Month: September 2014

Each day now I climb into the sheltering tree that lived outside my boyhood window. I am no longer cold and feel no shame when I’m in its branches. You can fault me for being a small “r” romantic and that’s ok. I was a small “r” romantic when I was five years old. I’m not certain I know much more than the boy knew. Knowing ain’t facts kitty kat. Facts include Wilson’s cloud chamber and the Greek alphabet. Up in the tree “knowing” means my body is a string. That’s what music is of course—sensing your body is one of the strings. Every lover is a quarter note, catching up.

 

The geese are arbitrary. One has a problem with its left leg. So the leg is unpredictable. That goose is wounded and restless. He limps toward a museum, some avian institute. In a moment I’ll follow him but now I’m making a sandwich with my favorite arctic mosses.

A neighbor has come. He looks in my kitchen window. He’s such a lonesome man and he wants to give me old books. He knows books are good, especially for the brain. I trade with him, hand him a dish of cloudberries. The cloudberries are ice cold.

The first mistake of the day: I turn on the radio. A man with a voice like an electric razor talks about bombs. That is, he favors them. A hornet circles the ceiling light.

 

I’ve been attempting an assault on my morbid imagination much as one might undertake housecleaning but first must imagine the process, seeing disheveled rooms in his mind’s eye. Perhaps the homely analogy isn’t quite right:  the world’s dreadful conditions in no way match bourgeois domesticity but my analogy is a gesture toward weariness. The morbid imagination has lately spent too much time with the news, has coursed repeatedly across digital media and now has concluded there’s no hope for human kind.

There were eras when the word fortune was warmth itself. Even in the darkest corners of the globe one could conceive of a future unencumbered by the evidence the planet is dying.

In those innocent ages the future wasn’t easy and we endured hard physical and intellectual labor but the steady nature of the “coming times” was possible. (Not probable but viable).

That ended with Hiroshima but then again we could hope, even pray for disarmament. The improbable but still viable future was still in our hands.

Now morbid imagination tells me otherwise—eco-destruction is so advanced and economies of warfare are so fully determined there’s no way out. And the morbid imagination says “we’re just playing a lost game until the clock runs out”.

As I say, I’ve been attempting an assault on the M.I.. I write my name with a finger on the vapor of the future. When this doesn’t work I attempt Zen laughter. Ha Ha! So much is nonsense! All is transient. Even the planet. Life will go on elsewhere.

Oh we’re in a fix alright. My nation is dying and now apparently lacks the political will to affirm its own freedoms much less tend to the destruction of the world. I channel surf, see the bloated corporate shills who pose as national leaders. The M.I. despairs.

I try seeing myself as a mind committed to a larger body. And in a few moments I will clean the rooms of my old house. I wonder if I’m tired because I’m nearing sixty. I wonder if there’s evidence for optimism—a way to beard the lion of the M.I.. I’m having some trouble. I remember a therapist who challenged me when in an earlier time I was also morbid—who said: “When have your negative expectations, your dark visions of what’s ahead been proven true?”

She was right to ask. I have a quick and gloomy mind. I adjust. Things, good things, agains seem possible.

Herein I admit I’m fighting. I’m walking straight up to my name and touching it gently.

My friends, how are you?

 

 

 

 

When I think of Lao tzu I get dizzy. I press my face into a lake and open my eyes.

Underwater my blindness is a virtue; I’m as much a lake as the lake.

I laugh sideways, water and darkness slip in and out of me.

When I’m dizzy I have to ask: who do I propose to become

and who will I leave behind?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suppose I asked you to be my friend?

How would I do this as an honest man?

I have so many secret artifacts,

so many broken parts—

I’m a house that gleams on the outside

but its rooms have been cleaned quickly of spilled blood.

I’m carried in my shadow by another shadow.

I wave at you under the long thin streaks of clouds.

 

I read a post last night on a rather unskillful group blog entitled “In Defense of Ableism”. Its  author argues being physically whole is simply better than being disabled and therefore able bodied people oughtn’t worry about tropes or phrases betokening disability as a miserable state of affairs. I love how non-disabled people imagine they know all about the cripples much as I enjoy pink men who declare their familiarity with the circumstances of racial differences on Fox News. I’m sincere about this—when pink men wade into the dank waters of aggregate imperial assumptions and intolerances and wave their $5 Disney souvenir magic wands I see the retreating vanguard of privilege soaking its collective knickers. The “Pinkies” (for so I call them) never inquire as to what it is they’re defending.

The Monty Python once had a skit depicting soldiers in WWI. They were in a trench with terrifying explosions all around and their single concern was the protection of a tall grandfather clock that had been inexplicably entrusted to their care. So it is with the aforementioned defense of ableism, not merely because the privilege of the argument is misplaced (though it certainly is) but because physical wholeness is not a useful paradigm for understanding the human condition. I would not want to defend physical perfection as the sine qua non of ethics for the same reason I avoid patent falsehoods in general. If physical ability is thought to be the signature of the human book that book is stitched too thin to be important. Its a comic book argument, puerile and complacent. Worse: its draped in neo-Victorian wool (smelling of camphor and anti-Macassar) and when spoken it assumes the weary tones of adults who must, alas, tell their children its a hard life and (insert here—art, liberation theology, post-colonialism) won’t help you live. The post might just as well have been titled: “In Defense of Infantilization” but of course such titles presuppose comic irony which is in short supply in the Ableism Defense Department.

Taxonomies of physical value are the stuff of eugenics and function in America as justifications in support of the prison industrial complex. The Los Angeles County jail is the largest psychiatric facility in the United States. This state of affairs is only possible or tolerated by means of ableist assumptions. Its a very hard life children. The philosophers have said so. It really is too bad. Maybe if you’re really really good the warden will give you a grandfather clock.

 

 

I walked around the barn without words—

no nouns or memories

 

a long clean glimmering silence in mind

as I circled horses.

 

When I was a child I wrote my name with a finger

on icy glass, saw how the letters

 

were evanescent—

innocence in training

 

for eternity, but truly

today I was for twenty minutes

 

moving in the shadows of late summer

without guilt or whisper.

 

 

 

 

 

If you imagine the tree of the world you’re doing the proper work of the mind.

Sometimes, late at night, I see the twisted branches of the world rising toward the Milky Way.

Now what does “proper” mean? The imagination has no manners. The tree is pure growth in its dark inheritance. The mind is jealous and wants to rise. If someone asks me what I’m thinking I say I’m seeing treasures for which there are no nouns.

 

**

Now I’m tired. I forget about the tree o’ earth. I read a cheap detective novel and fall asleep. In my dream someone has given me a pair of farmers overalls to wear. I discover I’m walking on water lilies.

 

**

 

Explain your disinterested self, I tell myself. You know, the self when you’re not apparent. I dip my writing hand into a well formed by two tree trunks and wiggle my fingers in the murky rain water.

 

**

Heraclitus:

It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.

This is why I love the tree of the world. It grows or doesn’t, always without hope.

**

It rains in the apple trees

Where a crow settles

In a dome of blossoms—

 

I watch him

With my clear head

The way blind people do,

 

Feathers, wet leaves,

Bird’s feet

Scratching the boughs…

 

**

Proper work of the mind. Leaves falling in rain…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the valley of dreams you find wandering men who bury spoons in the snow.

If you’re a Freudian you think of spoons as the instruments of motherhood.

If you’re a Jungian, spoons are solidified long tears of the gods.

But really, why should dream men bury spoons when all portable instruments

are useful to travelers?

 

In dreams you must walk light as you can.

In dreams food arrives in rare forms.

Last night I saw my father (long dead)—he was playing a grand piano

beside a window.

Snow fell outside and he leaned into the notes

though in life he hadn’t been a musician.

I knew he was feasting.

 

 

 

 

Czeslaw Milosz: A decent man cannot believe that a good God wanted such a world.”

Always the god outside the man. A failing of so many. Milosz god is extracorporeal and masculine. A gyne-corporeal god is on the inside. The god on the inside wants peace, drinking water, medicine, food, and shelter and in that order. A decent woman cannot believe in a god outside the body.