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!
Friday, February 26, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, February 22, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
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?
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.
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.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, February 05, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, January 29, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
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
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
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