the three lanes, hit the divider on the left, and came to rest in the left lane. Collided with nothing else. They're fine now, though of course they'll be sore tomorrow.

I can't help connecting the distress I was in with the accident, which must have been happening at about that time. I don't believe in that sort of thing, particularly. But it certainly was an overwhelming fit of -- something.

Anyway. Grateful to have my daughter & her partner still in this world. But a little shaky.

Late-Breaking News

Well, what do you know. Memphis is in Tennessee, just as Chuck Berry claimed. In the southwest corner of it, on the Mississippi. And what's more -- late-breaking news! -- the state of Tennessee extends all the way to the Mississippi! and it sits square on top of the states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, like a lintel.

(How, how can I have looked at maps of the US over and over and not really seen this? It's seeming downright spooky to me, now.)

And Columbia is, in fact, the state capitol of South Carolina, plumb in the center of the state. It sounds like a lovely little city. Memphis, to tell the truth, sounds like something of a hell-hole. But my responses to the South are all tinged with my horror of hot, humid weather. So are my responses to the East Coast, for that matter. I moved to Connecticut in late August, some 25 years ago, and could not believe that human beings voluntarily lived in such a climate. It was clearly simply uninhabitable. I was appalled to find that it did not get cooler at night. I had never lived in place that didn't cool down at night, and it gave me the horrors. It was as if the laws of physics didn't work there. In the daytime you moved through a miasma of hot, thick, soupy air, full of weird brown stuff. And if you opened a window at 3:00 AM and took a deep breath, you took a deep breath of -- hot, thick, soupy air, full of weird brown stuff. God. I still shudder to think of it.

(One good thing about it is, that I vowed that upon my return to a civilized climate I would never complain about hot weather again; and since I moved back to western Oregon, twenty years ago, I never have. There is no such thing as hot weather here. Weather that once would have made me fretful and cranky now leaves me placid and smiling. I know that I have only to wait till 3:00 AM to draw a breath of cool, pleasant air. Life is good.)

This Louche Transaction

I have always chafed at the phrase "believe in God." It sets up such a dualism: me here, God there, and between us this louche transaction of belief.

Clumps and Voids

The contemporary poets I read are mostly bloggers, and mostly, like me, they're in rebellion against overly precious, obscure poetry. Our unwritten credo might be: if this would make boring impenetrable nonsense written out as prose, chopping it into lines will not make it good poetry, no matter how many clever effects you build into it and how much verbal riffing you do.

We don't have a lot of patience with poetry that yields its surface meaning reluctantly. Too often it does so because there isn't much meaning there in the first place, and it has to make what there is last.

I say all this, not to argue that our poetry is better than theirs ("our" poetry is always better than "theirs," and who cares?) but by way of urging you to read a poet who doesn't at first look like one of us. Her poems do yield their surface meaning with reluctance. But there's more and more and more in them. And if you read them aloud, which I urge you to do, their music will astonish you, and the words will keep resonating in your head for days Her use of rhyme and alliteration is magnificent, and her meter is the most skilled and disciplined of any poet I read (with the possible exception of Dick Jones'). Say these stanzas over to yourself a few times:

glass spice-vials
chromatophores
of curry/ cumin/ turmeric

or

Tintinnabulary
processions of jars
glink-glink reassurances

The poet is Julia Martin, of Clumps and Voids. She is also, not coincidentally, a brilliant aphorist; check out the sidebar, "herr keppler's notebook," for such asides as:

Professionalism is not saying "asshole" until you hang up.

or

Mammograms are S&M without a safe word.

The appearance of Clumps and Voids has been one of the delights for me of 2008.

Slant Water: Meditation at the Half Moon

Sitting shamatha, my eyes unfocused;
following my breath as it leaves my body,
and appears at once again unbidden
in my pale lungs. It leaves again,
returns.

The world leans east, and the hanging sun
is edged from the window: the shadows slide away,
like clothes on the deck of a heeling clipper ship;

say some China merchant, reckoning on a killing
in tea and opium, racing for a Middle Kingdom
he can't begin to imagine.

If you think you're making no progress,
said my teacher, you're probably going backwards.

The world leans harder. The ship
labors uphill now: the sea gets steeper
by the minute. We claw for a grip on the water.

At last we can go no further, splash down
gasping in a trough of thin black fluid,
the backwash of the tilted sea, but
calm in defeat, and rocking softly, awake
at last, we look up:

Stitched loosely to a faded blue silk sky
is the broken button of the moon.

The South, Wrapped in Darkness

My brother and sister and I as children used to play, with great enthusiasm, "the map game" with my father. He had a world map, and a box of file cards with the names of countries, cities, rivers, islands, mountain ranges, lakes and oceans -- color coded, so which knew when he drew a card whether we'd be looking for a mountain range (yellow) or a body of water (blue). We each had a pointer, made from slender sticks that had once held the balloons they used to give away at Pietro's Pizza. He would draw a card -- we'd all note its color -- and then he'd announce, in his careful teacher's diction: "Atlas Mountains," or "Caspian Sea," or "Czechoslovakia." The first of us three to point to the place on the map won an M & M. We each of us had specialties: I specialized in mountains, so my heart leapt each time I saw a yellow-bordered card come out of the box.

In high school and college I played the marvelous historical games created in those days by Avalon Hill and SPI, played on beautifully rendered maps with superimposed grids. I was as familiar with the military problems and opportunities presented by the Pripyat Marshes of the Soviet Union as I was with the local bus routes.

But there are fuzzy areas in my geography. the places that have changed significantly are murky to me. It's hard for me to believe in the countries created in eastern Europe by the collapse of the Soviet Union: learning their boundaries and capitals seems to be beyond me. And then there's my ignorance of what by many standards is the heartland of humanity. China and India are simply huge blocks of land, to me. I know almost nothing of their provinces and geography. It's ludicrous that I know the exact shape of Idaho, with its handful of people, and nothing about the most populous lands in the world.

Prejudice creeps in. An inability to take people seriously results in an inability to learn their geography, and vice versa. I know the outlines of the states of western Europe by heart: given time I could draw them freehand with fair accuracy. Africa? Not a chance. I don't believe in the African nations, at some deep level. I think of them as made-up. It's partly a legacy of colonialism. As nation-states most of them were, of course, in some ways, made up. But the places are real enough, and so are the people who live there. I decided recently to force myself to learn the places. There's a certain circularity to this sort of insidious prejudice. If you don't know exactly where the place is, when you read about it in the paper, you take it less seriously. And then you're less likely to learn exactly where it is, because you don't take it seriously. And so on. I need to make Africa, eastern Europe, and the interiors of India and China real.

But what got me thinking about geography was reading about the Civil War, and realizing how sketchy my geography of the American South is. The rest of the country I know pretty well, but not the South. It's not an accident. The South made me deeply uneasy, as a child. I knew we'd fought a war with the South to destroy slavery. That stood clear in the light. But what had come after that was in pitch darkness. There was something that made the South impossible to speak about. I recognize it now, of course. Guilt. There were two pieces of it: one is that we held the South against its will. We were, or at least had been, an imperial power there: which called in question everything that America was supposed to stand for. And the other piece was that we had failed the slaves. Set them free and abandoned them. As the civil rights movement grew, that gradually came into focus. Light began to leak in. Memphis and Selma erupted into the news. But -- not so far as to illuminate the map. I didn't go to find them in an atlas. They were different. Not places that I wanted to exist.

So my geographical knowledge of the South remains stubbornly bad. I've tolerated a vagueness about it that I would never have tolerated about the rest of the country. I do not, for example, know which state Memphis is in, though the refrain of an old song comes to mind ("something something something, in Memphis Tennessee") which suggests it's a lot further north than I thought. There's a city of Columbia (unless it's Columbus), which is the capital of some southern state -- I think -- but I don't know which. All I know is that Sherman either burned it or tried to prevent it burning, depending on who you ask.

Of course, there are many people whose geography of everywhere is vague. My ignorance of these places only signifies because I have loved maps and pored over them all my life. And I have read detailed histories of the Civil War, complete with maps, and I still can't hold the places in my mind's eye.

So it's time to get some file cards, and drill myself a bit. By this time next week, I solemnly swear, I will know whether Columbus is actually Columbia, and what it's the capital of. And I will know where Memphis is.

Sacrifice

It is only a clearer example of the strangeness
of a God who creates us, and a few decades later
destroys us. We who make it alive out of the womb
may muddy the issue with guilt: we shouldn't have eaten
so much red meat. We shouldn't have smoked cigarettes.
Sure. However, that small heart that formed,
but never began to beat: nobody will lay the blame
on anyone but God. That strange and willful God.

He told Abraham to sacrifice his son, and wrapped
it in words, made it part of the covenant. A one-time deal
in the linear world of the fated kingdoms.
There are no words to help the women who see
the mute sacrifice of a bloody napkin. No one offers
a ram instead. No one explains. No one promises
a glorious kingdom. You can try again. That's all.

We walk to the water, listening,
all the world's women:
we listen for the slantwise words
of books written by men
whose sacrificial altars are
outside their bodies, who think
the Bible is talking about somebody else.

Lincoln


After his first narrow defeat, running for a senate seat in Illinois, Lincoln was tentatively offered the position of Governor of the Oregon Territory. I wonder what would have happened, if he had taken it? We would have suited each other down to the ground, I think. We've never been much for pomp and ceremony. The shiftless get-rich-quick settlers were mostly siphoned off to the California goldrush, and good riddance: California's been saddled with that inheritance of greed and goofiness ever since. People here expected to work for a living. Lincoln's homely, shirtsleeve style would have played well here.

It's impossible to see Lincoln as a villain. Shelby Foote says, justly enough: "He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic -- which he was -- but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not." The Emancipation Proclamation, frankly, is a miserable document, "freeing" slaves in the Confederacy (which of course it had at that time no power to do) and leaving them in servitude in the border states (where it could actually have affected them.) Lincoln, as always, was taking the practical course. He was a politician in the mold of Bill Clinton, possibly a little too quick to compromise, a little too responsive to the shifting political breezes. Fortunately for us, he was also a deeply humane and humble man. He wanted to save the Union, and he did save it, by taking on unconstitutional powers and wielding a despotism America had never seen before. In some ways the American Caesar, remarked Dave Bonta, and that's true enough: he marks the turning from the Republic to the Empire. The fact that we took as little harm from it as we did, though, was due I think largely to Lincoln's humanity. He never wanted to be a despot, and every unprejudiced person could see that. To him the issue of the Civil War was never slavery, but whether democracy could really work. He saw clearly enough that if the country split apart every time a really difficult dispute arose, a few generations would see the ruin of the whole experiment.

I have always loved and admired Lincoln. I wrote a report on him in school, in the fourth grade, I think, for which I read a simple and short biography. It's a book I'd like to see again, in the light of what I know now. Whatever it may have done with the facts, it conveyed the man.

I wish he'd come here, and never meddled in national politics again. We wouldn't have shot him. We would have given him a modest, unvisited mossy tombstone down in Salem, Oregon (marked "died 1892," say) instead of an outsize marble chair in Washington, D.C. Maybe Mary Todd would have settled down a bit here -- she would have liked being the first lady of the Territory, I think -- and his home life would have been happier. I like to think of him, old and content, wearing his slippers, reading Shakespeare by the fire. He would have done right by us, and we would have done right by him.

Sky

Fog this morning. Last night was clear: as I walked to the bus stop the full moon ghosted between the building tops.

Wrung and worn with love. In the last three years I've exhausted as many lifetimes: I am older than the earth. And yet younger than I have ever been. My leaves, if you could see them, are tender and Spring green. I've stopped trying to understand it.

Death is always with me. I look around Tosi's and see all the customers as they'll be in their coffins, slack-faced and shrunken; I talk with people at work and see their skeletons gently working apart, their bones nestling into the soil. There's nothing gruesome or terrible about it. But it makes it difficult to take the troubles of the workday or the discontents of the hearth all that seriously.

The days flicker by. I find myself looking more and more at the sky. Every time I go outside I have to contemplate it, puzzle over it. It has nothing to tell me, nothing that will pay the mortgage or fix the roof. But every day it sets the question over again: why, it asks, am I so heartrendingly beautiful? Until you understand that you don't understand anything.

Why a Non-Liberal Votes Democrat

It's funny that I almost always end up voting a liberal ticket, because I don't have a liberal bone in my body. I'm neither secular nor humanist. I want a small government. I don't want to improve people. I don't want to educate them so they're more like me: I don't even like government-run schools. I don't want government health-care (although I'd prefer a single-payer system to what we have now.) All this ought to put me in with the loony far right. So why did I again vote for a bunch of Democrats?

Well, because there's four non-negotiable issues, for me, and the Democrats fairly consistently take my side on all four.

One is a foreign policy that recognizes that as a general rule war is a spectacular waste of money, a crude and clumsy instrument of diplomacy, environmentally disastrous even on a small scale, and likely, on a large scale, to end humankind.

Two is an understanding of the gravity of the environmental crises (plural intended). The market is not going to solve this: it requires massive regulation and intervention. This is one of my few big-government positions.

Three is a commitment to civil rights. I take my first amendment seriously.

Four is a commitment to helping the poor. Your run of the mill Americans give maybe one percent of their income to any sort of charity. That's not enough to make even a dent. So, willy nilly, even though I find the Democrats' approach distasteful, paternalistic, expensive, and overbearing -- I vote for them. Because they propose to make sure everyone gets housed and fed.

Now, there are a couple of alternatives open to me, that still take in my four non-negotiables. One is the Green Party, and the other is the various incarnations of American socialist parties. (Nader wanders somewhere in these fields, angry and impotent.) I would vote for them before I voted for any party that stood against any of my four issues, let alone, as the Republican Party ordinarily does, against all of them. But -- leaving aside the realities of who has a shot at winning elections -- in both of them I find everything I dislike about the Democrats, only more so. Distasteful, paternalistic, expensive, and overbearing applies to them in spades. Their conviction of moral superiority reeks to heaven. You can't picture them deciding that something is too expensive to burden taxpayers with, or considering that opposition to them could proceed from anything but greed and malice. They do have a keen understanding of how deeply the Republicans and Democrats are beholden to big money, but I somehow think that if they gained a foothold and actually got some of that big money themselves, their scruples would mysteriously vanish. I don't know how to reduce big money's lamentable influence on our politics, but I don't think voting Green or Socialist will do it.

The libertarians are sometimes (though not always) with me on civil rights: I like Ron Paul, but -- they're an environmental disaster. They really just don't get it.

So that's why, although I'm not a liberal, I vote liberal, election after election. Notice to competing parties: I'm ripe for the picking. Give me something else to vote for, and I'm your man. Until then, I'm going to grimace, and sigh, and color in the little (Dem) ovals on the ballot.

Men without Weakness



"No. Shoot them all. I do not wish them to be brave."

Stonewall Jackson, responding to a Confederate colonel's regret at having killed so many young men of a particularly gallant Union cavalry force.

The cold blue eyes look down history, finding us with contempt. He gave up drinking whiskey when he found that he liked the taste of it; he gave up reading the newspapers when they started to praise him. He did take pride in winning battles, but he knew it was a sin: the victories belonged to God, not to him. In winning a battle he found spiritual ecstasy: it was, maybe, the only token of God's love he would ever believe. He exemplifies the hard cold center of the Confederate dream, as far removed from chivalry, in his direction, as Sherman of the Union was in the other. Between the two of them what was sentimental and humane in America would be ground to nothing. There was to be nothing but a wasteland, from now on, between the cold fanaticism of Jackson and the materialist imperialism of Sherman. In that devastated countryside men like Twain and Whitman would try to scrape a desolate spiritual living. It was a hardscrabble life.

Jackson was notoriously intolerant of weakness, and shot deserters without compunction. After his brilliant victories in the Shenandoah Valley -- achieved partly by marching his men so hard that they covered a phenomenal amount of ground, and began to be referred to as "foot cavalry" -- he was brought down to join the defense of Richmond. Driving himself even harder than he drove his troops, he rode all the way down to consult with Lee and rode all the way back to join his army and march down with them. He got some ten hours' sleep in four days.

What happened thereafter, in the Battle of Seven Days, perplexes many students of the war, but I don't think it would perplex many students of sleep deprivation. What Jackson mostly did during the Seven Days was fall asleep. Lee barely pulled a victory out of the fire anyway, but Jackson's veteran army, probably the best troops in the Confederacy at that point, took almost no part in it.

He loved his wife with surprising, even astonishing, tenderness.

I am rereading Shelby Foote's three volume history of the Civil War. Last month I read a biography of Grant, and I'm also in the midst of Sherman's Memoirs. I'm confirmed in the opinion I once gave, that if I were to give a foreigner one book to explain America, it would be Foote's Civil War. The Civil War is what made us what we are: it's when America hardened and set, when the dream of a New World empire triumphed over the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of independent farmers and artisans minding their own business.

People who think that it was World War I that destroyed the old order tend to forget that on this continent we had already fought a total war, a war of trenches, railroads and machine guns, a war of economic devastation, a horrible four year maelstrom that undid American civil liberties and destroyed the economy of the American South. It destroyed slavery as well, and thank God. But once a nation has practiced mass conscription, systematically eliminated its dissident press, and disappeared hundreds of its citizens, it will never, ever, be the same again.


Reading William Tecumseh Sherman's Memoirs, things began to fall into place. Why the South fought the Civil War is clear enough. But why did the North fight? "The mystic idea of the Union," explained Shelby Foote, and I thought: what the hell? What does he mean? But reading Sherman, I get it. "Union" is code for "Empire." It's all about expansion, the romance of the Reich. Sherman is high-strung and lyrical, and what excites him most deeply is the expansion of America. The dream of conquest. He began his career hunting Indians in the swamps of Florida, to make room for settlers; and after the war he hunted Indians again as the head of the U.S. army, protecting the railroads west by waging his trademark ruinous total war. That's why he couldn't bear to see the South depart. Nor can the South claim any moral high ground, here: they wanted to devour Mexico and Cuba as well. They wanted an empire in the image of Virginia, that's all, not in the image Massachusetts. An empire of planters rather than of manufacturers.

The two impulses weave throughout American history, from its earliest days. Two responses to the New World. One is: here is a place where we can finally be let alone, and put our own house in order. And the other is: here is where we shall found the new Rome, and make an empire to overawe the world.

We only want to be let alone, said Jefferson Davis. But one of the reasons the North fought was because Northerners felt there would sooner or later be a showdown anyway: why not now? Someone was going to master the continent, and then the world -- was it going to be a slave-owning planter aristocracy or honest egalitarian hardworking ingenious yankees?

But we are still here, too. The people who genuinely only want to be let alone. We want no part of war and empire. We want no corporations, no billionaires, no get-rich-quick. We don't want an enormous standing army posted all over the world. We want to tend our own garden in peace. I would appeal to the rest of the world: we've been overshadowed and our voices drowned out by the hectoring, bullying imperialists and frantically greedy capitalists, but we are still here, and our American dream is not dead either. Don't count us out. Men without weakness have their weaknesses, nevertheless, and weak men have their strengths.

Dance

Look at this. You're not going to find anything more beautiful & true today.

. . . the fourth dull day of breathing greyly here amid the landscape drained of all warmth and colour, you start seeing sparks through your lowered eyelids . . .

Bringing us Home Safe

Since I've been writing about the difficult part of having parents lately, I thought I'd repost this, which I wrote a couple years ago. There's a lot that's wonderful too.

On the ride home Sunday evening, in the pitch dark, our skis back on the rack on top of the station wagon, I would sit in the back seat, longing for the warm air to make its slow way to the back seat. It would take me half an hour, sometimes, to undertake getting my ski boots off. First I had to lift the heavy left boot, still cold and wet, with snow-ice wedged between the laces, onto my right knee, which had only just gotten warm: always the cold water soaked the knee of my ski pants. Then I took my numb fingers and began working on the knots. There was all the time in the world. Another hour to home. Sometimes I'd take fifteen minutes, worrying at the knot for awhile, then holding my hands under my thighs to warm them back up for a while, then going back to it, and worrying some more. Eventually the laces would come untied, and I'd unwind them from their hooks (little slivers of snow-ice dropping onto the floor, onto the seat, onto me).

Finally I'd ease my foot out. Numb and stiff. Pull off the sock. Cradle my foot, as cold to the touch as the snow at first, in my hand. Such pleasure, to feel the warmth slowly come back, to be able to wriggle my toes. It hurt a little too. I'd stare out the window, watching the snowflakes appear in the headlights, gleam once, and streak over the windshield, back into the dark. Eventually I would lift the heavy right boot onto my left knee, and begin worrying that knot.

We never went into the lodge. We skied all day. That was what we were there for, after all. I had hot chocolate in a thermos. It wasn't very hot by the middle of the day, but it tasted wonderful. We kids discovered that we could climb down the snow-drifts and duck under the walls of the chairlift housing. There, in a secret, dark, hangar-like space, unheated but out of the wind, I would drink my cocoa. Except we always called it "hot chocolate" -- there was something vaguely self-indulgent about the world "cocoa." It was the kind of word people would use who would come up to go skiing and then hang about in the lodge with warm feet. Not for us.

(Not that my father cared about dignity. In town he held hands with us and skipped down the sidewalk. He would try to climb anything, appropriate or inappropriate -- bridges, fences, trees in someone's yard. He skipped stones across rivers with us; carried us piggy-back, as we called it; built sand-castles with us; taught us to yodel.)

All day is a long time to ski, when you're six years old. I was terribly proud, though. I skied with my legs shoulder-width apart, maybe, but the skis were parallel -- no snow-plowing for me. And by the time I was eight I took the chairlift clear up, and skied the most challenging slopes. People would remark on how little I was and how well I skied. (It never occurred to me that they were letting me hear them say that on purpose. And I would never look at them or show any sign that I had heard. But I would lift my chin and stand very straight.) And I was terribly proud of my father, in his huge baggy grey pants that fluttered madly as he swooped down the slopes. He skied beautifully. He always wore those absurd grey pants, and an ancient beat-up coat and silly bright-patterned hats with tassels, and his skis were unfashionably long and unfashionably wooden. (Short, fiberglass skis -- shorter than the people who wore them, for heaven's sake! were just becoming standard. I was crestfallen when he finally gave in and got a pair.) He was dowdy and ridiculous looking, maybe, standing still at the bottom of a slope. But no one would have thought that, watching him ski. Grace; confidence; sprezzatura, even.

Finally nightfall, and the long drive home. My Dad, no longer the dazzling skier, but now the cautious, slow-but-sure driver. Absolutely safe. He was the safest thing, the solidest, most reliable thing in the world. My confidence in him was boundless. Being his son might mean having achingly cold feet on Sunday nights, but it also meant that I knew I was safe. I didn't know, at the time, that I was lucky. I thought all fathers were basically safe. But my Dad was extra safe. He did mountain rescue and ski patrol. He did scuba-diving and spelunking. He could go anywhere, and take us anywhere, and bring us home safe. I spent my seventh birthday at the bottom of the grand canyon, having hiked all the way down. By the time I was eleven, I had written my name in the mazama registers at the peaks of half a dozen Oregon mountains, and rapelled down into the lava tube of little Belknap, and into Frog Cave, and into one cave we found once but could never locate again, on the far side of the mountains -- just an inconspicuous hole in the flat ponderosa chaparral, but it dropped into a big cavern, with tunnels snaking away in three directions. We explored them all. I gained a physical confidence that I see, with a pang, that my own city-bred kids have never acquired. I belonged in the wilderness. I belonged on cliffs, in the water, under the ground, on the ice. I might loathe and dread human beings, but nothing in the natural world scared me.

It sounds reckless, taking children into such places, but actually my father took his risks very carefully. He was endlessly patient. However long it took to get the belay just right, that was how long he took. He drilled us in what we had to know. How to fall down a snow slope. What to do if we got lost. How to make a fire. He never rushed anything. I remember vividly, still, watching him climb. He was deliberate, one-pointed. He tested every hold before he used it, and abandoned it at once if it didn't turn out as secure as he liked. There was always another route to try. There was always all the time in the world.

The contrast between the recklessness of the endeavor and its patient, deliberate, meticulous execution thrilled me, then. It still does, really. I've never left off admiring him. I still want to be him when I grow up.

The Year of White Roses

for Michelle

It is the year of white roses, whose common theme

is death of fathers. I can't be clever today. No sleep comes.
Oh, give me your hand. Walk away with me to someplace

cold and simple. I am heavy with kisses, pregnant with love,
wanting to give what I know only time gives,

wanting to take what can't be mine. Forgive me. It is still
love, as I know it, and the only thing I know.

Listen to the meltwater, old snow dripping from the eaves.
July is under January: in Joburg you can tell

because the layers are reversed, and the light
is hot on thin cotton. Today is perihelion,

our closest approach to the sun: but plainly
what matters is not how close we are but how

we are inclined. Death came to hold our hands awhile
but he is saying goodbye, and we must let him go.

Ice hesitates here in the shadows
of northern walls, but the snowmelt is already

on its way, by cloud, to Africa.

Another Country

III

Strange, to come to the drenched hills
webbed with fog; the low, single-storied
houses, hidden under the trees, snubbed
between laurels and rhododendrons.
I was born here, and spent my childhood
yearning for space. For heights and vistas.

The raincloud broods, huge and dovelike, over
the nest of the city. Nothing ever hatches here.
Creatures eat the yolk and die in the shell.

My mother bought a grave for me,
a rectangle of putting green grass.
Eighty-four inches of wet soil waiting for me,
and a place beside her always. I'm not going
to come. Take what you can use: a cornea, a liver,
a kidney or two, and give the rest to the fire.
I'm never coming back. I'm going to the sky.

Subdued

Dark wet morning: cold rain, gray sky, leafless trees. In a subdued mood. Thinking of those I used to know, and no longer do. Thinking of how, at the grave age of fifty, I still can't visit my parents without feeling that I'm in danger of suffocating in alien expectations, in danger of my perceptions being overridden by theirs, in danger of losing my self and my way. It's none of their doing -- they can't help having their own perceptions of the world and of me, no more or less accurate than anyone's perceptions of anything, and they are very kind. But I limp away from the holidays feeling obscurely violated and lonely, at once overexposed and unseen.

And so. Hardly in the resolution-making frame of mind. More inclined to take to the hills, and find some hole under the soft dry duff in which to hide and heal up.

I'm glad of the rain and the thick drapery of clouds. I don't feel I could meet the stars on equal terms, just now.

I was so grateful to have a massage scheduled when I got home, which I did by the glow of a gas fire and christmas tree lights. A new life inside a pregnant belly. (Much is expected, little one: but you'll find your way, as we all do. And soon you'll be expecting things yourself, and you'll fondly believe these expectations are your own.)

It anchors me as few other things can, laying hands on a full abdomen, and feeling the baby move. The dream time, the long dark warmth, the mother's heartbeat like the constant sound of surf on a beach. Distant sounds. Shifts and turns. Soft walls to push against.

Maybe that's the real life, and this interregnum of separate personhood is only a necessary adjunct, an elaborate, farfetched way for the fully human dyads to blossom. We wouldn't be the only living things to flower only once in a generation.

No doubt the maple helicopters think they are starting a brave new life when they fall from the tree, whirling and swooping in the wind, and respond with horror when the flight ends and they're buried and trodden underground. They must wonder what it all was for. No way to tell them.

Morning

And this morning, delight, rising from nowhere, as if my body was a glass of champagne and my blood was effervescent. I walk into a room and into an invisible bubble that silently bursts, carrying a hint of sandalwood, a hint of cold clean air from far away, a hint of ozone. The cat ducks her head into my hand, and looks at me curiously, knowing by my aspect that there are presences here she can't discern. Ordinarily, of course, it's cats who can see things we can't, but every once in a long while we get to turn the tables on them.

Farewell to the old year, then. It folds into the mystery of the past and opens the mystery of the present. This next, I think, will be the year of white roses.

Love to you all. Thank you for walking with me.

. . . lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold companionable streams,
Or climb the air: their hearts have not grown old.
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

This Braided Cord

If I snip this braided cord
it will only bleed a little
and I will float up in the sky
with the dripping end dangling
like a shoelace from my belly.

And below, the other end
will sink like a lopped tower,
spouting gouts of wet red blood
in Jerusalem: in Jerusalem,
the navel of the world.

Ask at the Box Office

"There must have been a moment," says Rosencrans (unless it's Guildenstern), with the rope around his neck. "There must have been a moment, early on, when we could have said no."

But of course there wasn't. By the time you understand enough to say yes or no you are already implicated, compromised, and obligated: accessory to murder, affections pledged, mortgaged to the hilt.

Any meaningful yes or no will necessarily look like ingratitude, if not betrayal. It's too late. It's already too late. We start too late. Every human life starts in medias res. We appear on the stage with a script in our hands, already reading. We're a bad sport if we lift our eyes from the script; we show terribly bad taste if we depart from our lines and object that we never consented to play this part. But that's what we have to do. Stop the play. Disappoint everyone.

The show's over. Go home. You can ask for your money back at the box office. (Good bloody luck.)

I understand that now. But I'm still reading out my lines, even if the paper's shaking and I'm slurring whole passages. Everyone on the boards is exasperated with me. They'll be more exasperated, soon. I can't do much more of this.

Another Country

I

It's part of our hominid heritage,
being able to glimpse the doors:
primates who couldn't see the hungry,
hawkheaded deities slipping in
from other countries didn't last long.

By the time you see an entrance
it's usually too late. You're already past it.
And a sudden swerve, of course, slams
that particular door once and for all.


II

But sometimes you round a headland
with the wind just right, and a bay opens,
the scent of apple blossom on the light breeze,
and you sail sweetly in. You'll never find this way again.

Once in, you must observe a thousand pieties.
You thank everything you eat. You give a kiss
to every witch that asks. You leave the cup
of wine by the well. You take off your clothes before
climbing into a strange bed, no matter how cold.
You use each gift only as the giver intended.

To live strictly is one of the reasons we come.
We get tired of this world's slovenly half-hearted
consequences, its prudery and prudence,
its cavils and caveats. We want to be
where edges cut.

Silly Spraddled Souls

---

The raccoon's bright black eyes expressionless
as he lifts his nose to the glass door's outside;
inside, the cat's eyes go wide, ears flatten,
as she lifts a fascinated nose to his.

---

Silly spraddled souls,
one foot on the gunwale of heaven's boat
and the other on the shore of desire,
watching the wet dark gap
between their legs
widen.

---

The fool has said in his heart:
give me time to think.

---

Last Year's Rain

The snow falls like white shadows
in slow motion of last year's rain

if I were to let the tears start now
I don't think they would ever stop.

Home for the Holidays

"You again?" he scowled. "What am I supposed to do with you?"

"Isn't there a story about this? They come home. Prodigal sons. And then you kill the fatted calf." I stood there with my hands in my pockets.

He sighed. "Huh. I think you're supposed to bring a contrite heart with you. You got one?"

"Well, I've got a beat-up one."

"Sure, sure, big surprise, bucko. I don't think that's quite the same thing."

"No. No, it's not."

I looked off to the familiar line of the Coburg Hills, with their radio towers. "But I'm stuck, Dad. My heart's not contrite. I'd do it all again. Hell, I am doing it all again."

"Yah. You think this is news to me?"

"No, I guess not. But what am I supposed to do?"

"What, you're asking me? How would I know? I gave you the plain road. You go off the map, you gotta find your own way."

"Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense."

"You bet it makes sense. You know, sometimes I think the stupidest thing I ever did was give you a gift for words. You don't just talk yourself into ridiculous things, you talk other people into them too. Plausible, lad. Glib and plausible. And the less you know the prettier you talk."

"Oh, come on. You gave me the gift. It's not like I try to misuse it."

"No. No, I'll give you that. I don't know, bucko, so far you're one of my big failures. I keep trying to make you come out right, but I made a mistake somewhere along the line. There's always something a little skewed, something a little out of true. Tell you the truth, I can't figure it out."

"Oh, great. So much for the All-Knowing."

He made a rude noise. "Not a claim I ever made. I didn't ask for this job. It's like Larkin said. We don't mean to but we do."

"Hmph. You know, this whole thing was a little easier back when it was all a little more formal. Awe and dread, you know. Fear and trembling."

"Piffle. What could ever scare you? You been pig-headed since day one. You always know better than everyone else, oh yes, no telling you anything. You think it was any different back in the days of the tents? Young men, they always know everything."

"Well, I'm not young anymore. And I don't know a damn thing."

"And you'd think" -- he jabbed a finger into his palm -- "you'd think that would make you less pig-headed. But glory, no! If anything, you're worse."

"Look, I didn't come here for insults --"

"Sure you did. That's exactly what you came here for."

I stopped a moment and looked at him. "What do you mean?"

Suddenly he looked very tired and very old. "I think it's time for you to ask someone else. I'm played out, bucko. I've done my best. It's time to move on. My stories won't help any more."

"What do you mean, move on?"

"You come back to me because you know I got nothing more. You come back because I'm familiar. You're scared, you're lonesome, you think: I'll go home and get me some insults. Then I'll feel better. But you're not going to feel better. I got the insults, all right, but they don't work like they used to. You can't nail something to sand."

I stared at him. "So no fatted calf."

"What did the calf ever do to you? Let the poor thing grow up. There's been enough suffering on your account."

"And where do I go?"

He scowled, and then grinned. "Over the hills and far away. That's how her stories always go, don't they?"

I smiled back ruefully. "Yeah. Yeah, except I'm supposed to be a handsome young man."

"Well, don't waste time then. What are you waiting for?"

"I wondered -- I mean, I know it doesn't make sense, but --"

He laughed, then, and shook his head. "I get you. God, what a piece of work you are. Go on, kneel down. Bless you. Now get the hell out of here."

Second Person Blogular

I learned the use of the second person blogular from Lekshe. She wrote the most poignant, simple love poems, and they were all addressed to "you."

Having always been in more or less in love with Lekshe (along with half the people who know her: it's no distinction -- she's the sort of person who inspires devotion), the effect of these poems was pretty powerful. They were addressed to me, after all.

Now, of course they weren't addressed to drab and unexciting me. But -- they were, too. She would emphatically deny that they weren't to me, or that they weren't to anyone else. The point of them (one point of them) was to leverage all that erotic intensity into getting past the you and me. I have no doubt they were also love poems with particular people in mind. But to Lekshe, what most people take to be the end of erotic love was its beginning. The point of Eros is not to settle your attention on a single person, and to absorb all their energy, while they absorb all of yours. That doesn't make you into little gods, no matter what Hollywood claims: it makes you into a dual black hole, sucking in light and giving none out.

Jarrett wrote in a comment a couple days back:

This is fascinating in light of your comment on my last post, that "what I do is not writing, that I'm not a writer, that I don't know art but I know what I like, that I'm just writing journals or at most letters." Now I understand the second person who creeps unseen through so much of what you write; she's the necessary other that makes this a mere epistle.

That's the other primary use, for me, of the second person in this blog. I need to be speaking to some one person in order to speak at all. The person varies. Sometimes in the course of a single sentence. When I come back to rewrite, she's often not the same person she was when I first wrote the line.

There are plenty of people to whom this will seem just creepy. But it's the way I have always experienced the world -- as a shifting lover, constant only in beauty.

What I have promised, says Eddison's Aphrodite, I will perform.

She has not promised constancy. She has not even promised love. Her only promise is that she will always, always be beautiful. She promises to break our hearts.

And that's enough.

So when I refer to "you" in this blog, I mean exactly what I say. I mean you.

Blogroll Addendum

Long, long ago, in the dark backward and abysm of time, I added a blogroll from blogrolling.com. That sidebar to the right. At the time this was a rather cutting edge thing to do, and I was one of the cool kids. For months, however, my blogroll has been frozen in space: the blogrolling team protests weakly, every so often, that they're working on it, but one starts to lose heart after the third "we're almost ready!" update followed by a couple weeks' silence.

So I have been unable to add Clumps and Voids, Peony Moon, Northern Wall, Box Elder, and Ouroboros to my sidebar. Probably others too that are escaping my sieve-like brain at the moment.

I'm not a patient man. If this goes on another six months -- I swear, I may do something about it!

Solstice

---

We asked the sun to return, but she's walking in the skyfields far to the south, and ignores us. Her secretarial staff tells us we've made our request in due form, but there's no telling gods what to do: she'll come back in her own sweet time.

---

The waitress in the restaurant up the street hikes up her skirt and sits astride me to take my order, rocking absent-mindedly while she writes it up. Dismounts and pats my chest affectionately. To her I'm ancient, harmless, an old dog gone in the teeth. I find to my horror that my voice has gone high and quavery, and my hands shake. I'll never do massage again.

---

The sky goes iron-gray, then darker, darker, to ice-black, and the snow hisses, blowing in my face like fine white sand. It stings my face and my eyes horribly, but it does melt, after a moment, and runs down to clot in my mustache and beard. I shamble home in the dark.

---

The snow lies in thick drifts over the furniture and the books and the piles of paper. I lie down on couch, which stirs it up: it swirls high above me. I am tiny. I'm lying at the bottom of my grandmother's snow-globe. Of course. We've come to Grandma's for Christmas. A fire roars in the hearth of her big, square-built, Illinois house. Slowly the snow settles back down on me, in huge, comforting flakes. Warm. Getting warm at last.

---

Borrowed Time

Snowing hard, after a night of rain. The ground sucks up the snow, silently breathes it in.

You are standing in the sky, wrote Diane Ackerman. When we say that our distant ancestors crawled out onto the land, we forget to add that they really moved from one ocean to another, from the upper fathoms of water to the deepest fathoms of air.

---

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile, says Berowne. Which is as close a summary of the uneasy Buddhist account of the Fall as I can think of.

---

I have your bio in hand, and I am more perplexed than ever. But really it is only the old mystery over again. "Why are we conscious at all?" asked Martha last night, back from a day with her aged parents, whose health is dwindling. "and why do we stop being conscious? It seems like it ought to be one or the other, not both." All this light and complexity ought to come from somewhere more mysterious than the industrial north of England. And the snow shouldn't just vanish into the ground.

---

All night I walked in the dingy linoleum tunnels under the hospital, looking for you. Little withered things with gray skin labored in dim cafeterias along the way. Making body parts, you'd said. When I finally found my way up into the upper levels, and located you, you were asleep in a chair. I covered you with my coat. Took off your shoes and socks, and warmed your icy feet in my lap. Then I tucked one under my shirt, between my left arm and my heart, and rubbed the other with hot cinnamon oil, which had a reddish tinge under the florescent light. Om mani padme hum, I murmured under my breath, over and over. It was so cold I could see my breath. It was a long time before your feet began to warm. But when they did your whole body suddenly flushed, the light came back into it, and your sleep changed. Your skin radiated heat. I fell asleep then too, propped against the wall, your feet warming my ribs and thighs.

---

Sometimes one of us comes to the fountain, and the other isn't there. We go and look at the cold dark river, and watch the water move into the uncertain North.

---

Just who is this lender, from whom we borrow time? He never lays out his terms. It's beginning to make me nervous.

Diet

Boring alert! Talking about my diet again. Feel free to skip.

My diet is quite simple. No more than 80 grams of carbohydrates per day, and no more than 5 grams of refined carbohydrates.

By "refined carbohydrates" I mean sugar and corn syrup and fine-milled flour: I also throw honey and molasses into this category. Any sugar. And anything that gooses your insulin levels. White rice. Potatoes. I'm also, for the moment, avoiding most fruit.

I don't bother counting and measuring most vegetables. Technically they're carbs, but in practice they're harmless when they're not sugar-delivery systems.*

In practice what this comes down to is meat, eggs, and fish, a couple slices of whole wheat bread, and a big salad every day, with all the balsamic vinaigrette I want on it. (that's where I spend my quota of refined carbs.) Some cheese and nuts. Cream and butter are fine.

If I'm hungry, I eat. It's been about two weeks, and I've lost nearly two inches from my waist. This is faster than I wanted to lose -- I'm shooting for an inch a month -- but it tallies with my experience of carb-restricted diets before. The weight goes really fast, at first. I haven't been weighing myself: too much of a bother, and either my weight fluctuates too much, or my scales are not accurate enough -- there are weird ups and downs -- that I find it more of a distraction than an encouragement. And anyway, I don't care what I weigh. I want to get rid of the belly. So I measure my waist every few days. I started at 47", and I want to get it to 32".

Here's my expectation: basically, refined carbs and sugars have to go out of my life forever. Fruit may or may not be possible -- I found last time that I could tolerate grapefruit, but not oranges; and cherries, but not bananas. If I'm lucky, when I get to 32" I'll be able to maintain just that way, and I won't have to count anything. But it may be that I'll have to restrict the carbs forever. I'll just have to experiment.

I'm expecting the weight loss -- or maybe I should call it the inch loss, since that's what I'm measuring -- to follow some kind of tail-curve. Six months of an inch a month, six months of half an inch a month, six months of a quarter-inch a month, and then years to get the last inches off. But that's wild speculation. It'll be interesting to see what the actual curve looks like. A lot steeper than that, if it's like last time, and bending more sharply to the horizontal at some point. And of course there's zero chance that I won't monkey with the parameters, in that long a time. If I can lose ten inches, in a year and half, I'll be a happy camper.

I know some of you -- very sweetly! -- are worried about my health, since there's a lot of fat, and a lot of saturated fat, in this diet. So it may or may not be reassuring to you (confession time! the delicately nurtured may wish to skip the rest of this paragraph) that I think I'm eating considerably less fat, and less saturated fat, than I was. When, for instance, I binged on toasted bagels with butter, I could easily, easily eat a whole stick of butter at a sitting. Without even blinking. Now, although I can eat all the butter I want, there's simply no way I could face eating that much. On what? On my chicken? On my salad? I could eat really staggering quantities of oil in a bag of potato chips -- what, half a cup, maybe? But even at my most prodigal slopping of salad oil, I'll never do anything like that with a salad. And of course cookies, cakes, muffins, and candies have simply disappeared. You have to understand that in a just world I would have been dead long ago: my body's capacity to withstand abuse has been remarkable. Even by the (in my opinion) misguided FDA guidelines, I'm eating better now than last month.

In any case, my doctor's watching my blood lipids every three months. If the triglycerides and LDL shoot up, I'll quit. I'm expecting them to drop, dramatically. But I'm Mr Empirical. If they don't, then it means I'm wrong, and I have to change what I'm doing. This would not be a good time to die, and I'm going to try to avoid it for the moment.

*peas and corn are the big exceptions. They pack a big carb whallop.

Otter

Your skin is made of light,
Your eyes glow like the sun seen through
a glass of ale, in sleepy summers
ten thousand years ago, before MRI's,
before mortgages, before hesitation.

Your ribs settle into my palms,
flexible as a girl's. You twist and laugh
and nuzzle like an otter.

Death tried to hold you, but he got greedy:
he pulled too hard and lost his grip, and
suddenly
you were out of his hands.

We are marked where he seized us.
We are burnt, fragile, stretched out of shape
like a wet-dog sweater worn in the rain
by an obese cousin;
and of course
Death gets us in the end. But not yet.
Not now.
When you kiss me
you stick your tongue out at him.

How the Neighbors Disturb Me

Morning comes, in a patched white robe:
the smell of coffee and bacon and newsprint;
wet earth exhaling its last deep breath
before the snow comes.

Windchimes from next door.
A girl named Sweetwater sits on her porch
snug in her parka, smoking a cigarette,
watching the squirrels leap

from wire to branch. The last maple leaves
shiver. I clench my interdigitated hands,
sore knuckles taking painful comfort each from each;
force myself not to look at her.

She's native, and I have a notion
she doesn't like to be looked at casually.
She warms slowly, like a carefully tended fire
you nurse in the woods. It might not catch.

I've seen her fully alight only once
on the night Obama was elected,
her black eyes passionate. "I can't believe it,"
she said. "I can't believe it."

She looked directly at me then, and I thought
what fools we are to squander that first
direct look on ranging shots, instead of on
a deliberate smashing broadside.

I come home at night, lugging my folded table
and my duffel full of linens and oils,
climb sideways up the stairs; I see her
and her boyfriend smoking on the steps.

Sometimes during the day he plays the piano
masterfully. "Do I disturb you?" he asked once,
anxiously. (Everything beautiful disturbs me.)
"Of course not," I said.

Drift

You can hear the throb of the falls,
the river moaning as it loses purchase,
the endless spatter of water-brains on rock.
So many things drift and slide like this.
Stately, inevitable: toward headlong
pitches into empty air. Rafts. Lovers. Prayers.

Fingers over the side, trawling:
pale green spiders pulsing in
the diffuse syrup of the sun.
I am in no mood for repentence.
I don't look for portage. Having expended
my last, like a spawning salmon, I am content
to let the river take me.

Geranium

This crowded geranium
supplies its own understory
of brown and crumpled tissue;
Dead intermixed with vigorous,
white-outlined thrusts;
straight lines ending in little curves,
fifty cocked penis stems ending each
in an orgasm of leaf.

What My Time Is For

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress.

-- William Blake

---

The crows come tumbling
out of the treetops and chase a redtail
high up into the shifting airs,
raccoons pull the slats out of porch louvers,
and the cat paws curiously, delicately
at the moving images on the monitor.
They do all this moved by
the love of God and in the hope of
His mercy.

---

I will never apologize for loving you.
I will never think it was the wrong thing to do.
If it is complicated and difficult
sometimes
that makes it like calculus
and knitting and programming computers
which are other things
I am not ashamed of.

I will never apologize for loving anybody
I will never stop loving anybody
I will never say my heart stops here.

Love is not tidy. It does not color
inside the lines. It gives money to beggars
whether they are going to buy
a sandwich or a bottle of wine.

I do not ask for justice and I do not offer it.
I ask for love and mercy
which are what I am willing to give
and what I hope to receive.

---

They say that if we don't hold people
to a standard then there will be no telling
the difference between a bad person
and a good person. And I say yes,
you're right. You're exactly right.
And we'll be forced to love the one
as much as the other: which is
what God told us to do.

---

You apologized for taking my time.
You don't understand, I said. You
are what my time is for.

---

Ouroboros Review

I have some poems in the first Ouroboros Review. What a gorgeous piece of work it is! I'm delighted to be in on the first issue, among so many wonderful poets & artists.

(PS: while those of you well-read in early fantasy fiction might suspect a connection between someone who goes by "Koshtra" and a publication called "Ouroboros," -- since "Koshtra" derives ultimately from E. R. Eddison's novel The Worm Ouroboros -- I had, alas, nothing to do with the naming or inception of the magazine.)

Four Poems


Crippled

We are ancient, crippled with sin,
our knuckles swollen with fear:
our dowager's hump of resentment
keeps us from lifting our heads.
We hobble through the green world muttering
indistinguishable imprecations.


The Moon Behind the Door

High half moon at dawn:
cobweb clouds, full of dust, cling
to the furniture of heaven.


Strange Coin

You were a girl a year ago. And now
womanhood has come to you:
large leaking breasts, battle-scarred
belly, plum-colored
shadows under the eyes. You have become
beautiful and mortal,
robbed of sleep, drawn by us
into the company of death.
You have given hostages
and are at the mercy now of newspapers,
insurance forms, conscriptions. You will never
be free again. Belittled,
vulnerable to every worldly power,
bound to pettiness. A little greedy sucking mouth
owns your nipples: she will never love you
as you love her. You have given everything,
and you've been paid in strange coin,
not recognized as currency.


What To Take With You

I'm pretty sure that on our flight out
we're allowed only a carry-on bag,
and that our personalities
are too big for it. But I hope
we get to pack the sun and the moon
and a few favorite stars,
the rose-stained eggshell cloud
snagged on the mountain,
the rain lifting on the morning wind,
and the brightness of our lovers' eyes.

Bury Me Tenderly

It is only a hypothesis, Taubes says repeatedly, and it needs to be confirmed by empirical studies: the idea that what's behind diabetes, obesity, and most cardiac disease and cancer is the huge amounts of sugar, corn syrup, white flour and potatoes that have swamped the human diet, throwing the metabolic processes slightly out of kilter. But it's a hypothesis that explains the epidemiology of all those new, chronic diseases of Western Civilization. I am only suspicious of it now, because I so much want it to be true.

Most of my life I've been forty to sixty pounds overweight, and I've been told all my life that my inability to control my diet puts me in line for all these diseases, and that if only my will were not defective I would be healthy and lean. The metabolic hypothesis turns all this upside down. What if, as Taubes puts it, we don't get fat because we overeat? What if we overeat because we're getting fat?

At first that sounds like pure nonsense. But if the fat tissue is getting first dibs on the fuel coming in, and releases it only reluctantly, the body will respond by getting hungrier, and by decreasing its energy expenditure. We'll be hungry and reluctant to move. Which is precisely what is seen in the couch potatoes we love to ridicule. The correlation between overeating, sedentary habits, and obesity is obvious: but corellation is not causation. And the spectacular failure of programs of calorie-restricted diets and exercise to change the condition, despite huge and aggressive public health campaigns, and the fact that such basic vices as Vanity, Envy, Pride, and Lust can easily be rallied to their support, leaving only poor lightweights like Greed and Sloth to try to hold the line, should make us wonder if, after all, we've really got it right.

A theme I return to again and again is my skepticism about how much of what we do is really under the control of the storytelling part of the brain. A lot of that skepticism was born of my experiences in trying, and failing, to eat as people told me I should. My commitment to a diet would be as complete as I can imagine, my intention focused, my resolution of a sort that I've brought fruitfully to bear on all kinds of other things -- and within a few days I would have caved in completely. Perhaps I am a deeply defective person. I have many reasons to think so. But perhaps I was engaged in an endeavor that made no sense.

Picture a world in which all the medical authorities told us that our health problems and our unattractiveness were the result of taking in and storing too much oxygen. (Oxygen, after all, is a highly toxic substance: look what it does to iron!) If we would only breathe more moderately, then we would be healthy and attractive. You can picture what would ensue. All kinds of people would offer ingenious methods of breath-control. Learned authorities would get up in front of television cameras and tell us that of course the breath is under voluntary control, and it only wants discipline. People would invest enormous amounts of emotional and financial capital in controlling their breath. We would see psychologists investigating our pathological emotional commitment to overbreathing. And the sum total of oxygen consumed would not change a bit.

Because, despite the fact that yes, you can in the short term decide whether or not to breathe, in the long term you cannot. The body simply doesn't trust the conscious mind to run that process. If you don't do what it wants, it will take over and override the conscious mind entirely. The hypothalamus was here first. What it says goes. The cerebral cortex can sit lordly on its throne and issue orders all day, and as long as its orders don't contradict the hypothalamus its delusion of autocracy can remain intact. But put them in direct conflict, and you'll soon find out who's boss.

The only time I've lost weight easily -- almost spookily easily -- was on a version of the Atkins diet, a few years ago. Without any attempt to cut calories, without any portion control, without any attention to whether I bolted my food or ate slowly, and without any hunger, I'd lose a couple pounds a week. The rate at which I lost weight, in fact, concerned me: I'd been told that weight loss that rapid was unhealthy, and I tried to slow it up a bit. What concerned me even more was that I was eating a diet which medical authorities told me was horribly unhealthy. I assumed, at the time, that they had an empirical basis for this. I've learned since never to assume that about nutrition. For some reason nutritionists feel that they are exempt from empirical demonstration. After seeing authority after authority solemnly state that high-protein diets caused kidney damage, I decided to go look for myself and see what the studies were that proved this. It turned out that if you force-feed rabbits huge amounts of animal proteins they develop kidney problems. This was the only empirical basis for the supposed toxicity of high protein diets. The rest was all speculation, speculation which accounted rather badly for the good health and longevity of human populations which traditionally eat almost nothing but meat and fat. Why the Inuit and Masai weren't all on dialysis by age thirty (not to mention, why they weren't all dying of scurvy after three months of their animal-only diets) was left unexplained. furthermore -- and this is typical of nutritional "science," at least until recently -- no one even seemed to feel that it needed any explaining.

So. I had been planning to wait until after Christmas to undertake my new eating program. But I'm so excited about it that I think I'm going to do it now. It's not proven yet, but the weight of the evidence seems to me to indicate pretty clearly that refined carbohydrates are, at least for some people, metabolic poison. And Taubes' review of the evidence has convinced me that dangers of high protein & fat diets is purely speculative. (And the fact that it is still speculative, after so long a time as a ruling ideology of diet, is itself a sort of negative evidence. There's been plenty of time and opportunity to demonstrate this empirically. Why has no one ever managed to do it?) Likewise, I no longer believe that the supposed nutritional indispensability of carbohydrates has been demonstrated, or even proven to be likely.

So I'm off to undertake a fad diet. Bury my atherosclerotic body tenderly, next year! It's all Taubes' fault.

45th Parallel

On the highway to the beach is a sign marking the 45th parallel, solemnly announcing that this place is halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. As a child I was thrilled by the obscure magic of this spot. As an adult I find it comic, to gravely mark a spot of land whose importance is that it corresponds to a mark on a map made to represent that land. I picture a map with the signpost marked on it, and a further sign affixed to the post to mark the mark of the signpost.

A curve of sandy-shouldered road snaking through the high salal.

---

You sat up on the table, holding the drapery to your chest, reminding me sharply of The Nude in Art. I rubbed the excess oil off your back with a towel. We are still friends after all these years.

---

A wind-torn flight of strange birds.

---

I got a cell phone. The last person in America to get one. A prospective client was angered, upon calling me, to find that it was my home phone and that my son answered. It was unprofessional, she said, in an email. I suppose so. I mostly felt defensive about my son. He's not always very fluent on the phone, but he does his best. But anyway, I did get the phone and now my business communication is not tainted by the existence of my family. That's professional, I guess.

---

The wind came across the pitching salt water. You fell on the seaweed-covered rocks, and I wasn't there to catch you.

---

Higher still and higher
from the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire
The blue deep thou wingest
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

I'm afraid I will never hear a skylark. Never see the Southern Cross.

---

Even in this absurdly fortunate life, sometimes grief rises like floodwater.

---

I have two favorite oils, both of which I buy at a local shop, Escential Oils, on Hawthorne. One is infused with oil of lavender, and the other goes by the name of Egyptian Musk. I have never managed to find out what is in Egyptian Musk, so I can't use it on anyone who has skin sensitivities of any sort. I trust Escential Oils not to put anything noxious in it, but everything is an irritant to somebody.

Even though I ask them to go light on the lavender, they never go light enough. I end up cutting it with unscented oil, half and half.

Many, maybe most therapists have switched to lotion. And I carry some with me, because you get the occasional client who really dislikes oil. But to me there's something sweetly luxurious, a biblical sensuality and prodigality, to oils. In some kinds of Indian massage they practically bathe you in warm oil.

I couldn't tell you exactly what guides me in choosing between my favorite oils. If it seems to me that someone needs to be calmed and soothed, I use lavender. If it seems to me that they need to be woken up and stimulated, I use the musk. But gender plays in it too: other things being equal, I tend to use the musk on men, the lavender on women. But I don't know until I reach into my bag which I'm going to choose, and I often don't really know why.

Dear readers, do you all have any favorite scents I should experiment with?