April WTLP Zine

April's WTLP Zine, an all-poems edition, is out. My poem "Indigo" is in it. (Also not to be missed is Sage's puff of my massage skills, at the very bottom.)

The World's Cursor

I am followed by trails of light:
Every motion cuts lines in the air.

Even a cursory glance discovers
the divine waitress pouring

slack-jawed while our cup
runs over with trouble.

I am a cursive script. Every
maddening letter of my life

must join with the next: and though
I solemnly swear or affirm

that I will not tell the whole truth,
after years of coursing

they still have not found
a cure for candor.

Fragility

Maybe it's like practicing for a sort of death. A way to pretend at fragility, to inhabit, for however brief a time, sheer breakability, to enter the underworld and prepare yourself for what it will feel like to be helpless.

When I grow up and become a real blogger with a Wordpress blog and quick-draw html prowess, I'm going to have smorgasblog like Bonta. Till then I'll just keep on occasionally, arbitrarily and inconsistently linking to things like this amazing post of Kristen McHenry's, about the childhood doll she saved up for 14 months to buy.

Good Morning

Now this is Spring: the deep dark and the long steady rain.

No hint of morning yet: somewhere above the clouds the sky must be changing color, but no sign of it here below. The rain is soft but persistent; the parking lot of Tosi's glimmers, shimmies. Each raindrop, as it strikes, is a vanishing pixel, catching streetlight or traffic light or headlight: the whole surface wavers like an old tv screen. Beyond, the cars kick up wakes of spray behind, and cast beams of lighted droplets forward.

In the cafe, people talk quietly. It's slow: Jimmy comes out from the kitchen and perches at the booth of the old-timers by the window. The radio plays softly, some old song about longing to go out dancing.

As I've been writing, the sky has imperceptibly lightened. At least I suppose so: the doug firs have darkened -- their black sillouettes are clear now against the sky.

And now a tide of blue-gray light is slowly washing in, from everywhere and nowhere. Morning. The rain patters on, the parking lot gleams as before, but you can sense that somewhere the gods are waking, that restless intelligences are abroad now. Intention is washing into the world with the light. People have plans, ambitions, agendas. All over the city they're jolting awake with alarm clocks, launching themselves out of bed, shaving, applying makeup, running over their daily list of fears and hopes for the day, reminding themselves of appointments, tasks undone, disputes unsettled.

I say I'm a morning person, but it's not this moment of the morning that I belong to. It's the moment before this one, when the doug firs first pick themselves out against the paling sky. I have nothing to do with the frantic preparation of faces, and I want nothing to do with it. Let them go and fight their battles. There's nothing I want out there. I want the touch of your hand, the slow sleepy bright smile, the pools of lamplight, the gradual wash of cloudlight.

Good morning. Good morning, dear.

Making Sense of Things

Morning. The trees peering sleepily into their mirrors to see how they look in their new leaves.

There are six ways to order three different objects; twenty-four ways to order four. I had forgotten how to figure that out – I came late to that branch of mathematics, and it doesn't stick very well – but I was able to think my way to the algorithm, using my old programmer habits (start with the simple cases, and look for the patterns) and visualizing the objects as a row of buttons. I still can't remember the names for these things. But the formula is enchantingly simple. The number of ways to order 3 things is 3 x 2; the number of ways to order four objects is 4 x 3x 2, five is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2, etc. The solution came to me so easily that I must have remembered something about it. I wonder what. Those ghostly memories fascinate me. Did I remember only that the solution was simple and easy to remember? Did I remember an image of a row of buttons? Or did I only remember that the problem had a solution, that I once knew? That would be enough to keep me confidently gnawing at it till I got it.

This is how I thought about it. Two buttons – lets call them Fred and George – can only be ordered two ways: either Fred comes first or George comes first. So now we're going to introduce a third button. Call her Amy. Say Fred and George are standing like this:

(Fred) (George)

Button Amy has three different places she can stand: before Fred, in between Fred and George, or after George.

(Amy?) (Fred) (Amy?) (George) (Amy?)

So there are three possible orders with Fred and George standing this way. But Fred and George could also stand the other way around, with George first. In that case Amy would, again, have three different choices about where to stand, making six possible orders (3 x 2) in all. And whenever you're going to add a button, it will be just the same. If you have a 20 buttons, there will be 21 slots the new button can take, so the formula for the number of orders of 21 buttons can take will be 21 x (however many orders the other 20 can take.)

Easy to fill in the parenthesis. You'd figure out 20 buttons the same way: 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take): so it's 21 x 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take.)

And you figure out 19 the same way, of course. 19 x (however many the other 18 can take), which gives us 21 x 20 x 19 x (however many the other 18 can take). At this point of course the pattern is obvious. And now you've solved the problem for any number of buttons, be it billions, or trillions, or even a large number, such as the number of pennies in the national debt. Lovely!

I didn't learn this stuff until I was in my thirties – I have a rather odd educational history – so I remember clearly my delight in it when I first came across it. And the counter-intuitive knack, which you use all the time in calculus, of deferring the working out of the actual solution until after you've understood the pattern. The pattern is (the number of slots) times (the number of orders of the rest). Once you understand that clearly, the only problem you actually have to solve, at the end of the series, is: how many orders can two objects take? And even my soggy old over-fifty brain can do that by dead reckoning. It's Fred first and then George, or George first and then Fred. No other option. Two different orders.

This all started because I was walking down the street and saw a business logo – four squares arranged in a big square, with one letter in each square – and I wondered which way you were supposed to read them: right to left and then top to bottom? Or top to bottom and then right to left? And then my eye started playing with different paths, and that brought me to wondering: how many different paths through these letters are possible? How many orders are there, anyway?

I frowned, thinking, I know I knew this once. So I set to work to recover the knowledge, and after walking a couple blocks I had it back.

My mind does this sort of thing all the time. It's always ferreting about for intelligibility, playing with patterns. Letters and numbers magnetize me, fascinate me. There are few pleasures more intense to me than that of figuring out a simple solution to something apparently confusing and complex. Knowing enough of Old English, Old Norman French, and the laws of phonetic change that English spelling actually makes sense is a daily gratification. I find the sort of mind that can rest easy with a spelling such as “knight” baffling. How can you accept such a thing? How can your mind not ache? How can it not ask: what 'k'? why is the 'i' long? what are that 'g' and 'h' doing there? How can this have seemed like the right way to spell this word to somebody?

Even more baffling to me: how can you be proud of knowing how to spell the damn word, without understanding why it's spelled that way? How can you lord it over someone who tries to spell it in a way that actually makes sense? Someone who writes “nite” is at least using systematic rules, is bringing his or her intelligence to bear on the problem. Every day I read people sneering at examples “illiteracy” which seem to me far more admirable than the obedient memorization of a set of opaque facts.

I don't want to just know the right answers. I want to understand the answers.

It all comes down a respect and tenderness for other human beings. An Anglo-Norman monk sat in his English scriptorium, on a day when the new leaves were just coming out, faced with an impossible task. He was keeping legal records, depositions: he was supposed to write down, for the sake of our Lord Christ, the noises the Saxons made in saying their word for the seigneur -- that click at the beginning of the word, the cat-like hiss in the middle. What to do? Well, 'k' would do for the click, but what about that horrible throat-clearing sound? 'g' at least put it at the back of the throat. Throw in an 'h' to suggest the hissing. What else can you do? He dipped his pen in the ink and carefully began to write.

The man did his best with what he had. A few centuries later the click and the hiss were gone, worn away with the rub of the years: the only sign of them left was the lengthening of the 'i' into a diphthong – what we call “long 'i'” – to compensate for the lost hiss. But the nonsensical spelling was enshrined in writing now. It was “correct,” and everybody had to use it, other people just as hapless, children sitting in schoolrooms on days when the new leaves were just coming out, and they ached to be outside playing.

It's not the rules, not the rules that count. It's not the correctness. It's trying to make sense of things. And the new leaves. Those are what count.

Portland

Cloud staining cloud;
silver seeping through white screens;
tarnish soaking through cotton.

Forget love, forget the writing of poems.
Come with me. Walk on moss crusted sidewalks:
tell stories about five year olds

and the deeds of long dead cats.
Ask riddles you learned when you were small.
Tell your favorite color.

Walk the curb like a balance beam;
pool your change with me
to buy a Three Musketeers.

We'll watch the sky change
and the rain sweep down from the hills
until the gutters run clear as glass.

Helium Head Revisited

Carolee made a poem out of my "Helium Head" post. I'm so delighted!

Four Stations: Sun and Moon

Then, the lighted doorway: new leaves glimmering;
the waxing moon
losing her footing on turbulent clouds.
Softness of breast under sweater. Goodbye:
always goodbye.

---

Now morning, half light, hunched shoulders,
sorting through versions of the day, deciding
on the next press release, my own handler.
What the President meant to say --
What the President was trying to convey --
Hush. No one is listening.

---

This evening
I will drive through a concrete tunnel and up a hill
to where the sunset country gleams,
too bright to look at. Over the West Hills,
into the land of promise. No one can see:
The traffic will slow
and grope. An orange and violet diffusion,
the sky wearing garish lipstick, the road paint
glitttering. Sun
will hold my head in the vice of her hands:
an unwelcome aunt determined on a kiss.

---

Listen. This is all I have.
Don't think that there's more concealed,
better to come, delights yet
undisclosed. I love you like
a mother mouse loves the squirming skin
jellybeans of her litter;
I love you like a stag in rut
loves any doe that crosses his path.
I love you like a wolf loves
his loping packmates,
like a swan loves the glide of his wife,
like the moon loves the clouds that stumble her.

Helium Head

Yet another confession: I am a helium head. That's what I understand they call them in the Air Force, anyway: people who are obsessed with lighter-than-air flight. Airplanes, forcing their way through the air with props or jet engines, do almost nothing to satisfy my craving for flight. What good is flying if you can't feel the wind in your hair, and can't hear the silence of the sky? I want to sail in the sky, not to motor in it. I dream of vast ships, constructed of high-tech filament and membrane, using the wind the same way a sailing ship does. They'd be transparent, barely there, like the jellyfish I've seen in Oregon Coast Aquarium, barely distinguishable from the water, using the water, not fighting it. My ships would use the air, the same way. Airplanes are capsules for transiting a hostile environment. They're for land beasts that really don't trust the sky. Like so much of modern industrial culture, they're essentially hostile to the natural world, wanting to conquer it, to tame it, rather than to understand it and work with it.

I've read that one reason German pilots were the most accomplished, early in the second world war, was that they nearly all trained as glider pilots first. They understood the air as an environment more sensitively than pilots accustomed to bulling their way through it from the start.

The ships would have to be huge. Forget jet packs and angel wings: they're for people who've never really thought about the physics of flight. A condor weighs 20 lbs and has a wing span of 10 feet; by plain arithmetic proportion a human being with a little gear would need a wing span of maybe 100 feet These are idle numbers – the progressions aren't arithmetic. Rigid airship builders reckoned that helium ships “broke even” at about eighty feet. To sail in the air you'd need to accept these proportions: you would be like those little dots, the nuclei of jellyfish, not like a superhero. If you wanted to carry other people, or freight, the proportions would of course be even greater. Most people I think lose visceral interest at this point. What good would flying be if you weren't the center of attention? But if you really play boldly with the scales, you realize that at really large sizes, the penny-per-mile cost of bulk freight could be astonishingly low. Grain to Russia? Bulldozers to Peru? Easy. Go straight there. Forget all the railroads and sealanes, the port costs. Pick it up wherever it is, take it wherever they want it.

I don't imagine my ships would ever land; possibly they'd never even anchor. You'd be winched up and down, maybe. You'd ascend through the gossamer sails and faintly prismatic wings, under the soap-bubble helium membranes, to find your place, check a few things, reef a sail or two there, extend a rudder membrane there, and set a spinnaker floating a couple hundred feet out to catch a thermal, and you'd be off to – anywhere at all.

Face Cradle Frame and Heated Fleece

I stopped by Robert Hunter's shop last week and bought an adjustable face cradle – or rather an adjustable frame for the face cradle. It's been ten years since I bought my table from him. The table looks practically new, ten years later, and Hunter looks much the same too, except that his hair is quite white now.

His tables are legendary, in Portland. I set up to do a massage for a fellow therapist, and she says, “is that a Hunter table?” Like a violinist asking “is that a Strad?”

The table is dark green – hunter green, come to think of it – and it's two or three inches wider than standard: I'd always disliked having to tuck my hands to keep my arms from dropping off the table. I didn't know at the time that I'd be working as a therapist, and that I'd be setting up and taking down the table ten times a week: it was just good luck that I got a table that could stand such use. A factory-made table would have come to bits in my first year of practice.

But after splurging on the table, I got cheap about the face cradle frame, and bought an inexpensive, rigid one. It's been okay for most of my regulars, but it's not quite comfortable for one or two, and not really ideal for any of them – usually it's better for the cradle to slant down a little, so as to open the back of the neck. So, business being good, I finally went back and got an adjustable frame.

Hunter pulled a frame out of a pile of them, and glued a couple velcro strips on as we talked. I thought of how odd it is, now, to have contact like this with a craftsman: to buy something that's not packaged, and have it hand-tweaked in the shop, while talking of this and that. He gave me a couple pointers about using it – he's a massage therapist himself, and his Reiki certification hangs on the wall – and I walked out with just the frame, and stuck it in the basket of my bike, and rode on to work, feeling that I'd wandered back into some pre-industrial Shire, and liking the feeling a lot.

But I continued my buying spree in a thoroughly 21st Century fashion, by buying a heated fleece on E-Bay from someone in Florida. It left Hodgson, Illinois, according to the UPS tracker, two days ago, so it should be here any time.

I always tell people to crank up the heat before I come, but they seldom do it enough, and if they do, then of course I'm too warm. There's a ten degree gap between the comfortable temperature for giving massage and the comfortable temperature for receiving it – a perenniel problem. Many spas have a running battle about the temperature of their massage rooms: spa owners insisting on the high 70s and the pink-faced, sweating therapists longing for the high 60s. So I've been meaning to get one of these pads for a long time. It introduces some complexity (where do I plug in?) and some bulk to my travel kit, but I think it will be worth it. One of the very first things I learned, doing massage, is that a client who gets cold on the table is never, ever going to call you back. And this is the worst time of the year: people are so anxious for it to be Spring and so excited to see the sun that they fling open the windows and entirely fail to notice that it's still 50 degrees in the shade. After an hour on the table they notice, all right, but by then it's too late.

Lines Too Early for Easter

for the nicks and snags of battered hearts, and livers that like oysters
are helplessly gathering poisons in their red and rusty cloisters;

for the ribs that close and open like the fronded beards of mussels
and lungs that sweetly blossom in the dirty air that rustles

in the trachea, and whispers past the thyroid, dries the throat,
and catches in the nostrils like an old and dusty coat.

Person-Permanence

As I start to speak, I watch her face go blank. Her face has grown more expressive, more revealing, with age. She used to be able to keep an expression of bright interest through several of my sentences. Now it goes dull at once. I finish speaking as quick as I decently can, and normal conversation resumes. But anyway, I've done my duty; I've been sociable. If I say one or two more things in the course of the evening everyone can say it's been a good time. She has never actually wanted to hear anything I say, of course, but it does make me a little melancholy, having it made so obvious.

I'm the wrong son for her. Slow, inarticulate, and unexpected. Sometimes when I get in the car and turn on the radio, I find that I've left it on the classical station: I listen to that when I feel up to a challenge. But if I'm tired and seeking comfort, hearing those slow tempos and unpredictable sounds come on makes me almost savage. I want the familiar, comfort-sound. Old rock-n-roll. I think that's what it's like for my mother when I begin to speak. I'm always difficult, a quarter-tone off, unnecessarily complicated, agonizingly slow. No wonder her face goes slack and her eyes wander slightly out of focus when she hears my voice. She follows what other people say with interest, most of the time, anyway; though gaps have become apparent with them too. Always her attention has had a way of snapping off suddenly and completely. Like a light going out. And if you're a child, dependent on her for your sense of self, it's like the whole world goes suddenly, utterly, and inexplicably pitch dark.

I read a book once, ill-written and not very smart, but passionate, about growing up as the child of a narcissist. I didn't find much about it that was illuminating, but I recognized at once the shared experience. It's like living in a theater: either you're under the floodlight of intense attention, or you're forgotten, and there's no transition between the two states. You're either the most important thing in the world, or nothing. Onstage or offstage.

It gradually becomes less confusing as you learn that the light and dark have nothing to do with you; they're coming on and off according to the internal needs of the parent, and that they are useless as navigational aids. You also come to learn that there are people who aren't that way, people for whom you don't disappear as soon as you leave their field of vision.

The worst of it is that you yourself are prone, and will all your life be prone, to narcissistic habits of thought. Dewey makes a great deal of infants learning object-permanence: what the child of a narcissist needs to learn is person-permanence. They're still there, even after your attention leaves them.

Maybe this psychological damage is part of why the Buddhist conception of multiple lives and permanent relationships has been so important to me. Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing as a temporary person, no such thing as a one-off connection. Sure, bodies and personalities are impermanent, but persons are not. Karma, the unfolding of the consequences, is inexorable. The web of connections has no loose threads. Every single relationship you have ever had will have to be worked out, healed, made good, eventually. It is the exact opposite of the narcissistic world-view, in which phantom people float into view out of a vast nothingness and abruptly vanish back into it.

Is the Buddhist view true? Probably not. But the narcissist view is not either. The conception of other persons is probably the most complex and most human thing our brains do, it is at the very limit of what human consciousness can achieve, and we no doubt are very bad at it. Having confidence that I really understand what – for instance – my mother sees when she looks at me would be silly. Exactly how and why we exist for each other is a dizzyingly complex problem, and whatever conceptual scaffolding we set up to work on it, we had better recognize it at once as flimsy and inadequate.

All we can ask of a view of reality is that it give us some traction. What we are really dealing with is probably beyond our understanding. But anyone can tell the difference between having something solid in their hands, and grasping at air. The permanence of persons gives me something to work with. I'm still working blind, but there is real stuff under my fingers, which responds to my touch. That's good enough for me.

The Winter Thing

After the CPR class we hand in the dummies
we have been kissing through plastic
sanitary barriers. Just heads and torsos, all male;
and then the babies. A closetful of baby-dolls.

The old fireman stacks them with indifference
but I noticed how he cradled his, when he taught us
what to do with choking infants, even though
it wasn't on the syllabus for adult CPR;
he was used to having a baby on his arm.

All night the stacked men and babies will wait.
They won't move a muscle, breathless,
waiting for kisses through plastic again.

---

Sometimes the Winter Thing returns in March
And carefully fits her mouth
(or whatever that is) over your own
and breathes the air you were hoping for;

or again she will extrude her stomach
and kiss you with her whole reversible body,
and you're inside, dissolving,
without knowing you've been eaten.

Better to wait quiet in the closet, in the dark,
and listen to the air come on and off;
hear the hum of the electric clock, and
take such signs of love as come to you.

I Knew This Would Happen...
... if I read too much about William Morris. It's not a real pen, real ink, or real paper yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Writing, Blogging, and Online Community

Some time ago I wrote that a surprising amount of my intellectual, spiritual, and emotional life takes place here, in the writing of this blog. It only does so because of the community of readers and writers which supports it. An online community is a strange thing. The ties between us are light and ephemeral, in a way; though at this point in my life, several of my blogging friendships have outlived many of my supposedly more grounded and durable “real life” friendships. Events that rock or destroy “real life” friendships – moving to the other side of the country, illness, taking to drink, marrying – can leave these supposedly lesser relationships quite undisturbed. People drift away – or vanish abruptly -- and return unpredictably: but the conversation goes on, and it deepens year by year, as the context grows richer.

Plus you can do something with online relationships that you can't do with real ones: you can go back in time. It's not something any of us does very often, but can be strangely illuminating, sometimes, to go back in your own or someone else's archives and revisit conversations from five years ago. It's never exactly what you thought it was. Some blogs of course disappear over the years, and accidents befall digital records just as they do paper records. Things disappear. But I don't think there has been anything in the world, not even in the copious letter-writing 19th Century, quite like the preserved conversations we have in the comment-threads to our blogs and the archives of our yahoo groups.

I love the quirkiness of what people write in the comments. You get to see your audience, in a way that writers have seldom been able to see them, except in the rather stilted and often agenda-ridden context of formal readings. You get to see them squirm and object; you get to see them admire fulsomely. You get to know that some of them will just be happy whenever a certain sentiment gets expressed, no matter how un-apt or clumsily worded it may be. You come to learn that some bonnets are always going to buzz the same way no matter what you bat them with. And you get a few of those invaluable readers who can tell exactly what you're driving at and will tell you baldly either that you got there, or that your car is in the ditch and you better haul it out.

And if you're very fortunate in your readers, as I have been, you'll find that they're up for anything, that there's nothing too risky, too pathetic, too strenuous, too boring, too complicated for them. My imagined audience, I have found, is much more narrow-minded and censorious than my real one. I find that when I take risks in my writing there is always some reader willing to see my bet and raise me -- to dare me to risk even more. You find that some things you'd always thought of as weaknesses are in the opinion of your readers strengths, and vice versa. My writing has become in many ways much more disciplined, but in other ways much more extravagant, than it was before I had this wonderful audience. I will write things now in my blog that I would not have dared to write even in my private journals ten years ago.

Why I am a Socialist

I am Socialist. Except I'm not. It's queer how the identifications we arrived at so painfully as we became adults haunt us, ever after. It's been a long time since revolutionary political theory held much charm for me, and I don't think revolutionary action ever held any charm any for me: I loathe mobs. When masses of people get all stirred up, for any reason, I get away as fast as I can. And being in a room with people who are all agreeing makes me feel like I can't breathe.

But this comes up because of reading a biography of William Morris: the biographer is at some pains to demonstrate that Morris remained a committed Socialist all his life, even if he became less active in his later years. The biographer is right: it is important to understand that he never “got over” Socialism, never repudiated it. But I suspect he remained a Socialist much as I have remained a Socialist. Not because he supported any particular plan of action, certainly not out of any yen for violence. When I say I'm a Socialist, now, really I mean only one thing: I mean to say no.

No, I don't agree that this is the best we can do. No, I don't agree that it's tolerable for one person to have at his personal disposal everything of value that ten thousand other people make, no matter what his virtues or their vices. No, I don't accept the justice of a market that drives people into meaningless repetitive jobs, into kowtowing to stupid, mildly or venemously abusive bosses, into watching their creativity and energy wither, their bodies stiffen and fatten, their minds grow brittle and resentful, their spirits starve, as the prime of their lives dribbles away. I don't accept it: I will never accept it. This is not how human beings are supposed to live, not how they are supposed to work.

More. I am a Socialist because, as Morris so succinctly put it, fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death. Because I am my brother's keeper, and he is mine.

I'm perfectly willing to entertain arguments against any proposal of any Socialist group -- or against all of them -- on grounds that they will make things worse instead of better. Often enough they have. But what I will not entertain, ever, is the idea that what we have now is acceptable. It's not.

Strangers and Dead People

But it's also partly that the words of strangers and dead people don't often have much for me now. Time was they could slap me across the face and make me change my life. But now they're more often white noise, even the classics: I use them to keep myself from thinking, not to think. I have spent too much time with them. It's living people I need now: it's your warm breast under my palms, your blog post, your voice on the phone, your email, the light of your eyes.

I come out of Central Library and the light falls, as it does in early Spring, crossways; there are shadowed canyons and bright pools of sky, beggars and county officials, women with lined faces, sherrifs painfully shaved, patient dogs tied to backpacks. The inarticulate love rises and makes my throat contract. There will never be words for this. But I know that the same sun is rising in Chennai, and that you are seeing the colors as painfully as I am. And I know that tonight my hand will rest lightly on the crown of your head, and the hair will be so soft that it will seem to move of its own accord. And you will send me email about something trivial that will make me realize, suddenly and completely -- as Tolstoy used to do -- I have to change my life: that the snow on your side of the continent is telling me things that I need urgently to know.

It's you, now, that hammer me, mark me, shape me.

Soon I'll have a birthday, and I'll have as many years as there are cards in deck. Imagine that!
Who would have guessed I would get so far? Or have such luck as to know so many brilliant and wonderful people? Some scientists speculate that the universe is tending, not to ever-increasing uniformity, but to ever-increasing improbability. I wouldn't know, but I know that has been the pattern of my life. It becomes less predictable, less known, less knowable, with each passing year.

Spring

My blood drips like burning gold;
my teeth are sharp; my politesse
can't conceal my ferocity. I'll eat you all,
hook, barb, line: I'll grind your ribs
between my molars.

The strength is coming
back into my hands, and the warmth is coming
back into the soil. Strange rooted things exult
and push into the air; tendrils
cinch on bricks and tear the mortar.

Your houses are falling. Your cars
are sliding sideways down the drives;
Your marriages split like melons
dropped from a grocery bag.
I'm back. As if I'd never gone.

Now the Books

Now the books crowd around me, hissing,
and all the words crawl frantically: the letter-
feelers waving and groping, and all
looking for consummations I can't deliver,
for the honey sweet of perfect understanding.

I do not know how I ever loved
bookstores and libraries; I think it was only
that I didn't understand that all those books
were written by people like me, desperate
for connection. No price
of lies or misdirection
too high to pay; only
listen to me! they plead, and
make me special, just this once!
You may be the last
who ever will pick up this book.

I am: I am the very last,
and it is too much to bear.
I can't read you all. I am a feckless tourist
who gives a few rupees and then runs,
pursued by beggars, and stumbles on the steps
of his hotel. I have no more to give.

The Children of God

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form:
poor in spirit is comforted,
and blessed are they that mourn.

Slender finger bones, sun-white, clean and
tumbled by wind on the sand;

blessed are they that hunger
and thirst after emptiness,
for they shall be filled.

Therefore the wise man's branches
are useless and gnarled,

therefore he does not act.
Blessed are the meek, for the forester
passes them by.

Blessed are the peacemakers
for they shall be

blown out like a candle,
and the end of desire is the end of suffering
and they shall be called the children of God.

---

Inspired by Qarrtsiluni's next theme, New Classics.

NumberFest

My friend Murali's Number Puzzle Site:

Number Puzzles and Mind Exercises for All Ages!

We worked together in the high and palmy days of Informix. He has an extraordinary gift for getting to the simple heart of apparently complex problems. Enjoy!

Quick, Slow

One of the things I like about bicycling is that you don't have to be a fast, rangy ectomorph to do it. I'm an endomorph – stocky, slow, heavily muscled. When we were running in Phys Ed, at school, I always straggled in with the last few guys, half a lap behind. I was hopeless as a baseball and basketball player: but I surprised people by being able to swarm up ropes or pegboards with ease. I had plenty of slow-twitch muscle, even if I couldn't run or hit a ball to save my soul.

When riding a bicycle, I can use all that muscle. I have a twenty-one gear bike, 3 by 7, and I just never use the bottom 14 gears. Other people will be pumping rapidly away, while I grind slowly along in the highest gears, keeping pace even though my legs are moving much more slowly. I will never be fast at anything, but I can make a bike go fast.

Part of what has made this phase of my life so rewarding is that I am no longer trying to be things I'm not, physically, as well as mentally. I will never be rangy and quick. Stocky and slow is what I am, for better or worse. I have never thought well on my feet. I'm easily flustered by dealing with more than one thing: no one will ever call me a good multitasker. I am cautious, slow, and meticulous. I hate hurrying, and for good reason: when I hurry I make mistakes, ludicrous mistakes, mistakes that quicker-witted people would never make no matter what the rush.

The only thing I've ever been quick at is written tests and pattern-matching games. I've always been the sort of person who aces tests; I'm usually done before anyone else, and can't imagine what they're lingering over. This is immensely useful in the modern world, which depends so heavily on testing and certification, but I've always been a little embarrassed by it. People who are far more capable than I, and who study much harder than I do, come out worse on tests. I'm unhappily aware of the unfairness of that.

---

I've been thinking about quickness and slowness because I secretly lost my temper last night. I was riding home from work, and came to a four way stop. A car came to the intersection from the left, and arrived a little before me. I came to a full stop, and waited for it, but the driver waved for me to go on through, so I did.

This infuriated me. I arrived home in a bad temper, and it took me half an hour to recover my equanimity.

I know: I can see the blank look on your faces. What's there to be angry about? She was just being nice, right?

Yes, I know that. But you're thinking like a quick person, not a slow person. Imagine what this is like for me. I'm operating at the far end of my comfort zone already, dealing with more than one moving object. I have a set of rules for evaluating whether things are safe, and for what I do next. This is not easy for me. I have to do a lot of my processing ahead of time. And suddenly, for no reason, somebody plunges me into a hasty re-evaluation of the whole situation, and demands a quick decision of me. This is what I am worst at. This is the sort of situation in which I make disastrous mistakes. I rushed into the intersection, my feet slipping on the pedals, just hoping that her evaluation was correct, and that it was actually safe for me to go. I didn't know whether it was or not. It would have taken me twenty seconds to figure that out and verify it. I don't think fast on my feet. I mean that. I'm not making it up or exaggerating it.

There were a couple subsidiary responses. I felt infantilized by her waving me through. Just because I'm on a bicycle, that doesn't make me a six year old. I don't need any favors: I just need people to follow the rules of the road. And since I knew I'd travel through the intersection more slowly than she would, it was simply stupid, objectively, to send us through in that order: the total time expended by us both would end up being greater. But of course that's just the kind of ideation that being angry sparks: I could have come up twenty other justifications for being angry. What really made me angry was being made to hurry, being made aware of my incompetence, being forced to do something I was bad at, and at her bland assumption that I ought to be happy to use her judgment rather than my own. I know, my judgment is slow and ponderous; but I prefer to use it anyway. What do I know about a stranger's judgment? For all I knew, she could be waving me into the path of of a truck.

I don't think she was wrong to wave me through. I don't think she should have done otherwise. I just want all of you quick people out there to understand that we slow people may not respond the way you expect us to. In another mood, I might have stubbornly stayed put, and motioned you to go first. Not because you're wrong, but just because my capacities are different from yours: and I need to use mine, not yours.

Faces Hanging in the Air

Morning light coming almost horizontal through the windows: the sort of light favored by trackers, because it outlines little shifts in elevation with shadows. If I turn my fingers right I can see, quite clearly, the involuted ridges and valleys that make fingerprinting possible.

Across the street, pink blossoms on the trees in the Rite-Aid parking lot. There are also tall trees, of the aspen or poplar sort, standing leafless with their branches pointing straight up at the sky; the victims of an arboreal hold-up. They don't believe this Spring-in-February nonsense.

A TriMet bus rumbles to a stop, interrupting the sunlight. Briefly I see a blond high school student's face; I think of Ezra Pound's “petals on a wet, black bough.” Then it rumbles on again, the sun comes again, and I have to peer against the glare to type: my reflection on the netbook screen, my beard gleaming silver and gold, the rims of my reading glasses sparkling, the chiaroscuro transforming my features into a strange intricate shoreline. I try to see past all this to what I ought to be writing about, but the sun is too much for me. I shouldn't have taken this seat by the window.

But I always take window seats if I can get them. I love to be inside looking out. I like old-fashioned houses with little windows. Windows for looking out of, not for displaying yourself in. There's a deep misunderstanding behind all these huge modern windows, the same misunderstanding that played out in literature last century as Realism: the idea that if you only made the window big enough and transparent enough you could erase the difference between inside and outside -- the failure to recognize that it's precisely the frame, the narrowness of the aperture, that makes the glimpse of the other world so compelling. If we wanted to be outside we could simply throw on a coat and go outdoors. If we wanted real life we could slap shut the book and call a friend. It's something else that we want, more complicated than that. We want to be both here and there, both safe and exposed. Nothing irritates me more than windows without molding: there's a whole totalitarian ethos embodied in that style of window, in the refusal to accept the mediation between inside and outside, the refusal to accept that people must be able to hide in order to be fully human. You see it again in modern coin design, where the faces spill right off the coin. No borders, no boundaries. No inside and outside allowed. I don't need or want to know what Jefferson looked like. Jefferson is dead. I need to know how we are holding his memory, what locket we're placing him in. The frame is really far more important than the face, and when you refuse the frame you refuse to enter into the conversation that makes Jefferson meaningful to us now. Where do we gather to look at him? What do we look through to see him? That's the question. Refusing to ask it is itself an answer: it says, we don't gather. We each look and see our own personal Jefferson. There is no table to gather around: there are only glaring disembodied faces of dead men hanging in the air.

Sliver

I got it out of your finger at last,
a long wicked stinger of wood.
The paper towels spotted with blood;
the sky outside spotted with stars.

---

This tremendous sprawling ruined body;
the spraddled limbs, like ships;
my lips gasping in winds to fill

some new Aeolus's bag;
each convulsive clutch of my heart
sending a surge of blood, a tidal bore,

up the rivers as far as little fishing towns
where the trout jump.
No one knows where they found me,

no one knows what to do with me:
a behemoth, an engine of appetites,
with ears spiraling up to heaven, and heels

punching muddy holes for cattle
to drown unwary in the Spring;
my belly swags and whales roll

end over end in its wake;
As I step seismographs
flinch, all over the globe.

---

We will go to New Zealand to see the Cross;
we will go to Alaska to see the Lights;
we will go to Montana, where the stars are closest;
we will take a tour of the sky, you said.

And all that while
The sliver lay dimly under the skin
like a twig dreaming under the ice.

---

First the needle, tracing the entry,
widening the wound. You gasp with pain. Smile unevenly.
Then the tweezers, nosing the wood, breaking a bit.
Again, and several tries, till finally
“is it out?” I ask, unbelieving.
“It's out!” you say.
And there it is, a little bloody barb
on the spotted paper towel, a tiny thing.
Great flowering mammals like us,
brought to cringing by a filament of wood
no bigger than a beetle's leg.

Not Napkin Art



The days of napkin art, alas, are over: Tosi has starting buying soft, patterned napkins that ballpoint simply shreds. But here's a bit of spiral notebook art.

A Beautiful House


William Morris, who was a master of many trades, from poetry to wallpaper design, was once asked what the highest product of artistic endeavor would be: he said, without a moment of hesitation, “a beautiful house.”

He did not mean a comfortable house. When someone complained that the furniture he designed was not comfortable, he said shortly, “if you want to be comfortable, go to bed.”

There were few people more aware of the ubiquity of suffering than Morris. Beauty was, to him, what you raised up against suffering: not to alleviate it – not to become comfortable – but almost you might say to justify it. He hated modern civilization not because it made the poor so poor, but because it gave them no opportunity to create something beautiful in recompense. It was one thing peasants to toil in the shadow of a magnificent cathedral that they and their forebears had built and decorated with their own hands over centuries, and quite another for the poor to grind out their days in a factory producing shoe-black, having raised nothing by all their work but monuments to ugliness. Just as poor, and just as much in servitude: but Morris thought the one life was worth living, and the other not.

There's often a breathtaking effrontery in Victorian radicals – in all radicals, I suppose. How the hell does one man know what makes another man's life worth living? And yet we all make our judgements about that, whether we acknowledge them or not, and they inform our politics and our family lives, our pastimes and our art.

I've lost confidence in much of my radicalism over the years, but I believe more strongly than ever that modern economies inevitably – because of their structure and not because of the wickedness of the people locked inside them – ruin the natural world, ensure that the artificial world will be hideous, and corrode human love and loyalty. I don't know how to change them – their ruthless abstraction and dehumanization. I know I participate in it daily, further it. I know that the demands of an economy that genuinely respected the natural world, made beautiful towns possible, and nourished human love and loyalty, would overwhelm me. I'm not up to it. I'm a weak, slack addict of convenience: I use things and people once, and throw them away. I want to be comfortable. I am myself one of the things the modern world has ruined: how (I whine) can I be expected to put it right?

And yet – and yet – despite all my wriggling, despite all my concessions, despite having made comfort the ruling priority of my life – somehow, even so, I just can't get quite comfortable. Neither can you.

Valentine's Day

She has beautiful face, like that of a pre-Raphaelite's model, a long jawline and strong eyes: I fell in love with her at once, in the abstract way that an artist falls in love with the perfect model. Never has there been the slightest twinge of the erotic between us. But she's beautiful, beautiful in repose, beautiful in motion.

And sad, grief-stricken, yesterday. I hugged her three times, twice more than I ought to have, wanting so much to make it better. I made it worse, if anything, pulling her attention back to the hurt. It's hard, if you're constructed as I am, to leave grief alone. The streak of vanity in me is always roused by it. Surely you can't be sad in the full sunlight of my affection and admiration? Not my affection and admiration, oh no, surely not!

But she was as sad when I left as when I came, in that desolate February house. She's usually happy, quick to laugh, energetic. She stood back from the doorway, impatient for me to be gone and leave her alone with her grief, her hair rucked up, her shirt askew. I longed to comb and tuck and pat everything tidy.

Well. Nothing to be done. Load the table into the car, toss the bag and the portable heater onto the seat, drive away under the cold white sky.

I used to feel useless and de trop so often. Now it's an unfamiliar feeling, an unpleasant reminder of unhappier days. At home I put my hands together, murmur a few “om manis,” and watch raindrops descend the windshield in erratic swithbacks. May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering. Right.

Exasperated with the Buddha and all his kind, not because they're wrong but because they're right. The suffering runs even deeper than we think, much deeper than the unkindnesses, infidelities, and disappointments that ostensibly cause it. Those are only the thin places, where we suddenly fall through into that underground river of misery. The river's running all the time, eating everything away underneath us. In the same way that the joy is always there in the sky. None of it ever goes away. We're churned between the two of them like pebbles in an agate-polisher: we tumble endlessly against each other, chipping and scraping, rolled over and over by the push of the river and the shove of the sky.

Spring

The daphne in our front yard is in full blossom, smelling sweet in the soft, cool, wet dawn. And the maple trees are littering sidewalk, street, and car hoods with, well, whatever it is that maples drop at this time of year. Millions of little wads of dark brown stuff. I suppose it's blossom – surely anything so copiously proposterous must have to do with reproduction – but it looks more like rabbit pellets than like flowers. “Maple turds” is not very genteel. Maybe I'll settle on “maple trash,” or “maple litter.”

It's as difficult to imagine people shoveling snow in Pennsylvania, right now, as it is to imagine the dog days in Australia. There's only so much reality you can wedge into your mind at any one time. It's early for Spring, here, but it sure feels like it. Frost is still possible, even snow, but the crocuses have already placed their bets and are blooming recklessly all across the city. I reckon they know as much about the weather as anyone. I think it's Spring.

I close my eyes and feel the soreness, feel my sinuses bulge like overpacked bags at the airport. I keep waking at three or four, and not being able to get back to sleep. This cold that I should have shaken off last week is keeping up with me, loping along patiently like a wolf marking a herd, waiting for stragglers. If I drank a beer right now, I'd be too sick for work tomorrow. But if I eat right and exercise just enough, but not too much, I might get a full night's sleep and get the better of it.

Soft, soft: this morning, this light. I got a lovely valentine from Sage, a wonderful poem printed deep into thick paper. As Leigh Hunt said,

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

I walked around the house this morning muttering “it's all right, Dale. It's all right.” It's comforting to hear someone say that, even someone with no sense. It's what the crocuses are saying, too.

Hurrying and Waiting

And if she's coming back this way
I'm not that hard to find;
Tell her she can look me up
If she's got the time.

The timing of departures is always wrong. We begin traveling by either rushing or waiting: no wonder we never really end up where we want to go.

We ought to ride formally to the crest of the hill with our household knights around us, the banners snapping in the wind, and begin with a surge like a long slow bright wave breaking on the North Shore. That would be traveling. We might get somewhere, if we began like that.

Or like the morning in Delphi, when I rose before the sun and, finding the gate inexplicably open, sat in the broken temple of Athena and watched the dawn. The goat bells clinked below, and the sun was very large and very red. That would be a beginning worth making, too: a different kind of journey, but also a journey to a new place.

I don't remember who the teacher was who said, never hurry and never wait. Or maybe it wasn't a teacher: maybe it was me, making a note to myself. Maybe it's just that it's like the advice of a teacher, in that a) it makes deep, viscerally-felt sense, and b) it is clearly impossible to follow. Not advice as we understand it -- "this is the correct thing to do! -- but a pointing-out: "if you were enlightened, this is one of the things that would flow from it." To wit, you would never hurry and you would never wait.

Which is not to say I would never move rapidly and never hold still. But hurrying is what I do when I don't have enough time, and waiting is what I do when I have too much, and it's obvious that I can't really have too little or too much time: I don't have time at all. It's a drastic confusion of categories to even begin to think that way. If there's any ownership involved, it's time that has me.

And what use is that? Well, not much, except that when I find myself hurrying or waiting, I can look for the self-deception behind it, the way in which I'm trying to bend reality to fit what I expected of it. If I track honestly, it's astonishing just how often, on some thread or other of my life, I'm hurrying or waiting. Almost always, really.

Short of Courage

The problem has always been that I'm just plain short of courage, the sort of courage that you need to pick up the phone and make a call, the kind of courage it takes to admit that you don't know enough even to know what question to ask, the kind of courage it takes to do something new instead of doing what you've always done.

I asked Neva how she'd learned so much about insurance billing, and she said, “trial and error,” without missing a beat. I tried to imagine having the courage to make all those mistakes, right where people could see you do it. I know that the people who have that kind of courage don't think of it as something particularly admirable or special. Well, it is. It is admirable and special.

Once, years ago, I showed an aquaintance a love poem I'd written her, making clear, I hope, that it was not any kind of request or invitation. She said, “you're really brave.” I laughed and said, “no, I just don't have any sense.” But it wasn't that. I just knew: who really minds having a love poem written to them, if it doesn't entail awkwardness or pressure? Pretty much everyone wants to be adored.

I do things from time to time that look brave from the outside. I've never minded looking funny, for one thing. Never in my life having been in the running for the Cool Stakes, I never acquired the habit of minding looking dorky and nerdish. I don't mind fishing out my reading glasses; I carry around a backpack full of books and happily spread my dictionaries and flash cards out on restaurant table. I know I look silly in all my bike gear. So what? You could piddle your whole life away trying not to look silly. It's not worth troubling about.

And I can speak forcefully and cogently in a few kinds of public situations. Classrooms, seminars, professional meetings. I speak my mind. I'm seldom – unfortunately – really in doubt as to the value of my own opinions.

This might lead you to expect that I could phone an insurance company and ask them a few questions about their billing process. Well, I can, sometimes: after counting my breath for a few moments to keep my heart from racing, I can dial really quickly, so that I'm in the conversation before I can back out, and it's less awkward to ask questions than not to. Modern phones are wonderful for me, because you can enter the numbers ahead of time. Then when you think you might be brave enough to make a call, you can quick quick quick don't think don't plan don't rehearse push the single button, push it now! And you're over the hurdle and in the conversation, and you've done it, you've really done it, you've made a phone call.

Though of course if they say something I don't understand, I can't just ask them to explain it. I have to end the conversation and go look it up on the web. Or ask Neva. Or try to deduce what the answer must be. (Call them back? You're kidding, right?)

I'm getting so much better at using the phone. There are even rare occasions now when I can make a phone call just like a normal person – think, “I'd like to know that, I'll call and ask” -- and just make the call, just like that. With practice, I get better. And I've learned not to rehearse; for me rehearsing makes it harder, not easier. I already have too many moving objects to track when I make a phone call, without adding a script into the mix.

But anyway, that's not what I really wanted to say, none of it. The failures of courage are far deeper than that. To eat as I think I ought to, to love as I think I ought to, to live as I think I ought to; or else -- even scarier! – to change my mind about how I ought to do those things: that's what I don't have the courage to do. The cowardice, the cowardice runs so deep. It's in the marrow bone, a deep reddish-brown stain all the way through me. I will never be free of it, never.

But turn again. Remember, Dale, you thought you would never be brave enough to work as you ought to. And you did it. You did it. And you did it young: you're only fifty-one. Precocious little bastard. Who knows what you might not pull off when you're all grown up?

It's Only a Bloody Song

one day... John was grumbling about the expense of his burgeoning empire to Neil Aspinall. "Imagine no possessions, John," Neil reminded him. "It's only a bloody song," he retorted.

-- John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman

My eyes sore from lack of sleep, my stomach in consternation at the half pound of peanut M&Ms, my mouth raw from chips and salsa. Spent the afternoon yesterday in bed reading the 5th Harry Potter book, while a rare Spring day graced February, barely glimpsed through the skylight. Hard to believe in snowstorms in Virginia. Hard to believe in anything, for that matter. Last night stars blazed above the trees, and I didn't believe a word of them.

Never so lonesome, never so stranded-feeling. Thank God for JK Rowling and simple stories.

A lovely massage last night though. Today perhaps will be better. It can't easily be worse.

Technical Difficulties

Dawn again. Forgot my reading glasses when I rode down here to Tosi's, so I've cranked up the font to 18. I can kind of read what I'm typing, if I lean back. Good for my posture: keeps me from hunching forward.

Working on my little netbook, which means I have to pause whenever I come to an apostrophe, because it's down on the space key row, and I haven't been able to train my fingers to find it there: I have to stop and look and take my hand out of position to type it. I also haven't quite identified what I do that occasionally jumps the cursor way down or way up, Being used to the Thinkpad nubbin-mice, I find this touch pad stuff both unwieldy and skittish: I feel like a small child trying to control a crayon. Damn cursor wanders all over the place, as I try to get it back. In some Heinlein novel the protagonist protests that he can't draw, and his father says, “Nonsense. The pencil goes where you push it.” Both voices are in my head as I try to master writing on this little thing.

Because the advantages are enormous. It's dirt cheap ($225 total), about the size and weight of a hardback book, and its batteries last for hours. And it's Linux, which means I've escaped from the Dark Side and dwell now in the blessed realms of open source. You can hear Lennon crooning, “imagine no possessions...” as you type away on your freeware word processing and spreadsheet apps. (Actually, most of these apps have perfectly good Windows versions – I was partial to Abiword and Gnumeric, on Windows. Now I'm using Open Office, just because it came preloaded on this machine, and it works fine too. But so much open source code was developed on Linux and/or UNIX, and everything tends to run better on its native operating system.)

((Further parenthetical: I'll never forget my boss's look of horror when I proposed that we might save some money by abandoning MS Office and going to freeware. Microsoft has done an amazingly good job of convincing people that its behemoth apps are the only respectable tools for office work. They're fine tools, but they're enormous and expensive and the free ones work just as well, have generally better support, and can usually produce perfectly compatible .doc and .xls files, if you need them. But Microsoft software is what IBM hardware used to be: so dominant and standard that it's no-risk for a purchaser. No matter how badly it may work, no one ever gets fired for having purchased MS Office.))

Technical problems at home. Qwest upgraded our DSL for free – cool! -- except that now our elderly router is nonplussed, and drops connections periodically, which can mean rebooting it every couple minutes, especially if Alan and I are both online at the same time. Maddening. So I've been tending more and more to go to Tom's – Tom is Tosi's brother, & runs another cafe of roughly the same ilk – which has free wireless. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that none of my online interactions have the ease and readiness they did a couple months ago. I'm emailing, blogging, and blog-reading less. And I've been so busy with work that I haven't had time to address any of these things.

Soon, though, I'll be back to sauntering about the cyberhood, dawdling and chatting.

Odes to Tools


I received a chapbook in the mail yesterday: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools. Beautifully done. I thought I'd glance through, find a couple of my favorites, quote a few good lines. What's easier than writing a review of a good little book? It practically writes itself.

Well, first I'd find my favorites. I remembered some of them, and went right to them. “Ode to a Compass”:

...what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?

* * *

The compass is a crutch.
Restore its missing leg
so it can return to
its first life as
a gnomon:
stationary,
circled by the sun.

Yep. Still there. Better than I remembered: “a seed for a stone,” was that line in it when I read it on Via Negativa? So I'd just leaf through now to the “Ode to a Shovel,” quote a few more lines, and I'd be...

Wait a minute. “Ode to a Coping Saw”? I don't remember that. I laugh aloud at the end of it:

somehow
it copes.

And then, the “Ode to a Hive Tool”:

You need a key for entering where there is no door.
You are too much full of your mammal self
to fit through the always-open entryway
& in any case would have no idea
how to execute a waggle dance,
which looks like sun-drugged madness to you,
looming over the brood box with your angry halo.

Another one I'd missed, somehow. Oh, but here's the Scissors! “We are rich. We have three pairs of scissors.”

I got lost, on my way to the Shovel, discovering, rediscovering. How can you get lost, in a thirty page book? But I did. All these poems have edges, teeth. It's a brilliant collection.

I realized along the way that there's nothing more difficult than writing a review of a good little book: a review that did it justice would be longer than the book, a patent absurdity.

We are rich. I'm so happy to have this little book. Why on earth would you read a review of it? Just get it.

Clear Water

Dreamed of clear water running over green grass again: a dream of the purity of cold streams, running impossibly on clifftops, soaking my shoes; the drowned grass glowing like fire in the pulse of the sunlight. I've been here before: this is Jenny's poem for the Spring, but can I write it?

Tosi's. Headlights on Sandy Boulevard and on 62nd Avenue. The amber lights of the bus flashing as people climb on board. The red and green of the traffic lights. Behind all that, the morning slowly gathering, a power of light to make all these laughable. But not yet. Ahriman still keeps his trembling grip, for a few more moments. He makes the lottery machines in the corner flash and buzz and yammer, hoping for another sacrifice or two before he drops, helpless and resentful, for another day of prowling in basement apartments, lurking in cheap computers and writhing in dvd players, spitting bits of green and red and amber from warning lights and control panels. The daytime is always hard for him: but the daytime conquests are the most complete, his proudest trophies. I used to walk by the taverns in Spokane, doing a brisk business at 7:00 a.m., their doors open to let some of the stale, stale air stumble out onto the sidewalk, and think: now there's victory. Who says the Devil has nothing to show for all his work?

Even as I write the light grows more and more, the blue-gray light of dawn rising from the wet streets, reflecting back and forth from the wet clouds above, gleaming blue even from the dark wood windowsills. Streetlights discretely vanish. Across the street the headlights of a pickup at Ken's automotive wink out. Ahriman glares, panics, and disappears. Daylight. The light has gone silver. Everything white glows: light is resonating everywhere, spilling from everything with a soft prodigality far beyond Ahriman's imagination. Bedridden people lift their hands to twitch aside the curtains and let the light fall on their faces. Children stir in their beds. Dogs wake suddenly. A single crow flies across the sky.

No nearer to a solution than ever. When you don't know what to do, stop doing. Watch and listen instead. Easier said than done, but I'll try.

A Monthless Period

Cold this morning. I stepped out onto the porch to see if the paper's come yet. My bare feet ached. Nothing. Back again to the house. Feeling defeated, in a new way. Surely this is what I wanted? But life blocks the light, like a leaf against the sun, and shadows run every which way like minnows. I'm becoming stupider and less forceful with every year.

"Do you ever feel like your body isn't your own?" you asked, and seemed relieved when I said yes. My question was more urgent -- "do you ever feel like it is your own?" -- but I left it unasked.

Waiting for the sunwash, waiting for the summer and the slow pulse of warmth. I have become cold and frail and ghostlike. I long for an end to winter, but it's only the beginning of February.

January and February were the last two months to be added to the Roman calendar, since the Romans originally considered winter a monthless period, says Wikipedia. Not such fools as they looked, those Romans. Best not even to count.

Comments

Comments, the lifeblood of Mole, have changed. For many years I have used Haloscan as my comment server. (Yes, I started on Blogger before it provided comments, and yes, I do have a long white beard.) Haloscan has, on the whole, been good to me. But unfortunately, it has predeceased me. For no effort, and twelve bucks a year, I can continue with the folks who bought it, who call themselves Echo.

Now I have to admit that the transition has been handled pretty maturely. There was no hostage taking. They let me export my Haloscan comments to a reasonable xml format and warned me that no one actually has an import tool yet. And the first month on Echo is free, so if I really hate it at least I'm not out of pocket. But I confess to considerable foreboding.

So your job, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to leave lots of comments and stress the system and tell me what you think of it.

Picking My Nose in the Absolute Flesh

As a teenager I dutifully read Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, with intense attention, and tried to absorb the great lessons therein; I naturally attributed not finding any such lessons to my own incapacity. It's not Salinger's fault that he was made an inevitable part of the high school English syllabus, like that other wildly overvalued writer of the same period, Hemingway. But I still resent the fact that I piddled away that intensity of attention, for years, on mediocre recent American novels, when the whole wealth of English literature was to hand. I was in college before anyone ever assigned me a book genuinely worth reading. I was sixteen, and going to Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon: and I took a survey of world literature. Almost every one of those books exploded under my feet and sent me flying. Lao Tzu. The Bhagavad-Gita. Homer. Hamlet. Blake. Twain. Books that were revelations, that took me to new countries. Books that celebrated courage and loyalty, compassion and generosity.

It was decades before I had the self-confidence to take those elegant Salinger paperbacks off to the used bookstore and sell them back, to decide that the reason I got nothing from them but petulance and itching egotism was probably that they contained nothing but petulance and itching egotism. They were such beautiful books: so very upper class and restrained and austere. They looked like literature. The cover of Franny and Zooey was off-white, almost completely blank, with a double horizontal green line under the high-placed title. Oh, I wanted to be someone who read books that looked like that! It was surely my fault that, after repeated readings, I could not tell you what happened in any of those stories, or recall a single character from them. One scene only remained with me, as it does to this day: Holden Caulfield watching his principal in disgust as the man surreptitiously picks his nose. It distressed me at the time because I surreptitiously picked my nose, in exactly that way: and I understood that Salinger's contempt was as much for me as for anyone. I wasn't really the kind of person who read those elegant off-white books. I was a gross, fleshy sensualist, full of ideals that he couldn't live up to, just like that disgusting principal.

And I remain that. I hope without the bland self-righteousness and insensitivity: but I am going to pick my nose until I die, Mr Salinger, and ask no forgiveness, from you or anyone else. I am going to waddle through this world in the absolute flesh, falling in love and gaping in admiration, no matter how silly I look. I hope that won't prevent you from resting in peace, Mr Salinger: but if it does, I can't help that.

Splay; Embrasure

I finally got to meet Alexandra of Geology of Being. Wonderful! There is always something that takes you by surprise when you meet someone that you've long admired online in the flesh: in this case it was electric blue eyes. I guess I had expected a watercolorist to be all pale pastels & low saturation. Nope.

---

Back to reading Harry Potter in Spanish, learning or relearning wonderful words such as “lechuza” (owl) and “alféizar” (window-seat). Except “alféizar” was defined in my pocket dictionary – glossary, really – fascinatingly as “splay; embrasure.” “Splay” as a noun captivated me. I'm not sure I'd ever seen it used as one. I used it at once, in my last post -- wrongly, as it turns out: it's supposed to mean something like “bevel,” but I took it to mean something like “a thing that is spread out” -- and I'm sure there are poems accreting around it in my subconscious, even as we speak. Wiktionary assures me that “alféizar” derives from an Arabic word meaning “tenure.” That goes “plop” and vanishes into my subconscious as well. As often, I have the feeling that poetry simply grows of itself out of language: that poets are not so much like artists as like petri dishes. For me, other languages have always been a method, maybe my main method, of learning to see English fresh. Foreign words land in the dish, and all kinds of exotic things grow, over time, in the agar of English.

Someone Else's Sending

The leaves and branches hang quite still. A quiet morning. Grateful for a pause.

I've been slammed for weeks, not only at the Foundation -- the usual rush of charitable giving at the end of the year -- but also with massage: I've been booked solid, for weeks. Everyone's New Year's resolution seems to have been: get more massage. Also I've been taking a couple insurance clients, and people schedule a lot more frequently when they don't have to pay out of pocket. It's only a couple new clients, but they've both been twice-a-week people. The equivalent, in other words, of sixteen new once-a-month people.

I love that more of my sessions are with regular clients. The rapport deepens, and I become more confident that I know what works with this body; I try new things, let go of old things. If I was going to get tired of massage, I think I'd know by now. It's always new, because people's bodies and spirits are always new. I'm continually astonished both by their fragility and by their resilience.

There's the anchor of touch, of connection, but there's also intellectual challenges, the deductive part of tracking pain down to its (sometimes improbable) sources. There's hanging out with all manner of people at home, en deshabille -- in their bathrobes with their hair down. There's people bursting into tears and trying to figure out what their lives are for. There's people who drift out into wide waters of stillness, and take me with them. And always there's that moment, the unmooring: laying on hands, and becoming aware of my breathing and of theirs. You just never know where they're going to take you.

Things that have always been wrong with me are suddenly virtues. That I simply go where other people are emotionally. That I need to be in physical contact with people in order stay oriented. That my own agenda tends to dissolve when it meets someone else's. That I'm willing to follow narratives and metaphors that other people find incoherent or contradictory.

I have no intention of calling myself a shaman -- I'm always skeptical of people who borrow the glittery parts of other people's religious traditions without taking on the disciplines and sacrifices of them -- but I think I'm the sort of person who becomes a shaman, in cultures that support that. Someone who sees around corners and crosses boundaries, who's willing to be a bird in the air and a fish in the sea and a ghost in the past. I put on the dress that makes sense for the road I need to take. I don't mind that things are strange and disgusting sometimes; I don't mind that I find myself sometimes a snake, sometimes a girl, sometimes a swirl of dirty water. I'm always half a spy, half an envoy. I'm someone else's sending.

---

At this point I pause, and look over what I've written suspicously. I dislike the genre of self-congratulation-disguised-as-confession: and somehow it's those people who most loudly declare their marriages perfect that you're least surprised to see turn up in divorce court. What am I not saying?

Well, one, that it's not always easy to be traveling on other people's behalf: sometimes I wonder if I shoudn't be traveling on my own behalf instead.

And two, that I'm not always sure it's in perfectly good faith. Oh, I observe boundaries scrupulously. But a touch can be lover-like without being technically improper. You can call all this border-crossing and wearing of elaborately carved personas a high spiritual quest: but you could also call it a masked ball for incorrigible flirts. There's a reason, beyond prudery, that people look askance at massage.

But that's all I find, in the minor key: and it's not as though those reservations were unique to my massage relationships. In fact the massage relationships are generally more straightforward. I bring more awareness to them. It's more clear that care is needed.

I'm going to have learn to deal with a full schedule. A new, welcome, set of problems.

---

I push my fingers into damp moss and the water pools between my fingers. A faint smell of toast; the shrill peep of an unseen bird. Slippery clay. A white and formless day up above the canopy of firs: there are no shadows, only shifts of light. Every flaw in the bark draws an arresting coastline. Map after map of unexplored countries, unreachable worlds. I miss you. Somewhere up above a thrush gives a long, echoing, humorless laugh.

Over across the unfolded continent, you stand at the window, looking out at the white, shining Berkshires. The baby on your chest is momentarily quieted by your slow shift from foot to foot. You are composing prayers to your rash, inexplicable God, our absent mother. I can't follow: I only hear your resonant voice, a little hoarser and fuller with motherhood, slightly thickened with the milk coming, the deeper splay of the ribs, the wider stance. Once you have given hostages to the World, your relationship with it will never be the same. It's a helpless codependent relationship with a moody, violent husband, now; and God may sympathize but She won't intervene. You'll have to work it out yourselves, She'll say.

Hiya

Well, I just spent another morning writing an essay I won't post. But I wanted to say hi to y'all. I miss you. Sometimes all I seem to have in me is political rants, which I don't care to post because 1) they're just ignorant ranting, and 2) their effect, if any, would be the opposite of what I want, since I tend to get most irritated with liberal political attitudes -- in the same way I guess that it's your close family who always really tick you off -- and to attack liberalism in America, these days, is to attack all humane policy. So forget it.

I don't want to write about Haiti, for similar reasons, and for all the reasons I didn't want to write about the Tsunami or about Katrina. & I can't really write about massage without worrying about confidentiality.

But of course, those are all just surface fumes. What's really rotting at the bottom of the pond? That's the question.

I've been very busy, both at the Foundation and with massage. But yesterday there were white clouds in a blue sky, and my table was warm in the greenhouse of the Honda. In a couple months it will be Spring again. The time for the second renewal of my massage license has come. How can all these things be true at once? And how about all the things that are true, but that one must not say? I close my eyes, and bars of orange and umber shift in a roiling, starry field.

Yesterday Mt Hood must have been in the shadow of a cloud, for while it was a bright day, and the mountain covered in snow, it was strangely dark, a gray shape on the horizon. I'd never seen it look like that, and it made me uneasy.

love,
Dale

Orient

This is the country where broken things heal. Here
a bottle smashed on the sand gathers itself
together, fuses, melds: leaving smooth scars
where the light snags, ridges of brightness,
but whole again and stronger than it was.

Here in the dark the stars pulse,
and at dawn the spent moon
pulls lavender blankets over blue sheets,
and lays her head on my shoulder, while
the race of both our hearts fades into sleep.

Sails

Why is it the people who are most obviously out of control who most shrilly assert that they have free will? John Adams's metaphor (not original with him, I'd guess; his was a keen but not an original mind) is the one I like best: the passions are the wind, and reason sets the sails. A skillful sailor can usually get where he wants to go, but seldom directly, and not on a strict schedule. In a severe emotional gale sometimes all you can do is heave to, drop a sea anchor, and wait it out.

No wonder Americans won't put his head on a nickel. They prefer that prodigal slaveholder, the politically hysterical Jefferson. "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots." Screw that. I'll take Adams, every time. Build your weakness into the system. Make your weaknesses part of your strength. And

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

---

Ten things I've learned in six months of commuting by bicycle:

1) Most drivers are extraordinarily kind and accommodating if they see you.

2) They see you about half the time.

3) They have no idea that the raised left hand signal means a right turn. You need to signal by pointing left with your left hand or right with your right hand. Extending your whole arm, extravagantly.

4) Riding close in to a line of parked cars, where you'll plow straight into a door if someone suddenly opens it, is an excellent way to court death. You need to ride a few feet out. It feels more dangerous but it's actually much safer. It's where drivers look for vehicles, where they expect them. And they're not so tempted to try to squeeze past you if there really isn't room.

5) In the mild maritime Northwest, at any rate, cold isn't so troublesome as rain, and rain isn't so troublesome as wind.

6) It's your hands and feet that you need to keep warm and dry. The rest doesn't really matter. You generate plenty of body heat for that.

7) Except that blue jeans, once truly wet, will stay wet for a whole workday. You need to keep them dry, not for the ride, but for the sequel.

8) You must always assume they don't see you. Drivers, pedestrians, other bicyclists. (Bicyclists are no better than anyone else at being aware of bikes.)

9) It's just as fun as when you were a kid. You go zoom! and whoosh! You're a sky creature, not a miserable earth-crawler. And you get to the end of your commute feeling invigorated and intensely alive.

10) There's always a parking space. Always.

It takes me 20 or 25 minutes to drive to work; 30 to 35 minutes to bike. If I drove to work and went to the gym to get my daily cardio, the total drive-and-exercise time would exceed my total bike time by at least fifteen minutes. Maybe even half an hour. I'm saving time by riding my bike. Not to mention the $10 parking every day. (Yes, parking in downtown Portland is exorbitant.) $10 every working day, by the way, comes out to some $2,500 per year. In other words, enough to offset my whole breakfast-out addiction.

Fire on the Beach

Your hands are my hands: our fingers
twine at the least excuse. We need
so little now. All year I have been
casting things aside.

Burdens falling away
like the bark of plane trees, like
paint peeling from a fence:
you can pack light at the last.

Strip off the shirt, hair and all.
Point your toes and haul
your trouser legs off, one by one.
wrench the socks off of your feet.

No more shoes, no more coats,
No more fussing with laces or buttons,
With snaps, buckles, clasps. No more
Elastic. Nothing tied.

---

Bottle blue, shadowed insides of toes,
the dart of hummingbird tongues.
You turn your head and your hair swings
forward, and then back.

---

Again to the river, to the scree
of gulls, who can swallow anything;
to the scrabble of rats, the scuttle of beetles;
the pull and sieve of water through the nets

of river grass, the fragile eels, the sour
smell of mud, the sough of air
breathing down your neck. The sundrip
through the coffee filter sky.

---

Books you bought new, in the days of wanting,
break at the spine when you open them;
the pages are brown at the edges, the glue
falls brittle in clots and flakes.

Pages float loose. Crumple them. Do
what you would never do before:
shake them free in a heap on the beach,
strike a match, and watch them rise in love.

Teenager: Spokane, 1973

Crosby, Stills & Nash is what my mind returns to. I played that album, the one they did before Neil Young joined the band, incessantly. And I waited.

It had everything, all the pieces. The political defiance and despair. The sensual love songs that were about seizing the day, about being willing to lose, rather than about keeping and possessing. The cryptic acid-inspired imagist songs. But it was musically quite simple and tuneful, with lovely harmonies.

"Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming to us all," they sang. I didn't believe it, but I had to believe it. What else did I have to believe?

I waited for love, for the peaceful revolution, for everything to happen all at once, for a new life to present itself to me. Everyone knew it was glimmering just beyond the horizon. Nobody had a plan, though. No one had a task. No one knew how to work towards it. Our only directions, or the only ones we trusted, were that we should learn to see. "You better free your mind instead." It's funny: after all these years, I still believe it. That the fundamental task is to learn to see.

We tried. God, gurus were a dime a dozen. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was my brother's. Guru Maharaj Ji had a place around the corner. I spent an evening with the Jesus People on the beach, around a driftwood fire, and a pretty girl assured me that we wouldn't be idle in Heaven. We'd take the battle to the enemy. And she gave me a hug, a hug I still remember, nearly forty years later. The next day I cautiously invited Jesus into my heart. He, presumably aware that what I really wanted was more hugs from more pretty girls, declined to come.

I read Hugh Prather, Carlos Casteneda, Hermann Hesse. For a while my bible was a book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, which recommended uncompromising honesty and militant selfishness. A sort of dumbed-down Ayn Rand.

I knew enough about myself not to meddle with drugs. Everyone else was experimenting with mescaline and hash and acid and speed. I didn't trust myself: I had a shrewd idea that if I started I would never stop. And anyway, I found I could alter my consciousness quite as drastically, and much more cheaply, by simply going without sleep for thirty-plus hours. Waking dreams and hallucinations are not that hard to find. Nor are violent mood swings. Go that long without sleep and hang out with people doing acid, and your mind will indeed go traveling.

Traveling, yes. But not -- not to someplace new. Not to someplace where I was unselfconscious. Wherever I went, I was still shy, still awkward. I still had glut of love on my shelves for which I couldn't find a market. And my body dogged me wherever I went: pudgy, soft, and pale. I knew as well as you do that only slender, tan, catlike people find enlightenment, or love. I was more piglike. I had never lost my puppy fat. I burned and freckled under the sun, but never tanned.

I composed manifestos and declarations. Kept a diary, a precursor of this blog, which I invited people to read. The handwriting changed daily, from small precise printing to a ferocious forward-slanting scrawl. (I had never really learned cursive writing, despite the best efforts of my elementary school teachers. I pretended I didn't care about such a trivial matter, but the truth was that I found it impossible to concentrate on writing one letter while thinking about the next one, which is what you must do to write a neat cursive hand -- you have to know what the next letter is so you'll be able to join this one to it properly. I had always found this, and still do, hellishly difficult. As soon as I started thinking about the next letter, my hand started losing its place in the present letter. I hated the childish writing I produced when I tried this. Soon I simply and flatly refused to write cursive and took to printing, which is how I've written ever since. This trick of disguising my disabilities as the eccentricities of a genius who simply can't be bothered was, and remains, one of my main strategies for getting through life.

But I digress. Where was I? Manifestos. Yes.) One of the peculiarities of the time was the conviction that nobody could be meaningfully happy until everyone was happy. So all my projects for becoming happier were projects for making the world happy. Property had to abolished, authority abrogated, sex roles abandoned, oppression eradicated, before I could begin to become happier. I wouldn't even be able to start until these preliminary steps were accomplished. It was a generous impulse, in its bizarre way, if a useless one. The ambitions were so huge they smothered under their own weight. My solution to being pudgy was to write diatribes about the evils of private property. My solution to injustice was to try to get girls to go to bed with me. It all made sense at the time.

I was pudgy, but I was not out of shape, actually. I strode briskly for hours around Spokane, racking up ten or twelve miles per day at times, muttering to myself, arguing with myself, laying out frameworks for vast works of philosophy, composing worlds in which epic fantasies would play out. Then, as now, I would suddenly stop stock still and gaze at a crook of waterpipe, or a weed, or a cloud, in astonishment that anything could be so beautiful, so much itself. My senses were as raw and tender as I was. I wanted, desperately, to be loved. To be loved like that, like I loved the waterpipe. Such a thing was clearly both impossible, and urgently necessary.

"Carry on," they sang. I walked on, full of hope or of despair. Maybe I could make the impossible happen, just by wanting it enough. Maybe. Maybe I could.

Thank You

Walking strange winding paths. Happy? Yes, insofar as that word applies.

It's not a trustworthy word, though. It originally meant "lucky," and it implies the ideology of the lottery. What the world gives, it can, and sooner or later will, take away. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't delight in the gifts of the day. It just means you shouldn't mistake a tent for a house.

So. A new year. I'm a little suspicious of stock-taking: it always seems to me to say a lot more about one's mood at the moment than about the period supposedly under review. Still I pause and look back.

It has been a year of extraordinary, intense love. A year in which everything has been broken loose and jumbled together. It's been a year of Chinese (which I now formally announce I intend to give up). It's been a year of experimenting with diet (I have learned a lot and settled nothing). It's been a year of seriously replacing the car and bus with the bicycle, as my main method of personal transportation (to my great delight and to the serious improvement of my health. Swoosh!). Of replacing Powell's with the Library. Of Coleridge and of the 18th Century, of a little dabbling in listening to classical music. It's been a year of modest growth in my massage practice, which (given the miserable Oregon economy), pleases me.

I have traveled not at all. No further than Breitenbush. I have rather let friendships languish. Likewise, I have not paid much mind to writing, this year. It happens or it doesn't. A few good poems early in the year, but since then mostly fallow. Doesn't trouble me. There are still fish in the sea bigger than any that have come out of it.

I am happy. Working at the Library Foundation fills me with joy: I have never had a job in which I love, admire, and trust everyone I work with. I don't know that I've ever even heard of such a thing.

Bless you, dear friends, bobbing with me in this little coracle of the present on the huge sea of time. I won't say goodbye yet, but I will say thank you. Thank you. Thank you.