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.

The Deluge

 

 I spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks reading the novel The Deluge, by Stephen Markley. I'll say right here at the start that The Deluge is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it comes in at just under 900 pages. And those aren't pages with large print and big margins, either, more like nine-point type and half-inch margins. So to work through it requires a sobering investment of time and energy. And the story it has to tell is no walk in the park either. One of Markley's primary goals is to examine the likely consequences of climate change over the next twenty years. That in itself is sobering, in that many of the prognosticators currently wringing their hands and crying out loud about coming existential disasters talk about what is likely to be happening in 2050 or 2100. Markley's time frame is much more compressed. The sequence of events described in the book starts in 2013 and ends in 2039. Nothing of what is described is remotely implausible, or remotely encouraging. Markley describes in unflinching detail multiple scenarios which people across the globe are already experiencing and can expect to experience in the not-too-far-distant future: heat waves, fires, water shortages, dust storms, and decimated crops on the one hand; floods, storms, and sea-level rise decimating coastal cities across the world on the other. Those events will likely result in the displacement of literally billions of people who will find themselves homeless and on the move without resources.

So yes, it's a dystopian novel based on the impact of climate change. But one of the things which makes it such a gripping read is that it is also a character-based novel that depicts, again in utterly convincing detail, the interactions of an enormous cast of characters, the most central of whom are intelligent, well-meaning, and socially engaged, and trying to fight, each in their own way, against what they correctly perceive to be an existential threat to human life on earth.

There are 41 chapters in the book. Some are narrated in conventional fashion by major characters. They include a scientist, a charismatic social activist (one of the most memorable characters I've ever encountered on the page), the leader of an eco-terrorist group, an ad rep for a company helping industry give the appearance of supporting climate change activism while working frantically behind the scenes to forestall any change in the status quo. There are also chapters presented as primary-source documents: news articles, magazine articles, and most notably, position papers authored by a fiercely intelligent autistic savant who is tasked by various government agencies with trying to come up with coherent and intelligible delineation of the fearsomely complex issues which need to be dealt with through legislation. (The book would be worth reading if only for the depth and clarity of those position papers.) Each of these characters comes alive as a fully realized human being embedded in a network of family and friends, all of whom have their own stories and challenges as the world careens toward disaster.

What became clear, at least to me, as the story moves from year to year and crisis to crisis, is that the scientific and technical challenges having to do with dealing with climate change, vexing as they are, will amount to nothing next to the human challenges. Any single proposal for dealing with climate change, much less a coherent program of necessary initiatives, will necessarily be met with a torrent of indignation, outrage, obfuscation, disinformation, and denial. Some of that pushback is overt and explicit; a larger quantity is covert and maliciously duplicitous. None of which should be surprising to anyone who pays attention to our current political environment, which is exactly and predominantly that way, and getting worse every day.

I've read I don't know how many thousands of novels in my lifetime. I don't think I've ever read one more ambitious, or more successful in realizing its ambitions, than The Deluge. It's gripping. It's frightening. It's extraordinarily well-imagined and well-written throughout. It's certainly understandable that most of us would prefer to pretend that the threats we are facing are less immediate and less pressing than they actually are. Al Gore was attempting to call everyone's attention to "An Inconvenient Truth" sixteen years ago. What has changed in the meantime? Diddly squat, that's what. Markley's principled mission is to ask that we consider, individually and collectively, the human consequences of that sort of lassitude.

Since finishing the book, I find that as I scan the news each day I see the harbingers everywhere of the world as he imagines it in this book. Just this week the New York Times had a lead article entitled "Earth Is Nearing The Tipping Point For A Hot Future," another "last chance" reminder about the just-released UN report on climate change. What has been the response of our congress, of our president, of our global leadership? Radio silence. Big surprise. Maybe Stephen Markley can help tip the scales, at least for those willing to invest the time and effort into reading The Deluge. I strongly recommend that you be one of them.



 

Bookmarks II

 

 

 

Just bookmarks again this week. I've been doing more drawing than writing of late. I like working small scale like this; it lowers the stakes and I can finish a piece in one sitting, whereas larger pieces can take weeks. But if you happen to have arrived here looking for something pretty interesting to read, this short essay touches on many of the themes this blog has existed to explore. I ran across it this week in One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle, a collection of essays which is in its entirety pretty awesome. As is his novel, Mink River.

Bookmarks

 

 

Shantytown

 

Shantytown

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
                     - Kevin Wilson

On the other side of the equation are two peeled apples. The first is sweet, the second deliberates quietly with the kettle and the spoon. It's a predictable dilemma: one of us has to go first. How long can we expect the rain to last? Hard to say. But at least the furnace no longer belches flames, and streets are no longer flooded. If you want my opinion, nine crows is three too many. Grind your teeth all you want, it's not going to help you with the dishes. Across the road, the sound of hammering on someone's roof; it must be close to Easter. Do you follow me? The thing about mathematics: it's structured, at least until you start asking questions. Better to close your eyes, exhale, wait for what comes next. My sister Priscilla drank heavily, but she made a mean chocolate brownie, so we forgave her. Waking up from a dream sweating, breathing hard, tangled in the bedsheets. Later on, when it became clear that the sirens were never going to stop, we got in the truck and drove to Albuquerque. Quiet there, but no water to speak of. Watch out for scorpions, though. I keep asking myself if there's a better way to proceed. No answer as yet. Mercifully, the creek has carried the worst of the debris away. Staying on track is not as easy as it you might think it would be. You need a plan a, and a plan b. Diagrams help, but still. We didn't expect the earthquake, did we. No way to tell what's in store. Count to fourteen. Stop. Count back to zero. If you're going to drive, probably best to start early and stop frequently. Up at the silver mine there's a little shop with garlic fries and tasty milkshakes. Not cheap, but what are you saving your money for, anyway? There's a point beyond which even the bravest are unwilling to go. As for the silverware, you may as well just give it away. All these people wearing masks, as if it is going to do any good. Tribal rituals. That guy at the cash register, the one with the eyebrow piercing and the tats. I've had it up to here with lemon bars, with strip malls, with email chains. My mom used to insist that there's something in potatoes you can't get in any other food. Tell you what: you help me out this time, and next weekend I'll take you to Hudson and buy you that new pair of sneakers you've been talking about. Then of course there's Taylor Swift. For or against? You're supposed to steer clear of the third rail. They talk about the light at the end of the tunnel as if it were an actual thing. Vonnegut knew better. So do you. So do I.

Process Reflection:

This is a draft of a work in progress. I have a writing partner. Twice a month or so one of us comes up with a prompt and we both write responses to it. In this case the prompt provided by my partner was the sentence that appears in italics at the top, from Kevin Wilson's novel Now is Not the Time to Panic. What interested me about that particular sentence is that it makes a certain kind of sense using imagery and syntax that is offbeat and oblique. But many of the transitions between words and phrases are unexpected; at least to me as a reader they are. They probably make better sense in context, but as a standalone sentence it is interestingly enigmatic.

There's a pretty long tradition of writing in this vein, what I supposed might be called impressionistic or expressionistic writing, where whatever is being asserted in terms of paraphrasable content is subordinated to the sounds and shapes and surprises of the sequences of words themselves. John Ashbery, for example, made career of writing poems that unfold in such a way that every time you think you're starting to get what he's saying he pulls the rug out from under you. To cite but one example, more or less completely at random (from the middle of a poem called "Love's Old Sweet Song"):

                                                            Meantime, one comes
bearing an envelope that is fresh and blue, one salivates; even
it it's not a stay of execution but an order for the immediate putting into
effect of same there's something to learn. It's not like two cats
ignoring each other in the basement areaway. By that I mean it was
going to lead up to something and then did, quite quickly. Better
than scanning hirsute sands for plumes announcing the arrival
of reinforcements; in those cases one invariably skips forward to a
time in the near future when everybody is happy again and an engagement
ring slips onto a ring finger of its own accord.

Look at any particular phrase, and it makes sense. Look at them in the context of one another, and the sensemaking falls away. There's something on display, but it's not exactly clear what it is. Something about tone, something about feeling, something about a mind at work that isn't interested in showing your or telling you anything you might already know. The parallels with abstract art in general and collage in particular are pretty obvious. (Ashbery himself was a dedicated collage artist. On the side, so to speak.) I am of course no Ashbery, but I often find his approach to writing to be refreshing.

There is also a whole subgenre of prose poems that also present themselves as experiments in obliquity. Here's an example from Robert Bly:

 

A Rusty Tin Can
 

Someone has stepped on this tin can, which now has the shape of a broken cheekbone. It has developed a Franciscan color out in the desert, perhaps some monk who planted apple trees in the absent pastures, near the graveyard of his friends. The can's texture is rough and reminds one of Rommel's neck. When the fingers touch it, they inquire if it is light or heavy. It is both light and heavy like Mrs. Mongrain's novel we just found in the attic, written seventy years ago. None of the characters are real but in any case they're all dead now.

My original goal in writing Shantytown was to just get it going and then write whatever words came into my head, with the intention of undercutting the flow of logic often enough that it would be impossible to make literal sense of it. I used to do this exercise with my high school English students. The assignment was called "Stop Making Sense," and the instructions were to fill up a page with sentences that didn't mean anything, or that at least kept resisting the temptation to mean something. As it happens, that's a lot harder to do than you would think it is. Our brains aren't wired that way. Humans are pattern seekers, and are made uncomfortable when they can't get oriented, either in a world or in a text.

The passage above clocks in at 500 words, which is the initial goal I had set myself. Tonight, in preparation for a meeting of my poetry group tomorrow, I boiled it down into something Ashberyish that might work as a poem. Some time later on, my intention is to go in the other direction, which would be to expand it by another 500 words or so, and see what shows up.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place (II)

 

Okay, so I'm back. Having re-read Second Place, having done my charts and graphs, having met with my cohorts to discuss the book, I'm going to try to work through a couple of ideas I have in my head at this point.

I suppose the biggest question for me as a reader, and I suspect for other readers as well, is what to make of the narrator, M. The whole book is essentially a monologue on her part, and that's sort of a problem, in that what she has to say about her hopes and dreams is frequently at odds with her behaviors in pursuing those hopes and dreams. For example, she claims to love her husband Tony and to be grateful for what he has done for her, but she invites the painter L into their home and spends most of the novel conducting what certainly feels like an extended flirtation with him. Right from the start, M is drawn to L's work because it seems to represent to her an escape, a portal from what she is experiencing as a constricted life to one that might offer her freedom and transcendence. Even as she tries to articulate this, she seems to be aware that her yearnings are to some degree inexplicable:

There's no particular reason, on the surface, why L's work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young woman whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. (11)

M's frustration at the limitations she faces as woman, and her resentment of L (and Tony) for the freedoms they possess as males, seem to be rooted in the way she was treated, or remembers being treated, as a child. As she says later in the same paragraph, "The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy." (12)

In a climactic and emotionally fraught scene at the end of the novel, after M has finally talked L into painting her portrait, she puts on the only dress she owns that fits her closely, her wedding dress, and heads to the studio. Tony sees her going and screams at her to come back. She refuses, and walks into a situation that is even more fraught than the one she's walking out of. 

By the end of the novel, M seems to have arrived at some sort of realization about the nature of truth and freedom and transcendence, but it's a realization shrouded in a sort of mystery:

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. (180)

That's the basis of her attraction to L's work, why it speaks to her, and what in the end she takes away from her interactions with him and with his work: that there is something on the other side of the surfaces of things, something that is accessible to us only through art, something that could set us free if only we could find our way to it. It cannot be apprehended directly by the senses or stated directly in words. This of course is not a new idea. Franz Kafka once said "I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones." Many other writers have made similarly enigmatic observations along these lines. (Anais Nin: "The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.")

M's struggles to get past her very individual and very personal limitations in order to arrive at Whatever It Is that is on the other side are at the heart of the dynamism of the plot of this book, such as it is. But there's a larger question that my group touched upon in our discussion: what is Rachel Cusk, the author, up to? She presents us with a character struggling against her own inclinations and her own limitations, a character who is drawn to art and also to some degree frustrated by art, a character who is perhaps admirable in her aspirations, but also hard to sympathize with, since so many of her frustrations seem to be the result of self-inflicted wounds.

I've thought about this and I'm not sure I have a definitive answer. But my working hypothesis is that it is precisely the inconsistencies and problematics of M's struggle that interest Cusk. It would have been easy enough to make M into a more insightful and capable character, and to make this book into feel-good story where L arrives and M is reborn as a triumphantly free and happy and fully realized person. But that kind of story arc is, well, a cliché, and if there's anything Cusk is not interested in it's clichés. She is regularly dinged by snarky reviewers who consider her work to be "frosty" and "humorless" and "astringent" and "convoluted." Several reviewers have gone so far as to object to the publisher's use of Optima, a sans serif type face, in her books; Dwight Garner, for example, makes the rather puzzling remark in his Times review that "Optima is unusual to see in a novel; it delivers to my eyes a chill sense of the void." Anthony Cummins, writing in The Guardian, goes him one better: 

Cusk’s sans-serif Optima typeface, now as much a part of her brand as high-pressure deliberation on gender and selfhood, adds to an indefinable sense of threat, with the novel’s diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch. 

Obviously, these guys are going pretty far out of their way to find things to carp about. Equally obviously, Rachel Cusk's novels are not everyone's cup of tea. But I find them to be thought-provoking and relevant and insightful, not in the sense of delivering satisfying prefabricated epiphanies, but in the sense of posing questions well worth thinking about, both in terms of the workings of the novels themselves and in terms of they mirror the often muddy and complicated events of our own lives.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)

 

This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday,  I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book Second Place. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:

The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue  rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.

I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. ("...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway.


So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from Lorenzo in Taos, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of Second Place.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for Demon Copperhead, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read Second Place. So if I really wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read Lorenzo in Taos as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand.

Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process Second Place. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...