tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-197022472024-03-07T19:09:37.824-05:00Dear ReaderUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-74703809832904235322013-12-24T11:03:00.004-05:002013-12-24T11:03:44.905-05:00A Cat is Just a Cat, But... by Dean Blehert<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A Cat is Just a Cat, but</span></b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">lately I see the cat and feel a love for her</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that is sharp and unexpected. I look at her</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(looking at me) and realize I understand her</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">perfectly. How is that possible? She catches</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">my eyes and holds them. I don’t know</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">what she wants, and yet there’s a purity</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">and simplicity of intention there. I know</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">she wants something—a treat? To go out?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To be stroked? But, not knowing what,</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">yet I understand perfectly her wanting,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">and then I understand that slight frown</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">of frustration at my not knowing what she
wants,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">and then she rubs her head against my ankle,
and</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I understand perfectly that she thinks she
needs</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to win me over, and when her tail starts to
swish,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I understand perfectly what is escalating
there…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">so I move to the door to see if she follows</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">or turns toward the cat dish or…--eventually</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I figure it out. Sometimes I even come to see</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that she doesn’t know what she wants, is
feeling</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">bad and wants me to do something about it.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But long before I know what she wants,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I understand her perfectly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I get the intention, that insistent, gripping
look.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It’s pure, free of significance, like a phrase</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">from a late Beethoven string quartet, just a
few notes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that ping home a longing or exultation. It’s
music.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">How can this be? Because nearly all of
communication</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">is recognition. A Zulu greeting translates “I
see you.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The cat sees me. I see the cat. I see that
she sees me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">She sees that I see her.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A person can go for lifetimes starving for
this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">can be so numbed to the possibility of it</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(What parent ever sees the child, what child
its parent?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that it is a shock when it ambushes him</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">from a book, movie, song…or even a cat</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It is often said that cats are hard to
understand</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">or that women or men or children are beyond
understanding.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I see this and understand it. This puzzlement</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">is as clear and simple as the cat’s when she
is frustrated</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">by my perfect failure to understand.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-53892484284984270952012-07-18T10:39:00.000-05:002012-07-18T10:39:53.983-05:00Macbeth Hath Murdered Sleep<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
MacBeth hath murdered vision,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
for he can see only his reasons,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
whatever in the world justifies</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
what he has done: in a rainbow,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
inevitable disillusion; in sex,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the hectic twitching of decaying flesh;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in life, all life, a disposable litter,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
dead leaves disturbed by a cold wind;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in priestly teachings the mockery</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of mangy crows conversing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
among gnarled winter branches.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
MacBeth hath murdered memory,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
for he has put into the world</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
much he prefers not to know:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
that one much like himself</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
can be a corpse, a nothing;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
that one even more like himself</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
can be a monster; that dreams</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of greatness can end</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in what he now is.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
MacBeth hath murdered imagination,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
for to do what he has done and now must do,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
requires the consolation of not knowing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
that in others dwell ones like himself</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
or like what he once was, one with hopes,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
dreams, people he cared for. It is</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a leap of imagination to say “Hello”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and mean it. He can say it, but can</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
no longer mean it, for it is uncomfortable</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to be there to say it or to imagine</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
anyone exists to receive it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The universe demands compensation:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having deprived it of willing awareness</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(his own and that of those he has overwhelmed),</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
he must supply an unending compulsive wakefulness,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
if only to his nightmares. MacBeth</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hath murdered sleep.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having deprived it of lucid memories,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
he must be hounded by vivid fragments</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of what he would not see, their jaggedness</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
unsoftened by understanding. MacBeth</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hath murdered sleep.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having deprived it of an alertness</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to what cannot be seen, the spiritual existence</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of himself and others, he is lost</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
entirely in visions others cannot see:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
MacBeth hath murdered sleep.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He hopes death will give him rest,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
but he is already dead, yet sleepless,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
having murdered sleep.</div>
</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-35401678103067667812010-08-02T06:24:00.001-05:002010-08-09T06:47:30.209-05:00The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - reviewI just saw the movie “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.” I’d already read all three books of the Steig Larsson trilogy (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Girl Who Played With Fire, Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Next. I haven’t yet seen the movies for the other two books.<br />
<br />
The movie has certain advantages, the book others. Certainly the movie captures some key elements of the book, particularly characterization. It misses a great deal. Some would find the differences an improvement. The movie is more brisk, more exciting, more immediately gratifying and usually more gruesome, not because certain details in the book aren’t equally disgusting, but because the absence of the flashing video vividness and the rather flat tone of the written narrative leaves them less lurid. A flat tone could set them off and make them MORE lurid, but it doesn’t work that way in these books, usually, because things are revealed over a more extended period of reader-time and more gradually.<br />
<br />
But I want to recommend the books to you (if you haven’t read them already). I have very little time these days – work (and I do mean work) about a 65 hour week, plus about 12 hours of commuting a week. But I made time to read these.<br />
<br />
In case you have NOT read them, here are a few points:<br />
<br />
1. They are not exactly slow moving, but they go into detailed and often fascinating revelation of processes (of journalism, hacking, investigatory techniques, disinformation strategies, finances, etc. Larsson knows his stuff. He was, like his protagonist, Michael Blumqvist, an investigative reporter, one who became an expert on right-wing extremism, Sweden’s Nazi sympathizers (especially the eugenicists who sterilized some 70,000 Swedish women) and abuse of women, among other things. And he did receive threats. Per Wikipedia, he never married his lover of 25 years, because marriage in Sweden requires registration of address, and he felt too threatened to have his address in public records. (In volumes 2 and 3, the off-the-map address of the title’s “Girl”, Lizbeth, becomes crucial.)<br />
<br />
2. The books are not wham-bam, but an oyster-like secretion of details. (And by mid Vol. 3 the grain of truth in the book starts to acquire that milky opalescence of pearl as the interaction of apparently disconnected threads coalesce around that grain.) The books don’t move slowly, if you consider them as a complicated chess match. The moves are rapid. But the ACTION is not. The movies eliminated most of the REAL action of the book, which is mental, akin to a chess player’s review of possible strategies. The tone (which sets off Lizbeth’s razor-edgedness) is rather bland, conservatively friendly, expository. There’s no “deep, dark” background music. <br />
<br />
The trilogy has an overall emotional/logical/ethical curve of its own. The first book is mainly a set-up of characters for the next two. The key passage at the heart of the trilogy, in a sense, is the prologue to volume two, whose meaning is obscure (for most readers, I imagine) until near the end of volume three. The first volume seems complete in itself, but that completeness is shredded in volume two, and by half-way through volume three, the awful Vangers of volume one seem distant and relatively unimportant. And yet, everything in the first novel seems preparation for all that follows, not so much in terms of obvious plot, but in terms of understanding of the two main characters and what’s important to them and the building and straining of trust between them and the increasing schism between what we know about Lizbeth and what other characters (other than her chosen few almost-friends) think she is, and how this schism nearly destroys her, but ultimately proves to be her most effective weapon…and how it all relates to the perhaps legendary “world we live in.”<br />
<br />
3. The movie changes the book as all movies change all but the most movie-like books (e.g., Elmore Leonard novels – which I greatly enjoy, don’t mean to denigrate them, but the best movie versions alter little, omit little), simplifying, omitting whole sub-plots and many characters. Some of these changes are improvements for me. For example, Blumqvist’s sex life, in the books (his various affairs) I find a bit unreal in their asserted sanity. These and some unlikely coincidences (Blumqvist happening to witness something) are mostly omitted. Most of those that come up in Dragon Tattoo are left out of the movie. <br />
<br />
Other changes are probably necessary -- given what a movie can do in the time allotted and the difficulty of presenting what a character is thinking at length without putting viewers to sleep -- but unfortunate. For example, most movies and television shows make hackers magicians, and require an awful lot of suspension of disbelief, as genius nerds tap a few keys rapidly to get into arcane sites. The Dragon Tattoo movie is little better, but the books are a LOT better. You can actually get some idea how it’s done.<br />
<br />
4. I haven’t yet seen the other two movies. I can tell you that if you read the books, what you’ll probably find is that the first book is slow-going for about half-way through (and each book is big – about 600 pages), gets better, gets gripping, goes on past where most books would climax, but still holds interest. The second book moves in many different directions at once and at times seems to disperse attention and repeat itself, but still fascinates, and has a lot more action than vol. one, but by the end, a reader may begin to feel that it’s hard to see a good way to an integrated finish. Then (with Hornet’s Nest) you get something like 600 pages of PAYOFF PAYOFF PAYOFF at a level of intensity and grippingness I’ve seen in few novels. Kind of a record for prolonged orgasm (all in the same bland, analytical style of the first novel). It’s still mostly an intellectual game, not chase scenes, etc. (Not many.) But you do hit the ground (mentally) at high speed, and there’s no let-up, and the court scene near the end is incredibly real and satisfying. I don’t know if it’s what you’d call literature – well, it is, but perhaps not great literature – but it’s a great intellectual thriller, half genre/half “literature,” borderline, but playing the two off against one another in a way that contributes to both. There’s a segment at the almost-end that’s more standard thriller (but true enough to the characters) that amounts to tying up a loose end and is a bit anti-climactic (climactic in terms of action-thriller, but in terms of MENTAL thriller, a let-down), but interesting, then a final scene between the two protagonists that seems to me an excellent, fitting and wise conclusion.<br />
<br />
Larsson died before these books were published and supposedly left outlines for more novels (and complete text for much of one of them). Perhaps he planned more novels with these characters, but I’m not sure he could have topped Hornet’s Nest. I’m not saying it’s better than the other two volumes. I’m saying that, however compelling the first two books are, when you see how they feed into the collapsing armies of dominoes in the third book, the earlier books take on an additional dimension.<br />
<br />
Is it great literature? Who cares. I’d say no. Too talky, too many voices (at least in translation) that are the same voice. But it’s great SOMEthing. And the author tells us a lot about what we live in -- that’s literature. He knows how a variety of professionals act and, in some cases, how they talk and how they spin things. He knows something about what it takes to survive if you take on the military-industrial-psychiatric-security complex. (And he makes that complex real – this isn’t SMERSH.) And he manages to embody much of what it takes to survive in what appears at first to be (to put it in high-school year-book terms) a “Least Likely to Survive” character (“The Girl…”.), a victim who refuses to be a victim, then almost becomes one from the reflux of the force of her refusal, then manages to transcend that and become, to some extent (and in a real way) something more than “not a victim,” something positive.<br />
<br />
Dean<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-50365629285302268752010-07-06T07:12:00.000-05:002010-07-06T07:12:18.474-05:00Of! Dammit! Of! Of!by Dean Blehert<br />
<br />
The trick of much poetry<br />
is to boobytrap the innocent logic of syntax<br />
with nonsense - not a stream of gibberish like<br />
"bubble rats sour oyster foul snot pits<br />
blood summer", but "A bubble of rats bursts<br />
the sour oyster of our foul snot<br />
in deepest pits of blood summer" or "the calculus<br />
of winter" or "in the frayed easy chairs of<br />
incontinent autumn" or "a calculus of rats<br />
bursts the snot moon of..." (or even "...snots<br />
the burst moon of...") - it MUST make sense,<br />
because the power of syntax (A [noun] of [plural noun]<br />
[verb]s the [adj.] [noun] of our [adj.] [noun]...)<br />
carries it along, as heedless of its cargo<br />
as a speeding train, which, whether carrying<br />
vacationers, businessmen, potatoes or corpses,<br />
gets where it's going. Not much wrong<br />
with this: millennia of sheer plod cut<br />
these logical grooves into our language, dry beds<br />
for flow of even gibberish. Why NOT use them<br />
to make us know bubbles of rats, the bursting<br />
of sour oysters, etc.? We read such lines<br />
as if blindfolded and asked to touch<br />
whatever is put before us. Logical syntax<br />
is our inviter's confident glibness <br />
that lures us to plunge our hands into the bowl<br />
of spaghetti, worms or bleeding guts, at worst<br />
an adventure. I lament only the sapping<br />
of syntax, the cheapened status of sentence<br />
position, the dulling edges of our fine all-purpose <br />
diamond-tipped tools: Of, the, a, our,<br />
in, to .... Honed delicate tools should<br />
not be used to slice up old cardboard. Syntax<br />
is a miracle of complex agreement.<br />
If we waste it - too often treat the ancient<br />
aristocracy of articles, prepositions,<br />
pronouns and conjunctions as mere pimps<br />
for the perverse rompings of jaded, ill-<br />
associated, ostentatious, nouveau riche words<br />
like bubble, sour and calculus - then the<br />
little words that bear it all upon their <br />
shoulders will sicken from the shame of it,<br />
look for ways to lighten their load by<br />
cheating us, lose meaning - and then,<br />
without our razor-edged the , our handy-dandy<br />
slicer/masher/ricer/dicer of , our whole<br />
tool chest full of elaborately defined<br />
and compartmented if, to, and, on, as -<br />
O how shall we talk to one another!<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-48984742398964400442010-06-30T07:42:00.000-05:002010-06-30T07:42:03.018-05:00Your Whole WorldThis is your daily newspaper--<br />
your whole world is here.<br />
Here are the places in the world<br />
where you can't go because<br />
they are dangerous. Here are the<br />
people who hate you because<br />
you are an American. Here are<br />
the things that will run out or cost<br />
too much for you to have in the<br />
near future (the distant future<br />
has already run out, and you<br />
can't have it). Here are the things<br />
you can get in trouble for. Here<br />
are all the things going wrong<br />
with the world that you can't do<br />
anything about. Probably no one<br />
can do anything about them. Experts<br />
and reliable sources agree that<br />
there are no simple solutions and that<br />
only time will tell. In any case,<br />
it's certain that you<br />
can't do anything about these matters,<br />
but nonetheless, beyond the call<br />
of duty, we keep you well-informed.<br />
("We are now dropping the cyanide<br />
into your cell....") Meanwhile,<br />
if you can afford to drive<br />
your car, there's a good chance<br />
you too will be killed, maimed or sued,<br />
but there's a good chance of it<br />
even if you walk. That's the<br />
sort of world you live in, but<br />
fortunately for you, your friend,<br />
the daily news, is looking out<br />
for you--on the inside pages<br />
our columnists tell you how<br />
to deal with stress (per expert<br />
shrinks with CIA contracts)<br />
and our funny pages bring out<br />
the humorous aspects of the Decline<br />
And Fall of Practically Everything.<br />
We present all reliably authorized<br />
sides of every issue from our<br />
Viewpoint. We let you get a very inside<br />
look at what goes on all over the<br />
world. When you are done reading<br />
the papers, you can extrovert<br />
by inspecting your breasts or rectum<br />
for cancerous growths.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-90240434974635928312010-06-23T08:48:00.002-05:002010-06-23T08:48:49.108-05:00Lost and FoundYou stand there in the spring woods,<br />
admiring (as one would say politely<br />
to the hostess, "Delicious!") a loveliness<br />
that once tore you out of yourself,<br />
left the empty shell of you vibrating<br />
with a music that hummed long after<br />
your return. You walked home that day,<br />
ignoring the glad tears that gave you away,<br />
knowing yourself too transparent<br />
to be noted. <br />
<br />
Now, admiring, you are solid. <br />
You try to feel by looking harder, <br />
spotting details, stilling the voices <br />
in your head. For a moment you think <br />
something is about to happen,<br />
because you feel teary, but no tears flow--<br />
the source is muddied. And the sting<br />
is not of gladness. For several moments<br />
you stand there trying to put something<br />
back where it belongs, not knowing what,<br />
while the dog trots and sniffs<br />
farther and farther afield. You move on,<br />
thinking, "I've lost it", hoping someday<br />
it will turn up. <br />
<br />
Nothing has been lost.<br />
It is what has been added that thickens<br />
the day. It is always with you, a clenched<br />
headache you won't know has held you<br />
until it vanishes. Then you will know<br />
the mass of it--and the masquerade:<br />
<br />
That when you strained to see,<br />
the strain was not yours; when you thought:<br />
"I've lost it", the thought belonged<br />
to your burden; when you cried:<br />
"There is no freedom!",<br />
it was your shackles crying.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-30446258476474426032010-06-18T11:18:00.000-05:002010-06-18T11:18:34.879-05:00Saving FaceI catch at eyes on the street<br />
and they dart away, except once I held<br />
too long the eyes of a dapper man,<br />
who smiled too winningly.<br />
<br />
Counselling people, I can look at them<br />
without being expected to make a pass.<br />
With my wife, often, it is permitted<br />
just to look. With friends across restaurant tables<br />
looking at each other is not strictly forbidden,<br />
though always after an acceptable instant<br />
one must ask (meaning "Is something wrong?"),<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
Why is it better to let two sets of eyes wander<br />
in intricately interlaced choreography<br />
from table to food to napkins, mine sweeping<br />
(mine-sweeping indeed) past the face<br />
three feet away only when it faces<br />
elsewhere, catching eyes only a casual second,<br />
as if eyes were slippery to the touch<br />
of eyes? Why is it better, when eyes meet,<br />
that inner gaze be elsewhere?<br />
<br />
Even the dog knows that when I am giving orders<br />
I am head of the pack and must not be faced.<br />
People who look right at you<br />
are about to lie to you, on the make, eerie<br />
(Rasputins, pod people, zombies)--Oh<br />
there is no good reason ever for eyes<br />
to fix upon eyes. Movies dote on closeups,<br />
pornographically huge luminous eyes<br />
harmlessly sating our cravings.<br />
<br />
Not that we are our eyes,<br />
but they are where, craving raw light,<br />
we've let ourselves be located--what could be<br />
more dangerous? They've become our signature, <br />
identity badges in the swarming lobbies<br />
of the Humanoid Convention--the eyes<br />
or other cherished features: <br />
a mustache, "striking" cheekbones, the migraine<br />
that somehow justifies all failures,<br />
<br />
not much to be, but better than a billfold<br />
crammed with credit cards, a sex organ,<br />
a gun, a compendium of opinions<br />
and all the other things we become<br />
when we've lost, even, face.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-17743426539112581642010-06-12T07:38:00.000-05:002010-06-12T07:38:46.139-05:00In a HurryTwo days ago I drove past a young man<br />
writhing on the sidewalk while three men<br />
lifted his motorcycle out of a puddle<br />
of oil by the curb.<br />
<br />
I was going somewhere and decided<br />
I didn't have time to stop.<br />
<br />
No doubt he'd felt the same way<br />
until the crumpled rear end of that car<br />
persuaded him otherwise--<br />
<br />
though he may still be in a big hurry,<br />
answering petulantly his pain's questions<br />
so that pain must ask them over and over,<br />
haggling, wringing from him each detail--<br />
very time-consuming.<br />
<br />
I, too, have found since then<br />
more time than I thought I had<br />
for answering questions--not posed<br />
by any pain of mine,<br />
<br />
but by the tiny gap torn<br />
in where I thought I was going to<br />
by my maybe passing right by--<br />
in my hurry to get there--<br />
part of it.<br />
<br />
Today another accident: The front of his tiny car<br />
nearly cut off by a left-turning truck,<br />
he's slouched in the front seat, bleeding<br />
from his face (nose? mouth?) <br />
onto his once-white shirt, dazed.<br />
<br />
I park and bring over a box of Kleenex<br />
to catch blood and to make amends<br />
for driving past the broken motorcyclist.<br />
<br />
I feel okay about it now if you do, Lord,<br />
so you can stop damaging people<br />
and machines for me.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-18961624639907706712010-05-26T06:36:00.002-05:002010-05-26T06:36:38.749-05:00Walking Beside YouWalking ahead of you (it is hard for me to walk<br />
at your pace), I worry: What if an alien craft<br />
were to beam you up, just you. I'd be walking along,<br />
turn back - you'd be gone<br />
forever.<br />
<br />
So I slow down to walk beside you. Still, with a<br />
narrow beam, they could pick off you alone,<br />
so I put my hand on your shoulder, <br />
<br />
but maybe they'd take you and just<br />
my hand, and you'd worry, what happened to the<br />
rest of me - did I bleed to death, or did the beam<br />
cauterize my stump? - you'd never be certain.<br />
<br />
Would you save my hand? Would they let you<br />
remember me? I'd never be certain.<br />
<br />
Our old dog would be barking like mad,<br />
snarling at the empty sky, inconsolable.<br />
<br />
They'd put me away, too--<br />
In jail if I had no explanation,<br />
or in an asylum if I tried to tell the truth.<br />
<br />
How nice to walk along, (the dog nuzzling our hands<br />
then falling behind to sniff at the grass)<br />
kicking the autumn leaves, beside you.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-82600666743238566682010-05-14T13:39:00.000-05:002010-05-14T13:39:09.510-05:00On the Passing of Suburban Shopping ForestsThe trees are gone now - they just weren't practical,<br />
what with cereal boxes and CDs sliding off the branches,<br />
shopping carts catching on roots and overturning, skidding<br />
on ice, water leaking through the leaves, making a<br />
soggy mess of the movie popcorn, shrimp lo mein sliding off<br />
root-tilted tables into customer laps, having to shake<br />
snow off the videos to read the titles, all the books<br />
at Borders mildewed and cobwebbed, kids vanishing<br />
into the upper branches, poison ivy in the men's room,<br />
birds splatting into bright-skied movie screens,<br />
pushing faces through itchy spider threads to<br />
reach the pharmacy, squeezing between saplings to<br />
get green cream cheese (with ladybugs) smeared on<br />
your bagel, branches snapping in your face as you<br />
moved to the counter for your large hazelnut mocha<br />
with a little green caterpillar thread-dropping<br />
into the whipped cream, no place to park, thorns<br />
snagging and tearing nylons and shopping bags,<br />
all those CREATURES underfoot and overhead as if<br />
they owned the place and not very clean either -<br />
mangy deer nibbling the vegetables, foxes, squirrels,<br />
skunks, moles, woodpeckers making their messes<br />
right in the aisles, scary rustlings<br />
and crashings behind the canned goods, <br />
raccoons in the bakery, snakes in the Place<br />
for Hair, that huge moth spreading its wings<br />
on the fresh lettuce, bees swarming the Baskin-<br />
Robbins Pralines and Cream, just the tops<br />
of Boston Chicken and First Columbia Bank<br />
showing where the beaver dam submerged them,<br />
a lightning-felled branch spilling silk scarves<br />
and handkerchiefs, shattering a cosmetics<br />
display case, gallons of perfume wasted<br />
on old dead leaves, clouds of gnats<br />
kamikazing your eyes so you can hardly read<br />
the prices, things plopping into your soup<br />
in all seasons - yellow leaves, branch-loads<br />
of snow, acorns, winged whirling seedpods,<br />
silky puffballs drifting into everything,<br />
trying to separate your salad-bar pickings<br />
from dead leaves and seeds in all that rush<br />
of wind and rain, huge black wet creaky<br />
tree trunks looming up on all sides and in<br />
the leaves overhead a sudden crackle and WHOOSH!<br />
as a thousand grackles swirl upwards shrieking -<br />
HEADS UP! - yuchhh! They've been gorging<br />
on blackberries! Oh, it's so much more<br />
convenient now that everything is flat and<br />
air conditioned and asphalted and concreted and<br />
glassed and roofed in, sleek floors, straight<br />
wide aisles, level shelves and tables, nothing<br />
alive but us and some adorable puppies in a<br />
window and lovebirds in cages, all we need<br />
so easy to reach, so CLEVER! I don't know<br />
why we didn't think of this sooner!<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-90807928410977362372010-05-12T06:54:00.000-05:002010-05-12T06:54:15.001-05:00Close Encounters of the Fourth CourseThe dessert tray, a shimmering alien civilization<br />
Of mirrored chocolate domes and creamy turrets<br />
And tessellated plazas, cherry-studded, with gardens<br />
of emerald kiwi, descends, hovers, whisks away,<br />
Hovers near again—I feel tractor beams<br />
Reaching out to me, probing, searching<br />
For intelligent life to pervade, and now,<br />
All purpose, all sense of proportion<br />
Vanished, I am being pulled in, closer...<br />
Closer—suddenly before my glazed eyes<br />
The pecan pie is about to speak to me,<br />
I know it...<br />
And that's all I remember.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-37937003896557767892010-05-09T07:52:00.000-05:002010-05-09T07:52:17.088-05:00Dialog Poems Worrying WordsDean Blehert<br />
8 May 2010<br />
<br />
I no longer have my own words.<br />
They’d been alive and hard to maintain,<br />
pitted and yellowing. In each word, the nerve<br />
was deteriorating. Having them removed<br />
was painful, but necessary.<br />
<br />
With my false words,<br />
I just leave them in a glass by the bed each night<br />
in a solution of remembered admiration<br />
and sugar in sparkling water, and each morning<br />
they fill my mouth with dazzling highlights.<br />
<br />
My smile is fresh, new, authoritative,<br />
but years after the extraction,<br />
I remain numb.<br />
<br />
Alice Pero<br />
14 April 2010<br />
<br />
Worrying poetry like a ragged cur,<br />
nagging her bone<br />
the poet seeks out meat, hidden<br />
in crevasses, <br />
bits she can crack with teeth worn down<br />
by critics and dentists<br />
She wonders now if a workshop with<br />
eager young writers<br />
might fit her with dentures,<br />
give her a new bite<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-40063282678515339242010-04-20T07:23:00.000-05:002010-04-20T07:23:07.030-05:00English 101:The "apathetic fallacy" or fallacy of attribution<br />
of no feeling to that which cannot but feel<br />
is endemic in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism.<br />
Here is a common example: A young man<br />
goes strolling after the first spring shower,<br />
feels in every vibrant budding tree,<br />
each whistling robin, each droplet on each petal,<br />
in each salvo of tender and fiery greens -<br />
<br />
feels a surging joy as vivid as his own<br />
and writes a poem that says so. A critic who,<br />
with little life of his own, is unable to feel<br />
the life that surrounds him (only enough<br />
to suspect it may be disruptive) - a critic<br />
long sequestered in theories of biochemical<br />
mechanics that comfortably anaesthetize<br />
lacerations he's inflicted on himself and others - <br />
and to whom even the young man's joy<br />
is a possibly contagious rash,<br />
<br />
such a critic, reading the young man's poem,<br />
proclaims (as student pens wag busily),<br />
"See how the poet attributes his emotion<br />
to birds, trees and flowers? That<br />
is the PATHETIC FALLACY!" (Students<br />
circle these words for the next quiz.)<br />
<br />
The critic's proclamation is a perfect example<br />
of the Apathetic Fallacy: Feeling nothing himself,<br />
he ascribes his absence of feeling<br />
to all life. He assumes, for example,<br />
that birds and leaves cannot feel joy<br />
and that the young poet cannot feel<br />
the joy of others. He does not say<br />
(but cherishes the secret thought)<br />
that even the young man's joy<br />
is brain circuits on the fritz<br />
or good digestion.<br />
<br />
But this is unfair, calling it a fallacy,<br />
for after the lecture, the critic<br />
walks to his mud-spattered car<br />
past dull grey-green bushes,<br />
mite-ridden sparrows that jitter and hop<br />
like wind-up toys - he is right:<br />
it is a joyless world.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-28166993414303549572010-04-19T07:08:00.001-05:002010-04-19T07:09:07.202-05:00Among the MissingWe must trust, even when there is no body<br />
to see, no tiniest trace of the others,<br />
that we are all here, all reachable,<br />
not one of us ever irrevocably lost.<br />
<br />
Otherwise we each become a child who plays<br />
hide and seek so cleverly that none can find him<br />
and we think we'll just stay hidden,<br />
but at last wonder where everyone's gone<br />
(we want to brag about the cleverness).<br />
By then the seekers, deciding there must be<br />
holes in the universe, become persuaded<br />
that one can be utterly lost.<br />
<br />
Then (innocent yet of death) we fear<br />
for the persistence of play, invent lies<br />
and compulsions to prevent others<br />
and ourselves from leaving, say<br />
WE ARE ALL ONE, so that there will be<br />
no leaving, or say WE ARE EACH<br />
UTTERLY SEPARATE AND ALONE, so that<br />
there is no one else to leave.<br />
<br />
Thus has our play been protected<br />
out of existence, leaving us stuck<br />
with each other in the barriers of the game<br />
(turbulences, distances, rocks, bodies, aeons)<br />
to the point where, even if we recall<br />
our separateness, we can no longer<br />
reach out to one another.<br />
<br />
Like wind over water, we are perceived<br />
only in what we create. In the quick, rippling<br />
cross-currents, all perceptions flow,<br />
come in question like the changing faces<br />
behind the face in the mirror.<br />
<br />
No creation can hold its creator, not<br />
soft eyes nor hard poetry; no perception<br />
can replace knowing you are here<br />
and knowing I know.<br />
<br />
by Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-5620199872922014062010-04-16T08:32:00.001-05:002010-04-16T08:32:06.309-05:00The Importance Of Deciding To Be Ernest<p>One day the Professor showed us how Hemingway idles in neutral when his imagination is disengaged: He has his protagonist do things. Instead of just coming home, Jake or Nick lifts the cab door handle, leans his head forward and levers himself to the curb (but in three sentences), stands there a moment, eyes shaded beneath hat brim, facing the house, turns, walks around the cab, reaches his left hand into his left pants pocket (which jingles), etc. And there are so many things to be done with cigarettes and shot glasses.</p> <p>The sentences maintain that hollow Hemingway beat that could be numbness after pain or boredom or something taut about to snap or nothing at all (but we know it is Hemingway and it is good), and at some point the imagination engages and the story progresses.</p> <p>Every writer (says Hopkins) has his Parnassian style, his fallback voice for riffing on and on when he has nothing to say.Some writers have nothing else, just the carrier wave, all cadenza, all jazz, variations on the theme of me talking that talk.</p> <p>Some writers play hide and seek: Find me in my style... - no, good guess, but that was just a bit of crescendo or a reflection of your own silly mug, Reader; I'm over here...no here! (That old Nabokov Kafka Tristram Shandy Borges Melville slipperiness.)</p> <p>Sheer nothing to say, persisted in, becomes something to say, Beckett hopes.</p> <p>Well, why not? The style is the man. Ultimately, there's no escaping what we are. But ultimately there's nothing to escape. Imagination disengages when we neglect to decide to be what we are being. Then we are no longer where art is, before the beginning, pure cause, or at the beginning of what is, the decision to be. We have become the effect of old decisions inadequately recycled.</p> <p>And what if, idling, we cannot find ourselves to decide newly to be? See Hemingway in his later work struggling - numb with the shock of cold - against the current back up that stream - not making it, having trouble remembering now what it was - losing hope of ever rejoining the beginning, where he can make new decisions...</p> <div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-83836096631838395282010-04-07T14:14:00.000-05:002010-04-07T14:14:47.486-05:00Why My Deserving Talent Will Never Make It to the Big LeaguesRecently I got a printed letter from a student interne <br />
at Washington and Lee, saying that my wonderful talent <br />
deserved to be represented in the new collection <br />
of Virginia poets they are creating — and <br />
eventually they might even have funding <br />
to PAY poets for their work. So would I <br />
send them, please, all my published books. <br />
In the margin a handwritten note — looking <br />
just as personalized on each of the 200 letters <br />
(or 1000 or 10,000) sent out — says that it <br />
would be great if I'd autograph them too.<br />
<br />
I was tempted. But I wondered about a, <br />
no doubt, form letter from someone <br />
who'd never read a word of mine (I <br />
suspected), yet began by telling me what my <br />
talent deserved. I wondered too if I was <br />
obligated by my address to become a <br />
"Virginia Poet." <br />
<br />
The letter included an e-mail address (for questions), <br />
so after letting the letter ferment for three days <br />
(not a word of it changed), I e-mailed her. <br />
Why? Must have felt embarrassed at my cheapness, <br />
felt a need to justify. I said thanks, but I'd given away <br />
hundreds of copies of my books and never, that I knew of, <br />
had that expanded my audience; that I found <br />
people willing to pay for my books, who then <br />
actually read them; that I'd written my books <br />
to be read by people, not archived, but that <br />
I'd be glad to sell them as many copies as <br />
they pleased to buy. (I mentioned two other <br />
universities that had purchased my work.)<br />
<br />
The response, next day, was from the professor — <br />
(I must have been too much for the interne.) <br />
It said: <br />
<br />
"Thank you for your thrifty and candid response. <br />
I'm certain your decision is the best one possible <br />
for all concerned."<br />
<br />
(I could hear the gentle nudge on "all".) <br />
<br />
Ooh, that venomously genteel snideness — <br />
I remembered why I'd hated faculty meetings <br />
during my brief academic career.<br />
<br />
I thought of a dozen sharp answers, <br />
but knew that ANY answer would just <br />
make it worse. The whole exchange <br />
stuck in my throat until, thinking of <br />
Monte Python, I evoked an answer <br />
so good that I didn't need to send it: <br />
<br />
Dear Professor [name], <br />
Thriftily <br />
and candidly <br />
I fart <br />
in your general direction.<br />
<br />
Cordially, etc. <br />
<br />
Will this get to him somehow, perhaps <br />
by spiritual telegraph? With what professorial <br />
rapier thrust will he respond? <br />
I am waiting for the other silken stocking <br />
to drop. <br />
<br />
Dean Blehert<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-84449290436894094112010-03-22T09:13:00.001-05:002010-03-22T09:13:54.330-05:00Putting Des Carte Before the Source<p>I think I think; therefore, I think I am? <br />Or therefore I am I am?</p> <p>I think, "I think, therefore I am"; <br />therefore, I am "I think, therefore I am."</p> <p>The little Descarte engine chugs up the hill <br />chanting, "I think I am...I think I am...".</p> <p>I think, therefore I am...NOT!</p> <p>I am there, for I think I am.</p> <p>I think what I think; therefore, I am what I am.</p> <p>I eat spinach; therefore, I yam what I yam.</p> <p>I think; however, I am.</p> <p>I think; moreover, I am.</p> <p>They are; therefore, I think.</p> <p>You are; therefore, I am.</p> <p>You are there, for I think.</p> <p>I write sonnets; therefore, Iamb.</p> <p>THINK; therefore, IBM.</p> <p>We THIMK; therefore, we err.</p> <p>I am; air go; I am not.</p> <p>Cogito; ergoes the neighborhood.</p> <p>I shrink; therefore, I'm.</p> <p>I am, but I think.</p> <p>I think, therefore I damn.</p> <p>I fink, therefore I lam.</p> <p>I think not; therefore, I am not.</p> <p>I think; therefore, I am...I think.</p> <p>You think; therefore, you are...or so YOU say.</p> <p>Cogito; Here goes: ZOOM!</p> <p>— Dean Blehert <br />(posted by Pam)</p> <div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-76262699568946476632009-05-07T19:21:00.002-05:002009-05-07T19:44:57.361-05:00ON JUST LOOKING AT THINGSNo poem this time to give me the excuse of calling my essay "notes." I just want to describe a recent experience.<br /><br />I was sitting in a library near a window, reading. In the corner of my eye, I caught something shiny (metal?) in the grass outside. I stared at it. The gleam came and went, seemed less metalic. I kept looking, finally saw it, just a small square of whitish paper, leaning on grassblades, wobbling in the faint breeze, which shifted it so that, from time to time, it caught and reflected a sun beam.<br /><br />I did all this looking without thinking, but intently. I didn't really have the thought "I'm looking to see what's shining in the grass" until I was mildly surprised to find it was just a bit of paper, but by that time I'd drifted into a state of deep relaxation. It seems that in order to perceive at that distance that what I was seeing was a scrap of paper, I'd had to "let go" and give my perceptions full sway, and having achieved that state (where, without focus on the shiny spot, I could see what it was), I just sat there and continued to let what was in front of me fill my eyes.<br /><br />What did I see? A few birds (starlings, I think, four of them) rise from the grass to a tree. Various bugs flitting. Grass blades shifting. A car driving out of the lot, a person moving down a path....<br /><br />And it was fascinating. I felt no urge to move or look away or to do anything else ever again. That is, I felt I could sit there looking at the motions and comings and goings of the scene in front of me (not Grand Canyon or the Pacific, just lawn, some trees, some parking-lot asphalt) -- sit there forever and continue to find it interesting. Every motion created space, right there in front of me. Things could move in or away or to one side or any combo of these. Everything was moving. And for some reason or no reason, it was INTERESTING!<br /><br />Space and time and things were interesting. Isn't that interesting! And I knew (and know still) that there was no limit to this interest. After all, it's MY interest. I create it.<br /><br />I did not decide to continue to sit in that chair and stare at the scene forever, or until at closing time, someone had me carted away to a mental hospital. But the knowledge that I'd have been happy with no more than my little theater of space, time and motions, that I needed nothing more for myself (I don't speak of the body's needs) left me free, incredibly free.<br /><br />After all, the usual view of entrapment is the Eastern notion that we are caught up in the wheel of events/time/illusion by desire, a flame that enfolds and consumes us. I don't know that I escaped desire. I have no desire to be without desire. But I learned that I could dispense with it. I learned that I could find all the joy I wanted in myself. <br /><br />Of course, I was taking great pleasure in the bare bones of the physical universe, all the little happenings among blades of grass. But these props were so minimal that I could easily sense myself as the source of my pleasure and interest. I was palpably extending over the scene my own admiration, like a second and subtler sun light.<br /><br />So I became free from desire, free to have or not have it, for desire is easy to let go of when you know how much you can create, how little you need.<br /><br />(But it's still hard to resist a two-for-the-price-of-one sale on Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Me ye have yet for a little while! Or, speaking as a tricky poet, for a little wile.)<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-23176163871998041112009-05-07T18:56:00.002-05:002009-05-07T19:21:33.323-05:00THE ART OF THE FUGUEThe Art of the Fugue<br /><br />If all the world except the two of us<br />lying in this bed were suddenly to disappear --<br /><br /> and it did --<br /><br />then the power of our suddenly unfettered<br />dreams <br /><br /> (Look at us! We are the center of<br /> creation, our love the seed<br /> crystal, in thunder our bodies<br /> cracking out "Let there be light! Planets!<br /> Creatures!"--eyes seeing in eyes <br /><br /> (or only the idea of eyes, all<br /> that remains of us until we<br /> put back the rest)<br /> <br /> what we have made, that it is good, and<br /> there was evening and there was morning, the<br /> next day, lying late, lolling in the vast<br /> smiling space we have made, making<br /> leisurely additions (the bed, sheets,<br /> wallpaper, a ghostly shaft of sunlight,<br /> bird whistles, cluttery airplane noise,<br /> the dog's tongue hot on my cheek) to our dream,<br /> knowing a world that once seemed to be<br /> disappeared last night, but that by the time<br /><br /> (let there be time<br /> (again?)) --<br /><br /> by the time we leave the room<br /> we have made, the suddenly unfettered<br /> fecundity of our dreams<br /><br /> (and who can say if anything<br /> has changed, since we, both makers<br /> and seers, are changed<br /><br /> (though it seems<br /> we've been this forever),<br /><br /> making and seeing the old<br /> newly when we put it back?)<br /><br /> will have put it all back)<br /><br />would put it all back.<br />______________________________<br /><br />Notes: I've had this experience, for example, lying in bed with someone, looking at one another, having everything but the other person's eyes vanish, having her perceive that same vanishment, having the world reappear, having it feel as though we were putting it back, having present time thereafter seem (for a time) a continual instant re-creation, in-the-beginning being always now.<br /><br />The form of the poem is a fuguing of "If all the world..." and the fact of it happening, subjunctive (if) and declarative (and it did). This is, among other things, my attempt to convey the stuttery quality time takes on when one is half in it and half outside time. I get that feeling of being exterior to time when I listen closely to a complex Bach fugue and try to track all the melodies at once and, suddenly, am just there, containing them all. I've had a similar experience (though more spatial than temporal) when, looking at trees or grass, I let myself become aware of all the tiny motions that fill my visual field, all the breeze-twitched leaves and grass blades, and at some point I seem to overflow my visual field and to contain my entire body inside a much larger space that I fill up. Once, for a very long instant, I became the entire sky.<br /><br />[I mean this literally. I experienced it with at least as much reality as ever I've experienced being a body named Dean Blehert.]<br /><br />I've written elsewhere about time stuttering (now now now) and compared it to old movies where the heroine is tied to the train tracks or to the path of a rotary saw, and we see the train coming, the heroine screaming, the hero galloping, then the train coming again, but it seems to have lost ground and be coming over the same space again. That has happened to me with time: I've seen it stumble, falter,go back slightly and repeat. Or so it seemed, always when I felt on the verge of putting time there myself. Or perhaps of living in my own time and sensing how the agreed-upon time was and was not MY time.<br /><br />After all, there are many nows. Now you are reading this. Now I am writing this. Are these the same "now." Now two of you are reading this, but for one of you, it "is" 2009, and for the other, it is 2012! Into what incredible tangles we weave time!<br /><br />The poem assumes (as I do) that mastery of time (which implies prediction) is also mastery of creation, or step towards it. When I can predict something, I am close to understanding it well enough to cause it (create an effect). As a baby, perhaps, not sure yet what this body was or that I owned it, I would lie there, wiggling my feet in the air. I'd observe this, and gradually associate the motions of my feet with specific impulses (intentions) of my own. At first, I'd simply notice I could predict when my foot would move. But at some point I'd take responsibility for that motion, extend myself to own it, to call it my own, and then I'd be able to decide to move or not move that foot.<br /><br />Similarly, if one pays a very focused attention to what one is looking at, things may begin to vanish and return. One simply observes this at first (perhaps with shock or dismay, perhaps just curiosity), then begins to be able to predict it, then to cause it, at which point one has become, if not a creator, then a co-creator of the physical universe. What PRESUMPTION! Maybe. I'd call it an observation. <br /><br />By the way, the words "seeing...that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning" allude to similar phrasing in the Book of Genesis concerning creation.<br />Well, let there be...an end to this note.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-57185323687678775822009-05-07T18:14:00.002-05:002009-05-07T18:52:02.765-05:00LIBRARIES AND VOICESShhhhh! Or Else!<br /><br />The soot-grayed lions of the New York Public Library<br />look snooty, their noses serenely arched,<br />their eyes deigning to be vaguely aware<br />of what goes on beneath their line<br />of stoned vision.<br /><br />Symbols of wisdom? Or perhaps<br />guarding wisdom from our <br />voracious stupidity.<br /><br />In any case, symbols, solid ones,<br />much in demand among those <br />who pore over insubstantial symbols<br />like these.<br /><br />If you spend enough time with printed words,<br />they begin to seem to speak loudly,<br />but really they are so soft that a nearby whisper<br />drowns them out, exposes their silence,<br />shattering scholarly illusions and evoking<br />real roars that only one newly arrived<br />hears as soft, abrupt hisses.<br /><br />Perhaps the lions represent the proud rage<br />pent up by disturbed scholars, who can only say<br />"Shush" and wring their eyebrows meaningfully.<br /><br />Readers are like animal lovers, proud<br />that cats and dogs come to them and rub<br />against their legs. We are proud that books<br />talk to us. "See, Homer must like you.<br />He won't talk to everyone." A voice<br />in the library's noisy hush silences<br />our books. We fear they will not speak to us<br />again. We are furious.<br /><br /> We protect our libraries<br />with lions, each dangling a huge forepaw<br />over the edge, each relaxed, but formidable,<br />ready to defend with relentless silence<br />the gentler silence in which books<br />can be heard.<br />_____________________<br /><br />Notes: One day (I think as a teen), while reading, I realized that when I read, silently, I heard the words. I didn't hear them literally, with full audio perceptics, but I felt someone was talking to me. I felt the books had voices.<br /><br />It's hard for me to articulate how this did and did not resemble an actual voice. (And one must make such distinctions, because people who "really hear voices" are often forced to take lethal medications, for some reason.) One way to put it is that while I didn't hear an actual voice, I'd instantly react with rejection if someone read the same text aloud to me in a "wrong" voice.<br /><br />There's hearing and then there's hearing. When I was about 11 years old, I heard my voice on a tape recorder, and couldn't believe it. It was a child's voice (my body's voice hadn't changed yet). I grew up with radio, no TV until age 10. On the radio, people (that is adults) had deep voices. Occasionally there'd be a child on a show, and the child's shrill voice struck me as odd. Somehow, for eleven years, I imagined my own voice was not a child's voice. I didn't hear my own voice. I heard a far deeper voice, like an adult's.<br /><br />Once when my Dad was talking angrily to my Mom, thinking to defend her, I (about 4 years old) yelled at him as loud as I could, and heard myself as having a voice much like his own, full and resonant. (Fortunately, my parents chose to find this laughable, and I lived to tell about it.) When we were kids, pretending to be adults, we would deepen our voices and hear them as deep, though a recording would have exposed them as the voices of small children one or two notes lowered in pitch.<br /><br />Certainly when I was little, I could hear my own voice. I even remember some of the things I said. But I didn't hear it the way the tape machine did.<br /><br />And when I read silently, the voice I gave the books I read (you might say, my own mental voice) was far deeper and more resonant than my own speaking voice. But different authors had different voices and different characters had different voices. Again, this becomes obvious to anyone who hears a work he's only read done aloud by others, whereupon he instantly recognizes which voices are "right" and which are "wrong."<br /><br />(I suspect when one speed-reads, our internal voices lag behind the finger that sweeps down the page, poor breathless voices.)<br /><br />In my library poem, I represent this ability (that comes with reading) to hear books talk to us as something odd, like the ability of the boy in the movie "The Sixth Sense": "I see dead people." Since many books are, indeed, the voices of dead people, that similarity is strengthened. Books are one way the dead are alive, and sometimes (for example, with most text books and way too many books of poetry) the way the live are deadened--both writers and readers.<br /><br />Communication is lifeblood to the spirit. It's what all our games consist of. We grow starved for live communication--for example, real people saying real things to us. Books can be considered a desperate solution to the lack of live communication in our lives. Or, more positively, we can say that some of us have the gift to enjoy live communication from books, so that our lives are rich in communication--and perhaps when we read, the communication is two-way, the authors somehow getting our responses, our contributions to the worlds they create in their books. I know that when (as now) I feel I'm speaking to readers, I also feel I'm receiving something back from those readers. (And, if my work lasts, some of them may not be born yet--at least not born into the bodies that will read [are reading] this paragraph.<br /><br />Why is silence enforced in libraries? Why are noises so distracting (to those who have not been raised in homes with lots of noisy younger siblings and quarreling parents and have not learned to study with the TV on and various arguments going on overhead and underfoot)? The poem proposes, fancifully (or do I believe it?) that when people in a library are reading, they are "hearing" the book, but not really, as I grew up "hearing" my childish voice, but not really. When someone nearby talks or even whispers in a "real" voice or even sets a book down too heavily, making a "real" noise, the "merely imaginary" voices and gun shots and screams of books are exposed as phonies, even the deep, cavernous tones of the classics being less than the tiny tinny hum of a mosquito when compared to whispers from across the library table. The readers feel as I did, hearing my "real" eleven-year-old voice on the tape-recorder: They reject it. That's not the real voice of the books!<br /><br />And they reject the distractions that expose their internal voices as tiny things.<br /><br />Quite rightly, too. Our loudest screams and strongest laughter, our most eloquent perorations are often (to others) inaudible. But they are huge. We live in them. It's a matter of convention, like considering something bad manners or good manners, that we grant to the sounds everyone hears the bigness and loudness that makes them a distraction. When I was eleven, the voice on the tape recorder was wrong. I had my own voice. Can you hear it here? For it is here that I lay claim to my own voice--and to yours.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-83190512513025884212009-03-06T14:15:00.002-05:002009-03-06T14:19:53.820-05:00HUMORLANDWhat follows is a long riff on humor. I just wrote it. It's still a bit raw, tries to be a poem, but doesn't make it (the "Humorland"/"Disneyland" tour metaphor not turning into anything worth saving), and it's conclusions are probably a bit obvious. However, it was fun to write, nostalgia value, and may prove fun to read as well. I hope so. (I keep thinking of favorite bits of humor I'd like to add!)<br /><br /> Humorland<br /><br />On your left you can see literary humor. There –<br />a white southern boy and a run-away black slave,<br />best friends, drifting up-river together on a raft.<br />They meet charming scoundrels, self-righteous<br />church folk – a whole world passes through<br />their odd, innocent, crookedly intersecting<br />universes. And just beyond you see<br />another boy getting others to help him<br />paint a fence by pretending to enjoy doing it.<br />(No, that's a different world, where two teen-agers<br />excite themselves ribaldly with the words "doing it.")<br />Perhaps the joke is, the fence-painting boy<br />begins to believe his own pretense.<br /><br />Ah, now here's something you don't see<br />every day: This ordinary fellow has woken up<br />to discover that he is inhabiting the body<br />of a giant dung beetle, and all he can thing of<br />is that he'll be in trouble if this makes him<br />late for work. Later, he dies, shrivels up,<br />and his parents (relieved) sweep him up<br />into a dust pan, and the next day, on the bus,<br />they notice with pleasure that the sister<br />of the man who changed into a beetle<br />is also changing, becoming a woman.<br />This doesn't terrify them, which is (how<br />can this be?) funny.<br /><br />Now this one shows Mr. Pickwick, a sanguine fellow,<br />plumb, benevolent (with a stubborn streak), who,<br />despite age, spectacles and all the exterior trappings<br /> of dignity (if absent-minded dignity), gets himself<br />into the rudest slap-stick messes...and there's<br />a sober fellow, speaks in platitudes, of all things,<br />a Jew in Dublin, a little guy – but we have been<br />listening to his thoughts, which are brisk,<br />energetic, humorous, interested in everything,<br />missing nothing. In this scene, we see him<br />from the point of view of a lush in a bar, where<br />a huge anti-Semitic Irish Patriot condemns all Jews,<br />and this meek, dapper little man dares to speak up, <br />telling the Citizen that his savior was a Jew<br />and so was Christ's father and...but the burly one<br />snarls (as does his huge slavering dog, at his side)<br />that Christ had not father, to which our hero cries out, <br />Well...his UNCLE was a Jew! – and is chased<br />from the bar, which amuses the lush and all<br />the good company, this mating of courage<br />and ridiculousness.<br /><br />But we mustn't savor this too long – there's<br />too much more to see, the pomposity<br />of the Rev. Mr. Collins rejecting, with formal<br />and self-congratulatory prissiness, the woman<br />who has already turned him down. And there<br />(Oh Lord, can such things be funny?)<br />the ultra-civilized pedophile, all asimmer,<br />who cannot quite bring himself to violate<br />his innocent Lolita (because, somehow,<br />love has gotten mixed up with his compound<br />of lust, romantic ideals and world-weariness,<br />but he doesn't know that yet), until she offers<br />to show him what Charlie taught her at camp...<br /><br />and there, in a Georgia swamp, an alligator<br />puffs on his CEEgar while admiring his beret<br />and false beard in a mirror (funny how a good-lookin'<br />man look good in anything...), while an owl<br />and a turtle troubador argue as idiotically<br />as the bar patrons on Amsterdam Avenue<br />in Manhatten (where crooks meet in a back room<br />to plan capers as complex as the Manhatten Project<br />[which is still no joke?]), but, to get back<br />to the swamp, this time the last word goes to<br />one of the three bats in silly, suspendered trousers...<br /><br />and there's the boy with his tigeer – everyone else<br />sees no tiger, just a small, bedraggled tiger doll,<br />but we, seeing both, cannot unsee the REAL tiger<br />and all the other cavorting dreams this child visits – <br />often catastrophically – upon this world of ordinary<br />snowmen that just stand there until their three globes<br />become a dirty puddle. And way over there,<br />behind the boy and his tiger and his scary<br />snowmen, an elderly Spanish gentleman<br />in rusty armor on a swaybacked, spavined horse,<br />accompanied by a fat, vulgar peasant with ten<br />homey proverbs for every situation – the old man<br />is attacking a windmill! And here's one<br />you might have missed: He looks something like<br />Sancho Panza, has the street smarts and the bulk,<br />but every minute of every day he feels he's attacking<br />windmills. His name is Andy Sipowisc. He's a cop<br />in New York. He's uncomfortable with this stuff –<br />you can tell by the way he wipes his forehead.<br />It makes you laugh, it does! Sometimes sad things<br />are funny. Witchcraft.<br /><br />There's much much more to see – look,<br />a man called issa locks the wooden gate<br />by placing a snail on it! But it's not just<br />literature: What about that angry duck?<br />I can't understand a word he's saying!<br />And the nearly blind blusterer who denies<br />he can't see a thing, supported by a Providence<br />Who always provides something – anything! –<br />at the last moment, a turtles back in a stream,<br />a falling board that, just in time, lands across<br />the gap between two beams high in the sky<br />just in time for our hero to stride, blithely across<br />that narrow bridge between where we see<br />he is and the heroic world he imagines<br />he is conquering.<br /><br />And the exquisite suffering of two musicians<br />in drag (they join an all-girl bad) to save their lives,<br />who must control their hormones while being best buddies<br />with the sexiest blonde who ever turned out to be<br />(and somehow this is funny, desperately funny)<br />dreamily sad – oh, she's far too good at being<br />dreamily sad. But, we learn, nobody (and no body)<br />is perfect.<br /><br />And there's a nervous, croaky-voiced young man<br />in bed with the neurotic wife of his Dad's partner,<br />and after sex, they can find nothing to talk about --<br />which suits her, but bothers him, because he's<br />still alive, so he tries valiantly, asking --<br />as foolhardy as the Dublin Jew -- "What<br />was your major?" It was art. Art? – what happened?<br />he asks this sullen drunk, which turns out to be, er,<br />a non-starter.<br /><br />Say, look at how that little, raggedly dapper fellow in the derby,<br />so pertly mustached, walks, a cartoon amalgamation<br />of anxiety, self-assurance, bluff, leeriness and obliviousness,<br />ready at any instant to find himself terrified or exhilarated,<br />a walk that somehow impel him forward, while moving<br />in every direction at once, not so much a funny walk<br />as an expectancy of funny, so much that is jerky<br />and mechanical welded so tightly to what is<br />only alive.<br /><br />Enough! Yes, yes, there's much more to see –<br />it takes days, weeks, years, lifetimes to get through<br />all of it, but we must save time to see HUMOR,<br />not what great artists have made of it, but the real thing,<br />as raw as a poke in the funny bone, a dead fish<br />in the face, Joe Miller's joke book, the last pages<br />of Boy's Life magazine (where the blacksmith<br />tells his apprentice, "I'll hold the horseshoe,<br />and when I nod my head, you hit it with the hammer,"<br />thus teaching his apprentice the importance<br />of clear syntax in which the correct antecedents<br />for pronouns cannot be mistaken), the "ADULT"<br />jokes that make little boys squirm with delight...<br /><br />but let's have a look, here, to you right: something<br />ou rarely see -- a minister, a priest and a rabbi<br />are walking into a bar together. Over there<br />the same by is entered by a man with a dog,<br />who will be refused service, even though the dog<br />can talk. And there the same unlikely clerical trio<br />are on an airplane that is breaking apart – who<br />gets to use the only parachute? And who knew<br />that rabbis, priests and ministers spent so much<br />quality ecumenical time together!<br /><br />Here are similar scenarios featuring an Englishman,<br />a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, <br />maybe a Swede or Russian or Scot – and sometimes<br />a Jew (nationality not specified), none of them clerics,<br />each reacting differently to such things as writing<br />books about elephants (inspired, no doubt,<br />by the six blind men, in the future to be replaced,<br />perhaps, by tales of how Five Gay Men<br />redesign the elephant), jumping out of that<br />plummeting parachute-challenged airplane<br />(most of them valiantly and without a chute) –<br /><br />by the way, we never do find out if that plane crashes.<br />Perhaps not, for it's used in joke after joke.<br />Anyway, our United Nations prototype shows us<br />again and again that Englishmen are cold, stiff-upper-lipped<br />and practical, Germans verbose and abstract, French<br />lecherous, Italians excited, Scotsmen cheap, Jews<br />sly, Americans crude but savvy – I don't know<br />why any of this is funny, but it is, it is.<br /><br />(The funniest humor is the kind of humor people<br />of which you don't like very much would say,<br />"THAT'S NOT FUNNY!" But it is, and it's<br />so much funnier when someone insists it isn't.)<br /><br />Even though Hitler's minions killed 6,000,000 Jews<br />for their exaggerated, imaginary Jewishness, yet<br />exaggerated Jewishness can be funny, not to mention<br />unexpected Yiddish words. Even though these same Nazis<br />(and Nazis too can be funny – Ve haf vays uf making zem<br />funny) justified the enslavement of millions of Poles<br />because they were, after all, slavs, destined to be slaves<br />of un-ironic Aryans, yet that "Polock" over there,<br />the one getting married in his best bowling shirt,<br />and there he's slapping his forehead, and there,<br />on his honeymoon, naked on the bed, he's waiting<br />for the swelling to go down — even this fancied<br />stupidity of all Polish people (don't think of<br />Chopin, for example – think only of how stupid<br />you feel when you try to pronounce the names<br />of Polish athletes) is funny, don't deny it! Art can<br />play with or against that, but already (as crude oil<br />is oil, as rough diamonds are diamonds, as trite similes<br />are similies) – already what's funny is funny, even<br />the black man (descended from the end man on the right<br />of the Minstrel Show troupe), the one who is so easily<br />terrified, who, with saucer eyes and squeaking voice, <br />must be forced to walk past a graveyard, and<br />if wind in the trees rises to shrillness, will –<br />before fleeing – tell his feets to do their thing.<br /><br />Speaking of blacks, listen to these kids on a street corner<br />finding new ways to describe the promiscuity, ugliness<br />and obesity of one another's mothers, insults worthy<br />of ancient Greeks and Trojans to be hurled across<br />the lines before battle, and surely these kids<br />will kill one another...but no, they insults are too<br />incredible, and they are laughing! (And their mothers<br />would laugh too.)<br /><br />Over here elephants (though threatened with extinction)<br /> become jokes – what, for example, is gray and <br />ejaculates in large quantities? (Oops, sorry, I mean<br />"...gray and comes in quartz," though<br />I don't see what difference it makes...OH! Comes in<br />QUARTS! OK, now I get it.)<br /><br />In this next scene, someone (perhaps a news lady)<br />asks Mrs. Lincoln if, apart from THAT, she enjoyed<br />the play. We are not told Mrs. Lincoln's answer, a serious<br />fault to be found in many jokes – the most important things<br />are left unsaid or drowned out by laughter.<br /><br />Here are thousands of similar scenes, traditionally<br />used for sex education before there was sex education, <br />all involving a traveling salesman, a tough old farmer<br />and the farmer's plump and eager-to-please and lonely<br />daughter. These scenes usually include a barn, straw,<br />a cow, a bedroom, maybe a shotgun. And always<br />the salesman gives or at least offers the farmer's<br />daughter (and sometimes his wife and even a cow or two)<br />a free sample of his generically bodified seed (pure –<br />or impure – corn), that is, he fucks her or tries to.<br />The farmer disapproves. And what's funny about that?<br />But it is, O all the instruments (mostly male tools)<br />nod in agreement – it's funny. I guess you had<br />to be there.<br /><br />That crowd over there? They are watching a chicken<br />cross the road, each (and they are mostly well-known people,<br />their views flavored by celebrity) – each explaining<br />why the chicken is crossing or has crossed the road, <br />all opinion, no double-blind, randomized studies here.<br />And behind them we have (and this was once funny enough<br />to fuel a thousand variations) and older, simpler statement<br />that the chicken is crossing the road to get to the other side.<br />(But why did the moron throw butter out the window?)<br />Nearly as funny as being promised (by one's grandfather,<br />perhaps0 to be told a dirty joke, then being told<br />that a pig fell in the mud. To make such jokes funnier,<br />we have the elaborated form...see those shaggy dogs<br />over there? It seems a stupid punchline is funnier<br />if it takes forever to get there (we wait in line).<br /><br />Well, not forever, but a long time. Taking forever<br />to get to a punchline is over on the art-side (or outre side).<br />There, that cadaverous guy – one of the funniest writers ever,<br />told us about man who woke up a beetle. That man<br />had a cousin, Mr. K, who was told a story about another man<br />(or another cousin) who waits for an answer. (He dies,<br />unanswered, but that doesn't mean he's not still waiting.)<br />He can't get through to the person in the palace who has<br />the answer, because there are huge guards at the gate<br />to prevent him from entering, so he sits by the gate<br />day after day, waiting. As he's dying, the guards<br />close the gate. "Why?" he gasps. Because, he is told,<br />this gate is no longer needed. It was put there<br />especially for him. So is that an answer after all?<br />And, in any case, is it funny? Isn't it funny<br />to have to ask if it's funny when one is laughing<br />(really, not just writing LOL, but laughing)?<br /><br />But we lapse again into art. Let's keep it simple.<br />There's an English word for sexual intercourse <br />(or intercoarse) that derives from the German "ficcan" –<br />to beat, and that old joke, the similarity in appearance<br />and often in fact between one love-making and one person<br />beating another, reverberates through the ages<br />to make that four-letter word funny when some comedian<br />comes right out and says it again and again<br />(like poking out the angry purple head of an erect penis,<br />silly jack-in-the-box) – we just can't get enough of it.<br />Perhaps the word is no longer funny, but it is still funny<br />how we can't get enough of it – the word, that is.<br />The action itself we only think we can't get enough of,<br />as when we haven't had pizza for a long time,<br />we order more than we can eat. That's funny too,<br />like craving cream pie and getting one in the face –<br /><br />Careful, don't get too near those pie-slingers!<br />And watch out for explosions (though they'll just<br />turn you temporarily black), slashing swords,<br />unexpected abysses, even banana peels.<br />That cartoon cat, sliced like a loaf of bread,<br />recovers in an instant, but you might not<br />That coyote falls a thousand feet into sharp rocks,<br />but recovers with only a bad headache (represented<br />by birds tweeting and stars), but you might not.<br />You probably wouldn't even be able to run on air<br />for a long second before plunging. But you can see,<br />can't you, how if we were able to recover<br />from anything, it might be fun to fly off cliffs<br />or get blown up (whee!) or to blow up others –<br />what sport! ZAP! POW! kaBOOM!<br /><br />(Some say we CAN recover from anything,<br />even the loss of bodies, because we're spiritual beings,<br />but that's silly, because if we were really<br />spiritual beings, EVERYTHING would be fun.<br />And it's NOT. Live is NOT FUNNY!)<br /><br />And those three guys with the weird haircuts,<br />poking one another's eyes, yanking ears and<br />swatting heads – they're funny too, but not nearly as funny<br />as the skinny dopey guy who, with a flick, lights his thumb<br />as if it were a cigarette lighter, and his fat, pompous pal<br />who, unbelieving, tries to do the same thing –<br />and it WORKS! so he freaks out. There's another<br />fine mess his friend has gotten him into. Oops,<br />we've blundered into art again.<br /><br />Well, there's much more to see here, but<br />I think we've had enough for today. So what's funny?<br />(I'll try to explain it to you in case you're a blonde.)<br />Let's see, cruelty, violence, promiscuity, hypocrisy,<br />racism, obscenity, excrement, farts, boogers, bad smells,<br />injuries, death, greed, sexism, cannibals boiling missionaries,<br />people on couches talking to shrinks who aren't listening,<br />husbands and wives and mothers-in-law hating one another,<br />farmers, salesmen, daughter, cows, bestiality, lawyers,<br />chickens, elephants, snot, clerics, God talking to St. Peter,,<br />the Devil addressing someone newly arrived in Hell, St. Pete<br />addressing someone approaching Heaven, heresy,<br />poverty, wealth, heroic idiots, insanity, pain, the last man<br />on earth, genitalia, bird poop on statues, an ashtray, a hairbrush...<br />but this is a list of everything that's NOT funn. But it IS funny.<br /><br />Funny – pertaining to fun. Making fun of serious things.<br />Are there serious things? Are they serious because they're things,<br />the too too solid things whose solidity becomes contagious,<br />so that we would have them melt, resolve into a<br />dewy laughter? Would it be fun to make fun of –<br />that is, make fun OUT of – death? Not to mention<br />marriage! (Who was that lady I saw you with<br />last night?) The man – over there, between art<br />and "the dozens" (I'm the indecent docent of the dozens) –<br />another guy is pointing a gun at him and saying,<br />"Your money or your life!" and he (a Jew, by the way)<br />says nothing for a long time, so the gunman yells,<br />"I SAID your money or you life!" to which the famous<br />Jewish comedian says in an exasperated tone<br />(annoyed by this interruption of his calculations),<br />"I'm thinking! I'm thinking!" – well, that same guy<br />would often say in that same tone, "That's not funny,<br />Rochester" or "That's not funny, Mary," or<br />"That's not funny, Dennis" – and it would be funny,<br /><br />and millions of people would laugh and are still laughing,<br />because it was funny the way it was not funny,<br />and that's where humor goes right, goes wrong,<br />you see, because some things (like the Holocaust?)<br />just aren't funny, and it's a terrible thing<br />to make fun of that Jew's cheapness (Let's see,<br />my money or my life...?) or even Falstaff's fatness!<br /><br />But terribleness is funny too (ah, the terrible too's).<br />Even a pun can be funny. I myself heard a funny pun<br />once....<br /><br />But some humor makes me feel good, while some doesn't,<br />even though I'm laughing, like a child tickled beyond<br />where it's fun, but he can't stop laughing – and when<br />the tickling stops, he's pissed off at the tickler or in tears.<br />There's a difference between Hitler's jokes about Jewishness<br />and Jack Benny's (DUH!)<br /><br />The humor that most delights and haunts me<br />makes the agreed-upon world look ridiculous<br />in the light of a better, livelier world,<br />a more compassionate, varied, witty and noble world,<br />perhaps one invented by Calvin and Hobbes<br />or Don Quixote, perhaps one vaguely stirred up,<br />like the ache of a fading numbness, by Kafka.<br /><br />This I prefer to the sour humor that seeks to mock<br />and reduce a world already ridiculous (I won't say<br />"absurd," because the word has been used to death<br />by joyless people) with no motive other than<br />to be of that world, one of the gang, mocking a well<br />the dreamers, unable to see them as other<br />than their world. Is this a serious thing? Not really.<br />See over there, the man on a tree branch<br />sawing off the branch on which he sits?<br />He is one of the mockers. He will fall.<br />This is funny. But it would be even funnier<br />if the tree fell over, leaving him sitting on his branch<br />in mid-air, supported by nothing, nothing at all,<br />not a mocker of dreams after all,<br />SURPRISE!<br /><br />Dean Blehert<br />www.blehert.com<br />short poems at http://deanotations.blogspot.com<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-4866447829212740752009-03-06T14:01:00.003-05:002009-06-12T13:10:07.850-05:00The War Between Form and CreationHere's a recent poem, followed by the essay it suggested to me:<br /><br />Funny how the thought of starving to death<br />bothers me less than the thought<br />of my poems vanishing.<br /><br />What I will not lose, whatever the economy,<br />is I. Even if I forget myself, even if I try<br />to lose myself, I will survive as what haunts me.<br /><br />but I have relearned how to know myself<br />as the creator, not what I create.<br />Poems may perish, those ripples<br />in the stream of creation, standing waves<br />of varied configuration, depending upon<br />the forms (boulders, pebbles, rhymes, meters<br />ideas, words, experience) through which<br />I direct that stream. They mark the joy<br />we create as perishable as poems,<br />but not our ability to create it, not<br />the joy of creating, not a mark<br />on me.<br />_________________<br /><br /> The War Between Form and Creation<br /><br /> Natively, creativity knows no barriers. It is a "Let there be_____!" that instantaneously puts there what is intended. But the game of art, as it is played, depends on barriers. In a way, a work of art is a form created where one's creativity plays over (lambently licks over, sprays over, bounces about on, dances over) an apparent barrier to creativity.<br /> Why do artists nominate stones and sounds and other energy forms to be barriers and then pretend that creation is an exertion of energy against energy to create energy patterns? Why sculpt, laboriously, a David or a Venus from stone? Why not simply "let there be" a marble David, a bronze Venus?<br /> Because we have forgotten how to create, become habituated to energy games? Or because we have all agreed to be unable to perceive one another's creations, called them "dreams" and, worse, called them "mere"? Because we've called it an "invasion of privacy" to perceive the dreams of others? Perhaps, more basic: To make a game out of creating, we pretend to be unable to perceive one another's creations – a joke: "Image of a palace?...nope, can't see it...are you sure you're not imagining things?"<br /> And after playing that game – and having it played on us – for a long time, we become persuaded that it is hard to see the creations of others, and that our own creations are hard for others to see, and that we cannot even see our own creations ourselves – because we've agreed (despite our having a greed for creations) that they are hard to see.<br /> How often do we, thus, create, unaware of our own creation? (That is what a mind is!) For example, I notice a tune running "in my mind," noticing also that it has been doing so for hours (since I created it this morning in the shower?). And for that long time, I didn't perceive it. It became the carrier wave for all my conscious perceptions during those hours. And what has been running through your mind, unperceived, for years? (Centuries?)<br /> In the absence of the ability to perceive a simple creation, we all agree to perceive physical energy and mass. That becomes the legal tender of art. To play in this universe, one must agree to perceive it and be affected by energy and by that condensation of energy we call matter. So now we must WORK to create – hence works of art, which are oxymorons, really works of play, where we direct the play of creativity onto or against the creations we have agreed to call "real" or "physical." And where our energy (for we now identify our creativity with the energy we employ in order to create) meets physical energy, and, as permanent-seeming ripples and purls and eddies form on the surface of a stream, passing over obstructions and irregularities, so energy forms we call art are created where our energy meets barriers (also energy).<br /> The complexity here is hard to unravel: We create our creative energy. We create (by agreement) the permanence of the energy forms we consider to be barriers to creativity. The we use the interaction of these created energies to create a form -- a form that we could simply have, instantaneously "dreamed" into existence and probably did, in order to use that dream (already as perfect and as real as we cared to make it, like the picture of a stream you saw and felt when I mentioned ripples, eddies and purls) -- to use that form as a pattern for our energy games.<br /> As a further elaboration (though we tend to mistake it for simplification), we blind ourselves to our own intentions and let the physical forms seem to tell us what to create. We do "action" art, droodles, random words on a page, find all sorts of ways to persuade ourselves that the rock is telling us what form to extract from it (as if we were peeling a fruit), that the physical universe is doing all the creating, leaving us to be the bemused spectators or, at most, facilitators. Energy is the wizard. We are the wizards apprentices, doing the mickey-mouse work. If we imagine ourselves creators, we'll get in trouble. Beware of brooms bearing water. If you could make a lightning bolt stream from your pointing finger, it would melt your arm.<br /> And yet, we choose the medium, direct the effort and choose to perceive (a form of creation in itself) the art in what results.<br /> I'm In a room with many paintings on the walls. There's also a window – as rectangular as any painting, but with more light, more motion and more depth (though each painting emerged from a creation full of light, motion and depth). What an amazing painting I've just created, right there, where a moment ago, there was a hole in the wall though which I could view a tiny cut-out of a large scene. Now there's a whole in the wall, complete unto itself.<br /> If there's a window where you are now, and you are inside, looking out into daylight, see how long it takes you to create such a painting by considering that window a work of art.<br /> In a way, art is love: We grant to physical universe objects and energies everyone has agreed to call "real" – we grant them that reality and enhance it by agreeing that our creativity cannot do without it, cannot, without effort, pervade that stuff. Our creativity cannot own stuff except via more stuff of the same sort (the agreed-upon physical energy we call "work" or "effort").<br /> Ah, but an artist's love is also love for our creative potential. He isn't only enhancing or decorating an agreement not to perceive each other's dreams. Onto the carrier wave of physical effort, he can heterodyne admiration, a frequency too fine to be blocked by any barrier, a pervasion that haunts matter with the joy of instantaneous creation, a kind of calling card that says a creator has been here, a subversive reminder, camouflaged by the complexities of the game called art, that reminds us of the nature of the game, a golden thread that one can tug upon to unravel the game, when (because we have grown) it no longer fits us, begins to strangle us.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-18626644876592726902009-02-05T16:29:00.002-05:002009-02-05T17:15:58.310-05:00DISCONNECTION--a poem/essayWhat follows is a long poem I wrote a few months ago that will appear (in the opening section) to be a rather obvious riff on world affairs, but which, if you keep going, will, I hope, reveal itself to be more interesting than that. It's really about how, in our daily lives, we do or don't respond to evil.<br /><br />It's too slippery for an essay, flits from theme to theme, then pulls things together, then pulls them apart again, etc. It's designed to irritate those who expect a well-behaved poem. For example, as is my wont, I go on past many climactic "poem-should-end-here" points to fade out, finally, on what appears to be a trivial point. Do I have a good reason for this? It seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. It still does.<br /><br />I've put a few notes at the end.<br /><br /> Good Connections<br /><br />"Only connect, "someone said, and it's good<br />to make connections. We (when we are the United States)<br />should connect, shouldn't we, our wealth<br />to the poverty of nations we've...developed?<br />We should connect what is done to us<br />with what has been done in our name,<br />and we should connect what has been done<br />in our name (when our "intelligence"<br />replaces a democracy with a dictator,<br />for example) with what we ourselves<br />have done or failed to do (voted? inspected?<br />listened? understood? spoken out? thought<br />it enough to watch the network news between<br />sitcoms and (un)reality shows, yes,<br />it shows, doesn't it, eventually?)<br /><br />Yes, connect – but ONLY connect?<br />What about learning when to dis-connect?<br />Bludgeoned by too much reality,<br />some can only connect. Where, beneath fists,<br />hammers, bombs, remains space for anything<br />to be separate from anything else?<br />It becomes impossible to go<br />for a long walk.<br /><br />Going for a walk. Writing a long poem.<br />This is me writing a poem and also<br />my hand writing words on a page and<br />also my hand making ink marks<br />on processed wood pulp, the exercise<br />of various muscles, the conversion<br />of various nutrients into energy and efforts,<br />or, going the other way, the influences<br />of my childhood or my reading or my<br />stars hosing through me and my pen,<br />and it's me thinking out loud and hoping<br />I'm overheard, and it's this, right here –<br />lots of possible perspectives, easy<br />to find one where what I do and<br />whatever is good or bad may be considered<br />to connect.<br /><br />"Me going for a walk' is as slippery, being<br />"an American takes a walk in America"<br />(and speaking of connections, we have felt<br />no need to coin the term United Statesian",<br />since we assume what is American is ours,<br />we much-damned Yankees), and it's also<br />a body moves in a universe on the surface<br />of a planet-ball. And Lord knows<br />what else – for one moves also through<br />(and thus defines) what the Lord knows.<br /><br />As I (carrying in my mind like a convention label<br />my name, Dean) take a walk in Reston, Virginia,<br />where I live, and also, I hear, where lots<br />of retired State Department and CIA people<br />do whatever they do, live, maybe, but<br />I digress to connect – as I walk the paths<br />(Reston is threaded with forested asphalt<br />trails), I, having recently skimmed too many<br />newspapers (can't help it; a neighbor I hardly<br />ever spoke to – from Pakistan, I think – has<br />moved out; no one has yet moved in, but the<br />Washington Post keeps coming with orgiastically<br />bold headlines -- nobody is as excited about news<br />as the newspapers; there it is each morning<br />in the driveway, so I pick it up, just to read<br />the funnies – they aren't very funny now,<br />or is that just too much connecting? The funnies<br />and the puzzles, but I'm addicted to reading,<br />got to leave it completely alone or I read it all,<br />so I'm afflicted with POST-traumatic stress)<br /><br />[Why all these parenthetical appendages? Because<br />I haven't learned to disconnect.] – as if Internet<br />weren't more than enough connection, I dread it,<br />each day a dozen more petitions and offers that, if I don't<br />sign them or take them up, may cost us the whales,<br />our constitutional rights, honest government,<br />non-toxic food-trees-air-water, our children, energy, money, another million killed<br />in Darfur-Iraq-Myamar, the wolves, baby seals, bi-polar bears, a livable climate, the chance to please my babe with a greatly enlarged penis...<br />but I don't, I don't, I can't, I won't<br />sign them all, order them all! It takes time to click,<br />bring up the web site, log on, add "my own words" –<br />time to read enough and see enough to know<br />which ones make sense, time to wonder if petitions<br />get seen, if they work, if my time, my own time<br />(How DARE I take a walk with vital<br />petitions unread, unsigned!) – if my own time<br />has value, as much as my name on any petition,<br />but isn't this everyone's time? Can I have<br />some of my own? (Value must involve<br />the creation of time.) So because I have time<br />or because, having none, I don't have value,<br />so what difference what I do? – therefore,<br />I take a walk,<br /><br />having read too many papers and e-mailed<br />alarums and petitions (the antique "alarums" adds<br />a drum to the trumpet of "alarm"), I notice<br />I am also an American taking a walk<br />in America, the nation that is occupying<br />Iraq and doing something or other<br />in Afghanistan and planning maybe<br />to do worse in Iran and is fouling its own<br />eerie eagle aerie in the process, and that is also<br />(maybe REALLY is) the home of the brave,<br />land of the free, pilgrim's pride (though currently<br />addicted to grim pills), destination of teeming<br />masses yearning to be free (or me's yearning<br />to be "teams" amassing earnings, for there is no"I"<br />in "team"). Connect connect connect connect –<br />sounds more like a train ride than a walk.<br /><br />And I do. I stroll. The air is mild, bright, dewy<br />and green-stippled. I meet no suicide bombers<br />this balmy day. Nothing blows up. Iraq, Iran and<br />(for that matter) Viet Nam are as far away,<br />in space or time, as the sun, whose continuing<br />explosion would toast this marshmallow earth<br />in a nanosecond were it not for 93,000,000<br />unremarkable, but felicitously positioned<br />miles (good feng shui). The sun, some say,<br />is burning out, one more fuel to be conserved<br />for our pale children. (I have none,<br />but I think I'll be someone's soon enough<br />(if we connect body to body across generations),<br />and, anyway, my readers are mostly in the future,<br />if anywhere. They'll need reading light.<br />Or at least warmth enough to thaw<br />their fingertips so that they can<br />distinguish braille characters. If they can get<br />through page one, they can burn it to read<br />page two in its light and so on.<br /><br />But the sun's death is as far in the future<br />as my death was when I was a child (in a place<br />where almost no one died – Middle America, Mid-Twentieth Century,<br />where I thought that by the time I got old enough<br />to die – VERY old, I thought – something would<br />have been done about death, someone<br />must be taking care of it). The bombs,<br />though...if we fear dominoes may be headed our way,<br />and we nudge them so they'll fall the other way,<br />and the file of dominoes, extending out of sight<br />over mountains and oceans – if it begins here,<br />right behind us (where we denied<br />the Vietnamese the elections we promised them<br />in 1950 lest the Communists win – for example,<br />or where we ignored tribal boundaries to set up<br />our oil colonies – that is, nations – in the Mid-East, or<br />when the children we, through our federally mandated-<br />but-not-mandated screening programs, are put on drugs<br />that include among their side effects going nuts and<br />shooting up schools) – if the first domino<br />looms behind us, how long will it take<br />before the contagion of dominoes we shove forward<br />(hoping it will crush terrorism) winds around the earth and<br />that shadow from behind us fills the sky?<br /><br />So because I am out for a walk and feeling good, alive,<br />safe, full of future, I think, "I will have to pay<br />for this." I think, "When would this be<br />in the history of Rome?" I think, "Domino,<br />I didn't do it. Take our politicians, our corporations –<br />can't you collapse selectively?"<br /><br />But I know it has something to do with me,<br />with all my unnecessary second helpings<br />while others starved, my TV sprees, my years<br />of trying to be the world's greatest poet,<br />instead of saying something of use, my years<br />of doing less than my best – and though<br />I'm not sure what my best is, I believe –<br />I KNOW – I've done good things, and these<br />things connect too. They make – if<br />anything does – a difference. And I know<br />I could have done more.<br /><br />(The shadows ARE selective, must be,<br />if there is connection. Hell, even on earth,<br />will have higher and lower circles.)<br /><br />Two cabbage moths play tag across the path –<br />two AMERICAN moths. Must they, too,<br />pay? These tall oaks, must they be toppled<br />because retired CIA operatives enjoyed<br />their shade? (And can retired CIA operatives<br />enjoy shade, or, like Hamlet's uncle Claudius,<br />appearing to pray, are they cut off from such things?)<br />(And do I enjoy these oaks, or turn them into<br />props for poetry?) Or because I, who have been<br />a pretty good guy, but not good enough<br />(to save the world? to feed one fly-bait,<br />bloat-bellied African child? to get a good guy<br />elected?) – because I walk among these trees<br />(to forget that, not only are there nations<br />where it is an act of daring to walk to the corner,<br />but also there are vast desert-ovens where no man<br />can walk in daylight, and a few miles above<br />these trees begins a skyless dark, near<br />absolute zero that apparently goes on<br />(with brief starry interruptions, pinpricks<br />of nuclear heat) forever) – because I,<br />who could have been worse, cherish<br />(if only for the seconds before I swallow<br />them with my poem) these trees, will they<br />be spared?<br /><br />But out there in forever I'm not an American.<br />That will be another payback, not for America's crimes,<br />but for those that come with being human.<br /><br />And thinking such stuff, I notice butterflies<br />(tiger swallowtail, black admiral, viceroy – that's<br />the best I can do, Viceroy of all I survey, Vladimir)<br />(sorry, you may not know I mean Nabokov,<br />one of my addictions, a royal vice,<br />who taught me a few butterflies), wild flowers<br />(no names, they say – very hush hush), leaves<br />of varied greens, points and lobes (no names,<br />sorry, I cannot lobotomize o'er my species' grave),<br />and I notice birds, their songs, motion, swift rifts<br />of color flashing through leaves – and I disconnect<br />them from the argument, shrive them, want them<br />forgiven. (And our cat, too, though she's not out<br />for this walk, but she, too, must be forgiven –<br />or need not be.)<br /><br />So I begin to disconnect. And I hear<br />the counter-arguments of those who only<br />connect: Even the butterflies of America<br />are corrupt, and must be punished<br />(broken on the wheel?) for giving pleasure<br />to the hordes of Satan. (Nazi death camp officers<br />wax ecstatic over Beethoven, whose music must,<br />therefore, become hateful to all good folk,<br />as must the word "folk", for Hitler loved it.)<br />Every tree, every blade of American grass<br />shall be blasted. (British grass, too – they're<br />connected. Samuel Johnson rises from his grave<br />to assert – irresistibly – that his cat, Hodge<br />shall not be harmed.)<br /><br />And if I say, behold, your own empires,<br />past and to come, were as corrupt<br />and man-grinding as ours, enslaved<br />and tortured more...<br /><br />then I hear a new set of voices, like chilled crystal.<br />They say, yes, it is a human blight,<br />not merely the American nightmare.<br />We need a fresh start, Kaliyurga,<br />the old Hindu universe-recycling system, from Iron Age<br />to Golden age via the incineration of everything.<br />Blast this place, this earth, leave it to wolves,<br />to cockroaches – no, say colder voices,<br />sterilize it, leave not a microbe, for all<br />is corrupted. Leave the void, waiting<br />for a new, pure creation, for we (Americans,<br />humans, life, matter) are blots, cancers afflicting<br />nothingness, filling it with ceaseless images and thoughts.<br />Remove us and all our polluted symbiotes. All<br />is connected, so all must go. There can be<br />no Noah, for it is life itself, even the possibility of life,<br />that blights infinite space, and space itself – why,<br /><br />some say, "Don't stop at space. Undo<br />the universe, heat masses to thin gases,<br />let all explode or implode, bring back<br />chaos, reverse creation, make it all vanish,<br />especially thought, for any dream is a virus<br />from which new life and matter may ferment<br />and coagulate.<br /><br />They only connect. They include themselves<br />in their programs, seeking oblivion – a<br />coward's end? Where there is possibility<br />of life and art, there is disconnection: A is not B.<br />A is not even A. (One precedes the other.)<br /><br />Will we be spared for 10 good men?<br />Five good men? One slightly frayed<br />cabbage moth?<br /><br />(So much poetry is only connection,<br />metaphor by sticky metaphor, or the struggle<br />to disconnect some trace of us from death,<br />who is always shown first to be well-connected<br />indeed. Death is always in-crowd, A-list; Death<br />has pull. Get in good with Death, and you've<br />got it made (as a shade). Death can get it for you<br />hole-sale. Even this poem will end.)<br /><br />Of course we pay and of course<br />what we call ours (even moths and trees)<br />are taken from us. We pay what we have,<br />no more. Unless we can create more.<br />And we can. So what? A good cabbage moth –<br />not such a bad deal.<br /><br />This isn't about who pays or how much.<br />("My treat this time." "No, mine, I insist!)<br />What we are is payment enough.<br />Nothing worse can be done to us<br />than to make of us what we make<br />of ourselves.<br /><br />What do evil men make of themselves?<br />A righteous solidity. They are what they are<br />forever or until someone chisels<br />the pigeon shit off the monuments they've become<br />(statues are grave stones) to themselves,<br />then tickles them out of countenance.<br />Once one, being basically right and good,<br />does wrong and BECOMES a wrongness,<br />one – to insist on his rightness – solidifies.<br />(Statues are so official! How could they be<br />wrong?) Stupidity by stupidity one petrifies,<br />like a muscle that can't be unclamped,<br />that exertion against oneself to be right<br />in one's wrongness.<br /><br />And we all make payment in that untender kind –<br />or, unstuck from any solidity, able to be<br />anything, what can we owe, we who own and<br />occupy no space or<br />all there is?<br /><br />If we only disconnect, there's no responsibility,<br />no game. If we only connect, we compress<br />all games into a black hole. Most of my playmates<br />are human. How can I disconnect from you, George W. Bush?<br />Once I voted for you, one idiot<br />for a worse one. I wonder what I did (long ago)<br />that contributed to the terror that fermented<br />to burp out Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Houssein?<br />Not much, for they mostly missed me,<br />but my world is darker for their having been in it.<br />A Beatles tune gives me such joy – what<br />did I do to earn it? Or you, by what valor<br />or cowardice on what battlefield did you earn<br />the pleasure or affliction or monotony<br />of this poem?<br /><br />(As mathematicians might say, let U equal you,<br />my wife and lover, or you, my reader(s) or you,<br />my friends, or you, my cat, or you,<br />my poor undervalued left little finger...)<br /><br />But I needn't account for it all. I'm a<br />no-account fellow, not a being-counter.<br /><br />We pay by being. We connect by considering<br />a connection exists. We disconnect by considering<br />no connection exists. Fun requires the ability<br />to connect (Let's play!) and to perceive the connections<br />and to disconnect (Fuck off!) and know we've done so,<br />at will. That's why art, when it is, is fun.<br /><br />If your left hand knows not what your right hand<br />does (I want to say "doth", but then I'd have to say<br />"thy" because I want these things to connect, God<br />knowth wherefore) – you're a klutz, and, in the bigger game,<br />(where the murderer insists his hand wielded the blade – he<br />had nothing to do with it) evil.<br /><br />If you never let one hand's activities<br />escape notice, you won't be able to unknow<br />enough to have a game, because ones own actions<br />define what one gets. If you never let<br />one hand hide from the other (nimble hands<br />like two squirrels at play),<br />there IS no bigger game.<br /><br />I am you. I am not you.<br />(I didn't say that. Letters on a page said it.)<br /><br />I forgot to mention that I'm a big boy now<br />and can go for a walk to go for a walk<br />without dragging along U.S. failed foreign policy<br />or genetically modified wheat. I began pondering<br />the guilt of moths (giltlessly white)<br />because I hadn't written a poem in weeks<br />and thought the crimes of a cabbage moth<br />(for being part of America) might give me<br />a poem, which perhaps they did – wherever did I put it?<br /><br />How to balance connect with disconnect?<br />(Should it be "Only balance?" Or must we<br />investigate the art of unbalancing?)<br />When to cut loose? When is escape not escapist?<br />How to move away without disconnecting<br />(the connection extending, "gold to aery thinness beat").<br />How the awareness of a previously unnoticed connection –<br />the awareness alone – makes it easier (if not unnecessary)<br />to do something about it. How connections become<br />toxic when one thinks they aren't there –<br />there where one put and is putting them.<br /><br />Connections connect, you see.<br />I'm writing this to disconnect from<br />the newspaper and Internet world<br />(A net is a knotted trap) and to connect with a more<br />you-like world, in fact, you. Also me.<br /><br />I don't dis connections.<br />I connect and I cut connections.<br />That's the state I'm in: Connect-I-cut.<br />That was a belabored pun. A poet once<br />scolded me for trivializing my "serious work"<br />with such stuff. He lamented my slummy choice<br />of connections, my getting in with a bad crowd.<br />Oddly, the great proponents of "Only Connect,"<br />(many of them poets) tend to be fixated<br />on disconnecting lines from poems. "Only<br />CUT!" they chant. Cute.<br /><br />I've ambled far enough today. It's been a long walk.<br />_______________________________________<br /><br />Notes: The poem begins with a quotation: "Only connect." I'm not sure of the source, but I first saw it as the epigraph to the novel "Howards End" by E. M. Forster (punned later in the poem -- "coward's end."<br /><br />The speaker (me) lives in Reston, Virginia, a town of 60- to 70,000 people, about 20 miles west of Washington, DC and about 5 miles east of Dulles airport. Many Restonians are retired (one hopes) CIA and State Dept. officials. The walk featured in the poem takes place in Reston, which has about 60 miles of woodsy trails.<br /><br />The poem refers to dominos -- alluding to John Foster Dulles' justification of our war in Viet Nam by "domino theory" -- if Viet Nam fell to the communists, then its neighbors would fall, causing others to fall, etc., the way one domino, stood on end in a line of dominos, when knocked over, causes the next one to fall, etc.<br /><br />The reference to a "federally mandated-but-not-mandated" initiative refers to the New Freedom Commission's report to President Bush and the wording of much pharmaceutical-company-sponsored legislation based on it. That report called for the screening of the entire population of the country for mental illness so that we could all be properly treated (medicated, that is). That report shares the rationale TeenScreen programs and is the basis for such stuff as the "Mother's Act" (a plan to mandate the screening of all pregnant women before, during and after pregnancy, so that no mother is left un-medicated). The wording of the report and of such legislation clearly calls for universal screening, but weasel-words it so that when someone protests against "mandatory screening," defenders of the report point out that it doesn't use that exact terminology.<br /><br />The lines refering to "Vladimir" and "Nabokov" and "viceroy," etc., refer to one of my favorite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, also a distinguished lepidopterist, from whose novels I learned what little I know about butterflies. I call him "Viceroy of all I survey" because the normal phrase, "Monarch of all I survey," seems sad now that there are so few monarchs left, but we still have viceroys, who look like small monarchs.<br /><br />The reference to butterflies being punished by being "broken on the wheel" is stolen from Alexander Pope's poem "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," where Pope, writing satirically about a corrupt and delicate homosexual courtier of the day, says he will not be too hard on this guy, for who would break a butterfly on a wheel. The wheel is a Medieval torture device, used to break someone's bones.<br /><br />Later in the poem there's a reference to Kaliyurga, the Hindu iron age, part of a theory that we go through cycles, and that every eon or so we need an "iron age" when almost everything and everyone are destroyed (a cleanse), so that we can have the dawn of a new golden age.<br /><br />There's a line about Sam Johnson insisting his cat shall not be harmed. Samuel Johnson, subject of the most read and revered biography in the English language, was the 18th century poet, novelist, essayist, great conversationalist and scholar who, nearly single-handedly, created the first great dictionary of the English language. When he heard talk of a nut who was walking the streets of London, shooting cats, his response was that Hodge (his own cat) would not be shot, a line ever since associated with our human tendency to view massive catastrophes from our personal, narrow viewpoiints.<br /><br />A line about "lobotomizing o'er my species grave," alludes to a line in a Wordsworth poem where he is critical of science and refers to one "who would botonize o'er his mother's grave."<br /><br />The reference to those wanting an end to all life, including their own says that would be a "cowards end"--punning <em>Howard's End</em>, a novel by E. M. Forster whose epigraph is "Only connect."<br /><br />The line about "gold to aery thinness beat" is quoting from John Donne's poem, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," where he compares the commline to his wife when he's overseas to the thinning out of gold when it is beaten and expanded.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-18058782524356355482009-01-31T16:16:00.002-05:002009-01-31T16:21:38.459-05:00ENOUGH ABOUT FAITH ALREADY!--A FINAL WORD...MAYBE<strong>Among the Missing</strong><br /><br />We must trust, even when there is no body<br />to see, no tiniest trace of the others,<br />that we are all here, all reachable,<br />not one of us ever irrevocably lost.<br /><br />Otherwise we each become a child who plays<br />hide and seek so cleverly that none can find him<br />and we think we'll just stay hidden,<br />but at last wonder where everyone's gone<br />(we want to brag about the cleverness).<br />By then the seekers, deciding there must be<br />holes in the universe, become persuaded<br />that one can be utterly lost.<br /><br />Then (innocent yet of death) we fear<br />for the persistence of play, invent lies<br />and compulsions to prevent others<br />and ourselves from leaving, say<br />WE ARE ALL ONE, so that there will be<br />no leaving, or say WE ARE EACH<br />UTTERLY SEPARATE AND ALONE, so that<br />there is no one else to leave.<br /><br />Thus has our play been protected<br />out of existence, leaving us stuck<br />with each other in the barriers of the game<br />(turbulences, distances, rocks, bodies, aeons)<br />to the point where, even if we recall<br />our separateness, we can no longer<br />reach out to one another.<br /><br />Like wind over water, we are perceived<br />only in what we create. In the quick, rippling<br />cross-currents, all perceptions flow,<br />come in question like the changing faces<br />behind the face in the mirror.<br /><br />No creation can hold its creator, not<br />soft eyes nor hard poetry; no perception<br />can replace knowing you are here<br />and knowing I know.<br />_________________<br /><br />No commentary this time (except this one). This time I will have faith in my poem.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19702247.post-5659153350800918552009-01-31T14:18:00.005-05:002009-01-31T16:12:57.034-05:00What is NOT Faith?Faith is Everything<br /><br />Remembering solves not knowing.<br />Those who cannot remember have beliefs.<br />This we call faith. Between knowing<br />and remembering is not knowing -- being<br />right there with it, but not knowing.<br />This, too, we call faith. And the<br />unknowing call knowing faith.<br />And below belief is mystery, where<br />one becomes the unknown, knowing only<br />that nothing can be known, which also<br />some call faith. Even waiting<br />to find out what one is waiting for<br />is called faith. And total unconsciousness<br />bespeaks vast faith. In the words<br />of a modern theologian, "I believe<br />I'll have another drink."<br />____________________<br /><br />This poem summarizes ways we know. I've seen the word "faith" used to characterize all of them (and a few not mentioned in the poem). Even the absence of faith is a kind of faith or can be seen that way. (Ask any fan of existentialism.) I suppose this is the kind of profundity that equates to triviality. If you draw a circle, you have what's inside it and what's outside it. Any mode of being attributed to an identity has, we assume, outer limits and things beyond those limits, things that aren't it. Or, more simply, whatever I know is not all that can be known. And yet I act. Or don't act. Either action or non-action can be viewed as a manifestation of faith. Here's an example:<br /><br />I drive my car down the street, looking at what's ahead, checking the rear-view mirror for what's behind, looking to both sides. I'm being careful. This knowing by looking is, in a sense, the opposite of faith. Or it could be called my faith in looking. But I never look up for approaching meteors (and seldom look up to watch out for safes dropped from upper-floor windows). Carelessness? Or playing the odds? Or what's the point, since I wouldn't have time to dodge a meteor? Or faith?<br /><br />Or perhaps nothing is beyond me. Perhaps I am all that is, and what I know is all there is to be known. And if I say I know this to be true (and to whom would I say it?), that would sound very much like faith.<br /><br />Getting back to the poem, remembering solves not knowing because knowing is simply knowing. One remembers by looking at something (a mental picture?) in order to "remind oneself" of what one doesn't know. Odd, since we must know what we are able to make a picture of. What complicated games we play.<br /><br />What are some of the other ways we know things?<br /><br />Knowing about them at a slight remove, not completely able to pervade what is to be known, not quite able to be it;<br /><br />looking (a greater remove), by which is meant looking, hearing, tasting, etc.--perceiving in the usual ways;<br /><br />feeling emotions about and projecting emotions toward and sensing emotional responses;<br /><br />interacting via effort (as when, to refute doubts of reality, Samuel Johnson kicked a stone hard);<br /><br />thinking and thinking and figuring away at things, as if somehow our words will eventually become the things we are thinking about;<br /><br />symbolizing things and perceiving only the symbols (concentrated packages of thinking, really);<br /><br />eating (a way of knowing or admiring something);<br /><br />having sex with ("...and Adam knew Eve")--where it is purely a sexual exchange;<br /><br />bowing in awe before the mystery of things (a despair of knowing);<br /><br />waiting for an answer or just waiting, not knowing for what or even that one is waiting;<br /><br />unconsciousness (a considerable effort not to know which leaves a kind of imprinted knowledge, a scar embedded in the hard-shelled resistance to knowing, a way of not-knowing pain, a memory not easily accessed or subject to reasoning).<br /><br />These constitute a scale (with many intervening steps, no doubt), steps downward from knowing (or perhaps from an unknowing total capability for knowing, at each step downward using more mechanical means to know, a more condensed and limited approach to knowing. These ideas are not my own, but my take (I emphasize, MY take--my realizations on these matters may omit or distort the source of this scale) on the<a href="http://www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part14/Chp41/pg0766-a.html"> "Know to Mystery Scale"</a> developed by L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1950s. (Note: That link might be difficult for those unfamiliar with the terminology. This scale is best explained in some of his lectures. Or, if you're ambitions, you can find all needed definitions by reading <a href="http://www.bonafidescientology.org/Append/01/page09.htm">all the axioms that precede the one that contain this scale.)<br /></a><br />I was looking one day at the various intricacies of "faith" and how that word seemed to fit with equal propriety any step on that scale. I found the scale useful. I could actually find my position on that scale with respect to specific attempts by me to know. And spotting that position, I could improve it. (Why is moving up it and "improvement"? Knowledge is thus acquired more rapidly, with both greater depth and detail and is more readily and effectively applied.)<br /><br />Knowing at its theoretically highest level would be creating. One would create that which is to be known and thereby know it. At much lower levels, one knows what one considers is already there to be known by interacting with it. As one moves down these levels, increasingly one ceases to know and becomes what must be known and eventually what is unknowable (or moving in that direction). Have you ever tried to understand, for example, the thoughts or feelings of a rock? Or a person who has become an erratic object? Or someone in a coma? Or a psychiatrist?<br /><br />My conclusion? Discussions of faith are less useful to me than discussions of knowing and how to know and how to know one knows.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Dear Reader contains the essays and poetry of Dean Blehert (www.blehert.com)</div>Deanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13288987227344290690noreply@blogger.com0