Month: May 2017

Letters of the unliving

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Letters of the Unliving
–Mina Loy
The present implies presence
thus
unauthorized by the present
these letters are left authorless —
have lost all origin
since the inscribing hand
lost life.

The harshness of the past
croaks,
from creased leaves
covered with unwritten writing
since death’s erasure
of the writer —
erased the lover

Well-chosen and so ill-relinquished
the husband heartsease —
acme of communion —

made euphonious
our esoteric universe.

Ego’s oasis now’s
the sole companion.

My body and my reason
you left to the drought of your dying:
the longing and the lack
of a racked creature
shouting
to an unanswering hiatus
‘reunite us!’

till slyly
patience creeps up on passion
and the elation of youth
dwindles out of season.

Agony
ends in an equal grave
with ecstasy.

An uneasy mist
rises from this calligraphy of recollection
documenting a terror of dementia.

This package of ago
creaks with the horror of echo.

The bloom of love
decoyed
to decay by the finger
of Hazard the swindler —
deathly handler who leaves
no post-mortem mask
but a callous earth.

Posing the extreme enigma
in my Bewilderness
can your face excelling Adonis
have ceased to be
or ever have had existence?

With you no longer the addresser
there is no addressee
to dally with defunct reality.

Can one who still has being
be inexistent?

I am become
dumb
in answer
to your dead language of amor.

Diminuendo
of life’s imposture
implies no possible retrial
by my present self —
my cloud-corpse
beshadowing your shroud.

The one I was with you:
inhumed in chasms.
No creator
reconstrues scar-tissue
to shine as birth-star.

But to my sub-cerebral surprise
at last on blase sorrow
dawns an iota of disgust
for life’s intemperance:

‘As once you were’

Withhold your ghostly reference
to the sweet once were we.

Leave me
my final illiteracy
of memory’s languor —

my preference
to drift in lenient coma
an older Ophelia
on Lethe.

Wave goodbye

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“So now you start to recognize
That every single path you see
Leads to a tear in your eye
So wave goodbye, wave goodbye”
–Chris Cornell, “Wave Goodbye”

The other day virtually everyone I ever knew in Seattle (okay, not everyone, but an awful lot of people) went to see U2 play their now 30-year-old album The Joshua Tree in its entirety. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder joined them on stage. I joked with my mom that Eddie Vedder is now the Tom Skerritt of music. See, Tom Skerritt constantly shows up everywhere – in film, in TV shows, in the fucking Pacific Northwest Ballet. He turns up in the big budget stuff, in tiny, no-budget indies, in large, memorable roles and in the tiniest roles ever. I mean, the guy appears in MASH (the film), Top Gun, Steel Magnolias, Picket Fences, Cheers, Huff and a whole compendium of other things. There were moments when I thought I was safe from Skerritt, and then, as if just to taunt me, he’d appear – for example, the little-known film, Smoke Signals, an adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s short story “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” from his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Or for example when he turns up in the film Singles for just a few minutes of screen time as the mayor of Seattle.

I could carry on almost endlessly listing off Tom Skerritt sightings, but my point: Eddie Vedder turns up on other musicians’ stages (frequently in Seattle but often in cities all over the world) so often that he rivals Skerritt’s ubiquity – only in the music realm.

It’s strange, then, today to think that Eddie Vedder is kind of … the last man standing of grunge-era frontmen. News broke today that Chris Cornell of Soundgarden had died at age 52 after playing a triumphant show in Detroit. Never quite “of” the grunge ‘movement’ (if you could really call it that), never quite getting his due as a songwriter (this has immediately changed upon posthumous evaluation). I’m guilty of underestimating the guy – I never cared a whole lot for the Soundgarden sound but have only, in Cornell’s death, taken a look at the songs and lyrics. I did not recognize the beauty or power of his talent (either the writing or the voice) fully until seen in another context (i.e., both in death and in hearing him in stripped-down versions of songs from other genres and sounds).

Of his own work, I honestly had no idea that Cornell’s writing was often so dark (even if that is not all it was). But I was certainly not alone in this errant and incomplete appraisal; masked by various labels and categorizations (“He was a cock-rocker in an era when everyone was supposed to be too depressed or doped up to fuck”, ‘grunge’ being but one of them, it’s almost as though many people just didn’t listen to what was beneath the sound. (One of the many articles on Cornell today cites, as an example, Johnny Cash’s cover of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage” as an unlikely avenue through which people started to see Cornell’s writing genius.)

“It’s sort of a morbid exchange when somebody who is a writer like that dies, and then everyone starts picking through all their lyrics.”

What can you say about something like this? It’s a sad ending for someone who entertained, who evaded easy categorization, who defied labels and continued to reinvent and moreover brought solace and beauty to the lives of so many people. This is the best that can be said for most of us.

Photo (c) 2007 Guillermo Ruiz used under Creative Commons license.

“You cannot live and keep free of briars”

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The Ivy Crown
-William Carlos Williams
The whole process is a lie,
        unless,
            crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
        one way or another,
            from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
        Antony and Cleopatra
            were right;
they have shown
        the way. I love you
            or I do not live
at all.

Daffodil time
         is past. This is
              summer, summer!
the heart says,
         and not even the full of it.
              No doubts
are permitted—
         though they will come
              and may
before our time
         overwhelm us.
              We are only mortal
but being mortal
         can defy our fate.
              We may
by an outside chance
         even win! We do not
              look to see
jonquils and violets
         come again
              but there are,
still,
         the roses!

Romance has no part in it.
         The business of love is
              cruelty which,
by our wills,
         we transform
              to live together.
It has its seasons,
         for and against,
              whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
         to assert
              toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
         is to tear flesh,
              I have proceeded
through them.
         Keep
              the briars out,
they say.
         You cannot live
              and keep free of
briars.

Children pick flowers.
         Let them.
              Though having them
in hand
         they have no further use for them
              but leave them crumpled
at the curb's edge.

At our age the imagination
         across the sorry facts
              lifts us
to make roses
         stand before thorns.
              Sure
love is cruel
         and selfish
              and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
         young love is.
              But we are older,
I to love
         and you to be loved,
              we have,
no matter how,
         by our wills survived
              to keep
the jeweled prize
         always
              at our finger tips.
We will it so
         and so it is
              past all accident.

blinking through middle age

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“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.” -from Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Erica Jong’s heroine asks in Fear of Flying: “Would most women get married if they knew what it meant?” She follows up by stating that perhaps in middle age, marriages would work better. It’s hard to say, of course, but seems reasonable enough to presume. But then maybe it’s more likely that a second or third marriage would work best, regardless of how old the participants are. The book’s protagonist is already stymied in her second marriage and seeking comfort elsewhere. Much ado has been made about “starter marriages” and the likelihood of future marriages working because you learn from the mistakes of the first. I don’t know what to make of this. It too seems plausible – but not applicable to me.

If this is true, what of middle-aged people who never married and got no “practice” other than in a collection of short or long-term, ultimately dead-end relationships? I cannot say because I am in this demographic: middle-aged and never married. I have had a couple of long relationships that never held any future promise and a lifetime, otherwise, of flings and experiments to which I would scarcely be able to apply a name or formal distinction. In between there have been shorter and longer periods of just being on my own, which have always been the happiest and most content times of all.

Confronting the ‘more’

While it’s true that being alone and – by extension – independent has given me a lot of joy, there are moments, often more frequent than in the past, that I imagine my calm life could be enhanced by the presence of someone else. I’ve already written before about not wanting to invite in ‘the wrong element’. After all, as Doris Lessing wrote in The Golden Notebook: “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do”. It’s a delicate balance: you may finally confront the fact that you want and need to love and be loved, but to do so, is second-rate enough? Do you fool yourself into thinking that second-rate will do it for you? Can your view become so blurred that you think the ‘wrong element’ could be right? I’ve concluded that it’s most important to recognize the need for love – and go from there.

The ark of the ache of it

Many times I have cited Denise Levertov’s “Ache of Marriage” – and given a lot of thought to the ache one must feel within a marriage – but what about the ache you have without it? It’s something you feel without ever having had the missing part in the first place. It’s not constant but comes in waves. It can look so miserable when you look at it from the outside. Mundane, like a constant sacrifice of one’s own identity and preferences. What is it that softens us … age? The right element? The sunset? The need for warmth? Previous experience (which can also harden us)? The desire for daily soup? (Soup would really do it for me.)

Past sheds light…

Blink. Blink.

A recent experience, brief enough to be like the blink of an eye, has contributed one significant thing to my life. It opened a long-closed part of me and made me realize it made no sense to close it again. I had so many times before let previous experience influence me, to close me off, to shut emotional responses down. And now… maybe it was this recent experience, maybe my age, maybe all the previous “practice”, maybe the starker-than-ever realization that there are only so many sunrises and sunsets ahead, maybe a combination of everything that convinced me to stay calm, and stay open?

keeping warm: sauve qui peut

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Love-Letter-Burning
-Daniel Hall
The archivist in us shudders at such cold-
blooded destruction of the word, but since
we’re only human, we commit our sins
to the flames. Sauve qui peut; fear makes us bold.
Tanka was bolder: when the weather turned
from fair to frigid, he saw his way clear
to build a sacrificial fire
in which a priceless temple Buddha burned.
(The pretext? Simple: what he sought
was legendary Essence in the ash.
But if it shows up only in the flesh—?
He grinned and said, Let’s burn the lot!)
Believers in the afterlife perform
this purifying rite. At last
a match is struck: it’s done. The past
will shed some light, but never keep us warm.

“reality is only interaction”

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“Probability does not refer to the evolution of matter in itself. It relates to the evolution of those specific quantities we interact with. Once again, the profoundly relational nature of the concept we use to organize the world emerges.” -from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

Principles of physics come to mind for me frequently when I think of connections with people. It may be illogical, but somehow the way things are described in physics overlaps how things unfold. Do I feel this way because I am older, and I want to see connections where there are none? Physics is bound by rules, and connections between people are not, necessarily. But as Rovelli states in explaining concepts of physics, “the profoundly relational nature of the concept we use to organize the world emerges”. Every concept seems to come back to the principle that everything happens or is real because of how it interacts with other things. “Or does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?”

Reality is relational. Relationships, obviously, then are relational, as denoted in the word itself. We choose when, where, with whom, and how often to interact to create our reality and the relationships in that reality. And we make choices in allowing feeling to form or grow. We shut some things down; we slow other things down; we accelerate some things; we destroy others. Our reactions are individual, but also mutual and sometimes collective. And these interactions are sparked, changed, moved, freed by all these other interactions. Nothing much happens without interaction.

“The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder.”-from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

And in our immediate moment – the now – in our interaction, skin to skin, we keep each other warm?

Japanorama & penis power

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Back in the early part of the year I was contemplating an April return to Japan. Mostly because I thought I would like to see The Stone Roses again but also because April is the best time of year to go to Japan. I didn’t go for a handful of reasons but now I wish I had: I just found out there is a penis festival in April, which … seriously, who wouldn’t go to Japan just for that? (Well, and a side of ほうとう.)

I had been doing a lot of research into different things in Japan that might not have registered with me before – side trips and tours one could make to focus in on more niche things like Japan’s amazing pens, paper and denim obsession rather than just tourist traps, noodles and whatever.

In the end, I talked to my brother about going together, but it ended up being bad timing. I went on shorter trips – stuff like the PoPos and Czechia – will anyone ever get used to calling it that? And (little licks of – a term used just for London-based friend Karly!) London, which is never a delight, but sometimes necessary.

Mind clouded by Japan and penises now, I always forget that they have these strange fixations. Forgot checking out the VHS of In the Realm of the Senses from the public library as a teenager – probably not something they should have let a teenager have, but I don’t think the library staff was particularly familiar with the foreign language films. If I am not mistaken, the maniacal main character of the film cuts off the other main character’s penis; this is considerably more artful than, say, the made-for-tabloid-TV saga of John and Lorena Bobbitt.

“these words are like glass splinters”

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Years ago, I read this poem to my brother. He contemplated the ending in silence for a long time, as though he was poised to say something profound. Finally he exclaimed, with some exasperation, “MIST!”

Letter
-Yehuda Amichai
To sit on the veranda of a hotel in Jerusalem
and to write: sweetly pass the days
from desert to sea. And to write: Tears, here,
dry quickly. This little blot
is a tear that has melted ink. That’s how
they wrote a hundred years ago. “I have
drawn a circle round it.”

Time passes – like somebody who, on a telephone,
is laughing or weeping far away from me:
Whatever I’m hearing I can’t see.
And whatever I see I don’t hear.

We were not careful when we said “next year”
or “a month ago”. These words are like
glass splinters, which you can hurt yourself with,
Or cut veins. Those who do things like that.

But you were beautiful, like the interpretation
of ancient books.
Surplus of women in your far country
brought you to me, but
other statistics have taken you
away from me.

To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to complete the harbor
long after the ship was drowned.

And to finish: I remember only
that there was mist. And whoever
remembers only mist –
what does he remember?

Love in July

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There is so much rich, contradictory imagery in “Love in July” – it came to mind the other day when I was thinking about pens and handwriting, and very few poems I’ve come across in my life referred in such evocative ways to handwriting as does “Love in July”. In fact the imagery overall is vivid in ways that make no sense to describe (the poetry, the imagery, speaks for itself)…

Love in July
–Ivan Lalić
I
Open this evening like a letter,
Its handwriting spotted with blood of birds
Devoured in the bright lava of the afternoon.

Open this evening like a rose,
That dust, that bronze, and that sweat on your skin,
That constellation that breathes.

Open this evening like a letter.
I’m hidden in its handwriting
Like a shadow in the still leaves of a cherry tree,
Or like noon in our blood.

Comes night grown over with rain and cherries,
And the wavering diamonds of sudden freshness.
Open this evening like a letter.

The date is illegible, time without beginning,
But the signature is clear:
I love.

II
The taste of the storm in the stalk of the invisible rose
That you twirl absentmindedly between your fingers.
Summer golden and dark.

But there’s no wind, and the rain glitters
On your words like phosphorus
On the seams of the water.
Summer golden and dark.

The lightning that travels slower than memory
Will never again give us light in this place.

That lightning still buried in snows and flowers
In its journey around the year.
The taste of rain on your lips,
Summer golden and dark.

The lone wolf: familiarity, reason & cruets

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“‘And you know,’ continued the young biodynamicist, ‘I have a curious feeling, Professor, that somehow or other the numerous sheep are prized less than the one lone wolf. I wonder what is going to happen next. I wonder, for instance, what would be your attitude if our whimsical government with apparent inconsistency ignored the sheep but offered the wolf the most munificent position imaginable.’” -from Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov

(Not a totally appropriate quote for the rest of this content but struck me anyhow, especially for the times we live in: ‘our whimsical government with apparent inconsistency ignored the sheep but offered the wolf the most munificent position imaginable’.)

New properties in G4

Flowing, mellifluous correspondence does not happen any longer. Where once I bought envelopes and stamps in bulk (actually I still do but not because I have such florid letter exchanges on the go), now I have very few correspondents. I think only three of my pen pals remain as regular letter writers. Many remain in my address book as people to whom I mail cds and occasional notes. I don’t really miss it that much, but sometimes I have a moment when a sense of the lost joy of letter writing hits me.

It even occurred to me recently that I don’t receive real emails any more either. The few friends with whom I used email as a primary means of communication write rarely enough that I can’t even say that we’re regularly in contact. Who knew that even email would become too much of burden? I get a lot of automated emails about property in such-and-such a district in such-and-such a city (my whole real estate porn/fetish), but seeing something personal is exceedingly rare. And often only a “poke” to get me to call or text, so it is not a means of communication but a means for prompting another kind of communication. I have consciously in the last few months tried to return much communication to email, if possible. Back to a place where I have more freedom and choice – responses happen on my time, or your time, if at all. I don’t need or want phantoms from years ago to pop up suddenly in a chat window. Like a virtual way to put everyone at arm’s length and preserve my own space. Everyone who needs to get in touch with me, and with whom I want immediate contact, knows how to reach me. Anyone else: if they really have something to say, they can email. And if they don’t, well, then I guess they don’t really need to be in touch.

I don’t want the immediacy or demanding nature of things like texting or Whatsapp unless I have invited it. I realized too late that I had fallen into following people to embrace these immediate forms of communication even when I did not want immediacy with them.

Straddle the saddle

It isn’t that I think I have to be in control of every bit of communication. But I have realized that some of it can wait. Some of it can be anticipated. Some of it feels unnecessarily prying. The intimacy of being immediately too close and too accessible is too much in most cases. It makes sense to create barriers and filters in these cases, while selectively choosing openness and accessibility with only the very few, the very dear. I will once more straddle the saddle of controlling how, when and with whom I communicate, and ride on into the sunset. And into kitchen utensil stores. 🙂

Oh, please: the voice of reason

A case in point: after I had already started writing this post, keen to build some walls between almost-random-people and myself, someone popped up today in my Whatsapp conversations; someone I might talk to twice a year and whom I don’t really know. It is, as I told him, a tenuous link. We have a brief chat and then fall totally off each other’s radar. Apparently my baked goods and I appeared in his dreams and “talking to you is warm and meaningful”. And he claims he is… in love with my voice. Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please.

Actually, I scrubbed “oh, please” from my vocabulary in high school when a pen pal actually sent me a card that only contained those words: “Oh, please.” I didn’t take it personally; I had told him that he seemed awfully self-absorbed, if not a little OCD, not to mention a little presumptuous, writing to me about how he spent an entire summer hunting up and down the eastern seaboard for the perfect bed comforter/duvet… and then hid it from himself so he would really appreciate it when winter came. He also told me he had been searching for years for the perfect vinegar and oil cruets for his kitchen but had still come up short. I wondered, “How many cruets can there be?” Not long thereafter my question was serendipitously answered when I walked into an antique store and saw a book titled Cruets Cruets Cruets, volume III. The presumption came when he started writing about how he expected that I would apply to colleges in Boston (to be near him?), that nothing on the west coast was worth considering (?!). Yeah, exactly… oh, please.

Am I alone, a lone wolf, in thinking that all of this smacks of too much familiarity?