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The Advisor

Sometimes you see this on social media: “if your could talk to your younger self what would you say?” My answer is “read more” and get cracking. I mean read shit you don’t understand. You’re fifteen. It’s high time to read the Nicomachean Ethics. Study Boolean Algebra and for fun read Melville. Picture yourself floating on the coffin of your dead pal. See yourself as an empty set. “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” O Aristotle. Good numbers scrawled on a napkin. My younger self wanted very much to starve himself to death. Melville: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” Just read and laugh. Read and laugh.

Auntie History has a hangnail
She’s been scrubbing dirty laundry
Since her time at Ur
Back then
Her job was to wash out
Primeval darkness
Easy enough
What with Christ’s fish
In her pocket
A magic flashlight
Of sorts that fish—just aim it
And bloodstained rags
Would glow white
She has a hangnail
Everything good is costly
You want a personality?
Its so expensive
A soul?
Just acrobatics really
And having washed
The shirts
While half swept away
In the blind flux
Of all the world’s
Horrifying events
She has a hangnail

Uncle History is shaving:
Each subtle hair, half formed
Is an idea never
Realized—he knows
His hairs are avenues
Of chance
What might have been
Drops into the sink
He laughs
To think of stubble-rubble
Given all the massacres
The war crimes
He can at least
Cut off remembrances
At his mirror
He’s the anti-Proust
All he has to do now
Is run some water
And minuscule horrors
Will go down the drain

Auntie History collects Edison cylinders
She can hear them without a machine
Good old Mother Machree
And the lovely sound
Of hay scratching hay
Like all hobbies
One can’t get away from it
There’s no criterion of judgment
By the light of the silvery moon
Nearer my God to Thee
The hours so gentle
She thinks she might make a hat
Entirely of cylinders
Just to hear voices compete
Old folks at home
I’m forever blowing bubbles
Come where my love lies dreaming
Let’s cakewalk
Oh yes

I grew up on a steep divide but it wasn’t geographical. Instead it was a ridge or chain of mountains both inside and outside me. I didn’t wish to be blind. I wanted to play baseball. And perhaps, more significantly, I wanted to be a scientist. Neither baseball or physics would happen for me. I became a poet. Compared to physics I think poetry is easy. All you have to do is step barefoot on a worm like Theodore Roethke and you’ve got a poem. Poems fall out of cupboards like a box of starch loaded with spiders.

Now I’ve said two things you’re not supposed to say. Poems are easy and I’d rather be sighted and a physicist. What did the physicist say when he found two isotopes of helium? “HeHe!”

Someone will say there are blind baseball players and blind scientists. This is true. But not when I was a child. Back then the disabled were reviled. And it’s hardly news that evil-doers in films are often deformed and disabled characters. The Bond franchise alone is flooded with crippled meanies: Dr. No’s hand, Blofeld in his power wheelchair, etc.Frankly I’ve always wanted to be an evil disabled chemist. I want to turn wine back into water at Mar a Lago or put truth serum in Preparation H.

That’s Preparation HeHe for those who’ve been following…

When the Victorians read Dickens they read for plot and confirmation–they could see their world. When we read Dickens we still read for plot but less for confirmation as we think we are superior to his characters. This is a great mistake. Dickensian sins are fully our own though we’ve one extra: post-modern irony.

I’m thinking of pastiche as Frederic Jameson would say: irony that references itself. Most often it’s mediated consciousness draped with the status conferred by consumer fetishism. Dickens characters were vain or greedy but never so self absorbed they fell into anhedonia.

Most days I read like a Victorian who wants plot and confirmation but also a bit of compassion. I’m also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s dictum: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

I’m old fashioned that way.

Of Newman I also like: "Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.”

**

Dear Charles: you pushed your wife into the asylum when you were done with her. You rooted for the American Confederacy. You were silly. You thought Anton Mesmer was on to something.

**

Dear Kuusisto: and who are you? (Reader, does he get to answer? Does anyone get to answer?)

He tries: "I was half destroyed by war movies. They tried to brain wash me into thinking the good guys always won. I’d no idea that beneath Roy Rogers’ horse was the blood of indigenous people. Man was I tricked. And you can’t get your money back!"

OK. You’ve said who you aren’t but nothing more.

He tries: "I’m a human consciousness growth project lacking some essential vitamins."

That’s better.

All morning I drink bitter coffee
And try to rescue my private dead
Plumbing rattles
I hear my mother
Inside walls
My father beneath the floor
The refrigerator hums
I can’t guess what it says
Snow
Knows plenty
But won’t tell
Keeping her pact
With nature
That hydrogen agreement
Preparing us