Fire Sermon Redux: Revisiting T.S. Eliot

"For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'" Petronius, Satyricon. In the original draft, he used a quote from Heart of Darkness: Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - 'The horror! The horror!'

The first time I read The Waste Land was in an undergraduate literature class. I was maybe 20 years old. I remember being awed by the poem's language and scope, and by the sense of loss that seeped in between every chewy, tactile word. And although I'd been writing poetry on the sly for almost 10 years at that point, it had never occurred to me that a poem could do... all that. I never credit myself with genius; I've known genius writers so I know the difference; and really, Mostly I plod along and stumble over things that I end up playing with on the page. And since I learned most of what I knew about history from cartoons and literature ...  (maybe not) surprisingly little in class ... up to that point, it was the first I'd read about the world after World War I. I had a young man's view of history -- namely, anything that happened before my birth, whether it was the Revolutionary War or Vietnam -- was OLD. I tried expressing this to the professor, Ron Morrison, once in a conference, and I think both my absolute rubism and my exasperation at needing more put him off. 

My love for T.S. Eliot's poetry has always been at odds with some of the politics people read in his work. It's unavoidable, I suppose. The Waste Land  is a deeply socio-political poem and he was, towards the end of his life, a notoriously conservative Tory. His early association with Ezra Pound -- who was saved from the rope for supporting  Hitler and Mussolini only because he was found psychologically unfit to stand trial for treason -- hasn't helped. 

And while I don't have to agree with a poet's politics to like their poetry, it's difficult to overlook the literary company Eliot kept. In an time when there's a lot of talk about cultural appropriation, revisiting T.S. Eliot is like trying to keep your footing in a mudslide.  Yes, he  borrowed (or stole, depending on how deep your reading into decolonialization is) from a cross-section of every culture that white Europeans have historically colonized or attempted to colonize.  It's necessary to recognize that -- in spite of the debt I feel I owe to his poetry. Overlooking it because he's dead or because he's been categorized as one of "the greats" by those who feel like they have the ability to offer up such an opinion doesn't help anyone, including Eliot.

  
I've been reading around in an anthology edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, The Making of  a Sonnet and was surprised to come across the first stanza of the "The Fire Sermon."

from poetryarchive.org

Granted, I hadn't read it in a long time, but I lived in "The Fire Sermon" for a long, long time, both on and off the page. The form and focus of my Expedition Notes was inspired by it in many ways. So reading it as a sonnet rather than a stanza surprised me. It shook me out of a long established context. And while I'm grateful to Boland and Hirsch for bringing this back to me and for providing another context, I'm not sure it's a sonnet in the traditional sense. 

Then again, sonnets don't have to be traditional anymore. And thank God for that. 

Various critics have argued that the sense loss in The Waste Land is the poetic version of the idiot's guide to nationalism.  But in 2011, Pouneh Saeedi argued that rather than embracing nationalism, The Waste Land seeks to unify seemingly disparate and false dualities. 

Now I like that idea: Eliot as man looking for a unifying principle, the poet's version of The Theory of Everything.  I'm still sifting that one through the brain box, but I like it. And while I'm not sure that 14 lines alone makes a sonnet, it did make me want to take a stab at one: 

 

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Notes on "Locked inside the Difference Machine and other opus erratum"

"Opus operatum" translates as "the work wrought." I like that word: wrought.  I haven't generally feel like my poetry is, for the most part, something that IS wrought; but I've always liked the idea. It makes me think of my grandfather's hands, the hands of a carpenter, and the way he always smelled of wood shavings and nicotine.  Wrought like I imagined the way cars, trains, and airplanes were made; wrought like the real swords I pretended stick were in endless, imaginative games. Wrought, something beaten our or shaped by hammering. It's one of the crunchy words that gets used to describe masculinized creation. Nations are wrought. Industries are wrought and do themselves take credit for what people's hands make. When poets speak of poetry being wrought, it's mostly in a masculine sense; and as I mention, I like the word because it's chewy and because of the idylls it creates when I turn it around in my mind.

But poetry for me isn't  wrought. Not wrought, not wrangled, not forced, not carved, not fought for. It's not drip and dribble inspiration from the muses.  It's also not something birthed; not because I think a poet necessarily needs a uterus to birth a poem, but because that's not ever been my experience with language. And when I read poets speaking of their work... and sometimes worse, when I read people writing about someone else's poetry... the verbiage is generally an active one.  It's like we have to somehow justify the truth that writers spend a significant amount of time sitting down, or maybe trying to contradict the trope of the physically ineffectual wordsmith, or maybe it's an attempt to articulate the sensation of writing to a reader who maybe hasn't had the experience. 

The problem with metaphors about writing is that eventually all metaphors break down.  Even (and especially) the good ones.  After so undetermined and trope specific amount of time time has passed, even the best metaphors need their context explained in order to truly make sense. The same is true of movies, and of a large amount of music.  This break down explains why "To thine own self be true" is almost always treated as a self-affirming mantra and why Romeo and Juliet is still seen as a soppy love story. And if ol' Billy Shakespeare isn't immune, NOTHING is.

The Difference Engine -- what amounts to the first ever computer, was created by Charles Babbage in 18. And although now it's just a calculator that's far too big to fit in your hip pocket to help figure out the percentage amount of a tip, this it's one of those inventions that has transformed the world we live in. And most people -- many of us who use computers daily whether we like them or not -- don't even know his name.

I bring this up because outside of a certain context, Babbage's mechanical brain is easy to dismiss. So to is the fact that automatons (read: robots) are recorded as having existed long before the 18th Century, when they were popularized in Europe... some accounts even written about in ancient China (400 BCE).   

There are people for whom poetry is just another difference engine, or, like Jacques de Vaucanson's Flute Player (1737) is nothing but a curiosity.  I find most people who don't like poetry either weren't introduced to it with the appropriate context or dismiss it because it's not generally something someone does "for a living." Making money as a poet usually means doing any number of things, and in a culture driven by neoliberal capitalism, what a person earns ends up being more important than what a person does, what they make, or what they create.

I think of myself not as someone who wroughts language into poetry but as a lens. The world passes through me like light through a lens and what poetry comes of is nothing but refracted lights and images. This metaphor, too, is breaking down -- like Babbage's machine, the legendary Yen Shi's artificial man, or King Solomon's throne (in some writings described as an ivory and gold mechanical wonder.)

Read this installment of Anthology of Days here.

Notes on "the running back" (Anthology of Days)

My dad loved football.  When I tell my story -- the heretofore still short and unfinished long form -- I sometimes begin, in the style of Tristram Shandy, prior to my conception.  If it wasn't for family in-fighting and Paul Brown's bromance-style break up with Art Modell, I wouldn't have been born.

When the team debuted in 1968, the Bengals' uniforms were modeled after the Cleveland Browns. When Paul Brown was fired by Art Modell, Brown still owned the equipment used by Cleveland so, after the firing, Paul Brown packed up all his equipment which he then used for his new team in Cincinnati. The Cleveland Browns' team colors were brown, orange, and white, and their helmets were solid orange with a white dorsal stripe over the crest.  (Wikipedia)

When I tell the story, I mention as an aside that Paul Brown lit out of Cleveland in the middle of night with a truck full of Cleveland uniforms -- which has more flourish than saying he actually owned them and carried them off as much out of legal right as spite. Most people don't remember, and even more don't care, and there's only so much back story I'm willing to give in this the Age of "The Internet of Things."

I was never great at sports, though I did try. But I did grow up loving football, if for no other reason than my dad did. And even after he died, I found that watching football was a way to maintain my connection to him in some, almost ritualistic way.  And when I started hearing stories of former players with neurological issues, saw the doping scandals, starting with the death of Lyle Alzado, I started to wonder what it was all about. Recently, the neurological impact of the sport on its players has gotten more attention.  In both cases, someone points out at some point that the players made the choice to enter the sport; and while I think that's true, I think it ignores the socialization of athletes starting in junior high and up into college, as well as the economic urgency athletes from poor families have to "make good" on their talent.  

And today is 9/11, and I'm supposed to mention it because that's what we do. We rehash the day, talk about where we were, what we were doing. This 9/11 happens during a pandemic in which nearly 190,000 people have died, millions are infected, and every single one of them is erased as a statistical blip, or worse, a lie under some heretofore unfounded "conspiracy." Today, we honor 2,977 dead while whitewashing the suffering of those who survived -- all while we shrug our shoulders at not only the death and suffering in this pandemic, but using it as an excuse to ignore the suffering that happens everyday. My brother-in-law, who runs a 5K everyday and keeps a go bag packed, calls this "compassion burnout."  

A better word for it is "powerlessness."

The running back is just one more sufferer whose suffering is being largely ignored today. He asked me to help read his letter from the Metro Housing Authority because he had trouble finishing it. He needs glasses, he told me. The letter informed him that while he qualified for housing, because of the extreme need for available housing, he would have to wait. I tried to pitch this more optimistically by saying it meant he was further ahead in the que.  I think we both knew that was probably more for my benefit than his; but he accepted it graciously.  That, a temporary chair, and kind optimism was all I had to offer him. And true, I don't know his full story... there's no Wikipedia page link for that. And even if I did, I don't know that I'd tell it here, if only because maybe once upon a time he did decide to play a sport that breaks people and puts them back together like a badly glued ceramic mug. Maybe he wasn't poor and had few options. Maybe he wasn't puffed up his whole childhood to "make good" on his talent. Maybe.

Or maybe a better word for it is "Capitalism."

Read "the running back" here.

Debriefing of a (failed) marketing campaign: Notes from April 2020

Rain today and tomorrow. Some wind now. I don't mind rain or the raggedy yard. I'm making peace with the hole in the roof until the rain ends and the roof is repaired. My ankle is healing, though my hip still aches from stepping in the sump pit, especially during the wetter winds.

Like today.

***

Was a time I'd make myself see

the positive – that maybe

our capacity to learn will overtake

our need to make the world burn –

that we can rebuild out of these ashes

some ( ) thing.

***

Looks more like a rerun than a reboot

I'm still a fugitive from too many apocalypses. Burning oil fields and floods and mountains on fire. Swine Flu. SARS. MERSA. West Nile carrying mosquitoes.

The first End Times galloped after me when I was four, tried to choke me in the night. The world was burning then, too. And it has been trying to kill me ever since.

***

It's difficult to tell whether the marketing campaign failed because the consuming public never accepted the death of the Kennedy Brothers. Or something deeper. Something more congenital. Something bred in the bones that, as the Bard says, must will out in the flesh.

***

Pale fuzzy globs born to be men but too fragile and sugar-based schlep and schmooze through the streets, dinosaur death reenactors, trying to conjure that hobble into being yet again, with new cheap packaging wrapped around the the same necrotic flesh.

***

Blame Nixon                  Blame LBJ

Blame Hoover               Blame the bomb

The true accounting won't make the final report

and what remains will be illegible

until unborn readers learn

the language scribbled

on bone dust.

***

Now's no time to retreat

to some fabricated notion of civility –

some Eisenhower inspired dream carried

forward by forgetful bureaucrats

who still copy Nixon on rain-soaked memos

and send them to the capitol of Arkansas.

I keep me in a drawer - Notes from the month of June

I keep me 

in a drawer: 

saved for 

special occasions  

when I can't be 

spared the 

indignity 

of proving, 

by some 

bureaucratic 

standard

that I exist.

–

For the sake of argument, 

assume you are lying

to yourself with  the

best of intentions and with

the worst possible

outcome.

–

Often I'm told

I'm wrong     but

to be fair

after so many

years believing

it's a hard lie

to let go.

–

After “The Arsonist's Lullaby”

There is no keeping your demon

on a leash – but you should

on the regular, give it a hug.

–

So

me 

ti

me

s

I

for

get

what the

co

lor

or

an

ge

ta

ste

s

li

ke.

–

The best form of flattery

None of this interests me. The scrambling. The Fear. Sometimes, for the sake of others, I talk myself into anxieties. I learned this trick when I was very young and mistook it for compassion. The mistake people make is assuming that deeply emotional people are naturally compassionate. This wasn't the case for me. My emotions rang out so loud that other people's were drowned out. It's like being born without skin, but being asked to hug everyone so they feel better. Every touch feels like 3rd degree sunburns. 

It took me decades to figure out that nearly everyone else is a mimic, too. They just don't always know it.

Mockingbirds sing

and everywhere

people look for sparrows.

–

Down by the cleansing waters (after Oppenheimer)

No one is baptized only once.

Every day we dip into the water

diving to avoid 

the unanswering currents.

–

After Brodsky –

People act as if

burning governors

in effigy's a new

thing. Politics

has never been

civilized, no

matter what

Ms. Sue tried 

teaching us

in Social Studies.

Tools for tyrants

never fear history

because they never

learned it

in the first place.

The thing about them

(tyrants) is you

never know how

successful they

will be until after

the fact when we've

misplaced all the bodies.

–

Memorial Day (After America Died)

All of this has happened before.

I've done the social media outrage. 

Sort of feels like masturbation 

with 40 grit sandpaper. Sometimes 

I envy people's ability to just get angry, 

like I sometimes envy people's ability 

to drink just one cocktail. How in the hell 

do they DO that? Because I can't

have just one shot of bourbon and I can't

just lose my temper and let it splooge

like so much flotsam on the internet

with so much satisfaction. I'll just 

keep writing poetry and assume

the fascists are en route.

Calling in well

artwork by Darrell McKinney

Maybe someone should give those Madison Street marketing cutthroats a cigar, because it's three decades on and I still think about those Sunday morning retirement commercials on television. Do you remember them? Sandwiched somewhere been Archer Daniel Midland commercials, Meet the Press, and Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood like cheese in a Dagwood?

Maybe it's because I'm turning 47 next week and it's getting that

What's a Dagwood?

period of life when people (I'm told) start paying closer attention to their retirement nest egg... assuming they have one to look at. Maybe it's because I'm looking forward to being someone's grandfather when my granddaughter makes her appearance sometime in the next 6 weeks or so. I've been thinking about my dad a lot lately, and maybe that has something to do with the fact that he didn't live long enough to meet his grandchildren, or with the fact that I'm getting older and seeing less of him in how I make my way in the world.

I've written about this before, so I don't want to hammer in on it too much. Instead, I want to talk about calling in well.

I first heard the term from Utah Phillips, on The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, a collaborative album put out by indie icon Ani DeFranco's  on Righteous Babe Records. Utah was talking about his friend, the musician Mark Ross, "America's most famous unknown folk singer."  Calling in well is what Utah called Mark's decision to stop trying to live someone else's life and live his own... which meant making music, no matter what.

The notion stuck with me... sort of a dream, an unarticulated goal.  As peripatetic as my employment life has been, except for a 2 1/2 year stretch as a full-time composition instructor at Arizona State University, you might be surprised to know I didn't call in decades ago.  As a matter of fact, most of my working life has been an attempt to do things The Right Way.

No. Really. Honest.

I think in the end it's all about the platitudes you choose to give your life over to. Most of my working life was given over to Give your life over to the work you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life. That's primary mantra of job coaches, HR reps, college admissions counselors, and my high school Guidance Counselor Mrs. Click.   And as much as I fought it, and regardless of how much my own experience kept shoving my face in the contrary, I still tried for that goal. Teaching was close and so was journalism; those jobs, even though I was largely underpaid and certainly unappreciated in both fields, came close to matching my skills and my need to be useful. Both teaching and journalism -- the real kind, not what passes for the press most of the time -- can be noble endeavors, and I know people who engage in them nobly. 

But it didn't last. Some of the reasons were my fault, but I still believe I was written off by both higher education (for having the temerity to suggest that economic exploitation is wrong) and journalism (for not game playing and politicking in a political town).  The part of both of those situations that was my fault is this: I'm not good at the whole "play the game" thing. 

That's another one of those platitudes, most often uttered by parental types and sports fans. Play the game... which is code for "compromise for a paycheck." Now I do enjoy watching a good baseball game, but I never understood treating my working life like trying to get to third base, only to be tagged out sliding into home.

Maybe it's a temperament issue. Maybe it's about my birth order. Maybe it's about my middle class upbringing that translated into a disregard for money. Maybe it's the chip on my shoulder that, chip away at it as I might, I can't seem to get rid of.   All I know is this:

I'm calling in well. Now. 

It doesn't look like I wanted it to look; I was hoping to have a slightly better idea where the little bit of money I'd like to make would come from. But I'm done with platitudes that don't work for anyone except a larger system that's built to exploit and hold out the promise of retirement as the time to "really live."  I'm a poet, a writer and teller of stories, and a collector of stories. I'm a wordslinger. I write Word-Things. I fully expect to take on gigs from time to time, but copywriting gigs aren't going to define my life. 

So, to borrow and edit from Charles Osgood... really the best part of Sunday morning when I was younger... I'll see you in between the words. 

from Louisville: Another city on the make

2.

There's a coffee shop walking distance from the shelter. These days I haunt coffee shops like I used to haunt bars. I went to Freddie's on Broadway because it was a cheap, cash only dive bar that asked no questions and only required people not to offend the general atmosphere. That place was also a wonderful archive of all things masculine from the 20^th Century: hand drawn wrestling posters, beer steins, collector booze bottles from the 1970's, I hung out at Rubbie's because it's a neighborhood bar close to home, the happy hour prices are good, and the well bourbon was tolerably good. That bar was also a good bell weather for the last Presidential election.

Angry white men

trying to hold back

a changing world

like they grip their beer

Now I rotate between a handful of coffee shops in the city. When I'm scribing for pay or working on my own words, I go to noisy coffee shops, like the one close to where I live, or the one close to the shelter. When I'm meeting people, I go to one of two Heine Bros. On Bardstown Road because the white noise doesn't distract my ears from conversation. When I want to hang out and read, or talk to people who have also either stepped off or were pushed off the wide path , I go to Highland Coffee. They each have a thing I like better there than any other coffee shop. Heine Bros serves a turmeric chai with black pepper I really like. Highland has a nice selection of herbal teas and makes a cup of coffee. Sunergos, in my neighborhood, has the best cappuccino in the city and serves delicious cheddar chive drop biscuits that make for a good lunch.

Pockets of warmth

in an increasingly chilly cityscape

regardless of the season

regardless of the temperature.

Please & Thank You on Market and Shelby is a short walk from the shelter. They have wonderful herbal teas and the best blueberry lemon muffins in the city. I go there to scribe or to work, and to eat a muffin after I finish my short shift in the shelter coffee room. Lately I've run into K, a woman I met when I volunteered with one of the local homeless outreach organizations. She's usually sitting out front, a few steps off to the side away from the corner. When I can afford to, I get her a cup of coffee. Sometimes she's flying a sign. Sometimes she's waiting for her boyfriend J, who is always either off trying to find work, off trying to do some good deed that will, when he tells the story, never be repaid in kind. J has a demon in his gut like I do. When I see her I ask whether J has been drinking, so I know whether I'll see him or the demon. They are always in a state of emergency... being moved on, lost a tent, stuff stolen, scrambling to avoid snow, rain, cold, heat. Their home camp in Butchertown was bulldozed a few years ago to make room for a soccer stadium. The investors through money at the city to house the residents of Camp Campbell quickly for the good PR boost. Nearly all the former residents of Camp Campbell are no longer housed now. But there aren't any news cameras around to notice.

Erasure – delete a line

delete a camp

delete a person

a collateral damage

for the marketing collateral

Part 1 posted on Instagram. Check it out!

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”*

I had recent conversation about higher education and my thoughts on returning to the classroom, and while digging through some old files (looking for something else) I found this word collage. Names have been changed, and I apologize to the family of A.A. Milne and the creators of The Flintstones.

Word Collage / RE: ANNUAL EVALUATION

"During this review period (... one calendar year [January 1, 2008- December 31, 2008]...) your TEACHING SCORES -- RANGING FROM 1.17 TO 1.37 AND AVERAGING AN OVERALL 1.25 -- ARE BETTER THAN THE DEPARTMENTAL MEAN FOR BOTH YOUR RANK AND THE LEVEL OF CLASSES YOU TAUGHT. Students comment on your entertaining style and your pedagogy. "

/splice/

Your annual performance evaluation for this year is as follows:

Teaching: 2

Service: 1

Professional Development: 1

Overall: 1.8

{NOTE:  3=Meritorious performance. 2= Satisfactory performance. 1 = Unsatisfactory performance}

/splice/

"Your self-evaluation with no supplemental materials offers little evidence of service contributions and no evidence of professional development..."

/splice/

{NOTE: ON COURSE EVALUATONS, the lower the number the better. So a 1 = to an 'A'}

/splice/

From:

To: The Grand Pooh-Bah

Sent: Wed Mar 04 07:37:20 2009

Subject: Meeting to Discuss Annual Review

I am sending my annual review back signed, via campus mail, and I have saved a copy for my records. However, as you will notice, I would like to discuss it in more detail sometime soon. My score for Service does not reflect my contributions on the Steering Committee THIS academic year – which I did mention (and I thought, at some length) in my self-evaluation. Also, as with my evaluation last year, I am at a loss as to what I can do about Professional Development, as most of the opportunities that might apply are either not conducive to my schedule or too expensive.

Moreover, I am still left with the impression that being a good instructor means little or nothing… which seems ironic to me, since that’s what I was hired to do.

I am on campus on MWF and I teach from 7:30-12:40.  Is there a time soon that we could sit down and chat?

Regards,

/splice/

PLEASE RETAIN ONE COPY OF THIS LETTER FOR YOUR RECORDS AND RETURN ONE SIGNED COPY TO ME BY MARCH 23.

_X_ I will schedule an interview to discuss this review.

__ I will not schedule an interview to discuss this review.

From: The Grand Pooh-Bah

Sent: Wed 3/4/2009 10:29 AM

To: 

Cc: Pooh-Bah No. 2

Subject: Re: Meeting to Discuss Annual Review

Main Office staff makes my appointments.

--------------------------

Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

/splice/

____________

* Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

From Field Notes -- Lauds: Procession to the Long Night Moon

Wednesday, from The Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, KY:  Instead of observing Lauds and Mass this morning I came down to the cafeteria to sit with my coffee facing the windows that look out onto the patio that leads to the garden. On my way downstairs (where I was planning on staring out the window, anyway), the moon caught my attention through a window near the top of the stairs; the moon shined bright and hung low over the abbey. I decided to catch more of it because it was a crisp, clear, and cold moon. A December moon. And  with sunrise not until almost 8 AM, she would hold sway in the pre-solstice darkness.

My thoughts wandered, as they often do, wandering into wondering about ... well... my wonderings. My ruminations. And I found myself pondering the plusses and minuses of the contemplative life that Merton wrote about so eloquently. I can't be, nor do I have the desire to be, a Religious. But what about the notion of being a "secular contemplative"?

I had just read an article online about this, but the solution laid out there was to teach... an option I don't really have and, if I'm going to choose poverty in order to be able reflect and write,  I'll choose straight poverty and not sign up to be exploited.

Then there's the whole being in one place thing, which seems to be common among contemplators of various ilks and ordinations. But I think I try too hard to place contemplation and restlessness in opposition, even though I know in practice this isn't so. This tendency is World-bound thinking. Machine Thinking. My Ego, my enemy, still tries to set me in opposition to myself.  Merton maintained that "contemplation is dangerous" if only because the world at large tends not to understand the need for it.

Merton's thoughts on contemplation remind me of Heidegger's fears about calculated (machine) thinking -- a product of the industrial revolution -- causing humanity to reject what makes it human: the ability to reflect. Reflection and contemplation is a large part of what gives meaning to people's lives. How we think about life is what gives life  meaning; and without contemplation, without reflection, people deny themselves context for their own experience and have no choice to rely on some other, inorganic framework.

As usual no answers presented themselves. And probably, that was the answer anyway.
Of course, my nature has always been bent towards the contemplative, just as much as it's always been restless. This is what it means to be a dreamer. And I have most definitely always been that. Unapologetically.

I sat and watched the moon slip from the cradle of two giant arms from the oak tree out and to the other side. Even with the moon hidden briefly behind the tree, it's halo glowed like something out of a Renaissance painting.  Mars was stil visible... at least I think it was Mars... but as I left my monocular back in my room and couldn't retrieve it without crossing the balcony during Mass, I can't even get a minimal look at it. But I know it's there, orbiting the sun with us,  unobstructed by light pollution as the moon peaked out on the other side of the exterior limb: rounded, glowing. Beatific.

Wide-eyed dreamers:
we end up either
restless moon chasers
or bitter failures.

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Spontaneous Nothing/ Done getting kicked

Jean Baptiste Rochambeau: traitor but not bad game designer

The aftermath of every major life decision is that my brain, my  old enemy, kicks out every single reason that I might have read the road signs wrong. Like as I might, blaming this on alcoholism doesn't feel like it fits the bill. Yes, our brains are our enemies most of the time... the brain as controlled by ego, at any rate.

To wit: faced with an unexpected 40% tuition increase from last semester to this semester, I decided it wasn't right to put that kind of strain on my family's already thin finances. The financial aid office, in all it's wisdom, offered me the opportunity to apply for yet another loan that I probably wouldn't get. If I had gone out to LA to deal with the issue in person, I'd have had no money to pay for lodging and no sure way home ... unless my wife and I didn't pay the mortgage.

See what I mean? Untenable.  Add to that the fact that the additional loan I was "qualified to apply for" was a PLUS loan... which is essentially a bank loan.  They check your credit score for that one.
So I didn't go. I was able to get a Leave of Absence for financial reasons, but that means I'll graduate a semester later than I originally planned... December instead of June 2020.

Meh. That part I'm not all that bothered by. A little bummed that I won't get to graduate with my friends in the same cohort. But it's that ol' brain... my Ego... that's been kicking my ass over the last few days.

Well, fuck you Ego. And move over.

This self-questioning has been a paralytic in the past. My joints lock up. My brain turns into an old rabbit-eared idiot box permanently stuck on white noise.  Generally this happens while I'm mid-stride into some half plan or another. Except that this time I had a plan, even if I'd forgotten that my old enemy, ego mine, would try and get in between.

My plan? Nothing.

That's right. Nothing.

I'm pretty sure my wife doesn't want to know this, and I'm damn sure certain that every productive member of the Machina Trumplandia doesn't want to know, either. Nothing flies in the face of that Engrained Something we were taught from the moment our parents started trying to socialize us.  My mother will worry. My mother-in-law, too. Pretty sure my daughter, who is preparing to have a daughter of her own, will have some concerns. If my father's ghost is hanging around, he'll have some choice words on the matter.

But yeah. Nothing. One Big Spontaneous Nothing.

That Engrained Something... that's ego. That's all my previous lives and decisions trying to run on repeat.  But like a religious has to die to their old life, a poet ... to truly be one... has to die to his or her old life, too.  While I have a deep respect for The Grand Experiment*, I've (finally) learned that there is no such thing as finding an accommodation between poetry and "life."

Poetry IS life. And there is no accommodating life. Either you live or you don't.

I know what you're thinking. What about money? What about bills? Yes, I will need to  make money. My decision to try and go back for my MFA was predicated on the notion that I had to find another track to be a good husband. My decision put off going this residency because of the financial hardship it would drop on my household was based entirely on needing to do what's best for my family. Not my ego, which would have had me going out to LA and putting our domestic security at risk.

No thank you, Ego. Fuck off.

Now, it's true that I've done a lot of things to earn money. Nearly all of them were awful. I attribute this to the fact that I've always hated money.  Even when I thought I was engaged in my own little capitalistic experiment ... and doing pretty well at it, actually... the thing I was sacrificing kept kicking me in the nuts. Poetry. Poetry kicked me in the nuts. Life. Poetry ignored is one big game of Roshambo, South Park Style.

I'm done getting kicked in the nuts for you, Ego.

Nothing. Live it. 

________________________

*The working idea that a poet can balance poetry, professional, and domestic life. I'm not saying it can't work. I'm saying it doesn't work for me. I was born with rambling feet, but I'm a lousy dancer.

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going viral

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Redactions, 1 through 3

1. trucker cap

____preferred ball caps. Some people later referred to them as “trucker caps.” The only other kind of hat ___ ever saw ___ wear was blue wool Greek fisherman’s cap; but __ only wore that one when it was cold outside. Regardless of the hat, __ always wore it the same: placed atop __ head like a crown, the brim bent just enough so it would sit comfortably against that large forehead.  

___ was the only person__ saw who wore hats that way. Not even the old farmers, the few who were left and clinging onto what land they had left until the final crop was planted and their kids sold the acres for housing developments. Their hats were clamped down on their skulls, prepared for the storm. 

__  wore his hat like he carried the storm in a billfold next to a picture of ____ .

2.  there and back again

__ keep circling _____ , back around to meet _____  anew. Keep circling back on these poetic roots: Whitman, Kerouac, Basho, Thoreau, HST… then onto Li Po, onto Tu Fu, and on and onto the mad Zen poets like Ikkyu. ___  keep circling back to the original schism, the original sin that split poetry from itself like Cain split himself from Abel.  ____ knows they are road signs. ___ knows by the signs ___ is going the right way.

3. Word as cartography

_____ , grad student, anonymous preeminent post-modernist, slaughter house scholar, and maybe the 2nd most subversive person ___  ever met once proclaimed that “Kerouac’s open road has been converted into a warehouse.”  25 yrs later, shambling as ___ is , trudging as ___ is , circling back as__  is only to find ____  on the road Kerouac mapped. Mapped, but did not create. 

Thus, ____  must respectfully disagree.

 

Escape

Central Air is busted. We sleep with the windows opened strategically to take advantage of the cooler night air. At 3:37 in the morning, the storm that will make today boil blows in. Cool breeze. That fresh, taciturn kiss of almost autumn rain. Far off threat of thunder and lightening.

At 3 in the morning, the dogs are restless. They always know. I ignore them until the sound of their paws, like a telegraph operator in an old western sending a message at gunpoint, makes it impossible. Pulling on my pajama pants, I motion for the dogs in the early half-light through the window. Part sunrise, part light pollution from the airport. Ubi, the skittish one, is afraid of storms but is overcome by curiosity and the need to piss. 

I stand on the back porch and wait. Soak in the cool air through every available pore. It is 4 in the morning.

Being so accustomed to control when hubris fails 

we are still monkeys finding God in a cool breeze

and in the distant thunder, a lullaby.

Hashtag Sick: A Word-Thing

I am sick of the world through a social media lens

I am sick of bad distillation,
sick of all the negative inflation,
sick of feeling like I’ve been infiltrated
                                                                with a social disease –

some social disease fermented in the belly
of a sick, poisoned pig
gestated in the minds
of fear-mongers and profiteers

tired of being told to lock my doors
tired of being told the cops are my friends
tired being told white fascist terrorists
                                                              are just “mentally ill.”

We are all mentally ill!
We are sick with fear
being fed through a social media tube
sick from being screwed with social media lube

tired of being told
by one more keyboard psychologist
with a Google Search PhD
that this fascism
is not what we see

and that all we need
is a gun-toting Jesus
to pave our safe way.

I am pissed off and sick
of a country crucified on an AK

pissed off and sick
pissed off and sick
pissed off and sick

and the only thing I know
the only real trick
is to get far away
from this social media schtick:

to put on well-worn boots
to put on my hat
to grab my rucksack
to pick up my walking stick

and see the world through a lens unmuddied
by profiteers and fear mongers --

to see with a vision unmolested
                                unassimilated and
                                divinely unsullied.

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Baboon Lumbering

Compiled in the early 12th century, Konjaku monogatarishñ, or the "Tales of Times Now Past" is an anthology consisting of more than one thousand tales form India, China, and Japan. This print illustrates a scene from the story of a turtle who tried to kill a monkey because he heard that monkeys' livers are effective medicine. The turtle invited a monkey to his place telling him that there would be lots of delicious food. Anticipating the feast, the monkey climbed on the turtle's back to cross the ocean. When they were far out to sea, the turtle revealed his true intentions. The clever monkey then confided that he had accidentally left his liver hanging on a tree branch on the shore. Tricked by the monkey's claim, the turtle returned to land, where the monkey quickly scurried to safety high in the tree. Despite their adversarial roles in the story, the turtle and monkey in this print look to be friendly, thus giving the image an overall bucolic ambience.

I offer this image from a 12th Century manuscript and short explanation from the archive notes just to add a bit of context. Hopefully it will make sense by the time I'm finished with this post.

During my morning meditations a while back, it struck me that I am a baboon riding a turtle. I'm still unwrapping what all this metaphor means, but if I'm being honest this particular revelation didn't come as a great surprise. A few years back I started a long series of poems, many of them unread except by me and most of them probably not all that good, in which I wrote myself as a baboon. The phrase BABOON LUMBERING, or at the very least the image of it, was a central theme of those poems. It best described how I felt in the world.

Although my formal education is relatively extensive, my self education really began while I was still traversing  high school. I'm sure I went to classes my senior year, but I don't remember much of that year ... the year my dad died. What I do remember is spending a  lot of time in the very small high school library, obsessed with these dusty old books on the reference wall that no one ever paid any attention to. There was a huge series... maybe two or three encyclopedia sets long... of THE GREAT BOOKS. The first volume covered the major writings of Aristotle. Of course I didn't start there. I started with Descartes and The Scientific Method. I don't know why I started there, except that in the early time of mourning Dad's death, I found the religion I'd grown up with to be little or no salve. So maybe, I figured, maybe science will offer something else.

It didn't. Not really. But it did start to give me framework with which to view the world. There are two major element to the Scientific Method that matter here and now: evidence and observation. Although I'd done ok in school (I was a lazy student) I don't know that I ever learned anything about oberserving. And it was through the process of reading Descartes, Bacon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and as many other of The Great Books as I could read, that I began to understand the difference between just SEEING and actually OBSERVING.

That lesson has been instrumental, and has shaped me into the writer, the thinker, and the spritutal and metaphysical person I am. That lesson continues to shape my journey because at the core of it is the belief that I am not just here to SEE. I am here to OBSERVE and to write it all down as honestly as I can.

Monkeys and baboons in various mythologies are storytellers, messengers, and tricksters. And while my choice of BABOON LUMBERING had more to do with my general discomfort in the world at that time, I am starting to see that my brain keeps kicking this image back at me for a reason.


And so, here I am. Still lumbering, but more at ease. Experience and observation. Detachment (a kind of empiricism) also comes into play. But I'll save that for another time.

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