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.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
"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.
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.
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