Kingdom Of Throat-Stuck Luck, poetry by George Kalamaras
Elixir Press, 2012
There is a place near Manaus, Brazil, where the Rio Negro meets the waters of the Amazon and the two colors of the two rivers remain distinct as they run side by side without mixing. The water of the Rio Negro is dark, almost black, and that of the Amazon is a sandy-colored beige. The phenomenon is due to the differences in temperature, speed, and water density. The waters do eventually blend and become indistinguishable, but for the few miles that they remain distinctly separate, the river presents a sight of singular simultaneity. This striking image, especially from the air, provides a strong visual analogue for the confluence of poetic influence apparent in George Kalamaras’s poetry.
Kalamaras is a remarkably eclectic poet and there are far more than two influences on his work, but there are two whose sources are as unlikely as they are geographically and culturally distant. This would be surrealism and eastern religion and philosophy.
Kalamaras has written extensively of Japanese surrealism, the work of Takiguchi Shuzo in particular, and is a practitioner of yoga meditation, a discipline not ordinarily associated with surrealism. Where these rivers blend we find a fusion of impulse, a debouch of fluid agreements: articulations of elsewhere, alterity, divergence, variance and otherness that are often as brilliantly opaque as they are inscrutably lucid. There are elements of Zen apparent in Japanese surrealism which reverberate in Kalamaras’s poems, or sutras, as he likes to call them, paratactic constructions that emphasize the irrationality of existence, the kaleidoscopic montage that is the fluctuating play of disparate stimuli that constitute each moment. Contrariety, eccentricity and contradiction urge discovery of our inner auroras and the fierce authenticity of life experienced as a spark in a cosmic fire.
The work gathered in this recent collection have a pleasant uniformity that suggests a heated composition within a single time frame. Whether that might be the actual case, I don’t know, but together the pieces have the savor of a symphonic ensemble.
“Bone Sutra,” the first poem of this collection, revels in osteopathic insomnia. The opening line - “Now we take up the study of bones” - is an adaptation of Patanjali’s first Yoga Sutra, “Now we come to the study of yoga.” Here is the poem in its entirety:
Now we take up the study of bones.
The copper-colored queen: wind through the cedars.
Perhaps one night I can’t sleep.
Or, perhaps you are convinced of the ritual naming of a dark gem.
There is severe ice cracking below each of the floating ribs.
Yet, his maybe, his how-come and what-not.
We lived in insomniatic teacups.
We spent our loves loving a certain flea.
Some old man wears a gray left sock, seeks hints and cockroaches.
An altar of eels floats through each speck of dust.
Someone is drawing us drawing him or her with chalk.
The moment the milk arrives, all the children run, laughing.
Notable here is a keen structural character. Kalamaras favors couplets, which makes sense to me as an aesthetic choice as it is keenly suited to enhance the effects of paratactic collage. This is especially apparent in the fifth couplet, where we find mingled an old man and his sock, cockroaches, and an altar of eels floating through each speck of dust. Eel and dust are quintessentially opposed mediums - the wet and the dry, the slithery and the nebulous - but within the irrational milieu of the poem, seem strangely appropriate. They work in the same way that the adjective ‘insomniac’ enhances the image of the teacup.
Some of the pieces are quite macabre. In “The Beauty of Sadness,” Kalamaras presents a montage of iconography associated with the ominous and the dying. It is a blend of Thanatos and Eros, the erotic and reproductive with the ghostly and preternatural. It begins with a wonderfully striking image: “He entrusted the chemical dust of seahorses to the wound in his spine.” This transmits a sense of magic, of ritual healing that suits the tenor of the poem. “He displayed,” the poem continues,
… a complicated answer as if sharing mice bone with an owl.
The beauty of sadness is its celestial ascent.
We tremble with god envy yet insatiate our veins.
If a wing-flapping swan inhabited our sideboard, which of the
dinner guests would weep?
How might I dance naked on the table without creating a scene,
without sending my wife into protracted shame?
We arrive from the other world, expressing the unseen, yet lapsed
with memory.
We torment our adults with knowing how to give, how to cry, how
to ask for both eggs at once.
Why should we colonize the sea with male reproductive scope?
Shall we accept the groinal cricket, the seahorse as our method,
and share the male egg with anyone who, when cut, will bleed?
Finally, the quiet of sincere inertia, of guests leaving early, one at
a time, profusely praising the food.
After the spiritual coup, we weighed our body hair, we burned
the epaulets, we asked the cadaver lamp to guide us home.
Notable is Kalamaras’s use of an adjective - insatiate - as a transitive verb. Why we envy the gods is implied, not stated, though it’s not hard to guess: power, freedom, omniscience, immortality. There are quite a few reasons to envy the gods. What prevents us is gluttony. Our inability to find satisfaction, fulfill our appetites. One associates ‘insatiate’ with grossness, obesity, substance abuse. The appearance of the swan in the next couplet suggests a more pre-Raphaelite setting, a bird emblematic of the sublime, of otherworldly grace and beauty. Which, in this instance, is intended for eating.
The line “We arrive from the other world, expressing the unseen, yet lapsed with memory,” is redolent with romantic and neo-Platonic associations. “We torment our adults” is an interesting phrase within this context. It implies that as we mature and adapt to the human condition we lose that vital understanding that was once cognate with our being.
The final couplet which culminates with the farewell of dinner guests ends with the remarkable image of the “cadaver lamp” to guide us home. Thanatos, the poet tell us, is the spirit which will guide us home. That other world from which we arrived.
Paradox is pivotal to the practice of both Zen and surrealism. Kalamaras blends these elements in much the same way as the Amazon blends its two major tributaries. But there is a third side to Kalamaras’s writing that I find interesting from the point of view of delirium. As phantasmagoric or strange as much of Kalamaras’s poetry tends to be, there is an accompanying feeling of equipoise. Of balance. This is apparent in his technique, his couplets and paratactic montage, but also in the general tone of his pieces. We are never quite sure who is talking, driving the narrative. The voice, or voices, have the appearance of disembodiment. Of being diffused through the words like wandering spirits. One feels systole and diastole, inhalation and exhalation, the quiet rhythms of the body.
I believe this has much to do with the reason he enjoys referring to his poems as sutras. Sutra, from the Sanskrit, literally means a thread or line that holds things together. The verbal root is ‘siv,’ meaning to sew. Here again, we find an image of balanced symmetry, a needle rising in and rising out as it embroiders or joins two pieces of fabric together.
Kalamaras’s images do not appear to arise from delirium, but from some other transcendent level of consciousness whose tendencies move toward calm rather than chaos. Wittgenstein comes to mind, since his philosophy of language as a body of signs with no logical connection to external reality, a notion drawn ultimately from Saussure, advances the notion of language as a chess game. Kalamaras likes switching parts of speech around like pieces on a chess board, as in the line “Might a commendable exchange parliament my hips?” This testifies less to a disordering of the senses than a deliberate philosophical application referencing Wittgenstein’s ideas concerning language and reality. “Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking,” remarks Wittgenstein, “but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.”
Kingdom Of Throat-Stuck Luck is divided into five parts. The last section is titled “The Make Possible.” It seems that this is the intent of Kalamaras throughout his work. To make possible the buzz of the real in the indicative and subjunctive be.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Timeless Advice
There is an intriguing scene near the end of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek in which the elder Spock (Leonard Nimoy) gives counsel to the young Spock (Zachary Quinto).
Who wouldn’t relish that opportunity to travel back in time as the older, wiser you, and give counsel to the stupider, younger you?
Here I am in the winter of 1973, age 26, freshly graduated from college with a BA in English. I am at a crossroads. I am living in a small studio apartment in downtown San José with a galley kitchen smaller than what you might find aboard a 30 foot sailing craft, sharing a bathroom at the end of the hall with four other men, one of whom declares he was once a Texas Ranger, and another who likes walking around with a Remington carbine. I am tired of being poor. I have heard there is a glut of teachers, especially at the college level. This had once been my ambition, but now, I just want a job that pays reasonably well and doesn’t give me suicidal thoughts morning noon and night.
Get that master’s degree, I tell myself. There will be jobs. Don’t be discouraged. But get that degree. With no skills and nothing but a BA in English, you are virtually unemployable. Getting a master’s degree will save you from numerous menial, dead end jobs, that leave you feeling like a lump of fecal matter squeezed from the rectal orifice of the workaday world. And while it’s true that getting a master’s degree doesn’t quite conform with your ambitions of becoming the next Richard Brautigan, or Tom Robbins, the publishing world may not be so quick to grant your literary efforts so generously with a livable income and broad distribution for a public eager to spend their hard-earned dollars on your work. I’m not saying your writing isn’t good. Just that your expectations about publication and finding an audience or painfully naïve.
This is what parents are supposed to do, but nobody listens to their parents. Parents are parents. They come from a different time and adhere to a slightly different worldview.
So what makes me think I would listen to myself at age 64?
I am a very different person at age 64 then I was at age 26. I would imagine most people feel similarly, though maybe not. I would like to think that the 26 year old me would find something to respect and admire about the 64 year old me. The fact that we are the same person does not readily mean that we will have things to like about one another. The difference will be acute. The 26 year old me might well find the 64 year old me just as pedantic and tedious as Hamlet found Polonius.
The difference (apart from weight gain, wrinkles, and loss of hair) consists in wisdom, wisdom which is the fruit of experience. So it’s not really fair to call myself wiser, because it is experience that has made me wiser, and confers an unfair advantage over the person I was at age 26, who was still acutely concerned with romance, getting laid, and drinking immoderate amounts of alcohol. How do you reason with such a person? How do you tell such a person that life is sweeter and far more benevolent when you go to bed at, say, 10:00 o’clock and drink prudently, if at all, and by all means don’t worry and fret over getting laid, or finding a romantic partner, those things happen naturally, and unexpectedly, usually at times in your life when you’re happy living alone, and are passionate about other things than women, and getting laid. Because women are quick to sense those things about a young man. They tend to be leery of men who are needy, impatient, and basically just want to get laid. Men find it desirable to have sex with someone with whom they feel compatible, but that is generally an afterthought. Men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love. It’s a nasty little formula, and one that results in a lot of unhappiness, but there it is, it’s the gospel truth. So watch it. Buy a lot of dirty girly magazines. It will serve you better than all those drunken nights at the local meat market.
I see the 26 year old me nodding with polite agreement, but knowing, deep down, it will be impossible to adhere to this advice. At 26, testosterone is pouring out of one’s ears. One is chained to a maniac. Telephone poles look sexy.
At 64, one is down a few quarts in the testosterone department. Given a choice between a good novel or a freebie at a Texas brothel, the novel would win hands down. Moby Dick. So to speak.
Of course, knowing what happens in the future confers an absurdly obvious advantage when it comes to giving advice to someone. But would I have the heart to tell the 26 year old me that there will come a time when books are no longer appreciated by the masses? That text will be available on tiny electronic gadgets but that the art of reading will have virtually disappeared? That theocratic fanatics who denounce science and evolution and believe the world is 6,000 years old will run for president? That the United States will be a totalitarian police state in which 84 year old women are pepper sprayed for protesting against an obscenely wealthy and fraudulent class of oligarchs? That the middle class will be dying? That a substantial number of people who once owned homes and lived Leave It To Beaver lives are now living in tent cities? That although only a tiny minority continue to relish books and read poetry there will be an industry cranking out millions of poets competing for the limelight? That habeus corpus and posse comitatus will be quaint constitutional relics? That Bob Dylan will be doing commercials for the Cadillac Escalade? That Bob Dylan will be mistaken as a vagrant and picked up by a woman cop in New Jersey? That Bob Dylan will actually still be quite a compelling song writer and weirdly relevant?
That the world itself will be on the brink of destruction due to irreparable environmental degradation and climate change?
That Mount Saint Helens will erupt? That a tsunami will wipe out Indonesia? That a Penguin anthology of 20th century American poetry will not include the work of Allen Ginsberg? Will not have Howl in it? Will not have George Oppen or Louis Zukofsky or Michael McClure in it?
That would be cruel. I would not do such a thing to myself. Maybe the kindest advice I could give myself is to hang in there with the poetry thing. There is salvation in poetry. It is the sweetest religion going. It won't save you from a lot of pain, but it sure makes it more palatable, and interesting.
I might also hand my 26 year old self a suitcase full of winning lottery numbers from the future, and all the winning football, baseball, and basketball scores. A little financial independence never harmed the working of the muses. It would also be nice to finance a media empire that would not only rival but squash that of Rupert Murdoch's. Goodbye Fox. Goodbye Rush. Hello Howl. Hello Bernie Sanders.
Who wouldn’t relish that opportunity to travel back in time as the older, wiser you, and give counsel to the stupider, younger you?
Here I am in the winter of 1973, age 26, freshly graduated from college with a BA in English. I am at a crossroads. I am living in a small studio apartment in downtown San José with a galley kitchen smaller than what you might find aboard a 30 foot sailing craft, sharing a bathroom at the end of the hall with four other men, one of whom declares he was once a Texas Ranger, and another who likes walking around with a Remington carbine. I am tired of being poor. I have heard there is a glut of teachers, especially at the college level. This had once been my ambition, but now, I just want a job that pays reasonably well and doesn’t give me suicidal thoughts morning noon and night.
Get that master’s degree, I tell myself. There will be jobs. Don’t be discouraged. But get that degree. With no skills and nothing but a BA in English, you are virtually unemployable. Getting a master’s degree will save you from numerous menial, dead end jobs, that leave you feeling like a lump of fecal matter squeezed from the rectal orifice of the workaday world. And while it’s true that getting a master’s degree doesn’t quite conform with your ambitions of becoming the next Richard Brautigan, or Tom Robbins, the publishing world may not be so quick to grant your literary efforts so generously with a livable income and broad distribution for a public eager to spend their hard-earned dollars on your work. I’m not saying your writing isn’t good. Just that your expectations about publication and finding an audience or painfully naïve.
This is what parents are supposed to do, but nobody listens to their parents. Parents are parents. They come from a different time and adhere to a slightly different worldview.
So what makes me think I would listen to myself at age 64?
I am a very different person at age 64 then I was at age 26. I would imagine most people feel similarly, though maybe not. I would like to think that the 26 year old me would find something to respect and admire about the 64 year old me. The fact that we are the same person does not readily mean that we will have things to like about one another. The difference will be acute. The 26 year old me might well find the 64 year old me just as pedantic and tedious as Hamlet found Polonius.
The difference (apart from weight gain, wrinkles, and loss of hair) consists in wisdom, wisdom which is the fruit of experience. So it’s not really fair to call myself wiser, because it is experience that has made me wiser, and confers an unfair advantage over the person I was at age 26, who was still acutely concerned with romance, getting laid, and drinking immoderate amounts of alcohol. How do you reason with such a person? How do you tell such a person that life is sweeter and far more benevolent when you go to bed at, say, 10:00 o’clock and drink prudently, if at all, and by all means don’t worry and fret over getting laid, or finding a romantic partner, those things happen naturally, and unexpectedly, usually at times in your life when you’re happy living alone, and are passionate about other things than women, and getting laid. Because women are quick to sense those things about a young man. They tend to be leery of men who are needy, impatient, and basically just want to get laid. Men find it desirable to have sex with someone with whom they feel compatible, but that is generally an afterthought. Men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love. It’s a nasty little formula, and one that results in a lot of unhappiness, but there it is, it’s the gospel truth. So watch it. Buy a lot of dirty girly magazines. It will serve you better than all those drunken nights at the local meat market.
I see the 26 year old me nodding with polite agreement, but knowing, deep down, it will be impossible to adhere to this advice. At 26, testosterone is pouring out of one’s ears. One is chained to a maniac. Telephone poles look sexy.
At 64, one is down a few quarts in the testosterone department. Given a choice between a good novel or a freebie at a Texas brothel, the novel would win hands down. Moby Dick. So to speak.
Of course, knowing what happens in the future confers an absurdly obvious advantage when it comes to giving advice to someone. But would I have the heart to tell the 26 year old me that there will come a time when books are no longer appreciated by the masses? That text will be available on tiny electronic gadgets but that the art of reading will have virtually disappeared? That theocratic fanatics who denounce science and evolution and believe the world is 6,000 years old will run for president? That the United States will be a totalitarian police state in which 84 year old women are pepper sprayed for protesting against an obscenely wealthy and fraudulent class of oligarchs? That the middle class will be dying? That a substantial number of people who once owned homes and lived Leave It To Beaver lives are now living in tent cities? That although only a tiny minority continue to relish books and read poetry there will be an industry cranking out millions of poets competing for the limelight? That habeus corpus and posse comitatus will be quaint constitutional relics? That Bob Dylan will be doing commercials for the Cadillac Escalade? That Bob Dylan will be mistaken as a vagrant and picked up by a woman cop in New Jersey? That Bob Dylan will actually still be quite a compelling song writer and weirdly relevant?
That the world itself will be on the brink of destruction due to irreparable environmental degradation and climate change?
That Mount Saint Helens will erupt? That a tsunami will wipe out Indonesia? That a Penguin anthology of 20th century American poetry will not include the work of Allen Ginsberg? Will not have Howl in it? Will not have George Oppen or Louis Zukofsky or Michael McClure in it?
That would be cruel. I would not do such a thing to myself. Maybe the kindest advice I could give myself is to hang in there with the poetry thing. There is salvation in poetry. It is the sweetest religion going. It won't save you from a lot of pain, but it sure makes it more palatable, and interesting.
I might also hand my 26 year old self a suitcase full of winning lottery numbers from the future, and all the winning football, baseball, and basketball scores. A little financial independence never harmed the working of the muses. It would also be nice to finance a media empire that would not only rival but squash that of Rupert Murdoch's. Goodbye Fox. Goodbye Rush. Hello Howl. Hello Bernie Sanders.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Storms Of Emily Dickinson
I live in a palace of ice on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. The plumbing is ice and the counters are ice. The doors are ice and the windows are ice. The doorknobs are ice and the refrigerator is ice. The carrots are ice and the pork chops are ice. The rice is ice. The sweet potatoes are ice and smells and spices and books are ice.
I watch Bonanza reruns. And The Fugitive. Since the television is ice, the images are remarkably lucid. I can see the lines in David Janssen’s face, and Dan Blocker’s eyes are huge and generous and blue when he sits on his horse and smiles.
Richard Kimble, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Jack Kerouac, gets a job as a migrant field worker in southern California near the Salton Sea. A brush fire starts in the nearby hills. The field workers are enlisted to fight the fire. Kimble sees a fallen man in the smoke and runs down and drags him to safety. The foreman orders Kimble to drive the man back to camp where there is a nurse (played by the very sexy Beverly Garland) in the company truck. He orders Paco Alvarez, who has a pregnant wife in camp, to accompany him. Paco refuses to go. He tells Kimble privately that he and the other workers suspect that he is an undercover border cop and will send anyone without papers back to Mexico. Kimble convinces Paco that he is not a cop. In fact, he is on the opposite side of the law. Paco believes him, and they take off back to camp in the truck. I get up to increase the heat on the thermostat and my palace melts. The TV melts and the truck melts and Paco and Richard Kimble melt.
I fall from the moon and land on earth. It’s 4:30 p.m., December 9th. Roberta returns home from work. I’m shaving in the bathroom. I have lather on my face. She tells me she called. When? A few minutes ago. I must have been in the shower, I say. What happened? She spotted a small bird at the top of the hill by the corner of 5th Avenue North and Prospect, where that big hedge is. The bird was disoriented. I went to scoop him up with my hat, and he flew back into the hedge. I’m sure the bird will be ok. If he could fly, he couldn’t have been too youg. It’s strange, though. It seems awful late in the winter for birds to be hatching out of eggs.
We eat kielbasa and beans and watch Le Journal de France 2. David Cameron looks angry. Sarkozy and Merkel look happy. Cameron vows to veto the Eurozone deal. We watch the bonus CD for Paris, Je T’Aime and eat ice cream as the Coen brothers explain what they want Steve Buscemi to do in the Paris Metro. Roberta worries about the bird and I tell her I am sure that if the bird could fly back into the hedge he could not have been too young or disoriented. His chances for survival appear good. And what could she have done? If she had brought the bird home Toby would have eaten him.
Tomorrow is Emily Dickinson’s birthday. I wonder what to get her. And then I realize she is dead. And how ironic that is. So many of her poems were meditations on death. On dying. On stone. On Time and Sound and Bells and Spools. Sedulous of Multitudes, notwithstanding Despair, even Nature herself has forgot it is there. What? The dog, of course.
There are no poodles in Emily’s poetry. No collies. No spaniels. No beagles. No Dobermans or pugs. No boxers or whippets or Chihuahuas or golden retrievers. Emily appeared to be remarkably focused on pearls. Flags of Snow. Slow gold. Crooked hills. Everlasting Night.
Men of Ivory. Pizarro’s Ear Rings. Billows of Circumference. Long storms. The quiet nonchalance of death.
The storms of Emily Dickinson rage in the heart of a dachshund. The dachshund sends out rays of light. Tomorrow I will construct another palace. I will construct it of rupture and spring and call it Xanadu. It will have the glaze of a thousand revolts. I will grow more hair on my head. I will wear sonnets. I will create a cemetery for birds. I will place it in the Sea of Tranquility. Now, 64 years of age, I push the door of my life open and discover that I am really Emily Dickinson, and my breasts are made of ice, and small white words ripple among my ribs.
I watch Bonanza reruns. And The Fugitive. Since the television is ice, the images are remarkably lucid. I can see the lines in David Janssen’s face, and Dan Blocker’s eyes are huge and generous and blue when he sits on his horse and smiles.
Richard Kimble, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Jack Kerouac, gets a job as a migrant field worker in southern California near the Salton Sea. A brush fire starts in the nearby hills. The field workers are enlisted to fight the fire. Kimble sees a fallen man in the smoke and runs down and drags him to safety. The foreman orders Kimble to drive the man back to camp where there is a nurse (played by the very sexy Beverly Garland) in the company truck. He orders Paco Alvarez, who has a pregnant wife in camp, to accompany him. Paco refuses to go. He tells Kimble privately that he and the other workers suspect that he is an undercover border cop and will send anyone without papers back to Mexico. Kimble convinces Paco that he is not a cop. In fact, he is on the opposite side of the law. Paco believes him, and they take off back to camp in the truck. I get up to increase the heat on the thermostat and my palace melts. The TV melts and the truck melts and Paco and Richard Kimble melt.
I fall from the moon and land on earth. It’s 4:30 p.m., December 9th. Roberta returns home from work. I’m shaving in the bathroom. I have lather on my face. She tells me she called. When? A few minutes ago. I must have been in the shower, I say. What happened? She spotted a small bird at the top of the hill by the corner of 5th Avenue North and Prospect, where that big hedge is. The bird was disoriented. I went to scoop him up with my hat, and he flew back into the hedge. I’m sure the bird will be ok. If he could fly, he couldn’t have been too youg. It’s strange, though. It seems awful late in the winter for birds to be hatching out of eggs.
We eat kielbasa and beans and watch Le Journal de France 2. David Cameron looks angry. Sarkozy and Merkel look happy. Cameron vows to veto the Eurozone deal. We watch the bonus CD for Paris, Je T’Aime and eat ice cream as the Coen brothers explain what they want Steve Buscemi to do in the Paris Metro. Roberta worries about the bird and I tell her I am sure that if the bird could fly back into the hedge he could not have been too young or disoriented. His chances for survival appear good. And what could she have done? If she had brought the bird home Toby would have eaten him.
Tomorrow is Emily Dickinson’s birthday. I wonder what to get her. And then I realize she is dead. And how ironic that is. So many of her poems were meditations on death. On dying. On stone. On Time and Sound and Bells and Spools. Sedulous of Multitudes, notwithstanding Despair, even Nature herself has forgot it is there. What? The dog, of course.
There are no poodles in Emily’s poetry. No collies. No spaniels. No beagles. No Dobermans or pugs. No boxers or whippets or Chihuahuas or golden retrievers. Emily appeared to be remarkably focused on pearls. Flags of Snow. Slow gold. Crooked hills. Everlasting Night.
Men of Ivory. Pizarro’s Ear Rings. Billows of Circumference. Long storms. The quiet nonchalance of death.
The storms of Emily Dickinson rage in the heart of a dachshund. The dachshund sends out rays of light. Tomorrow I will construct another palace. I will construct it of rupture and spring and call it Xanadu. It will have the glaze of a thousand revolts. I will grow more hair on my head. I will wear sonnets. I will create a cemetery for birds. I will place it in the Sea of Tranquility. Now, 64 years of age, I push the door of my life open and discover that I am really Emily Dickinson, and my breasts are made of ice, and small white words ripple among my ribs.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Movie Rant
This has been a remarkably shitty year for movies. Usually, by early fall, some fairly decent movies have been released. The kids are back at school and now is the time for drama without boogers and robots. People exchanging actual dialogue. Facial expressions with nuance and subtlety. Except for a couple, such as 50/50 and Drive, the movies have been mind-numbingly awful. What is Al Pacino doing in the steaming pile of human fecal matter that is Adam Sandler’s Jack And Jill? I like going to the movies to get away from a world that is in the throes of imminent disaster. Catastrophic rot. I go to the movies for escape, yes, certainly, absolutely, but also for something a little extra, a trace of insight, a whisper of truth, a thoughtful exploration of the human soul, with maybe a sword fight or two and a dinosaur for good measure.
But it’s not just the movies Hollywood has been issuing like ground meat from an automatic stuffer. It’s the venues themselves. The audience. The management. The seats and screen and sound system.
A recent example: Roberta and I went to see The Descendants last Tuesday at the Guild 45th. We arrived early, and so went across the street to Starbucks to wait for the box office to open for the 2:30 matinee. While sipping my hot chocolate, I saw a man ascend a ladder to the roof of the Guild 45th, but thought nothing of it, assuming he was up there to clear away some leaves or check a minor leak.
At 2:00, we went to buy our tickets. We went into the theater and sat down. I could hear someone pounding on the roof, hammering, throwing heavy weights around. This continued into the previews. I went out to the lobby to complain. I asked the young woman who took our tickets if this guy on the roof was going to keep working through the movie. She followed me into the theater to check how loud it was. She heard the pounding instantly, and said she would go tell the manager. I figured the problem would be quickly solved.
But no. Movie began. The Descendants is not Savage Guns, Pearl Harbor, or Transformers. It’s a quiet movie, heavy on dialogue, pregnant pauses, facial close ups. I tried for an hour to get absorbed in the movie, but couldn’t. No one else seemed to mind. There were about 30 other people in the theatre. Finally, I gave up. I signaled to Roberta, and we left. We were refunded our money and given two free tickets.
But I can’t help wondering: what the fuck was the manager thinking in scheduling some guy to do roof construction during a movie? The mind boggles.
Could it be that people just don't give a shit about quality anymore? Or am I a whiny prima donna who expects far too much from the world?
I worry that the movies are dying. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, are willing to go through the bother of getting into a car and driving to a theater, finding a place to park, hoping the theater has a lobby in which to get out of the wet and cold, and they won’t be surrounded by nincompoops who spend the entire time texting.
When Roberta and I saw Stiegg Larson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last year, there was a young woman in front of me who took out her cell phone and began texting. The bright light from her little instrument was distracting. I found it difficult to keep my eyes focused on the screen. There was a luminous blur in my peripheral vision, and the light itself kept drawing my attention, away from the action and dialogue on the screen. I thought she just needed to check something urgent, then would put her little toy away, and get back to the movie. But she didn’t. After about ten minutes, I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I leaned forward and asked her to put it away. Which she did. I was glad of that. Her boyfriend was a bruiser. I didn’t want to mess with him.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve been bothered by people texting. It happens a lot. Why anyone would pay 10 bucks to see a movie, and then not see it, but text away on their little gadgets, is beyond my comprehension.
I see this behavior, and other forms of rudeness which have become much more prevalent, as signs of a dying culture. I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing the Romans went through, circa 400 AD, before the inevitable and final collapse into the Dark Ages.
Those displaced Romans and Christians still had a planet, though. We don’t. Our planet is swiftly becoming inhabitable. No water to drink, no air to breathe.
Meanwhile, until the atmosphere catches fire and angels descend blowing trumpets and God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney, I want to see movies. I want to see a movie in which God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney.
Or Obama. Anyone who is responsible for our demise. Or tells whopping lies to get his or her ass kissed. I’m not real big on the truth, frankly, I tend to prefer illusions, for obvious reasons, but I hate it when someone gets away with a deceit so colossal it would shame the devil.
In the Scorsese documentary about Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, Lebowitz remarks that a high level of connoisseurship is vital to the arts, and to culture in general, and that a significant population of connoisseurship was lost during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the mid to late 80s. Arts became more vulgar, everything had to be “broader, more blatant, more on the nose.”
I see that happening now. I don’t blame AIDS, I blame another epidemic: technological materialism. A mindset that is capable of referring to Steve Jobs as a visionary, or Bill Gates as a philanthropist. This is a society whose perceptions have been blunted by cheap entertainment and whose intellects have been bludgeoned by propaganda. I agree with Lebowitz: there needs to be more democracy in our politics, and less democracy in the arts.
But it’s not just the movies Hollywood has been issuing like ground meat from an automatic stuffer. It’s the venues themselves. The audience. The management. The seats and screen and sound system.
A recent example: Roberta and I went to see The Descendants last Tuesday at the Guild 45th. We arrived early, and so went across the street to Starbucks to wait for the box office to open for the 2:30 matinee. While sipping my hot chocolate, I saw a man ascend a ladder to the roof of the Guild 45th, but thought nothing of it, assuming he was up there to clear away some leaves or check a minor leak.
At 2:00, we went to buy our tickets. We went into the theater and sat down. I could hear someone pounding on the roof, hammering, throwing heavy weights around. This continued into the previews. I went out to the lobby to complain. I asked the young woman who took our tickets if this guy on the roof was going to keep working through the movie. She followed me into the theater to check how loud it was. She heard the pounding instantly, and said she would go tell the manager. I figured the problem would be quickly solved.
But no. Movie began. The Descendants is not Savage Guns, Pearl Harbor, or Transformers. It’s a quiet movie, heavy on dialogue, pregnant pauses, facial close ups. I tried for an hour to get absorbed in the movie, but couldn’t. No one else seemed to mind. There were about 30 other people in the theatre. Finally, I gave up. I signaled to Roberta, and we left. We were refunded our money and given two free tickets.
But I can’t help wondering: what the fuck was the manager thinking in scheduling some guy to do roof construction during a movie? The mind boggles.
Could it be that people just don't give a shit about quality anymore? Or am I a whiny prima donna who expects far too much from the world?
I worry that the movies are dying. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, are willing to go through the bother of getting into a car and driving to a theater, finding a place to park, hoping the theater has a lobby in which to get out of the wet and cold, and they won’t be surrounded by nincompoops who spend the entire time texting.
When Roberta and I saw Stiegg Larson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last year, there was a young woman in front of me who took out her cell phone and began texting. The bright light from her little instrument was distracting. I found it difficult to keep my eyes focused on the screen. There was a luminous blur in my peripheral vision, and the light itself kept drawing my attention, away from the action and dialogue on the screen. I thought she just needed to check something urgent, then would put her little toy away, and get back to the movie. But she didn’t. After about ten minutes, I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I leaned forward and asked her to put it away. Which she did. I was glad of that. Her boyfriend was a bruiser. I didn’t want to mess with him.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve been bothered by people texting. It happens a lot. Why anyone would pay 10 bucks to see a movie, and then not see it, but text away on their little gadgets, is beyond my comprehension.
I see this behavior, and other forms of rudeness which have become much more prevalent, as signs of a dying culture. I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing the Romans went through, circa 400 AD, before the inevitable and final collapse into the Dark Ages.
Those displaced Romans and Christians still had a planet, though. We don’t. Our planet is swiftly becoming inhabitable. No water to drink, no air to breathe.
Meanwhile, until the atmosphere catches fire and angels descend blowing trumpets and God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney, I want to see movies. I want to see a movie in which God kicks the shit out of Richard Cheney.
Or Obama. Anyone who is responsible for our demise. Or tells whopping lies to get his or her ass kissed. I’m not real big on the truth, frankly, I tend to prefer illusions, for obvious reasons, but I hate it when someone gets away with a deceit so colossal it would shame the devil.
In the Scorsese documentary about Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, Lebowitz remarks that a high level of connoisseurship is vital to the arts, and to culture in general, and that a significant population of connoisseurship was lost during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the mid to late 80s. Arts became more vulgar, everything had to be “broader, more blatant, more on the nose.”
I see that happening now. I don’t blame AIDS, I blame another epidemic: technological materialism. A mindset that is capable of referring to Steve Jobs as a visionary, or Bill Gates as a philanthropist. This is a society whose perceptions have been blunted by cheap entertainment and whose intellects have been bludgeoned by propaganda. I agree with Lebowitz: there needs to be more democracy in our politics, and less democracy in the arts.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
My Beautiful Lassitude
Here is a bearing which combines laceration
With amusement. As a keepsake it has been
Turned into a parable. A large Antarctic plug
Chafed with cellophane while humming
And percolating algebra. Sleep is more
Like an engraving than a conversation
With a wire and a pair of calipers. Knots
Are hectic with teak when they are shoveled
From the land. Nails jingle in a toolbox
And cellos turn to silver, their music dribbling
Guts and curry. When all is said the waterfront
Is nothing but mist and gloom and history
Dancing in a nightclub. Shall we dare
To soak ourselves in antifreeze? The candy
Is a nasty fire. And no, I am not opposed
To cyclones. I just don’t like fussing
With an old tube of glue. The thin logic
Of the tailgate is far more ecstatic. The map
Is a naked bud. A wedge of sound from the radio
Incites watermelon to arc into romance
With a nexus of hacksaws. The window
Is unassuming. The azaleas heave
Themselves into nirvana and we count
All the castles of the landfills until
The gasoline coughs. The laceration
Continues as a paragraph. The rest of us
Go to jail, which is just noodles after all
Is said and done. Noodles and bars and
Birds and armadas of wonderful poetry
That releases everyone into crickets.
The invertebrate drugs have a wall
In their scenery so be careful. There
Is just enough syntax available to make
Snacks and chew our memories into benediction.
In this realm we deposit our shoes in the bank
And withdraw into an obdurate obscurity
That is worthy of poets. Even the parakeets
Are delirious. Our shoulders are distilled
Into puddles. The scars form bundles of skin
That we can fold into slices of water.
This is how we have come to dawdle in mirrors.
There are more veins than wisps of aviation.
More shoulders than wainscoting. More suitcases
Than horizons of summer. Beautiful summer
Which I have folded into a shirt. My glands are opals
And the glue is an apparition, a flip of adhesion
Like an octopus tap-dancing on a jetty. A new
Anthology of poetry full of penguins and lassitude
Drifts under the boardwalk and yaws into blackberries.
The world is not a mechanical salad. No it is not. The world
Is a churning aluminum wallet stuffed with lips
Running amok among the credit cards and equations.
There are more than molecules in the house of olives.
There are verbs and hoes and watts that smell of life.
Life as it is lived in the drip of biography. Life as it is lived
In the cleavage of a yak at a nightclub in London. Yes
And a river long after it becomes a gate and lets us in
To better understand infinity, and get silly in the waterfall.
With amusement. As a keepsake it has been
Turned into a parable. A large Antarctic plug
Chafed with cellophane while humming
And percolating algebra. Sleep is more
Like an engraving than a conversation
With a wire and a pair of calipers. Knots
Are hectic with teak when they are shoveled
From the land. Nails jingle in a toolbox
And cellos turn to silver, their music dribbling
Guts and curry. When all is said the waterfront
Is nothing but mist and gloom and history
Dancing in a nightclub. Shall we dare
To soak ourselves in antifreeze? The candy
Is a nasty fire. And no, I am not opposed
To cyclones. I just don’t like fussing
With an old tube of glue. The thin logic
Of the tailgate is far more ecstatic. The map
Is a naked bud. A wedge of sound from the radio
Incites watermelon to arc into romance
With a nexus of hacksaws. The window
Is unassuming. The azaleas heave
Themselves into nirvana and we count
All the castles of the landfills until
The gasoline coughs. The laceration
Continues as a paragraph. The rest of us
Go to jail, which is just noodles after all
Is said and done. Noodles and bars and
Birds and armadas of wonderful poetry
That releases everyone into crickets.
The invertebrate drugs have a wall
In their scenery so be careful. There
Is just enough syntax available to make
Snacks and chew our memories into benediction.
In this realm we deposit our shoes in the bank
And withdraw into an obdurate obscurity
That is worthy of poets. Even the parakeets
Are delirious. Our shoulders are distilled
Into puddles. The scars form bundles of skin
That we can fold into slices of water.
This is how we have come to dawdle in mirrors.
There are more veins than wisps of aviation.
More shoulders than wainscoting. More suitcases
Than horizons of summer. Beautiful summer
Which I have folded into a shirt. My glands are opals
And the glue is an apparition, a flip of adhesion
Like an octopus tap-dancing on a jetty. A new
Anthology of poetry full of penguins and lassitude
Drifts under the boardwalk and yaws into blackberries.
The world is not a mechanical salad. No it is not. The world
Is a churning aluminum wallet stuffed with lips
Running amok among the credit cards and equations.
There are more than molecules in the house of olives.
There are verbs and hoes and watts that smell of life.
Life as it is lived in the drip of biography. Life as it is lived
In the cleavage of a yak at a nightclub in London. Yes
And a river long after it becomes a gate and lets us in
To better understand infinity, and get silly in the waterfall.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Ode To A Chair
Is it wrong to love furniture
I love my chair
I think of it as my personal organizational assistant
With four legs two arms and a reasonably soft cushion
The arms are smooth and gently curved
With fluted columns in a duet of maple conviction
The front legs are also fluted and proudly vertical
While the back legs are more discursive
They descend to the floor in an obstinate curve
That argues the ontology of objects and persons
Consistent with the empirically established facts
Based on epistemic considerations
And causal interrelations of the chair’s constituent atoms
Manifesting themselves in a form I can sit on
And rest my body and lean back occasionally
To enlarge my prospects
I also love the couch
Because I love to recline
Consider a gas in a vessel with perfectly smooth and elastic walls
In an arbitrary initial state and let it evolve in the course of time
And you will get a couch
Bubbling out of a mossy hillside
In the middle of a football field
I believe the subjunctive mood is a form of furniture
For it supports the labor of the mind
Attempting to crawl out of reality
To find a commodious object
In which to launch its fanciful creations
For instance take this poem
Driving down Second Avenue
In a Lamborghini wearing nothing
But a refrigerator light
Would you say it was bald
Or more like a sandwich
Of words and lettuce
A wind blows through my work
If you want to call this work
I call it a public fountain
You can make anything on your lips
Travel out of your mouth and become a bloodmobile
I am trying very hard to be
Worthy of this chair
Even if I have to club it into submission
My love for this chair must be sweet destiny
For why else would I sit in it committing these words
To its shape and description
Its immortal being
Its four legs and two arms and cushion
Enthusiasm is the god within
My eyes walk out of my head to say this
Chair isn’t everything but it means a lot
Which is why the ode was born
To convey such thoughts and feelings
Even in a time of iPods and pixels
Pythagoras, it is said, lectured to his students
From behind a curtain so that they would concentrate
On what was said and not on its source
This was known as being “acousmatic”
This strategy applies equally
To expanding a chair into an evocation
Of perturbations and ribbons
The time is exquisite
At the frontier between perception and language
It is where the crocodile heaves its body onto the blacktop
And Scarlet Johannson takes off her clothes
The better to startle you
Into a recognition of yourself and your possibilities
Cézanne was on the verge of middle age
When he had the crucial revelation of his artist’s mission
He reversed the illusion of deep space
To achieve mass and volume first
Recording with a separate pat of paint
Each larger shift in direction
By which the surface of an object
Defined the shape of the volume
It enclosed and so a chair was born
To support the weight of the body
As it becomes available to itself
The chair has a more liberal
Breadth of a purpose than a feeling
But put a feeling in a chair
And that feeling will grow into a chair
Whose purpose is to lead the mind
To heights of understanding
I love my chair
I think of it as my personal organizational assistant
With four legs two arms and a reasonably soft cushion
The arms are smooth and gently curved
With fluted columns in a duet of maple conviction
The front legs are also fluted and proudly vertical
While the back legs are more discursive
They descend to the floor in an obstinate curve
That argues the ontology of objects and persons
Consistent with the empirically established facts
Based on epistemic considerations
And causal interrelations of the chair’s constituent atoms
Manifesting themselves in a form I can sit on
And rest my body and lean back occasionally
To enlarge my prospects
I also love the couch
Because I love to recline
Consider a gas in a vessel with perfectly smooth and elastic walls
In an arbitrary initial state and let it evolve in the course of time
And you will get a couch
Bubbling out of a mossy hillside
In the middle of a football field
I believe the subjunctive mood is a form of furniture
For it supports the labor of the mind
Attempting to crawl out of reality
To find a commodious object
In which to launch its fanciful creations
For instance take this poem
Driving down Second Avenue
In a Lamborghini wearing nothing
But a refrigerator light
Would you say it was bald
Or more like a sandwich
Of words and lettuce
A wind blows through my work
If you want to call this work
I call it a public fountain
You can make anything on your lips
Travel out of your mouth and become a bloodmobile
I am trying very hard to be
Worthy of this chair
Even if I have to club it into submission
My love for this chair must be sweet destiny
For why else would I sit in it committing these words
To its shape and description
Its immortal being
Its four legs and two arms and cushion
Enthusiasm is the god within
My eyes walk out of my head to say this
Chair isn’t everything but it means a lot
Which is why the ode was born
To convey such thoughts and feelings
Even in a time of iPods and pixels
Pythagoras, it is said, lectured to his students
From behind a curtain so that they would concentrate
On what was said and not on its source
This was known as being “acousmatic”
This strategy applies equally
To expanding a chair into an evocation
Of perturbations and ribbons
The time is exquisite
At the frontier between perception and language
It is where the crocodile heaves its body onto the blacktop
And Scarlet Johannson takes off her clothes
The better to startle you
Into a recognition of yourself and your possibilities
Cézanne was on the verge of middle age
When he had the crucial revelation of his artist’s mission
He reversed the illusion of deep space
To achieve mass and volume first
Recording with a separate pat of paint
Each larger shift in direction
By which the surface of an object
Defined the shape of the volume
It enclosed and so a chair was born
To support the weight of the body
As it becomes available to itself
The chair has a more liberal
Breadth of a purpose than a feeling
But put a feeling in a chair
And that feeling will grow into a chair
Whose purpose is to lead the mind
To heights of understanding
Monday, November 28, 2011
Ted Enslin Letters
I corresponded with the late Ted Enslin for something like 18 years, beginning sometime in 1993, or possibly 1994. I received his last letter on July 6th, 2011. I knew it would be his last. “Well,” he had written, “I think my condition is terminal. How long is a question. Personally I hope not very long. The past week was a stinker.”
Ted did not identify his illness or go into details about his limitations, though I had a pretty good idea, having been witness to my father’s death, mother’s death and that of my father- and mother-in-law. Ted’s evident acceptance of death was impressive, but not surprising. It was obvious from our years of correspondence that he was not only accustomed to reality but welcomed it. His poetry testifies to a no-nonsense worldview that exalted the world’s stony reverberations in a language of percussive penetration and solidity. His words were simple but carefully placed, pulsed, like the purity of notes in a composition by Eric Satie.
Ted loved music, Mahler especially. He had had a rigorous training in composition, and studied under French composer, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger. Poetry provided a means for musical expression in lexical form. He believed that the same principles apply to both music and poetry and that ideally they are one art. “I became increasingly aware of the fact,” Ted remarked in an interview with Robert J. Bertholf for Web Conjunctions,
that there was a great deal of material that I could not deal with in the usual ways. For instance, I wanted to write something antiphonal, I wanted to get that spatial sense of sound, and I was attracted—as many, many people have been—to the possibilities of a concert hall such as the nave of St. Mark's in Venice, where the so-called Antiphonal School arose. The Gabrielis and their great students (Monteverdi and Schütz in particular) is where that came from. Well, I thought, yeah, this is a great idea, the idea of an echo, but spatially moved out so that it would be apparent in the readings of such a piece. Could that be done? And I tried something which I called "Antiphony", I guess it must have been in about the middle '50s. And it didn't work. I didn't have the means to do it. I did do it, however, about 22 or 23 years later and it did work. I had it performed twice, once at Bowling Green in 1989. It is based on the consideration of a rock, geologic rock, and it comes back again and again in the series of echoing and returning sounds, and in a kind of percussive sense of rock, of something against which you can't push much of anything else.
Ted was a prompt letter writer. I would sometimes take as long as two months to answer a letter. But when I did, I would have a letter from Ted in less than a week.
Ted’s letters were all identical in size: the envelope was 6 ½ by 3 ½ inches and the letter itself was most ofen a small single sheet of paper, 5 ½ inches in width and 8 ½ inches in length. They were always typewritten. Ted used a manual typewriter. When I held one of his letters, my fingers could feel the little impressions the typewriter keys made on the back side of the paper. I don’t know where Ted managed to find ribbons. He lived in a rural part of Maine, less than a mile from the seashore. He was married to an artist named Alison Enslin, but was in all other respects a hermit. He had little use for society. We shared a contempt for American culture, its militaristic hardness and brutality, its cheerless pragmatism and inability to appreciate or value anything that didn’t involve money.
Ted was particularly contemptuous of doctors. “Of course, for me, doctors, and their inane ‘tests’ are unthinkable.” Fortunately, Ted was in remarkably good health for most of the years we wrote. He must have been pushing 70 when we began our correspondence, and he frequently mentioned swimming in the Atlantic. I often complained about the cholesterol lowering medication I had to take, and he would respond by letting me know that his cholesterol level was well below 200, which was probably the result of his love of seafood. He remarked in his last letter that he always had a fondness for big Dungeness crabs, and that he’d “eaten a good clam chowder a few days ago, and haddock yesterday.”
“I have always preferred fish, shellfish, etc. to meat,” he remarked in an earlier letter. “No moral preference. I simply like seafood more. I was that way as a child. Whenever I had the choice I invariably picked seafood. Something of a merman, perhaps.”
He did not like snow. He did not like winter. Maine winters especially. “Ah,” he remarked in a letter dated 1/11/11, “but I wish I could go to Belize as I used to. Not possible now for many reasons. To go alone is unthinkable in my physical condition.”
In May of 2011 it was still there. “Yes, 130 inches of snow, what I call our white filth, is a bit mind boggling, but we are used to anywhere between 70 and 80 inches a year.”
I would sometimes remark on the deplorable ignorance and decay of America’s public schools, and there, too, Ted had a lot of contempt. He referred to himself as an autodidact: “I have always been an autodidact, and started early. Standard schooling was an utter waste on me, and I rejected it. Actually some of it was harmful to me. Despite Horace Mann, and others, I often think that public schooling in this country should be abolished. Much money saved for better purposes. The best teaching is one on one, and I am sure many others have been injured by this usual crap.”
Ted’s letters were always a comfort to me. A kind of compass heading. He proved that one could live independently of society’s suffocating bureaucracies and soul-killing commerciality. He was outside the politics of the literary academies and conventions where everyone shows off their wares and jockeys for publication opportunities. He did not own a computer. He was his own man, all the way.
Whenever I went to collect the mail, I recognized Ted’s letters immediately by their modesty of size. I could tell immediately that they weren’t bills or requests for money. I liked that.
Ted’s pleasures were as modest as his letters. He liked smoking a pipe, reading, listening to music, and drinking a glass of whiskey per day. I sensed in his letters a profoundly New England character, a love of honesty and craft and reverence for nature, for economy and the deeply gratifying pleasure of a skill achieved by hard learning, be it carpentry, music, or fishing.
Ted had had a long history with New England. Ted’s great-grandmother was first cousin to Lydia Jackson, Emerson’s second wife, and William James second son, William “Billy” James, chose Ted as a model for a number of his paintings.
I once made inquiry about Ted’s view of the afterlife, of the supernatural, and Ted answered that “my interest in paranormal evidences comes through a number of instances in my own life, which can’t be explained in ‘normal’ ways. Of course all of the evidence is colored by the way in which people think at particular times. I don’t think of ghosts in white sheets, or accounts from some pie-in-the-sky paradise. Rather, I think that there is a residuum from experience and knowledge similar to archaeologist’s soils – carbon dating etc. All of us have a bit of that kind of sensing, though it is limited, and often stunted by ‘practical’ thinking. But there are other senses, and people like Aunt Nora have them in a developed degree. Ivan Tolstoy once told me that it is mathematically demonstrable that man’s knowledge has added to the weight of the earth. I think he was thinking in the right direction.”
I will miss Ted’s letters. I have become so accustomed to receiving them. They have been a part of my life. More than an adjunct; more like a tide. A coming and going of thoughts and convictions, opinions and images. Lives shared. Feelings contrasted and shaped according to the notes of one another’s words.
I never actually met Ted. Never even spoke to him on the telephone. Yet I feel I knew him deeply. I must have, because I feel his loss deeply.
The impulse to write him remains. I suppose in time that feeling will dissipate. And, like now, I will find myself writing about him, rather than to him. There is a world of difference between those two prepositions. On one side is life, and on the other, the complete unknown.
Ted did not identify his illness or go into details about his limitations, though I had a pretty good idea, having been witness to my father’s death, mother’s death and that of my father- and mother-in-law. Ted’s evident acceptance of death was impressive, but not surprising. It was obvious from our years of correspondence that he was not only accustomed to reality but welcomed it. His poetry testifies to a no-nonsense worldview that exalted the world’s stony reverberations in a language of percussive penetration and solidity. His words were simple but carefully placed, pulsed, like the purity of notes in a composition by Eric Satie.
Ted loved music, Mahler especially. He had had a rigorous training in composition, and studied under French composer, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger. Poetry provided a means for musical expression in lexical form. He believed that the same principles apply to both music and poetry and that ideally they are one art. “I became increasingly aware of the fact,” Ted remarked in an interview with Robert J. Bertholf for Web Conjunctions,
that there was a great deal of material that I could not deal with in the usual ways. For instance, I wanted to write something antiphonal, I wanted to get that spatial sense of sound, and I was attracted—as many, many people have been—to the possibilities of a concert hall such as the nave of St. Mark's in Venice, where the so-called Antiphonal School arose. The Gabrielis and their great students (Monteverdi and Schütz in particular) is where that came from. Well, I thought, yeah, this is a great idea, the idea of an echo, but spatially moved out so that it would be apparent in the readings of such a piece. Could that be done? And I tried something which I called "Antiphony", I guess it must have been in about the middle '50s. And it didn't work. I didn't have the means to do it. I did do it, however, about 22 or 23 years later and it did work. I had it performed twice, once at Bowling Green in 1989. It is based on the consideration of a rock, geologic rock, and it comes back again and again in the series of echoing and returning sounds, and in a kind of percussive sense of rock, of something against which you can't push much of anything else.
Ted was a prompt letter writer. I would sometimes take as long as two months to answer a letter. But when I did, I would have a letter from Ted in less than a week.
Ted’s letters were all identical in size: the envelope was 6 ½ by 3 ½ inches and the letter itself was most ofen a small single sheet of paper, 5 ½ inches in width and 8 ½ inches in length. They were always typewritten. Ted used a manual typewriter. When I held one of his letters, my fingers could feel the little impressions the typewriter keys made on the back side of the paper. I don’t know where Ted managed to find ribbons. He lived in a rural part of Maine, less than a mile from the seashore. He was married to an artist named Alison Enslin, but was in all other respects a hermit. He had little use for society. We shared a contempt for American culture, its militaristic hardness and brutality, its cheerless pragmatism and inability to appreciate or value anything that didn’t involve money.
Ted was particularly contemptuous of doctors. “Of course, for me, doctors, and their inane ‘tests’ are unthinkable.” Fortunately, Ted was in remarkably good health for most of the years we wrote. He must have been pushing 70 when we began our correspondence, and he frequently mentioned swimming in the Atlantic. I often complained about the cholesterol lowering medication I had to take, and he would respond by letting me know that his cholesterol level was well below 200, which was probably the result of his love of seafood. He remarked in his last letter that he always had a fondness for big Dungeness crabs, and that he’d “eaten a good clam chowder a few days ago, and haddock yesterday.”
“I have always preferred fish, shellfish, etc. to meat,” he remarked in an earlier letter. “No moral preference. I simply like seafood more. I was that way as a child. Whenever I had the choice I invariably picked seafood. Something of a merman, perhaps.”
He did not like snow. He did not like winter. Maine winters especially. “Ah,” he remarked in a letter dated 1/11/11, “but I wish I could go to Belize as I used to. Not possible now for many reasons. To go alone is unthinkable in my physical condition.”
In May of 2011 it was still there. “Yes, 130 inches of snow, what I call our white filth, is a bit mind boggling, but we are used to anywhere between 70 and 80 inches a year.”
I would sometimes remark on the deplorable ignorance and decay of America’s public schools, and there, too, Ted had a lot of contempt. He referred to himself as an autodidact: “I have always been an autodidact, and started early. Standard schooling was an utter waste on me, and I rejected it. Actually some of it was harmful to me. Despite Horace Mann, and others, I often think that public schooling in this country should be abolished. Much money saved for better purposes. The best teaching is one on one, and I am sure many others have been injured by this usual crap.”
Ted’s letters were always a comfort to me. A kind of compass heading. He proved that one could live independently of society’s suffocating bureaucracies and soul-killing commerciality. He was outside the politics of the literary academies and conventions where everyone shows off their wares and jockeys for publication opportunities. He did not own a computer. He was his own man, all the way.
Whenever I went to collect the mail, I recognized Ted’s letters immediately by their modesty of size. I could tell immediately that they weren’t bills or requests for money. I liked that.
Ted’s pleasures were as modest as his letters. He liked smoking a pipe, reading, listening to music, and drinking a glass of whiskey per day. I sensed in his letters a profoundly New England character, a love of honesty and craft and reverence for nature, for economy and the deeply gratifying pleasure of a skill achieved by hard learning, be it carpentry, music, or fishing.
Ted had had a long history with New England. Ted’s great-grandmother was first cousin to Lydia Jackson, Emerson’s second wife, and William James second son, William “Billy” James, chose Ted as a model for a number of his paintings.
I once made inquiry about Ted’s view of the afterlife, of the supernatural, and Ted answered that “my interest in paranormal evidences comes through a number of instances in my own life, which can’t be explained in ‘normal’ ways. Of course all of the evidence is colored by the way in which people think at particular times. I don’t think of ghosts in white sheets, or accounts from some pie-in-the-sky paradise. Rather, I think that there is a residuum from experience and knowledge similar to archaeologist’s soils – carbon dating etc. All of us have a bit of that kind of sensing, though it is limited, and often stunted by ‘practical’ thinking. But there are other senses, and people like Aunt Nora have them in a developed degree. Ivan Tolstoy once told me that it is mathematically demonstrable that man’s knowledge has added to the weight of the earth. I think he was thinking in the right direction.”
I will miss Ted’s letters. I have become so accustomed to receiving them. They have been a part of my life. More than an adjunct; more like a tide. A coming and going of thoughts and convictions, opinions and images. Lives shared. Feelings contrasted and shaped according to the notes of one another’s words.
I never actually met Ted. Never even spoke to him on the telephone. Yet I feel I knew him deeply. I must have, because I feel his loss deeply.
The impulse to write him remains. I suppose in time that feeling will dissipate. And, like now, I will find myself writing about him, rather than to him. There is a world of difference between those two prepositions. On one side is life, and on the other, the complete unknown.
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