Whitman's Bootsoles

Fall

2012-02-01T21:50:00.000-08:00

It was clear, as the car pulled in, that this would be a long, joyless ride. Something in the way the engine sputtered. Something about how she knocked. Thudlike, too methodical.

Things hadn’t been the same since that weekend she went to Connecticut without him. It had been spring then, flowers everywhere. He had been busy in the garden.

The leaves were still on the vine now, but they’d turned brown.

He walked to the window, looked out as the light slanted across her taut face.

“Wait a minute,” he said, motioning toward the door through the glass as he pointed, mouthing the words in an exaggerated fashion as he spoke without making a sound. Mimicking the words to her as though she were not already standing outside, did not already feel the chill... “Let me grab my coat.”

When My Father Died

2012-02-01T21:27:00.000-08:00

When my father died, I didn’t grieve. It wasn’t because I refused to let him go or was glad to see him gone, or any of the usual reasons. I didn’t love him too much or too little, or anything like that. It was just because the feeling never came. I thought it would, I expected it to happen, but it simply never did. It was like I was sitting in the train station waiting for the last train out, having arrived just on time by the clock on the wall, and got stuck forever in that moment when you’re not sure whether you missed the train altogether or whether it’s simply late, that moment before you are forced to decide that it’s not going to come and that it’s time to find another way home. You sit and read your paper and remain calm in such moments, with a studious kind of patience. You listen for the train in the still of the night and try to keep expecting it. You remain in the moment and think of something other than the paper and train and the waiting, and you wait until the next moment comes.

The call had come in at 2 a.m., while I was warm in my bed in the middle of an early night in January. It was five years ago, and I slept through the ringing. I awoke only when I heard my wife -- or, more properly put, the woman who was my wife at the time -- cursing the darkness and the phone and the world as she padded across the floor and felt around on the dresser for her glasses so she could make her way to the kitchen to pick up the receiver. I remember her scuffling urgency, coupled with the hint of resentment in her grumbling. She always thought it was unfair that she was a lighter sleeper than I, and that it was inevitably she who had to climb out of bed and push into the cold on a morning like this to answer the phone or the doorbell or the tree limb tapping on the window. Or the babies. Or the children into whom the babies had grown.

I rolled over and drifted in a languid suspension, half awake and half dreaming, then slowly roused myself from my slumber as I became aware of her voice as she spoke with the person on the other end. It was slack in the way that early morning yawning voices are slack, with the warmth of the body making the mouth wide and loose. “Hello?” she said, half yawning, half questioning -- fully hoping I suppose even in the midst of her sleep-induced state that it was a some drunk on the other end who had dialed the wrong number, since a call at that hour is almost never good news if it is meant for you. She grew quiet for a moment and listened to the person talking and I leaned out over the cliff, readying to swan dive back into the deep warm sleep from which I was only then half aroused. I teetered on the cliff and forced myself to listen to the silence in her voice before jerking back from the edge as the next words she spoke were unintelligible to me, but unmistakable in the way the looseness in her jaw had snapped into rigid attention. Her voice became tense, then concerned, and finally dawned to some horrible unspoken realization. I sat up in bed, suddenly knowing what had happened without knowing anything at all.

“Chris, it’s your mom. You need to get up and talk to your mom.” I walked to the phone, knowing it would be bad news and that my life would never be quite the same again.

If my life at that moment had been a song, it would have been a dirge. The movement would have been one of high funereal flourish, a brightening and tensing of the instruments before the long solemn march to decline. It was as if the tensing of the jaw of the woman who was my wife at the time, as she passed through loose slackness into rigid attention, had jolted entirely and immediately through me. I was awake, fully and completely, and tense with an unknown and ancient urgency.

“Hello? Is everything O.K?” -- I picked up the receiver and suddenly became aware of a stack of bills on the counter, and the fact that I had yet to caulk around the replacement windows I had put in the summer before. It’s odd how the littlest details suddenly make themselves known when your brain turns completely on. It’s like your entire life flashes before your eyes. I knew, even as I asked the question, that everything was not O.K., and I could be pretty certain just exactly which part of it wasn’t. And yet, even with the tension in my body, I felt an emotion that can only be described as relief as I heard my mother voice. The orchestra was playing something loud and dramatic in a minor key as I waited for her answer, and I could barely hear her talking through the music as she told me how she had come into the bedroom and found him stretched across the bed, how the paramedics had been unable to revive him, how I needed to fly out the next morning and bring a suit for the funeral. There was a slight decrescendo as I took a breath and she stopped talking, and I asked the question which had to be asked. My father had had a heart attack before, several years after I had graduated from college, and had actually been dead for several minutes before being raised from the dead to live on as if nothing serious had taken place. The average number of heart attacks in my family is three for the men by the time they are 70, so I knew that there was at least the theoretical possibility that this one, being number two, was not the final in the series. I asked if she was certain, as if there was somehow the possibility that this was just another false alarm. Then I paused again and music stopped, and the orchestra laid down their horns in expectation of her reply. I noted that her voice sounded surprisingly businesslike, as if she had processed the information and was satisfied with the outcome.

“Yes. He’s Dead.”

I put down the receiver and sat in the darkness until morning.

Born in the Hearts of Stars, Part 2

2012-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be born in the hearts of stars? This is the crowd’s inevitable follow-up question. It’s a reasonable but difficult question. It deserves the kind of measured and careful response one might give, for example, to a boy who has asked where babies come from. One must dance around the edges of mythology to give an adequate reply to such a question, but one must do this without falling into the fire.

The answer requires a bit of poetry, something more than a mere recitation of the mechanical workings of things, but the poetry must be informed. Too much fact makes the eyes glaze over, but too much fiction makes them blind. For example, to satisfy the boy’s curiosity about the origins of babies, one should not be too obscuring or invent too much fiction posed as fact, else the boy will spend his life when he becomes a man looking under cabbage leaves for his offspring or scouring the sky for storks. One must attempt, when answering such a question, to walk the fine line between science and fiction, without blurring the line so that everything becomes science fiction. This is clear enough about a topic such as making babies, on which everyone, eventually at least, professes to be an expert -- even though few among the crowd can correctly define the various body parts or systems which play a part in their pornographic understandings. It is even clearer, however, when discussing the making of matter, a subject on which few know anything or profess to know anything or, except in our little narrative, care to.

The problem is that the crowd takes matter for granted. The chair holds up when they sit in it, that’s all they need to know. What do they care if Heisenberg wrings his hands in the knowledge that this is theoretically impossible? It is the gap between science and practical fact that makes the crowd’s ignorance understandable. They live in a world of bliss because they live in a universe in which the blistering realities of the parts and systems that went into making up their bodies and their minds, or the ground on which they walk and the sky above their heads, operate in a way that protects them from having to know. As long as they can plant something in the soil and harvest it for their food, what need have they of knowing where the soil comes from, or what its particulate substances are?

There is another problem, of course, which is that many in the crowd have read storybooks and believe in mad scientists who cook up matter in their basement laboratories, alchemists who while searching for gold accidentally spill their inventions across the table and onto the floor so that the chemicals run out the door and down the street and into the soil and up to the sky. Or else they believe in a god who, as some other storyteller long ago claimed, created the world in the space of six days. The crowd takes comfort in these beliefs because they have not stopped to think how long it took this god or that mad scientist to create the other ten million worlds that whirl and roil through space. Or they have not considered why god or the mad scientist, if they exist, would go to the trouble of creating a world in which so many people act, while professing belief in his magic, as if the world’s creator has not even the power to heal their wounds or to stop their wound-making or to clean up the milk they continually spill across the table and onto the floor to mix with their eternal tears.

So, they sit on their chairs without thinking about the miraculous power that the chairs have to hold them up, or they sit in their pews or on their couches or in sidewalk cafes, and they argue like two little boys arguing over where babies come from -- except that some of them believe babies are found under cabbage leaves while others believes they are brought by storks. They argue until they are blue in the face and their fists turn red in anger, and they choose up sides and begin societies and develop cultures and establish academies which provide food for thought and grist for the mill of religious wars, and thus a thousand years are spent in murdering each other over which version of the fairy tale comes closest to the truth.

It’s sad, really, because neither version comes anywhere near the truth, but for these members of the crowd, it is the gap between science and faith that makes their ignorance understandable. They live in a world that is far from other worlds, and by associating only with those of similar beliefs they make that distance further still. What need have they of knowing whether they are right or wrong in their beliefs when they, and those who believe as they do, so thoroughly believe they are right? They remain uncurious not because they shun knowledge, but because their heads are filled with something that for them surpasses knowledge.

Except that now, for just a moment, they are not uncurious. For the purposes of our little story, they have gathered in a room and they are curious. Someone has posed a question. The scientists are amazed that they’ve been consulted at all, much less taken seriously for an answer. Normally they slink among the shadows and meet in the back alleys of their own small academies, whispering in quiet tones about the hidden nature of their knowledge. Normally they sit in front of their computers or their microscopes and admire the beauty of the world without having to give an account for it. But now they have been given center stage and with the exception of the occasional shuffling of one of the crepe tissue ribbons which swirl around the outer walls of the gymnasium, they have been granted a near perfect silence in which to make their case. They realize that they may have only one shot to do this, as the crowd is filled with preachers and philosophers and businessmen, all of whom are sure to want to poke holes in their story.

But they do know that the crowd needs a story, they need something which will hold their attention and give them hope and understanding, and the scientists know that the story must not be too impractical. They must use poetry to describe the motion of particles and the development of material concepts, and they know that the poetry must be drawn from experience. So they choose from among them one who has a gift for language, who has an imagination for narrative, and he is pushed to the forefront to explain. He leans into the microphone and clears his throat and replies.

Here is one possible answer, the scientist begins, one narrative scenario for how matter came from stars. The universe had, in the beginning, after the beginning of time but before the formation of matter, poured its dust across space in a brutal angry gesture. It had spewed and spit its rage like a drunken father, words lost in the hot infernal glare of his severity. The birth of stars, his children, was colored by the weight of this legacy. The stars had spun and sputtered in response to their brutish paternity. They searched for ways to give weight and meaning to their own lives. But muted by the trauma of their childhood alienation, they went unnoticed for millions and millions of years. Simple-minded hydrogen and helium stood in the midst of their fires and stared into the glow, but the stars found that they needed more. They became addicted, as it were, to their need for attention. They gathered more and greater strength unto themselves from the attraction of similarly violent elements who fed on the same alienation. They were like teenagers running in the streets in a world filled with anarchy. They formed gangs and cliques and bands. They strutted and preened and gathered their strength, and flailed their arms in protest, but they could not fill their voracious appetites for love, for affection, for the warm glow of admiration.

Lacking language to express themselves, having learned from their father only the impressive show of force, they grew and matured in stature. They developed muscle. They became ever more dangerous in their violence. While it is true that some simply came to accept their lot and pulled in around themselves in a marshalling of resources, to nurse their wounds and pain, others flexed and tightened. They rebelled and spun and sputtered, and the largest among them, those with the greatest weight and stature, the bullies, in a final showy performance of self-destructive art, blew themselves up and disappeared into the smoke and ash. It was as if they could not bear the thought of going so long unrecognized, of being so misunderstood. So they released their primal screams in muted brilliant passion and exploded across the universe. It was in this release by these most impressive stars that a miracle occurred. On their deathbed, these supernovas, having lived their lives in seething but silent anger, finally acquired a voice. It was as if these stars, these giants, had known somehow all along what they wanted to express but had simply been unable to find the words. In turning in on themselves, in confronting their demons and their pain, in becoming self-destructive, they found language.

It was, perhaps, a language ruled by an ancient emotional intelligence, an expressiveness coming from a reptile brain that functioned in its heated compacted vibrations to take simple words and syllables and then combine them into more complex phrase constructions, but it was language nonetheless. Imagine, if you will, the neglected baby learning language, but without the guidance of Wittgenstein, or the shunted student learning the math of the universe without the benefit of Einstein’s equations. An innate, if late-flowering brilliance and sudden understanding brought a release of orgasmic intelligence. In the glow of their final throaty protests, in the throes of their death rattles, these stars produced communication. It was a language of symbols and numbers, an alphabet language of chemical barbarity. But it had a grammar and a punctuated periodicity, and it had a product which could be used for more novel constructions. The vast universe of stars had, in its heated eccentricity, come to spit and boil and shun and flail in the hearts of these largest disasters, and the atomic building blocks of matter came spewing forth, now matured in fiery baptism, now sent strewn across space in a second diaspora, new homeless searching for a home.

We are born in the hearts of stars, that is, because the stuff that makes us, the stuff that makes everything, was created in the tremendous heat and compaction and nuclear attractions that occurred in those moments of intense suffering and destruction.

The scientist leans back from the microphone. The crowd is stunned. They have never heard the story put quite this way. It almost sounds believable, largely because they do not know exactly what it means. But they know that the scientist has said something about the earliest stages of the universe. They know that he has linked exploding stars to the creation of material worlds. They think of their own fathers, their own children, and the story makes a kind of sense. They have heard the common saying that if you want to make an omelette you have to crack a few eggs and they remember having to walk on eggshells around their drunken fathers. They think of how their own children came -- pushing through the thin tissue of the gelatinous membrane at birth, and they think they understand. The worlds were born as they themselves were born, from a kind of painful reckoning with life at the threshold of death’s door. And family, the preserver and continuance of life, sets up the pattern and builds in the problems and teaches the language of life which the person must deal with throughout life until death. Heat and light, force and pressure, begat matter, just as the human race is begat by the warmth and constriction and bonding of family.

　

Flight

2012-02-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

In a dream I keep having lately,

I am sitting on a park bench,

eating my lunch,

when you swoop down on me in a hurried rush of feathers and bone.

I look over at you,

And you nod toward me with your huge, horny beak.

Slowly, I place my sandwich back in its sack and I slide my hand across the cracked grey surface of the park bench, until I am only inches away from your face,

and I can almost feel the airy softness of your tufted plumes.

That's when you catch a glint of light from some corner of your beaded eye,

And it frightens you,

And you fl-

fl-fl

fl-fl-fl-fl-fl

flutter

away.

Sugarsnap

2012-02-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

We're two peas in a pod,

You and I.

Your well-rounded firmament

Slides along my ecliptic seed,

As we slip through the elongated housing

Of our two-valved vessel.

Your tendrilous vines twine

Around my trembling trellis.

My fibrous sheathing gleams

In the early morning dew

Of your succulent sweetness.

The recipe book says:

"They are sweet, crisp, and versatile.

Can be eaten whole and raw,

or gently steamed and lightly turned.

Mange tout!

Inconsolable, Coffee

2011-11-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

It was the kind of sadness that could only be properly observed by accompaniment in a foreign language, preferably a language full of sentiment, with a magical ring. Portuguese maybe, or one of the gypsy languages -- something throaty and tear-stained, to be sure, but sensual in its primary effect. Felt and understood, rather than simply understood.

It was seen as from a distance, from a remove, through a darkened glass, as if one was watching from a corner café -- one of those long, sleek, low affairs where the jukebox in the corner still plays songs by men named Sinatra or Martin or Tormé. The window on the street runs the length of the building in such places and if you look in while walking past you will see men and women leaning furtively in, towards each other over plates of eggs and bacon while a waitress named Dot pours them coffee. She is trying studiously, Dot is, to appear uninterested in their quiet conversations. Each one has a low pitch hum of its own, as the couples want very much to be understood by each other but to be ignored by the outside world. Except for the odd younger couple. They care very much to be seen and known, and heard and seen by the world. And smelled, some want to be smelled.

But the low pitch hums gave the place a hive effect. Like bees churning around on the floor, swirling in and out of the booths with the air currents following, flowing from and through. Dot, with the occasional tinkling urgency of a dropped fork, or the dull finality of a plate landing in the sink, waits.

The noises inside the café are white noise, drama encoded for public consumption and displayed with entirely custom-built receivers. Then up above this noise, faintly at first but growing, rising, with the swirling violins in the firmament, and lengthening cellos cutting through the room like the ocean, a tsunami washes all attentions away. And eyes look up, and through the glass out into the street where some immaculate disaster has caused a tumult -- deeply, deeply personal, but through some odd series of back channels sent rushing out into the street.

From the bodega across the street, comes a flurry of action.

A woman comes spilling out of the bodega into the street, doubled over, clutching her breast. Immediately, with an almost shocking immediacy, the crowd around her, on the street, makes a bubble, a spontaneous hovering circle around the woman -- and it floats round her in a counterclockwise direction. They are trying, the people in the bubble, to see if she is shot, or stabbed, or poisoned or otherwise injured, trying to see if she is hurt, trying to see if she mad, curious, trying to understand what she is saying, to see if she’s in danger. And the woman is pulling one of those faces, where she is trying to decide whether to enter the real world or to get lost forever inside a grief that beckons her with warmth and affection. It the kind of grief that plays on violin strings. And she hovers, like in the movies when some actress is trying to express a paralyzing realization. Maybe a child has died. Maybe a lover has cheated. And the actress grips her heart and simply tries to hold on. She lets it pass through her body. She quivers, not finding any sound in her body. She simply tries to breathe. Breath comes only in gasps.

And she is wailing to herself, the woman is. And to the crowd. To the air, to God. But she wails in a language that no one in the crowd understands. No one in the bubble has a clue what she is saying. It is as they were viewing her through a screen, and the words can’t be made out. If it were a movie, the camera would pan around the woman, in a motion like the bubble, watching her in her isolated pain as it writes itself across her face, across her body. Her eyes, stained and tightened in rich indelible ink, in paralyzed intensity, become the center of attention for just a brief moment as if peering into the woman’s soul could give some indication of the thing that is racking her body. The viewer, if this were a movie, would be allowed a moment of contemplation, perhaps something in, close up, something allowing the viewer to turn over in his mind what her meaning could be.

Any interpretations would have to be entirely contextual, as there are no subtitles provided to help the viewer guess her meaning. Some in the crowd, in the bubble, suspect that the woman is so crippled by pain that she is mumbling gibberish, that there is no literal translation in any language for her words, although they continue watching as if there is still some universal in her expression, some emotional communication that will permit a fuller understanding of her pain. And they understand that in the event of such pain, words become little more than weak signifiers, anyway. What can words add to an understanding of such feeling? It is best known, simply observed. Felt, rather than understood.

And the woman in this scene, and the actress portraying the woman in the movie of the scene, are turning over in their minds the subject of the grief. It has become clear by now, to those who are viewing the scene, that what she is feeling is grief. It is a pain deeper felt than the physical, a pain that sinks underneath bone. It is pain for when a child dies or a lover cheats. No bullet can do to her body what this grieving, stressing menace has done. The viewer continues to watch as she heaves her shoulders forward, as if she wants to collapse in upon herself.

The actress portraying the woman is recalling a time when her lover left her, with her wanting more. He was, for a time, the man that the actress had been waiting for, and he left without her permission. The idea of the pain broke her in two. The woman is recalling… What? We do not know. Because we do not have language for the pain she feels. And yet we somehow understand, or we wonder, which is the same as understanding.

So the sepia-toned crowd stands waiting with breath, a bubble, an enclave, a circle in a river holding hands and watching as the woman communes with something imperceptible. She stands with her ghost in the middle of the circle, waiting and watching as she catches the breath in her throat and slips down under the smooth surface of the water, baptized in her grief, some unknown tender by her side, an unseen grief counselor, a memory, hope, or the lack of hope, the feeling of being alone in public with her pain.

And she slips down into the water, and comes up gasping for air, spitting with a ferocity that can only be mustered by those who have borne a heavy load. And she goes under again, only to surface again.

The crowd in the ring, in the bubble, is waiting to see if she will drown. And some watch to see if she will wave for their help. They stand on the shore and watch her tread water. Is she in trouble? Does she need help? Is she drowning? Should we throw her a line? Can she swim? And if she cannot, does she want us to pull her out of her distress, out the deep and into the shallows?

But the woman simply holds on, keeps breathing, gasping in the open air. And the actress playing the woman holds on for her close-up. And they both pull faces, and those faces communicates all we know and all we need to know about the pain. And the actress, recalling her grief, feels the tear on her cheek. And the camera, if this were a movie, would pull away, almost imperceptibly at first, but with increasing speed and ease. And the woman in her grief and the crowd in their concern would be swallowed entirely by the street, by the corner. And the street and the flow of traffic would shuffle back to life, eventually unconcerned. One can already feel the weight of that unconcern.

And the soundtrack would cue a song in a foreign language as the camera pulled away, something soft and low, maybe in Spanish now as we think about it, driven by the mournful plucking of acoustic guitars. Maybe flamenco, maybe the mournful wail of a gypsy loss. And the music would serve to romanticize her pain. To allow the viewer to think of a time when she felt such pain, when she wanted someone to reach out to her but felt the vast divide of unshared meanings.

And the viewer thinks of her pain, the woman’s, in the street, and a time when she herself held her pain too dear, too close, but because she is not the woman, her pain is easily sublimated. It is not actual grief, not presently experienced. It is understood, not felt.

And the camera pans away from the bodega and across the street and through the traffic, and through a thick plane glass which runs the length of the café situated opposite the bodega. It picks up the backlighting, the camera does, on the scene in the street, and the woman and the viewer -- insinuating the removed comfort of the spoons and the plates and low soft hums, insulating the café from the sound of her weeping. And the bustle of the café noises creep into the consciousness, and the realization sets in eventually that life goes on, There are pies to be made, coffee to be poured. Dot reaches across the counter and swats away a fly with her apron.

But there is man in the back, in the corner, in a booth, and he has seen it all, the comfort and the pain. He looks up from time to time to view the scene in the café and the scene in the street, and he imagines the woman’s pain and the young couples’ pleasure and the viewer’s sublimation, and he sits and stirs his coffee, watching the scene, watching the life around him, remembering his own.

Of Disoriented Penguins, Bartleby, and the Search for Self

2011-10-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

In his 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog visits the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, the largest habitation at the southernmost reaches of the earth. There he finds an assortment of eccentrics, adventurers, and gifted visionaries who have come to perhaps the last true frontier in order to find themselves and study nature in its most rugged forms. Among the oddballs and misfits he finds there is one scientist that Herzog makes a point of introducing by saying even the other researchers and support staff at the station seem to leave alone. He is a man who has gone off to live with the penguins, and Herzog says that he rarely speaks to other humans. The man, identified as Dr. Ainley, has agreed to give Herzog an interview, but throughout the interaction the viewer can see that clearly he is uncomfortable. He acts almost as if he has lost the function of language, pausing before every answer, trying to finds the words. Herzog seems oblivious to this, plunging in with his characteristic style, asking in a thick, articulate enunciation whether penguins have homosexual relationships. One shivers a little at the question, if only out of empathy for the struggling scientist, who seems to be out of his element in the company of another man. Couldn’t Herzog have started with a simpler line of questioning, one wonders? He shows no mercy, however, pressing the scientist, when the scientist denies that he has seen gay penguins, by asking whether penguins show signs of insanity. The viewer winces a little, wondering what point, exactly, Herzog is trying to make – whether he means, in fact, to couple homosexuality with insanity. But Dr. Ainley soldiers on and claims that, no, he has not seen crazy penguins either – he has never seen, for example, one bashing its head against a rock. Herzog simply will not let it go, and he keeps pushing the scientist, as if he means to make him admit that penguins are ultimately just like humans, gay and crazy. The scientist wants to be helpful – this becomes obvious. He struggles to accommodate Herzog in making the comparison of penguins with humans, and in the end he offers an enticing observation: “They do get,” he claims, “disoriented.”

In the next scene, Herzog follows a group of penguins as they move off screen towards the water where their feeding grounds lie, following their colony across the snow, walking in single file. He pauses the camera on one particular penguin that has stopped midscreen and turned its back toward the camera. The penguin faces the inland mountains straight ahead and stands stock-still for a moment, as if deep in thought, contemplating the mountains, entranced by something it sees in them. Then it slowly begins to make its way inland toward the mountains, turning plaintively for a brief and wistful look back at the camera, before trudging away toward what Herzog points out is 5000 kilometers of rugged, untamed territory. Herzog voices the question that arises in the viewer’s mind as the penguin walks away, skirting past the humans who stand in its way but refuse to stop it because they argue that it would be pointless to stop it, because the penguin will simply return on its path toward a “certain death” – Why? Is the penguin operating from some Freudian drive toward self-destruction? Is it simply, as Herzog suggests in his commentary, deranged? Has it had enough of community? Then one comes to the realization that the penguin, while perhaps neither gay nor crazy nor deranged nor disoriented, is certainly like the humans who have come to study it. One realizes that the scientist, Dr. Ainley, who has just described the penguin’s odd behavior has more in common with it than perhaps even he might admit. The penguin has set off after adventure, seeking unexplored frontier. The scientist, too, has become a disoriented penguin, stepping off the face of the earth, becoming dislodged from his community. He has come to the end of the world in a march to a drummer that no one hears but himself.

____________________________

When I was in college my favorite writer was Melville and my favorite Melville story was “Bartleby the Scrivener.” I was intrigued at the fascinating story of this odd little man who answered every query about why he would make no effort to fit in, to do what was expected of him, with the retort “I prefer not to.” I found his story – as an existential crisis that led him ultimately to prefer not even to eat, to live – to be troubling in the extreme. At the time I was an ambitious young man and thought I had the world at my feet. I couldn’t understand why he would prefer not to, when he could so easily prefer otherwise. To be or not to be? I wanted to be. I remember identifying with the Wall Street lawyer who narrated the story and lamented the fact that he could not find a way to make Bartleby see the error of his ways. Caught up as I was in the world’s understanding, I could not understand why this man, Bartleby, who seemed to be good at his job, who seemed to show great potential, would simply decide that he didn’t want to participate in the human community. Ahh, the humanity, indeed.

As a reader and also a seeker, even at that early age, I wanted to find meaning in Bartleby’s story. In attempting to give a name to the cause behind Bartleby’s actions I settled on a psychological one – depression. As I read Melville’s enigmatic story, I thought I saw in the episodes in which Bartleby stood for long periods in the frame of his office window, staring out at the brick wall of the building adjacent to his office, an inner tension, a disappointment with life, that I was familiar with through the person of my own father. I thought how my father seemed to struggle for most of his adult life with periods of depression and regret. I remembered coming home in the middle of the night during my teenaged years and finding my father sitting in the dark in his underwear smoking a cigarette, the bright red point of fire punctuating the night, hidden behind a penumbra of smoky haze. I knew that my father was a man of considerable intellect and social ability yet I knew that he felt he had never quite reached the height of that potential. What I couldn’t understand at that tender age was why he would, like Bartleby, give up trying. When I suggested that it was never too late to pursue whatever dreams gnawed at him, I was dismayed at his wave of the hand, his dismissal, his preference to remain in a standstill. I thought I was, like the lawyer, attempting to bring him back around and he, like Bartleby, refused to be swayed. I decided that Bartleby, like my father, had simply stopped trying to scale the walls of his self-made prison in order to pursue his dreams. I thought he had thereby squandered his potential. I was determined not to do the same.

The walls in Melville’s story are everywhere pronounced. There are walls that enclose and surround, that seem to protect but also contain. They are, like the setting in a Wall Street law office, economically determined. But they are also psychologically and sociologically impenetrable. Bartleby stands at his window and contemplates his predicament. He has very little room for maneuver and so, it seems, he sits down and turns inward. He gets lost inside himself and seems cut off from the human community by something that he cannot name. Or, at least, that is the interpretation that presents itself from a consideration of the story through the lawyer’s eyes. It is natural to read his tale, I think, when reading from the viewpoint of society, as if he were a deranged and disoriented penguin, voluntarily trudging into the wilderness of his soul, and cutting himself off from the community that wants to save him. It is easy to feel pity and remorse for him, as I did in the case of my father, and to wish he would come back to the fold. And yet, like all tragedies, there is another way to view the story that understands his actions not as a signal that he is lost forever, but as an example of a man who has found the only possible path to redemption.

____________________________________

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that occurred while Thoreau was in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War. It’s a story that revolves the moment when Thoreau penned “On Civil Disobedience,” in which he writes that he was never more free than when he was jailed for acting on his convictions. Emerson, the story goes, walks around the jail to the window of Thoreau’s cell and lifts himself up to peer in on his young friend. He asks Thoreau in a voice that is somewhat disapproving, “What are you doing in there?” – to which Thoreau replies, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” There is something in this story that I think speaks to the question of why Bartleby, and my father, in their refusal to bring themselves around, can be seen not as depressives but as men who have sought the last refuge left to them. In refusing to accommodate they are perhaps not models of lives lived in waste of potential, but lives lived in contemplation of something higher, something offering freedom even within the walls that society builds around them.

What I don’t think I understood when reading Bartleby as my youthful self, and what I only now beginning to understand well into my middle age, is that society wants to fashion us, as much to control us as to free us. I heard one of my elderly uncle joke once that you spend the first thirty years of your life digging a hole and the next thirty years digging your way back out. That has certainly been the case in my own life – although I am not yet through the maddening cycle and so I cannot say yet whether his timetable is correct. As a young man I entered the workforce and tried to do what society expected of me. I took all the necessary steps – climbing the corporate ladder, building a family, participating in my community, voting, paying taxes. For my troubles, I found one day that, waking up, I was confronted with what Nietzsche speaks of when he writes that philosophy comes whistling through the keyhole saying “come away with me” only to find the man chained to his bed, unable to follow. Having become indoctrinated into the reality of the world, the expectations of the community, I slowly realized that my father in his underwear and Bartleby at his window may not have been merely feeling sorry for themselves. They may have, in fact seen a higher calling, one that could only be contemplated in silence, one that could not be pursued except from within. Of course, some come to this realization earlier than others do, and for these we often reserve terms like “rebellious youth” or “artist.” Such people are eventually either brought around to “maturity” or else they lead their lives as outliers. The problem is that once one sets in with the herd, it becomes more and more difficult to extract oneself, and the walls that are set up around a man or woman become higher and more difficult to scale. They often become impossible. And so the only choice is to break through them entirely or to take the ladder down and begin to confront the soul.

In his 1957 review of Kerouac’s On the Road, Gilbert Millstein in the NY Times paints the picture of a set of youthful extremists in a bygone era who have come to embody one of our cultural notions of the type of people who refuse to accept socialization, the beats. He argues that in the characters of Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty we find two of the tendencies with this youthful generation that ultimately come to react to the world in different ways. Paradiso, as a young man, seems to long for freedom and to be fascinated by his free-wheeling, free-thinking, free-living friend, but he is ultimately headed towards an acceptance of his place in society. Moriarty, on the other hand, is portrayed as a man lost to his times, who ultimately breaks our hearts because he breaks himself upon the ideas of an all-but-impossible freedom. Millstein writes that the variety of beat intellectuals, wastrels, oddballs, and outlaws that these two comes across in their travels seek a life of freedom but that such a seeking frequently ends “in death or derangement.” He calls the search for belief and for meaningful, purposeful freedom “very likely the most violent known to man.” When one is free and can roam about the country without cause or destination, this search can be told in all its epic grandeur. When one grows old and can merely lie in bed or stare out the window in thought, it becomes sad in a way beyond words. But I believe it is the same search for freedom.

There is another moment, more recent in our popular culture that I like as an example of this search. In one of his many temporary dalliances with smart and resourceful women on Mad Men, Don Draper is asked by one of them why he won’t come with her, why he won’t allow himself to be caught up in their relationship. What, in fact, is he looking for? He shakes his head as if unable to even contemplate it. “It’s so big,” he replies. This man who, as a fictional character has come to represent our most skilled and passionate wordsmith, cannot bring himself to define what he seeks. Like the words of the U2 song, he simply knows that he still hasn’t found it.

________________________

So what to make of this story, this man Bartleby, my father’s search, my own, yours? I think that we are all like that penguin. Disoriented, perhaps. But faced with a choice. We either take up our cross and follow our dreams. Or else we let them die. But even if we let them die there is a search to be made. Sometimes we find that we cannot leave. Sometimes, we are bound within walls of our own making and walls we have accepted from others. I no longer think it a sin to sit up at night and contemplate those walls or that path. They are by their very nature uncertain. We do not know what is on the other side, or whether we will find suitable travel companions. Certainly there are vast and untamed wildernesses. And certainly there are those who will go the ends of the world to help us if we stay but won’t lift a finger to help if we go. I would still like to think of myself as having the spirit of Whitman, who seemed to have no limit to his freedom or his willingness to pursue. But I also realize that even Whitman found himself homebound in his later years, his mind ranging across the free universe but his body crippled and insecure. I take some comfort in that. The choice is ultimately up to us, to each of us. Will we turn within and seek what may seem a negation but can be, at last, an example of freedom as renunciation, or will we renounce society and trudge across the snow and tundra in pursuit of our better selves?

Happy trails.

(Picture Source: link)

Resolution

2011-10-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

Henry Miller wrote somewhere in the Tropic of Cancer that if just one man were to drop his pretense and address the world with complete and utter honesty, the world would tilt on its axis. Something like that. That's probably not exactly how he put it, but it gets at the point. Which is that we hide behind convention, and expectations, and fears, and ourselves. And we shouldn't.

I want to be that guy. I want to open up and just say everything that comes to mind. Not to censor myself one whit. Not to care one iota whether anyone is listening to approve. But to do so, of course, of course, in a way that does not sound like an ego's raw nerve... or a homeless man's mindless rant. In other words, I want to be honest, but to do so in a way that allows me to be authentic in the world, centered in myself, learned where I can be, thoughtful everywhere else, whether the world cares or not. I demand honesty from myself not so much because I want to turn the world on its ear, but because I am so sick and damned tired of being other.

So I will confront the world. I will see beauty in the shifting light. I will accept the judgment of others if and when it is offered. But I will stay true to myself. That is the iron string to which my heart will vibrate. My life will be, as Emerson said somewhere, although I forget where... a life, and not an apology.

Grand dad

2011-10-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

He came from the oilfields of West Texas, but he might just as easily have hailed from the coalmines of Kentucky or the steel mills of Pittsburgh. He was the kind of man who would fit in as easily in one place as in another, but only because he fit in nowhere. He was a square peg. The earth was, for as far in the distance as anyone could see, a round, dry hole. This is not meant to be a metaphor. It is not meant to suggest that here was a man who found no sex or had no intelligence or lacked mechanical skill. He had all of these, and in abundance to hear him tell it, though they rarely served the purposes one might expect. He was small man with a thorny nature and no amount of hammering, no cunning or crafty reserve, could force him past the gates and into the human community in a way that would stick. If it were what it is not, if it were a metaphor about sex or intelligence or skill, it would be an inadequate one. It would suggest that, but for the mere shaving off of a few rough edges, this man might find a way to belong. But that was not the case at all. In fact, he was unsuited by nature to find a true home. His thorns kept folks at bay. Even his own reach was not enough to overcome them. In those moments when it seemed that he had slipped right in, that he blended with his surroundings, he would ultimately come up short. Like a peg in a hole, there was always space and distance to be weighed. He had points of contact as he rattled around the perimeter, but he could never mold himself to the smooth even lines of social acceptance. His edges were too straight, too hard, too set in their linear ways. And so the large round earth would swallow him up in its rolling, beckoning topography. He was angular and it was curving. And he searched the distant horizon for a line of fit, but as he cut across her form, he always found that the line moved further into the distance. He wore out his boots as he sought the line, but the caliche sand didn’t stick as he walked. He couldn’t find a place to belong, try to fit, that is, as he might.

And he did try, too, this man who did not belong. For a stone-cold loner he spent a great deal of his life looking for a place to hang his hat. He became at one time or another throughout his long life, an Optimist, a Shriner, a Mason, an Odd Fellow, a Baptist, a Methodist, a Democrat, a Dixiecrat, a Republican, and even, for one very short period of time in the 1930s, a Klansman. This final misguided attempt to fit in occurred while he worked as a rough-and-tumble roustabout during the Great Depression in the deadset middle of the Permian Basin, in the modern desertfloor that once was a prehistoric swirling seabed. This land was, like the man himself when I knew him, an ancient dusty joke, a shadow of its former self. It had once been rich with minerals and teeming with life, until the inevitable sun dried up the last drop of moisture and the ineluctable winds covered the flat dead basin with a thick layer of dust, like a dry sink in a dirt-caked Men’s Restroom at an abandoned gas station in a ghost town. And the land had come, like the man himself, to bend to the inexorable pull of the earth, her minerals crushed under her weighty embrace, as they squirmed and twisted, the minerals did, to get out of those meaty arms, that sweaty Sunday clutch, and they ran when they broke, ran fluid from the room, all wild abandon and innocence, a swirling burbling jumble, through the parlor and out of the infernal heat and the noise of the adults in the kitchen, and through the swinging screen of the back door and into the whitebright yard, through the sandbrown crust of the earth’s embrace and into the sky’s oceanblue. And he came to live, like the minerals, in the freeing airless air that is the vast skyless plane of the barren West Texas oilfields. He came to live in the wind. This happened, this part of the belonging story which marks our man with a mark as black as tar, and sticky, like crude, when the man became a Klansman, in a small town that was a drive of, at least, 300 miles distance from the nearest black man – “As the crow flies,” to hear the folks tell it. This man who lived in the wind, who strafed across the earth in search of a home, tried at last to join by signing on to a cause that was ugly in its heart. And he failed even here because he didn’t have it in his own heart, either the will to stick or the hate to stay. Still, he would try, when I came to know him and asked about it, to pass it off like it was youthful indiscretion. He would tell anyone who would listen to him that the group disbanded after only a handful of meetings because they didn’t really have anything to do. He was the kind of guy who’d say things that weren’t funny just to watch folks twitch. And though there was probably some truth in his excuse, there was surely more in the fact that, even if he’d been born in Mississippi’s Hill Country, he wouldn’t have lasted in the Klan. He didn’t know how to hate because he never figured out how to love. I think that he was a little embarrassed by the fact that he couldn’t even fit in among the rabble-rousers. He had a little too much good in him, and a little too much wrong with him. He was a square peg and life a round hole. He was a gypsy, a roamer, a tumbleweed. And so he remained alone.

I knew him only briefly during his final years, meeting him by one of those chance-of-fate encounters that bring all people together. We were never really properly introduced. He just stuck his face in mine one day, on an early Tuesday morning when I was resting in my bed, contemplating the daylight creeping across the wall, and the world outside and my own place in it. He had let himself in, evidently, like he owned the place, and had made his way up the stairs to my bedroom and, as I lay there resting and contemplating. He suddenly burst into the room and walked over to my bed and leaned over my startled body, and put his face into mine. He made these strange, and strangely aggressive, gargling noises. Something like a catch in the throat,enunciated with his thick burbling lips.

Ah-bubbbb. Ah-bubbbb. Then, just like that, he growled and moved on. And out of the blue, we came to make each other’s alarming acquaintance. I didn’t have any say in the matter.

The next day he did the same thing. And the next, he did the same. This went on for a time, this bursting in and leaning over and this weird aggressive gargling. Each time he’d end with a growl. Each time he’d stay only a moment. And then it would end as abruptly as it had come on. He’d disappear quickly, as quickly as he’d appeared, shaking the dust off his boots as he walked down the stairs.

This odd how-do-you-do continued to occur on almost a daily basis for probably a year or more. It happened for so long, in fact, that it eventually became of little notice to me. And then, when he noticed that I’d stopped being impressed, he began, through a series of interactions that grew increasingly sophisticated, to sharpen his approach. He would sometimes push his face near my own as if he was tempting me to touch it. I sometimes gave in to the temptation and reached out a tentative hand to push at his gnarly whiskers. He’d wait until my fingers had almost reached their mark, and then he’d turn his head and snap at them, his bared teeth clicking in a snarling grimace, noise burbling up from his throat, forcing me to pull back in fear.

He wouldn’t leave me alone. It came to a point, over a course of days, weeks, months, years, that, at any moment I might, for example, find the man rushing from around the corner shouting epithets and running straight at me in a brazen attempt to pick me up and throw me over his shoulder. Or else, I would be walking through a room somewhere, anywhere really, and I’d look up and see him sitting in a chair in the corner. He’d be sitting there patting his knee with a flyswatter, a glass of bourbon on the table beside him, telling me to come over and take a seat beside him. He spoke with a strange, measured lowness, slightly whistling through his teeth. He was completely unaware that I was terrified by his gruffness. Or he knew and didn’t care. He was clearly unlike the others in the room. He was, indeed, it seemed – it still seems – an Odd Fellow.

Actually, if truth be told, the oddest thing was that I found myself over time to be drawn to this man. It was as if, even in those early encounters, when I looked in his face, when I reached out my hand, it was as much from a strange fascination as it was from a startling fear. When I saw in his face the structure and the story of the man, the creases in his eyes, his life’s experience, his wrinkling skin pulled tight around his sharp cheekbones, I found both the nature and nurture of humanity, or the lack thereof, played out in in his lanky frame. It was as if, when I looked in his face, I saw a version of my own story, like a foreshadowing of things to come. I recognized, without being able to put words to it, a family resemblance and, more, a map of the fearsome world. The deep-cut fissures in his once smooth skin told of rivers cut into the rock, of hardscrabble search for meaning. His eyes were black as oil, and as suggestive of buried value. Something stirred in my blood when I saw him. As if I felt some ancient tug in his direction, drawn along by an odd warming of the blood. This response was, as I have said, beyond my reckoning. It ran fluid like rivers, deep like oil, and warm like the blood in my veins. And the thick viscous pull of this man ran like blood, like oil, through my heart. I came over time to warm to this man not just because he was strangely familiar but because he was angrily other.

Perhaps it was his scrawny-bone frame, or the fact that he hunched over slightly at the waist in a way that made him look somehow tough and mischievous and vulnerable, all at the same time. I can’t really say, even now, what it was, but whatever the attraction, I came to be drawn ever more closely into his sphere. He would sit with his flyswatter and curse at the TV, his web of arms catching me up as I ran past his chair – always slowing just a little, just a little, as I rushed by, cutting wide swath circles to make sure I didn't bump his table and spill his drink and block his view. It was a game we played, we two, as he sipped on his bourbon and I dashed through the house. He’d sit and curse as if I didn’t exist, and I’d dash around the corner with my sparkling eyes, and he’d slowly reach down with his glass, pressing his hand upon the table waiting motionless until I, like a fly to his swatter, came to rest within his reach. And just when I thought I had made it past his reach he’d snap out his arm in a flash of light and catch me by an ankle, turning me head over heels in a pile on the floor at his feet. Then I’d reach up and stroke those scraggly whiskers and I'd climb up in his lap and I’d be caught in his web, where I’d sit with him and listen to his wild stories and watch his over-animated expressions. I’d hold my sides and laugh.

It was then that the relationship transformed into something miraculous. When I say “miraculous” I know the weight that is implied. I know it and I intend it. I mean to say that the relationship was life-changing. It was the kind of relationship that comes along only rarely, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. We two, this old man and I, came to know and to love each other, despite ourselves. He was the source and I was the echo. And yet through our prickly interactions, I became a source of my own. He took on something like a second youth when in my presence and I benefited from the lift of colorful lies that he told with the wit of deep experience. He became a wellspring of youthful vigor, I opened up to an ancient priming knowledge. I drew from his well of wishful, whimsical memories and he from my unabashed innocence. Perhaps it was his withered body, its increasing frailty suggesting a kind of weakness, or a need where none had existed before. Or perhaps it was the fact that he was small for a man, hunched at the waist to exaggerate the effect. But somehow we came to see eye to eye. He was closer in height to my own small frame than other adults, and there was a comfort in his proximity, his frailty, his willingness to play the clown to cover over any weakness. He was Shakespeare’s second childhood, having nothing but time left to lose. I was Shakespeare’s morning-faced school-boy, lost in the wilderness of endless fantasy. We became lost, we two, in mere oblivion. Like conspirators, I became protective of him, and he of me.

... to be continued

Polaroid

2011-10-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

I miss those old black and white polaroids from the Sixties
in which everyone stood around in their sleek new kitchens
with their buttoned down shirts and upswept coifs,
as the kids ran through the living room,

in which even the frightened grownups in my redneck family,
secluded from the revolution in a Podunk town in Texas,
seemed somehow more sophisticated, and engaged, and alive.

Flesh

2011-10-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

I sometimes feel my face freezing in place,
experience written across the eyes -- scars, creases, repetition.
The laugh-lines and frown-lines of laughter and heartbreak set into my face like an early version of a deathmask.
And I wonder how I will be seen, how I am seen, by the world as it passes.
I fear that my face is settling not in hopeful happy lines – although I have these, as many happy signals written into my experience as sad, as many silly as angry – but in a dumbfounded slack-jawed yokel expression.

I spend so much time drawn into myself.
I fear I will make an ugly corpse.

All the sparkle, all the electricity that is in me and through me and with me is found in my eyes. That’s where I spend the best of my time, in the inner reaches of my private self. In my mind.
So the flesh that hangs on my skeleton, on my skull, my jawbone… hangs on with a loose, even slackness as the electricity is pulled inward, burning fires in the deeper hearth beneath my outward appearance.
Brain waves are my stock in trade, not smiles and waves, not happy to see you how’s the wife and kids --
The fuel that burns the energy that is me, and the flesh that hangs dumbly, awaiting instruction, do not often connect. My mind has turned inward upon itself. It’s mostly memory centers with me, logic not laughter. It is thinking through a problem. In solitude.

And so in solitude, the flesh hangs dumbly, the jaw goes slack. Its long pointless jowels lengthen and release.
My thoughts send me skyward, cutting into the night. Gravity pulls me earthward, down with the ever present pull of weighted experience. I am a slack-jawed yokel thinking thought of the heavens. Slowly being crushed until ending in dust.

And it is around the weight of that contrast, the soul of that electric spark fighting to break free, to break through to that loose-hung flesh, warming it from the inside like some universe of its own, threatening to collapse in upon itself like some tired supernova, that my world revolves. The spark will be lost someday when the flame is extinguished, leaving only flesh, only the loose appurtenance of the worldly flesh. A corpse.

And in my case, perhaps, an ugly one.

Hugo

2011-10-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

A little piece I did for a poetry slam...

Hugo said that sometime in the middle ages the written word surpassed architecture as man’s chief means of communication with himself. He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s--
What’s that?! No, my cousin Hugo from Bayonne, motherfucker. Of course it was Victor Hugo. Stay with me.

He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s bible was the single most revolutionary event in the history of the world.
Something about “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh, and the word was God.”
Do What?! No dude, I don’t know for sure if that’s exactly how he put. But it was some shit like that.

Anyway, I gotta admit that when I was younger I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about.
I mean I read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in school and I’ve stood in the cathedral where the book was set and --
What’s that? Yeah. You remember that summer when we were just out of high school and I went on that trip…? We spent three days in Paris. It was cool. Yeah I saw a woman who didn’t shave, she was kind of hot. Dude, let me get back to my story…

So I read the book and I stood in the place, and in my mind there’s no comparison about which one was more impressive. I mean you can read about the Gargoyles watching Esmeralda in the distance but when you stand there and look up at those bastards leaning out over the building, licking their chops, it’s fucking creepy.
Do what? No dude, of course I said gargoyles. What’d you think I said “Gargles?” Gargles? Really? Shut the fuck up.

So I thought he was being, I don’t know, pretentious or something. I mean a guy who writes for a living… what’s he gonna think is more important, being able to write about a building or being able to build something worth writing about? You know? It just seemed to be kind of self-important -- less about the truth and more about… I don’t know… job security.

Anyway, now that I’m a little older…
Fuck you, dude -- I’m only a little older --

All right, so now that I’m middle aged, I can see that the guy may have had a point. I mean -- hell I spent twenty years buildings houses, and I can take you to a shitload of buildings that I’ve worked on. And they’re nice, I suppose, in their way, but somehow they don’t seem all that impressive to me anymore. Not one of them has gargoyles. You know? And as for job security, please. Really.

So anyway, the other day I was digging through my drawers and --
Oh, Christ a-mighty… I was digging through a drawer. Grow up.

And I found a postcard that I had sent to myself inadvertently when I was on that tour.
Inadvertently -- it means accidentally. Yes it does, look it up -- Whatever.

Yeah -- so I had actually sent it to my girlfriend at the time but I put my own address back in New Jersey down as the return, and while I was on the trip she met this other guy and one thing led to another… and she refused the postcard, had it returned to me. I don’t know, it was kind of weird. I don’t know why she did it. And I really loved that girl, too. When I got back I pined away for months. Hell she was the reason I got into construction. Yeah I was accepted into a couple of colleges but I got a job with a builder my dad knew so I could stay home and try to win her back. A twenty year mistake, bro.

Oh yeah, so the postcard was a picture of this place called the Fountain of the Innocents. Yeah. It’s this really cool fountain, the oldest one in Paris. It was built in the 1500s before mechanical pumps, so everything had to work by gravity, and work right, too, because the people in the city used it for drinking water. It has these nymphs and tritons all over it symbolizing natural spirits that are supposed to protect the source of a spring. And they are decorated with all these swirling undulating curlicues and scrolls, you know, so that it gives a sense of flow and movement.

Yeah but evidently Miss Nancy Hinglis-Smootfield couldn’t see any of that -- Yeah that was really her name. She was from over in Ocean County. Remember you met her at that party that time...? Anyway, she missed the point entirely. Missed what was written on the other side of the postcard, too, I guess, cause she dropped me like the plague. Or didn’t care, or didn’t see… So she left me hanging and I stayed home from school and built track houses for a living and wasted twenty years for fucking nothing.

Hmmm? Oh, that... Humph -- It was nothin' really. It said: Life is beautiful. Wish you were here.

Born in the Hearts of Stars

2011-10-16T18:49:00.000-07:00

Despite what you may have read in your storybooks, in the moment before time began there was nothing but the void. There was no being to move across the surface of the water, and no water to be moved across. There was no god, no man, and no woman. No earth, or matter, or gravity. Darkness was the only vista, and silence the only music. Had language existed in that moment, had it merely existed to describe the lack, it would have consisted only of negation, indicating the absence of good and evil, the want of want or plenty. There were no planets, no stars, no shooting lights, no mountainous cavernous wastes of land, no gaseous opaque fogs. In fact, in the moment before time began, there were no such thing as anything. No tangible hopes or fears, or sensate life to hold such hopes and fears. There was no future and no past. No sexlovepeacewarhappinesspestilencejustice. There was only a perfect, utter stillness.

Then all hell broke loose.

Cosmologists tell us that in an instantaneous instant, almost 14 billion years ago, in a super massive explosion, the entire mass of the universe, having been compressed into an infinitely small super-heated ball, having been defined down to nil, inflated. That’s the term the scientists use, inflated. As if the making of everything we see, or imagine we see, or imagine but know that we will never see, could be described by using a term that signifies the raising of prices on milk. It’s really kind of sad, this notion that, even with the mountain of tears we‘ve shed since the spilling of milk across the galaxy, we still haven’t developed an ability to describe our feelings better or to put into words the reason for our troubles. It’s as if it left us speechless, breathless, our very thought -- the electrical patterns in our minds that shape concepts and give them voice -- defined down to nil. Nevertheless, despite our lack of language, or perhaps because of it, the resultant force of this explosion was almost unimaginable. Matter itself, and before that the building blocks of matter, and before that the forces which shape those building blocks -- electricity, magnetism, gravity -- were created in the blink of an eye. In fact, it took even less than a blink, it took the blink of a blink -- it took less than the time to imagine the blink of a blink or the time to imagine imagining. It was that damned fast. The universe was spilled across the whole of space like so many marbles tossed onto a table. It was unleashed like hormonal urges at a public high school dance. Chaos and collisions occurred, heat and light were formed. It was as if the whole of heaven had suddenly squeezed itself entire through the eye of a needle and came roaring out the other side with incomprehensible fury. It was if a woman had been spurned, and would now have her shrewish revenge.

As one might imagine, this process of inflation, this wild uncontained explosion, this colossal two-year-old’s outburst, had a number of odd results. Chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that, as the universe was exploding outward, particles were collapsing inward, driven by the introduction of forces that had been until then unknown. Quarks and leptons… electrons, neutrons, and protons… atoms and their resultant matter -- all were pushed and pulled by force and gravity at incredible unknown speeds. Energy and the attraction of harmonious vibrations unwound in a frantic dance. The fundamental particles that came to make up everything were all thrown outward like teenagers expelled from their homes. Understandably, they sought refuge in the attraction of like particles and substances. Suddenly finding themselves homeless, like disowned youth, like runaways, they needed a place to crash. So like sought like, and hydrogen formed, and helium, and spinning gaseous stars on the outer reaches of space. It’s kind of funny that helium and hydrogen were made first, and that they in turned formed stars. It was as if the universe, now barely seconds old, just minutes after birth, had decided to throw a party, and needed balloons and transport, maybe a disco ball or two. Accordingly, the material forces which shape matter, acting like a planning committee, began to decorate the broad flat gym of space. Banners were hung from the ceiling, and balloons were inflated and released, to hang in the still of space. The revelers settled in, and the stars heated up, and the expansion cooled down. A pleasant radiant buzz was felt as night came on.

Now as anyone who has been to such a party can tell you, it takes all kinds to make it work. If you invite too many from the same crowd you may get a lack of conflict, but you will also suffer from a lack of any fun. Someone needs to be the life of the party. And life, we are told by the scientists, requires carbon, as well as other elements to stand around and laugh at carbon’s jokes. So the universe added variety. Hydrogen and helium, as we have noted, had arrived first along with a few other stragglers, but they just stood in the corners along the walls and under the lights, and waited for the rest of matter’s constituents, half a billion years later, to show up fashionably late. This raises, of course, the question of where, in a universe of exploding, expanding simple gases, did all the variety come from? Where did the iron come from that gives tint to your blood and the calcium that gives strength to your bones? These are just a few examples, obviously, and they are drawn perhaps from the conceit that bones and blood are important. But ignoring this conceit, and overlooking the question of how the gases themselves seemed to come from out of nowhere, we may still reasonably ask: once the wheels were set in motion, once the party had begun, how did we get to the diversity of matter that we see all around us, that we stand or sit upon, that we feel in our hearts or that form our working minds? In a universe that started with a simple, brute exclamation point, in other words, how did we get to the periodic table? It is a question punctuated by an elementary curiosity about the curious elements which mark us. And for questions such as this, we have somewhere to turn for the answers, to satisfy our curiosity. In fact, we don’t even have to try that hard in order to seek the answers.

Imagine it is the morning after the party, or the morning after a thousand mornings, and we are standing in the same gymnasium, now lined up in neatly ordered rows of chairs, organized and rationalized, with only the unswept detritus from the party in the corners of the room, bits of streamers left floating along the edges of the room seeming to hint at the revelry from the night of nights before. A press conference has been called where we are seeking answers. Someone has posed the question. Where did all this stuff come from? We are sitting with bated breath. We are all pressed forward, waiting for the answer, and the line of cosmologists standing on the podium sways with anticipation at the first hint of the question. They hold their line for less than a second before the scientists push forward, rushing to the microphone, tripping over each other to be the first to get the answer out, to be heard by the assembled crowd.

We are born, the scientists tell us, in the hearts of stars.

Beat Box

2011-10-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

A little piece I did at a poetry slam...

Watch out mister I’m about to throw down.
Step back sister I’m about to throw up.
I’m about to show up and bring my beat box.
Era, hiccup, I’ma pick up my beat box.

Stop. How come all the people on the radio are crazy
Thinking that they fucking with the alphabet like jay-z
Or eminem when him and him be swimming in a wave, gee.
So that the others just don’t phase me.

Go fuck yourself if you tell me that you don’t like their music
Hell I don’t give two shits, wait make it three. You know what? I don’t give four shits.
And I can’t wait til they do more shit.

Stop, I was only kidding ‘bout the part where I said fuck you.
Hell I don’t even know you. You could be a sweetheart. Shucks, you
Might even be the sweetest person who would ever eat cocks.
Naaah. I’m just fuckin’ with my beat box.

So… d’you ever notice anything you say that’s put to rhythm
Somehow goes down easier? I’m talking beef or schism,
Grief or jism, sidney moncrief, religion…
With beats we’re lief, clay pigeons

Put the proper gait to it and no one takes offense
… well, maybe just a smidgen.

But still, isn’t pleasure measured by the fissures in the sheet rock?
Wasn’t the universe the first to curse and spit its heat shocks?
Hasn’t clever ever been a lever of the fleet fox?
Wasn’t rhythm with’em when your parents made their feet knock?

Ask me I think it’s cause we’re all a bunch of meat clocks.

So that is why I brought my beat box.

How I Write Poetry

2011-10-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

A little piece I did at a poetry slam...

Words crowd upon the page like wait staff mimes
in a scripted banquet scene from a lesser known film by Fellini.
They flail their arms and bend their waists and tilt their heads --
their thin, wan smiles overexpressed and held, ridiculously, a little too seriously. Tensed, they thus stand, their lips pursed and pursing in bright red lipstick on their pale white faces.
They have come to work the banquet without adequate training, they were hired not for their competence but because they were the only ones able to find the address,
to make their way down the dark alley and into the kitchen’s bright light.

The words stand in a line, waiting to be summoned. They hold their pose
and refill glasses as they come to half full.
They have had a difficult night. They have been clumsy in their flailing, and
have spilled food everywhere.
They have thrown wine in the faces and plates in the laps of their unhappy guests.
They are mockingly apologetic in response to the alarmed and questioning looks they find on the faces of the startled revelers.
They trace, with a finger, a tear down the cheek.
They bend to wipe the lap of the bespectacled intellectual.
They notice the overturned meats, the rolling olives, that have been spilled onto the tablecloth of the hungry workmen and they point and hold their bellies and act as if they are laughing.

The earth goddess sits alone among the luminaries, hangers-on, and wanna-be’s who attend the banquet. She is aloof, yet somehow embracing.
She sits with her legs crossed, the smooth tension in her firm muscle bouncing in the lengthening light, outlined by the moon, whose purpose it is to reflect upon her.
She tosses her chin in conversation, perhaps smokes, her face covered in a sweeping white scarf and her eyes hidden behind overlarge sunglasses.
Her face is thin and angular and intelligent and glows with the glow of experienced youth.
Her body is lithe beneath a shimmering gown.
She has the soul of a mother.
She has the heart of a whore.
She is beautiful.
The mimes find themselves at a loss for words.

The scene is luminous in its overlit production, so that even if the stage lights extinguished,
the stars would flood the scene with a reticent glow.
Occasionally there are nights when the stage lights themselves seem redundant, when the stars align, and the moons and the planets align, and the mimes serve their purpose with dignity and poise.
But usually it is like Jupiter is on her period
and Pluto can’t decide whether he’s in or he’s out.

On these nights, the mimes act badly, and they spill food and wine in the faces and laps, and meats and olives on the table of the guests -- and they seem to be mocking, almost sincerely so.
On these nights, the intellectual leans over to the workmen and makes, in a conspiratorial tone of his own, some comment about the mimes, how they can’t seem to get out of their box, how they walk across a highwire without a net.
And on these nights the mimes stand silent.

It is a silence in which one could hear a fork drop.
They stand in the silence of their black coats and ties, and their white painted faces, and their lips dripping Titian red. And listen to the intellectual -- his voice being the only thing that cuts through the gauzy stillness.
He’s saying something like… If these were Saturn’s children
-- sweeping his hand across the nighttime tableau in a way that made the workmen unsure whether he was talking about the mimes or the stars, or the moons and planets aligned behind them--
He’d eat them.

Sister

2011-07-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my sister Kelly. The one who died of breast cancer a couple of years ago. And what she meant to me. And what she’d mean to me still, if she hadn’t died when she did. I expect that it would be like what my aunts and uncles were like for my mom and dad... a kind of reality check.

But I don’t know for sure.
And I won't.
***
And I’ve thought a lot lately about how I had lost touch with her there at the end, as she pulled in her resources and drew almost exclusively upon her inner circle. I wasn’t really in that inner circle anymore, and hadn’t been for a while. I was still family and all, but I had been going through my own thing, whatever that was. And she had been going through hers. And though we really enjoyed seeing each other when we saw each other, I lived four states over and she’d had my mom to help her through it, and she had faded considerably there at the end, anyway.

And then, of course, I had been me.
And so we’d lost touch a little.
***
But I loved her. And I miss her.
***
It wasn’t only that, of course. I should say that we’d had little moments in our adulthood when everything had seemed golden and lovely, but those moments had become fewer and farther between in the last several years as the family generally had just run into some tough spots. And by tough spots I mean all along the way – all up and down the line. And I think my sister and I, and all of us, really, for that matter, all up and down the line, had felt just felt a little bit shell-shocked. And so we had lost touch.
***
But I was also thinking, just now, this night, about how there was this one time when my sister and I had been in each other’s inner circles.

I was thinking about my childhood.
***
You remember that time back when the world was new? I was thinking about how it was in that place. In that time when my sister was probably the most important person in the world to me. The period in which I was learning the world, the time of pre-language… before she was taken away and made into a girl and I was taken away and made into a boy… in that inbetween time.

When we were just beings.
***
I was thinking about how that period had turned me into the man that I am.
***
I mean, when I was growing up, I lived out on the edge of town, and for better or worse was dropped down the chimney of a family that had this wonderful, but insular, feeling to it. And we moved to the frontiers of town just as our forebears had once moved to the edges of the frontier… so that my dad – who fancied himself a Renaissance cowboy – could have more space.

To be left alone.

Because we wanted to be left alone. There’s that, for sure. But, of course, there was more to it than that. For example, there was also the fact that we were just an insular kind of people by our nature. You know what I mean?

We were a little clannish.
***
Maybe you should look that up before you read further.
***
Anyway, you read my family history and there were lots of brothers of one family mixing with daughters of another family and then switching back in the next generation. Most of it was because they were all really poor… since dirt farming didn’t pay particularly well… and the rest of it was because they didn’t get off the farm often enough to know many girls except the ones on the next farm over.

It wasn’t, of course, quite that bad.
It never is, of course... But it was bad enough.
***
There were lots of kissing cousins in my family as it came down through the ages. I don’t think anyone ever showed up sporting six fingers, but that was only because there was someone in each generation, in each family, in each sub-clan, that was appointed – perhaps even self-appointed – as the keeper of the clan secrets. And with that person there was accorded great trust and responsibility… for keeping track of family genaeologies and other elements of family business… so that everybody could know just who was far enough down the genetic chain that it’d be OK if you wanted to date’em.

That is if you’d wanted to. Of course you didn’t have to want to. But just if you did.
***
And my grandma was the one in my family who kept the running tallies in our collective heads regarding which ones were OK and which ones weren’t and which ones had uncles who were no account bastards that still owed them money from that time in ’57 that they bought ‘em that blue Chevrolet.

My grandma was the one who kept track of that sort of thing in my family.
***
She was, I guess, like everybody’s grandma. Except that she also read the farmer’s almanac to find when the best month to get pregnant was.

You see what I mean?
She was fucking old school.
***
It actually wasn’t even that bad though. Not exactly HBO’s Big Love or nothing… but I will say that sometimes when I see that show… it feels like – except for all the sister-wiving – a lot like… home.

Like when I watch the glances they give each other, the way they almost communicate telepathically… like they are always likely to be guiltiest criminals in any room if the cops show up… like they are always ready to pick up sticks and disappear into the night… I’ve felt that.
***
Though it’s never utilized, the gypsy spirit is a necessary tool in the cultural life of any clan. To keep the clan organized for departure at the drop of a hat is… of utmost importance. And one of the ways you do that is to have a system of hand signals and eye movements that are meant to communicate to others that it’s time to cut and run… but in noticing that… the hand signals and the rolled eyes… we must not mistake what is being truly communicated. It is not merely, or even primarily, a system of hand-eye coordinators. Rather, it is an empathic communication. And so we must not take the symptom for the disease. You know?

Because the clan isn’t a clan because they have a gypsy spirit… they have a gypsy spirit because they are a clan.

They communicate out of a sense of survival.
***
Well anyway, back then I could have looked up from the yard and seen those kind of folks, all except for the mormonizing, just kind of standing around over there in the next yard, having a kind of next-of-kin resemblance.
***
But actually that’s not true at all. I said all of that for effect.
I have given you a wrong impression of my grandma. Which, by the way, is not all that hard to do… I mean how do you give a good impression of your grandma?

Seriously, I mean it. Do you squeak a little at the end of each sentence? Wheeze? For me it was always somewhere between a squeak and a wheeze… that’s just how I do it… but I don’t know, maybe I’ve lost my touch… maybe I can’t pull it off the way I used to…
***
So back to what I was saying… Maybe I’ve given you a wrong impression about my grandma. Let’s be honest. I kind of flat out exaggerated… The reason for all that cousin-swapping was not because folks wanted to earn their way to heaven… but because people were trying to survive their hell on earth.
***
That was because -- in my grandparents’ generation -- they’d been through the Great Depression. And that meant that you had to have a long list of kinfolk.

So’s you could call ‘em on in a crisis.

See, back in those days, if you went on a trip somewhere to see your family… there might not be a hotel within two hundred miles of the hardscrabble farmhouse your distant family probably lived in… and you probably couldn’t have afforded the hotel anyway, even if there had have been one.

Hell, given your family’s history, you probably could barely have afforded the trip.

Anyway… if you needed to travel, you needed to know where your kinfolks were located, so's that you could have had a place to stay.
***
And even locally, knowing your folks was necessary.

Even if it only meant that you needed someone to listen to you tell the story about how it had been Christmas time, and you had only bought that blue car for him because you’d have thought that he was going to pay you back… and that if you’d have known that he was gonna cheat you out of the money you’d have loaned him, you’d have let him go jump in the lake…

Even if you’d have needed someone who could provide you with only that level of family, you’d want that kind of family to be around. Like a family should. On a twenty-four hour basis. On call. With scheduled shifts and routinized protocols. Because everybody has a role to play.
***
But I’m just kidding. My grandma wasn’t anything like that…
***
Actually back in her day that was a real skill to have. It made you more attractive as a woman. And gave you something to do for sport. I'm not entirely sure about this, of course, because it was a different time. Not at all like today. But that’s how it seemed... and I do know that if you were really good at it you became a kind of local matchmaker, putting people together with opportunity.

Like, say, for instance you’d have lost your job. Cause’n the economy went to shit… well then you might’ve needed to know who your kinfolk were, so’s you could fall back on ‘em in a spot. So you’d want to talk to somebody who could rally the troops and raise hell in heaven. Or whatever the appropriate phrases are right here. I sometimes forget.

But you know what I mean, right?

Well that was just how it was back then. For my grandma’s generation.
As I said, not at all like it is today.
***
Anyway. If you needed to travel, say, to Arkansas… you needed to know where it was you had kinfolks, so’s you and yourn could call on them and thern. And though they’d they all had it rough, this generation of gossips… they didn’t complain about it. Even though they did complain.

This, by the way, I think I should stress, is an important point. They did complain. They were certainly capable and one even might find that they were… effective at expressing their capacity by means of demonstration…They were, in fact, practiced in the art of complaining.

But they hadn’t complained about the Depression.
***
As God is my witness, they had a deep and troubled look on their face when they talked about it. Just like they did when the subject turned to the War… in France. But they didn’t talk about it. They never complained.

And in fact, if you’d have asked them, they’d have said that they hadn’t had it any rougher than any of the rest of ‘em had had it. Before them.
***
That is true in every family, I suppose. Substitute the Holocaust or the diaspora or the slave trade or some other cultural catastrophe, and it is true for everyone. But especially so, it seems to me, for me. Because this is my story.

It seems especially so, to me, about my family.

Because they’d for some reason always seemed to be the black sheeps, the ones that had moved the “furtherest out.”
****
It had started with my great-great-granddad. Something having to do with a cousin and an argument.
***
And a hammer and a bottle of whiskey.
***
But I couldn’t tell the story straight because I never got it full from Aunt Fanny and Uncle Chalk before they died.

But it was bad. I knew that.
***
And before all that, there’d been this other great-great-great-great-great-whatever-whatever granddaddy that had won his freedom as an indentured servant serving two terms in the Revolutionary War. And while that hadn’t exactly been slavery, it hadn’t been a cake walk either... and so none of us had had it easy.

That is what they’d say. Or more precisely, what she’d say.

And one thing that was always weird to me about that story, was the fact that I was the one who had learned about it first. What happened was that I found out that we had come from some German shoemaker or other, some predecessor who had basically sold himself into servanthood in order to gain his passage to the US… where he expected he could find a better life.

And yet, here we were a couple of generations down the line and wondering whether we’d found a way to make his dreams come true yet. I mean… had we found a way to get out from under that thumb…? And how come, if other people had, we hadn’t?
***
What was funny about that whole thing was the fact that I had come across that piece of information when I was in my thirties.

In other words, when the information came across to us… to our family, through me… my family’s narrative had already been set for years.

Locked. Down.

We’d have already sat around the table and swapped tales with others at family reunions… and shared gossip from as far away as anyone could have figured, and swapped other tales with other folks along other ways who would have just kind of snooped us out.

Or maybe it was us who were doing the snooping, I could never tell. Because you could turn my grandma loose on anybody and within three minutes, she would have found the relevant kinfolk. And then it was all “hey Billy, you might know his cousin Luke… Ginger’s boy, who came over from Alamogordo... ALAMOGORDO …“
Or something like that.

I mean, you know? It was always like that. And then she’d just start showing off…. “Honey, this is Freddie’s daughter”… Or whatever it was.

But I didn’t wait til it got to that point. I was already out the door. I didn’t stay to listen like I should have.
***
But anyway I had had this distant cousin call me up one time… and I had kind of been thinking about learning where I came from… you know, like I should think about that now that I got kids. And before, let’s be honest, all the old folks die out. I mean, that’s something to think about, right?

So I had kind of already started to thinking about it, and I’d even gone so far as to sit around with a number of folks, gathering stories. But at that point I was only just kind of beginning the process, you know? I mean, I hadn’t yet even yet started forming my list of interrogatories for talking to my grandma. I was just kind of getting the wiretap going… so’s I could listen to recordings that’d help me bring down the whole crime family. You know? Building the case against them. It would take me a while, maybe even longer than a while, to work my may up to the kingpin. You know? I mean, hemming her in. Prepping my witnesses for their interviews… Trying to figure out who’d been where, with whom, back in double-ot-6.
And then this other woman just called me up and we chatted for a moment or two, and then she told me where I came from.

I mean, who my kinfolks were. Going all the way back.
***
And in her story, the story of this distant cousin, was this story at the end of it. That there had been an indentured servant as our earliest known predecessor. And how his son, we are told, won his own freedom after serving two terms for rich men during the Revolutionary War, having gone through the same kind of process that the father did, so that he could in turn survive.

Now, by the way… I don’t know if any of that is true. I know what she told me. But I don’t know if it was true.
***
But I do know that my family took it as one of those stories that was too good to check.

You just kind of run with a story like that. Mainly because it fits with the way you see the world.

And that story was just accepted wholeheartedly by my family. Just completely accepted. Wholeheartedly.

Everything that the woman said, they accepted without question or rebuke.
Or even a muffled guffaw. Not even a nervous, dawning realization that… ain’t that hell? We have been here two hunnert years and ain’t a one of us ever had nothin’…

There was none of that.

We just kind of gave a quick look around at each other, and looked her, and she gave a nod, and we cleared our throats and gave a little shrug of the shoulders… and kind of agreed that, yes, well, that certainly explains a lot, doesn’t it?
***
Anyway, my grandparents hadn’t complained much about the Depression, though they could have. And they also didn’t complain about the frontier mood that can only be called a depression. Though they could have complained about that, too.

They just kept biting their lip and looking farther out on the horizon, and moving further out to sea.
***
And then there was my family.

And its impact on me. And its making of me a mental mind. And the fact that as I was shaping in the womb and in the crib, and in the first moment I opened my eyes and saw my first light, when I began to make out shapes and figures, and began to record my own tallies… I saw the face of my mom, and the warmth of her embrace and her laughter, her acceptance. And I saw the face of my dad, his strength and expectations.

And I saw the face of my sister.
***
See, one learns the world through interaction with those faces. You have to -- because you can’t move your hands yet. You have very limited motor skills.
***
And yet your motors are whirring away, aren’t they?

Assimilating data, putting language and spatial relations and textures and temperatures and emotions together into contexts, moving things toward the place that feels right... But what is that right place?

Well to know that you need filters. Perspectives. Theorems. You need a framework for making sense of all this data spinning around in your tiny head. And for this you need help. You need cues.

Your parents, for example, show you how to move your face. And in exaggerated fashion at that…

Really.
Remember how it used to be?

“See this, baby boy…” and you’d watch as daddy moved his lips and his eyes and his nose in strange and unusual contortions… while he made these noises from his throat.

That’s weird, right?

But isn’t that what it looked like? And still does? The father there, making his ridiculously exaggerated contortion noises? And the baby there, reaching out in strange fascination?

Well that’s how it was in my family.
***
So the father makes these noises and the baby stares at them and is amused because the face is so… [he touches it]

fucking… [he grabs it in his meaty fingers, feels that bristle of the beard and the leathery skin against his own tender fingertips]

flexible… [So shapeable. I mean seriously, feel of this… Wow! It feels like playdoh. You can just kind of move it around on his skull, too. And this… listen to this… listen to how the pitch from his throat gets higher when I dig my fingernails into the flesh of his inner cheeks like this-- ]

Right? Isn’t that how it was?
***
And then one day the baby wakes up to realize -- hey – What the fuck? What if there is more going on here than just a show for the baby? What if that shaping of the mouth and the raising of the pitch can mean something else entirely – something more than just a mere plaything to push around for my own amusement.

And then he moves to acquire language.
***
And then… to unleash his own voice.
***
Well who do you think has been at his side the whole time, showing him how to move his lips, how to hold his fingers on his lips, to feel his lips.

So’s he could understand what mommy and daddy mean when they part their own lips and go “nuhng nhung nhu nhu…” Who was showing him that he had to kind of flex the lips to focus that “nhung” -- with a kind of circular push on the outer rim of the lips? Who knew that?

You know?
***
Who was it that taught him to walk?

His sister.
***
See, the problem is that as you grow, as you learn… you need to do a number of things that require the use of a certain kind of perspective. I can’t begin to tell you and won’t venture a guess about which perspective is better, but you must have some explanation for how the mind is invented. Try this. Read Locke or Kant or Hume or Hegel or Kierkegaard or B.F. Skinner or Piaget. Or Wittgenstein. And then read Nietzsche, and throw them all out the window. And then read ee cummings. And then read Emerson, and finally, Whitman.

And then read them all again.

Do you begin to have an idea in your head now? For how our minds form?
***
Good. So we can go on...
But first… just by the way… why no Plato? Or Shakespeare? Or Pythagoras? Or Carl Sagan? Or Buddha? Or God?
***
Anyway. One needs a certain perspective, the kind of thing one learns to bring to the world through interaction with the faces that one sees… looking up from the cradle.

And mine was shaped in large extent by the fact that I had a smart, tough, keen-minded, older sister to guide me through those early years.
***
I mean that’s kind of important to have that.
Right?
***
Think about your early years.

Or better yet, think about the early years of your children. Because isn’t it easier, really, to tap into your memories of their lives than it is to have to tap into the memories of your own life?

I think it’s at least partly because we are watching them with adoring protective eyes, and we don’t miss a trick. But it’s also because we get to filter all the good and bad shit out, to kind of sort it… to make meanings of the way they hold their spoon... to take pictures of the way they snort their cake. Right?

We are shaping them just by loving them… right?

And that’s easy to do. But that’s only because of who we are right now.
Right?
***
I mean, think about it… We know how to filter. Right? We’ve learned how to process information and do all kinds of neat things with it, right?

Right, so we watch our kids and make out our little timelines and take their pictures and build our scrapbooks… but through it all we can see through their struggle, through their joy, through their accomplishment and development… we can see how their minds develop because we have filters. Right?

But that’s not how it is at all for them. Or for you, when you were their age. Or for me. When I was their age.

Because at that at, it's all chaos.
***
And what we have lost, what we are forced to lose as we move from childhood to maturity, is the capacity not to filter information. The ability to deal with chaos.
Right?
***
Did you just filter? Of course you did.
***
We simply do not how know how to not do it… because we have been socialized to do it. We can’t help it. We operate according to social and emotional and relational and intellectual and spiritual and survival filters… all… the… time. Even the zen among us. Even the stoned. We have hierarchies in our brains because that is how our brains have been formed.
***
But in those early days, in those early moments, and later in those early years, we are just bumping up against a world that is new.
***
See... when we come up against something new… something encountered for the first time…

We need filters. Meaning we don’t have them. It’s like the first time you encounter each new monster in Supermario Bros Nintendo, where you’d run up to them and let them kill you so you can see how they do it, what their powers are, so you can work your way completely through the game again to get back to them and have some idea of how to begin to put together a plan to kill them. You know? Or maybe you do something else will get you there, make your own metaphor here... but the point is that as a boy you are learning the world against this horrendous onslaught of information coming at you and sometimes you just let it wash over you, through you, to feel its wrath… to learn from it…

And then we learn to filter ourselves, to control, to order the chaos.
And the world is no longer new.
***
It's a shame, because in the beginning, before the word was made flesh, before the face moved upon the surface of the water and began to make sense of the chaos... each new thing that we came across was a completely new thing.

Even the notion of what the thing was called. Is called. Or how it smelled. Or smells.

It's all like that... What's this?! We’ve never encountered this before. OK. What are we supposed to do with this? You know?

That sort of thing.
***
And your sister is the one who helps you through that.

Helps you get up over it.

She’s the one who sits and plays with you while mommy cooks a meal. She sits beside you in the back seat and either tells when you spill your drink or shares with you her candy.

She the one that teaches you about politics and diplomacy. And warfare.

Because it’s her choice. Her candy, her choice.
***
Seriously, don’t even think of touching the fucking candy, ok? –
***
I saw that. I’m going to tell mom if you touch the fucking candy… That’s just the way it is.
***
So when mom slows down to a quick stop at the red light and flings out her arm to do the automatic arm-swing-out seatbelt thing, you learn to dive out of the way so that you’ll get behind mama’s arm but also so’s to avoid her cigarette tip. Or else you’ll get burned.

And it was sissy that taught you that shit.
Right?
***
I mean, think of how your own kids are forming. And think again about how they are seeing the world. Are you teaching them more than their sibling?
Even as teenagers? Even as adults?
***
How about for you then? Are you closest to your brother? or to your dad?
I know. Right?
***
So, again, think about your own kid’s view …
Or better yet – you know what? Think about your view. Let’s keep the focus on you for a moment. Shall we? When you were your children’s age, whatever that age might be… what did you need to know about the world? When you were growing up, when you were two… when you were twenty… what did you need to know? Who is more likely to know what, at any particular stage of your life, you are going through? Your parent or a sibling? And in those early years especially… how cool was it to have a sibling who had just run the obstacle course, or just conquered that task, or was just about to?

Didn’t your kids feel a special bond with their sissy? Didn’t you?
I did.
***
With a sister that is three and a half years older than you, she is showing you how to move and how to eat and how to read. And also how to make mudpies and cook marshmallows and chase lizards… and how to read, and how bury the hamster in the back lot, behind the apricot trees, and how not to cry when it’s your turn to put a flower down on the grave. And how to read.

And how next time you better feed the hamster.

And keep your hands away from the candy. That’s the last god-damned time I’m going to tell you….
***
You see what I mean?
***
I mean I was learning about stuff not only from my parents, but also from a sort of guru. A mentor, if you will. She would stand at my side and guide my way. Right? Didn’t you have a guru? A brother, a kid from the block, a cousin? She was my guru. But also she was a girl. So from her I got a kind of a softer view of things.
And by “softer,” I mean “frontier woman softer.” Frontier woman like my grandma, who would call me out of the garden at noon, up to the back gate, where she’d have me hoeing corn or checking the tomato plants for bugs, and she’d send me down to the barnyard with my granddad to help him catch a chicken, and I’d help herd it into a corner and we’d both leap at it and stuff it in a toesack if it was a rooster, or catch it in our bare hands if it was a hen, and he’d reach down in the sack if it was a rooster or by take it by the feet if it was a hen, and I’d run out and make a guess where I thought the body’d land, and then I’d run across the barnyard and retrieve the bloody twitching body of the chicken after my grandfather had put it under one arm and put one hand over the neck and swung its body round his head until the body’d flung off, thereby wringing its neck, and I’d get ten points toward a new bicycle for Christmas if I’d guessed within five feet where the blood-spurting body’d landed, and then we’d bring the dead chicken up to the trailer house and my grandma’d sit on the porch with me and teach me how to pluck the feathers and take the chicken apart with a variety of knives – whatever I had handy she had a method for, but some of them you had to really bear down on the blade, push it into the bone – and then we’d get up and go inside and fry the chicken up for dinner.

And I was six.
That kind of soft.
***
Except maybe not even that soft. Because my older sister was older. And she didn’t get it taken easy on her like I did.

She didn’t get the baby boy treatment, when grandma’d call.
***
End, Part the First
***
In the next episode… how growing up in the same environment kinds of turns you both into the same kind of person, how you both came to see the world in similar ways, how your younger sister, who came along much later, is very much the same as you and your sister, and how that seems to prove to you that those environmental cues are important even if they are sometimes not shared in time and space, and how you hope that knowledge, the fact that environment shapes you, doesn’t mean that your own kids are fucking doomed…

The Question

2010-04-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

“Dad… are you gay?”

She was standing there in her high-top Chuck Taylors… in her best tomboy-pose… exuding cockiness and shy uncertainty. Livvy, my youngest, the baby, had just turned eight, and was asking a question, with a particular emphasis, a phrasing, really, an upturn on the last syllable… that suggested she meant it as a question, but she would withdraw it and pretend it as a joke if I’d rather. All I had to do was to give her some kind of a sign.

It was the kind of question that can kill a buzz. I had just put my empty cup in the sink, I was reaching to grab my windbreaker, and I startled. Then I looked up to see what was written on her face --

At that exact moment, her sister comes into the room behind us.

“OK... I’m ready... Let’s go.”

We are walking out the door to go for a bike ride.

***

The weather has been cold and wet for a while, and windy. First came the blizzards, and then we had the rain. We’d been locked up inside like grizzly bears for most of my daughters’ recent weekend stays, for most of the winter really… We’d put on weight, and our claws were beginning to reach that stage where they might begin to be useful. This was the first real week of Spring, a little chilly still, but with a promise of warmth in the air. So we were riding bikes at every opportunity… trying to get out and about, to kind of work off some of the energy.

Yesterday we had gone for a ride down this tree-lined street in one of my favorite neighborhoods. This street, it should be explained, is kind of special. It is one of those that have a “nature’s cathedral” feel. It is gorgeous in summer, with spectacular cover creating this cool, still haven from the sweltering bustle outside. And then it has this stripped back beauty in winter. For my tastes, this is when it is really lovely. When all the leaves are off the trees and only the bony remains are left, the trees look like they are raising their plaintive arms to heaven, in some sort of furtive cry. It is astonishing.

The street is a constructed one… but one that was done well, and long ago. It is lined along its entire length with sycamores. Its narrow winding pavement looks almost like a footpath, if you walk out into its center and imagine it as a footpath. The path pushes gently down a hill… and lulls rightward… before dipping away, and into the intersection. It is – how to say it? – draped in this kind of shady, gauzy veil. And it is beautiful. The trees are standing there in their skeleton-walled canopies, with their winged buttresses forming a kind of long, bending Gothic arch cathedral of tree limbs and trunks, running all the way down the lane. It’s like a painting… or a movie. It’s a Harry Potter dining hall... Or, better, it’s an animated drawing. It’s a forest in one of the princess movies. It’s a forest in Snow White…

And so I was explaining this to my girls, as we stood there in the middle of the street. I had pulled them right into the center of the space. We were standing in the middle of the sanctuary, in that place where, if you know anything about music, if you’ve ever sung in a church that was built before the microphone, you get that perfect lilting lightness… where the purity of the sound seems like it will rise forever, where the sound gathers, in that smallest possible space at the uttermost possible arch of the building’s acoustic heights… and shimmers. Sound becomes light itself in such places. I know that sounds a little corny, but it’s the best way I can come up with to describe it…. It’s as if sound somehow attains the speed of light and turns into a spark. It’s like your whole body opens and is filled with light… your cells, the pores in your skin… your body resonates with the ringing, with the purity of the sound…

Do you know what I am talking about?

Well this was one of those places… and the girls had been good little soldiers and had pulled up beside me. And we are stopped in the middle of the street… A crisp light was spilling through the trees at an angle that set them off against the grey of the sky, lighting up their burnished beams… The overcast sky worked with the effect, to accentuate the feeling that we were in a small cathedral, a forest. And I was trying, somehow, to figure a way to explain this to the girls.

Of course, the question is… how, exactly, do you tell a just-turned-eight and soon-to-be-ten about the beauty of such things? They have so little experience. Have they had the opportunity to sing, in a perfect choral moment, a flawless cantata, or the satisfaction of reading the Transcendentalists over the course of a lifetime? Have they been to the cathedral at Chartres? Do they have the experience and imagination to appreciate this Tim Burton movie set? They are growing and are showing signs that they are done with silliness… Do they remember how to make believe…?

And it occurs to me that, as a middle-aged man who lost touch with his inner child long ago, I may not have the skill and imagination to relay what I am trying to communicate to them. And so I worry about these things for a moment…and then I fell back on what I know.

I point my finger toward some imaginary object down the road and I kind of squint at it, like I am really trying to make it out. I lean forward, searchingly. Dutifully, the girls fall into line and try to see what I am looking at.

Shhhh, I whisper... Quiet. Look down the road… right about… there! Do you see it? Ignore all the other stuff going on around us. Just sit here on your bike and pretend we’re at the movies. Pretend that all of this – and I indicate the world generally with a sweeping gesture – but particularly this place, the one inside this canopy of trees… imagine that all of this… is a movie screen. Pretend that we’re watching a scene from Snow White… And if you look down there at the end of the forest… you can see a white horse just stepping into the path.

And I looked, and leaned, and I squinted... And I saw the white horse. Because if you don’t believe your own story, nobody else will.

And it almost worked, too. There was this little wrinkle, this moment, when I thought that they might be feeling it. I even asked them if they were feeling it.

Do you feel that? Does it feel like you’re in a movie? I made a few additional sweeping gestures with my hands and arms. The purported effect was to create this magical transformation. And so I stood, there just slightly in front of them… ridiculously acting it out… like we had somehow ridden our bikes into a mediated world and were now standing in a digitization of Snow White’s reality. I was acting as if I had woken up and found myself in a new body, as if I had just exchanged souls with someone else and I was now moving in… hanging pictures on the walls... I was patting the air with my hands and doing these quirky wax-on-wax-off motions. I was doing the whole mime routine...

And then my oldest daughter. Izzy, slapped me out of my reverie.

I had thought that I was constructing this meaningful experience for the girls. We do a lot of bike riding and nature watching in this neighborhood, and they often stop me to point out some budding flower or some odd-shaped stone. So it wasn’t entirely out of the question when I had hoped that they would feel the same sense of austere beauty that I was feeling in the interior space of the place. So it should have worked , but on this day it didn’t. To them, it was just a street with trees on one side and trees on the other… And no one was going to convince them otherwise. My Izzy turned her head into my shoulder and leaned into her punch.

“Dad, you sound kind of gay.”

***

So it had happened two days in a row.

Now it hadn’t particularly worried me when Izzy had thrown cold water… I knew what she really meant to say was, “Dad! Stop talking so loud! The guy over there in his driveway can hear you!” … I knew this because there had been a guy standing over in his driveway, and he could hear me. And she had been worried about it… In fact, she had been on my case a lot, lately, because I talk too loudly in public. I think it’s her age, really. She doesn’t come right out and say it, but I don’t think she thinks… that I’m as cool as I once was. The reasons for this are complicated, but they feel pretty certain. I can sense it and I’m sure that I’m correct. Even so, I think this thing about the loud talking is a momentary thing. It will soon run its course. Apparently, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I embarrass her. I know this because she assures me of it every time she brings it up. And she brings it up about four times a day... so I believe her. It truly is just a question of my being a person who talks loudly… At least, that’s her story. And for now, I’m sticking with it.

Also, there was another reason that I hadn’t been worried when Izzy said what she said. I mean, let’s face it, I did sound kind of gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but come on… a grown man standing there, in the middle of the road, describing, like some hapless Mr. Rogers, the aesthetic niceties of his neighborhood... and all he can come up with is princess stuff? It was like I’d called a meeting of the court, and put my best minds on it, then begged the favor of my children, to entice them to sit in recline with me awhile, to commune -- and in the midst of the festivities my daughters begged my pardon... “And what are we to talk about, dear father?” And I replied… unicorns!

Now you tell me, buddy… Is that or is that not… gay??!?

Ok, so actually, it is undeniably girly. But I don’t know that I’d call it gay. At least not per se. I mean, I’m a father, right? And I have daughters. True? So you tell me… What am I supposed to do? When I had stepsons, all they wanted to watch was movies of people being punched in the testicles. And so we did that. We watched many, many movies of people being punched in the testicles. But now I have girls, and they want unicorns. So I give them unicorns.

***

Now… I want you to stop what you’re doing. Stop it. I know what you’re thinking – just stop it. This is not going to be a coming out party. There is no coming out to be had. It is merely a story about a father and his daughters, and how a few little moments were filled with meaning. I also won’t be, in this story, having a bar-mizvah or a quinceanera… This is because I am not Jewish and because I am not a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl. I am a father. I have daughters. And they have both made comments recently about things they don’t understand. I am trying to help them understand.

So, to do that, I need to understand... myself.

There are two things going on here. First, Izzy has used a throwaway insult to allow her to break ranks and ride ahead rightquick on her bicycle, thereby signaling to the guy standing in his driveway that she has no idea who we are, that we are just some strangers who happened to ride up to the same spot on the street with her but otherwise she doesn’t know us. And while I suppose that it is within the realm of theoretical possibility that I had been acting -- and sounding, too, apparently -- "kind of gay" that particular weekend, I think Izzy’s comment had more to do with her age and her newly-found independent streak than anything I was doing. She is about to be ten. For the next seven or eight years she will think everything is kind of gay.

And anyway, I am not entirely sure what that means… to sound gay. I mean, sure, I get the concept. I’ve seen the stereotypes. But how does that fit me? So I had a skiing accident when I was seventeen. It knocked two teeth out and almost ripped my nose from my face. And after the bridge work and the rebuilding of my nasal cavity, I speak a little nasally. And there is also the slightest hint… of a lisp. But I ask you… if you felt, as I did just now, that little shiver… What was that shiver for? For God’s sake, Humphrey Bogart had a lisp. As does Mike Tyson… And what about Truman Capote? OK, bad example, that last one, but you take my point. It can’t be just about a way of talking.

I think at least part of the problem is that, included in the stereotype of gayness is a kind of extravagant creativity. Gay men and artists are the only men allowed in our society to show any sensitivity, and for our trouble in allowing them to act out, we expect them to produce flamboyant, imaginative expression. But does that make what they produce… gay? It just doesn’t seem to me to be both necessary and sufficient to say that creativity and expression equals gay. As if poetry itself has become the exclusive property of gayness. I think that boldness and extravagance of thought, of ideas, is neither male nor female, neither straight nor gay. It is universal. It is immense. Imagination and poetry are, for me, the lifeblood of living zenlike... in the moment. I am most alive when I am so, and that is what I want to be. Immense. Was Henry Miller gay? Was Whitman? Again… you take my point.

So I think that what it meant, if it meant anything at all, when Izzy said I sounded gay is that … I’m alive. And I can live with that. Still, I worry more about where she got that stuff than what she means by it. For example, I wonder… How the hell do I know what I wonder? Who in God’s creation knows where kids come up with their stuff... Can you answer that?! Can you?! Maybe one of their friends has a teenaged brother, and so they have learned that to say something is “gay” is an all-inclusive insult, a veritable triple-dog level of difficulty in the lexicon of teenage public insults. Or maybe they have suddenly come face to face with the possibility that their father, this man whom they have never questioned, should not necessarily be taken at face value. Maybe they are beginning to question authority, and starting at the most basic of levels. Perhaps they are taking graduate courses on Lacan at the community college on the weekends they are with their mom. How do I know? The point is… I don’t know. Kids operate in a kind of kid space. It is informed by so many things that have so little to do with me… Just as I live in my world and do not want to have to explain every single thought that runs through my head to them… I try to not read too much meaning into their comments unless they take the time to express them in a way that says they want me to… So while I want to tell Izzy that... as the war-torn path of a thousand ex-lovers, girlfriends, spouses, and their consorts can attest, and as these forlorn souls, strewn behind me like so much carnage, like so much food for the hunt… as these women surely will bear witness… I am not gay... I don’t do this, however, beause I do not feel it is warranted. If asked to place odds, I would bet that her comment lacked a deep psychological core. It was child’s play… perhaps not innocent, because it hinted at a kind of ugly bias that I don’t accept… But still, child’s play.

But then there was this second thing…

***

Livvy stood there, not quite sure what she had just done. I think the fact that I looked up at her made it worse in a way. She has really been clinging to me lately. She’s been especially gentle, and sensitive, and her hugs have been electric. She is in the final throes of the Sweetness and Light stage, those last few days of Barbie and coloring books. She has seemed vulnerable, as if she wants to wring out every last drop from these vestiges of childhood but she is also afraid of being mocked. She is trying out a variety of new roles – punk rock girl, brainiac, and most importantly… the girl-who-is-no-longer-just-Izzy’s-little-sister. She is new at all of these, and she plays them tentatively. She is seeking authenticity… She craves attention, but she shuns it. And she doesn’t want to be the one to rock the boat, but she kind of likes the rocking… And so now comes Livvy, with her wild wild question… Why here? Why now?!... and she clearly means it as a serious question. And I look up at her like she has just told me that she won the lottery but I am trying to determine whether she is putting me on... You know, one of those searching looks.

Her innocent face is crystal. She is delicate and breakable in her sweetness. She holds her pose, but we both know that it could slip at any moment and break into pieces on the floor. She will start to look for a hole in the floor to jump into if I don’t think quick, if I don’t speak up.

So I pause, and I straighten myself, and I look her in the eye... I say, “What?! “

There are a number of ways to say that word… the way I said it was the way you say it when your drunken friend has just made an impassioned argument that The Carpenters are his favorite early rock band. Wait… What ?!

She is kind of smiling, but only just kind of. Her smile looks like an expression you might see on one of the kids in the hall... She is not sure for whom she feels more embarrassed, me or her. And I can tell that she is trying to sort it out. So I try again. “Baby Girl…”

Now just where do you go with such an answer. I mean, she’s eight, right?. And she’s old enough to know that if she wants to know something all she has to is ask, yeah? But she’s also old enough to know better… She has been raised to be sensitive by a guy who grew up with Alan Alda on the tube. While she should know that her father is a veritable dynamo of masculine insouciance. And while, of course, she will find this out over time. (I can be just such… a… man. Perhaps her mother could share some stories.) … she also needs to know about acceptance and tolerance. I want her to avoid the dark thinking that lies at the bottom of her question… as if it was an accusation.

So I struggle with what to say. And I struggle with how to say it. And this struggle, though mighty, takes all of two seconds… and then I fall back on what I know.

“Baby Girl, as the war-torn path of a thousand ex-lovers, girlfriends, spouses can attest, and as the souls strewn behind me like so much carnage can bear witness, I am most definitely… not gay.”

She looks at me uncertainly. Not because she doesn’t accept what I am saying, but because she is processing it. She is a gifted and talented girl, bright as a new penny, but she sometimes takes me too literally. Her funny bone is oriented toward physicality, whereas her sister’s is more verbal. She is trying to determine my mood, my intent, from the words I have used. She is reading me.

I don’t give her any help at first. I just let it sit there. I have always used adult language with my girls, as well as conceptual thinking, and trusted them to hear and understand. It is important to me to have integrity, and I don’t think I do my girls any favors by spoon-feeding them knowledge. And yet, it occurs to me, as I stand there, that I can’t let something I’ve just said go without clarification. Honesty is very important to me. I am not a Nazi about it, but I do try to advocate for it when I can. So I must go back and make sure that the girls, both now standing in the living room, each with one foot pointed toward the door, don’t get any wrong ideas.

Well, OK… I say. There may have been just a few less than a thousand. It was more like a hundred… OK? Fine. You want to play detective, missy? Ten. There were ten… all right?! And I realized that I seemed less than authoritative. And also slightly comical with my sudden and unexplained punching of the air. So I add… But there was strewing. Believe me -- strewing was involved…

It was this last bit that broke the ice. Izzy snorted and Livvy took her cue, and grinned. I stood there like the class clown who has just discovered that if he cracks wise it’s almost as good as doing his homework… Then, I walked over and gave my girlies a little peck on the cheek.

Livvy had been looking for a sign, and so I had given her one.

“No, Boo. Your daddy is not gay… he’s just a little silly.”

I coined a phrase, today. Oh boy.

2010-03-22T23:50:00.000-07:00

I coined a phrase, today. I probably shouldn’t say “coined.” It was more like reinvented. I took an old phrase and made it my own. It didn't take much, really... I didn't really have to work at it. The thing just kind of came up and tapped me on the shoulder and introduced itself.    There was no awkward moment when the phrase had initiated the contact by tapping me on the shoulder, but then hadn't said anything yet... when it was just kind of standing there, waiting for me to recognize it from some other time we'd met, like at some party or something... No, it wasn't like that at all. The thing just came up and stuck out its hand.

“It’s the Economy, Stupak!”

I feel reasonably confident that I am the first person to use that phrase in the debate on healthcare. And listen, brother, that is saying something. Because there has been a lot said in the debate on healthcare.

(Can I get an Amen?)

***
The reason I say that I am "reasonably" confident that I am the first to use the phrase is that I googled it and nothing came up in exactly the order in which I placed the words – at least not in the first three or four lines of the search. Anyone who has ever done a little research, and by "little" I mean one of those jobs where you are reasonably sure you know something and you don't want to have to do too much to get the level of certainty from "reasonably sure" to "OK. Now I'm Really Certain" ... as anyone who has done that level of research will tell you -- a search which doesn't turn up an exact match in the first three of four lines of google is the gold standard for searches.

So I’m pretty sure I’m the first.

Yea.

***
Now I should clarify that a bit. It is always possible that someone else used my phrase in its current ordering in exactly the same fashion that I did, prior to today, but even if that is true, they likely did so while intending an entirely different meaning. For example, imagine a scenario in which several “representatives” of "the people” were walking along to some press conference or other, yesterday or the day before.  Imagine they were going to find someplace where they could stand in front of the cameras and lean down into the microphone (you know, like a lover), and opine about whether this wording or that wording was a better way to describe just what they had achieved. And also how grateful they are that we are so grateful or how angry they are that we are so angry. It is entirely, theoretically, possible that at some point during such a spectacle, Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI) leaned over to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and asked, “Madame Speaker, what is the name of that thing that the folks back home want fixed right now so that they can continue to send us money?” It is possible that the Speaker leaned down to him (you know, like a conspirator) and said “it’s the economy, Stupak.”

But I gotta be honest -- I doubt that happened. Because as anyone can tell you... nobody’s talking about the economy in Washington right now.

***

I suppose the reason that no one is talking about the economy in Washington right now is that in recent unemployment figures the number stands at just under 10 percent. Which means that the effective unemployment rate is likely somewhere near 17 percent. Which means that a lot of the people who want to work – you know, in order to continue to write checks to the government so that the government checks don’t bounce -- don't have a job. And they are grumpy.

And as anyone can tell you, grumpy people won’t come to the party unless they hear the music through the ceiling and their banging on the ceiling with the broom handle a couple of times already to get your attention... unless that still hasn’t caused you to turn the music down.

Let's face it, the government did what you would have done. In fact, the government did what players have done since before the game was invented... they threw a party. They threw a party and they turned the music not only up, but up. And the grumpy people came up the stairs in their robes and curlers and stood in the hall under the flickering flourescent bulb--

And they banged on the door.

***

Depending on which side you were on, you may have viewed it as a drunken brawl or a victory celebration. But no one can deny that it was an event not to be missed. And so, no one did miss it. Everybody showed up. Even the print media. Even the broadcast news. Which is odd, because many of the folks back home who used to work in the media and now are looking for other lines of work so that they can continue to send checks to the government have recently been made decidedly more grumpy. You might have thought that some of that grumpiness would have trickled up, would have been reflected... But no.

In any event, it kind of works out for everybody, because the media gets a big news event. And anyone can tell you that a big news event drives ratings, which allows for increased advertising rates... so that the media players can make enough money to hire back the folks back home who have been otherwise spending their time working on the drywall project and blogging -- wondering whether if it comes down to it they will give up the additional car or dip into the kid's college fund first, in order to pay the mortgage... All of this, of course, all of this onslaught of jobs, not just saved but created... is to happen for the media players and by extension, one may hope, for every other player in the house... just as soon as anybody can find anybody else who can scrape enough money together to buy an ad.

But what of the politicians? The politicians love the whole thing because they get to throw a party. And who doesn’t like a party? Free buffet, free bar. Come in and look around. Enjoy the fireworks and the hookers. (Yeah, it's that kind of party.)

And for the people? A piece of bread to eat while they watch the circus. And not too shabby, that. Better enjoy it. Better notice the enticingly aromatic, wholesomey goodness of the bread and the spectacular agility of the drunken acrobats... Better eat up!

Because once that’s done, we could be down to bones.

And scraps.

***

Anyway, the fact that I’m the first on the scene with the phrase in question, as I said before, says something. Just consider the sheer magnitude of the cacophony of words that have been poured into this debate, dripped from the honey smooth lips of some of our most eloquent public orators. Consider the wit of the pundits. Think of how many, many sentences have been typed onto keyboards and then sent along through various cable and plasma networks to enter the many, many retinal gazes, to be lodged in the many, many neural networks and to spark the outraged or approving responses which have driven the people to pull out their pocketbooks and send many, many dollars to politicians on either side of the argument – checks which are dutifully endorsed and handed to their staffs by the politicians on their way out the door to another television interview… Which means, of course, more words.

When you think of it that way, you have to admit that it is a little surprising that no one has thought to use the particular play on words that I coined.

***

I mean... look, for, example at a sentence in an article in the Daily Kos, a journal of reputed political wit and radical politics. (This reference, by the way, is one of the references that appeared in my original search.) One posting found here (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/21/161250/056) used almost precisely my phrasing but with one very important difference. Their phrase (quoted here in context) was, as follows:

“James Carville coined the phrase 'It's the economy, stupid,' Stupak noted”

Therefore, their phrasing of the part of the sentence relevant to our concern -- once all of the context is removed and just the words themselves are stripped out -- is, as follows:

"'It's the economy, stupid,' Stupak" ...

If you look even for a moment at that phrasing you can see the very important difference of which I am speaking. Do you see it? In their phrasing, they are reporting something that Stupak was supposedly quoted as saying in a satirical piece about how Stupak was running for Pope now, and how he will be hiring James Carville to run his campaign. So they quoted Stupak as quoting Carville. Do you see it? Their phrase was, I admit, close to mine. However, the Daily Kos, being who they are, simply ran the satire without commenting on the missed opportunity to make the pun that I make. They simply reported the Carville sentence which included the additional word “stupid” between “economy” and “Stupak.”

And in my phrasing, obviously, I removed the “stupid” from the Carville phrase, because as anyone knows... only the stupid come between Representative Stupak and his fierce, intent focus on the health of the nation's economy.

***

Except that lately that hasn’t been altogether true. (Has it?) Because lately, Representative Stupak's focus has been on other kinds of health concerns. As have, oddly enough, the focuses of the other politicians.

And I wonder why.

***

Really, I mean it. Why?

***

The govenment, the media, the people...  All of their respective focuses have expressly not been on the economy.

Which is odd. Because the economy is not in entirely great shape. In fact, it has lurched back and forth, lately -- but then back again. It's always back, again... to the point that it seems it may be caught in gear. It reminds me of an old Dodge Caravan I drove right in the middle of my second marriage, just before things started going downhill. The van had been sold to me as a bargain at any price, and checked over by a mechanic who told me I could trust him. One day, however, not too long after I got it, it just ground up its gearbox as I was climbing a particularly steep hill. It simply broke... gave out beneath me.

It started rolling backwards. And I could feel the drag of gravity. There was that moment, that brief interval at the tipping point, when I realized that I had to sort of ride it out... that I'd lost control. And my "bargain that was not to be" rolled with increasing momentum back down the hill.  Engine blaring.

True story. And I feel that same lurching here.

In fact, it got so bad a short time ago that a single man walking onto an airplane with an explosive package in his shorts was enough to make us really begin worrying about the real world of danger and security. And it was in that worry that a few small voices began to pop through, telling us about how Wall Street is off and running again and how the healthcare care debate has halted any hiring, as companies wait to see the fall-out of their rising costs... and how the foreclosure rate is rising and the Chinese willingness to continue financing our out-of-control deficit is falling, and how we could be teetering on the brink of another formidable collapse... And how, even with all of that going on... we have been focusing on something else... entirely different.

And that seems exceedingly odd to me, because I distinctly remember hearing just a very, very short time ago a certain amount of talk about how the economy is now Priority One. The President stood up there on the deck of the ship of state, with a troop of economics professors and corporate leaders assembled before him, a banner spread behind him that declared “Mission: Economy,” and leaned into the lectern (like he cared)... Or I could have some of my storylines mixed up.   One spectacle blends into another for me these days.

***

On any account, with all the this’n and the that’n and the hemmin’ and the hawin’ of the healthcare debate, the government’s attention has been turned to matters other than the economy. And so when the Daily Kos misses the obvious pun that I did not miss, it is not because they are “stupid,” it is just because their attention is not on the same things as mine. Bart Stupak and the President are focusing on whether healthcare reform should include abortion rights, and the President needs Stupak’s vote and Stupak is attempting to give it to him while still maintaining his identification as a Catholic in the increasingly murky waters of religion-based identity politics. So when Stupak finds a way to give his vote to Obama despite his misgivings (Lucky that!), and the Daily Kos, being who they are, write a post saying that the guy ought to be lionized, ought to run for pope, in fact -- it's all just a kind of giggle. You know what I mean?  It's a dig at Stupak, but also a kind of welcoming back into the fold. The prodigal son returning. And what’s a welcoming home without a party. And what’s a party without a clown. So the Daily Kos runs its phrase as a set piece in a kind of tossed off joke, and Stupak gets a kick out of it and the President leans in, so that some of that holy fire will rub off on him. And the dancing horses waddle across the stage...

***

Whereas when I use my phrase, I just want them all to shut the hell up and fix the economy.