I, Jew

And thinking about all adult men,

some of them quite old, refraining from touching the text,

only using a godly pointer whose term I forget if I ever knew,

I'm sure they must have known, somewhere in Talmud,

the way to bless the sprinkler and the time of day to turn the water on.

And whether to call the play gear 'monkey bars'

since the relationship between primates and 

cylindrically-shaped objects get governed in certain ways.

To them, my ways must seem like Hunter Thompson's,

a man adrift in mistake.  And whether to turn on a fan

in a particular weather.  It's all so crazy and sacred.

And they write about me, in the interstices and prayers.

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Dead Ducks

Some statements elevate a man.

For instance, Kung Fu, circa years ago, 

prescribed that rules must play like music --

and the notes on Yeshua watch him urge

(in a throw-off line) to be like babes.

William Tecumseh Sherman,

man to fight all war, pronounced that war is all hell.

And there's Qoheleth's 'all turn to dust again',

and then, and then, there's Nietzsche,

or S. Freud, or even Groucho Marx.

J.P. Sartre, in fictional despair,

saw the omens present, the encroachment

on the eve of World War Two

of the throb -- if you heed -- that causes the heart

to burst its dam, to flood it all.

Some prophet, just to be one up,

to get the last word in, from his webcast shouts

Give me a match to strike and I'll fire the world

and the crowds somewhere, with butane near the stage,

flare-up the hall, bring the curtain down.

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The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 1 Of 2

I have become a card-carrying Medicare enrollee and am unashamed of it.

The application process, online, went smoothly, and the personal 'call-back' I expected from a 'live representative' didn't have to happen.  They just sent me the Award Letter and my card.

Later on, thinking about my access to online information, I re-entered the system, quickly realizing I hadn't yet established a password, so I followed the instructions to get one.  After going through four entry screens, the alert showed:  Unable to access at this time.

Ultimately understanding my standard American English pronunciation, the automated, sound-sensitive, multi-menu national phone number, which I went to next and which might have resolved things, also didn't.  After several of my vocal and numeric attempts over the phone, the alert sounded: Unable to access at this time.

This is not a major problem, since I'm still working -- functionally, happily, and getting better at what I do -- and when I do retire, I'll be applying online again, a new claim, a retirement claim, at which time my 'access' problem would likely be resolved.

But I'm something of a terrier, and I like to dig.

So I went into a local office.

Knowing fully ahead of time that the press of humanity would not be genteel, I readied myself with patience and a book.  The office itself is situated in a newly-constructed building, the fourth floor, and there is a greeting station wherein you punch your choice of reasons for visiting, get a 'triaged' number (four separate sets, depending on your query), and take a seat in an area set up like a private viewing room.

It's well-lit, has an aisle.  There's a big screen TV silently displaying the current numbers being served.  Those numbers were getting matched every so often over a loudspeaker directing people to particular windows.

General information also gets displayed on the big screen TV.  It shows in English and then in Spanish.  I deliberately avoided the English in order to practice my Spanish.  I also watched a close-captioned version of how Social Security works to one's advantage.  It stars Patty Duke-Astin and George ('Mr. Sulu') Takei and takes place on a mock-up of the Starship Enterprise, its bridge.

I'm sure it's a comedy, but I was too absorbed in the book I brought along, La Nausée, Sartre's seminal novel in which a bridge between Phenomenology and Existentialism is laid out in fictional form.

Although written in the late 30s in France just as fascism was rising as a plausible political force in Europe -- what with Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler saluting and huffing and shouting and lying and bashing -- the realization felt by the main character Roquentin that the existence of any thing was nothing more than an empty abstraction, that its reality was only a convenience, a relation between itself and any other thing, including oneself (!) -- that realization made him sick.  Movement and arbitrary assignment of meaning.  

I might say that I myself was getting a bit of vertigo trying to comprehend the missing floor that Roquentin had found himself unable to stand on.  And I was sitting.

I jerked myself away from the book's momentary abyss and looked at the screen.  My category of numbers (Roquentin would have rejected all categories as ephemeral?) had reached A32.  My number was A35.  I, for some inexplicable reason, began feeling butterflies in my stomach.  They flew around each other, one non-thing around another, one nerve impulse firing on the basis of chemical activity derived by my reading a book in a public office.  I had to stop this.  It was almost my turn.  Almost my time on stage.

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Ms. Wasikowska. Ms. Bronte. Ms. Eyre

Hard work week at the end of which I found this reward.

Texture.

Yes, Romantic sentiment between socially vulnerable young woman and a Byronic older man.

Yes, 'Gothic' secrets, 1830s English country conservatism, heath, rain, snow.

Yes, a mute servant class, a knowing but powerless housekeeper.

Yes, many sins, some revealed, some merely suggested.

Candle fire.  Hearth fire.  Room fire.  Estate fire.

But we're not merely interested in the discharge of formulas, are we?

The film is a real one.

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Not-So-Commonplace 4

The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.

But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself:  her privates, he, so to speak.

The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind.

He is reponsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.

-- Northrop Frye

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Points East

The mythic power of film is larger than even those who claim it to be large fully understand.   

Try stumbling onto a film, like this one, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (. . .Of Shangri-La), at age 16, a movie buff never having seen or heard of the film and only distantly aware of the term 'Shangri-La'.

The story follows a man jostled by a war-torn world and seeking a peaceful one. 

It finds him.  He loses it.  He fights to get it back. 

The archetype around which I've seen my life playing.

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The Age Of

Pinter Stoppard Mamet Albee Schaffer and Schaffer Gray and Gray Wilson Kushner Hare and Guare.

Obsessed with film as we are, no doubt that literature's still alive and it's in its plays, its moves and words.

(photograph: Dave Cornish)

The Homecoming

This filmed Harold Pinter play was shown on PBS years ago, in the 70s.  

Despite being 'film', it gives itself away clearly as 'stage', 'theater', an art more highly dependent on actorial talent and most especially, on words.  Rarely does a movie script contain anything like poetry.  Not infrequently, drama contains ample amounts of it.  Certainly Pinter.

Despite our recent generation or two (or three) having their enthusiasm dedicated to cinema, look at what movies miss:  charged, in-your-face, real emotional conflict.

This clip handles two adjacent scenes, the first between Ian Holm and Vivian Merchant, the second between Holm and Paul Rogers.  The play itself, housing 4 men and a woman, lets us know who the outnumbered actually are.  Hint:  it's not the one who doesn't wear trousers.

You won't regret watching this.  The eight minutes you spend will spark your evening.

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Centuries Of Misgiving

The question with which Mr. Bertram had to contend over the next hours roiled him the deepest, indeed would have perplexed any man bred to such gentility.  Why would Miss Price have ventured to do as most worried him?

Certainly her modesty had always prevailed, and yet, now, in this instance, her attachment, the seeming depth of her attachment, both to Elvis and to Tupac, drew notice of even the most unaware in the village that she might jilt and bolt.

Oh, pray, he inwardly voiced, that I have not lost Fanny!

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Neighborly

Two clean women ding-dong at my door

Wanting to know if I know of the Bible book

And I say: many books

Do I know of the thread which joins the books

And I say: many threads

They get around to sin, its need to be 

In order to vindicate God's name

(In the wind of Satan's bluster)

To prove He still has powers --

Since Eve consumed with a flushed face

And Adam ate his way --

Prove we can be good for God

Overcome our basic sin, the Satan's sin.

Ah, sin, yes.   Overcome.  Yes, yes.

Many threads and many books.

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The Joy Of Index

You know talk.  How many conversations

Get nowhere.  That's getting somewhere

Where I've been:  the stockiest restaurants,

The retro RPM stores, sheerest malt shops.

Especially talking with strangers

In old book stacks, rummaging and interleaving,

The glimpse of a Dickens page,

Dawkins and DeLillo, looking for code.

Making 'a mestizo'? She looked through me,

I go with semi-colons; break from a text

Then go on to the next, I say to myself.

She said, and ceded her Philip K. Dick.

We did coffee over it, under the filigree

Of pepper tree leaves, and finger sandwiches

Something like the English people do in film,

With watercress and butter and Dundee jam,

And when I learned her name was Aphrodite,

I could only laugh at the coincidence --

Almost leap after that surprise hiccup! --

Being myself so all-weatheringly like a god.

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Dark, Two

In first reading -- memorizing! -- some Theodore Roethke poems, I had no idea he was crazy.  Let me soften that.  He was suffering from schizophrenia of a kind.  

None of the poems say that to me.  They're observant, grounded, solid.  No extravagance, no wildness.

That idea held throughout my reading of 'In A Dark Time', housed in a volume where critics laid out their 'takes' and Roethke had a last say.  I remember nothing written by any of them on the issue of insanity.

So, even when the poem itself reads, What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumstance, I take that as a comparative expression, as something nearer to what we, the sane, might imagine than what he means us to understand by the poem.  

He pushes on, then, soon, to what might be the start of a transformation, pressing the membrane of 'circumstance' to find more room:  

A man goes far to find out what he is --

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Was I instructed at the time to liken this to Teresa of Ávila, to Juan de la Cruz?  Somehow my memory connects these.

Roethke's last stanza:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill.  Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

This so obviously wants to read as a mystic experience.  Do we reduce it to neurology?  

Whether or not such experience might not occur if certain medications were present (or would occur if certain others were), should we eliminate the 'phenomenological authenticity' of it?

Our history is filled with myth.  Our lives are fuller for it.

There's always a price.  We can settle the bill by selling our bodies as meat.  We can also contract to pay it as adventurers to the end.

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Dark, One

When you 'do' poetry, it's a matter of writing and reading and reciting aloud, too.

When you 'do' poetry in writing,  that means you produce it or you write about others.

Being an analyst or critic -- even an appreciator commenting a bit -- carries risks.  

For one, there's seldom full agreement on anything, in no small measure because it's hard to establish anything worth saying that doesn't involve weighing subtleties or taste.  A casual position you take may deeply offend either the writer or another reader.  

It may put you in a world of polemics radically far from the poetry itself.  Academic departments and personal reputations stake out territory.  Even outside the professional area, egos always hang in the balance.

Another risk is being flatly wrong.  Misreadings happen.  Things fly far over one's head, sometimes, and observers evaluate analysts as well as poets.  It's your dignity lost, you goof!

With that as minimal preface and humble, innoculating defense, let me catch a bit of Emily Dickinson's  #419 We grow accustomed to the Dark.

Into the poem, she ends: 

And so of larger -- Darknesses --

Those Evenings of the Brain --

When not a Moon disclose a sign --

Or Star -- come out --within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead --

But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight --

And Life steps almost straight.

Are we dealing with contemplative seriousness or depression?  Are we solving a metaphysical problem or coming to grips with ailment?  Not sure there's a solution given the word 'almost'.  

Right.  We can adjust, we can learn anew.  But 'darkness' isn't handled, necessarily, isn't finished-off or tamed.  When we think so, we may just be convincing ourselves that it's changed when in actuality we've changed.  

This could be a kind of 'making-do'.  This could be a 'caving-in', adopting the other side as one's own, making the best of a bad thing.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Calling defeat victory; diminishment, growth. Deceiving oneself in order to 'move on'.  Making league with forces sinister because that's life.

Maybe without fully admitting any of that.


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Fit As A Fiddle

Finding a Broadway, finding it ever, with its clang music

Its vamps, its sugar babies, its prevalent taxis and print news,

In such a.m., doing a danse macabre which (when you get down

To it) is every dance and shimmy, all your best moves and feels

Touring the dinner clubs and catching the jazz bands

Closing the after-hours so as to breakfast on the grapefruit

Splash the cream, swallow whatever juice that bit you

Leaving a big tip before a group visit to the foot masseuse

And watch the sky giving itself up, at last a thing like pure rain water.

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The Simple Sign

Outside of class, not even in a hallway, on a Sunday

It occurs that Democritus must have been looking at clouds

And mulling the Thracian Heraclitus's work

On the always-changingness of things, 

And he turned to a casual friend and said They recombine.

You'd never get that from a hot, blue sky, the permanence

Of those major Desert Gods, each one a One.

I tell you, life requires the drama of change, the accident

Of passing cars, even sedans whose whoosh is their only trace,

Not just to keep us awake for the important parts

Of the play, but to resonate as symbols of the theme,

The Start-and-End.  For the roiling storms, cumulonimbic

Strike and attack, they come and go.  Take this though:  iced tea.

Both my last joy and beginning of a fresh day.

Listen. Do You Want To Know A Secret?

Although titled 'T.S. Eliot', the video's reader is Michael Gough, a British actor whose imdb CV fails to show an appearance on one or some episodes of The Loretta Young Show in the 1950s where I remember Loretta featuring him as an honored player.

He's had a very durable career, and I do remember him in some of the horror films shown on his list and also in the more somber or sinister roles he's otherwise done.

Here he voices Eliot's 'Prufrock', a modern fool for love, a model of dull despair, of loneliness, a manipulee in the sophisticated hands of sexual puppetry, ripe for risible gossip, a man deadened to the prospect of anything but ironic response to his outreach.

When a trained British actor -- Gough, in this instance -- recites that which is -- though memorable on the page, in the mind's ear -- depressing, it is the high delivery that carries the poetry to us.  Consonants crackle and pop and kick.  Vowels open abysses and squeeze to a shriek.  All that within a classical containment.

Americans.  I'm one.  We do not have this music.  Our English can be welcoming or plain-spoken or hushed or rowdy or sincere;  it can have brute poetry -- at its best, for example, in David Mamet.  Southerners come close to the lyricism:  Tennessee Williams, Capote, and (his greatness!) William Faulkner.  

Americans.  I'm one.  We do not have this music.  It's in our basic culture to despise aristocracy.  Try as British working class heroes might, in their closer resentment, want to make His Lordship or Her Ladyship kiss their own Arses, these mates are still rooted more directly to Shakespeare, his modeling of great mankind, than they may be comfortable to admit.  

His breath.  Shakespeare's breath.

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What's In A Word?

Creed

Filioque

Mishna

Amoraim

Pentateuch

Lapsarianism

Septuagint

Aramaic

Midrash

Episcopacy

Halacha

Bavli

Schism

Decalogue

Sanhedrin

Sola scriptura

Tannaim

Pericope

Tanakh

Justification

Ecclesia

Apostate


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Seeking Salvation On The Thin Edge Of A Razor

 Anne Baxter as Sophie, The Razor's Edge, the Zanuck film based on the Maugham novel.

Newly re-met group of Americans first night together in Paris, go slumming.

In a very low-life cabaret, l'Apache and cheap champagne in abundance, Sophie appears, having lost her husband and child in an auto accident some years before and trying still to get as lost as she can, as deadened as a living person can become.

Of her 'protector' yanking her away from a shamed conversation with her past Chicago acquaintances, she proclaims with an ironic lust:  He's a sulky brute, but he's quite a man.

Watching the entire scene conveys the pity of ruin.  Even Larry's saintliness isn't quite enough to retrieve her.

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Actually, Thinking Helps

Religious men who, no doubt, hundreds of millions of the credulous would consider heretics.

Luke Timothy Johnson's lectures -- and there are several on CD -- deal with early Christian material.  He's about backgrounding and inspecting the documents we have that are foundational for faith and that have formed the structure of faith.  

Clearly, he's a Christian guy, but not a salesman.  I think his intent is in removing misinformation and dogma.  In a straight way, he's teaching literary approaches.  Historical surround.  Sociological perspective.  Theological shifting.  Defining a position in a reasoned way.

If you've tasted a bit of Bart Ehrman, you see the skepticism that must automatically go with any Bible study.  A skepticism that literalists think the work of 'Satan'.  Ehrman is also on CD.  He's quite readable, very authoritative, a man whose 'born-again' studies right in the womb of fundamentalism led him, simply, to doubt.

If the world could always be faced with the honesty of these men, we might be able to feel brave in our apprehensive, dangerous place.

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Long Poem Project

Thomas Hardy

D.H. Lawrence

Phillip Larkin

John Fowles

Ian McEwan

If not a course, then a long poem.

Not a critical epistle, no, but a poem in cantos or movements, musical movements in quasi-musical forms.

Sonata. Minuet-Trio.  Rondo.

Theme-and-Variations.

Adagio.

Each movement collapsing one of the author's main works, entry/exit, and developing that 'content'.

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