B/W

 

 

This is a series of experimental pen and ink drawings with accompanying poems (also experimental) that Ive work on over the last six months. While I was doing the drawings, I was often listening to music from Blonde on Blonde, and particularly "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," so I decided to use phrases from that song as titles for the poems, which each bear some oblique relation to the drawing or the thought processes that the drawings generated in my mind as I wrote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warehouse Eyes

One over here, one over there, not where
you might expect them to be, but then again
what reason do we have to expect the future
to unfold in congruence with the past? More
likely, as in the present case,  it's just one thing
after another, the logic becoming clear only
in retrospect, if at all, and in any case subject
to revision. Leaves, legs, letters, jellyfish,
shovels, fins, wings: what you see is what you get:
individual parts blended into a whole that keeps
shifting around for as long as we keep looking.
The point being, there may not be any point.
But then then again there might. There's only
one way to find out: keep looking. So keep looking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arabian Drums

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking
that's unlikely. One, because even I'm not entirely sure
what I'm thinking, or whether in fact I'm thinking at all.
And two, because thought, to the extent that it can be shared
at all, most often manifests itself as a series words
articulating quite possible arbitrary discriminations
—this and not that, this as opposed to that, this following
that—none of which seem likely to be able to capture
the experience of being present to the presentation
of an experience which is of its nature necessarily wholistic.
Yes, we have parts, no two the same, each making a claim
on our attention. But then, again no one stands alone.
Nor should they. There is no music in a single syllable.
Only in sequence are drumbeats able to conjure a dance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matchbook Songs

Beyond everything else, there's this to consider:
even though the world does not often conform
to our expectations of it, it does have a logic
of its own, which is not necessarily less satisfying
for being hard to predict or interpret. What we
might read as horizontality might just be verticality
of a less obvious nature. What we experience
as noise may likewise just be silence in disguise.
Illogic and incoherence may very well resolve
themselves, if we are willing to entertain even
a minor shift of point of view, into the epiphanic
apprehension of thusness and suchness. If there
is a lesson here somewhere,  it will likely turn out
to be in the form of a question rather than an answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midnight Rug

We sit in silence, watching the water for what
seems  like hours, the ripples turning back
upon themselves again and again like snippets
of a song blown through the branches of the alders
and spruces until all semblance of coherence
has vanished, even as the notes continue to arrive
intermittently, carrying intimations, however indistinct,
of insight, of justification, of resolution. In this manner,
our time together passes by pleasantly enough.
After all, there is no where else we need to be.
The silence we share is clarifying, a relief from the rivers
of words we are in the habit of exchanging to make
sense of each other, and of the world in this moment.
The water speaks a wordless language that makes us whole?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sheet Metal Memory

Every new beginning comes from some other
beginning's end. Once we start, there can be
no stopping, right? Whether we move forward,
or back, or stay right where we are, eventually
we wind up, well, right here where we are now.
We will not have changed, other than by having
become indistinguishably older by an hour
or a day  or a week or a year. But our sense
of who we are now or who we might eventually
become will have been altered by the arrival
of today's new memories, as well as by the fading,
if not the disappearance, of older ones. All we have
left is the map of the path we have traveled,
or as much of it as we can still hold in our minds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ghostlike Soul

 Who among you can say where the spirit resides?
In darkness or in light? In song or in silence?
In birds or boulders, in fish or flowers? In the body
or in the breath? Here, echoes suggest this is what
salvation must be like after a while. Elsewhere,
mouths open as if to speak, but do not close again.
Is it not more desirable to wander with no clear
destination in mind? To dance alone on the beach
at night, to bate your breath as waves break over
your body which is dissolved into... what exactly?
The appearance of intention? An aspiration toward
timeless resonance? Questions asked but unlikely
to be answered. Apparitions, as it were. So what?
Not to worry. Sit with me a while. I'll keep you safe.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curfew Plugs

Room full of revelers, party going strong. In the all night
museum, the masked avenger addresses the renegades
in hopes of deliverance, absolution or at least sympathetic
understanding. Meanwhile, on the back porch, black cats
yowl under the light of a thousand stars to the accompaniment
of slide trombones and flamenco guitars. There's hardly room
to think, much less to breathe, but that's not necessarily
a bad thing. Isn't that why we came, to be present at the creation,
to celebrate the lunar conjugation, lending our individual
voices to the folding and unfolding of the origami chorus?
Whatever happens, don't lose heart. We're all in this
together. So just keep dancing for as long as the lights
continue to blink on and off and on again. You'll know when
it's time to go. In the meantime, keep sporting those smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Childhood Flames

Can you recall what it was like in the garden?
The warmth of the sun on your face, the soft breezes
in your hair as you wander across the green grass
and stand in the shade of the blue spruce watching
as the cars glide by, each one carrying the mystery
of lives and stories other than your own but still
somehow the same? Or fishing with your father
at Croton Lake, standing by the water, casting  
your line in hopes of feeling the tug of a sunfish
or perch? Each moment an expanse continuous
with all the others, until the skies begin slowly
to darken and it's time to go home, take a bath,
climb into bed, drift off to sleep, and wake up
all these years later in another world entirely.

Inventories

 

Inventories
           
An Abecedary

 

_______________________________________________

Earlier this year I ran across a reference to a book by Aaron Angello called The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications. In his introduction to this entertaining and offbeat book, he had this to day about its origins and evolution:

... I had a sketchbook, and at the top of each page, I wrote, in order, a single word from Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet. I sat in the chair, looked at the word for that day, then for several minutes I just thought about it, completely out of its context. Once I felt I was filled with that word—as if the word filled my body, not just my mind—I began to write. Usually, I had no idea what I was writing. For the most part I started from a place of what I like to call “the beyond consciousness,” from a place where I didn’t “know” what I was composing, so to speak. I wanted to access a mental space that allowed for spontaneity, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats so famously said. Occasionally, partway through a piece, I would do a bit of research (i.e., look something up on my phone), but generally, I just wrote. I paid no attention to whether I was writing a prose poem, an essay, a story, or something else. I didn’t even care if it “made sense.” My only rules were that I had to write in prose, I had to fill the page, and the piece couldn’t overflow onto the next one.
    I’m not certain why I chose Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet instead of, say, a poem by Emily Dickinson or John Ashbery, or any other bit of text for that matter. The experiment would probably work just as well no matter the source....Once I’d finished a draft of the manuscript—once I’d written a page for each of the 114 words in the sonnet—I put it aside for a while. Then, over the next few years, I periodically revisited it. I edited the pieces mercilessly. I rewrote some. I cut with abandon. I thought about how the pieces resonated with each other and what themes and memories I came back to again and again in those 114 days of writing every morning. I tried to take daily individual ruminations and make them work together as a kind of long lyric essay.

Something about the built-in randomness of Angello's way of working in this book appealed to me, and I decided to give it a whirl. Instead of beginning with a sonnet or other pre-published work, I opted to build upon a project that had occurred to me in one the generative sessions of semi-consciousness that often come to me in the morning hours when I'm lying in bed not fully asleep and not yet fully awake. I had begun running through the letters of the alphabet and selecting the first five-letter word that occurred to me. Later that morning I went to my laptop, created a little table with four columns and 26 rows and printed it out. Then I began penciling into each cell in sequence the first five letter word that occurred to me, proceeding in alphabetical  order. When I had completed the four lists, I typed the list in the first column into a new document, and, following Angello's example, began doing freewrites under each. It took me several weeks to complete the first draft of the entire document. Then I undertook the revisions. I have often found that having one or more formal constraints to work against gives me a way of making purposeful decisions about what to cut, what to add, and what to re-arrange when I am revising. My first-draft paragraphs had ranged from 75 words or so to more than 130, so I made an arbitrary decision to work toward having 26 paragraphs of exactly 100 words each in my final draft, which is what you will see below.

_______________________________________________

Amber

There's honey, of course. All those busy bees at work, all those waxy combs filled with golden sweetness. Apple juice. Maple syrup. Yellow ochre in the watercolor pan. Insects from a hundred million years ago, preserved in pine resin. The waves of grain beneath the spacious skies of the country whose praises we are exhorted to sing, and whose history we are encouraged to whitewash, the same country in which a child named Amber was abducted and killed, giving rise to the cell-phone alerts that bear her name. So much beauty, so much terror; so much sickness, so much hope.


Brush

Near miss, narrow escape from danger. Soft touch. Gesture. Caress. Instrument of re-presentation, the means by which a world can rendered in black and white, as in Japanese and Chinese ink painting, or ideograms can be deployed on paper, as in calligraphy. Also the means by which the world can be rendered with colored water on paper, or paint on canvas. Used in cleaning: Soak, scrub, rinse, repeat. Used in personal care: the cleaning of teeth, the parting and styling of hair.  Going further into the country, a term used for small bushes and trees that are difficult to penetrate.


Color

Conveys feeling, George likes to say. Upon hitting your eyes, color generates emotion subliminally. Which spills over into language. As when I am blue, or seeing red, or accused of being yellow, green with envy, or black-hearted. Children love to color. Give them crayons, fingerpaints, watercolors, and watch them go to town. More problematically, there's the whole sociology of skin color—black, white, yellow, brown, red—and how those colors have been coded and interpreted and responded to historically and in the present moment. Do you have a preference? My grandson wants to know: What's your second least favorite color?


Dense

Parsing the sense of dense. Case study in denotation and connotation. Heavy, thick, compacted: examples being lead, iron, rocks of any kind, cement. Castle keeps. Hardwood. Used to describe certain texts that are hard to decipher or hold in the mind: Faulkner's writing is too dense for my tastes. As opposed to, say, Hemingway or Rupi Kaur. Also used as a descriptor for someone whose head seems to resist incoming data: He can be a little dense sometimes. The opposite of dense in that sense would be bright, or intelligent, or quick on the uptake. Water is denser than ice.

Early

Too soon. Or perhaps optimally prepared, with anticipated obstacles avoided, thereby freeing you up to read or dance, nap or take a walk. Just before sunrise, lying in bed halfway between sleeping and waking, skirting the edges of a dream, perhaps pondering whether to throw off the covers and rise to greet another day,  or just turn over and cocoon under the warm covers for another few minutes. Or, conversely, the time just after midnight, those wee small hours that Sinatra sang about way back when. Or a premature arrival: a surprise that may (or may not) be pleasant, depending.


Fault

As in at. As in foot. As in my, or your, or his, or her, or their, or nobody's. As in gap or chasm, as in mountains sliding into the sea. As in the distance between what was hoped for and what transpired. Who or what is to blame for the way I am feeling right now? Who is going to pay for this? After an accident, determination of responsibility, insurers relying on investigators to decide who made the first, or most telling, mistake. Followed by lawsuits that will determine whether money must change hands, and if so, how much.


Giant

A creature of legend or myth. Goliath, for example, slain by a boy with a slingshot. King Kong. Paul Bunyan. Anyone acknowledged as a leader in his (or, presumably, her) field. Mascot for many baseball and football teams, and for at least one food company specializing in vegetables. Used of certain buildings And then all the adjectival connotations of absolute or relative largeness or importance: a giant step, a giant boat, a giant appetite, a giant boondoggle, giant redwood, giant panda. The largest of giants being the universe itself, or any of a certain class of dwarf stars within it.


Heart

This one is almost too rich. That which pumps blood. The quality of bravery or courage. Determination. The ability to feel deep empathy and compassion. Sticktoitiveness. One of the four card suits. The central point, the middle, the very the essence of something. Anagram of "earth." The locus of feelings (as distinguished from, or opposed to, or complementary with) the brain, the locus of thoughts. Lead-in to any number of phrasings: Heart attack. Heart to heart. Heart monitor. Heartwood. Heartache. Heartfelt apologies. Shot through the heart. The heart sutra. The heart of the matter. Deep in the heart of Texas.


Ideal


What's the best thing you can imagine? The moon sparkling on the water? Buying a new car? Riding horseback on the beach? Straight A's? Peace and quiet? A day without rain? Poker night with your best friends? Transformational sex? Season tickets for the Warriors? A novel that draws you into an invented world and keeps you there, enthralled? A home-made breakfast after a good night's sleep? Being able to walk without pain? Chris Stapleton on electric guitar? Sitting with someone who gives you their complete and total attention? That which can only be wished for but never attained? Unless, unless...


Jaunty

He strides in smiling, wearing a felt hat with a leather band, in which he has inserted a pheasant feather. He glances around the room and spies an empty armchair near the fireplace. On his way over, he plucks a glass of champagne from the bar, makes a show of taking a sip and closing his eyes and raising his head as if in the throes of an ecstatic revelation. Settling in the chair he doffs his hat, raises his glass in a toast to the assembled partygoers, takes a another sip, and smiles broadly at no one in particular.


Koala

What are you doing here? Were you invited, or did you just show up to see who would make a fuss over you? I get it; some people think you're cute. They point at you,  make soft cooing noises. Some of your more aggressively obnoxious fanboys and girls will likely pull leaves and stems out of the flower vases by the window and come over and try to entice you to nibble at them. If you were smart, which you're probably not, you wouldn't play along. Then they'd get bored and find some other way to call attention to themselves.


Lanai

In Hawaii, since the weather is almost always sunny and warn, most houses (and many condos) have at the side or in the back, which serves something of the function that a "porch" would serve in a house on the US mainland. Except that a lanai typically has no roof and extends longer and wider than a porch. It's a place to sit with friends and have a drink, or play a game of catch with your son or daughter, or just lie in the sun with a mai tai on the table at your side, soaking up the rays.


Mercy

As an exclamation, a word suggesting a) surprise at how poorly something is turning out, or b) pleasure at something so wonderful as to threaten becoming overwhelming. In the ethical sense, the act of forgiveness, often placed in contrast, as in Shakespeare's Othello, with "justice," often in the sense of earned punishment. The ethical ideal being justice tempered by mercy. An attitude more often aspirational than operational. There are Mercy Hospitals all over the country, which makes sense. I was taught in elementary school by nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy, and by and large they were anything but.


North

As in star. As in Pole. As in to Alaska. Straight up. An orientation during travel, as with a compass. Suggestive of winter. Snow and ice. Glaciers. Vikings with fair skin and blond hair carrying axes, pillaging the coastal villages of England. Historically and geographically embroiled, in the United States, with controversies associated with the civil war. From the point of view of the South, the metonym of all that is wrong about an American Federalism administered by Ivy League intellectuals, including multiculturalism, affirmative action, trade unions, and government handouts. Traditional rival of "South" in college and pro All-Star games.


Obese

Big. Round. Overlarge. But a loaded word these days. Those of a sensitive disposition emphasize the unfairness of fat shaming and to endorse "body positivity," which would preclude the need for a term like "obese." OTOH companies spend millions of dollars on television ads promoting diets and food plans and medications which are basically guaranteeing no-hassle weight loss, and those products are flying off the shelves. So there's a disconnect between the messaging from the politically correct and the messaging reaching the politically incorrect, as when Hillary Clinton lost the election after calling a significant percentage of the population "deplorables."


Pupil

The very center of the eye, the portal between the world and the brain. Circular window. Also, an attendee at school, not necessarily synonymous with "student, "which would connote at least some small degree of active engagement. You can be a pupil without being a student. Trust me, I know. But you can also be a student without being a pupil, if you are moved to study on your own. Wherever you are, you can be paying attention, letting the light fall upon the inner lens of your eye and make its mysterious way into your brain and reflective consciousness.


Query

Hints of academia. The sense of someone on a search for a hidden truth. Can I ask you something? What is your problem? (How come I get to be the one with the problem if you are the one asking all the intrusive questions? Did you ever stop to think that maybe it's your problem? It's always stupid this and fucking that and "I don't want to do this anymore.") You're right. I'll try to do better. (You have been saying that for years. But it never seems to stick, does it?) (Okay. Tomorrow then. One day at a time.)


River

Water on the move from the mountains to the ocean. Conveyance, highway for boats, attraction for nature lovers and skinnydippers. Home to fish and fishermen and fish fries.  Often a property marker. Natural symbol of anything in flux, not to mention various elements of oxymoronical folk wisdom, e.g. You can't step in the same river twice (which is simultaneously true and untrue). Thus mystery. Thus legend: the Danube, the Mississippi, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Orinoco. Last card dealt in Hold 'Em. Favorite subject of songwriters and artists. Picture it youself: the sun glinting off the water, sailboats skimming along.


Stand

As in taking one. As in tall. As in together. As in alone. As in easel. As in of trees. As in being upright, as in refusing to go along with what you know is not right. As in abide or put up with. What I cannot stand is this. And how about understand? Under from the German Unter meaning among. Standing among, suggesting community, and perhaps agreement or consensus. Yes, I understand. I stand among you, I stand with you, I will stand by your side. I will be a standup guy. We will stand together, you and I.


Train

A vehicle on rails. Cars carrying people, carrying goods, carrying gold. Freight train. Passenger train. Locomotive. Coal car. Tanker. Sleeper car. Caboose. Catnip for robbers, for hobos, for people eager to get out of town, for storytellers, mystery writers, movie directors. One also trains to become an athlete, a writer, a soldier, a doctor. What is left in one's wake, as the train of a wedding gown. Think of the ways in which train relates to river and stand. Movement and stasis. Being where you are, or being on the way somewhere, anywhere, else. Reaching the end of the line.


Under

The bus. The influence. The wire. The circumstances. The weather. Wear. Water. Write. Appreciated. Fire. Current. Pressure. Consideration. Perform. Pinning. Going. Standing. Investigation. Value. Going. Up from. Down. The emotional connotation of under-ness. Below. Beneath. Less than. The implication of failure, the disappointment of not rising to the standard. OTOH, what is under something is also the thing that supports it, the base, the basis, the rock upon which something rests, as in the famous and likely spurious saying about St. Peter. Who would merit a whole disquisition all on his own, historically and mythologically, were we to undertake it.


Value

Worth. Quality. Usefulness. Esteem. Appreciate. The question of metrics: how is value to be evaluated? Who is to say what is good and what is not good, whether and to what degree? What do you mean to me? What do I mean to you? Alternatively, what about the choices people make in the social sphere? Imposing houses? Good looks? Hot cars? Hot sex? The exercise of power? Competition as the driver of the economy? The accumulation and deployment of capital. Capitalism vs Socialism vs whatever the alternatives might be. Nirvana? Non-action? Total acceptance? What are you doing with your life?


Water

Original element, without which nothing, life having arisen out of the mineral-rich oceans of prehistory. Clouds. Rain. Snow. Lakes and rivers. Glaciers frozen tundra. Water in the stems of plants and in the veins of every living thing. For the grass, for the flowers, for the fish, for the whales. For cleaning out the digestive system, for washing the car, for showering and shaving and the baking of bread. Water on which to float, to sail, to cruise. To survive in the desert, look for an oasis. Water as a symbol of life, of clarity, of the richness of life.


X

The ex-ception. Marks the spot. Not commonly seen at the beginnings of words. Represents, among other things, the unknown. Something to solve for. Symbol for multiplication. Used to indicate the choice of a candidate on a ballot or a choice on a test. The means by which something written down may be crossed out. The generation following the baby boomers. Aurally, spoken—sometimes with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with real animus—of someone no longer a lover. Combined with the "Command" key on the keyboard, serves to delete whatever has been selected. Now you see it, now you don't.



Youth

Often said to be wasted on the young. Then again, youth is a relative concept, and even adults and oldsters have trouble inhabiting the present moment with attention and appreciation. I do like the sound of the word "youth," and I enjoy the pictures that come into my mind when I consider the concept of youth, or the actual young people who populate my memory and occasionally appear in front of my eyes. But I am in fact an old man, even though in my mind's eye I still think I'm the same person I used to be. As if.


Zen

Basic concepts: One, that your buddha nature, which is to say your enlightenment, lies within you, and that you are responsible for doing what you need to do to bring it forward, whether that be by work or meditation or art. It's not going to be provided to you by your family or friends or the deity of your choice. Two: that the world and all that we value in it and attend to in it is illusory. We want the world to make sense: we have to let go of that. It's not real, and it doesn't matter.

Mahmoud Darwish

 

Recently a friend sent me a link to a poem by Mahmound Darwish. I had not previously heard of Darwish, despite the fact that he is considered by many to be the "Palestinian Poet Laureate." I was intrigued by the poem, although I was not sure how much of it I really understood. I did some research into his background, but even with that information, I found "I Didn't Apologize to the Well" a hard poem to pin down. 

Part of that had to do with the translation that was sent to me, which was by Fady Joudah, himself a Palestinian poet. I was able eventually to locate another translation online in a book translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, which falls much more smoothly on my ear. I felt their phrasings snapped some of the imagery into focus for me as well. I have no idea what images and connotations and connections would be clearer to someone reading the original Arabic.

Part of it is also, I think, actually thematic: the introduction by Amin and London makes note of his strategic deployment of "lyrical instability" as he tries to create a "map of absence." It is, in their reading, a poem of dislocation, and the way Darwish frames it is probably intended to give the reader a parallel experience of dislocation within the poem itself. Here's the translation I like:

I Didn’t Apologize To The Well


I didn’t apologize to the well as I passed by it.
I borrowed a cloud from an ancient pine and squeezed it
like an orange. I waited for a mythical white deer.
I instructed my heart in patience: Be neutral, as though
you were not a part of me. Here, good shepherds
stood on air and invented the flute and enticed
mountain partridges into their traps. Here, I saddled
a horse for flight to my personal planets, and flew.
And here, a fortuneteller told me: Beware of asphalt roads
and automobiles, ride on your sigh. Here, I loosened
my shadow and waited. I selected the smallest stone
and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth
and got broken myself. I circled the well until
I flew out of myself to what I’m not. And a voice
from deep in the well spoke to me: This grave
is not yours. And so I apologized. I read verses
from the wise Qur’an and said to the anonymous presence
in the well: Peace be with you and the day
you were killed in the land of peace and with the day
you’ll rise from the well’s darkness
and live…

                        – Mahmoud Darwish
                        Tr. Omnia Amin and Rick London

It's a poem that had political ramifications when it was written twenty years ago which are now even more relevant and more intense than they were at that time, which means that any attempt to interpret it puts the interpreter under some pressure whether to address that political context or instead to ignore it. There are of course competing interpretive orthodoxies about this dilemma. Biographical Critics argue that you should not and indeed cannot interpret a poem without taking into consideration the circumstances under which it was written, including the lived experience of the author. The New Critics, at least during the era in which they could be said to be "new" argued that all of that supplementary data ought to be irrelevant: the poem must stand on its own; one can only "interpret" based on what you the words that you see in front of you. "Reader response" critics argue that the poem is just a stimulus, a locus of attention, and that the "real" poem, such as it is,  is constructed in the mind of the individual reader. Marxist critics, psychological critics, feminist critics, deconstructionists, each have their own orthodoxies. Suffice it to say that there are lots of lenses to use, individually or sequentially or simultaneously.

That much said, here are a couple of my observations, inferences, and hunches:

"The well" is an inanimate object, so right off the bat Darwish seems to be nudging me to wonder how the speaker could apologize TO the well even if he wanted to. But I can infer that it is an inanimate object with certain defining qualities: it's an oasis, a gathering place, the focus of the community of people who go it for nourishment and, presumably, the company of others.

The speaker, electing to pass all of that by, turns inward: he enters into imagination and myth, music and magic. I love listing of the activities he claims to have engaged in: borrowing the cloud, waiting for the white deer, saddling the flying horse, consulting the fortuneteller. The images, one after another, are surprising and delightful. And of course somewhat cryptic. "I selected the smallest stone and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth and got broken myself... I flew out of myself to what I'm not." I see these, I FEEL these, as compelling emblems of, well, instability and dislocation, among perhaps many other possibilities. Attention and beauty and pleasure among them.

At that point an astonishing thing happens: the well speaks to HIM, saying "This grave is not yours." The implication being that it's "not yours" because it is mine, which is to say it is the grave of the person whose spirit resides within the well. And so THEN the speaker decides to apologize after all, and turning to the Qu'ran, wishes the spirit in the well peace, and suggests the promise—or at least the hope—of resurrection, of a new day arriving when the spirit will "rise from the well's darkness and live."

It would not be a huge interpretive leap to read all of this as a gloss on the tribal conflicts in the middle east. But I'm not really inclined to go there. For one thing, that whole situation is colossally messed up in a million different directions and has been for centuries. It seems to be even worse today than it ever has been. But I have so little lived or learned experience with it that I don't feel entitled or qualified or inclined to speculate on the poem's political and social themes. But I love the poem for other reasons. It seems to  me to be a very eloquent testimony to the power of poetry itself to help us process and cope with the distress and dissonance in the world. We are at the present moment a bewildering array of existential threats, including among others religious and ethnic rivalries, ongoing wars, climate change and its impacts, disinformation via social media, huge economic disparities among and within countries, the failure of our educational and health care systems.

But at this late date in my sojourn on this planet I feel like I am often hearing the voice that says "This grave is not yours." I'm getting closer to mine every day, that I know. And I do share the wish that those many millions and millions of others, and their descendants and mine, will eventually  rise from the darkness of whatever well they do inhabit, and live. Wishful thinking, yes. But as the old saying goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." So why not go ahead and ride? As Darwish does in this poem, and as I do when I read it.





 

Good Intentions

 

It has been a year and two days since I last posted something to this blog. I had not intended for it to be so long. But in my advancing old age—and in the absence of any of the urgency that while I was still teaching I was more regularly able to muster—it's pretty easy to let my good intentions slide, one day at a time, until I look up and oops, another year gone by. The post below has actually been sitting for some months on my desktop, waiting for me to get around to posting it. It was intended to be the first in a series. It still may be. Or maybe I'll see you next year. We'll have to wait and see.

    As a sophomore in college I took a first-semester course in Chinese philosophy from Dr. Lik Kuen Tong. (I wrote about that course on this blog ten years ago.)
    Dr. Tong was a tremendous teacher, and our class was so taken with him that we asked him if he could teach a followup course the following semester. He said he would have to ask permission from the deans to do so. They gave their permission, we all signed up, and so during the second semester he taught a course that featured the process-based philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, among others. What I remember most clearly about that course was a series of presentations Dr. Tong did on symbolic logic, the essence of which was that certain philosophers had hit upon the idea that given the inherent slipperiness of verbal communication, it might be possible to represent the Truth (or Truths) of the Universe more accurately in mathematical terms.
    On the first day of the unit on symbolic logic, Dr. Tong walked to the blackboard and said something to the effect that we might begin by letting the Greek letters sigma stand for human existence, the letter lambda stand for the universe at large, and see the former as a function of the latter. While doing so, he wrote that equation on the board.
    I should acknowledge here that I am recalling this presentation from a distance of more than fifty years. I don't remember much of what he actually said or wrote down, and I don't know that what I do remember is anywhere near close to accurate. The importance of the lesson for me, both at that time and from the wrong end of the telescope today, is the experience I had as a student of watching as Dr. Tong began fiddling with the equation, saying things like, "Well, having gotten this far we would have to ask ourselves what the equation does not yet include that would be important," and then he would scribble some more on the board, adding factors and including items in parentheses in the denominator and talking his way through his thinking. He would arrive at class the next day and say something like "I was thinking about where we left off yesterday and it occurred to me that we had not considered the quadramoxial factor..." and he'd be off, chalk in hand, talking to us, sort of, but mostly talking to himself as he motored on down the road toward a mathematical representation of the universe that would stand up as being both accurate and adequate.
    I cheerfully admit that I understood only a very small percentage of what he was saying. But what blew me away was the ambition of the project intensity and intelligence and self-discipline with which Dr. Tong pursued it. From a spectator standpoint it was not unlike witnessing YoYo Ma play a cello sonata or Pablo Picasso painting a portrait of Dora Maar. The lasting value of that class, for me, had very little to do with process philosophy in general or symbolic logic in particular. It had to do, rather, with finding myself in the presence of someone who had made a fierce commitment to the deployment of the full resources of his considerable intelligence to a task which was not only ambitious but by any normal standard of judgment clearly impossible. What I have come to understand at this point in my life that I did not understand then is that the impossibility was precisely the point. If it was something anybody could figure out for themselves, there would be no point in attempting it. I'm sure to most of us, most of the time, that sounds counterintuitive, if not completely insane. But I will say this: Dr. Tong demonstrated in class every single day the rewards of the attempt to transcend your perceived limitations. By means of his aspirations be became an inspiration to me.
    I've been fortunate in my life to have had several such inspirational teachers. Some I have know personally, others I have encountered in print. The great British sculptor Henry Moore, for example, had this to say:

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Much of my working time the last few years—to the extent that as a retiree I can be said to have "working time"—has been devoted to the reading and writing of poetry. And the thing about writing a poem is that it's basically impossible to get it right. The testimony of working poets and writers and artists echoes Moore over and over again. Here, for example, is Dani Shapiro:

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.

So sure, any poem I write, or you write, or anyone else writes, will be at least a partial failure. But as Shapiro suggests, that's maybe the most important reason to attempt it.