The End of the Day
For almost two years, beginning in 2006, I kept up a practice of writing journal entries and capping them with what we think of in the West as haiku, though many are actually more like senryu. Senryu have the same form and origin as haiku, but don’t depend on linking a moment in nature to human nature as do haiku. They are often funny, little Japanese three-liners. They grew out of renga, a form of linked verse that inspired the Dreamawake Dream section of this website.
I became inspired to try this practice by the famous haiku poet Basho’s (1) travel sketch A Narrow Road to the Deep North, wherein the poetic pilgrim goes on an epic journey with his companion Sora, stopping at beautiful natural sites, temples, monuments and shrines along the way. After economic passages of prose that recount his feelings and adventures, he inserted haiku to capture his impressions. Sometimes he would engage hosts in writing “linked verse” (renga) with him. They would produce books that he would leave behind. He often included verse by his companion Sora. I was intrigued by the dynamic between narration and poetry, how the narrative zoomed you out to get the background, and the snippet of verse zoomed you in to pick up a detail with a feeling attached. Sometimes the feelings were quite deep. Basho would weep bitterly at reminders of the deaths of dedicated priests or heroic warriors, for instance. Other poems were more whimsical, or reflective, depending on the essence of the place and the insights he had there.
Where Basho oriented his journal entries around particular locations, mine were oriented more around my experiences in time. Each entry captures some aspect of a day that culminates in a little taste of poetry. On a craft note, I wasn’t particularly worried about sticking strictly to the haiku syllabic and line structures, or the inclusion of particular ingredients such as a “kireji” (a cutting word), or a “kigo”, (a season word). I was more concerned with using the form to help me be pithy and prevent me from perseverating on a topic. It was an experiment, really, not only in developing an approach to composition, but in seeing if the practice would bring me serenity and insight on a routine basis.
Over the span of those two years I wrote 138 entries, some more noteworthy than others. I include a sampling here, not selected so much for any literary quality, but for what they might reveal about the efficacy of the approach. At first my entries tended to be short, then they got longer as I got better at using my memory to revisit the day. I included senryu/haiku from some of these examples, as well as from other entries that aren’t included here, in the “Senryu/Haiku” section of this website. I excluded entries that went too far in demonstrating my obsessions, neuroses or bad habits, out of embarrassment more than anything, even though those passages gave me insights into how I have become wiser or more foolish since those years. (Not much change on either account, I’m sad and happy to say.) If you see any here that you would like to respond to, write me an email and we can get a linked verse thing going. That might be diverting.
11.10.06
The young man comes to apologize for his obsessions. He wants to see something happen; he thinks it’s important; he can’t get it off his mind no matter how much he talks about it. So afterward he apologizes. At first I think he talks too much. Then I listen. A whole new avenue opens up in the air around and about. A lot of people might benefit from traveling down this newly paved highway through the jungle of what we feel around here.
He goes on and on.
I wince until
the wall dissolves.
the teachers and I finally
bag an idea.
A day of striving at the L- School, with moments of wonder along the way, particularly at the writer’s workshop, where teachers experienced the delight of sharing their work and finding out how others saw, felt, and thought of it. An Ode to Finished Products, an Ode the Fruit Fly, and a story of becoming a monstrous mouse while trying to exterminate mice. In the morning on the white board I had written Yosa Buson’s haiku
Blown from the west, fallen leaves gather in the east.No teachers commented on it but later in the afternoon a couple of students were hanging out in the Teacher Center and noticed the poem. They discussed a fellow student whose name was Yasu, similar to Yosa. The girl asked the boy what the poem meant. “I don’t get it,” she said. He said, “It’s about the west sending its armies to the east and all the death they leave behind.” When I chose that haiku to write on the white board, I had that interpretation in mind even though Buson probably wasn’t thinking about that. Or, given that he was alive during the founding of the United States, perhaps he was prophetic. Not long after those two literary-minded students left, younger ones came in to do their math homework, and erased the haiku without a second thought.
The haiku
on the white board –
erased.
12.06.06
[Entry on the contrast between high ideals and turds.]
It’s late at night. I’ve traveled throughout the city. I’ve helped teachers teach, students talk, my daughter do her homework. I’ve read with my daughter as she fell asleep. My book told of tarring and feathering and racism in the South. I’ve reflected on the significance on many words: density, igneous, Devonian, rationale, reason and supporting detail. At the dinner table, I said I was grateful for water, which led to my daughter’s observation that the water I was drinking with my breaded flounder had been drunk by countless creatures before me: that water could change its state, but couldn’t be created or destroyed. No atom could be destroyed, she maintained, which led us to talk about the splitting of the atom and all of the conceptual thrills and natural destruction that came from that.
It has been a very rich day, but the most illuminating moment came when a well dressed woman on 14th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues let her dog take a shit on the granite paving stones at the entrance of a recently renovated residential building. She started to walk away, stopped, looked back at the turds steaming in the wintry air, reached into her purse and started to remove a plastic bag, decided against going back, shoved the plastic bag back into the purse, and walked away. I stepped into the street to see if I could find a cop to arrest her, but none were in sight. I had fantasies of scooping the shit up and patting her on the back with it. I had to resign myself to the injustice of it. I had to accept that it just happened, and someone would have to clean up after her, maybe by extracting the canine feces from the treads of their shoes, as I have done on several occasions.
The lady leaves
the turds behind when her dog
shits on the sidewalk.
1.4.07
How does the fabric of life feel for black children? The daily racist warp and weft…. Today I saw this graphically in the classroom of a teacher who told them to shut their mouths, who openly mocked them, who told them there was only one way to have an opinion. When asked later why she didn’t give them a chance to succeed, she said she didn’t have time to get organized. I shook the hands of other teachers who wanted to try seeing how much the kids could do. I told the principal how yet other teachers don’t trust him. I tried to frame a level of sympathy for all of the teachers and all of the students, but ulcers did start up in the classroom when the yelling at the students began.
Later with Elizabeth, at the dinner table, talking about Haruki Murakami, we talked about his heroes making the world right. And after that, reading about Auerbach’s study of Dante, that Auerbach said, “…we know something which often remains hidden from us in our thoughts about ourselves or those with whom we are in daily contact: namely, the simple meaning which dominates and orders their whole existence.” The reviewer says, “…self revelation builds on the recollection of some definite act or event, and ‘it is from this act or event that the character’s aura arises.’” It occurs to me that an aura generated by an act is one thing, and that one determined by being acted upon is another.
This morning I listened to a lecture on Blake, wherein the visionary poet discusses in his proverbs the innocence of energy and damnation, often caused by the church, of stopping the energy’s flow: “Expect poison from the standing water.” “Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.” I would add, “Schools with slabs of cynicism.”
So hard the teacher worked today, to stop the flow of the students’ energy, yet she is the one who is dammed. At the end of the day I hadn’t been walking through the preternaturally warm weather, so I strolled to the open field behind the white block buildings of the school and looked at the seagulls there, how they seemed to want to be close enough to maintain their identity with the flock, but far enough away from each other to keep from having to negotiate any relationships. They were ready to conserve their energy for another day’s flow:
Spaced evenly
on the green field, the white gulls
bob and bob and bob.
1.6.07
We broke heat records today, the day we celebrated Elly’s birthday at the skating rink in Prospect Park. I took my binoculars along to look at the mallards, the Canada geese and the gallinules swimming obliviously on the sparkling water of the adjacent lake. Ten girls skated on the wet ice, got blisters, talked on cell phones, giggled, acted their age. I took pictures thinking of their forms like Degas thinking of dancers’ forms. Thinking too of their oblivion. They are an inherent celebration of life. And I celebrate life too.
Visions of our imminent demise, or at least the destruction by our homo fabrications, concern me but don’t trouble my spirit. It’s all been provisional from the beginning, and contingent. When I tried to explain global warming later to Elly’s old Trinidadian baby sitter L-, who had dropped by for a visit, she listened politely. I stand in amazement of us all. At dinner, with V- and E- at the table while the girls played computer games, I mentioned this and we talked about how faith-based thinkers like some of the teachers we work with change the topic when you talk about heating up the earth, maybe rejecting science, maybe in denial that we could create our own hell out of the paradise of the planet. Elizabeth told her story about the teachers who, when you ask how they’re doing, answer “BAD,” i.e., “Blessed And Delivered.” Jewish E- can’t grok this thing of salvation and deliverance, heaven and hell. Elizabeth wondered if it was Aquinas who created the concept. I said it was more attributable to Augustine, that Aquinas was the guy who loved the birds. Of course this was a brain fart.
I looked up St. Francis of Assisi later. He would have preached to the gulls I saw in the football field yesterday, how it was their duty to praise god. Reading his biography, a narrative of dreams and visions and rebellion against a father that couldn’t understand him, I felt a soul mate. Then I read his Canticle of the Creatures. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Earth, Sister Death. Flashbacks to Brer Rabbit.
St. Francis then,
and the faithful today, say brother, sister.
I say duck, goose.
1.10.07
I don’t have time to remember my dreams. I sit around in a school without a focus. I come home to difficulty. I read in the newspaper about limousine drivers and their complaints about famous people, about the NOAA finally deciding to mention global heating after all of these years. 2006 was the warmest on record. I remember John Holt’s New Yorker article about probability, his thesis that what’s around now can be predicted to continue to be around for about as much time as it’s been around. Humans for instance. We’ll have our day in the sun, then our day will end. Holt points out it’s no coincidence that we are alive now while so many are alive. We probably wouldn’t or won’t be around at another time, in the past or future, when fewer people roamed or will roam the writhing planet. The banji is extinct in the Yangtze. Douc Langurs are endangered. I was reminded of them looking at the serene face of one on the cover of a book in a school. I stopped to look at it and remembered the douc langurs in the Memphis zoo. Our exquisite cousins.
Meanwhile, I am disgruntled, verging on depressed, as the program I work in at Columbia is threatened and I don’t remember my dreams. Elly danced at dinner time, though. She had a series of imaginative moves, creatively choreographed. At the age of five she used to choreograph me and order me around to make an endless variety of moves.
The douc langurs
and the banji say their farewells,
but my daughter dances at dinnertime.
I’m not exactly sure why it should happen this way, but this weekend I’m inhabiting my body comfortably, like an old familiar easy-fitting coat. I think it started on Thursday night when I managed to get what felt like a good night’s sleep. The next day, I pulled off good demonstrations of fishbowls in two math classrooms, sparking new awareness that the students could actually think for themselves. One group of math teachers actually began a debate on how important conceptual understanding was. Among those teachers was a fiery dragon of a teacher who stomped around and breathed fire from her nostrils before leaving the room in a huff in earlier meetings. Now she behaved herself. I felt successful, like an evangelist who’d gathered a few souls from the devil’s side of the equation. The next day I took a three-hour nap. When I swam at the gym, I felt smooth and healthy. Today, Sunday, I still had the sensation that all was in tune, even as I prepared for my meeting tomorrow with Darth Vader of the Evil Empire. Why am I feeling so centered amid so much politicking, even facing old nemeses? I can’t explain it. And Elly has been chipper as well. Yesterday she remembered math facts and smoothly found common denominators. At the dinner table later that evening, during the opening expression of gratitude that I have tried unsuccessfully to ritualize in our family – except for myself, I talked about the gratitude I feel for my body. It has come here through millions of years of evolution. We discussed how many generations of parents must have preceded me and, counting the one-celled organisms way back when that gave rise to the rest of us, decided the number must be in the trillions.
This body of mine,
that fits like an old coat – how many
matings to make it?
1.26.07
Centered on the sidewalk in the Arctic air, with my goose down Woolrich coat keeping me perfectly warm, on the way to school. The stances I have taken against Darth Vader feeling good in my bones. All day long rising to the occasion with teachers, and new light shining all around. A kind of joyousness in all the exchanges. The old fortress of a school, generation after generation of school children having trod its stairways, and how many coats of paint on the walls. This year, sky blue walls and midnight blue moldings.
After school, the friendly neighborhood café showing children’s art. I was invited by the art teacher, so I went. When you are invited, you should try to go. One child there, the superintendent, a couple of teachers…that was about it. The art glowed like backlit stained glass windows. Afterward, a teacher took me half way home and we talked about cleaning apartments before the cleaning lady came so as not to embarrass yourself.
Then I walked home in the same Woolrich coat at the end of the day, feeling the spice of the icy air as it tried to penetrate the bubble of warm air under my hood. The condensation of my breath wafted away in the breeze. At home, I found the article in a newspaper misquoting me and making my whole fight look a little silly.
During school, I talked with people about the comics, so I read the sequel of Sleeping Beauty from “Little Lit “to Elly before bed. Then I watched a violent film noir movie with Harvey Keitel for a while. Nice scenes of naked pole dancers in bars. All of my concentrated memories and sensations adding up now as I write, listening to Bill Evans soothe my ears.
The words and feelings
all evaporate when you exhale
into the chilly wind.
2.19.07
It’s the day after the end of the sesshin. This is my second one. My first was over eleven years ago, before Elly was born. What’s to say about it? Five of us, the minimum required, met at the zendo on Friday night; late Sunday afternoon, we dispersed. In between, four people worked very hard to meet the requirements of sitting, bell ringing, food serving, sutra chanting, zendo cleaning. I contributed a very small piece, mopping and vacuuming here and there, but more often made a nuisance of myself: getting in the way, making too much noise while eating, using too much water on the mop, asking questions in a loud voice about whether to clean various spaces, leaving the cottage cheese serving spoon in my own personal bowl, rattling about at night instead of staying put in my bed, using an excess number of cushions and pillows, transferring cat hair from a home blanket onto the zendo mats, losing track of the syllables in the chants, eating my chocolate treat too early, forgetting to gassho at the right time, glancing around for clues on how to behave instead of keeping my eyes to myself, using a large dishtowel and supersize wooden bowls instead of the discreet nesting kind, and so on. I got depressed after being corrected on a couple of these things (I self-chastised on the others) and just wanted some sloppy American version of attaining enlightenment. Forget these nit-picking Japanese rituals. On top of everything, my underwear started bunching up and my knees, feet and back dropped into a zone of excruciating pain on the third to last sitting. This got me focusing on the numbers as I counted my breath. I already look like a bull-rider at a rodeo instead of the lotus flower everyone else looks like as I try to find a position on a stack of cushions.
Despite everything, during the last two sittings of the day, I managed to distribute the various sources of pain and discomfort more evenly and finally reached a minimal state of Samadhi. This was one long climb. (Nothing of course next to what real Zen veterans do.) Then, when we chanted the final syllables at the end of the whole affair, I found I was shaking and shuddering with some kind of release of energy and tension that I hadn’t even been aware was building up inside me. This despite the fact that I was faking the chanting because I wasn’t sure what the syllables were, even though I’d tried to memorize them half a dozen times from the sheet on the bulletin board in the hall. When we stood up to act like normal people at last, I was cathartically moved, to the point of tears. Everyone hugged each other: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. No, thank YOU, I say.
During the course of the sesshin, I read various Buddhists texts, sutras, etc. Because of Elizabeth’s struggle with a bully at her job, I copied this down for her from Yoka Daishi’s Shodoka, or Song of Enlightenment:
Some may slander, some may abuse;
They try to set fire to the heavens with a torch
And end by merely tiring themselves out.
I hear their scandal as if it were ambrosial truth;
Immediately everything melts and I enter the place beyond thought and words.
I also found the final lines of the song worth thinking about further, both the image and the infinitely generous, but somewhat cowboy-like ending:
Great enlightenment is not concerned with details.
Don’t slander the sky by looking through a pipe.
If you still don’t understand, I will settle it for you.
At one point, during a break, I looked out the window at the buildings across the street and watched vents release steam into the wintry air. I wrote this haiku:
Outside the window
of Soho Zendo, wisps of steam
rise into nothing.
3.31.07
The farmer’s market, under the gaze of the statue of Prospect Park’ founder, James S.T. Stranahan. I had never taken time to notice the statue before. I only saw it yesterday, walking home from P.S. 124. His top hat in his hand, he stares down at the plaza through sad bronze eyes. At the market I walked from stall to stall. Cheese, yogurt, ice cream, apples, bread, muffins, eggs, turkey, beef, preserves. The people who serve at the farmer’s market, their long trips into town, to Grand Army Plaza, the hub of a wheel whose spokes extend to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, down to New Jersey. Their battered vehicles, sunburnt faces, callused hands. Our soft city hands hand over the money, and we take home a week’s worth of culinary satisfaction.
I am variously attached to the vendors there, known well by the cackling artisanal cheese lady and the rotund apple farmer, recognized by the others. How could I ever paint their bucolic faces? Today, because of the light, I became especially alert to the nature of the skin that wraps human bodies. The Spring air was particularly clear, so the light illuminated it with rosy luminosity. Because of the recent Mueck exhibit at the museum, I thought that we are all inhabitants of our own fragile and temporary cellular shells, the beauty of our exoderms hiding the machinery below. I was sensing the milling of the bodies from stall to stall as a movement of sculpted ghosts in the sunlight. Each one aroused in me a reaction, guarded, judgmental, libidinous, curious, hostile, peaceful, in the end tranquil – a quality by no means assured across the world. A grounding section of my world would be destroyed if our market were bombed. How far away are we from that event, I sometimes wonder?
My skin’s cut
from the same ancient bolt of cloth
as yours.
4.1.07
With this cold, I’ve turned into a gaseous snotbucket. But I’ve spent the day in the kind of suspended animation that recalls the days I wandered the hills of West Virginia not reading Wordsworth when I should have been. The trip to the kielbasi store, the bank, the hardware store, the drug store. Elly enacting the drama of the sensation in her belly and her ribs as she eats. Alyson calling wanting a break from the typewriter, coming up with a bottle of wine. Ray Federman. The Fiction Collective. Her daughter in France. I read a Ray Federman story when Elizabeth came home and joined the conversation. All about her family’s arrival in the US and the myth and the reality, never getting past the arrival. The love it and hate it of America.
Then the conversation with my Brother, about the Englishman who can reel off Pi and relates to numbers through their colors and their personalities. One of the seven or so recognized savants in the world. Then watching the holy grail Monty Python movie to complement having seen the musical. Eleanor singing the songs afterward about the brave Sir Robin running away bravely. Frittering my time away all the day long. One part I left out, the way I drove around the block looking for a parking space, saw pedestrians, three sets, exactly the same ones I saw later walking by my car as I lurked. It was a sensation of the passage of time, as if a clock had been laid over another imperfectly, the hands crisscrossing in a pattern as fixed as the orbits of the planets.
I dilly dally
the day away while the planets
stick to their orbits.
4.9.07
The first day back from Phoenix, where Elizabeth and I helped to organize and channel her parents’ and brother’s obsessions into saner conversations, and celebrated the parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. On the trip Elizabeth, Elly and I went to Patagonia, where I walked a mile up a dry creek bed and centered myself among the lives of courting Gambel’s quail, kestrels, western kingbirds, so many other precious species.
Today I met with B- and brought my centered self to a discussion about a vision of the school that becomes inclusive, inspired and fair. B- has had to fire people. Achieving a vision is not painless. I met with S- and became more centered around my novel, and helped her to become moreso around hers. I met with D- and helped her struggle with the firings at Columbia, as well as to grasp in firmer hands her lovely Caribbean poems.
Supporting my students, then, and after that sick Eleanor, who told me her dream of cats flying, landing on the chandelier and licking the crystals there. We sang “Fais Dodo” and “Hush Little Elly” to get her to sleep. It seems as if I have been able to help people recently. For so long, I really only wanted to help myself. Now a shell has fallen away. What if I hadn’t lived long enough to break out and be available for folks? I heard from David about Jim McElduff’s unexpected discovery of cancer, metastasized throughout his body, a death sentence at 51. It doesn’t look as though Jim will live to see his still built. Have I lived long enough to take care my business?
I’ve seen the kestrels
courting in the cottonwood trees –
mission accomplished.
5.1.07
The world in Brooklyn and Long Island aglow with blossoms. My sinuses aflow with snot. No matter. Through my three workshops, an immersion into a rich jungle of words. Discussing the words, writing about them, I recalled the moment listening to the white-throated sparrow outside Carol Varsalona’s house. This evoked memories of Memphis, when I listened closely to the faintly mournful, hypnotic sound of the same species uttering its dialect as I worked in the upstairs room at Ray Hill’s house.
In my writing I described these days as days of misspent youth, but that isn’t accurate. Troubled, focused…a spirit struggling in a net of unchecked impulses, less than perfect empathy, and dubious ambitions. Where did Ray’s faith come from, to support me? Now, so long after his death, I return that faith in my work with teachers, and in these words right here, right now. On the ride home I listened to NPR’s report on the carbon atoms that structure the foundations of life, their need to bond, the energy released when the bond is broken, the marriage of the freed but lonesome atoms to the atoms of oxygen, producing the carbon dioxide that blankets the earth and melts the icecaps by reflecting back the rays of the sun that attempt to escape. We die, the carbon doesn’t. We become the petroleum that we consume that becomes the net that might, unless we can think fast and feel certain, consume us. Curious, worth thinking about as I go about my business of using words and spirit to lift the spirits of teachers. Not a bad expenditure of energy, but in the end I am no more than the next entity trickling its way toward fossilhood.
The white throated sparrow
sang its song of the carbon atom
in two separate cities.
5.15.07
Almost every day I have the intense fulfillment of looking into the faces of teachers as they think and feel their way through lessons to students. I investigate the faces of students, too, but it is the teachers who mean so much to me. The more I get to know them, the deeper go my feelings. Now, for instance, I am thinking of SG, who is open-minded and brilliant and as calm and centered as a meditation master. She is a dancer, with a light body and delicate face, with a gaze as sharp as a hawk’s but as kind as a mother’s. Yesterday in our conference she talked about the power of writing, and I suggested she use that idea as the guiding understanding of her coursework. We looked at Richard Wright’s haiku, which she had pasted to the center of large pieces of chart paper, for the students to have a “chalk talk” around. Today I shared one of mine, the one written in the Teacher Center:
Cut roses inside.
Outside the window?
Red winter berries.
In one of our conversations today I made a wry comment, “And guess what we’re working on in skills class? Skills! Imagine!” She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then said, “Oh, you’re being sarcastic.” I had to be careful to explain that I wasn’t dissing DG, a person, but the whole lack of focus in the school on skills themselves. I told the story of how DG’s class behaved so much better and learned so much more content with this focus on skills. But still I felt like I had been educated. Why did I use sarcasm? Was it necessary? By coincidence, DG had earlier in the day discussed the root of the word sarcasm with us: to bite the lips in rage, or bite at the flesh.
Another teacher whose face comes into focus today is A-’s, when she said that she, S- and K- had already picked out candidates to be Elly’s tutor next year. So many good people are taking care of Elly, going out of their way to think of things she needs, and no prompting from me. This is what it’s like to be embraced by the world? I can only aspire to embrace the world as warmly.
Do you want to
learn the skill of love? Study
a true teacher’s face.
6.19.07
This is a bit on the existential side, to try and write in a state of exhaustion after being irritated with my daughter, and others, at regular points throughout the day. What is irritation, anyway? Why do we lose tone? Is it the heat? The pressure? The lack of time to reflect? To be inspired? That’s rather why I’m writing this, to redeem the day. What can redeem the day?
Here’s an idea: the word soar, which I have inserted into the mission statement I am drafting for one of my schools. Some react as if the word were a piece of fluff, but as a birdwatcher, it is anything but a fluffy word. For my part, I have a reaction against the word fluff. It’s too easy to call something you don’t agree with fluff. I’m comparing the way the words roll off the tongue now. Fluff rolls out like a cheeky huff, ridiculous, an expectorative word that drifts, once emitted through flatulent lips, with every light breeze.
Soar has dignity. It is has the power of a sigh of fulfillment. It shares the sprung-from-a-trap onset with the cry of a red-tail hawk as it – well – soars majestically above a landscape. I soar when I hear the word soar and take delight in speaking it. A critic of the word claimed today that it was the kind of word you’d see on a poster in the guidance counselor’s office. My response? We can’t let the trivializers steal our best language. We have to reclaim the powerful words and put them back to good use. Shelley didn’t quail at the word in To a Skylark:
High still and higher,
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
Shakespeare didn’t flutter in the face of the word soar when he wrote Romeo and Juliet:
You are a lover; borrow Cupid’s wings,
And soar with them above a common bound…
Why should we stay on the ground? Why can’t we breathe (inspire) and soar as we wish? I am full of conviction in the word soar tonight. Thinking of it is redeeming me. Through it I have been invited into the company of Shelley (who was a selfish scoundrel and all around cad, I’ll admit) and Shakespeare (no flies on him, that I know of.) Nevermind that Wordsworth said, “Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.” Milton fights back, and quite personally, with this:
I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
Don’t we want our students going beyond the middle flight to pursue things unattempted yet – and bravely (another word in the mission statement)? Here, in my personal tradition inspired by the likes of Basho, Buson and Issa, I write my humble poem on the word:
Two mornings ago
I saw the osprey soar with its catch
above Jamaica Bay
7.11.07
Practically every minute this year I was doing, hardly every reflecting, or cleaning out my room. The summer’s hardly any better. My office is a wretched dust-encrusted trash heap and I still don’t have time to clean. Today was little different, with one exception. I was able to sit at the dining table for a while and listen to the sounds of Geogia’s and Elly’s delighted voices as they played in her room. The world had landed in a cheerful spot. I looked beyond the table to the living room, at the leaves on the plane tree outside our window, the view sliced by the slats of the Venetian blinds.
In all such moments since our visit to Asheville I think of Jim and Kathy, their journey toward Jim’s probable death. My memories of the visit include a walk along a streambed overturning stones to find salamanders, investigating wildflowers by the side of the road on a remote hillside, staring at the smoky blue of the mountains flowing away superimposed on each other like musical movements, hiking through the pasture to identify birds and talk about a youth misspent chasing crazy women, selecting tiles from Kathy’s series “Constrained, Contained, and Confined.”
I remember the invasion of the insects our first night in the bunkhouse, all of their imaginative structures and ways of moving, frenetic, feeling their way along with their twitching antennae, leaping acrobatically, wagging their abdomens suggestively, desperately circling the light.
I remember talking to Jim about his writing, finally getting past my own dread that he had already passed over, in some essential way, to the land of shades. One thing that felt right was telling him what I wanted in his writing: lessons from his journey, any thoughts that might come to him along the way. It also felt just about right to reason through all of the issues, find themes, make meaning out of the process of finding meaning in the writing. He has written back that he will read about the battle for Troy to inform him in his next lesson, as he waits in “the catbird seat” of his chemo drip, which is delivered through a port installed beneath his skin on his chest. (His body has become a development project, tubes and instruments invading the natural habitat.) He wrote that it was good to have a friend of 20, 30, 40 years come to visit. I agreed. I said maybe Homer could be counted among his friends, as well.
Me at home in Brooklyn.
Jim in an Asheville hospital.
Two catbirds in their seats.
7.15.07
Today touring the American Museum of Natural History with Makayla and Elly, Makayla doing her best to adapt to NYC as a bumpkin from Arizona/Oregon, as a new-age Pippi Longstocking full of tales of death, destruction and general human woe. How does a child of eleven get to be so imaginatively delusional and manipulative? I instituted a zero tolerance policy on trash talk as they explored the depths of their insecurity. At the museum: Dinosaurs, Cosmic Collisions. We have been a family in formation the last few days. Yesterday A Chorus Line with Makayla’s grandmother and her grandmother’s friend, two ticket writers from Phoenix.
Then the anniversary dinner with Jeff and Elsa at One if By Land, Two if By Sea, where Jeff laughed in outraged amazement at the size of the check. I drank for the first time in a year. And today I’m eating ice cream again, along with my yearly peach pie. Oh the drama of the little bourgeois comforts we deny/allow ourselves in succession.
Meanwhile I’m reading Sebald and his streaming meditations on the way our civilization is built on a hecatomb of skeletons, victims of our capitalist brutality. I suppose the AMNH is an institution like so many that arises from midden heap of greed and exploitation. At one point during the day, as I was waiting for the girls to finish choosing their lunch platters in the “food court.” I thought about how I probably wouldn’t have been able to coordinate such a complex adventure before, psychologically or in terms of organizational skill. I myself would have been the disturbed one, but am now more clear. This has been a miraculous journey, from where I started to whatever modicum of clarity I’ve achieved. We’re such sensitive neural machines, us humans, compared to the reptiles in our evolutionary lineage.
In the busy food court
I helped two girls choose items –
pizza, salad and ice cream
7.18.07
A few days ago, after getting back from North Carolina, I sent Jim this poem by Miklos Radnoti to follow up with a conversation we had had at his cabin, overlooking a scenic pasture:
Postcard
4
I fell next to him. His body rolled over.
It was tight as a string before it snaps.
Shot in the back of the head–“This his how
you’ll end.” “Just lie quietly,” I said to myself.
Patience flowers into death now.
“Der springt noch auf,” I heard above me.
Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear.Szentskiralyszabadja
October 31, 1944
(translated by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks)
(“Der springt noch auf” means something like, “Wait till you see this guy break open.”)
The reason I sent the poem was to show him an example of a person sending messages back from a tough journey. Radnoti was on a forced march across Hungary when he wrote the piece, and was murdered by the Nazis not long after. I felt that while Jim’s journey was more hopeful, writing his “lessons” would nevertheless be of use to us who would face similar journeys in the future but might not be able to imagine them now. Jim wrote back, “I like the idea…. Today my fingertips hurt so much that each keystroke feels like a splinter being driven beneath the nail. A day of short messages…” Later Jim wrote a journal entry in Caringbridge and referred to bear meat as a noun he could recall, whereas verbs eluded him while under the influence of his chemo drip. I wrote back on Caringbridge two words: “Bear meat?” intending to be wryly humorous. Jim wrote me an e-mail today that reads as follows:
I was randomly thinking of subjects and objects that had come through the door or into my head in the last few days. Had I posted the piece after last Thursday, the list would have included “four foot black snake” right before living room. My Roman pump was rasping away at my side and I was lightly holding onto the kitchen counter for stability when I spied a big snake under the rocking chair in the living room. Luckily my friend Charles had just arrived for a visit. Being more comfortable with those things, he gently picked it up and put it back outside. As it was though, the notion of bear meat was still playing in my head when I edited the piece for posting. Actually, it was bear liver that I was thinking of, but somehow I can remember that. The relatively more generic concept of bear meat is harder to hook. Oscar, just a day or so before you got here, had been describing to me how he intended to cook the liver that a hunter gave him in May. Someone killed a bear up in the woods just behind where you and I sat for a while that Saturday morning in the pasture. Had I been onto the idea at that time, “bear meat” might have qualified that day as the basis for my haiku.
His segues reminded me of Sebald’s segues in Rings of Saturn. I love it when you can get away with meanderings along what William Stafford called the “golden thread.” Why, in my own meanderings, am I thinking of a teacher I worked with today in relation to the idea of bear meat and the conversation about it? Maybe it’s the idea of the vulnerability that inadvertently rises to the surface in this discussion. The teacher seemed a bit wounded by life but brave nonetheless, and ready to use her best energy for the benefit of her colleagues and her students. Her name is L-. She teaches English to 7th and 8th graders in West Babylon, a blue-collar town on Long Island. No bears on Long Island any longer, that I know of. It’s one endless suburb in bands of wealth, poverty and the shades between.
A bear was shot
behind the spot in the pasture
where Jim and I talked.
Since last week we have delivered Elly to camp, visited with Sandi and Russell, gone for a nice sail in a Friendship Sloop on Penobscot Bay, driven through the labyrinths of highways north and east of town, seen our shelves fall, breaking S-‘s bowls, which I have carried with me for nearly forty years, entertained Larry and Lisa, struggled through the chaos of a week with too much to do, and ended with the kind of oxytocin-producing contact that teaches you what marriage is all about. I suppose that summarizes the week well enough. Why do I now think of shopping with Elizabeth this evening at the Fairway? Did I open up just a bit to the spectacle of it, the produce, the deli, the organic thises and imported thats and the stock boys working as hard as bees patching cell walls in a crowded hive? We were in too much of a hurry to go out back to look at the waters of the bay, but I did see them through the window shortly after picking up a little bag of loose green tea that looked very much like a lid of marijuana – here a memory of the old days. How deeply I am digging into the brain cells to find that word lid. Who would have expected it to pop up tonight? And I bought a little metal tea strainer exactly like the kind we used to use in the hippy days. Indeed, the adventure at Fairway carried mists about it from those long ago experiments in coming to life, which swirled in and out of consciousness, massaging my sensibility, make me feel replete with experience and alive in my senses. How wonderful to have a wife with whom to go shopping.
New York Harbor and
Penobscot Bay are connected
tonight – like lovers.
9.3.07
Labor Day. Last night the steel drums pounding dreamily as they passed on Eastern Parkway. Today the blasting stadium speakers announcing the arrival of another troupe of befeathered, near-naked dancers from one of the Caribbean islands. Elizabeth and I can barely brave he chaos and the noise to get some curry chicken and fried plaintain. The music out there penetrating our bodies to rattle our organs – in a kind of massage if you’re able to surrender.
Earlier in the day, discussions about whether to buy a share in Elk Creek Café, which brought about the analysis of our finances. What we have saved for retirement, for college, for rainy days. Not nearly enough. And hard to say the yes that would lift my spirits.
We had a family meeting about the upcoming school year, establishing rules. We got through it with much expression of emotion. And took Elly off the computer freeze that had been in effect since the incident in Anchorage.
I am having to make decisions about work, money, raising Elly, and my energy feels in decline. I am feeling a kind of despair, with so many hard decisions that are not smoothly made. I did not meditate today, and am not embracing this despair with Buddhist ease.
Am I becoming bitter? I fear I am becoming bitter.
At the L- School, I am a purveyor of hope and a designer of programs that have the potential to inspire. Why is it that I am losing my focus here at home? I think home must be the hardest place to keep your center, and the one that requires it the most.
Do I need to take a walk?
Alison Kraus’ voice sounds pretty good on the sound system now. And I am able to type these thoughts. That counts for something.
Dusk falls out the back window
as the last of the noisy parade
passes in the front.
9.11.07
After dinner, Elly danced to the tunes in her cell phone, elaborate, vaudevillian enactments of comedic dread, bubbling idiocy, histrionic fandangos. I was truly amazed at her sudden burst of choreographic energy. It made me recall when she was no more than five, how she would direct me in dances with dozens of moves. This is some kind of epitome: her trillions of body cells like microscopic cities on steroids doing their business while she flings them about in anthropocentric space.
I’m aware of the idea of cells from reading the Angier book, which elicited a burst of enthusiasm when I read passages to HC today in our significant meeting on a writing initiative. H- is Elly’s teacher, having her do yeast experiments that Elly observes, analyzes, interprets. Elly can see the logic of the yeast smelling like baking bread, but not of the odor of alcohol. And of course yeast is a significant cell, a eukaryotic microorganism, a form of fungus that lurks eagerly awaiting a sweaty opportunity to invade the nether environs of our bodies.
I am thinking a lot of the way our bodies are walking metropoli packed with billions of bacteria, fungi, myriad mites and who knows what other exotic citizens oblivious of our moral codes, artistic sensibilities, athletic accomplishments and philosophical reflections. The mind looms as a weird Wizard of Oz manipulated by a backstage impostor, powerless over the thriving hordes that it can barely conceive in its most informed imagination.
And what were those tiny yellow larvae that built the shiny cellophane tents on the coxcomb blossoms on the countertop, just as tent caterpillars do on oak trees? They were as busy as the proteins that labor to keep life alive in the cytoplasm of our cells. Seemingly out of nowhere, life forms flourish all around us, brilliantly in front of us or in dark seclusion, in our daughters, in our kitchens, everywhere.
And welcome to you too,
busy larvae that teem
on the coxcomb blossoms.
Yesterday atop Hawk Mountain with Elly, Elizabeth, Kelly and Georgia, I watched the broadwings, the Cooper’s, the ospreys, the sharpshins, the red tails soar against the overcast sky. Dozens and dozens of hawks migrated through. A sharpshinned hawk dive-bombed a broadwing. Kettles of broadwings formed, sometimes including an osprey. I found it curious that the kettles would form without the sun to create thermals. Did enough heat penetrate the clouds to have the same effect? Was the updraft caused by the topography of the Pennsylvania hills? I watched the birds with a sense of vicarious satisfaction as they sliced the air on their way south. My eyes felt caressed by the soft light reflected back to me from distant vistas. Elly and Georgia went off on their own to Sunset View, then took Kelly on a trip there. Elizabeth and I found a way to be close, having overcome the latest demon-driven upheavals of trust.
that I saw soaring yesterday
over Hawk Mountain?
We stayed at an Allentown hotel that was situated awkwardly beside a showfield of prefabricated homes called “Love Homes,” hopefully because of the owner’s name. Kelly took the girls on a couple of trips to inspect them and to fantasize about living in them. At night, rows of lights decorated the roof lines, making the view out our window festive.
Construction was underway on a state highway on the other side of the hotel, and two other soulless highways converged at another corner. Somehow, despite all of the mindless abuse of the earth and of every aesthetic principle, a spirit of calm transcendence pervaded the atmosphere in the hotel. I can remember in particular looking out over Love Homes’ strings of lights, which included gaps where bulbs had burnt out, to watch the tractor-trailers move down I-78. The key was the silence. I could see, but not hear, the rectangles roll away to the west, just as I had seen the sinuous birds glide south earlier in the day.
a chaos of concrete planes. But
my hotel room’s quiet.
I forgot my folder of student work for the collaborative assessment conference and had to return to Brooklyn, never leaving the subway station at 14th Street. Finally at the school, I fought the hard flow of resistance to reflection. What is it about synthesis and reflection that bothers some people so much? Are they afraid of what will happen when all of the elements of experience are “mooshed” together? Will the atoms of thought, feeling and action fuse, go critical, explode, spread fallout over the school? Are we playing with more fire here than we calculated on? The universe born in the Big Bang, an interesting fusion of thought, feeling and action there. I am thinking of the idea of the red shift, how the Doppler effect goes cosmic, the waves waving goodbye. All my love in vain, the train leaving the station with red lights on behind. How I sang that song for Edna O’Brien at Carly Simon’s house. What an odd life I’ve led, my little contacts with fame, not the least of which being my great uncle who was the director of the Mount Palomar observatory from which Edwin P. Hubble, the Adonis Astronaut, detected the red shift that led to the deduction of the Big Bang. I sit in my humble, messy office thinking these big thoughts about these big people, who are all, in my memory, getting farther and farther away from me as the time passes. Bread rising, balloon expanding….
my folder. In the skies, the stars
forget each other.
10.2.07
Exhaustion. I scan through all of the meetings, the walkings down the street, the ideas. Maybe a list of ideas. Some of them, anyhow: Shay’s Rebellion and what it means to be a patriot; what it means to reflect on experience; culture, geography, history in the book Things Fall Apart; a schedule of things to forget; thermometers; atoms; what does it mean to compete becomes what is personality becomes what is emotion becomes what is character becomes what are we here for; visions and goals and action plans; the vocabulary of science; odes, acrostics and list poems; the shrinking Arctic ice; the effect on the body of bottling emotions; the deterioration of Linnaeus’ memory; the littoral zone.
How lucky I am to spend a day with such notions, even if I was exhausted, even if a young lady cried when a young man claimed the god in whom she believed was the cause of the world’s suffering, even if my heartburn returns with the hubristic delusion I can drink wine and tea and eat most anything I can put my hands on.
Here’s something odd: I don’t recall seeing any wild animals today. Usually I see, at the very least, my share of gulls, sparrows, pigeons. They were there (they must have been), but the ideas must have clouded my eyes. And in my freewrite at the Teachers as Writers lunch I had written, “Am I developing, after all the false starts, a theme? A theme of seeing? Of finding in what I see a truth made manifest?” It’s a dangerous world when you can’t see what’s there for being blinded by ideas, the most pernicious being the idea that you are seeing when you are doing nothing of the kind.
pigeons, gulls, or sparrows.
Where were they hiding?
10.7.07
I dreamt so many remembered dreams last night. I got swindled by drunken mechanics. I gave hope to urban adolescents. I ate quarters to the point of fatal toxicity. I stayed in Muslim hotels. I found a woman’s dildos in her backpack. I felt shame, fear, exhilaration, guilt, curiosity. I studied the nature of dreams as a dreamer, making the claim that the detail of reality in dreams was as perfect as the detail of reality in waking life. When I woke up with this thought, I found it curious, but the passion I had experienced while having it in my sleep was profound.
We discover passions in unpredictable moments, I think. When Elly had her bike accident today I became the tenderest of fathers and all sins were forgiven. Sometimes making love to Elizabeth I find myself overwhelmed with a kind of open desire that surprises me.
These passions are different than the emotions that can be aroused by schmaltzy movie music. I can cry like a baby in the movies, but it really doesn’t feel cathartic. I read in the newspaper today that no-one knows what Aristotle meant by the term catharsis. I had always been under the impression it meant something on the order of, “But for the grace of God, there go I…” But the account today said you got to be glad because incest, patricide and the like only happened to royalty and you were off the hook. There’s a difference to me. In the first case, you are purged. In the second, merely reassured. I like my old long time understanding. I want to feel catharsis.
I felt it last night in my dreams. Theater – art – can have that quality of a purging dream then, I suppose. Freud would certainly have made that case. But Freud is discredited. I can only go by the evidence of my experience and my senses.
fell off its stem, but opened anyway
in the small white cup.
10.19.07
How can a brain fire well enough to produce coherence after a day, a week, of non-stop work? Maybe coherence isn’t necessary. A list of images:
- A dictatorial principal stamping her feet against reading words in the classroom.
- Marauding starlings plundering red berries in a hedge.
- Driving in the rain through the dark before dawn along the now familiar byways of Long Island.
- Sullen teachers becoming animated, coaxed to life by the voices of their fellows.
- The poison left by bitter, insensitive, narrow minded people.
- The radiant smiles on the faces of Eleanor’s teachers.
- Fight or flight in response to torn leadership at Lab.
- Watching the squirrel on the fence then on the tree, carrying a nut, twitching its tail, then coming to a perfect standstill as the airplane passes.
What is it that makes a squirrel’s tail move about like that?
The many writings that don’t take place in stories and novels, the knowing that the working of the material is everything regardless of the dimensions of time one inhabits. There is a kind of eternity to art – as an impulse – just as the principles driving life transcend the incarnation of individuals.
It takes the jet’s shadow
to stop the twitching
of the squirrel’s crazy tail.
10.21.07
Yesterday the allergies then the Sheep and Wool festival, where acres of yarn stretched across the fields of Rhinebeck. Apple fritters, Frisbee dogs, French fries, llamas, Angora rabbits. Angora goats. Mohair. Now there’s a word worth riffing on.
That night talking to Pat Muller, a retired dancer from ABT who had danced on Broadway with Agnes DeMille in Pal Joey and other productions. She organized the Tango Café. She touched my arm a lot when she spoke. We were able to connect at some theatrical wavelength, especially around the idea of sacrificing art to have a normal life with a family.
On the way home listening to rock and roll hits from the 80’s. “Shooting at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am the warrior.” I think that’s how it goes. “Love is the Kill.” And listening to the Irwin Shaw story, “Girls in Summer Dresses.” How gently he captures the theme of irrepressible attraction to beautiful girls.
Today the struggle to meet with Elly and have her conform to norms of the civilized world. Being accused in family meeting of being hypocritical, then treated lovingly throughout a stroll through the Botanic Garden where among so many other beautiful life forms we gazed at the robust pale phallic blooms of the Giant Elephant Ear plant from Malaysia, with its leaves the size of ping-pong tables. We watched the seeds of the cattails take wing across the Cherry Esplanade. Elly caught one. We watched the bees pollinate the flowers.
All so summery here in late October, the reports of droughts coming from East and West. I noticed the robins flitting back and forth between the treetops, chasing each other aggressively. I had seen so many over the past few weeks. I wondered if they had stopped migrating because of the temperate weather they were finding here, but sensed something wasn’t right. Or were they fighting over territory as if it were mating season, as if winter just didn’t exist anymore?
Yesterday’s overheard comment, “This whole problem of global heating may be coming at us far faster than anyone has realized.” Sure seems possible. Meanwhile, I change a few light bulbs to fluorescents to save energy. I’ll probably use the a/c tonight, add my energy to the feedback loop.
Jim’s lines on the drought in NC, that I turned into a poem:
FALL DROUGHT
Fall has established itself
though it’s dry as a bone.
I pray in front of the reservoir
every morning and evening.
The trickling sounds
of the water falling out of the overflow pipe
are like the muezzin’s call.
My lines:
in the late October heat,
the robins are fighting.
10.27.07
So after I had my snack, and read about the splitting of evangelicals in their weird ideas about the gospel and politics, I found myself sitting alone in my quiet house rubbing my hands together, appreciating the fatty deposits beneath the skin in heels of my palms, the satisfying feel of the skin rubbing the skin, the evolutionary design of the five fingers and the opposable thumb. I studied the various fingers and was forced as a consequence to take a longer look at the middle finger of my right hand, which is a truncated archeological record of my life. Beneath the skin of the first joint above the knuckle joint (metacarpal, phalanges, I search for the word) is a black spot of graphite from a sharpened pencil I was flipping during a class in middle school, and which speared my finger spectacularly. The skin of the metacarpal (is it?) at the end of my finger is obliquely marked with the scar of an accident with a dock board when I worked for Malone & Hyde distributing supplies to drugs stores in Memphis. (Ou sont les supplies d’antan? Long evaporated ointments and cartons perhaps still decomposing in the deeper layers of dumps.) The scar is white. Keloid? Hypertrophic? I don’t know. It’s a streak of shiny, dimpled white across the universe of my fingerprint.
I will die with my graphite period in the middle of my middle finger and the meteoric marking across the skin at its tip.
Study the design of your fingers.
What do you feel? See?
or, maybe more to the point, ha ha:
the whole of human history:
my middle finger.
10.28.07
I quote a letter I wrote to Jim:
Jim, I’ve been meaning to get back to you but events and obligations have been popping up like Halloween zombies and warding me off. I’ll write the thorough letter, and thank you note, that you deserve when I have a moment to concentrate. In the meantime, I’m thinking of you guys often, trying to send some of our rain down via Uri Geller-like manipulations of matter. I guess it hasn’t worked very well. One anecdote: I was buying Wild Boar Pate at a gourmet place today and both the youngish (coulda been you or me 30-40 years ago) guys behind the counter had wild boar stories. One was chased across a river by a wild boar in Florida when he was 12. I said well now he had his revenge being able to serve wild boar pate to gourmands like myself. That’s when the other guy kicked in and said the way to elude a wild boar was to run as fast as you can toward a tree, take a right-angle turn right before the tree, and the wild boar will run into the tree and knock itself out. The first guy said he really wasn’t thinking too much about strategy. He was just running. Well, the second guy said, he knew a guy who liked to catch wild boars with two dogs, a hunting knife, and large twist ties. The dogs would each grab a different end of the animal and stretch it out so he could use the twist ties to bind the legs. By now the first guy was a little tired of the second guy one-upping him so he asked me if I knew of Willie Nelson, who wrote “Crazy” for Patsy Cline (which I didn’t know, inasmuch as I do know a bit about WN.) I said yes, I did know a bit about Willie Nelson. He said Willie Nelson had a pig farm for a while and learned to hate those pigs so much that he’s been getting his revenge on them ever since one slice of bacon at a time. I felt sorry for the guy and refrained from telling about when I bought a pig for our sorry little farm outside Memphis, named Fatima, who attacked me suddenly from a dead sleep when I tried to get her to follow some simple instructions via ESP (Uri Geller-like). Anyway, the wild boar pate was delicious. As always, D. PS: Has Oscar eaten the bear liver yet? I was thinking about him after listening to a lecture on tape about Faulkner’s “The Bear.”
The pate was for an afternoon of wine and hors d’ouvres with the downstairs neighbors. We talked a lot about education and raising children. The wild boar story didn’t interest them as much as it might Jim. But at least I didn’t get the cold reception from the neighbors that I did from a colleague at work when I told her the Oscar story about running girls down on a horse and sparking them.
you can’t tell wild stories
to just anyone.
11.1.07
On the way out to Rockville Centre at dawn, watching the sun’s light play its slow-motion symphony of color on the underside of the sculpted clouds, a complement to the scene out the window of the gym last night when I watched the first movement in this symphony over Grand Army Plaza, the clouds like a wing with feathers flying loose, catching the spectral light in equally slow motion. The headlights cars circled the Arch of Victory below like flecks cast off from the clouds, moving at a steady clip. In minutes the clouds became leaden and the lights all belonged to the humans below.
On the way out to Rockville Centre, listening to the lecture on the Norse gods Odin, Thor, Loki and the like. How the talk must have gone on and on in the halls of the Jarls. Valhalla, Asgard…the Valkyries maybe painting the scenes I saw? Eerie chills running up my spine to think of the sunset seen through the centuries by the tribes with their warriors, projecting their gods into the light. Sol chased by Skoll. Skoll chased by Sol. Round and round and round…
The workshop today, spirits high, but I cry when I write of the demise of the bees, on the heels of the frogs. The most delicate of creatures dying from the stress, a dark foreboding of our own descent into hell? Are we not then approaching our own Darwinian Ragnorok? It’s hard not be a doomsayer, when the frogs and the bees are dying, and when you are from a long line of Scandinavian doomsayers.
But the counterbalancing lightness of the work with the teachers today. Why do some groups make music purely from the good natures together in the room? A kind of emotional music arises. Laughter emerges. Accomplishments bloom. Other groups bring a kind of anger, a repressed and neurotic force that must be exorcised professionally by the truth of the ideas and the design of the lesson.
At lunch I listened to a wonderful Levon Helm song, followed by the Grateful Dead, “Don’t’ Murder Me.” The wizened bards and charming court jesters of my generation. A private moment with them on the radio waves.
So many layers, then. The Big Bang producing the matter of the matter. My solar system producing the sunlight to spawn the sunset. Evolution producing my species through the billions of years of life on the planet. My species producing the gods that track the sun across the sky. My own eyes to celebrate the sky and to grieve over the destruction we’ve wrought on our own house.
One of the workshop participants, who is getting married this summer, a young woman in love with her life, her job, hopefully her betrothed, declared toward the end of the workshop, “I believe in creation, but this information about natural selection has made me think.”
then the sunrise this morning:
return of the old gods?
11.5.07
Crammed into the mass of Brooklyn bodies today. The adults on the way to work, clogging the subway doors, suspended from handholds, hovering over and all about. At the clinic seeing Dr. Ajl, the wailing babies and all the mothers so young with their children, their cell phones, their strollers and carriages.
And at Lab the mothers of sixth graders there for the town meeting, and the halls swarming with the bodies of the kids, the teachers, the hall monitor Melissa. On the walls all of the project work, papers flying off to die like unfortunate birds beneath the trampling feet.
I think my views of the masses of people I encountered today are colored by Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever, which describes the lemming-like outpouring of bodies from famine-struck Ireland. Ship after ship. Sickness claiming wide swaths of the bodies like a sickle. The filth and stench and lost hope. And the conflict: do you turn the Irish away to certain death, or risk your own population’s demise from exposure to typhus?
And Darwin exhorting us “never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that the heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or the old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals.”
These days I’m constantly mindful of both the increase and the destruction. Mindful as well of my own doom. Mindful of the nature of my body as just another meat puppet, just another bag of bones. Mindful of the spirit of it all too. Did natural selection make joie de vivre an adaptive trait? Or is it inherent in the inorganic nature of the universe? I don’t mind ascribing joyousness to those vibrating atoms at the bottom of it all, and a kind of symphony to the collective performance of those dervish-like bits of matter.
kindly feeds the bottle
to her baby sister
at the clinic.
11.18.07
A sweaty dance in the cafeteria for the middle school students. A Bar Mitzvah for Spencer. The reception at which I danced to R&B classics. Contact with old friends. So many layers of commentary on our lives and times, from David’s brother Chris telling about his attempt to start a career as a salesman of surgical and pharmaceutical products. David’s son Forrest talking about low and high context cultures, reminding me of guilt and shame based cultures. Unspoken memories of past near-liaisons with figures at the party. A daughter hiding from her mother the fact that she met her husband via personal ads. The mother a sour old puss who puts down her son and seems bent on spreading a buttery layer of shame and guilt on everything she touches. Oh, the repression in this Calvinist ancestry of hers, and my friends’, and mine.
The moment that lives as vividly as any is maybe the moment I needed the most: to spend a few moments watching the birds in the woods by David and Stephanie’s house. I noticed the downy woodpecker’s anatomically miraculous neck action as it pounded the bark of fallen limbs to stir up insects. How it drilled, ate its tidbit, looked for the next landing site on a nearby branch in some mathematically interesting random pattern of choices. Combing the branches also in subtly different ways, exploiting infinitesimally different niches, the titmice and the chickadees. Scratching about in the multicolored leaf litter the fox sparrow, the white-throated sparrow, the junco. They too so similar but doubtless also as separated in their approaches and food sources as coyotes and wolves. Bluejays. A lonely unkempt robin high in the branches. Too weak to migrate? These will clearly be its last days, as the cold approaches. I catch each bird in the frame of the binocular lens and study its busy perfection, notice the delicate legs and claws of a chickadee as it clings momentarily to a twig and think of the match between form, function and habitat.
Before leaving the small patch of woods, I stop to listen to the tap tapping and cheeping and chicka dee-dee-deeing, and the rustling. Then on my way out I think of the energy expended in the cell division and metabolism that built the trees, the leaf-litter, the insects, the birds, and the subsequent and consequent topsoil. I think of the chemistry behind each transaction and see myself as a concentration of related substances and forces with my own weight, my own temporality, and I know my days are as numbered as the robin’s. I suspect that the robin is simply living its days without bemoaning its fate, and feel as if at least for this few reflective seconds I might too be able to simply embody the energetic transition of matter from form to form without bringing any special pleading or anticipatory grief to the occasion. This feels like just about the right thing.
takes in the view from its perch
above the fallen leaves.
11.29.07
Flowing into me throughout the day the old news of Auden’s evolution as a Christian. “To pray,” Auden wrote, “is to pay attention, or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.” Well, this sounds an awful lot like Buddhism to me, or a marriage of Buddhism with some Thomas Merton style of Christianty. He must have been conscious of that. By the end of his life Auden had moved from his boyhood response to ritual as a magical excitement to his view of rite as “the link between the dead and the unborn. As such, it requires a timeless language which, in practice, means a dead language.” I found it interesting that, when asked by the rector of St. Mark’s in the Bowery (where friends and I read our poetry on various occasions) to help write an experimental modernized liturgy, he complied, but then stopped attending that church, and instead attended a Russian Orthodox church nearby where the liturgy was still in Old Church Slavonic. (And I’m pulling much of these sentences from the New York Review of Books article by Edward Mendelson.) I can understand this, especially after the recent bar mitzvah, where I felt the voices of the dead uttered by the boy as I felt my own creaky bones sinking toward the clay.
And I am thinking too of the politics I am involved in at one of my schools, the secrets I hold, the intrigues I am part of, how it is in human nature to get drawn into these things under the rubric of loyalty to a person, or belief in a cause, or both. I blundered on Tuesday and nearly blew the cover off our plot to a person who couldn’t hear of it at this point without doing considerable damage. Conspiracies, like humor, require precision of timing or the results are disastrous. And shame can be the product. So in the wake of my near miss on Tuesday, I have been feeling a kind of shame, along with the resolve that I am not really cut out to be Arthur Schlesinger to the principal’s John Kennedy. I should just hone my own oyster knife as Zora Neale Hurston’s character does, and not get too much dark drama dammed up in my soul. I need to listen as carefully to G- as I do to V-, who he is judging harshly, and who I am protecting. I need to listen as carefully as I have always done to all my teachers. That is beauty, and I have written about it. Listening to a teacher, paying attention to a landscape.
This evening doing my best to pay attention to the carrots I sliced, the thin ones from the farmer’s market, that developed their orange brilliance in the lightless soil as the multiplying cells played out their Hades-bound fate. And the compound carotene declaring its wondrously colorful molecular identity in the feathers of ibises and flamingoes. The texture of the carrot firm but yielding succulently to the slicings of the knife blade. A depressing day all day long not being able to write or celebrate anything, but filing papers with the TV playing B-Movie westerns in the background, Charles Starrett playing the Durango Kid, taming the west with his two fists and his six gun, Tex Ritter and his Texas Playboys tagging along for the ride. The satisfaction of justice delivered. And the amazing performance of the horses. All is well in Dusty Gulch (as long as we keep the extermination of the Indians out of mind), and all is well with me now because of that carrot. I was getting tired of that stick….
The carrot’s cover
blown by the edge of the knife –
sunrise in a stick!
12.7.07
A day spent hauling literacy books to the tinny collage of a neighborhood around PS 124, like a pack animal. At home, dozing in a chair like an old man while Elly and Elizabeth got ready for their party. Then I watched the movie Master and Commander. What do you make of a title like that?
If a movie is what you bring to it, it was a great movie. A ship stripped and re-rigged, cursed and blessed. A ship commanded by a leader who lost his way and found it again. England on the open sea. A proto-Darwin robbed of his chance to make Darwin’s conclusions by the necessity to turn the French into flattened crepes. Heroes live and die for their cause, drink their grog, and don’t complain about being pressed into service. I couldn’t help but identify with the naturalist going after his flightless cormorant and playing with his beetles.
Let’s see, did I encounter a beetle today? I barely noticed a single bird. Just one gull flying over the new building going up catty corner to the school. And in Matt Sharpe’s book Jamestown the gull being shot to prevent eyes being gouged out while the characters take a nap at their beach house.
wheels above the skeleton
of the new building.
12.9.07
Herbie Hancock is issuing Miles Davis sounds from the round rig behind the computer screen to which I am far more married than my wife, of late.
A light above the speaker illuminates a photo of the field behind the tool shed at Larry Wolken’s farm in West Virginia, from which I observed the turkey vultures wheeling in to stand like sitting ducks in a hay meadow, from which I witnessed a fox slinking along the fenceline to a farm, from which I watched countless goldfinches and a family of indigo buntings make a home in the nearby brush. The power lines in the picture droop between the poles that stand like dancers attached at the hip, hanging their arms parallel to their torsos. I feel a sense of sadness at how the moment of the photograph has captured the image of the grasses where the mower couldn’t reach, below the barbed wire fence. That moment will never be here again, only the image, the carcass of the moment to haunt me when I foolishly think about it too much.
Above the photograph, Albert Einstein looks at me above his signature, in which, in 1931, he wrote Mrs. Howard and had to change it to Miss. I can imagine that conversation. My great aunt the closet lesbian explaining to the light-loving Lothario the nuances of a dicey situation. Or maybe one of the secretaries in the office clued him in.
What does it mean that Einstein drifted through the edges of my family’s solar system like a wandering comet? I see him in my dreams. I am filling up with sadness again to think of lost relatives and how this particular one couldn’t really come out, even though she had her lover.
Members of my tribe have roamed throughout California and the Southwest now, from teaching in Needles (grandmother) to book store managing in Marin County. The sense of my family and all of the sadness of my lost sister Caroline and my mother, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Ike being told they were too intelligent to adopt the child they wanted. This is vertigo. This is a vortex. It takes me back through cellular time through all of the unknown stories of the unknown organisms that through meiosis and brutal defense for survival, got me here. I am so sad.
Elizabeth is working too much and I’m working too much and there’s no time for contact and the vortex spins and spins.
But Herbie Hancock’s tickling his ivories. And I’m tapping my keys.
Forget the lost ones,
just mind the way you spell
the word piano.
Normans. Normandy. Vassals. Duchy. The end of the Carolingian Empire. The men from the north, having spent their careers raping and pillaging, retire by becoming vassals to Charles the Simple. Tip him over for access when asked to kiss his foot. Their savvy leader Rolf. Normandy’s extraordinary power, extending this way and that throughout Europe. And my personal memories of the tower with bones sticking out of the wall at the bottom of the hill in Lillebonne, where William the Conqueror planned his attack on England (or so the local legend goes.) No plaques on the tower there, at that time. Just the tower, at the edge of a compound, accessible to all. With those bones sticking out. And nearby a dovecote. I think I’m remembering the shrubbery, certainly the spirals stairs within the tower, with the slotted windows, the general feeling of mold and the musty smell and a wondrous pre-adolescent’s sense of history. I didn’t know the Viking history. I didn’t know my own Scandinavian roots. I made no substantial connections, until now, nearly fifty years later. English roots, Swedish roots, connected on the Western coast of France before it was France. Republican Candidate Huckabee asks, thinking of Republican Candidate Romney, “Don’t the Mormons think Jesus and Satan are brothers?” The uproar over this. As if human nature itself didn’t contain all possibilities. My Viking roots, my Norman connections, in the mix a pacifist somewhere. Life is connected to life. What’s the big stir about? And all built of inorganic materials. How fervently we cling to our beliefs. An odd coincidence that after listening to the Viking tapes a teacher said, discussing the memorability of projects, that she remembered building a Viking ship when she was young. Practically the only thing she remembered from school. Then I’m in a classroom where project work is going on about the Egyptians, and a girl asks me if I’ve ever heard of the Egyptian paper folding art of adami. I say I haven’t. She proceeds to make me a beautiful origami bird from blue paper, which is the essence of sweetness, and I am touched, the old Viking. But I lose the bird in my travels through the school. I go back to look in every room, but can’t recover the bird. Teachers do beautiful work but do it without the support of the leaders. They can’t find their lost faith. I can’t do much about it except to give them a little of my heart and share an ironic laugh or two. I’m so often confronted with the sheer idiocy and insensitivity and stupidity of human nature. What can you do but shrug, maybe laugh, just plow ahead and hope you’re not too stupid yourself.
made me an origami bird.
Where did I leave it?
Engaging the unengageable 7th grade children: maps of their neighborhoods, stories of their lives, and mathematical words. “This is refreshing.” The doves that I disturbed in the patch of grass at my end of the parking lot, who returned to sleep there, as I slept in the car. The way their wings whistled on the way out. I didn’t see or hear them return. They were there when I awoke. My conversation with M-, who showed me her journal: her rage at the doctor who advised an abortion when she discovered her breast cancer. Instead, she opted for he mastectomy and delayed treatment. The raw looking two-inch scar above the top of the dress that covered her breast. Was that where the incision was made? And she didn’t cover the scar. And she didn’t hide her story from me. So we’ll try to have writing sessions together and get more of that story. And driving home, listening to lost gospel music, watching the dance of the sun’s rays emitted from behind clouds of varying shapes. One of the more spectacular light shows I’ve seen in my life, and the car humming along just fine. I took my time. The road was golden today. I know that a million words could not describe the play of the rays among the clouds. I know that I’ve never seen anything quite like it. On the way to Amityville, the way the Vikings forced the unification of England. The story of Alfred the Great of Wessex (contrasted with Charles the Bald). This wouldn’t be a bad story, two leaders and their different responses to the trials of their lives. The Vikings, I gather, were a very trying group of people. And the King of Northumbria, Aella, who didn’t pay his Dangal (sp) and was foolish enough to fight foolishly – suffered the “blood eagle,” delivered by Ivarr the Boneless. The Vikings weren’t particularly nice folks, I gather. Tonight, packing for Phoenix, exhausted, and Elizabeth nervous about conflicts to come. We will try to build nice memories. We will build memories.
The sexy sunlight
fan dances among the clouds
over the parkway.
A quiet moment in the house. Elizabeth out with Elly and Martina for the beginning of her birthday celebration. I have been home all day trying to take care of business. Just saw a flash on TV of a tour of Graceland, Elvis’ lightning bolt, signifying taking care of business. I have also been reading in NY Review of Books about Werner von Braun, who took care of Nazi Germany’s business via lightning-like strikes on Britain with his fancy V2’s. His story’s compelling. Born into German aristocracy, his dream of manned space flight, his career building rockets, his choice to join the SS to enable him to stay in the rocket program, his expertise being valued in the US, resulting in his work with US government, then NASA, then for a corporation (Martin Marietta?). He saw his dream come true. A life threaded through a swamp of moral confusion to a tainted dream. And I heard him speak when I was sent to the science conference for HS students in Albuquerque, near the Sandia Mountains. I believe it was with the Sandia Corpration? I can’t remember. I do recall he spoke about random numbers. I wonder, looking back, if he also reflected on random fates. What was random? Nazism as a problem. What wasn’t? His love of rockets. What could make a guy like Werner von Braun give up his dreams, if the prospects of joining the SS wouldn’t? And I’m thinking too of the way that the US coopted scientists and engineers to keep them from going over to the Russians. You can lead a charmed life if you are an engineer, I suppose. I think my engineering father understood that. I can picture a conversation between my father and Werner von Braun. Talking memories of the war. Taking pride in the feats of engineering of their fatherlands (homelands? native countries?) So much assumed. And I admired Werner von Braun too, because I was signaled to. I was special, being able to attend this conference. Young people can be made to feel special, be it by the Boy Scouts, Hitler Youth, Honor Societies, Street Gangs. How much you begin to assume when you’re made to feel special. How much you also assume in another way when you’re made to feel less than an authentic entity, as Desmond Tutu discussed blacks feeling before the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Any time you’re cast as less than someone, you believe it. People believe what they’re told. I think this must be some kind of adaptation. Now I am remembering the tall, long-haired coed at Southwestern who set up an anti-Apartheid table on campus and I’d never heard of Apartheid yet I was soon to be editor of the paper. I thought she was brave, weird, advanced, dangerous. I admired her and avoided her, but I was affected by her. Then later bringing the fraternity system to its knees and reporting on the King Assassination. A full generation after that finding out the leadership of the school was sent into a kind of diaspora over this, the president losing his position and the dean moving over to the Memphis College of Art. I didn’t know the power of a voice well expressed. But I learned. And used it at Columbia, the same spirit of outrage. But what, in the end, makes me any holier that Werner von Braun? I made my choices being shaped by the baits and switches of my time. This would be an interesting thing to debate in myself. Am I any better than Werner von Braun? It would also be interesting to see a conversation between my father, my great uncle Ira Bowen, and Werner von Braun in Uncle Ike’s Mt. Palomar telescope. The oil beneath the earth driving the rockets aimed at the stars. I would be the scribe. That’s a play for the future, in which I have time to write plays, this one along with my play on Livingstone to investigate the phenomenon of race. All of this going in my mind intertwined with the news, delivered by Larry Shainberg, that Roshi died. Kyudo Nakagawa. I have a hard time remembering the name because I never use it. My mind returns to his significance in my life all day long, his way of being, rising from solemnity to delight as he finds his way to meaning in his digressive talks. His sayings and expressions. “Don’t be confused by confusion.” “Don’t complain.” His focus on posture above all. His monks found him dead on the floor at Ryutaku-ji.
look so perfect this morning?
News of teacher’s death.
1.5.08
Striding through the city to Strauss Auto, beside PS 124. When I got there, I looked up at the empty building shrouded in construction netting and thought of the work I do there. The conversations and inspirations, the fundamental happiness of the children. How lucky I am to be able to work among teachers and school children.
Yesterday’s conversation with EF, who looks and feels the emotions of a passionate Russian intellectual. After our planning session, we spoke long into the Friday afternoon in the library, animating it with our connections. I gave him alternate stances to what he’s taking as an intrusion into the sacred spaces of his classroom by the state: all the measures of accountability, the constant collection of data on the students, which impedes the teaching, when preparation for the tests is already destructive enough. I suggested that, as a competent and professional teacher, he give it a go, and if after a thorough good faith effort, he simply let the authorities know that it wasn’t working. The authorities could then respond as they wished. I reminded him what an outstanding and committed teacher he was. He did acknowledge that he was burning out, poisoning his well with bitterness.
I had been wanting to avoid him during the day because he is grinding his anti-authoritarian ax to the point of obsession. But when we talked, I felt it all worthwhile. I showed him the work I’d been doing on these “End of the Day” pieces, and said it wouldn’t have happened without his having shown me his book of haiku. I showed him one or two. I told him my teacher had died, and I showed him the haiku I had written in response to the news. When he read it, I watched him. It seemed to hit that spot that was hit by Basho and Issa for him. He quoted haiku from memory:
Sick on a journey,
over parched fields,
dreams wander on.
(Bassho)
Climb Mt. Fuji,
oh snail,
but slowly, but slowly.
(Issa)
how deep they must go
beneath the sidewalk.
to haunt the empty school
on Saturday afternoon.
1.13.08
Dug Elly out of her funk, out of her messy bedroom. Forced her on a walk to the drugstore. Easily something we could’ve done in any small town in the country. A walk with your daughter to the drugstore. On the way, as we passed Olmstead and Vaux’s trash-decorated berm of parkland between Plaza Street and the traffic streaming around the memorial arch and Bailey Fountain, with Neptune and its extravagant nudes representing Wisdom and Felicity, I heard an odd sound, something more appropriate to desolate woods than a patch of trees in a teeming city. It was a churring sound, perhaps from a squirrel? A catbird? It didn’t quite fit either. Elly was impatient. And I didn’t have my binoculars, so I kept on, but it’s hard to live with a piece of a puzzle that doesn’t fit, so I kept the corner of my eye attuned and saw an upright oval shape with a pearly gray sheen that didn’t fit quite into the arrangement of branches on a tree atop the berm. A bit of further investigation revealed it was a large raptor. An owl? Elly was too impatient.
On the trip back, after the drugstore and a latte at a café, the bird was still there. We walked on the fountain side of the berm this time and got a good view of a large redtail, looking gray in the cloudy light, but with the characteristic stippled V across the chest. I pointed it out to Elly, who eventually found it but didn’t show the kind of enthusiasm I wanted her to have, because she is a different person and a twelve-year old and only in thrall to me, not a chosen bird-watching companion. A lady at the bench over which I was pointing, who was perhaps homeless, or at least out freely awandering through her own as well as the city’s realities, looked up, saw the hawk and said, “Thank you for sharing.”
The city red tail rests
hidden in her tree.
Ideas from the day include:
- Cotton, the Fabric of Our Lives (King Cotton)
- Remorse and penance adjudicated by the undemocratic Catholic orders responsible for the missions in the far west.
- Virgil and Dante at the gate, abandoning hope, and entering, to witness the symbolic justice meted out in the Inferno, those indifferent to religion, to right, to wrong, stung by hornets as they run through dreck that consumes their feet and ankles.
- Cultural diffusion.
- Multiple intelligences.
- The structure of the bible, and the tellers of the story of Jesus (reminding me of Ray’s story of the family that named their sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and Henry.)
- The suicides of the young women in Orhan Pamuk’s
- The mathematical illogic of God as represented by John Allen Paulos, and a discussion of the fact that mathematicians believe in God at more than twice the rate of believers among scientists. But the raw data, 14% and 5% respectively (as I remember) put this into perspective. Only 14% of mathematicians believe in God, but over 51% believe in, and often physically sense, the ideal world of mathematics as Platonists.
- And did you know the most common backboned creature on our planet is a fish known as the benttooth bristlemouth, which is only found in the deep sea, at depths that until recently humankind was figured inhospitable to any life at all?
- Spinoza causing so much trouble for his fellow Jews in Amsterdam.
- The postwar generation of Germans’ shame at their parents’ behavior.
- The petty jealousies of the Greek gods.
- The effect of geography on the identity of a people.
- The agenda of the right wing Supreme Court justices.
dreams what, in the depths of the sea?
Not of me. Not of me.
Here is something worth reporting: playing pool at Brownstone billiards. Something I have longed for so long to take Elly to do. So we went with Georgia. And Elly is coordinated at it but doesn’t care to pay enough attention to make something of it. So I am left alone to take my shots and study my form and chalk my stick and celebrate the times I can shave the edge of the nine-ball just right and wonder what’s wrong with my hand-eye coordination when I miss shots. All of that familiar in the body. But the visitation of lost pool-playing partners, particularly Stokes, even memories of Philip Glass playing with us, and Stokes’ son, and older memories of John Verlenden. It was as if I were haunted there at Brownstone Billiards. I felt my body was a shell, older, abraded from being tossed in the breakers, containing the experience as if it were fresh and recent if not contemporaneous, as if Stokes had just gone to take a leak and would be right back, and I had all the time in the world to shoot pool and not have to worry about putting a life together, which I do now, as an impostor, a family man who was never really cut out to have a family. Yet my daughter wants me to sing her a lullaby and hold her hand.
Will she feel like an impostor too? Does everyone feel like an impostor?
Was it me,
or a memory of me,
shooting pool today?
In his book Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man, Jonathan D. Spence quotes Zhang Dai writing his obituary for himself:
As a youth he was a real dandy, in love with the idea of excess: he loved exquisite shelter; he loved pretty maidservants; he loved handsome serving boys; he loved bright-colored clothes; he loved perfect food; he loved handsome horses; he loved colorful lanterns; he loved fireworks; he loved the theatre; he loved the trumpets’ blare; he loved antiques; he loved paintings of flowers and birds. Besides which, seduced by tea and ravished by oranges, poisoned by stories and bewitched by poems, he drained to the lees the first half of his life, which has now become just dream and illusions…. When he turned fifty, his country was obliterated, his family erased. He hid his traces by dwelling in the mountains…. He wore cotton clothes, ate coarse vegetables, and often could not even keep his stove alight. Casting his mind back to a time twenty years before, it all seemed as if the world had been cut adrift.
Well, this reminds me of my postponed project to use comprehension strategies the basis for a list poem. Having struggled to find a way to summarize, I think I’ve found it: Write your own obituary. So here’s a sketch:
As a youth he was a true believer, in love with the idea of being good, then he changed what he loved, and began to love being bad. He loved to make love with women; he loved to infuse chemicals into his body; he loved to throw himself like a yo-yo back and forth around the country; he dearly loved his friends; he loved the countryside; he loved putting his hands to work; he loved his fantasies of being a writer and he even loved writing; he loved the idea of himself as an anti-materialist; he loved rock and roll music; he loved literature; he loved the idea of himself; he loved his power to persuade others; he loved old cars and trucks.
But when he hit a wall, and the chemicals didn’t work and the love of the idea of himself didn’t work and his writing stopped working, he had to find something else to love. So he got his wife and his daughter, and fixed his love on them. And he found work as a coach, and that was something to love as well. He found a way to look at the world around him with eyes washed slightly cleaner by zazen. In the end, after so much loving, he found love, inasmuch as a person with so many flaws can ever do that….
I don’t know. I think there may be hidden possibilities there, but I would have to search for them, and my eyelids are getting heavier by the second. What really seems of the essence after all of the lofty experimentation, is the walk home with Elly from a subversively entertaining formulaic romantic comedy. We passed through the park woods. After becoming enchanted with the filigreed patterns of the twigs, one tree in particular looking like the hennaed patterns on the skin of an Indian bride, I was struck by the way the sun illuminated the trunks of the trees. Earlier Elly and I had stepped on puddle of ice and noticed that, despite two days of freezing temperatures, the mud beneath the ice wasn’t frozen. Later, coming back, we stepped on the ice again and the mud beneath was frozen. I speculated on what could have made this happen. I believe it was the greenhouse effect. Earlier, the sun had hit the ice directly, warming the mud beneath. Now later in the afternoon, with no direct sunlight, the mud was free to freeze again.
slants through the park woods,
dappling tree trunks.
1.23.08
Not much to say tonight, after a day working on the computer at PS 124. Looking at cartoons in the collegial circle. One of Charon taking the kids across the river Styx to show how it feels on the first day of school. A teacher picking that out because she feels guilty for putting the students through the pressures of her class. She says she gets mean to them.
My hard pressure on Elly about her homework. Working her hard. Busting her for not doing what she’s supposed to do. Me, the drill sergeant. Elly, the poor girl who doesn’t want to be a slave to learning. Now there’s a phrase worth remembering. Are we becoming slaves to learning? I don’t know.
On the way home, I feel the pull of gravity through the soles of my feet. Earth, the huge mass of it, holding me to the sidewalk. Yet I step lightly, riding the surface of the earth, a surfer upon it.
pulls me to the sidewalk,
but I step lightly.
2.3.08
It’s late, after the Giants upset the Patriots in the Superbowl, and we watched it on a tarp and Elly was leaping, spinning with the electricity. Afterward she thanked us for letting her stay up.
I just worked all day. Read a bit about the choking hazard that comes with speaking being a legacy of our evolutionary descent from sharks.
shark nature, one nature
in spine and throat.
2.7.08
My freewrite at Rockville Centre today, where the effect of my work has dug as deep as work can dig, to plant foundations in writing across the entire district, with portfolios and projects flourishing:
The dawn light this morning. A long horizontal line of seaglass green under an eruption of pink and red scallops. Sunrise Highway, living up to its name. And BB King on the radio singing about how the thrill was gone. What can I say? He was wrong.
And I had just been listening to a lecture on the Vikings, otherwise known as Rus, or Varangians, how they tried to avoid the deadly arrows of the Turkomen Pechenegs as they gradually set themselves up to launch assaults against Constantinople. Scandinavians, Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Slavs, the melding of the Viking identity into the cultures they conquered, threatened and traded with. Viking sea king Sviatoslav becoming more of a Khazar kagan. (These words leaping at me from the pages of history.) His skull eventually providing a handy drinking cup for the leaders of the Pechenegs. A theme of note in all of this: The advantages in power and lucre of converting to Christianity.
Would that I had time to process this all into some kind of literature. Maybe examining the resonance of the genetic ties and the wonder of the cross ties. What a people, that would explore so far, beat up and enslave so many, settle for so much.
Meanwhile I press on like some Viking into B- the Vampire’s steppes hoping not to get filled with arrows, but to discover something, or effect something. I am preoccupied too much, but why? Power, survival, justice, all capable of arousing the limbic system to alarming levels of chemical hyperactivity. A game, but one that has danger in it.
underlines the fiery clouds
over Sunrise Highway.
2.15.08
MC, seeking meaning in her life as she gets breast cancer treatment while pregnant, answers the following questions:
- Imagine you are on your death bed. 2. What was the main reason your life was not a total success? 3. For my life to have been a total success, I wish I had…. 4. My life is a total success because I am now…
I said I would do it myself:
The main reason my life was not a total success: I didn’t live long enough to raise my daughter to adulthood. I didn’t love my wife enough in small moments. I struggled too hard for lost causes. I gave up my search for a writing voice. I didn’t spend enough time in nature.
I am too tired to finish this tonight, but I think I have a good start there.
at the passing butterfly —
sat back down fast too.
2.27.08
A walk through Forbidden Planet, where teens and greasy old men (like me?) peruse the Gods of Manga, of Dungeons and Dragons, of who knows how many fetishistic genres of graphic fiction. A walk then past the buxom mannequins of the Costume Shop. A walk then past Jesus and the Saints carved more permanently into the stone at Grace church. All to the dentist who talks of Hillary, Barack, Paul McCartney and the profanity of the insurance/drug industries.
A wonderland walk through the East Village’s theme park of the sacred and the profane (and I have a hard time telling the difference). All to fix a painful tooth.
the dentist’s hand, connected
to his sculptor’s brain.
2.28.08
Here are freewrites from the day:
Those massive wheels on the flatbeds on I-495 today. Looked like something from the middle ages. They looked like they belonged on juggernauts, meant to attack Medieval villages. You could get crushed beneath them. They sailed confidently down the highway. Heading east. To do what? Who knows? Attack Riverhead?
Natural Selection. Lately I’ve been reading about sharks and other fish. How in the course of evolution, fish came into existence – with gills, spines, fins, head. Heads weren’t really defined until fish came along: two eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, skull, brian – you get it. So we owe our heads to fish. Thank you, fish. Spines, too. It would be hard to keep organs organized in anything but a big lump without spines. So thank you, fish, for spines, too.
So, how do we reconcile religious belief with scientific theory? Does scientific truth lose all meaning in the face of the bible? We gotta think it over, but what will we decide? Will we be weeded out as intellectuals if we are religious? Will be become dead believers if we are intellectual? How do we choose? By thinking? By feeling? Of course I think it’s a false dichotomy, but that’s an easy thing to say, a hard point to make with so many. The superstitious nature of human nature….
Here are a couple of ideas for list poems: Thank you… and How do we reconcile?
a pair of towering wheels
rolls toward Riverhead.
3.2.08
No time for how do we reconcile. Work at work all day. Go to ice rink with Elly, watch the skaters from across the lake. Seagulls circling overhead in the fading light. Mallards taking off from the water, going tail up to dabble. A weird man waving his arms at them from the edge of the water. Then the squonk from the sky. A blue heron soaring like the gulls, circling. Looking for a place to rest for the night? It peeled away from the vortex and sailed off toward an inlet.
A blue heron circles high
on broad wings.
3.11.08
Today I observed autistic Michael, in A- and S-‘s 6th grade class:
on his mind map he asks if I know what PSP stands for
I make something up: Please Save Paris
but that’s not right he has to correct me
it’s Play Station Portable
and this is a cunning victory for him
so I have him write the story and he writes the story
he’s way ahead of the class
and Shelley’s at the board explaining how to choose
so I ask him how many items he’s attached to the center bubble
and without looking he says five
I counted six
he got me again
and he’s already slipped his notebook into his backpack
and he’s playing with his ring binder click open
click shut click open click shut click open click shut
now he’s leaning back in his chair
staring with stargazer’s wonder at the overhead fluorescent
now he’s produced two quarters like a magician
and he’s rolling them around like Captain Queeg rolls
those little pacifying ball bearings in his palms
now feeling the serrated edges
with the digital sensitivity of Stradivarius
oops now out comes the notebook from the backpack again
and he’s showing me with pride the checks
even a couple of check plusses
and a gold star!
and the signature of his father Peter
and I ask how many letters in the name
and without looking he says five
oh now he’s paying a little bit of attention to Shelley
who’s talking at the board about choosing this or that
so the hands slip into the tummy pocket of his sweatshirt
and push it out this way and that
the fingers feeling the texture of the cloth
for just a second
out fly the hands
and the fingers on the ring binder again
click open click shut click open click shut
now he’s standing up how did he make that transition
so fast
putting his backpack on his chair
putting his notebook in taking it back out
putting it in taking it out
how’d that pencil get in his hands
so fast
opening up the notebook crossing off categories
on a clever little hunt for special presents
not finding the kind he’s supposed to find
only having banned electronics
and caring about this for maybe a nanosecond
turning back to those checks and especially
those two check plusses
now leaning back to stargaze at the fluorescent
and leaning forward again to gaze at the gold star!
beaming at that bright five-pointed wonder
now counting the letters on those words again
and looking up to share the glory what’s next
I can’t even think of including the other wonders of my day.
contained in a classroom desk –
Hello, Michael!
3.22.08
The words I’ve heard today…
In a discussion about buying cheese, Elizabeth the cheese monger quotes King Lear, “O reason not the need….” A phrase she likes to use with customers, to give them permission to buy her Fromage d’O’Cow, or the Hooligan she sells. I quote back to her the one line I know from Lear, “Never, never, never, never, never.” She says I’ll be all right if I can remember to count the nevers.
Getting my money from the cash machine in Tribeca, I look over and see an acquaintance hulking there, the misplaced country music singer now entrepreneur of jewelry kiosks in malls around the land. And connected with a New York maja of major proportions. Reeking of cigarettes. “How’s it going?” “Everything’s the same. Oh, actually, everything’s not the same. My wife and I are breaking up.” The words I say: “That’s tough.” What can a man say to another man who’s breaking up with his wife, after moving all of the kids from his original marriage up from where, Florida? “That’s tough.” Pleasantries about the beautiful spring flowers.
A memory of words from the Palestinians at the Bodega, “It’s the zealots who are making all of the trouble. Zealots on both sides.” Zealots. Did the Palestinian storekeepers know that the original zealots were from Palestine in the first century AD, fighting Roman rule? They didn’t want to be heathenized. Palestine seems like the right place for zealots to originate. As for me, I have heathenized myself enthusiastically. I think. What the hell is a heathen, anyway? What’s the source of that word? People who wander the heath, some speculate, unconverted, barbaric, neither Christian, Muslim nor Jew. The sound of heathen, a gust of breath from the gut, cut off peremptorily, easy to use derogatorily.
The other day MB walks in and I joyously say, “Here comes a man who understands everything,” to which he replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about understanding. I feel mocked.” He does this with pure reflexive analysis, sapping my spirits. I suppose he’s right, as Elizabeth was right when she used to call me out for my joking. I smarted from his accusation of mocking him, when I had made my comment purely from an excess of spirits. I did it in front of gentle Sara Grundman, too, who always makes me feel a wee bit crude because of her goodness and her composure. Mock. Mucous? Blowing the nose in derision? Old French mocquer? Varia lectio muccare. Or maybe Middle Dutch mumbling? Mocking and mucous do belong together, but not so mumbling, though I am attracted to the idea of a middle dutch woman mumbling into the side of her Dutch cap, the headgear not the barrier contraceptive.
Other words, Elly’s recount of the plots of the High School Musicals.
Elizabeth and my frequent reference to John the Torturer, the trainer, the sweetest man on the planet.
“She is very pretty, isn’t she?” Our words of praise for our daughter, who seems to be responding so beautifully to the borders we have set against the electronic pale she has lately been going beyond.
Are there any other special words? What is the synonym for word? I know of no synonym for word. I will look up the word word. And I will find the word morpheme. The word unit. The words black bird. Woord. Wort. Orth. Waurd. Wirds. Verbum. Words are weird, and depend so much on the wind that escapes from our lungs, and how it passes through the gauntlet of our gullets.
The best word I heard today? The one I relish the most? Hamster.
imagination’s hamster,
but hard to care for.
3.27.08
In Wheatley Heights, napping to the birds, then Ali Farka Toure, then the workshop swimming along nicely with the beautiful teachers, mind often preoccupied with the meeting tomorrow with G- to go over the proposal.
In the big auditorium, winged ants swarmed up to the fluorescent lights, the males then dropping exhausted onto the table tops to stagger around a few minutes before dying. During our writing time I wrote this about them:
What drives you to swarm?
How does it feel to be an insect suddenly with wings in the springtime after a long winter’s sleep?
Do you think of the past, pupating in the dark of your silky cocoon?
Do you think of the future, when you will fall, spent, from the sky?
I don’t think so.
I think you don’t think.
I think you just flow up toward the light in wonder and surprise at how your new appendages carry you.
I think you glory in the crisp air around you, the sense of motion, the sudden wash of brilliance all around.
And you love the company you keep. You know you belong in the whirling chaos of the swarm. Yes, it feels
just right until…until…until it happens.
That unexpected and maddening thing that happens.
the winged ants fall, spent
from their soaring dance
with the queen.
4.5.08
What is there to say tonight? Gramercy Park, the only private park in the city. A couple of fellows doing tai chi in there among the Spring blossoms. The old Friends House, now a synagogue.
Getting Elly on track….
I have nothing to say tonight…
I need a project…
Looking over my work, I saw so much that was too personal. Some pieces that worked in their way.
I think the work needs to have its own genre integrity.
I want to keep playing with the idea of the list poetry.
I’m thinking now of the beautiful woman in the swimming pool, who I wanted to ogle, because I’m an old goat now.
I used to be a young goat.
I trust the thing I get to in these works, the haiku, and the way my perceptions sharpen along the way to getting there through this kind of probing, however scattered and inane.
Is there a theme here?
I have nothing to say. I am an old goat. End of story.
The most that can be said is that I try to be discreet.
Is it ogling when you sneak peeks?
My rush through the farmer’s market.
I left my cheese behind.
My mind is left behind too.
As with the keys that time.
Reading Mamet. Reading Canin. Not really getting all of that inspired. Something is too pat, or belligerent, or studied.
Was there not one point in the day when my focus was drawn?
A serene moment with Elly when she cooperated in writing a thank you note to make her Mom feel better after committing an adolescent pecadillo. She drafted the letter, and made it sincere, and prepared Mom’s dinner. All is harmonious.
The mother and daughter parallel playing on their computers.
I go out to be the enforcer.
Maybe this is it?
the girl asks, “How do you
spell consequence?”
4.19.08
Ten days since I’ve talked to my friend, the journal. And all I have to offer now, is this haiku:
casts shadows of the petals
within the tulip.
6.13.08
Reading the Science section of the NY Times I am struck, perhaps because of the wine, by the wonderment in each paragraph. The decline of the miraculous and ancient horseshoe crab, which predates the dinosaurs, due to its usefulness as fish bait in catching eels and conchs for the Japanese. The auction of books by Copernicus, Brahe and the first telephone directory. The markings of male barn swallows, which make them sexier to females, and the resultant increase in testosterone. The turbulent F ring of Saturn, moons colliding within its confines, providing a replication of the early conditions of the solar system. We weren’t around for that piece of the evolutionary puzzle – for our evolution does have pre-organic steps leading to the big event: the creation of our reflective and knowledgeable selves, the even bigger event that followed: our awareness of the rise and fall of the horseshoe crab, the coming into being of enlightenment texts, and the banging of matter against matter. Yes, our awareness right now is the thing, the subject of awareness in this right now being the information in newsprint. It is a fleeting thing. It won’t be around any longer, relatively speaking, than the petals of a flower in a funeral bouquet.
showed me the long-lasting petals
in her gift orchid.
9.17.08
The Atlantic stop on the 2/3 line where you switch to trains on the Pacific line is the place the Greeks had on their minds when they invented the word agora. On one side, Peruvian panpipists, the usual lady trying to save starving Falusha Jews, and the spiffy young men and women with red blazers handing out brochures proclaiming the power of prayer. One lady chants “Prayer changes things” over and over like a mantra, blending in with the panpipes, the screeching trains, the shuffling feet and the murmuring commuters. I get to thinking about this idea that prayer changes things. What, exactly, does it change?
Prayer changes the moment of the prayermaker, taking her mind down a different avenue than the ones the monkeys do their shines on.
What else changes things?
The light changes the movement of the plants.
The clouds change the movement of the light.
The wind changes the movement of the clouds.
The light changes the movement of the wind
when she took that extra second
to tap him on the forehead.
8.14.19
About eleven years after that last End of the Day entry, I was sitting in Atlanta’s Flowerchild Café reading Elizabeth’s copy of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. The experience of reading the book had been a revelation in many dimensions. For one thing, Elizabeth had bought the book while browsing a bookstore when she was a 15-year-old high school student. She had read every word entirely on her own, marking it up with exclamation points whenever she was particularly impressed with an anecdote, or a haiku, or a linked verse by Basho. I could hardly believe that, coming from a family that was so little inclined to literature, she independently explored this work and found it meaningful. It was liberating for her, something I’m sure Basho intended, and here it was taking place three centuries after he set his examples and composed his verse. For me it was an odd sensation to have a conversation with the adolescent version of my wife through my own response to her annotations, forty-five years after the fact. Of course this spurred new real-time conversations with her about the work. Time an accordion, playing its felicitous tunes.
I had finished the title travel sketch, and was reading the long, informative introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa with rapt interest. Rapt because I was coming to understand the man Basho better: his commitment to his art, the suffering he endured, how the suffering seemed to sharpen his art. He didn’t seem to be suffering for others, or not suffering for others. He didn’t seem to be doing his art for himself or for others. He seemed to be at one with both, just as his project in life had been to become one with the moment and whatever both his inner and outer environments presented him with, in that moment. The end of the introduction was as moving a passage as I had read in some time. It was as he was dying of dysentery that Basho wrote his poem that I have carried with me in my notebook binder ever since my conversation with EF eleven years before (see End of the Day Entry 1.5.08 above.) I prefer the translation of it given to me by him:
Sick on a journey
over parched fields,
dreams wander on.
At my seat in the café, pop music playing on the speakers, the fashionably dressed upper crust denizens of Atlanta spearing cubes of tofu at the tables nearby, feeling at one with Basho, or at least my idea of him, I wrote this haiku:
Reading of Basho’s death,
his dreams circling the withered moor
I find myself weeping.