For the dead are not far,
Nor are they neighbors,
Tricked out
In the fashions
Of ease. Instead they speak like working men
Or the women who saved Finland
When Stalin was near,
Voices dark and resolved
Still conveying love, half of unreason,
Half of hope for when they were alive
They were fluent with sadness
but never fooled.
Luigi, Connie, and Steve, January 16, 2012.
Listening to Miles, the moon cleaning dreamtime over the house and me, oddly happy even in the half cast, stretched worry of aging–solo, so much mystery in being alive. I know this is why we are here: loving mistakenly, leaving notes on the trees.
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“Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.”
The line is Pablo Neruda’s.
This is not possible, as indeed it was beyond Neruda’s grasp at the end, when his beloved Chile was annihilated by Henry Kissinger. Those who cannot love us mean us real harm. In this country, in this hour, the Tea Party Republicans want to eliminate all social programs benefiting the poor and the elderly or people with disabilities. That is a story about which the outcome remains in some doubt. What is not in doubt is the predatory and heartless social reformation well underway in the United States–a reframing of social Darwinism without apology.
Here is a quote from The Nashville Examiner that tells a tale so Dickensian I want to scream:
“A few days ago, doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia delivered stunning news to parents Joe & Chrissy Rivera. They were denied approval to a life-saving kidney transplant needed for their daughter, three year old Amelia. The reason given: “Mental Retardation.”
When the Riveras were told they would never be able to get on the waiting list they objected, stating that they or someone in their family would donate a kidney. There was no need to wait for a donor. But the doctor persisted.
“She is not eligible because of her quality of life. Because of her mental delays,” the doctor insisted, according to Chrissy Rivera.”
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I was on a playground in Durham, New Hampshire. The year was 1960 and I was five years old. I had thick glasses and I was smaller than my classmates. A big kid who I’ll call Rollie came up to me with a handful of dirt which he clearly meant for me to eat.
“You will eat this,” he said.
“It looks good,” I said. “Hey Rollie, have you ever eaten an acorn?”
Rollie held his dirt before him like a little pillow.
“An acorn?” he said.
“Yeah, they’re just like peanuts, really good, that’s why squirrels like them. You want one?”
“Sure,” he said. He held out his other hand and I dropped a neatly shelled acorn into his palm.
“Go on Rollie, its yummy!”
Rollie ate it. Then he turned red, and I mean red, not beet red or fire engine red—he was red as an unkind boy with his mouth swollen shut. Acorns are among the bitterest things on earth. And of course I only knew this because I’d tried one. I was a solitary kid. Spent a lot of time in the woods. Those were the days when a boy could still go to the woods.
Rollie was incapacitated. I don’t think he ever bothered me after that.
I still recall the thrill of my discovery. That a feeling, a simple reaction, a swing tricked out with language could render a nemesis harmless was rousing.
I didn’t do a little dance. Didn’t brag about the matter. But I was on the way.
A lyric life, I will imagine, is one wherein you can access feelings and then, by turn do something productive with them.
The simplest definition of a lyric poem is a poem that expresses the writer’s feelings.
Freud said: “Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.”
One of those palliative remedies is lyric itself. One may think of this as causative intuition, a feeling that trips a switch and makes you sing when you should properly be weeping or running for your life. Again Freud: “Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get in accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.”
We are getting in accord. We are beside a country road picking edible flowers in the cool of the day. We do not pick edible flowers beside highways because there are pesticides in trafficked areas.
We remove the pistils and stamens before eating.
“Hey Rollie, wherever you are, have you ever eaten Milkweed?”
“Rollie, you can trust me this time. It tastes like green beans.”
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There are poets of glass: Hilda Doolittle with her sands of Egypt, Li Po drawing fortunes on water, even Kropotkin who saw history through a cup of red tea.
Today I saw a raven study itself in a department store window. “Death,” said Tennessee Williams, “is one moment, and life is so many of them.”
The raven turned his head from side to side, like a precision tool. He was expressing his gratitude in a city of glass–the bird’s sidelong glance like nothing you will see from the birds who live beside stones.
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Children Languish Without Education As India’s Laws Go Unenforced
(Times of India)
January 11, 2012
BANGALORE, INDIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daili] Syed Umer Farooq wanted — wants — to become an automobile engineer but was forced to leave school after class VII because no school wants him. And the law is not helping either.
Syed is now 18 and suffers from muscular dystrophy. He completed class VII in 2009 from Shradhanjali Integrated School (SIS ) in Lingarajapuram, Bangalore. SIS, which is a special school, only goes up to class VII and Syed has been looking, increasingly desperately, ever since for another school to take him. But in the two years since 2009, he’s been refused admission by 30 schools.
The revolutionary Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009 will not come to his rescue for he falls outside of its purview. According to the RTE Act, a child is entitled to free and compulsory education till the age of 14. But Syed is already 18, so the schools are able to turn him down without fear of prosecution.
Adding to the confusion, another law — The Persons with Disabilities (Equal opportunities, protection of rights and full participation ) Act, 1995 — says every child with a disability has the right to free education till the age of 18.
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It was a working class bar and everyone was painfully drunk–that manly near death atavistic Viking berserk hallucination of everything, the star that flew through you on your way to the wedding and the dropped, cosmetic eyes of the old soldier strangely now in your own pocket. After all these years so many wounds and so few praises. That was when a man I did not know turned to me and said: “You are a Jew!” “You’re right,” I said, because I was young and in love with poetry, “I am a Jew!” It was the first time I had ever felt the pins of anti-Semitism, I, a Lutheran with a long beard. He reached for me then but missed and grabbed another man. “You are a Jew!” he shouted. “No, it is I,” I said, “I am the Jew!” But it was too late. They were on the floor and cursing, two men who had forgotten the oldest notion of them all: in Jewish history there are no coincidences.
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A friend says he hates Wallace Stevens and Edgar Alan Poe. He reveals this in front of a crowd which has come to hear him read his poems. “In America they don’t like you if you say that,” he adds, and I think just how many things they really hate you for in this monolithic shopping mall of a nation, and of what a cowardly country it is. Wallace Stevens would be low on my list of miscreant writers but let’s be clear, he was a large pink man with a law degree and how many of those do we love? Oh I think we are schooled to love them and that’s an old story. I can’t stand T.S. Eliot and I really hate Ezra Pound both of whom were moral weaklings and whose poems were shoved down the throats of college students for decades.
Oscar Wilde once said there were two ways to hate poetry. One was to hate poetry, the other was to read Pope. Everyone can make his or her own list. The problem with Stevens and Poe is of course a matter of their respective metaphysics–each cultivated his own private cabalistic worship of death, a tautology that, when read against the bloody backdrop of American history, can appear like a critique but is really not much more than a reconfiguration of despair.
That last phrase is the reason I read very little contemporary fiction by American writers. I can’t stand short stories about divorces and quotidian disappointment, the measly plots tricked out with jazzy lingo. And that is pretty much what’s on the menu. There’s plenty if sadness to go around but not much bravery.
So who is brave? Pablo Neruda; Tomas Transtromer; Ben Okri; Alice Munro; Ruth Stone; Common; Bob Marley; Naguib Mahfouz; Alex Laguma; Abena Busia; Jim Harrison; Paul Eluard; Walt Whitman; Oscar Wilde; Mark Doty; Langston Hughes; Lou Reed; Wole Soyinka; Mahmoud Darwish; Nazim Hikmet; Tayeb Salih; Salman Rushdie; Colin Channer; Sam Hamill; Nancy Mairs; Yannis Ritsos, O it’s a long list, I could type all day…
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There are walls of memory and sometimes they fall away. When I was a boy in New Hampshire, there was a flower called the floating heart. This morning I saw it: five yellow petals rich among green thoughts. When she was small, my mother stepped from a boat, believing she could walk on the gold hands of the lilies. I believe I can walk around the sad mountain of philosophy by following palms like birds like sun.
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Planet of the Blind 