Tuesday, July 31, 2018

As If

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Mona and I went to see a David Phelps concert at a nearby church last week. It didn't go well.

I'm not Christian, but I was raised Catholic so I know all the stories. I enjoy devotional music of all faiths, and like David Phelps in particular. I have a few of his albums.

But from the moment I walked in, I felt a very bad vibe. I stood out, and not in a good way. I have long hair and a long beard, and my t-shirt had a picture of Pete Seeger on it. I found myself surrounded by clean-shaven men with very short hair, polo shirts tucked into their belted waistbands. I was the only one wearing sneakers.

A lady sat down next to us, smiled, and said, "We're a very inclusive church here. We even have some Negroes and Chinese!" She considered this for a second. "They might not be Chinese. I don't know what they are."

If I could digress for just a second here: Madalyn Murray O'Hair didn't set out to file a lawsuit ending mandatory prayer in public schools. Before taking such a drastic step she had gone to the school and explained that, as an atheist, she simply wanted her own child to be excused. The school agreed that he wouldn't have to pray, but insisted that he would still have to stand, bow his head, clasp his hands, and move his lips as if he were praying. They considered this a reasonable compromise.  (She disagreed.)

And that's pretty much the East Texas definition of inclusiveness: we'll allow you to exist, all we ask in return is that you believe the things we believe, do the things we do, say the things we say, and look the way we look. If you can't do that, well, it's a free country-- and by that we mean you're free to go, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I could see the sideways glances direct my way, and I wasn't happy about being the local sideshow freak, but thought that once the lights went out and the show started, we'd be fine.

Unfortunately, the show stunk. You would never believe these were professional musicians. They seemed intimidated and confused by the instruments in their hands. The mix was all wrong-- every time the bass player plucked a note, the lead singer was completely drowned out.

We gave it a few songs, hoping the engineer would notice and fix it, but he didn't.

So, we called it a night and snuck out early. The ushers glared at us.  One literally shook his finger at me.

I briefly considered giving him a finger of my own, but didn't.

I was in a church, after all.

The Hedonic Treadmill

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From Wikipedia:  The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

Monday, July 30, 2018

say why?

The Art Of Disappearing
by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Different Ways to Pray, ©1980


When they say Don't I know you?
say no.


When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.


If they say We should get together
say why?


It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.


When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.


Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.


It's always kind of a strange feeling to "discover" someone who's been around for quite a while.  I always wonder if everyone knew about her but me.

That would be okay.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Different Ways

Different Ways To Pray
by Naomi Shihab Nye

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

Friday, July 27, 2018

I Have the Time

Monday, Two Months Later
by Rod McKuen
from moment to moment, ©1974


Now I have the time
to take you riding
in the car
to lie with you in private deserts
or eat with you
in public restaurants.

Now I have the time
for football all fall long
and to apologize
for little lies and big lies
told when there was no time
to explain the truth.

I am finished
with whatever tasks
kept me from walking
in the woods with you
or leaping in the Zanford sand.

I have so much time
that I can build for you
sand castles out of mortar.

Midweek picnics.
Minding my temper in traffic.
Washing your back
and cleaning out my closets.
Staying in bed with you
long past the rush hour
and the pangs of hunger
and listening
to the story of your life
in deadly detail.

Whatever time it takes,
I have that time.

I've always wanted
to watch flowers open
all the way,
however long the process took.

I'd hoped that I might
take you travelling
down the block
or to whatever.

Now I have the time
to be bored
to be delivered
to be patient
to be understanding
to give you
all the time you need.

Now I have the time.
Where are you ?



You can listen to this poem read by the author HERE.

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Clippings



 

We found a small wooden box with a few newspaper clippings Mom had saved.

There were three notices of her dance recitals.  As a young woman she was a member of a modern dance troupe, but turned down an offer by Martha Graham to dance professionally since it would have meant leaving college.

There was a neatly trimmed notice of her marriage to my father.

And her own father's obituary, torn out by hand and carefully folded in half.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Gone From View

When Paul Simon's mother died, this is the note Art Garfunkel sent him:
To Paul from Art:   We're out under the stars now, the harbor we came from is gone from view.

Excerpted from Art Garfunkel’s autobiographical What Is It All But Luminous / notes from an Underground Man ©2017

Find The Others

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the normal people as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like 'Have a nice day' and 'Weather’s awful today, eh?,' you yearn inside to say forbidden things like 'Tell me something that makes you cry,' or 'What do you think deja vu is for?' Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger. Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”  ~Timothy Leary

Sunday, July 22, 2018

The line I called the horizon does not exist

Monet Refuses the Operation
By Lisel Mueller


Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.


I like the idea that everything I think I know could be wrong.

I like the idea that I could wake up someday, maybe tomorrow, and see the same things in brand new ways.

 

Everydays into Holidays

In Case You Didn’t Know
by Rod McKuen

Some days up ahead
will come down empty
and some years fuller
than the fullest one
we've known before.

Today has been
the best day yet.
                I thought
you ought to know that,
and I thought it time
that I said thank you
for whatever might have
passed between us
that in your mind
you might have felt
missed my attention.

It didn’t
and it doesn’t
and it won’t.

Thank you
for the everydays
that you make
into holidays.

I close up
more often now,
not just to you
but even to myself
                 within myself.

I know I should
be always open.
At least I ought to make
               a better try.

I will.

When the library at the college Mona works for moves a book out of rotation, they put it out on a table for anyone to have.  We've found some treasures in their trash.  The poem above is from moment to moment by Rod McKuen, ©1974.

McKuen reminds me of Ringo Starr.  There isn't a lot of nuance or metaphor in their poems or songs; you don't have to wonder, "What is he trying to say?" because he's come right out and said it.

For better or for worse.

Friday, July 20, 2018

Not Supposed To Do

This poem, excerpted from Art Garfunkel’s autobiographical What Is It All But Luminous / notes from an Underground Man ©2017, reminds me of the playfulness of Shel Silverstein:
Today I'll judge my books by their covers.
I'll watch a pot, count unhatched chicks,
I'll fix the unbroken, hold secret gods divine.

A thousand fine soldiers, resplendent in
their jacket designs, are lined in shelves
in my aerie--
All the noble sentiments quilled,
Cry for all the milk that's spilled,
Let the unaware buyer be sold--
If the book cover glitters, it's gold;
I'll make a Top Forty polled for pretty veneers,
how the book appears, and how it feels
to hold and be held the whole night
through...
Today I'll do exactly what you're not
supposed to do.

In a world seduced by easy understanding…

This short excerpt from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014, was a big help to me in understanding his poems.  It's a tremendous relief to know I'm not supposed to "get it" right away:

Modernism as (E.E.) Cummings and his mid-twentieth-century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was the exploration of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader's feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure: the formerly hidden skeleton of a work would now be exuberantly visible. The third facet of modernism was an embrace of adversity. In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernists believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading. In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Tim Hawkins

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We went to see comedian Tim Hawkins last weekend, and he was a lot of fun.

He's been labelled as a "Christian comedian," but don't let that scare you off.   I'm of a different faith, and was still the most I've laughed in a long, long time.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

While the silence

My Friends Don’t Get Buried
Edward Hirsch


My friends don’t get buried
in cemeteries anymore, their wives
can’t stand the sadness
of funerals, the spectacle
of wreaths and prayers, tear-soaked
speeches delivered from the altar,
all those lies and encomiums,
the suffocating smell of flowers
filling everything.
No more undertakers in black suits
clutching handkerchiefs,
old buddies weeping in corners,
telling off-color stories, nipping shots,
no more covered mirrors,
black dresses, skullcaps and crucifixes.
Sometimes it takes me a year or two
to get out to the back yard in Sheffield
or Fresno, those tall ashes scattered
under a tree somewhere in a park
somewhere in New Jersey.
I am a delinquent mourner
stepping on pine-cones, forgetting to pray.
But the mourning goes on anyway
because my friends keep dying
without a schedule,
without even a funeral,
while the silence
drums us from the other side,
the suffocating smell of flowers
fills everything, always,
the darkness grows warmer, then colder,
I just have to lie down on the grass
and press my mouth to the earth
to call them
so they would answer.


I had to look up the word "enconium."

You can hear this poem read by the author at The New Yorker.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Star



This carving was created by Gislebertus between 1125 and 1135, and shows an angel awakening the Three Wise Men, impelling them to follow the star.  You can read a little more about it HERE.

I just like the way the three kings  sleep with their crowns on, all spooned together.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

'69

Excerpted from Art Garfunkel's autobiographical What Is It All But Luminous / notes from an Underground Man ©2017:

In May of '69… Paul's writing changed from "I know your part'll go fine"-- words of a deep friendship (The Only Living Boy in New York)-- to "Why don't you write me?"-- words of frustration.


So many things that are obvious in retrospect slip by us in the present.

(An aside:  it seems petty to complain about a book's font, but this was published in something resembling Comic Sans that is very difficult to read.)

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Who made who?

Excerpted from Maureen Dowd's  column in The New York Times, Sunday July 8, 2018:

Trump has certainly made political discourse more crude and belligerent. But is he making the whole country meaner, coarser, and less empathetic? Or was the pump primed for a political figure like him because the internet had already made America meaner, coarser and less empathetic?


Putting the blame on The Internet would seem to imply that we were always a vicious, self-centered people just waiting for the means to unleash our vitriol on the world.

I don't believe that.

I don't know what changed.

And I don't know how to change it back.

Monday, July 9, 2018

"I thought you were a trout stream."

Excerpt from Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, ©1967:

I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.


"Excuse me," I said, "I thought you were a trout stream."


"I'm not, " she said.


Almost all of Richard Brautigan's poetry and novels are available for free download from The Brautigan Archives.

Sunday, July 8, 2018

Baggage

"I'm taking this trip from Mexico City to the Gulf of Mexico and back without any bag or person-- only what I can carry in my pockets.  The need for baggage is a form of insecurity."  ~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Saturday, July 7, 2018

Do you want it? Do you like it?

"Birth, aging, illness, and death: these things are normal. Birth is the normal way of things, aging’s the normal way of things, illness and death are the normal way of things. Get so that you can see clearly that this is the way things normally are. That’s when a sense of disenchantment can arise. You’ll be able to loosen the grip that these things have on you. You’ll be able to pull them out, root and all.

"We’ve suffered as the slaves of defilement and craving for how long now? Can you remember? Ask yourself. Can you remember all you’ve been through? And how much longer are you going to let it keep on happening — this holding and carrying and weighing yourself down? How many eons have you been doing this? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of eons. Can you count them all? Of course you can’t. And how much longer will you have to keep on suffering in this way? If you’re still stubborn, still unwilling to listen to the Buddha’s teachings, this is the kind of reward you’ll have to expect out of life. Do you want it? Do you like it? If you don’t want it, then you’ll have to develop the goodness of your mind so that you can see your way out of this, so that you can see your defilements, so that you can see the suffering and harm they cause."

~Ajahn Fuang Jotiko (source)

Friday, July 6, 2018

Slow Down the Inexorable Rush

Excerpted from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014

Princeton poet Richard P. Blackmur said (E.E.) Cummings's poems were "baby talk," and poetry arbiter Helen Vendler called them repellent and foolish: "What is wrong with a man who writes this?" she asked.


Nothing was wrong with Cummings-- or Duchamp or Stravinsky or Joyce, for that matter. All were trying to slow down the seemingly inexorable rush of the world, to force people to notice their own lives. In the twenty-first century, that rush has now reached Force-Five; we are all inundated with information and given no time to wonder what it means or where it came from. Access without understanding and facts without context have become our daily diet.


 

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

It Is Important Not to Know

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the benefits of travel:

Sometimes it is better not to know anything about a country when you visit it. Especially it is important not to know its language or languages. Thus every sound, striking the ear like a small bell or animal cry, without any associative meaning, takes on the immediate quality of poetry, the quality of pure color in painting, with the percussive effect of pure sound in a void. It is only as these sounds accumulate inside us that some sort of composite meaning forms itself. Until then, we are like children newly arrived on earth, with virgin timpani, each a tabula rasa upon which all has yet to be written. Herein lies the true fascination of travel, not in the confirmation or contradiction of what we have been led to expect by the perusal of history or the learning of local languages, nor by the recognition of native customs in their similarity or dissimilarity to our own…


Thus it was that I came upon the souk in Marrakesh as a space traveler in a time warp, knowing nothing of the place in which he has landed, with only his senses to inform him of the strange terrain.


And strange it certainly was. Night itself, and I arrived at night, casts its mystery even on the most familiar domestic scene, for night itself is always the eternal unfathomable darkness out of which all is born and into which all is borne in the end. We are merely time travelers in between, fleetingly passing in a patch of sunlight, from shadow to shadow. Every day is a patch of light, however somber or bright, every night a patch of that eternal mystery.


The souk was of that darkness, and it lay everywhere before me.


Excerpted from Writing Across the Landscape, © 2015.

But in your dreams, whatever they be…

Another excerpt from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's travel journal, Writing Across the Landscape, © 2015:

NIGHT OF MARCH 6 (1972), IN NADI MOTEL-- So noisy couldn't sleep all night. Like a train station: trucks roaring past, people talking in hotel, doors slamming, etc., etc. Bad dreams… 7:15 a.m. we fly out to Australia. Possible that our waking psychic states are mirror images of our sleep & dreams, as the branches of the tree mirror the pattern of the roots? So that the profile of our dreams transfigures our waking moods preceding or following that sleep? The depression or euphorias of dreams carried over into our daytime subliminal feelings… A bad dream may blight our day, a dream of desire carry over into waking sexual aggressions. Of course, it's all in Freud, all in Wilhelm Reich… The moon is my undoing when the sun comes up, the midnight sun gathers us in, our dream siblings signal us thru the flames.


 

Sunday, July 1, 2018

To Be

"Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."   ~Albert Camus (via Jules of Nature)

I can still smell the ocean



When I was a child in the early 70s, this is what it was like to go to the beach at Galveston.  The waves would roll back, there would be a brief pause, then thousands of these tiny shellfish would wriggle to the surface.

Technically they were edible, but they're only about a quarter of an inch long so you'd have to have a lot of time on your hands to prepare enough for a meal.  We just loved the vibrant colors and the motion.

They started disappearing in the 80s, and they're pretty much all gone now.

There's a huge, constantly expanding "dead zone" at the mouth of the Mississippi, caused by fertilizer and pesticide runoff, and I assume that zone finally expanded large enough to wipe them out.

It's a pity.  They were a joy.




An aside:  Mom used to pack Chips Ahoy chocolate-chip cookies for our beach trips, and they would become soft and salty in the humid ocean air.  I sometimes buy a bag at the grocery store, but they are crisp and fresh and don't taste right to me.