I love you you are 39 cents
What laws physical or otherwise brought you into existence
What rain what wind what seed what spirals and genes what codes
Chromosomes threads chemicals tendencies jiggles warmth
energy light
Moved you into shape and actuality dear avocado
I love you you are 39 cents
Do you go good with bacon I’ll bet you do
Today is the first of May hurray hurray maybe it will finally
Get warm I’m sick of winter sick of grey skies and cold
temperatures
Sick of ice sick of snow sick of tea party republicans wanting to
shut
Government down and take comfort and shelter and food away
from old people
People like me I don’t feel old but I am old is 63 old it probably is
If you’re fourteen or fifteen
In dreams sometimes I am 20 or 23 sometimes 33
But never 63 never old
I am always a young man chased by monsters
I wake up I eat breakfast a slice of cherry pie from Whidbey Island
Slices of orange sip some coffee watch TV5 a documentary
In French about Silicon Valley and a shiny red car running on
electricity
This is all wrong I meant to say dear avocado
Cancel all engagements I am spending the day with you
I will grow large sympathies larger sympathies than I have ever
had before
Monumental empathies I will grow into feelings so huge I will need
a frame
To put it all in a big mahogany frame with beautiful grain and
dovetailed corners
Hang it on the wall that’s my last duchess
On the wall my last avocado
I forget what a trope is a trope is a figure of speech
Therefore it is tropical
And tropospheric and troubling
It is not my purpose to give a detailed history of the organ
But rather to present those aspects of its development which
influence
My situation today which is the idea of sound
L’objet sonore
Which is delivered to the soundboards
From bellows below tonal color is determined by the shape of the
pipes
And is vast as the study of pharmacology
An enigma that is never quite teak but waits for summer
To make it churn with elbows
Scowls and lipstick that is to say papyrus
Which is like a harness in the rain
The smell of a horse in the rain
Did you see Prince William and Kate Middleton get married I
didn’t
I stayed home and glimmered with horns
Incessant expressions of the fetus I truly am
Blatantly pulsing with things to say
Fibula filigree gubernatorial cormorant dear avocado I love you
you are 39 cents
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
During Times Of Stress
During times of stress I like to imagine myself in a spaceship. I sit at a dashboard, the lights blinking, gleaming, glowing in red and blue and yellow. The way lights on a dashboard shine when you’re driving at night, say in the southwest, a gazillion stars overhead that become dizzingly apparent each time you stop for a rest, or to relieve yourself.
Of course, as soon as I realize that, unlike a car, I would not be sitting at the controls of a spaceship, unless I was strapped in. I would most likely being floating around, like the astronauts at the space laboratory. Some rock ‘n roll classic plays, Maggie Mae, Nights In White Satin, Good Morning by the Beatles, and the president calls and says he is proud of them as they twist and turn and their hair floats and they all grin broadly, sober, mathematically inclined astronauts with engineering degrees.
That ruins my spaceship fantasy. So I think of swans instead. Wild swans on a lake at night. Slowly, languidly gliding, heads tucked under their wings.
Too pre-Raphaelite, I think. I need something else.
Roberta draws to relieve stress. Her drawings are amazing. No way could I draw like that. And I inherited my father’s aptitude for drawing.
When I was 8 years old I got a tremendous crush on a girl in my third grade class named Cathy. The name had significance because I had just seen Wuthering Heights on TV, the one with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and even though I was only 8, I identified completely with Heathcliff, especially as he strode out onto the moor shouting for Cathy. My dad was an illustrator by profession. Cathy liked horses. I asked my dad if he could teach me how to draw horses. He taught me how to draw horses and I began producing drawing after drawing of horses, which I presented proudly to Cathy. She received these gifts gratefully, though nothing like a romance developed. I was 8. I had not yet learned the equitation of romance.
I have a lot of movies going on in my skull. They come in handy during times of stress. Hard Day’s Night. Dances With Wolves. Heat. It Could Happen To You. Raising Arizona. Mulholland Drive. Help. Alien. Red River. The Searchers. Henry V. Hamlet. Open Range. The Matrix. Unforgiven. Rain Man. Notting Hill. Green Card. Groundhog Day. The Last Of The Mohicans.
My head is a jumble. Everything gets jumbled in my skull. Clint Eastwood gets mixed up with Shakespeare. Hamlet carries a navy revolver. John Wayne delivers soulful soliloquys.
The best movies, sometimes, are the movies I make up. Visiting a house after someone has died. The creaks in the floorboards. The smell of bread and coffee. The hallways empty. The echoing of a realtor’s voice pointing out the highlights of the house.
My first memory is a movie: John Wayne wrestling an octopus. The movie was Wake Of The Red Witch. 1948. I must have been one, or two. Is that possible? I remember my father carrying me into the theatre in his arms. The theatre was packed. And silent. Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the screen as John Wayne wrestled an octopus, those slithering arms, bulbous head, the flash of a knife, a cloud of blood, John Wayne floating to the surface, exhausted, spent, his back arched as though being lifted to heaven.
Of course, as soon as I realize that, unlike a car, I would not be sitting at the controls of a spaceship, unless I was strapped in. I would most likely being floating around, like the astronauts at the space laboratory. Some rock ‘n roll classic plays, Maggie Mae, Nights In White Satin, Good Morning by the Beatles, and the president calls and says he is proud of them as they twist and turn and their hair floats and they all grin broadly, sober, mathematically inclined astronauts with engineering degrees.
That ruins my spaceship fantasy. So I think of swans instead. Wild swans on a lake at night. Slowly, languidly gliding, heads tucked under their wings.
Too pre-Raphaelite, I think. I need something else.
Roberta draws to relieve stress. Her drawings are amazing. No way could I draw like that. And I inherited my father’s aptitude for drawing.
When I was 8 years old I got a tremendous crush on a girl in my third grade class named Cathy. The name had significance because I had just seen Wuthering Heights on TV, the one with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and even though I was only 8, I identified completely with Heathcliff, especially as he strode out onto the moor shouting for Cathy. My dad was an illustrator by profession. Cathy liked horses. I asked my dad if he could teach me how to draw horses. He taught me how to draw horses and I began producing drawing after drawing of horses, which I presented proudly to Cathy. She received these gifts gratefully, though nothing like a romance developed. I was 8. I had not yet learned the equitation of romance.
I have a lot of movies going on in my skull. They come in handy during times of stress. Hard Day’s Night. Dances With Wolves. Heat. It Could Happen To You. Raising Arizona. Mulholland Drive. Help. Alien. Red River. The Searchers. Henry V. Hamlet. Open Range. The Matrix. Unforgiven. Rain Man. Notting Hill. Green Card. Groundhog Day. The Last Of The Mohicans.
My head is a jumble. Everything gets jumbled in my skull. Clint Eastwood gets mixed up with Shakespeare. Hamlet carries a navy revolver. John Wayne delivers soulful soliloquys.
The best movies, sometimes, are the movies I make up. Visiting a house after someone has died. The creaks in the floorboards. The smell of bread and coffee. The hallways empty. The echoing of a realtor’s voice pointing out the highlights of the house.
My first memory is a movie: John Wayne wrestling an octopus. The movie was Wake Of The Red Witch. 1948. I must have been one, or two. Is that possible? I remember my father carrying me into the theatre in his arms. The theatre was packed. And silent. Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the screen as John Wayne wrestled an octopus, those slithering arms, bulbous head, the flash of a knife, a cloud of blood, John Wayne floating to the surface, exhausted, spent, his back arched as though being lifted to heaven.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Home Sweet Home
I like this planet. I really do. For starters, it’s round. True. All planets are round. This seems to be a fundamental law of the universe. No one has yet reported a square planet. Or a rectangular planet. Or an octagonal or triangular or polyhedral planet.
It’s not strictly a matter of shape. The planet has water and clouds. How can anyone not fall in love immediately with water and clouds? How can anyone not love water? Aside, of course, from somebody drowning. Or clouds. What is there not to like about clouds? They drift. They change shape. They drop water on the ground. They curl around mountains and trees and make everything lush and wet and beautiful.
The Internet has made the world much smaller. Mostly in a good way. You can go on Facebook and be friends with people in Iceland and Egypt. Though it is arguable what the quality of that relationship may be, it’s nice to write someone in Cameroun and get an immediate response. A response that, in some beautifully serendipitous way, brings you to the real Cameroun.
And as you look down from your window seat on your way to Cameroun, you can see the folds and ripples and rivulets of the planet, its crinkles and wrinkles, glittering lakes and opulent fields, and abstracted like that you cannot see the fine, exquisitely balanced ecology of these things, and so your worries of environmental depredation are momentarily abated. I believe that was the allure of the movie Up In The Air. Up in the air, you aren’t connected to anything. In reality, you are: the bolts, operation, and structural integrity of the plane on which you are moving through the air. But the illusion is sweet. The illusion of being high, in an abstract place, where your only worries are how to get to the bathroom by stepping on the fewest toes. Or making conversation with the person sitting next to you. Or trying to get your plastic bag of nuts open without smacking that person in the face when you lose your grip and your arm goes flying.
It’s easy to be cordial to people with whom your relationship is only going to last five to ten hours. Maybe a tad longer, if you’re headed to Australia, or Fiji. But the upshot is its blithe temporariness. You can like almost anyone within a prescribed timeframe. Or pretend to like someone within a prescribed timeframe.
Although the confines of your seat and the plane itself rather dictate a policy of amenability. What a shame such courtesies cannot be extended on the ground. Where there is seemingly much more room, but the actuality is a little more harsh. There is not that much room. And the planet is round. Meaning everything rebounds. Bounces back to you one way or another. If you’re an industrial tycoon blowing the tops off West Virginia mountains, one day it will affect you. Or your children. It is inevitable. The air you breathe. The water you drink. All affected. Poisoned. Too bad tycoons don’t get this. If they did, they wouldn’t be blowing the tops off West Virginia mountains. Or building nuclear reactors on notorious fault lines.
And although our apartment is really small, there is room for Shakespeare and Proust and Paul Celan. Jack Keroauc and Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia and Edgar Allan Poe. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. André Breton and Tristan Tzara. For the coffee table, which Roberta’s brother built in high school, in woodshop, and is solid as a Swiss bank vault. For the refrigerator and all of its odd noises.
For all our implements of hygiene, toothpaste, brushes, shampoo, balms and lotions, razors and combs, tweezers and nail clippers and hair dryer and towels.
For the TV, which is becoming increasingly useful as Seattle’s movie theaters shut down. And TV5, which brings us France, and Marie Drucker. Thalassa, Le grande librairie, and Des racines and des ailes.
For Matisse on the wall, and Magritte and Man Ray and Peggy Murphy.
For Toby, our cat, who sleeps under the gooseneck lamp on the table by the window. Where I look out, and see that it is raining, and that there are splots of raindrops on the blue shingles of the house next door, and the fronds of the ferns tremble just enough to register a lightness of breeze.
How can you not love this planet? It’s the jewel of our solar system. And the apple of my eye.
It’s not strictly a matter of shape. The planet has water and clouds. How can anyone not fall in love immediately with water and clouds? How can anyone not love water? Aside, of course, from somebody drowning. Or clouds. What is there not to like about clouds? They drift. They change shape. They drop water on the ground. They curl around mountains and trees and make everything lush and wet and beautiful.
The Internet has made the world much smaller. Mostly in a good way. You can go on Facebook and be friends with people in Iceland and Egypt. Though it is arguable what the quality of that relationship may be, it’s nice to write someone in Cameroun and get an immediate response. A response that, in some beautifully serendipitous way, brings you to the real Cameroun.
And as you look down from your window seat on your way to Cameroun, you can see the folds and ripples and rivulets of the planet, its crinkles and wrinkles, glittering lakes and opulent fields, and abstracted like that you cannot see the fine, exquisitely balanced ecology of these things, and so your worries of environmental depredation are momentarily abated. I believe that was the allure of the movie Up In The Air. Up in the air, you aren’t connected to anything. In reality, you are: the bolts, operation, and structural integrity of the plane on which you are moving through the air. But the illusion is sweet. The illusion of being high, in an abstract place, where your only worries are how to get to the bathroom by stepping on the fewest toes. Or making conversation with the person sitting next to you. Or trying to get your plastic bag of nuts open without smacking that person in the face when you lose your grip and your arm goes flying.
It’s easy to be cordial to people with whom your relationship is only going to last five to ten hours. Maybe a tad longer, if you’re headed to Australia, or Fiji. But the upshot is its blithe temporariness. You can like almost anyone within a prescribed timeframe. Or pretend to like someone within a prescribed timeframe.
Although the confines of your seat and the plane itself rather dictate a policy of amenability. What a shame such courtesies cannot be extended on the ground. Where there is seemingly much more room, but the actuality is a little more harsh. There is not that much room. And the planet is round. Meaning everything rebounds. Bounces back to you one way or another. If you’re an industrial tycoon blowing the tops off West Virginia mountains, one day it will affect you. Or your children. It is inevitable. The air you breathe. The water you drink. All affected. Poisoned. Too bad tycoons don’t get this. If they did, they wouldn’t be blowing the tops off West Virginia mountains. Or building nuclear reactors on notorious fault lines.
And although our apartment is really small, there is room for Shakespeare and Proust and Paul Celan. Jack Keroauc and Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia and Edgar Allan Poe. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. André Breton and Tristan Tzara. For the coffee table, which Roberta’s brother built in high school, in woodshop, and is solid as a Swiss bank vault. For the refrigerator and all of its odd noises.
For all our implements of hygiene, toothpaste, brushes, shampoo, balms and lotions, razors and combs, tweezers and nail clippers and hair dryer and towels.
For the TV, which is becoming increasingly useful as Seattle’s movie theaters shut down. And TV5, which brings us France, and Marie Drucker. Thalassa, Le grande librairie, and Des racines and des ailes.
For Matisse on the wall, and Magritte and Man Ray and Peggy Murphy.
For Toby, our cat, who sleeps under the gooseneck lamp on the table by the window. Where I look out, and see that it is raining, and that there are splots of raindrops on the blue shingles of the house next door, and the fronds of the ferns tremble just enough to register a lightness of breeze.
How can you not love this planet? It’s the jewel of our solar system. And the apple of my eye.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Frankenstein Meets Wittgenstein
Three Sea Monsters, poetry by Tod Thilleman
Spuyten Duyvil, 2011
Monsters are anomalies of ferocity and size, beings whose grotesque appetites and malformations run wild and contrary to the harmonies of nature. Their scales, claws, fangs and wings terrify and fascinate. We flee them, but are drawn to them. We chase them with pitchforks and torches, but revere and worship them. Sometimes we create them. Give them being and life with our own perversions and resources. We defy gods. Government. The natural order. We put them in museums. Feel them lurk in our emotions, seeking egress and expression. Turn them over in our minds, absorbed in their terrible beauty, their exhilarating ability to exist outside the bounds of intelligibility.
“One aspect of the monster concept,” observes Stephen T. Asma in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History Of Our Worst Fears, “seems to be the breakdown of intelligibility. An action or a thing is monstrous when it can’t be processed by our rationality, and also when we cannot readily relate to the emotional range involved.”
Sea monsters are particularly alluring. This is due, in large measure, to the magnitude and mystery of their medium. There is something monstrous about oceans; the recent tsunami that devastated a major chunk of Japan’s geography is testament to its ruthless force.
“Off a Bermudan island in 1930,” writes Asma, “William Beebe and Otis Barton witnessed swarms of bioluminescent creatures -- transparent eels, shrimp, and nightmarish fish -- and giant shadowy figures looming just outside the range of their spotlight. They could descend only a fraction of the actual sea depth, but when asked to describe the receding waters below them, Beebe said that the abyss ‘looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself.’”
Tod Thilleman’s Three Sea Monsters plies the waters of the eccentric and grotesque, the aberrant and unnatural. Prodigies of jelly. Miracles of breath. The flora and fauna of tropical imagination.
It is not strictly a matter of theme. It is also a matter of style. Thilleman’s hybrid creations of poetry and prose combine exposition with a welter of epistemological mania; his ardent exploration of human consciousness and its representation in sign and design revels in verbal extravagance. His sentences unravel in long, energetic yaws of deviating play. Words crackle with Van de Graaff simulations of the human sensorium. One can feel the energy of struggle and investigation in his words: “Image can contain the or any meaning,” he observes in “Notes On The Matter Within Three Sea Monsters,”
knowledge, understanding, ideation. What has happened since experimental ‘inductive’ art movement(s) in American letters gained momentum is the attendant reality of the impossibility of any idea. If idea is only and always its coming forth with and into Being, in Being’s shining forth (that elevation) then it has done so without poetry simply because the growing centrality of image as a kind of automatic application of ideation has become the mainstay of ‘meaning.’ What does a word SYMBOLIZE? In the round of one day it symbolizes at the level of one day.
Thilleman alludes, throughout, to names associated with vision, mythology, linguistics, and dream: Carl Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Butler Yeats, Saul Kripke, Ezra Pound, and - especially - Ernest Fenollosa.
I had to look Saul Kripke up. I had never heard of this guy. Here is what Wikipedia had to say:
Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960’s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosphy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusually for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a metaphysical description of modality, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics. Another of his most important contributions is his argument that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as “Water is H2O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referrred to as “Kripkenstein.” His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).
Most readers of contemporary poetry will be familiar with Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa’s seminal essay, “From The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry,” is the second essay in Donald Allen’s and Warren Tallman’s The Poetics of The New American Poetry, following Walt Whitman’s letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ezra Pound, who provided many of the footnotes for Fenollosa’s essay, was hugely influenced by Fenollosa’s emphasis on image and metaphor. “You will ask,” writes Fenollosa,
how could the Chinese have built up a great intellectual fabric from mere picture writing? To the ordinary Western mind, which believes that thought is concerned with logical categories and which rather condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations.*
The asterisk refers to a footnote by Ezra Pound at the bottom of the page: “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius.’”
The universe is alive with myth, Fenollosa observes elsewhere. Thilleman’s concern with mythology is acute. “I have set these poems around an appropriation of myth,” he writes, “working in a similar pattern attained by earlier ‘interpreters.’” He argues that mythology provides humanity with a “mode of seeing” “inherent in the creation of time itself,” and provides an excerpt from Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, alluding to it as the “core translated source” for Three Sea Monsters:
Ancient China had no Hesiod, Homer or Ovid to retell the mythic oral tales at length. Instead, Chinese writers introduced fragmentary passages of mythic stories into their works of philosophy and history to illustrate their arguments and give authority to their statements. Chinese myth thus exists as an amorphous, diffuse variety of anonymous archaic expression that is preserved in the contexts of philosophical, literary and historical writings. They are brief, disjointed and enigmatic. These mythic fragments incorporated into miscellaneous classical texts vary in their narration, and authors often adapted myth according to their own point of view. The result is that Chinese Myth survives in numerous versions, the content of which is broadly consistent, but which shows significant variation in the details. Whereas the reshaping of archaic oral Greek and Roman myths into an artistic form of narrative literature implies the loss of the authentic oral voice, the Chinese method of recording mythic fragments in a wealth of untidy, variable stories is a rare survival of primitive authenticity.
Thilleman reads into “primitive authenticity” an antidote to groupthink and tepid, stale MFA writing, i.e. accredited, indoctrinated, institutionalized creativity. “One needs a certain bravery mixed with foolishness in order to tackle the totemic and seemingly omnipotent assumptions of this or any cultural landscape,” he remarks. He attests that his poetics is driven by five key impulses: “Temper, Hubris, Love (Fondness), Will and its direct co-conspirator, Joy.”
I find these discussions not a little curious since we live in a time bereft of mythology and poetic imagination. The movies have preserved some of that imagination, but there it has been cheapened to look like video games. Balls, whistles, programmed monsters whose digitalized forms, however impossibly muscled and sinewed, are fake, manufactured, electronic vomit disgorged from the corporate juggernauts devouring the world. They, the corporate giants, are the real monsters: Goya’s Saturn Eating His Children.
The United States has never really had its own mythology. It has borrowed from the Greek and Romans, or the stories of the Old and New Testaments of the Judeo-Christian bible, but has never produced a mythology that is uniquely American. Our tall tales and myths tend to revere public figures, quite generally rich and powerful men like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Ours is a highly materialistic culture. Rather than a Zeus hurling lightning bolts at a trireme on the choppy Aegean sea, angry over some mortal’s éclat of hubris, we have the young, geeky inventor Bill Gates amassing unthinkable amounts of wealth by obsessively tinkering with gadgetry, `a la Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison, unleashing his indispensible product to the world and manipulating the market with savage, sociopathic savvy. I would not be surprised to see a marble statue of Bill Gates scattering Monsanto seeds to the hungry mouths of sub-Sahara Africa like some modern-day Augustus Caesar.
Our messiahs do not self-sacrifice, lead the way to spiritual transcendence, or shield us from apocalyptic forces. They get rich and buy mansions in the Hamptons with 32 toilets and a fleet of sports cars in the warehouse sized garage. They do not protect us from the apocalypse. They are the apocalypse.
Thilleman’s Three Sea Monsters begins with four long poems: Jellfyfish, Catfish, Hugefish, and Soma. Each poem functions as a theater of oceanic space, enactments of incarnate moment, trembling articulations embodying a primordial energy in language. Thilleman uses sound and image -- image particularly -- to recreate the principles of creation itself, a palpable realization of life forms in pullulating interaction. Phrases appear to float, disconnect, then congeal in ventricle and shell. Soma, stoma, and stomach.
The jellyfish referenced in the first poem evoke images of those giant jellyfish inundating the waters off of Japan’s coast, a phenomenon freakish in number and size. These things are huge. Their stingers dangle in thick, translucent clusters, sickening to look at. Thilleman alludes to Medusa, “snakes in the hair / whorls of water-braid,” calls them “multitudinous gelatinous / Jejune ballooning portions of Earth disanimated.” He puns, says they are “Flambouyant,” sees comedy and tragedy aligned, tangled, as they generally are.
Catfish references Xibalba, the “place of fear,” or underworld, in Mayan mythology. He recounts the story of the twin brothers, Hunahpu and Xblanque, who were ballplayers, who go to play ball in Xibalba, but must survive a number of tests along the way. The gods of the Mayan underworld are treacherous, and mean to trick the brothers with one fatal ploy after another.
Hugefish employs what appear to be primordial Chinese ideograms. Thilleman weaves his text in and out through these symbols, retelling the tale of Kun Hugefish, a giant fish that becomes a bird, whose wings are so big they “are like clouds all over the sky.” The story of Kun Hugefish comes from the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, whose first chapter is called “Free and Easy Wandering.” One can easily see the appeal of such a creature to the poetic imagination. A being that begins in water, grows wings, and flies to the Lake of Heaven.
Soma references Vishnu, the Hindu god described as the “All-Pervading essence of all begins, the master of -- and beyond -- the past, present, and future… who supports, sustains and governs the Universe and originates and develops all elements within.”
Thilleman tells a story of Vishnu in fragments, abrupt, telegraphic shards of clay and claw and “soft blue-veined milchy udders.” My knowledge of Hindu mythology is shamefully limited, so I’m not entirely sure what is transpiring in this section. Thilleman talks about Vishnu assuming the form of a boar in order to have sex with the earth, sleeping “on the long Serpent Night,” a poet named Hiranyagarbha watching “swimmers in the river’s shining,” “Blue lotus blooming in all directions,” “demonic glory seekers,” “false shelters, righteous wounds,” “Chthonic Serpent-Demon dripping flat-liner, Gautama / Ananta the eternal the only one the matter the mind conceives.”
Quite fittingly for a book of poetry premised on monstrosity, Three Sea Monsters is large, disparate, and vigorously aberrant. Thilliman explores everything from semiotics to Eternal Will, Chinese characters to Jungian vision. What holds the book together is a faith in the primary forces of universal stories to twist objective assumptions about the knowable into deviant agons of slippery, mythopoetic being. The knowable is set adrift on a sea of shifting presuppostions, all tantalizingly buoyant, but equally unstable. The fullness of the mystery that is existence lurks many fathoms down in the sludge and steep abysses of the ocean floor.
Spuyten Duyvil, 2011
Monsters are anomalies of ferocity and size, beings whose grotesque appetites and malformations run wild and contrary to the harmonies of nature. Their scales, claws, fangs and wings terrify and fascinate. We flee them, but are drawn to them. We chase them with pitchforks and torches, but revere and worship them. Sometimes we create them. Give them being and life with our own perversions and resources. We defy gods. Government. The natural order. We put them in museums. Feel them lurk in our emotions, seeking egress and expression. Turn them over in our minds, absorbed in their terrible beauty, their exhilarating ability to exist outside the bounds of intelligibility.
“One aspect of the monster concept,” observes Stephen T. Asma in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History Of Our Worst Fears, “seems to be the breakdown of intelligibility. An action or a thing is monstrous when it can’t be processed by our rationality, and also when we cannot readily relate to the emotional range involved.”
Sea monsters are particularly alluring. This is due, in large measure, to the magnitude and mystery of their medium. There is something monstrous about oceans; the recent tsunami that devastated a major chunk of Japan’s geography is testament to its ruthless force.
“Off a Bermudan island in 1930,” writes Asma, “William Beebe and Otis Barton witnessed swarms of bioluminescent creatures -- transparent eels, shrimp, and nightmarish fish -- and giant shadowy figures looming just outside the range of their spotlight. They could descend only a fraction of the actual sea depth, but when asked to describe the receding waters below them, Beebe said that the abyss ‘looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself.’”
Tod Thilleman’s Three Sea Monsters plies the waters of the eccentric and grotesque, the aberrant and unnatural. Prodigies of jelly. Miracles of breath. The flora and fauna of tropical imagination.
It is not strictly a matter of theme. It is also a matter of style. Thilleman’s hybrid creations of poetry and prose combine exposition with a welter of epistemological mania; his ardent exploration of human consciousness and its representation in sign and design revels in verbal extravagance. His sentences unravel in long, energetic yaws of deviating play. Words crackle with Van de Graaff simulations of the human sensorium. One can feel the energy of struggle and investigation in his words: “Image can contain the or any meaning,” he observes in “Notes On The Matter Within Three Sea Monsters,”
knowledge, understanding, ideation. What has happened since experimental ‘inductive’ art movement(s) in American letters gained momentum is the attendant reality of the impossibility of any idea. If idea is only and always its coming forth with and into Being, in Being’s shining forth (that elevation) then it has done so without poetry simply because the growing centrality of image as a kind of automatic application of ideation has become the mainstay of ‘meaning.’ What does a word SYMBOLIZE? In the round of one day it symbolizes at the level of one day.
Thilleman alludes, throughout, to names associated with vision, mythology, linguistics, and dream: Carl Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Butler Yeats, Saul Kripke, Ezra Pound, and - especially - Ernest Fenollosa.
I had to look Saul Kripke up. I had never heard of this guy. Here is what Wikipedia had to say:
Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960’s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosphy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusually for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a metaphysical description of modality, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics. Another of his most important contributions is his argument that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as “Water is H2O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referrred to as “Kripkenstein.” His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).
Most readers of contemporary poetry will be familiar with Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa’s seminal essay, “From The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry,” is the second essay in Donald Allen’s and Warren Tallman’s The Poetics of The New American Poetry, following Walt Whitman’s letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ezra Pound, who provided many of the footnotes for Fenollosa’s essay, was hugely influenced by Fenollosa’s emphasis on image and metaphor. “You will ask,” writes Fenollosa,
how could the Chinese have built up a great intellectual fabric from mere picture writing? To the ordinary Western mind, which believes that thought is concerned with logical categories and which rather condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations.*
The asterisk refers to a footnote by Ezra Pound at the bottom of the page: “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius.’”
The universe is alive with myth, Fenollosa observes elsewhere. Thilleman’s concern with mythology is acute. “I have set these poems around an appropriation of myth,” he writes, “working in a similar pattern attained by earlier ‘interpreters.’” He argues that mythology provides humanity with a “mode of seeing” “inherent in the creation of time itself,” and provides an excerpt from Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, alluding to it as the “core translated source” for Three Sea Monsters:
Ancient China had no Hesiod, Homer or Ovid to retell the mythic oral tales at length. Instead, Chinese writers introduced fragmentary passages of mythic stories into their works of philosophy and history to illustrate their arguments and give authority to their statements. Chinese myth thus exists as an amorphous, diffuse variety of anonymous archaic expression that is preserved in the contexts of philosophical, literary and historical writings. They are brief, disjointed and enigmatic. These mythic fragments incorporated into miscellaneous classical texts vary in their narration, and authors often adapted myth according to their own point of view. The result is that Chinese Myth survives in numerous versions, the content of which is broadly consistent, but which shows significant variation in the details. Whereas the reshaping of archaic oral Greek and Roman myths into an artistic form of narrative literature implies the loss of the authentic oral voice, the Chinese method of recording mythic fragments in a wealth of untidy, variable stories is a rare survival of primitive authenticity.
Thilleman reads into “primitive authenticity” an antidote to groupthink and tepid, stale MFA writing, i.e. accredited, indoctrinated, institutionalized creativity. “One needs a certain bravery mixed with foolishness in order to tackle the totemic and seemingly omnipotent assumptions of this or any cultural landscape,” he remarks. He attests that his poetics is driven by five key impulses: “Temper, Hubris, Love (Fondness), Will and its direct co-conspirator, Joy.”
I find these discussions not a little curious since we live in a time bereft of mythology and poetic imagination. The movies have preserved some of that imagination, but there it has been cheapened to look like video games. Balls, whistles, programmed monsters whose digitalized forms, however impossibly muscled and sinewed, are fake, manufactured, electronic vomit disgorged from the corporate juggernauts devouring the world. They, the corporate giants, are the real monsters: Goya’s Saturn Eating His Children.
The United States has never really had its own mythology. It has borrowed from the Greek and Romans, or the stories of the Old and New Testaments of the Judeo-Christian bible, but has never produced a mythology that is uniquely American. Our tall tales and myths tend to revere public figures, quite generally rich and powerful men like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Ours is a highly materialistic culture. Rather than a Zeus hurling lightning bolts at a trireme on the choppy Aegean sea, angry over some mortal’s éclat of hubris, we have the young, geeky inventor Bill Gates amassing unthinkable amounts of wealth by obsessively tinkering with gadgetry, `a la Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison, unleashing his indispensible product to the world and manipulating the market with savage, sociopathic savvy. I would not be surprised to see a marble statue of Bill Gates scattering Monsanto seeds to the hungry mouths of sub-Sahara Africa like some modern-day Augustus Caesar.
Our messiahs do not self-sacrifice, lead the way to spiritual transcendence, or shield us from apocalyptic forces. They get rich and buy mansions in the Hamptons with 32 toilets and a fleet of sports cars in the warehouse sized garage. They do not protect us from the apocalypse. They are the apocalypse.
Thilleman’s Three Sea Monsters begins with four long poems: Jellfyfish, Catfish, Hugefish, and Soma. Each poem functions as a theater of oceanic space, enactments of incarnate moment, trembling articulations embodying a primordial energy in language. Thilleman uses sound and image -- image particularly -- to recreate the principles of creation itself, a palpable realization of life forms in pullulating interaction. Phrases appear to float, disconnect, then congeal in ventricle and shell. Soma, stoma, and stomach.
The jellyfish referenced in the first poem evoke images of those giant jellyfish inundating the waters off of Japan’s coast, a phenomenon freakish in number and size. These things are huge. Their stingers dangle in thick, translucent clusters, sickening to look at. Thilleman alludes to Medusa, “snakes in the hair / whorls of water-braid,” calls them “multitudinous gelatinous / Jejune ballooning portions of Earth disanimated.” He puns, says they are “Flambouyant,” sees comedy and tragedy aligned, tangled, as they generally are.
Catfish references Xibalba, the “place of fear,” or underworld, in Mayan mythology. He recounts the story of the twin brothers, Hunahpu and Xblanque, who were ballplayers, who go to play ball in Xibalba, but must survive a number of tests along the way. The gods of the Mayan underworld are treacherous, and mean to trick the brothers with one fatal ploy after another.
Hugefish employs what appear to be primordial Chinese ideograms. Thilleman weaves his text in and out through these symbols, retelling the tale of Kun Hugefish, a giant fish that becomes a bird, whose wings are so big they “are like clouds all over the sky.” The story of Kun Hugefish comes from the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, whose first chapter is called “Free and Easy Wandering.” One can easily see the appeal of such a creature to the poetic imagination. A being that begins in water, grows wings, and flies to the Lake of Heaven.
Soma references Vishnu, the Hindu god described as the “All-Pervading essence of all begins, the master of -- and beyond -- the past, present, and future… who supports, sustains and governs the Universe and originates and develops all elements within.”
Thilleman tells a story of Vishnu in fragments, abrupt, telegraphic shards of clay and claw and “soft blue-veined milchy udders.” My knowledge of Hindu mythology is shamefully limited, so I’m not entirely sure what is transpiring in this section. Thilleman talks about Vishnu assuming the form of a boar in order to have sex with the earth, sleeping “on the long Serpent Night,” a poet named Hiranyagarbha watching “swimmers in the river’s shining,” “Blue lotus blooming in all directions,” “demonic glory seekers,” “false shelters, righteous wounds,” “Chthonic Serpent-Demon dripping flat-liner, Gautama / Ananta the eternal the only one the matter the mind conceives.”
Quite fittingly for a book of poetry premised on monstrosity, Three Sea Monsters is large, disparate, and vigorously aberrant. Thilliman explores everything from semiotics to Eternal Will, Chinese characters to Jungian vision. What holds the book together is a faith in the primary forces of universal stories to twist objective assumptions about the knowable into deviant agons of slippery, mythopoetic being. The knowable is set adrift on a sea of shifting presuppostions, all tantalizingly buoyant, but equally unstable. The fullness of the mystery that is existence lurks many fathoms down in the sludge and steep abysses of the ocean floor.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Gross Beta
What do John Wayne, Dick Powell, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendáriz all have in common?
If you were to answer that all participated in one of the worst movies ever made, you would be partially right. But the correct answer is radiation poisoning.
The movie in question, The Conqueror, finished production in 1956 and was produced by Howard Hughes. The movie was so bad it wasn't shown until many years later, in the 80s, on TV. It starred John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and Susan Hayward as the Tartar princess Bortai.
John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Not a brilliant casting choice. This movie was doomed from the get-go.
Exterior scenes for The Conqueror were filmed in St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United State’s government’s Nevada Test Site where numerous above-ground nuclear detonations occurred, including, in 1953, Operation Upshot-Knothole, a series of eleven nuclear test shots. That’s a lot of radiated dirt. Hughs shipped 60 tons of that dirt back to Hollywood so that the color would match the scenes filmed in California.
Cast and crew for The Conqueror totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 had developed some form of cancer, and 46 had already died of the disease. And while it’s true that Wayne and Moorehead were heavy smokers, these statistics are fairly alarming.
But what the hell is radiation? Isn’t it just a form of energy? How can energy make you sick? Would watching The Conqueror make you sick? Probably. But not from radioactive dirt.
Living tissue consists of different types of atoms united by chemical bonds. Healthy functioning of these atoms depends upon their composition and structure. Ionizing radiation (particles or electromagnetic waves energetic enough to detach electrons from atoms or molecules), interferes with that functioning. It alters chemical bonds. Composition and structure are disrupted. Black, ugly, gooey tumors form. DNA molecules are scrambled into crackling illegibility. Cell reproduction ceases. Mutations occur. Giant 50 foot tall women crush Hondas and Cadillacs. But most people just flat out get sick and die.
Intense radiation will cause burns. I saw the burns on the arms and legs of those brave men that entered the Fukushima plant to try to get the coolants going and the wires untangled.
The flight distance from Tokyo, Japan to Seattle, Washington is 4,792 miles. I wish I could double that. Triple it. Hell, I wish I could move to Mars.
Elevated amounts of radioactivity have been discovered in French and Massachusetts milk. We now live in world where distances cease to matter. Anyone who has dropped acid, eaten psilocybin mushrooms or peyote knows that everything in the universe is interconnected. This is especially true on our little blue and white planet. Not just cosmically true, scientifically true.
The day-to-day, minute-by-minute leakage occurring at the Fukushima nuclear power plants will affect all living creatures. Which is why I, and I’m sure thousands of other people, are all wondering the same thing: when the hell are those smarty-pants scientists going to stop it? And whose idea was it to build a nuclear power plant right next to the goddam ocean on one of the most geologically unstable countries of the planet?
Nor do I feel at rest hearing that General Electric built those plants.
This kind of anxiety is weird. Because you can’t see radiation. It’s not like the smoke and flames of an oncoming forest fire, or people hacking and coughing and sneezing because they’re down with a virus. A virus is invisible, too, but there are evident signs of it affecting the human body. Who knows what the cancer and leukemia and birth defect statistics are going to be ten years from now? How much more abbreviated will my life, or the life of my wife, or cat, or the neighbor upstairs be because TEPCO couldn’t get a handle on their nuclear catastrophe?
And how is it that a brilliant scientist capable of writing all those mystifying symbols on a blackboard or figuring out the fundaments of matter can go along with something as monumentally dumb as using nuclear fusion to boil water? Or build one of these plants on the frigging coast, like the ones in California, Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre in San Diego, both aging, both smack dab next to the surf lapping the sand of numerous fault zones?
The mind boggles.
Lately, I have begun checking radiation levels just as I check the weather each day. I go to a special site developed by the Washington State Department of Health that has been daily monitoring gross beta levels in the air. They update the information each day at 3 p.m. They also assure worried people such as myself that there is no real health risk. “Several factors,” they say, “play a role in protecting us from the release of radiation occurring at the damaged reactors in Japan:”
Most of the radioactive material is contained at the damaged plants; there does not appear to have been any large release to the upper atmosphere. The trace amounts of radioactive material that have reached Washington are not in concentrations high enough to cause a health risk.
The fires and explosions at the Japanese reactors have not been as intense as the 1986 Chernobyl incident. Radioactive material ejected into the jet stream from Chernobyl reached Washington in small amounts. Even after the Chernobyl disaster, protective action was not needed in our state, and the Japan incident is much smaller than Chernobyl.
Even if radioactive material is released in Japan and reaches the jet stream in larger quantities, only very small amounts would be carried the 5,000 miles from Japan to our state. In the time it would take to cross the Pacific, the material would be diluted as it’s blown in the wind. Rain would also wash some of the material from the air into the ocean.
Radioactive decay, especially for short half-life radioactive materials such as iodine-131, would substantially reduce the amount of the radioactive material that could reach here.
For these reasons, it’s unlikely that we will see an increase in background levels of the normal radiation found in Washington. The small amounts of radiation that have reached us from Japan have been well below levels that would pose public health concerns.
This information is reassuring. And I wish I could believe it. But frankly, I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Today’s gross beta reading (radioactive decay emits beta particles) is 11.
I don’t know what that means. 11 doesn’t sound bad. Not that it would make any difference if it was 12, or 13, or 172.
It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go.
If you were to answer that all participated in one of the worst movies ever made, you would be partially right. But the correct answer is radiation poisoning.
The movie in question, The Conqueror, finished production in 1956 and was produced by Howard Hughes. The movie was so bad it wasn't shown until many years later, in the 80s, on TV. It starred John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and Susan Hayward as the Tartar princess Bortai.
John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Not a brilliant casting choice. This movie was doomed from the get-go.
Exterior scenes for The Conqueror were filmed in St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United State’s government’s Nevada Test Site where numerous above-ground nuclear detonations occurred, including, in 1953, Operation Upshot-Knothole, a series of eleven nuclear test shots. That’s a lot of radiated dirt. Hughs shipped 60 tons of that dirt back to Hollywood so that the color would match the scenes filmed in California.
Cast and crew for The Conqueror totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 had developed some form of cancer, and 46 had already died of the disease. And while it’s true that Wayne and Moorehead were heavy smokers, these statistics are fairly alarming.
But what the hell is radiation? Isn’t it just a form of energy? How can energy make you sick? Would watching The Conqueror make you sick? Probably. But not from radioactive dirt.
Living tissue consists of different types of atoms united by chemical bonds. Healthy functioning of these atoms depends upon their composition and structure. Ionizing radiation (particles or electromagnetic waves energetic enough to detach electrons from atoms or molecules), interferes with that functioning. It alters chemical bonds. Composition and structure are disrupted. Black, ugly, gooey tumors form. DNA molecules are scrambled into crackling illegibility. Cell reproduction ceases. Mutations occur. Giant 50 foot tall women crush Hondas and Cadillacs. But most people just flat out get sick and die.
Intense radiation will cause burns. I saw the burns on the arms and legs of those brave men that entered the Fukushima plant to try to get the coolants going and the wires untangled.
The flight distance from Tokyo, Japan to Seattle, Washington is 4,792 miles. I wish I could double that. Triple it. Hell, I wish I could move to Mars.
Elevated amounts of radioactivity have been discovered in French and Massachusetts milk. We now live in world where distances cease to matter. Anyone who has dropped acid, eaten psilocybin mushrooms or peyote knows that everything in the universe is interconnected. This is especially true on our little blue and white planet. Not just cosmically true, scientifically true.
The day-to-day, minute-by-minute leakage occurring at the Fukushima nuclear power plants will affect all living creatures. Which is why I, and I’m sure thousands of other people, are all wondering the same thing: when the hell are those smarty-pants scientists going to stop it? And whose idea was it to build a nuclear power plant right next to the goddam ocean on one of the most geologically unstable countries of the planet?
Nor do I feel at rest hearing that General Electric built those plants.
This kind of anxiety is weird. Because you can’t see radiation. It’s not like the smoke and flames of an oncoming forest fire, or people hacking and coughing and sneezing because they’re down with a virus. A virus is invisible, too, but there are evident signs of it affecting the human body. Who knows what the cancer and leukemia and birth defect statistics are going to be ten years from now? How much more abbreviated will my life, or the life of my wife, or cat, or the neighbor upstairs be because TEPCO couldn’t get a handle on their nuclear catastrophe?
And how is it that a brilliant scientist capable of writing all those mystifying symbols on a blackboard or figuring out the fundaments of matter can go along with something as monumentally dumb as using nuclear fusion to boil water? Or build one of these plants on the frigging coast, like the ones in California, Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre in San Diego, both aging, both smack dab next to the surf lapping the sand of numerous fault zones?
The mind boggles.
Lately, I have begun checking radiation levels just as I check the weather each day. I go to a special site developed by the Washington State Department of Health that has been daily monitoring gross beta levels in the air. They update the information each day at 3 p.m. They also assure worried people such as myself that there is no real health risk. “Several factors,” they say, “play a role in protecting us from the release of radiation occurring at the damaged reactors in Japan:”
Most of the radioactive material is contained at the damaged plants; there does not appear to have been any large release to the upper atmosphere. The trace amounts of radioactive material that have reached Washington are not in concentrations high enough to cause a health risk.
The fires and explosions at the Japanese reactors have not been as intense as the 1986 Chernobyl incident. Radioactive material ejected into the jet stream from Chernobyl reached Washington in small amounts. Even after the Chernobyl disaster, protective action was not needed in our state, and the Japan incident is much smaller than Chernobyl.
Even if radioactive material is released in Japan and reaches the jet stream in larger quantities, only very small amounts would be carried the 5,000 miles from Japan to our state. In the time it would take to cross the Pacific, the material would be diluted as it’s blown in the wind. Rain would also wash some of the material from the air into the ocean.
Radioactive decay, especially for short half-life radioactive materials such as iodine-131, would substantially reduce the amount of the radioactive material that could reach here.
For these reasons, it’s unlikely that we will see an increase in background levels of the normal radiation found in Washington. The small amounts of radiation that have reached us from Japan have been well below levels that would pose public health concerns.
This information is reassuring. And I wish I could believe it. But frankly, I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Today’s gross beta reading (radioactive decay emits beta particles) is 11.
I don’t know what that means. 11 doesn’t sound bad. Not that it would make any difference if it was 12, or 13, or 172.
It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Some Particulars Pertaining To My Life On Planet Earth
The park offers serenity and grass. Coffee tastes of clairvoyance and rain.
I do push-ups. My wife decorates cakes.
Once I owned a pair of beautiful gloves. They warmed my hands and inclined toward music. They were so beautiful that surrealism evolved a new form of neck and haberdashers worldwide sensed a new form of meat in the air.
Our stove is old but the burner bowls are new. The old ones had holes in them. The new burner bowls were hard to find. We looked all over the internet. We finally found some at Sears.
The planet orbits a corpulent yellow sun and wobbles on its axis creating four seasons: horrible, less horrible, velvet, and so-so.
I work on a farm with Guillaume Apollinaire. I have grown feathers. There are feathers all over my body. I constantly itch.
The air is heavy. The rain comes and goes.
The mirror in the bathroom is large and honest. A bathmat hangs from a chrome bar on the shower door. It has a light blue background and a motif of arabesques and flowers rendered in white. One of the edges is frayed. White threads in impish dishevelment.
There is a large pitcher and washbowl on the bureau that once belonged to my grandparents in North Dakota. It’s porcelain and very, very white. I used to think it was a ghost when I spent the night on my grandparent’s farm and saw it glowing in the dark while the weather vane creaked on the roof and branches of a nearby sycamore scraped the wall. There is a pair of earphones and a flyer for the Columbia Tower sticking out of the bowl.
I am comfortable in my life. More or less. But then, I don’t know any other life. I would have to live it to tell you how it feels.
The city we inhabit is rich, restless, and ruthless. My private life is perforated, huckleberry, and hyperbolic. My public life is mindful, chalky, and subterranean. Together, they create a feeling of awkward duplication. For example, it would be more agreeable to indulge a celestial ductility than grovel in fruitless subjunctives.
I need some fingernail polish for retouching the corner of the wall by the door in the bathroom where it was scratched by carpet layers maneuvering a roll of carpet into the bedroom. You can hardly see it, but it bugs me. I hoped to find the paint that I used to paint the bathroom when we cleaned out the utility closet under the stairwell. I thought I had saved a pint, but apparently not. Hence, fingernail polish. I don’t want to buy a full pint.
The most perfect abstraction is horses.
Most of the time, I am clean shaven. I grew a beard once when I was in my thirties. It didn’t feel right. My mouth felt like a hole in a forest of hair. Nor did I feel comfortable sporting such an evident sign of masculinity. I prefer presenting to the world the mordant and alienated look of a clean shaven Charles Baudelaire. Being nothing in front of no one.
I do push-ups. My wife decorates cakes.
Once I owned a pair of beautiful gloves. They warmed my hands and inclined toward music. They were so beautiful that surrealism evolved a new form of neck and haberdashers worldwide sensed a new form of meat in the air.
Our stove is old but the burner bowls are new. The old ones had holes in them. The new burner bowls were hard to find. We looked all over the internet. We finally found some at Sears.
The planet orbits a corpulent yellow sun and wobbles on its axis creating four seasons: horrible, less horrible, velvet, and so-so.
I work on a farm with Guillaume Apollinaire. I have grown feathers. There are feathers all over my body. I constantly itch.
The air is heavy. The rain comes and goes.
The mirror in the bathroom is large and honest. A bathmat hangs from a chrome bar on the shower door. It has a light blue background and a motif of arabesques and flowers rendered in white. One of the edges is frayed. White threads in impish dishevelment.
There is a large pitcher and washbowl on the bureau that once belonged to my grandparents in North Dakota. It’s porcelain and very, very white. I used to think it was a ghost when I spent the night on my grandparent’s farm and saw it glowing in the dark while the weather vane creaked on the roof and branches of a nearby sycamore scraped the wall. There is a pair of earphones and a flyer for the Columbia Tower sticking out of the bowl.
I am comfortable in my life. More or less. But then, I don’t know any other life. I would have to live it to tell you how it feels.
The city we inhabit is rich, restless, and ruthless. My private life is perforated, huckleberry, and hyperbolic. My public life is mindful, chalky, and subterranean. Together, they create a feeling of awkward duplication. For example, it would be more agreeable to indulge a celestial ductility than grovel in fruitless subjunctives.
I need some fingernail polish for retouching the corner of the wall by the door in the bathroom where it was scratched by carpet layers maneuvering a roll of carpet into the bedroom. You can hardly see it, but it bugs me. I hoped to find the paint that I used to paint the bathroom when we cleaned out the utility closet under the stairwell. I thought I had saved a pint, but apparently not. Hence, fingernail polish. I don’t want to buy a full pint.
The most perfect abstraction is horses.
Most of the time, I am clean shaven. I grew a beard once when I was in my thirties. It didn’t feel right. My mouth felt like a hole in a forest of hair. Nor did I feel comfortable sporting such an evident sign of masculinity. I prefer presenting to the world the mordant and alienated look of a clean shaven Charles Baudelaire. Being nothing in front of no one.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Letting Go
There is a saying in AA I like that goes “Let go let God.” And even though I don’t believe in God, or at least a monotheistic supreme being who looks like a cross between Fabio and Walt Whitman staring at a butterfly on his finger, I still feel good when I hear that phrase spoken.
It means nonattachment.It means the world flows. It means the green mountains are always walking and the eastern mountains travel on water. Letting go means the mind as it is in itself is free from ills. If from the Mind arises this world, why not let the latter rise as it pleases? Or, for that matter, fall apart.
Letting go means letting go.
Letting go of the radioactive waste spilling into the ocean from the shattered Fukushima nuclear plants. Letting go of the sociopathic bastards on Wall Street and Obama’s cabinet. Letting go of Tea Party wackos who want to put a summary end to the social services that keep them and their grandmothers and children and crazy uncle Fred in his ramshackle Topeka mobile home fed, warm, clothed, medicated, and educated.
Letting go of the soulless corporate CEOs who want to kill higher learning and replace it with competition and meaningless tests.
Letting go the West Virginia mountaintops getting blasted into eternal annihilation. Letting go of the stumps and barren slopes that were once the Amazon rainforest. Letting go of the oily goop suffocating the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico deposited by 4 million gallons of British Petroleum crude.
Letting go of the fact that not one person was arrested for the Deep Horizon disaster, or the collapse of financial institutions on Wall Street. While 15 million people languish in jail for possessing marijuana.
Letting go of the rape, pillage, murder, torture and horror that is war.
Letting go of everything that makes me mad, frustrated, impotent, and depressed.
Why worry? Why care? What is the point of that? Wouldn’t it be great to sit back and watch as it all crumbles and realize right down to the marrow in your radiated bones that there was nothing you could do?
To worry about something is like trying to solve a math problem by chewing gum.
Or so I’ve heard it said.
Letting go is different from not giving a damn. You still care. You still have feeling for the things and people that are being destroyed, or destroying themselves. It is the simple recognition that you are not in control. Of anything. Except yourself.
Letting go does not mean surrendering to futility, or giving in to those darkly thrilling nihilistic impulses that sometimes awaken in the blood after a few shots of tequila and a line of pure Bolivian coke. It does not mean (although it is tempting) that since you do not have control over the things and people enmeshed in destructive behavior, to join in on the havoc and fun and buy a Hummer, load it with cases of Jack Daniels, and going fishing with sticks of dynamite lobbed into the local pond. Or draw the curtains, kick back, and watch war porn and Glee until the bank kicks you out onto the street. Or go about your business in a Brooks brothers suit making gobs of money by manipulating the market or shuffling fraudulent mortgages or denying health insurance coverage to somebody’s leukemic kid.
Letting go does not mean giving in. Entering the domain of the amoral and apathetic. That’s a dull, stultifying, brain-numbing place to be. A swamp of fetid, miasmic rot. Dead bloated dogs. Rats big as terriers. Sinister boot-swallowing muck. Things may look sweet and manageable on the outside, but inside, you are dark water under a coat of shit-brown algae.
I’m not sure what letting go would ultimately mean. But I do love that speech George Clooney gives in Up In The Air in which he takes all those imaginary items - house, car, marriage, relatives, job - out of his backpack and invites you to feel the lightness of that. Every time I hear that speech I feel a little giddy.
Impotence is not inevitable. There are options available. One can join, say, Chris Hedges and Ray McGovern as they chain themselves to the White House fence to protest Obama’s wars in Iraq and Aghanistan and now Libya, get arrested, cuffed, shoved into a police van, and spend the night in jail hoping you don’t get shuffled off to a black site when no one is looking.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” observes Thoreau, rather grimly, in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
Civil Disobedience is not incongruous with the idea of letting go. It is not incompatible with having, and exercising, a conscience. One can let go of worry, feelings of impotence, take the high road, and do something noble and altruistic to fight corruption, tyranny, and evil, even though you will not see positive results within your lifetime.
Which means you will have to let go of ambition, self-aggrandizement, or any notion of heroic action that will have the dramatic impact that is the stuff of cinema and Shakespeare.
Civil disobedience is a private and unheralded act with highly uncertain results. But it is better than armed rebellion. Revolutions usually end in rubble, heads tumbling into baskets, and another form of tyranny.
The words conscience and consciousness are so similar they must be intermingled. And not just semantically. “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?,” asks Thoreau. “Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”
I do not envy the life of the sociopath. Being without a conscience means being without feeling. Empty of everything that makes life rich and meaningful. Including, I guess, worry. Anxiety. Which brings me back to square one. The idea of letting go. And letting God. Which I take to mean fate. Destiny. Kismet. Karma. Throw of the dice.
Or that divine essence, whatever it may be, holding the universe together and imbuing the consciousness of living beings with a sense of awe, and caring.
How do you let that go?
It means nonattachment.It means the world flows. It means the green mountains are always walking and the eastern mountains travel on water. Letting go means the mind as it is in itself is free from ills. If from the Mind arises this world, why not let the latter rise as it pleases? Or, for that matter, fall apart.
Letting go means letting go.
Letting go of the radioactive waste spilling into the ocean from the shattered Fukushima nuclear plants. Letting go of the sociopathic bastards on Wall Street and Obama’s cabinet. Letting go of Tea Party wackos who want to put a summary end to the social services that keep them and their grandmothers and children and crazy uncle Fred in his ramshackle Topeka mobile home fed, warm, clothed, medicated, and educated.
Letting go of the soulless corporate CEOs who want to kill higher learning and replace it with competition and meaningless tests.
Letting go the West Virginia mountaintops getting blasted into eternal annihilation. Letting go of the stumps and barren slopes that were once the Amazon rainforest. Letting go of the oily goop suffocating the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico deposited by 4 million gallons of British Petroleum crude.
Letting go of the fact that not one person was arrested for the Deep Horizon disaster, or the collapse of financial institutions on Wall Street. While 15 million people languish in jail for possessing marijuana.
Letting go of the rape, pillage, murder, torture and horror that is war.
Letting go of everything that makes me mad, frustrated, impotent, and depressed.
Why worry? Why care? What is the point of that? Wouldn’t it be great to sit back and watch as it all crumbles and realize right down to the marrow in your radiated bones that there was nothing you could do?
To worry about something is like trying to solve a math problem by chewing gum.
Or so I’ve heard it said.
Letting go is different from not giving a damn. You still care. You still have feeling for the things and people that are being destroyed, or destroying themselves. It is the simple recognition that you are not in control. Of anything. Except yourself.
Letting go does not mean surrendering to futility, or giving in to those darkly thrilling nihilistic impulses that sometimes awaken in the blood after a few shots of tequila and a line of pure Bolivian coke. It does not mean (although it is tempting) that since you do not have control over the things and people enmeshed in destructive behavior, to join in on the havoc and fun and buy a Hummer, load it with cases of Jack Daniels, and going fishing with sticks of dynamite lobbed into the local pond. Or draw the curtains, kick back, and watch war porn and Glee until the bank kicks you out onto the street. Or go about your business in a Brooks brothers suit making gobs of money by manipulating the market or shuffling fraudulent mortgages or denying health insurance coverage to somebody’s leukemic kid.
Letting go does not mean giving in. Entering the domain of the amoral and apathetic. That’s a dull, stultifying, brain-numbing place to be. A swamp of fetid, miasmic rot. Dead bloated dogs. Rats big as terriers. Sinister boot-swallowing muck. Things may look sweet and manageable on the outside, but inside, you are dark water under a coat of shit-brown algae.
I’m not sure what letting go would ultimately mean. But I do love that speech George Clooney gives in Up In The Air in which he takes all those imaginary items - house, car, marriage, relatives, job - out of his backpack and invites you to feel the lightness of that. Every time I hear that speech I feel a little giddy.
Impotence is not inevitable. There are options available. One can join, say, Chris Hedges and Ray McGovern as they chain themselves to the White House fence to protest Obama’s wars in Iraq and Aghanistan and now Libya, get arrested, cuffed, shoved into a police van, and spend the night in jail hoping you don’t get shuffled off to a black site when no one is looking.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” observes Thoreau, rather grimly, in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
Civil Disobedience is not incongruous with the idea of letting go. It is not incompatible with having, and exercising, a conscience. One can let go of worry, feelings of impotence, take the high road, and do something noble and altruistic to fight corruption, tyranny, and evil, even though you will not see positive results within your lifetime.
Which means you will have to let go of ambition, self-aggrandizement, or any notion of heroic action that will have the dramatic impact that is the stuff of cinema and Shakespeare.
Civil disobedience is a private and unheralded act with highly uncertain results. But it is better than armed rebellion. Revolutions usually end in rubble, heads tumbling into baskets, and another form of tyranny.
The words conscience and consciousness are so similar they must be intermingled. And not just semantically. “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?,” asks Thoreau. “Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”
I do not envy the life of the sociopath. Being without a conscience means being without feeling. Empty of everything that makes life rich and meaningful. Including, I guess, worry. Anxiety. Which brings me back to square one. The idea of letting go. And letting God. Which I take to mean fate. Destiny. Kismet. Karma. Throw of the dice.
Or that divine essence, whatever it may be, holding the universe together and imbuing the consciousness of living beings with a sense of awe, and caring.
How do you let that go?
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