Dear Reader

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - review

2010-08-02T06:24:00.001-05:00

I 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.

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.

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.

In case you have NOT read them, here are a few points:

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.)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dean

Of! Dammit! Of! Of!

2010-07-06T07:12:00.000-05:00

by Dean Blehert

The trick of much poetry
is to boobytrap the innocent logic of syntax
with nonsense - not a stream of gibberish like
"bubble rats sour oyster foul snot pits
blood summer", but "A bubble of rats bursts
the sour oyster of our foul snot
in deepest pits of blood summer" or "the calculus
of winter" or "in the frayed easy chairs of
incontinent autumn" or "a calculus of rats
bursts the snot moon of..." (or even "...snots
the burst moon of...") - it MUST make sense,
because the power of syntax (A [noun] of [plural noun]
[verb]s the [adj.] [noun] of our [adj.] [noun]...)
carries it along, as heedless of its cargo
as a speeding train, which, whether carrying
vacationers, businessmen, potatoes or corpses,
gets where it's going. Not much wrong
with this: millennia of sheer plod cut
these logical grooves into our language, dry beds
for flow of even gibberish. Why NOT use them
to make us know bubbles of rats, the bursting
of sour oysters, etc.? We read such lines
as if blindfolded and asked to touch
whatever is put before us. Logical syntax
is our inviter's confident glibness
that lures us to plunge our hands into the bowl
of spaghetti, worms or bleeding guts, at worst
an adventure. I lament only the sapping
of syntax, the cheapened status of sentence
position, the dulling edges of our fine all-purpose
diamond-tipped tools: Of, the, a, our,
in, to .... Honed delicate tools should
not be used to slice up old cardboard. Syntax
is a miracle of complex agreement.
If we waste it - too often treat the ancient
aristocracy of articles, prepositions,
pronouns and conjunctions as mere pimps
for the perverse rompings of jaded, ill-
associated, ostentatious, nouveau riche words
like bubble, sour and calculus - then the
little words that bear it all upon their
shoulders will sicken from the shame of it,
look for ways to lighten their load by
cheating us, lose meaning - and then,
without our razor-edged the , our handy-dandy
slicer/masher/ricer/dicer of , our whole
tool chest full of elaborately defined
and compartmented if, to, and, on, as -
O how shall we talk to one another!

Your Whole World

2010-06-30T07:42:00.000-05:00

This is your daily newspaper--
your whole world is here.
Here are the places in the world
where you can't go because
they are dangerous. Here are the
people who hate you because
you are an American. Here are
the things that will run out or cost
too much for you to have in the
near future (the distant future
has already run out, and you
can't have it). Here are the things
you can get in trouble for. Here
are all the things going wrong
with the world that you can't do
anything about. Probably no one
can do anything about them. Experts
and reliable sources agree that
there are no simple solutions and that
only time will tell. In any case,
it's certain that you
can't do anything about these matters,
but nonetheless, beyond the call
of duty, we keep you well-informed.
("We are now dropping the cyanide
into your cell....") Meanwhile,
if you can afford to drive
your car, there's a good chance
you too will be killed, maimed or sued,
but there's a good chance of it
even if you walk. That's the
sort of world you live in, but
fortunately for you, your friend,
the daily news, is looking out
for you--on the inside pages
our columnists tell you how
to deal with stress (per expert
shrinks with CIA contracts)
and our funny pages bring out
the humorous aspects of the Decline
And Fall of Practically Everything.
We present all reliably authorized
sides of every issue from our
Viewpoint. We let you get a very inside
look at what goes on all over the
world. When you are done reading
the papers, you can extrovert
by inspecting your breasts or rectum
for cancerous growths.

by Dean Blehert

Lost and Found

2010-06-23T08:48:00.002-05:00

You stand there in the spring woods,
admiring (as one would say politely
to the hostess, "Delicious!") a loveliness
that once tore you out of yourself,
left the empty shell of you vibrating
with a music that hummed long after
your return. You walked home that day,
ignoring the glad tears that gave you away,
knowing yourself too transparent
to be noted.

Now, admiring, you are solid.
You try to feel by looking harder,
spotting details, stilling the voices
in your head. For a moment you think
something is about to happen,
because you feel teary, but no tears flow--
the source is muddied. And the sting
is not of gladness. For several moments
you stand there trying to put something
back where it belongs, not knowing what,
while the dog trots and sniffs
farther and farther afield. You move on,
thinking, "I've lost it", hoping someday
it will turn up.

Nothing has been lost.
It is what has been added that thickens
the day. It is always with you, a clenched
headache you won't know has held you
until it vanishes. Then you will know
the mass of it--and the masquerade:

That when you strained to see,
the strain was not yours; when you thought:
"I've lost it", the thought belonged
to your burden; when you cried:
"There is no freedom!",
it was your shackles crying.

by Dean Blehert

Saving Face

2010-06-18T11:18:00.000-05:00

I catch at eyes on the street
and they dart away, except once I held
too long the eyes of a dapper man,
who smiled too winningly.

Counselling people, I can look at them
without being expected to make a pass.
With my wife, often, it is permitted
just to look. With friends across restaurant tables
looking at each other is not strictly forbidden,
though always after an acceptable instant
one must ask (meaning "Is something wrong?"),
"What?"

Why is it better to let two sets of eyes wander
in intricately interlaced choreography
from table to food to napkins, mine sweeping
(mine-sweeping indeed) past the face
three feet away only when it faces
elsewhere, catching eyes only a casual second,
as if eyes were slippery to the touch
of eyes? Why is it better, when eyes meet,
that inner gaze be elsewhere?

Even the dog knows that when I am giving orders
I am head of the pack and must not be faced.
People who look right at you
are about to lie to you, on the make, eerie
(Rasputins, pod people, zombies)--Oh
there is no good reason ever for eyes
to fix upon eyes. Movies dote on closeups,
pornographically huge luminous eyes
harmlessly sating our cravings.

Not that we are our eyes,
but they are where, craving raw light,
we've let ourselves be located--what could be
more dangerous? They've become our signature,
identity badges in the swarming lobbies
of the Humanoid Convention--the eyes
or other cherished features:
a mustache, "striking" cheekbones, the migraine
that somehow justifies all failures,

not much to be, but better than a billfold
crammed with credit cards, a sex organ,
a gun, a compendium of opinions
and all the other things we become
when we've lost, even, face.

by Dean Blehert

In a Hurry

2010-06-12T07:38:00.000-05:00

Two days ago I drove past a young man
writhing on the sidewalk while three men
lifted his motorcycle out of a puddle
of oil by the curb.

I was going somewhere and decided
I didn't have time to stop.

No doubt he'd felt the same way
until the crumpled rear end of that car
persuaded him otherwise--

though he may still be in a big hurry,
answering petulantly his pain's questions
so that pain must ask them over and over,
haggling, wringing from him each detail--
very time-consuming.

I, too, have found since then
more time than I thought I had
for answering questions--not posed
by any pain of mine,

but by the tiny gap torn
in where I thought I was going to
by my maybe passing right by--
in my hurry to get there--
part of it.

Today another accident: The front of his tiny car
nearly cut off by a left-turning truck,
he's slouched in the front seat, bleeding
from his face (nose? mouth?)
onto his once-white shirt, dazed.

I park and bring over a box of Kleenex
to catch blood and to make amends
for driving past the broken motorcyclist.

I feel okay about it now if you do, Lord,
so you can stop damaging people
and machines for me.

by Dean Blehert

Walking Beside You

2010-05-26T06:36:00.002-05:00

Walking ahead of you (it is hard for me to walk
at your pace), I worry: What if an alien craft
were to beam you up, just you. I'd be walking along,
turn back - you'd be gone
forever.

So I slow down to walk beside you. Still, with a
narrow beam, they could pick off you alone,
so I put my hand on your shoulder,

but maybe they'd take you and just
my hand, and you'd worry, what happened to the
rest of me - did I bleed to death, or did the beam
cauterize my stump? - you'd never be certain.

Would you save my hand? Would they let you
remember me? I'd never be certain.

Our old dog would be barking like mad,
snarling at the empty sky, inconsolable.

They'd put me away, too--
In jail if I had no explanation,
or in an asylum if I tried to tell the truth.

How nice to walk along, (the dog nuzzling our hands
then falling behind to sniff at the grass)
kicking the autumn leaves, beside you.

by Dean Blehert

On the Passing of Suburban Shopping Forests

2010-05-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

The trees are gone now - they just weren't practical,
what with cereal boxes and CDs sliding off the branches,
shopping carts catching on roots and overturning, skidding
on ice, water leaking through the leaves, making a
soggy mess of the movie popcorn, shrimp lo mein sliding off
root-tilted tables into customer laps, having to shake
snow off the videos to read the titles, all the books
at Borders mildewed and cobwebbed, kids vanishing
into the upper branches, poison ivy in the men's room,
birds splatting into bright-skied movie screens,
pushing faces through itchy spider threads to
reach the pharmacy, squeezing between saplings to
get green cream cheese (with ladybugs) smeared on
your bagel, branches snapping in your face as you
moved to the counter for your large hazelnut mocha
with a little green caterpillar thread-dropping
into the whipped cream, no place to park, thorns
snagging and tearing nylons and shopping bags,
all those CREATURES underfoot and overhead as if
they owned the place and not very clean either -
mangy deer nibbling the vegetables, foxes, squirrels,
skunks, moles, woodpeckers making their messes
right in the aisles, scary rustlings
and crashings behind the canned goods,
raccoons in the bakery, snakes in the Place
for Hair, that huge moth spreading its wings
on the fresh lettuce, bees swarming the Baskin-
Robbins Pralines and Cream, just the tops
of Boston Chicken and First Columbia Bank
showing where the beaver dam submerged them,
a lightning-felled branch spilling silk scarves
and handkerchiefs, shattering a cosmetics
display case, gallons of perfume wasted
on old dead leaves, clouds of gnats
kamikazing your eyes so you can hardly read
the prices, things plopping into your soup
in all seasons - yellow leaves, branch-loads
of snow, acorns, winged whirling seedpods,
silky puffballs drifting into everything,
trying to separate your salad-bar pickings
from dead leaves and seeds in all that rush
of wind and rain, huge black wet creaky
tree trunks looming up on all sides and in
the leaves overhead a sudden crackle and WHOOSH!
as a thousand grackles swirl upwards shrieking -
HEADS UP! - yuchhh! They've been gorging
on blackberries! Oh, it's so much more
convenient now that everything is flat and
air conditioned and asphalted and concreted and
glassed and roofed in, sleek floors, straight
wide aisles, level shelves and tables, nothing
alive but us and some adorable puppies in a
window and lovebirds in cages, all we need
so easy to reach, so CLEVER! I don't know
why we didn't think of this sooner!

by Dean Blehert

Close Encounters of the Fourth Course

2010-05-12T06:54:00.000-05:00

The dessert tray, a shimmering alien civilization
Of mirrored chocolate domes and creamy turrets
And tessellated plazas, cherry-studded, with gardens
of emerald kiwi, descends, hovers, whisks away,
Hovers near again—I feel tractor beams
Reaching out to me, probing, searching
For intelligent life to pervade, and now,
All purpose, all sense of proportion
Vanished, I am being pulled in, closer...
Closer—suddenly before my glazed eyes
The pecan pie is about to speak to me,
I know it...
And that's all I remember.

by Dean Blehert

Dialog Poems Worrying Words

2010-05-09T07:52:00.000-05:00

Dean Blehert
8 May 2010

I no longer have my own words.
They’d been alive and hard to maintain,
pitted and yellowing. In each word, the nerve
was deteriorating. Having them removed
was painful, but necessary.

With my false words,
I just leave them in a glass by the bed each night
in a solution of remembered admiration
and sugar in sparkling water, and each morning
they fill my mouth with dazzling highlights.

My smile is fresh, new, authoritative,
but years after the extraction,
I remain numb.

Alice Pero
14 April 2010

Worrying poetry like a ragged cur,
nagging her bone
the poet seeks out meat, hidden
in crevasses,
bits she can crack with teeth worn down
by critics and dentists
She wonders now if a workshop with
eager young writers
might fit her with dentures,
give her a new bite

English 101:

2010-04-20T07:23:00.000-05:00

The "apathetic fallacy" or fallacy of attribution
of no feeling to that which cannot but feel
is endemic in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism.
Here is a common example: A young man
goes strolling after the first spring shower,
feels in every vibrant budding tree,
each whistling robin, each droplet on each petal,
in each salvo of tender and fiery greens -

feels a surging joy as vivid as his own
and writes a poem that says so. A critic who,
with little life of his own, is unable to feel
the life that surrounds him (only enough
to suspect it may be disruptive) - a critic
long sequestered in theories of biochemical
mechanics that comfortably anaesthetize
lacerations he's inflicted on himself and others -
and to whom even the young man's joy
is a possibly contagious rash,

such a critic, reading the young man's poem,
proclaims (as student pens wag busily),
"See how the poet attributes his emotion
to birds, trees and flowers? That
is the PATHETIC FALLACY!" (Students
circle these words for the next quiz.)

The critic's proclamation is a perfect example
of the Apathetic Fallacy: Feeling nothing himself,
he ascribes his absence of feeling
to all life. He assumes, for example,
that birds and leaves cannot feel joy
and that the young poet cannot feel
the joy of others. He does not say
(but cherishes the secret thought)
that even the young man's joy
is brain circuits on the fritz
or good digestion.

But this is unfair, calling it a fallacy,
for after the lecture, the critic
walks to his mud-spattered car
past dull grey-green bushes,
mite-ridden sparrows that jitter and hop
like wind-up toys - he is right:
it is a joyless world.

by Dean Blehert

Among the Missing

2010-04-19T07:08:00.001-05:00

We must trust, even when there is no body
to see, no tiniest trace of the others,
that we are all here, all reachable,
not one of us ever irrevocably lost.

Otherwise we each become a child who plays
hide and seek so cleverly that none can find him
and we think we'll just stay hidden,
but at last wonder where everyone's gone
(we want to brag about the cleverness).
By then the seekers, deciding there must be
holes in the universe, become persuaded
that one can be utterly lost.

Then (innocent yet of death) we fear
for the persistence of play, invent lies
and compulsions to prevent others
and ourselves from leaving, say
WE ARE ALL ONE, so that there will be
no leaving, or say WE ARE EACH
UTTERLY SEPARATE AND ALONE, so that
there is no one else to leave.

Thus has our play been protected
out of existence, leaving us stuck
with each other in the barriers of the game
(turbulences, distances, rocks, bodies, aeons)
to the point where, even if we recall
our separateness, we can no longer
reach out to one another.

Like wind over water, we are perceived
only in what we create. In the quick, rippling
cross-currents, all perceptions flow,
come in question like the changing faces
behind the face in the mirror.

No creation can hold its creator, not
soft eyes nor hard poetry; no perception
can replace knowing you are here
and knowing I know.

by Dean Blehert

The Importance Of Deciding To Be Ernest

2010-04-16T08:32:00.001-05:00

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Sheer nothing to say, persisted in, becomes something to say, Beckett hopes.

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.

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...

Why My Deserving Talent Will Never Make It to the Big Leagues

2010-04-07T14:14:00.000-05:00

Recently I got a printed letter from a student interne
at Washington and Lee, saying that my wonderful talent
deserved to be represented in the new collection
of Virginia poets they are creating — and
eventually they might even have funding
to PAY poets for their work. So would I
send them, please, all my published books.
In the margin a handwritten note — looking
just as personalized on each of the 200 letters
(or 1000 or 10,000) sent out — says that it
would be great if I'd autograph them too.

I was tempted. But I wondered about a,
no doubt, form letter from someone
who'd never read a word of mine (I
suspected), yet began by telling me what my
talent deserved. I wondered too if I was
obligated by my address to become a
"Virginia Poet."

The letter included an e-mail address (for questions),
so after letting the letter ferment for three days
(not a word of it changed), I e-mailed her.
Why? Must have felt embarrassed at my cheapness,
felt a need to justify. I said thanks, but I'd given away
hundreds of copies of my books and never, that I knew of,
had that expanded my audience; that I found
people willing to pay for my books, who then
actually read them; that I'd written my books
to be read by people, not archived, but that
I'd be glad to sell them as many copies as
they pleased to buy. (I mentioned two other
universities that had purchased my work.)

The response, next day, was from the professor —
(I must have been too much for the interne.)
It said:

"Thank you for your thrifty and candid response.
I'm certain your decision is the best one possible
for all concerned."

(I could hear the gentle nudge on "all".)

Ooh, that venomously genteel snideness —
I remembered why I'd hated faculty meetings
during my brief academic career.

I thought of a dozen sharp answers,
but knew that ANY answer would just
make it worse. The whole exchange
stuck in my throat until, thinking of
Monte Python, I evoked an answer
so good that I didn't need to send it:

Dear Professor [name],
Thriftily
and candidly
I fart
in your general direction.

Cordially, etc.

Will this get to him somehow, perhaps
by spiritual telegraph? With what professorial
rapier thrust will he respond?
I am waiting for the other silken stocking
to drop.

Dean Blehert

Putting Des Carte Before the Source

2010-03-22T09:13:00.001-05:00

I think I think; therefore, I think I am?
Or therefore I am I am?

I think, "I think, therefore I am";
therefore, I am "I think, therefore I am."

The little Descarte engine chugs up the hill
chanting, "I think I am...I think I am...".

I think, therefore I am...NOT!

I am there, for I think I am.

I think what I think; therefore, I am what I am.

I eat spinach; therefore, I yam what I yam.

I think; however, I am.

I think; moreover, I am.

They are; therefore, I think.

You are; therefore, I am.

You are there, for I think.

I write sonnets; therefore, Iamb.

THINK; therefore, IBM.

We THIMK; therefore, we err.

I am; air go; I am not.

Cogito; ergoes the neighborhood.

I shrink; therefore, I'm.

I am, but I think.

I think, therefore I damn.

I fink, therefore I lam.

I think not; therefore, I am not.

I think; therefore, I am...I think.

You think; therefore, you are...or so YOU say.

Cogito; Here goes: ZOOM!

— Dean Blehert
(posted by Pam)

ON JUST LOOKING AT THINGS

2009-05-07T19:21:00.002-05:00

No poem this time to give me the excuse of calling my essay "notes." I just want to describe a recent experience.

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.

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.

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....

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

THE ART OF THE FUGUE

2009-05-07T18:56:00.002-05:00

The Art of the Fugue

If all the world except the two of us
lying in this bed were suddenly to disappear --

and it did --

then the power of our suddenly unfettered
dreams

(Look at us! We are the center of
creation, our love the seed
crystal, in thunder our bodies
cracking out "Let there be light! Planets!
Creatures!"--eyes seeing in eyes

(or only the idea of eyes, all
that remains of us until we
put back the rest)

what we have made, that it is good, and
there was evening and there was morning, the
next day, lying late, lolling in the vast
smiling space we have made, making
leisurely additions (the bed, sheets,
wallpaper, a ghostly shaft of sunlight,
bird whistles, cluttery airplane noise,
the dog's tongue hot on my cheek) to our dream,
knowing a world that once seemed to be
disappeared last night, but that by the time

(let there be time
(again?)) --

by the time we leave the room
we have made, the suddenly unfettered
fecundity of our dreams

(and who can say if anything
has changed, since we, both makers
and seers, are changed

(though it seems
we've been this forever),

making and seeing the old
newly when we put it back?)

will have put it all back)

would put it all back.
______________________________

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.

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.

[I mean this literally. I experienced it with at least as much reality as ever I've experienced being a body named Dean Blehert.]

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.
Well, let there be...an end to this note.

LIBRARIES AND VOICES

2009-05-07T18:14:00.002-05:00

Shhhhh! Or Else!

The soot-grayed lions of the New York Public Library
look snooty, their noses serenely arched,
their eyes deigning to be vaguely aware
of what goes on beneath their line
of stoned vision.

Symbols of wisdom? Or perhaps
guarding wisdom from our
voracious stupidity.

In any case, symbols, solid ones,
much in demand among those
who pore over insubstantial symbols
like these.

If you spend enough time with printed words,
they begin to seem to speak loudly,
but really they are so soft that a nearby whisper
drowns them out, exposes their silence,
shattering scholarly illusions and evoking
real roars that only one newly arrived
hears as soft, abrupt hisses.

Perhaps the lions represent the proud rage
pent up by disturbed scholars, who can only say
"Shush" and wring their eyebrows meaningfully.

Readers are like animal lovers, proud
that cats and dogs come to them and rub
against their legs. We are proud that books
talk to us. "See, Homer must like you.
He won't talk to everyone." A voice
in the library's noisy hush silences
our books. We fear they will not speak to us
again. We are furious.

We protect our libraries
with lions, each dangling a huge forepaw
over the edge, each relaxed, but formidable,
ready to defend with relentless silence
the gentler silence in which books
can be heard.
_____________________

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

(I suspect when one speed-reads, our internal voices lag behind the finger that sweeps down the page, poor breathless voices.)

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.

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.

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!

And they reject the distractions that expose their internal voices as tiny things.

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.

HUMORLAND

2009-03-06T14:15:00.002-05:00

What 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!)

Humorland

On your left you can see literary humor. There –
a white southern boy and a run-away black slave,
best friends, drifting up-river together on a raft.
They meet charming scoundrels, self-righteous
church folk – a whole world passes through
their odd, innocent, crookedly intersecting
universes. And just beyond you see
another boy getting others to help him
paint a fence by pretending to enjoy doing it.
(No, that's a different world, where two teen-agers
excite themselves ribaldly with the words "doing it.")
Perhaps the joke is, the fence-painting boy
begins to believe his own pretense.

Ah, now here's something you don't see
every day: This ordinary fellow has woken up
to discover that he is inhabiting the body
of a giant dung beetle, and all he can thing of
is that he'll be in trouble if this makes him
late for work. Later, he dies, shrivels up,
and his parents (relieved) sweep him up
into a dust pan, and the next day, on the bus,
they notice with pleasure that the sister
of the man who changed into a beetle
is also changing, becoming a woman.
This doesn't terrify them, which is (how
can this be?) funny.

Now this one shows Mr. Pickwick, a sanguine fellow,
plumb, benevolent (with a stubborn streak), who,
despite age, spectacles and all the exterior trappings
of dignity (if absent-minded dignity), gets himself
into the rudest slap-stick messes...and there's
a sober fellow, speaks in platitudes, of all things,
a Jew in Dublin, a little guy – but we have been
listening to his thoughts, which are brisk,
energetic, humorous, interested in everything,
missing nothing. In this scene, we see him
from the point of view of a lush in a bar, where
a huge anti-Semitic Irish Patriot condemns all Jews,
and this meek, dapper little man dares to speak up,
telling the Citizen that his savior was a Jew
and so was Christ's father and...but the burly one
snarls (as does his huge slavering dog, at his side)
that Christ had not father, to which our hero cries out,
Well...his UNCLE was a Jew! – and is chased
from the bar, which amuses the lush and all
the good company, this mating of courage
and ridiculousness.

But we mustn't savor this too long – there's
too much more to see, the pomposity
of the Rev. Mr. Collins rejecting, with formal
and self-congratulatory prissiness, the woman
who has already turned him down. And there
(Oh Lord, can such things be funny?)
the ultra-civilized pedophile, all asimmer,
who cannot quite bring himself to violate
his innocent Lolita (because, somehow,
love has gotten mixed up with his compound
of lust, romantic ideals and world-weariness,
but he doesn't know that yet), until she offers
to show him what Charlie taught her at camp...

and there, in a Georgia swamp, an alligator
puffs on his CEEgar while admiring his beret
and false beard in a mirror (funny how a good-lookin'
man look good in anything...), while an owl
and a turtle troubador argue as idiotically
as the bar patrons on Amsterdam Avenue
in Manhatten (where crooks meet in a back room
to plan capers as complex as the Manhatten Project
[which is still no joke?]), but, to get back
to the swamp, this time the last word goes to
one of the three bats in silly, suspendered trousers...

and there's the boy with his tigeer – everyone else
sees no tiger, just a small, bedraggled tiger doll,
but we, seeing both, cannot unsee the REAL tiger
and all the other cavorting dreams this child visits –
often catastrophically – upon this world of ordinary
snowmen that just stand there until their three globes
become a dirty puddle. And way over there,
behind the boy and his tiger and his scary
snowmen, an elderly Spanish gentleman
in rusty armor on a swaybacked, spavined horse,
accompanied by a fat, vulgar peasant with ten
homey proverbs for every situation – the old man
is attacking a windmill! And here's one
you might have missed: He looks something like
Sancho Panza, has the street smarts and the bulk,
but every minute of every day he feels he's attacking
windmills. His name is Andy Sipowisc. He's a cop
in New York. He's uncomfortable with this stuff –
you can tell by the way he wipes his forehead.
It makes you laugh, it does! Sometimes sad things
are funny. Witchcraft.

There's much much more to see – look,
a man called issa locks the wooden gate
by placing a snail on it! But it's not just
literature: What about that angry duck?
I can't understand a word he's saying!
And the nearly blind blusterer who denies
he can't see a thing, supported by a Providence
Who always provides something – anything! –
at the last moment, a turtles back in a stream,
a falling board that, just in time, lands across
the gap between two beams high in the sky
just in time for our hero to stride, blithely across
that narrow bridge between where we see
he is and the heroic world he imagines
he is conquering.

And the exquisite suffering of two musicians
in drag (they join an all-girl bad) to save their lives,
who must control their hormones while being best buddies
with the sexiest blonde who ever turned out to be
(and somehow this is funny, desperately funny)
dreamily sad – oh, she's far too good at being
dreamily sad. But, we learn, nobody (and no body)
is perfect.

And there's a nervous, croaky-voiced young man
in bed with the neurotic wife of his Dad's partner,
and after sex, they can find nothing to talk about --
which suits her, but bothers him, because he's
still alive, so he tries valiantly, asking --
as foolhardy as the Dublin Jew -- "What
was your major?" It was art. Art? – what happened?
he asks this sullen drunk, which turns out to be, er,
a non-starter.

Say, look at how that little, raggedly dapper fellow in the derby,
so pertly mustached, walks, a cartoon amalgamation
of anxiety, self-assurance, bluff, leeriness and obliviousness,
ready at any instant to find himself terrified or exhilarated,
a walk that somehow impel him forward, while moving
in every direction at once, not so much a funny walk
as an expectancy of funny, so much that is jerky
and mechanical welded so tightly to what is
only alive.

Enough! Yes, yes, there's much more to see –
it takes days, weeks, years, lifetimes to get through
all of it, but we must save time to see HUMOR,
not what great artists have made of it, but the real thing,
as raw as a poke in the funny bone, a dead fish
in the face, Joe Miller's joke book, the last pages
of Boy's Life magazine (where the blacksmith
tells his apprentice, "I'll hold the horseshoe,
and when I nod my head, you hit it with the hammer,"
thus teaching his apprentice the importance
of clear syntax in which the correct antecedents
for pronouns cannot be mistaken), the "ADULT"
jokes that make little boys squirm with delight...

but let's have a look, here, to you right: something
ou rarely see -- a minister, a priest and a rabbi
are walking into a bar together. Over there
the same by is entered by a man with a dog,
who will be refused service, even though the dog
can talk. And there the same unlikely clerical trio
are on an airplane that is breaking apart – who
gets to use the only parachute? And who knew
that rabbis, priests and ministers spent so much
quality ecumenical time together!

Here are similar scenarios featuring an Englishman,
a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard,
maybe a Swede or Russian or Scot – and sometimes
a Jew (nationality not specified), none of them clerics,
each reacting differently to such things as writing
books about elephants (inspired, no doubt,
by the six blind men, in the future to be replaced,
perhaps, by tales of how Five Gay Men
redesign the elephant), jumping out of that
plummeting parachute-challenged airplane
(most of them valiantly and without a chute) –

by the way, we never do find out if that plane crashes.
Perhaps not, for it's used in joke after joke.
Anyway, our United Nations prototype shows us
again and again that Englishmen are cold, stiff-upper-lipped
and practical, Germans verbose and abstract, French
lecherous, Italians excited, Scotsmen cheap, Jews
sly, Americans crude but savvy – I don't know
why any of this is funny, but it is, it is.

(The funniest humor is the kind of humor people
of which you don't like very much would say,
"THAT'S NOT FUNNY!" But it is, and it's
so much funnier when someone insists it isn't.)

Even though Hitler's minions killed 6,000,000 Jews
for their exaggerated, imaginary Jewishness, yet
exaggerated Jewishness can be funny, not to mention
unexpected Yiddish words. Even though these same Nazis
(and Nazis too can be funny – Ve haf vays uf making zem
funny) justified the enslavement of millions of Poles
because they were, after all, slavs, destined to be slaves
of un-ironic Aryans, yet that "Polock" over there,
the one getting married in his best bowling shirt,
and there he's slapping his forehead, and there,
on his honeymoon, naked on the bed, he's waiting
for the swelling to go down — even this fancied
stupidity of all Polish people (don't think of
Chopin, for example – think only of how stupid
you feel when you try to pronounce the names
of Polish athletes) is funny, don't deny it! Art can
play with or against that, but already (as crude oil
is oil, as rough diamonds are diamonds, as trite similes
are similies) – already what's funny is funny, even
the black man (descended from the end man on the right
of the Minstrel Show troupe), the one who is so easily
terrified, who, with saucer eyes and squeaking voice,
must be forced to walk past a graveyard, and
if wind in the trees rises to shrillness, will –
before fleeing – tell his feets to do their thing.

Speaking of blacks, listen to these kids on a street corner
finding new ways to describe the promiscuity, ugliness
and obesity of one another's mothers, insults worthy
of ancient Greeks and Trojans to be hurled across
the lines before battle, and surely these kids
will kill one another...but no, they insults are too
incredible, and they are laughing! (And their mothers
would laugh too.)

Over here elephants (though threatened with extinction)
become jokes – what, for example, is gray and
ejaculates in large quantities? (Oops, sorry, I mean
"...gray and comes in quartz," though
I don't see what difference it makes...OH! Comes in
QUARTS! OK, now I get it.)

In this next scene, someone (perhaps a news lady)
asks Mrs. Lincoln if, apart from THAT, she enjoyed
the play. We are not told Mrs. Lincoln's answer, a serious
fault to be found in many jokes – the most important things
are left unsaid or drowned out by laughter.

Here are thousands of similar scenes, traditionally
used for sex education before there was sex education,
all involving a traveling salesman, a tough old farmer
and the farmer's plump and eager-to-please and lonely
daughter. These scenes usually include a barn, straw,
a cow, a bedroom, maybe a shotgun. And always
the salesman gives or at least offers the farmer's
daughter (and sometimes his wife and even a cow or two)
a free sample of his generically bodified seed (pure –
or impure – corn), that is, he fucks her or tries to.
The farmer disapproves. And what's funny about that?
But it is, O all the instruments (mostly male tools)
nod in agreement – it's funny. I guess you had
to be there.

That crowd over there? They are watching a chicken
cross the road, each (and they are mostly well-known people,
their views flavored by celebrity) – each explaining
why the chicken is crossing or has crossed the road,
all opinion, no double-blind, randomized studies here.
And behind them we have (and this was once funny enough
to fuel a thousand variations) and older, simpler statement
that the chicken is crossing the road to get to the other side.
(But why did the moron throw butter out the window?)
Nearly as funny as being promised (by one's grandfather,
perhaps0 to be told a dirty joke, then being told
that a pig fell in the mud. To make such jokes funnier,
we have the elaborated form...see those shaggy dogs
over there? It seems a stupid punchline is funnier
if it takes forever to get there (we wait in line).

Well, not forever, but a long time. Taking forever
to get to a punchline is over on the art-side (or outre side).
There, that cadaverous guy – one of the funniest writers ever,
told us about man who woke up a beetle. That man
had a cousin, Mr. K, who was told a story about another man
(or another cousin) who waits for an answer. (He dies,
unanswered, but that doesn't mean he's not still waiting.)
He can't get through to the person in the palace who has
the answer, because there are huge guards at the gate
to prevent him from entering, so he sits by the gate
day after day, waiting. As he's dying, the guards
close the gate. "Why?" he gasps. Because, he is told,
this gate is no longer needed. It was put there
especially for him. So is that an answer after all?
And, in any case, is it funny? Isn't it funny
to have to ask if it's funny when one is laughing
(really, not just writing LOL, but laughing)?

But we lapse again into art. Let's keep it simple.
There's an English word for sexual intercourse
(or intercoarse) that derives from the German "ficcan" –
to beat, and that old joke, the similarity in appearance
and often in fact between one love-making and one person
beating another, reverberates through the ages
to make that four-letter word funny when some comedian
comes right out and says it again and again
(like poking out the angry purple head of an erect penis,
silly jack-in-the-box) – we just can't get enough of it.
Perhaps the word is no longer funny, but it is still funny
how we can't get enough of it – the word, that is.
The action itself we only think we can't get enough of,
as when we haven't had pizza for a long time,
we order more than we can eat. That's funny too,
like craving cream pie and getting one in the face –

Careful, don't get too near those pie-slingers!
And watch out for explosions (though they'll just
turn you temporarily black), slashing swords,
unexpected abysses, even banana peels.
That cartoon cat, sliced like a loaf of bread,
recovers in an instant, but you might not
That coyote falls a thousand feet into sharp rocks,
but recovers with only a bad headache (represented
by birds tweeting and stars), but you might not.
You probably wouldn't even be able to run on air
for a long second before plunging. But you can see,
can't you, how if we were able to recover
from anything, it might be fun to fly off cliffs
or get blown up (whee!) or to blow up others –
what sport! ZAP! POW! kaBOOM!

(Some say we CAN recover from anything,
even the loss of bodies, because we're spiritual beings,
but that's silly, because if we were really
spiritual beings, EVERYTHING would be fun.
And it's NOT. Live is NOT FUNNY!)

And those three guys with the weird haircuts,
poking one another's eyes, yanking ears and
swatting heads – they're funny too, but not nearly as funny
as the skinny dopey guy who, with a flick, lights his thumb
as if it were a cigarette lighter, and his fat, pompous pal
who, unbelieving, tries to do the same thing –
and it WORKS! so he freaks out. There's another
fine mess his friend has gotten him into. Oops,
we've blundered into art again.

Well, there's much more to see here, but
I think we've had enough for today. So what's funny?
(I'll try to explain it to you in case you're a blonde.)
Let's see, cruelty, violence, promiscuity, hypocrisy,
racism, obscenity, excrement, farts, boogers, bad smells,
injuries, death, greed, sexism, cannibals boiling missionaries,
people on couches talking to shrinks who aren't listening,
husbands and wives and mothers-in-law hating one another,
farmers, salesmen, daughter, cows, bestiality, lawyers,
chickens, elephants, snot, clerics, God talking to St. Peter,,
the Devil addressing someone newly arrived in Hell, St. Pete
addressing someone approaching Heaven, heresy,
poverty, wealth, heroic idiots, insanity, pain, the last man
on earth, genitalia, bird poop on statues, an ashtray, a hairbrush...
but this is a list of everything that's NOT funn. But it IS funny.

Funny – pertaining to fun. Making fun of serious things.
Are there serious things? Are they serious because they're things,
the too too solid things whose solidity becomes contagious,
so that we would have them melt, resolve into a
dewy laughter? Would it be fun to make fun of –
that is, make fun OUT of – death? Not to mention
marriage! (Who was that lady I saw you with
last night?) The man – over there, between art
and "the dozens" (I'm the indecent docent of the dozens) –
another guy is pointing a gun at him and saying,
"Your money or your life!" and he (a Jew, by the way)
says nothing for a long time, so the gunman yells,
"I SAID your money or you life!" to which the famous
Jewish comedian says in an exasperated tone
(annoyed by this interruption of his calculations),
"I'm thinking! I'm thinking!" – well, that same guy
would often say in that same tone, "That's not funny,
Rochester" or "That's not funny, Mary," or
"That's not funny, Dennis" – and it would be funny,

and millions of people would laugh and are still laughing,
because it was funny the way it was not funny,
and that's where humor goes right, goes wrong,
you see, because some things (like the Holocaust?)
just aren't funny, and it's a terrible thing
to make fun of that Jew's cheapness (Let's see,
my money or my life...?) or even Falstaff's fatness!

But terribleness is funny too (ah, the terrible too's).
Even a pun can be funny. I myself heard a funny pun
once....

But some humor makes me feel good, while some doesn't,
even though I'm laughing, like a child tickled beyond
where it's fun, but he can't stop laughing – and when
the tickling stops, he's pissed off at the tickler or in tears.
There's a difference between Hitler's jokes about Jewishness
and Jack Benny's (DUH!)

The humor that most delights and haunts me
makes the agreed-upon world look ridiculous
in the light of a better, livelier world,
a more compassionate, varied, witty and noble world,
perhaps one invented by Calvin and Hobbes
or Don Quixote, perhaps one vaguely stirred up,
like the ache of a fading numbness, by Kafka.

This I prefer to the sour humor that seeks to mock
and reduce a world already ridiculous (I won't say
"absurd," because the word has been used to death
by joyless people) with no motive other than
to be of that world, one of the gang, mocking a well
the dreamers, unable to see them as other
than their world. Is this a serious thing? Not really.
See over there, the man on a tree branch
sawing off the branch on which he sits?
He is one of the mockers. He will fall.
This is funny. But it would be even funnier
if the tree fell over, leaving him sitting on his branch
in mid-air, supported by nothing, nothing at all,
not a mocker of dreams after all,
SURPRISE!

Dean Blehert
www.blehert.com
short poems at http://deanotations.blogspot.com

The War Between Form and Creation

2009-03-06T14:01:00.003-05:00

Here's a recent poem, followed by the essay it suggested to me:

Funny how the thought of starving to death
bothers me less than the thought
of my poems vanishing.

What I will not lose, whatever the economy,
is I. Even if I forget myself, even if I try
to lose myself, I will survive as what haunts me.

but I have relearned how to know myself
as the creator, not what I create.
Poems may perish, those ripples
in the stream of creation, standing waves
of varied configuration, depending upon
the forms (boulders, pebbles, rhymes, meters
ideas, words, experience) through which
I direct that stream. They mark the joy
we create as perishable as poems,
but not our ability to create it, not
the joy of creating, not a mark
on me.
_________________

The War Between Form and Creation

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.
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?
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?"
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.
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?)
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).
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.
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.
And yet, we choose the medium, direct the effort and choose to perceive (a form of creation in itself) the art in what results.
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.
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.
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").
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.

DISCONNECTION--a poem/essay

2009-02-05T16:29:00.002-05:00

What 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.

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.

I've put a few notes at the end.

Good Connections

"Only connect, "someone said, and it's good
to make connections. We (when we are the United States)
should connect, shouldn't we, our wealth
to the poverty of nations we've...developed?
We should connect what is done to us
with what has been done in our name,
and we should connect what has been done
in our name (when our "intelligence"
replaces a democracy with a dictator,
for example) with what we ourselves
have done or failed to do (voted? inspected?
listened? understood? spoken out? thought
it enough to watch the network news between
sitcoms and (un)reality shows, yes,
it shows, doesn't it, eventually?)

Yes, connect – but ONLY connect?
What about learning when to dis-connect?
Bludgeoned by too much reality,
some can only connect. Where, beneath fists,
hammers, bombs, remains space for anything
to be separate from anything else?
It becomes impossible to go
for a long walk.

Going for a walk. Writing a long poem.
This is me writing a poem and also
my hand writing words on a page and
also my hand making ink marks
on processed wood pulp, the exercise
of various muscles, the conversion
of various nutrients into energy and efforts,
or, going the other way, the influences
of my childhood or my reading or my
stars hosing through me and my pen,
and it's me thinking out loud and hoping
I'm overheard, and it's this, right here –
lots of possible perspectives, easy
to find one where what I do and
whatever is good or bad may be considered
to connect.

"Me going for a walk' is as slippery, being
"an American takes a walk in America"
(and speaking of connections, we have felt
no need to coin the term United Statesian",
since we assume what is American is ours,
we much-damned Yankees), and it's also
a body moves in a universe on the surface
of a planet-ball. And Lord knows
what else – for one moves also through
(and thus defines) what the Lord knows.

As I (carrying in my mind like a convention label
my name, Dean) take a walk in Reston, Virginia,
where I live, and also, I hear, where lots
of retired State Department and CIA people
do whatever they do, live, maybe, but
I digress to connect – as I walk the paths
(Reston is threaded with forested asphalt
trails), I, having recently skimmed too many
newspapers (can't help it; a neighbor I hardly
ever spoke to – from Pakistan, I think – has
moved out; no one has yet moved in, but the
Washington Post keeps coming with orgiastically
bold headlines -- nobody is as excited about news
as the newspapers; there it is each morning
in the driveway, so I pick it up, just to read
the funnies – they aren't very funny now,
or is that just too much connecting? The funnies
and the puzzles, but I'm addicted to reading,
got to leave it completely alone or I read it all,
so I'm afflicted with POST-traumatic stress)

[Why all these parenthetical appendages? Because
I haven't learned to disconnect.] – as if Internet
weren't more than enough connection, I dread it,
each day a dozen more petitions and offers that, if I don't
sign them or take them up, may cost us the whales,
our constitutional rights, honest government,
non-toxic food-trees-air-water, our children, energy, money, another million killed
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...
but I don't, I don't, I can't, I won't
sign them all, order them all! It takes time to click,
bring up the web site, log on, add "my own words" –
time to read enough and see enough to know
which ones make sense, time to wonder if petitions
get seen, if they work, if my time, my own time
(How DARE I take a walk with vital
petitions unread, unsigned!) – if my own time
has value, as much as my name on any petition,
but isn't this everyone's time? Can I have
some of my own? (Value must involve
the creation of time.) So because I have time
or because, having none, I don't have value,
so what difference what I do? – therefore,
I take a walk,

having read too many papers and e-mailed
alarums and petitions (the antique "alarums" adds
a drum to the trumpet of "alarm"), I notice
I am also an American taking a walk
in America, the nation that is occupying
Iraq and doing something or other
in Afghanistan and planning maybe
to do worse in Iran and is fouling its own
eerie eagle aerie in the process, and that is also
(maybe REALLY is) the home of the brave,
land of the free, pilgrim's pride (though currently
addicted to grim pills), destination of teeming
masses yearning to be free (or me's yearning
to be "teams" amassing earnings, for there is no"I"
in "team"). Connect connect connect connect –
sounds more like a train ride than a walk.

And I do. I stroll. The air is mild, bright, dewy
and green-stippled. I meet no suicide bombers
this balmy day. Nothing blows up. Iraq, Iran and
(for that matter) Viet Nam are as far away,
in space or time, as the sun, whose continuing
explosion would toast this marshmallow earth
in a nanosecond were it not for 93,000,000
unremarkable, but felicitously positioned
miles (good feng shui). The sun, some say,
is burning out, one more fuel to be conserved
for our pale children. (I have none,
but I think I'll be someone's soon enough
(if we connect body to body across generations),
and, anyway, my readers are mostly in the future,
if anywhere. They'll need reading light.
Or at least warmth enough to thaw
their fingertips so that they can
distinguish braille characters. If they can get
through page one, they can burn it to read
page two in its light and so on.

But the sun's death is as far in the future
as my death was when I was a child (in a place
where almost no one died – Middle America, Mid-Twentieth Century,
where I thought that by the time I got old enough
to die – VERY old, I thought – something would
have been done about death, someone
must be taking care of it). The bombs,
though...if we fear dominoes may be headed our way,
and we nudge them so they'll fall the other way,
and the file of dominoes, extending out of sight
over mountains and oceans – if it begins here,
right behind us (where we denied
the Vietnamese the elections we promised them
in 1950 lest the Communists win – for example,
or where we ignored tribal boundaries to set up
our oil colonies – that is, nations – in the Mid-East, or
when the children we, through our federally mandated-
but-not-mandated screening programs, are put on drugs
that include among their side effects going nuts and
shooting up schools) – if the first domino
looms behind us, how long will it take
before the contagion of dominoes we shove forward
(hoping it will crush terrorism) winds around the earth and
that shadow from behind us fills the sky?

So because I am out for a walk and feeling good, alive,
safe, full of future, I think, "I will have to pay
for this." I think, "When would this be
in the history of Rome?" I think, "Domino,
I didn't do it. Take our politicians, our corporations –
can't you collapse selectively?"

But I know it has something to do with me,
with all my unnecessary second helpings
while others starved, my TV sprees, my years
of trying to be the world's greatest poet,
instead of saying something of use, my years
of doing less than my best – and though
I'm not sure what my best is, I believe –
I KNOW – I've done good things, and these
things connect too. They make – if
anything does – a difference. And I know
I could have done more.

(The shadows ARE selective, must be,
if there is connection. Hell, even on earth,
will have higher and lower circles.)

Two cabbage moths play tag across the path –
two AMERICAN moths. Must they, too,
pay? These tall oaks, must they be toppled
because retired CIA operatives enjoyed
their shade? (And can retired CIA operatives
enjoy shade, or, like Hamlet's uncle Claudius,
appearing to pray, are they cut off from such things?)
(And do I enjoy these oaks, or turn them into
props for poetry?) Or because I, who have been
a pretty good guy, but not good enough
(to save the world? to feed one fly-bait,
bloat-bellied African child? to get a good guy
elected?) – because I walk among these trees
(to forget that, not only are there nations
where it is an act of daring to walk to the corner,
but also there are vast desert-ovens where no man
can walk in daylight, and a few miles above
these trees begins a skyless dark, near
absolute zero that apparently goes on
(with brief starry interruptions, pinpricks
of nuclear heat) forever) – because I,
who could have been worse, cherish
(if only for the seconds before I swallow
them with my poem) these trees, will they
be spared?

But out there in forever I'm not an American.
That will be another payback, not for America's crimes,
but for those that come with being human.

And thinking such stuff, I notice butterflies
(tiger swallowtail, black admiral, viceroy – that's
the best I can do, Viceroy of all I survey, Vladimir)
(sorry, you may not know I mean Nabokov,
one of my addictions, a royal vice,
who taught me a few butterflies), wild flowers
(no names, they say – very hush hush), leaves
of varied greens, points and lobes (no names,
sorry, I cannot lobotomize o'er my species' grave),
and I notice birds, their songs, motion, swift rifts
of color flashing through leaves – and I disconnect
them from the argument, shrive them, want them
forgiven. (And our cat, too, though she's not out
for this walk, but she, too, must be forgiven –
or need not be.)

So I begin to disconnect. And I hear
the counter-arguments of those who only
connect: Even the butterflies of America
are corrupt, and must be punished
(broken on the wheel?) for giving pleasure
to the hordes of Satan. (Nazi death camp officers
wax ecstatic over Beethoven, whose music must,
therefore, become hateful to all good folk,
as must the word "folk", for Hitler loved it.)
Every tree, every blade of American grass
shall be blasted. (British grass, too – they're
connected. Samuel Johnson rises from his grave
to assert – irresistibly – that his cat, Hodge
shall not be harmed.)

And if I say, behold, your own empires,
past and to come, were as corrupt
and man-grinding as ours, enslaved
and tortured more...

then I hear a new set of voices, like chilled crystal.
They say, yes, it is a human blight,
not merely the American nightmare.
We need a fresh start, Kaliyurga,
the old Hindu universe-recycling system, from Iron Age
to Golden age via the incineration of everything.
Blast this place, this earth, leave it to wolves,
to cockroaches – no, say colder voices,
sterilize it, leave not a microbe, for all
is corrupted. Leave the void, waiting
for a new, pure creation, for we (Americans,
humans, life, matter) are blots, cancers afflicting
nothingness, filling it with ceaseless images and thoughts.
Remove us and all our polluted symbiotes. All
is connected, so all must go. There can be
no Noah, for it is life itself, even the possibility of life,
that blights infinite space, and space itself – why,

some say, "Don't stop at space. Undo
the universe, heat masses to thin gases,
let all explode or implode, bring back
chaos, reverse creation, make it all vanish,
especially thought, for any dream is a virus
from which new life and matter may ferment
and coagulate.

They only connect. They include themselves
in their programs, seeking oblivion – a
coward's end? Where there is possibility
of life and art, there is disconnection: A is not B.
A is not even A. (One precedes the other.)

Will we be spared for 10 good men?
Five good men? One slightly frayed
cabbage moth?

(So much poetry is only connection,
metaphor by sticky metaphor, or the struggle
to disconnect some trace of us from death,
who is always shown first to be well-connected
indeed. Death is always in-crowd, A-list; Death
has pull. Get in good with Death, and you've
got it made (as a shade). Death can get it for you
hole-sale. Even this poem will end.)

Of course we pay and of course
what we call ours (even moths and trees)
are taken from us. We pay what we have,
no more. Unless we can create more.
And we can. So what? A good cabbage moth –
not such a bad deal.

This isn't about who pays or how much.
("My treat this time." "No, mine, I insist!)
What we are is payment enough.
Nothing worse can be done to us
than to make of us what we make
of ourselves.

What do evil men make of themselves?
A righteous solidity. They are what they are
forever or until someone chisels
the pigeon shit off the monuments they've become
(statues are grave stones) to themselves,
then tickles them out of countenance.
Once one, being basically right and good,
does wrong and BECOMES a wrongness,
one – to insist on his rightness – solidifies.
(Statues are so official! How could they be
wrong?) Stupidity by stupidity one petrifies,
like a muscle that can't be unclamped,
that exertion against oneself to be right
in one's wrongness.

And we all make payment in that untender kind –
or, unstuck from any solidity, able to be
anything, what can we owe, we who own and
occupy no space or
all there is?

If we only disconnect, there's no responsibility,
no game. If we only connect, we compress
all games into a black hole. Most of my playmates
are human. How can I disconnect from you, George W. Bush?
Once I voted for you, one idiot
for a worse one. I wonder what I did (long ago)
that contributed to the terror that fermented
to burp out Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Houssein?
Not much, for they mostly missed me,
but my world is darker for their having been in it.
A Beatles tune gives me such joy – what
did I do to earn it? Or you, by what valor
or cowardice on what battlefield did you earn
the pleasure or affliction or monotony
of this poem?

(As mathematicians might say, let U equal you,
my wife and lover, or you, my reader(s) or you,
my friends, or you, my cat, or you,
my poor undervalued left little finger...)

But I needn't account for it all. I'm a
no-account fellow, not a being-counter.

We pay by being. We connect by considering
a connection exists. We disconnect by considering
no connection exists. Fun requires the ability
to connect (Let's play!) and to perceive the connections
and to disconnect (Fuck off!) and know we've done so,
at will. That's why art, when it is, is fun.

If your left hand knows not what your right hand
does (I want to say "doth", but then I'd have to say
"thy" because I want these things to connect, God
knowth wherefore) – you're a klutz, and, in the bigger game,
(where the murderer insists his hand wielded the blade – he
had nothing to do with it) evil.

If you never let one hand's activities
escape notice, you won't be able to unknow
enough to have a game, because ones own actions
define what one gets. If you never let
one hand hide from the other (nimble hands
like two squirrels at play),
there IS no bigger game.

I am you. I am not you.
(I didn't say that. Letters on a page said it.)

I forgot to mention that I'm a big boy now
and can go for a walk to go for a walk
without dragging along U.S. failed foreign policy
or genetically modified wheat. I began pondering
the guilt of moths (giltlessly white)
because I hadn't written a poem in weeks
and thought the crimes of a cabbage moth
(for being part of America) might give me
a poem, which perhaps they did – wherever did I put it?

How to balance connect with disconnect?
(Should it be "Only balance?" Or must we
investigate the art of unbalancing?)
When to cut loose? When is escape not escapist?
How to move away without disconnecting
(the connection extending, "gold to aery thinness beat").
How the awareness of a previously unnoticed connection –
the awareness alone – makes it easier (if not unnecessary)
to do something about it. How connections become
toxic when one thinks they aren't there –
there where one put and is putting them.

Connections connect, you see.
I'm writing this to disconnect from
the newspaper and Internet world
(A net is a knotted trap) and to connect with a more
you-like world, in fact, you. Also me.

I don't dis connections.
I connect and I cut connections.
That's the state I'm in: Connect-I-cut.
That was a belabored pun. A poet once
scolded me for trivializing my "serious work"
with such stuff. He lamented my slummy choice
of connections, my getting in with a bad crowd.
Oddly, the great proponents of "Only Connect,"
(many of them poets) tend to be fixated
on disconnecting lines from poems. "Only
CUT!" they chant. Cute.

I've ambled far enough today. It's been a long walk.
_______________________________________

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

The reference to those wanting an end to all life, including their own says that would be a "cowards end"--punning Howard's End, a novel by E. M. Forster whose epigraph is "Only connect."

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.

ENOUGH ABOUT FAITH ALREADY!--A FINAL WORD...MAYBE

2009-01-31T16:16:00.002-05:00

Among the Missing

We must trust, even when there is no body
to see, no tiniest trace of the others,
that we are all here, all reachable,
not one of us ever irrevocably lost.

Otherwise we each become a child who plays
hide and seek so cleverly that none can find him
and we think we'll just stay hidden,
but at last wonder where everyone's gone
(we want to brag about the cleverness).
By then the seekers, deciding there must be
holes in the universe, become persuaded
that one can be utterly lost.

Then (innocent yet of death) we fear
for the persistence of play, invent lies
and compulsions to prevent others
and ourselves from leaving, say
WE ARE ALL ONE, so that there will be
no leaving, or say WE ARE EACH
UTTERLY SEPARATE AND ALONE, so that
there is no one else to leave.

Thus has our play been protected
out of existence, leaving us stuck
with each other in the barriers of the game
(turbulences, distances, rocks, bodies, aeons)
to the point where, even if we recall
our separateness, we can no longer
reach out to one another.

Like wind over water, we are perceived
only in what we create. In the quick, rippling
cross-currents, all perceptions flow,
come in question like the changing faces
behind the face in the mirror.

No creation can hold its creator, not
soft eyes nor hard poetry; no perception
can replace knowing you are here
and knowing I know.
_________________

No commentary this time (except this one). This time I will have faith in my poem.

What is NOT Faith?

2009-01-31T14:18:00.005-05:00

Faith is Everything

Remembering solves not knowing.
Those who cannot remember have beliefs.
This we call faith. Between knowing
and remembering is not knowing -- being
right there with it, but not knowing.
This, too, we call faith. And the
unknowing call knowing faith.
And below belief is mystery, where
one becomes the unknown, knowing only
that nothing can be known, which also
some call faith. Even waiting
to find out what one is waiting for
is called faith. And total unconsciousness
bespeaks vast faith. In the words
of a modern theologian, "I believe
I'll have another drink."
____________________

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:

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?

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.

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.

What are some of the other ways we know things?

Knowing about them at a slight remove, not completely able to pervade what is to be known, not quite able to be it;

looking (a greater remove), by which is meant looking, hearing, tasting, etc.--perceiving in the usual ways;

feeling emotions about and projecting emotions toward and sensing emotional responses;

interacting via effort (as when, to refute doubts of reality, Samuel Johnson kicked a stone hard);

thinking and thinking and figuring away at things, as if somehow our words will eventually become the things we are thinking about;

symbolizing things and perceiving only the symbols (concentrated packages of thinking, really);

eating (a way of knowing or admiring something);

having sex with ("...and Adam knew Eve")--where it is purely a sexual exchange;

bowing in awe before the mystery of things (a despair of knowing);

waiting for an answer or just waiting, not knowing for what or even that one is waiting;

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).

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 "Know to Mystery Scale" 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 all the axioms that precede the one that contain this scale.)

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.)

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?

My conclusion? Discussions of faith are less useful to me than discussions of knowing and how to know and how to know one knows.

FAITH, INTEGRITY & NITTY GRITTY

2009-01-30T15:31:00.003-05:00

Cynics say faith and religion
try to explain away the world's
chaos and mystery.
Sometimes it's the opposite:

They try to explain all the things we KNOW,
though we see no reason in this universe
why we SHOULD know.

A cynic is one who cannot face
how much he knows,
for it is mysterious to him that one can know --

and threatening,because he has done much
that he does not want to know,
nor know that it can be known.

Cynicism, then, is an attempt to explain away
what, despite the world's chaos, we know.
Why SHOULD there be a reason in this universe
for our knowing? Why should we expect
the playground to teach us the game we play?

Some religion is pretended knowledge.
Some religion is refusal to know.
Some religion is an excuse for knowing --
an apology to the physical universe
for patronizing a competitor.

Cynicism is embarrassment about knowing.

If you know and know that you know,
you can dispense with both excuses
and embarrassment.
___________________

The poem above suggests that faith can be many things, and that it is a vast oversimplification to label all faith a crutch, a way to avoid the so-called truths (the "nitty gritty" ones). There is a kind of faith that amounts to integrity, a willingness to recognize one's own knowledge. And most cynicism, I think, amounts to an inverted crutch (must be uncomfortable to rest one's arm pits on the small end).

After all, certain things associated with faith are far from comfortable for most people. For example, if we're immortal beings, what will we do with eternity? Even visions of harps and angels suggest ultimate boredom. And if blame and shame do not end with death, how will we bear those burdens?

Isn't it comfortable to think that we will not have to experience that ordeals we've left to our descendants (possibly nuclear wars, certainly huge indebtedness, perhaps a Brave New Medicated World, etc.)? Isn't it uncomfortable to think that we don't get out of it that easy? That we may be our descendants?

Which is the crutch and which is the obvious? I think the cynical ones know damned well that they've been around longer than one lifetime. Or at least they did as children, before they erected stone walls of arguments and evasions. Why else would they dodge so clumsily? For example, if you say that we are each immortal beings, the cynic will say that that's silly, because we all know that bodies die, an odd non-sequitur. I think the cynic hopes for an end, all debts paid forever, no need ever to take responsibility for past actions. And, as the poem says, I think the cynic proclaims the impossibility of knowing certain things because the cynic hopes never to be known by others.

Of course, some forms of religiosity are refinements of cynicism--of failed cynicism, a cynic covering his ass, just in case, or putting more impenetrable walls between himself and knowing or being known.Skepticism is a different critter. What one knows can and should be tested. But tested against what? What experts say? What "everybody knows"? Actually, I think there are better tests. For example, the day (age 12) when I, drug free, looking up through birch and tall pines at woolly summer clouds, found myself far above my body, filling up the sky, I knew something. Here's a poem I wrote about that:

Growing Pains

At a distance from the bustling cookout fire,
I, twelve, awkward, unpopular,
lay back on my jacket on pine needles
to look up through branches
along tapered birch-laced pines,
rising so swiftly I found myself

suddenly alone in the sky, filled up
with millions of minute rustlings of leaf, needle
and branch, each defining with each movement
new planes of perspective,

bending, supple as wind, to touch
the curvature of clouds. My body
tiny, but I am huge, overflowing
myself, floating there...

when a kid threw sand in my face!
I wept, turned away from him, hid my face.

Wait! Retake! Close-up! Slow motion!

Yes, floating there, I looked down
at the other small bodies scuttling
about the camp-fire and thought: They
could never understand THIS--
and had started to think: THAT thought
doesn't belong to the sky--

when a kid threw sand in a body's face--mine.
Anger and self-pity whooshed out like air
from a punctured balloon, as I was swallowed upb
y my growing body.

Turning from myself, I felt myself,
watching me, weep a few bitter tears
at my silly smallness,
floating there.
_________________

But whether that's "evidence" or can be communicated to others is another subject. What I will say is that at that time I not only knew something, but knew that I knew it. Later I learned of ways others could experience something similar (with considerable predictability--and without drugs or hypnosis). Obviously anyone else's reasoning about how such a thing cannot be or cannot be known will not impinge upon my certainty of my own experience. Unless I'm so suggestible that I can be persuaded that a hot stove is cold because someone has placed a label on it saying "COLD."

But what I mainly look at is workability: Does supposed knowledge, treated as knowledge, open my life up or close it down? Do I become a more able or a less able person, brighter or stupider, better able to align data and resolve confusions or less able, more useful to others or less useful, etc.?

But this, too is another subject, not the point of the poem. My poem is subtler than I am, and doesn't seek to insist on any particular knowledge, but merely to suggest that if there is any to be obtained, it will not be obtained via cynicism. It is true, I think, that some forms of faith (for example, acceptance of dogma with no willingness to relate it to one's own experience) are obstacles to knowing. It is also true, I think, that cynicism is a barrier to knowing. Both are vested interests, based on fear.

Faith--2

2009-01-27T01:08:00.002-05:00

O Ye Faithful

Only the faithful, who believe
in what they cannot see,
allow themselves the luxury of doubt.
The faithless cannot afford to doubt,
but must be rigid in their insistence
on not seeing what looms before them:

Behold the adulterer's faith
in spouse's stupidity, in the nonexistence
of a specific agonizing future, in somehow
being able to talk his/her way out of anything
or to wait out all questions in silence
until life moves on, all questions
forgotten. Behold the faith of politicians
in our apathy and forgetfulness, the faith
of conmen, admen and newspapers
in our credibility, the faith of deadbeats
(as they waste friend after friend)
that no matter how many of us they break,
another willing crutch will appear
to prop them up (until it, too,
snaps beneath their bulk
to be replaced by yet another).
_______________________

A friend suggested that this poem should begin with "Behold the adulterer's faith," and probably she's correct, since that's showing what the first stanza, abstractly and somewhat obscurely generalizes about. And it's where the poem moves from purely oracular (and who wants to hang out in an incense-choked cavern with a hag who cuts open birds to search the guts for omens and talks like a zombie?) to something with an element of wit and irony. I think it's interesting to see how much faith the supposedly faithless have. Sometimes blind dumb faith is simply blind and dumb, like all the criminals who know they'll never get caught--even after being caught again and again.

But I've kept the first stanza because I like the point that there's another kind of faith, not at all blind, which gives one the certainty (and space) needed to tolerate doubt. The criminal's faith, if faith it is, is desperate. He puts himself in a position where he can't afford doubt. It's too expensive.

Really, faith is a word we use to describe someone who seems certain of things for which we, who call it faith, see no evidence. But such faith can range from an apathetic agreement with what one has been told or had impressed upon him to desperate grope for something to which one can cling--and to someone who is simply certain of what is obvious to him, an obviousness that escapes others.

If someone had extremely sensitive hearing and could hear melodies where for others there was only silence, those of us who could not hear the melodies he danced to would call his hearing faith until all our instruments agreed with him. The one-eyed man among the blind, if they had no concept of vision, might seem to them a man, not of vision, but of faith, if he went running ahead of them without due regard for obstacles.

But it's fun, when one knows, to doubt what one knows, to challenge it. Science (derived from a word meaning "to know"), when it IS science, relishes doubting itself. I have no doubt that you are here, reading this, but it is easy for me to doubt it. I can decide you're here. I can decide you're not.

For that matter, I can decide that I'M not here. (Or am I a question?) The more certain I am of who I am, the more I can play with who I am. The more able I am to be myself, the more easily I can be anyone or anything, like a child being Daddy. I suppose such things are not really what we usually think of as doubt. They are play, fictions, art (more rudely, lies). But where certainty is simply knowing what one knows (and what one doesn't know), doubt becomes play, fictions, art.

Knowing in the absence of evidence that others can perceive--so similar to what we call insanity (he KNOWS there are giant spiders coming down the wall others see has no giant spiders on it). One difference is that one who DOES know in the absence of such evidence is not obsessive about it, is able to take the viewpoint of others who do not know. He can choose viewpoints. And, if he is artist enough, he can get others to see what he sees. The great composers have all given us music that only they, at first, could hear.

Of course, if he's indiscreet, he may still find himself burdened with a "diagnosis." But only shrinks can fail to see the difference between one clinging to a viewpoint others do not share and unable to assume any other viewpoint, and a person who is able to assume agreed-upon viewpoints, but able to assume viewpoints that are his alone.

It's not the ability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive that is madness. It's inability to share in the agreed-upon creation we call reality. And another sort of madness is the inability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive. Such an ability is, I think, native to all beings, so those who judge the sanity of others based on departure from agreed-upon reality are, themselves, awfully scared of slipping into knowledge and finding themselves having to take responsibility for what they can create.

That's a complex statement. To simplify: There are the normal (the so-called sane), who are not in very good shape, having lost the child's ability to pretend and perhaps a great deal more and who cling to what everyone knows, the most boring sort of faith. There are those who, having been bruised by the reality that everyone knows and having harmed others in that reality, prefer not to confront that reality, prefer to pretend it's not there or dub-in something else, rooms crawling with giant spiders, for example. (His world will be full of exaggerated manifestations of whatever he is trying to evade in reality. Resistance is pressure against something that has no space to retreat into. It oozes back into the life of the one who pushes it away.)

And there are those who are truly sane, able to choose a viewpoint, certain enough of themselves not to need to cling to agreement, nor to need to fight agreement and cling to an alternative reality. Able to create.

What is Faith

2009-01-25T10:37:00.005-05:00

[This is the first of a series of poems (and brief essays) on the concept: Faith.]

Someone Somewhere

Faith is the certainty,
even in the absence of perceivable life,
that there is someone there,
and not only someone,
but an infinite abundance of someone.

We dress up someone as Self, thinking,
how can one lose certainty
of self, but one can, as easily
as looking in the mirror.

Then we name it others,
until the day we extend a trembling candle,
whispering, "Is there anyone there?"

Then we call it God,
so that it has nothing to do
with us, and this works, except only God
is allowed to have certainty,

while faith has become our own
cancerous replica of certainty,
the machine's decision that machines
are not designed to operate smoothly
in the absence of the idea
of someone somewhere.

Commentary: This poem describes a reduction or decay of faith, not into cynicism, but into a mockery of itself, the way clumps of cancer cells sometimes take the shapes of the organs they destroy.

Faith, as seen in stanza one above, is a certainty. When one chooses to doubt this certainty (persuaded it is shaky? for a game?), the next step is to "solve" this doubt by putting faith in something more broadly agreed upon, more visible, like one's identity.

When that proves shaky too (and who has not at some point looked in the mirror and seen signs of mortality and weakness?), we put faith in others--for example, fall in love, and place our faith in a lover, one who will never fail us.

That failing, we put faith in something safe because it seems to us to be nothing at all (a God posited to be beyond anyone's experience). Probably we first try wooden and stone gods, looking for lastingness. Wood burns, stones shatter. But nothing can shatter what can't be experienced.

What we start with is hard to identify, but can be experienced, that infinity of presence. Whether it is called God or Self or true self or spirit or glumph, it is not only a presence, but an infinity of presence or an infinite capability in God or in ourselves of granting life. It is not a certainty one must cling to or protect. It is simply created and known (and creating is the surest knowing--the ability to create and uncreate).

Master Eckhart (best Googled as "Meister Eckhart"), a Catholic mystic, said (before the Inquisition gagged him) "The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you." The faith I describe in the first stanza is, in a way, that eye. It isn't important whether that certainty is God's certainty of you or your certainty of God. They are one thing.

Or so postulates this poem.

It moves from God to God, where God begins as what is most intimately present to us (more so than the "self" we define by body, personality, attitudes, etc.), then moves to God as infinitely alien to us. It moves from faith as certainty to faith as desperate fear of having no certainty and of there being nothing it is possible to be certain of.

At the top, faith is not separable from knowledge by immediate experience, and is perhaps even communicable to others, simply by sharing that presence. It is as empirical as the expectation that a hammer blow to the finger will cause pain. At the bottom, faith becomes a footnote to one's life, an insistence on knowing what one has decided can't be known, a creed. It is this level of faith that we call different from or even incompatible with knowledge. It is when we view faith this way that we begin to classify religions as gnostic (based on the idea that one can come to know God or spiritual awareness) as opposed to faith-based.

At this level, having attributed to God all causality, all ability to create, we have defined ourselves as automatons. This is a "belief in" (I've never seen a good definition of "in" when used thus with "belief"--it makes me think we get into something, like a moving bundle of meat, in order to believe), a belief in God in the absence of God's having any presence in what we are. God's presence in what we are is a concept (in every religion, among some of its followers) that the Gospel of John expresses in "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." There are many other similar expressions, some from people who, apparently, do not mention God.

Personally, I do not look for a theology to believe in. Any theology can be a ladder to be climbed and discarded or an anchor to hold one fixed and down. (And also fun to banter about, mustn't omit that.) But I do find--and I've worked hard at this thing that now is almost second nature--that, increasingly, I'm aware of an infinite abundance of someone, and that, increasingly, it doesn't matter what I find this "in." When I admire our cat, I find it in her (and understand why Christopher Smart included perhaps the best cat poem ever written ("For Geoffrey, His Cat") in a long religious poem, "Jubilate Agno" (rejoice in the lamb). And when I admire any person, I find it, or any tree or nothing at all.

I do not call myself a mystic, because none of this seems mysterious to me. And because I see no importance in calling myself something. Not that I have no named religion, but it's the means I use to achieve the state, not a label for a set of beliefs.

My body is alone now, in a room, typing at a computer, with a faith that you are here, infinitely here with me, if not now...then now.

HATS OFF!

2009-01-16T14:51:00.001-05:00

When I was little, and my Dad went to "the office", his presence in the house was strongest in the front closet, where, on the top shelf, like a row of conservative silent fathers, were hats, part of the uniform, like suits and ties, part, really, of the shape of a man's head in the 1930s and 40s, narrow-brimmed, felt, front-to-back dented. Fedoras, I guess, though I heard them called only "hats"--where did they go?

They vanished before anyone heard of global warming. Why? They were hardly unmanly. Even now they don't look quaint on Bogart or McMurray or Mitchum. I read recently that the first dictator of Paraguay ordered every man to wear a hat (this in the tropics) so that respect could be shown to ladies by doffing them. (What a good word, "doff"--from "do off". Why didn't it become mob slang: "Vinnie, that asshole needs to be doffed." We'd have the Mafia Don and the Mafia Doff.) So maybe rudeness or Women's Lib unhatted us.

But, by the way, how do we account for the passing of women's hats? They were never doffers, but always hatted, not just at banquets, but whenever they left the neighborhood (e.g., to "go downtown" to shop or see a doctor) and sometimes close to home, big-brimmed bonnets and tiny pill-boxes with bits of veil in front, all shapes and shades. These, too, are gone or worn to stand out, unusual.

But hats don't characterize Mom as they do Dad. Women were most often in and around the house, bare-headed. But men -- any day downtown, lunch hour, groups of suited men passing, heads brim-crossed and muffin-creased, silk bands out, leather sweat-bands in, hair or skin (fashion was kinder to bald men then) nestled in soft silky white inner lining, just enough brim to shade the eyes -- trimmed cowboy hats for crowded city life. If they'd lasted a few years longer, I'd have gotten my first one around age 17 (1959). Were they expensive? Did blue-collar men own at least one, for going to church? I'm so ignorant. When I was a kid, a man was someone who went to an office. But I think they all--even the tramps--wore fedoras, though some were hand-me-down, frayed.

When hats vanished, how many hat makers went unemployed? (Were they all twitching-mad from chemicals used to shape hats--mad as hatters?) And how masculine those hats were! What more seductively perverse than Marlene Dietrich in a man's hat? Did poets then wonder what had become of top hats? Derbies? (Imagine Abe Lincoln in a Fedora, Bogart in a Derby.)

OK, so times and styles change. But this was so quick: It happened in my time, my Dad's time, I don't know when or how or why. There went Dad and his cohorts to work in suits, ties, overcoats and fedoras; then the same men went to work in suits, ties, overcoats and no hats. How do such things happen. Was it Eisenhower? I see Truman fedora'd, but not Ike. He was military. Fedoras were civilian. Probably it was the return of all those soldiers, not in a rush to replace one helmet with another, really in no mood for uniforms of any sort. My Dad wasn't accepted into the Army: Flat feet. Being a civilian in a fedora was not something he was proud of. In 1945 arrived a flood of demobbed, hatless heroes from the world's most informal army, known for slang, chewing gum and big-nosed Kilroy, who was here. (Hitler expected little from such easy-going troops, officers who responded to formal invitations to surrender with "Nuts!") It must have become young and heroic to be hatless. (But why didn't they do away with ties as well? What a sadly missed opportunity.)

I'm satisfied. I'm sure that's the answer, so don't tell me about the felt mines drying up in 1946--I don't want to hear it.

Add Freedom and Stir

2009-01-13T18:31:00.000-05:00

Freedom is what my love grants
any motion I choose to become.
Since I can endow it, I must
be it, becoming aware of myself
(which is becoming aware of freedom)
in the bestowing.

I grace the eagle's obsessive circling
with soaring ecstasy;
I invest the cat's wide-eyed insinuations
with her love for us, freely given;
I tease the tree's knotty algorithms
for maximizing absorption of sunlight
(another form of freedom) through
leaf surfaces – I tease them into
a naughty frolic of lacy extravagance;
I add to a dust-blued scrim of atmosphere
my own infinity into which vision
can plunge, losing itself.

All this is true, but it must be added,
what I give to what I love is also true,
and, once given, has always been,
for it is I and I (and each of us) alone
who am always and endow the gleam of now --
like sunset's red-gold sparkle racing our car
along the telephone wires -- with what I am.

One S or Two S's?

2009-01-11T16:52:00.003-05:00

One, Many, None.

The addict has many needles,
but is only briefly needless.
Rain. No cabs. It raises my hackles,
being hackless.
At poker my money trickles away
when I am trickless.
You pick the ticks off me: It tickles...
But I become tickless.
I blow bugs from my bugles until they are bugless.
Don't drool on your Bibles:
Never read your Bibles bibless.
No cookie crumbles crumblessly.
With toothpicks I could spear the pickles...
were I not pickless.
In pain, we welcome Death, for sickles
make us sickless.
Having many girdles, she is never girdless.
Milk that curdles is not curdless.
In his groin he feels no prickles, being prickless.
The proud teamster lost his truck, begs the bosses
for another: Truckless, he truckles.
Breathless, he dangles, dang!-less.
Lovers sing, but singles are singless.
The jungles of the Collective Unconscious may be Jungless.
In many trips to the plate, he triples,
but now, retired, he is tripless.
No man wants her with all her pimples,
so she is pimpless.
She found all men to be wimps, so became a nun.
Now, wearing wimples, she is wimpless.
Waiter, we asked for our bills. Why are our tables
tabless?
Animals in old stories never use laundry detergent.
All our fables are FABless.
The minister told his hecklers to go to Hell,
for, wearied by heckles, he was Heckless.
Spaghetti without sauce, tangless tangles.
Spilt barrels: bungless bungles.
The widow's soup: Ladless, she ladles.
No spurs on our horses. These are stabless stables.
Tall silent movie idols: gabless Gables.
The passionless man idles, Idless.
How do we get to the maples, mapless?
To make us A.D.D.less, with drugs the shrink addles us.
_______________________________________

Famous Fatty-Ass IDs

2009-01-10T20:44:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I suggested to people
(poets marveling over the wondrous
human brain, the only bit of organic matter,
said some admired scientist, that is aware
of itself) that they were not their brains,
but themselves. One of them said,
"Not according to science" - referring,
I suppose, to some brains kept in skulls
(rather than bottles) attached to muscles
in white (probably stained) lab jackets or
dark (subtly striped) suits and discreet ties.

When I dared to mention the frequent bemusement
of such brains, when distracted by generous grants
from pharmaceutical brains (it takes money
to maintain fatty, healthy brains), he began
to lift his pencil before him and drop it
on the table and pick it up again and
drop it again, to show me that each time
the pencil, dropped, moved downward,
something he seemed to think had been discovered
by modern science. I thought this game
with his pencil was an amazing thing
for a brain to do.

Later he read us a poem (for this was
a poetry workshop - brains aware of being
brains marvelously aware of being brains
aware of being marvelous brains) that told
a story about someone referred to as "I."
A brain (with a name the brain calls "mine")
suggested replacing "I" in each occurrence
with "A brain." It didn't read well that way
(to this brain's judgment), but why should
that matter to that matter?

Posted by Dean Blehert

ON NOT DYING

2007-07-31T21:08:00.000-05:00

Note: This poem is actually twelve poems (ah, those pretentious Roman Numerals!) on a single theme: Specific times in my life where I became aware of myself as something other than the body by which I was known to others and even to myself, at first. That is, most of the poems are specific moments. A few, like the last section, are conclusions, parables, exercises for that mythical creature, "the reader". I'll add a few notes at the end. Here are the poems:

I

I know that bodies do not last,
but wonder if we do.
I remember once, exhausted
after too many laps, I stood
on the sand track, knees turned
to water, holding myself up
as if from above by wires,
head hanging, a leaden mass,
when before me were hive-like
crystalline golden cells, huge
grains of sand filling my vision
too close for eyes to focus, yet
unblurred, and I had time to wonder
if I'd hurt myself falling
on my face when, finding again
my eyes, I realized I still
stood, had seen or dreamed
those grains of sand at my feet
with other than my body's eyes,
"seen or dreamed" I say now,
but knew then only seeing.

II

If we are immortal,
we are all here.
It gives me pause,
even with those of us
who are in familiar bodies,
to think we are all here.
I sit near the window,
reading, hardly aware of the dog
asleep on his couch across the room.
He stretches, lifts his head,
scratches his chin with a few fast
rhythmic swipes of a paw, then
looks at me, and it astonishes me
to think that he is here with me,
has been with me all day, being
whatever he is just as you and I,
all along, have been with each other,
an idea that stirs me as if I were
a baby bursting with giggles
each time Momma pokes her head in view
and goes "peek-a-BOO!"

III

Once, sitting on the edge of a bed,
I noticed my head wasn't quite
in the right place, just an inch
or so out of kilter, my whole body
not quite right--in fact, it had
begun to slip from me, was hanging on
just barely by the habit of being me,
and I sat there or rather
it sat and I floated just above
and noticed my state and poised,
as if an unquiet breath or thought
would jar me loose to slip or glide
like a dew down a blade of grass
into alignment with the body,
and as I thought it, I did.

IV

I don't remember much of being
anything this body was not,
but I remember one childhood day,
walking past the playground fence
on my way home, thinking, this is it,
I am really a third-grader, one of
them, whatever "them" was, I can't
remember now, but I remember
the certainty, the vividness
of what, then, being a third-grader was.
And now, if you asked me how old
I am, I would not have to look
at old albums or a wristwatch
to say "50" ("going on 51!"
as the third-grader would eagerly
add). And once, assailed by more
certainties than I could stomach,
I knew I was ageless, had seen
and done more than I wanted to know,
knew, not by remembering, but by
being unable to unpicture,
the bottomlessness of my forgetting.
It is not what I knew, but the way
I knew, as, in third grade, I knew
I was in third grade.

V

Right now it's more remembering
than knowing. You trot out
the same experiences for years
to prove things to yourself
and they get shopworn, encrusted
with the dust of words, the tarnish
of opinions. But I remember
knowing.

VI

When I think of an ending
to what I am, a lack
of me knowing I am, standing here
before the window, seeing
what my eyes can see, being,
somehow, a head which must be
moved to move me who am perforce
put wherever my body is put,
I wonder if this, what we call
life, this being a thing of flesh,
is not itself
that not knowing
that I am what I am,
that ending
to what I am.

VII

A man sits in a cell and knows
(the way his forehead knows
when it cracks against the wall):
this is where he's always been
since he's been anything and
where he'll always be until
he becomes nothing at all.
What could be worse? Maybe
whatever he did to get himself
into this, maybe what he was,
could be again, must not
remember.

VIII

Odd that more people don't hate
having to go to bed. Children
understand, plead to stay up,
watch the good TV shows full of
violent action, want the hall light
left on, try to prolong goodnights
from loving giants who cannot hide
the fact that they are ready
to use whatever force is needed
to make the child be as much
as possible without sound or motion.
The child lies there trying out
different horizontal postures,
spreading the legs apart
to be a cowboy or, on his side,
drifts off, running in place,
an angel embedded in amber.
Children sense it is an unnatural thing,
an imprisonment, to be put
on a padded shelf, there to lie
almost still, only a few feet
in which to twist, having to close
their eyes and not do anything--

IX

Perchance to dream. You can dream.
And if you don't wake up,
who will be with you in your dream?
What if, in your dream, you are still
you, but have not even a bed
to move in, are buried in your coffin,
not an inch of leeway to stretch,
utter dark, utter silence, utter
knowledge of never seeing the sky,
of no one knowing you are--
what does it mean then to say you
are still you? And if you had
no body at all but were still,
somehow, you, could you sense
anything, get in touch with
anyone? From these dreams gladly
we waken to our prison of meat.

X

Once, staring intently back at a cat,
suddenly I saw a human face
staring at a cat, saw from where
the cat's eyes were, saw so clearly
I could see a cat's face reflected
in the human eyes. It was a flash--
then I was seeing a cat flinch
and gallop full tilt from the room
as if she'd sensed (as cats do)
a ghost. Once, looking
at someone who looked at me
for a long time, I said to her,
"Your face just disappeared,"
and she replied, "I know.
So did yours." Once, lying
beneath pine trees, looking up
along the tall trunks through
pinwheeling branches to the sky,
I found myself in the sky,
and I could see and know
and I was I. Once, after making love,
I knew what she would say
before she said it and what
I would reply and what she'd say
to that, and I saw her knowing
me know this and I started to say
and she said, we said
as I knew we would,
"I know".

XI

If I sit very still
I can feel it, my head a tension
and waves of tension around my head,
a force field, solid and habitual.
If bodies are traps, does death free us?
Not if, nullified by eons of force,
we've grown addicted to bodies,
think ourselves nothing without bodies,
think we must suck memories from them,
having none of our own, cannot see
without eyes, hear without ears,
we undead embedded in our heads;
releasing us is like releasing habitual
criminals. Death can't hold us,
only knowing can. We'll be back.

XII

From beneath the earth
where we cannot move,
a worm.
From beneath the water
where we cannot breathe,
a fish.
From the fire
we could not withstand,
food.
From our own guts,
where we will never go,
excrement
we send...where,
we choose not to know.
What can you be?
Where can you go?
If the air were a wall,
if your own flesh were a wall,
if you could see only as far
as your own retina
and could not unsee that,
if the future were a wall,
mirroring the solid past,
if...can you hear me?
From where?

*************

Notes:

Part 1: This occurred in 1964 or 1965. I'd been jogging round the track at Stanford (where I was a grad student), working out hard. I stood exhausted, looking down at the sand, and suddenly saw (as vividly as anything I'd seen) a microscopic view of the grains of sand, at first didn't realize what I was seeing, then, knowing what it was, thought I must have fallen, since my eyes seemed up against the sand, but (backing my vision back into my head), found I'd been standing up the while. As the poem says, I saw the grains in perfect focus, not blurry, as one might have expected had my eyes been a quarter of an inch from the sand.

Part 2: This sense of immortality and its corollary -- that we've all been here all along -- gives the game of "peek-aboo" a dazzling hall-of-mirrors quality. When Momma says to baby, "Peek-aBOO!", she's also saying, "Hey, don't worry so much about that cute blob of flesh. We're ancient friends, you and I." Maybe she doesn't know she's saying it. Maybe baby is trying to tell HER that. Certainly my dog seemed to be telling me we'd known each other forever. Somewhere he's scratching another chin, I'm sure.

Part 3: Briefly (1964-5) I had a few encounters with drugs. The verdict? I had drug experiences that made it obvious to me that I was not a body. But before those experiments, I'd found it fairly easy to move away from and towards my body. After them, I was kind of stuck to the body (like B'rer Rabbit to the tar baby) for years, looking for a way out. Psychedelics, I'd say, pushed me off on an elastic leash that snapped me back in, and when I snapped back, I found that I'd become sticky. (These days, I occupy a space in which, sometimes, my head is a long ways off, down by my toes -- just 6 feet from them. For example, sitting in a living room, talking with people, I'll notice that our bodies are very small and oddly distant.)

Part 4: That day when I realized, with surprise, that I was in 3rd grade, I was walking past a playground wall that was diminishing as I walked up the slight incline -- a diminishing of the wall's height that may have (inversely) heightened the realization. Numbers meant something. I'd only been in first grade for a month or two before being skipped (because I knew how to read from age 4), but had some difficulty in 2nd grade with my own immaturity and never felt I was one of the "real" 2nd graders, but on this day, well into third grade and doing a bit better (with a far more friendly teacher), it struck me that I was now a REAL 3rd grader.

Our labels, superficial though they are, are also the best way to become free of our labels. We find ourselves when we are amazed to realize that we are REALLY an adult, a lover, a tax payer, a car driver, a person with a job, an old person, a dying person, etc. We find ourselves in our amazement.

Part 5: You can't really wear out a good memory. It only seems that way when you try to use one of them to handle current upset or sadness. Instead of reanimating the past, re-creating it anew, BEING the enthusiastic child one once was, we try to buy new joy with that counterfeit, the memory, and, finding that memory (merely a verbal recitation after much use of it) ineffective, we dismiss it as "gone forever" or "useless" or "wasn't much after all." But it's all there and can be fired up again. In fact, one day, when you look around you and fall in love with the world again, you slip into that "memory" and find it fully alive and functional. (Forgive my rapidly shifting pronouns, we, one, you -- someday I'll make up my/our/one's mind(s).)

Part 6: Some slippery syntax -- that which is that that.... But I hope the point is obvious: Being in a body (to the extent that our involvement in the body clouds our knowledge of our spiritual existence) may be said to be the only death (ending) there is: We forget ourselves.

Part 7: This section suggests a few of the questions that might (if pursued) help us understand why these bodies and this belief in the absoluteness of death are so persuasive. For example, if we have done things in the past that we regret or that give us overwhelming indebtedness, we may prefer to believe that we are mortal and end at death. Where memories are painful, we may choose to believe there are no memories. In other words, though the thought of being imprisoned in a small cell is unpleasant for most of us, and though, if we think of it, the body itself is an imprisonment, there are probably things far more unpleasant that we think we avoid by being bodies. Another troubling aspect of immortality (not dealt with particularly in this set of poems, but in some of my others) is "Now what?" -- what does an immortal being do for a game?

Part 8: How huge those childhood beds seemed to my small body, how easily I could lie in bed with my legs spread wide, thinking I was being a cowboy. But such pleasures quickly palled, and on nights where I didn't easily fall asleep (perhaps because I could hear some "good" radio show downstairs, knowing it was good because of the gunshots), it was hard to avoid feeling a certain limitation, a sense of being only where I was, of being located (like a target), of being unable to be anything other than what I was. It was easier to pretend -- when awake and running about in the yard or lost in radio drama or talking to Mom or a friend -- that my limitations were temporary and flimsy, that there was future, over the horizon, just around the corner, etc. But lying in bed awake at night, I sometimes slipped from three to two dimensions, so that it was a relief to hear the distance being created by the moving a way of a distant steam locomotive's fading chuff-puff.

Part 9: Another nightmarish vision of self limited to self being no self at all, of limitlessness being another kind of limit, for if you extended to fill the universe, you would be just that, the universe. The point is not that existence is a nightmare, since we could, as players on a playing field of that scope, create newer, better games and dreams than we can conceive of from our current vantage points. In other words, we generate nightmare considerations by imagining our limited selves somehow (superficially) limitless. It's like imagining ourselves 10,000 feet above the ground, but neglecting to imagine for ourselves means of flight. But such silly nightmares do scare us back towards our illusions of mortality and are perhaps fed us through the generations to keep us under control.

Part 10: The love-making incident is a composite, but mainly refers to incidents in 1962 and 1964. My moment of filling up the sky occurred at camp when I was 12 or 13. There's a longer story to it, which you can find well into my longer poem, BLANK PAGES, on www.blehert.com. (Briefly, just as I was having some petty thoughts about how the other campers down at the campfire, wouldn't understand this experience, another camper, from behind me, used a small shovel to toss sand in my eyes, and when I cried, a counselor took me aside and tried to console me, thinking I was crying because of the sand, and I had to explain to him that it wasn't the sand, but the loss of that experience, and that I'd brought it about myself by indulging in the petty thoughts. (And I had to figure that out in order to tell him -- far less articulately than I've done so here.) The incident with the cat occurred in 1965, and one of those drug experiments precipitated it, but nonetheless, I saw what I saw, and I saw the cat seeing it too. Poor cat. (I've had other more vivid experiences in the absence of drugs (haven't touched a drug, in over 40 years -- except one flu tablet in 1974, a partial shot of novacain when a dentist forgot that I'd said no anaesthetic (in the 1980s) -- I stopped it, prefer pain to numbness; some second-hand smoke, a bit of caffeine, etc.). But here I'm pulling together a few scraps of experience that seem to me to create a larger picture.

Part 11: There have been times when I've become aware of my body as swathed in tensions, masses pressing against it, wound around it, etc. This came up during my brief period of drug experiments (about 7 of them in all) and several times before and after them when I would meditate (something I did a lot of, 1963 through 1968). I've since unwound these. (I'm no longer so "tightly wound.") I won't say that I got nothing valuable out of meditation, but it led me into some things that I found I couldn't handle with meditation, but could handle by other means and do so better by dispensing with meditation.

The idea of recidivism here is that so long as we have no strong sense of who we are, a self-definition and self-knowledge that is not dependent upon having a body, death is no escape: We'll get ourselves stuck on body after body (or drift around in a daze when bodies aren't available), because we can't conceive of any other way to have an identity and, thereby, a game.(Gotta have a uniform with a number to be on team, right?) Death won't "hold us" (apart from bodies). Only self-knowledge (becoming the player of the game or even the game maker) gives us the choice to be or not to be (a body or anything else).

Part 12: This poem is meant as a kind of exercise for the reader -- an exercise in locating oneself or dislocating oneself. It seems to be a turning inward into ever more solid introversion, with a twist at the end that perhaps points to the freedom of the being playing the game of being solid in a solid world -- and the role of live communication in freeing us.

For more data on bodies and ways of orienting oneself inside them and outside them, I recommend the books to be found at Scientology.org.

OUT OF TOUCH

2007-07-13T19:28:00.000-05:00

All sense is touch,
in a sense, with intervening
distance. With hearing we touch
waves of air or water and know
the motion of what sent them
(and touching the motion, know
across distance of selfhood, meaning).
With sight we touch light and know
with what force and degree of integrity
it bounced off or tore itself away from
what last it touched. Even smell
is the touch of chemical to chemical,
one sating with its excess the other's
craving. All these senses receive
couriers of distant news. Remove
all distance and we touch as now,
my love, I touch you...

Whence, then,
impervious to all my messengers,
this distance?

Note: When in closest conceivable touch, closer than flesh permits (if we were only flesh), in an instant (quicker than a bright day goes gray as a cloud slides over the sun), impossible distances intervene, sudden doubts open wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon and, as quickly, vanish. It seems, in our own universes we have distances and spaces whereof neurochemistry knows nothing.

Poetry Reading

2007-07-13T19:10:00.000-05:00

Such a racket of feelings:
Clearly this poet lost her mommie.
That one lost his daddy.
This one needs a good cry,
that one a good lay.
This one is hungry and that one
feels guilty that others are hungry.
This one likes having loved ones,
but isn't sure about always having them,
and if not, how that changes the feeling
of having them. This one is gaga
about something I never heard of
before, but it's purple, and I think
it's some sort of flower. That one
would like to break windows until
everyone (or whoever THE SYSTEM is)
knows that he is not one of THEM
and have THEM admire him for it,
but not too much. These poets
could be anyone, but significantly,
ah! SIGNIFICANTLY so.

Note: This is a mean poem. Most poetry readings are better than that, and most? -- well, many poets are saner than those described. So why did it give me such pleasure to write about these varieties of childishness? Maybe I'm just mean. (Someone said that a poem must not mean, but be. Perhaps I try to have it both ways, by being mean.)

But no, that can't be. I'm the good guy here. See my white hat? (^) So maybe even the saner, more professional poets sometimes leave me wondering: "What are you saying to me? Are you saying it to Me? Why are you saying these things? Why am I supposed to enjoy/admire/care?"

If you're a poet, please ignore my fussiness. You may have to say a few silly things to get to the good stuff.

Whipping Good Memories and Dead Horses

2007-06-20T02:03:00.000-05:00

Despair, when it is, is bottomless, omnivorous,
swallowing whatever you throw at it. As your goals
vanish into its maw, you try to kill despair,
hurling at it your best memories, your triumphs,
your deepest truths, and these too are instantly
coated with sticky black drool.

Memories will only stand for so much, and then
they mutiny: "Don't you remember...?" "NO! I
never loved you, it was never good with you!"
An old truth is a slippery anchor in a maelstrom,
one more weight to drag us under.
"But it was good! It was wonderful,
remember? Please remember!" So one tells oneself
(or so we tell each other) like a teamster
in a blizzard who doesn't realize the horse
he's whipping has frozen to death.

Despair owns the walls of the room, each piece
of furniture, your body, the bed, the window,
whatever you can see through the window,
the texture of whatever you touch --
and any wisp of memory you drag into the room
where you are stuck, staring at or away from despair.

Despair is beaten by not believing what one seems
to know (that this night or week or month or year
is forever), by knowing that it eats anything
you bring near it, by not feeding it.

See that delicate ship hoisting
all its bright-colored sails into the dark fury
of a storm? See it plow under, all sails flying?

No, best to batten down, lie low until
one can move, can see or imagine a way to move,
lifting one foot, then the other
and moving in a direction one insists on calling
(against all of the nightmare's frantic denials)
forward; one finds something to do that one can do --
a little thing, tie a shoe, take a walk,
clean a room, get out of bed, scratch
an itch, listen to the Blues...

not some radical puffed-up parody of total solution
urged by despair itself, charged with
melodramatic electricity. Find one thing
that is (if we pretend there can ever again be
one thing better than another) better to do than
nothing at all, and do it,

and gradually -- as chaos resolves into up and down,
what is and what is not -- one can do more,
begins to feel that the circles
in which one has been moving have, themselves,
been moving, like a child's traveling ovals --

one has been getting somewhere, one begins to know
some things one never knew before,
and there are calmer spaces, breaks in blackness
hints of a sky that is not sea, a long arc of horizon,
a direction, a future and, therefore, a past,
the tingle (uncoaxed) of a few good memories,
still dazed, but alive after all,
a smell of salty tangled life
that could be hope.

A Theory of Murder

2007-06-20T00:41:00.000-05:00

The thing about murder is it's too easy. Where's the game? You dent a body slightly -- if it were a car, it would be easily patched up -- and it's dead. The guy is gone.

In the arena of creating effects, wowing people, getting people to say "Man, you're too much!" or "Ummm, you're a great lover" or "Did you really just make that up?!" or "Oooh! Ahhhh! Don't stop!" or "ENCORE! ENCORE!" or "And the WINNER is..." -- in that arena, creating an effect upon someone by killing him or on others by killing their intimates is akin to aceing a challenging test by looking up the answers in the back of the book.

There's a game to not getting caught, and there are other ways to decorate murder with the semblance of intricate play, but I wonder how often something like the following happens (perhaps over several lifetimes, perhaps over decades):

A person accidentally kills someone he loves -- bumps that person off a cliff or puts a small hole in the otherwise intact face or by some small, seemingly harmless action causes a heart to stop, a clot, an unintended impact. Let's say it's sudden -- the person is very much there, full of familiar mannerisms and gestures, smiling, chatting, knowing your thoughts, responding to your words and expressions, and something happens, and the body is still there, almost looking at you, but has gone still, is unresponsive, no one is there, and you have no idea where your friend has gone, whether or not the friend still exists (and you begin to doubt, in the face of such apparently absolute absence, whether anyone could possibly ever have existed there). Let's say the body appears whole and unharmed or only slightly marred (as by a small bullet hole between the still open eyes).

There's a huge discrepancy between the enormity of the presence becoming an absence (friend here, friend gone) and the triviality of the visible causes (some slight damage to some tiny part of the body). The discrepancy would be less if the death had been slow and agonizing or quick and dramatic and gory. But here death seems too trivial an event to be associated with so huge a spiritual result. And it's particularly hard to deal with if you think you caused it -- if you handed the person the mushroom that turned out to be fatal or accidentally fired the gun you thought unloaded or, in play, tripped your friend who fell and hit temple against sharp stone and went still.

You did such a tiny thing, caused such a huge effect.

In such a situation, one solution -- one way you might make sense of it -- is to view your action as a terrible action causing terrible damage, magnify death, no matter how quick and simple, to monstrous proportions, live a life of pennance.

But a more attractive solution (since it lessens your guilt) is to say, after all, nothing much has been lost. We're just chemical accidents. When you kill someone, it's no big deal, nothing more than shutting down a few chemical reactions.

In other words, you reduce the enormity of the absence by deciding that there was never much of anyone there in the first place. Perhaps there SEEMED to be, but that abundance of beingness was an abundance you imagined, just as a child endows a doll with personality. You resolve never to do that again -- give depth of being to others, give others the means to disappoint you.

And if the loss was extreme enough (and your own carelessness flagrant enough), you might find yourself obsessed with proving to yourself that death is no big deal by killing some other people (intentionally) just to prove to yourself that it's awfully easy to kill people and makes no difference to the world or to you.

And along the way, you feel justified, since your victims inevitably betray you: You create what you think must be the ultimate effect upon them, but they reward you with no response. They just vanish. That pisses you off, so you begin to do weird things, like arrange bodies in lifelike positions, have sex with them, talk to them -- all desperate attempts to persuade yourself that you've created an effect on them by having them appear to be creating effects on you in return. I suspect this is part of the stereotype of the serial killer getting off on his killings, having an orgasm. And it's part of the rage associated with such people.

Eventually the only interaction that's real to them is killing, and that interaction is always initially a release, but soon after devastatingly disappointing -- an exaggerated parody of he letdown after bad sex, in the absence of live communication.

I'm not sure it ever happens that way (well, yes, I'm pretty sure), but I do know that we sometimes feel impelled to degrade our idea of identity and of the reality of other people. Killers and torturers tend to kill, as they kill others, their own imaginations. They no longer want to know that behind another face can be found another being like oneself with hopes and dreams. Life goes flat for them.

Since that perception of others, that knowledge that you are among fellow helloers, gets killed off when you kill others, soon it validates itself: You no longer need to deny that others like yourself exist, because, devoid of the imagination that lets you grant life to others, you can no longer grant life to yourself. When you begin to unsee the beings around you, you become less. In the absence of others, your own identity becomes unreal to you. After all, who else exists to agree that you exist? Having no playmates, no one to help (and a game is, among other things, a means to help ones teammates), you are dead.

So now it's OK to assume that others exist like yourself, because you dead yourself, devoid of dreams (it's no longer safe to dream), a distant spectator to the actions of your own hands. So the killing of those like yourself is now of no significance.

I wonder if it might happen that way?

And I wonder how engaging in wars creates killers -- or at least people dead inside. And I wonder how drugs designed to make us not feel much (so that we don't feel bad) might accelerate such a process. And I wonder what remains of the identities of those who promote and prescribe such drugs. No wonder they perceive that the person drugged has "improved" -- if they aren't really aware that there is someone there. Psychiatrist says "He's much improved." Parent says, "But he's like a zombie!" How is it the psychiatrist hasn't noticed?

The serial killer thinks those he kills are thereby much improved. They are purged of their phony eye-gleams and words and cutenesses. To the serial killer, life is a siren, a temptation to get caught in a painful trap. Chemicals pose as life. The serial killer frees the body from life as one removes bait from a trap. Not that psychiatrists are serial killers -- I suppose some of them aren't.

I wonder how those of us who'd prefer to be alive and have others be alive can create life faster than the deadly ones create death.

It must be odd to stand next to a living person and be unable to perceive the being. Here I am, miles and perhaps years from the "you" I address, and yet you are alive for me. I recall (partially) an old poem of mine about why I'd never become a serial killer: What if, without realizing it, I killed one of my readers!

Games Beings Play (poem & essay)

2007-06-06T12:34:00.000-05:00

We Can't Go On Meeting This Way...

If my voice, my smile seem
as intimate to you as your own
(yours seem my own), it's because
you and I met long ago in a dream
(where first meetings happen),

one I'd thought my own until the day
my setting sun surprised me
with a tint of airy blue I'd never
put there. Thus the game began:

I put forth Romeo and Juliet. You
covertly took over Juliet, and
when my Romeo's avid lips drew near,
her tiny teeth nipped off his nose.
I did a quick fade out (stifling
an earthquake of giggles, thinking--
one of us thinking--"Will Romeo
be rebuilt in a day?")

to a long white beach
with palm trees and crashing surf.
You turned into an old airplane
and sputtered across the sun,
dragging a Coca Cola sign. I became
an ack-ack gun, you an elegant finger
plugging my gun barrel. I became a
crocodile, jaws closing over the finger,
which became a stick thrust crossways
to prop open my jaws--

Too trite! Go back
to the gun, no the finger, no, just
play it out (I said, you said, we...)--

and so into the soft sky rose our
crocodile, trailing a Coca Cola banner,
and, flaring to lurid orange,
set slowly in the West.
_____

The poem above (humor me -- I call such things poems) I wrote as an attempt to liven up the way we think of the spiritual life. If we are spiritual beings capable of creation, immortal (and I think we are), then what do we do with enternity? Where's the fun? Most poems that approach this (and there are millions of them) deal with finding some long-ago "you" and becoming verdant landscapes, winds, storm clouds and mountains, pervading galaxies and pocketing universes as if they were a child's pretty marbles.

They're good on spectacle, but often light on games, an old difficulty resembling the traditional response to the Christian idea of Heaven: OK, here we are on a cloud with golden harps. Now what? (One of the more ambitious attempts to resolve this and propose a life both transcendent and playful is Herman Hesse's novel, THE BEAD GAME. A more fully realized approach is Nabokov's great PALE FIRE, both about this and designed to involve the reader in a game of this sort, with author and reader the competitors. Kafka's THE TRIAL is a similar, but grimmer game. PALE FIRE is about as much fun as one can have while reading a book, which, on planet earth, means about as much fun as one can have, though love, sex, hot fudge sundaes and high speed chases are good too.)

The game in the poem above is closer to the way I think we interrelate when we are most ourselves. The closest parallel to it that I know of in art is the depiction of Calvinball in the great comic strip, "Calvin and Hobbes", where the boy (Calvin) and the tiger (Hobbes) invent the rules as they go along.

Suppose you're a being and you live in a universe of your own creation? How do you know someone not part of your creation is impinging? Something surprises you! ("I know I didn't put that blueness into the sunset!") And then the game begins, no limit, no end of ways to express no end of emotions and concepts via exchanged creations, the rules changing with great rapidity, action epics lasting a fraction of a second -- or as long as we consider they are lasting.

And the rules are based on aesthetics. One puts up (creates, makes available) a handsome male, the other bites of its nose: Is this attack? joke? intimacy? It's playfulness (above) is understood because it livens a boring stock romantic image. In other words, to respond appropriately, yet freshly, you have to operate at a level of aesthetic awareness comparable to that of a poet who must respond to a line of poetry with a next line that is both immediately recognizable as appropriate and also surprising, expanding the game -- or, for the hell of it, plunging into chaotic nonsense that's a kind of art in itself (not a sunset, but a gorgeous crocodileset).

I mentioned Calvinball, where, if tagged off the base, Hobbes will "remind" Calvin of the rule he has just made up that Calvin must spin around three times before making the tag. An even better analogy to what I describe in the poem is something I once witnessed between two nephews of mine -- identical twins. I watched them play -- age 4, I think (I'm ancient, since they're now in their 30s). They were playing catch on the carpet, rolling a ball, but not just rolling it, using some toy that had a ramp to start it rolling. And I noticed that as they played, mostly without words, they kept changing the game, more than once in a second, responding in ways that implied rules, and it all made sense -- to them, to me, watching.

It was odd, my knowing exactly what the little changes meant, without knowing how I knew -- or rather, realizing why I knew: We are not, natively, the players of games (not only that). We are the creators of games.

The best ways I know of to experience this state in action are to get involved in improv. groups, jazz and jam sessions or any art form, and especially art with live interaction among artists.

The single most effective way I know of to introduce someone to an awareness of the extent to which living is a continuing creation of games is explained in a book entitled THE CREATION OF HUMAN ABILITY by L. Ron Hubbard. In that book (pages 207-208 in my 1989 edition) is a "process", a sort of game used to increase someone's awareness (a sloppy definition, but it'll do here) called "R2-69: Please Pass the Object." It explains exactly what to do to get someone aware of games and rehabilitate the sense of play. Try it on someone deathly serious and watch him/her rediscover laughter.

[Note: The process is labeled "R2", meaning "Route 2" because it's one of a sequence of processes designed to get someone somewhere (from spiritual state A to spiritual state B, for example -- a route), and is done after a set of processes labeled Route 1; and this process (R2-69) is the 69th process of Route 2.]

Apologies to the pious, but "spiritual life" is not synonymous with "solemnity" or "dullness" or even "sexlessness".

Consciousness Explained?

2007-06-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

I recently read a longish pseudo-profound quote from a book called "Consciousness Explained". It was a very complicated explanation of what the self is, the complications required because it began with the assumption that there is no self, only a body and an incredibly complicated reason for a body to require the "center of narration" we (who?) call "self".

Such silliness is far more intelligent than the truth (or at least a workable truth -- something that can lead us to more interesting games). I don't mean it's smarter to believe that you and I don't exist. What I mean is that it's so stupid that it requires numerous graduate degrees to explicate. It sounds intelligent because it takes so much intelligence to articulate the complexity that results from such stupidity.

For example, if you assume that the sun and other planets revolve around the earth, the mathematics required to "demonstrate" this and predict motions and positions of sun and planets are far more complicated than those required if you assume that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun.

If you delight in paradoxes and complexities, don't look for truth. Look for desperate attempts to avoid truth. It's tempting for any intellectual to avoid truth, since truth is often simple: For example, you're you, I'm me, we aren't our bodies; that seems simple enough and obvious enough, and it's a workable hypothesis. Using it, you can cure illnesses, reduce crime, reduce insanity and a do a number of other desirable things. (OK, it may not be obvious to everyone, but some of us have seen what it can do as a hypothesis. The point I'm making here is that it's as reasonable a hypothesis as "We are the delusions of chemical actions in a brain pudding.")

But that's far too simple. It's too much like truism. It's something that just about any laborer or beggar could understand, most children, too. So it's useless to an intellectual. Intellectuals are a lot like pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies aren't much interested in letting people know what mineral and vitamin and some herbal supplements can do for them, because these things aren't patentable, so there's no profit in them.

Similarly, intellectuals profit (or win glory and rave reviews in the New York Review of Books and other lofty venues and tenure at universities) by coming up with complex brilliance that only a few people can grasp.

And yet the stupidity of "Consciousness Explained" is excruciating: The title says it all: Consciousness precedes explanation and is a far more basic concept than "Explanation". Another way to put it is that you can't resolve consciousness or get a clearer idea of it by explanations, but you can resolve explanations or get a clearer idea of them by consciousness. So the book is bass-ackwards.

We don't have a verb "to conscience". We can't say "Explanation Conscioused". Consciousness is basic enough that we don't do it. We are it. We are that which is aware of being aware -- and which (as described eloquently at this site) can create things to be aware of and agree about them with other similar creators. A less awkward title might be "Awareness of Explanation".

"Consciousness Explained" is a bit like starting with the idea that the books in the library were here before we were and that we are their delusion, and that these books are somehow culminating -- by evolution of language all by itself -- in a book about books that explains how and why all the books that exist have come up with the illusion of authors and readers and a world that exists elsewhere than on the pages of books.

The best way to understand consciousness is to be aware of being aware. Lately, have you noticed that you are?

How YOU Can Make Billions in the Mass Murder Industry

2007-06-01T03:51:00.000-05:00

How YOU Can Make Billions in the Mass Murder Industry

Cho went about it wrong.
He just started shooting,
a crude and unrewarding activity.
Here's what he should have done:

1. Switched from English to medicine.

2. Gotten his degree in psychiatry.

3. Gotten on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) committee
that updates the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM),
mainly by creating new mental illnesses
by voice vote.

4. Proposed a new illness: Obsessive
Respiratory Rhythmic Inflation/Deflation Disorder
(ORRIDD) -- that is, breathing, a specialized,
chronic restlessness or tic.

5. Worked with a major pharmaceutical firm
to develop a cure (a lead pellet to be injected
directly into the brain).

6. Helped develop the marketing campaign:
IS YOUR CHEST ALWAYS RISING, FALLING, RISING, FALLING,
ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, EVERY NIGHT, RISING, FALLING, AND
YOU CAN'T STOP IT, CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT, CAN'T
REMEMBER WHAT IT'S LIKE TO HAVE A MOMENT OF SILENCE,
FREEDOM FROM MOTION, FROM THE RASPING OF AIR
IN YOUR THROAT? YOU may be SUFFERING
FROM A CHEMICAL IMBALANCE IN YOUR BRAIN
AS A RESULT OF LEAD DEFICIENCY (LD). YES!
STUDIES SHOW THAT MORE THAN 50% OF THE PEOPLE
VIEWING THIS COMMERCIAL
(IN SPITE OF THEIR VIEWING HABITS)
may SUFFER FROM Obsessive Respiratory Rhythmic
Inflation/Deflation Disorder!!!

If YOU are suffering from ORRIDD, tell your doctor
or your local quiet, unsocial person (perhaps
one of our trained students or postal workers)
that you may need a prescription for QUIETUSIN!
Quietusin is made of the purest lead available
and is injected directly into the brain. The results
are instant, a blessed restful state for the first time
in your life -- and it LASTS! Lasts without your needing
a second prescription. NOTHING WILL EVER
BOTHER YOU AGAIN! This is what you've been waiting for!
[sideeffectsincludeinonlyeverycase...ah...deathwhich
isusuallymoderateandatroomtemperaturessome
bodilydecompositionwithpossiblevermiculate
interventionanderuptionofflowersalsomaggots...]

7. Become a well-known proponent of Quietusin,
give talks on it to doctors, write a book about it,
get interviewed on the late shows, in magazines,
author studies on the reliability, the lack of
withdrawal symptoms (the impossibility of withdrawal),
etc.

8. Welcome your patients, point out (if they haven't noticed)
that they are suffering from this obsessive condition.
Get them to notice how much of their time and energy
is expended on this respiratory unease. Make sure
they are properly insured. Give them their "shot"
of Quietusin -- preferably outside the office,
to avoid messes. Collect from the insurance companies.
You can line up hundreds of patients in front
of a freshly dug trench, and use one of the latest
automatic delivery devices to medicate them all
in a second.

9. Find more patients.

10. Since many obvious sufferers from ORRIDD
will be in denial, utilize current state laws authorizing
mandatory out-patient medication to force those
who by virtue of this ailment (a disease just like diabetes
or tuberculosis) may be a danger to themselves or others
(your ex-wife's mother or your boss, for example)
to receive their doses.

11. Invest in perpetual care cemeteries, crematoriums,
armament manufacturers.

And so on. The possibilities are endless...
almost.

The Mechanics of Being Right

2007-05-26T21:19:00.000-05:00

How does one force oneself?
One must become two to be a problem.
Problems are convenient for those
who aren't the problems, since problems
stay right where they are, expending
themselves against themselves,
part of the landscape. Problems
are no problem at all, but beware
of solutions. Hitler, for example,
was a solution. He had no problem
with himself. We had to oppose him
and be one side of a new problem.

Once, perhaps, Hitler was a problem,
a precarious balance of jaw-breaking
forces, holding himself immobile--and
how clever of him to solve his problem
and become our problem.
______________________________

That's an old poem of mine. Recently I saw a friend (or one-time friend) go through the conversion described above. While he resisted his cravings (booze, perhaps other drugs -- he admitted to booze), he was both sides of a problem in precarious balance, and thus held himself in stasis. He could become someone else's problem if someone else tried to help him, but left to himself, he was simply a problem, his cravings poised against his social leanings. He spoke softly, tended to mumble, seemed restrained, a bit vague, his communications trailing off into the ether.

Then he solved himself, managed to unbalance the impasse, started drinking (and maybe was "medicated") -- why? Long story, probably, and one I know only a small part of. But having solved his problem, he became the problem of a number of other people, as, rather cheerfully, in a hoarse smoke-and-booze-rasped voice -- with no vagueness or trailing off -- he began to threaten and insult people who'd thought him a friend ("I'm gonna kick you're ass", "You fag!"). He's thus opted himself out of several social circles. He appeared to enjoy all this -- after all, it was action. I don't know if he found the morning after enjoyable. Usually such solutions lead to new problems which lead to new solutions. And usually there's a descent. Each problem is more severe than the last, each solution more desperate, unless something intervenes to reverse the process -- some bit of insight that makes it unnecessary for the problem to exist.

After all, we like games, and it's a game to solve a problem. Games are, in a sense, problems -- opposing forces trying to hold one another motionless, like two football teams. That is, each team tries to be a problem for the other team, and each team tries to solve that problem.

So one way a problem vanishes is if one has other, more interesting games to play, so doesn't have to maintain his minor problems in perfect balance with such dedicated tenacity. For example, people "rise above" their petty problems in a crisis, and, having done so, when the crisis is over, typically are better able to deal with the petty stuff.

But in the absence of some new awareness that enables us to let go of a problem, we solve it, and the solution becomes a worse (more limiting, more gameless, less fun) problem. This applies to all of us, I think, not just the person described above.

This is not about the rightness or wrongness of his actions. Perhaps he was miserable without the booze. Perhaps the people he threatened deserved to be threatened. (At least, whomever he mistook them for deserved it, probably a long time ago.) The point is the mechanics of it: A problem slipped along its fault lines, an earthquake in his psyche that left him able to move. He ceased to be a problem to himself and became a problem to others, who found themselves worrying about what to do with him.

In my poem, above, I use a far more extreme example: Hitler, who went about becoming a problem to the world with high spirited confidence, at least until he began to get beaten back. And the German nation as a nation went through a similar process, moving from post-war apathy and apparent lack of a shared mission, lack of games to play (stopped) to the cheering sieg-heiling crowds in Nuremberg rejoicing at the "Triumph of the Will". Germans ceased to have problems -- nearly full employment, prosperity, armed strength, high standard of living (for those considered to be German), etc. Germany was no longer a problem to itself, but a problem to the rest of the world.

Which led to a deeper defeat, millions dead, etc.

The Germans had a desperate solution: Just kill all the Jews and enslave all the Slavs and... -- well, when you're desperate, any solution seems better than none.

MUCH better than none. That bottle, that snort or injection is gold! Just saying "To hell with them all! What does it matter! I can do anything! There's nothing stopping me!" is exhilarating. Until someone or something stops you.

One way to define the role of ethics in our lives (our taking responsibility for ourselves and others and, in widening concentric ripples, society, mankind, etc.) is that ethics allows us that joy of freedom without making us a problem that others must solve by stopping us.

In other words, ethical action allows the high without the hangover and without the broken marriage, the lost friends, lost job, lost health. This is a riddle to someone who equates ethics with doing what one is "supposed" to do, rather than a matter of integrity, something that aligns with one's own goals and that is not inconsistent with freedom.

That's a mouthful of abstractions. Sorry. Here's another poem on this subject (the brief high of capitulation to a desperate solution):

Downhill

How is it at our craziest,
thrashing out in rage, screaming -
we feel so RIGHT?
It's sheer electricity,
like the edgy air during a summer storm,
almost a relief,
because what has been tormenting us,
demanding that we act out its obsession,
this ghost we've been wrestling with day and night,
this clenched fist in the forehead -
we've let go,
given it our own voice, body, knuckles,
blood - we've given it what it wants,
and even as we rage,
we are at peace,
riding the wave of our rightness toward
where mist and distance blur
the crash of foam on ragged rocks.
___________________________

POWER OUTAGE

2007-05-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

We keep using words that don't work anymore
(we're told)--beauty, heart,
truth, love--using them because
we want them to work.

Keats spoke
simply of truth and beauty, and an arc
of brilliance that lit up his century
leapt the gap between dream and know.
Yeats had to give birth to a terrible
beauty to ignite us.

These sparks,
like stars hazed over by city lights,
now are blanched in the neon flare
of frenetic signs blazoning the truth
of True Cigarettes, the beauty
of beautiful shampoo, the breakfast
cereal you'll love and the politician
you know is right in your heart.

Can one ashamed to say "I love you"
love? We try to heighten love and truth
and beauty, add garish auras with
"diseased", "hectic", "skeletal beauty",
"the rictus of love", "the bruised
apples of truth left to us", "the
algebra of the unknown heart"--

but we cannot further overload
these circuits; the fuses blew out
decades ago. Yet we stand here
in the abandoned house, flicking
the dusty light switches on, off,
on, off (because it is all we know
on earth, but not all we need to know),
hoping for a light.
________________________

Note: The poem above is a bit condensed for an essay, but I think a careful reading will find in it a linear discursive line of reasoning. Language deteriorates when it ceases to provide us a means to communicate what we want to communicate and, in particular, a means of sharing our most important experiences, which, thus becoming difficult to share, to that extent become unreal to us, since much of what makes these experiences (of love or beauty, for example) real is our sense of agreement about them.

Usually when we consider the degeneration of language, we look at the way words once vital have become trite, so that speaking of love, truth or beauty is "truism", stirs no spark of recognition, just tired nods.

In the poem above I look at another sign of degeneration: The strains introduced into language in an attempt to do battle with triteness. For example, where the word "beauty" ceases to induce swoons, perhaps "a terrible beauty" (Yeats) will stir something up. And decade by decade we find more odd and perverse ways to position beauty in hopes of wringing a few more drops of feeling (even if only disgust) out of the word.

When poetry or other verbal expressions rely too much on such efforts, the result is a mere masking of the degeneration, as when, lovers, fallen out of love, keep trying to stir up the embers with crotchless panties, odd sexual positions, adultery, threesomes, orgies, etc., none of which have anything to do with revitalizing the love (based on free-flowing communication) that, by this time, the lovers have ceased to believe could ever have been possible. Being in good communication made sex fun. Trying to force sex to be fun does not engender good communication.

Problems vanish when the lies that hold them in place are spotted. Problems persist in ever more pervasive forms when they are "solved" by a concatenation of desperate gimmicks.

How does this apply to poets and their communications? I have some phrases that mean something to me and perhaps have helped my writing. I don't know whether they'd be of use to others, but here are a few of them:

While part of writing is to write and keep writing and write a lot, it is more important to become someone who has something to say.

I try to look at my reader and talk to him/her (that may be you).

On Resisting Evil

2007-05-18T00:03:00.000-05:00

Because the evil have made the trains
run on time, we are wary of efficiency
and accomplish nothing.

Because the evil have misused force,
we hesitate, hoping for miracles.

Because fools have thrown away
their lives for madmen, we imagine
there is nothing worth dying for
and, dying anyway, live in fear.

Because the evil have created
formidable organizations, we dream
of standing alone, swallowing
that swindle (dreamed up by the weak
to subdue the strong) that organization
must be abhorred.

Because the evil seem driven
by destructive purpose, we are
wishywashy, lost, as it were,
in qualifications, lest we be tainted
by zeal.

Because the evil rely on solid stuffy
citizens (who can best be governed
by fear of loss of status) and call them
sane, we think we must be crazy
to be creative, so create only
self-destruction.

Because madmen have equated
love of our own country with hatred
of all other countries, we try to love
mankind by despising our country,
as if love of neighbors could grow
from hatred of self.

Nothing is left to us if we try to be
good only by being what evil is not,
nothing but evil itself, which is maybe
a violent effort not to be evil.

Shrinking Creativity

2007-05-16T05:50:00.000-05:00

[Note: I'm a bit allergic to "one" as a repeated pronoun and to a lot of "his/her" and "he/she", so I've settled for "he" in most of the following essay on artists (which is loaded with pronouns). I do know that not all artists are male.]

Recently, I tuned in to National Public Radio just in time to hear part of the "Science" hour, where a female psychiatrist was being interviewed about her book on creativity, and we got to hear the psychiatric line on it.

Here are the viewpoints (opinions presented authoritatively as scientific):

1. Creativity is almost entirely an unconscious activity over which the creative person has little control.

2. Creative people don't know what they're going to create when they start to create something. Art just happens. It probably kills creativity to outline the work in advance or otherwise try to exert conscious control over the outcome.

3. Creative people don't create their own work. They all say that it's as if "the muse sat on my shoulder and spoke through me."

4. Based on her acquaintance with many writers in the Iowa School of creative writing (back in the 70s), she has concluded that creative people have a higher than usual incidence of mental illness, both in their family histories and in their own lives. They suffer from "mood instability". She says that the ones she interviewed did not think this mental illness was good for them, that, contrary to the idea of the wild genius relishing his insanity, they all felt that their "mood instability" hindered their work, and said they got their best work done in between bouts of "mood instability." (This seems to me to be a covert argument for drugging them to handle their unwanted "mood instability"--that is, their emotional roller-coaster, which is caused mainly by connection to people who ignore or invalidate their work. And yet, those same drugs -- for example, anti-depressants, are notorious for putting dampers on creativity--including the act of creativity we call "sex.")

I think it important to understand these points, and realize that they are a subtle mixture of lies and truth, and that they ARE pretty much the psych line. Here, roughly, is my take on each of the above points:

1. Creativity is as much a conscious activity as the creator is conscious. Awareness is not the enemy of creativity. Most people have a very dim awareness of their own universes, so have little knowledge, responsibility or control in that area. When in contact with their own universes (their own dreams, hopes, ideas, creations), they are overwhelmed by them as if by some alien invasion of ideas and pictures ("The story just leapt out of me, as if I were taking dictation").

It may seem that being effect of creation, and unconscious of it, is an aid to creativity--they are contacting areas unknown to them; thus it seems unconscious. Yes, when most people try to communicate what comes from their own universes, they are dealing with territory unknown to them. As they know themselves better, the process becomes more conscious and the mastery greater, not less -- because they are more aware of their own universes, less obsessed with the agreed-upon, neutral, no-man's-land we call the physical universe.

2. An outline may be a constriction (I never use an outline), but it may also be helpful as a guide or a barrier--a barrier, can be a challenge. Certainly if the poet sets out to write a sonnet or some "fixed form," the barriers of a particular game (the rules for rhyme and meter or other formal constraints) may aid or hamper creativity, depending on the writer's ability to confront those barriers and use them successfully. It's difficult to write a formal sonnet without knowing one is writing a formal sonnet. And yet some formal works happen to be fine art.

The idea that the creator doesn't know what he will create until he creates it is a half-truth. Obviously creation doesn't occur if what's created is already created, so there's some truth to it: We create what we create when we create it. But that act of creation, when an artist is operating at peak, is instant fullness, perception of richness, permeation, knowing. The thing is there, created at that point (that's my experience). It will change some in the process of writing it down, working out how to translate it from my universe to others' universes (and that, perhaps, is the alteration needed to give an instant creation some persistence--in minds of others, who recreate it. They think they are getting it from me, when actually I'm stirring them to create something; therefore, they've misowned it (attributed to me what is their own), which means it will persist for them too). But there's a tremendous and acute knowingness involved.

[One way we get things to persist is by attributing them to others. If I want to spread a rumor and have it take root, it helps if I attribute it to "everybody" or even to God, our theological everybody.]

If this shrink had interviewed Nabokov (probably the most creative writer in the last century), she'd have heard a different story. I don't have the exact words at hand, but here's how Nabokov described his writing of a novel: He'd write on note cards, which were on a sort of podium, so he could write standing up. He would pace the room, then pause at the podium to fill out a card. He'd put the notes together later (like a mosaic). He said that at the start the entire work was there for him, surrounding him. He said it was as if he were standing inside a huge, beautiful cathedral, perhaps under the dome, but it was dim, only tiny details emerging from the darkness here and there. So his work was a matter of bringing his own creation to light.

In his pacing he felt as if he were viewing the cathedral with a flashlight, catching a detail here, another detail there, writing down each point of glimmer on a note card. But it was his creation from the start, and he knew it was there, created in all its finest details. This is just his particular metaphor and method, not mine, probably not yours. The point is, he always stressed that from the point he created it, the creation was there. The knowingness was senior to the unknownness. He created it, and he worked out (flashlight-view by flashlight-view) what it was he created.

I recall that when I wrote papers in college, I'd have a concept, an involved set of ideas, and I'd have a clear sense of numerous interrelationships and interconnections, but I'd have to go for long walks turning the thing (already there) around in my mind, seeing it from one viewpoint, then another, then turning it back again, incorporating more and more stuff, sometimes for days, before I could sit down and put it all on paper. (I no longer have to do that. I don't need that particular excuse for knowing--or Nabokov's.)

Being effect of his own creation to the point of having little or no idea what he is going to create is as true for an artist as the artist isn't aware of what he's doing. Also this idea that he must be effect confuses the act of creation with the act of communicating the creation, which is a problem of language and compositional technique. The instant of creation, of bringing concepts into being, gives him a sense of a creation having occurred, a wholeness. Dimly or vividly, the artist is aware of that presence, that created wholeness. Crafting it (for example, putting it into words that will stir a comparable act of creation in others) is an act involving additional creation or re-creation, a keeping it in view or keeping in touch with what he has created--at least enough so that he can recognize when he has said it or when he has departed from that creation.

Here's where most artists have some degree of "not-knowing", mystery, feeling that some other force is leading them on, feeling despair if they lose touch with that force, muse, inspiration. But that transcendent force is the artist himself and his own creation. And the more aware the artist is of that act of creation and of the resultant concept, the less the artist feels moved by some cause external to self, and the less the artist feels his grasp of his own creation is tenuous and difficult. Knowingness is not the enemy of creation. (Unknownness of self is the enemy.)

3. The idea that the artist doesn't create his work, that some muse bypasses him, the words going directly from his muse (or inspiration) to the page, is an idea derived from the creator's unawareness of his own universe, or of that universe being his own creation. That unawareness doesn't make him more creative. His attempts to create involve him in unawareness, because they stir up a universe he has forgotten he created, or is creating.

An author doesn't create more alive characters because the characters "go their own way" (as opposed to the author's directing them), but many authors prefer not to be aware of the levels of consciousness at which they are capable of creating life. (As an artist moves up toward personal spiritual freedom, the process simplifies, because he simply creates what he creates. Ability to create life improves.)

4. Of course many creative people have "mood instability." Suppressive persons are always eager to "help" them. Even if no one puts down their art, the frequent lack of an audiences is in itself an invalidation. Plus there's the haunting suspicion that he is dishonest and faking it. (The Iowa "creative" writers seem to me to turn out a lot of work in which all of them seem to speak the same voice.)

In addition, there is the liability of running into past incidents of loss, pain and unconsciousness while working in creative writing classes that encourage writers to dredge up painful experiences, to take on personally (as method actors) the gruesome thoughts and feelings of characters, as in a play, etc. The basis for much creative writing instruction is that something "merely" imagined, as opposed to being dredged up from one's most traumatic experience, will lack "authenticity."

Also there's the push to be critics of their own work long before they've gotten a good flow of writing going. There is the notion that to write well, the writer must experience (be effect of) everything, where "everything" usually means promiscuity, violence, drugs, deliberately immoral behavior; he must be involved in all this to flaunt his "authenticity" as a true artist by living a degraded life, etc.

And then there are the hidden standards: Is my work great? Am I changing the world? Am I doing any good for anyone? These standards are "hidden" because they are undefined and, maybe,undefinable. Greatness -- as the word is used by critics and artists -- is like "obscenity" in the courts: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." (So pronounced a judge in an obscenity case).

Almost every artist faces, too, the contradiction between the instantaneous acts of creation -- whole worlds created in a flash -- and the slow, grueling work (at first, usually) of getting something well-written or painted or danced. And the still slower development of audience, income, fame. In other words, he creates what should be a huge effect (and is in his own universe, his own dream), then undergoes the enormous invalidation of time-bound, barrier-ridden physical-universe communication lines. The artist lights a bomb and, in the world where we all live, nothing happens or just a dull, distant pop. Or a whimper.

Imagine you have something brilliant and urgent to say to the world, and it's all there and vibrant and alive, but to communicate it, you have to go through a bureaucracy of bored officials, most of whom don't speak your language. It's different if your work is entirely along material communication lines (for example, if you've developed new, improved toilet paper), no dipping into your own universe nor impinging on the native universes of others.

You can live your whole life without ever noticing the communication lags (for example, the time lag between the time you ask a question and the time you receive an answer, or between the time you address a vision to millions of readers and the time when, having received it, they send you their gratitude) of the material universe, because you ARE a communication lag, not aware that you're waiting for an answer, because you are BEING the waiting, being the trap, being human flesh. As soon as you become aware of creation, you begin to suffer from the dominance of a universe that is everyone's agreement--automatic mediocrity.

Also, most creators who persist, feel they have to sell out to have an income-- become, for example, teachers who must toe the academic party lines. In addition, some of the so-called creative people got into that line of work because they couldn't confront producing anything else. It's not that they're creative so much as that they lack the ability to confront business, real estate, bodies, sales work, medicine, objects more solid than notebooks. I don't know how frequent that is, but I can think of many examples, and I suspect it's a little bit true of most. I can certainly see it in myself, not as a major factor, but as a small component: I didn't like being neat, well-dressed. My hair is unruly, and I hate hair oil. I don't like schedules or neckties. I wanted to do something where I could be a slob, and still "get respect." That's not the main thing I wanted from art, but that element is there.

Certainly SOME people turn to the creative professions because they figure it'll be easier and get them out of things they don't want to deal with. Such people, faced with pressures of having to come up with real products and market them, are miserable. They dreamed only of writing the great American novel, after which publishers and audiences would magically appear, as if summoned by the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp.

So the shrinks are right: Many creative people and wanna-be creative people have "mood instability." But that is not inherent in creativity. Creation is JOY. But the artist declines to the degree that he cannot turn his life into creativity: He soars to creativity, then plummets into uncertainty and mundane editing and promotion and marketing, which is depressing, especially when it fails. So the only way to live a creative life without despair is to become more creative in all areas of life, self, family, groups, mankind, plant and animal life forms, life sources, spiritual freedom, the imagining of a relationship to one's concept of infinite freedom--which means becoming more causative in these areas.

In other words, if he creates great work, then spends the night being vicious to his wife and children, using drugs, eating bad food, professing poverty as "proof" that he is a great artist, lamenting the fact that he is unjustly not yet famous, getting drunk over it and being a mean drunk--there is going to be a roller-coaster, or "mood instability."

Once he's become aware of his own universe, how can they keep him down on the materialist farm, tilling brain chemicals for the sacramental brain religion. He has at least to become just a little bit causative about earning a living, having a family, associating with groups, etc. If he uses art (as many do) as justification for having no groups, chaotic love life, poverty, etc., he's going to have problems with "moods." If he use his art--his knowledge of how to create--to lead a creative life, he may notice that all areas of life require continuous creation. He may have failures and occasional ups and downs, but he won't have that heavy contrast between bursts of artistic sublimity and the downward plunge into a tedious, grungy, uncreated life.

Or he can stay on the roller coaster, being an art addict, having his art highs, followed by life lows. He should probably join "Creators Anonymous": Whenever he feels like writing a poem, he calls his 12-step buddy, who talks him out of it. He needs to get past withdrawal symptoms and never touch creativity again, because he can't handle causative creativity. (Poetry lodges, so to speak, in fat cells--must be a brain function; brains are made of fat. He'll need to sweat poetry out, lest he get flashbacks of compulsive creativity.)

The correct handling is to get a life--that is, a Causative Life. Bring life to all areas of existence, expand knowledge and effectiveness. This may require drilling the technology of communication. The wrong thing for the artist to do is to assume that he has a "mental instability," to be corrected by psychiatric drugs and evaluations and labeling.

If, on the other hand, he buys into the psychiatric view (perhaps not recognizing where it comes from), he will probably move in the following directions:

1. Art is unconscious; therefore, it's important to be unconscious, to cultivate drugs and mystery, to experience murky, chaotic sex, to give free reign to "impulses," to ignore discipline, persistence, awareness; to live a corrupt "authentic" life in the underside of decency and reason. This "proves" he is a rebel genius, that destruction is creation, and "proves" that anyone who does not appreciate him is a middle-class philistine pig.

2. The artist never knows what he is creating--and the less awareness he has of what he is doing or where his creations come from, the more he is a true creator. So the way to create is to wait for something to come--sometimes he sits in front of a blank page for weeks, and nothing comes (it's like constipation)--but that's all he can do, other than stir up unconsciousness with a drug, or drink, or some other stimulus that weakens decisiveness, lowers awareness, and "releases inhibitions," so that he feels free to write some form of chaos that he is sure will add up to "great literature."

3. Since he doesn't create his work, but the muse (or inspiration or some higher power) does it all, he is not, as an artist, responsible for the effects he creates. Moreover, since his work comes from a higher power, he, as artist, is God-favored, and above all that other stuff in life. He is superior to others; he can mess up his life and hurt others, but that's okay, because he's an artist.

4. He will expect to be "mentally unstable," because insanity goes with creativity, although it sometimes gets in the way. He will go to a psychiatrist to handle it. He won't handle it by raising his level of responsibility for other people's lives. He won't handle it by taking more control of creation. He will remain pure by knowing nothing. He is an artist, not responsible for creating anything--the muse does it. He rides the spontaneous and unconscious Muse (to oblivion).

If an artist begins with artistic power and craft, he may produce some good stuff on this downhill road, but it will be a rapidly accelerating plunge. And at each downward spiral, it gets more difficult to turn things around. (Ask Brian Wilson what it took for him to get back some fragment of his magic after he escaped his years of psychiatric captivity -- partially escaped, still on a long pharmaceutical leash, limited to the lovely wistfulness of "Pet Sounds".)

The psychiatrist is not the artist's best friend. Why would those who see differently (have their own personal visions) trust the herd of pompous suits who have produced DSM IV, the psychiatric bible that classifies every form of action or feeling or perception that departs from some never-defined norm as "mental illness"?

Artist, find out who you really are before someone sticks you with a trendy, but toxic lie.

Note: I wrote the first version of the above essay over a month ago, aiming at a specialized audience. My thanks to Russell Salamon (old friend, excellent poet, one of the Lost Angels of Southern Cal.), who edited that essay to make it suitable for the general reader, whoever he/she may be. I then gave it a final edit (final so far). Those of you who know Russell's work will be able to spot his phrases instantly.

Opinions of Opinions

2007-05-16T03:08:00.000-05:00

Opinions are fun. They give us things to argue about in bars. (Which team is...? Which player is...? What are women all about? Men?) They identify us. We wear them like pin-on name tags. We can be proud of them. Even if we've borrowed them, once we call them ours, they are a source of pride because our opinions are the right opinions because they are ours -- circular logic, but we enjoy traveling in these circles. We consider our opinions good company.

Except sometimes they're not. Sometimes having opinions becomes like reswallowing one's own vomit. We get tired of hearing ourselves say them (especially when someone we're with has heard them 1000 times), tired of thinking them, tired of that tight little circle of words and attitudes, tired of being nothing else. It's a relief to look at something (say a leaf or a puddle or a bottle or the quality of light in a doorway) and notice that it's not an opinion, but a thing one is looking at.

Probably long ago we could create things, say "let there be a universe" and there it would be (and we're still in it!). We seem to have lost that knack (poetry a poor approximation, but still a creation). And from creation, it appears we deteriorate through various stages. For example, long after we feel we can't create, we can still LOOK at creations. We can see, can have considerations (con-sideris, with the stars -- no longer with the Gods as creators, but still pretty high), for example, we can consider it a fine day, and, lo! it's a fine day. And when we no longer believe our considerations have force, we can still have opinions about the weather.

I won't say opinions are the last resort, the final consolation prize for our failure to be gods. We can fall lower, be unable to have an opinion, be only the automatic circuit that mouths the opinions of others, be less than that -- since the blessing and curse of this universe is that there is no bottom. (No top, either.) It's a blessing, because we're never at the bottom. It's a curse because no matter how bad it gets, it can get worse. (That's why we have death -- to disguise that bottomlessness from ourselves. Suicides, poor deluded escape artists, think they've ended something, like the prisoner who spends months of exertion digging a tunnel only to come up in a neighboring cell.)

[I suppose a topless and bottomless universe might be a blessing in another sense as well -- for some of us, anyway -- if the universe is a beautiful woman. Some of us might not mind coming up in a neighboring cell if that woman were there, waiting for us.]

So opinions may be only one station among infinitely many on the way up or down, but it's a popular stop these days. If a man can't create a game (say baseball) and can't play the game, and can't afford to own a team or manage a team, he can still call it HIS favorite team and have millions of opinions about it. Opinions are a kind of ownership. As a dog makes territory his own by pissing at the borders, so we make things our own by having opinions about them: Teams, politicians, wars, places, anything and everything. We even have opinions about God. We defend them -- sometimes violently -- until they become, for us, fact or belief, something we think we know. Not that we can't know things (even God, perhaps), but when knowledge is a solidification of opinion (a conviction), it's vulnerable. One day you know something -- maybe you simply know whatever it is one knows when caught up in the sweetness of a dog's beseeching eyes or the hard eagerness of a cat's. Maybe it's just a moment. You're suddenly aware that you're here and now and that everyone and everything is here and now with you.

Anyway, time is full of holes, and one day you trip into one of them (something falls on your head, and you're knocked flat, and as you come to, you woozily notice, then notice with unfamiliar vividness the way the feet of people walking past move off into space and make the space they walk into -- you notice dimension) -- and suddenly you know something. And when that happens, you know something else: That all your opinionated knowledge is just a paper-thin husk of knowledge. Or the next time you start to tell someone what you KNOW about how Babe Ruth was twice the player Barry Bonds is, you suddenly know that this is not knowing; this is a a torn, dog-eared sepia photo of knowing, something found in a stranger's attic, nobody you've ever known, hard to imagine it was once a someone with a life and people he loved and who loved him.

Another reason why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: It exposes all our fraudulent knowledge, the memorized data, the assertions, the support of authorities, the argumentative statistics -- it turns much of our life into a weary charade and makes us long for more knowing, even painful knowing.

Opinion as ownership is hollow. We stick our opinions all over the surface of something (the weather, our spouses, our kids, our work) until nothing shows except our opinions. Nothing shows to us, that is, but we also tell our opinions to all, in hopes that they, too, when they look at the weather, people, things, politics, will see only our opinions. That makes our opinions real -- because they are shared. But what we own is this coating of opinions, which prevents us from noticing that what we thus own is an alien thing, all the more alien for being thus owned. For example, when all I know of my wife is my opinion of her, I lose track of the existence of another being with her own dreams, separate from my own.

When we've filled the world with our opinions, seeing only our opinions, we can no longer have opinions about anything BUT opinions. And I think many people live their lives that way, aware of nothing other than their opinions of their opinions.

You come to us as wings to carry us from one subject to another, O pinions, but soon we find we are shackled by you, O pinions.

[Why does "pinion" mean both wing-feather and shackle? Because birds are restricted -- to parks, for example -- by having feathers removed from their wings so they can't fly away, and since "pinions" were removed to restrict motion, the birds are said to be "pinioned", so "pinion" comes to mean that which restricts, and thus the freedom of flight becomes imprisonment, O pinion! But I digress.]

Lest I seem to mock others, let me assure you that I've fallen into this trance of opinions myself and still slip into it at times. Opinions (for me as for most of us, I think) run through my consciousness in endless ostinato (for the musically illiterate -- a musical phrase repeated over and over again by the same instrument or instruments). Many hours I've wasted day-dreaming, not of conquest by sword or phallus, not of leading armies or illuminating kings or capturing criminals, but hours of imagining myself eloquently persuading people of my opinions, being on talk shows, telling the world my opinions, proving to scoffers that Tolstoy is superior to Dostoyevski and Thomas Mann is mediocre, that there haven't been any great songs since the Beatles; proving to a dreamed-up murderer or accuser or woman who left me long ago that I'm a worthy person with profound opinions; finding brilliant things to say to someone who earlier bested me in argument, leaving me and my sacred opinions gaping. I read something I don't like, and hours later find myself (lying in bed, trying to sleep) working over my opinions, my wonderful opinions on the subject -- who could fail to agree with such wonderful opinions!? I wake up still chewing on these now sour opinions.

Go ahead, just ask me, ask me about anything, but please ask me! Ask me what I think of the Iraq war (I'll come at it from 10 viewpoints and tie it all together for you) or homosexuality (they're all wrong about it, all sides are missing the point) or God or.... Hell, am I the only one who has his own internal muttering (though brilliant) bag lady 24/7? Reminds me of a great line from one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems: "The taste of me I could not spit out."

But I exaggerate. I'm not grinding out opinions 24/7. There is respite. More and more there is respite, whole minutes devoid of these sticky critters and whole days where opinions (traveling in their pastel schools, each school a mob of identically-pouting faces) drift in and out of my coral reef, but do not touch me (hanging there, floating).

I find it's a great relief not to have opinions, not to HAVE to have opinions. I begin to own things by looking. I simply look or touch or otherwise perceive what is there. After all, when you own territory by pissing on it, what you own smells of piss. How refreshing -- a world that doesn't have my stench, isn't sodden and sticky with my mastication of it, like a dog's chewy rawhide toy.

And at times it becomes a wondrous thing to me, the eagerness with which people leap to have opinions, swarm about call-in talk show phones like sharks around blooded bait. I wonder, how is it these people want to have opinions about things that don't concern them? After all, there are times when we NEED to have opinions. For example someone says, "What do you think of [this poem? going to a certain restaurant tonight? that movie?]" and politeness demands we come up with something. Or we're asked to be judges, or at work we're asked to report on "options" and recommend a course of action.

And having sampled knowledge, one may begin to find such duties onerous. How do you get us back on opinion, once we've seen some truth? But most of us manage. We may even be able to make a game of it. And sometimes, just for the fun of it, we may jump in (one night at a cocktail party) with an outrageous opinion. And if we get rebuffed stingingly, we may find ourselves, in bed that night, doing a play-by-play and formulating an invincible opinion -- trapped again, having to unstick ourselves again.

E-mail is the latest opinion trap. I see a message that seems to be MADE to provide me an outlet for my vast and convoluted wisdom. I spend hours answering it, finally send it, notice that I've done none of the things I needed to get done today -- and today is gone! And gradually (with frequent recidivism) I wean myself from this intoxication of opinion and learn to go through 50 or 60 messages I don't need to answer without...without answering them. And when I find myself forming opinions, I remind myself that I DON'T HAVE TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT THIS, and what a relief! There is so MUCH about which I don't need to have an opinion. I can even not know things.

That's one of the sweetest siren songs of Opinion: Not knowing is dangerous. One must know. One can't live not knowing if going to war will be a terrible thing or not, without knowing which candidate is the best, without knowing if terrorists will strike here again, without knowing if Global Warming is for real or not, without knowning who was the greatest, Ruth or Cobb? Jordan or Chamberlain? Who was worse, Stalin or Hitler? Eventually (in this mood) there's hardly anything one is willing to not-know. We become like the compulsive gambler who must bet on everything. "Hey, see that guy tying his shoe? $10 bucks says he knots the bow twice." "See those leaves falling? A dollar says that one there lands first."

Opinion is our way of knowing things we don't know. But I said that before.

So when I can let go of having opinions, I can dispense with having to know, another great relief. And it puts me closer to knowing. Not so paradoxical: The false knowing we call opinion is out of the way. Now I know what I don't know, so I can LOOK. Or better, I can pervade, get into, become intimate with, practically BE that which I would know.

Not that I have to know. But my ability to know rises as I shed my opinions -- or rather my need to have them. I can still have them. It's fun to have opinions when you don't have to have them. What? You think all opinions are bad? Nonsense, you don't get it, let me explain, it's really simple, you see, opinions are fun. They give us things to argue about in bars....

Opening Up Again

2007-05-09T01:05:00.000-05:00

I've missed a lot of spring (and a few years, it seems, of springs, summers, winters, autumns) sitting in a dark room answering and originating e-mails. This spring I've started taking walks. Last week I took a long one, much of it along wooded paths, dappled with light and shade and flitting bird shadows, bird song, squirrel rustles and all the other familiar props.

It began to get to me (or I to it). I liked the world a lot. Loved it. Started to talk to it.

I realized some things I'd always known, corny things, of course: That wishes come true, that our thoughts and feelings make things happen. I noticed something a bit less obvious (though, really, it's another way of saying that wishes come true): When I get too involved with trying to do the right things, with trying to understand what is happening to the world, what chaos is being wrought in it, when I badly want to do something about the wrongnesses I see --

[the possible destructon of the planetary food supply by genetically modification, the glut of mind-and-liver-and-nervous-system-destroying FDA-approved drugs (particularly those prescribed for non-existent mental "illnesses"), a population sapped by artificial sweeteners -- as if sugar weren't bad enough... -- OK, maybe some of these aren't real to you, but you can probably list your own bete noires] --

but the wrongnesses seem overwhelming, and the few things I think of doing (e.g., signing petitions and writing letters to Congresspersons who depend on the designated villains for their campaign funds) seem futile, and even these futilities pile up in my in-box, as I fall behind and neglect my own production (poetry),

and I begin to feel desperate, start to daydream of solutions, huge effects I might create, though I know the dreams are stupid (what do I know about blowing up things, and wouldn't the consequences be heavy oppression and a scarier world?),

but as I walked through the woods and felt a renewed love for our planet and you and even for myself, I realized the trap I'd gotten into, and it vanished -- at least it's gone right now.

What happened is that as I walked I realized that it does the world some good to love it, even lessens the likelihood that some of its denizens will need to resort to psychiatric drugs or feel impelled to muliply their billions by further poisoning us. Affinity creates a space for people to be themselves, be people of good will. My small wave of affinity created a small increment of the space for good will, and lots of us create vast spaces for it.

When I get locked into desperation, I lose faith in the value of creating small effects. Worse, I don't see them anymore. I don't see that my dreams are affecting others. I go blind to this, so think I need to create huge effects. And that need leads to despair.

This is what happens to most artists at some point: The need to produce only GREAT and MIND-BLOWING art renders them mute, unable to create. One man struggles in vain to create an effect on others by leaping about, waving his arms and screaming obscenities. Another man has greater impingement, though all he did was listen to someone and acknowledge or smile, in passing, at the beauty of a child or a cat. The one screaming can't conceive of creating any worthwhile effect simply by admiring beauty -- and CAN'T admire it because he can't RECEIVE that small effect. Not only does he not feel he's created an effect unless he can create a huge effect (like blowing up a planet -- in an extreme case), but since he can no longer perceive any small effects, he can't experience them: He can't feel, because only huge overwhelming feelings can touch him, or so he thinks. He must push sex toward violence, for example. An extreme case would be the serial killer who can't be turned on by anything less than murdering and mutilating -- and in time that fails him, so he tries to find greater outrages.

I know of people -- GOOD people, eager to help others, aware of ways to help, willing to work at it, able to lead others -- who get caught up in this despair of small effects and lose the ability to feel. They still pursue their goals, lead movements, hide their despair behind masks of calm certainty, but have lost their own dreams because they no longer know that small effects are significant -- perhaps are not even small. They MUST save the planet, CAN'T save the planet, become obsessed with visions of mad, violent, revolutionary chaos, fight the visions down (usually), and are locked in combat with themselves, unable to spare a nano-erg of energy for attention, much less admiration.

I'm not saying one should always be satisfied with creating small effects, never strive for larger games, greater scope of action. But I'd say that the ability to create large effects derives from an ability to create and appreciate the small effects. If you can't care for the ones you're with, your large-scale actions will be tainted by desperation. The world you strive to save will be an abstract world with no live beings in it, only symbols.

Another thing I'm not saying (actually I'm not saying practically everything) is that the path to creating a better world begins with the ability to take a walk and fall in love with the world we have, because for many people that's too difficult. There are easier steps on the path. For some people, perhaps a first step would be to notice that one exists and not get nauseated by noticing this. There is no bottom to awareness, no bottom to dreams. Even the stones are dreaming, but are so caught up in the frantic random criss-crossed zinging and twitching of their molecules, that their e0ns-long dreams are never completed, never blossom as what we'd call awareness. They cannot dream themselves awake.

I believe that wishes, prayers, dreams all work. We always get what we often don't realize we want. When we wish against our own wishes, things get complicated. When we get simple enough and aligned with ourselves enough, we no longer have wishes. We have, instead, decisions. We decide what sort of world we want, and we put it there. Except when we're real good at it (fast-draw artists), the deciding and the putting it there aren't separable. That must be why, when I feel most in love with the world and everything in it, I feel so quick. The quick and the dead. Quick, yare, ready, responsive, perceptive -- these are things that go together well.

I wrote this quickly, made the phrases tumble over one another, piled up the commas -- that's how a spring day came upon me last week and has been with me since. Sorry I haven't offered you much talk of sun and cloud and buds, etc. It would be nice to do it all and give you that day, but you can make your own. I hope I've created a small effect here.

I have.

On Seeking God

2007-05-02T20:24:00.000-05:00

He thought it would be fun
to play hide and seek. These were
simpler times, when his only playmate
was God. "God," he said, "you hide,
and I’ll try to find you." He covered his eyes
with his hands and counted for a long time
(and in those days, a long time
was a real long time), but when he opened his eyes,
God was still everywhere,
in plain view, which spoiled the fun.

He said, "No no no, you’ve got to HIDE,
get it?" (God has always been a rather
difficult child. We used to know that.
It didn’t bother us. We thought that was
how it was supposed to be.)

So this time, he counted...and counted
like forever – more like forever
than what passes for forever these days.
But when he opened his eyes, there was
God, the big goof, as obvious as an ostrich’s ass,
except more so, since God didn’t even
turn away from man, much less hide his head.

So he said to God, "OK, I see this is
difficult for you, sort of like ceasing
to be Yourself, so let’s turn it around: I’ll hide,
and You come find me. Don’t forget
to count...", and he looked for a good hiding place,
but where can you hide when everywhere is God,
nowhere to hide but within God? How could he not
be found instantly? But he had a bright idea:
He would simply not be there. He’d be elsewhere
or nowhere at all. He simply wouldn’t be,
just go dead, unconscious, oblivious, unfindable,
so that’s what he did, and God couldn’t find him,
and, he noticed, he couldn’t find God either – if there was
a God, and if there was himself, for that matter – he couldn’t
find himself either and couldn’t recall what the hypothetical-he
had been looking for.

That worked fine, except the game was no longer
a game, since it had no ending (so far).
And from then on something, perhaps a trace of himself,
sought himself, occasionally, in the process, catching a glimpse
of divinity, or sought divinity, occasionally catching
a fleeting glimpse of himself.

The Disappearance of the Bees

2007-04-26T11:09:00.001-05:00

We've had beautiful weather (in DC area) the past 4 days, so I've gotten out in it. For three days I didn't see a single bee or butterfly or moth (late April!). Maybe it's partly the unseasonable cold April in recent weeks, but having read various Internet articles about the vanishing of honey bees (estimates running from 50% to far more of the adult bees leaving their hives and not returning, their fates unknown), I lay in bed last night creating lots of bees -- lots of insects, but especially bees, visualizing them bumbling about blossoms, crowding into their hives ("do a little dance -- get down tonight!"), boiling out from a hole in the rocks, swarming, darting about -- generating a lot of affinity for them, a space for them. I created butterflies, too (some of them also pollinate our plants), starting with the "easy" ones, the white cabbage butterflies (or are they moths?), with one or two viceroys and monarchs.

So while jogging today (for an hour, all of it in a suburbia filled with blossoming trees) I saw ONE (count it, one!) bee and, not far away, one modest white butterfly. Well, it's a start.

The articles on the bees said that they're required for about 70% of our fruit/vegetable diet. I don't recall them mentioning whether this disappearance of bees is just in the U.S. or in other nations as well. (Of course, B's have been disappearing in colleges gradually for decades as the Self-Esteem doctrines increasingly dictate that everyone must receive an A.)

I think we're going to have to put out a lot of love for bees, all of us -- you've been stung? Get over it! We need these guys. And they're wonderful creatures: They don't eat other creatures. They trade pollination service with flowers for the stuff of honey, which they also share with us. Free trade exemplars. (I suppose you could call them pimps for flowers. I prefer to think of them as the third sex of flowers.)

I suppose they aren't popular with ardent Women's Libbers. All the work of the hive is done by sterile females (the worker bees). The males (drones) have as their fulltime occupation keeping the queen pregnant. The queen has as her fulltime occupation (after she's fought to the death with other potential queens to be THE queen) getting laid and laying eggs. Hardly a lesson in sexual equality.

Anyway, even if you don't care to consume honey, if you like flowers and vegetables, you should put out a postulate for the return of our honeybees. (Note: Besides the one bee I saw today, I've also seen a couple bumblebees in the last two weeks. The one today was the first regular honeybee I've seen.)

Meanwhile, I've decided to make some predictions about this honeybee shortage and how it will be "handled" (if we fail to postulate them back into our lives):

Articles about the shortage of honey bees will creep slowly into the back pages of newspapers, but won't make it to the front pages until accompanied by news of "studies" by prestigious universities that trace the problem to a virus. The studies will be funded by companies like Monsanto (manufacturers of insecticides and genetically modified crops) or by their front groups (foundations, etc.). Probably the virus will be something that's been around for a long time, and will be said to be a new variant. The evidence won't be stunning, but a big deal will be made of it, and some new Monsanto of pharmaceutical product will be offered as a solution. The possibility that insecticides or GM plants may have something to do with it will not be mentioned or, when brought up, be dismissed as improbable. No one will ask whether such factors might have lowered the immune systems of bees and made them more susceptible to viruses or why no such virus had wiped out our bees before.

The government will be asked to fund a handling. Various handlings will be suggested. To make up for the honey shortage, the people who produce Splenda, Equal and other artificial sweeteners will come up with artificial honey, golden yellow, better than bee honey, vitamin fortified NutraSweet syrup, etc. (Maybe the sugar people will do the same -- if the sugar beets and sugar cane can do without bee pollination.)

Perhaps we'll open the borders wide for Mexican laborers, millions of them, who will receive less-than-minimum wages to swarm through our fields with Q-Tips, cross pollinating plants by hand. (That could be done, right?)

Monsanto will produce genetically modified bees that can resist the virus (but whose honey will cause liver disease and whose swarms will tend, on occasion, to turn into killer bees for reasons unfathomable). Or perhaps Monsanto will produce all sorts of food-crop seeds genetically altered (by adding genetic material from teen-aged boys) so that their flowers will self-pollinate. We'll be eating nothing but "West Virginian" fruits and vegetables. (No insects? Try incest! Same letters.)

Or perhaps killer bees will move up from South America to fill the vacated niche in our warming ecology, and Lilly will produce a drugged gas for rendering them less hostile (except when it sends them on savage killing sprees), while tincturing their honey (they do make honey, don't they?) with the same chemical, which will give the honey a calming effect on humans (except when it sends them on savage killing sprees).

Or perhaps in some areas most food crops will become rare, and we'll see a reversal of the vegetarian move to replace steak with eggplant and soy substitutes. Vegetable lovers will be offered, instead, brocolli and beans made from cow fat and various chemicals. Etc. (But what will cows eat?)

Essay by Dean Blehert

Are you there?

2007-04-24T10:48:00.000-05:00

If I dial the right
number and you're home, you'll answer.
Why else have a phone?

So I keep writing, thinking,
why else have a language.

On the subject of metaphors (as being essential to poetry and as having both advantages and drawbacks):

2006-06-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

Many of my favorite poems are devoid of metaphor. It is seldom used in haiku, for example. It would swamp them and overwhelm their simplicity. But nearly all poems make associations. Metaphor is simply a way to indicate likeness. The spectrum from identity through association to differentiation applies. In an engram, any datum can equal any datum, represented often as A=A=A. The dog is the man is the car is the tree is the sky is the smell of gasoline is the pain of a concussion is the voice of the man yelling something, etc. Along that spectrum, one could place metaphor, simile, allegory, symbol, juxtaposition and other devices that indicate some sort of likeness or degree of identity. In a way a simile is closer to differentiation than a metaphor, since it explicitly says that two things are similar, not the same.

In haiku, usually juxtaposition is used rather than metaphor. More is left for the reader to contribute. In some cases the juxtaposition is mainly between stillness and motion or what's perceived and a sense of the perceiver. That's pretty obvious in the poem usually considered the first haiku (old pond, frog jumps in, splash). I use no metaphor in the following:

It's even sadder than you think:
They were ALL good people.

I think it's one of my best poems. You may not care for it, of course. The poem does use devices, chief among them irony. And a vast omission that only becomes clear on rereading.

Use of metaphor is a two-edged sword: It allows compactness, multiple meanings interrelated with minimal baggage. It also invites reactivity. As Dr. Szasz points out, most of the illogic (and insanity) of psychiatry stems from the failure of psychiatrists to understand that "mental illness" is a metaphor, a way of saying that certain conditions are similar to diseases (illnesses). When one forgets that it is merely a metaphor, one gets in trouble. Similarly, Bush doesn't understand that "War on Terror" is a metaphor. He actually believes one can declare war on a level of the tone scale or an idea. Much metaphor-fraught poetry is similarly reactive. Sometimes the reactivity is the subject (getting us into a reactive viewpoint to gain insight), but just as often, the poetry itself is reactive. Metaphor is also the language of bigotry: Jewish swine, Commie pigs, etc.

So to me a metaphor is a responsibility. It's not something that makes a poem a better poem. It's something that may improve a poem or may ruin a poem. It's just another tool to be used wisely or unwisely.

by Dean Blehert, posted with slight corrections by his wife Pam

On Placebos and Poetry

2006-03-27T08:53:00.000-05:00

The following was an email-letter to close friends of the poet, Dean Blehert, and is being posted here for Dean by his wife Pam as Dean is on an extensive and intensive study cycle and I thought there might be some out there in the wide world who would like this "essay."

(original date: 3/25/1999)

On placebos, not to put down any specific poet, but it seems to me that when one sits through readings of fairly well-written poems (or reads them in a book) and feels increasingly dull and sleepy and bored, there are only a few explanations: One is that one has gone past words one doesn't fully understand -- or the words don't make sense, so that they CAN'T be understood, because their use in the poem doesn't fit the definitions you (and the dictionary) know. In reading, one has a better chance to look back and clear up the connections that don't connect, look up words, etc. But even there, many poems disperse attention, and large sections of them slip past most readers.

The second explanation is that we've been taking placebos. Why else would we listen and think, yes, good poetry, even though we feel bored and sleepy, not enthusiastic, inspired, amused, instructed?

The thing is, if, on a program of poetry, no one really gets in communication with the audience and says things TO that audience that are really interesting to that audience, that (in very old-fashioned terms) amuse and instruct, or (in my own sense of how poetry works) evoke both surprise and recognition -- in the absense of any of it really reaching us or being anywhere near as interesting as the average TV sit. com., then what can it mean when we say afterwards that some of it was very good or very well written?

I've seen people in poetry groups with bored faces say to another poet who's just read a poem, "That was very good" and "That was great." It's obvious that the person saying this has not been changed in any way by the poem. No one in the room is moved by it, not one emotion in the room has been stirred, no one has a new idea of anything in his/her life, and yet people chime in about how good or even how great the poem is. What "That's an excellent poem" means in such cases is, "That's the sort of poem that a prestigious magazine accepts" or "That's what a poem is supposed to be."

If, in such a group or at such a reading, someone reads or performs a LIVE poem, the difference is immediately obvious. The poem won't necessarily be LIKED as much as some of the dead poems, but you can SEE the effects it creates. (I've seen very live poems -- mine and others -- lose at slams to poems that caused FAR less effect on the audience, but agreed more with what the audience and/or judge thought a winning slam poem was supposed to be.)

One of the tricks in testing is to use a placebo that causes some obvious effect, so that the people being tested won't know it's a placebo. Recent research showed that when sugar pills were used as placebos, many people KNEW they were getting placebos, because there were no obvious side effects.

[The full significance of this research has not yet been digested by science or made public: Most of the drugs now on the market were tested years ago using sugar-pill placebos. Many of the "miracle" drugs scored only slightly above the placebos, and sometimes that took some statistical tampering: For example, the drug companies or the FDA found excuses not to include studies where the placebos scored BETTER than the drug being tested, and this gave the drug a statistical edge. This applies to some VERY popular medications (e.g., Prozac). (No one even kept the test data on Ritalin, so there's no existing evidence that it's effective, and the FDA hasn't required new versions of it to be fully tested against placebos, only against the original Ritalin. In other words, if it works as well as a drug whose effectiveness is without evidence, it is ruled effective.)

The statistical distortion caused by some of the users KNOWING they're getting a placebo is more than enough to invalidate the effectiveness of many drugs now on the market. (Of course, there are other reasons to doubt their effectiveness: The tests are done by labs paid by the drug manufacturer; excuses are found to deem bad side-effects "not proven to have been caused by the drug" or to ignore them altogether, the drugs are tested for a few weeks, then prescribed for long-term use, etc.)]

Anyway, to get back to poetry, one way to make it harder to spot a placebo is to include ingredients that create obvious side effects (effects that have nothing to do with the purpose of the drug). People expect side effects from a "real" medication. So if the pill makes the mouth dry or creates a tingling or something, the person being tested is less likely to think it's a placebo.

Similarly, we expect poetry to create effects, so people are less likely to think something's a placebo if it creates a big effect, for example, shock. If a poet yells "Fuck!" at an audience loudly enough, many are fooled. And there are lots of other tricks. The idea is to create a SIDE effect and let US, the audience, contribute the poetry. Really, that's all a cliche is: something associated with poetry or that sounds like poetry because it's often used in poetry, in hopes that we'll provide the poetry or, really, the poetic-ness -- much as a dog salivates when hearing Pavlov's bell, even though he's not being fed -- whereas real poetry nourishes. It gets us to contribute to it, but we contribute, not the poetry, but our own real worlds, emotions, hopes, etc. We take the poetry, and use it to illuminate our own lives.

We can go on salivating for years at bell sounds and not realizing we are starving. Then someone actually feeds us and we remember what all that salivation was about, and that could be our salvation.

It's All One to Me

2006-02-22T08:05:00.000-05:00

the West says we are each alone,
and the East says we are all one,
and they say the one same lie,
for you are you
and I am I
and we can communicate.

The dictionary derives "alone" from "All one." "We are all one" -- not a cozy thought. But you are not alone, and we are not all one. These are not alternatives, but the same thing. I am I. You are you. But we can communicate, because I am able to be whatever you are able to be and vice versa -- you can say my words and make them yours, see what I see, even be, for example, Dean Blehert, for I am not these or any things, but I am and you are and we can communicate.

Dean Blehert is a sequence of viewpoints I occupy -- or anyone can occupy. (One head, slightly used, to let.) To be is an ability. To be alone or to be all one is not an ability, but a misunderstanding of the meaning of "alone" and "one" -- to be one WHAT? To be alone with regard to WHAT? We are not alone. We are not one. We cannot be identical who are not our identities.

When we misunderstand each other, a blankness sets in, which we explain to ourselves (we being so accustomed to knowing, that the blankness following misunderstanding is intolerable; so we coat it in explanation) -- we explain it by saying "I am alone." Then we solve our aloneness by saying, "We are all one." But once we are all one thing (one VERY together thing), we are alone again.

We maim and harm and betray each other, and that's OK, because there isn't anyone else, and besides, we are all one. A sin against oneself or another is simply a communication that cannot easily be received because the sender knows the receiver is unwilling to be what is communicated. (Communication includes duplicating; one must be a mirror in the process, willing to accept an image.) No matter, for there IS no sender, no receiver. How can there be a sending (to whom?) if one is all alone or if all is one?

The West says we are each alone, and the East says we are all one, and they say the one same lie, for you are you and I am I and we can communicate.

Dwindling Spiral

2006-02-22T00:56:00.000-05:00

The physical universe is as eternal as the two-minute race between Achilles and the tortoise. That is, it lasts forever if the speed with which we exhaust lifetimes accelerates proportionately to our approach to its limits. When there are only a billion human years left, we'll become ants and have another trillion ant years left, and so on.

To participate in that eternity, we need only concede that we cannot ourselves create new energy -- an easy concession in a universe so rich with pre-fabricated energy, so solid and agreed-upon.

Once in the game, we operate by using physical universe energy (it's a monopoly, our Standard Oil) to control physical universe energy and bodies and cars and planets (congealed energy -- previously used, but only by a very old God to drive to church on Sundays).

But the more energy is used and reused (as the physical, like a dog, licks up what it spits up), the less controllable it becomes. We cannot make fresh energy. That's in our admission contract, remember? Nobody gets into this universe without first waiving the right to create energy, because those who can create it, can also make it vanish, and that's dangerous, if we want this universe to last. So we chew over the same old ergs for trillennia until it's all amorphous gruel, no use to anyone.

The way out? We'll have to forget about hurling galaxies about, but if we make ourselves real small, within our thin gruel of galaxy, we'll find stars bursting with energy to play with, untapped Niagaras -- and when stars are exhausted, we can shrink again to be overwhelmed by yet more miniaturized explosions.

After a few millennia of bodies in machines creeping over the skin of a pretty blue planet-marble, fuel runs short. We can look forward (unless we remember how to create our own energy) to a 10-second aeon of jockeying electrons and talking in voices much too shrill for ants to hear (Quark Quark!), hoping for our terasecond of fame, hurtling round nucleii, whirled without end, Hallelujah, amen.

Memo to the Class of '59

2006-02-20T21:45:00.000-05:00

Time stopped in the '50's. I was born in the '40's, which is where the REAL movie stars (Gable, Hepburn, Tracy, Cooper) are from (well, from the 30s, too), but I first noticed I was noticing there was a world in the '50's, which is a time period hard for me to distinguish from an artificially sweetened news magazine ("The Weekly Reader") for kids passed out in school with its photo of "the car of the future," all fins, chrome and cockpits, and articles about America, the good guy.

So I grow old from the 50's, except there's no growing FROM them, because the 50's won't go away, because they were "modern times." They were what the American Dream had been waiting for: cars like space ships and every home agleam with all the modern conveniences, just a few more diseases and racial and political unpleasantnesses to clean up (by explaining to Africa and India how silly and unmodern such things were and showing them the cars, lawns, offices and supermarkets) before we would all be Ozzie and Harriet and not have to feel guilty about it, because everyone else in the world without regard for race, creed or color (as long as it was nothing outlandish) would be Ozzie and Harriet too.

Time had to stop there, because where could you go after "modern." (Yes, now we say "Post-Modern", which is another way of saying "Damn it, it's still the 50's and it pisses me off!")Beyond "modern" lay science fiction, and no one really goes there. People keep struggling to understand the 60's. They find the 60's complex because they assume they already understand the 50's -- the insufferably bland and insular and bovine 50's, that we blame the world for not being like anymore.

But we're still there, even Generation Z or whatever we're up to now -- they're still in it, though they don't remember Marilyn Monroe, cowboy movies, or the Korean War. We make our future, decide it, agree upon it -- or we don't. The 50's was when America stopped creating a future, so we live there -- in the last future America created.

But what of the mad 60's dream? Nah, that's self-conscious stuff, like counting sheep to fall asleep, the effort to out-create the solid, easy 50's agreement that had settled hairdos and everything else in the world forever and to come. The 60s protested too much. The 50s just were/are. We live in an old dream that is falling apart, unless we can bully a bit of future into being with our art.

Maybe someday someone will understand the 50's so that we can stop living in them. I hope so: They're getting mean. Maybe they need our love.

If We Outlaw Dreams, Only Outlaws Will Have Dreams

2006-02-20T21:11:00.000-05:00

Psychologists and psychiatrists like to warn us of the dangers of "Hero complex," "Delusions of Grandeur" and other delusional states they cannot distinguish from the real thing. Or perhaps, to a psychiatrist, all grandeur, all heroism is a delusion. (They never speak of "Delusions of Expert Testimony" or "Delusions of Glib Cynicism").

No, they warn: Beware the man who dreams himself a hero; of such are the fanatics, the crazed assassins of our day. (And yet, what child does not dream of being a hero?)

These students of the soul they think does not exist (for psychiatry means healing of the soul, and if you have one, they can cure you of it) -- they fear any who dare disagree. Those who dream their own dreams are not well-adjusted, nor do they need our fear to compel agreement with their dreams.

Those who imagine themselves heroes well enough, are heroes. Greatness is one's dream come true for all, all our dreams come true in one.

Beware those who fear dreamers. Beware those who cannot dream.

The real madmen can only borrow the dreams of others, overwhelmed by the agreement called the world, its solidity ever demanding "Just who do you think you are!"

The real madman is what the psychologist and psychiatrist try to mass-produce, with their ideal: The well-adjusted person, someone who craves agreement and dares not dream, not even for himself alone in bed, for to dream one must disagree. Isn't that what dreaming is about? -- disagreeing with what is, putting something else there?

Yet even the madman clings to his last desperate fragment of truth, that he is someone special -- for who is not a hero, having once decided to be? (And I think every child at some point decides to be a hero.)

Therefore, in the only world he recognizes (everyone's), he registers his specialness the only way he can: bombs, bullets, sloguns -- solid dreams prefabricated by others, flung or fired into a mob of gaping flammable faces, eyes wide with terror, pain and guaranteed recognition. No need to think: He gropes for his quick fix, the confirmation of his specialness by a world that swallows dreams and shits headlines.

What Became of Baby Doll?

2006-02-20T20:50:00.000-05:00

Mama causes things. Little girl gets caused -- ears scrubbed, teeth brushed, dress and shoes put on, shoelaces tied ("...and don't get them muddy!") by Mama. Overwhelming, all that one-way causation, unless little girl is given a littler girl to scold, dress up, take places. Little girl can't be trusted with baby sister, but a doll will do.

At least that's how it used to be when dolls were mostly rubber and porcelain babies or cloth Raggedy Annes (little girls) or furry teddy bears (cuddly -- pets that can be handled, yet won't need to be buried in a shoe box beneath the bushes in the back yard because "I told you not to handle it so much").

Mama caused things to happen to her child, so her child caused things to happen to her mock-child or pet, child becoming mock-Mama. Later, in grade school, big girl snipped out Betty and Veronica from comic books, dressed them (Fold Tab A into Slot B) in cut-out clothes, wanting to be Betty or Veronica, because they could cause things to happen to boys, who specialize in causing things to happen to girls.

That's how it used to be. But tiny hard-plastic bimbo-Barbie (our Betty and Veronica) is all the rage with tots. Who is trying to be what? Who wants whom to be what? The child is mother to the nubile teen-ager? (Babies are, after all, unwanted.)

And Barbie is so small -- an adult doll, yet tiny compared to the long-ago pliable soft baby dolls that sat up and said "Mama!" and lay back and closed their lashed eyes.

Our dolls are aging, and so are our children. If we live again, a newborn baby is, after all, someone who recently died. Perhaps the next generation of dolls will be tiny old people, made of hard slippery plastic designed to be shoved up into the womb to entertain pre-natals and remind them whence they come.

Can You Feel Fingernails Growing? Whose?

2006-02-20T20:01:00.000-05:00

I trim my nails -- they grow back.

But WHEN do they grow? While I sleep? I never catch them at it. Or maybe what I call "my nails", what I feel when I put attention on them, IS their growing -- the quick of my fingers against their slow,but steady; motion against motion, the earth against my feet, all motion: The earth and my body tugging against each other, the earth's slow internal magma convulsions, my body's tiny convulsions, more than one throb each moment; the earth's spin around sun dragging or pushing me along with it, and all that fizz of molecular motion -- motion against motion is what we can perceive, perhaps what we can cause -- Give me your hand.

My motion?...no, my body's motion, for I, feeling motion, must be no motion, stillness. Why? Because I do not change. Once, not long ago,I sat in a crib -- I remember -- and felt all these motions, and then, too, I was me, and before that -- I remember it, better than I remember all the fads of motion of those times -- then, too, I was me and could cause and perceive and mirror motion and remember and re-create it.

Surrounded by motion, the only show in town, I thought I, too, was motion, but when I know who I am and have always been, I see that I do not change, and all the illusory "was-ness" drops out, this succession of me's, beads on a string, becoming the one pearl of who I am only and always, unchanging, unsleeping (it is I who watch over my sleeping), this awareness of the awareness of my toenails growing or of nothing at all, here I am.

How Fame Happens

2006-02-19T22:37:00.000-05:00

What blocks the road to fame also eases the way: You go along, bouncing in your own estimation from "I am someone" to "I am no one," occasionally coming to rest halfway between at "Maybe...who knows? Does it matter?"

You know you are good at what you do, but knowing doesn't make it real -- that takes agreement, and you aren't even sure you agree with yourself. But your being unknown is what wins the day, when, finally, someone whose opinion counts happens to pass over your work and gets yanked back to it and says, "Hey! Who is this? It's terrific!"

To this eminence, you're no one -- the condition you've long cursed -- and that's your gateway to fame: To you you're no one...someone... no one.... To this someone you're simply no one, then someone, suddenly someone, pure someone. You don't arrive with all that baggage, the decades of self-doubt (this eminent fellow wasn't there when you were vascillating through the years), the skin of "small-time", "local", etc., acquired despite (or by) your efforts to resist it.

You are that "bolt from the blue." Your decades of effort got you no recognition worth mention, so you come from nowhere. You aren't even a recognizably "pretty good" or "reliable" poet. The road is wide open. Now you need only remember that fame is mere opinion. Your work is to touch individuals and make them more alive. Fame is only a way to reach individuals, only a way. Aren't you glad fame hid from you until you were able to use it without becoming infatuated with it...well, almost.

Hat's Off!

2006-02-19T16:55:00.000-05:00

When I was little, and my Dad went to "the office", his presence in the house was strongest in the front closet, where, on the top shelf, like a row of conservative silent fathers, were hats, part of the uniform, like suits and ties, part, really, of the shape of a man's head in the 1930s and 40s, narrow-brimmed, felt, front-to-back dented. Fedoras, I guess, though I heard them called only "hats" -- where did they go?

They vanished before anyone heard of global warming. Why? They were hardly unmanly. Even now they don't look quaint on Bogart or McMurray or Mitchum. I read recently that the first dictator of Paraguay ordered every man to wear a hat (this in the tropics) so that respect could be shown to ladies by doffing them.

(What a good word, "doff" -- from "do off". Why didn't it become mob slang: "Vinnie, that asshole needs to be doffed." We'd have the Mafia Don and the Mafia Doff.)

So maybe rudeness or Women's Lib unhatted us.

But, by the way, how do we account for the passing of women's hats? They were never doffers, but always hatted, not just at banquets, but whenever they left the neighborhood (e.g., to "go downtown" to shop or see a doctor) and sometimes close to home, big-brimmed bonnets and tiny pill-boxes with bits of veil in front, all shapes and shades. These, too, are gone or worn to stand out, unusual.

But hats don't characterize Mom as they do Dad. Women were most often in and around the house, bare-headed. But men -- any day downtown, lunch hour, groups of suited men passing, heads brim-crossed and muffin-creased, silk bands out, leather sweat-bands in, hair or skin(fashion was kinder to bald men then) nestled in soft silky white inner lining, just enough brim to shade the eyes -- trimmed cowboy hats for crowded city life. If they'd lasted a few years longer, I'd have gotten my first one around age 17 (1959).

Were they expensive? Did blue-collar men own at least one, for going to church? I'm so ignorant. When I was a kid, a man was someone who went to an office. But I think they all -- even the tramps -- wore fedoras, though some were hand-me-down, frayed.

When hats vanished, how many hat makers went unemployed? (Were they all twitching-mad from mercury in chemicals used to shape hats -- mad as hatters?) And how masculine those hats were! What more seductively perverse than Marlene Dietrich in a man's hat? Did poets then wonder what had become of top hats? Derbies? (Imagine Abe Lincoln in a Fedora, Bogart in a Derby.)

OK, so times and styles change -- women's far faster than men, because, in a "man's world", fashion was one of the few things women were allowed to change (without consulting men) in their self-definitions. But this was so quick: It happened in my time, my Dad's time, I don't know when or how or why. There went Dad and his cohorts to work in suits, ties, overcoats and fedoras; then the same men went to work in suits, ties, overcoats and no hats. How do such things happen. Was it Eisenhower? I see Truman fedora'd, but not Ike. He was military. Fedoras were civilian.

Probably it was the return of all those soldiers (about 16,000,000 of them returning after WWII), not in a rush to replace one helmet with another, really in no mood for uniforms of any sort. My Dad wasn't accepted into the Army: Flat feet. Being a civilian in a fedora was not something he was proud of. In 1945 arrived a flood of demobbed, hatless heroes from the world's most informal army, known for slang, chewing gum and breezy postures. (Hitler hadn't expected much from such easy-going troops, officers who responded to formal invitations to surrender with "Nuts!")

It must have become young and heroic to be hatless. (But why didn't they do away with ties as well? What a sadly missed opportunity!) That's it. I'm satisfied. I'm sure that's the answer, so don't tell me about the felt mines drying up in 1946 -- I don't want to hear it.

Trust the Deserters; Victims are Always Dependable

2006-02-19T16:31:00.000-05:00

The boyish, sincere network interviewer sympathetically invites horror stories from a living room full of victims of the CULT-Of-The-Week Club. Then, to be FAIR, he questions one of the CULT leaders, who denies it (we are given 20 seconds of his 30-minute statement), but official suited and neck-tied blandness can't compete with teary-eyed women telling how they were DRIVEN to slash their wrists and feel just terribly GUILTY -- and then, to be even more FAIR, a svelte newslady reads letters from obviously unsvelte people who claim to be HAPPY with the CULT, choosing only passages that are abstract and kind of JESUS-IS-WITH-ME-NOW-AND-ALL-IS-WELL, as moving as "Have A Nice Day" from a Happy Face.

They don't fill a living room with the letter writers and let them talk to us. Happy cult members are only shown in too-enthusiastic crowds, not in living rooms or one by one.

But we have to believe those who've LEFT. After all, they were there. They know. "It's a cult! They brainwashed me! They took away my money, my self! They ganged up on me! They all do whatever they're told!" (An army of fanatics prepares even now to snatch YOUR loved ones...).

Easy to believe them: They MUST be victims; who ever heard of a victimizer criticizing a victim? Why would murderer hate murdered? Why would swindler despise dupe? Why would a husband who beats his wife call her a tramp? Why would the guy who joined up and claimed to be one of the guys, then took off with the silverware and an emptied bank account or two want to put down the group he deserted? Why would a crooked politician accuse his enemies of being corrupt? (Are newspeople ever corrupt?)

Why would the meanest kids whine loudest about their parents' meanness? That would be crazy (and yet, who are the loudest whiners?), whereas these are just nice people who claim to have given their lives -- by mistake (whoopsie!) -- to a crazy CULT, then come to their ravaged senses.

We believe because they tell us that something we don't understand and don't want to understand, something whose truths don't wear their hair the way our truths do, is evil, insane -- meaning: Don't worry, there's nothing there to be understood, no threat to the certainties upon which depend our after-all-reasonably-satisfactory lives....

It's Impossible to Understand

2006-02-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

When horrendous things happen, like the Holocaust or 9-11, we often hear people say that such things are beyond understanding. Actually they are easy to understand once one realizes that there's nothing there to understand. That is, they are acts of no-understanding.

Most of us, except those who like to implicate the hand of God and then torment themselves asking why - most of us know this when it comes to hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and other "acts of God". That is, we don't try to understand them in the way that we try to understand human actions. We understand that they are not to be understood in that way.

Someone seeing odd marks on rocks and thinking they might be inscrutable ancient religious sculptures, might spend years puzzling them out, or, learning that they are typical of the markings made by glaciers, would feel an understanding. He would understand that they were not to be understood in that way.

Where we drive ourselves nuts is in trying to understand insane human action (for example, the Holocaust), assuming the understanding is there simply because human beings are the actors. But those who commit criminal actions are not there, are not the ones who act. A criminal will tell you, he didn't do it: his hands did it. The criminal's crime is not in the act, but in allowing himself to become less than he is, allowing forces no more human than hurricanes or glaciers to supplant him. Another word for this is "irresponsibility." A criminal is a person who is not responsible for his actions. And that means that the criminal doesn't do anything, doesn't cause anything. It is all done to him or through him. He was only following orders, whether from Hitler or from mysterious voices, compulsions, obsessions, needs, etc.

And, of course, to say "he couldn't help himself because he's mentally ill" is to validate this irresponsibility, to reward it. This is the main activity of psychiatrists in the legal system: To explain that it's OK for people to fail to take responsibility for their actions, and that this failure excuses those actions.

This passes for "understanding" in some circles: To understand bad actions is to be able to list the excuses for them. There's some truth to the notion that it helps to understand what a person has been through, but carried to an extreme, it amounts to telling us that we are all victims, incapable of taking responsibility for our actions.

When you look at insanity, you are looking at an absence of understanding. Trying to understand an absence of understanding is like talking to a chair or a table or a rock - or a hurricane - and expecting a verbal answer. Insanity is not difficult to understand once you realize that there is no understanding in it, nothing to be understood except that it cannot be understood.

That doesn't mean nothing can be done about it. It just gives you a starting point for increasing understanding. Once you know that the actions are insane, you know where to find the being (who understands...who IS understanding) - you know the being is not in that insanity, so now you can locate him and get in communication with him. How can you locate him, if you think he's the bundle of tics or stoniness right there in front of you. He'd like to be lost in his insanity - easier than confronting what he's done or allowed to happen. Our trying to understand it helps him stay lost.

2006-02-14T14:15:00.000-05:00

If you've been reading the news lately, you may have come across the new warnings the FDA is considering adding to ADHD drugs (Ritalin, etc.). You have to read the inside pages. The front pages are reserved for announcements of new miracle drugs. The inside pages tell us that the new miracle drugs may be ineffective or dangerous. Ten years later, when it becomes obvious that the miracle drugs have killed thousands, the news may make it to page one.

Over the past month or so, we've learned that ADHD drugs sometimes cause cardio-vascular trouble. (This has been known for decades, but until it hits the headlines, it ain't so.) We've learned that the anti-depressants so dear to Ms. Shields (and shame on Tom Cruise for objecting: What can a man know about such things?) cause birth defects when taken during pregnancy in a significant number of cases, cause other problems for child if the mother tries to withdraw from the drug during pregnancy and have been implicated in numerous cases where mothers killed their infant children. We've learned that the toxins in anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, excreted by users, are increasingly being found in the flesh of frogs, wild birds, etc. - and in tadpoles, lead to developmental problems: missing limbs and other environmental side effects. And these psycho-toxins get into our water supply - are not dealt with by the filtration systems now in use.

(You perhaps haven't seen those articles? Visit your nearest Google today!

I just wanted to pass on the good news: All sorts of bad things are happening, but it won't bother us, because we'll be getting slightly-used-but-good-as-new anti-depressants from our drinking water.

Or perhaps I'm just an alarmist. Surely the experts know what they're doing. Surely we're in good hands.

Exposing Evil

2006-02-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

Yes, there are evil people who conspire, some behind familiar masks. Which are they?

You can spend your life searching them out, or just draw them from hiding by creating something beautiful.

Either the beauty moves them to come out of themselves, shaming their smallness, or it exposes them when they can't resist attacking or snidely misinterpreting it. Either way, you've improved the world.

Mr. Magoo

2006-02-05T16:32:00.000-05:00

It gets worse and worse: First the quarks got blurry, then I couldn't make out electrons, then I started bumping into atoms, even heavy metals, then couldn't even make out molecules without my glasses, and so on, until these days without my specs, I can't tell one galaxy from another from across the room, but I'm too vain to wear glasses all the time, so I make do with blobs of light and shade.

I think there's a planet here. I see hints of it on occasion, since I'm required by law to wear glasses when driving, peeing, or dreaming.

Talkies

2006-02-05T16:29:00.000-05:00

Silent movies became talkies. Why not add sound to paintings? The Mona Lisa, for example, would say endlessly, "Ummmmm?" Munch's "The Scream"--that's obvious.

A landscape's hush, a still-life, there are the challenges. I don't know if we could make out what the fragmented voice of "Nude Descending a Staircase" would say; perhaps, "Oops!"

Solving Other People's Problems

2006-02-02T12:00:00.000-05:00

Other people's problems are the easiest in the world to solve. You look at this guy who's complaining of getting nowhere in life, and you see he's a slob, he's a blob, he's indecisive, he's not trying, he's... - well, you look at him, and you see all the obvious solutions: Take a shower! Get some decent clothes, exercise, DO something, be presentible, decide what you want to do, go see some people....

At first he seems hungry for your suggestions, even says "Wow!" a few times, but one by one, upon closer scrutiny, he rejects them. He can't do this because...and that's no good because...and he doesn't have time for that or money for this and he doesn't think that would do any good....

And as you persist, working it all out for him, showing him exactly what's needed, making charts, he begins to get upset with you, and when you leave, he thanks you stiffly and you know he won't do any of it.

(And you lie awake wondering what you did wrong. So now YOU have a problem.)

People get ornery when you try to take on yourself their misery. Often, it's all they have. Every problem is a dear possession, hard to relinquish. Before it became a problem, it was a solution to some other problem. That's why, when you look at this guy, you immediately see solutions: Because that's exactly what you're looking at - all of this guy's solutions.

Being a slob, for example - what could that solve? It could solve having to dress up and shave every day. It could solve fear of people, by making one so repellant that people are kept at a distance. It could solve the loss of Dad or Uncle or Grandfather, who loved him dearly and was a slob, so by being a slob one keeps that person alive. Who knows what it solves? He doesn't. He's not aware of what he's doing. It's all submerged beneath heaps of old discarded solutions become problems.

And those earlier problems - they, too, were solutions to something. How do you unravel this? Where does it end?

Normally, it never ends, life becoming a dwindling into ever more confining solutions to solutions to solutions. That's why so many are now on psychiatric drugs: They are desperate solutions. And people themselves move, gradually, from being the solvers of problems to being, themselves, problems (the homeless, the insane, you're pal who is pissed at you for trying to solve his problem or for failing to solve his problem...) that must be solved by others. Thus, problems are a contagion.

So how can you help another or even help yourself?

It helps just to view what is - not try to solve it, but simply confront it. It helps another if you can just get him to view what is. It helps a person rise above problems (actually the problems simply cease to be problems) if you can get him to look at things or touch things - you know, walls, furniture, sidewalks, trees.

Perhaps you've experienced this yourself: You had lots of problems spinning round and round in your head. You took a long walk in hopes of sorting them out, but they just kept going round and round, leading into one dead end after another. But meanwhile, it's a beautiful day and you start noticing things, and a particular slant of sun on some kid's bike beneath a tree feels good for some reason, seems to take you back to a happy time in childhood - or you start to become aware of wind sounds in the leaves or notice a cat hiding behind a bush, staring at you.... You walk for a long time, maybe traces of the problems flitting in and out of consciousness, but you are simply aware and increasingly aware of a larger and more detailed and luminous world. When you get home, you look for the problem, but isn't there any more.

What happened? Nothing much. You just stopped trying to solve something, and it vanished (and with it, the entire chain of earlier problems and solutions that held it in place).

Awareness dissolves the lies that create what we call problems.

How could you use this to help someone else with problems? Here's a silly example: George has a problem: He can't go anywhere. Why not? Because he's in his house holding onto a door knob (attached to a door). He can't let go of the door knob, so he can't go anywhere. If you try to help him solve this, you get nowhere and are tempted to dismiss George as hopelessly insane, though his reasons for hanging onto that door knob are probably quite logical. Maybe years before, George was in a tornado and was saved from being blown away by grabbing a door knob and holding on tight. A door knob attached to a well-anchored door was a great solution.

But this was long ago, and George doesn't remember it, prefers not to think of that painful time (lost his family and his house, nothing left standing but the door he clung to), and probably doesn't even realize he's holding onto a door knob. He just knows that when he tries to go anywhere, he gets yanked back, and this is messing up his life, because it makes holding a job impossible, much less eating or going to the bathroom. (Yes, George needs a lot of help just to stay alive.)

He's tried everything! For example, he had the door taken off it's hinges, so he could drag it around with him, but that, too, was awkward, the door too heavy and bulky and upsetting to others. He's also tried isomorphic exercises to bulk up his shoulders and biceps so that he could more easily carry the door or maybe pull himself away from it, but the stronger he gets, the more tightly he holds onto the knob.

How could you help George (who, apart from his being unable to let go of the door knob, is rational )? Well, you might have him look at the door, look at the table, look at the wall, look at the door knob in his hand, look at one thing after another for hours, until he realized there was a door there and a door knob there. He may seem to know these things already - after all, he's been told about them often enough. But are they REAL to him? Of course not.

Once they are real to him, you might ask him to hold on to the door knob as tightly as he can, and have him do this repeatedly (each time saying "Hold on tightly to that door knob", and when he does, saying "Thank you" or some other acknowledgement, so that each time he does it newly and knows when he's done it), and after a few hours (or a few hours a day for several days) of this, George will suddenly realize, "What the hell! I'm holding onto this door knob!" And he'll let go of it, just like that. (Maybe he'll realize at this point why he was holding onto it and start laughing and not stop laughing for a long time.) And that will be it. You didn't offer him a solution. You just familiarized him with what is - and as he confronted, increasingly, how things were, a lie vanished, and with it, the problem.

He didn't solve his problem. It simply vanished.

(I call drugs a desperate solution, because the way out of traps involves confronting them, becoming more aware of what is, and drugs are designed to suppress from view the exact things that need to be confronted, on the grounds that they are upsetting. So drugs are a good way to make it more difficult ever to be free of one's problems.)

A silly story? Or do our most formidable problems rest on foundations as fragile as George's? Do we have to work as hard as George did to maintain the problem keep it in place, keep it from vanishing? Do we hold on tight to our problems?

I've had the following experiences:

I had problems. I took my attention (somewhat) off them and concentrated on listing things I'd started, but never completed (including letters unanswered, housework not done, etc.). I took the easiest of these and finished it, then took another and completed it - at the start, some of these tasks looked forbidding, but as I got the easier ones done, the harder ones began to look easy too (I was on a roll); I completed them all or at least got them all well underway, and somewhere along the line, the problems that had occupied my mind for weeks vanished. Some of them had nothing obvious to do with the tasks I was completing, but they, too, vanished.

On another occasion, having attention on problems, I just looked for all the incomplete communications I could find and completed them, and my problems vanished. I answered my letters and e-mails, called some people I'd long meant to call or had been avoiding calling, told someone something I'd been avoiding saying, etc. And my problems disappeared.

The single most powerful thing I ever did to deal with problems (in 1968) was get into Scientology. In fact, since a particular session of Scientology counseling that year, problems have never since seemed as solid and desperate as they did before that session. At the time it seemed like magic, because I'd been a buzzing hive of problems, but I came out of that 30-minute session utterly free of them, able to view life as a game that included challenges, but none of the things I'd considered problems (stucknesses, MUST-have-CAN'T-have impasses) remained.

It was at that time that I worked out my parable of the man who couldn't let go of door knobs. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain what had happened to me. I'd seen exactly how and why I'd been clinging to the situations I'd called problems, and suddenly was able to let go of them. Not "solve" them, not "do something about" them, just let go of them and get on with the game of living.

Imagine a guy who keeps hanging onto the "problem" of not having the money he needs who stops having that problem. Does this mean he goes into apathy on the subject of money, gives up? No. That would be a "solution" - not caring. Letting go of the problem does not mean lowering responsibility for one's own condition. It means ceasing to fixate on some lie that prevents change. So if you are able to dispense with a money problem, that doesn't mean you won't have money. On the contrary, it greatly increases the likelihood that you'll prosper, since you're attention isn't hung-up in the "problem" of money.

The techniques used to deal with problems (and other basic traps of existence) in Scientology are not just applicable to individuals. For example, right now the United States has "problems" with terrorism, drugs, etc., and keeps trying to "solve" them, and, sure enough, the "solutions" (for example, invasion of Iraq) are becoming problems. Hmmm. Dear United States, what problem do terrorists solve for you?

(NOT as silly as it sounds. For example, we have "problems" with getting oil inexpensively and "problems" about finding excuses for moving into the Middle East oil countries and "problems" about the Arab countries accepting Euros as well as dollars for oil and this destabilizing the U.S. currency and economy and "problems" justifying the existence and expense of parts of our government that previously depended on exaggerating the might and evil of the Soviet Union for their existence and funding; and "problems" keeping the people of the United States in line as well-behaved consumers and "problems" moving an increasing share of the money of citizens into large corporations via the government - for example, right now the Bush Administration is making the argument that the FDA must restrict the right of citizens to sue pharmaceutical companies because the expertise and viability of these companies may be needed for the War on Terrorism. I'm not saying these are the reasons for the War on Terrorism. I'm simply citing possibilities. What I know for certain is that the "War on Terrorism" is a solution, and therefore has become a problem and therefore is based on lies. Enough aware citizens would cause the problem to vanish.)

Entertainment as Containment

2006-02-01T17:23:00.000-05:00

To entertain: From "between" (enter) and "hold" (tain), to hold between, as when entertaining a guest between walls or thighs.

We amuse a guest, divert. Guest is stranger, stranger is enemy, enemy is to be killed. We make the guest at home: held lightly between. Even if the wine is poisoned, we amuse, divert, distract, come to think of amusement itself as entertainment, a holding (the suspension of disbelief), and when we hold an opinion between the whore-legs of the intellect, we entertain a thought.

When a thought, like the Man Who Came to Dinner, stays too long (well entertained, but enemy after all), takes over this little home, our mind, we have an obsession; we are held between, much to the entertainment of all.

In Support of the Space Program

2006-01-31T17:24:00.000-05:00

"Why can't we take those millions from the space program and spend them in our ghettos?"

But the space program is our only hope to build NEW ghettoes on other planets!

One Way to Write a Poem

2006-01-31T17:22:00.000-05:00

You can start with a stroke of the pen, then make it some letter, say a "Y", then add more letters to make a word like "You", then more letters & words to make some sort of sense, something you might be saying to someone, some "you", for example, then--and some find this harder than starting-- say something that makes it make sense to stop.

And also to say "I told you so!"

2006-01-30T15:42:00.000-05:00

We want to live a long long time, but we want to die while all our friends and lovers are still around to realize by our sudden absence how important we really were. Hence the attraction
of YOUNG friends and lovers.

Committees, Capacitors and Capricious Derivations

2006-01-29T15:07:00.000-05:00

"Committee" derives from the Latin, "Com" - with, and "mittere" - to put or send. Thus, a committee is a group to whom one sends things or with whom one puts things. It is, in short, a storage facility, particularly useful for long-term storage.

If issues are charged, too hot to touch, you refer them to a committee, which, like a capacitor, is layered: the conductors (who conduct business or electricity) are separated from one another by paper, which, like the layers of waxed paper in a capacitor, are dielectric, a word that combines the words "die" - expire - and "lectric" - which shares the Latin origin of "lecture", "lectern", etc.: "Legere", to read.

Thus, as a capacitor stores charge, so a committee stores matters of importance, which eventually expire, lost in the many layers of papers which must be read.

A committee is also a com-Mitty ("Mitty" as in Thurber's story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") - a group of people who sit around a table and, together, dream unreal dreams of their own heroic statuses and capabilities. Sometimes, amid the sounds of paper shuffling and snoring, one hears them muttering in their dreams: "pocketa pocketa - queep! - pocketa...."

[Note: For the source of "pocketa..." -- see the Thurber story.]

Mystery

2006-01-28T17:32:00.000-05:00

Much talk of the mystery of the spirit: The spirit is the spirit is what we are when we know we are it, know we are.

Those who think little of themselves demand, in addition, mystery, as if (like Groucho, ashamed to belong to any club that would have him) they cannot respect anything understandable by such as they, as if the spirit is that which knows itself only by overwhelming that through which it is to know itself.

These people, meeting God's messenger, wrestle him with words, hoping to lose. This is the mystery of the spirit: It is too simple for mystery. That's what overwhelms us: The complexity of mystery, the lie we believe when we believe ourselves less than we are, the mystery we then become to ourselves so as to have something to worship.

Am I speaking to a mystery or a solution? (I suppose you're all wondering why I've called you all
here...)

Procrastination

2006-01-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

He idled away the day, thinking it would wait for him, found - too late to get anything done - that the day had gone off to play with others, leaving behind its dark, taciturn companion with a blunt message.

Discuss Among Yourselves

2006-01-26T12:51:00.000-05:00

Talking about the Middle East, inflation, values, crime, talking about and about, not knowing how, simply, to talk to each other, how to see each other to talk to, so talking instead about the things we do, the things we suffer, to make life interesting, not knowing how interesting WE are, no end of what we must invent to talk about when there's no one to talk to.

If you and I could talk to each other, there'd be no inflation, since our dreams would be more important than the price of fish.

A Use for Art

2006-01-25T09:08:00.000-05:00

What is this craving for fame? We long for a dense texture of agreement, enough random intersecting of viewpoints to make a solid ball of thread, never to be disentangled, not even by a kitten.

Being known by 2 or 3 or 10 differs from being known to millions, differs in kind (we hope), not only in degree. We imagine there are fame thresholds, points of no return, points beyond which the agreement that we are something special is no longer agreement, but solid fact, like pigeon-spattered statues in the town square.

Profusion of viewpoints, multiplicity of agreement yield confusion: It becomes increasingly difficult to spot the source of opinions that "everyone" holds. When you fasten a button, if the thread passes through the material (and itself) enough times, it can no longer easily be extracted by tugging it back out the way it went in. Confusion, randomness give us the solidity we call "fact" or "knots". If the same message comes at us from all directions at once, we call it "reality". It's what "everyone knows."

We long for the degree of randomness that is just beyond what we can confront, the point where we shrug our shoulders, saying, "It's too complicated for me - no one could make sense of it", in hopes of a permanent knot.

But ah! there is no reality too solid and confused to have a loose end. The most permanent creation is the creation we knowingly and willingly continue to create. And even where most of a "fact" (an institution, an individual's fame, the greatness of a work of art, the solidity of a planet) is a knot of complexity for which no one takes responsibility, just a single thread of intended creation revitalizes weary, petrified fact and makes it flex and breathe and become again a living thing.

At Home

2006-01-23T16:42:00.000-05:00

I go for a jog, moving through miles of space with no sense of entering or leaving, though in my house, doors and narrowings and other dividers celebrate my every few steps. Home is where each room (if not each step) is its own universe. If I could leave behind each instant as I enter the next, lightly, but not without ceremony, where would I not be at home?

Traffic Court (Abridged)

2006-01-23T16:39:00.000-05:00

Traffic court. What odd things people do every day! A very serious place. People don't like to be punished, don't like punishing people. No one appears to be having fun.

I wish this many people would show up at my poetry readings.

Wisdom Over Wit

2006-01-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

Wisdom beats wit. There's a larger market for wit, but also more competition. And when you can't sell or give away your wit, it doesn't help you dispense with self-pity and keep writing.

A Note From The Forest

2006-01-22T16:57:00.000-05:00

Getting here was not easy,
so I mark my path with poems,
that others may follow me.
No wild creature disturbs my path.
Even the birds know that poems
leave a bitter taste.

26 Characters in Search of a Play

2006-01-22T16:53:00.000-05:00

This poem is self-explanatory:
It consists of English words comprised
of permutations of 26 characters
in search of play. It means no harm.
It comes from a brutal universe,
where nice people hurt and die.
It doesn't have time to say much.
It would like to be useful,
because if play can be useful,
it will be permitted to play.
It means well.
It can't help itself.

Bodies and the Single Spiritual Being

2006-01-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

What's hard to understand about ghosts is not that they've lost their bodies, but that they can't seem to pick up new ones.

WE did it, so it must be easy.

But we don't know how we did it or how we'll do it again (which makes us leery of losing the body we "have"), any more than a randy teenager knows how he gets turned-on, except that it's easy, impotence inconceivable.

Adventure

2006-01-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

Though I find new streets to walk, it's always just the earth's surface, and if I could go to the center of the earth or to the stars, it would be just more points in space, and if I could leave space and time as we think we know them, It would still be just me, and, it being just me, I have decided my front yard is new and interesting, and it is.

Pappy Always Used to Say...

2006-01-21T10:46:00.000-05:00

The first time I pulled my adjective on that cliché and backed him down, Daddy said, "Son, that were a damn fool thing to do. Thet thar hombre were out to kill yer language. Y' let him live. Son, never pull yer adjective unless y' mean t' use it."
"
Hell, Daddy," I said--"It weren't even loaded."

"Then use yer verbs, but finish what you start."

A Longish Riff on "What Is It About Judaism?"

2006-01-19T22:53:00.000-05:00

Someone asked me recently why Jews were such a big deal -- why they seem to be and to have been so influential in history when compared to their relatively small number, why so often hated, etc.

This is far from a new question, and I'm sure if I had time to read a thousandth of what's been written on the subject, I could come up with a learned answer. I don't have that time, but I do have some ideas. They may be old hat. I haven't seen them before, but you may have. I'll summarize them here, and perhaps you'll find something fresh in them. They may also be wrong. For example, if I say that Jews were the first to develop something, perhaps there are cultural anthropologists who could tell me otherwise. But I think my ignorant opinions are as good as anyone else's ignorant opinions, and, hey, this is a blog.

First let's look at the phenomenon itself:

I remember a paperback I read in college with a title something like "Four Men Who Changed The World", and that all four were Jewish: Jesus, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Not to get into arguments about the many non-Jews who could have been among the four most influential (Buddha? Plato? Beethoven? Lenin? [But not John Lennon, who was part Jewish], Shakespeare?) or the obvious European bias of the book, the point is, given that Jews are 2 or 3 tenths of a per cent of the earth's population, it's surprisingly easy to name four Jewish candidates -- or ten Jewish candidates for high position on "most influential".

(Who else? St. Paul, Moses, David, Soloman, St. Peter, Matthew -- or more recently, Proust, Trotsky, per many scholars -- Christopher Columbus, Bob Dylan...)

Quick, name the world's ten most influential Methodists. Lutherans? (I get as far as Luther and Bach, then go dry. I know there are many others -- but I don't know who they are!)

There's also the fact (or illusion) that many professions (law, math, music, etc.) have a lot more Jews than would be expected from their small portion of the population.

In Hitler's day, there were about 18 million Jews on the planet (by most counts -- and I wish I could say "...but who's counting?" Alas, Hitler's minions were counting, with the help of IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, which provided all the Hollerith machines [punch-card sorters, etc.] that made it possible). By the time Hitler and much of Germany were gone, there were only 12,000,000 Jews left. But even at 18,000,000, Jews represented less than one per cent of earth's population. Yet Hitler was able to persuade tens of millions of Germans (and others) that Jews were running and ruining the world.

Of course, Jews did own banks and have high positions in various industries and governments out of proportion to their numbers, but not, typically, positions of crushing predominance. There were more Christians among international bankers than Jews, more wealth among Christians, etc. We tend to forget, when someone generalizes about Jewish bankers, naming, for example, the Rothschild family, that the Rockefellers, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, the Mellon family, the Vanderbilts, etc. were not Jewish. Someone pointed out to me years ago (and it was certainly true at the time - the '60s) that the two main areas most dominated by Jews in the United States were music and mathematics - NOT banking or commerce. I suppose some areas of commerce have long been Jewish or were until recent years: the Amsterdam diamond cutters and Jewish jewelers, the NY garment industry, the big movie studios. But large segments of commerce are NOT primarily Jewish. Tom Watson (of IBM - who supported Hitler logistically), Henry Ford (a noted anti-Semite) and other titans of industry -- not Jewish. Nor, today, is Bill Gates Jewish.

One can go back and forth on this. The point is that enough Jews hold high positions in Western society that it has been easy for demogogues to scape-goat Jews and hold them to be huge hidden influences on society. Freemasons have received similar (though far milder) treatment, and have, similarly, a disproportionate share of high positions in the world (George Washington and others of our Founding Fathers, for example). And, like Jews, Freemasons have a culture that is mysterious to outsiders.

And now 1.2 billion Moslems (or a significant portion of them) are focused on the tiny Jewish state of Israel (whose inhabitants include nearly as many Muslems as Jews) as THE enemy. Bin Laden justifies his attacks on the United States partly by citing U.S. aid to Israel. All the Jews in the world amount to about 1 per cent of the number of Muslems.

So the first obvious question is, how did this relatively tiny group (compared to Chinese or Arabs or Christians or Germans or Japanese or Buddhists or Hindhus, etc.) come to be so damned important? Why do they stick in so many craws? Why do they produce so many people of note?

The second question is, how come they're still around? Back in the days when Joshua was resettling the land of Canaan (Israel), there were lots of other peoples in the area. Where are they now? Can you point me to the Hittite part of town? Where can I hire an Emorite lawyer? In what industries are the Amalekites dominant? And where are the worshipers of Dagon (the Fish God) -- the ones we know as "The Philistines" and from whom "Palestine" takes its name, though the current Palestinians have little to do with the Biblical Philistines. Where are the Pharaohs?

I think there are still about 100 Samaritans in Israel. But Samaritans are a sect that splintered off Judaism (believing in the Five Books of Moses [The Torah], but not the other books of the Old Testament). So they're really Jews, in a way. No wonder they survive yet as a people.

Can you fix me up with an Assyrian? How about lunch with a Babylonian? Raise your hand if you're a Midianite...Chaldean? Are the Iranians the descendents (culturally? genetically?) of the Persians from the days of Cyrus and Darius?

Yes, peoples seem to have vanished. I know that arguments can be made to the contrary. Mussolini tried to persuade Italians that they were the Roman Empire ressurected, and there's a wild and grotesquely funny scene in one of the early episodes of "The Sopranos" where Tony Soprano and his henchmen are beating up the Jewish owner of some motels because he refuses to pay protection. The Jew, though beaten and in danger of being shot, will not submit. He tells them that Jews have out-lived one mighty empire after another, despite attempts by many to destroy the Jews, that Jews are still around, but where are the Babelonians, the Assyrians, the Romans -- gone! Tony Soprano, mafioso, replies (I don't recall the exact words), Oh yeah, I got news for you: WE'RE the Romans.

(Another argument I've seen, but with no documentation, is that the Delphic Oracle was an Assyrian plot to undermine the Greek's Hellenism. Hmmm. And I'm told that those who get very "significant" about Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism consider them cultural descendents of ancient Egyptian lore.)

But I think it's fair to say that it's unusual to find a group of people (even if we limit this only to the more observant Jews) still following the traditions and cherishing the language their ancesters spoke as long as 4,000 years ago (Abraham) and 3,500 years ago (Moses). Keep in mind that the "ancient Greeks" and Romans are relatively recent phenomena. Nor do modern Egyptians understand hieroglyphs (unless they happen to be scholars of Egyptology), worship the gods of the Pharaohs, etc. When Christianity came into existence (if we date it from the point where Paul began to splinter off from Judaism), Judaism was already about 2,100 years old. How many Christians today can speak Aramaic (Christ's language)?

So that's the second question: How come Jews are still around and still being Jewish?

The questions are connected, I think, though when we think of Jews being "Jewish", we are likely to think of observant Jews, whereas, many of the most influential Jews (for example, Jesus, Karl Marx, Freud and Einstein) were not particularly observant - with the possible - and surprising - exception of Jesus, most or all of whose ideas already existed in one or another Jewish sect that preceded him; as I said in an earlier essay, it was not obvious to his own disciples, after his crucifixion, that their group was to be considered other than Jewish; the decision by Paul to take Christ's teachings to the "gentiles" was controversial.

But I think when we look at some of the things that have made Judaism unusual, atypical of peoples on this planet, we'll see that the many prominent people of Jewish descent who were not observant were still greatly influenced by the Jewish culture perpetuated by the observant.

What makes a culture last? Mainly isolation. Language, for example, changes quickly in centers of commerce and development. The accent of educated Englishmen in, say, the 1760s was not much like the accent of educated Englishmen today. It was (according to linguists) more similar to isolated communities of Kentucky hillbillies, descended from English immigrants in the 1760s (or earlier). In these isolated communities, language has changed less than in modern, industrial England, influenced by all the other languages and dialects it came in contact with via trade and war.

But it's hard for a cultural group to remain isolated for thousands of years. Most groups get destroyed or otherwise assimilated into the dominant culture. Judaism and perhaps a few others are anomalies. The Gypsies (whose name refers to an old idea that they are Egyptians, though their language tells us that they hail from the general area of India) manage to be among other cultures without being of them. How? They don't usually settle down, don't usually live on farms or run taverns or run factories -- at least not in the past. They travel. They are always passing through. (And they, too, were targeted by the Nazis.) They were among the nations, but never of them. Thus they kept intact an ancient language and an ancient set of customs, being, often, more like the Gypsies in other nations than like the other citizens of "their own" nation.

Since their methods of surviving are their own and aren't much like the Jewish methods, I won't try to go into them. I know little beyond the stereotypes -- Gypsy roles as traveling fortune tellers, as thieves and con artists, as seasonal labor, etc. As I say, these are stereotypes; I have no idea how accurate they are. But the example of the Gypsies does indicate that for a people to last for thousands of years among other cultures, but separate from them and intact requires some unusual strategy for living.

Now, can you name 4 famous influential Gypsies? I can't name one, and I'll bet most of you can't either. So, though here we find another example of an ancient culture that has survived in and among other cultures, we don't have anything like the Jewish phenomenon. The question remains, how were Jews able to remain so deeply a part of the mainstream cultures as to play large roles in their development, yet keep their own culture largely intact during thousands of years of diaspora (being scattered among "the nations" -- the gentiles)?

The answer, I think, lies in certain oddities about Judaism from nearly the beginning -- and definitely from the time of Moses. When Judaism came into being, it was one among many Semitic peoples. It was a tribal culture. You were a Jew (or a member of Abraham's tribe) because you were desended from Abraham. "[Jew" came later as a name, because the descendents of Jacob's fourth son, Judah, became the dominant tribe of the remnant of Israel after ten tribes got "lost" (after the days of Solomon). Israel is a name given to Jacob, so goes back much earlier than "Jew" and "Judaea".]

A tribe persists by spreading its "seed". You get lots of Jews if Jews have lots of kids. But with small tribes, inbreeding works against survival. The American Indians avoided this by adopting women and children taken prisoner during raids or simply by intermarriages among allied tribes. The Jewish tradition seems to have allowed marriage outside the tribe. Ruth, for example, is a "Moabite" (I don't think I've met a Moabite recently.) Moses had two wives, neither from within Israel's people.

Also, the tradition that anyone born to a Jewish mother is Jewish means that a Jewish woman could marry a man from some other tribe, and the children would be Jewish. (But I think the man was usually required to be circumcized and thus become part of the "Convenant with God" that was said to define a Jew.) I don't know much about this, just enough to know that Judaism was tribal and stressed marriage within the group, but allowed enough exceptions to avoid the genetic dangers of inbreeding among a small group.

[At this point I could dodge the question and say that Judaism survived because Abraham and the other Patriarchs had a special personal relationship with God. Maybe so, but I'll see what I can come up with apart from that.]

There are hints early on that Abraham and his immediate descendants were a bit different from the other tribes. We get a sense, for example, that Abraham is humane when he argues with God, hoping God will be merciful with Sodom and Gemorrah. That's not a tribal view. These weren't Abraham's people (except for his kinsman, Lot, who was already to be saved). The tribal view is, typically, that the tribe's name means "the people" and the other tribes have names that mean things like "the enemy" or "the strangers" in "the people's" language.

We also learn that when the Sodomites tried to attack the angels visiting Lot, they were violating basic laws of hospitality. In other words, we get a sense that these Jews had some ideas about ethics that extended beyond "We're the people, and eveyone else is the enemy."

But where Judaism really begins to look like the Judaism we know today is when Joseph becomes a slave in Egypt and rises to be second only to the Pharaoh on the basis of his wisdom, hard work and honesty (refusing to be seduced by married royalty, for example). In a way, this is a new beginning for Judaism. The earlier patriarchs are either dead or out of the picture. Suddenly it's just Joseph, alone in Egypt, becoming what Hitler would call "cosmopolitan", a man of the world.

But then we are reminded that Joseph, through all this, has remained a Jew. And suddenly he brings his family back into the picture, inviting them to join him in Egypt (and forgiving his brothers for their little prank -- selling him into slavery!).

So how is it that Joseph, basically a shepherd boy from the boondocks, is able to prosper so quickly in Egypt? What did he have going for him? Something, obviously. Good looks? Brains?

No doubt, but I suspect he was already literate when he got to Egypt. Can't prove it, but he certainly knew something about how to learn and what to learn.

More basically, a culture (even if viewed in just a single representative, like Joseph in Egypt) is likely to survive such a contact if it is superior in key ways to the larger culture. I suppose the belief in a single immaterial God (whether a "true" belief or not) confers a certain superiority over people who worship statues. For one thing, God, not being a large statue, can more easily be felt to be with you anywhere. But I'm just guessing. I really don't have an anthropological explanation for Joseph's success. I'm simply stressing that the Jewish story is encapsulated, in miniature, in the story of Joseph -- and in the sad result: Envy, and his family's descendents becoming slaves in Egypt.

I conclude there was something different about Judaism that kept it intact as an extended family, that helped Joseph succeed in Egypt, that led to envy and enslavement. The enslavement itself is one of those things that, if it doesn't kill a people, may strengthen it. In any case, it forbids the mixing of Jews with Egyptians, so leaves the separateness of Jews intact.

We tend to stress "enslavement", but the Egyptian experience was more than the experience of slavery. It was also a bunch of shepherds forced to live for generations in crowded cities. I wonder what this sequence taught Jews: Moving from being roaming sheep herders to being among the foreign elite of a wealthy empire (when they joined Joseph) to being slaves in urban slums?

What I'm seeing dimly is an odd pattern: A people that adheres to ancient tribal forms while developing ethical values that have some universal aspects I don't associate with tribal values -- which is not to say that a tribe (say the Dakota) doesn't hold complex and spiritual values, but simply that certain so-called modern ideas of how different peoples should live among one another are not usually associated with tribal values -- which depend largely on having lots of space for relatively sparse populations. Also, a people that is non-urban is suddenly forced into an urban life, and a people with generations of relatively isolated and insulated traditions and language is plunged into a cosmopolitan life, led there by Joseph, who has become a wise man (who interprets dreams) , a healer, an organizer of production, etc., while keeping intact his sense that he is not an Egyptian, but an Israeli. It's as if a great Apache (Cochise, for example) had been taken prisoner, shipped to NY (remember, Joseph came to Egypt as a slave), and risen to be one of the top officials in the U.S. Government and in U.S. industry, all the while remembering that he was an Apache. (Sounds unlikely. Makes me think all the more that Joseph and his family were already literate.)

Generations later, they move out of Egypt (led by Moses, who was born Jewish, but not raised Jewish! He was raised Egyptian.). Now, the book of Exodus would have us believe, there are 600,000 Jews (still numbered by tribes). That figure may be exaggerated, but one of the effects of being heavily suppressed is, often, lots of children. When there's no future for individuals, they try to put a future there by creating children.

Now here's the point where something arises that seems to me crucial: In the desert (says the Bible) the "Children of Israel" receive the law from God. And it's in writing. (Those "tablets" were not medication.) Every people has its laws, traditions, etc. But few tribes in those days had their laws in writing. Few had writing. At least that's my impression. Yes, in some great civilizations of around that time (China -- and in Hammurabi's Babylon -- around the time of Abraham) there were written systems of law. But those were exceptions, and they weren't among the tribes of a non-urban sheep-herding people (the vinyards of Israel were yet to come).

So that's one point: They had written law. Moreover, this law covered all aspects of life: What could be eaten, how to treat an adulterous wife, what fabrics to combine or not in clothing, what animals to sacrifice at what times of year, how to deal with epidemics, etc. The 613 laws enumerated in the Old Testament deal with religious matters AND secular matters, both civil and criminal. AND ALL OF THESE LAWS ARE SAID TO COME DIRECTLY FROM GOD.

Do you see the various anomalies here? They pop out at me:

Rule by law (rather than by fiat of a ruler who is above the law) is one of the advanced ideas that has made nations like the United States possible. Here it is part of a tribal culture.

Written law that covers all aspects of life and behavior and must be followed exactly because it comes, not from man, but from a God who opens up the earth to swallow up those who do not obey him (which happens immediately after Moses first returns with the tablets of the law, hint hint) - so you have the idea (an ancient one, that seems the antithesis of modern - at least to most of us) that all law is from God, that God is, as it were, a totalitarian God -- this combined with the very advanced idea of written law. And the law is elaborate, yet must be understood so that it can be obeyed. The result? The need for many Jews (if not all) to be literate, the "People of the Book". There are simply too many laws, and it is too vital to obey them, lest one incur God's wrath and God lets one's enemies devour one - too vital not to be able to read and understand these laws. (It's not like Catholicism, for example, where you can break all the rules, then go to the priest, confess and be shriven.) So we get (and I think have had at least from that time, if not earlier -- as with Joseph) the Jewish tradition of literacy.

And with literacy comes another anomaly: If each Jew (or at least most male heads of family) can read the law for himself, he begins to rely on his own understanding. This is something tyrants have always understood: If you want to have slaves, you keep people illiterate. Literate people begin to have opinions. Among Jews, there has long been a tradition of wrangling (even the wrestling with God for which Jacob was named Israel - one who wrestles with God). There has always been the right to reason with others about religion, law, etc. So we get this odd combination of a people, more or less theocratic (God-ruled) - something we Westerners are inclined to consider a backwards quality - that cherishes reasoning and the individuals right to learn for himself and form his own opinions -- qualities we consider advanced.

Also, since the law is presented (by God himself, remember - that's what the Bible says and what Jews appear to have believed) as complete, with everything that's needed, we end up with a nation of lawyers and fine reasoners. Why? Because times and conditions change, and laws must change to fit the new conditions. But these laws CANNOT BE CHANGED because they're from God.

We need to look at this "from God" point, because it's stranger than it may at first seem, at least to Westerners. It may be familiar to Muslims, if their "Sharia" is as comprehensive as the Torah. Imagine if Christians had been given by Christ a complete compendium of all the laws, religious and secular, and told that they were all God's commandments and that they were all the laws we'd ever need? But that didn't occur. In fact, Christians were specifically excused from adhering to all those laws by one of Christ's statements in the Gospels (at least that's the usual explanation of why, though most Christians accept the Old Testament as "God's Word", they consider themselves exempted from, for example, keeping Kosher). Many Jews, too, have tried to reset priorities over the years. Rabbi Hillel (not too distant in time from Jesus) , asked to explain what one must do to be a Jew while standing on one leg, said that the key principles of Judaism were two: "The Lord is God; the Lord is One" and "Love thy neighbor as thyself".

But the main line of Jewish history has involved a massive intellectual effort to interpret the law, because the law is from God and is said to cover everything needed, so it can't be "changed", but must be "interpreted" and "explained" so that it will continue to make sense under changing circumstances.

This law was (says the Bible) given to the Jews 3,500 years ago. Orthodox Jews today aim to follow it totally. You're not supposed to light a fire on the Sabbath. Today we don't need to light a fire. We just turn on the lights or the electric stove. So scholars have to work out whether or not that's allowable on the Sabbath. Changing conditions require new interpretations. Or the Bible gives a broad statement, but there are many particular applications of it to be worked out: Two people each grab hold of something and each says "It is mine". How do you decide who gets it? If there's no other evidence, you give half to each. What if it can't be cut in half? Sell it and divide the money. What if one says "It's mine" and the other says "it's half mine and half his"? Give the first one three fourths of it, the other one fourth. And so on. In the chapter from the Talmud (18 huge volumes of Jewish law and commentary on that law and commentaries on the comentaries, written over a period of far more than 1000 years) that I'm paraphrasing (Baba Meziyah, which means "The Middle Gate" -- and I've forgotten why), the Rabbis having this discussion keep posing scenarios and coming up with the answers, citing evidence from the Bible, but then, suddenly there's a long list of special circumstances (things that make you wonder, "How did they come up with that?" and the chapter ends with the statement (or the initial letters in the words of the statement) that means "These questions will be answered when the Messiah comes."

I say "the Rabbis discuss", but you must understand that when the Talmud (a word derived from the Hebrew word for learning) says "Rabbi Meir says..., but Rabbi Akiva says..." and so forth, the first Rabbi may have said his piece in 300 BC, while the second Rabbi's reply came 800 years later.

Getting back to my point about anomalies: Because it's a "primitive" tribal people with a "primitive" idea that all its laws are absolutes, God-Given, but this is combined with it being a "modern" written law with a literate people encouraged, in a "modern" manner, to reason and discuss and required, by the very fact of it's being a supposedly absolute law that must be applied in changing conditions (a very "primitive" idea) - required to become masters of close reasoning, exegesis (finding evidence in Biblical and earlier scholarly texts for later conclusions), developers of the Talmud, one of the most complex and highly developed legal systems of its time -- though today, I suppose, the laws of most nations fill many more volumes than the Talmud. But when you consider that much of the Talmud was already there 2000 years ago and that it was added to until the 13th Century, you are looking at a remarkable compendium of legal and religious reasoning.

So what we have, just looking at this one phenomenon, 3,500 years ago, is a bunch of anomalies from the viewpoint of most of our ideas of what's primitive and what's modern:

1. The Jews are primitive: Tribal, held together by family lines (whereas a modern nation is held together by language, law, etc., but can rapidly expand beyond genetic boundaries).

2. The Jews are advanced: They support rule by law and include in their laws ethical precepts that include ways of dealing with other peoples that are far more sophisticated than the usual tribal view.

3. The Jews are primitive: A bunch of nomadic shepherds.

4. The Jews are advanced, with experience of both managing and being slaves in sophisticated urban socities.

5. The Jews are primitive. Their laws are all Divine fiat, absolutes, requiring religious adherence in all sorts of everyday matters we moderns consider secular (diet, for example).

6. The Jews are advanced, promoting literacy among most Jews long before this was common -- in fact, long before anyone else, I suspect. China had lots of literate people, but many more who were illiterate. The Jews may be the first people in our history books for whom literacy was, if not universal, at least encouraged for all or most levels of society (male society, I suppose).

7. The Jews are primitive, trying to take a set of detailed laws from 3,500 years ago and apply it to modern times. (Are we really going to stone homosexuals and adultresses to death? But wait - that, too, is interpreted by the Talmud to permit more humane resolutions.)

8. The Jews are advanced, encouraging reasoning and producing what may be the most sophisticated and most closely reasoned legal system of its time. (Actually, TWO such systems, since there are two separate lines of development, the Babyloninan Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, but that's a longer story -- and besides, I've forgotten most of it!)

Aren't these odd combinations of characteristics? I think they are unique among peoples. In a way, the Jews are the perfect BRIDGE from primitive to advanced, being (by current Western ideas of what's primitive and what's advanced) far ahead of others in some ways, far behind in other ways. When a more advanced culture encounters a less advanced culture (for example, England in the 18th or 19th Century encounters African tribes), the less advanced culture is overwhelmed, tends to sicken, perhaps die off (and get assimilated). This may be because the more advanced culture uses military superiority to destroy the less advanced. But that's not necessary. Just the contact, even if friendly, will suffice. How do the village elders handle the kids once they've seen blue jeans and rock and roll?

But what happens when two cultures collide (for example, Roman and Jewish during the decades of bloody rebellion in Judaea preceding 160 AD) where one is clearly superior in many ways (Roman military might and commercial strength and probably finer sculpture -- maybe many other things) and clearly inferior in other ways (I think at that time the Jews had a higher literacy level, more dedicated fighters -- they held off the Empire far longer than the Romans had believed possible, perhaps a more sophisticated legal system, as rich a literary tradition, a religious belief that was superior to Pagan Rome's -- enough so that far more Romans moved toward Judaism and to its offshoot, Christianity, than went the other direction, toward Paganism). (Speaking of literacy, the best Roman history of the rebellion is by an assimilated Roman Jew, Flavius Josephus.)

What happens is, I think, the anomally we call Judaism: A people that survives among the nations, often barely tolerated by them, keeps its culture more or less intact (both by intention and because forced into separateness), yet exerts a powerful influence on that culture, far more than, for example, Gypsies; with a literacy level and tradition of study that enables those who break out of the ghettos to master professions quickly (for example, the great Jewish doctors of the Middle Ages), with a reasoning ability and legalistic mind and attention to fine detail (part of the requirements of Talmudic interpretation) that carries over into commerce.

Nearly always there was this balance of cultures: The Jewish culture was seldom overwhelmed by the cultures it inhabited, because the Jewish culture had strengths, points where it was superior, based on its internal rule by law, some fairly sophisticated ethical ideas, it's tradition of literacy, it's urban background, etc. The Jewish culture seldom (contrary to Hitler's assertions) overwhelmed the host culture, being in some ways inferior to it (no Jewish army, not allowed to farm, constrained by tribal ideas of membership - making it hard for the Jewish community to expand, theocracy, etc.)

Here's where we connect up to the many great names in Western culture that are Jewish: When Jews move out of the ghetto and start to assimilate, they have the best of both cultures: They retain the love of learning, the literacy, the ability to live in cities, the ability to reason, perhaps many of the ethical precepts. They typically move away from the idea that their lives must be constrained by the details of the law or that they must remain part of a tribe that wears odd clothes and speaks with an odd accent. In other words, when they assimilate, they take with them all the points of Judaism that we would tend to think of as advanced.

This leads to envy, persecution, Jews frequently having to flee to other cities, other countries. That leads to a stronger sense of being different, of having to keep the culture intact, so that the success of the more or less assimilated adds to the preservation of Judaism's separateness - ironic.

So now we have a whole culture of people that, unlike Gypsies, are tied to stable communities. They are not nomads. But because of frequent attacks, they must be ready to move at any time. Aha! That's one reason Jews pioneered modern commerce and finance. Here are a few examples:

Because they might be forced to leave a country or city with very short notice, Jews developed ways to transport wealth quickly and secretly. They converted their wealth to forms easy to transport. Thus they became expert jewelers (jewels could be sewed into skirts and underwear and were valuable everywhere). Because a Jewish money lender might be exiled (all property seized) by some king or lord who owed him money, Jews developed international finance to the point where a ruler who reneged on a loan in, say, Vienna, would be pressured to pay up by, say, a ruler in England who hoped to borrow money from the English branch. That was the genius of the Rothchilds: The family created branches in all the major capitals.

Another part of quick transport was the development of credit based on deposits "elsewhere" - somewhere secure, and all the modern modes of wealth (stock, etc.) that consist of paper, not gold or property. Jews developed a great deal of what we think of today as having always been around - modern concepts of credit, banking, etc. - because they had to in order to survive.

(Brief historical digression: In ancient Israel they were mainly farmers. In Europe they were mostly not allowed to own land, because to own land, one had to take an oath of loyalty to the ruler and to Christ - something like that; and Jews couldn't take the "Christ" part of the oath. So Jews were in-keepers, traders and money lenders. Jewish law forbids the taking of interest on loans, calling it "usury". Christians also considered usury a sin. This delayed for centuries the development of a workable banking system, since without collection of interest, banks found it hard to be profitable. The non-Jewish Medici family of Florence rose to wealth and power as a banking family because they figured out tricky ways to make interest on money they loaned that was not "technically" interest. I don't know the details, but this shows how much the economy NEEDED some sort of incentive for bankers.

In most of Europe the solution was to have Jews be money lenders. The idea was that it was sinful for a CHRISTIAN to take interest from another Christian, but not for a Jew. Some Jews disagreed, but others said the Jewish prohibition applied only to fellow Jews. (And of course, many Jews were just a little annoyed with their Christian neighbors after centuries of persecution.) This was popular with the ruling classes, because if they became too indebted to a Jew, the Jews got skimpy protection under the law. It was easy to stir up an anti-Jewish mob or find some excuse to confiscate Jewish property. And, of course, being literate, attentive to details and able to reason (and that includes ability to work with figures), Jews were often good at it.

That's the background that led to Jewish bankers and much hostility to Jews as Shylocks. There were many non-Jewish bankers as well, but it was the Jewish bankers who had the incentive, indeed the necessity to develop the means to make wealth easily transportable and international and who pioneered much of our current financial system.)

In summary: What has allowed Judaism to survive where so many cultures died or disappeared has been its odd combination of weaknesses and strengths that kept it, simultaneously isolated from its host cultures (isolated enough to ensure preservation of its culture) and intermingled with that culture in a unique balance of strengths and weaknesses (or primitive aspects and advanced aspects).

This goes back to the odd phenomenon of a tribal people with a written law that, because it covers all of life and is said to be directly from God and is complex, makes for a literate people, proud of their independent opinions and reasoning, and a need for legal skills to keep that law relevant over centuries.

This also creates the situation where, particularly when Jews become assimilated, they have a likelihood of prospering, doing well in professions, etc. The details I gave about Jews in finance are just one example of this.

How did the Jews come to have their law in writing? I don't know. A literate God? A people who happened to have a genius named Joseph who set something in motion? Or does it go back to Abraham (whom someone will say, was really an exiled Babylonian high priest or something?).

And, of course, some would just say "It's because God chose them." Whether or not that's the case, I think a great deal follows from that odd combination of literacy and theocracy and tribalism.

Neatness

2006-01-19T21:46:00.000-05:00

If it's messy enough, it's neat: A butcher's knife or a grenade strews us with bloody, but recognizable bits. A nuclear blast leaves fine clean ash. Such overwhelming force compresses and explodes time, rendering the friends and family of the moment so dead that they are not dead, but historical, as physically remote as dioramas of ancient ancesters behind glass museum walls, leaving even memory a numb neat blank. Everything that was dear to you will fit in a single small urn on a mantel, if a mantel survives.

Destruction seems to be a lower harmonic of nothing at all. Nothing at all is neither neat nor messy. It's the instant of potential creating of any or everything. We try to return to that state (so that we can make things over? Do a better job of it?) by destroying so completely and indiscriminately as to make zillions of atoms and molecules and gamma rays and all the other special ingredients moving wildly every which way resemble, in their randomness, nothing at all, just as inconceivably disordered and random fast motion (like that of the molecules making up a rock) appears to be stillness, as the motions of colliding particles cancel out -- just as a business or army in which every individual is doing his own thing, with no co-ordination, is at a standstill.

That's probably why God in the Old Testament told Moses to speak to the rock, not strike it. Why add to the motion when the rock is already alive and just needs a purpose upon which all its particles can agree?

Odd how the experiences most of us associate with "nothingness" are experiences full of somethings, random explosions and fizzzipping of live wires, trash, bodies, stench and noise (and noise being too many meaningful sounds all at once). We call "white noise" silence -- or the thudding of one's own heartbeat. No amount of noise brings us silence. No amount of destruction brings us nothing.

Nothing, true nothing, is the absense of all the things we associate with nothingness. Can you hear these words in your own mind, as if some voice is speaking them? And your responses to them, are they not spoken even as we speak? Who or what is listening?

Fatal Exclamations

2006-01-18T18:23:00.000-05:00

Why is it (in the old comic books -- Korean War vintage, for example) that cowboys and American soldiers died with simple sounds like "Uh!", "Ugh," and "Gaa," while the Indians and Japs died in diphthongs ("Aiee!")? [A diphthong is not a kind of thong. It's a complex sound made by sliding from one vowel to another -- a sort of vowel movement?]

And how come the bad guys are so formal ("Capitalist dogs!"), while the good guys are so slangy and nonchalant ("Commie pigs!")?

The bad guys seem to take getting killed very seriously, laughing only to gloat, just before a wounded hero they left for dead gets off one last shot and one last wise crack as the villain
rediscovers seriousness briefly.

And why do we feel better about killing people after giving them the sorts of affectionate nicknames (Jap, Nip, Charlie, gook) one might give to a child or a pet monkey?

Why Stop There?

2006-01-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

Mistreatment of prisoners violates international conventions.

War does not?

There must be rules about war. It probably goes back to having champions. Each army chooses a champion to battle the other army's designated champion, while both armies watch. No one else is supposed to get hurt. It's almost entertainment.

OK, we can have rules for war. But if we can agree on the rules for war, why can't we increase our agreements? What else can we agree about, you and I? We and they?

(I've even made my pronouns agree in case, and I think I got that right. Agreeing about oil and religion ought to be relatively simple.)

No One Home

2006-01-18T18:13:00.000-05:00

The policeman protects your home. The poet tries to find someone home and say hello. In this society, we reward police, not poets.

Our homes are safe, but there's no one home.

Individuals and Groups

2006-01-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

It isn't group versus individual. The question is, does the individual make the bigness of the group his own, growing to encompass it? Does he take responsibility for the flourishing of his group?

Or does he wear it pompously, like Daddy's too-big boots? Or cringe before it and scurry on errands, heart filled with gratitude-coated resentment?

An Odd Thought After Dying

2006-01-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

When I died, the music in the next room didn't stop, and--this is the strange thing-- I thought, "Why hasn't the music stopped?" before I thought, "How come I'm still thinking?"

A Bright Idea for Poetry Readings

2006-01-15T15:06:00.000-05:00

We shouldn't have these open poetry readings with seated audience and poet, for five tight minutes, at podium. Instead, a poet should, in the center of a circle of his/her peers and admirers, recite poems while dodging a volleyball hurled by other poets in the circle. The reader would be allowed to go on and on until hit, then replaced by the marksman (marksperson?).

Think of the much needed exercise for our effete poets, now debilitated by tobacco, drink, drugs, inertia: In their desperate need to hold an audience, they will train for stamina and agility.

And listeners will be able to take out their frustrations with lousy poetry and do so without resorting to critical sniping. How much easier to take we poets will be when audiences can zing volley balls at our sensitive heads.

A Very Limited Way to Handle Sadness

2006-01-14T10:11:00.000-05:00

I had some long sad stretches. These days they are called "depression". Mine were caused - partially - biochemically: The spiritual and biochemical phenomenon I called "my first wife" extricated herself from "our" life.

It wasn't even "my" life she left, but a knotted combination of our lives that remained, for over a year after her departure, the same knotted combination of a life I couldn't let go of and the life of the ghost of her. The future we'd created for ourselves in which we were together persisted, kept trying to crowd out of existence any new future I tried to create.

One thing I learned from that period is the long-term folly of depending on memories of happier days to pull one out of the dumps. Depressed, we remember sad things. If we try to remember happy things, soon we can no longer find the joy in them. Drawing on hopes turns hopes gray.

We make our pictures to suit and solidify our moods, so it is foolish to expect cheerful memories to fish us out. There are no cheerful memories, only cheerful rememberers. I must think up a cheerful me to think my cheerful thoughts.

What seemed to work (as a cope measure) was walking and looking at what was there, and that meant walking for hours before, at some point, I would see something, anything (a tree, a house, a pattern of light and shade and motion, kids playing in a park) and maybe even feel something.

The trick was not to be fooled by the lifelessness of all I saw, the way my vision cast a grayness over even the brightest day, to know (take it on faith) that I was putting that there and just keep walking (letting my thoughts plod along with me in their tedious rounds: Why did she have to...? Why couldn't she have...? Why did I...?), just keep walking and looking about and, really, peeking out of my thoughts to notice a sidewalk crack here, a fire hydrant there.

Deadly to remember how beautiful trees were to me once and try to jump-start joy by forcing myself to look at trees; why waste them thus? It's like getting mud on a treasured toy, then, to make it better, pushing all one's other toys into the same mud.

Perhaps this is because the end of a relationship is filled with attempts to force emotions into being. This often happens gradually, so that one doesn't realize it is happening. She turns a fraction of a degree colder, so, without knowing one is doing it, one turns up his heat a fraction of a degree. (One doesn't know one is doing it, because one doesn't want to admit that she's more distant.) And as the gap widens, in tiny increments one increases that effort to make love happen, until, at the end, one is hollering over an abyss to communicate to someone so far away (as if across Grand Canyon) that one isn't sure anyone is there, and all one gets back is echoes.

So as soon as one tries (on such a walk) to make the world beautiful and responsive, one stirs up the the ashes, which turn the world gray and get in one's lungs and eyes. Because it's the same reach, the same enforcement.

(One does all this. One, that lonely pronoun, so appropriate here, like Emily Dickinson's "formal feeling".)

So finding (on many walks) that recalling happier times soon became like sniffing one's own vomit, I learned to be patient with the world, to walk and notice and impose as little as possible upon either my thoughts or what I saw, and I discovered that gradually, increasingly often, I'd find myself right then and there being me again and the world alive around me.

Really what I discovered is that there is no loss, that whatever happiness I'd ever had had been in myself, and that whatever ability I'd had to access that happiness could not be lost. It could be buried, but never destroyed.

And it only takes a second of revival, of suddenly, unexpectedly slipping into that imperishable ocean of joy, of what - it now seems to me - one basically IS; just an instant of it after days of work that has lost its purpose and long rambling walks, just an instant, and loss begins to disintegrate, like the first rumblings of a frozen river at the start of a spring thaw. There are days when the sky is solid dead gray, spitting cold drizzle. And after you walk a mile or so, you see a thin spot in the gray, just a haze of blue, and after another mile, you find yourself under a tiny hole in the gray, visible vertical rays of sunlight surrounding you, and then you put your attention elsewhere for what seems a few minutes, then notice that things are more sharply defined, more brilliant, then realize that the clouds are gone except for a few blindingly white puffs here and there in a sea of gold and blue. It can happen that fast. Does it last? No matter if it doesn't, if the day turns dark again. That dark no longer has the same power to daunt you.

Of all my gripes with chemical psychiatry, my loudest is simply this: Losses and tangles of things said and done that shouldn't have been said and done and all the other mires that spatter us daily coat awareness with smeary muck and cut us off from ourselves. The pills a shink gives us, when "effective", are effective because they coat that smeary muck with a shiny lacquered finish and make it hard to see or touch. In doing so, they impose between us and what we truly are yet another layer -- a layer even more impenetrable than the muck.

Trust yourself a little longer. Trust the world a little more. You are still there. You can still communicate. There is still something there to which you can communicate. There is still a playing field. Better games are still possible.

[Soon after my longest bout with sadness, I discovered something that would have accelerated the recovery process 100 fold and which has, since then, spared me a great deal of worn-down shoe leather. This you can learn about here.]

Nailing Down the Spirit

2006-01-13T13:10:00.000-05:00

Cartoons tell us that "the spirit" is a transluscent white image of your body that rises from the body when it dies. Some versions have the evil become black shapes that fall from the body.

The spirit - that is, you, for example, or I -- the spirit has no form, but we insist on trying to REPRESENT it as an ethereal woman, a dove, a mountain, a white sheet with eye-holes, etc., for it is unreal to us that what we are can feel such pain, yet not be touched, see such suffering, yet not be seen.

Life taxes the spirit, and we oppose taxation without representation.

Tabulating a Life

2006-01-13T13:06:00.000-05:00

I'm dead now, in Heaven, I think, though it could be hell--they don't say. I have lots of time - I guess it's still called time time - to review my life and develop a statistical breakdown: Time spent saying "How are you" and "Fine, thank you" or listening to the news or brushing teeth or wondering if I shouldn't be doing something about the yard or having sex, eating, tasting, talking, saying something - anything you can think of, very impressive, all these records at my disposal, reams of figures, everything I did measurable.

Truly, I have lived.

Protesting Protest Songs

2006-01-12T16:59:00.000-05:00

It's like "The butler did it!", these protest songs where, whatever bad thing happens to poor folks, surprise! surprise!--the rich folks did it and also the politicians, and maybe all of us
(either because we didn't know it was happening or because we did, but didn't prevent it or even because, on a day when, somewhere, children were starving , we were on a picnic, enjoying sunshine, beer, egg salad sandwiches and one another).

Such songs should begin, "I suppose you're wondering why I've asked you all here...".

I say these things, and yet, I'm glad to be reminded from time to time of all that cannot simply be left to "the experts" and that I am part of a world that includes much misery. Apart from their glibness, there are only two things wrong with protest songs:

1. If it is wrong to take pleasure in sunsets, food, love, etc., while others elsewhere are suffering, then, since always somewhere someone suffers, it is wrong ever to enjoy oneself, in which case, what's the point? Why feed the starving children, for example, if life is to be a gray miasma of self-conscious sympathy.

2. It is important to point out abuses, but no group (poor, blacks, women, etc.) ever rises above its miseries solely by blaming others for them. Why promote the cult of the victim? It is very tempting to victims -- it's so easy to be a victim, so much easier than looking to see what part of one's condition one can improve and how one's own decisions and actions have contributed to it. But the road out of traps always involves increased responsibility -- on the part of both individuals and groups.

At this point someone says, "But surely a starving infant in sub-Saharan Africa can't be said to have contributed to his own misery!" There are answers to that, answers that address its substance, but really, the question is irrelevant, since our protest songs don't persuade the children they are victims. The songs persuade those who weep over the children (parents, for example) that they are victims, that it's their role in life to weep and supplicate, and our role to feel guilty or send money.

It's probably true that the best thing to do with a starving child is feed and educate him/her, not talk about responsibility. That's called coping.

It's also true that we do not get stronger by blaming others for our conditions in life. We may get paid damages by a court and you we may get vengeance, but we do not get stronger. We end up wedded to the weaknesses that have served us so well.

A little protest goes a long way.

A Needy God

2006-01-12T16:51:00.000-05:00

Definition of God: That entity which is perfect, complete, unlimited, utterly above our onception, and, according to those who claim to know Him intimately, in urgent need of our agreement that He is.

[That's a smart-assed definition, since many tell us that it is we who need to know His presence. But certainly the impression given by many of the faithful is that the God they worship insists on being acknowledged. Odd how exactly the God each person professes resembles in temperament the person professing Him.

The God I chat with likes to play.]

Critics and Monkeys

2006-01-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

It has not yet been determined that any number of monkeys left in a room full of typewriters would, in any length of time, produce a single great work of literature.

It has, however, been proven that a generation of literary critics, left in a room with the production of said monkeys would, in a few years, produce a significant mass of critical literature, analyzing and debating the merits of the monkeys' work.