Eruptions from the Past

My sister would have been fifty-five years old, today. It's as difficult to imagine her being fifty-five as it is to imagine John Lennon being seventy. The good die young, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust / Burn to the socket. (If anyone should know, it's you, Mr Wordsworth!)

I grope hesitantly towards a new life. Or more precisely, maybe, I grope towards an old life that I never really lived.

Strange eruptions from the past. People prate about the evils of Facebook, its transcience and inanity – as if all this doodling were not transient and inane – but its real powers are just beginning to reveal themselves, and – to confound all of our knavish tricks – they turn out to be historical powers. The dead past isn't dead, Faulkner insisted; it isn't even past. And nothing proves it like old friends from high school or college surfacing, and tagging you with pictures.

My friends Norman and Marcel, from my hippie free school, had started up a design studio in Seattle. I visited them, and here is a polaroid picture of me examining a polaroid picture there. (Ask your grandparents what a polaroid picture is.)

Notice the luxuriant hair and scanty beard: now the hair is scanty and the beard is – well, at least respectable. That was my favorite shirt. A strange pale green, a color without a common name. A knit turtleneck. I always shoved the sleeves up over my elbow. I imagined, at the time, that it gave me a raffish yet practical look. You roll up your sleeves to drop your pretensions and get to work, right? But to me, this photo is all about pretension. I was in awe of Norman and Marcel. I knew that they understood the world of visual art in a way that I never would. They had passionate responses to design that I never understood, or rather, understood just enough to know that my eye settled for the hackneyed and conventional, while they were stirred to go beyond that to things more complex and more important. No doubt I had been looking at graphic designs all day and pretending to be able appreciate what I was seeing. I was out of my depth, bewildered by the big city and my sophisticated friends: I was just a yokel from Springfield, after all. I longed for the glamour of Seattle, but I knew I wasn't really up to it. I couldn't hold my liquor, I got confused by dark bars with pointy lights that lit nothing up, and I got maybe a third of their jokes, though of course I laughed at all of them. I pretended to be a writer, because that's almost cool like an artist, so long as nobody reads the grandiloquent, hectoring opening chapters of your plotless and unfinishable fantasy novels, and of course there was small danger of that.

So little, so little has changed: I still long to be one of the cool kids, and I still never will be, and I still will cultivate anything but my own garden.

Maybe it's not too late, though. Maybe all this fuss is to some purpose. And I find sometimes, to my surprise, that some of the people from my past remember me with affection, rather than contempt. I walk through dim hallways of memory, searching for doors, searching for clues about how I should have lived my life, how I should live my life now. I think I have to treat that awkward young man more gently, soothe his touchy pride, and coax the real stories from him, the stories he was always too ashamed to tell.

The Timeless Trash of the Sea

Somewhere, the ocean
crashes back and forth
like so much broken glass,
but nothing breaks.
Against itself,
it is quite powerless.

(Chase Twichell, “Inland”)

Later in the same poem, Twichell says,

The timeless trash of the sea
means nothing to me.

She's lying, of course, and so am I; but you can understand the yen to escape altogether from the endless noise and fret, the grind and backwash of all those thoughts: so destructive to everything but themselves. The one thing you can't think your way out of is thinking. “Against itself, it is quite powerless.” Just so.

If I ever have the time, I'd like to try to bushwack my way all the way up the Breitenbush. On the map, it looks like it comes straight down from Mt Jefferson – that most beautiful and difficult of Oregon's mountains. Of course, as Clausewitz will tell you, the map is not the terrain.

Ravens. Oh, ravens. What a reproach to me you are! I've forgotten everything I ever knew that was worth knowing.

Well, well, start again. Easier this time.

Over at One Word, Zhoen wrote: Make the people around you feel loved. If they don't feel it, you're doing it wrong. Now that's a nut with meat inside it. Crack that, if you can.

I'm still subscribed to the KCC mailing lists. I still lurk, and watch the stuff go by: the requests for prayers for failing parents, for the dying children of friends, for aging cats; the building of the Goldendale retreat center, the planning for the new urban center; the news of our exiled lineage in India. The gears spin but the teeth don't catch. I say a few om manis for the kids and the cats. I don't know what I am, or what I'm doing. I'll never be comfortable with costumes and regalia, with pomp and ceremony. All those pieties. If you're going to observe pieties, surely they should be those of your own people? But of course, that's the problem, we have none, we're Americans. But you can't borrow other people's pieties. That's not how it works. The whole point of pieties is that they're not chosen -- they're given. And if you were given nothing, that's just your cross to (not) bear.

Enough! Or too much. Time to do something. Time to make someone feel loved.

Breitenbush, October

The moon just dwindled from the half,
revealing horns, and Draco coiled
on the ridgetop, glittering over the river.
I soak in the sulfuric water till the sweat
prickles in my hair, and I am pregnant
with heat. Then I slide out of the water,
rest my butt on the cold smooth stone. The wind
blows steam from my moonwhite flesh.

Last night, Cassiopeia was where the Dipper is now,
and the Dipper held Cassiopeia's place.
If you watch long enough
you can feel the slow turn of the stars
you can feel them twisting in you, the torque
of all that ancient fire.

The hemlocks and the cedars breathe on me.
The Pleiades drift from one crown to the next.
The Big Dipper's handle stops dragging. It's lifted,
and that means that the sun will be here soon.
An hour perhaps, no more.

The light never seems to come out of the East,
at the beginning of the dawn. It seems to come
from the broken line of the horizon, North and South,
as if a fault had opened in the firmament,
as if the light was oozing through the cracks.

The stars become uncertain. They backpedal.
Suddenly I'm cold, and I slip back in the water,
back into this pore in the skin of the Earth.
I am a germ, a germ of thought, a germ
of discontent, a skin infection
of this great mineral hide.

Only the moon is holding out against
the incoming tide of daylight—the stars are washed
away in the flooding sky—when the ravens begin
to grumble and rattle across the way. In ones
and twos they reconnoiter the colorless air.
Someone forgot to tell them they are not
gregarious birds: they've gathered in the cedars
to mutter together. Some immemorial wrong,
some age-old grudge, is on their minds.

But in the middle of it all, a greater bird
appears, and all go quiet. The largest heron
I have ever seen. His wings
spread from bank to bank
of the narrow river; he flies
straight up the stream, impossibly slow,
each wingbeat a pulse
of this dark country's heart.

Clean and Pretty

It becomes familiar, the taste of a household
being dismantled. All its shifts revealed:
the squalid corners no guest ever sees,
materials for home repairs, knitting projects,
collections, crafts botched and put away;

beads in little vials, paints dried in the tube,
curtains to be hemmed.
They all smell the same at last:
the mildewed paper and the rancid dust,
impotent solvents,
stiff glue, spilled oil, rotting silk.

Death will seize them and show them grinning
to your heirs. They are his trophies, not yours:
your children will flinch away from them.

Oh, throw away your life before you die.
Don't leave it to be groped by estate salers,
to be peeled and sorted by dealers in junk;
don't wait for it to be given
to dirty indifferent fingers to stroke.
Put on fresh underwear, just as your mother said:
go clean and pretty to your early death.

Out of the Light

She came out of the light, out of the wonder.
Wounded. Half blind. Enormously strong.
She came to me for shelter: I did what I could.

I fed her bowls of syrup,
I stroked the clutching muscles of her thighs;
I watched her wings

fill with new blood. Uncrumple.
The web of arteries, arterioles,
the threads of capillaries --

all engorged, until her wings
rose above me like sails.
She bore it, uncomplaining, trembling,

her eyes weeping milk. She nuzzled me
and mewed once, like a kitten
disappearing in a river;

now she's gone,
and the morning has gone with her.

The Two Most Important Crows

Two crows wag their way
side by side across the asphalt,
their thumbs in their waistcoat armholes.
They think they will build a new store here:
sell hamburger wrappers to starlings.
Big plans. For crows, you know,
crows are very important, and these
are the most important of all.

Beyond My Karmic Means

With cars parked on either side, Salmon becomes effectively a one-lane street. I was riding to the right, far closer to the line of cars than I usually do, out of a vague sense that to ride smack in the middle of the street and claim both lanes would be overbearing, when a car door flashed open, right in front of me.

I had time to brake, though not to swerve: I skidded into it, and was suddenly airborne. The next thing I remember is thinking, “time to do a somersault,” and I did. My helmet tapped the street lightly. Then I was standing up. Time, which had accelerated, was now molasses-slow. In slow motion I walked back to my bike, set it upright, and walked it to the sidewalk. I gravely examined it. Remarkably, it looked undamaged.

“Never mind the bike! Are you OK?” The driver, a young woman, had come out of her car. She was agitated.

“I'm fine,” I said. I could have told her that I was moving slowly precisely because I didn't know: I was waiting for all the reports to come in. But that was more complicated than I cared to try to put into words.

“I don't know what to do. I've never hurt a bicyclist before. Are you OK?”

A teachable moment, I thought. I could say something about looking out for bicycles before flinging open your door. But if the experience didn't teach her, I didn't reckon any words of mine would, and besides, she was young and distressed. “I'm fine, really.” I went on checking the bike; the wheels and the brakes and gearing were all in good order.

I rolled my shoulders, stood on one leg and then the other, swayed my hips. I ran my hands over my arms. Rolled my head in a cautious circle. Nothing. No scrapes, no abrasions. I hadn't landed on my hands, my knees, or my elbows. What on earth had I landed on? My upper arm was going to bruise up nicely, between the elbow and the swell of the triceps, but you don't fall on your upper arm.

“That was pretty spectacular,” said a passer-by, holding a baby in her arm. “Are you really all right?”

“I really am,” I said. The driver apologized again, and this time I grinned reassuringly at her. She looked doubtful. I fetched my pack from the street and put it back in the basket I have mounted behind the seat, got back on the bike, and rode on downtown to work.

And today, three days later, I'm still fine. The bruise on my arm is the only mark on me: the only place that hurts is an abdominal muscle – whether I snagged a handlebar with it, or pulled it at some point during my gymnastics, I can't say. It objects to me doing sit-ups, and I reckon it's likely to be forming trigger points soon – muscles usually do, a couple days after trauma: often that's all that “whiplash” consists of. The check-rein muscles of my neck, especially the SCM, are a little sore, of course. But overall my lack of injury is a little mysterious. Something must have taken the impact. I'm inclined to think I must have flipped over the door, landed on my feet, and gone into my somersault from there. Extraordinarily lucky.

But I have always had uncanny luck. It used to make me uneasy, to make me feel that I was living beyond my karmic means: but now I just accept it. Landing on my feet just seems to be what I do.

If This Box

if this box I lie down in
is not what you suppose

if it is a ship
they will push with grieving hands

if it is a fuel
they will light in the dark

I will burn and I will sail
and when the cage

breaks open the stuff inside
will flare briefly

brightly
on the water

The Gathering of the Day

The coffee tastes like woodsmoke,
the waitress is plump as a rumpled pillow,
and the radio mourns, mourns
as she reaches a braceleted hand towards my heart
and pours into my cup.

Spheres of white and black, and glitters of silver:
sparkly things that delighted once
in shops far away in a girlhood
unaccountably lost; and now
babies and strange, hostile,
struggling men. Oh, it is not
what any of us expected my dear, don't weep,

the coffee is sweet and bitter,
and the light is growing around us,
and the radio mourns, mourns
the gathering of the day.

Words and Starlings

I watch a flight of maybe two dozen birds – starlings, I think – rise from a treetop, and take a wide semicircular path to settle in another treetop. They're barely more than specks: I identify them as starlings by the jitteriness and pointiness of the individual dots. But what draws my eye is that, at this distance, the group of birds is obviously not a collection of individuals, but a creature in its own right. You can imagine, if you can't see, the invisible membranes that hold them together, their flexibility and tensile strength; a bird too far from the group is drawn back in, as if tethered by a transparent rubber band. The whole constellation flies with a graceful undulation, far more graceful, and transfixing, than any individual starling: individual starlings being actually rather uncouth and awkward birds. What to make of this creature of flickering points, riding on the sea of the air? How did it decide to move to another treetop, and why?

---

I have never been so deeply aware of how unlike most human beings I am, of how hard I have to work to keep up with the normal world and present acceptable personas to it. I spent much of my thirties and forties berating myself for not making more of my gifts, literary, mathematical, visual, analytical. Now, in my fifties, I am beginning to think, not only that all that judgement is a waste of energy, but that any proper accounting would also have to weigh how well I did, given my disabilities: my crippling shyness, my inability to integrate with the flock, how rapidly social interaction floods my circuits and renders me passive and stupid. I also often simply blank out if asked to switch tasks: I can concentrate on one problem for longer than most people can, but I make silly high-level mistakes. I'm perfectly capable of working intently for fourteen hours on a problem without ever noticing that it actually is irrelevant and doesn't need to be solved. And once shaken out of my problem-solving trance, I'm dopey, automaton-like: it takes a hour and a half of walking about and mental idling before I'm good for anything again. Gifted I may be, moderately, but I am also neurologically – what? Disabled is possibly too strong a word, but it's the aptest one I can find.

I would call this something on the Autism/Asperger's spectrum, but it doesn't fit in two ways. For one, I am intensely, even excessively verbal. I am a slow and awkward speaker, but I'm acutely sensitive to writing, to its shading and nuance, and I produce it with alarming ease. One of my gifts is linguistic. And the other is that I don't usually seem to have any deficit in empathy, any difficulty in reading social and emotional information, in understanding the language of facial expression and gesture. Still though there are strange gaps in my understanding, and my emotional memory is notoriously unreliable. My current emotional state floods back through my past: when I'm unhappy, I imagine that I've always been unhappy, and when I'm happy I imagine that I've always been happy. I recognize this intellectually as distortion, but I find it very difficult to counter, and I have to rely on other people for access to my own emotional past. And I make from time to time emotional mistakes which no one of ordinary intelligence ought to make.

I could blame this on my family history, on my gender, or on my culture (or perhaps on my awkward placement in that culture, half in and half out). Or upon my neurology, as my current immersion in Oliver Sacks' books disposes me. Or simply on my own peculiar weakness of character. But however I play the prologue, the action of the drama is the same.

---

We understood each other better before ever I opened my mouth. I quoted that to Martha, after a difficult conversation recently. (Maturin to Dillon, or Dillon to Maturin, after they finally break silence with each other, in I think the second volume of the shelf of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels.) “I can never say what I mean.”

“But you're so good with words,” she said.

“No. I'm not good with words. Words are good with me, that's it,” I answered.

Words lead me on, plausible, clever, entrancing: endless varied swirls of those 26 letters, those 47 phonemes. Word after word after word, each with its ancient history, crusted with past meanings or shiny with new use, forming brilliant mosaics of sound, of movements of the throat and tongue, of patterns for the eye. I follow where they lead, until they vanish, and leave me in a cold dark unknown street, where all the doors are locked against me. No. I am not good with words.

Achromat

When he lost his color sight he said the world
was made of metal: gray fruit, gray skin;
black tomatoes; a sky of filthy white.

What greater disaster for an artist?
He thought of swallowing a pile
Of dirty grayish pills; hanging himself

With a coil of rope like shining leaden guts.
But life went on, and art went on. He began
to paint in black and white, ferociously:

sunsets made of glare and stabbing jet,
shapes and gleams, insignias, rising forms
against the infinite gradations of the light.

He took to evenings walks, and nightclubs,
where his sight was better than yours or mine,
catching hints and traces that for us

are flooded by the blare of color, and at last,
when some thought they might have a cure, he said
he could not be bothered. He had work to do.

How to get a Bad Massage

I've moved this post over to my massage blog

Long Hard Roads

Apparently there are two ways to make me really angry: one is to suggest that I'm stupid, and the other is to suggest that I'm complacent. I'll swallow a lot – I'm not ordinarily a terribly contentious or insistent fellow – but those will get a rise out of me, every time. You can suggest that I'm selfish, lazy, incompetent, or inconstant, and I'll probably just mildly agree that often enough I am all those things. But suggest that I don't understand, or don't care, and you'll find you've got one ferocious, vindictive Favier on your hands.

Understanding and caring are virtues, of course, but they're not the only ones in the calendar. Why do I clutch them so tight? Why is my ego so heavily invested in them that all my charity and compassion vanish if someone so much as hints that I'm deficient in them?

That may be an idle question. Who knows? I grew up with a father determined to instill understanding, and a mother determined to instill caring . But I have doubts about the historical determinism of psychology, and the usefulness of the historical method of understanding yourself. And anyway, that's not really what I wanted to ask. What I wanted to ask is, what does that tell me? What should I know and watch for, because of it?

Well, that I should loosen my insistence on both of them. That I will be most tempted to do hurtful things in the name of understanding and caring. And that sometimes I should let it alone, let myself appear stupid and complacent.

---

Lama Michael once suggested, as an exercise, dressing up in clothes you would never wear, styling your hair in a way you would never style it, driving a car you would never drive. Anything to interrupt the constant filtering of experience, the constant process of making sure that people we consider our enemies stay alien and hostile, and people we consider our friends stay cosy and friendly. Of course we think the people we identify with are nicer people: we signal them with a thousand signs that we're on their side, that we'll welcome their thoughts and approve of them. Our clothes, our comportment, our cars, our bumper stickers, our dialect, our vocabulary, our makeup, our tattoos – it's all designed to signal to others: I'm one of your kind, expect me to be nice or I'm your enemy, expect me to be hostile. And everyone else obligingly does the same. How could someone costumed as a lefty tree-hugger not go through life thinking that lefty tree-huggers are nicer people? They're the people who smile back, who are supportive, who give you the benefit of the doubt. In just this way, someone who goes about advertising himself as a conservative Christian will find that conservative Christians are nicer people. But suppose you swap your clothes, your makeup, your tats, and your hairstyles? You'll find out soon enough that your own people are not nearly so nice as you supposed. They'll be stony-faced, suspicious, and critical; they'll always assume the worst about you. They're not really such nice people as you thought.

---

Last night, on request, I read the long first chapter of the The Lord of the Rings aloud to Martha, Ashley, and Tori. Forty pages about an elaborate birthday party. (Try to sell a novel that starts like that nowadays!) Outside was the hiss of the waves, the sough of the wind. I was as close to happy as I'm ever likely to be.

---

We look before and after, and pine for what is not
our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught
our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought

They're all long hard roads, even the easiest ones.

Horse and Horseman

Last night the sun
dropped into the ocean without a splash,
and the water went black, went underground,
the line of the sky a faint orange
where it met the intractable dark.

So tell me, when the moon rose,
and the shadows slowly
redrew themselves on the walls,
where were you walking? Your quick bright form
appears, and disappears. The dead outnumber the living.
They always have, and we knew that, but
only gradually have we learned to know it
by the emptiness of hands that once held clay,
by the missing step in a staircase:
we the living are only froth,
riding on waves of the dead.

---

You misunderstand. I do not feel betrayed.
No one has wronged me. But to make this crossing
I must chose horse and horseman carefully.

---

I don't know this whale, gliding
off the point of Devil's Punchbowl.
He's long and pale, no Gray, and
he keeps his flukes to himself.
In diving, he shows his endless back, that's all.
Not a show-off. The flukes remain submerged,
and he pushes with them mightily.
You can see the hill of water that they raise
as he makes for deep water.
Like that. A horse like that. That's what I need.

---

For horseman? I need a boy
with long yellow hair, and a sullen look.
He must be outrageously lucky:
you must take these things on the volley,
if they're to be taken at all.

---

Now rap rap rap! Like a woodpecker
Against a steel chimney. Horse and rider,
Boy and whale, sky and sea:
Now we'll see something worth seeing.

Facts

I have discovered in myself a new response to novels, when I glance at rows of them in the library. It's ridiculously naïve: but this is not real. This is all made up. I used not to mind that; I used to prefer it. Now there seems something dangerous about it. We are already prone enough to make it all up: why encourage each other? I am hungry these days for fact. I read mostly nonfiction. The more facts the better. How many people died of diphtheria in Cairo in 1908? That's the sort of thing I want now. Maybe it's because I am aware now of how hard facts are to come by. When I was a boy it seemed that facts were all over the place. My father was an inexhaustible fund of them. How far away was the moon? How much more likely were smokers to get cancer? What was the real, indisputable, Latin name for St John's Wort? My father knew all those things, and made sure that I did too. My world teemed with authoritative facts.

He meant no harm by this, of course, and in the long run I think it was good for me. I inherited, anyway, his respect for facts, and I learned early that much of “what everybody knows” is dead wrong. But it left me with the impression (which was easy to get anyway, growing up in the sixties) that the fact collection was all under control and proceding splendidly. My help would not be needed.

And what I could see, but it seemed that my father could not, was that all these facts were curiously helpless. My father steered by them, his own idiosyncratic course, but nobody else I knew did. Everyone else steered by stories. Even if they were obviously false stories: the stories in Genesis that my father found so ridiculous, or the New Testament miracles of walking on water, of loaves and fishes – my father, it sometimes seemed, was the only man in the world to whom it mattered that these stories were manifestly false. And I very gradually learned – for I was a voracious and indiscriminate reader – that most of the bedrock stories, the founding of America, the high nobility of the Civil War, and even my father's favorite stories of the religious persecution of science, were mostly false, or at least tendentious. My father, I decided, much as I admired him, had missed the point. What mattered was not whether stories were true: it was whether people wanted them to be true. Or rather needed them to be true. Many people did not at all want a fearsome avenging God: they knew they'd sinned, and that God was going to smite them. But somehow they needed him anyway. And so I wandered away into stories, as the things of real power, the things that really caught people by the throat and made them change their lives.

And I turned – partly I suppose out of sheer rebelliousness against the dominion of fact – to fantasy. It seemed more honest, somehow, to say right up front that you were talking about places that never were just because your heart yearned for them, or about imaginary phantoms just because you dreaded them. Others might mistake the Shire for the kindly England of Tolkien's childhood, but I knew better. Tolkien grew up like any American child, rootless and homeless, a fatherless, Catholic, South African colonial come home to precarious suburbs and a new school every year, a permanent alien and outsider. Tolkien could describe home with such overwhelming feeling, so convincingly, precisely because he had never had one and didn't know anything about what homes were really like. All he knew was what he longed for. I wasn't looking for the Shire to be real. I just wanted to know that someone else missed it, too.

Now that I'm sidling back into science, because I'm on the outskirts of medicine and I really need to know things – such as, does massage assist the metastasis of cancers? – I'm finding that facts are not so easy to come by after all. Good science no longer seems like the juggernaut driving all before it: it seems more like a delicate, fragile lighter-than-air craft, as threatened by its duller-witted partisans as by its enemies. I want to go back to school, or at least get some textbooks, and get a good scientific education. I didn't pay proper attention in the statistics class for my computer science degree: and the fact that I got an A makes me very uneasy about the general state of research. How many people actually know what they're doing out there? I haven't done a lab, nor written a science paper, since the the 8th grade. I read abstracts of papers and get only the vaguest sense of how important their results are: for my own field of massage research I've been relying heavily recently on Paul Ingraham, of SaveYourself.ca, but I have only his word for it that he knows how to evaluate these things. I ought to be able to evaluate them myself.

It used to be thought that massage was not appropriate for cancer patients, because it would push the lymph around, and that might spread the cancer. There was never any evidence that this happened: it was just a plausible hypothesis, and one that nobody wanted to test. (For good reason: “Hey, let's take a group of sixty cancer patients, do massage on thirty of them, and see if their cancer progresses more rapidly!” is a study that's hard to get enthusiastic about.) I read a book about it a couple years ago that emphatically denied massage could do this, and it seemed to be the standard modern book on massage and cancer, but I don't recollect what research it rested on, if any. Even back then my common-sense response to the idea that massage might help metastasis was that if you were relying on your lymph standing still to save your life you were a dead man anyway: but common sense isn't always a very good guide in medical matters.

But you see? An untested hypothesis became a standard medical protocol (“no massage for cancer patients!”) And the scientific basis for my present conviction that massage is fine for cancer per se (though radiation or chemo may contraindicate it) rests on information I no longer remember, derived from research which (if it exists) I couldn't reliably evaluate even if I did read it. And I'm one of the science-minded massage therapists. Oy.

The Terror in my Kitchen

Called in sick to work today. I do have a cold, but really I just needed to punch the reset button. There are times when my mind gets overstuffed with a sense of obligation, of duties impending, ten thousand things that I ought to do all contending for the upper spot, fighting to be the thing that I actually do, like a swarm of beetles climbing over each other. Enough already. No one is going to die if I don't go in to work today.

(I'm very glad, by the way, that I didn't become a doctor. What if I couldn't say that?)

It's interesting that this mental condition afflicts me, not at the times when I'm genuinely too busy, but at slack times. I guess that's when I start thinking about all the things I ought to do, as opposed to the one thing that I must get done if I can.

It's not really dependent on the external world, of course. It's more in response to the internal tides of my mind. Any old duties, real or imagined, can play the roles. It's an old play and they all know the words. If I wasn't so self-indulgent, if I had the right kind of will, if I had a spirit like a clean bright sword instead of like a forgotten egg-whisk, if I had a genuine spiritual practice, if I lived up to my potential, if I was lean instead of fat, quick instead of slow, true instead of false – a long monotonous mumble of self-reproach in multiple voices, telling me about chances missed and resources squandered. As if anything one could actually do, in the real world, could satisfy them all. No. Not if my blog won a Pulitzer and my massage research won the Nobel prize and W. S. Merwin admired my poetry. Not even if I weighed 155 pounds.

A brilliant day. Not yet hot, but it will be. By this afternoon it will be a scorcher. The light is shockingly beautiful, playing over the faces of passersby, making their summer shirts into flaming banners of blue or yellow or white. They go by, stage representations of themselves, their faces a little too big, too real to be true, their eyes squinting into the rising sun. What shall I do with this day?

It doesn't matter. I'll sit shamatha a little while, and clear up odds and ends, do some paperwork. The kitchen is already clean.

I'm ashamed of being proud of the kitchen, but I am. So I'll tell you about it. All my life I've lived with messy kitchens, taking what modern businesses would call a just-in-time approach to cleaning. When you're out of bowls, you wash some. When you need to wash vegetables, you clean the sink. When you have nowhere to put groceries, you clear a counter. What this means, of course, is that when you contemplate preparing food you are contemplating an enormous task, hours of work. Just to put the groceries down you'll need to clear a counter which means you'll need to clear the sink which means you'll need to deal with whatever dubious things have been in there since you don't want to know when, and you'll have to look up which of those containers can be recycled and which can't, and, you know, the food at Burgerville is actually local and fresh and surprisingly good and they never make you wash up. So it's gone on, year after year. Until about a year ago, when I started cleaning the kitchen every morning, first thing in the morning, cleaned it until it was completely clean. Every single morning.

It's sort of miraculous. The house feels utterly different to me. I swear I can feel my pulse slow down when I enter that kitchen, as my heart realizes, it's actually under control here, I don't have to worry. I didn't know I was worrying, but apparently I was.

It meant adopting what was, for me, extreme ruthlessness and cruelty and immorality. A couple days ago Martha brought in a tiny new potato that had grown in our compost, and washed it and put it on the counter. We'd grown a potato! Inadvertently, but we'd done it! Very cool.

Well. Yes, but it was now our solemn duty to cook it and eat it. And I knew, I knew the fate of that potato the moment I saw it glistening on the counter. It was going sit there, and sit there, and sit there, and grow old, and the flesh under its peel would turn green, and it would sprout, and eventually, after having served as evidence of our inadequacy and a trigger for depression for months, it would be thrown back into the compost whence it came.

But you see, it wasn't mine. It was Martha's.

I chucked it into the compost after two days. Yes, it was a perfectly good potato. But I've discovered a startling fact: when you clean the kitchen daily, everything in it belongs to you. When mysterious objects appear on the counter, I wash them or throw them out with reckless disregard of their origins. There's only three things I do with things that appear on my counters now. If I recognize them as things that belong in the kitchen, I wash them or I put them away. If I don't recognize them, I throw them out. I've instituted a reign of terror in my kitchen. And though there is some occasional murmuring, I think everyone is grateful for it.

Not an Accident

I think of Lucy (probably vaingloriously) as a poet more or less like me: someone with a gift for prose who dabbles in verse and sometimes gets lucky. But you don't get a poem like Accident Spot by luck. Go read this one.

and here and there still the pale scarlet
bloodsplash of a poppy.

To Mend a Broken Heart

Split the sternum and open the cage
of the ribs. Scoop out the heart and lay it
in a bed of ice, like some monstrous
meat salad, a dish for the athropophagi.
Now sew in the valve of a cow's heart;
season with a little paprika. Suture well.

Failure Guaranteed

I touch people. I try to give relief to their suffering, solace to their grief, comfort to their loneliness.

But I am not a healer, a doctor or a teacher. Suffering, grief, and loneliness are not pathological conditions. They are not diseases to be cured. They are not caused by bad hygiene or sin or ignorance.

I study, sure. I learn techniques. I have a spiritual practice that I try to follow. But I'm offering nothing from Mt Sinai. Nobody has handed me any tablets. I lay my hands on a client as one suffering, grieving, lonely human being lays hands on another.

Suffering or joyful. I draw radiance from them: I get whispers of love, intimations of plenitude, from their skin. I am profoundly grateful to my clients. Not as in “thank you for your patronage!” As in “thank you for taking me into your home, thank you for traveling these bewildering twisty roads with me, thank you for trusting me with the shrine of your body.”

It does seem to me sacred – holy. The body. I am more in sympathy with Judaism than with Buddhism, in this regard. This body is not disposable container: it's a temple. I have the same sense, at the end of a massage, that I have at the end of a Buddhist meditation practice, of having entered a special place with special rules, a place where humility is the only attitude that makes sense, a place where my quotidian agendas fall away and become meaningless.

Some of my clients see it this way; others don't. Last night I finished a massage and murmured “thank you.”

Her eyes popped open, and she said, “What? Oh. Thank you,” in a flat, ordinary voice. It was a bit startling. Had I gone that journey alone? I don't think so; but I don't think she knew I was with her.

Which is fine. I trust massage to work. It's like meditation in this way as well: failure is guaranteed. Part of massage is, and ought to be, a failure of connection, a missed stairstep. There's always a wistfulness, a heightened sense of distance, a sense of how far we are from real communion. If we were capable of perfect communion, there would be no need for massage, just as – as you always have to tell tyro meditators – if we were capable of perfect meditative stability, there would be no need for meditation. What we are working with, in meditation, is distraction: what we are working with in massage is loneliness.

Monday

the spray of nothing knowing
nothing owing nothing lost
and pulling us the spinnaker of God