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.

Sonnet 116, Revised for Modern Times

"But that's not what I said", he said, "You are
Making up a story. I'm not in it."
She slapped the armrests. He glanced at the car-
Light moving on the ceiling. He couldn't
Look at her. She said "Can't you even look
At me when I'm talking?". He said "No. I
Can't even see you. In here." Then she took
His hand, which he left there but limp. Then: "Why
Do you even invite me here? I don't
Feel welcome here. You make me want to leave."
"Again", he sighed. He rolled away. "I won't
Try to stop you this time." He hardly breathed.
The edge of doom: all these brief days and weeks
They had walked it 'til they began to speak.

I Know, Right?

This from On the Road: The Original Scroll version, which is mainly like the other one except it has Wolverine:

I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the ticketmasters threw me out. Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under his father's roof, then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

He was hungry.

And this one:

"Where do you live Ponzo?" I asked. "Nowhere man. I'm supposed to live with Big Rosie but she threw me out last night. I'm gonna get my truck and sleep in it to-night." Guitars tinkled. Bea and I gazed at the stars together and kissed. "Mañana," she said, "everything'll be allright tomorrow, don't you think Jackie-honey man?" "Sure baby, Mañana." It was always Mañana. For the next week that was all I heard, Mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

Blogging Makes Me Well

Dude, the Modern Condition, and many of its little Sub-conditions, is slaying me. I cannot freekin believe how much it's slaying me. For example: I really need to have some clear ideas and I need the energy to carry them out or I will die without accomplishing anything but my phone rings and the UPS guy wants to chat and my keyboard runs out of batteries, and even if I work extremely hard for a year I will not get close to paying off the taxes I owe for 2007, and won't even begin paying 2008, and will be late for 2009, and will be well into wracking up a huge fee for 2010, which makes me want to bloody well destroy the IRS building and take I rifle out into the desert and not come back, ever. I am so burdened by obligations and responsibilities that I can't even find a way to get started on them. When I drive down the street I want to destroy everything. I don't want to play the game. I can't even think of anything funny to say about this.

To the Unknown Self

Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?

I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?

I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?

I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.

All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.

And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as the lowlying darkness of a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape, become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K

sleeptwitch, nightalk

So, The Wrester? Heartbreaking and undeniably real for starters. My first response is there it is. Like, we are what we are and there's little to do about it except try to plan accordingly in order to spare others pain, where possible? But why did you really like it?

I kept thinking that the line between Micky Rourke playing someone who can only live by his own exploitation, if that's what it is, and Micky Rourke being someone who can only live by his own exploitation, was very thin. That face; my, those blood vessels that carry ravages have been busy. Maybe the real problem with judging others isn't that it's rude, as Protestantism would have it, maybe it's that you can't argue with WHAT IS. But I must admit that I've been drinking. Some beer. s.

Today again to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this time for the portraits. Wheeled Emma around because she can't stand up for so long. Good to push her weight forward in the world: past John Brown, Joseph Smith, carved walking sticks, whirly-gigs, bust of Jackson, trippy Art Deco grillwork, WPA middling cityscape madness, elevator, elevator, tiny elevator. Ah, what is art but a way to talk without anybody there? And if one biproduct is the amplification of what would otherwise be inaudible for the wrong reasons, that 's not so bad. Make a few brute facts picturesque for the financigencia, fundable. Make an amusement park ride of primal gravity: well. Please send love and blithe spirits upon the tides of dawn, cools of night. Love one's elf.

Some Stuff about Pretending

V: "So why does raising a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then resolving it count as low rhetorical form?" Partly because low persons have used it to coerce America into bed recently. It still hums with the sad fug of loveless sex. So people like Ann Coulter (may she be forced to raise Madonna's African babies Bolshevik) will accuse Obama of steering America towards Socialism, which is alas so far from true, and then explain in these-people-just-don't-smell-the-peril tones about how he's betraying the Pristine Vision of the Founding Fathers. That and bare clavicles will get you rich.

And another reason is that it's so genuinely difficult to understand other people that pretending to understand them easily in order to mischaracterize them has, I think, the broad consequence of giving people the illusion that understanding is supposed to be easy. This sort of mock-patient, didactic name-calling is so much like those grad seminars where everybody talked real fast and nobody really understood anybody else and everybody assumed that they were the only one not understanding and so everyone talked a little faster still. Actually saying something true is difficult and understanding someone else's attempt to say something true is maybe even more difficult. Saying and hearing are more like gardening than like dis- and reassembling a rifle while being timed. The patience and slow method, waiting for foreign and heterogeneous bits to slide together, grow together. Not meant here as a sexual thing, although there is also, weirdly, a strong fascination to what you don't understand that is like sexual attraction. Waiting for things to come together is wonderfully creative and sexy. The Universe's desire to try new combinations moving through us. Pretending, inclining towards, moving with, grokking.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that you have to mean everything you say. That seems like not only a depressingly high standard but also a misunderstanding of how language works. That is, we don't just find words to make the sentences in our heads. We also learn to speak the sentences that find us. Like a new dance form that teaches you an unexpected way to move your body, and you try it and you realize your body works really well that way, that your body is truer, more itself somehow or that it has this unexpected dimension, when it's doing this dance. People like me have to say stuff before they know if they mean it; lots and lots of stuff. We try to minimize and repay the tedium we impose on our listeners. And so another reason why this is a low rhetorical form is that we need the good will of those in whose presence we pretend. Willfully give pretending a bad name? Squander whatever meagre capital that pretenders may have saved up? Madness!

Pretending--or whatever, probably I should be more careful what word I choose here-- is not the same thing as lying. Pretending--fiction, vision, experiment, spirit-talk, art and making, as well as openly patiently reading and seeing and hearing these things--all these are attempts to find new dances that say something about the body, that let the body become itself in some way. And the body is changing, don't you think? Along with the rest of us? And so for people to pretend for the wrong reasons again gives the impression that something difficult and on-going is supposed to be fixed, finite, easy. Or that all pretending is lying. Or that accepted forms of pretending--like religion and annual physical exams--are true. Good understanding and good pretending are difficult and sacramental and sexy. Bad pretending: eegh(shiver).

I know that when I willfully misunderstand and when I falsely pretend it's out of lack of courage. Or maybe another way of saying it is that I don't have faith that the Universe is becoming Itself in me and so I don't pretend properly. And this aloofness is sadder than anything that I suffer at the hands of the Universe.

That Rhetorical Thing Where You Set Up a Misunderstanding that Nobody Actually Has and Then You Disabuse Them of It.

"...that rhetorical thing where you set up a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then you disabuse them of it", as you called it, is such a powerful tool, K. It's really a very savvy use of desire, which, of course, is usually totally from the blue and left field, as in: there you are, thinking your chirping little thoughts, fiddling with pocket stuff, when a waft of bacon blows out the door of Trayf's Pizza and causes you to reconsider your plans, about-face, and grab a slice. Perfume, of course is designed to do this, just like bacon. As are ads. All these things set up a tension that must have been in you but dormant, like they're drawing a bowstring. So, what Nicholson Baker calls "...the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out" is the perfume of fiction, leading us on, making the conclusion available, etc etc etc... which is as good an explanation as I've ever dreamed up for David F. Wallace ending Infinite Jest the way he did: a mature reader is happy in the continuance of Don Gately's life beyond the end of the written-down part of it the same way that a mature lover is never really done...in other words: the need for a neat and tidy ending, preferably involving tension building to surprise and concussive denouement is the literary equivalent of the frat boy's one-minute stand. So why does raising a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then resolving it count as low rhetorical form? Seems like flirting with the reader, giving her options, setting the table, making desire.

Malibu Barbie Rides Her Dialectical Surfboard on the Wave of Aufhebung

I am SO not sublating today. It's 2:30 PM and I am, like, blogging. I had a major deadline yesterday, which I missed, and now I just cannot catch a wave. Does Malibu Barbie ever roll out of her picturesquely-rumpled bed in Aufhebung Dream House at 9:00, scratch, make a big elaborate production of coffee, read two New Yorker articles about overachieving super-rich Jews, take a BATH, check the garden, blog for a while, and then, finally, paddle maybe one wavelength out before being so crippled by dread that she simply returns to shore, picks up the New Yorker again, and sits on the edge of her easy-chair half-reading, her shoulders around her ears, heart racing with anxiety because she's not working? Doubt it. Malibu Georg-Wilhelm didn't name it Aufhebung Dream House for nothing. As anyone who's ever partied there knows, the place is positively humming with Historical Imperative. Hell, I met Oprah there!

But that was then. Countless waves have swelled and crashed upon the shores of the Ideal since I last stood there, my brow furrowed with concentration, my eyes piercing the horizon of immanence and transcendence. I grew weary. A bitter wind from the Schopenhauer archipelago tore the flesh from my bones, and I could no longer bear aloft the Comprehensive Philosophical Framework, even in the relatively manageable MP3 format. All the compound nouns and crashing consonants broke my will, and, finally, I was beguiled by Nature in the guise of Freedom, and now I am a slave indeed. Barbie wouldn't recognize me if I tried to friend her.

Reasons to Keep the Barbie Dream House Packaging

It's 9:30 AM and the girls are still asleep. This has required years of work. They all drink coffee now, too. Again, on the MBA model this is my work. I have cultivated a workplace culture where the girls can think outside the box, effectively add value, etc. I go downstairs to make coffee. The cat, who is terrified to eat without company, is psyched to see me. I put water on to boil and we go to the bathroom so the cat can eat. Because I did this to the cat, somehow, I think. She peers uncertainly up at the top of the counter for several seconds, rearranging her undercarriage for the 40 inch spring. The little dance she does is unnerving. Or maybe it's just for my benefit? This is the only time she appears to have little cat feet. She arrives, scrambling slightly beyond her apex, hunkers there crunching. The kibble is eerie. Have I communicated this idea to the cat? I'm not full-on afraid of any foods, except maybe figs, now that JZ explained about the horrific life cycle of the fig wasp.

10:53. Hilde staggers out in her wildly mismatched underwear, abbreviated (the underwear) to the point of terseness. Laconic. I'll make her coffee for the silence.

There are two basic versions of the Barbie Dream House, and if you don't correctly identify the one you bought--or, as is more likely, the one you were given before you could choose--you may be living your life totally wrong and wondering why you don't feel completely located, successful and at peace. If you own the Romantic Aufhebung Barbie Dream House set-up, then yes you will have to constantly sum and up and transcend all your earlier works. Your life will indeed need to unfold in some way that looks both monumental and organic, and you will require both heroic individuality and very deep communion with fellow RABDH Laborers. But the people at Mattel are no fools, and neither are they Sadists (although Google 'de Sade Dream House' for a good, if unnerving little chuckle). Your Barbie is hypersensitive to taste and touch. USE the amenities. One small representative example. Your Dream House is equipped with a large claw foot tub, which during the summer months, when surfing mainly replaces bathing, can be converted into a cannabis planter. But also take baths in it. You've got the sea, the sun, the wind, and endless amenities and small creature comforts. You'll also find all the scaffolding you'll need to erect the huge, cloudy forms that will express and guide your Soul, and keep you on the verge of transports and hysterics most of the time. The Romantic Aufhebung RV is a nuisance to park but really a load of fun. Get out, see stuff.

But there is some chance that you have Han Shan Barbie, as there was some chaos with the shipping department in the mid-Sixties that has regrettably had long term implications for a small number of Laborers. If you are frequently transcending your previous work and making handsome use of the RABDH amenities and you still do not feel completely located, successful and at peace, please find Ken and examine the small of his back. If he has a small tattoo that says either Big Stick or Pickup, and if you have repeatedly noticed his absence during parties only to find him huddled next to the convertible shivering and looking dreamily at the sky, then you should stop calling him 'Ken'. You probably have the Cold Mountain Barbie Dream House. The CMBDH is a totally different cup of tea.

Don't panic. Mattel has PDF files of the major Taoist literature available, and they'll even send out a representative if needed (although they smell odd and frighten children). The main thing you need to know if you have the CMBDH is that it actually is a dream, and should not be regarded as a set of objective facts. Learn to look at it in soft focus until your Dream House begins to resemble a cave with foliage hanging across the entrance. Allow rain and wind free access. Build a fire in the living room and keep it stoked up pretty good for a couple weeks. Squat more. So important, so important.

There are also a small number of Soviet era Dream Houses still in circulation.

On N Droppong By in the Middle of the Day: A Two-Fold Coffee Exegesis

She called and I scurried to order the kitchen but she got here before I had a chance to boil water or even excavate the French press from this morning's crust of cuarenteno. She handed me the Baume de Venise that was the solider and less befuddling reason for her visit, and, rather than begin with the peaches right there and then I put the bottle in the fridge for later. She did want coffee, but had only ten minutes which is not enough time for the boiling and French pressing, so we had clear, lukewarm water from identical glasses. We spoke over the stove. The peaches imperceptibly sank under their own weight. The clock ticked 600 times, and up she got, palmed her keys, and we chatted Saturday or Sunday for supper? and I walked her out to the steps and off she go. So yes, mouth-feel, and the whole-body involvement, the way it's not in your head, and the way it's a straight tentpole when socially you're blowing around all white and tent-like in the wind of not knowing for certain what to say or how to say it and you are so unmanned by the messiness of the kitchen that must be baring your privatest squalor.

Worklust

Where does worklust come from? How do you cultivate it? It's empirically true, in my experience, that no amount of thinking about something really gets anywhere until you get out your pencil and draw or write or pick up your guitar and play. My thoughts are pretty aimless and insubstantial and forgettable until I start writing, and then they just more or less spontaneously, without much help from me, take on an order and a shape and a trajectory and end up somewhere, often a place I couldn't have predicted. I often change my opinion about something in the process of arguing it out on paper. But that moment of getting out of my head and into the work feels like a very high threshold. I resist it with all the might of my formidably-built laziness. Lust doesn't require any effort at all, right? It's self-propelled. It's nearly unstoppable. Is worklust the right word for what makes some people produce so much? Or is it boring old discipline? Or is it occasional spasms of worklust that flare up in an otherwise boring schedule of disciplined, self-imposed, rationally-driven labor? Is worklust sustainable? How do you know the border between worklust and a pathological need to be recognized through your work? Or is that what it is? Huh?

Goodness Molecules, Flavor Dots

Dang, bra. I wrote me a whole bunch of nincomsense about coffee and some madness re: whether it's a taste or not, or whether it's this whole body/mind experience thing on account of it's a stimulant and it gots mouth feel. Mouth feel. (Pick the second one and we can go on from here without further ado. Do you pick the second one?) And what I was doing was that rhetorical thing where you set up a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then you disabuse them of it. The tendency of an audience, I speak from experience here, is to be sort of drawn in to the false drama of this and be sort of all amazed and relieved when the fallacy has been smoked out and untangled and laid to rest. Brings people together, and I would know because sometimes I'm together with them and we walk out talking about it, and how glad we are to be disabused of that thing we never even thought of unless we did and forgot, and we now have something in common. Our hands might even touch as we walk, and we pause for a moment and say, well, I'm parked up here a bit, good to see you. But it's a bad business because what are you supposed to do when someone has a real difficulty except the same thing you do when it's a cry wolf difficulty situation? So I had to save our blog from that sort of thing and now I'm back to about nothin. It seems to me that this non-paragraph is far preferable to the other thing that now I take back.

But here are the coffee thoughts. Or thought. I really really like coffee, V. It's a sacrament, and I'm not even kidding. Often, especially where espresso is involved, I will involuntarily quote Renfield from Dracula: "The blood is the life." Renfield is a warped and pitiable and deluded character but there it is. Little short on sleep for this kind of thing but I'm essentially serious. I was thinking that the wholeness of the coffee experience--that it involves your whole body including your blood vessels and synapses, that it lightens your mood and silences background static and puts certain things into very sharp focus--that this wholeness has something in common with your garden that makes both Good Things. But I can't explain it right now and maybe it's all strained and loopy. But it matters where things come from, what they're connected to. And it matters that you know where they come from, so that in a way when you receive them you sort of reach up from the balls of your feet through your pelvis and sternum, and balance the taking on your tongue delicately for a second, and then you receive. Something like that. Even though it's hard to explain why in ethical and economic terms. Because you would think, or I was trained to think, that food is food and textured soy protein with really awesome flavor dots ought to be fine. But it doesn't feel that way.

Tomatoes Misused, Reused, and Ogled.

I got major tomatoes and zookeeny, tell you what. Never have so many vegetables been squeezed out of so little unpromising-looking dirt, whether by skill or by natural fecundity or by shear dumb dint of labor. Basically what you got is a springtime of heretofore unprecedented raininess, followed by several weeks of hot sun of the direct yellow variety, during which yours truly applied some unrepeatable perfect mix of tapwater, horse dooky, composted lawn clippings, kitchen scraps, and good wishes. The assembled ghosts of all the deceased migliore fabbri are looking over my sunburned shoulders this year silently cheering me on and high-fiving my repeated fortuitous accidents of impeccable plant husbandry. I cannot take even a sidelong glance out my rear window in the general direction of the vegetables without a two-pound brandywine crashing through the downright Brazilian canopy of verdure and into the bleeding morass of her saucy big sisters. You called them once 'misused tomatoes' in that chapbook of lovely sonnets and I have ever since seen in a high-summer garden all the May planting and August sticky waste as a story about a marriage getting so ripe it falls. Not to say that you could ever pick a tomato at its moment of perfection, right at the fulcrum of coltish girlishness and curvy womanliness, not more nor less but right at the very moment, and keep it that way forever. Pretty soon it's going to sag and sadly smoosh and gravitize a cloud of little flies and then you're going to set it on the counter to admire for maybe two days, max, before you put it in the compost so it can make a more lissome tomato next year, or maybe a zookeeny.

That bit about the compost: that's what I thought the moment I read you mention the bit about how we are just a temporary vortex of chemicals, some coming some going, and it won't last. That's a hopeful and happy-making thought when you look at my garden this year and the way it seems so skillful and intentional and artlike though what it is actually is: a coincidence of fortuitous circumstances and me standing there trying not to breathe so the tomatoes don't fall.

Asslight

So I'm nervous about starting this. Because it seems public maybe. Maybe?

Or because it's like walking out into new snow, which is really something little kids are supposed to get to do. I like the photo, though, and there looks to be no shortage of snow.
Satchel is out walking Lazlo. Satchel is this stubby grommet of a 10ish year old boy, and Lazlo his torpedo-shaped dirtywhite dog, and they have a sort of matching full-on-ness about them. Both their asses are on fire for this dusk walk. Over the last several years the neighborhood is filling up with new skate grommets and they look at me with complete indifference and incomprehension, as they should. I don't get it myself.

And it's the thing you said the other day about the tragic quality of feeling connected to everything--these kids and their incomprehension and time moving through them. Properly tragic, because it culminates in the complete union of the big IT and whatever molecules we're using at the time. Which seems to present a few curious questions.

Today I was looking at a couple of Howard Finster pieces in the weird jumbled annex of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Dude can't render, and his theology is laughable, or vicious even. It's like he's living in some sort of mythic, nonhistorical present where you'll never have to reckon with anyone different, but then catching a plane to Florida St. to talk to the MFA students there. But so I was wondering about the value of untutored naivete, hardy unchastenable naivete, bordering on willful dumbness. All that painting and in a way never getting really good at it, but getting good at work, good at filling up canvasses with text and color and lines, finding how a new thing begins to crystallize and letting it happen again and again, keep at a tangent as Heaney has Joyce's ghost say to him at the end of Station Island, cultivate a worklust. Just working. Or not just, I'm sure, but doing it, anyway.

Howard Finster and Lazlo and Satchel and me, maybe Joyce, and a man who works at a hedge fund and a young mother who walks awkwardly as though she has MS?, and a fox and a cloud of fireflies, we pass each other in the street. There's not enough light to see clearly by, asslight notwithstanding. None of the others looks up, maybe, and I almost stop them to make them see each other, me at least. Hey! I think, but only stand, unable for like the gazillionth time to say the thing I need to say. They are so much themselves, and they disappear away.