Van Helsing on America

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.

BYOAK Catalyzing Quote

"...at that coastal brink of American self-invention, were branded as permanently expedient and on the run, piratically bold, and driven by a geographically renewable innocence, like the nation itself." -Jonathan Lethem

A Shot Accross the Bow of My Distractors

This is where I escape into from what is so bugging my attentions out there. You cannot say one whole complete sentence out there without but some bugger comes around and does his or her thing that is like the world's thickest penny on the track of my mind in which my thoughts are the train which is about to do a backflip into some field. Nobody benefits from this except my enemies. Not saying that I am paranoid or what have you but it is conceivable that they do not want me to get anything done because believe you me I make no small plans and heads will roll if ever I can really uninterruptedly say what's on my mind and speak this truth to power. So all I have to do is close the door and get all ensconced or whatever and put pen to paper and write my own personal Kublai Khan in Xanadu so to speak and some metaphorical salesman is banging at the door and there I am poemless and I can taste the adrenaline and after I've mollified him or her and got back to my desk there it is: gone. Forever. This is why I have put that pile of concrete blocks in front of my door around which this afternoon you yelled in to me some muffled questions about why was I stockpiling building materials of such unsightly nature and don't you know I was about to crystallize after weeks of factfinding the crucial theoretical underpinning of what would have been my magnum opus, but those will have to wait for some future person to formulate them, maybe in, as I imagine it, his remote cave or treetop perch or completely soundproof underground hermitage. I envy him in his hermetic enclosure free from sudden sounds and disruptions such as disease, friends, family, excellent aromas, and the media. I am not one to get all hypothetical by any means but I do imagine that with a sufficiently thick soundproof barrier I could generate many great works of intense beauty and unimaginable revolutionary aptness. I say hypothetical because I do not currently possess the funds sufficient to this project and have thus far been able to acquire only approximately 90 concrete blocks, though even with these few I see some benefit and have enjoyed the mind game of: picturing what the IRS will do when they come and try to extricate me as the requisite bulldozer would be such a bad p.r. move on their part that surely the media exposure would make donations come out of the woodwork and one of my major distractions from my life's work would be solved, pronto. This is indeed a pleasant thought to entertain while I burn my phone bills and type this, my last epistle before they cut the power and the mortar dries.

No Amount of Evidence Can Make Me Believe

You have to start the water early if you want your clothes dry by dark. Say sunup, maybe 6:30, when the water you siphoned off the roof the night before is frozen halfway down the tub. You pile mesquite branches into the 50-gallon drum marked "Union Carbide Not For Re-Use", stuff in a balled copy of the Partido Comunista de Bavispe broadside, which has very flammable ink, and drop in a match. Not too soon, because you are cold. Very cold. Your house is a shack of corrugated steel, without heat, and your bed is a wool blanket on a tarp on the floor. There is ice on the steel wall where you breathed all night trying to stay on the warm spot you made. So when the flames catch and the bark ignites and the thick diesel smoke of the mesquite starts straight up to the medium-blue sky, you lean in its path and begin to thaw. In a few minutes you stop shaking and you can feel your face soften, and the ice begins to separate from the tub. You stay there, almost immobile, until the ice is half gone and steam grays the smoke. Then you get your dust-red shirts and shiny pants and secret underwear and pile them into the tub, stirring with a stick until they're under. Water explodes when it sloshes onto the barrelhead. And now you are warm.



You move out of the jacal and into the sun, which now angles into the courtyard. The chickens are out and looking for crumbs. The sun comes over the wall through broken bottles, and the rim of the wall's shadow is toothed with green and brown, eating away the frost inch by inch, quickly now. Several other plumes of black and white rise over the houses, and you hear Spanish and Tarahumara, and you smell coffee.



The senora's house has a blanket for a back door, and she pushes it aside to come out with two mugs of canela. She is already made up, but her hair is still in curlers and she is in her nightgown, over which she has draped two threadbare cardigans.



"Good morning."

"Good morning. Did you sleep well?"

She winces as she hands you the tea. "My back is not so good in this cold." She always starts her day with tea and a complaint, though she is by nature sunny and agreeable. You sip your tea, remembering how you mistrusted its redness when you first came here, sure it contained food colorings long-since banned in the States. Now you like it, though she's added too much sugar.

"I had a dream about you." She has dreams, and is known with some suspicion and much reverence as something of a bruja. You don't want to encourage her, but you can't say nothing.

"Tell me."

"Well, OK, but maybe this is not what you want to hear on laundry day. Maybe you want a break from God and all this Spanish you must be tired of."

"No, it's OK. You dreamt, then, of God?" This is how you say it in Spanish. I was long since comfortable with these Baroque constructions, no longer American, really. Converted to grand gestures, gentlemanly suavity, chivalrous deference, and eloquent solicitousness.

"Yes. Of course. I dreamt that you brought me a book, very fine, of gold, with the finest engravings in a mysterious script. You told me to read it, and I was very moved by your trust in leaving it here in my poor house. I read the book for three days and nights, not stopping except to light the lamp when it was dark, and put it out when it was light. At the end of the book, a great curandero wrote that I should ask God if it was true, so I went to the church and did many rezas and then asked Baby Jesus and the Sacred Heart and Mother of God if the book was true. They told me to ask you, that you would speak for them. So I am disturbing your laundry day to ask you if it is true, this book of gold."

My heart was beating so hard I couldn't take a deep breath. My hands were shaking. I felt something like fire start inside me and my heart surged. "Yes, sister. It is true. All of it. Every word."

She smiled, hugely, her teeth and gums the color of cinnamon. "I knew it!" she said. It was such a beautiful book, and I knew it was true!" Then she told me she would have eggs ready in a minute and went inside.



I stirred my clothes some more, and began to fish them out of the now boiling water and onto the concrete washboard. I soaped the collars and did a rather cursory job of it as my hands began to chill. Then I lifted the tub off the drum and rinsed everything, and refilled the tub for my companion, who would wake up soon to wash his own clothes.

A Sort of Reunion

Salt Lake City is the world's biggest small town. Everyone, at least on the wealthy Mormon East Bench, knows everyone else. Parties are all sugar and polite affable chatter on safe topics and astonishment at the accomplishments of the other young couples: Christmas shopping completed the first Saturday of December, children looking so handsome, decorations just so, the appearance of effortless managment of very busy schedules. Everyone leaves early. The men are tired, the women have dealt with demanding children all day. The boiled-wool sweater sets, the blandly maculine uniforms of acceptably professional employment, the neat hair and the practiced smiles belie a deep exhaustion that must not be mentioned, but is visible around the eyes. To an outsider, the main impression is of conformity to a very strict code, in which men are emphatically masculine and clueless, women are pretty and wear seasonal outfits and are always agreeable, and children are cutely overdressed, and strangely clean. Houses at Christmastime are decorated with great care and control, with apparent reference to design magazines and catalogs: trees are allowed one color of light, one color of glass ornament, and a few pewter figurines with the engraved names of the family members. These East Bench houses tend to look like hotel lobbies, in their starchy regularity, their matched sets of chairs, their cleanliness. There are few signs of individual taste, and one front room can look much like another.

This time of year I am a ragged eccentric, trailing shreds of strangeness where I go, causing disruption, arousing exclamations of astonishment, drawing attention to my self, though what I want most is to be invisible, or absent. I forget that my silver bracelet is a small transgression in these homes. My hair, normally so unremarkably short and brown, appears almost radical in its slight disorder. And I always forget that politics is taboo. I silenced a room today when I volunteered that Mit Romney had swung Southern in his positions during the '08 campaign. Recognizing my faux pas as soon as the chatter stalled, I glanced up, and saw many weatherman smiles above plates of Vienna Wieners and cheese balls. All the teeth were straight and white. All of them. It was uncanny, and I felt so alone I almost cried. I could just barely hold it together.

An old friend, from my grad-school days in Boston, dropped in. She was so warm, and such an able smalltalker, that I started jabbering about myself, my divorce, my flailings at single fatherhood, even my creative ambitions. A few people joined us and listened, murmuring their polite interest, apparently hanging on every word, until I suddenly felt that I was irritating them, making a fool of myself, showing my failed history, looking maybe exotic or delusional or at least ineffectual.

I was the only one there who'd left the church. I was the only one divorced. I have the unfinished house, the dented truck, the old boots. I forgot to shave. I can't stomach the sugar. I feel superior and I feel humiliated and I feel free and I feel alone. I think maybe I have missed something important.

Magdalen thinks Voldemort wrote Harry Potter

Wouldn't that, like, change everything?

But here's really my point, here in this song by My Morning Jacket about "What a Wonderful Man He Was." Here at Christmas time we all need to take time to reflect and give the Devil his due, because we owe it to This Great Land of Ours (America) and to our monotheism of our own choice. His dew. And grow, for godsakes, out our hair, greasy-sweet and long like the Baby Jesus meant it to be, especially at this blessed time of year.

Stefana's Native Earth Comes to Find Her

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh

Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask. He was great.

He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with the words that you say. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.

Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.

Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and seeking refuge, the odds parts of the self that are lost and replaced in flight. He is, as it turns out, Jewish; his passage out of Romania in 1966(?) was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.

He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own folded hands. He tilted his head at her, took a half-step forward, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.

I hadn't known that Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, and Andrei had no way of knowing besides whatever it was that he saw in her face or heard in her voice. It was her mouth when she talked, he said.

The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate how deeply and permanently we are formed place and ethnicity. But our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? I don't think I have words to ask her.

Wichita Mind Control and the Plural of Lasagna

I was at a party last night with all these Johns Hopkins oncologists. (I did not crash; I was invited. I brought apple granola as a hostess gift, even though Charlie was the one who took the afternoon off from curing cancer to make the super yummy white sauce lasagna.) But so anyway, apropos (maybe) of your last post, I got to talking to these folks, and they were really nice and humane and I liked how they talked about their kids and they were enjoying the wine, and everything like that. And then in three of these conversations it became clear, to me, that what they were casually doing was working out this argument that the practice of medicine can be largely replaced with a series of algorithms or logic shrubberies or something. That in a way the doctor doesn't even need to be present.

Which I don't dig, because it seems--as I stupidly said with my actual mouth in the first conversation rather than by tensing my shoulders or looking momentarily ceilingwards as I ought to have--like a defense of the practice of spending five minutes with a patient, locating them (the plural pronoun as a gender-neutral will prevail, so let's just practice getting over it) on the appropriate logic shrubbery and heading to the next roomlet to avoid eye-contact with the next (he or she or they, hope, still, despite waiting in this tiny room with the cross-section of the human throat and tongue and sinus emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company and a copy of Red Book) patient by consulting the next chart. I'm willing to keep being patient if the doctors will keep practicing; otherwise, no. But so I said to the really nice and smart man who teaches Medical Inference--which is kind of awesome--I said, said I, that as undeniably useful as the statistical understanding of medical causality is, long may it ride, statistical understanding also seems like the cause of lots of missed or partial diagnoses, and it also seems a philosophical defense of spending only five minute with your patient because, after all, for purposes of healing they're just a set of symptoms to be divided as neatly as possible from the total set of personal phenomena.

He seemed a little hurt by that. Do I get to get hurt if someone suggests that most education is actually dyseducation? I sort of wish that people would say that to me more often. And of course I hadn't meant to be aggressive, although clearly I was a little, at this party with the multiple yummy lasagnas and the Chiantis that didn't change my mind about Chianti and the talk of children.

But so a couple things. One is that it seems like a problem if long practice and even deep competence make us skip the first step of open observation. Not scanning for the most obvious things but allowing the senses a moment of soft focus to see what might constellate in that moment: maybe something orbiting around something else in a wholly unexpected way. Maybe the answer to a question one hadn't even consciously framed. Number two is this: we're basically herd animals, and although it's hard to see, we spend a ton of time and energy achieving consensus. We're pushing each other around or running the personal edition of the deep-consensus software all the freeriggin' time. The fact that I can't spell consensus but change it when the spellcheck thingy tells me to is the tip of the assberg. (There goes my neighbor Rob in dad jeans. These are not the right jeans. And so forth. Serious, those jeans don't look good, and his hat is pulled own too far, and what's he going to do with that folding chair?) These good people were standing around at the nice party telling me politely to believe a particular thing about the medical product I'm supposed to gratefully buy.

So much militates against the sort of openness you're describing. But I think that something like What Is Perceptible When You're More Open to Data That You've Ever Been Before is my version of God at the moment.

So I never got to Wichita Mind Control. It was Bruce Conner's phrase for the feeling when he first sat listening to Harry Smith's deeply weird and centripetal Anthology of American Folk Music in the Wichita public library. For the first time, he said, " I was sure something was going on in the country besides Wichita mind control.” Statistically, in some distant galaxy a Sophia Lauren who will never leave Rome is making an unheard-of type of lasagna with a vegetable that tastes like chlorophyll butter and the smell of ambergris. A 14 year-old Keith Richards is fiddling with the dial of his radio at 2AM to hear Muddy Waters through the staticky surf of G.I. radio. And a doctor is sitting down to an excellent meal in expectation of a two hour conversation during which he will seldom speak.

My Own Personal Vast Middle Way: a Proposal

Me, I'm working on triangulating a middle way between Cartesian "fact" and personal opinion. Since everything in the universe is connected, you just cannot be taking narrow observations and drawing big-ass conclusions from them. Not without your consequences getting all unintended and such. You may be in the phlebotomy business or whatever, but you can't just sidle up to the circulatory system and define it per se. It has inputs and waste products and "issues", as you know, and it is connected to everything obvious and not so obvious, your location relative to the equator, for example, which has just about everything to do with vitamin D3, the lack of which may explain my current lethargy or at least let me off the hook of billspaying work today. Then you got your quantum-mechanical mysteria, in which matter seems to have no ultimate existance as such, and may not even have suchness, as such, except in our interactions with it. You do the math and bingo! you're standing there square in the middle of what you're supposedly observing, and you start knowing how a particle is just about equal parts energy and gestalt, and not even locatable except in what is commonly known as a "probability cloud". In all likelihood the little blighter is right at the center of that cloud, right at the peak of the bell curve, but then again maybe not. You can't know for certain. As it turns out, you can even walk right through your wall and most likely never collide with anything except pure potential, and that, my friend, is not a reassuring bit of news for those of us who still owe the bank. However, if you stop paying your mortgage, it may be reassuring to note that the street you end up sleeping on or even the thick walls of debtors' prison can no more constrain you than an old family penchant for, say, rage or martyrdom or whatever. Back to that middle way: so, on the one hand, you have Cartesian "fact", which is basically the set of mechanical explanations for how things appear to function in isolation. It doesn't allow for infinitely complex interactions with everything in the universe. It's very useful, but it also tends to lead to a bad case of engineering, in which every problem, perceived in isolation, has a solution, perceived in isolation, and no time is wasted complicating things. Then, when the culture gets tired of grand projects and more or less raping the planet, we move on to personal opinion, eschewing objectivity, and adopt a new religion of identity that values above everything else, even that fresh-showered feeling, a bunch of comfortably self-propping notions that in the old days were always preceded by 'mere'. As in: mere taste, mere fashion, mere pop, stuff like that.

This is what I'm getting at: 'fact' is always so narrow that it's dangerous, and opinion is always so exclusive of the shared human experience that it creates illusions of identity, self, and isolation that all but disallow the sufferer to experience tragic one-ness. [By the way, the disenchanted terrifying oneness of the universe is what modernity is trying to avoid, bracing scientific-heroic rhetoric to the contrary, IMHO.] So: in light of this, I hereby urge myself to be humble about my own observations and 'knowledge', and to focus on shared human experience, like comfort in food, people, and shelter. Ok.

Here I sit in Camelot
Sher having drunk alot
And really sloshed is how I feel
Cuz rose-ay is the real deal which really rimes w/ onion peel.

Massive are the beams that sway
and undergird my new sashay
and due to them I list and stray
Into the headache of a brand new day lying in bed w/ Doris Day

Or at least someone who looked like her
When on Hallows' Eve I looked at her
Accross a wine-dark dance floor
Upon which the wretched poor were bouncing to Justin Timberlake

Which I see is not a proper rime
But at this point in thyme
I really need to watch a movie
and I got Rushmore from Netflix today and she looks real good.

The end.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

K's Writing

K does high/low very well and this works because it mixes funniness with poignancy. You always laughweep because it's barely bearable tragedy.

Not Necessarily a Design Methodology

If you stand anyplace and block out the noise for a minute you can feel a sort of tug that suggests a best orientation, a best direction to face. And if you walk around with this kind of attention you will notice that some places and orientations are better than others. It is hard to explain why. There are some easy explanations of the social-evolutionary kind: we stand most comfortably with our backs to walls, facing open space, maybe responding to a survival instinct that co-evolved with our forward-facing vision; we enter dark enclosed places with some trepidation, maybe because apes who didn't didn't live long enough to sire our line. But why is a chair on a porch best oriented just so? I've noticed that if I pay attention closely I feel very small tugs right and left, up and down, sunward and shadeward, and that if I don't heed them I feel slightly off, maybe slightly misaligned, and this sense of wrongness grows until I feel agitated. And I've noticed that people tend to place themselves more or less predictably, given the chance. These subtle forces are not purely spatial, they are also social. If you're sitting on the porch oriented comfortably and a friend [or an enemy] comes out and sits down, near or far, the forces respond as a planet responds to the orbit of a moon. Everything, actually, has its own gravity. We sit with our back to the wall, but if the wall is plaster or wood or stone we notice a gravity that has qualities that are very hard to describe.

When I have the luxury of designing for myself, I try to take the most direct route to rightness, and this involves very detailed, complete, three-dimensional mental images of a place, to which I return over and over until everything feels right from every point in space. Then I take this mental image and transpose it to paper. Sometimes I have new clarity as I draw, but mostly the drawing is just a record of what is already clear in my mind. This process takes concentration in the form of disciplined day-dreaming, in which I mentally enact many daily activities inside my mental model: I walk down a passage with my hand dragging on the wall, I cook, I sit by a window, I reach for a book, etc. And as I do these things I make adjustments: I roughen the stone of the passage wall, I raise a table-top and thicken it, I lower a windowsill and move a stack of books onto it. As the image evolves and solidifies it becomes less and less conceptual, more and more tangible. Architectural ideas, no matter how dearly I hold them, tend to weaken, compromise, and dissemble. The house becomes an aggregate of many small local decisions based on what I can feel about their rightness. I loosen my grip and symmetries, symbolism, fashion, and all the other forms of conceptual prejudice tend to fall away, leaving an artifact that is in many ways accommodated to its site, the way worn shoes accommodate to the wearer's foot. These mental models are intensely dynamic. Every time I put something in a place, the place changes, and the object responds to the change that its initial presence precipitated. There is a kind of diminishing echo of influence between the place and the objects I place in it, and the echo finally dies in perfect accommodation between place and object. Following this metaphor, an object that is placed without regard for the site creates an undiminishing noise, and will always feel incongruent and wrong.

Everything in a place has its own gravity. Even small things can be set at odds with their place, as noticeable as a thorn. This is not to say that meticulous design and thematic integration create right places. In fact, the best places seem to be more or less provisional and hodgepodge and contingent. There are so many reasons we can love a thing that things that are supposedly unmatched can be beautiful together. I have a beautiful Japanese rectangular bonsai pot, glazed pale green, sitting on a very rough Burmese sideboard which sits in front of an almost chartreuse wall. This serendipitous arrangement seems about right, and I like it, but recently I set down an orange bag on the sideboard and noticed that the whole room seemed to have found a new center, as though these beautiful objects had been waiting for something. It's hard to come up with a social-evolutionary explanation for this. Maybe we primates love to see an orange fruit in the green canopy of a tree? So why don't I get the same sense or rightness when I place my orange highlighter on this green sticky note? No idea.

It is good to be right at the edge of what I have words for. The words like a wall at my back, and the open space of not knowing spread out before me.

Piteous Interviews with Brief Men

One of the jobs that writers are supposed to do is to hear lost voices. The narrowing forces of 'education' as a commodity--'education' as the stuff you're supposed to know to be civilized or credentialed. Or something.--are constantly whittling down a life's sustenance to a list of more or less homogeneous lists of what one must read, know, think. And if you're not careful, of course, it's possible to come through a really pricey and plush-carpeted education having learned to confuse the assimilation of lists with thinking itself. (The difference between silently rummaging through data and thinking is almost completely lost on me, for instance. And may be important. (The difference.))But people who read looking for information in aid of a particular project read very differently. Or maybe it's better to say that reading is done differently by people who are looking for clues. They have to listen, follow a faint hum that leads them along. Or that's how it seems to me.

Eliot heard Donne; D. H. Lawrence, weirdly, heard Melville; John Ashbery heard John Clare. Not because, I think, they were looking to land a killing blow in some sort of cultural cage fight. More because they were looking for company, or listening for words to describe an experience of being in the world for which they had not been handed words.

I heard an in interview with David Krasinski on NPR this weekend about his film version of David Foster Wallace's story Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The title alone is so audibly Wallace, right? But Wallace himself was sure that he was inaudible. Or worse, that what was audible in him was not what was best in him, was not what he aspired to, was not what he felt charged to deliver himself of, to make good on. It is very clear that Krasinski has heard him, knows that these fictional interviews are powerful because of a particular kind of honesty that perseveres despite the near impossibility of saying what is true without dragging in what is false in this vocabulary that we speak. Krasinski hears that Wallace's 90's-speak pastiche is not merely hip, self-consciously correct satire--although it is, may God forgive us, that too. Wallace's 90's speak is a form of confession that requires that the speaker never wink at the audience to grant it absolution by including it in the joke, never turn to the audience to collect its gratitude. Krasinski hears Wallace, who as far as we know went to his death believing himself inaudible.

You don't get to know who will hear you.

Taxes

I, for one, simply cannot pay my taxes. I make middlin'-good money, have three kids and a child-support payment. I own my own business and have no employees because the record-keeping and hassels are stunningly death-dealing. I earned lots of money in 2007, and then gave most of it to my ex-wife, because the house was at peak value and my income was high and those were the things our settlement was based on. Then I lost almost all my work and have earned less than 25% of my 2007 income since then. I can't afford to pay my '07 taxes, haven't even filed for '08, and now I have only a few weeks before I need to file for '09, and I can't even make my child support payments on time and am stressed all the time about insurance, health-care, car repairs... hell, I can't manage to save more than a few percent of my income. I spent the last of my savings on a new roof this summer. How do actually-poor people even EAT? The only way I have been able to sustain this grind is to take it one day at a time. I can make as much as $100 per hour consulting, but my back taxes are more than I can make in a YEAR with my normal workload, and then they'll take a big chunk of that... And what's maybe worst of all is that I can't think of one lousy thing to say about this that isn't s familiar to most Americans that it's totally boring. There is no place to get legitimately, publicly, spectacularly, productively angry, which is what I want to do. So I just sit here and ineffectually write it out. All my friends have heard this 100 times and are tired of it, I'm sure. Most of them make less than I do. I want a bloody revoLUtion. Ineffectual men always do. The temptation to just vanish is very, very strong. Ok. That's all.

BTW, it will cost me $900 x 3 just to FILE my damned paperwork for those three years. Where do I get that? Quit paying for the house or child-support? Huh?

nonstop bloody busyness and now 1 am beer and ambien and then start all over again

A Sacrament

A bridge across the Susquehanna is not a sacrament, and neither is a highway with Amish buggies into Lancaster, PA. Got directions at dusk from a very old young woman missing her front teeth, she paused a long while from putting her baby in his carseat to puzzle out the way to Water Street. Last light on dark 19th C brick is not a sacrament, falling night is not a sacrament, and neither is a cat stuck on a steep slate rowhouse roof, even if it's stuck there until somebody lets it back in.

Waiting for the band to come on is not a sacrament. An accordion under one arm and four beers in the other hand is not a sacrament. An accordion is not, a Guild hollow-body six string is not, the worn scar below the f-hole is not a sacrament, and the singer's reluctance to speak or make eye contact is not a sacrament. Nothing is consecrated by a three-step sway aloft on a boozy waltz, and nothing changes when the singer closes his eyes and his brother leans into him for the chorus, because singing to the punched tin ceiling that shines two stories above an audience passing round a bottle of Maker's Mark is not a sacrament. Stomping out a waltz is not, certain people touching each other who otherwise never touch because your heart is too good for this town is not a sacrament. The sound of too much sound is not a sacrament, when it's like holding your ear to the ocean and you're pretty sure you're hearing the world's highest octaves for the last time, it is not a sacrament how imaginary harmonics become indistinguishable from actual harmonies. Sweat and fatigue late at night with the presence of other bodies moving and the smell of beer is not a sacrament. It is not a sacrament when the Maker's Mark comes by again, almost gone and sloshing golden, dark and warm in your throat and your heart is too good for this town could be nearly anyone. Your booted heel stomping onetwothree, onetwothree against the floorboards is not a sacrament although it could almost be a voice and the voice could almost be a tall man with hair in his face thinking your heart is too good. Gratitude is not a sacrament, loneliness is not a sacrament, silence is not a sacrament, and neither is a bridge across the Susquehanna.

On Re-reading Christopher Alexander

I don't know how they did it to curmudgeonly, resistant, skeptical me, but somehow my architecture professors instilled in me a set of profoundly-rooted compunctions around what is usually called modernism. Somehow it got under my skin and into a part of my brain that is remarkably impervious to criticism and evidence that the peculiar congeries of aesthetic qualities that arose right around WW1 in Germany and France contain sweeping ethical imperatives. Somehow, unadorned, flat, white walls, uninterrupted expanses of glass, fixtures that look like they belong in a submarine, and an overall facelessness or blankness came to signify solidarity with the proletariat, which in the USA means something like: not getting all hoity-toity and remembering where you come from and honoring your small-town roots, whether you have any or not. This is, of course, absurd. Whatever the needs of the European proletariat back when Marxism still had some cachet and could maybe even save the world, that kind of faith in a political solution is long-since dead, and architecture was never more that a mutable symbol that easily accommodated the post-soviet condition by switching meaning: from symbol of egalitarian solidarity and state munificence to symbol of corruption, decay, and terrifying soullessness. In America, the same aesthetic was almost immediately bought up by big, faceless corporations to become decoration for their headquarters. Here it meant, and means, efficiency, solidity, no-nonsense busy-ness, seamlessness, international reach, etc. But here I sit still more or less in hock to that old Corbusian idea: ornament, surface decoration, gaudiness, that sort of thing are all holdovers from an old regime of bourgeois preoccupation with status through conspicuous consumption. Maybe only the rich could afford decorative crafts, so the poor found solidarity in machine-made sameness? No, actually, that's what the academics, revolutionaries, and architects postulated. The poor had forever decorated as much as they could, and had always displayed considerable ingenuity in decorating on a budget. Their idea of a good house was a decorated box. Always has been. Nothing new here. This criticism of Modernism is old hat: all the seamless, smooth sleekness was not the organic result of efficient design and noble concern for the poor, it was an aesthetic. And, it happened, it was an aesthetic that provided developers and states to house their poor in very cheap boxes. It also, conveniently, resisted decoration, which had long been the public display of clan identity, so it was very useful for multinational economies to consolidate their populations through sameness. These were the days of mass-production, international fashion, the beginnings of mass media exposure, and Esperanto, remember. So what Le Corbusier theorized and proselytized, whatever his intentions, quickly became a tool that worked well for the bourgeoisie, who could leave it at work and go home to comfortable old houses. etc etc etc.

And: "comfortable old houses" raises some sticky questions: why do we say that? Why are modern houses almost universally derided as uncomfortable? What went wrong? Here's an answer: what went wrong was a compound, complicated thing best summarized as a series of pseudo-ethical arguments about the meaning of architectural form combined with the oft-cited European susceptibility to revolutionary ideas around WW1. I can't picture another time in history that could have been such fertile ground for these ideas: millions of buildings destroyed, millions of homeless people wandering the countryside and choking the cities, a general disgust at the past that led up to the slaughter of the trenches, all that stuff. The field was freshly-tilled and watered, and they planted the seeds of change.

It took a while to see what was going on. After some years the gleaming buildings became sooty and rusty. People started hanging distinctly non-Bauhausian curtains, the socially-condensed poor didn't own their properties and began to vandalize them. The Utopian Platonic perfection of the early Moderns looked pretty bad in real-world conditions, and became downright squalid, pretty soon. It became easier to criticise the precepts of the Moderns, which had seemed like a gospel of salvation a decade or so earlier. The building boom after WW2 pushed this further. And by now a whole critical apparatus has grown up around the machine aesthetic. But one very strange thing about that criticism: there are almost no architects involved. Architects and architecture critics have almost universally stuck to their guns, to the point where a traditional building, made of good old stone and wood, is seen as retrograde, out of fashion, downright laughable. Modernism has become the arriere-garde. Funny how that happens when you serve the state and corporations. Anyway, here's where Christopher Alexander comes in:

In the sixties, [of course!] he proposed what amounts to the most radical challenge to modernism yet: he suggested, gently but firmly, with tons of examples and some very beautiful little pictures and lucid prose, that what we really need in our houses and towns is a set of normative standards or rules, that basically amount to a how-to manual for designers. Porches should be 6 feet wide if you want to sit at a cafe table, 9 feet wide if you want to dine. Kitchens should be the heart of the house and should have a place to eat and a place to sit by a window. Windows are tricky, and should usually be small, even when the view is spectacular. Fires are not simply heat sources, but have deep psychological or even archetypal meaning that defies analysis and programming. Ditto water. Roofs should SHELTER, not just by being waterproof, but by creating a psychologically-satisfying sense of enclosure and safety. Stuff like this. He was proposing, I think, to remove architecture from the realm of conceptual art and ethico-political tool and return it to the accreted wisdom of the deep past, to tradition. Anathema in those days!

But I think he was right. Turns out you can't simply tabulate human shelter needs and devise a systematic machine for accommodating them. There is more to dwelling, which is, after all, closely held to BEING. The quality of a dwelling has existential meaning, somehow. There is something so at the root of humanness in dwelling that a house can't ever be just an enclosure, and a combination of intuition and hard-won lessons from the deep history of building seem to accommodate people better than any amount of programmatic cleverness and analysis has ever managed to do.

So, getting back to my own personal puzzle: why do I feel so resistant to decoration? Why is a sort of modern stripped minimalist cleanness my default design mode? Why do I have to work so hard to get the edge of a timber just right, all the while feeling professor Sobin hanging over my shoulder asking why don't I just leave it square and unadorned? Compunction! It feels like a hangover from a period of religious devotion! And I should know. Anyway, here's a comforting note of encouragement to myself: when I sit by a sunny window in an overstuffed chair with a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and sketch I come up with the most marvelous and beautiful stuff. Professor Sobin retreats into the bracing distant history of revolution and Marxist certainty, and I am left wondering at the power of a subtle curve in a timber to soften an entire room, and make it fit for habitation. I am left with little comprehension of the intellectual kind. I don't know why, and I can't say much in defense of the design intuition that allows this, except to guess that we have evolved as human beings along with our buildings, and we can't be separated from them, and we know when we're home.

Our Text This Morning Comes from Sting's Epistle to the Yrekans

A terrifying confession. Very few people have approached me and offered to explain life, and when they have I wasn't paying attention. More planning the next thing I was going to say. So my sources of wisdom may be a little haphazard.
But I remember reading an interview with Sting when I was a kid, maybe in Spin magazine or maybe it was Musician. Not Rolling Stone because there were lots of pictures. Anyways.

He said, in text that sort of Alice-in-Wonderlanded around these b&w photos of him cavorting in beret and hoodie on some Caribbean island that has since, ich scheiss dich nicht, been more or less alemonaded by hurricane, that Great Leafblower of Jehovah. He said that he, I think it was, "honed his musicianship" during the frequent periods when he was uncreative and more or less depressed. He said that learning was what made the pain of life bearable. And I thought, man, what a bleak vision of the world. Isn't there ice cream and stuff? Can't you always make something up and play it? And there you are with your upscale Wild Rumpus catered and you still can't be brave about the Darkness?

But I get it now, Sting, and I have come here to apologize. Or no, you're right that the tone is wrong for an apology. But I see now that you were being brave, not least because you were saying this to a rock journalist who I'm sure did all he could not to elicit this sort of thing. And that you seem not to be a (conventionally) nice or modest person is neither here nor there. The origins of our unhappiness may ultimately not matter a damn, though the moral high ground from which we view the unhappiness of others feel ever so firm and fecund underfoot. The Great Leafblower's extension cord is long, the workings of its Patient and Impersonal Bellows obscure, eventually the Toddler of Fate will find an outlet and figure out the plug. And though our cabana face placidly to Leewards, yet shall the wind march through like Sherman.
Not our fault; Nature of Things.

So let us hone our musicianship while we wait for inspiration, brethren and sistern. Let us not seek too far for pattern and cause in our rubble. And let us make of our profane jobs an holy work unto the Cosmos.
Amen.
[photo: Sting doggedly multi-tasks his way through an oppressive Mediterranean morning.]

Privacy?

So, Dude, would it be more conducive to the free exchange of ideas here if we shut this blog down to outside viewers? Your black butterfly poem should be in here, I think. It's important to me that this place be as free of impediments to thorough honesty as possible. I don't mind visitors, but maybe you do? Just checking.

Stuff I, V, Want to Do

1. Become 90% food self-sufficient. Growing fruit and vegetables, raising chickens, sheep, and pigs, hunting and fishing. The other 10% is for the wonderful exotics: seafood, chocolate, coffee, wine, that kind of thing.

2. Build my own house. I can't afford my mortgage, and I have a hunger to make stuff with my hands. I always have. I have almost everything I need to convert trees into lumber, and I certainly have the expertise. Now I just need the land and the time and the money for the stuff I can't make.

3. Move to Boulder. To my own land. This is a prerequisite for items 1 and 2.

4. Somehow overcome the dread, anxiety, and homicidal fury I feel when dealing with finances, especially taxes, which are killing me.

5. Figure out a way to have conversations with my family about what really matters to me. I have responded to being outnumbered by being silent, conciliatory, and neutral.

6. Finish my songs, orchestrate them for a small band of real musicians, and record us. I accept the possibility that I am delusional here, but I think some of my songs are really good, but definitely limited by my lack of proficiency on the guitar.

7. Learn how to write a narrative song.

8. Finish and publish my eccentric illustrated book about the sacralization of food, shelter, and love.

9. Either figure out how to act on what I've learned about my neuroses or quit therapy.

10. Figure out how to simplify my life, and really do it. I have too much going on, and I recoil from too much of it. One thing at a time.

11. Start painting again, specifically this idea I've been carrying around for years: a series of still-lifes and a series of portraits that get to that line between depiction and reportage. Y'know. THAT line.

12. Make some kind of indelible mark so that people will love, respect, and revere me. That's actually the motivation behind the music and book stuff, to be honest. So maybe here's a worthier goal: get to where I don't need the recognition and can just do creative work for its own sake, or maybe for ethical and aesthetic reasons. Be a self-starter.

Myles Murphy and the Build-Your-Own-America Kit

When I was in my early twenties a towering and ambiguous friend sent me a peculiar present. Three 90 minute cassette tapes recorded front and back, more than four hours of original music. Titles were recorded on the folded up paper inserts but outside that, partly visible from the outside of the case, there was also a large geometric pattern done in water colors and cut into three parts with 1/3 included in each case. And the most amazing part was the box. The cassettes were--entombed? enshrined? installed?--in a triangular cardboard box that sat upright like a pyramid, painted all over with trippy neo-Navajo designs in red and black and green.

And on the tapes were these brilliant meandering songs, mostly fragments of legends about odd characters. Dan the Pharmacist Fan, Elvis whom everybody loves, the Thunderbird. But also there was ambient sound, bird song, car engines, the sounds of things being found or knocked over or thrown together, rattlings and shudderings and quaverings of all kinds, the equivalent of thinking aloud. The vocals were not only sung but also moaned, whined, slurped bits of odd dialogue read in hysterical voices from all distances, from around corners, through improbable substances. Sent to me on my birthday. The whole thing was a token of grudging respect, or a capitulation to the need to be understood, much more than it had anything to do with affection. Or at least with personal affection. I was something of a second or third-string recipient but was finally deemed the most likely to understand the music.

I think maybe I do. But it took years for me to be able to listen to it as a whole thing. Partly because the sound quality is very bad but as much because of the heterogeneous, meandering quality of it. It kept needling me, more or less night and day, with its prickly brilliance, its oblique self-importance, its heedless facticity. Myles had made this music and given it physical form as well and now it irreducibly and essentially Was. It contained not only music but Facts of all sorts, pleasant and unpleasant. It is a shrine to omnivorous Americanness. And I now think I see why it was such an affront to me at the time. At a time when I was very self-protective and assembling my own fantasy version of the world, The Box accepted and held out to me everything: drugs, homelessness and insanity, bravado, self-destructiveness, restlessness. Cruelty as well as tenderness, tedium as well as wit, discord and melody, huge raw civic conscience and the anger that arises in those who have it, pettiness and charity.

So I played the first of these tapes as my daughter Emma and I drove down to the Smithsonian American Art Museum this morning to walk through another brilliant and heterogeneous version of America. I turned Dolby on and off, fiddled with bass and treble, gave her synopses, repeated good lines, trying to make it clear. I wheeled her chair past the faces of John Brown and Joseph Smith, the redwhite&blue collage with Obama's hopeful face, busts of Lincoln and Jackson, WPA cityscapes, weathervanes and walking sticks, statesmen and madmen and prophetesses and kept women, Sodomites, saints, suicides and dandies. All the parts have to be there. And arriving back home I see that my room is another version of the Build-Your-Own-America Kit, and my heart yet another.

Yoga Lessons

Here's what I've learned in three years of about twice-weekly, quite consistent yoga: When I face difficulty, as in an uncomfortable stretch or balance, my mind tends to recoil. It tries to get me to stop. Every time I choose to continue, which involves observing my mind's recoil as a more or less interesting fact while patiently explaining to myself that no harm will come of this, and some benefit will, I become better at choosing to continue. There is a sort of mental muscle that gets practiced, and the very same muscle is what is needed to be present, to 'lean into' difficult challenges of all kinds. Getting verbally assaulted used to occasionally bring me to physical violence and later gnawing anxiety and self-loathing. Now, when my insane neighbor barks something caustic at me, I am much more able to stand there and watch him yammer until he runs out of steam, and then go into the house and ignore him. Very effective, and easier on me. I am far more flexible than I was a few years ago, and stronger, and I have repaired some chronic misalignments that were gradually limiting my movement and enjoyment of life, but the most important thing I've learned from yoga is the difference between pain [what circumstances create] and suffering [what my mind makes out of pain], and how to manage my experience day to day with relative equanimity. I'll be damned if I don't sound just like all them yoga books. It works. It is strange at first, or was to me, but it is the most down-to-Earth pragmatic mind training, strange maybe because I was raised to believe that my feelings are the product of my circumstances, that my mental state is an unequal and opposite reaction to exterior conditions. I am relearning, and this has been a clear path to happiness. I also have a long way to go.

What's a Build Your Own America Kit?

How about a sorta divination matrix for a Build Your Own America Kit? Take the personal and cultural conditions that are most American and write them around the perimeter of one of those spin-the-arrow things they used to have for pre-digital games. Maybe: innovation opposite corporate slavishness, enthusiasm opposite victimhood, appetite opposite provincialism, faith opposite certitude, politically correct self righteous liberalism opposite know-nothing christian conservatism ... I'm being sloppy here, but sorta like that. In another concentric circle write the most American products: pop music, cars, guns, electronic gadgets, high journalism, comic books, junk food, talk radio, opinion, pornography, self-sufficiency mags, high-tech military stuff, etc... On a third concentric circle you write the things you are interested in producing: poems, essays, songs, foods, stuff like that. Then you spin the arrow once and get, say, provincialism. You spin it again and get, say, talk radio. Your third spin produces song. Then you write a song about someone listening to talk radio in a samll town. Or three other spins tell you to write poem about a self-righteous smartypants liberal finding Jesus. THis was more coherent before I started writing it. THe idea is that you basically make your own recombinant DNA for Home-Built Americans.

Or maybe a set of paper dolls and clothes that allow you to mix and match what is not mixable and matchable in America: a middle American guy with gun and an Obama T-shirt. High campiness possible here, too, which feels like maybe what America most is. I love how iconic things become ironic things when you change their context. The Marlboro man reframed is Brokeback. The Village People play straight, but the context makes them queer, doubly, for playing straight. Black conservatives are endlessly fascinating. I met a Navajo man in Boston, long black brain, silver and turquoise, boots, eariongs, all that, but turns out he was a manager at the Massachusetts MV. That was very American. I once saw a 6'8" very muscular man with long blond braids and ahuge yellow handlebar mustache wearing very wworn buckskins and fur walking down Newbury street. I figured he was either some kind of fetishist or an honest to Thor Viking. Where else?

FWIW.

V.

Stuff I Want To

1. Learn Spanish so I can travel easily and so I can read Roberto Bolaño properly.
2. Go on a walking tour of someplace in these United States. Unite them: they are for me mainly a series of disunited airports looking out over identical barrens. Walk the Pacific Crest Trail or walk through southern Utah until parts of my body start to naturally slough off.
3. Write. Keep writing.
4. Learn a lot more songs from my own Personal American Songbook. I love how you can whip out someone famous's beautiful obscure song and it sounds like you just found it under a rock in the parking lot but it opens up worlds. To me, anyway.
5. Make beautiful coffee carefully every day. This is sort of a cheater one to help keep up esprit de core in the chill shadow of some of the harder ones. But unshallow.
6. Be conciliatory less often or at least not out of cowardice or reserve. Sheesh.
7. Learn to fecken cook more than a scant dozen things out of my own damaged noggin.
8. Yogayogayoga.
9. Commit passages to memory that transport me when I read them. They're so useful once you've got them. They can keep teaching you.
10. Talk about what I want to talk about even when others find it a bit boring or bewildering. Not to be rude or opaque, but just enough that I don't feel inaudible and fall altogether silent.
11. Keep working on the Build-Your-Own-America Kit. Whatever that is. Figure out what that is.
12. Write a book. Maybe. (Refer to 5 for courage.)
13. Follow Gary Snyder's excellent advice to learn at least one form of traditional divination. I'll tell you why later. No, you tell me when I'm going to tell you. See there?
14. Learn the names and habits of more plants. Learn more about geomorphology. Stuff like that so that when I return to the dirt we'll be on speaking terms.
15. Walk an hour a day even when I don't feel like it. The rhythm of walking straightens out my other rhythms real nice.
16. Write songs. Write bad ones. Dare them to suck, suck, suck. Relish the good ones. Play them to my darkness.
17. Ride proud in the humble body.
18. Return often to good friends among books and music. What's with this preoccupation with always learning stuff I'm going to forget anyway?
19. And conversely, learn omnivorously. Not stuff necessarily, just learn. Follow the faint buzz, that kind of learning. Keep at whatever's forming. New synaptic connections are the cambium of the soul.
20. Love right.
21. Plan practical things competently.
22. And conversely, give up on the trying to control the future. I'm resisting aphorism here, because anything you say about this should sound like benevolent chaos.

Thank you!

God-like condescension, humor with a shrug:
Time called him "father of the Beats."
He replied: "An entomologist is not a bug."

Thank you for the Rexroth, brah. I dig.

It's a be-yootiful stitched flawless first printing, too.

U rock.

XOV.

Something to Think About

I been thinking about how there's too much happening in my life, which is another way of saying that the things I consider important take up more time than I can comfortably spend working hard enough to be happy with the results. I have 3 kids half time; I own a business; I manage very high-liability projects on which many livelihoods depend; I have a very active intellectual curiosity that demands regular feeding; I have a bloody willful pit-bull; I do yoga, walk, and meditate; I grow my own vegetables; I have an old decrepit house that is basically Howl's Moving Castle with me as that hearthfire dude; I insist on cooking meals for all sorts of ethical, aesthetic, emotional, and social reasons; I have IRS problems; I have great, complicated friends with dramatic lives; I have a girlfriend who lives 4 hours away; I have at least 2 psychotic neighbors... So I went looking on the 'net for something about maybe how people do this, except, to be honest, if someone handed me a recipe for exactly how to take care of all this stuff I would be so bored by the topic that I would lose the paper. Anyway, one thing I found appeared to be one of those reductive lists found throughout the self-help literature. But it's been sorta gnawing at me, maybe because I hope it's not true and maybe because it is, or both. Basically, it says: to be successful you can pay attention to only two of the following four things: your work, your family, your health, and your friends. Is this true? I mean, without getting too wound up in parsing "success", is there really just enough human attention in any one person to take care of two big interests? Maybe some really intense people who don't need much sleep can do three? Golly, I'm thinking, do I really need to give up at least some of the people I love in order to succeed at work? Do I really need to give up my health if I want to keep my friends and family? I guess the idea is that each of these things requires time and there's only so much. Maybe I can consolidate a few items, like include my intellectual curiosity in my "work"? My cooking in my health? My friends in my family? Certainly there are many many men who abandon their families and health for success at work. Certainly many many women have seen that having children makes a dent in their careers. Anyway, just trying to get a handle on my busy-ness and this four-burnered stove of life thing caught my attention.

Conditioning and the Non-Contingent Mind

My mind is a still pond, clear to the depths,

Into which my parents, with the help of

the cash-and-credit economy

and old-time religion

tossed a fully-revved, oil-belching

two-stroke roto-tiller when I was

too small and weak to

throw it back.

Song for Blake- Probably a Lively Reel or a Jig

I fell asleep planning my garden
but dreamed of dust and rue,
and banks of toxic spurges,
and swarms of locusts, too.

[Mournful pennywhistle here]

And I dreamed you were installing
a basin lined with rocks
to catch the rain now falling,
and running away like thoughts.

[Fiddle kicks it up a notch]

What was a hump of sunburned ground
now drank the water deep
and every bird within a mile
came fearlessly to see.

Fa la, la-la, la-lolly loo-la,
fa freakin-leakin la!

and brought with them grass and seeds
and laid them thickly down
and made my blasted hardpan
the oasis of the town.

He ha, ha-ha, hep-honkin hoo-ha,
he humpf-a-lumpf a loo!

Cottonwoods and chokecherries,
willows, grass, and sedge,
junipers and pinon pines,
and cliff roses 'round the edge!

[Guitar and banjo duel for a while]

And every kind of passerine
that nests west of the prairies
now beds with us and gorges on
clear water and chokecherries!

A Word of Wisdom for the Weakest of These, My Brethren

Chapter 1

1: If you ever forget who really owns your stuff, stop paying taxes and see who comes to get it. If you ever forget who you are, set aside worry for an hour and I bet God tells you. If you want a close-up view of a hummingbird you're going to have to shoot it. I bet you didn't know that no amount of saying sorry in that tone of voice is going to fix the situation you've got us into.

2: If you so much as LOOK at me crosswise, so help me I will break your arm.

3: If you don't turn that trash down, so help me I will come in there and do it myself, and it won't be pretty. You, mister, are going to live to regret it.

4: If you knew one thing about our family genealogy you would never put that stuff to your lips again. And this decision you're making I should just knock your heads together so you can get some sense.

5: There is no use crying over spilt milk, is what I always say. If you'd have stitched in time this kind of thing would never have happened.

6: No amount of blood on your doorposts is going to stop me from ripping you a new one. You might as well make up your mind right now that you're going to get with the program because believe you me there is no other option.

7: What I serve you isn't important. What's important is that we're eating it as a family and enjoying it. If you think for one minute that the kids in Cambodia would eat this with anything but gratitude, you're mistaken. I expect the same from you. Now shut up and eat.

8: Christ loves you when you keep His commandments.

9: The revolution would be televised if you were a little easier to look at.

10: Some sorry excuse for a human being you are. There's not a chance in hell you're ever going to be sorry enough to make this right. Not on MY watch.

11: I thought I told you to get a haircut.

Darśana, Leonard Cohen and Levon Helm

I recently got to see two of the great aging bearers of the (North) American tradition of words and music. And see is about right because in both cases I didn't get to hear much of them. I may have told you that Magdalen got a migraine within a few minutes of getting our chairs set up and hunkering down for the Leonard Cohen show in the rain. We got to hear "Dance Me to the End of Love" and then "Take This Waltz" as we headed for the exit, Magdalen weaving limply on my arm and the rain beginning to fall in sheets on those unlucky ones who weren't under the pavilion. I was surprised how little it mattered to me, actually, and how almost proud I was to be outside the feast. The main thing was I got to see the man. He was dressed in a black, wool Italian suit. Jowly and thin as he was he carried himself with great strength and flexibility and even power. As we walked past, he knelt on one knee and held his finger to his lips, dropping nearly to the bottom of his gravelly range to whisper across the night, "Take this waltz./ It's yours now,/ It's all that there is."

For Hindus, enlightenment can be conveyed by seeing a great master or by seeing the divine in a person. It's called, apparently, and not in Roman letters, darśana. And these two experiences helped make sense of it for me. I was oddly grateful to see Leonard Cohen, and his image on stage has taught me something about how one holds oneself when one is a pilgrim but finds oneself in the black Italian suit of a cabaret singer. And how one holds oneself when one is a sensualist whose body is aging and failing. Stretch, bend, invite the body to continue finding postures for the eternally youthful, eternally restless soul--these postures must change as the body changes, they will be abbreviated, more cautious, but they can work just as well as the postures of the young body, confounded as it is with so much energy and so little decisiveness or knowledge or stillness.

And then this past Sunday I got to see Levon Helm. He came on stage with a young forty-year-old's thick head of white hair but the stooped shoulders and wiry, slightly bandy-legged gait of a much older man than I'd expected to see. His singing voice is strained and scraped but normally very strong, or at least very determined. He sat at the drums, suddenly full of strength and succinct skill, counted off the 9-piece band and lit into "Tennessee Jed". Only after Helm had pounded away at four songs did the guitarist, Larry Campbell, who had been singing lead so far, allow as how we would have noticed that "Levon hasn't been doing much singing today." None, in fact. There was no vocal mic anywhere near him, because his doctor had forbidden him from singing. Helm didn't even talk in the course of the show, including at the end when he walked back and forth at the front of the stage touching the hands of maybe a hundred people in turn, while his bandmates and the stage hands looked on, seeming puzzled and maybe a bit put out. Everybody wanted to touch him. All the younger performers mentioned him as they played their sets. We all felt the significance of being near him.

And at the end of the show nobody seemed bothered that he hadn't sung. We had gotten to watch him, his obvious physical pleasure as his wonderful band played these songs that are his but also belong already to the American tradition. The songs and the feel of his drumming under his voice are all now a part of the lineage, they are more than just a man or the work or the voice of a man. If someone is playing "The Weight" in the next room, you can feel Levon Helm's presence coming through the wall to you--that restless sweet talk on the snare as his drums leave space for the chorus to catch up to the beat. It's what Frost said about how the "sound of sense" of a well-formed sentence can be heard just as clearly from the next room. I mainly felt grateful to be in his presence. And his presence is actually more proof than I needed of his existence. The sight of him showed me that I already knew him quite well. I can feel his existence every time I cop the descending baseline, the one that weaves hillbilly-wise down to the truth of the chorus, and that I recently took my turn stealing from him. Twice; in two recent songs. Thanks for giving me something to steal--honorably and goddamn well for good--from you, Master.

I'm taking both your waltzes, and I hope that someone will take them from me.

Y'all Lack a Stithy, K.

My better, true maker: I would make you a wordshop
More private than a bedroom
At the top of narrowing stairs, over a high threshold,
Under a header low enough
To keep all of your comings and goings humble and slow.

It's not a room for living, but for working. The ceiling
is low and crude. The walls are shelved
in cedar to protect the many books, planed plain, only
incidentally beautiful.
The window is high and shortsights a white wall, for light, not view.

The floor makes no concessions: one frivolous sock-slide
and it'll punish you with splinters.
The too-low desk is of the same pallet-wood. The thick door
silences domestic squabble.
I trust your tidy self to regulate the piles of paper.

The jamb says: KEEP OUT, in Roman. Salesmen, children, and wives
Will read this and take the deadbolt
seriously. When your dog is old he can come in
for naps, because dogs want to be
with a working man. He may even make it into your poems.

Your guitar has a stand so you can admire its shape
against the red wall. You will
remember your youthful needs when you see it there.
There is a small mirror turned to
the wall. On the back is painted: BREAK IN CASE OF FIRE.

In the drawer of your too-short desk is a drawing your
masterbuilder gave you: a just-right
desk of flawless oiled cherry, perfect in every way,
the way things are as planned. He will
build it for you when you finish this next poem.

There is no fucking phone, nor anything else you can
plug in except a lamp. The room
is just big enough that you can touch only two walls
at a time if you lie on the floor and
stretch like you're learning a foreign language or yoga.

If the room works as planned, which is to say: perfectly,
then when you go downstairs at the end
of your workday you will blink like Plato must've when
he had been right to the mouth of the cave
and was trying to figure out how to tell everyone about it.

The Architect Hears a Tinny Echo

I who share your melancholy
dispute the verse below as folly.
In fact the fierce impluse to write it
is lively proof it's mainly bullshit.
And as to your three well-loved daughters
and whether you've written on water:
it's fire you write on, and fire that stays
your like, who do not look away.

To Be Painted in Water upon Blank Paper

I, the fuck-up Vandenbergh,
With clever hands and useless words,
And papers from universities,
Bought into endless scarcity;
And may these few words wash away
And not get in my daughters' way.

Haiku

My girls have many
clever ways to stay up late, skip
chores, and get ice cream.

The Last Supper Party

Judas, jilted, watched his ephebic Lord
Dip his long hands in rose-water, and take
The towel from James. He started forward

But paused in the door long enough to make
A quick adjustment to his sky-blue robe
Where it stretched across his gut, and to shake

The dust from his hem. He squeezed by the stove,
Sooting his ample backside, avoiding
Eye-contact, breathing in the scent of cloves

From a groupie's hair. He heard in passing
One pretty boy sing to another a
Fragment of a popular tune, flipping

His hand to the rhythm. Bartholemew
Was whispering, agrieved, leaning accross
The table to disagree with Andrew,

Who looked amused and leaned back to toss
An almond into his fat-lipped mouth.
Judas took the bench across from his Lord,

Hooked a wine-bowl from in front of Matthias,
That earnest hanger-on, and gulped it dry.
James nudged him the towel, then returned his eyes

To his Lord, who was wrapping up a joke.
His Lord smiled and shrugged a brown shoulder back
Into his seamless robe, coughed, turned, and spoke

Too quiet to hear. They shushed, the door clacked
Shut to keep out the street noise, and their Lord's
Sweet voice held them all like planets, in fact

Even the city boys hung on his words
Like dresses on girls. They jostled for sight-
Lines, but quietly. Some stood on the curve

Of the hearth. The sagging benches were tight
With the twelve and their closest friends and aids.
Their Lord got down to business, asked for light,

And thumbed the ledger. Boring stuff, he said,
But we had to balance the budget, keep
The purse-strings tight, pay for rooms, wine, and bread.

He went on. The boys shifted on their feet.
Judas remembered the heady days when
His Lord had been mobbed by throngs on the street,

Even had his robe torn, his name chanted, been
Hassled by the Romans and the pious
Both. But now these fine robes, this good red wine,

These boys with their oiled black hair who eye us,
The acknowledgement of the priests... What now?
The poor widows outside and the silk that we tie

Our robes with indict us. Judas looks down
At his disgusting belly and at the
Shadow of his loaf-like nose. John's head bows

And starts awake. James' knee presses at
His Lord's. Judas stares at his Lord's brown ear,
More perfect than any man's. His Lord pats

The ledger, closes it, and smiles. He clears
His throat, and the room relaxes. Its axis
Doesn't change: their Lord is their shepherd.

The mood lightens. John yawns and stretches.
Judas' Lord smiles at him, catching his eye.
"He maketh them lie down in green pastures",

He says, and winks. Judas, confused, just smiles
Back. His Lord speaks again, this time to the guests:
"How about some supper? Please, stay awhile."

And when they were served, their Lord took bread
And broke it, and said: "I am tired", and ate.
Then he drank wine, and some ran down his beard

Like blood, and James caught the drips before they
Could stain his robe. And Judas' Lord said:
"This is why I wear a red robe to these affairs",

And he leaned into James and laughed, his red
Lips stained with wine. The room a sudden din
Of drunken babble. Judas sat back, fed

Too full, very drunk, and beginning to spin.
He heaved up from the table, wiped his mouth
On his sleeve, glanced around, and couldn't think.

His Lord watched him stagger his way around the
Guests on the floor, unstable and heavy.
He lurched past security, and out the

Door, into the cool street, where the lepers
And beggers kept their patient watch. Roman
Guards approached, tipped off by the neighbors.

Picture Judas, a fat and ugly man
Wearing a fine robe, drunk, love-sick, moon-lit
In a silent crowd of grey-ragged bums.

The guards went to him, of course. "You Iscariot?"
Like they owned the place. "Tell us you name",
The small one demanded in bad Aramaic.

Laughter came under the door. Not the same
Delighted laughter they'd had for their first
Big crowds, before the ledger and the fame.

Judas was about to speak when the door burst
Open and out steps his Lord, unsteady,
The beggars stood, but Judas got there first

And kissed his surprised Lord. The guards were ready
And grabbed his arms, and pinned them. "I'd give you
Thirty for that robe, Jew" one soldier said,

"If I had it", he laughed. They marched him through
The still-recoiling crowd, and away to
The holding cell. Judas, along with a few

Of the twelve followed, but other guards moved
In and held them back. That night Judas tore
His sky-blue robe and hanged himself by stepping
Off his narrow bed.